by Liam Perrin
His posture must have communicated what Thomas wanted. The wolf relaxed ever so slightly and turned its attention to its previous engagement, glancing nervously past Thomas, back across the bridge. A growing rumble of hooves on ground issued from that direction, and the wolf backed a few steps down the road. And then it did a most startling thing.
It yowled. Only it wasn't so much a yowl as a plea. And it sure sounded to Thomas like the plea was the word "Help."
"Did you just–" said Thomas.
And then it was gone, racing as fast as its wounded leg would let it, into the woods.
A horse came galloping out of the trees on the other side of the bridge. Its mane flew. Its rider crouched. Moonlight glanced off helm, lance, and shield. It was a fearsome sight, half a ton of flesh and metal barely exerting itself and still moving easily twice as fast as Thomas could run. There wasn't a moment to think, and so, unencumbered by the kind of careful analysis that time affords and that generally keeps a person alive, Thomas swung his plank of wood from his back, brandished his walking stick, and squared himself in the middle of the road. On advisement from the self-preserving part of his brain, which was clearly stunned but scrambling to come up with something, Thomas shut his eyes tight.
There was a great tumult of whinnying, and yelling and pounding hooves and clanking metal in the general area in front of Thomas. A blast of dirt pelted him, stinging his skin where it was bared and sounding like a rain shower where it bounced off pig leather, wood, and kettle. A moment passed. When no impact came and Thomas determined his teeth were still inside his head, he opened an eye.
The rider sat tall in his saddle, looking down at Thomas, and made no effort to keep his amusement from his voice, "Lost your carnival have ye?"
Thomas swallowed, "My name is Thomas, Thomas of Fogbottom, and if it's the silver wolf you seek, I must petition you to give up your chase." An image of Elizabeth hugging her stuffed bunny, Alice, flitted through Thomas's mind, and he suddenly felt very foolish.
"You've seen the beast eh? I'm sworn to capture and deliver it. Give up this charade, boy, before you get hurt. Which way did the foul thing go?"
Thomas was clearly outmatched. The rider's helmet alone looked like it was worth more than all of Thomas's family's belongings put together. He carried himself well too. And though he showed no coat of arms that would indicate actual knighthood, he was clearly trained and born to it. Thomas tried to ignore the insults. He'd been treated worse, and was expecting a great deal more of these kinds of remarks upon his arrival at Arthur's court.
"Will nothing persuade you to give up your pursuit of that remarkable creature?"
"No. Now give it up, for my patience wears thin."
Thomas saw only two choices. He would either have to hand over the noblest creature he'd ever seen or stop the rider somehow. Handing it over seemed impossible, especially if Thomas had heard what he thought he'd heard. He could lie and say the wolf went in a different direction, but the rider would eventually discover it and then he would be after both of them.
Thomas had learned long ago by being William's younger brother that if you start something, you'd better at least try to finish it if you want any respect after. Though part of him couldn't believe what he was about to say, he figured now that he was in the thing the only way out was straight through.
"I can't let you pass." He knew he was in for it, but he felt proud nonetheless.
The rider shifted and said, "Well, isn't this a pickle?"
And with that, he trotted up next to Thomas, brought his pommel down on Thomas's head, and knocked him out cold.
CHAPTER VI
The Weeping Giantess
The first thing Thomas noticed was the smell. Or smells, rather – there were lots of them, and they didn't fit together like smells usually do. There was something sweet, like maple syrup, and right there next to it something ghastly. There was something soft and calm and beautiful, but then a pungent undercurrent would shove it over, as if a cat had peed on a lavender bush.
He sat up, rubbed his eyes and looked around. He was sitting on a pile of straw in the corner of a small wooden shack. There was a large rock for a pillow, which explained a terrible stiffness in his neck. In addition to a window and a cracked door, light streamed in through gaps between nearly every wallboard. The floor was dirt, and a single table and chair formed the sum of the shack's furnishings. There was a plate with a crust of bread and a clay cup with a bit of water on the table. Thomas's gear, such as it was, lay piled on the chair.
His head ached. He felt at the spot where his helmet had interceded for the rider's pommel, and his hand came away covered with sticky goo. Instinctively, he brought his hand to his nose and sniffed. In a flash Thomas was on his feet, "Mother of Mercy!" The smells were coming from this stuff on his head. He stared in horror at his hand, shoving it as far from him as anatomy would allow. He'd never in his life wished so hard for longer arms.
He grabbed the clay cup, poured the water on his hand and scrubbed to no avail. The water ran right off the goo, and he succeeded only in spreading it over both hands and up part of his arm. He surveyed the cabin for anything that might help wipe the stuff off. He settled on the straw from his bed. This ended poorly. When an old man entered through the shack's door, Thomas's hands and head were bristling. He looked like a living, breathing scarecrow.
The old man cried out and nearly dropped a whole bowl of the same goo that was on Thomas. This was a fresh batch, ripe and steaming. There must have been some horseradish in the mix. The first wave came like a battering ram and cleared a path straight through the sinuses so the second and subsequent waves could pillage the olfactories at will. The old man wore a clothespin on his nose.
"No, no, no, no, no! You must leave the ointment where I put it!" The old man backed Thomas onto the straw bed and sat him down. Thomas was a sticky, straw-covered mess. "Well, in any case, if it has to come off it's me - that is I - I'll do the... the off-coming and no one else. Unless you want Bane to be the death of you." He unwrapped an oily cloth from around his bowl of goo and set about cleaning up Thomas.
Thomas, still reeling, tried to parse it all. "You're a healer?"
"And lucky for you."
"What's bane? A plague?"
The old man paused. He peered out from behind great, bushy gray eyebrows. His eyes looked like they'd seen all of time come and go, but they sparkled with a youthful mischievousness. "Bane is the boy you met on the road."
Thomas gasped. "The Bane? The son of the Baron of Fogbottom... that Bane?"
"There aren't a lot of Bane's in the world I should think," said the healer who seemed to be honestly considering the question.
"But he wasn't wearing his colors... wait, you saw that?" Thomas wasn't sure which to be more embarrassed by: that he'd played a fool to the Baron's son or that it had been witnessed.
"Of course I did, saw the whole thing lucky for you," he said, pointing at Thomas's head and leaning in to wipe a tendril of goo creeping toward Thomas's ear.
"I wouldn't categorize Bane," continued the old man as he rubbed vigorously with the towel, "as a plague so much as an infection perhaps, or an irritation of the skin. If it goes untreated, these things tend to worsen. A person's parts are all connected you see, and if you don't set things straight as soon as possible–"
The old man stood back, inspected Thomas's skull then laid his towel down on the table.
"–a small problem this year can be fatal next. Little chance of getting treatment from the Baron of Fogbottom though. Fortunately for both of us, Bane and his father don't pay much attention to people like you and I. Unless..."
"Unless what?"
The old man seemed to have wandered off mentally.
"Hmmm? Oh. Unless we get in his way. Now hold still."
The old man picked up his bowl and a short wooden spoon and began applying fresh goo liberally. Twice Thomas thought he'd faint. When it was done, the old man wrapped a clean cloth around Thomas
's head and pronounced him fit for duty. He explained that this was most fortunate for it meant that Thomas would be able to set to work straight away paying off the healer's services and if he was quick about it, could still make Arthur's court in time for the wedding.
"Besides, we'll be helping each other. What good is a knight without a magic sword? How would it look, showing up at Arthur's, lining up with all the other, er, hopefuls, and you with nothing special about you. No real qualifications as it were. I've seen your talent lad. With that and a piece of toast, you'd have trouble serving breakfast. You've got no pedigree, no reputation. What you need is something I've got, and will gladly give if you do this thing for me, and we'll call ourselves square."
"You have a magic sword?"
"I sure do. But what use do I have for such a thing? It's good luck you happened along when you did too, I was thinking of taking it to Arthur's tryouts and auctioning it off. Now you owe me sure, but the task I need doing is no easy thing. I'll throw in the sword for the balance and because, well, I saw the kindness you did at the bridge, and you look like you could use a break in life. So, what do you say?"
"But I'm not," stammered Thomas, "that is, the reason I'm going isn't..."
The old man stared at him.
"The thing is – I'm not going to be a knight. I’m going to ask Arthur to pardon my brother." And then Thomas explained his family situation.
The healer listened patiently and when Thomas had finished said simply, "Rubbish."
"Pardon?" said Thomas.
"That's all rubbish. Look around, what do you see?"
"Um," said Thomas. "Well, there's the chair, the pot of goo..."
"Bah. Not in here. Come on." And he pulled him outside. "Here. What do you see?"
Thomas looked, really looked at the forest for the first time. It took him a moment, then he began to see it. The yellowing leaves, the brown and wilted ground cover, the fading wildflowers. Even the stream looked sluggish and cloudy. Directly across the water from the healer's hut was an enormous oak that at one time must have sheltered countless birds and towered as a king among trees. It was now leafless, gray, and splitting.
"The land is dying here too."
"That's right. It's dying everywhere. And let me ask you this: What good will it do if you get Arthur to tell the Baron to let your brother go?"
"Well, he can... He can help us... You know. He can help the family."
"Do what?"
"I don't know. William is quite a guy. He could..."
"I'm sure he is. But will it change the Baron? Will it solve Fogbottom's problems? Will it solve anything in any lasting way?"
The healer was reaching right down into Thomas's heart and tugging at the very thoughts he'd been working to suppress since his father set him on this course.
He frowned. "No, it won't," he said. "It'll make my family feel better, but it won't solve anything. We'll all still be starving."
"That's right. Your brother's confinement is a symptom Thomas. You've got to find the cause of the sickness and set that straight if you really want to fix anything. You've got a dream, Thomas. You have eyes to see the real problem. And you have the heart to want to fix it. Don't abandon that to please someone else."
They both stared at the dying tree for a moment. Thomas could scarcely believe this old man was articulating so clearly what boiled in his heart. If he was going to ask for knighthood – a seat at Arthur's tables – a magic sword sure would help. But William...
"So how about that sword?" asked the healer quietly.
Thomas clenched his jaw. "I'll do it," he said.
§
As you know, King Arthur established several orders of chivalry in Camelot in addition to the Round one. The Table Round is of course the most famous, and those who sat at it were understood by all to be peers of the court and friends of the king. But there were other tables, some almost as lofty, some not so much. Among those in the not-so-lofty category, the Table of Less Valued Knights was far and away the unloftiest. The Knights of Less Valued Table were the workhorses of the court, performing the inglorious duties that are nevertheless essential to a realm's operation and taking care of any requests that the other orders found... uninteresting. Its first administrator, Sir Tuttle the Authorized, was a quiet man who'd risen to his position mainly by keeping his head down and outliving the more ambitious. The fourth rule in the Table's Code of Service read as follows:
Rule IV: Never promise to do something that hasn't been spelled out precisely, in advance, and preferably in writing.
Sir Tuttle penned that rule the day Thomas agreed to take the healer's quest. Earlier in the same day, he'd written this one:
Rule II: Know your limitations.
Sir Tuttle would've shaken his head and frowned at what was taking place by that old oak tree. And then he would have given Thomas a copy of the Code of Service with rules II and IV highlighted.
§
As night fell, the healer sent Thomas to scrounge some kindling and then built a small fire by a stream outside the shack. They sat on stumps and watched embers float up into an impossibly starry sky while the healer puffed on a pipe and told his tale.
"This stream here is the same that flows under the bridge up yonder where you met Bane. It's old, with a history that makes a man's life look as fleeting as one of these embers." He pointed with his pipe.
"But there are things even older than this, if you can imagine it, and there was a time when the water didn't flow here at all. Giants lived here then, a whole city of them, and they worked and played, got married, had children, and raised families just like we do. They had giant carpenters that could've built one of our ships in a day. It would've been like a toy to them for their giant children who could've smashed that ship in a blink with one giant fist. Their giant masons could have built a man-sized castle a week, but they would've been little more than tourist attractions for them, what with not being able to fit inside and all. They had giant physicians to care for giant wounds, and giant priests too, to deal with giant sins.
"One day, a giantess named Gorgella came to one of the priests to make a giant confession. She'd murdered her boyfriend's other girlfriend. Well, the thing about giants is that they murdered each other left and right. They didn't have any rules about it. You might've noticed that there aren't many giants wandering around today. If someone had introduced them to the right set of precepts early on, maybe things would've turned out different. In any case, murdering her boyfriend's girlfriend wasn't the problem.
"The problem was that Gorgella had tried everything, but her boyfriend – correction: former boyfriend – didn't love her anymore. This was a terrible giant crime, to lose someone's love. Giants were known to bribe their ex-lovers until they were penniless, or even starve themselves to death to try to win back a lost love. Such efforts seldom worked. Of course you and I know the giants had it backwards, it should've been no fault to lose love, but to stop loving, now there's a crime worth confessing. Again, the right set of rules and regulations can make all the difference.
"The giant priest, in light of such a horrible confession, broke his vow of confidentiality and reported Gorgella to the giant constable. Gorgella was sentenced with banishment until and unless her boyfriend wanted her back. She was to climb to a high point on a nearby mountain and wait. Weeping, she left. She didn't bother to pack any bags or say goodbye to any friends. She thought she was a terrible, villainous giantess, because the authorities with the backwards rules told her so. She climbed the mountain, sat down, and waited.
"The boyfriend never called on her. Within five years, the entire giant population save a few stragglers passed away. Murdered each other mostly. There's no such thing as a petty squabble when you're a giant. That shouldn't be surprising; we see it in our own race too. Often times the bigger the man, the more serious he is about how his tea should be served and the more egregious the error if he gets one lump when he wanted two.
"Gorgella followed the ru
les though, and there she sits to this day, waiting for her boyfriend to call. Her weeping is the source of this very stream."
The healer held out a small glass bottle to Thomas. "Giant tears are wonderful stuff if you can get them straight from the source. By the time they flow down to us here, they've been filtered of the qualities that make them noteworthy. I want you to go find Gorgella and get me a bottle of her tears."
Thomas pursed his lips and took the bottle.
"You want the tears of a giantess," said Thomas, "in this bottle?"
The healer nodded.
"Can I pick you up anything else on the way? A dragon's dimple or... or a dwarf's booger maybe?"
The old man raised his eyebrows.
"Never mind," said Thomas hastily.
§
For two days, Thomas trudged upstream. Early on the second day, the land rose up and started to climb. By mid-day, he was finding it difficult to follow the water directly. When the path grew tricky, the stream was wont to throw up its hands and skip over the details by plummeting straight down, carefree and unencumbered. Never in its life had it stopped to consider the rough time it would have if it needed to go back home for a visit. It flowed in one direction, always, and while this is a proven path to worldly success, it can leave a body feeling sad and lonely and unconnected in spots. As the sun began to set and tinge the world gold, Thomas came upon one of those sad places.
Fed by a trickle on the upstream side, and relieved by a fall on the down, the water collected in a deep, glassy pool. A single, young willow grew by its edge, gripping the mountain. Its longest branches just barely brushed the water's surface. The reflected world was perfect and stunning in every portion, from the way its sky faded between golds and pinks and reds to the gentle twisting motion of the willow's leaves. No particular, big or small, was left unrepresented. It gave the illusion that the entire world was contained in that pool. A person could believe that if you came at it at the right angle, you'd see what was happening anywhere you cared, and if you stepped in, you'd be there.