The Giant-Slayer

by Iain Lawrence

  For Laurie, it seemed very sad. She looked at Dickie’s face hovering in the mirror, and wondered how he could be so happy for something that had come too late for him. She suddenly heard the words her father had spoken on a day that seemed long ago: Can you imagine how it haunts them that they got polio just because they went to a swimming pool, or something as frivolous as that? She wished harder than she had ever wished for anything that she could turn back the clock to that afternoon at the creek and tell Dickie not to drink the water, or slap it from his hands as he cupped them to his lips. If they had never gone to the creek that day, he would be reading the headline at home, not caring about it at all.

  Miss Freeman was still holding the newspaper. But her smile was fading. “Aren’t you happy, Carolyn?” she asked.

  “Sure. Whoop-de-doo,” said Carolyn. “Doesn’t do me any good.”

  “No, not directly.” Miss Freeman folded the paper. “But think of all the children who won’t go through what you’ve been through. All the parents who won’t have to worry anymore. Can’t you be happy for them?”

  The girl’s head didn’t move on the pillow. Her body lay still in the iron lung. But, somehow, it seemed that she shrugged. “Were they sorry for me?”

  “I’m sure a lot of them were,” said Miss Freeman. “We’ll talk about it later, if you like. For now I just wanted to pass on the news.”

  She put the paper under her arm and turned toward the door. “Oh, and Laurie, your father’s on his way up. He just asked downstairs if you were here, so we told him to come to the fourth floor. He seems such a nice man.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  THE CASTLE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  There was a party that evening in the polio ward, but Laurie wasn’t there. Nurses in white uniforms spooned cake with white icing into the mouths of the children in their iron lungs. Little girls in leg braces danced to phonograph records, tangling their crutches until everyone was laughing.

  And Laurie Valentine sat in her living room, feeling as small as an ant on the big old sofa. As though she were still only six, her legs didn’t reach the floor, and her father loomed above her.

  He spoke in his calm and quiet way. “I was very angry, you know,” he said. “I thought we had an understanding that you would stay away from Bishop’s.”

  “I never really promised,” said Laurie.

  “So I should have made you take an oath?” Mr. Valentine paced on the carpet, his tie swinging across his chest. “You’re not a little child anymore. We have to trust each other, Laurie.”

  “If you trust me, why did you spy on me?” She was taking a chance, not sure even now if the man at the pond had been her father. But by the way he paused in his pacing she could see that she was right. “I saw you at Piper’s Pond that day,” she said.

  “As I recall,” said Mr. Valentine, “you told me that you would be at the library.”

  “And you didn’t trust me!” cried Laurie, as though she had won a huge victory. But even she could see that it was hollow. She didn’t look up at her father.

  “Laurie, it was wrong of you to go to Bishop’s,” he said. “But it was wrong of me as well to stop you. I see that now, and I apologize.”

  Laurie could hardly believe that her father was apologizing. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said generously.

  Mr. Valentine stopped pacing, took out his pipe, and lit it. He tossed his match into the fireplace and watched the smoke curl from his pipe. “Mrs. Espinosa called me today. She wanted to say how kind it was of me to let you visit Dickie. You’re the only one who does, apparently.”

  “I’m his only friend,” said Laurie.

  “It’s good you have convictions,” said Mr. Valentine. “I didn’t want you to go, but you weighed my advice and took the high road. You took it by yourself; I’m proud of you. It’s sometimes a lonely road, the high road.”

  Laurie thought of Dickie, who had said that she was the Woman in the story. It was strange that Jimmy’s mother had also set off on the High Road.

  Mr. Valentine puffed a ball of gray smoke. “So how is your little friend?”

  The “little” stung her. “Well, he’s still in an iron lung,” she said, a bit snootily, “so I don’t think he’s all that great.”

  Mr. Valentine winced. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He pulled a shred of tobacco from his lips. “I imagine you saw the headline today?”

  She nodded.

  “The vaccine’s ready; it’s finished. It hasn’t proven to be quite the miracle the papers have made out, but it’s better than expected.” Mr. Valentine looked proud, as though he brewed the vaccine himself. “The Foundation intends to vaccinate nine million people before summer. I’ve been pulling some strings, Laurie, and I’ve seen to it that you’ll be one of the first. If you’re going to hang around polio wards, I think I owe you that.”

  The announcement pleased Laurie. “When will that happen?” she asked.

  “As soon as possible,” said Mr. Valentine. “I believe you’re getting the first batch from the Cutter lab.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Laurie. She stood up and hugged him, then reached a bit higher and kissed his neck.

  He blushed and said, “Is it too much to ask that you stay away from Bishop’s until you’ve had the shot?”

  “No, that’s okay,” said Laurie. “I will.”

  And she did.

  It was nine days later when Laurie got the first of her two vaccinations. A photographer took her picture for the weekend paper. “Wince, please,” he said, which made her smile. So he took another.

  That was on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, she was back at Bishop’s.

  The front page with the polio headline was taped to the wall in the respirator room. James Miner rolled his treatment board right across the room to show it to Laurie. He had put up the page himself, so it was just six inches above the floor.

  “Miss Freeman, she says I helped to beat polio,” he said. “A little bit of the vaccine, that’s on account of me.”

  “Really?” said Laurie.

  “I guess so.” He smiled and nodded. “I was a Polio Pioneer.”

  “Were you?” Laurie had wanted to be a Pioneer herself but was a year too old when the doctors and nurses had come around to her school with the test vaccine. She remembered how she had envied the little kids with their buttons and candy and membership cards.

  “I got the fake vaccine,” said James. “So I wasn’t protected.”

  “That’s awful,” said Laurie.

  “Yeah. My dad felt really cheated,” said James. “Besides, he thought you got money if you were a Pioneer. That’s why I was in it.”

  Across the room, in his iron lung, Chip laughed.

  “It’s true,” said James. “My dad’s always looking for ways to make money. In his store, he sells all this junk, like—”

  “What kind of store?” asked Dickie.

  “Kind of like a grocery store.” James was turning his board back and forth to try to look at everybody. “Its real name is Miner’s, but everyone calls it Miser’s, on account of my dad’s so cheap. I started working there when I was four. That’s where I was when I got polio.”

  “What happened?” asked Laurie.

  He turned toward her. “My job was sweeping—and stocking the bottom shelves. ’Cause I couldn’t reach the ones any higher. One day I was filling up the jam shelf, and I kind of fell down, and all the jars of jam started rolling off the shelf. There was strawberry jam and blueberry jam and blackberry jam and gooseberry jam and all these different kinds of jam, and they were all bursting when they hit the floor.” He laughed at the memory. “I couldn’t stop them, ’cause it hurt so much to move. Oh, my dad was so angry! He made me get the mop and bucket and clean it all up. And I could hardly even stand, so he said, ‘You shiftless bugger, you’re not leaving till you finish.’ So I just kept working until I kind of fainted in all that jam. When the doctor came and saw the red jam all over me, he thought my g
uts had fallen out.”

  James laughed again. But nobody else did. When he stopped, there was just the hum and whoosh of the iron lungs. Then Carolyn, looking straight up into her mirror, asked, “Where was your mother?”

  “Oh, she was long gone by then,” said James, turning his board again. “She went away when I was little. I don’t know where she went, not really.”

  Dickie said, “That’s funny. It’s just like Jimmy the giant-slayer.”

  “No fooling?” said James, who had missed the first part of the story.

  “Cross my heart. His mother ran away from Fingal,” said Dickie. “And he worked for his dad.”

  “I don’t remember where the giant-slayer is just now,” said James. “Did they get the big wagon going?”

  Laurie nodded. “Yes, they did.” She took her place at the window, hopping up to the broad sill. She poked her glasses on her nose and started again with the story. “But the teamster, Finnegan Flanders, he was scared to drive it.”

  “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.