by Ruth Nickle
Gerund moved a short distance away and stared at the back of the giant’s head. The tan hair was still thick around the sides but gave way to a round bald patch near the top.
“Ha!” Gerund couldn’t hold back a laugh. “Balding at your age, Tomas? Did you comb the rest over the top to hide it, I wonder?” There wouldn’t have been much reason for him to try; few would have been in a position to notice.
But Meena would have. That thought brought a scowl with it, and Gerund closed his left eye, letting the world blur into a churn of color. He listened to the mutter of arguments, the shout of instructions, the . . .
Blue.
He looked again at the body, both eyes open. The worn green overshirt was fragmented, the pieces trundling away to the village. One cart carried a panel from the shirt’s back, thick with brown dirt and old manure from the fields it had dragged through when the body was moved. Another cart held the shoulder and collar, caked in brown. A third held one of the sleeves. It too had a coating of brown, but not only brown. On the cuff, the soil was a deep blue.
Gerund lurched to his feet and stumped up a small rise until he was high enough to see. The trouser knees were blue. Before his fall, Tomas had been gardening.
His half-run drew too many eyes, so Gerund pretended to stumble. Then his knee twinged and the stumble became real. Several pairs of hands steadied him.
“Careful, grandfather.”
“Steady, uncle.”
One of the friendly strangers fingered Gerund’s nearly empty purse. She didn’t bother to take it.
Gerund grumbled and massaged his knee, then made his way more carefully to the dirt-crusted boots. Someone had already started to harvest the worn leather, and little mounds of blue were scattered all around Tomas’s feet where soil had been dislodged and discarded. Trying not to attract attention, he felt and sifted through each pile. He found nothing.
But of course, the body had been moved. Collecting his cow, Gerund walked back along the track made by the dragged body, watching for clumps of blue soil. Around noon he reached the base of the beanstalk, carrying a small handful of oversized seeds. Grass and carrots wouldn’t get him far, but they were a start.
Best not to linger here. Jack would be awake by now, telling his tale and counting his riches. His mother might come to the ruins of her home. She would recognize the cow, and Gerund didn’t want to risk the questions that would follow. He had been hidden behind the hedge during her tirade about Jack’s “foolish bargain,” and later, while he crouched outside the window and pushed the beanstalk through time, he had heard her sobs about ruin and starvation. She would demand answers.
As he walked to the road, Gerund passed the row of prizes taken from Tomas’s body. The jewels and glittery bits were gone, of course, but the more mundane items remained, guarded only by a smith’s sleeping apprentice. The belt. The nail file. And the trowel, handle thick as a draft horse, blade pitted with rust. There was blue soil clinging to the blade.
In the clumps on the back he found two cucumber seeds and, Providence be thanked, a seed the size of his spread hands. A sunflower.
* * *
The plan didn’t seem terrible, but it was. Walk two days to find a secluded spot. Plant the sunflower seed and age it to maturity. Climb the stem and walk two days back to find Meena in Tomas’s home. He got as far as sprouting the seed before realizing the glaring flaw: cows can’t climb.
Even then it might have worked. Instead of climbing a grown plant, he could let the growing flower carry them into the sky. He just needed to keep the cow balanced on the top of the sunflower as it grew. A smarter beast might have cooperated, might have known how to walk in place to keep its footing. Gerund’s cow was not such a beast.
He forced the cow to stand over the plant, the leaves pressing against her chest, and pushed the plant to grow. Lowing, she tried to walk away. Gerund hauled on the rope to keep her in place, so she bent at the knees, sliding off the leaves. She sat on the ground protesting loudly, so he struck her between the eyes. That neither calmed her nor convinced her to obey. He spent hours maneuvering her into place again and again, but she fought against the rope and the plant and especially him.
Eventually Gerund gave up on getting the cow’s cooperation. It would be far easier to leave her and climb up on his own, but of course he couldn’t do that. He had bought her from Jack. Bought her with beans and magic, with a change in the lad’s fortune. He would not relinquish a possession so easily. So he spent another two days walking back to the village, where he purchased a pair of ice spikes from the smith. That night he found an outbuilding where the villagers had stored the rope used to haul Tomas’s body across the fields. There were coils and coils of it, and Gerund loaded as much on the cow’s back as she could carry. If it could drag a giant, it would be strong enough to lift an obstinate cow.
Walking back to the sunflower, his cow moved much more slowly than she had before. Gerund hauled on her lead, but she wouldn’t walk any faster. Gerund cursed at her. Had Jack known how poor an animal he was selling? Did Jack feel guilty for cheating his buyer? She couldn’t even carry a simple load of rope.
At midmorning of the third day they finally reached the sunflower sprout. Gerund stomped up to it and pushed. The flower flew through weeks of growth, reaching into the sky and unfurling pair after pair of enormous leaves until the top vanished from view into low-lying clouds. Good.
Gerund had already fashioned a harness for his cow and tied it to the longest of the ropes. Now he fastened the ice spikes to his boots, shouldered his pack, and, pulling the rope behind him, started to climb. He climbed past the first leaf and looped the rope around the base of the leaf above it to form a pulley. After pausing to catch his breath, Gerund climbed back down and tied the end of the rope tight to the lower leaf. The leaf was heavier than his cow, so cutting it off of the flower’s stem would turn it into a counterweight, pulling the cow up toward him. Before doing so, however, Gerund used another rope to anchor himself to the stem. He eyed the distance to the ground and triple knotted the anchor. No sense risking a fall from up here. When he was sure it would hold, he took out his belt knife.
He didn’t have the strength to chop through the leaf on his own, and the knife was far too small for that anyway. But by focusing carefully, he could age just a segment of the leaf rather than the entire plant. His weak thumb meant he had to grip the knife in his left hand, so while he cut at the leaf he used his right to push those cuts through time. In moments the many small cuts shriveled and grew fuzzy with mold. He kept pushing until the wounds progressed into frank rot and the weight of the leaf tore through its weakened stem. Swinging free on the rope, it began a slow descent to the ground, lifting the cow into the air. She protested loudly, but Gerund could only smile. It was working!
The cow and leaf collided gently as they passed in the air, but they were moving too slowly to worry Gerund. She wouldn’t be injured. The real danger was that he would exhaust himself. Going up and down like this, he would have to climb the whole distance how many times? He had been prepared to climb into the sky once, not repeatedly by stages.
When the leaf reached the ground, his cow dangled in front of him, spinning slowly. Gerund attached the second longest rope to her harness and climbed up to loop it around the next higher leaf. The one he’d used as a pulley before would become the new counterweight.
When everything was in place, he detached the first rope, anchored himself to the stem, and started to cut. The rope had rubbed against the leaf and bruised it during the first ascent, so he had a head start this time. While he slashed and rotted the leaf, Gerund tried to calculate the total distance he would have to climb. Numbers had never been his strength. The pulley rope was how long again? If the distance between leaves . . . Gerund froze, realizing his mistake. The rope wasn’t long enough! Under his fingers, the counterweight tore free and dropped away. For a horrified moment he
watched it go, then he fumbled at the knots anchoring him in place. The pulley was higher than before, and the counterweight had farther to fall. This time the leaf wouldn’t just lift his cow higher, it would pull her all the way up to the pulley and over it.
The first of the three knots came loose under his fingers, and he started on the second. There wasn’t enough time! His cow’s ascent had felt slow before, but now, racing against his frantic fingers, it was far, far too fast. He was sure he could untie the anchor rope before she reached the top, but if he didn’t get free before she reached him then he wouldn’t have time to do anything but watch her tumble to her death. Where was his knife? There! He snatched it up and sawed at the tough fibers.
Gerund startled when the rising cow bumped his foot, and in that moment of inattention the knife tumbled from his grip. He grabbed for it, but the rope around his waist held him back. He succeeded only in nicking his palm and knocking the knife into a rapid spin so that it glinted in the sun again and again as it fell.
He was stuck, couldn’t get free in time. He cursed. Well, if the anchor rope wouldn’t let him budge, then he would use that immobility. He could still save his cow. If he could just link the cow’s harness to the anchor, the counterweight would find itself pulling against the entire flower stem, not just a skinny cow. His cow’s head was pushing against his knee now, and by leaning out as far as the anchor would let him, Gerund could just barely touch the loop of rope over her shoulders. He strained, slapped, and finally managed to get two fingers hooked around it. All of this was too much for the cow. Already close to panic from dangling in the air, she thrashed, battering Gerund’s leg and arm with her head. He lost his grip.
“Fool beast,” he yelled. “I’m trying to save you!” He tried again for the ropes, but she writhed. He couldn’t even grab the harness, much less secure it to anything, with a hundred stone of distraught cow fighting him. If he tried, she would just injure him on her way to death. The smart thing to do would be to keep his distance and let gravity claim her.
He couldn’t. However worthless the dry milch cow seemed, he had paid too much for her. This cow was his, and Gerund would not let wilting leaves and empty sky steal her away.
Her face was now level with his, and he hugged it to him with both arms, his hands on the back of her head. She fought him, but he held on and focused, pushing gently and carefully. It was a delicate and tricky bit of magic to make a mind feel the passage of time, to exhaust it into unconsciousness. He had seen it go wrong before. But the cow was at her limit already and required only a brief touch before falling limp.
With the cow insensate, Gerund scrabbled at the harness and caught hold. With one hand he pulled off his belt and looped it first through the harness, then through his anchor rope, and cinched it tight. It took the strain and held, arresting the cow’s ascent. Gerund breathed a sigh of relief and, after securing his cow with redundant ropes and knots, he sat back to rest. It had been a near disaster, but nothing had been taken from him this time. As he waited for his heartbeat to slow, he planned out how to raise his cow safely from leaf to leaf. It would take more climbing to tie and untie multiple ropes, but it would work.
First, though, he needed to climb down and retrieve his knife.
* * *
The cow slowly grew accustomed to the blue soil of the land above the clouds. She had balked at first, nearly as upset about the strange land as she’d been about the ascent up the giant sunflower. But over the long, slow days of walking she had calmed and settled into a bearable, drooling silence, leaving Gerund with nothing but anxious thoughts.
They had both needed two full days to recover from the ascent before walking anywhere. Gerund hadn’t minded too much, since sleeping under the sunflower’s enormous yellow blossom had felt luxurious, despite the lumpy ground. But then he had gotten turned around in the strange geography, and days passed with no sign of Tomas’s cottage. He kept them away from roads to avoid meeting people, but eventually admitted that he was lost. He approached a bridge and asked its troll for directions. The troll told him they had come entirely the wrong way, so he and his cow had to retrace their steps, hours and days vanishing beneath their feet.
Each mile was a torture of anticipation. Was he too late? Would Meena be gone? She might have left the very day Tomas fell, eager to escape her prison. If she was gone, how would he find her? Would she return to the university? She would at least tell her friends at the university where she had gone, wouldn’t she?
More than two weeks after the beanstalk was felled, he finally found it. Tomas’s home was an immense building, but clearly not a palace. Just a cottage like any farmer’s. Drab. Meena could not have been happy here. There was some sort of ornamentation crisscrossing the walls, though the pattern was odd. Maybe she had tried to decorate, but the giant had stopped her.
Still avoiding roads, Gerund and his cow approached the back of the house across a field of something immense and green and leafy. He caught sight of an enormous white mass in the middle of the nearest one. Cauliflower, then. The rows were not quite in line with the house, so most of it was obscured from view. Through gaps between plants he searched the chimney for smoke, the windows for light, the doorway for motion. There was nothing.
They came out of the field at the edge of the kitchen garden, and he realized that what had seemed ornamental patterns in the stone and plaster were in fact staircases sized for regular feet. They crisscrossed the entire building, granting access to dozens of human-sized doors and windows.
Of course he wouldn’t have seen movement in the large windows—those were for Tomas. Towing the cow behind him, he stepped onto a wide path cutting through the garden. Staring at the closest of the small doors, he stepped forward.
“Can I help you?” asked a woman’s voice from his blind side.
Gerund clutched his chest and spun to the right. There was Meena, trowel in hand, kneeling in the blue dirt.
“I’m sorry to startle you, sir. I thought you saw me.” She took off her gardening gloves and stood. He tried to watch her face, read her reaction, but he couldn’t look away from the scar on her throat. It was pink and ragged silver, partly covered by a loose shawl.
His mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, and he wet his lips. “Meena,” he finally said. It was scarcely more than a breath.
“I’m sorry, do I know . . . ?” Her throat moved in a sudden gasp. “Ing? Ing! Beast’s beard, what happened to you?”
Gerund smiled to hear his old nickname, and chuckled. Somehow he had forgotten how different he would look to her.
“I am a bit older than I was the last time you saw me.” He smiled his perfect teeth at her. “I am well enough. The important bits are still young.”
Meena’s eyes were wide. “Well enough? It’s barely been five years. I knew you were dabbling in time magic, Ing, but what could you possibly have needed to spend so much for?” She shook her head. “Never mind that. You’ve clearly been traveling for some time. Come and sit down!”
Meena led him to a long stone bench nearby. It was sized perfectly for Meena’s tall frame, so Gerund had to hop a bit to sit on it. When he was settled comfortably, she hesitated a moment, then sat beside him. On his left, where he could see her clearly without twisting.
“Ing, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” He forced his gaze up to her face. Small brown eyes set above lovely brown cheeks. Twin tracks of blue ran down those cheeks, soil clinging where tears had dried.
“Not at all, Meena. I came for you.”
“You heard about Tomas, then. But all this way!” She glanced at the cow. “How could you possibly . . . ?”
She stopped, eyes closed, and pressed a hand to her chest. After a moment she faced him with a warm smile and said, “Truly, Gerund, I am touched. It means a great deal to me that you would drop everything to come and comfort me.” She laid one hand o
ver his. “Thank you.”
“It took so long to get here, I was worried you would be gone.”
Meena nodded. “We had a memorial service here last week, but when everyone left I almost couldn’t face the empty house. I thought about staying with my mother for a time, but . . . ” She shrugged. “This is home.”
Gerund kept his expression neutral. “You are happy here?”
“Well, less sad, at least. I won’t say it isn’t hard. Sometimes the good memories are the most painful, you know? But I keep thinking that if I weren’t here to stumble over them, maybe they would all just fade away. There are so many things that feel fuzzy already. I have to”—her voice broke—“I have to think that embracing the loss is better than walling it off.”
“Still as strong as ever,” Gerund said. “That’s my Meena.” Then, choosing his words carefully, he added, “Your pardon for speaking ill of the dead, but he treated you well? I’ve wondered.”
She gave a little laugh. “I guess you would have. No secret that you two didn’t get on, is it? I like to think he’d be glad you came now, but honestly? It’s good you didn’t try to visit when he was here.”
“But you . . . ”
“Yes, yes.” She waved dismissively. “I won’t deny he had a temper. Just as impetuous and fiery as he was at university. You should have heard him rant when that thief Jack first showed up. ‘I’ll grind his bones to powder!’ and so on. But yes, I was well.”
Gerund saw how she cradled her arm when she said it and didn’t entirely believe her. That must have showed in his expression, because she laughed.
“What, you thought I needed to be rescued from the big bad giant?”
At his silence her laugh died. More softly, she said, “You did think so, didn’t you, Ing?”
“No.”
“Oh, Ing. Is that why you came?” Meena clasped her hands in her lap. “I didn’t think it through, did I? To get here now, traveling alone, you must have set out long before news of Tomas could reach you. You didn’t know he was dead, but you were planning to come anyway.”