The Giant, O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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‘What age?’
‘Three.’ Her hair was as fine as feathers, and the colour of ash. ‘And as for three years I have never eaten my fill, neither has he.’ Blue veins, thin as a pen’s tracing, rippled across her eyelids and marbled her inner arm.
These, the Giant said to himself, are the sons and daughters of gods and kings. They are the inheritors of the silver tree amongst whose branches rest all the melodies of the world. And now without a pot to piss in.
Her hand reached up for his arm. She drew him down the street. ‘This is my cabin.’
Beside it, Connor’s was a palace. The roof was in holes and mucky water ran freely through it. The child was in the least wet part, wrapped in a tatter or two. In his fever, he kept tearing the rags from him; with practised fingers, his mother wrapped them back. His forehead bulged, over sunken, fluttering eyelids. ‘He is dreaming,’ the Giant said.
Squatting on her haunches, she gazed into his face. ‘What is he dreaming?’
‘He is dreaming the dreams that are fit for a youth who will become a hero. Others babies dream of milk; his dreams are of fire. He is dreaming of a castle wall and an armoured host of men, himself at the age of eight as strong as any man grown, a gem set on his brow, and a sword of justice in his hand.’
She dropped her head, smiling. The corners of her mouth were cracked and bleeding, and her gums were white. ‘You are an old-fashioned sort, are you not? An antique man. If there were a gem on his brow I would have sold it. If there were a sword of justice, I would have sold that too. What hope for the future, you’ll say, if the sword of justice itself is sold? But it is well known, almost a proverb, that a hungry woman will exchange justice for an ounce of bread. You see, we have no heroes in this town, not any more. No heroes and no virtues.’
‘Come away with us,’ he said. ‘We are going to England. I am going to the great city of London—it seems that there a man can show himself for being tall, and they’ll pay him money.’
‘Come away?’ she repeated. ‘But you go tomorrow, do you not? Shall I leave my son unburied? I know he will die tonight.’
‘You have no husband?’
‘Gone away.’
‘No mother or father?’
‘Dead.’
‘No brother or sister?’
‘Not one alive.’
‘Must you measure the ground where they dropped? Will you pace it every day?’ He indicated the child. ‘Will you scour these rags to swaddle the child you are carrying? Come away, lady. There’s nothing left for you here. And we need a woman of Ireland, to sit beside me on my throne.’
‘Who’s getting you a throne?’
‘Joe Vance. He’s shown giants before. He’s got experience in it.’
‘Ah, you poor man,’ she said. She closed her eyes. ‘I never thought I should say that, to a giant.’
‘Don’t fear. There is a sea voyage, but Vance has made the passage before.’
The child’s head jerked, once; his eyes flashed open. He reared up his skull. A thin green liquid ran from the side of his mouth. His mother put her hand under his head, raising it. He coughed feebly, snorted as he swallowed the vomit, then began to expel the green in little spurts like a kitten’s sneeze.
‘What did he eat?’ O’Brien asked.
‘God alone knows. Here we live on green plants, just as in my grandfather’s rime men ate grass and dock. The children have found something that poisons them, and it is always the ones who are too young to explain it—you could ask them to lead you to where they have plucked it, but by the time you know they are poisoned they are too weak to lead you anywhere. Or maybe—I have thought—it’s something we give them—some innocent herb—that we can eat, but which murders them.’
‘That’s a hard thought.’
‘It is very hard,’ she said.
The Giant and his train enjoyed nettle soup, and before the craving became acute Vance appeared with his flasks of the good stuff. Squatting in the cabin of the woman, the Giant told these stories: the Earl of Desmond’s wedding night, and how St Declan swallowed a pirate. All the town had come in, some bringing a light and others a turf for the fire, listening to the tales and praying in between them. When the death agony arrived, O’Brien took the child on to his knee, so that the rattle in his throat was interlaced and sometimes overlaid by his light, mellifluous tones, that tenor which surprised the hearers, coming as it did from a man so grossly huge. He tried to fit the cadence of his tale to the child’s suffering, but because he was a fallible person there were moments when it was necessary for him to pause for thought; at these times, the mud walls enclosed the horror of labouring silence, the scraping suspension of breath before the rasping cry which brought the babby back to life for another minute, and another. His body sleek with hair, his bones thick as wire, he looked like a mouse under O’Brien’s hand.
When the crux came, he cried out once, with that distant, stifled cry that hero babies make when they are still in their mothers’ wombs. It was cry of vision and longing, of the future seen plain. When O’Brien heard it he scooped the little body in one hand and placed it in his mother’s lap, where within a second the child became a corpse. Within another second a green sludge dripped from the nostrils, leaked out between the thighs, dripped like the sea’s leavings even from the cock curled like a shell in its rippling beach of skin.
At once, Pybus began to sing, his high-strung boy’s voice rising to the sky. The clouds had no call for it; they sent his song back, stifled, to die between the wasted shoulders and the mud walls. ‘At least you’re not short of water,’ Claffey said, raising his eyes to tomorrow’s certainty of rain.
At dawn, the youths met them and escorted them to the end of the town. ‘Can’t you voyage with us?’ the Giant asked. ‘You’re brave boys, and there’s nothing here for you.’
Joe Vance looked daggers.
‘Thank you, sir,’ the foremost youth said. ‘We are decided to remain here. A better age may come. Are you a poet, by the way?’
‘In a poor sort,’ the Giant said. ‘I can make a song. But who can’t? As for the old systems, the strict rules, I never learned them, and if I’m honest with you it’s a matter of training rather than aptitude. I believe there is no one of my generation who is confident in them. That was the use of Mulroney’s, you see, we met the old men there, and we would learn a little.’
‘Let’s get on the way,’ Joe Vance said. He shifted his feet.
‘There was a time when friars walked the roads, disguised as rough working men: friars from Salamanca, from Rome, from Louvain. They have left me with the rudiments of their various tongues, besides a sturdy and serviceable Latin, and a knowledge of the Scriptures in Greek. Travelling gentlemen, all: never more than a night or two under the one roof, but always with time to spare for the education of a giant boy.’
Joe Vance reached up, and tugged at his clothing.
‘A fly besets me,’ the Giant said. He pretended to look about. ‘Or some hornet?’
Joe removed his hand, before he could be swatted. ‘A honey bee,’ he said.
That night in his sleep, the Giant sat among the dead, and heard the voices of the old men at Mulroney’s: dry whispers, like autumn leaves rubbed in a bag.
Scotland, day: the child is alone in the field, the black ruts rising around him: flat on his belly on the damp