by Jack Dann
He walked to the far end of the bar, as if he were going to the men's room, then ducked under the rope that separated deck from beach. Joline would be sitting back there alone, waiting. But I can't go back, he thought. He shivered at the thought of kissing that mouth ... feeling that long, protruding tooth with the tip of his tongue .. . smelling her odor.
He walked along surf's edge, shoes squishing in the wet sand, and he became lost to the sound of waves pummeling the shell-strewn beach ... lost to the waiting darkness ahead ... lost below the clear sky filled with clusters of silent stars.
He passed a small hotel, which had one beachlamp on overhead, and standing upon the shadow line was the unicorn. It had been waiting for Steiner. It stood tall and gazed at him, only its great horned head clearly visible. The unicorn's blue eyes seemed to glow, the same melting, beautiful color of the water in the Blue Grotto in Capri. Steiner stopped, and suddenly remembered being in Europe as a young man, suddenly felt the selfsame awe of the world he had once felt. He also felt lost and empty. He grieved for himself and for the poor woman waiting for him at the Fontainebleau. What would she tell her friends when they returned? Would she, indeed, even wait for them?
Steiner gazed back at the unicorn, trying to make certain it was real and not just the play of shadows, or his imagination. It was not his imagination, he told himself. Staring into the unicorn's eyes seemed to stimulate memories he had forgotten for years:
He remembered swimming in the Mediterranean. He remembered a two-week vacation in Atlantic City with Grace and his two sons. He remembered riding bicycles on the boardwalk with his family. He remembered cooking eggs at four o'clock in the morning after a party and permitting the kids to come down and eat, too. He remembered his first trial ... as a lawyer and as a judge. He remembered uneventful days with Grace .. . beautiful, precious, never-to-be-recovered days. He remembered coming home to problems with the boys and sharing dinnertime conversation across the table with Grace.
And he suddenly, desperately missed it all. He wanted the days back!
He also remembered the nameless women, and how Grace had begged him to come back. She had waited, but couldn't wait long enough. He wanted to go home ... to Grace. He looked into the unicorn's sad eyes and saw himself, as if in a mirror. He was an empty old man who had lost his life to foolishness. He had wasted all of Grace's love ... and now it was too late to make reparation.
Tears trembled and worked their way down his face, and the unicorn stepped toward him. It walked slowly, as if not to frighten him. Steiner stepped to the side, but did not try to run. The beast lay down beside him and rested its head in the sand, a gesture of submission. Steiner nervously extended his hand toward the unicorn's muzzle. The unicorn didn't flinch or move, and Steiner stroked its forehead. He touched its fluted black horn and saw that its tip looked red, as if dipped in blood.
He felt a contentment radiate through him as he stroked the unicorn. He also felt the throbbing return of the pain in his chest and arms, yet as the pain became greater, so did his sense of being removed from it. As he rested against the unicorn, he felt it quiver, then begin to move. It raised its head, all the while watching Steiner, but before it stood up, Steiner pulled himself upon its back. I can ride the beast, Steiner thought as he held onto its coarse mane as the unicorn brought itself to full height.
"Come on, boy," Steiner whispered, feeling an almost forgotten heart-pounding joy. The unicorn sensed it, too, because it broke into a playful canter. It shook its head, as if miming laughter, and kicked its hind legs into the air. Steiner held the horse tightly with his legs. He felt his youthful strength returning. He felt at one with the unicorn. The unicorn jumped, galloped, and stopped short, only to sprint forward again. It ran full-out, edging closer to the sea, until it was splashing in the water. Steiner was shouting and laughing, unmindful of anything but the perfect joy of the moment. Steiner felt wonderful. For the first time in his life, everything was right. He felt he could do anything. He was at one with the world .. . and he rode and balanced on the back of the unicorn as if he had spent the past forty years of his life riding the wind.
Suddenly the unicorn turned and headed straight out into the ocean. Waves broke against its knees and chest. Steiner's legs were immersed in water. "What are you doing?" Steiner shouted joyfully, unafraid but holding on tightly to its neck. The unicorn walked deeper into the sea, past the breakers, until it was swimming smoothly and quickly through the warm, salty water. The sea was like a sheet of black glass, made of the same stuff as the unicorn's horn. It seemed to go on forever.
As the dark water rose over Steiner, he finally accepted the wreck of his life.
The unicorn lifted its great head as it descended into the sea. Steiner took hold of its red-tipped horn, and the unicorn carried him gently down into the ocean's cool, waiting depths.
THE GIANT
Giants seem to come in many varieties, from the big to the very big indeed. Some—the giants of Greek mythology and Norse legend, for instance, and of fairy tales like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk—are very big. One of the Greek giants, Tityus, covered nine acres of ground when stretched out flat, and another, Enceladus, was so big the gods had to pile Mount Aetna on top of him to keep him down. In Norse myth, the giant Skrymir was so big that Thor and Loki unwittingly slept in his glove one night, thinking it a "very large hall." Even Bran the Blessed, while not quite in that league, is still huge enough that the Welsh myth describes him as looking like an approaching mountain as he wades across the channel between Wales and Ireland—wading the sea because no boat was big enough to hold him.
Several folklorists have suggested that some of the really immense giants, particularly those in the Celtic tradition, had once been gods ... now dwindled and diminished from gods to "mere" giants with the passage of time, and especially with the coming of Christianity to the pagan North. (Interestingly, William Butler Yeats offers the exact opposite suggestion, saying that "when the pagan gods of Ireland—the Tuath-De-Dandn—robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies, the pagan heroes grew bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants.") Some giants are reasonably human-looking, some have several heads, some are grotesque and monstrous of face, with huge fangs or tusks (although here we are beginning to approach the ambiguous dividing line between giants and trolls or ogres). Sometimes they are man-eaters, like the fearsome Jack-in-Irons who haunts Yorkshire lanes at night, or like the giants in a dozen fairy tales. Sometimes they are benevolent and good-natured, willing to be helpful to human folks—although, sadly, it seems to be true that the benign giants are also usually portrayed as being rather stupid, and are often taken shameful advantage of by the humans they try to assist. Sometimes humans even trade on their good nature to trick them to their doom.
Interestingly, giants seem to be slowly getting smaller as the twentieth century progresses, continuing the dwindling process begun in dim antiquity. The really huge, mountain-sized giants are somewhat out of fashion, and most of the giants who turn up these days in the pages of fantasy literature are closer to ten feet tall than a hundred. That's still pretty big, of course—although, as the giant in the story that follows discovers, there's no man so big that he can't run up against a problem that's bigger still .. .
Manly Wade Wellman is perhaps best known in the fantasy field for his series of stories detailing the supernatural adventures of "John the Minstrel" or "Silver John," of which "Walk Like a Mountain" is one. The Silver John stories were collected in Who Fears The Devil? and in recent years there have been Silver John novels as well, the most recent of which is The Voice of the Mountain. Wellman has won two World Fantasy Awards, one the prestigious Life Achievement Award.
Walk Like a Mountain
by
Manly Wade Wellman
ONCE AT SKY NOTCH, I never grudged the trouble getting there. It was so purely pretty, I was glad outlanders weren't apt to crowd in and spoil all.
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The Notch cut through a tall peak that stood against a higher cliff. Steep brushy faces each side, and a falls at the back that made a trickly branch, with five pole cabins along the waterside. Corn patches, a few pigs in pens, chickens running round, a cow tied up one place. It wondered me how they ever got a cow up there. Laurels grew, and viney climbers, and mountain flowers in bunches and sprawls. The water made a happy noise. Nobody moved in the yards or at the doors, so I stopped by a tree and hollered the first house.
"Hello the house!" I called. "Hello to the man of the house and all inside!"
A plank door opened about an inch. "Hello to yourself," a gritty voice replied me. "Who's that out there with the guitar?"
I moved from under the tree. "My name's John. Does Mr. Lane Jarrett live up here? Got word for him, from his old place on Drowning Creek."
The door opened wider, and there stood a skimpy little man with gray whiskers. "That's funny," he said.
The funnyness I didn't see. I'd known Mr. Lane Jarrett
years back, before he and his daughter Page moved to Sky Notch. When his uncle Jeb died and heired him some money, I'd agreed to carry it to Sky Notch, and, gentlemen, it was a long, weary way getting there.
First a bus, up and down and through mountains, stop at every pig trough for passengers. I got off at Charlie's Jump—who Charlie was, nor why or when he jumped, nobody there can rightly say. Climbed a high ridge, got down the far side, then a twenty-devil way along a deep valley river. Up another height, another beyond that. Then it was night, and nobody would want to climb the steep face above, because it was grown up with the kind of trees that the dark melts in around you. I made a fire and took my supper rations from my pocket. Woke at dawn and climbed up and up and up, and here I was.
"Funny, about Lane Jarrett," gritted the little man out. "Sure you ain't come about that business?"
I looked up the walls of the Notch. Their tops were toothy rocks, the way you'd think those walls were two jaws, near about to close on what they'd caught inside them. Right then the Notch didn't look so pretty.
"Can't say, sir," I told him, "till I know what business you mean."
"Rafe Enoch!" he boomed out the name, like firing two barrels of a gun. "That's what I mean!" Then he appeared to remember his manners, and came out, puny in his jeans and no shoes on his feet. "I'm Oakman Dillon," he named himself. "John—that's your name, huh? Why you got that guitar?"
"I pick it some," I replied him. "I sing." Tweaking the silver strings, I sang a few lines:
By the shore of Lonesome River Where the waters ebb and flow, Where the wild red rose is budding And the pleasant breezes blow,
It was there I spied the lady
That forever I adore,
As she was a-lonesome walking
By the Lonesome River shore... .
"Rafe Enoch!" he grit-grated out again. "Carried off Miss Page Jarrett the way you'd think she was a banty chicken!"
Slap, I quieted the strings with my palm. "Mr. Lane's little daughter Page was stolen away?"
He sat down on the door-log. "She ain't suchy little daughter. She's six foot maybe three inches—taller'n you, even. Best-looking big woman I ever see, brown hair like a wagonful of home-cured tobacco, eyes green and bright as a fresh-squoze grape pulp."
"Fact?" I said, thinking Page must have changed a right much from the long-leggy little girl I'd known, must have grown tall like her daddy and her dead mammy, only taller. "Is this Rafe Enoch so big, a girl like that is right for him?"
"She's puny for him. He's near about eight foot tall, best I judge." Oakman Dillon's gray whiskers stuck out like a mad cat's. "He just grabbed her last evening, where she walked near the fall, and up them rocks he went like a possum up a jack oak."
I sat down on a stump. "Mr. Lane's a friend of mine. How can I help?"
"Nobody can't help, John. It's right hard to think you ain't knowing all this stuff. Don't many strangers come up here. Ain't room for many to live in the Notch."
"Five homes," I counted them with my eyes.
"Six. Rafe Enoch lives up at the top." He jerked his head toward the falls. "Been there a long spell—years, I reckon, since when he run off from somewhere. Heard tell he broke a circus man's neck for offering him a job with a show. He built up top the falls, and he used to get along with us. Thanked us kindly for a mess of beans or roasting ears. Lately, he's been mean-talking."
"Nobody mean-talked him back? Five houses in the Notch mean five grown men—couldn't they handle one giant?"
"Giant size ain't all Rafe Enoch's got." Again the whiskers bristled up. "Why! He's got powers, like he can make rain fall—"
"No," I put in quick. "Can't even science men do that for sure."
"I ain't studying science men. Rafe Enoch says for rain to fall, down it comes, any hour day or night he speaks. Could drown us out of this Notch if he had the mind."
"And he carried off Page Jarrett," I went back to what he'd said.
"That's the whole truth, John. Up he went with her in the evening, daring us to follow him."
I asked, "Where are the other Notch folks?"
"Up yonder by the falls. Since dawn we've been talking Lane Jarrett back from climbing up and getting himself neck-twisted. I came to feed my pigs, now I'm heading back."
"I'll go with you," I said, and since he didn't deny me I went.
The falls dropped down a height as straight up as a chimney, and a many times taller, and their water boiled off down the branch. Either side of the falls, the big boulder rocks piled on top of each other like stones in an almighty big wall. Looking up, I saw clouds boiling in the sky, dark and heavy and wet-looking, and I remembered what Oakman Dillon had said about big Rafe Enoch's rain-making.
A bunch of folks were there, and I made out Mr. Lane Jarrett, bald on top and bigger than the rest. I touched his arm, and he turned.
"John! Ain't seen you a way-back time. Let me make you known to these here folks."
He called them their first names—Yoot, 011ie, Bill, Duff, Miss Lulie, Miss Sara May and so on. I said I had a pocketful of money for him, but he just nodded and wanted to know did I know what was going on.
"Looky up against them clouds, John. That pointy rock. My girl Page is on it."
The rock stuck out like a spur on a rooster's leg. Somebody was scrouched down on it, with the clouds getting blacker above, and a long, long drop below.
"I see her blue dress," allowed Mr. Oakman, squinting up. "How long she been there, Lane?"
"I spotted her at sunup," said Mr. Lane. "She must have got away from Rafe Enoch and crope out there during the night. I'm going to climb."
He started to shinny up a rock, up clear of the brush around us. And, Lord, the laugh that came down on us! Like a big splash of water, it was clear and strong, and like water it made us shiver. Mr. Oakman caught onto Mr. Lane's ankle and dragged him down.
"Ain't a God's thing ary man or woman can do, with him waiting up there," Mr. Oakman argued.
"But he's got Page," said Mr. Lane busting loose again. I grabbed his elbow.
"Let me," I said.
"You, John? You're a stranger, you ain't got no pick in this."
"This big Rafe Enoch would know if it was you or Mr. Oakman or one of these others climbing, he might fling down a rock or the like. But I'm strange to him. I might wonder him, and he might let me climb all the way up."
"Then?" Mr. Lane said, frowning.
"Once up, I might could do something."
"Leave him try it," said Mr. Oakman to that.
"Yes," said one of the lady-folks.
I slung my guitar behind my shoulder and took to the rocks. No peep of noise from anywhere for maybe a minute of climbing. I got on about the third or fourth rock from the bottom, and that clear, sky-ripping laugh came from over my head.
"Name yourself!" roared down the voice that had laughed.
I looked up. How high was the top I can't say, but I made out a head and shoulders looking down
, and knew they were another sight bigger head and shoulders than ever I'd seen on ary mortal man.
"Name yourself!" he yelled again, and in the black clouds a lightning flash wiggled, like a snake caught fire. "John!" I bawled back.
"What you aiming to do, John?"
Another crack of lightning, that for a second seemed to peel off the clouds right and left. I looked this way and that. Nowhere to get out of the way should lightning strike, or a rock or anything. On notion, I pulled by guitar to me and picked and sang:
Went to the rock to hide my face,
The rock cried out, "No hiding place!"... .
Gentlemen, the laugh was like thunder after the lightning.
"Better climb quick, John!" he hollered me. "I'm a-waiting on you up here!"
I swarmed and swarved and scrabbled my way up, not looking down. Over my head that rock-spur got bigger, I figured it for maybe twelve-fifteen feet long, and on it I made out Page Jarrett in her blue dress. Mr. Oakman was right, she was purely big and she was purely good-looking. She hung to the pointy rock with both her long hands.
"Page," I said to her, with what breath I had left, and she stared with her green eyes and gave me an inch of smile. She looked to have a right much of her daddy's natural sand in her craw.
"John," boomed the thunder-voice, close over me now. "I asked you a while back, why you coming up?"
"Just to see how you make the rain fall," I said, under the overhang of the ledge. "Help me up."
Down came a bare brown honey-hairy arm, and a hand the size of a scoop shovel. It got my wrist and snatched me away like a turnip coming out of a patch, and I landed my feet on broad flat stones.
Below me yawned up those rock-toothed tops of the Notch's jaws. Inside them the brush and trees looked mossy and puny. The cabins were like baskets, the pigs and the cow like play-toys, and the branch looked to run so narrow you might bridge it with your shoe. Shadow fell on the Notch from the fattening dark clouds.
