Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [52]
"Perhaps there is another trick to it, lad?" the boy's mother guessed. "Mayhap you missed some magic word that makes it sing?"
"No!" The boy pushed me from him so roughly that my strings shuddered and I felt a cruel tug in my chest. "I watched that great ogre careful as careful," he insisted. "'Play' is all he said, and point is all he did." Once more, he aimed his finger at me as if it were a musket. "Play!" he roared.
"Still, 'tis a lovely thing, my sweet," his mother said, study ing me as I sat, silent, where her son had placed me. "Tune or no tune, 'tis made of gold, I'll warrant. Mind how it shines and all." I sensed a timid ditty, the beginnings of a song, as she looked at me. But as she dared not command me, I fell back to sleep.
So they stood me next to the hen, then, and were pleased to have visitors praise their new harp, the very size and shape of a lovely girl. "The filthy monster placed a spell on that instrument," the young man would tell them whenever they asked if I might be played. He would pluck one of my strings, then let it fall back, soundless. "It may never be played by the pure of heart." That was enough, of course, to keep strangers from trying to coax a song from me, and the boy always boasted most of the hen, whose eggs he could be sure of calling forth. "Now look ye here, for a true wonder," he would say, lifting a glistening egg from under the uncomplaining pullet.
Though it was a lie and the giant had cast no spell to keep me his, it was the same as if he had. The lad and his mother no longer tried to play me, and, having no songs of my own, I remained silent. I sorely missed the times when my master's loneliness had pulled tunes from my throat. Alas, no one but me mourned his death at all. Until the villagers at last succeeded in heaping dirt over his great fallen body and constructing thereby a massive fortification outside the town's gate, my poor giant lay looking with unblinking eyes at an endless procession of curiosity seekers who traveled to see the slain monster. And, of course, to heap praise on "Jack, the Giant Killer," as they soon christened the boy.
Jack loved to meet a crowd of such travelers by the mountainous corpse and tell over and over how he had bested his fearsome enemy. "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum," he would howl, loud and gruff as the voice of Death in a Whitsunday pageant. "Those be the very words this hell-fiend screamed when he came after me." He would brandish an imaginary sword, swirling it in mad arcs around the giant's arm or leg. "But I was not afeared, you know. It required only a bit of derring-do to smash this clumsy oaf to kingdom come."
By the end of his tale, which grew and changed with every telling, young Jack had always made himself out the bravest, most courageous young man in all the world, one who richly deserved the coins and treasure he had pilfered from my master. And each time he recounted his glorious adventures, he was wont to bring folk home to gawk and make much of his hen and his golden harp. "Lest ye believe me not," he would tell them all, "here be the magic proof."
When the body of my old master was at last moldering under a vast hillock of earth and thatch, it was clear that the cocky young man who had killed him now had more time than he knew what to fill it with. There were no more travelers to listen to his tales of glory, and the prettiest of the village girls—the one on whom he had set his heart—grew tired of listening to her suitor talk about himself. (As he wooed her by the hearth, the hen and I were privy to most of their conversations and to her final announcement that she had decided to wed the mayor's son.) Suddenly, then, Jack remembered me.
"I shall