We have heard him.’
‘Do you not speak English, O’Brien? I thought you were an educated giant.’
‘I have learned it and forgotten it,’ the Giant said. ‘I have sealed it up in a lead box, and I have sunk it in the depth of the sea.’
‘Fish it out, there’s a good lad,’ Vance said. ‘If any see it, grapple it to shore. You must understand, I’m not aiming to present you as a savage. Nothing at all of that kind of show.’
‘Are we going as far as Derry?’ Jankin asked. ‘I’ve heard of it, y’know.’
‘Ah, Jankin, my good simple soul,’ said the Giant. ‘Vance here, he knows how things are to be done.’
‘You are aware,’ Vance said, ‘that I was agent to the brothers Knife, very prodigious giants who you will remember well.’
‘I remember them as rather low and paltry,’ O’Brien said. ‘The larger of the Knives would scarcely come to my shoulder. As for his little brother—Pocket, I used to call him—when I went to the tavern at ten years of age, I was accustomed to clutch my pot in my fist and ease my elbow by resting it on his pate.’
‘The Knives were nothing,’ Jankin said. ‘Dwarves, they were, practically.’
Joe Vance moved his honest eyes sideways. He recalled the Knives—especially Pocket—as boys who could knock down a wall just by looking at it. Pocket was, too, uncommonly keen on his percentages, and once, when he thought he was short-changed, he had lifted his own proper person high in the air and hung him by his belt on a hook where a side of pig was stuck just yesterday. It was with one hand he hoisted him, and that his left; Vance wouldn’t easily forget it. Glancing up, he appraised O’Brien, assessing his potential for violent excess. Where he could get away with it, he was this sort of agent; he took twenty shillings in the guinea.
‘Now, as to my terms,’ the Giant said. ‘Myself and my followers—that’s these here about—we must have all comfort and commodity on the journey.’
‘I am accustomed to booking passage,’ Joe Vance said, bowing.
‘It must be a vessel to surprise the Britons. A golden prow and sails of silk.’
‘You yourself shall be the surprise,’ Vance cooed.
‘I must have six singing women to go before me.’
Vance lost control; it didn’t take much. That’s all shite! You, Charlie O’Brien, you haven’t tasted meat since last Easter. You live on your hands and knees!’
‘True,’ said the Giant, glancing at the roof. ‘All six must be queens,’ he said, smiling; he thought Vance’s manners mild enough, and what’s to be lost by upping your demands?
‘Where would I get six queens?’ Vance bellowed.
That’s your problem,’ the Giant said urbanely. He stretched his legs. The brush of his big toe nearly pitched Jankin into the flame, but Jankin blew on his burnt palms, and licked them, and apologised.
Claffey raised his head. He engaged Vance’s eye. He nodded towards O’Brien, and said, ‘He’s dangerous, in a room.’ He left it at that. On the whole, Claffey did know where to leave things.
The Giant said, ‘Vance, shall I have coin in my pocket? Shall I have gold in my store?’
Vance held out his hands, palms up. ‘What Joe Vance can lawfully obtain, you shall share in. The English public, of my certain knowledge, is starved of the sight of a giant. It’s a kind of charity, now I think of it, to take a giant over to them.’
He looked Jankin in the face. ‘Englishmen are a type of ape,’ he explained.
He was smiling with half his face. The Giant saw this.
‘Not so,’ he said. ‘Low in stature, barbarous in manner, incomprehensible in speech: unlettered, incontinent and a joke when they have drink taken: but not hairy. At least, not all over.’
‘I have never seen an ape,’ Jankin said. ‘Nor dreamed of one. Have I seen an Englishman?’
They are the ones that ride horses,’ Claffey said.
‘So,’ Jankin said. ‘I have seen them.’
‘What about Connor?’ Vance asked. ‘Are you coming yourself?’
‘Connor is a man of wealth and substance,’ Claffey said. ‘He has his cows to guard.’
Connor’s brow creased. He ran his hands back through his hair. ‘Once, O’Shea came over, sneaking in the night with a basin, and bled my cows to make his Sunday broth. As if he were a Kerryman.’
‘Yes,’ the Giant said. ‘A Kerry cow knows when it’s Saturday night.’ He lifted his head. ‘Well, this hearth has been our anchor. But now we must be under sail.’
When they came down the mountain, their feet sunk in the mud and squally rain blew into their faces. It was the time of year when rats stay in their holes, dogs in their kennels and lords in their feather beds. Civilly, the Giant carried all their packs, leaving them with their hands free to help them balance if they skidded. A league or so on they came to a settlement, or what had been so recently; what was now some tumbled stone walls, the battered masonry raw, unclothed by creeping green. A few months after the clearance, the cabin walls were already disintegrating into the mud around; their roofs had been fired, and they were open to the sky.
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
