The Giant-Slayer (26 page)

“I’m not going up there,” Flanders said, pointing at the tiny seat at the top of the spindly tower. “Heights give me the jee-bies.”

So Jimmy was the driver. He climbed up to the bed of the wagon, and Flanders threw the reins in a huge coil so that Jimmy could catch them. Then the giant-slayer scaled the tower, higher and higher, until he could again look out across forest and swamp, to the very edge of the world.

He had driven only the small team of horses at the mine. So looking down now, and seeing a hundred oxen ranged below him in their harness, made him feel a little frightened. He imagined that a flick of the reins might send them
charging down the old hauling road, the great wagon out of control.

Then he saw Khan looking up at him, so tiny down there on the ground. And he grabbed the reins, hauled with his left hand, and screamed as loudly as he could, “Gee up! Gee up!”

From his hand, the leather ran down to the tongue of the wagon, then forward through the rings in the oxen’s horns, through ring after ring, right to the very first animal. A tug sent the lead ox plodding forward. As it pulled up against its yoke, the next one followed, then the one after that, and with a great shuddering of wood and chain and leather, the wagon started forward. Its enormous wheels turned half a foot. The oxen heaved, planted their feet and heaved again, and the wheels creaked round in their hubs. The huge tower swayed to the right, then back to the left.

“Gee up!” screamed Jimmy, and tugged the reins again.

A hundred hooves slammed the ground with every step. The wheels turned faster, with squeals and shrieks of metal, now with small explosions as rocks and stones burst beneath the metal rims.

High above the trees, Jimmy the giant-slayer glided along on his little seat. He was so small up there, but huge and powerful too. He could carry a giant now, to wherever he wanted to take it, with just one pull on his arm. And even Collosso, he thought, couldn’t manage that.

The old hauling road took them straight to the north, right to Collosso’s castle. In places, it was badly overgrown, so
choked with bushes and young trees that often it seemed to end altogether, to go no farther than the next wall of gorse and ivy.

But from Jimmy’s seat the road stretched on and on. And the oxen pulled right through the bushes, through stands of little trees, while the wheels crushed all in their path.

By the hour, the mountains seemed to come closer. The route through the pass became clear as craggy peaks loomed higher all around. At night, the hunter, the teamster, and the giant-slayer camped on the bed of the wagon, far above the forest and the beasts that roamed through it.

On the third day, when they were climbing through the foothills, Khan tethered his horse and pony to the back of the wagon and rode beside Jimmy, both squished into the small seat. It was the first time that he seemed afraid, holding on as he did to the armrest, while the seat rocked far from side to side. He licked his lips and stared down at the rows of oxen, at Finnegan Flanders galloping here and there. It was half an hour before he could even talk.

“Jimmy,” he said then, “there’s something on my mind. Something worrying at me in an awful way.”

“What’s that?” asked Jimmy.

Khan shifted on the seat. He didn’t have room to straighten his legs. “Well, we’re getting mighty close to the castle now. And I’ve been wondering just how you mean to kill the giant.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Jimmy. “I’ll do him in a flash. I’ll knock him down.”

Khan looked at Jimmy the same way he had looked at Finnegan Flanders. “And just how are you fixing to do that?”

“I’ll tie his shoelaces together,” said Jimmy. “Or I might put up a bit of string and trip him. I guess I’ll decide when I get there.”

The road had been bending to the left, but now it turned more sharply. Jimmy pulled on the rein, hauling it back. “Haw! Haw!” he yelled at the oxen. Far ahead, the team began to turn.

“So, Jimmy,” said Khan. “How are you fixing to get to his shoes?”

“While he’s eating,” said Jimmy, as though it were too simple to need explaining. “He’ll be sitting at the table, and I’ll nip up and—”

“You learned this from the gnomes?” asked Khan.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Jimmy. He tugged on the other rein now, to straighten the team. “They should know; they’ve killed dozens of giants.”

“Well, now, I’m not saying I’d swear to that,” said Khan.

“You mean they’re liars?” asked Jimmy.

“No, not exactly,” said Khan. “You see, Jimmy, a gnome don’t always see things the way that we see them. Take someone like Flanders down there.” He pointed to the figure below them, dashing just then down the rows of oxen. “When Flanders tells you a tale, he means for you to believe it. Might even believe it himself. Flanders don’t invent stories; he invents the truth as he sees it.”

That made sense to Jimmy. In the parlor of the old inn he had heard thousands of stories from hundreds of travelers, and every man had sworn he was telling the truth.

“Flanders tells lies ’cause his truth ain’t worth talking
about,” said Khan. “But to a gnome, there ain’t no difference. Truth or lies, it’s all the same. Life’s a story, and you can tell it any way you want.”

Jimmy didn’t really understand. “Well, do gnomes kill giants or not?” he asked.

“Well, it’s true and it ain’t,” said Khan. Dust swirled below them, boiling over the bed of the wagon. “While they’re telling the story, that’s when it’s true.”

As the wagon climbed to the top of the hill, Jimmy and Khan looked out on a vast plateau of farms and villages. They were nearly at the very end of the Great North Road, with nothing but the flatland between them and the mountains.

Jimmy steered straight for the pass, through little hamlets, past schoolyards and windmills. Finnegan Flanders rode ahead, his big horse prancing. He posted in the saddle, with the big plume waving on his hat, all his fringes shaking.

From every building, people ran out to watch the wagon pass. Children poured from the schools, farmers from the barns. Flanders kept shouting, “We’re off to kill Collosso!” And the men cheered, and the children whistled and clapped, and the women tore off their scarlet, gold, and yellow scarves and held them up like streamers.

They all cheered for Finnegan Flanders, for each of the hundred oxen, for Jimmy and Khan and the enormous wagon, and for the white horse and pony that trailed along behind.

“Kill the giant! Kill the giant!” shouted the boys and girls.

“Kill the giant!” cried the women, waving their pretty scarves.

And the men stepped forward, shouting advice to the giant-slayer and his companions. “Go for his eye!” said a farmer. “That’s his weakness.”

A miller cried out, “He has a glass jaw!”

“Hit him in the stomach!” shouted a teacher. “You’ll knock the wind out of him.”

“He has a cauliflower ear!” yelled a sawyer.

Squished on the seat beside Jimmy, Khan waved to the crowd. “That’s one frail giant,” he said. “He’s got so many weak points he might fall to pieces soon as we look at him.”

Just as the Swamp Witch had said, the pass through the mountains opened in front of Jimmy and his companions. The Great North Road curved between peaks that soared ten thousand feet in crags of snow and rock. It hugged the slope, so one side of the road was always a sheer cliff where boulders came tumbling down, and the other a vast nothing, a drop-off to a valley so distant that those tumbling boulders always disappeared before they hit the bottom.

Jimmy steered the team along this road, around its curves and bends. The wagon rumbled along with the oxen tramping, stones exploding under the wheels. From the swaying seat, Jimmy saw dragons in their high lairs on windswept cliffs. And then he saw Collosso.

It was just a glimpse he got, of the giant in the distance. Collosso was striding across a mountain slope, and his red
cap bobbed along the top of a ridge where a glacier crawled. It was like a huge ball bouncing on the ice and rock, in view one moment, hidden the next. And then Collosso himself rose over that ridge and stepped across it.

Jimmy saw his enormous head with its bush of red hair, his mighty arms swinging, his great legs carrying him on. He saw his boots kicking up blizzards of snow, and with each step an avalanche went rumbling down the glacier.

The oxen picked up the scent of the giant and shied nervously in their harnesses. Jimmy had to wrench on the reins, screaming “Haw! Haw!” at the top of his voice to keep them from stampeding over the cliff.

And then the giant was gone. He trampled his way across an old, burned forest and slipped behind the crest of a mountain.

The sight left Jimmy shaken. He had never imagined the true size of the giant or the strength in his limbs. He put his hand to his shirt, feeling for the ball of bones that Khan had given him. It was all he had to fight against a giant.

On the day after he sighted Collosso, Jimmy steered the wagon round a bend, looked up, and saw the castle.

It was white and shiny, a fabulous sight of towers and ramparts and spires. It clung to the top of a rocky knoll; it perched at the very edge of the world. At its front and sides were the mountains, but behind it was the void—just a terrible swirl of clouds, the beginning of infinite nothing.

Khan was riding on the seat again, and neither he nor
Jimmy said a word. They just stared at the white fortress, at the ramparts and the windows, until the road turned again, hiding the castle. It rose as steeply then as it had ever risen, so the oxen had to strain and pant. Then it turned again and followed the side of the mountain around. And it came out at the edge of the world.

Jimmy began to look down into the void. But Khan shouted, “Don’t!” He held up his hand to turn Jimmy’s head aside. “It drives men mad to look into there,” he said.

“But what does it look like?” asked Jimmy.

“I don’t know,” said Khan. “I’ve never looked.”

The clouds kept welling up from the void like smoke from a fire. They rose in billows, in spirals and bursts. Black as night, brown as the earth, they rolled over each other, carried by an endless wind that moaned and whined through the rock. And on the draft, a flight of crimson dragons soared. They circled in and out of the clouds, their leathery wings never moving, their long necks bent into red crooks.