The Giant-Slayer

by Iain Lawrence

  “Sure, Meezle,” said Jimmy.

  It was a miserable ride for Jimmy along the Great North Road that day. As well as the creak of the cart’s wooden wheel came the moaning and crying of the gnomes. But Meezle and Jiggs never stopped to look after them.

  “Maybe they’re thirsty,” said Jimmy.

  “Maybe so,” said Meezle, as though the idea were only an interesting theory. When the sounds grew too loud, he banged his fist on the roof and shouted, “Shut up in there, you blithering gnomes.”

  They traveled through the night. Though the wheel kept creaking and the gnomes kept wailing, Jimmy fell asleep. He swayed back and forth like a doll made of rags and didn’t wake up until the cart stopped at dawn.

  The sky was yellow and orange. Blocking the road in front of the cart was a wooden gate in a wall made of logs. A man was coming out of a little booth, shuffling his feet in the dust. He unfastened his locks and latches.

  “Where are we?” asked Jimmy, rubbing his eyes.

  “The end of the road,” said Meezle. Tee-hee-heeeee.

  Jimmy expected to see the castle of Collosso on the other side of the wall. But when Meezle drove the cart through the gate, they entered a dusty compound that looked more like a prison than anything. There was a row of pretty houses, with flowers in window boxes, but most of the buildings were stark and square, with locks on the doors and bars on the windows.

  Jimmy looked warily at Meezle. “What sort of place is this?”

  “It’s the mines, of course,” said Meezle. “Gold, mostly. Bit of silver.” He steered the cart toward the row of houses, then cleared his throat and called out in a voice that was loud and deep, like the hoot of a foghorn: “Gnomes for sale!”

  Out from the houses came men in fine clothes, and women in dresses, and boys and girls who didn’t pause on the porches but came running across the compound with dust flying from their heels.

  “Gnomes for sale!” shouted Meezle.

  In the cart the gnomes were wailing louder than ever. They pressed against the window, reaching their fingers between the bars.

  Meezle stopped the cart. “Gnomes for sale!” he cried again.

  A man in white clothes, with bushy whiskers on his cheeks, came over with a walking stick. “How much?” he asked.

  Meezle named a price that was, per gnome, what Fingal would have earned in an afternoon. The man nodded. He climbed up on the back of the cart and peered in through the window. Then he stood below the driver’s seat and pointed at Jimmy. “Why’s that one riding with you?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m not a gnome,” said Jimmy. “I’m not for sale, sir.”

  The man looked delighted. He grinned at the boys who stood around him, watching from a distance. “Why, he’s a lingo.”

  “Yes,” said Meezle. “He speaks very well for a gnome.”

  “What do you mean?” said Jimmy. “We’re partners.”

  The boys and girls hooted with laughter. The man stroked his whiskers happily. “Will a gnome never speak a word of truth?” he said. “I’ll give you a thousand Royals for the lot.”

  “Two thousand if you want the lingo,” said Meezle.

  The man looked into his purse. “Fifteen hundred.”

  “Done.”

  They shook hands, and that was it. Jimmy was sold as a slave.

  A gang of men came to unload the cart. They brought a cage on wheels and pitched the gnomes into it like so many bags of potatoes. Jimmy argued and pleaded, but they pitched him too, tossing him feet first.

  He grabbed onto the bars of the cage and reached through them. “Please,” he said. “Somebody save me.” But nobody moved to help poor Jimmy. A boy looked around with a stupid grin. “I never seen a funnier gnome,” he said.

  It was the gnomes who comforted the giant-slayer. They closed around him, patting his shoulders, rubbing his back. They talked in their jabbering voices as the cage was wheeled across the compound, and although Jimmy couldn’t understand a word they were saying, he felt less wretched and abandoned.

  Jimmy and the gnomes were hauled high into the mountains, above all but the scrawniest trees. They were taken to a camp that was ringed by a stone wall, guarded by hounds with no tails, by burly men from Hooliga, armed with blackjacks and bludgeons. They were put to work in a silver mine, where they labored in darkness with hammer and chisel. They went down before dawn and came up after dark, never seeing the sun.

  “Boy, why didn’t Jimmy know about gnomes?” said Dickie. “The travelers at the inn should have told him.”

  “They didn’t know,” said Laurie. “The runners and the miners were the only ones who knew what was going on, and they didn’t talk to anyone. Everyone else was afraid of gnomes. Why, most were scared to death. Jimmy had no idea what a gnome was like until he met the runners.”

  “How long did he work at the mine?” asked Chip.

  “A long time,” said Laurie. “A very long time.”

  Jimmy was kept so long at the mine that he learned the language of the Gnomes. He became friends with many, even with those he had herded from the cave, because they were the ones that he lived with, all crammed in a windowless hut barely bigger than a Hooligan dog house.

  He told them about Fingal and the Dragon’s Tooth, and they sometimes laughed when he mixed up the strange gnome words—but never in a cruel way. He told them that he was born to kill giants, and that—somehow—he was going to slay Collosso.

  That made the gnomes excited. Gnomes were always excited, but then more than ever. In the dark little hut, with Jimmy the giant-slayer sitting in the middle of a circle, they began to talk of giant killing. It soon would be all they ever talked about.

  “Killing giants is easy. It’s child’s play,” said one, named Felix. “I’ve killed three of them myself.”

  “I’ve killed four,” said another.

  Jimmy smiled. It seemed wonderful that a turn of bad luck had brought him into the company of giant-slayers. “Tell me,” he said. “How do I do it?”

  Felix pulled at his long beard. “Knock him down, that’s what. Let physics do the rest.”

  “But how do I knock him down?” said Jimmy.

  “Trip him up,” said Felix. “Trip him up and knock him down. That’s all there is to killing giants.”

  “But how do I trip him up?” asked Jimmy.

  “Put his shoes on the wrong feet!” cried a different gnome.

  “Tie the laces together,” shouted another.

  “Yes, I invented that method,” said Felix.

  It seemed there were many ways to kill a giant, and the gnomes rattled them off for hours, until one of the Hooligans bashed on the hut with his bludgeon and told them all to be quiet. The gnomes only lowered their voices and in excited whispers described their many adventures, each more thrilling than the last.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  THE RETURN OF THE HUNTER

  Jimmy stood out among the gnomes, and not only because he was the tallest. He didn’t have a beard like the others, nor a voice that was old and manly. His ears were too big; he had longer legs, so he didn’t run in the staggering way of a gnome. But most obvious of all, Jimmy couldn’t dig and chisel like a gnome. As a miner, he was useless.

  To the Hooligan guards, Jimmy was “that big one,” which pleased him, or “that funny-looking one,” which didn’t. They knew he was a lingo, but they treated him like a fool. “Diggy here!” they said, thrusting a shovel in his hand. “Diggy, diggy! You savvy?”

  When they saw what a poor miner he was, the guards made Jimmy “boss gnome” and put him in charge of the woodcutting party. They taught him how to drive the wagon with its team of four horses, and every morning Jimmy headed off across the mountainside, instead of down into the mine. A Hooligan guard was always with him, a slathering dog in hand.

  Jimmy drove the wagon back and forth. He did that in the autumn and all through the winter, when the air was so cold that he wrapped himself in seven furs and still shivered every minu
te.

  But the woodcutting was easy in the winter. There was no need to limb the trees, because the branches broke away as the great pines came crashing down. They shattered so cleanly that they might have been made of glass, and the sound was clear and sharp—echoing forever through the mountains. At the end of the day, the beards of the gnomes were solid with frost, and icicles dripped from their eyebrows. But they sang their old gnome songs, with that wonderful echo, as they rode the wagon back to camp.

  It was on a day toward the end of winter when the unicorns came over the ridge and down across the mountain. There were six of them running, with the snow in a cloud around them, their snorting breaths—in white puffs—the only sound in the world. The gnomes just stood and watched, and the Hooligans didn’t order them back to work because they were watching too.

  Long manes flowing, horns sparkling with sunlight, the unicorns went plowing through the snow, past the woodlot, down the hill, into the thickness of the forest.

  And behind them came a hunter.

  “Was it Khan?” asked Dickie.

  “Yes, it was Khan,” said Laurie.

  Dickie smiled. “I knew he would come.”

  Peter in his wheelchair, and Ruth beside him, hadn’t heard of the hunter. “Who is Khan?” they asked. Chip said that he was a hunter, that he followed the unicorns, and that he had given a mysterious charm to Jimmy the giant-slayer. And then Carolyn said, “Dickie thinks it’s him.”

  Ruth hid her smile by looking suddenly at the floor. But Peter laughed out loud. So did Chip, though he’d already heard the idea.

  “It’s true,” said Dickie. “I’m Khan. Every night I ride across the mountains in the snow.”

  “You dream about him every night?” asked Peter.

  “It’s not dreaming, really. I am Khan,” said Dickie. “At night I live in the story. It’s like I’ve always been there, kind of.”

  Chip looked across from his pillow. “Are you giving us the business?”

  “No way,” said Dickie. “It’s hard to explain, but it’s true.” The coonskin cap dangled in front of his face. “I’m Khan the hunter. And I think James is Jimmy.” The machine took a whirring, wheezing breath. “And Carolyn’s the Swamp Witch.”

  “Then who am I?” said Chip.

  “I don’t think you’re in it.”

  “What about Laurie?” asked Carolyn. “If it’s her story, she oughta be in it.”

  Dickie frowned at his mirror. “Maybe she’s the Woman,” he said at last. “That kind of makes sense, ’cause she made the giant-slayer. You know? Like he was born on account of her?”

  “But the Woman vanished,” said Carolyn. “Probably the giant got her. So Laurie should be squashed or something. She should disappear.”

  “Well, I can’t figure all of it out. Not yet,” said Dickie. “All I know is that I’m the hunter.”

  James Miner wheeled himself sideways on the treatment board. He looked up at Dickie. “At night do you travel on the road? The Great North Road?”

  “Sometimes,” said Dickie.

  “Do you know where it goes?”

  “No.”

  “I do.” James looked up at all the faces, but nobody asked him where he thought the road went. So he said, “I think it goes to Piper’s Pond.”

  Laurie smiled to herself; she liked that idea. But Chip snorted. “Piper’s Pond is a real place, you dummy,” he said. “How can a fake road go to a real place?”

  “I don’t know,” said James. “But it’s still what I think. If you go far enough along the road, you get to the pond. First, you hear the piper way in the distance, and that’s how you know you’re getting close, ’cause you hear the bagpipes when there’s no one around to play them.”

  “Aw, cut it out, you goof,” said Carolyn.

  James ignored her. “And you know what? Not all of us are going to get there. I think one of us is going to die.”

  “Cut the gas, will you?” Chip turned away. “Let’s just hear the story.”

  Khan was riding the big white horse that Jimmy had seen long ago from the window of the Dragon’s Tooth. A pony trailed behind it, walking with weary steps. On its back was a bundle of furs.

  The hunter swayed with his horse. He wore his coat of unicorn hide, while his legs were bundled in wooly wrappings that might have come from a mastodon. He held the reins but let the horse find its own way as it stepped through the snow.

  Jimmy was up on the wagon, helping the woodcutters load their timbers. Felix was beside him, and the rest of the gnomes were just standing at their places, leaning on their axes. They and the Hooligan guards, and even the hounds, were watching the hunter ride steadily toward them.

  One of the Hooligans waved his bludgeon above his head and shouted Khan’s name. It boomed through the mountains, back and forth between the peaks. “Khan! Khan! Khan!”

  As the hunter rode into the woodlot, the hounds tugged madly at their leashes. They snarled and barked, and the horse shied away until Khan spoke to it calmly. “Steady, girl. Steady.”

  The Hooligans pulled on the leashes. They bashed at the hounds with their bludgeons, but nothing would quiet the dogs. High on his horse, Khan looked down at the gnomes and the toppled trees, at Jimmy on the wagon’s bench. If he recognized the boy, there was no sign of it.

  The biggest of the Hooligans spoke to the hunter. “You come early,” he said.

  “So does spring.” Khan pulled the pony up to his side and started unlashing the bundle. “In the valley, the daffodils grow.”

  The Hooligans didn’t care about daffodils. They wanted to buy furs and pelts, and especially the yellow skins of manticores. They crowded round the little horse as Khan spread open the bundle. On the instant, and as though he had loosed a magical power, the hounds suddenly lay flat in the snow, whining like puppies.

  Jimmy turned to the grinder, the gnome who sharpened axes. “What happened?” he asked.

  “They smell gryphon,” said the gnome.

  From his bundle, Khan pulled a clutch of talons and feathers, the remains of seven gryphons. The hounds yelped as though they’d been whipped, and buried their faces deep in the snow.

  “You see?” said the grinder. “Just the whiff of a gryphon will cower the hounds.”

  The Hooligans took all of the manticore hides, a unicorn pelt, and a long strip of hydra skin that glistened like oily water. They pulled coins from their pockets, but Khan only waved them away. “Give me one of them gnomes,” he said.

  The Hooligans looked at each other as though trying not to laugh. It would cost them nothing to give away a gnome.

  Khan still sat on his horse; he hadn’t budged from its back. He raised an arm and pointed at Jimmy. “Give me that one there. The funny-looking fella.”

  “That’s the boss gnome. He’s a lingo,” said one of the Hooligans. “He’s worth three times the others.”

  Khan kept the feathers and talons, and rolled the rest of his bundle onto the snow. It tumbled from the horse’s back, spilling horns and pelts and furs of every kind. There was enough to buy a dozen gnomes, but Khan took only the one. A Hooligan grabbed Jimmy by the arm and pitched him up to the hunter, and the guards fell on the furs like a pack of wolves.

  The hunter shoved Jimmy down in front of him. “Don’t talk to me, gnome,” he said. “Just sit and be quiet.” He nudged his heels at the horse and set off at a gallop, straight up the hill the way he had come, plowing along in his own tracks. The gnomes called out with the most pathetic cries, and Jimmy twisted round to look back. He called farewell in their language, and they shouted back, “Goodbye! Good luck! Good living!”

  Khan stormed across the ridge on the big white horse, in a cloud of kicked-up snow. The pony ran at his left side, bounding like a deer. Jimmy clung to the horse’s mane and leaned out, looking back behind Khan, watching until the woodlot vanished behind the hill. Some of the gnomes were waving their hats, others reaching out with their little arms. Then it was only snow behind him, and the voi
ces of the gnomes echoing all around.

  Khan let the horse slow to a walk. He looked down at Jimmy and said, “Mistook you for a gnome, did they?”

  Jimmy grinned back at the hunter’s red and frosty face. “You knew it was me?”

  “Soon as I seen you.” Khan opened his coat and pulled Jimmy into its warm folds. He closed it tight around the two of them. “I’ll take you down to the valley and turn you loose. You can make your way home from there.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” said Jimmy. “There’s something I have to do before I ever go to the Dragon’s Tooth again.”

  “Now what would that be, Jimmy?”

  “I have to kill Collosso. The Swamp Witch told me so.”

  Khan grunted. He rode across the slope and came among the trees. Then he let the reins go slack, leaving the horse to find the way downhill. The snow grew thinner, then faded away altogether, and at the bank of a tumbling river, Khan stopped to make camp.

  Below a pine, he built a fire. He kept it small and free of smoke, and above the flames he roasted strips of rabbit. There was tea to follow, sweet with honey, before the hunter settled back and looked at Jimmy.

  “You haven’t a hope,” he said.

  “Of what?” asked Jimmy.

  “Of killing that giant.”

  Khan kept feeding twigs to the flames. The day turned to twilight and then to darkness, and in the woods below them little specks of light appeared—the lamps and candles of the mining camp. Jimmy talked and talked, and the hunter didn’t say a word until the story was finished, and he didn’t waste them even then. “Maybe you should look for a Wishman,” he said. “Let the giant be.”

  “Why?” asked Jimmy.

  “Could be that you are what you are because of a Wishman. A Wishman can give you what you want, if you pay the price. A giant can only get you killed.”

  But Jimmy said that he was determined. “If I’m born to kill giants, I have to kill giants,” he said.