The Giant-Slayer (24 page)

It must have seemed to the guard that his dogs had vanished. He heaved such a sigh that Jimmy could hear it clearly. Then he opened the gate, hitched up his trousers, and went crunching across the snow.

Jimmy circled round him in the dark and came to the open gate. There were other hounds inside, and every one lay down like the others and covered its eyes with its paws.

Jimmy scattered the talons and feathers as he crept from hut to hut. At each one he called quietly through the door, warning the gnomes not to make noise. He led
them through the camp, past the cowering dogs, out through the gate. He had one talon left when he reached the woods.

He heard a snorting breath and a stamping in the snow. A man rode out from the blackness.

“Going into the gnome business?” he asked.

It was Khan. He was high on his horse, leading the pony.

“I came back to help you, but I see there ain’t no need,” said Khan. “Started eating at me, that them gnomes are all slaves. Never really saw it till you showed me. But everything ought to be free, even a gnome.”

Jimmy gave his last talon to Felix and sent him down to the valley, leading the gnomes. All were in a terrible hurry to be away from the camp, but most were so thin and frightened that they could manage no more than a shuffling step.

“Ain’t you going with them?” asked Khan.

“No,” said Jimmy. “I have to kill Collosso.”

“Thought as much,” said the hunter. He leaned down from the horse, reaching a hand toward Jimmy. “Reckon I’ll go with you, seein’ you’re so dead set on it. If that’s all right with you, of course.”

Jimmy smiled. “Reckon it is.”

The two rode away on the big horse, with the pony trailing behind. Again the hunter wrapped his coat around the two of them. He fastened the toggles down the front, and his hands brushed against the charm at Jimmy’s neck. “So you’ve kept that,” he said.

Jimmy nodded. “What does it do?”

“Wondered that myself,” said Khan. “Never seemed much useful to me.”

As Khan had said, it was springtime already in the valley. Women were planting in the fields, scattering seeds by the handful from baskets at their hips. Men were plowing here, painting there, fixing fences flattened by snow.

The road ran straight as a ruler, past farm and orchard, and faded away in the distance, into a cloud of gray dust.

It was the same sort of cloud that the taxman had raised with his carriage, but ten times bigger, swirling as high as a thunderhead. It came with a rumble that shook the earth, and now and then with a low, unearthly moan.

“What is it?” asked Jimmy.

“I don’t rightly know,” said Khan.

The hunter rode north, the cloud came south, and they met near an orchard of apples. A man on a horse was riding in front of the cloud, holding a long rope that snaked behind him into that gray. He seemed to be towing the dust, hauling that great cloud to the south. He was dressed as a drover, in a long coat that seemed to be made of dust.

From the cloud came another deep and bellowing moan. The drover tipped his hat to Khan. “Mister, if I were you, I’d get off the road,” he said.

“Ain’t it a free road?” said Khan.

“It is that. I know it, and you know it,” said the drover. “But the beasties don’t.”

He tugged on his rope, and the “beasties” began to emerge from the cloud of dust. They were oxen, shaggy and brown, with long horns that reached six feet across. The drover’s rope went to the first one, to a brass ring in its nose.
And the others followed, in a huge bellowing mass that filled the road from side to side.

Khan nudged his horse through the ditch and up to the fence. The gray cloud closed around them, and the oxen kept passing. From the backs of the beasts hung coils of rope and lengths of chain, yokes and whips and harnesses. In the tips of their horns, passing just inches from Jimmy and Khan, were little rings of brass and gold.

The big horse grew frightened, but Khan kept it quiet. The pony scampered and whinnied until the last of the oxen went plodding on by. Far behind was another horseman, coming along in the clear.

“He sure don’t ride like a drover,” said Khan. “Not one with half his senses.”

The rider came in darts and circles, surging forward, falling back, wheeling in little circles. His horse reared with its front legs kicking, then shot forward like a charger, only to be brought up short again. With a feather in his hat and fringed gauntlets on his hands, the man looked as dashing as a cavalry officer, and he rode like a whole brigade.

Khan urged the white horse onto the road. The rider was just then circling around, as though regrouping for a fresh attack. When he saw Jimmy and the hunter there in front of him he made his horse kneel down on the road. He shouted loudly from its back—as though he were a mile away—“Hi ho! Hi ho, my friend.”

Khan barely nodded.

The rider stared at Jimmy. “Are you the son of Fingal?”

“Yes, I am,” said Jimmy.

“I knew it!” cried the rider. He sat straight as a statue. “I
stopped long ago at the Dragon’s Tooth. You sat on my knee and I regaled you with stories of the road. Of course, you may not remember.”

“Sorry. I don’t,” said Jimmy.

The man looked very disappointed. “Well, you were young. But never mind, for you’ll remember me now.” He cocked his head and grinned.

“Well, who are you, then?” asked Khan.

“Finnegan Flanders,” said the rider, as though it were something to boast of. “The best teamster on the Great North Road.” Again he made the horse bow down. “I’m driving a hundred oxen.”

“Why?” asked Jimmy.

“To keep them safe, of course.” His grin fell away. “Haven’t you heard the news from the north?”

“What news is that?” asked Khan.

“Collosso is out.”

The rider shivered as he said it, and Jimmy felt a chill himself. Khan only frowned. “What do you mean, he’s out?”

“He’s marauding. He’s rampaging,” said Flanders. “For years Collosso has kept to his castle, but not anymore. He flattened a farm the other night. Squashed the cows like bugs. Took the farmer for a toy.”

The rider looked back, north up the road. “Everyone is fleeing.” For a moment he didn’t seem so brave and dashing.

“Where’s Collosso now?” asked Khan.

The rider shrugged. “Every day he goes farther from the castle. But every night he returns.”

“A giant shouldn’t be hard to find,” said Jimmy, looking up at Khan. “You can track him, can’t you?”

Flanders gawked. “Don’t tell me you’re going looking for him?”

“We’re going to kill him,” said Jimmy.

“Go on!” Flanders laughed loudly. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

But Khan said that it was true. “Jimmy’s bound to try,” he said. “And so I’m bound to help him. That’s the duty of a man, ain’t it? What kind of fella would let a boy go alone against a giant?”

“The sensible kind,” said Flanders. “The kind that grows old. Not that I wouldn’t love to have a crack at Collosso myself. That giant squashed my best dog, you know.”

“Did he?”

“Oh, yes!” The rider nodded furiously. “Skippy, that was his name. If you had need of a teamster, I’d go right now. There’s a hundred oxen going down the road there, each as stupid as a brick, but say the word and they’re yours.”

“I could use them,” said Jimmy.

“Go on!” said Flanders.

“It’s true,” said Jimmy. “They could pull a wagon.”

Flanders laughed. “That would be some wagon!”

“There’s one in the woods,” said Jimmy. “It has wheels as high as houses, and a bed as big as a field—”

“Now, that’s just a tall tale,” said Khan. “Like the vanishing army and the bottomless swamp. Ain’t no credibility to them things.”

“But I saw it,” said Jimmy. “It’s just sitting there, on a road made of huge stones.”

“The old hauling road?” asked Khan. “Could that story be true?”

“They say it’s how Collosso built his castle,” said the teamster. “Great wagons hauling a whole tree at a time; half a mountain all at once.”

“I can take you there,” said Jimmy.

“Well, let’s be going,” said Khan.

“Tally ho!” cried the rider. He spun his horse and galloped down the road, into the cloud of dust.

Khan and Jimmy followed him. They squeezed past the oxen, between the tips of their horns and the fence. In the gray fog, the animals were coming to a stop, and at the front of the herd, in the middle of the road, Flanders was arguing with the drover.

“I don’t care. I’m not going,” said the drover.

They sat on their horses, yelling at the tops of their voices, while the oxen moaned and bellowed. Khan rode up beside them.

“Your own mother!” shouted Flanders. “That giant squished your own mother!”

“I know it,” said the drover. “I was there. I remember her last words, uttered while she lay flat as a leaf, breathing her last. She took my hand; she told me, ‘Listen, deary, run for your life.’ That’s what she told me, my poor old mother. ‘Save yourself, Tim,’ she said, and every day I live up to that. Take on a giant? What’s the use of trying when you know you’re going to fail?”

“I won’t fail. I can do it,” said Jimmy. “The Swamp Witch said I can.”

“Good luck to you, then.” The drover passed the end of his rope into Jimmy’s hands. He turned his horse’s head and put his heels to its ribs. He went off down the road at a run, and when he was just a speck in a ball of dust he shouted back: “I will tell Fingal that his boy died bravely.”

It seemed wrong to Jimmy to be heading south, with the morning sun on his left. He felt he was going backward, while the hundred oxen made such a bellowing noise that he was half deaf by the time they reached the great wagon, nearly four days later.

Khan grinned when he saw it. “Well, fancy that,” was all he said. But Finnegan Flanders was so awed by the size of the wagon that he got down from his horse and fell to his knees, as if he’d come to a holy ark. “My granddad used to speak of this,” he said. “I thought he was an old coot telling stories.”

It took more than a day to harness the hundred oxen. As Khan pointed out, the work might have gone more quickly if Flanders hadn’t been there. “That fella, he’s plum useless,” said the hunter. “He just gets himself in the way.”

It was as though Flanders had no idea how to harness oxen. He bullied them here and there, like a farmwife chasing chickens, but it was Khan who got them into place, who attached the yokes and harnesses. It was the giant-slayer who sat down to untangle the pile of reins.

“That don’t look like enough leather you’ve got there,” said Khan. “Half of them critters ain’t going to have reins on them.”

“They don’t have to,” said Jimmy. “It’s only the front ones you have to steer. The rest just follow along.”

“Is that right?” cried Flanders. “They just follow along? Just like that?”

Khan squinted at the teamster. “Now, exactly how much do you know about driving?” he asked.

“Why, I know it all,” said Flanders. “I read every book that’s ever been written about it.”

Jimmy looked at Khan, who was looking back at him. “And how long have you been doing it now?” he said.

“Well, let’s see.” Flanders stroked his chin. “Bought the oxen up north. Hired a drover. Came down south. Must be—oh—a week now.” He grinned his dashing grin. “Pretty near.”

He got back on his horse and dashed here and there as Jimmy and Khan rigged up the reins. They attached them to the front oxen, to the rings at the ends of their horns. Then they threaded them back through the rings of the others.