Hilary Mantel - The Giant, O’Brien

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 ahead but weakness, swelling, low fever and the strange growth of hair. Only Jankin sang out: ‘We are coming to the town, the town.’

‘Kill that noise,’ Claffey said. They looked about them. Like a puppy, Jankin crept closer to the Giant’s side.

‘They have broken you, I see,’ the Giant said to the youths.

The town was nothing now; two streets of huts, dung heaps steaming outside their doors, their walls cracked and subsiding, their roofs sagging. It was a town with no pride left, no muscular strength to mend matters, no spark in the heart to make you want to mend. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were parting. The rutted road held standing pools, a white hazy sun glowing in their depths. The children stared as they passed, scratching the bursting pods of their bellies. They gaped at the Giant, but they did not shout. They were weary of wonders. The wonder of a dish of potatoes and buttermilk, that would have made them shout; but for potatoes, it was too early in the year. If O’Brien had been the devil come to fetch them, they would have followed him, bug-eyed, hoping they might dine in hell.

‘Where’s Mulroney’s?’ Claffey said. Where’s Mulroney’s tavern?’

‘Where’s anything?’ one of the youths said. ‘Mulroney died while you were away up the mountain. He took a fever. His house fell down.’ He waved an arm. ‘There it is.’

What – that? That ruin slid into a ditch? Mulroney’s, where they used to hold the Court of Poetry, after the big house was destroyed? Mulroney’s, where there was no fiddling or singing or vulgar harping, but a correct recitation of the old stories in the old metres? It was a Court of crumbling men, their faces cobwebbed, their eyes milky, their hands trembling as they gripped their cups. Bad winters killed them one by one, fluid filling the lungs that had breathed the deeds of kings.

‘But that can’t be Mulroney’s!’ Pybus burst out. ‘What will we do? The Giant must have strong drink! It’s a need in him.’

‘It’s sauce to a good story,’ Jankin said, having often heard this expression.

‘Joe Vance will be here presently,’ the Giant said. ‘We’ll do, till then.’

A woman appeared at the door of one of the cabins. She began to step towards them, skirting the puddles, though her legs and feet were bare and muddy already. She approached. The Giant saw her large grey eyes, mild and calm as a lake in August: the fine carving of her lips, the arch of her instep, the freedom of her bones at the joint. Her arms were white peeled twigs, their strong muscles wasted; a young child showed, riding high inside her belly like a bunched fist.

‘Good day, my queen.’

She didn’t greet him. ‘Can you heal? I have heard of giants that can heal.’

‘Who wants it?’

‘My son.’

‘What age?’

‘Three.’ Her hair was as fine as feathers, and the colour of ash. ‘And as for three years I have never eaten my fill, neither has he.’ Blue veins, thin as a pen’s tracing, rippled across her eyelids and marbled her inner arm.

These, the Giant said to himself, are the sons and daughters of gods and kings. They are the inheritors of the silver tree amongst whose branches rest all the melodies of the world. And now without a pot to piss in.

Her hand reached up for his arm. She drew him down the street. ‘This is my cabin.’

Beside it, Connor’s was a palace. The roof was in holes and mucky water ran freely through it. The child was in the least wet part, wrapped in a tatter or two. In his fever, he kept tearing the rags from him; with practised fingers, his mother wrapped them back. His forehead bulged, over sunken, fluttering eyelids. ‘He is dreaming,’ the Giant said.

Squatting on her haunches, she gazed into his face. ‘What is he dreaming?’