Jack, the Giant-killer

"There's no such thing as magic."

     Jack’s Mother always said that. It was her answer to everything. The reason you couldn’t trust people to help you; why you always had to be careful about what you say; why the good guys don’t always win; why you have to give yourself an escape route, hide a reserve fund, and not count on your next meal; why you should never assume today’s friends will be your friends tomorrow, that people keep their promises, or that every story had a happy ending, even yours. She had drilled all this into Jack’s head ever since his Father died. Since the giant had killed him. 

Life had turned out to be as bad as she had predicted. For Jack, there had been no good luck, no mercy, no magic. Everything had failed. Now, the crops were dying. They were starving and they had to sell the cow.

Jack had named her “Mrs. Cow.” Mother had always told him not to give the cow a name because one day they might have to sell her. He’d named her anyway. Now they had to sell her. Mother didn’t say “I told you so,” didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

But she made Jack take the cow to market, a long walk down a dusty, lonely road.

“Don’t talk to strangers,” she told him. “Don’t talk to anyone. Just take the cow to market.”
So Jack did exactly what she said.
At least he tried to.

“Nice cow,” the Stranger said, a starved but nimble fellow with pale blue skin appearing instantly out of nowhere at the crossroads. But Jack wasn’t afraid. 

He just ignored him and kept walking.

“Right,” the man said. “’Don’t talk to strangers.’ Right. Good advice, that. But everyone’s a stranger at the market, aren’t they?”

“How do you know I’m going to market?”

“Well, it’s either that or you’re out walking the cow.”

Jack’s lips curled into a smile in spite of himself. He stopped and looked at the Stranger.

“What do you want?”

“I want to save you a long walk and buy your cow right now.”

Jack thought about it. 
“Why not?" he said.

“Deal,” said the Stranger.

“Not yet,” said Jack. “What’ll you give me for it?”

The man held up a sack.

“This,” he said.

“What’s ‘this’…?” 

“Magic beans,” said the Stranger.

Jack laughed and spat on the ground. He turned his back on the man and continued walking to market.

“Don’t you believe in magic?” the man shouted after him.

“No.”

“No?”

“No!”

“Look me in the eyes and say that.”

Jack turned, walked back, and looked the Stranger in the eyes. Then he spat out the words like broken teeth:

“I. Don’t. Believe. In. Magic. Satisfied?”

“Your Mother should be satisfied.”

“You shut up about my Mother! You don’t know my Mother!”

“Well, that’s your Mother talking, isn’t it?” said the Stranger. ‘There’s no such thing as magic.’ It’s what she always says, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“I see it in your eyes.”

“Yeah? What else do you see?”

The Stranger looked into his eyes.

Jack glared back with hate. He kept looking at the Stranger, looking him straight in the eyes, and he held his gaze for a very long time. The Stranger was taller, but Jack wasn’t afraid. He had his knife. The Stranger didn't seem to care. The staring contest went on for a lifetime. Until the Stranger looked finally away. 

“Just as I suspected.”

“What? What'd you suspect?"

“I can see that you’re lying.”

“About what?”

“Magic. You do believe in magic, Jack. That’s the truth.”

“I don’t believe in you, mate.”

“Don’t you, Jack?”

“How do you know my name’s Jack?”

“What else could it be?”

Jack turned his back and walked away again. 

“It’s a trick,” he said. “Some sort of trick. I’m not falling for it.”

The Stranger didn’t follow but shouted after him.

“These beans are powerful magic, Jack. Very powerful.”

Jack kept walking.

“Don’t you want to know what they can do?”

Jack kept walking. The Stranger shouted again.

“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know?”

He kept walking until he was over the next hill and couldn’t hear the Stranger anymore.

Bastard.

Poor, thin Mrs. Cow looked up at him and “Moo?”

“Shut up, you,” said Jack.

He kept walking, tears leaking out of his eyes.

Twenty minutes later, Jack turned around and ran back, dragging Mrs. Cow behind him down the road. The Stranger was still there. Just standing there. Smiling.

Bastard.

“All right … what?”

“What do you mean what?”

The Stranger’s smile grew impossibly wide.

“You know what!” Jack exploded. “What sort of magic? These beans of yours, what do they do?”

“Oh that…”

“Yes. That.”

Right bastard.

The Stranger leaned down and whispered to him.

“It’s like this, Jack. If you plant these beans by moonlight, they’ll grow up into a magic beanstalk.”

“A magic beanstalk? Really?”

“Overnight.”

“So what? What good’s a magic beanstalk? You can’t eat it. You can’t build a house out of it.”

“You can climb it.”

“And?”

“You can go places.”

“What, above the clouds?”

Jack was not so stupid as to think there was a kingdom floating above the clouds.

“No, Jack, not above the clouds. Not here, not there, not up, not down. Not on this earth. Other places. Other realms.”

“Fine. Let's say you're not lying. Your beanstalk grows. I climb it. I reach your sodding "realms." Then what?”

“Then you take back what’s yours.”

Jack knew instantly what the Stranger meant. The Giant. His father. The harp. Jack’s eyes watered up and he fought the waters down. Bastard. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate”

“Yes, you do. You think this is your life – this filth, these rags? No. The Giant stole your life.”

“There’s no such thing as giants.”

“Right. And I suppose that ring of standing stones just danced into that field all by themselves, hmm? Don’t play stupid, Jack. Of course there are giants—any educated person knows that. One of them worked for your Father, you see. Sadly,  he didn’t want to work for your Father.”

“My Father…?”

“You’ve heard the stories, of course. What the people say.”

“What do they say?”

“Well … your Father was a thief, a pagan, punished by heaven, so on and so forth.”

“Yeah. That’s what they say, all right. I’ve heard it my whole life.”

 “Ah, but the people only say what the Giant tells them. He whispers in their dreams, Jack, and they believe him because they're weak and stupid. But I knew your Father and he was no thief. Know this: The Giant was the thief! The Giant killed your Father and stole his harp. The harp is yours by bloodright, Jack. Yours. Take it, Jack. Go up there and take it.”

“He’s a fucking giant,” said Jack.

“And you’re a giant killer. Here.”

The Stranger threw the sack of beans at his feet.

“Fight and live or despair and die. It’s up to you, Jack. And you can keep the goddamn cow.” 

Of course what the Stranger actually said was closer to, “An yae ge’a nu gekeapaen youren kine an’t hast g’habeen g’damnyed t’ye.”

But you get the idea.

The Stranger turned his back and walked away. Jack picked up the sack of beans and continued towards market with Mrs. Cow, then thought better of it, and turned around. He expected to catch up with the odd, blue-skinned Stranger on the way, and finally did.

“Here,” he said. “Take the cow. It’s only fair.”

The Stranger smiled and did just that.

Mother was furious, of course.
She knew instantly before he'd said a word. 

Where's the money, Jack? Where's ... You don't have it do you? God I knew you'd do this! I knew it! You’re just like your Father. You stupid little ...
Mother screamed and screamed. Jack stood there in the doorway looking stupid and holding the sack of stupid beans. He tried to explain. Mother snatched the sack out of his hands and threw it out the open window behind her. Then she slapped Jack across the face and sent him to bed. Jack thanked Lord Jesu that she hadn't used the cudgel. And he huddled in his bed for hours. He could hear Mother in her own bed, bitterly weeping. Jack knew she would kill him if he went outside and tried to pick up the sack of beans , so he didn’t. He just tried to go to sleep.

But the moon wouldn’t let him.

The moon was in his eyes all night, a bright, full moon. Jack had horrible dreams. Not proper nightmares. The horrors of half sleep, which are much, much worse. Then the moonlight stopped stabbing him.

He woke and saw something in front of the moon. Something big. 

A giant fucking beanstalk.

I’m mad, Jack thought, utterly mad. Some of that bad rye bread, perhaps.

Best to make the most of it, then.

Jack ran outside, kept running until he reached the beanstalk, grabbed hold, then started climbing. He kept climbing.

Until he reached the top.

Whiteness.

Fog, or something like fog.

Jack was in a different place.

Not above the clouds. He knew he wasn’t walking on clouds.

Just a different place.

It was like the land between dreams and waking, the land you went to when your mind woke up but your body stayed frozen, when your eyelids were closed but you could still see through them, when the familiar room surrounding you was the same and yet not the same, and strange floating diamonds seemed to hang in the air.

A very dreamy place, this. But Jack knew he wasn’t dreaming. This place was real. If he forgot that fact, he would die. Jack knew this, although didn’t know why he knew it. He kept reminding himself of this very important fact.

I have been here before in dreams.

I am not dreaming now. This is different.

It is possible to die here now.

When you’re here in this place in a body it’s possible to die here.

Jack kept repeating it

But he still walked through it all. 

It was a beautiful place. It was a dead, lifeless place. As if all the pretty things in all the beautiful, happy stories of childhood had died and rotted here. 

First the stepping stones of elf bones.

Then a crucified unicorn.
Then ...

You get the idea.

The horrors came in many forms. Their message never changed.

There is no such thing as magic.

But Jack kept walking.

At the end of his march, Jack followed the long, shattered spine of some dead beast that turned out to be a dragon, a strong, wise dragon that had been hacked apart and died horribly. Though Jack could see it fought like hell.

The stepping stones of its long, broken spine finally led him to the Giant’s castle. Nothing moved there. Jack studied it, then crawled under the massive door.

Jack emerged in a broken maze of translucent crystal, shining walls snaking in and out of each other, walls kicked open in places by a Giant too impatient to read the sacred pattern. Jack knew instantly that this wasn’t a castle but a temple, some sort of holy place. Or it had been a holy place once upon a time, but had been defiled long ago by the Giant and was now filled with skulls and bones and bits of dead things.

A saintly man would think of God, why is there so much evil in the world, and so forth. Jack merely wanted to vomit.

So much holiness still lingered in this place. Jack closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. Eyes shut, he saw a Being of light. The Giant cut its throat. The Being bled light and bled out until it died. The light stained the walls, stained everything. Jack could see the stains. Even when he opened his eyes, he could still see them. This place filled him with terror.

But that was a bad way to put it.

This place wasn’t terrifying. This place was terror itself. Pure terror – which was just another word for pure knowledge. Knowledge crystallized. Knowledge like a crystal knife in Jack’s heart. Knowledge about everything, including himself.

And Jack knew far too much.

Jack read the pattern in the shining walls and what he read there was himself.

And he hated what he read.

Jack was not strong. He was not courageous.

He was a boy, a little boy.

He was selfish and bad and hiding his fear.
Run! Run and hide!

But he couldn’t hide now.

Now, Jack was shaking like a chattering skeleton.
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.

That's all he ever thought about. It's the reason he did everything he did. Fear.
I don't want to die.
God, how selfish. Why shouldn't I die?
What terrified him was his rotten self.

You’re a selfish, selfish boy.

Mother was right this time. Jack clearly knew that all he’d ever thought about was himself. And yet he’d never faced ...

Jack suddenly realized that Mother had been hurt, that her spirit had been broken, but all he could ever think about was how mean she was, how she always said no. He knew that he'd added to her pain, that he was a total bloody bastard, that nothing he did was noble or pure, that he had no right to go on living. But he also knew an easy fix for that.
Jack picked up his knife and held it over his heart, quite ready to plunge it in.

It was very possible to die here.

But he didn’t plunge the knife in, after all. Jack came to the surprising conclusion that he was already dead—at least from the perspective of the children who would hear his story. Once he knew that, the shaking stopped, and that was that.

Jack really didn’t care any more.

And just when he was feeling much, much better, the Giant returned.

Roaring. Stomping. Screaming.

Holding something beautiful and struggling in its big, thick fist.

The first thought in Jack’s head?
This Giant really isn’t that big – maybe 30 feet tall or so, but not big like a mountain. 

Jack’s second realization was that the Giant was holding a delicate, fairy princess with butterfly wings. How pretty she was! Unfortunately the Giant popped the Fairy into its mouth, still screaming, and crunched down on her with loud, crackling satisfaction until the screaming stopped.

The Giant spat the bloody bones on the wall. Then it sniffed the air.

“Fe-fi-fo-fum,” it shouted.

Old Druid words.

Jack had heard them before. Quoted badly. Mangled.

“Fe-fi-fo-fum.”

But here was the source. The undistorted words of despair in the Giant’s own bloody tongue.

The Giant started chanting – a ritual curse involving grinding Jack’s bones and making bread with them. But its anger soon grew beyond words. All it could do was howl and scream and thrash about the ruined temple, mindlessly breaking things, increasing the ruin. Jack took the opportunity to crawl under a shining slab, squeezing in between all the tightly packed stinking skulls that had rolled beneath it over the years, hoping the stink would cover his own scent. Jack stayed there for hours while the Giant roared and roared and then eventually got drunk, grew tired, and fell asleep.

It snored. For a long time.

And then Jack came out.

He found the harp immediately on pure instinct.

Held it in his hands.

Gold. Who cares? 
The songs are what matters.
Singing harp they called it.

Not that it sang on its own.

Stupid peasants believe that.

But Father had told him the truth.

It lets you sing, Jack. Pure poets’ songs of light with no place for darkness to hide. The answer to every riddle. The clean bone of truth. Your truth. Everybody’s truth. Just hold it and sing. That's all you have to do.

Just hold it and sing. 

That’s all he had to do.

Jack held the harp and looked at the big, sleeping thug beast of a thing that had killed his Father. It's mouth was open. Rows of yellow teeth as big as millstones, meat and marrow stuck between them. Singing seemed like a very bad idea at the moment. But ...
Jack knew he could easily cut the Giant's throat while it slept. But holding the harp, Jack decided against it, because that would be cowardly, and nothing he’d ever want to sing about.

Instead, Jack walked to the door. Holding the harp, with all of its words and songs. But not singing. No. Not now.
Almost out ... almost.

I got away with it! Just sneak out of here like a quiet rat and its yours forever, Jack.

Jack walked closer to the massive door. Saw the gap beneath it. Just a few feet away ...

With the harp in his hand. With the pure words singing in his mind. A song. That had nothing to do with sneaking. 

And whether he wanted to or not.

Jack reached the door, and turned around.

And shouted:

“HARP FOR HARP AND SONG FOR SONG, WORD FOR WORD AND AN I FOR AN I. MY NAME IS JACK, YOU BLOODY GREAT FUCKING BASTARD, AND I’VE TAKEN WHAT IS MINE. WINE FOR BLOOD AND BONE FOR BREAD. THE SON RETURNS TO SEE YOU DEAD.”

Not particularly poetic, he thought.

But it got the point across.

The Giant roared and staggered after him. Jack ran.

He passed the Dragon’s bones and told his Father goodbye. Kept running until he came to the beanstalk.

The Giant followed, a slow, clumsy, cursing thing. Jack was quicker and cleverer. Reaching the beanstalk, Jack grabbed, let himself fall, then grabbed again. Not so hard! Mad idea, but it worked, so Jack kept it up, while the Giant roared above him. Jack would slide down, then reach out his hand to clutch a vine and break his fall at the last possible instant. Slide-clutch, slide-clutch. Continuing in this fashion, Jack reached the ground in no time. His hands were bloody, but he was down. The stupid bloody Giant wasn’t even close.

Curious, bleary-eyed villagers walked up to him. Perhaps even more stupid than the Giant.
"What's all the ruckus about, young fella?"

Jack pointed to the beanstalk.

“Cut it down, you idiots,” he started hollering. “The Giant’s coming! Can’t you hear the Giant? Cut it down!”

The villagers surrounded him, looking slightly less idiotic now, as if waking from a dream. The Giant was roaring over their heads now, but the villagers were taking their time, not wanting to do anything rash and impulsive, you know. Despite their caution, a new idea was slowly forming in their dull heads at exactly the same time. What’s making that noise? A Giant, maybe? You think that’s what the kid’s talking about? As the Giant got louder and louder and closer and closer, it became harder and harder for the villagers to deny that Jack here just might have a point.

“The fucking Giant’s going to kill us,” Jack screamed. “Cut the fucking thing down!”
The villagers barely started moving. Then stopped for some reason. Jack turned to see what they were looking at.
And saw his Mother standing there.

“There’s no such thing as giants,” she said.

“And I suppose there’s no such thing as giant beanstalks?” 
She laughed. Jack didn't hate her in that second.

He’d made her laugh. That made everybody laugh.

Her laughter broke the spell of helplessness.

Mother ran back to the old tree stump and grabbed an axe. The other villagers looted the barn for axes, blades, knives, and anything that could chop, cut and hack.

They all tromped back to the beanstalk and hacked away.

The Giant was closer. But not close enough.

The beanstalk cracked like a lightning bolt.

Beanstalk and Giant fell. It hit the ground but didn’t die right away. The Giant was a tough sort of giant after all, but it was still bloody and broken for all that. The villagers approached what was left of it with their knives, and axes and, before you knew it, cut the Giant to pieces, until he was very nearly dead, thank you very much. They gave Jack the honor of giving the deathblow, but he knew it wouldn't feel like an honor. He'd just be putting the damn thing out of its misery.

The bloody thing looked up at him.

“Jack … your Father ...”

“Fuck you,” said Jack.

Then split the Giant's skull open.

And, before you knew it, things returned to normal.

Like his Father before him, Jack returned with his harp to the circle of standing stones at the full and dark of the moon each month. He played the harp and the sacred words flowed out of him whether he liked it or not. The villagers drank his words like water and grew quiet and wise and strong and not at all stupid as they’d been before. Although there was no way to stop the children from telling stories, the now-wise adults all agreed to hide these stories from outsiders. They’d keep the true tale to themselves and tell only lies. The rest of the world didn’t believe in magic and it was best to leave it that way.

What was left of the Giant and the beanstalk soon rotted into the ground.

The stories went on.