White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  It can’t be killed, Fiona had said, so we manage it.

  I knew better, now.

  As I got closer to the entrance of the lair, I started to notice strange, greyish lumps of congealed matter scattered like pellets amongst the stones. I crouched to get a closer look at one of them, poking it with my finger. It was dry and spongy, about the size of a large pillow. A white, sharp object stuck out of the grey stuff, the end splintered, and chewed.

  Bone.

  This was the regurgitated human matter that the giants could not digest properly, parcelled up, expelled as pellets and deposited here, outside the cave. Hair, bone, clothing, other things that glinted. Jewellery, perhaps. Maybe teeth with fillings. Other things I didn’t want to look at too closely. The giant pellets were like owl pellets. I found another one, saw a rotting wisp of white lace peeking out from amongst the bones. And another, from which fragments of skull stared balefully at me. The more I looked, the more I saw lying around, in varying states of decay. There were hundreds of them around the mouth to the cave, each one representing a human life, snuffed out.

  How many years had this thing been killing my species?

  Were any of these people from White Pines?

  Was there only one Nimrod?

  One giant?

  I stared at the entrance to the giant's lair, my body brimming with strange energy. I’d been given this strength for a reason, but was this it? Was this my purpose? With the ritual incomplete, it was hard to know.

  I pushed the thoughts to one side, and went into the lair.

  It stank. The giant may have been fastidious about leaving its bone-pellets outside, but it was not so fastidious about its excrement. Huge piles of it lay curled in stinking, brown coils near the mouth of the cave. Scuff marks in the sand showed that the giant had half-heartedly attempted to kick dirt over the shit once it had done its business, as a dog would. The resulting mounds of faeces rose to either side of me, and through the middle of this, a wide track ran.

  ​I took the path, listening for signs of the giant, and hearing nothing. The further in I went, the darker it became, but to my ruined eyes, it made no difference. My sight came from another place now, a place deep inside. I could still feel what was left of my eyeballs crusted on my cheeks, twin streams of gore that had now gone hard and flaky, like dried egg yolk. I left them there. The Picts of old painted their faces with wode. These were my own battle marks, and I wore them proudly.

  ​The cave was long, and ran far back into the cliff side. Huge stalactites stabbed down from the cave ceiling, only to meet with stalagmites stretching up from the floor. I was soon surrounded by towering, needle-like columns of mineral deposits down which water trickled constantly. It grew cold and damp around me. I moved along, and the stalactites gave way to massive crystal formations, great white spars of something that looked like quartz, easily ten to twelve metres long, the root of each one glowing a deep, vibrant blue. The temperature shifted, and became warm, humid. I would have sweated, in my old body, and grown thirsty.

  I no longer lived inside my old body.

  Eventually the cave widened out, the crystals thinned to small, sparkling lumps on the walls. I began to hear noises echoing down the path towards me. Heaving, grumbling, moaning noises.

  Finally, I came to the lair. The cave walls swooped out to the sides, and a huge natural pocket opened up before me. Despite how far into the cliff we were, there was a faint, greenish light illuminating the hole, in the centre of which, a giant had made its home. I could see an enormous, sprawling nest of driftwood and dried seaweed and foliage and soft things the beast must have scavenged from the beach.

  In the middle of this nest, Nimrod crouched before me with its back turned. Its entire frame heaved and shuddered, and it thrust its head forward and down rhythmically, emitting long, low, pained noises as it did so. The soft flesh of its face hung loose like soft, putrid dough, and its eyes trembled with exertion on those rigid stalks, as the giant heaved, and heaved, and heaved.

  And I knew then what it was trying to do. It was trying to regurgitate what was left of Fiona, what it hadn't been able to digest.

  I watched, fascinated, as the pink slit of a mouth opened, and streams of drool began leaking down to the ground. Then, something lumpish and wet and grey squeezed out from between its jaws, slowly at first, and then suddenly shooting out with a rush: a pellet of undigested bone, and hair, and clothing.

  Nimrod caught it deftly with one of its massive hands, and crooned to itself in satisfaction, poking at the pellet as if fascinated with its own excretion.

  I remembered the first time I had met Fiona, sitting in her little glass box at the back of Laide Post Office. I remembered her counting out money and politely quizzing me about where I had come from, even though she must have known who I was straight away. I remembered a tattoo on her wrist, and mismatched eyes. I remembered how she had slammed a spade down on my head, how she had ripped out Mac’s tongue.

  I thought, distantly, that this was a fitting end.

  Nimrod played with the soggy pellet for a minute or two while I watched, and then got to its feet. It made to leave the cave, no doubt to deposit the bundle along with all the others, amongst the boulders outside the lair. I shrank to one side of the cave as the beast stalked by, those massive feet thundering past me in long, heavy strides.

  Once the cave was empty, I realised I did not know what to do next.

  How does one kill a giant? I thought. It was not knowledge that the Ancestors had thought fit to bestow upon me.

  I looked up, thinking. On the ceiling of the cave, far, far above my head, white blobs had been daubed onto the rock. They glowed a faint, fluorescent green in the dark, the source of the light in the lair. Algae? Phosphorescence of some sort. The giant had used it like paint to decorate its home. I realised that the blobs looked like stars, like a galaxy of sickly, green stars, and that the creature must fall asleep looking at them.

  Do giants dream? I wondered, and a wild laugh bubbled up from the depths, rolling around the cave as it burst out of my mouth before I could swallow it down again.

  There is a dark surge of air above my head. An enormous hand swoops in from above, for Nimrod never left the cave at all. Nimrod knew I had been following it, and hid behind one of the huge columns of crystal, waiting for me to reveal myself.

  It had tricked me.

  ​Nimrod was clever. My ancestors chose its name well.

  The hand wraps around me.

  45. Up

  Up, up, up.

  I felt breath, hot and fetid on my face.

  I bit down hard upon the hand that held me. Rubbery, blistered skin broke beneath my teeth, and my mouth filled with the taste of it, a taste beyond description. I gagged, but hung on grimly, squeezing my jaws together as hard as I could. The creature roared, and I was pelted with the debris of its earlier meal: tiny scraps of flesh and bone, gobbets of hair, brain matter and flaps of skin that must have been stuck in its mouth, dislodged only now with the force of its cries. I saw, as it bellowed at me, that the giant had no teeth, which is why it couldn't digest the bones and other, tougher items humans wore. Like a bird, it could not chew its food, and so it regurgitated what its stomach could not handle.

  Roaring back, I bit down again, and again, and again, until I was able to free first one of my arms, and then the other. Nimrod did not let me go, for I was a puny, biting human, a mere gnat, an insect, and the giant was a hungry apex predator.

  But I cared not for such things. I was different now. I was an insect with a poisoned sting.

  I cared only for a world where this creature did not exist.

  I shot an arm out and grabbed one of the giant’s eye stalks as it craned around me. The vast, white eye attached to the end stared at me with unrestrained, wild malevolence, and I wondered how well Nimrod could see through the thick, crusted cataract that festered on the end of the stalk. What did I look like through that diseased lens?

  Like food
.

  I yanked the flexing tendon, and twisted it with all my strength. Nimrod’s fingers tightened on my body, trying to crush the life out of me, and its pink, slitted mouth began to open wide, preparing to stuff me inside even as I fought back.

  I squeezed, and wrenched, and pulled, and the eye-stalk snapped beneath my twisting fist, and suddenly I was falling, falling from a great height, for Nimrod had dropped me in pain. It clutched its ruined eye, which now flopped down like a wilted flower, and howled with rage. I had time to feel satisfied about that, to feel triumphant before I slammed into the ground, but as the floor rushed up towards me, the giant caught me, snatching me back up again mere seconds from death. Its hand went back towards its mouth, and I knew, in those last, final moments, as Nimrod opened wide and fed me into its massive, pink maw, what it was that I had to do.

  46. Down

  No teeth. Only gums, ridged like mountains. Only a scaled, hard tongue that rasped against my naked skin. Saliva, acrid and thick and gelatinous, soaked me in seconds.

  The mouth closed. I took a deep breath as the last of the light faded from view.

  Then all was hot, dark, and wet.

  The creature swallowed, or tried to. The massive tongue surged up beneath me, squashing me into the roof of Nimrod’s mouth. It hurt, like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was like being rolled flat by an enormous, fleshy rolling pin. I screamed, unable to help myself, and struggled, and then realised that I had only seconds to act before nature took its course and I found myself in the giant’s throat.

  The tongue curled, began to shunt me towards the back of Nimrod’s mouth.

  It was going to swallow me whole.

  I rolled into a ball, head between my knees, arms over my head, tucking in like I was about to dive-bomb a swimming pool. The world spasmed around me.

  Nimrod swallowed.

  And I slid down.

  I was in the colossal throat, being slowly pushed along towards the esophagus. I had no time to think about what waited for me at the end of that narrow passageway: a pit of acid, ready to digest me whole, ready to break me down cell by cell while I thrashed about in agony.

  The throat narrowed, and I felt something sphincter-like beneath my bare feet, contracting and pulsing, ready to take deliverance of me before sending me down into Nimrod’s belly.

  This was it. This was the last stop before death. The point of no return.

  I braced myself, shooting my arms and legs out, digging my hands into the slimy walls around me, stabbing my feet out and in as hard as I knew how. My hands were strong, with them I had unearthed thousands of years of history, with them I had dug three holes and held my sistren tight, with them I had…

  The giant swallowed again, trying to force me down. A huge sound of distress rumbled through my body, and I pushed back as the wet walls constricted again, as they tried to subdue me, tried to deliver me to my death.

  But I was strong. Stronger than I’d ever known.

  I knew what it took to kill a giant.

  I held myself stiff, and large, and I blocked Nimrod’s airway, filling its throat with my body, and I made a seal, felt burning air trying to escape past me.

  And eventually, Nimrod began to choke.

  47. To kill a giant

  It took far, far longer than I could have imagined.

  Every second that passed became a year. Grimly, I hung on, my limbs trembling with effort. I was filled with a strange, primordial strength, a power that came from four-fingered women who had walked the earth long before I.

  ​Massive fists beat against the outside of my heaving prison. I dug in, clinging like a limpet to a storm-battered ship. The fists turned back into hands, and I could feel it as Nimrod then clutched at its throat instead of beating at it, the deep, shatteringly loud distress cries turning to high-pitched squeaks and whistles as I jammed myself tight up against the wall of its voice box.

  ​And still, I endured. My hands made deep furrows in the lining of the giant’s throat. I felt the massive larynx of the beast rattle and buzz with a peculiar, strangled whine. Nimrod’s windpipe gripped me fiercely with a reflexive, uncontrollable contraction.

  There was a sense of something shifting, a difference in orientation, as if the world were moving slowly sideways. I realised that Nimrod was sinking to its knees, still scrabbling at its neck as if it could claw its way through its own skin and get to the obstruction blocking the airway. An almighty jolt confirmed my suspicion, and I almost slipped from my place as the giant crashed down heavily to what I could only assume was a kneeling position. I held firm. I held strong. My body remained a seal against more chaos. Against more white stones in a little seaside cemetery. Against innocent bodies dangling from a gallows frame. Against years more of warped, indoctrinated self-sacrifice and missives of duty.

  It all stopped today.

  There was another shift, and we were lurching again, falling further downwards. The giant keeled over at the knees, slowly, like a felled tree making its final descent to the earth. Nimrod’s movements grew weaker and weaker, and the keening whine trailed off.

  I made one, last, final push, keeping my body flat and tight and sealing the vacuum in the ancient creature’s windpipe.

  And the giant, unkillable by fire, or guns, or any weapon a man could make, stretched out long across the floor of its lair, spasmed three times, emitted one final, pathetic, distorted whine, and died.

  I waited. Nimrod was tricksy, a smart beast. I wanted to make sure it was really dead.

  It was.

  Slowly, carefully, I inched my way back along the giant’s throat, back into the huge, disgusting mouth. The beast had twisted its head as it had fallen, smooshing its lower jaw into the ground and forcing a small gap between its lips in doing so. Its monstrous tongue lolled out of this gap, swollen and blue, making a bridge for me, a slimy path from the giant’s mouth to the ground.

  I dragged myself across this bridge, inching along by grabbing the creature’s discoloured, chalky papillae and using them as leverage handholds, every part of my body burning in pain, and, then, finally, slippery as the day I was born, I rolled out of the mouth of the beast and crashed to the floor, where I landed on my back and lay panting in a puddle of giant phlegm, staring up at a ceiling painted with glowing green stars.

  PART FOUR: LEAVES

  48. What things I have seen

  I don’t know how long I lay in the giant’s hole, breathing in and out while the corpse of a vast, ancient predator grew cold and stiff beside me.

  Eventually, I summoned enough strength to stand. I climbed to my feet, and stumbled out of the cave, to the beach, which had changed in the time I had been inside. New things decorated the sand. I did not know what they were: they were not from a reality I recognised.

  I turned to look back only once as I stumbled away from the lair. Above me, perched on the edge of the cliffs where before there had been nothing, I saw a castle. Not ruined, but intact, well-maintained, the stone clean, and bright, as if built recently. It perched haphazardly on the cliff’s brink, one perfectly crenellated tower teetering half-on, half-off the banded ledge, seconds away from collapse. I knew it was from my world, but it was not from my time, my era. Time must be fluid here in the Other Place, the past and present simply opposite ends of a single piece of string that had been knotted to form a loop. I squinted at the castle, and a shower of masonry rained onto the sand underneath. I could hear men shouting from inside the structure, and then I saw them, scrambling to escape the building before that part of it tumbled away. They ran, ant-like across the ramparts, dressed in strange clothes, and I thought of all the historians and archaeologists and scholars who would have wept with joy and wonder to see what I was seeing. History, in motion.

  I did not stay to watch the castle collapse in its entirety. I did not stop to watch the men inside die, or gawp at the waterfall that suddenly poured from the sky not far from where the rubble landed, piling up in front of the giant’s lair and eff
ectively sealing Nimrod in, a fitting tomb for a terrible beast. The water tumbled from a wide hole in the air, and beyond, for a split second, the edges of the fall were visible, as were rocks, ferns, and trees. The hole then closed as if zipped up abruptly, and the cascade snapped off, mid-pour. The remaining water hurtled downwards to the beach with the same terrible finality that the castle had, and hit with a loud smack, before making its way across the sand and out to the sea.

  A castle on the brink of collapse, a waterfall in the sky: these things were beautiful and terrifying, but I had seen worse. I had seen what happens when the boundary between my world and another flickers, when those who built their home in the wrong place suffered the consequences, and when those who had been kidnapped by the Other Place were returned.

  I had seen such things, such dreadful, wondrous things.

  And I still had a ritual to complete.

  I stumbled across the beach, walking towards what, I did not know. I kept going until I could walk no more. Like the giant I had killed, eventually, I ran out of steam. My legs buckled at the knees, and I saw Matthew’s face once again, floating before me, his final expression haunting me, always haunting me, but none of that mattered anymore, because here was the beach, here was the sand, here was my end, and I had made it a good one.

  Of course, it was not that easy.

  I found myself back in the triangle. A cairn rose up proud in the middle of it, waiting for me.

  I stared at it hazily with one ruined eye.

  I had...I had a ritual to complete.

  But I couldn’t.

  I just couldn’t.

  Instead, I lay on the ashen ground, sticky and sandy and filthy, and felt the weight of what I had just done press down upon me.