The Story Giant Read online

  “‘It was a story about a lion whispering advice into a man’s ear,” said the older man.’

  ‘One of the tribes must have got the story from somewhere else,’ said Hasan.

  ‘But how?’ asked the Giant. ‘Neither of the tribes had ever travelled. They were separated by thousands and thousands of miles, by mountains and oceans and deserts. Both countries were land-locked, and both said their story was old even before the invention of boats, let alone more modern forms of transport.’

  ‘Then how did they know the same story?’ persisted Hasan.

  ‘I believe the story was old before either tribe existed,’ said the Giant, ‘and that the explorers had simply been talking to different branches of the same tribe.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Humankind.’

  ‘Neat,’ said Betts. She had been standing in a corner, propped up against a bookcase, listening with one ear while flicking through a book. ‘Is that the point of your story, then?’ she asked. ‘That we are all different branches of the same tribe?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s ever just one point or meaning to any story,’ said the Giant. ‘Just as there is no right way or wrong way to interpret them.’

  Hasan felt irritated with Betts for interrupting what he thought was his own private conversation with the Giant: after all, he had been in the library first. ‘I’ve got a story as well,’ he said.

  ‘Then by all means tell it,’ said the Giant.

  Hasan hesitated. ‘But what if it’s not the one you are looking for? Will I be sent away from here?

  ‘Of course not,’ said the Giant.

  Still Hasan hesitated. He enjoyed being the centre of attention, but was uncomfortable in such an informal atmosphere among a group of strangers. He was the son of a strict and powerful man, used to doing exactly what was expected of him, and what was expected of him was being in bed asleep, not sharing other people’s dreams. He suddenly noticed he wasn’t even wearing his pyjamas any longer, but was in his day clothes. It was all rather muddling. He was afraid of being rejected by these people, even if they were only dream people. For a year now he had lived with this fear of rejection, of being spurned and left alone. Ever since … but he could not bear to think about the tragedy that had befallen him. He knew he would burst out crying if he did. And showing his emotions was another thing Hasan found difficult.

  ‘But if I did have to leave here, what would happen?’ he persisted.

  ‘You would simply wake up in your own bed and remember us all only as the dream we are,’ said the Giant. ‘No harm would come to you.’

  This reassured Hasan. ‘I’m only telling my story because it’s funny,’ he said, feeling he was regaining control of his strange situation. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  And so he told his story.

  THE MAN WHO KILLED TWO THIEVES WITH A CHICKEN

  A FARMER OVERHEARD TWO NOTORIOUS THIEVES PLOTTING to rob him that very afternoon. Having nothing to rely on but his wits, he quickly rushed home and said to his wife, ‘We’re about to be robbed. Cook a meal of lamb and apricots, but don’t let anyone see you prepare it. As soon as you’re done, hide it away. When the thieves I’m expecting arrive, tell them I’m out in the fields with something precious. The moment they set off to find me lay the dinner on the table with two extra places.’

  After giving his wife these strange instructions the farmer took one of the two chickens he kept in a cage in the yard, tied it up in a bag, and rushed off into his fields. Sure enough, the thieves turned up a while later and his wife, who by then had cooked and hidden the meal, sent them off after him.

  When the farmer saw the thieves approaching he didn’t give them a moment to think. ‘Well timed!’ he called. ‘I was just about to stop work and have a meal. I must send a messenger to my wife to tell her you’ll be joining us.’

  ‘What messenger?’ asked the puzzled thieves, looking about them. ‘You’re quite alone here.’

  ‘Alone? I’m most certainly not alone,’ said the farmer. ‘I have this magic chicken with me.’ He pulled the chicken from the bag, held it to the ground by its neck, and instructed it: ‘Go and tell my wife to prepare a meal of lamb and apricots for our honoured guests.’

  The moment he let the frightened chicken go it scrambled off, and with a great clucking and flapping of wings vanished over a hedgerow.

  The thieves thought the farmer quite mad, but when he led them back to the farmhouse they were astonished. There was the meal, exactly like the one he had ordered, waiting for them.

  The thieves were burning with curiosity about the chicken and after the meal they asked to see it.

  ‘I’ll fetch it right away,’ said the farmer. A few moments later he returned with his second chicken, which to the thieves looked pretty much like the first one.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s wonderful having such a fine chicken?’ he asked, dangling it enticingly before their eyes. ‘Why, sometimes it even lays golden eggs.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of it being stolen?’ asked the thieves.

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ said the farmer. ‘Anyone who tried to steal this magic chicken would drop down dead immediately.’

  ‘Then how much do you want for it?’ they asked.

  ‘You can have this one as a gift,’ said the farmer, handing it across to them. ‘I’m sure I can find another sooner or later.’

  The thieves couldn’t believe what a fool the man was. They thanked him and took the chicken off with them, convinced it was worth a fortune. On their way back to town the thieves started to mistrust one another, each man wanting to have the chicken to himself.

  ‘I’ll hold it.’

  ‘No, I’ll hold it.’

  ‘Give it me.’

  ‘It’s mine.’

  And so on.

  They grew furious, drew knives and began fighting.

  Soon one of the thieves lay dead, stabbed through the neck, and the other lay groaning on the earth, badly wounded. ‘Go and tell the people in my village I’m dying and need help,’ croaked the surviving thief, taking the chicken from the bag and releasing it. The bird went scurrying off in a panic.

  The mortally-wounded thief waited for the chicken to return with help, but of course it never came back, and all the time blood was running from his wound like water from a tap. Before long he, too, died.

  And that’s how the farmer killed two thieves with a chicken.

  When he finished the story Hasan grinned at the others. ‘Imagine! Killing two thieves with a chicken.’

  Maybe it was the way he told his story, but no one else seemed to think it was quite as funny as he did, and when Betts jumped in and began discussing what, if anything, it meant, Hasan told her she was being ridiculous. But Betts was keen to find a meaning, if only to impress the Story Giant. ‘It’s about how greed can blind you,’ she said. ‘It’s about how it can make you do stupid things. Can you think of anything more silly than the idea of an intelligent chicken? What do you think, Liam?’

  Liam could think of a lot of things sillier than a chicken – half the population of the world, for example. But he simply shrugged and nodded in agreement. If anyone other than Betts had asked him, he would have said he couldn’t care less, but he liked the way Betts looked.

  ‘See, Liam agrees with me,’ said Betts.

  But Hasan was insulted that his story had not gone down as well as he’d hoped, and soon a squabble had broken out between him and Betts.

  Liam watched them, saying nothing. Dressed in black jeans and a white T-shirt over which she wore a bottle-green jacket Betts was exactly how he imagined Americans should look. But perhaps she wasn’t so cool after all, he thought. He couldn’t see the point in her arguing with Hasan, who was so much younger than her.

  The Giant couldn’t see the point of them arguing either. ‘Stop standing on each other’s tongues,’ he admonished. ‘That’s the way wars begin.’

  HOW WARS BEGIN

  THREE CHILDREN F
ROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES FOUND SOME money outside a shop and decided to go in and buy something.

  The first boy was Greek. He said, ‘I’d like some zacharota.’

  The second boy was from Italy. He said they should all buy something he called dolci with the money. The third boy who was from France insisted they had bonbons.

  Within minutes they’d started to fight. From being the best of friends they’d suddenly become the bitterest of enemies. They were squabbling and pushing one another all over the shop and arguing about what to spend the money on.

  When the shopkeeper finally separated them he put a bag of sweets on the counter and said, ‘Next time, before you start fighting, I suggest you find out what it is you are fighting over first.’

  ‘Is that it? asked Hasan. ‘The whole story? I don’t understand it.’ ‘They all wanted the same thing,’ said the Giant. ‘They were all asking for sweets in their own language, but they didn’t know it. Most stories are to do with conflicts of one kind or another,’ he explained. ‘Whether it’s a conflict between armies or children in a sweetshop, or even between our own emotions. It is often what makes us want to read and hear stories – we’re all keen to know the outcome of whatever the conflict is. I’ll tell another story,’ said the Giant, ‘this time about a different kind of conflict.’

  THE LITTLE MONSTER THAT GREW AND GREW

  A SOLDIER RETURNING HOME ALONE FROM A GREAT BATTLE found a monster blocking his path. It wasn’t much of a monster. In fact it was quite pathetic. It was small, its claws were blunt, and most of its teeth were missing. The soldier had won all the battles he had ever been in and was considered something of a hero.

  He decided he would deal with the rather feeble-looking monster there and then.

  He had run out of bullets, so using his rifle as a club he brought the creature to the ground with a single blow. Then he stepped over it and continued along the path. Within minutes the monster was in front of him again, only now it looked slightly larger and its teeth and claws were a bit sharper.

  Once again he hit the monster, but this time it took several blows to bring it down. Again he stepped over it, and again, a few minutes later, the monster appeared before him, bigger than ever.

  The third time, no matter how much he hit the monster it would not go down. It grew larger and more ferocious with each blow the soldier aimed at it. Defeated, the soldier fled back down the path, with the monster chasing after him. Yet by the time it arrived at the spot where he’d first seen it, the monster had returned to its original size.

  When another traveller appeared on the path the soldier stopped him and warned him of what had happened.

  ‘Maybe we can fight it together,’ he suggested, ‘then we will overcome it.’

  ‘Let’s just leave the feeble little thing where it is,’ said the traveller. ‘If you pick a quarrel with something unpleasant when you don’t really have to, then it simply grows more unpleasant. Let’s just leave it alone.’

  And so they did. They walked around the toothless little monster and continued unhindered along the path.

  ‘Well, I guess even Hasan would agree there’s a meaning in that story,’ said Betts. ‘The soldier became obsessed with the little monster, who stands for our worries, but if he’d not tried to fight it, it wouldn’t have grown, and he wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place.’

  So far the Indian girl, Rani, had said nothing. She’d enjoyed being in the Castle and in the Giant’s presence so much that she’d hardly given the other children a moment’s thought. With its windows looking out onto the rainy moorland and its hundreds of polished shelves and countless books, the library was the most wonderful room she’d ever been inside.

  When she did begin watching the older children, the first thing she noticed was how much richer they seemed in comparison to herself. Liam was stocky and strong; Hasan verged on being fat and Betts, for all her slimness, glowed with health. Although Liam and Betts would have disagreed, she imagined them as all coming from fabulously wealthy homes.

  How different their worlds must be to hers!

  She wondered if they could imagine the terrible stream of life that flowed daily through her home city – the small boy without hands who clip-clopped along the broken pavements with blocks of wood tied to his arms and who sounded for all the world like a horse, or the skeletal old rickshaw drivers, almost too weak to work, who slept day-long under the dusty trees. And there were those who were even worse off, men who could easily be mistaken for bundles of rags, men whom even the beggars scorned.

  Rani’s parents worked as servants, but although she owned little more than the clothes she stood in, she’d had more education than most children of her caste, and the thing she was most proud of was her reading. Not even her parents could manage as well as she. Her favourite reading by far was a simplified version of a book called the Panchatantra. She was determined to tell one of the stories from it.

  She turned from the window she had been gazing out of, and taking a deep breath, faced into the room and said, ‘I too can tell a story.’

  Hasan, Liam and Betts were so surprised to hear her speak that their conversations froze in mid-sentence.

  Encouraged by the way the Giant smiled at her, Rani hurried across the library and, smoothing down her dress, dropped down beside the fire at his feet.

  ‘Yes, I can tell one. It is from our very famous book, the Panchatantra.’

  ‘The what?’ Betts looked down at the young Indian girl, amused by her enthusiasm.

  ‘The Panchatantra. It is one of the great, great books of Indian literature. It is our masterpiece,’ Rani said with pride.

  With her delicate hand she beckoned the other children to sit beside her, for that’s how stories were told, she knew, sitting and sharing in a circle.

  ‘It contains the best stories in the world,’ she said when they’d joined her.

  ‘What about our stories?’ asked Hasan. ‘Aren’t ours as good?’

  ‘Tell us, Rani,’ said the Giant. ‘And Hasan, hush.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rani, ‘in the last story, the soldier is returning home from a war, but in mine a poor man is wondering what the point of wars might be.’

  THE TRAMP AND THE OUTCOME OF WAR

  A TRAMP HAD BEEN WANDERING LOST FOR WEEKS THROUGH a strange country that had been devastated by war. The war had been over for many years, but it had been so terrible that neither the land nor the population had recovered. Crops had been burned, once-fresh streams had been polluted, and the poor people had fled their homes taking everything they could carry with them. There was nothing for the tramp to eat or drink except the grubs he found under stones and the dew he licked from the grass at dawn. He was going mad with thirst and hunger and knew he would soon die unless he found food.

  He had no idea why there had been a war. It was something he brooded over simply to help keep his mind off hunger. Every time his stomach rumbled, every time his lips cracked, he tried to think instead about the reason behind the war.

  Wandering beside a small wood one day he heard a noise that disturbed him. Frightened, he crouched in the tangled roots of a giant oak tree and listened. Thump-a-rump-rump, thump-a-rump-rump.

  The sound was repeated over and over again, and seemed to be coming from the far side of the wood.

  The tramp edged his way slowly and carefully through the wood to investigate the noise. He was amazed at what he found on the other side.

  The sound was being made by the seed heads of poppies being blown against the skin of an old war-drum. He had discovered the very place where the last of the country’s great battles had been fought. And on this battlefield, among the worm-eaten butts of rifles and the skeletons of soldiers, was a wonderful sight.

  There were apple trees and plum trees, pear trees and cherry trees, wild asparagus, and all manner of strange fruit and vegetables.

  When the two armies had fallen, the fruit and other foods they’d carried with them into war had rotted i
nto the earth. The soil had been nourished by the decomposing bodies of the dead, and in time an orchard had sprung up among the ragged skeletons.

  The tramp sat on the old war-drum and began eating a delicious plum.

  ‘I may never discover the reason for the war,’ he thought to himself, ‘but the outcome is obvious. The end result of all this carnage and misery has been to feed a single tramp.’

  The Giant was delighted that Rani, the most timid of the children, had suddenly blossomed. He knew the story already – it would have been too much to hope that his unknown tale could turn up so quickly.

  He remembered back to when he’d first heard it, when the world had seemed almost new to him. He’d lived elsewhere then. In Kashmir, in a remote region of snow-capped mountains near a tribe that – because in those days he had not been so expert at concealing himself – had spotted him from time to time. They’d called him the Yeti, and thought him still there.

  He had heard a very different version of the story back in those days. He tried to remember exactly how long ago it had been, alarmed at how moth-eaten his memory was becoming.

  Had it been two – or even three thousand years ago? Whichever, the story had existed before then, even before written language as the world now knew it had been invented. His second memory of the story was seeing a Himalayan priest copying it down from a local tribesman. And how long ago had that been? Two or three hundred years before the birth of Christ? About that. Copying it had been a laborious task for the priest. The poor peasant had had a stutter.

  And had it been only eleven centuries ago that he himself had passed the story on to a travelling scholar, some of whose texts still existed in Islamic museums to this day? The man had written in Sanskrit, an ancient language the Giant loved. And now here was the same story again, tripping lightly off a child’s tongue, mangled, simplified, but recognizable all the same.