Power of Three (11 page)

The Giantess, meanwhile, lumbered to her feet, clutching the magic box to her great stomach. The ground quivered as she did so, like the shifting marsh pools, and such birds as had not already left the wood flew screaming from the treetops. But, vast and heavy though she was, they were astonished to find that, standing up, she was very little taller than Ayna. She was fat—so fat that Ayna could not have put both arms more than halfway round her. She stood monstrously on the bank of the stream, one side of her face bright purple where the Giant had hit it. There were tears in her eyes, too.

“Order me out, won't you!” she said. “There was a girl climbing trees here all yesterday, and you never said a word to her!”

The Giant replied with a bad word. Ayna blushed and Ceri's eyes widened. The box seemed to tumble to the situation at last.
“We have just had news of storms in the South,”
it said.
“The Meteorological O—”

The Giantess silenced it by briskly snapping a knob. And the Giant dashed forward again, with the same unexpected speed as before. On her feet, the Giantess was not so swift, and she was hampered by the magic box. The Giant caught her, and they wrestled on the edge of the stream with Giant snorts and gasps. The encounter shook the treetops and awed the three onlookers. The Giants swayed, tipped and both landed with one foot in the stream. They were out again the next second, yelling abuse at one another, leaving the stream boiling yellow. The next second, they had wrenched apart, the Giantess holding a handful of the Giant's hair and the Giant with the magic box. The Giant, taller and nimbler, limped quickly away backward, holding the box high over his head and laughing unpleasantly, while the Giantess pursued him, screaming.

“No, Gerald! Gerald, please! Don't you dare!”

The Giant, still laughing, moved the box as if he were going to throw it in the stream.

“Just like Ondo!” Ayna said indignantly. No one could have heard her above the yells of the distressed Giantess. Gair's ears buzzed with the din. He supposed the Giant was behaving like Ondo. In fact, the fascinating thing was the way this was like an enlarged version of the quarrels people had.

The Giantess threshed at the Giant with her feet, but not seriously. She was too much afraid of losing her box. “Give it me, Gerald! Give it me and I'll go!”

“Promise you'll get out,” said the Giant. “If you don't promise, your radio goes in the brook.”

“I promise!” she shrieked. “Snotty beast!”

“Fatso!” retorted the Giant. He slung the box at her so hard that she gasped and nearly dropped it. “Now get out!”

Clutching her box, the Giantess made off like an earthquake.

But she was not entirely defeated. Ten feet away, she swung round again. Ceri, who had unwisely started to move, froze. “You may think you own the whole Moor, Gerald Masterfield,” she said. “But you don't!
Your
property,
your
wood—you make me sick! You won't sing that tune next year, will you?” The Giant, looking very surly, started to say something, but the Giantess screamed him down until Gair's ears rang. “Behaving like you're the King of Creation, just because your family owns Moor Farm! Well, next year, when they flood the Moor, it'll all be underwater just like the rest!
Then
where will you be? You won't look so grand then, and I shall be glad!
Glad!
”

The Giantess swung round and marched off. The earth boomed under her feet. The sound pulsed through Gair's head. Boom-bad, boom-bad, boom-bad. For a moment it seemed to be the same as the queer pulsing of the Giants' house.

Irritably, the Giant put his hands in his pockets and turned away. Gair was still quivering with the sound of the Giantess's feet. He had no time to move. For perhaps a tenth of a second, the Giant and he stood and stared at one another. It was one of those times which seem to last an hour. What the Giant thought he saw, Gair could not imagine. Gair saw a fierce, moody nature, unhappy deep down, and unhappy, too, on the surface now, because of the Giantess. Then the Giant blinked and started to take his hands out of his pockets. The moment his eyes closed, Gair whisked himself out of sight round the tree and got ready to run. He had a feeling Ayna said something. He waited for the Giant to move. Waited. And waited.

“Funny,” said the Giant. He began walking away. Gair could not believe it at first. But, when he dared to look, he saw the Giant's tall narrow back as the Giant limped slowly away toward the pulsing house.

“Whew!” said Ceri. “Narrow escape! I thought he was going to start on Gair.”

“He was,” said Ayna. “That's why I said the words to stop dogs. Which just goes to prove what beasts Giants are!
Wasn't
he a beast?”

“Foul,” Ceri agreed. “Wasn't she
fat
?”

“Sort of tight,” Ayna said, chuckling. “As if she'd been blown up!”

“Let's get back,” said Gair. He did not like the wood any more. It still seemed to boom with a faint pulsing, though the Giantess must have been a long way off by then. And meeting the Giant face to face had shaken him badly. Gair was not happy until they had crossed the tufty field and reached the marshy meadow beyond. Even then he did not want to talk much. But Ayna and Ceri were thoroughly excited and had plenty to say.

“She wasn't very tall,” Ceri said. “Neither of them was. I thought Giants were bigger than that.”

“Of course they are,” said Ayna. “Full-grown Giants are yards high. Those were only children.” Gair knew she was right. If he compared their size with that of the monstrous blurred foot he had seen on his first hunt, he saw they could not have been fully grown. And he realized he had known they were children all along, by their behavior.

But Ceri was dubious. “Then how old were they?”

“Only babies,” Ayna said decidedly.

“No they weren't,” Ceri said, equally decidedly. “The fat one was older than me, and she was the youngest.”

“You're just being silly,” Ayna said loftily.

“I'm not. I can tell. So can you, if you think,” said Ceri. “Fatso wasn't as old as you. She was more Gair's age. But the Snotty one was older, maybe older than you are, even. Isn't that true, Gair?”

Gair nodded. He had a feeling Ceri had got it right, which was very puzzling.

Ceri turned triumphantly to Ayna. “There! So full-grown Giants
can't
be yards high. You're almost as tall as Mother now.”

This seemed to be undeniable. Gair thought again of the foot he had seen. He had been very small at the time, of course, and things seen near to and blurrily always looked larger than they were. Perhaps Giants were not the huge beings he had supposed. Maybe their Giantliness really lay in their violent, larger-than-life behavior.

“Giants,” Ayna declared, “grow at a different rate from people.” But she did not feel on strong enough ground to continue with that subject. “Wasn't the Snotty one like Ondo! I was quite sorry for Fatso.”

“You needn't be,” said Ceri, speaking from bitter experience. “You could see she'd done horrible things to him, too. Though at least you don't kick me very often,” he added handsomely.

Ayna ignored this. They had come in among the long white grasses, and she pretended to be very busy looking out for standing pools and steering clear of dikes. A thought struck her. “We couldn't get Ondo over there and set Snotty on him somehow, could we? I'd love to see someone make mincemeat of Ondo!”

“Gair did,” Ceri reminded her.

Ayna looked at Gair and realized she had been tactless. The gloomy, lonely look she and Ceri knew so well had settled on Gair's face. Gair thought of Ondo rolling among the bees. He rather dreaded what must be in store for him in Garholt. Worse still, he remembered the misery in which he had set out, which the Giants had knocked clean out of his head. It was not so bad now, but he knew he would never see Gest the same way again.

“Do you want us to stay out longer?” Ayna asked, trying to make up for what she had said. Gloomily, Gair shook his head. He felt he might as well get it over.

Ceri looked up into Gair's face in frank fascination. “You know, it's not Ondo Snotty was like! It's you, Gair!” He scuttled sideways as both Gair and Ayna rounded on him. “I didn't mean it!”

“Yes you did,” Gair said bitterly. “You mean I'm proud and brutish, don't you?” He feared Ceri was right again. Ceri was far too observant for comfort. And, during that short, endless moment in which he and the Giant had stared at one another, Gair had indeed felt he was looking at someone rather like himself.

Ayna and Ceri did their best to soothe him.

“No, no. I just meant dark and gloomy,” Ceri protested.

“You're
not
brutish!” said Ayna. “And a Chief's son has every right to be proud.” She saw she was being tactless again. “You're never proud to us.” This only seemed to make matters worse. Ayna was wondering what else she dared say, and Gair was thinking that this day seemed to be dedicated to unpleasant discoveries, when the storm the magic box had predicted hit the Moor. The grasses whistled and leaned over. The Sun shot like gold pouring into a mold between racing blue clouds. The stinging rain soaked them in seconds, and hailstones clotted in their hair and their clothes.

They ran for the flimsy shelter of a thornbush and crouched behind it, shivering. “How did that box know?” Ayna wondered.

“Giant's magic,” said Ceri, whose teeth were chattering. “I wondered whether to put a Thought on it, to make it shout rude things at Snotty. But I didn't quite dare.”

“Good thing,” said Ayna. “Knowing you, it would probably have grown legs and run about.”

Ceri opened his mouth to explain he could control Thoughts, and decided against it. That was Gair's secret. Gair was dejectedly watching the hailstones hiss through the heaving grass, wondering what made him seem proud. He had nothing to be proud of. In an effort to think of something else, he hit on an uneasiness which had nagged at him for some time now.

“What did she mean, saying the Moor would be flooded next year?”

“I thought she was just yelling nasty things to scare Snotty,” Ayna said doubtfully.

“She couldn't have meant it,” said Ceri.

But Gair was fairly sure the Giantess
had
meant it. It had been in her manner, and the Giant had not denied it. And the way her feet had boomed through the wood for some reason made Gair surer still that she had been speaking the truth. He thought about it while the storm raged around and behind them. How could anyone flood such a big place as the Moor? And who would want to? The answer seemed to be the Dorig. They had already begun by flooding Otmound. In that case—Gair had a sudden horrible vision of everyone on the Moor drowning or homeless. Surely not. Surely the luck did not run so much against them as that. He would have to ask Adara. And if this disaster really was coming, the Giants would drown, too. So it looked as if Giants were the enemies of Dorig as much as people.

Ayna was thinking, too, but her thoughts went the other way. “If she did mean it, then that must be the reason the Otmounders are going so far away. You asked me the wrong question, Gair. I knew somebody would! Dorig and Giants are in league against us.”

“I don't think they are,” Gair said, bowing over as the bush rattled in a stinging gust.

“They are,” said Ayna. “That's why the Dorig said they wouldn't attack Garholt. They're leaving us to the Giants. Ask me. Go on.”

“Ask you what?” said Gair.

“Stupid!” said Ayna. “Ceri, ask me.”

“Will the Giants attack Garholt?” Ceri said, promptly and anxiously.

Ayna gazed out into the swirling grass. “No,” she said, with great decision, and laughed, because she was so relieved. “Then we've only the Dorig to worry about. Let's go home. This storm's not going to blow over in a hurry, and we couldn't be wetter if the Dorig had caught us.” She stood up, bent over in the wind, with her hair blown sideways. “Come on.” Her voice whipped away over the marsh and they could hardly hear it.

Ceri and Gair got up and squelched after her. Gair sighed, because Ceri's question and Ayna's answer did not seem to him to have settled anything. But he had no clear idea what Ayna should have been asked. Nothing was clear. His mind seemed to be a vague cloud of worry, pulsing a little like the Giants' house and the booming of the Giantess's feet. When he looked out across the Moor, it had become hissing gray distance with regular white gusts beating across it. The inside of his head felt the same. He sighed.

He sighed more frequently as they plodded closer to Garholt. Ceri and Ayna took to giving him consoling smiles.

“Don't worry,” said Ayna. “It'll all be over by tonight. Father won't stay angry.”

Gair was busy with his vague worry and he lost half this in the wind. “What?”

“Father was dying to hit Ondo himself,” Ceri called. “She means.”

“Saw it in his eye,” Ayna shouted.

Gair supposed he must be dreading returning to Garholt. He did not feel as if he was—or not that much. But he could not understand why else he should feel so depressed.