The inn on the High Road was packed full to the rafters with rowdy guests, busy and cheerful, all stuffing their mouths with food and packing in whatever spaces remained with beer. Loud talk and laughter bounced from wall to wall, crescendoing into a din that would’ve made a bear whimper. All were of good cheer, raucously celebrating the approach of further celebration, of holiday festival, of three full days of feasts and family and arguing.
All except one. The man sitting in the corner, staring at his plate as though it was all he had left in the world. This intrigued Jack, over at the bar, so he walked over and asked him what was what.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the man, as the weight of the something pressed down on his shoulders further still.
“A big nothing, then,” said Jack, who stole the man’s leftovers from unresisting hands. His steel tooth flashed as he tore through the potatoes. “Tell me about it.”
The man rubbed his face. “It’s my family. You see, the wife and I – she is upstairs, asleep, you see – we live far apart from our kin, so when we married two years ago we agreed to take it in turns to visit our families each holiday. Last year we visited my father and mother, brothers and sisters, all in the city…”
“Ah. In-law troubles await you this year then?”
“Yes. They are ogres.”
Jack stopped chewing midmouthful to think this over. “So, do you mean this as a figure of speech, or more of…”
“More of a matter of fact, yes. They are ogres. Tall as a troll each and twice as ugly, with muscles that can shatter boulders, breath that can blacken mirrors, and squinting, glowering eyes that can barely make out a barn wall five feet away in broad daylight. They don’t like me.”
“My sympathies,” said Jack, resuming the busywork of his knife and fork. Few things had ever put him off a meal for more than a moment. “I take it your wife doesn’t take after her family?”
“No, no. Julie is the sweetest, prettiest thing I’ve ever met. She’s gentler than a nightingale, won’t eat meat for harm of the animals, and she winces when she swats an insect. How she grew up in that house I’ll never know.”
“Adopted, maybe?”
“Definitely not. She has an extra joint on each of her thumbs, a nose that can smell the difference between the sunset and the sunrise, and her back teeth can crack bone. She’s an ogre all right.”
“Hmm. Why does her family not approve of your union?”
“I’m not nearly ogrish enough for their tastes. I’m far too small, much too weak, and I’m scarcely brutal. I’m afraid that an honest cloth merchant is just not good enough for their little girl, and that this holiday visit will end in nothing but misery.”
Jack nodded in sympathy.
“And they might eat me.”
Jack slammed down his flagon. “Right!” he shouted. “That’s certainly enough of that nonsense! Hear me all,” he called to the inn around them, which watched in surprised, “I’m Jack the traveller and I’ll be damned if I’ll let any passing acquaintance of mine whose meal I’ve taken be eaten by his in-laws! Sir,” he said to the distraught cloth merchant, “I’ve got a plan, and I advise you hearken to it. First, let me borrow your clothes.”
So they went upstairs to the cloth merchant’s room and he gave Jack his second-best suit, as he was wearing the best. Jack admired the seams, then spoke again: “Second, give me whatever soap or perfumes you might use on your person.”
This the cloth merchant did, and Jack applied them liberally, stopping to sniff now and then with the utmost care. At last he was satisfied, and turned again to the merchant. “Third, let me go to your in-laws in your place. I believe I can fool their noses in this manner. You’ll be apart from your wife for a few days, but I believe you two can bear the sweet sorrow of a few days away from each other’s arms in exchange for your still having arms to clasp her in, when once again you meet.”
“I concede this,” said the cloth merchant, “and shall alert Julie posthaste.” He nudged the sleeping woman in the bed awake.
“Why,” she asked, “is that man wearing your clothes?”
“It’s a deception, sweet-pea,” he said to her, “to stop your family from eating me.”
“Oh all right,” she yawned. And then she fell back asleep without so much as a murmur.
“It was a long ride today,” explained the merchant, carefully moving the pillows so that she wouldn’t fall off the bed.
“Then she can take her rest now, and you yours while you wait,” said Jack. He slept on the roof outside for the view of the stars – as was his custom – and he and Julie left in the morning, he on the merchant’s fat nag, she on a slim mare with cross-shaped hooves.
“My mother gave it to me,” she explained as Jack eyed the horse dubiously, stroking its muzzle. It was as white as cream, with luminous and unpleasant eyes.
“Marvellous,” he said, and snatched his hand away a mere nails-width from snapping teeth. “And cheeky.”
“She’s like that with men,” she apologized. “Unless you have a sugar cube. She’ll do anything for a sugar cube.”
Jack chose to stay at arm’s length, and whiled away the trip entertaining Julie with an endless stream of ventriloquism applied to knock-knock jokes.
Jack heard the ogres before he saw them, a great rough laugh booming through the forest and making the birds scatter, then the thud-thud-thud of big horny feet smacking on the dirt, unshod and heedless. The trees bent and groaned, the ground rumbled, and a huge ogre burst through the trees and picked up Julie in a bear-hug, horse and all.
“Big sister!” he roared. The mare seized ahold of his eyelashes and yanked them away, and he laughed.
“Hello, Othello,” squeaked Julie, happily but breathlessly. The ogre dropped her, making the mare do a little dance to stay on her feet. She whinnied villainously.
“Mother and Father are inside, and Grandfather, and the cousins, and Uncle Abraham and Auntie Skadi, and Great Great-Grandmother is coming soon!” He ceased his little hops of excitement and looked forlorn at her. “We all missed you very much,” he said plaintively, and shot an evil look at Jack as Julie adjusted her petticoat.
“Well, I’m here now, and so is Clarence,” she said with a meaningful nod to Jack. “Let’s go inside and say hello.”
The ogre home was a sprawling heap, a hall made from ruptured earth and bent trees, a hill repurposed into a hold. Its great iron door-knocker was in a sad state from the countless hairy knuckles that had wrapped about it over the years, beating it senseless and dented. Othello’s fist showed it no mercy, setting up such a din that Jack’s ears twitched.
“Mother!” he bawled. “Father! Julie is here, and so is that man!”
The door creaked open, and Father’s fetid breath washed out over them all, making their clothing wilt. He stood sixteen foot tall if he was an inch, with a nose that would put a halberdier’s pride and joy to utter shame and deep-set eyes that were as screwed shut as a mole’s.
“Harruumph,” he said, long and rough. “Welcome back daughter. Mmrrmm.” The door swung wide as he ushered them within, horses and all. He plucked Jack from his nag with one hand and picked it up with the other. It nestled in his sprawling palm, too terrified to so much as twitch a muscle.
“Your mother worries, you know,” he told Julie as they walked under the dirty, tangled wreckage of the ceiling, a forboding mass that Jack could not stop eyeing. “Hrrrooum. She worries about her little girl out there, all alone.”
“Clarence keeps me safe,” said Julie.
“Fwwuush! This little fellow couldn’t safeguard a baby bird, let alone you, daughter.”
“You’ll see,” said Julie. She gave Jack a nervous glance.
“Yes indeed,” he said, with as reassuring a pat on the shoulder as he could manage. Othello growled at him.
Heat flowed over the company, and it was in the red light of a fireplace that could boil a king’s court whole that Jack saw the next ogre. It was half as high as Father, but twice as wide and a hundred times the hideousness, a hag beyond recall. Her fangs hung down to her thighs and her thighs turned into her knees before they began; her feet could’ve been mistaken for live crocodiles without cause for reproach.
“A snack, love,” said Father, handing Jack’s nag to the hag. She spread her jaws wide and swallowed the terrified animal without so much as a chew, blinking three time hugely as she did so.
“Now, where’s my little girl?” she asked.
“Mother!” cried Julie, and she rushed to the monster’s legs for a hug.
“Julie-girl,” crooned Mother, and cuddled her with one big fist-hand, fingers stroking the woman’s golden hair with all the soft delicacy of maggots in flesh. “You’ve grown so much, precious!”
“Thank you, Mother,” said Julie. Her face was buried in the hag’s foul dress, and so she missed the grin that Mother was directing at Jack. It showed entirely too many teeth to fit in one mouth.
“Is the man cruel to you, sweetling?” she asked. “Why do you fret at Mother’s hem so? Does he strike you? Mother can stop that, you know. Stop it good and proper.”
“Mother!” admonished Julie, stepping back and composing herself. “Don’t fret. You’ll see!”
“Indeed,” said Jack. He tried not to wince as Mother stared at him head-on. “Indeed.”
“Soup’s near up, precious,” said the ogre hag. “Why don’t you tell your man to make himself useful and call up the others for supper? Can’t let all this good meat go to waste.”
“I don’t eat meat, mother,” said Julie. “It’s inhumane.”
“Nonsense, dear, there’s not a spot or lick of human in here – more’s the pity,” she sighed. “It has such a lovely piquant flavour to it too, like good prime pork. But there’s lots of nourishing elk in here, so let’s get everyone here and dug in before it cools!”
Julie curtseyed, then turned to Jack. “Mother would appreciate it if you would call the family for suppertime,” she said with her mouth. Her eyes added: and it would be terrible, terrible, and terrible if you do it improperly. There’s lots of room in that kettle yet.
Father reached up high over the fireplace and brought down a mighty horn in his paws, carved from the tusk of some long-dead beast that would’ve dwarfed even him. He handed it to Jack with a grunt, and it was to his great pride that he barely allowed his knees to buckle, nor did he scream.
“Blow,” commanded Father, and he sat back with his arms crossed, judging.
Jack was no stranger to music, and there was scarce any instrument he hadn’t taken a gamble at one time or another in revelry near or far. He pursed his lips, he placed them to the sooty, blackened bone mouthpiece, and he blew a blast that would’ve melted a brass trumpet to slag. It sounded like a kitten burping in the bottom of a tin bathtub.
Father leaned back. Waiting. Othello cracked his knuckles.
Jack examined the horn, trying to appear unhurried. “Just finding the pitch,” he explained through one of his especially favourite smiles, the one he used when he was asking for money that made his steel tooth shine so prettily. The family watched on, unimpressed. Julie hurriedly tried some of the soup and pretended not to be paying attention.
Jack inhaled deep enough that his ribcage started to creak, then let fly a tremendous roar of wind into the horn, a sputtering shout. It left him dizzy and barely able to hold it, but had scarcely more effect than the first.
Jack had often had to think in many unpleasant circumstances, but under the unblinking stare of Mother was among the worst he’d known. There had to be some trick to the horn, a rough sort of enchantment. Ogres were scarcely sorcerers, but they were as likely as any other sort of troll to have some sort of base magical cunning wrapped up in their belongings.
Julie flicked into his vision again for a moment, brushing by him with a hand discretely pressed to her mouth from the soup. She burped a little, and he hoped she wouldn’t be sick.
Wait. Aha. Clever girl. Of course.
“Only joking that time,” he said with a laugh, and he pressed the great, stinking horn to his lips one last time and belched into it long and hard, from the belly, like an ogre. It let out a blast of fulsome fumes and odorous echoes, leaving him coughing in the wake of its roars.
“Hrmmmm,” said Father thoughtfully. Othello looked a little impressed, but a little more disappointed.
Your soup stays inhumane tonight, lad, thought Jack, and he tossed the horn with as much nonchalance as he could manage to Father, who caught it one-handed.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Jack said, “but I’m hungry.”
It had been a while since Jack had been at a meal that boasted this level of volume. The chewing alone could’ve knocked over the inn that he’d stayed at the night before, and the volume of the hoots, hollers, and rumbles that echoed over it all could’ve stricken a jay in full screech unconscious. The cousins were a particularly noisy lot; Jack was seated right between two of them and across from Julie, who was protectively insulated from his presence by the immense bulk of her parents. She smiled nervously at him.
“Good food!” roared the cousin on Jack’s left, mouth overflowing back onto his plate, where he scooped it back in with relish.
“Good food!’ agreed the cousin on his right, belching midswallow with enough force to rock the table.
“Good food indeed,” said Jack loudly, tearing apart a chunk of elk-gut with his hands. “Why, it’s so good, I’ll wager I could out-eat both of you at once.”
There was a sudden silence around him, relatively. He could actually hear himself think for the first time in twenty minutes.
“Haw!” exclaimed the cousin on his left, a great, pot-bellied fellow.
“Hah!” erupted the cousin on his right, a longer, leaner, ogre, shaped as though he’d been slapped together out of slabs of beef.
“First one to the bottom of his bowl, gentlemen.” said Jack. “Do we have a bet?”
“A bet!” they shouted together, and as one they dove for their plates, hands shovelling giblets, mouths gnashing wildly at entrails, and noses rooting for scraps like wild boars.
Jack smiled as he ate, rapidly yet surely, reaching for cups and sauce vessels as needed. The elk was pretty good, and he was pretty hungry, but he was under no illusions as to his ability to out-eat two ogres at once. He would tack a different wind with this problem.
“Hrrrmph,” the right cousin heard Father say, “pass the pine-nut sauce, hrrm.” So he reached out to grab it.
“Shove that pine-nut stuff this away, there’s a peach,” the left cousin heard Mother speak of, and so he reached out and seized it.
“Leggo!” huffed the right cousin.
“Shove off,” said the left cousin. “Mother wants it.”
“Father asked first!”
“Push off, you just want it for yourself!”
“Maggot!”
“Hog!”
And then the right cousin slapped his brother with an elk-hock and the meal degenerated from there. Jack ate as quietly as he could, chewing down the meaty bits and spitting out the gristly ones discretely, smiling all the while.
“Finished,” he proclaimed.
“FINISHED!” he yelled a moment later. The cousins looked up from where they lay on the floor, fists planted in one another’s breadbaskets.
“Can’t be!” objected the right cousin, struggling to his feet and scrubbing at his freshly blooming shiner.
“It is,” observed the left cousin, peering at Jack’s bowl with a gloomy expression. “Fair and square.”
“No it isn’t, he kept eating while we fought!”
“That’s your fault.”
“Not it isn’t, you started it!”
“No, you!”
“Arrgh!”
The fistfight resumed under the table, and Jack joined in with the rest of the family in throwing scraps of bone at them, silently thanking that he’d taken the chance to practice throwing his voice on the trail.
“That was very risky,” scolded Julie as she lay down in bed. “If they had noticed, you’d have been eaten before you could say Jack Robinson.”
“They were far too thick to notice,” said Jack lazily from the floor, where he’d made a sort of mattress out of his coat. “And my last name isn’t Robinson, so we’re in no danger of that.”
“Yes, well, that won’t work on Uncle or Auntie,” said Julie. “Nor Grandfather neither. And I don’t even want to imagine what would happen if you tried to fool Great Great-Grandmother. You’ll need my help on this if you want to impress them, like it or not. Or have you forgotten my help with the horn so soon?”
“All right, all right, all right,” agreed Jack, rolling over in his coat. “I’ll listen to your advice come morning.”
“Good,” said Julie. “Now, the thing about Uncle is that –” but Jack was asleep before she finished her sentence.
The next morning found him bleary-eyed and shaky in the hands, badly in need of coffee and barely awake enough to listen to anything at all. The floor of an ogre’s house is the bumpiest, the mouldiest, and the most lively in all the world. He’d been woken by a rat the size of a terrier trying to eat his boots right off his feet.
“First day is gathering and feasting, second day is games and feasting, and the third is the grandest feast of them all,” reminded Uncle Abraham at breakfast – boiled rabbits. “I propose a game of bowls outside as soon as we are able.”
“I’ll take that game,” said Jack, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Julie was shaking her head violently.
‘Excellent,” said Uncle Abraham, with pronounced relish. He was bearded fiercely, the only one of them besides Grandfather not to go clean-shaven, and whereas that ancient had long ago aged to grey tangles, Abraham’s beard was black as coal and fiercely sharp, jutting out down over his chest like a thicket of briars. His moustache was serrated as only the most vicious of knives was. “I’ll fetch the balls.”
“Why the worry?” Jack asked Julie as they followed Uncle Abraham down the front hall. “I’m no stranger to gaming of any sort.”
“Ogre bowls is different,” Julie explained through daintily gritted teeth.
“How so?”
“You throw the balls at each other. You score points for what part you hit, and you get the most from knocking someone down. Or killing them.”
“Oh.”
The ogre’s lawn was half marsh, half desert, a mire of dirt and confusion and noise. Othello and the cousins were engaged in some sort of wrestling involving tree trunks, Father and Auntie Skadi were throwing axes at a target made from a live, still-thrashing bear tied to a boulder, and Grandfather was sleeping in a bog, head tipped back carefully and teeth removed so as to allow him appropriate space to snore in. Even Julie’s mare was out and about, pulling rabbits out of their burrows and eating them.
“Here you go,” said Uncle Abraham, handing Jack a rough-chiselled boulder that looked to have been chewed upon at one time. He hefted his own and spun it from finger to finger, making it dance. “We count off forty paces, turn, and toss. If you move your feet, you forfeit. If you die or are knocked senseless, you forfeit. Ten points a bruised flank, brisket, or ribs, twenty for a brain-panning or a broken leg, fifty for a knockdown. Play ‘till one hundred, deal?”
“Deal,” agreed Jack. He tossed his rock from one hand to another, thoughtfully. It probably weighed as much as he did, but he’d done worse.
“Right,” said Uncle Abraham. They turned and paced – his paces much longer than Jack’s – and spun and hurled. Jack ducked low and felt the missile breeze over the top of his head, ruffling the hair. His own strike smacked Abraham amidships, right in the gut. Winning seemed the thing to do here, but killing Julie’s relatives was probably not the best way to win their hearts.
“Hroff!” exclaimed the ogre. He peeled off his shirt, rewarding Jack with the unpleasant sight of his slug-pale belly; hairy, horny, and unblemished by a bruise. He winked unpleasantly at Jack. “Not so much as a mark. A poor throw for each of us. Now, let’s try again. Julie, mind fetching our balls?”
Julie did, hoisting them one in each hand without so much as a grunt or strain. She gave Jack an I-told-you-so look as she reloaded them, but he was too busy eyeing his next target to notice it. Fine, so that hadn’t worked. Maybe the head was his goal after all.
One, two, forty paces, turn, fire. This time Abraham’s boulder clipped his shoulder, spinning him all about until his teeth nearly shook out of his head. His own shot slammed the ogre dead in the centre of his skull, which it bounced from as though it were made of rubber. Abraham laughed and laughed.
“A good shot! Ten points for me, but nought for you, I’m afraid! Lass, our sporting equipment!”
Jack saw Julie’s lips move this time as she walked to him, and bent closer as she presented his ball.
“The chin,” she whispered. “Uncle Abraham hides his heart under his chin.”
Jack nodded, and re-examined that bristling beard-structure that adorned the spot in question. Its every hair looked harsher than an iron spear-tip.
“Abraham,” he called down the field. “I fear I have you at a disadvantage, Uncle!”
“And why is that?” roared back the ogre, infinitely amused, arm cocked to throw.
“Because there is a wasp in your beard.”
At this, Abraham cursed and swore, swatted and spun, rocked and bounced and slapped at his hair, cutting himself many times over on its hard bristles. He parted and re-parted it many times over, drawing the hair thin, and still he could not find the wasp.
“It’s gone,” called Jack.
Abraham cursed at him and threw the rock. Jack leaned to the side, felt it caress his coattails, and threw his boulder. It slipped nimbly through the combed and softened surface of Abraham’s beard and struck his chin dead centre, neatly folding him up in a heap.
“Forfeit,” said Jack pleasantly, and strolled off the field, trying not to feel the pain in his shoulder.
Dinner that night was quieter. The cousins were winded from the beating Othello had handed them on the wrestling field (doubtlessly unaided by their brawling the previous evening), and Abraham’s jaw was locked from the blow he’d taken. Jack enjoyed the silence a little, as well as the newfound willingness to chat that Father was showing to him. Perhaps he was less than utterly fond of his brother-in-law.
“You’re making sure she eats well, hrrm?” he asked, idly scooping up a big ladleful of bear pudding. “Needs good meat, strong flesh, harrumph.”
“I don’t eat meat, Father,” said Julie for the twentieth time that day, chewing on a veal cookie.
“Mmmmrrrmmmph,” commented Father idly, patting her back with a chuckle. She nearly choked. “That’s my girl, rruumm.”
Aunt Skadi beamed at them both. She too seemed less than troubled by her husband and children’s newfound mutedness.
“Tell me,” leaked a voice to Jack’s side, just past the cousins, “do you tell, stories?”
Grandfather had never spoken in Jack’s hearing before. He’d only just heard it, and already he was hoping he never would again. It sounded like gas escaping from the corpse of a little dead thing, hissing as it passed through the idly flicking wings of the flies.
“A little,” said Jack.
Grandfather blinked his solitary eye, slowly and ponderously. Everything he did was slow and ponderous; it had taken him all evening to rouse himself from his bog and drag his bulk to the table. He was more than twice the size of father, but coiled up, all loose flaps of mossy skin and exposed, dirt-scrubbed bone. His skin was the colour of spoiled cheese.
“I will, tell, a story,” he managed. “Come.” The old monster rose from the table, upending half of it, and lurched towards the dark stone staircase that led down to the cellars.
Jack shrugged, looked helplessly at Julie – she was biting her lip, he noticed – and followed, trying not to step in the ooze trail.
“This is, my home,” droned Grandfather, slipping into a wide worn hollow in the flagstones of the basement floor. “Like, it?”
Jack looked. He did not like it.
The mighty limestone slabs of the floor had been covered over and over long ago, layered with dirt and bone in alternating patterns, white shards and blackened decay.
That wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was the trophy shelf, a lopsided slab of basalt hammered crudely into the wall by monstrous force.
The figures that sat atop them were entire skeletons, held together with crude blackened wire and treacle-like hardened spittle. A knight on his horse, a hundred years old or more at the very least. A priest, complete with tattered ritual robes and chewed spectre, and his whole retinue, all sloppily piled up in a heap around him. A war-king of old with his broadsword, broken in half. Dozens more, all the old meals and old wars and old foes all deposited here in a mound of dust that could’ve swallowed a lake.
“Impressive,” said Jack. He meant it, to a point.
“Thank, you,” said Grandfather. “Now, listen.” He picked up the knight in one claw, bones rattling in time with arthritic strength.
“This man, was, the first,” began Grandfather, and Jack realized too late what was happening. He nodded his head and said “mmm” and “you don’t say?” and none of it made any difference. His brain hurt from the guttural humid vapidness of the mouldy air, and the nasal, breathy drone of Grandfather’s voice sounded inside his bones like a gale in a wind chime. Every bone of every skeleton required an explanation, with lengthy digressions and asides and that-reminds-mes, all in that endless, wobbling voice. His teeth felt like they were trying to crawl out of their sockets.
There was a pause, and Jack came out of his haze long enough to realize it was a snack. Julie stood at Grandfather’s side, passing out a glass of warm milk and some toast, which were indelicately dropped into that endless maw with the very tips of his talons.
Jack took his toast warily, and was surprised to find that it did not contain meat. It came with a honeycomb, filled with fresh, sweet honey, and it was the best thing he’d ever tasted because it took his mind out of Grandfather’s endless cobwebs of the throat.
Julie looked meaningfully at him as she left. His hand trembled with the good-bye wave, and he wondered how much more of this droning he could take.
Then he realized what Julie had just handed him, and felt very stupid.
“But that’s, just the, first one,” said Grandfather, and Jack felt the horror overtaking him again. He buttered and ate his toast with the speed of seven mortal men, pocketed the knife out of habit, drained the combs dry and balled them. The little wax pellets went in his ears in a fancy motion disguised as a stretch and a kick-back-your-heels, and his mind went beautifully, blissfully blank for the first time in over three hours. He nearly started crying in relief before he realized the odds were against him being able to pass it off as tears of joy.
From then on, time was on his side. All he had to do was nod and mutter every five minutes as he stared glassily ahead, and try to keep his gaze focused on Grandfather’s lips without actually examining them too closely. It was almost restful. It was very restful. And then it was so restful that he woke up the next morning as Julie shook him awake.
“It’s all rot, you know,” she told him, as they gazed across the basement at Grandfather’s snoring bulk. “He never killed any of those men. Well, not the way he said. He just talked to them until they died, then ate them. The poor old thing’s got very sensitive skin; a poke with a pin would make him bleed like a pig, let alone a sword slash. And he’s allergic to iron.”
“A shame,” Jack said. His neck was stiff, apparently he’d been sleeping on top of some unfortunate’s backbone, mangling his own slightly more than it was used to.
“Great Great-Grandmother got here last night. You’d better come up for breakfast. And whatever you do, don’t talk to her unless she talks to you first. Be careful, all right?”
Breakfast was less hushed than last night’s meal – ogres healed fast. Still, anything felt quiet after the ordeal of the evening. Surviving Grandfather’s little talk had earned Jack even more respect, it seemed – only Othello still gave Jack that ogrish glare over his food, which, however unsettling, was a vast improvement over the whole family. Jack wondered how on earth Clarence had ever managed to weather this mob to wed Julie in the first place.
It took him a while to notice Great Great-Grandmother, searching as idly as he was, sipping over-sugared, blood-thick tea and stealing sugar cubes the size of his fist for sheer novelty value. First he looked for size, and that turned up nothing – Father was still the largest upstairs, a half-foot above Uncle Abraham. Then he looked for a new face, and found none. Then he saw Auntie Skadi very carefully pass down a bowl of pig entrails to the head of the table, and he finally saw Great Great-Grandmother. Like himself and Julie, she could barely peek over the tabletop. She looked like nothing more than a normal, pleasant old lady – rather quiet, yes, but some were like that, rare as they were in Jack’s experience – until she opened her mouth, revealing teeth that were just a little too long and white to belong to any human, anywhere.
That, and her eyes twinkled at him. In three days of ogres, he hadn’t yet seen eyes like that.
The third day of the holidays, in Jack’s experience, was an open-air banquet, a meal interspersed by snacks that lasted all day long. The ogres simply tripled the length of all meals, with a five-minute grace period between breakfast and lunch. Jack spent most of it loosening his belt buckle, and most of lunch wishing he’d loosened it more. At last, stomach groaning, he lurched away from the table and begged a chance to relieve himself.
“Stump out back, hrrrmmrr,” grunted Father.
The stump in question was an old, long-dead hemlock that once probably could’ve held a house in its branches. Now it stood ten foot tall, half-hollowed, and filled with muck that you didn’t really want to look at. Jack spent ten minutes manoeuvring himself into a position where he didn’t have to, five finding a spot where he was positioned appropriately and wouldn’t fall in, and six more after he was through just relishing the silence.
There was the thud-smush-crash of ogre footsteps.
“Occupied,” said Jack, seconds before Othello’s fist closed around his ribcage and yanked him out of his perch.
“Leave her alone,” he hissed in Jack’s face, tottering in his one-handed balance on the stump’s rim, brandishing Jack above its fetid depths. “You’re bad for her!”
“Erk,” rebutted Jack.
“Say what?” said Othello, loosening his iron grip on Jack’s lungs for a moment.
“Surprise!” said Jack, and stabbed him between flesh and nail with last night’s pilfered silverware.
Othello clutched his hand and howled loudly, which was a bad move because it set him up for the next thing Jack did, which was to flip over his shoulder and kick him in the pants. He landed in the bottom of the stump with a squelch you could hear halfway round the countryside.
“Are we through?” asked Jack brightly, shimmying his way down the side of the stump to solid ground.
Othello made some bubbling noises at him; apparently even ogres weren’t impervious to their own stenches, not to that degree.
“Right, we’re through. Water under the bridge. I’d offer to help you up, but you know how it is.”
As Jack walked back inside, he took a very small and vindictive pleasure in knowing he’d used the last of the birch-bark wiping pads that hung on the limbs of the stump.
Othello came back to dinner late, after what looked to have been a bath in swamp water and a scrub with a brush made out of a fistful of cattails. His mother admonished him with a clout to the head, and for the first time that week, Jack sat at the big, rough-hewn table and not a single overlarge, overstuffed face was looking at him as though he were a particularly large and tricksome sort of cockroach. And a good night it was, not just because of that – it was the last night, the last time anyone might threaten to string him up by his kneecaps from the roof, the last eve spent sleeping on floors where the vermin had vermin, the last time he’d need to see an ogre’s face for hopefully many months. He couldn’t recall exactly why he’d done this, but it had probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Charity, maybe. That always seemed sunnier that it was.
Grandfather came lumbering up his stone stairwell late in the evening, towards the end of it all. “Ma, ma!” he rumbled, and slumped down to the end of the table, where Great Great-Grandmother hugged him and cradled that hideous, wrinkled old skull. He sat down in his seat looking happier than he had since Jack first met him.
It was a good meal. The meat even mostly contained bits Jack could recognize. The dessert of boiled frogspawn jelly, however, he discretely passed on.
And there, at the very end of the night, just before the big bronze clock that was wedged into the ceiling itself could begin to chime, Great Great-Grandmother stood up and cleared her throat and began to speak.
Jack knew many languages, and had forgotten even more. He didn’t know this one at all. It sounded like spider legs walking on sheets of frozen glass, and it gave him the shivers.
Mother stood up and walked to her side, where she whispered back and forth.
“Granny says thank you for the lovely meal,” she beamed, happiness floating up through the grim and out between her tusks like an errant cloud.
Hooting, hollering, and clapping echoed around the table.
“And,” Mother continued, waving for silence, “she says she thoroughly approves of this nice young man Julie’s brought. A proper fellow, she says – heroes and monsters make a nice match.”
More clapping, shouting, and at least one massive hand slapping Jack on the back hard enough that it sent him into a brief coughing fit.
“But furthermore,” continued Mother, cheer practically wafting from the air around her as thick as the stench from her putrid cooking rags, “since Granny says this young man isn’t her husband, it’s perfectly all right for us to eat him! So thank you very much Julie for the lovely present for your great-Gran!”
Massive cheering, standing ovation, enormous hands groping for Jack from all sides. Jack was slightly comforted to see that Julie looked as surprised as he did before he was hoisted aloft and passed down the table like a parcel, transferred from iron grip to iron grip before he could so much as begin to wriggle, and receiving a nasty sucker punch to the jaw at one point from someone who was probably Abraham or Othello. At last he was enclosed in the slimy grasp of Grandfather, who held him aloft before Great Great-Grandmother, legs dangling.
“Mama’s, hungry,” explained Grandfather carefully, pressing his great eyeball close to Jack’s face.
Jack felt his teeth gingerly with his tongue. One of them seemed loose, and he shoved it harder. “So I see,” he wheezed. “But why me?”
“Has to, be, young man,” said Grandfather. Behind Jack somewhere he heard Julie yelling at her parents, buried under a wave of shushing and murmurs from one corner and indistinct grunts from the other. “It’s Mama,” he said, as though that made everything make sense.
Great Great-Grandmother smiled at Jack, a friendly, genuinely warm grin that was easily the most frightening thing he’d seen here all holiday. Those long, long teeth were even longer than they should’ve been by now. How could they fit in her mouth?
Jack’s tooth popped out. Great Great-Grandmother reached up to him, stubby nails on thin, brittle wrists stretching out forever. And Jack spat his steel tooth into Grandfather’s one eye.
It wasn’t quite iron, but it did the trick.
Grandfather lurched backwards, screaming, spasming, flipping over the entire banquet table. Bowls of meat and frogspawn went flying to smash against walls and misshapen heads, splatter over bodies, cake limbs and bruise extremities. Jack flew from his shaken grasp, bounced off the floor, and sprang to his feet in a charge for the hall. Father stood in his way, warding back Julie with one hand, but it went hard for him. Fighting large people is much easier than most non-heroes think: your prime target lies right overhead.
Jack grabbed Julie’s hand as he dashed between Father’s toppling legs, dragging her along – no, wait, she was rather more dragging him along. Easy to forget that she was an ogre, wasn’t it?
They came to a skidding stop in the field. Footsteps pounded behind them in the hall, turning the whole mounded hall into a giant, angry drum. Shouts and roars and grunts.
Julie whistled, fingers between her teeth. Then again. Then again and again. “Come on you silly bitch!” she screamed at the trees.
Jack fought through the haze of confusion (Julie swearing? Most unthinkable) and plucked the item he sought from his inside jacket. “Sugar cube?” he asked.
The mare had her mouth in his palm before he quite knew she was there, almost taking his fingers off when he jumped.
Julie took the reins. Jack would’ve insisted on it anyways – it was her horse – but as it was he had no say in much, mostly because he was half-conscious, half-concussed, and approximately five-thirds overstuffed on bits of meat that perhaps had been just a little more spoilt than he recalled them being.
“Well,” she said, after the noise of the pursuit had died down behind them (thanks to a good hour or so of the mare’s tireless hoofbeats), “I suppose that’s that for family holidays.”
“Mmm,” agreed Jack. He was trying not to watch the road move beneath them.
“I feel so bloody stupid,” she complained. “Of course they wouldn’t have eaten Clarence. I know they frighten him and he’d never stop worrying, so I let him go along with this – I don’t want him to be unhappy, you know – but I should’ve guessed that you wouldn’t have been able to hide from Great Great-Grandmother. You just aren’t stout enough to be a match for him. And you’re a little shorter.”
“Mmmhhmm,” seconded Jack. He had the feeling that if he were more conscious, he’d be loudly objecting to something.
“They would’ve eaten you, yes, once they found out you’re not my husband, but never my husband. This whole thing wouldn’t have happened if he’d listened to me. And you wouldn’t have had to nearly blind poor Grandfather if they’d listened to me.” She drooped in the saddle slightly. “Nobody listens to me. They all talk about how much they love me, but they never listen to me.” She turned and smiled at him weakly. “Well, you do. You learned to do that fast enough once it was that or be beaned by Uncle Abraham.” Julie stifled a giggle. “Poor Uncle Abraham. He’s got his nose in a sling right now, I’m sure. You really did a number on all of them, by the end. Fooled the cousins into a fight, bonked Uncle Abraham right in the chin – with my help, of course – beat up Father and Grandfather and shoved poor little Othello into the outhouse. And all with my help.”
The forest was lightening around them, noticed Jack against the background noise. The High Road must be near again.
“It’s a relief, you know. I haven’t felt this good since I ran away from home the first time. Nothing but happy then, and then I met Clarence.” Julie sighed. “He was the first person I met who wasn’t an ogre, and he was so nice about it that I just about fell in love with him. Just about. I’m not sure I did anymore. He’s nice, but not much else. And he doesn’t listen to me.” She turned in the saddle to look at Jack again. “I should change that, don’t you think? All the love in the world isn’t any good if you can’t be treated like a person. Mother, Clarence, Father, all of them think I’m a little fragile doll. Well, maybe I can’t change Mother and Father’s minds on that. Maybe never. But I can change Clarence’s.”
“Mmmmhhm?” managed Jack. He really needed that other sugar cube or three he had in his jacket, if only he could reach them. Heroing takes a lot out of you. That, and all that food. He’d need to keep his belt loosened for a month.
“I can change Clarence’s mind,” clarified Julie sweetly, as they approached the glowing lights of the inn on the hill, “because I can hold him out the window by his ankles until he starts listening.”
“A Family Get-Together,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.