The Giant, O’Brien
Hilary Mantel

For Lesley Glaister

…But then

All crib from skulls and bones who push the pen. Readers crave bodies. We’re the resurrection men.

George MacBeth, The Cleaver Garden’

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Note

About the Author

Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

‘Bring in the cows now. Time to shut up for the night.’

There came three cows, breathing in the near-dark: swishing with the tips of their tails, their bones showing through hide. They set down their hoofs among the men, jostling. Flames from the fire danced in their eyes. Through the open door, the moon sailed against the mountain.

‘Or O’Shea will have them away over the hill,’ Connor said. Connor was their host. ‘Three cows my grandfather had of his grandfather. Never a night goes by that he doesn’t look to get the debt paid.’

‘An old quarrel,’ Claffey said. They’re the best.’

Pybus spat. ‘O’Shea, he’d grudge you the earache. If you’d a boil he’d grudge it you. His soul is as narrow as a needle.’

‘Look now, Connor,’ the Giant said. His tone was interested. ‘What’d you do if you had four cows?’

‘I can only dream of it,’ Connor said.

‘But for house-room?’

Connor shrugged. ‘They’d have to come in just the same.’

‘What if you’d six cows?’

The men would be further off the fire,’ Claffey said.

‘What if you’d ten cows?’

The cows would come in and the men would squat outside,’ said Pybus.

Connor nodded. ‘That’s true.’

The Giant laughed. ‘A fine host you are. The men would squat outside!’

‘We’d be safe enough out there,’ Claffey said. ‘O’Shea may want interest on the debt, but he’d never steal away a tribe of men.’

‘Such men as we,’ said Pybus.

Said Jankin, ‘What’s interest?’

‘I could never get ten cows,’ Connor said. ‘You are right, Charles O’Brien. The walls would not hold them.’

Well, you see,’ the Giant said. There’s the limit to your ambition. And all because of some maul-and-bawl in your grandfather’s time.’

The door closed, there was only the rush light; the light out, there was only the dying fire, and the wet breathing of the beasts, and the mad glow of the red head of Pybus.

‘Draw near the embers,’ the Giant said. In the smoky half-light, his voice was a blur, like a moth’s wing. They moved forward on their stools, and Pybus, who was a boy, shifted his buttocks on the floor of bare rock. ‘What story will it be?’

‘You decide, Mester,’ Jankin said. ‘We can’t choose a tale.’

Claffey looked sideways at him, when he called the Giant ‘Mester’. The Giant noted the look. Claffey had his bad parts: but men are not quite like potatoes, where the rot spreads straight through, and when Claffey turned back to him his face was transparent, eager for the tale he wished he could disdain.

The Giant hesitated, looked deep into the smoke of the fire. Outside, mist gathered on the mountain. Shapes formed, in the corner of the room, that were not the shapes of cattle, and were unseen by Connor, Jankin and Claffey; only Pybus, who because of his youth had fewer skins, shifted his feet like a restless horse, and lifted his nose at the whiff of an alien smell. ‘What’s there?’ he said. But it was nothing, nothing: only a shunt of Claffey’s elbow as he jostled for space, only Connor breathing, only the mild champing of the white cow’s jaw.

The Giant waited until the frown melted from the face of Pybus, till he crossed his arms easily upon his knees and pillowed his head upon them. Then he allowed his voice free play. It was light, resonant, not without the accent of education; he spoke to this effect.

‘Has it ever been your misfortune to be travelling alone, in one of the great forests of this world; to find yourself, as night comes down, many hours’ journey from a Christian hearth? Have you found yourself, as the wind begins to rise, with no man or beast for company but your weary pack-animal, and no comfort in this mortal world but the crucifix beneath your shirt?’

‘Which is it?’ Jankin’s voice shook.

‘’Tis the Wild Hunt,’ Connor said. ‘He meets the dead on their nightly walk, led by a ghostly king on a ghostly horse.’

‘I will be feart,’ Jankin said.

‘No doubt,’ said Claffey.

‘I have heard it,’ Connor said. ‘But at that, it’s one of his best.’

They finished debating the tale, and then the Giant resumed, bringing them presently through the deep, rustling, lion-haunted forest to where they had not expected to be: to the Edible House. From his audience there was a sigh of bliss. They knew edible; they knew house. It had seldom been their fortune to meet the two together.

He mixed his tales like this: bliss and blood. The roof of gingerbread, then the slinking arrival of a wolf with a sweet tooth. The white-skinned, well-fleshed woman who turns to bone beneath a man’s caress; the lake where gold pieces bob, that drowns all who fish for them. Merit gains no reward, or duty done; the lucky prosper, and any of us could be that. Jesu, he thought. There were days, now, when he felt weakness run like water through legs that were as high as another man’s body. Sometimes his wrists trembled at the weight of his own hands. A man could be at the end of his invention. He could be told out; and those who have not eaten that day have sharp tempers and form a testy audience. Only last week he had asked, ‘Did you ever hear the story of St Kevin and O’Toole’s goose?’ and a dozen voices had shouted, ‘OH, NOT AGAIN!’

A cow, intent on the fire, had almost stepped on his foot. To teach it a lesson, he stepped on its own. ‘Mind my beast!’ Connor cried. The Giant glanced to heaven, but his view was blocked by the roof. Forty years ago Connor’s grandad had thatched it, and now it was pickled and black from the fire; when it rained, and the rain ran through it, it trickled a dilute sooty brown on the men’s heads. Connor had no wife, nor was likely to get one. Nor Pybus, nor Claffey; Jankin, he slightly hoped, would be unable to breed.

Changes were coming; he could see them in the fire and feel them in the whistling draught from every wall. His appetite was great, as befitted him; he could eat a granary, he could drink a barrel. But now that all Ireland is coming down to ruin together, how will giants thrive? He had made a living by going about and being a pleasant visitor, who fetched not just the gift of his giant presence but also stories and songs. He had lived by obliging a farmer who wished a rooted tree lurched up, or a town man who wanted his house pushed down so he could build a better. Strength had been a little of it, height had been more, and many hearths had welcomed him as a prodigy, a conversationalist, an illustration from nature’s book. Nature’s book is little read now, and he thought this: I had better make a living in the obvious way. I will make a living from being tall.

He turned to Claffey, who alone of them had a bit of sense. He said, ‘My mind’s made up. It’ll have to be Joe Vance.’

A day or two after, Joe Vance came up the mountain. He had a greasy hat to his head, and a flask of strong liquor bobbing at his thigh on a cord. He was a smart man, convenient and full of quips; he had been agent and impresario to a number of those who had left the district over the last ten years. He knew the art of arranging sea voyages, and had sometimes been on voyages himself. He had been in gaol, but had got out of it. He had married many wives, and some of them were dead; died of this or that, as women do. He had black whiskers, broad shoulders that showed the bones plainly, a bluff, reasonable, manly aspect, and honest blue eyes.

Connor’s cabin came into view. It had not the refinement of a chimney—since six months there was not a chimney in miles—but there was a hole made in it; indifferently, the smoke eased itself through both the hole and the thatch, so it appeared the whole house was steaming gently into the rain and mist of the morning.

Joe Vance found the cabin full of smoke, and all of them huddled around a miserable fire. His honest eyes swept over their circumstances. The Giant looked up. He was ridiculous on his stool, his knees coming up to meet his ears. ‘You should have a throne,’ Vance said abruptly.

‘Of that he is in no doubt,’ Claffey said.

‘Will you be coming on the venture?’ Vance asked him.

‘He must,’ Pybus said. ‘He speaks their lingo. Jabbers in it, anyway. We have heard him.’

‘Do you not speak English, O’Brien? I thought you were an educated giant.’

‘I have learned it and forgotten it,’ the Giant said. ‘I have sealed it up in a lead box, and I have sunk it in the depth of the sea.’

‘Fish it out, there’s a good lad,’ Vance said. ‘If any see it, grapple it to shore. You must understand, I’m not aiming to present you as a savage. Nothing at all of that kind of show.’

‘Are we going as far as Derry?’ Jankin asked. ‘I’ve heard of it, y’know.’

‘Ah, Jankin, my good simple soul,’ said the Giant. ‘Vance here, he knows how things are to be done.’

‘You are aware,’ Vance said, ‘that I was agent to the brothers Knife, very prodigious giants who you will remember well.’

‘I remember them as rather low and paltry,’ O’Brien said. The larger of the Knives would scarcely come to my shoulder. As for his little brother—Pocket, I used to call him—when I went to the tavern at ten years of age, I was accustomed to clutch my pot in my fist and ease my elbow by resting it on his pate.’

‘The Knives were nothing,’ Jankin said. ‘Dwarves, they were, practically.’

Joe Vance moved his honest eyes sideways. He recalled the Knives—especially Pocket—as boys who could knock down a wall just by looking at it. Pocket was, too, uncommonly keen on his percentages, and once, when he thought he was short-changed, he had lifted his own proper person high in the air and hung him by his belt on a hook where a side of pig was stuck just yesterday. It was with one hand he hoisted him, and that his left; Vance wouldn’t easily forget it. Glancing up, he appraised O’Brien, assessing his potential for violent excess. Where he could get away with it, he was this sort of agent; he took twenty shillings in the guinea.

‘Now, as to my terms,’ the Giant said. ‘Myself and my followers—that’s these here about—we must have all comfort and commodity on the journey.’

‘I am accustomed to booking passage,’ Joe Vance said, bowing.

‘It must be a vessel to surprise the Britons. A golden prow and sails of silk.’

‘You yourself shall be the surprise,’ Vance cooed.

‘I must have six singing women to go before me.’

Vance lost control; it didn’t take much. That’s all shite! You, Charlie O’Brien, you haven’t tasted meat since last Easter. You live on your hands and knees!’

‘True,’ said the Giant, glancing at the roof. ‘All six must be queens,’ he said, smiling; he thought Vance’s manners mild enough, and what’s to be lost by upping your demands?

‘Where would I get six queens?’ Vance bellowed.

That’s your problem,’ the Giant said urbanely. He stretched his legs. The brush of his big toe nearly pitched Jankin into the flame, but Jankin blew on his burnt palms, and licked them, and apologised.

Claffey raised his head. He engaged Vance’s eye. He nodded towards O’Brien, and said, ‘He’s dangerous, in a room.’ He left it at that. On the whole, Claffey did know where to leave things.

The Giant said, ‘Vance, shall I have coin in my pocket? Shall I have gold in my store?’

Vance held out his hands, palms up. ‘What Joe Vance can lawfully obtain, you shall share in. The English public, of my certain knowledge, is starved of the sight of a giant. It’s a kind of charity, now I think of it, to take a giant over to them.’

He looked Jankin in the face. ‘Englishmen are a type of ape,’ he explained.

He was smiling with half his face. The Giant saw this.

‘Not so,’ he said. ‘Low in stature, barbarous in manner, incomprehensible in speech: unlettered, incontinent and a joke when they have drink taken: but not hairy. At least, not all over.’

‘I have never seen an ape,’ Jankin said. ‘Nor dreamed of one. Have I seen an Englishman?’

They are the ones that ride horses,’ Claffey said.

‘So,’ Jankin said. ‘I have seen them.’

‘What about Connor?’ Vance asked. ‘Are you coming yourself?’

‘Connor is a man of wealth and substance,’ Claffey said. ‘He has his cows to guard.’

Connor’s brow creased. He ran his hands back through his hair. ‘Once, O’Shea came over, sneaking in the night with a basin, and bled my cows to make his Sunday broth. As if he were a Kerryman.’

‘Yes,’ the Giant said. ‘A Kerry cow knows when it’s Saturday night.’ He lifted his head. Well, this hearth has been our anchor. But now we must be under sail.’

When they came down the mountain, their feet sunk in the mud and squally rain blew into their faces. It was the time of year when rats stay in their holes, dogs in their kennels and lords in their feather beds. Civilly, the Giant carried all their packs, leaving them with their hands free to help them balance if they skidded. A league or so on they came to a settlement, or what had been so recently; what was now some tumbled stone walls, the battered masonry raw, unclothed by creeping green. A few months after the clearance, the cabin walls were already disintegrating into the mud around; their roofs had been fired, and they were open to the sky.

Something small, dog-height, loped away at their approach: hands swinging, back bent.

‘A hound or a babby?’ Pybus asked, surprised.

The Giant wiped the streaming rain from his face. His quicker eyes discerned the creature as not of this world. It was one of those hybrids that are sometimes seen to scuttle, keen and scrape in ruins and on battlefields: their human part weeping, their animal nature truffling for dead flesh.

‘I’d thought we could take shelter,’ Claffey said. His fur hat lay on his head like a dead badger, and his best coat had its braid ruined. ‘Not a roof left in the place.’

‘I told you not to wear your finery,’ the Giant said.

‘A plague on the whole class of agents,’ Claffey said. ‘On agents, bailiffs and squireens.’

‘You shouldn’t say a plague,’ the Giant said. ‘You should say what plague. Say, May their tongues blister, and the eyes in their head spin in orbits of pus.’

‘You’re pernickety in cursing,’ Claffey said. ‘I’d curse ’em with a cudgel and split their skulls.’

‘So would I,’ said Pybus.

‘Cursing,’ the Giant said, ‘is an ancient and respectable art. An apt curse is worth a regiment of cudgels.’ He eased the packs on his shoulders. ‘Ah well, let’s step out for the town.’

“The town!’ Jankin said. He tried to skip.

When they came to the town, only a youth or two walked out to greet them; there was no clamour of children come to see the Sight. They spotted the youths from a great way off; the road was bare and smooth as a queen’s thigh. The Giant gave a great hulloo, greeting them from afar; it whooped over the treeless domain, looping the boys like a rope with a noose.

The Giant slowed, accommodating his stride, as he had to remember to do. The youths met them in a wilderness of splintered wood, the raw wet innards of tree stumps offered up to a blowing, twilit sky.

A whole forest chopped down for profit, and houseless birds shrieking at day’s end.

‘We have only been walking one day,’ Pybus said, ‘and we have come to this.’

The Giant looked at him sideways. Already, the journey was bringing out finer feelings in Pybus, which he had not suspected him to possess.

The youths bowed when they drew up to them. ‘Welcome, Mesters. These days, even the beggars give us the go-by.’

‘Do the blind men visit you?’ the Giant asked.

‘Yes, they have the kindness. They don’t turn back, though they say they can smell disaster. Yet if they have a fiddle, we have no strength to dance.’

The youths brought them on to the town. They are cutting, as you see,’ one said. The stench of the wood’s fresh blood lay on the damp air, floating about the Giant at chest height.

Jankin gaped. ‘Where will they go, those persons who live in the woods?’

Hastily, he corrected himself: ‘Those gentlepersons, I ought to say.’

‘We can’t care,’ one of the youths said harshly. ‘We have lived beside them and even put out milk for them in better times, but we have no milk now and only ourselves to help us. I’ve heard they’d bring grain and a piece of bacon or a fowl to those they favour, but that’s not our experience. They must shift for themselves, as we must.’

‘It’s stories,’ Claffey said. ‘Gentlefolk in the woods, green gentlemen and small—it’s only stories anyway.’

They looked up at the hillside. It was a face with a smashed mouth, with stumps of teeth. There were no shadows and no shifting lights. It was just what it was, and no more: a devastation. The Giant said, to soften the facts for Jankin, ‘There are still some forests in Ireland. And to travel doesn’t irk the gentry, as it irks us. They are as swift as thought.’ Then he bit his lip, and grinned, thinking that in Jankin’s case that was not very swift at all.

The town was silent, and to the Giant this silence was familiar. It was the hush of famine, the calm that comes when bad temper is spent, the gnawing pain has ebbed and there is nothing ahead but weakness, swelling, low fever and the strange growth of hair. Only Jankin sang out: ‘We are coming to the town, the town.’

‘Kill that noise,’ Claffey said. They looked about them. Like a puppy, Jankin crept closer to the Giant’s side.

They have broken you, I see,’ the Giant said to the youths.

The town was nothing now; two streets of huts, dung heaps steaming outside their doors, their walls cracked and subsiding, their roofs sagging. It was a town with no pride left, no muscular strength to mend matters, no spark in the heart to make you want to mend. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were parting. The rutted road held standing pools, a white hazy sun glowing in their depths. The children stared as they passed, scratching the bursting pods of their bellies. They gaped at the Giant, but they did not shout. They were weary of wonders. The wonder of a dish of potatoes and buttermilk, that would have made them shout; but for potatoes, it was too early in the year. If O’Brien had been the devil come to fetch them, they would have followed him, bug-eyed, hoping they might dine in hell.

‘Where’s Mulroney’s?’ Claffey said. Where’s Mulroney’s tavern?’

‘Where’s anything?’ one of the youths said. ‘Mulroney died while you were away up the mountain. He took a fever. His house fell down.’ He waved an arm. ‘There it is.’

What – that? That ruin slid into a ditch? Mulroney’s, where they used to hold the Court of Poetry, after the big house was destroyed? Mulroney’s, where there was no fiddling or singing or vulgar harping, but a correct recitation of the old stories in the old metres? It was a Court of crumbling men, their faces cobwebbed, their eyes milky, their hands trembling as they gripped their cups. Bad winters killed them one by one, fluid filling the lungs that had breathed the deeds of kings.

‘But that can’t be Mulroney’s!’ Pybus burst out. ‘What will we do? The Giant must have strong drink! It’s a need in him.’

‘It’s sauce to a good story,’ Jankin said, having often heard this expression.

‘Joe Vance will be here presently,’ the Giant said. ‘We’ll do, till then.’

A woman appeared at the door of one of the cabins. She began to step towards them, skirting the puddles, though her legs and feet were bare and muddy already. She approached. The Giant saw her large grey eyes, mild and calm as a lake in August: the fine carving of her lips, the arch of her instep, the freedom of her bones at the joint. Her arms were white peeled twigs, their strong muscles wasted; a young child showed, riding high inside her belly like a bunched fist.

‘Good day, my queen.’

She didn’t greet him. ‘Can you heal? I have heard of giants that can heal.’

‘Who wants it?’

‘My son.’

‘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.

2

Scotland, day: the child is alone in the field, the black ruts rising around him: flat on his belly on the damp ground, a vast sky swirling. His chin is on the earth, his body is blue in bits, where he has got his clothes wrong. It is his own task to dress himself, cover himself decently, and if he’s cold that’s his fault. He has been sent out to scare crows. In other places they have a doll to do it, made of sticks and old clothes. He has heard of it: English luxury. Here old clothes are not wasted.

To scare a crow, jump up, wave arms. Bugger it. Bugger it off.

Up a blade of grass a crawler goes. Little black feet on a sweet, edible stalk. He watches, his brow furrowing; it’s apt to cross your eyes. He puts out his finger. The crawler goes on to it, though it doesn’t make a feeling; it is too light, or his finger is too cold? His finger tastes of salt, earth and shit.

He closes his palm. Then opens it, and teasing with his finger takes off one of the crawler’s legs. A time ago, when he first did this, he felt a hot wetness deep inside himself, as if water had begun to run there, above his belly button; but now when he does it he feels nothing at all. He pinches off leg two. He can count; they say he can’t, but he can. One leg, two leg, three leg, four. Count, yes; and read, by and by. The crawler goes round and round on his palm. Why didn’t it fly away? It had the chance. One leg off, it could have flown. It’s kicking now, with what’s left. It must have stayed because it liked him, because it was his friend, even despite what he’d done. He didn’t mean malice; he only wanted to see what would happen. He would like to give it back one leg, two legs, three. He would like to know, now, if it’s alive or dead. He breathes, John Hunter, and the words come out on his breath: ‘It was a trial. It was nothing cruel.’

Crows above. Foreign black hands stretching across the sky. He brushes the crawler away. He stands up. The wind’s tooth strikes at him, gnaws and gnaws. He flails his arms. John Hunter, he yells, John Hunter. Bugger off all crows. Over and over he shouts: John Hunter, bugger off crows.

3

My brothers are James, lately dead; John, dead. Andrew, dead. William is living but gone away. My sisters are Elizabeth, dead. Agnes, dead. Isabella, dead. Janet, dead.

I have also one sister living yet. Her name is Dorothea. We call her Dolly, when we are in a lighter mood.

Our family suffers from rotten lungs and rotten bones.

The John who is dead is not to be confused with me, the younger John. I say this because though in most cases the dead and the living are quite unalike, there are special circumstances when it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. There are many accounts, some from antiquity, of unfortunate people buried alive. Such burials may be the origin of quaint stories, stories of vampyres and ghouls and hauntings; of voices from underground, and the earth welling with fresh blood. But I have been in a small room with many a dead man and woman. I have slept under a dissecting bench in brother Wullie’s workroom, and I have hauled many a corpse to its final resting place on Wullie’s narrow bench. I can tell you that there are no ghosts. If there were, they’d haunt Wullie, would they not?

And haunt me. But don’t think it. It’s a slab of butcher’s meat you have to haul, head waddling and hands flapping; the rigor’s passed by the time their keepers knock at the door, and they’ve once again a semblance of flexible life, yet they’re heavy, they don’t help you, you have to drag them, and their faces are fallen in, their noses are rims, sharp edges of falling flesh, and their lips are invisible already, shrunk back against the gum.

So why are the living sometimes confused with the dead? Often the physician or surgeon is to blame, for his lack of care. But there are other occasions when even the keenest will not detect a pulse, yet the pulse exists. There are times when the breath does not lift the ribs, nor mist a mirror, nor stir a feather, but the corpse is breathing still. I have heard that sometimes when people fall into deep water, deep water that is very cold, they may remain chill and extinguished for an hour or more, and yet the spark of life is flickering within them; when warmth returns to their organs, when it spreads to their limbs and their heart and their muscles gather strength—why, then they may sit up, and speak, to the horror and astonishment of the mourners.

This is what I have heard: although, unfortunately, I have had no opportunity of making actual experiments upon drowned persons.

The house is built of stone, a farmhouse, built on ground that is thin and poor. In his family, he is the tenth child, and the last. When there is no room at the fire, he is kicked out into the yard.

Gradually, as he sees his siblings carried to the churchyard, room is made, but by then he is not accustomed to hearthside comforts, and the company of those who remain makes him uneasy.

At six years old he is sent out into the fields to pick stones, and also to scare crows. The crows watch him for any advantage. They circle in the air, talking about him in their intelligent voices. Sometimes he thinks they are plotting to take out his eyes.

Once your eyes are out you can’t get a second pair. He pictures himself flipping on his back like a landed fish, his spine flexing and arcing, beating the ungiving ground with the flat of his palms. The first scream is practising to come out of his mouth and the first stream of vomit. The crows have got his eyes in their beaks and are toddling over the ruts in the direction of East Kilbride.

There never was a man that wanted to be a great man ever was a great man. My present state of life I neither thought of nor could imagine. I am not a rich man, in fact I am poor, yet not poor in esteem; I say without boasting – pride not being in my nature—that the finest medical scholars of Europe have written me testimonials, and the most eminent surgeons in these islands and beyond crave for their sons a place at my table. And how, as the unmannerly Scots lad I am, could I have predicted this eminence?

While my brothers prospered at the academy, my school was the moor, hedge and field. I asked questions to which few knew the answer and none cared to give it. Why do the leaves fall? Why do the birds sing? They would hit me across the ear and shove me out into the stark, away from the smell of humanity. In the end I preferred it so, I liked the keen wind against the smoky fug, my silent company against their chattering. My outdoor life, the labour to which I was born, hardened my hands and my spirit. I was thought of small account, and believed I was. My eyes followed the turning leaf, the bird in flight, the moon’s phases.

His father, fifty when he was born and suffering with the gravel, frequently hit him across the ear. Mostly; whenever he saw him. This went on until he was thirteen, when his father died. By then he had acquired a high-shouldered look, and a habit of trying to see behind him.

4

London is like the sea and the gallows. It refuses none.

Sometimes on the journey, trapped in the ship’s stink and heave, they had talked about the premises they would have at journey’s end. They should be commodious, Vance said, and in a fashionable neighbourhood, central and well-lit, on a broad thoroughfare where the carriages of the gentry can turn without difficulty.

‘My brother has a lodging in St Clement’s Lane,’ Claffey said. ‘I don’t know if it’s commodious.’

Vance blew out through his lips. ‘Nest of beggars,’ he said. ‘As to your perquisites and your embellishments, Charlie, they say a pagoda is the last word in fashion.’

‘A pagoda?’ The Giant frowned. ‘I’d sooner a triumphal arch.’

‘Let’s see when we get there,’ Vance said. ‘I think we’ll call you Byrne, Charles Byrne. It’s more select.’

A lurch of the timbers, a fresh outswell of mould and fust; Jankin was sick—he had the knack and habit—on Claffey’s feet. Claffey kicked out. Hot words flew in the stinking space.

‘Will you have a story?’ the Giant soothed them. For the time must be passed, must be passed.

‘Go on,’ Vance said.

The Giant did not stop to ask what kind of story they would like, for they were contentious, like fretful children, and were in no position to know what was good for them. ‘One day,’ he began, ‘the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride.’

‘Where East?’ Vance asked. ‘East London?’

‘Albania,’ the Giant said. ‘Or far Cathay.’

‘The Land of Nod,’ said Claffey, sneering. ‘The Kingdom of Cockaigne.’

‘Wipe yourself, stench-foot,’ O’Brien said, ‘then pin back your ears. Do you think I tell tales for the good of my soul?’

‘Sorry,’ Claffey said.

‘One day the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride, and he hadn’t gone far on his road when he met a short green man. The strange gentleman hailed him, saying—’

‘I don’t like a tale with a short green man in it,’ Jankin said.

The Giant turned to him, patient. ‘If you will wait a bit, Jankin, the short green man will grow as big as the side of a hill.’

‘Oh,’ Jankin said.

The wind moaned, the boards creaked and shifted beneath them. From the deck the world appeared no longer solid but a concatenated jumble of grey dots, sometimes defined and sometimes fusing at the margins, the waves white and rearing, the clouds blackening en masse, the horizon crowded with their blocky forms and their outlines unnatural, like the sides of unimaginable buildings, set storey on storey like the tower of Babel. Conversing with the sailors—who cowered away from his bulk—the Giant found he had regained his command of the English language. One day, he thought, we will be making tales out of this. Our odyssey to the pith of London’s heart, to undying fame and a heavy purse. Rancour will be forgotten, and the reek of our fear in this ship’s dark hole. In those days Jankin will say, Do you remember, Claffey, when I was sick on your feet? And Claffey will clap him on the back, and say, O I do indeed.

And so at that time, after his father’s death and he being fourteen, fifteen years of age, John Hunter was still in the fields largely, the business of sending him to school having met with scant success. Having come home from the field to drink a bowl of broth, he heard one day a beating at the door, the main door of the house at Long Calderwood, and himself going to open it and propping out the door frame, short for his age but sturdy, his sleeves rolled and his red hands hanging, and there’s the carrier with some distressed bundle wrapped in a blanket. It’s human.

His first thought was that the man had been asked to transport some sick pauper, who being now about to take his leave of this mortal world was not required, I’ll thank you very much, to piss and shit his last in the cart, and so the fastidious tradesman was attempting to pass on his responsibilities and let some unsuspecting farmer’s floor be soiled. ‘Get off with you, and go to the devil!’ he’d cried, his temper even then being very hot if he thought anyone had made a scheme to take advantage of him.

But then from within the bundle came a long, strangulated coughing, and after that the words, ‘John, is that you, my brother John?’

His brow furrowing, John approached the cart, and pulled back the blanket where it obscured the man’s face. And who should it be, but his own dear brother James? James, who had taken a degree in theology? James, that was a gentleman? James, that had gone to London to join brother Wullie, and become a medical man, and a man of means? See how far education gets you.

‘Y’d best come in. Can ye step down?’

‘I’ll have your arm,’ James quavered. ‘Dear brother John.’

Stout brother John. He half-lifted his relative from the cart. ‘Is there a good fire?’ James begged to know. Through the cloth of his coat John felt the quake of his body, his jumping pulses. There was a nasty smell on his breath: rot.

Dumped on a three-legged stool, James seemed hardly able to support himself upright. ‘What means this?’ John enquired. ‘What brings you home in this condition, mon?’

‘I am done for,’ James said. ‘I am worn out from the dissection room, the noxious emanations from the corpses, their poisoned fluids and exhalations, and the long hours your brother Wullie keeps. So jealous is he of his subjects, that he bade me sleep at night under the post-mortem table, lest one of his rivals should crack in at the windows and carry off the corpse.’

‘I see. So theft of corpses is an ever-present worry, is it?’ John asked. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at his shivering brother. Well he remembered the day James left for London, sovereigns in his purse, felicitations ringing in his ears, and a new hat in a leather box completing his general air as a man of present prosperity and greater ambition. And now—the ribs were stoved in, the stomach collapsed. There were two red blotches on his cheeks—a sick parade of well-being. ‘It seems to me you have come back to die,’ he said. ‘All our family have a charnel disposition. Have you heard of a great man, called Sir William Harvey? He dissected his own relatives.’

James raised his head. Hope shone in his face. ‘Have you formed an interest, brother John, in matters anatomical?’

‘But only after they were dead.’ He turned aside, calling out to his sister Dorothea to come and view James. ‘You need not fear me,’ he said, under his breath.

Dorothea came, and made a great fuss and to-do, and boiled something nourishing for the invalid. Dolly never criticised or carped, and when he became a great man himself he would have her for his housekeeper, since all his other sisters were now residing in the churchyard under sod.

When they docked, and stood on dry land, Pybus fell about, and affected to be unable to walk except in the manner of a sailor, rolling and slowly riding upon the element he has made his own. Claffey grew impatient with the joke, and kicked him, saying, That’ll give you something to straggle for.’

The Giant looked up, scanned the English sky. A few scudding clouds, the promise of sun breaking through. ‘God’s same sky over us all,’ he said. But the voices were foreign, the shoving, shouting men, the tangles of rope and rigging, the salt and fish odours, and the buildings piled on buildings, one house atop another: they had boarded after dark, so now Pybus gaped, and pointed. ‘How do they—’

They fly,’ Vance said shortly.

‘Jesus,’ said Pybus. ‘Englishmen can fly? And the women also?’

‘No,’ Vance said. The women cannot fly. They remain on what is called the lower storey, or ground floor, where the men are able to join them as they please, or, when they sicken of their nagging chatter and wish to smoke a pipe of tobacco, they unfold the wings they keep under their greatcoats, and flutter up to what are called the upper storeys.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Claffey said. ‘They must have a ladder.’

The Giant gave Claffey a glance that expressed pleasure at his ingenuity. He was familiar himself with the principle of staircases, but in the lifetime of these young fellows there had been no great house within a day’s march, where they might see the principle applied.

‘Oh yes,’ Vance said, sarcastically. ‘Surely, they have a ladder. Take a look, Claffey—don’t you see them swarming over the surface of the buildings?’

They looked, and did not. Glass windows caught the light, but the Giant’s followers saw glinting, empty air, air a fist could pass through, that flesh could pass through and not be cut.

On the quayside, Jankin leapt in the air, pointing. He was swelling with excitement, bubbling at the mouth. The black man he had seen strolled calmly towards them. He wore a good broadcloth coat and a clean cravat, being, as he was, employed at the docks as a respectable and senior kind of clerk. He was young, his plum-bloom cheeks faintly scarred, his eyes mild.

Jankin danced in front of him. He gave a shriek, like one of the parakeets the Giant had heard of. His grubby hand shot up, massaging the man’s face, rubbing in a circle to see would the colour come off. Jankin stared at his grey-white, seamed palm, and clawed out his fingers, then rubbed and rubbed again at the fleshy, flattened nose.

‘Get down, dog,’ Joe Vance said. ‘The gentleman is as respectable as yourself.’

The black man reached out, and took Jankin’s forearm in his hand. Gently he removed it from himself, pressing it inexorably into Jankin’s chest, as if he would fuse it with the ribs. His mild eyes were quite dead. His mouth twitched, but it did not speak. He passed on, his tread firm, over the cobbles and towards the city he now called home.

The Giant said, ‘People are staring at me.’

Vance said, ‘Yes, they would. I should hope so. That is the general idea.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Sooner we get you indoors and housed, the better for us all. We don’t want them gaping for free.’

The Giant saw the parakeets, green and gold, flit and swoop in a hot tangle of deeper green, and heard the alarm shrieks from their beating throats, and felt rope cut into skin and smelt the sweet, burnt, branded flesh.

He called out after the black man, ‘Poor soul, you have a brand on your body.’

The man called back, ‘Shog off, freak.’

The first night of their walk to London, they begged lodgings in a barn. Joe Vance parlayed with the farmer, and purchased from him some milk, some beer and some nasty dried-up bread with green mould on it. Claffey became militant, and raised a doubt about Joe Vance’s abilities. The Giant was forced to detain their attention with a long tale. He settled them among the straw, and turned his cheek to the alien breeze. They had come so far in thin rain, their heads down, purposefully observing as little as they could. London would be all wonder, Vance said. They were disposed to believe it, and not notice anything immediate: just walk. They had expected lush valleys, mounts snow-topped, fountains, a crystal house or mansion at each turn in the road: but no, it was tramp, tramp, just tramp. ‘Look now,’ the Giant said. ‘Shouldn’t we have a conveyance, Vance? I’d have thought a coach would have been sent for me, or some sort of elegant chariot?’

Hm. Or possibly not. Vance seemed likely to break out into a rage, which he did too readily when things went wrong. ‘What kind of a coach?’ he yelled. ‘One with the roof cut off? Who’s going to wreck a perfectly good coach for the one-time transport of a giant? It isn’t as if England is teeming with giants, it isn’t as if having made a ruin of a perfectly sound vehicle they can hire it out again on a weekly basis, is it? No Englishman does business that way!’

‘What about a chariot?’ the Giant asked mildly. The same objection cannot be raised to a chariot.’

‘Oh yes, a chariot, but then it would have to be reinforced! You couldn’t have your customer stepping in and putting his giant foot through it, so it would have to be strengthened—which costs money—and then drawn by heavy horses.’

‘Did you not think of this before?’ Pybus asked. (And Pybus was only a boy.)

‘Just what are you insinuating?’ Joe Vance bellowed. ‘Are you insinuating that I have in some way exaggerated my experience as a giant’s agent? Because if you are, Pybus, I’ll slit your nostrils and pull your brains out through the opening, and then I’ll pound them to a paste and put them down for rat poison.’

The Giant asked, ‘Do you know the tale of the man that was drunk in the company of the priest, and the priest changed him to a mouse, and he got eat by his own cat?’

‘No,’ Jankin said. ‘By God, let’s have that tale!’

…As for what we can say of Buchanan—whoopsy-go Buchanan! Why John am I glad tae see ye—hup, whop, ye’ll take a drop, take another, take a flask, woeful tangle wi’ ma feet, here’s a go, here’s to you, here’s to lads, hup! Hic! Take a sip! Never mind, sit ye down, mind the chair, chink the cup, Saturday night, wife’s a-bed, Hic! Whop! Saints Alive!

Slithery-go, ho, hey! Wallopy-hic, clattery-hey—phlat, hold yer cup out, no harm done—what a daft bloody place to put a staircase!

Well, Buchanan was an episode, nothing more. The man was not untalented as a cabinet-maker, but he could not keep his books straight, nor would a coin lodge in his pocket for more than an hour before it would be clamouring to be out and into the pocket of some purveyor of wine and spirits. In those first days in Glasgow, in the house of the said Buchanan, he would grieve—on windy days, the notion of fields would possess him, the sigh of the plane under his hand would turn to the breeze’s sough, and he would long to lie full-length upon the earth, listening to the rocks making and arranging themselves, and deep in the soil the eternal machinations of the worms. But he said to himself, conquer this weak fancy, John Hunter, because fortunes are made in cities, and you must make yours. At night he opened the shutter, letting in the cold, watching the moon over the ridge tiles, and the stars through smoke.

Buchanan was a hopeless case. His slide to bankruptcy could not be checked. He had taught a skill, at least; now he, John Hunter, could say, ‘I am a man who can earn a living with my hands.’ But he was glad when he was able to pack his bundle and foot it back to Long Calderwood.

Buchanan died. Brother James died.

One day a letter came. ‘Wullie’s sent for me,’ he said to Dorothea. ‘I’ve to go south. He’s wanting a strong youth.’

Then I suppose you’ll do,’ his sister said.

Seventeen forty-eight saw John Hunter, a set-jawed red-head astride a sway-backed plodder, heading south towards the stench of tanneries and soap-boilers. He came to London across Finchley Common, with the gibbeted corpses of villains groaning into the wind. A hard road and a stony one, with constant vigilance needed against the purse-takers, but he was counselled against the sea-voyage by brother Wullie, who had once been in a storm so horrible that the ship’s masts were almost smashed down, seasoned sailors turned white from terror, and a woman passenger lost her reason, and has not recovered it till this day.

At the top of Highgate Hill he came to the Gatehouse Tavern, and observed London laid out below him. The evening was fine and the air mild.

It was an undrained marsh, the air above it a soup of gloom. The clouds hung low, a strange white light behind them. The Giant and his companions picked their way among the stinking culverts, and hairless pigs, foraging, looked up to glare at them, a metropolitan ill-will shining red and plain in their tiny eyes. As they tramped, their feet sank in mud and shite, and the sky seemed to lower itself on to their shoulders. As night fell, they saw the dull glow of fire. Men and women, ragged and cold as hermits, huddled round the brick kilns, cooking their scraps of food. They squatted on their haunches, looking up bemused as O’Brien passed them. Their eyes were animal eyes, glinting. He thought they were measuring the meat on his bones. For the first time in his life he felt fear: not the holy fear a mystery brings, but a simple contraction in his gut. All of them—even Vance, even Claffey—stepped closer to his side. ‘Keep walking,’ he said. ‘An hour or two. Then lavish baths await us, and the attentions of houris and nymphs.’

‘And feather beds,’ said Jankin, ‘with quilts of swans-down. And silk cushions with tassels on.’

London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitch-soaked ropes in the streets, and branched globes of light sprout from the houses. Pybus thinks they have come to a country where they do not have a moon, but Vance is sure they will see it presently, and so they do, drowned in a muddy puddle in Chandos Street.

John’s arrival was well-timed, for it was two weeks before the opening of brother Wullie’s winter lecture programme. ‘I hear you’re good with your hands,’ Wullie said.

He grunted: ‘Who says so?’

‘Sister Dorothea.’

Wullie put his own hands together. He had narrow white gentleman’s hands. You would never know, to look at them, where they ventured: the hot velvet passages of London ladies who are enceinte, and the rigid bowels of dishonourable corpses.

Wullie had also a narrow white gentleman’s face, chronically disappointed. It was some four years since his fiancée Martha died, and he had not found either inclination or opportunity to court any other woman; pale-eyed chastity had him in her grasp, and he thought only of sacrifice, late hours, chill stone rooms that keep the bodies fresh. The rooms of his mind were cold like this, and it was difficult to imagine him sighing and groaning all night on a feather mattress beside the living Martha with her juices and her pulses, her dimples and her sighs, and her Yes Wullie, yes Wullie, oh yes just there Wullie, oh my little sweetheart can you do it over again? Easier to imagine him a-bed with the dead woman, four years buried and dried to bone.

Easy to see, Wullie creeping up from the foot of the bed, his tongue out, daintily raising the rotted shroud: fingering her phalanges with a murmur of appreciation, creeping each pointed finger over the metatarsals and tarsals while his nightshirt, white as corpses, rolls up about his ribs. It’s with a gourmet’s desire he sighs; then tibia and fibula, patella, and—ah, how he smacks his dainty lips, as he glides up the smooth femur, towards his goal! He pants a little, crouching over her, scarred Scottish knees splayed—and now he probes, with expert digit, the frigid cavity of her pelvis.

‘Are you quite well, brother John?’ Wullie asked.

‘Aye. Oh, aye.’

‘You are not fevered?’

‘Only deep in thought.’

Then fall to work on these arms. I am told you are observant and deft. Let us try your vaunted capacities.’

The arms came wrapped in cloths, bloodless like wax arms, but they were not wax. Severed at the shoulder; and his job to dissect, to make preparations, to serve the students with a feast for their eyes. His voice quivered. Whose are they?’

‘Whose?’ The little query dripped with ice.

Two arms—I mean, a right and a left—are they from the same man? I mean, is he dead, or was he in an accident?’

He was a raw boy, after all. He’d done little but stone the crows, follow the plough. Glasgow had been an intermission, and had not taught him about men with no arms.

Wullie said, ‘When I was a student in France, there was none of this nonsense of forty men crowding round the dissecting table, craning their necks and babbling. To each Frenchman, there was one corpse, and in the dissecting chamber there was an aura of studious calm. The French are a frivolous nation, and deeply mistaken in many of their inclinations, but in this vital matter they have the right of it.’

John got to work dissecting the arms. Later, he castigated himself for a jimmy idiot—bursting out like that in front of Wullie, as if it should matter where limbs came from. Still, he couldn’t help wondering, speculating in his mind: making up a life to fit the possessor of the fibrous, drained muscle. It was matter, no impulse to drive it; only half its nature was on display, structure but not function, and he knew this was less than half the truth, for how can you understand a man if you don’t see him in action? He couldn’t help thinking of Martha, when he himself lay down at night: he saw her narrow and flat and yellow-white against the bed linen, and Wullie puffing above her, his shirt scooped up, and he heard the little chattering cries of pleasure escaping her non-existent lips.

‘Slig!’ said Joe Vance. ‘Hearty Slig!’

They were standing in some alley. Vance clapped the man on his shoulder. His head indicated a low door, half-open, from which the man had just emerged: behind him, steps running down into the earth. ‘Can you lodge us?’ Joe asked. ‘One night only. Tomorrow we move on to greater things.’

Slig gnawed his lip. Two pennies each,’ he said.

‘Slig! And yourself an old friend of mine!’

‘Be reasonable. I have to cover the cost of the straw. And fourpence for the big fella. I shall have to turn two away if I’m to let him in.’

‘But it’s a privilege to have him under your roof! Besides being huge, he can tell tales and make prophecies.’

‘Fourpence,’ Slig said. ‘Liquor’s extra.’

Sighing, Vance disbursed the coins. Pybus and Claffey were heroes about the steps, striding down into the cellar as if they had been doing steps all their lives—though there was a moment of nervous hesitation from Claffey at the top of the flight, and the manner in which his frown changed to a cocky grin showed that he had harboured some anxiety. Jankin could not be persuaded to put his first foot forward, even though Pybus ran up and then down again to show how easy it was: eventually, the Giant had to carry him.

The room was low and filled with smoke. There was straw underfoot, and men and women sitting, convivial, their pots in their hands, and nobody drunk yet; rush light on exiles’ faces, the sound of a familiar tongue. And a grubbing sound from the shadows, a snorting.

‘Jesus,’ Jankin said. ‘We have touched down among the rich. These fellows have got a pig.’

There was a moment’s silence, while the people considered the Giant; an intake of breath, and then applause rang to the roof. Men and women stood up and cheered him. ‘One boy of ours,’ a woman said. ‘The true type.’ She stretched up, and kissed his hip. ‘Giants are extinct here for hundreds of years.’

‘And why is this?’ the Giant asked—for the woman, who was not young, had a look of some intelligence, and the matter puzzled him.

She shrugged, and with a gesture of her small fingers pulled her kerchief down, modest, hiding her rust-red curls. ‘It may be that they were shut up and starved, or hunted with large dogs. The Englishman craves novelty, as long as it will pack and decamp by the end of the week. He does not like his peace disturbed—it is the English peace, and he thinks it is sacred. He magnifies his own qualities, and does not like anyone to be bigger than himself.’

‘This bodes ill for my projected fame and fortune,’ the Giant said.

‘Oh, no! Your keeper was right enough to bring you. You will be the sensation of a season.’

‘At the end of which, I shall still be tall.’

‘But I expect you can tell stories? Giants usually can. Even the English like stories—well, some stories anyway. The ones where they win.’

‘This is not what we were promised,’ Claffey said. He looked around. ‘Here, Joe Vance! This is not what we were promised! But for the breath of the mountain air, we might be back at Connor’s.’

‘No, Vance,’ the Giant said. ‘It’s not what I’d call commodious.’

‘Contain yourself in patience,’ Vance said. ‘Give me the chance, will you, of a day to prospect for some premises for us.’

‘I’d have thought you’d got it already fixed,’ Claffey said. ‘That’s what it means, being an agent, doesn’t it?’

‘Being an agent is an art you will never acquire, Bog-Head.’

‘Now, Vance,’ said the Giant. ‘Temperate yourself.’

‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do,’ Vance said.

‘Claffey, have patience,’ Pybus said. ‘Joe will get us a place tomorrow. One with a pagoda.’

‘Did we agree on a pagoda?’ the Giant said. ‘I still favour a triumphal arch.’

‘A triumphal arch is timeless good taste,’ said a man squatting at their feet. ‘Whereas a pagoda, it’s a frivolity worn out within the week.’

‘It’s right,’ said the red-headed woman. There’s a whiff of the vulgar about a pagoda.’

Vance spread out his hands, smiling now. ‘Good people! He’s a giant! I’m a showman! Don’t say vulgar! Say topical! Say it’s all the buzz!’

‘Tell that giant to sit down,’ said an old man, who was leaning against the wall. ‘He is disturbing the air.’

‘He is blind,’ said the squatting man, nodding towards the speaker. ‘Strange vibrations bother him.’

The Giant folded himself stiffly, and sat down in the straw. Pybus bounced down beside him. Jankin was admiring the pig. Joe Vance looked easy. Claffey looked peevish.

‘We saw pigs on our way,’ Jankin said. ‘Skinny brutes. Not a one that could hold a candle to this. Why, at home, he’d be the admiration of a parish.’

‘All of us own this pig,’ the blind man said. ‘He is our great hope.’

A young girl with an open face, slightly freckled across the nose, reached up and plucked at the Giant’s sleeve. ‘Would you oblige, and cheer us now with an anecdote? We are, all of us, far from home.’

‘Very well,’ said the Giant. He looked at Claffey, at Pybus, at Joe Vance. He stretched out his legs in front of him; then, seeing he was taking too much floor space, drew them up again. ‘Here’s one you’ll know or not, and you may make your comments as if we were at home and gathered at Connor’s.’

He thought, there’s only this earth, after all. The ground beneath us and God’s sky above, and we will get used to this, because people can get used to anything, and giants can too.

The young girl looked down, smiling in pleasure. She had long fair hair, almost white even in the cellar fug: like a light under ground, O’Brien thought, Persephone’s torch made from a living head. The girl’s cheeks were pink and full; she had eaten only yesterday. She settled her hair about her, combing it with her fingers, arranging it about her shoulders, drawing it across her face like a curtain. And now the outline of bowed shoulders, of sharp faces, must be blurred for her, and the facts of life softened: like a slaughter seen through gossamer, or a throat cut behind a fan of silk.

‘A year or two ago,’ said the Giant, ‘there was a young woman, pretty and light of foot, walking the road alone at night, coming to her cousin in Galway, with her babby of scarce six months laid to her breast. She had been walking for many a mile, walking through a dense wood, when—’

‘A demon comes up and eats her,’ said Pybus, with confidence.

‘—she emerged at a crossroad,’ the Giant continued, ‘just as the moon rose above the bleak and lonely hills. She stood there bedazzled, in the moonlight, wondering, which way shall I go? She looked down, into the face of her babby, but snug in his sling he was asleep and dreaming, dreaming of better times, and she could get no direction there. Shall I, she thought, linger here till morning, making my bed in the mossy ditch, as I have done many times before? It may be that in the morning some knowledgeable traveller will come along, and direct my way, or perhaps even in my dream I will receive some indication of the shortest route to my cousin’s house. I need hardly add, that her hair was long and curling and pale, her form erect, her body low and small but seemly, so that if the most vicious and ungodly man had chanced to glimpse her he would have thought her one of the gentry, and would have crossed himself and left her unmolested. Now this was her protection, as she walked the road, and she knew it; what man would touch a fairy, with a fairy babby bound in a cloth? And yet she was a mortal woman, with all her perplexities sitting heavy on her shoulders, and her worries making the weight of the babby increase with every mile she trod.’

A man said, from the shadows, ‘I’ve heard of a type of fairy where they carry their babbies on their backs, and the nursing mothers have tits so long and supple that they can fling one over their shoulder so the babby can suck on it, which is a great convenience to them when they’re labouring in the fields.’

‘Yes, well, some people will believe anything,’ the Giant said.

‘Must be foreign,’ said a woman. ‘A foreign type. I’ve never heard it. Still and all, it would leave your hands free.’

A man said, ‘Whoever heard of gentlefolk that labour in the fields?’

‘Will you be quiet, down at the back?’ Vance asked testily. ‘I’ve brought you over a master storyteller of unrivalled stature, and you’re just about going the right way to irritate him, and then you’ll be sorry, because he’ll stamp on your heads and burst your bloody skulls.’

‘It’s not worrying me, Joe,’ the Giant said. ‘Calm yourself and sit down, why don’t you? Shall I go on?’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘So: just then, as she was casting around, she heard a noise, and it was not the sound of a horse, and it was not very distant, and she discerned it was the slap of shoe-leather, and she thought, here is a man on the road who is either rich or holy, either merchant or priest, and I will beg either a blessing or a penny—who knows which will do me more good, in the long run?

‘Then out of the shadows stepped a little man, with a red woollen cap upon his head, and carrying a leather bag. So he greeted her, and Step along with me, he says, and I’ll fetch you to a place you can sleep the night. Now she looked at him with some dismay, for he was neither merchant or priest, and she did not know what he was, or what he had in his leather bag. She said, The wind is fresh and the moon is high, and I think I’ll step out, because my relatives are gathered about their hearth in the town of Galway, and they are waiting for me.

‘And he says to her, very low and respectful, Mistress, will you walk with me for all that? I will bring you to a hall where a little baby is crying with hunger, with no one to feed him, because his mother is dead and we have no wet nurse among us. Do me this favour, he says, as I observe your own child is plump and rosy, and he will not miss the milk, but without it our babby will die. And if you will do me this favour, I will give you a gold piece from my leather bag.

‘And then he gave the bag a good shake, and she could hear the chink of gold pieces from within.’

‘She ought not go, for all that,’ the red-haired woman observed. ‘It will end badly.’

‘And aren’t you the shrivelled old bitch!’ Pybus said. ‘Not go, and have the babby starve?’

‘I’m telling you,’ the woman said. ‘Just wait, you’ll see.’

‘Do you know this story, then?’ Pybus asked her.

‘No, but I know that type of man that wears a red woollen cap.’

‘Well now,’ the Giant said, ‘let the true facts of what occurred put an end to your debate. For she was an amiable, good-hearted young woman, and she says to him, For such a pitiful tale as you have told me I’ll come to the babby, and ask you no money, for you are an old man, and you may need your cash yourself, by and by.’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Joe Vance said. ‘If that were my wife, I’d beat her into better sense.’

‘So off they step together, many a mile, turning her out of her true path, and still her babby sleeps, until she grows footsore and says to the old man, I fear we will not be there by morning.

‘We shall come to the place before dawn, I promise you, says the old man. This is a king’s son I am taking you to nurse, and it is not likely I should find him lying under the next hedge.’

‘A pox on kings,’ said the blind man. ‘What do kings avail? Better he dies.’

‘You speak out of your bitterness and affliction,’ the Giant said. ‘Not all kings are bad.’

‘Yes,’ said the blind man. They are bad inherently. It is not a question of their personal character. Kingship is an institution merely silly in itself, and pernicious as well.’

‘Less politics,’ the fair young woman said. ‘I want to hear of the girl, she is feeling she can’t go a step more, so what is the old man going to do to coax her, as she doesn’t seem to want his money?’

‘Put his hand up her skirts and wiggle his finger?’ Vance asked. ‘That’s often known to invigorate a female.’

The red-head yawned. ‘Little man, you might wave your cock to the five points,’ she said. ‘Not a woman in Ireland but would be laughing.’

‘Go on,’ Pybus said, impatient. ‘Go on with the tale, Charlie.’

The Giant began again, taking up the young woman’s voice. ‘Good sir, I did not know it was a king’s son you were bringing me to. So off they step, across field and stream, for what seems another hour, and another, and another, and dawn does not break, nor does the sky lighten one crack, and on and on they go, into the dark. And again she is weary, the babby grown a leaden weight, her feet cold and sore, her breath coming short and painful and every limb crying out for rest and warmth, her belly rumbling too. She says, King’s son or no, I can walk no more. Then the old man takes from under his coat a silver flask, and hands it to her—and she marvels at its workmanship, for it was finer than any she had ever seen or dreamed of. Take a draught! says he, and she takes a draught, and it is like nothing she has ever tasted in her mortal life. It is like honey but sweeter, it is like new milk but milder, it is like wine but it is stronger than any wine that was ever poured into a chalice. And as soon as she drinks it down, she feels all weariness drop away from her, and all torment of mind, and the babby is as light as air, and her feet feel as if she’s on her way to a dance, twitching at the first strain of the fiddle and ready to jig through the night. So she says to the old man, With a draught like that I could walk for half a year.’

‘Hm,’ said the red-head. ‘You notice how he only offered it after she said she was all through and done for? Why didn’t he give her a swig when he met her? Too mean, that’s what.’

‘Presently,’ the Giant said, ‘they came to a halt. Before them was a forest.’

‘I knew a forest would be in it,’ Jankin said. There is a demon in that forest, I bet you.’

‘Seal your gawpy mouth, Mush-head,’ Joe Vance said. ‘Go talk to your friend the pig.’

The Giant glanced at Joe; he saw he was heart and soul in the tale. He’s not a bad man at that, he thought, and he’s a good standby when the weapon of words must be employed; with his natural, flowing abuse, he’s working within a fertile tradition. ‘She enters the forest,’ he said. They walk a half-mile. She’s light now, her steps bouncing. Before her, she can see nothing but trees. Then when she looks again, she can see a gate set into the trees—and the gate is made of gold.’

‘A common delusion,’ said the red-head.

Then the old man says, Mistress, will you enter in? She does so. And there she beholds such splendour as there never was this side of heaven.’

‘Silk cushions with tassels is in it,’ Jankin said.

‘Indeed,’ said the Giant. He closed his eyes, and drew in his brows. So many times he had been called upon to describe splendour, and so many times he had called upon himself to do it; by now the thread of his invention was wearing thin. There were hangings on the wall,’ he began, ‘rich and dense tapestries, with every manner of flower and child and beast depicted upon them. There were mirrors between these hangings, their gilt frames studded with rubies. There were candles blazing, and the skins of lions to sit on, and there was a huge joint of meat roasting on a spit, and a mastiff—no, a brace of mastiffs—to turn it. So when she sees all this, she thinks, I should have taken that gold piece after all, because it’s obvious now that there’s plenty more where that came from.’

‘First glimpse of sense she’s shown all evening,’ Claffey said.

‘So there she stood, her babby in her arms, looking about her open-mouthed. At one end of the great room a door opened, and in came a man and a woman, tall and elegant, attired in sumptuous robes embroidered with silk. She bobbed her head then, and she was shy and tongue-tied, having no acquaintance until now with princes, which was what she took them to be. But they spoke her very fair—their voices were low and gracious, a whisper merely—and stretching out their hands to her they drew her towards them, and said they would conduct her to where the child was. So they took her into another great chamber, its hangings even richer than the first, the logs blazing, and golden birds singing in their cages, and the music of a harp sounding in her ears as sweet as the breath of angels. Surely I’ve died and gone to heaven, she said to herself—but then the woman reached forward to her, and drew her babby out of her arms, and the man put a hand on her breast and, with the utmost reverence, uncovered her dug. Here, says the woman, and led her to the cradle, which was draped in purple velvet and set on a stand carved of ivory, fetched from—’

‘Jesus!’ Claffey said. ‘I am getting weary of the catalogue of furnishings, so I am. A hand plucks back the curtain and she sees—’

‘—a yellow-skinned babby, its skin wrinkled, its eyes rheumy—’

‘Much like he must have been,’ the red-head said, indicating Vance.

‘—so ugly she had never seen a child like it, and her gorge rose, and she said—putting aside all common politeness, such was the strength of her feeling—I don’t know that I can touch it. Then the man and woman again spoke to her, and their voices were low and whispering and they seemed to hold in them the same shivering note of the harp-string and the melody of the golden birds bowing on their perch—and they said, cooing to her, There’s nothing the matter with the child, except want of nourishment.

‘And the woman shook her head, saying, If that’s the manner and appearance of a king’s son, my own fair child should be emperor of the earth and skies. But she pitied them, and she pitied the yellow baby, and so she lifted it from the cradle of velvet and ivory, and laid it to her blue-veined breast. And all the while her own child lay sleeping in the arms of the woman so richly dressed, and lay so quiet and still that it seemed he was under an enchantment.’

‘Which indeed he was,’ the red-haired woman said. Again she plucked nervously at her kerchief. ‘You could see it coming a mile off.’

‘I wish you’d be quiet, mother,’ Pybus said.

‘Yes,’ Jankin broke off from his play with the pig. ‘I want to hear, I want to hear. It is not the demon tale we thought it was.’

A man laughed. ‘They are simple, these. Come over the water just now.’

But the other shushed him, the blind man saying severely, ‘It is seldom, in these debased days, we are able to hear a tale told in the antique fashion, by a gent of such proportions.’

‘So when the yellow child was laid to her breast, he took a fierce hold, and drank greedily, and she cried out, Oh, you did not say he had teeth! Surely, blood is springing from my tit!’

‘Dear, dear,’ Vance said satirically. ‘What the female sex have to endure!’

‘Ah, my dear, he has but one tooth, one tooth only, said the queen, soothing her. He will suck me dry! the young woman cried. Feed him but one minute longer, they coaxed, and then you shall have a soft bed to lie in all night, and a goosedown quilt to cover you, and in the morning we will give you seven gold pieces, and shoes to your feet, and in no time at all you will be in Galway among your own people.

‘So, thinking of the bed, and the quilt, and the shoes, and the gold, she let the yellow child drain her. The moment it was done, it flinched away its head, like a rich man offered a dry crust. And the queen took it from her—and all at once, she felt her eyelids droop, her legs weaken—and that was the last thing she knew.’

‘Now you will hear the coda,’ said the red-head. ‘I feel I could whistle it. It is no pretty tune.’

‘Morning came at last. She woke, and put out her hand to stroke the feather bed—’

‘But felt,’ said the blind man, ‘only a mulch of leaves.’

‘It was cold, and the harp-string was mute, and only a common sparrow of the hedgerows sang in her ear. She opened her eyes, sat up, looked around her—and the hand that had smoothed the bed grasped a handful of weeds, too rank to feed a cow—’

‘And her baby?’ the freckled girl said. Her fingers parted her curtain of hair. Her voice was sharp with anxiety.

‘She is twelve years old,’ the red-head said. ‘Excuse her. She has not heard many tales.’

The Giant shook his head. ‘Then this is a sad one, for a beginner. For the young lady, who last night was in the hall of kings—now her feet are in the ditch, her mouth is dry, there is muck in her hair and her belly is empty. And she cries, My babby! Where is he? She casts around, but her rosy babby is not to be seen—and then from the hedge she hears a little bleat—’

The red-head laughed. Time to run.’

‘—and looking into the hedge what should she find but the yellow child, its skin flapping, its eyes running and its nose snuffling, its evil pointed teeth grinning at her, and its wizened arms held out to fasten about her neck.’

‘Well?’ asked a woman in the shadows. ‘Did she turn and walk away?’

‘I think not,’ the red-head said. ‘It’s the hand you’re dealt, isn’t it? She’d pick him up. It’s what women do. She was a fool, and well-intentioned, and just a little bit greedy, and isn’t that like most of us?’

Jankin gaped. ‘What happened to her babby? Did she get him back?’

‘He was never seen again,’ the Giant said emphatically.

There was a long silence.

Jankin broke it. ‘Do you know what I think? I think, if she had not made the remark about the child’s ill-looks, and said that about her own child being an emperor, I think they might well have seen her safe back on the road and a penny in her hand. For they are decent-minded people on the whole, the gentry, but they will not stand for spitefulness.’

‘In my opinion,’ said the red-head, ‘when the old man first offered her a gold piece, she should have said, Show us the colour of it, then grabbed it in her hand and run.’

‘Well, however it may be, and however you think,’ said the Giant, ‘this happened to my own cousin, on the road to Galway, but one or two years back. And this is the story, as I had it from her own lips; and if you don’t like it, you may lengthen it by your complaints.’

There came from the company a great sigh, an exhalation; they were, on the whole, satisfied. Drink had now been taken, and Slig came down the steps with a cannikin, offering more. The cellar was warming up, with the press of extra people, and the heat of the pig, and the heat of contentious opinion. The blind man had sunk down against the wall, into a heap of rags, and he held out his beaker, his voice searching, ‘Slig? Slig? Fill us up here.’ He turned his face in the Giant’s direction. ‘Would you like to hear our ballad, big man?’

‘Certainly, yes.’

‘It is still in the making.’

‘That is the most interesting stage.’

‘So polite you are!’

‘I add it to the advantages of nature.’

‘You do well.’ The blind man paused. ‘We are making a ballad about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Does that suit you?’

‘There was in former times a great poet who made verses upon the subject of the shovel he used to dig a road for Englishmen—so simple and pure his heart, and that object not too low. Can I then disdain your cellar, or the circumstances in which you are found?’

The blind man nodded. ‘So. Very well. I will proceed. We are making our ballad on Hannah Dagoe, a wild girl, that when the hangman came to noose her she knocked him clean out of the cart.’

‘What was her crime?’ asked the Giant.

‘Stealing a watch only, and that on St Patrick’s Day. She came out of Dublin, and her trade was milliner.’

‘Whenabouts was this?’

‘I don’t know. Some year. They hanged her, anyway. We have also a ballad of Thomas Tobin and William Harper, how William Harper was rescued from the Westminster Gatehouse by twenty Irish boys with cutlasses.’

‘And Thomas Tobin?’

‘And how Thomas Tobin was not.’

‘Did they hang him?’

‘I expect so. For Robert Hayes was hanged, though he spoke Latin like the Pope. And Patrick Brown was hanged for stealing silver spurs. Bryan Cooley was hanged, and his wife and four of his children came from Ireland to see it. Patrick Kelly was hanged, that was fifty years old, that filed coins, that made a speech about if each had their own no man would be poor. James Carter was hanged, him that was five years with the French armies, and John Maloney, that fought in Sicily, which is a hot country at a good distance but it’s not the Indies. John Norton was hanged, and him twelve years a soldier. Thomas Dwyer was hanged, that came from Tipperary and had no coat to his back. William Rine and James Ryan, Gerald Farrell and James Falconer, they were all turned off together. Teddy Brian was hanged and Henry Smith, that robbed the High Bailiff of his gold-topped cane. Katherine Lineham was hanged, but her husband was hanged before her, and Ruggety Madge was hanged, that was Katherine Lineham’s friend, and Redman Keogh, and black and damned Macdonnel that sold them all to save his neck, but they hanged him anyway. William Bruce was hanged, that stole a silk kerchief and a man’s wig off his head, and they found him in a barn, he was a man out of Armagh. James Field was hanged, him that was a boxer and the Watch were afraid of him till they came to take him in strength. Joseph Dowdell was hanged, he was a Wicklow man but fell to picking pockets in Covent’s Garden. Garret Lawler was hanged, that was a cardsharp. Thomas Quinn was hanged, and Alexander Byrne, and Dan the Baker and Richard Holland, and all of those you could find any fine night of the year drinking at the Fox Tavern in Drury Lane. Patrick Dempsey was hanged, he was a sailor, turned off when he was drunk. William Fleming was hanged, he was a highwayman. Ann Berry was hanged, a weaver turned a rough robber, and Margaret Watson, she heeded no laws. Robert Bird was hanged, and of him I know not a jot that would make a line or half of one. James Murphy and James Duggan were hanged, and their bodies cut up by the surgeons.’

‘Dear God,’ said the Giant. ‘Was the whole country of Ireland hanged, and not one spared?’

‘When the people gather they call it the crack-neck assembly. When you are turned off they call it the cramp-jaw, and the new jig without music, and dancing in the sheriff’s picture frame.’

‘It is the slaughter of a nation,’ the Giant said.

‘Katherine Lineham was what we call a hemp-widow. Her husband was a month in Newgate, and she so in love with him that every day she waited till she saw him led from the cell to the chapel, that she might see his shadow slide against the wall. O, then how he did bounce, his face to the city! Rope is the first word of English that an Irishwoman learns. Hang is the word of her husband, hang him, the thief, he is a rebel, hang him for a rogue. Dog is the word of her children, kick them out, kick them out like dogs. These are the next words: Papist, and starve him, and let him be whipped.’

They separated then; the women moving chastely to one side of the hovel, the men to the other. A low hum of goodnights, smiles in the dark. By the last flicker of light the Giant saw the red-headed woman draw the fair young girl to her breast, patting her, and he heard the tiny bleatings of sorrow and loss suppressed.

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