There weren’t any giants in the earth in those days. Too small, too low, too cramped, too narrow.
They’d moved into the sky instead. The ceiling was higher, the floor was airier, there were less bothersome little things underfoot.
But there was also less to eat, and what there was to eat was scarcer than would be appreciated, and the nutrition it supplied was smaller than convenient, and nothing could go to waste. And because of all of this and because giants have big appetites even for their size, certain professions were taken up.
Beantender Buckletin was a respected giant, and in a way that had nothing to do with his size (a moderate fifteen metres) or his wisdom (adequate to find his way out of an empty room within three tries) or his strength (he could hold a thunderhead overhead without his arms shaking for at least a few moments). No, it was the reason his mother had been a respected giant, and her father before her, and his father before him, and so on and on. They had been beantenders too and they had been revered for it as he was even now – a giant’s plate without a beanstalk of stratus upon it was empty and sad indeed, and a giant’s bowels would blame them for it most petulantly. All nodded to him when they met him, all knew his name, many thanked him when they parted.
But he bet they didn’t have to deal with things like this.
“Burrowed right up through the turf and stole a whole pod for itself, the little thief!” he complained to his wife, who was inspecting the hole in the cumulus with a critical eye guiding a steady hand holding a fog patch. “Where the little pest came from I don’t know, but we need to put a stop to it – are you sure that’ll hold?”
“For now,” she told him absently. Her name was Broomplate, and she was in work mode. No promises. “If there’s more they could dig in around the edges. Never seen this kind of damage before. Got any idea what it is?”
Buckletin held the cup-and-plate he’d captured the intruder in up to the light, fashioned of rainbow-hued glass burned in the kilns of the heavens. It bared its teeth and hooted at him.
“Not the faintest clue in the big broad blue and beyond,” he admitted. “Looks like a horrible tiny little giant if you ask me, but its belly is too small and its mouth is all narrow and puckered. Gross. Gross gross gross.” He shuddered. “Give me eelnadoes any day. At least those are big enough you can punch them.”
“Mmmm.” All attention on the hammer now, cold grey stone capped with ice, mountainous.
“I suppose I’ll fling it off the margins. Eugh, but what if it clings to the glass. It has thumbs, tiny little thumbs – augh, what a beast!”
WUMP, tons and tons of force slapped into fog slapped over puffy white cloud, ice particles and mist everywhere. Broomplate blew away the residue and freed up her attention span for a second, and with that second she said thusly the words of doom:
“Take it to the bakery.”
“Pardon?”
“It stole calories and vitamins. Let it become calories and vitamins. Nothing must go to waste.” She lined up the hammer again.
“Oh. Oh! Yes, how convenient. How poetic. I love you, you know. And your poetry.”
“Mmmmmmm.”
He scrutinized the offending creature with a newfound (wary) enthusiasm. “Mushy, but with a crunchy core… yes, that could do. That could do! The cup will be back before the evening is out!”
“Mm-hm.”
“Farewell!”
WUMP
So Beantender Buckletin took his cup and plate down to the bakery and left them there, and the first he heard of the rest of the day’s events was the screaming and crackling flames.
***
“I’m telling you, I’ve been off my feet since before the day started! Why, first that starwhaler comes in a week late with no notice before midnight, then as I’m trying to get that under control then grey-upon-his-skull Kettlemuck comes rushing down my door with a racket about how this sackful of barometernacles are perfectly fresh but need grinding down NOW before they spoil, and by the time I’ve made halfway progress on THAT everyone else has dropped off their own materials and I’m behind again, just like I was last week when we had all that overflow from the eelnadoes and I’d shut down early since the starwhaler wasn’t back yet.” Grinder Spoonfrond stopped for breath, then recalled his manners. “You DO remember that, right? I’m not boring you?”
“Guh,” said his audience, a perfectly innocent giant of advanced age and respectable clothing who arrived at precisely six o’clock in the morning every other weekday and whose name Spoonfrond would definitely get around to learning someday. Twenty minutes ago the golden doorchime at the bakery’s entrance had rung proud; twenty minutes in which the last twenty years of another’s life had been funneled into her skull via her ears. She was beginning to hyperventilate.
“Anyways, your loaf,” Spoonfrond said, and from the great burning oven he plucked bare-handed a brick of meteor-heated snow-iced ground cloudbone bread. “Was in a cirric dogfish this time yesterday, now it’s on your plate. Come again!”
“Bwuh.”
“Yes, I said come again – the gold-upon-the-door chimed, then chimed again – “WHAT NOW oh sorry beantender didn’t see you there, was talking about something else to someone else. Anyway! What have you got there?”
Buckletin held up a cup and a plate and a creature and a blissfully unaware smile. “Garden pest!” he said proudly. “It stole a bean, let it fulfill a bean’s function! Can’t let something go to waste.”
Spoonfrond inspected his prospective ingredient closely. He flicked the cup, watched its flesh ripple and its body cringe from the shockwaves.
“Well, there’re bones in there,” he said dubiously. “And I suppose they’ll do even if the flesh is no good. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can fit it in.”
“Tomorrow?” said Buckletin with the genuine alarm of the blissful encountering a fact. “Oh no no, are you sure you can’t just take it now? I promised my wife the cup would be back this very evening! Please, my friend, my good grinder, can’t you just squeeze it in? Last thing before your meal, quick as a blink – see how small it is? It won’t take more than two twists of your pestle!”
In the face of such marshalled, earnest inconsiderateness from a publicly revered person Spoonfrond caved, but had the self-respect to do so gracelessly. “Okay fine, sure, I guess, well, maybe this one time, it’ll be tough, I’ll fit it in somehow,” he said in one long beleaguered sigh.
“Thank you!” said Buckletin, filled with cheer and an utter absence of awareness, and he departed in good spirits, leaving all of his troubles in his wake to fume and spill over the great granite slab of the grinder’s counter of the bakery.
Spoonfrond glared in distaste at the little trapped beast. It was, he realized with a pinch of amusement and a pound of revulsion, mirroring his expression in a most uncanny way.
“Vile beast,” he muttered, and put it to the back of the queue and out of his mind.
He took up the great pestle, hewn from a sapling that had held up a rainbow’s end. He took up the broad mortar, hollowed from a skywhale’s brain-pan.
There was grinding to do.
So grinder Spoonfrond ground.
He ground the fat-defleshed bones of the skywhale that had come in last night, thicker than his forelimbs and fighting the pestle every turn of the way, sparking with lightning that seared the scant hair of his forearms, and he put them into broad cakes that stank most heavenly with ozone, each a feast for a family with leftovers.
He ground the last bones of the day’s catch of cirric dogfish – lean and crumbly when dried, elastic and springy fresh, barely bones at all if you asked him, but oh what a fine toothsome loaf they made.
He ground the musty attic-smelling still-dripping bones of a nimbostratic gulper, and he shaped them into dumplings to be boiled in rainbroth at home until they were no longer bitter and would instead of spittle drip with toothsome, oilsome, delightsome grease.
He ground the many and thin and MANY bones of a sunfish that had swum too close to the sky, and he patted the charred lean loves that emerged fondly – they always baked so evenly.
He ground a little too vigorously, and cursed as he knocked over the scale and had to retrieve it from the floor. Clatter clatter clunk clang smash clang clunk.
He ground the fine-toothed bones of the lean skylurks that whispered unwholesome things under the gables of the giants’ homes and crept into their shoes at night to nest, and put them into simple muffins for midday snacks.
He ground a long, long, long sheaf of dried auroarfish borealis vertebrae, pale and perfect in the night, and from them made an anniversary cake of eighty beautiful interlocking donuts like chain-links, that could wrap around the happy couple twice over with room to spare, seasoning each in a different colour.
He ground until he was light in the head and then realized he was suffering from smoke inhalation, and that the air was hazy, and that it wasn’t coming from the oven, and that his door was open a crack and he hadn’t heard it happen because his golden doorchime was missing.
Then he fell over.
Spoonfrond’s last blurry thought before he passed out was that his head hurt from more than the impact. Someone had left broken glass all over his floor, and the cupboard he kept the matches in – dried pine saplings dipped in their own tar – was swinging wide open.
When he woke up again it was all over and it was too late to do anything but complain about it. Which he did, to every being in the hospital.
***
Kettlemuck was picking his teeth with a knife down at the wharf – as sky-fishers did, or so he’d assumed they did when he was a child, which had been whole YEARS ago by now – when he smelled the smoke. That got his attention. Then he saw the running fire brigade with their emergency glacier-buckets, which raised his eyebrows.
Then he heard a doorchime. That just confused him until he saw it scuttling along the ground at ankle-height, clutched in the grips of what smelled like a very tiny and very dirty giant.
“Ho!” he called. “Halt!”
The thing didn’t halt, which meant it was probably alright by the code of the sky-fishers to do what Kettlemuck did next and fling his knife at it. A meter-long blade of good wholesome sunset steel spun happily through the last of the day’s blue and embedded itself precisely in front of the scuttling vermin, which ducked and wove and hurried its way under the lofty cloud-pillared wall of the nearest garden.
Kettlemuck looked down the street. The bakery was aflame. The doorchime looked familiar. And if the bakery was aflame…
“Little shit! My order wasn’t ready yet!” he shouted at the unthinking vermin and the world in general, and took the wall at a leap, harpoon unsheathed and at the ready, bad-weather kilt of haze and smog swirling about his legs, teeth gritted until thunder cracked, every inch the portrait of the sky-fisher at the ready, defending kin and feeding kith with every expedition into the trackless reaches between the big broad blue and the black beyond.
He landed on the far side up to his ass in beans, tripped over a stalk, and almost landed on top of the escaping vermin, which shrieked in a barely-audible voice whose pitch cleaned his ears like a finger round a cup’s rim. Kettlemuck’s mind recoiled, Kettlemuck’s body lunged, and Kettlemuck’s harpoon split the difference and plunged a jagged furrow through the clouds below, dropping him down to his armpit – and then, abruptly, dizzingly, up to his armpit. He dangled below the garden, tangled in bean roots, gripping to the edge of the world by one finger.
Something touched the one finger.
Kettlemack looked up and saw a good meter-long blade of wholesome sunset steel and a little vermin clutching a golden doorchime in its free hand.
“Cursed be ye and yours from all that lies above,” he said. But he was a little surprised still and the knife was very sharp, so instead what came out was more like this.
“Ah! Uhh-nuh! ACK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH”
and so on.
***
Jack cut down the wispy cloud of a beanstalk afterwards to be safe against pursuit, then moved on out – to a bigger city, a bigger place where you could sell a magical golden thing that made music on its own.
But slow month by slow year, eventually, gradually, a second beanstalk sprouted from the crater where Kettlemuck had landed. A scrap he’d kept in his belt for emergencies, for an empty plate in times of need, fueled by his good strong bones and learning, root by root, stalk by stem, of all that lay around it.
And oh, and oh, what lay around it was such excess, such luxury, such shallow-rooted fleetingness! It knew how to compete with that. A thing that lives in the sky knows that nothing must go to waste.
It grew long meters while remaining a humble surfacebound sprout, wispy and ethereal. Downwards. Outwards. Reaching, gnawing at the deep earth’s feed of minerals and organic detritus, drinking down its cold hidden waters steeped straight from the bedrock. Storing its treasures in roots and tubers and nodules. Bracing its feet before stretching its arms.
There were no giants in the earth in those days.
But that left room for just one.