Fresh Short Story: Giant of the Black Forest (2)
I know that you must be very worried for poor Nell, all alone in the darkest forest with horrendous beasts — but you mustn’t be too concerned, for something wonderful is about to happen.
Though he had never seen one, to the giant’s eyes she looked like a tiny porcelain doll, with real fabric ruffles and soft, silky hair. At first, he was too frightened of breaking her to touch her.
For her part, Nell had been frightened out of her wits when the giant came tromping through the woods, peered down at her through a cloud of bristles and mustache dappled with brambles and coniferous needles and sap and branches, and slammed onto his backside. Nell could not run, as she had taken herself to one of those tight-knit clearings. She sat huddled in a shaking ball until the proportion of discomfort to fear reversed.
She peeped up at him, and there the gargantuan man-thing sat, still staring. Nothing much to lose, Nell thought, and waved.
The giant did not wave back. He had never been among civilized persons. His form was humanoid, but he was the only him he’d ever known, and he did not conduct greetings and farewells among himself. Her movement was as meaningless to him as the twitching of a cat's tail to someone unfamiliar with felines. He was thinking, in his own gianty way -- all images and feelings -- that here was one of the prettiest creatures in the forest, even prettier than the little spotted fawns that the great owls loved to eat, or the blood-red birds that sing of love and their own virtues.
The giant ruled this place, and all that happened was his will. That is why no beast had harmed Nell: the creatures of the black forest bent even to his future sentiments. He was a being above and apart from the rules of human life. If Eden had become twisted and grim, overrun by vipers and the worst of beasts, the black forest is how it would have been.
The giant very much wanted to keep Nell for a pet, so he stomped away -- BOOM, BOOM, BOOM -- and before Nell could make up her mind to run, returned carrying an acorn cap the size of Nell's head. He set it on the ground before her, and she saw that it was filled with water.
Recognizing the gesture of goodwill, Nell eagerly sipped from the cap to cool her parched throat. She peered up at the giant, whose face was entirely hidden by his bristly beard when he stood up straight -- that was how tall he was.
"Are we friends?" asked Nell in her daydreamer's way, but the giant only heard a very soft chittering, such as might be emitted by little beetles that pause in their scurrying to say hello. He put his hand on the ground, palm up, and gathering all her remaining courage, Nell walked onto it. She gripped the thumb for support. Then up, up, up!
Imagine yourself standing on a dirt-lined hand wider than an elephant as it whisked through the air past brambles, briars, coal-black branches, giant hawks' nests, and other things only glimpsed in nightmares.
Well, and now she was at the top. I must confess to you that the giant wore no clothes, so there was no pocket to put her in. Instead, he set her on his own massive head, where she clung for dear life to his thick hair. But it was some comfort that at last she could see the sun through the remaining foliage above.
The giant wanted to show his new pet his domain. Nell found herself transported through a dreary wonderland of sights, with regular pauses in areas that the giant particularly liked.
He set her in a field of moongrasses, which is a pale white grass that has only the slightest hint of green, and glows like pearls under the full moon. When she walked through it, albino grasshoppers as big as her hand went soaring over her, their wings whirring like clocks.
He introduced her to a friend of his, a four-antlered creature with obsidian eyes and acuate hooves. It puffed breath that felt like a strong gust passed over a roaring fire. She wanted to ride it, but such wild beasts are not for the frivolous riding. And she learned later that it lived entirely on dark purple weeds that were poison to almost anything that ate them.
He showed her where to watch the huge stag beetles fight, on rotting logs bigger than houses. Their shells gleamed like polished armor while they tore at one another in a gristly battle for dominance.
The giant commissioned her a little boat of leaves and spider silk. She rode it down the stream whenever she liked, and he ran alongside her to ensure that she never got lost. Once she leaned too far on the side and tumbled into the water, but when the panicked giant fished her out and saw her soaked hair and dress sticking to her body, he made a roaring sound that Nell recognized as laughter. Nell looked down at herself, then began to laugh as well, and she realized for the first time since her entrance into the forest that she could not be happier.
She never tried to go home. She told one of the blood-red birds, whom she taught to speak as well as any parrot, to inform her family that she was well. It told a crow, and the crow told the village -- and that was that.
She learned to appreciate the violence of the forest. She accepted the wolverines who tore the throats from red squirrels, the incarnadine entrails panthers left to mark their territories, and the morbid piles of bones collected by striped tapirs. She learned to gracefully evade the briars and set traps for fish to cook. She devised a series of signs for communication with the giant.
Nell may as well have been the queen of the forest. Every creature obeyed her. None ever harmed her. She could command a python to abandon its prey, and the fortunate shrew would become a friend who brought edible berries as tribute. The giant and herself were inseparable.
But when she grew old, the giant felt less attached, for she was not as lovely and bright as she had been. It left her one day and did not return, which made tears roll down her wrinkled cheeks. Then the four-antlered elk took pity on her. It became her mount and carried her through the moongrass -- into which her white hair now blended with eerie beauty -- to a cliff made of onyx, and together they leapt into a dark pool that had no bottom.
They drowned in peace. The tapirs asked the fishes to bring their remains so they could make a display of her bones and its antlers and hooves; but they got it all wrong, with antlers seeming to grow out of her eye sockets, and foot bones mixed up where the stomach would be. This became a wonder of the black forest.