‘Now, as to my terms,’ the Giant said. ‘Myself and my followers—that’s these here about—we must have all comfort and commodity on the journey.’
‘I am accustomed to booking passage,’ Joe Vance said, bowing.
‘It must be a vessel to surprise the Britons. A golden prow and sails of silk.’
‘You yourself shall be the surprise,’ Vance cooed.
‘I must have six singing women to go before me.’
Vance lost control; it didn’t take much. That’s all shite! You, Charlie O’Brien, you haven’t tasted meat since last Easter. You live on your hands and knees!’
‘True,’ said the Giant, glancing at the roof. ‘All six must be queens,’ he said, smiling; he thought Vance’s manners mild enough, and what’s to be lost by upping your demands?
‘Where would I get six queens?’ Vance bellowed.
That’s your problem,’ the Giant said urbanely. He stretched his legs. The brush of his big toe nearly pitched Jankin into the flame, but Jankin blew on his burnt palms, and licked them, and apologised.
Claffey raised his head. He engaged Vance’s eye. He nodded towards O’Brien, and said, ‘He’s dangerous, in a room.’ He left it at that. On the whole, Claffey did know where to leave things.
The Giant said, ‘Vance, shall I have coin in my pocket? Shall I have gold in my store?’
Vance held out his hands, palms up. ‘What Joe Vance can lawfully obtain, you shall share in. The English public, of my certain knowledge, is starved of the sight of a giant. It’s a kind of charity, now I think of it, to take a giant over to them.’
He looked Jankin in the face. ‘Englishmen are a type of ape,’ he explained.
He was smiling with half his face. The Giant saw this.
‘Not so,’ he said. ‘Low in stature, barbarous in manner, incomprehensible in speech: unlettered, incontinent and a joke when they have drink taken: but not hairy. At least, not all over.’
‘I have never seen an ape,’ Jankin said. ‘Nor dreamed of one. Have I seen an Englishman?’
They are the ones that ride horses,’ Claffey said.
‘So,’ Jankin said. ‘I have seen them.’
‘What about Connor?’ Vance asked. ‘Are you coming yourself?’
‘Connor is a man of wealth and substance,’ Claffey said. ‘He has his cows to guard.’
Connor’s brow creased. He ran his hands back through his hair. ‘Once, O’Shea came over, sneaking in the night with a basin, and bled my cows to make his Sunday broth. As if he were a Kerryman.’
‘Yes,’ the Giant said. ‘A Kerry cow knows when it’s Saturday night.’ He lifted his head. ‘Well, this hearth has been our anchor. But now we must be under sail.’
When they came down the mountain, their feet sunk in the mud and squally rain blew into their faces. It was the time of year when rats stay in their holes, dogs in their kennels and lords in their feather beds. Civilly, the Giant carried all their packs, leaving them with their hands free to help them balance if they skidded. A league or so on they came to a settlement, or what had been so recently; what was now some tumbled stone walls, the battered masonry raw, unclothed by creeping green. A few months after the clearance, the cabin walls were already disintegrating into the mud around; their roofs had been fired, and they were open to the sky.
Something small, dog-height, loped away at their approach: hands swinging, back bent.
‘A hound or a babby?’ Pybus asked, surprised.
The Giant wiped the streaming rain from his face. His quicker eyes discerned the creature as not of this world. It was one of those hybrids that are sometimes seen to scuttle, keen and scrape in ruins and on battlefields: their human part weeping, their animal nature truffling for dead flesh.
‘I’d thought we could take shelter,’ Claffey said. His fur hat lay on his head like a dead badger, and his best coat had its braid ruined. ‘Not a roof left in the place.’
‘I told you not to wear your finery,’ the Giant said.
‘A plague on the whole class of agents,’ Claffey said. ‘On agents, bailiffs and squireens.’
‘You shouldn’t say a plague,’ the Giant said. ‘You should say what plague. Say, May their tongues blister, and the eyes in their head spin in orbits of pus.’
‘You’re pernickety in cursing,’ Claffey said. ‘I’d curse ’em with a cudgel and split their skulls.’
‘So would I,’ said Pybus.
‘Cursing,’ the Giant said, ‘is an ancient and respectable art. An apt curse is worth a regiment of cudgels.’ He eased the packs on his shoulders. ‘Ah well, let’s step out for the town.’
‘The town!’ Jankin said. He tried to skip.
When they came to the town, only a youth or two walked out to greet them; there was no clamour of children come to see the Sight. They spotted the youths from a great way off; the road was bare and smooth as a queen’s thigh. The Giant gave a great hulloo, greeting them from afar; it whooped over the treeless domain, looping the boys like a rope with a noose.
The Giant slowed, accommodating his stride, as he had to remember to do. The youths met them in a wilderness of splintered wood, the raw wet innards of tree stumps offered up to a blowing, twilit sky.
A whole forest chopped down for profit, and houseless birds shrieking at day’s end.
‘We have only been walking one day,’ Pybus said, ‘and we have come to this.’
The Giant looked at him sideways. Already, the journey was bringing out finer feelings in Pybus, which he had not suspected him to possess.
The youths bowed when they drew up to them. ‘Welcome, Mesters. These days, even the beggars give us the go-by.’
‘Do the blind men visit you?’ the Giant asked.
‘Yes, they have the kindness. They don’t turn back, though they say they can smell disaster. Yet if they have a fiddle, we have no strength to dance.’
The youths brought them on to the town. ‘They are cutting, as you see,’ one said. The stench of the wood’s fresh blood lay on the damp air, floating about the Giant at chest height.
Jankin gaped. ‘Where will they go, those persons who live in the woods?’
Hastily, he corrected himself: ‘Those gentlepersons, I ought to say.’
‘We can’t care,’ one of the youths said harshly. ‘We have lived beside them and even put out milk for them in better times, but we have no milk now and only ourselves to help us. I’ve heard they’d bring grain and a piece of bacon or a fowl to those they favour, but that’s not our experience. They must shift for themselves, as we must.’
‘It’s stories,’ Claffey said. ‘Gentlefolk in the woods, green gentlemen and small—it’s only stories anyway.’
They looked up at the hillside. It was a face with a smashed mouth, with stumps of teeth. There were no shadows and no shifting lights. It was just what it was, and no more: a devastation. The Giant said, to soften the facts for Jankin, ‘There are still some forests in Ireland. And to travel doesn’t irk the gentry, as it irks us. They are as swift as thought.’ Then he bit his lip, and grinned, thinking that in Jankin’s case that was not very swift at all.
The town was silent, and to the Giant this silence was familiar. It was the hush of famine, the calm that comes when bad temper is spent, the gnawing pain has ebbed and there is nothing