He answered falsetto, “I can’t think of anything.”
“Ye can.” Her confidence sank a little. She stared at the ground and dug with one toe. “If ye canna, well, let him have me. He only wants me to eat. Ye mean too much, Holger, to the whole world, methinks, to risk death in a fight over nobbut me.”
He groped in his bewilderment. What puzzles did he know? “Four hanging, four ganging, two leading, one trailing: a cow.” Samson’s poser to the Philistines. A few such. But surely over the centuries, the ogre had heard them. And he, Holger, wasn’t bright enough to invent a brain teaser on such short notice.
“I’d rather fight for someone I know, like you, than—” he began. The squatting monster interrupted him with a gruff “Hurry, I say!”
A wild idea coursed through Holger. “Can’t he stand the sun?” he asked Alianora in his stage-eunuch tone.
“Nay,” she said. “The bricht rays turn his flesh to stone.”
“Oh-ho,” squeaked Hugi, “if ye hold his mind fast eneugh, lad, so dawn comes on him unawares, then we can loot yon bag o’ gold.”
“I dinna know about that,” said Alianora. “I’ve heard treasure won by such a trick is cursed, and the man who wins it soon dies. But Holger, in an hour he must flee the dawn. Can ye no delay him an hour, ye who overcame the dragon?”
“I... think... so.” Holger swung back on the colossus, who was beginning to growl in angry impatience. “I’ll contest with you,” he said.
“For this one night, then,” said the giant. His grin was sadistic. “Perhaps another night after that... Well, bind the wench so she can’t flee. Hurry!”
Holger moved as slowly as he dared. Tying Alianora’s wrists, he piped, “You can throw off this knot, if worst comes to worst.”
“Nay, I willna flee, or he’ll turn on ye.”
“He’ll have to fight me anyway,” said Holger. “You might as well save your own life.” But he couldn’t sound very heroic in falsetto.
He threw some more sticks on the fire and turned to the giant, who had sat down with knees under hairy chin. “Here we go,” he said.
“Good. You will be glad to know for your honor, I am the riddle champion of nine flintgarths.” The giant looked at Alianora and smacked his lips. “A delicate morsel.”
Holger’s sword was aloft before he knew what he was about. “Hold your foul tongue!” he roared.
“Would you liefer fight?” The vast muscles bunched.
“No.” Holger checked his temper. But that such a hippo dared look on his Alianora—! “Okay,” he snapped. “First riddle. Why does a chicken cross the road?”
“What?” The giant gaped till his teeth shone like wet rocks. “You ask me that?”
“I do.”
“But the veriest child knows. To get to the other side.”
Holger shook his yellow-maned head. “Wrong.”
“You lie!” The mammoth shape half rose.
Holger swung his sword whistling. “I have a perfectly good answer,” he said. “You must find it.”
“I never heard the like,” complained the giant. But he seated himself and tugged his beard with one filthy hand. “Why does a chicken cross the road? Why not, if not to get to the other side? What mystical intent is here? What might a chicken and a road represent?” He shut his eyes and swayed back and forth. Alianora, lying bound near the fire, gave Holger a cheer.
After an endlessness of cold wind and colder stars, Holger saw the eyes of the monster open. They glowed in the firelight like two blood-colored lamps, deep under the cavernous brows. “I have the answer,“ said the terrifying voice. “’Tis not unlike the one that Thiazi baffled Grotnir with, five hundred winters agone. See you, mortal, a chicken is the human soul, and the road is life which must be crossed, from the ditch of birth to the ditch of death. On that road are many perils, not alone the ruts of toil and the mire of sin, but wagons of war and pestilence, drawn by the oxen of destruction; while overhead wheels that hawk bight Satan, ever ready to stoop. The chicken knows not why it crosses the road, save that it sees greener fields on the far side. It crosses because it must, even as we all must.”
He beamed smugly. Holger shook his head. “No, wrong again. “
“
What?
Why, you—” The ogre surged erect.
“So you’d rather fight?” said Holger. “I knew you had no intellectual staying power.”
“No, no, no!” howled the giant, starting a minor landslide. He stalked about for a while before getting enough self-control to sit down again. “Time presses,” he said, “so I’ll yield on this one and ask for the answer. Why indeed does a chicken cross the road?”
“Because it’s too far to walk around,” said Holger.
The giant’s curses exploded over him for minutes. He was quite content with that; his whole object was to stall for time, if possible for so long that the first sunrays would fall on his enemy. When the titan finally made a coherent protest, Holger had marshalled enough arguments about the meaning of the terms “question” and “answer” to keep them shouting at each other for half an hour. Bless that college course he’d taken in semantics! He killed ten minutes just reconstructing Bertrand Russell’s theory of types.
At last the giant shrugged. “Let it go,” he said ominously.
“There’ll be another night, my friend. Though I think not you will win over me this next time. Go to!”
Holger drew a breath. “What has four legs,” he asked, “yellow feathers, lives in a cage, sings and weighs eight hundred pounds?”
The ogre’s fist smote the ground so that rocks jumped. “You ask about some unheard-of chimera! That’s no riddle, that’s a question on natural philosophy.”
“If a riddle be a question resolvable by wit, then this is,” said Holger. He stole a glance eastward. Was the sky paling, ever so faintly?
The giant cuffed at him, missed, and fell to gnawing his mustache. Obviously the behemoth wasn’t very intelligent, Holger decided. Given years in which to mull over a problem, the slowest brain must come up with the answer; but what a human child would have seen in minutes this brute might need hours to solve. He certainly had powers of concentration, though. He sat with eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. The fire died low; he became another misshapen shadow.
Hugi tugged at Holger’s pants. “Forget not the gold,” he whispered avariciously.
“Nor the curse on ’t,” said Alianora. “For I fear if we win, ’twill no be by wholly honest means.”
Holger was too pragmatic to worry about that aspect. Doubtless only a saint could fight evil without being to some extent corrupted by his own deeds. Nevertheless, the giant had come as an unprovoked, cannibalistic aggressor. Hoodwinking him to save Alianora could not be a very heavy sin.
Even so... curses were not to be laughed off. Holger felt a chill in his guts. He didn’t know why, but an instinct muttered to him that victory over this foe might be as ruinous as defeat.
“Done!” The hideous face opened. “I’ve found your answer, knight. Two four-hundred-pound canaries!”
Holger sighed. He couldn’t expect to win every time. “Okay, Jumbo. Third riddle.”
The giant stopped rubbing his hands together. “Don’t call me Jumbo!”
“And why not?”
“Because my name is Balamorg. A fearsome name, which many a widow, many an orphan, many a village kicked to flinders, has good cause to know. Call me truly.”
“Oh, but you see, where I come from, Jumbo is a term of respect. For hark you—” Holger spun out an improbable story for ten or fifteen minutes. Balamorg interrupted him with a grated command: “The last riddle. Make haste, or I overfall you this instant.”
“Heigh-ho. As you wish. Tell me then: what is green, has wheels, and grows around the house?”
“Huh?” The ponderous jaw fell. Holger repeated. “What house?” asked the giant.
“Any house,” said Holger.
“Grows, did you say? I told you, questions about some fabulous tree on which wagons cluster like fruit are not true riddles.”
Holger sat down and began cleaning his, nails with his sword point. It occurred to him that Alfric’s magnesium knife might have the same effect as sunlight, when kindled. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The total energy output would probably be too small. Still, if he had to fight, he could try the Dagger of Burning. He could now make out his enemy’s features, though the fire was burned down to embers.
“The challenges I’ve given you are common among children in my homeland,” he said.
True enough. But Balamorg’s wounded ego led to several more minutes of huffing and puffing. At last, with an angry grunt, he went into his trance of concentration.
Holger sat very still. Alianora and Hugi lay like stones. Even Papillon grew motionless. But their eyes were turned eastward.
And the sky lightened.
After some fraction of eternity, the ogre smote the ground and looked at them. “I give up,” he snarled. “The sun pains me already. I must find shelter. What’s the answer?”
“Why should I tell you?” Holger rose.
“Because I say so!” The colossus got up too, crouched, lips drawn back from fangs. “Or I’ll stamp your wench flat!” Holger hefted his sword. “Very well,” he said. “Grass.” “What?”
“Grass is the answer.”
“But grass has no wheels!”
“Oh, I lied about the wheels,” said Holger.
Rage ripped from Balamorg in one thunderous bellow. He hurled himself against the knight. Holger skipped back, away from Alianora. Could he keep this monster berserk and witless for another five minutes, and stay alive himself, then— “Nyah, nyah, nyah, can’t catch me!” Balamorg’s paw snatched at him. He swung his sword with all his force and hewed off a fingertip. Then it was leap and duck, cut and wriggle, taunt to enrage and gasp to breathe.
Until the sun’s rim cleared the eastern darkness.
As the first beams touched him, Balamorg screamed. Holger had never heard such agony before. Even while he ran from the toppling mass, he was haunted by the horror of it. The giant hit the ground hard enough to shake boulders loose. He writhed and changed, gruesomely. Then he was silent. The sun fell on a long slab of granite, whose human shape was hardly recognizable but which was still wrapped in skins.
Holger fell to earth also, a roaring in his ears.
He recovered with his head on Alianora’s bosom. Her hair and her tears fell on his face like the new sunlight. Hugi capered around the great stone. “Gold, gold, gold!” he cackled. “Ever they giants carry a purseful o’ gold. Hurry, man, slit yon sack and make us wealthier nor kings!”
Holger climbed to his feet and approached. “I like this no,” said Alianora. “Yet if ye deem it best we take his riches—for sure ’tis we can use some pennies on our faring—then I’ll help carry the load, and ask the curse fall on me alone. Oh, my dear!”
Holger waved hugi aside and stooped by the wallet, a crude drawstring affair. Some coins had already spilled out. They gleamed under his gaze, miniature suns in their own right. Surely, he thought if he put some of this treasure to worthy use, such as building a chapel to good St. George, he could keep the rest unharmed.
What was that smell? Not the stink of the hides, but another, a faint skiff as of rainstorms, under this clear dawn sky... Ozone? Yes. But how come?
“God!” Holger exclaimed. He sprang up, snatched Alianora in his arms and bounded back toward camp. “Hugi! Get away from there! Get away from this whole place! Don’t touch a thing if you want to live!”
They were mounted and plunging down the western slope in minutes. Not till they had come miles did Holger feel safe enough to stop. And then he must fob off his companions’ demands for an explanation with some weak excuse about the saints vouchsafing him a vision of dire peril. Fortunately his stock stood too high with them for anyone to argue.
But how could he have gotten the truth across? He himself had no real grasp of atomic theory. He’d only learned in college about experiments in transmutation by such men as Rutherford and Lawrence, and about radium burns.
Those tales of a curse on the plunderer of a sun-stricken giant were absolutely correct. When carbon was changed to silicon, you were bound to get a radioactive isotope; and tons of material were involved.
13
AFTERNOON FOUND THEM still descending, but at a gentler pace and in milder air than before lunch. The woodland, oak and beech and scattered firs, revealed signs of man: stumps, second growth, underbrush grazed off, razorback shoats, at last a road of sorts twisting toward the village Alianora expected they could reach today. Exhausted by his encounter with Balamorg, Holger drowsed in the saddle. Birdsong lulled him so that hours went by before he noticed that that was the only noise.
They passed a farmstead. The thatched log house and sheep-folds bespoke a well-to-do owner. But no smoke rose; nothing stirred save a crow that hopped in the empty pens and jeered at them. Hugi pointed to the trail. “As I read the marks, he drave his flocks toonward some days agone,” said the dwarf. “Why?”
The sunlight that poured through leafy arches felt less warm to Holger than it had.
At evening they emerged in cleared land. Ripening grainfields stretched ahead, doubtless cultivated by the villagers. The sun had gone down behind the forest, which stood black to the west against a few lingering red gleams. Eastward over the mountains, the first stars blinked forth. There was just enough light for Holger to see a dustcloud a mile or so down the road. He clucked at Papillon and the stallion broke into a weary trot. Alianora, who had amused herself buzzing the bats that emerged with sunset, landed behind the man and resumed her own species. “No sense in alarming yon folk,” she said. “Whate’er’s their trouble, ’twill ha’ made them shy enough.”