In The Path of The Giantess

We heard her long before we saw her. Crashing trees and shuddering earth, sometimes a muffled crack as a chunk of mountain split and slid down the side of the valley. A goatherd left his charges squalling on the hillside and ran through the night to warn us. I pressed a flask into his hand as he babbled, how he had seen the shape of her, soft black against the stars and moving towards us.

I wouldn’t have believed him if I hadn’t heard the rumbling myself. It was many lifetimes since the giants walked; we thought them long dead, if they’d existed at all. Whatever we’d once known about their kind we’d forgotten. 

For the sake of my quick feet, I was chosen to travel upriver and face her, to discover any way that she might be halted, turned around, warded off. Meanwhile, the rest of the village packed our lives into carry sacks and carts.

I trampled my fear under my heels as I ran. As dawn lit the edges of the sky, I shinned up the tallest pine I could find, shielded on all sides by the thick blue needles. When I heaved myself above the canopy, I nearly lost my hold.

The first shock was her size. I don’t know how to tell it. There is the landscape around us—the mountains, the river, the forest, the fields—and there is us, the creatures who live in it and upon it. When I saw her, I felt the foolishness of that distinction. She was the earth, and she was alive. It was as if a section of the sky suddenly unfolded its wings and flew away. A living being, vaster than our whole valley, larger than the little world I knew so well. In that moment, breaking out of the dark leaves into the pale morning light, I felt the world dilate like the pupil of an eye. The world was larger than I ever could’ve imagined. It was endless.

The second shock was that she was beautiful. Not like our village girls, but like the moon, like a waterfall, like harvest. Through a haze of cloud I could see her round milky face, surrounded by golden hair which waved like wheat in the field and mingled with the sunrise. She wore a pale cloak over a rust red dress, patterned with strange designs. Her feet were bare, crushing young birches like daisies beneath them.

I knew then that I couldn’t stop her. Even with an ingenious trap, or felled trees, or ropes, or any of the plans I’d been weaving as I scampered up the pass. Scrambling down the pine, I realized what I had to do.

I ran towards a rocky outcrop where a dead tree stood tall and alone; somewhere she might see me. By the time I reached it, my muscles burned and my breath raked at my throat. The ground was shaking under me as I climbed, as high as I could, and perched facing down the valley.

She stood in the new sunlight, wreathed in clouds from the chest up, magnificent and impossible. 

I wrenched one of the dead branches free and fumbled to pull my flint from its pouch. The spark caught and I held the flaming branch up over my head, waving it desperately and trying to draw her gaze. I shouted; a greeting, a warning, a wordless cry. But she kept moving, shins like sheer cliff faces swinging towards me. Her cloak—made of what? by whom?—swept through the air. Her face was shadowed by the sun, but I thought I saw it slowly turn.

I shouted until my throat was raw. As the flames nipped my fingers, I dropped the branch, and watched it disappear among the boulders tumbling down the hillside below me, shaken loose by the shivering earth.

Was she slowing? Had she heard? What were we to her? I thought of my people.

The branch I was sitting on broke with a sharp crack, and I fell into the roaring nothingness below, until I landed with a soft thud in the centre of the giantess’s open palm.

She lifted me up, into the clouds, until we were face to face. She filled my vision, ringed by a horizon of gold. I was far too close to read her face. Her eyes were dark, dark green, like the pine needles, and they shone like the lake under moonlight. The air was cool, and mist enfolded us suddenly. For a moment it was just she and I, wrapped in a cloud. Then the sky opened again like a curtain drawn back. My hair and clothes were damp. I laughed, and her cheeks rounded in a smile.

She lowered her hand below the clouds. Our valley stretched before me until it reached a fringe of trees and the yellow plains beyond. I saw other villages, towns, and in the far distance, gleaming white in the sun’s rays, a castle. She moved, and I felt the sway of her shoulders and her hips, the crash of her footsteps. Under her skin I felt the vibration of her blood, a pulse like rolling waves.

Soon the village was below us. She stopped, and I felt a rush in my ears as the hand I was standing on descended and came to rest on the ground. I climbed down onto the grass. Her hand disappeared into the sky above me, and after a moment first one of her feet then the other, each the size of a wheat field, lifted and fell.

On hands and knees on the thundering earth, I watched her walk down the valley and onto the plains, until she was small enough to be lost behind the trees and the ridge of the mountainside. I stood up on trembling legs and saw the crushed earth on either side of our village, which lay before me, empty, and safe.

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Ⓒ Sarah Jackson