Giant, page 22
Eventually, it ended in the hands of Florin Athelstan.
He looked down at it, and then up into the eyes of his father.
‘Dad?’ he said. ‘Is this true? Did … we steal the island from the giants? Were our ceremonies –’ his jaw clenched – ‘based on a lie?’
Mr Athelstan hesitated, and as he was about to speak, Minnie realised that there was a new type of shaking under her feet, and it wasn’t an earthquake.
It was the sort of tremor you get when an entire group of giants are marching at the same time.
‘Hello Minnie,’ boomed Blade. ‘Hello Robin.’ The city walls were so high that only the faces of the No-Go giants could be seen. But behind the broken part of the wall Minnie saw that they had come in their masses; dusty, smoke-streaked, grim-faced, but there.
‘You heard me! You came!’ she gasped. ‘I wasn’t sure—’
‘Of course we did,’ said Blade. ‘When a giant shouts for us like that, how could we ignore it? It sounded like you were in terrible trouble.’
‘We lost you once,’ added Issa, quietly. ‘Couldn’t bear to lose you again.’
Minnie saw Mrs Primrose whisper something to one of the guards, and saw him slip away from the dirty street. What are they up to now? she thought, tiredly.
Blade was staring at her. ‘You look so much like your mother. Wonderful woman.’ He sniffed, loudly, then peered over at the shaking islanders below him.
‘Hello,’ he shouted. ‘Listen, before anything starts, can I just check – does anyone have any nuts? No? Never mind.’ He sighed. ‘Worth a try. Anyway, here, Minnie, I’ve brought you someone.’ And he picked up a golden creature from behind the wall, and put him carefully on the top. Twist looked at Minnie, and gave a ferocious wail of recognition.
‘Twist?’ gasped Minnie. ‘He’s alive?’
‘He was badly injured,’ said Blade, stroking his back with one finger, lovingly. ‘But he limped all the way to the tunnel and came and found me. What’s more –’ and here Blade beamed so widely that all his teeth were visible, and all the islanders gasped, even Speck, at the sight of a giant smiling properly – ‘we met even more of his pals. Aren’t they beautiful? They’ve been gathering all over the island, clever little things.’
And in the next moment, a swarm of golden jackals leaped up on to the wall, and stood on it in a line. The Lloyd family, who owned the jackal-meat factory, made faint noises of fear, for the jackals were staring at them with loathing, peeling their lips back to reveal their teeth.
For a moment, the No-Go giants and the jackals stared solemnly over the wall at the GMC guards and their dogs. There was a heavy silence as they all contemplated what lay ahead. There had been a long war before. Would there be another one now? The screecher birds held their breath hopefully. Could there be bloodshed?
‘You know, we don’t have to fight—’ started Issa.
‘Seize them!’ said Mrs Primrose, cutting across her. ‘Grab them and kill them all, before they kill us.’ She smiled menacingly. ‘Here come the provisions.’
And then there was a squeaky, rusty sound behind them, like the sound of a hundred wheels rotating together across cobbles. Minnie turned, and realised that the Giant Management Company must have been preparing for something like this for a long, long time.
THERE WERE TOO many wagons to count, and no doubt there were many more lying in wait somewhere. Each wagon was piled high with jackal-skin torches. Some of the torches were falling apart on their sticks, as if the skins were hundreds of years old, but some looked freshly scraped and tied, as if they’d been made in the last month. It would have taken the GMC several decades, if not a century, to stockpile so many missiles.
At the sight of the torches and as the stench of petrol filled the air, every single giant on the other side of the wall paled and went quiet. Minnie thought of their scars, and how long they had been terrorised by flames. Desperately she squirmed and tugged at her handcuffs, but they held firm. At the formidable sight of the weapons in front of her, she was suddenly filled with a terrible misgiving. Had she called the giants and the jackals to their deaths?
‘Fire!’ ordered Mrs Primrose.
For a moment, it seemed as if no one would obey her. The guards hesitated. The No-Go giants waited.
‘I said, fire!’ repeated Mrs Primrose. ‘Or be fired at.’ She looked imperiously around the entire crowd. She pointed at the smallest child. ‘Come. Now. Pick up a torch, and throw it over the wall at the enemy.’
‘I – I don’t want to,’ said the small rubbler child.
‘Then I shall throw you in the dungeon, you troublemaker.’
The little girl walked, quivering, to the nearest wagon, and was handed a torch by Mrs Primrose.
‘Now throw,’ said Mrs Primrose. ‘Go on!’
The torch barely flew a metre, but it seemed to set the battle in motion. One by one, the others slowly walked to the wagon and picked up their weapons, too.
While the humans armed themselves, the giants and the jackals began to climb over the city walls, their flecked skin and fur combining together to make them look like a river of gold, pouring over the walls and into the city.
‘We don’t want to hurt you,’ said Blade, to the smallest children, who were sobbing.
Twist, still clearly injured from the kicking he’d received at the swamp, made his way through the crowds, heading straight for Minnie, but, as he limped towards her, a pack of dogs leaped on him. In his injured state, he was no match for them, and quickly disappeared under the assault, snarling and biting as best he could.
A second later, a flame had landed in Blade’s red beard, and as his hands flew up, desperate to untangle the torch from his face, wincing, five guards ran to his legs and began to tie them together with rope, so that he was bound. When the jackals around Blade flew at the guards, the dogs attacked them, too, and a wild, snarling fight began.
Vainly, Minnie struggled to break open her handcuffs, pulling and pulling at her wrists to be free. My hands may be cuffed, but I can still walk, she thought suddenly. And so she strode into the fray, kicking the dogs away whenever she could, pushing the guards off the giants on the ground. A guard held a torch near her ankle, causing the worst pain imaginable, and she flinched, and had to retreat, but then she rallied and went in again, hoping not to fall.
More flames were thrown. Some giants, dodging these, managed to move through the crowd, but as none of them wanted to hurt or step on any of the children, the guards throwing the flames were able to aim with better precision, and kept pushing them back to the city walls.
Cruelly, the servants were tasked with firing flames at their own kind. The torches flew and sang past Speck, still pinned in place. Each time they struck a giant or a jackal someone would cheer.
But others did not.
The mountain giants tried valiantly to reach Minnie and Robin, but the flames flew thick and fast, and the dogs were wild, snapping and biting and leaping up their giant legs, trying to bring them down by any means possible. Chesca managed to fight off the two dogs that were clinging to her skirts, growling, and, with one arm bent across her face, she nearly reached Minnie, but at the last minute three torches fired in quick succession sent her sprawling to the ground. The guards cheered at the sight of a fallen giant, and the younger servants from the compound were told to bind her in chains and take her to the dungeon.
When Minnie looked up, she saw with dismay that many of the No-Go giants had been beaten back or were retreating, terrified of being thrown in the dungeon to die. As the tiny street filled with smoke and snarling dogs Minnie’s heart began to sink. She couldn’t see or hear Twist any more. Chesca had disappeared. She couldn’t see Robin or Blade or Issa.
At first, when she saw Papa reaching through the smoke with a look of furious anger, and Mama not far behind him, slapping at a giant, Minnie thought they were fighting on the side of the townsfolk. But then, when she squinted harder through the smoke and limbs, she realised that Papa was actually pulling a dog off Issa, and Mama was trying to put out the flames leaping up a giant’s dress, patting at them with her bare hands in an attempt to stop them consuming the entire garment.
Minnie’s eyes widened in amazement. The dog was ripped off Issa, and landed on the floor with a whimper. As if he sensed Minnie watching him, Papa grinned, and raised his hand to his forehead in a salute, before immediately plunging into a fight with one of the guards. Minnie strode over and joined him. With a combination of punches and kicks, they were able to push him back from Papa and Mama, and sent him running away down a side street.
‘He’s probably gone to get more wagons,’ shouted Papa, panting slightly from the fight, his white shirt ripped at the collar and arm. ‘But I think we can say we won that fight, Min.’ They shared a grin, and, in that moment, Minnie felt more like his daughter than she’d ever felt before.
‘I’ve seen you, Keyton Wadlow,’ came Mr Athelstan’s voice. ‘Don’t think you won’t be punished for your treason!’
‘Oh, working for you is punishment enough,’ shouted Papa. ‘I know now that you never wanted me to stop the earthquakes. I was wasting my life away, working for you.’
To Minnie, he said: ‘Minnie – go and get Speck. See if you can free her. I’ll try and stop them from throwing the flames.’ Then he gave Minnie one final look of love, and turned back into the smoke.
Despite the bravery of the giants and the jackals, their numbers were dwindling. And still the flames kept being thrown. The servants from the compound, though young and frightened, were healthier and stronger than the weakened, battle-scarred No-Go giants. What’s more, they were terrified of the GMC, and so ultimately they proved the better fighters, spurred on by what might happen to them if they didn’t win. Minnie couldn’t see Speck any more, and the flames whizzing past her head were getting faster and closer. When she wasn’t dodging those, she was ducking frantically left and right, trying to avoid the screecher birds, who had decided the time was right to start pecking at the weak.
Things were looking desperate. Giants were being felled like trees by the flames. Their side was losing.
Then she felt someone prodding at her ankle. She looked down into the eyes of Florin Athelstan.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘Bend down.’
Minnie got to her knees, and the boy who had never stopped loving Sandborn told Minnie what he wanted to do.
‘MINNIE,’ HE SHOUTED, into her ears. ‘Minnie, remember our history classes?’
She shot him a look of baffled frustration. ‘Florin, we’re in the middle of a battle!’
‘Listen. We were always told how our kisses would turn giants into stone, right?’
‘Y-yes …’ she said, shaking off a wild dog that had just sunk its teeth into her ankle.
‘And they always said that our belief in the process would make it work more thoroughly, didn’t they?’ His face was lit up with urgency. ‘What if a kiss could turn our giants back? If we kissed them believing they should be alive again? No one ever talks about that. But I wonder—’
Everything about him burned with a desperate question. ‘D-do you think Sandborn is still intact? Did he avoid getting smashed to pieces in the earthquake?’
Minnie thought for a moment. ‘The last big quake hit here the hardest,’ she told him. ‘The rubbler district wasn’t hit at all. Mrs Primrose lied about that.’
Their eyes met. Florin’s eyes were full of tears, and not just from the smoke.
‘I think it’s worth a try,’ said Minnie, smiling at him. He gave a big, juddering sigh. ‘Do you?’ He looked as if he wanted to cry. ‘I need to go to him now, before we lose.’
Minnie surveyed the dwindling number of giants. ‘Blade,’ she shouted. ‘Blade!’
To her relief, his head loomed out of the smoke. Parts of his beard, she noticed, had been cut away, perhaps because blazing missiles had landed there – and there was a screecher bird on his head, pecking furiously at his scalp, making blood pour down into one of his eyes. But he was alive, and, she was amazed to see, that tired swagger seemed to be burning just as before.
‘Blade, can you carry Florin down to the rubbler district? And run!’
*
Still the fighting went on. Mrs Primrose was shouting instructions at all the children to go around and kiss any fallen giant on the lips, but she shouted in vain. All the children, sickened by the sight of humans burning giants, refused to do it.
A group of No-Go giants had surrounded Speck and were pulling and pushing at the wall around her to bring it down, valiantly persisting despite the many burns now blossoming on their backs, but Speck had been wedged in so deep, and the giants were by now so weak, that theirs was a losing battle.
Robin was surrounded by snarling dogs, pinning him in place. Minnie could hear, somewhere, the sound of Twist’s howl as the screecher birds took their revenge on him for the time he’d beaten them. A huge shadow fell over the Old Town, as if the sun had been blotted out, and Minnie felt bleakness steal into her heart.
‘Time to give up?’ said Mr Athelstan.
‘Not quite,’ said Florin Athelstan, beaming, standing proudly beside the giant he’d brought back from the Rubbler District. ‘I’ve brought backup.’
And the shadow that loomed over them didn’t seem quite so gloomy – for it had been cast by Sandborn.
‘We meet again,’ he said, picking up a handful of guards and looking at them contemplatively as they struggled in his fist. His skin was slightly covered in dust, and still completely grey, but he was alive.
‘It worked!’ Minnie gasped. Beside Sandborn, Florin shone with happiness. He glanced at Minnie. ‘It did,’ he whispered. ‘Easy as anything.’ Blade and Sandborn stood close together, staring down at the fighting around them.
‘Back in a tic,’ said Blade, and he strode off and began to stamp out fires with his bare feet.
Sandborn glanced at the new, shaking servants from the compound, who were staring at him open-mouthed. ‘Join us,’ he called, holding his hands out towards them.
And then he turned and stared into Minnie’s face. ‘It’s really true then,’ he said, grinning at her. ‘You were a giant all along. I kept hearing a rumour …’ He frowned a little. ‘And you’re taller than me? Outrageous!’
Blade and Sandborn’s return seemed to galvanise the remaining No-Go giants and jackals. With their loss of fear came a new realisation of how strong they really were, and that was all the giants seemed to need. Tentatively, one of the training giants broke away from the GMC side and strode over to Speck, and a few seconds later the other apprentices had joined them. The young servants began to pull down the bricks in the wall that were pinning Speck in place. The harder they worked to pull down the wall, however, the faster and thicker the flames flew at them.
The sound and fury of the battle roared in Minnie’s ears. She was tired, and despite Sandborn’s appearance, still wasn’t sure if they would win the battle. She felt dizzy, and as she stared at the scene around her, her hopes began to slip away.
She glanced down at herself, and at the people fighting beneath her. She saw the Giant Management officials, cruel and mean and small in everything they did. A dark cold despair stole into her heart. But then she looked at the giants again, and slowly she lifted one arm, and then the other, watching how she sparkled in the light, looking at the new dimensions of her new body.
I’m a giant now, she thought, and for the first time, the idea pleased her. It did more than please her. It filled her with a huge wave of pride and wonder. I’m a giant.
She turned her head and stared down into the eyes of Mrs Primrose. I’m a giant, she thought again, and she smiled hugely. And then she strode over to the wagons, filled with jackal torches waiting to be thrown, and began to kick them over, and stamp on the torches, and as she destroyed the remaining weapons, she gave thanks for what she was.
Mrs Primrose, aware now that she was on the losing side, seemed to shrink in her clothes, and as more children bolted away, hurrying off to turn their giants back to life, all the power and authority seemed to seep out of her. She too, turned and fled.
The weakened island seemed to sense this, and decided to give one last quake, and this one rippled under the city walls. This, combined with the efforts of the young compound giants, released Speck from her prison, and she was finally free. Minnie, puffing from her exertions, stood and stared at Speck, and for a tiny moment, it was all she could do.
Speck opened her arms.
Minnie ran into them as fast as she could.
It took a long, long time for Speck to stop hugging Minnie, and when she finally pulled away, her face was streaked with tears. ‘I can’t believe you made all this happen.’ Her voice was soft and wondering. ‘You overthrew the Giant Management Company. I never would have thought it possible.’
‘I couldn’t bear to lose you,’ said Minnie.
‘You ran away to save me? And you – you stayed away, despite the pain you were in?’
Minnie nodded, unable to speak. Speck smiled softly. ‘I love you, Minnie,’ she said. She glanced mischievously around, and then raised her voice and said it again.
‘I – I – I love you too,’ stammered Minnie.
‘Do you hear that, Mrs Primrose? We’re breaking all the rules! Quick, come and arrest us! Oh, too busy?’ Speck was shouting into the air, crying and laughing at the same time, shaking all over, and Minnie felt it all at once. Felt how unhappy and trapped Speck had been all her life, and how she’d never been able to tell a soul.
Minnie sat down on the floor, suddenly. She rested her elbows on her knees, put her head in her hands, and sobbed, for it had been a long, long journey for a young girl to go on.
Speck put her hand on her shoulders for a second, and left, as if she knew that Minnie needed to be alone for a while.
Minnie leaned back against a brick and closed her eyes, and a few seconds later, she felt the warm fur of Twist as he nestled next to her. He made a tiny whine in the back of his throat. ‘No more fights for you, Twist,’ murmured Minnie. ‘No more.’
