Mrs Beppo’s Magic Bag
The Owls That Could Not See Beyond the Ruins
The light of imagination transcends decay
THE STORY GIANT
Around the Castle he had woven an illusion of ruins that blocked it from the sight of mortals. To anyone out on the moor, the Castle appeared no more than a jumble of ancient stones and a few tall, roofless walls overgrown with lichen and ivy. The Story Giant was all but invisible, and his voice was often mistaken for the wind blowing over the tumbled stones.
It was how the Story Giant wanted it, how it had always been. He had created illusion upon illusion, mixing the real and imagined till they were one and the same. He was from a time before the ancient pharaohs. He had been intelligent when people were little more than apes, and had come into existence whole, as he was now. The Story Giant had never experienced childhood, yet his food and drink were the stories told and dreamt by humankind from its infancy onward. He was the custodian of those stories, and his castle was their storehouse.
Before writing had existed it had been hard to keep track of the world’s growing pool of knowledge and folklore. People forgot things. But not stories; they remembered stories. Into even the simplest story they had learnt to pour their understanding of each other and of the world around them. And the giant had learnt to sip wisdom and information from the stories, like wine from a glass.
But there was one story the Story Giant did not know. For thousands of years he had tramped the earth, always believing it would turn up sooner or later, carved in runes on an ancient stone, or found among the pages of a forgotten book. But it never had. And only tonight had he finally realized its importance.
Now, the thought of not finding the story filled him with dread.
In a city called Patna in Northern India a young girl called Rani curled up on the lattice-patterned floor of a small iron balcony and fell asleep. The clamour of the rickshaws and human traffic below her carried on into the claustrophobic, marigold-scented night, but Rani heard nothing. Having worked all day and a good part of the night in the steamy laundry of a hotel in a wealthy part of the city, she was exhausted. She slept deeply, dreaming of a cool, far-away castle in a land of gentle rain.
Hasan El Sedeiry’s father and mistress had been out most of the evening at an embassy dinner in Riyadh, and though he’d begged to stay up until their return the house-servants were set against it. They would not bend even the slightest against his father’s wishes, and so here he was, high up in his little minaret-like bedroom looking out over the mosques to the towers that edged the far side of the city.
He turned on the television, which was usually forbidden at this hour of the night, but it was an old film about goblins and giants and he’d seen it several times before. Sighing, he turned the room’s cooling system to a low setting so that its hum would not disturb him, and climbed into his bed.
Sometimes Betts Bergman found it difficult to sleep because of the red and blue neon lights that blinked on and off below the bedroom window of the Los Angeles apartment her mother rented. No matter how tightly she pulled the curtains some light managed to get through. Some nights it did not matter, but on other nights even the faintest glow was enough to keep her awake. Tonight was that kind of night. She switched on the bedside lamp, picked up a dog-eared book that had been a favourite when she’d been younger, and began reading. Ten minutes later she was asleep, the bedside lamp still on, her book on the pillow beside her, still open at an unfinished story about a giant.
Liam Brogan lay on his bunk bed in the converted fishing-trawler he and his father called home. The boat rocked almost imperceptibly as the incoming tide lifted it from the South Devon mud-flats where it was moored, and nudged its bow round to face the estuary mouth. Liam could hear the cry of owls and, less frequently, the barks of squabbling fox-cubs. The sounds were muted by beads of mist and the sea-fret that fell on to the woods and lay like a comforting blanket over his thoughts, most of which had to do with school, and a book of ghost-stories that had been confiscated from him during a maths lesson that afternoon.
The Story Giant woke and sniffed the air. Children had come again. He could smell four of them – two boys and two girls. They were puzzled, but not frightened, and he decided he would have no problem weaving them into a single, unifying dream.
But for the moment they were each still locked in their own private dream.
The one called Liam was in the Castle’s north wing, staring out of the thick mullioned windows at the falling snow.
Another child was leaning on a window-sill, looking down into a courtyard where lemon trees glowed in bright sunlight and a faint breeze rattled the polished green leaves. Now and then she would close her eyes, smile, and breathe in the lemon-scented air without a care in the world.
The third child, Hasan, was in the library pulling out books with which he immediately grew bored. He did not bother to replace them, no doubt thinking that one of the servants would do that later.
There was another visitor somewhere, but the Giant could not yet locate her.
He put down the book he had been reading and stood uneasily, his bones brittle and stiff with age. He descended a broad stone staircase flanked by wooden banisters, sections of which had crumbled away, leaving only sharp iron railings standing like rows of warriors’ spears.
He lumbered on, through corridors and rooms abandoned to the workings of woodworm and time, until finally he came to the Castle’s massive entrance hall. He pushed open its iron-studded door and stared out upon the moor.
It was neither snowing nor sunny outside. There were no lemon trees, there was no sound of rattling leaves. Instead, the moorland stretched in sombre isolation from one horizon to another. He sniffed the night air. The smell of heather and all the varied scents of the night drifted on the wind. He imagined he could even smell the moonlight that covered the gorse and bracken with an imitation of frost. He breathed in deeply once again, wondering if tonight would be his last chance to gaze upon the mortal world.
For the Story Giant was dying. The process had begun some time ago, and tonight, for the first time, he sensed that it was nearing its end. With each snuffle of the badger and hoot
