Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [50]
The giant never went to church, and I doubt that he was acquainted with the Bible or with Our Sweet Lord. But I think he knew something of beauty and of holy sorrow. For when I sang for him, his dreadful face became composed, his eyes closed, and he acquired the devoted, worshipful expression of the parishioners back home. He never needed to tell me which songs to play, for as a result of my enchantment, I knew without words what melody he wanted to hear.
The giant loved most the plaints of waifs and wanderers. Perhaps because he was an outcast himself, feared and scorned by the folk he terrorized, he wept each time I sang of loneliness. "Ay, ay," he would say, nodding his frightful head. "That is the way of the world, is it not? The sorry way of our sorry world." Then, a tear as big as a pillow on his mighty cheek, he would close his eyes and soon be snoring.
You may be surprised when I tell you my life with the giant was not a bad one. It is true I could not move or speak, except to sing, and that at someone else's bidding. Yet though my songs were not my own, the way they sounded first in my chest and then in my master's heart made them almost like hymns. It was as if I had been born to bring this savage creature peace, to soothe that massive furrowed brow, and to put all to sleep in that perilous place, where our castle clung to the rocky cliffs above a patchwork of little towns.
In between songs, I suffered not at all, feeling neither hunger
nor thirst. Sometimes I watched the giant's wife mend her husband's endless leggings or listened to the pair chat over their supper. But most days I slept away the time, waking only to sing and then slip back into dreams of dancing and talking and running just as I had before my enchantment. Some wise men say our time on earth is but a dream; if so, my life had changed little. I woke from sleep to serenade my master, to settle his heart and his house, then slipped back into the past, where I could still speak my mind and my own two feet still took me where I wished to go.
I cannot say exactly when the boy first came to us, when he sneaked in to change the regular rhythm of our days. I know only that even after we discovered he had stolen some of the giant's gold, no one was much disturbed. The giant's wife blamed herself. The young man had looked so lean and meatless, she explained: no good for one of her husband's hearty stews, no good for much except fattening up. So she had fed him and hidden him, hoping to surprise the old man with a treat one day. But the boy had betrayed her kindness and run off before he could be cooked, run off with a bag of yellow coins.
"Do not trouble yourself, Wife," the giant told her. "The littie gnat took nothing of value, nothing I cannot get back twofold from his village below."
And it was true. So long as the hen was untouched and I played for him each night, the giant was content and life went on as it had before the stealthy boy's visit. The great man would stumble home each afternoon with more gold, more jewels and trinkets. His wife and he would place them in bags in a store-room, where they remained untouched. There was, after all, nothing for them to spend the coins on; the giant had long ago frightened away all the merchants and tradesmen in his domain. On rare evenings he would ask for a bag and run his fingers through the shining coins, but the pleasure he got from that was nothing beside the way his spirits lifted when the hen ruffled and squawked and lay, like a miracle, a perfect golden egg.
But when the boy stole the hen, everything changed. The giant's wife must have guessed how angry her mate would be, for at first she lied. She told him the hen had wandered away and must have fallen off the cliff beyond the castle walls. But her husband, whose large nose was more sensitive than ten smaller ones put together, knew the boy had returned. "I smell him," he bellowed. "I smell that pesky troublemaker. Where be he, wife?" He began to stomp around the rooms