The Giant-Slayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

said. “Tell about a dragon. And a guy like Davy Crockett.”
    Laurie Valentine had made up stories all her life. She
lived
in stories that she narrated constantly in her head. But it was completely different to tell a story to people she didn’t know. “How would it start?” she asked, with an odd-sounding laugh.
    “Once upon a time,” said Dickie. “Like that.” He breathed with the machine. “Once upon a time. There was a man named Fingal.”
    “Why Fingal?” asked Laurie.
    “I dunno.” Dickie grinned wider than ever. “I like that name.”
    “Well, you’re right. There
was
a man named Fingal,” she said. “He kept an inn called the Dragon’s Tooth, at the foot of the Great North Road.”

    The inn was made of black timber and white plaster. It was two stories high, and the chimney at the top had a slab of stone set into it, as a resting place for any passing witch.
    There was a parlor with a big fireplace, seven rooms upstairs, and a stable around the back. Just to the south, the Great North Road split off from the High Road. It headed past the Dragon’s Tooth and into the wilderness, into a forest as thick as the hair on a dog’s back, as black as night even at noon. When the Great North Road curved to the right and went into that forest, it didn’t come out again for a hundred miles. Many of the people who went along it
never
came out again. So every traveler—no matter where he was heading—stopped at Fingal’s inn. He found others there, sitting in front of the fire, and the ones going north asked the ones going south for news about thieves and trolls. On their way in, and on their way out, the travelers touched the dragon’s tooth.

    “Why?” asked Dickie.
    “For luck,” said Laurie.
    “What did it look like?”
    “It was five feet long,” she said. “A bit bigger than me. It was like a thick saber, hung sideways from chains above the door, just inside the parlor. Where it curved down in the middle, it was worn to a shine by the fingers of the travelers.”
    “Like who?” asked Chip.
    “Oh, the woodsmen,” said Laurie. “And the wandering knights, and the ones who went searching for gold. And the unicorn hunters, and the minstrels, and the dragon slayers. The only ones who never stopped at the inn were the Gypsies and the gnome runners.
They
passed right by, up the Great North Road.”
    “Where did it go to?” asked Chip.
    “No one really knew,” she said. “It was a mystery.”
    “How come?”
    “Because no one ever returned from the end of it.”
    “That’s so dumb!” Carolyn Jewels was glaring at Laurie in her mirror. Her beautiful face seemed hard as marble. “If no one got to the end,” she asked, “how did anyone build it?”
    Laurie liked little puzzles like that. She smiled as an answer came right away. “That was a mystery too,” she said. “The road was so old that no one remembered who made it, or when. The people believed that it went up into the land of the giants, but nobody knew for sure.”
    “Who were the giants?” asked Dickie.
    “Well, one of them was called Collosso, and he was the worst of all. He was the tallest, and the meanest, and the cruelest. He ate babies for breakfast, tossing them into his mouth like peanuts.”
    “I like that.” Dickie grinned ghoulishly in the mirror. “Start over with the giant. Okay?”
    “Start over?” asked Laurie.
    “Yes, please. With Collosso.”

    Once upon a time, there was a giant named Collosso. He lived at the edge of the earth, in a castle made of white stone. He kept a thousand slaves to do his work, and a thousand more for dreadful entertainments.
    On most mornings Collosso went out of his castle with a basket on his arm. He strode across the land at a hundred feet for every step, filling his basket with food. He plucked sheep from the fields, and cows from the pastures; he took the farmers too, scooping them up as they ran for their lives. He chased them hunched over, his arms reaching out,