Instead, when they got up there, the world of the oaf was in its death throes, and his dreams of living in a place where he was not a freak, but a common oaf with a common name, were gone forever.
So he married a woman and tried to live a normal life. The only good that came from that was his son, and now the son was gone, having inherited from his mother that peculiarly human disease called short lifespan and succumbed to it at age eighty-one (in man years).
The life of a man is so brief.
The life of an oaf is so long and so lonely.
But here on this mountain, the lonely, loveless, companionless freak had developed a final plan. He would go through the portal one last time and die up there.
It is fitting that my bones should rest up there. I shall set out swimming in the great eternal ocean and swim until the strength leaves my body and I surrender my life to the murky deep.
He reached up and found the secret latch to the door into the lower firmament and he opened it and pulled himself up and in.
He rested on the bottom rung of the nine miles of stairs and tugged thoughtfully on his long red beard as he gazed at his strange surroundings. All he could see were clouds on the ground, and jutting up out of the carpet of clouds here and there were the well-preserved corpses of the several oafs Jack had slain with his pistol so many years ago.
He sighed, memories. Memories. Fi, fi, fi.
Then he began to climb the stairway to the upper firmament. And he climbed and he climbed, and he did not stop for a rest. When he reached the top of the stairs, he stopped to say a prayer: “Lord and creator, be with me as I return to the sacred dust that made me. Amen.”
Then he sang a song that his mother used to play on her small singing harp: “In the heart, in the air, hear the joy everywhere. Shall we call, shall we sing, of the joy everywhere? Come, my friends, let us sing, of the joy everywhere. There is joy, there is joy, there is joy everywhere.”
“I have no friends,” he said aloud, “but I have joy, dear lord.”
And he undid the latch on the door through the upper firmament and he opened the door, bracing himself for the rushing flood of waters which would likely knock him off the stairs and send him tumbling down to his death, his body as broken and lifeless as the quietly resting corpses of the oafs that Jack had slain with his pistol.
But there was no water rampaging down through the door in the upper firmament.
“I guess it is low tide. I got lucky,” the man-oaf mused as he pulled himself up to the hole in the firmament and then climbed into it.
He made it through the many tunnels. He made it to the cave. The cave was dark as always, but the ground was dry. There was no water beneath his feet.
“Low tide,” he said again. “Am I not the fortunate oaf?”
In the cave, which was bereft of life except for his, he had another moment of reflection.
“This is the place where I was conceived. This is the place where that vile oafen general took advantage of my mother.”
He left the cave, and the sun outside was bright, so bright that it took his eyes many minutes to adjust.
“The sun is still so hot,” he said, and he was momentarily seized by the fear that he might die of fire before reaching the ocean, but when his vision had cleared his skin felt no pain and he saw that he was on a green mountaintop.
Green.
There were trees and grass and flowers in bloom. He looked, he looked and looked, but there was no sight of water.
“Perhaps the floods have receded.”
On he walked, until he found the path that led down the mountain. Every step he took, he became more hopeful. His heart was filled with hope. He saw small animals scurrying up the trees. He heard insects buzzing. He heard birds singing.
There was a moment of real fear when he spotted two large brown beos blocking his path down the mountain. But he knew that beos were only dangerous if you troubled their cubs, so he waited a respectful distance away from them until they lumbered out of the way, followed by two lively, playful cubs that had been hiding among the trees.
“It is a good thing that I waited.”
It took him half a day to make it down the mountain, and before he got to the bottom he spotted the village.
There were about a dozen houses and twice as many barns. He noticed six bovins penned into a yard and three hosses tethered to a post. He heard the happy yipping of a small dog. Someone — a young girl, a child, from the voice — was humming a merry tune.
His heart swollen with glee, he skipped the rest of the way down the mountain and then bounded toward the village, which was still about a mile away.
Now he could hear the sound of many dogs barking, large dangerous dogs this time. He heard more voices — male voices, adult males, and the voices were the voices of alarm.
There was the sound of a bell tolling. Sharp commands were shouted. He heard the words, “Giant! Giant! Arrow from quiver! Sword from sheath!”
He heard the unsheathing of swords.
He heard the angry hiss-whistle of arrows in flight.
The first arrow bit into his hand like a great and very sharp tooth.
The second one pierced his upper thigh, and his leg buckled beneath him and he fell.
He was close enough now to see that the houses of the village were too small for oafen habitation. This was a village of mans.
There was the sound of angry barking and the shocking pain of being violently ripped to pieces. The dogs were upon him in the pungent stink of their fury, their hungry mouths dripping warm, blood-tinged saliva, their razor teeth shredding flesh.
Beyond the black fur cloud of canine frenzy, he saw mans with their swords raised high, their heavy armor clanking. Now there was a sandaled foot upon his throat, and he squinted up at the bright sunlight reflected in the broadsword whose deadly edge was poised to deliver a deathblow and behead. Now there was the shout of “Monster!” from the rumbling voice of the brave warrior — the brave giant killer looming above him.
“I am a man! I am a man!” he shouted frantically in Frisian, then English, then Dutch, then Swedish, then German —
There was a moment when he thought he would surely die, but then the noble giant killer rumbled another command and the dogs were pulled off and the biting ceased.
“The world survived the way it has always survived,” the sacred speaker of the mans said in a language they called Deutschailai, which was a mixture of German, Old Frisian, and English. Mike, a student of language as had been his stepfather before him, found that he could communicate in Deutschailai with very little difficulty. “The storms washed away the old, and the new grew back in its place. We do not know why it happened or how it fixed itself, but the waters began slowly to recede after ten years, though it was a slow process. The plants came back shortly thereafter. My people with what animals they could take lived on boats and rafts and anything that would float during the ten years of the great waters and then the forty years of the lesser waters that followed. I was born on a boat and did not leave it until I was well into my middle years. The first time I set foot on land that was not a small island was when I was forty-five, and now I am sixty.”
Mike, the man-oaf, sat at the head of the great table, a place of honor, and listened to the words of the sacred speaker of the mans. Mike wore the bloody bandages of his recent injuries on his hands, legs, and face. The dogs that had bitten him earlier now begged for scraps at his feet.