The Ring of the Giants

Chapter Two-2

Biting his lip, Kalesh with trepidation approached the great rock outcropping that must have been the giant’s head. One side, along with the forward part that pushed sullenly out of the earth, was rough, with a texture that vaguely suggested great locks of hair. When he circled again to the other side, however, the light struck the stone at such an angle that despite the slow weathering from even the time before man, despite pocks and cracks, despite patches of lichens of different colors and textures, he saw the eroded remnants of a tremendous face. The thing was turned aside, its long-whiskered cheek sunk in the soil, but with the great lips ever so slightly parted—it was dark in that slim vertical fissure, as if an opening ran back, back, back, and that was an eerie thought. The rock nose had collapsed sometime long ago and lay in rubble, further softening and obscuring the outlines of the once-great thing. But the eyes! Those stony lids were closed forever, and yet something in the set of those softly curving surfaces spoke, after immense suffering and perhaps treachery such as mere man cannot imagine, final peace. This great creature, Kalesh knew all at once somehow, was not evil.

Feeling kinship with this long-dead giant more than he ever had with any of the tribe that scarcely tolerated him even at its edges, the boy dropped instinctively to his knees and pressed his forehead solemnly to the rugged grass. “I-I am sorry,” he said, hoping the spirit might hear him. It was a little thing, but so was he, and perhaps the giant could understand. He pitied this huge thing in its lonely death, and he felt bad to have disturbed its rest by bothering its great still hand. He would not have done so had he known, he swore. He would not.

Gradually he sat up. Then, blinking, he thought. Nodding firmly to himself, he dug a little hole in the earth before the firm stone lips, close and yet not too close to offend, he hoped, and then he gently placed in every one of the mushrooms he had spent all morning gathering, and he covered them up. He would be hungry tonight, and the next day, too, but he felt this offering was only right.

Kalesh pressed his forehead to the ground once more, and then, sighing, he rose to his feet. He felt bad for the old stone finger he had broken, and he thought before he left to pile the pieces back up at least, perhaps to help the great stone man sleep better. When he looked now, however, he saw that the curve of golden metal that first had caught his eye now stood free of the cracked and broken rock, hanging there supported only by the faint grip of the encroaching soil on the outer side. The thing had not been like that, he believed. He was certain of it. Perhaps the stone had crumbled that last bit of its own accord, he supposed a little uncertainly.

He approached, puzzled, and just then the gleaming circle began to tip, and he lunged quickly so it would not fall and sully itself in the raw earth. For a moment, outstretched and teetering, he bit his lip nervously. Yet at last, very slowly, and with some reluctance, he raised the thing before his eyes. Sun gleamed on the burnished surface as he turned it respectfully this way and that.

The object was a ring. That much Kalesh could tell now. The metal band, perhaps as thick as his little finger and yet as wide as his first two digits together, was of a substance unknown, harder than either copper or gold, somehow darker, too, and shimmering now and then with a faint blue gleam that sometimes he saw and sometimes did not. The thing was heavy, heavier than it looked like it should be. There was not a spot of tarnish, not a scuff or a scratch. But the outside was marked with clear, angular cuts, sometimes interlocking, that even the best-knapped chisel of man could not have produced—if stone ever could cut such a thing, as of course it could not.

Holding the ring of the giant in one hand, Kalesh dutifully scraped up the pieces of rock he had broken, pushing them as best he could back into the shape of the great finger he had rent. Really, he probably should place the ring back now, too, he told himself a little unwillingly. And yet… Strangely, it was a hard thing to do. That ancient circle of unfamiliar metal, wrought by the long-forgotten art of the giants and tempered in their magic was still so solid, so smooth, so wondrously gleaming. Ages in the sun and the wind and the rain at the top of this ridge had not touched it, nor the brutal snows of the Time of Great Ice either. Somehow, to put it back in the dirty ground seemed wrong.

Kalesh did not know what to do. In some way he could not have explained even if he tried, he felt a deep sympathy for this great slain giant of old, and a reverence of the adoring little brother. He was not sure what to do—but even if such a tiny nothing as Kalesh could not truly do honor to the mighty creature as it deserved, at least he wished to do it no disrespect. It was not just fear anymore that made him think this. No, the boy knew that this was only proper. He looked at the beautiful thing in one hand, and then, without quite meaning to, he glanced at his bare left arm, taut with work and brown with sun, scarred here and there from someone’s rawhide lash or a thorny branch some boys had wielded—a thing most homely and familiar. He blinked at a strange thought…

Kalesh hesitated, lips pursed, and yet suddenly, almost by itself or as if drawn by cords that could not be seen, his hand began to move. As Kalesh could only goggle at the sight, the hand traveled over, toward its empty companion that also had risen without thought, and then his wrist rotated, and his solemn fingers drew that golden ring around his surprised left hand, over his forearm, and onto the little space just above the elbow, before the swell of the muscle of the upper arm. With a grave finality his digits settled the band of metal there, the ring of the giant’s little finger now an armlet for a little man. The fit was perfect.

In slow wonderment he flexed his arm, turned his wrist back and forth, curled his fingers up and then straightened them one by one. It felt… right somehow. It was as if this thing had been made for him, a gift from one age to another across a gulf of immeasurable time. The armlet felt as natural as his own flesh. It was solid, oddly comforting, a thing of reassuring permanence. And yet it did not bind, did not pinch, no matter how he moved. It was there, almost a part of him now. In fact… this relic of the giants made him feel… different. Perhaps there was a magic not just to the making of it but to the being of it as well.

Kalesh licked his lips. How did this glowing band of giant-metal make him feel? he wondered. Really, he was not accustomed to thinking of things like this, things without easy words. Mostly, after all, things were good or they were bad, they were wet or they were dry, they were tall or they were short. But the wearing of the giant’s ring made him feel, well, big somehow. Certainly he had not grown any taller, yet neither could he stop the strange thought. He had always believed he was small, unworthy, both for what he was and for what one-eyed old Haramop sometimes made him do in the night. And small was how people treated him, too.

Now, however, the boy of no family, no friends, and no tribe felt as if he belonged to something far grander. Was it a people, a history, even an idea? He knew not. But he was different now. Open-mouthed, he looked around in a slowly dawning understanding that was not understanding—it was a feeling, a being, a sensing. He felt. He saw. He heard. He smelled.

Blood surged in his veins, and power, too, sure and steady as he had never known before. Strength pulsed quietly in the pillars of his legs, the thews of his arms, his lean-ribbed belly, and the hanging place below that made his c*m. How that hairy little bag twitched and clenched ever so faintly, eager for something, anything, and everything! Oh, if that w***e-faced Mara were here before him right now—

Why, he felt he could soil her from her stupid head that never looked at him to her dirty toes that squatted wide for sucking the c***s of every undeserving other man and boy, then back again, and every gleaming bare place between, soft and firm and smoothly rounded, still untouched even after all of the things her wickedly hungry mouth had done. Yes, and he would even soak the hairy place, too, the one that got all wet and slippery and fishy when she thought about the naughty things she did. Ah, for he surely had a pot-full of clingy gray goop brewing between his thighs if there was a drop! Mm, to splash that skinny, black-haired c*m-pig, to splatter and glop that slender pale body, making those dark eyes go wide in astonishment as she realized at last, while those soft red lips gulped and sputtered and gasped, that what he could do to her was the worth of what all the others did, and more… He shivered slightly at the thought.

Nostrils flaring, he looked around quickly for something upon which he could take out his frustrations. His dark eyes lit upon a great rock a little ways away, a thing not of giant-flesh but a natural stone, wider than the standing of his feet and perhaps as high as his knees. Kalesh strode quickly over, squatted, wrapped his splayed hands around the boulder, and lifted it as easily as just moments before he had hefted the hammering rock the size of his head. And then, with a mighty twisting motion he then flung the great thing up and away, and down into the roof of the forest below. Ah, how it went!

The stone spun, and as the huge stone rolled through the air, somehow he could see with astonishing clarity a depression in one side as it came and went again and again, and though it grew far away, he spied bits of soil and grass flying off piece by piece, strangely slow, and pebbles shaking loose from the soil, and even a worm whose wriggling was like that of a worm at only arm’s length. And as the stone at last began to crash down into the forest, it was slow even though it was fast, and he seemed to hear the too-distant slap of each leaf, the snap of each twig, the crack of each sundered limb as the thing dropped down, down, down, and then finally the great thud that was a sodden thunder which made the earth tremble and the little things upon it, and he heard them, too.

It was magic of a kind, realized Kalesh in awe, open-mouthed, his face shining with the marvel of the thing. Tales he had heard, vague stories of the Time of the Giants, things hard to truly imagine, and yet this— Why, here it was, something he could see and know. The giants had gone, but though they had died and turned to stone, their magic still was in the world! The black-haired boy breathed deep of the knowledge, his chest swelling with a strange, excited sort of calm. He was part of this wonder, he told himself a little dazedly, and it was part of him now. Surely he would never be the same again…