The Giant-Slayer (6 page)

Once upon a time, there was a giant named Collosso. He lived at the edge of the earth, in a castle made of white stone. He kept a thousand slaves to do his work, and a thousand more for dreadful entertainments.

On most mornings Collosso went out of his castle with a basket on his arm. He strode across the land at a hundred feet for every step, filling his basket with food. He plucked sheep from the fields, and cows from the pastures; he took the farmers too, scooping them up as they ran for their lives. He chased them hunched over, his arms reaching out, like a monstrous boy hunting beetles. He uprooted whole trees of apples and figs and pears, shaking them into his basket. Along the way he snacked on dogs and cats, on chickens and gryphons and gnomes.

Every person and every animal lived in fear of Collosso. Even the birds kept glancing around, watching the far horizon, for at any moment the giant might appear. He could stride across a hill, or come sweeping through a forest like a farmer through a field of wheat, crushing the trees to make a path. The people set out offerings of fruit and bread and butchered sheep, hoping to keep Collosso away from their homes and farms. But it never worked. So every three or four
years, someone would stand up in a village square and announce that he was setting out to kill the giant. He would hold a pitchfork in the air and ask, “Who will come along?” But always he would end up going alone, never to return.

Collosso laughed at those men who came to kill him. He never squashed the giant-slayers, but took them alive and kept them in his toy box, to amuse himself with at night. He was so big and powerful that nothing could scare him. Thirty years he lived without a twinge of fright, without a single thought of danger.

Then, one night in midsummer, a black storm rose in the mountains.

It began at midnight, with a rumble of thunder no louder than the purring of a cat. But an hour later it was shaking people from their beds with a terrible din and a roar of wind.

From end to end, the sky flashed silver. Bolts of lightning cracked the clouds apart, shot toward the ground, and set the forests aflame. Sparks flew half a mile high, and the colors of the fire shone in the clouds, until it looked as though the air was burning. Animals ran in shrieking herds, deer and wolves together, rabbits and foxes side by side.

Through it all, Collosso slept. The flashes of lightning lit his enormous face, making black shadows round his eyes and mouth. Thunder boomed through his castle, and smoke flowed in through every window, and down in their cages the slaves were screaming. The toys were screaming too. But Collosso didn’t stir, though it seemed the end of the world had arrived. He snored softly in his bed as the storm passed over.

It was the final roll of thunder that woke the giant. The
storm had swept a hundred leagues to the south, and the sound was so faint that a pine cone falling in the forest could have drowned it out. But with that tiny noise, Collosso sprang up in his bed. Six tons he weighed, yet in a flash he was upright. His heart, the size of a mule, kicked wildly in his chest. For the first time in his life, Collosso was terrified.

Far below his castle, the forests crackled as they burned. Trees exploded with puffs of yellow flame, and a blizzard of sparks whirled through the sky. Collosso stood at his window, pale as death in the shifting colors of the flames.

Somewhere in the land, beyond the mountains and the forest, beneath that final thunderbolt, a boy was breathing his first breaths. Collosso knew it as surely as he knew anything. A giant-slayer, that night, was born.

“Gee, who was it?” asked Dickie. His iron lung wheezed and hummed. “What was his name? The giant-slayer?”

“Don’t be a stupe,” said Carolyn. “It was Fingal.”

Laurie looked at the girl through the mirror. She didn’t mind if Carolyn listened to the story. She didn’t even mind that the girl tried to seem bored and pained, as though she wasn’t really listening at all. But it bothered her very much that Carolyn had guessed so easily that Fingal was the giant-slayer. So Laurie changed her story.

“Well, it wasn’t Fingal,” she said, as though the thought were crazy. “It was the
son
of Fingal.”

“Gosh!” said Dickie. “What was his name?”

“Jimmy.”

Carolyn put on a petulant, doubting look. “Jimmy the giant-slayer?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Laurie.

Jimmy was born in the thunderstorm. The same clap of thunder that had woken Collosso was the first sound that the baby heard. For him it was monstrously loud, an ear-splitting crash right over his head. Down in the parlor, Fingal watched in fear as the rafters shook and a snowfall of plaster fell upon him. But Jimmy didn’t cry. He didn’t wail or shriek; he just lay in his mother’s arms, pink and wrinkled, like a wise old man.

At the moment of his birth, the wolves began calling from the forest. They sang and they howled, more wolves than ever had sung at once. Jimmy’s mother, hearing them, pulled the blankets over herself and the baby. She lay shaking in the bed while Jimmy laughed and kicked against her.

Although she must have had a name, no one could remember ever hearing it. She was Fingal’s wife—the Woman—no more than that. Thin as a whip, with hard lines in her face, she had a nose like the blade of an axe. She was always telling her husband what to do, and when to do it, and when to do it again if he hadn’t done it right.

Jimmy wasn’t the firstborn child. He was neither the second nor the third, but he would never meet the others. A sister had drowned, and another had been squashed by the giant, while his only brother—Tom—had simply disappeared.
Fingal’s wife told anyone who asked that Tom had struck out on his own, up the Great North Road to seek his fortune in the mountains, but as he was only six years old at the time, that seemed unlikely. Fingal believed the gryphons had got him. “There’s nothing that gryphons like better than boys,” he said.

“Well, gryphons won’t get this boy,” said Fingal’s wife. “My little Jimmy won’t be eaten, and he won’t be squashed. He’s my little treasure.”

Treasure?
thought Fingal. He muttered under his breath, careful not to be heard.
“Woman, you’re mad if you’re thinking that babby’s a treasure.”

Fingal was a mean-hearted man, and to him the child was a cost, an item he recorded on the debit side of his ledger. On the day that his son was born he drew a narrow column that he headed “Jimmy,” and there he recorded in minuscule writing—because even ink cost money—every expense, from diapers to mashed peas. He had started columns for his other children, and began this one in the same way—with a huge sigh, as though he believed it was bound to be a wasted effort. As he wrote he kept moaning, “All debits, no credits. What’s the use of a babby?”

“What about the giant?” asked Dickie, in his iron lung. The bellows worked below him. “Did Collosso go looking for Jimmy?”

“No, he didn’t,” said Laurie.

“Was he scared?” asked Chip.

Dickie’s head nodded slightly on the pillow. “I think so.”

“Well, you’re right; he was,” said Laurie. She shifted her feet, leaning back against the windowsill. “Collosso was scared to death of the giant-slayer.”

For days, the giant fretted in his castle. He stood at the ramparts, staring across the mountains, over the valleys, toward fields and forests. From sunrise to darkness he stood and stared, leaning his elbows on the great stone blocks.

It was all he could think about, that a giant-slayer was out there. The idea worried away at him, as though an animal gnawed at his innards. At night he dreamed about the giant-slayer, then woke in the morning more frightened than he’d been the day before. On a Sunday afternoon, as he had on many Sundays, he took out his entertainments. He lifted the lid and saw the people cowering inside. Some held on to each other, some raised their hands toward him for mercy, and many sat hunched and quivering in the corners. Just weeks before, the sight would have made him laugh uproariously. But now he only slammed the lid in place again and pushed the box away.

“Curse him. Curse him,” said Collosso. “I cannot bear this any longer.”

Right then, the giant got up from his chair. He put on his jaunty red hat and went out from the castle. He strode to the south, over the pass and down a valley, then west across the foothills. People scurried away, hiding in ditches, diving into cellars. Collosso didn’t stop to crush them. His arms
swinging, his great thighs shaking, he marched along with his enormous boots smashing all in his path. Flights of white swans rose from fields and copses, and he swatted at them as though at mosquitoes.

He went straight to the marshes, to the home of the Swamp Witch. He believed that she had lived a hundred years in the mud, and knew everything there was to know. He had gone to see her twice before, the first time to ask how long he would live. She had taken a frog and pulled off its legs, then stirred the pieces in the mud, reading the patterns they made. Then she had looked up and told him mysteriously, “You shall live to the end of your days.” Three years later he had gone again, to see if she could turn his hair from curly to straight, because he believed that giants looked best with straight hair. Again she had killed a frog and cast its pieces. “Wear a red hat,” she’d told him.

The journey would have taken any man a year, but Collosso was there in hours. He stomped down the long slopes of barley and corn, through a forest of pines, to the edge of a swamp that seemed to stretch on forever.

It was believed that the marshes were bottomless. It was said that an ancient city—with streets of gold—lay drowned in the swamp. A famous legend told of ‘the lost army’ that had marched out to find the city, only to vanish in the mud. Its leagues of men, its hundreds of horses, its wagons and chariots had disappeared in a moment, along with seven siege towers nearly as tall as Collosso. Some said that the witch had eaten every man and horse.

Well, the stories weren’t utter nonsense. Collosso strode out into the mud and sank to his ankles. Then he sank to his
knees. Then he sank to his waist. As thick as tar, the mud sucked and oozed around his feet, and the black water swirled in torrents behind him.