The Giant-Slayer

by Iain Lawrence

  Stunned, the dragon fell. It landed on Jimmy and Khan, and the arrows in the hunter’s quiver pierced the scales on its belly. The wings opened again, beating furiously now. It lifted Jimmy from the ground, and Khan held onto his waist.

  From the belly of the dragon came drips of black blood. They fell on Khan, on Jimmy. A drop fell on the charm, and the bones began to gleam and shine. They turned to red as a heat built up inside them, then to white and blue. With an enormous flash, that ball of bones burst open.

  Khan and Jimmy tumbled together onto the ground, while the dragon shot up through the air, hurled backward into the cloud with its red neck writhing. The claw from the center of the charm fell on the road beside Jimmy. Half its length hung over the edge of the world, and slowly it tipped over. Jimmy reached out to grab it, but down the claw went, into the void.

  “No!” shouted Jimmy. “No!” There seemed nothing else that could help him now, no hope of killing Collosso.

  But he had forgotten the words of the Tellsman, the message scrawled in cold ashes: Has lightning inside.

  The claw exploded with a flash that was brighter than the sun. An instant later, a clap of thunder nearly deafened the giant-slayer. Then the dark clouds of the void began to flare and flicker. They pulsed with sheets of lightning.

  The giant screamed. He tore off his red cap and held it over his face as though to hide himself from the storm.

  Thunder boomed again. Lightning seared in a bolt from the clouds and hit the tower where the giant stood. Another followed, crumbling the stones. A third blasted into the moat, setting the tar and pitch on fire.

  Flames leapt up from below, and the lightning kept flashing above. Collosso reeled across his platform. One foot went over the edge; he tried to catch himself. For a moment he balanced there at an impossible angle, his huge arms flailing. The red cap soared from his hand. It spiraled higher on the draft of wind and fire. Then—with a scream—the giant slipped from his tower and plummeted down, past the edge of the world.

  The lightning stopped. The thunder faded away in echoing booms. And the red cap fluttered down to land on the road near Jimmy and Flanders and Khan.

  In her iron lung, Laurie stirred. She didn’t wake, exactly, but she almost did. Her eyes came open, and her head turned slightly, and then she slipped away again.

  Mr. Valentine, at her side, saw it happen. He shouted her name. “She’s awake!” he cried.

  James called out for the nurse. He lurched toward the door on his braces, hobbling as fast as he could. “Miss Freeman!” he shouted. “She woke up!”

  The nurse came running. By the time they got into the respirator room, Laurie was back in her coma, in her own strange silence and blackness. Mr. Valentine held his hands on his daughter’s face and begged her to open her eyes.

  Collosso was dead, but the story wasn’t finished. There was not a person in the room, including Mr. Valentine, who didn’t want it to carry on.

  Carolyn was the one who started again.

  She said that Finnegan Flanders jumped down from his horse, that he and Khan raised the little giant-slayer between them, up onto their shoulders, and paraded him down the road. They carried him to the wagon, where the Swamp Witch pulled herself from the mud and looked down from the top. And they all shouted three cheers for Jimmy.

  In the castle, across the moat, a rumble of metal began. The giant-slayer and his friends had heard the sound before and knew what it meant. They looked up at the drawbridge and saw it slowly open.

  The chain clanked. The drawbridge dropped into place. The iron portcullis rose from the floor.

  Through the gap below it came the servants of Collosso, the giant’s slaves and toys. They crawled on their bellies when the gap looked pencil thin. They came in a crouch when it was a little bigger, and then running—in a flood—as the portcullis rattled up into the castle walls.

  There were hundreds of people, many holding hands, most skipping along, all laughing and cheering. They streamed across the drawbridge and onto the road, and they gathered in a huge crowd around the strange-looking wagon and the even-stranger-looking giant-slayer. They shouted out that Jimmy was a hero. They made him stand up on the wagon so that they could see him that much better, and they cheered and cheered and cheered.

  It was a wonderful thing for Jimmy to have men looking up at him. He heard them praise and bless him; he heard women shout out that they loved him. And then a voice cried above all the others. “He’s my boy! That’s Jimmy.”

  The Woman was the last to leave the castle, and she was just then nearing the end of the drawbridge. Jimmy tried to get down, to run and meet her, but there wasn’t enough room on the ground for Jimmy to stand. And there was no need. Men lifted the Woman high, and she came running to Jimmy on the shoulders and heads and hands of the crowd. She vaulted across to the wagon and hugged little Jimmy more tightly than he had ever been hugged before.

  The crowd whistled, laughed, and cheered. A little group of men brought the giant’s red hat, carrying it on long poles that they balanced on their shoulders. A mass of people closed around them in a babble of voices. For a moment it seemed the crowd would tear the hat to shreds, but instead it was hoisted up above the wagon, mounted on the poles as a sunshade for the Swamp Witch. Then all those hundreds of people stood back in a quiet group, and the men took off their hats, and they all began to clap for Jimmy the giant-slayer.

  They would gladly have carried him down from the mountain; they would gladly have carried them all. They would have carried Flanders on his horse and the Swamp Witch in her wagon all the way to the village in the valley. They would have made kings of the men, a queen of the witch.

  But that wasn’t fitting for Khan. It wasn’t what Jimmy was after. And the witch wanted something else altogether.

  Only Finnegan Flanders was happy amid the crowd. He let the people hoist him up, as he had hoisted Jimmy, and his fringes flashed as he waved his sword above them. When the cheering died down—and that took a long time—Flanders mounted his horse. He found room on its back for six young ladies, and he pranced along at the front of the crowd, leading all the hundreds of people down from the valley, free from Collosso’s castle.

  The Swamp Witch smiled as he rode away, her mouth in a thin red line. Khan waved once, then untied his big horse and got up on its back. “Reckon I’ll be off,” he said. “The unicorns will be shedding their horns soon.” He backed the horse and turned it round. He looked up at the castle with its shattered tower, along the road at the ruined wagon, at the red cap of Collosso. Then he looked at Jimmy.

  “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jimmy. “It’s up to the witch, I guess.”

  “If you cared to go hunting …” He let his voice fade away.

  “Thank you,” said Jimmy. He had never been so pleased, nor so torn. He would have loved to go hunting with Khan, into the mountains and the snow. “I think I have to go the other way,” he said.

  “Reckon you do,” said Khan. “I’ll watch for you, Jim, at the edge of the sky.” He nodded, then dragged his horse’s head around, kicked its ribs, and went loping up the road with the pony running behind. The eight hooves made a flurry of dust.

  Khan never looked back. But he raised a hand, with his fingers spread, and he shouted through the mountains, “You’re a mighty big man, my friend.”

  Jimmy watched the hunter fade away, vanishing into a world that was wild and empty. Then he helped his mother up to the seat of the wagon and settled beside her. He looked down at the Swamp Witch, who was wallowing happily in the mud. “Which way should we go?” he asked.

  “North,” she said, her throat bulging. “Stay on the road. We go right to the end.”

  Jimmy clicked his tongue. “Gee up!” he shouted, as though he were still driving a team of a hundred. The ox put its head down and plodded along the road.

  Beside the giant-slayer, the Woman touched his arm. “Jimmy,” she said, “you’ve got a lot of expla
ining to do.”

  He said it would have to wait, that the journey was nearly done. Then he shouted at the ox again, and he drove past the wreck of his glorious wagon, past the ninety-nine stains on the road. His mother looked around at the signs of his battle, at the gryphon hides blowing in the breeze. She looked pointedly at Jimmy but said nothing, happy to ride along primly with her hands on her lap, her back as straight as an arrow.

  A mile beyond the castle, the road turned away from the edge of the world. It went steeply down the mountain in a series of switchbacks. Jimmy kept pulling on the handbrake, but the wagon still outran the ox, shoving it down the hill. Round the sharp bends, the mud sloshed so badly that the witch got angry. “Slow down!” she said. “Do you want a knuckle sandwich?”

  “It’s all wrong,” said Dickie. “She sounds like Popeye or something.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Carolyn. “They drove to the end of the road.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Four days.”

  “What did they see?”

  “Well, all along the way,” said Carolyn, “were little piles of gold.”

  The first pile of gold appeared in a hollow tree, a stack of small bricks very neatly arranged. The second stood beside a little pool where Jimmy stopped to water the ox. Every three or four miles was another—always a tidy stack of gold, sometimes silver as well, or little bags of emeralds.

  Jimmy’s mother was delighted, and the Swamp Witch gloated. They couldn’t believe there was such a place in all the world where gold lay by the road for the taking. “How did it get here?” asked the Woman.

  “It’s from the gnomes,” said Jimmy. “It’s their way of saying thank you, I think.”

  By the fourth day, the wagon was laden down. The poor ox was struggling, breathing hard with every step. On a long hill, the wagon was barely moving when the Swamp Witch raised her head from the mud and said, “Listen.”

  From the distance came a strange howling, a sort of hullabaloo of hoots and whines. Jimmy frowned at the Woman, who shrugged her shoulders. “What is it?” asked the Swamp Witch.

  To Jimmy it sounded like cats—like dozens of cats—in a sort of feline choir. They weren’t just howling, he thought, but howling in a chorus, in a crazy sort of cat song. The sound was strangely beautiful, and it grew louder as the wagon neared the crest of the hill.

  From the summit, Jimmy and the Woman and the witch looked out across a valley. Stands of trees, bright green and olive, dotted fields of yellow. Across the sky flew flocks of birds of every color, and a herd of silver unicorns grazed among the grasses. It was a beautiful, pastoral place, and in the middle was a white house and a little wooden workshop. They stood beside a quiet pond where a man was playing the bagpipes.

  “I knew it!” said James. He beat his little fists happily on his metal braces. “It was Piper’s Pond, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, it wasn’t Doodyville,” said Carolyn.

  It was where the road came to an end. Jimmy guided the ox to the very last inch of the Great North Road, and on another yard, to the grassy bank of the pond. Ducks and swans were swimming there.

  The man with the bagpipes came toward them, playing steadily all the time. He took steps that were small and slow, and while his arm squeezed the bag of air, his fingers played the tune. Long streamers of scarlet and gold fluttered from the pipes.

  He was a very old man, the oldest that Jimmy had ever seen. His hair was long and white, his beard the same—like the tail of a unicorn glued to his cheeks. He made a last little flurry of notes, then stood smiling—panting—below the wagon as the music drained out of his bagpipes in a leaky sort of whine.

  “You have done it,” he said, looking up at the giant’s red hat. “You have killed Collosso.”

  “Not just me,” said Jimmy.

  “I know,” said the old man. “News of your deed has traveled before you.”

  The Swamp Witch had hauled herself up to the top of the wagon, her long fingers hooked over the edge. Just the top of her head and her eyes showed above it, and she blinked down at the old man.

  “Are you a Wishman?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you give us what we want?”

  The old man put down his bagpipes. He arranged them carefully on a little round stool. Then he scratched his beard and said, “Wishes are expensive.”

  “Come here,” said the Swamp Witch.

  The man was too old to climb by himself. Jimmy had to help him from below, and the Woman from above. They got him up to the seat, where he looked down into the tub of the wagon.

  “Bah!” he said, and turned to leave, because all he saw was mud and the Swamp Witch wallowing there.

  “Wait,” said Jimmy.

  The gold and silver and jewels had raised the level of the mud by three or four feet. The witch dug in with her webbed hands and brought up clotted mounds of gold and emeralds. Black as they were, coated with ooze, there was no mistaking the riches there. Even the Wishman had seldom seen such wealth in one place.

  “Now, there’s rules,” he said. “One wish is all you get. One each. No changing your mind later. You’re not happy, too bad.” He looked sternly at all of them. “So what is it that you want? No, no. I can guess; it’s so easy. I’ve seen this too often not to know at once.”

  He sat in the shade of the giant’s red hat, crossed his legs, and scratched his ribs. He pointed at each of them in turn. “The witch wants her youth and her beauty restored. The Woman wants her husband to be generous and kind. The small boy wants to be big.”

  The three looked at each other and laughed delightedly. They laughed with such mirth that the Wishman smiled. “Am I right?” he said. “Am I right?”

  “You were,” said Jimmy.

  The old man had guessed exactly what each of the three had set out to find, but what all no longer wanted.

  “I think we wish for the same thing,” said Jimmy the giant-slayer. “It will be one wish for us all.”

  “No, no.” The old man shook his finger. “Shared or not, it still counts as three wishes.”

  “Fine with us,” said Jimmy.

  It was an easy wish, simply granted. “That’s it?” asked the Wishman, and Jimmy said, “That’s it.”

  The Wishman toddled into his little shop, and in a moment he was back. “There, it’s done,” he said with a wave of his hand.

  Jimmy looked all around, but he didn’t see that the wish was granted. He started to complain, but the Wishman said, “It’s not like instant potatoes. You have to wait.”

  He pushed a little stick into the ground and laid another one flat on the thin shadow of the sun. “In a day,” he said, “when the shadow comes round to that spot, the wish is granted.”

  They passed the time pleasantly. Jimmy and the Swamp Witch splashed in the pond, while the Wishman slept in the grass. The Woman picked flowers of clover that she fed to the ducks. But in the morning of the next day, neither Jimmy, the witch, nor the Woman strayed very far from the old man’s stick.

  They watched the shadow creeping round.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  THE SHADOW OF THE STICK

  “Laurie? Laurie!” said Mr. Valentine. He was on his feet now, both hands on his daughter’s head. One combed through her hair, again and again; the other ran softly across her cheeks, his fingers just touching her skin.

  “Laurie,” he said again.

  Dickie tipped his head on his pillow. “What’s going on, Mr. Valentine?”

  “She’s coming awake,” he said. “Her eyes are twitching.”

  James went on his crutches and called for the nurse. It wasn’t Miss Freeman who came, but another that Carolyn and Chip knew well. She elbowed Mr. Valentine out of the way and started prodding and poking at Laurie.

  “Yes, she’s coming round, I think,” said the nurse. “It’s a good sign, but too early to hope for too much.”

  Dickie was watching. Laurie looke
d the same to him—even worse right then for not waking with the noise and the prodding of hands. It was scary to see her like that—barely alive, but not dead, with her breath making whistles in the plastic pipe.

  “But she’s getting better, isn’t she?” asked Mr. Valentine. “She’s going to be her old self again. Isn’t she?”

  The nurse straightened the cotton padding on Laurie’s neck, arranging it around the edge of the rubber collar. “There’s a doctor on his way. A specialist,” she said.

  The iron lungs wheezed and whooshed. The stretching of the rubber lungs made shifting shadows on the floor.

  Dickie turned away, distraught. “Boy, you better say what they wished for, Carolyn,” he said.

  The day seemed long with waiting. The shadow of the stick crept so slowly across the grass that Jimmy the giant-slayer kept looking up at the sun, willing it to hurry.

  At noon the shadow was a short little spike. Then it stretched and shifted, swinging round more quickly. Jimmy, the Woman, and the witch all crouched beside it. They watched as the shadow touched the pointer stick that the Wishman had set on the grass.

  Right then, across the valley, came a jingling sound. And from the trees on its far side emerged the Gypsy wagons.

  They came rolling right across the grass, pitching from side to side. The drivers, in their seats, looked like sailors tossed by stormy seas. In the wagons clattered pots and pans, bracelets, jewels, and tambourines.

  Jimmy stood up and watched them. The Gypsy King was in the lead. The Woman suddenly raised her hand and waved. At the same time, the Swamp Witch dashed for the pond with her little basket in her hands. She crossed the grass in three long bounds and slipped into the water.

  The Gypsies ranged their wagons like spokes on a wheel, in a circle round the pond, all facing in toward it. The boys leapt out to care for the horses; the girls stared shyly from the doors and curtains of the wagons.