“No, you go!” Alea cried, though the tears flowed freely now. “I’d hate myself forever if you lost your true chance because of my selfishness! Go, Jorak, and the gods smile on you!”
She turned away then, and managed to hold back the worst until a glance over her shoulder showed her that the giants had gone out of sight through the trees. Then she dropped down on the road and wept and wept, wondering if her heart would break—and wishing that it would.
4
Magnus had to suppress the impulse to project a call to Herkimer on radio frequency out of sheer loneliness. If it hadn’t been for the road, he’d have found it hard to believe there were people on this planet, never mind the photographs he’d seen from orbit. Even then, the road might have been only an animal track, if it hadn’t been ten feet wide. It seemed unusually broad for a medieval road until Magnus remembered that giants might have laid it out. That gave him a strange chill down his spine. He found himself trying to believe giants were only fairy tales.
Well, true enough, these weren’t forty feet tall, and no human being could hide in their beer steins or spend the night in one of their gloves—but they were big enough to call giants. From what Magnus had seen in the orbital shots, though, this buffer zone between Midgard and the giants’ country might very well have had ordinary-sized people as well as giants walking about. It was barren enough, Heaven knew—a broad plain with knee-high grass, and a line of trees to his left that presumably shaded a watercourse. But there was genuine forest to his right; it seemed that the road had been built along some sort of natural boundary.
Then some people came around the bend, half a dozen in armor and with battle axes at their hips, with two adolescents along. Magnus was surprised that the bend was so close—it had looked much farther away, but the people made it seem much nearer.
Then he realized that it wasn’t the bend that was so close, it was the people who were so tall.
He stopped and stared, eyes wider and wider as the strangers came nearer and nearer. For the first time since his adolescent growth spurt, he found himself looking up at someone—up higher and higher. As they came close, their sheer size overwhelmed him—not just their height, though he only came up to the chest of the shortest grownup, and was still a head shorter than the boys. It was their mass that made him fee! so small, for each of the grown giants was easily twice as broad in the shoulder and hip as Magnus was. Their legs were virtual tree trunks, and their arms would have shamed a gorilla.
They weren’t looking any more friendly than that gorilla, either. The oldest man—at least, to judge by the gray in his hair-rested his hand on the haft of his axe and demanded, “Who are you, Midgarder? And why are you here?”
“My name is Gar Pike,” Magnus said, trying to imitate their accent.
The leader couldn’t help it; his face quirked into a smile. “Your parents didn’t really name you that!”
They hadn’t, so Gar decided on belligerence. “And what’s wrong with my name, I’d like to know?”
“Why, a gar pike is a big fish, and you’re scarcely a minnow!” the leader said.
It was the first time in fifteen years that anyone had called Gar small. He found he didn’t like it, especially since it was true, given the present company. “All right, Gar is short for Edgar, and Pike has been a family name for centuries.” He carefully didn’t say whose.
“Well enough, and pardon my rudeness,” the leader said gruffly. “I am called Gorkin. Why have you come to this no-one’s-land, Gar Pike?”
For a moment, Gar stood amazed by the giant’s courtesy—after all, it was himself who was the intruder. But he pulled himself together and answered, “I’ve come from far away, and the…” What had the giant called him? Midgarder, that was it! “…the Midgarders enslaved me. They said I was too tall, too close to being a giant.” He managed a sour smile. “They seem to have been mistaken.”
“Not so much as you might think,” Gorkin said. “We’ve children who grow no bigger than you, some even shorter. But you’re no child of ours, and far too small to become one of us.” He clapped one of the boys on the shoulder. “Jorak, now, he’s only fourteen, and already taller than you by a head. He’s due to grow two feet more at least, and fill out to a proper size—but how old are you, foreigner? Thirty, if you’re a day!”
“Well, I’m more than a day, that’s true,” Gar said slowly, “and you guessed well. I’m thirty-one.”
“Two in one day!” the woman beside Gorkin said—and Gar was amazed to realize she was indeed a woman. But her face was more finely featured than Gorkin’s, her hair flowed down around her shoulders, and her armor bore two huge bulges that Gar found not at all stimulating. He did wonder who the other of the “two in one day” was—and what. Gorkin shook his head sadly. “We can’t take you in, foreigner. For all we know, you might be spying for the Midgarders—and you’ve surely grown as much as you’re going to, at your age. Why, you’re almost small enough to be a Midgarder, and certainly as skinny. Besides, if you’re like the rest of your kind, you’ve been raised to hate and fear giants, and you’re too old to have a change of heart there.”
Both boys glanced up at him, then looked away, sheepish and guilty.
“They were both raised as Midgarders,” Gorkin explained, “but they’re young enough to learn they’ve had lies poured into their ears from their cradles.”
“But I never saw this man before, not in my village or any where in the barony!” Jorak protested.
“Nor me,” Rokir said, “and my barony was one over from his.”
“His accent is strange,” the woman pointed out.
“It is that,” Gorkin admitted. “Might be you’re from far away indeed, foreigner.”
“Yes, and you believe it, Gorkin,” the woman said, “so you’d be calling him ‘stranger,’ not ‘foreigner.’ ”
“Peace, good Morag,” Gorkin grumbled. “What I believe of him and how I may treat him have to be two different things. You know the law.”
“Yes, and know there’s reason behind it,” Morag sighed. She said to Gar, “I regret it, foreigner, but we can’t risk a spy coming into our town to creep out and let a Midgard army in. Besides, if we took you, we’d have to take that woman we just left on the road, too, and the next one we found, and the next and the next. First thing, there’d be more Midgarders than giants, and we’d have to flee our own homes.”
“I understand, I understand.” Gar stood amazed at the kindness of these people, who actually apologized for not giving hospitality to a potential enemy!
“You go on back to Midgard, and tell them the giants threw you out,” Gorkin said gruffly. “Likely they’ll find you a place among them then.”
“Yes, as a slave,” Jorak said darkly.
“Might be, might be,” Gorkin agreed heavily. “Still, that’s better than wandering the wild lands with everyone’s spear against you, isn’t it?”
“No!” both boys said together, and Gorkin looked down at them, amazed.
“They’re right,” Gar said. “I’ve seen what slaves go through in Midgard. I was lucky to escape. Better to have everyone’s sword against me in the wild. After all, out here, I’m allowed to fight back.”
“Is it so bad as that?” Gorkin asked, shaken, then shook his head in sorrow and anger. “And they call themselves the only human folk, these Midgarders!” He look down at Gar, deeply troubled. “We’ll bid you farewell, then, foreigner, and wish you well, but that’s all we can do.”