Together Under the Wing

On the day the Giant King ate his greatest rival, her son came home with blood on his tusk-blades from the war she’d begged him not to fight. 

The matriarch Grass-Whisper had lived in a grove in the hills, now stomped flat by vast human-like footprints. Her carved tusks lay in cracked-off chunks; they and the blood were all that remained—that, and the huge flint used to skin her before eating. A flint five times the size of the quartz blades bound to his tusks.

As Grass-Whisper’s son took in the tragedy and the horror of the scene, a small and secret part of him felt eager for a battle that wouldn’t wrack him with regret.

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Recognizing that inspired further guilt, because if—when—he killed the Giant King, his purpose should be pure, unselfish vengeance. 

His mother had called him Sweet-Onion as a boy. For ten far-ranging winters, peoples of many kinds had known him—feared him—as Walks-like-a-Rockslide.

One shuffling, weary step at a time, he crossed the ruined grove where the Giant King had skinned and eaten the matriarch. Walks-like-a-Rockslide touched the pieces with the tip of his trunk, seeking the comfort and connection of his people’s bone-ritual, and felt hollow. There wasn’t nearly enough left. He’d felt the real thing a few precious times, when encountering other mammoths’ bones on his travels, or as a boy under Grass-Whisper’s care. Touch the bones, caress them, and know the lost one: the bone-ritual of the Blue Ochre People. He could have used such comfort now. 

Probably for the best, though. Comfort, like guilt, would blunt his purpose. 
A distant, muted, colossal thud tore his eyes from the sight. Raised in these hills and plains, he knew the sound of a great giant walking.

There in the misty hills: tall and lean, human-shaped, wearing a single massive pelt around its hips: a pelt painted blue. The Giant King, greatest of his kind, commanded magic as terrible as Grass-Whisper ever had in her wilder days. Perhaps, by skinning her, he’d stolen her power and doubled his own. He massed five times as much as Walks-like-a-Rockslide, and carried an oak-trunk club that could shatter a mammoth’s bones. His great hands still dripped with blood.

Walks-like-a-Rockslide came up on his back legs, trunk high, and trumpeted fury. Grief. Guilt. An oath of vengeance without compromise or mercy.

The Giant King strode into the cloud-veiled crags and never looked back. He had, no doubt, heard all this before.

* * *

Rest was betrayal, but Walks-like-a-Rockslide learned that mourning drained his blood like human spears. Moody clouds hid the comfort and wisdom of the stars, and the chase had ranged beyond familiar hills: he was lost. His only guidance came from the giant’s slow, heavy footfalls, and even those had stopped for the night. 

Each step was a conscious effort. Press on in the dark, and he might kill the giant in his sleep—or break his leg in a ravine and lose his chance. Better to sleep just a little, guilt or no guilt, and be stronger for it in the morning.

The giant had walked between hills or simply strode over them. The next time Walks-like-a-Rockslide found a footprint, the giant’s weight had squished soil up on all sides to reveal bedrock. A cold bed, but the hummocks of earth at the edge of the footprint would cut the breeze. Walks-like-a-Rockslide curled up in the footprint, trusting his pelt to keep him from freezing. He’d rested in worse places. 

Perhaps he slept, perhaps he didn’t; the clouded stars offered no sense of how much time had passed when the humans attacked.

The ambush took a familiar shape: a net of ropes they’d made or stolen from the Blue Ochre People. Mother had made ropes like that, even the cords that bound the great quartz blades to Walks-like-a-Rockslide’s tusks. Startlement turned to fury as he smelled ochre, blood, and mammoth-hair. 

These weren’t the friendly traders and villagers of the Longwalkers, the Great Antler Hills, the Barde Coast. Nor were they his great enemies, the proud riders of the plains, who’d never try such a cowardly ambush. These were hill-bandits, scavengers in the wakes of giants.

He lurched to his feet. The net tugged and groaned: they’d lashed it to, what, the bases of the nearest scraggly trees? A nuisance, but then again, the point of the net was just to foul him up for the real attack.

He needed to move off this spot. Immediately.

A swipe of his stone-bladed tusks ripped at the net. Trees ripped from the earth, and anchor-ropes snapped like whips. As he hauled himself out of the giant’s footprint, stone grated on stone, then escalated to a rumbling clatter. They’d triggered a rockslide, and he was moving straight toward it. Charging, even. They’d outsmarted him.

Too late to turn and run, and knowing that the front of the rockslide would shatter his legs if he set his stance, he reared up roaring against the tide of rocks and dust. His timing needed to be exact, but he knew his body, knew ambushes like this. 

As rocks surged under him, he came down in front and kicked up in back. The last tumbling debris crashed against his planted front legs, and boulders scraped and punished his back legs, which he couldn’t get up high enough. But the rockslide ebbed, the worst of it passed, and the rest bounced painfully, but harmlessly, off his shins. He strode through, shaking off the net and the settling dust with contempt.

And speaking of things that deserved contempt—

Here they came, ragged hill-bandits, charging into the dust-cloud with spears high. The first steps of their practiced ambush had failed, and they didn’t know it yet. Walks-like-a-Rockslide felt a certain grim amusement at that, but mostly fury at the delay. A deep thud carried through the ground: somewhere, the Giant King had started walking again.

Thrown spears tangled in his fur, barely pinpricks. Others hissed past his notched ears as he turned to face the charge. One throw struck his forehead squarely: the flint spearhead crunched and fractured against the dense bone, and a hot rivulet of blood fountained down the base of his trunk. He set his stance, got his traction, and charged.
 

Perhaps in the dark they hadn’t seen the well-used stone blade bound to each of his tusks. Their trap would have worked against most of the Blue Ochre People, but not a seasoned warrior. At the proper moment, he wrenched his head just right, wiping his right tusk-blade across their charge at the height of a human’s waist. Too high to leap above, too low to duck beneath. 

Battle had blunted the quartz, but anger and will had edges all their own. The long quartz blade ripped messily through two bandits and threw their ruin into their comrades. Humans fell in a tangle of flimsy limbs, too broken to shriek. Rather than ease their deaths, Walks-like-a-Rockslide whirled toward another group of spearmen. Arrows were coming down from the hills now, for all the good it would do them.

Bone crunched as he curled his scarred trunk around the legs of a warrior and hoisted him off the ground. The man—the club, now—screamed. Briefly.

Spears jabbed at Walks-like-a-Rockslide’s flanks and hindquarters. He left off pounding bandits into the earth and flung his messy club sidelong to clear an archer off a ledge. As he turned, the remaining men drew back. Too many had spent their weapons on his thick fur, which was matted with stone dust, blue ochre, and many kinds of blood. 

Distant, hard to feel in the earth, the giant’s footsteps moved farther away. Walks-like-a-Rockslide trumpeted out his frustration and broke from the wreck of the ambush. 
 

A spear sank home, cold and deep enough to rock him back from his course. It took him far too long to realize that the spear was in his left eye. The darkness had just seemed too natural on this gloomy night. There was pain, but he was used to pain: the wrongness of it, the intrusion, was what shocked him. He tossed his head in confusion and the spear wobbled in agonizing ways.

As more spears jabbed at his legs, he fought back panic and gripped the spear with his trunk, right where it entered his face. He steeled himself and ripped it out. It came free as if he’d torn out some unnatural growth, slick with blood and the fluid of an eyeball. 
 

He shifted his grip to the sensitive, delicate end of his trunk and threw that spear back the way it came.

Though humans and their clever little hands could always outmatch Blue Ochre People for dexterity, he’d thrown a spear any number of times, clumsily but with enthusiasm. Losing his eye baffled his sense of distance and wrecked his aim. The spear slashed past its owner into the dark; the flailing butt-end of it cracked uselessly against the human’s arm. Walks-like-a-Rockslide shuffled that way and ripped off the arm in question with a swipe of his tusk-blades. 

As the bandit fell to his knees, Walks-like-a-Rockslide heaved himself up, then down, crushing the human into the gritty soil. Little bones crackled like pine-boughs in a fire.
 

When he whirled, the rest were running. His breath shuddered deep in his chest. The blood he’d taken seemed much less than the blood he’d lost. He ripped a spear from his shoulder with a wince. Other spears and arrows were still tangled in his fur, pricking at his thick skin, but he could handle those as he climbed deeper into the hills. The Giant King was farther away than ever.

The lost eye had been a fitting punishment for rest.

* * *

The Giant King’s bed was a lifeless valley among peaks marked by handprints and trophies. Grass-Whisper’s pelt hung from a pinnacle that Walks-like-a-Rockslide could never hope to climb. 

Cold wind spiked through the place where his left eye had been. His outer wounds, at least, were numb by now.

The giant sat on a hill at the end of the valley, naked except for old blood, picking his teeth with a mammoth-rib. His deadly tree-trunk club rested across his knees. That club had been a matriarch oak in life, another rival. Another desecration.

He looked as tired as Walks-like-a-Rockslide felt. Grass-Whisper would not have died easily.

"Have you not lost enough, Sweet-Onion?" said the Giant King in human speech, in a voice whose echoes shivered snow off the peaks. "Your mother, and now your eye?"

How the giant knew that name unsettled Walks-like-a-Rockslide. No answer came to mind, or rather no reason to answer, and this place did not deserve the ancient mix of sound, dance, scent, and deep ground-rumble that made up Blue Ochre speech. Walks-like-a-Rockslide picked his way down a mountain pass that was a path. Years of traffic—from giants, and other peoples in better days—had ground the trail flat and smooth, but losing his eye threw off his sense of the slope. One stumble here, and he’d slide all the way down. 

The Giant King heaved himself up off his seat, a hill piled high with boulders to form a crude throne. His knuckles popped as he raised the club in warning. Grass-Whisper’s joints had sounded like that in later years, when Walks-like-a-Rockslide had deigned to visit between wanderings. The Giant King was old too, and worn down by a life of massive effort. Slow, perhaps. Though Walks-like-a-Rockslide had never fought a giant this size, he knew how humans fought mammoths. He’d need to think like a small creature challenging—harassing—a large one.

The valley, the giant’s bed, offered some room to maneuver. The whole place was bare rock or smears of dirt. Nothing could grow here without being scraped away as the giant rolled in his sleep. With the club, the giant could reach the whole breadth of the valley if he crouched. 

But although Walks-like-a-Rockslide knew he should be planning, coming at this problem differently and carefully, purpose was an avalanche in his chest. He found himself staring not at the Giant King or the oaken club, but the blue-ochre-painted mammoth-pelt hanging on one of the peaks at the valley’s rim.

He listened for her voice, some sense that her spirit was with him, some echo of the connection he’d felt when she’d led him to touch the bones of the dead—and nothing whispered. Nothing comforted him, and that was as it should be.

He charged. Half as fast as a galloping horse but twice as fast as a human sprinting, he thundered down the valley’s centerline. The Giant King set his stance and, at just the right time—like a mammoth meeting a charging human or shell-lion—swung that club in a hissing arc.

Stopping or turning aside weren’t options, not charging on smooth rock. Instead, Walks-like-a-Rockslide sank down low and skidded. 

Heat bit into his front and back knees and the front of his feet; he smelled burning hair as chunks of his pelt tore away. The club’s gnarled end, what had been the oak-matriarch’s crown, ripped gouges in his back but didn’t solidly connect. 

Walks-like-a-Rockslide came up off his knees and threw his head high. The dull quartz tusk-blades ripped along the inside of the giant’s legs, just like an unlucky plains-rider had done to him once. 

And remembering how he’d killed that rider, Walks-like-a-Rockslide scrambled aside, bending his momentum to a new course along the base of the throne-hill. The giant’s foot came down with emphasis, perilously close. Blood sprayed across the vast slabs of stone that gave the throne its shape. The peaks shuddered: up high, the raw blue pelt flapped in an angry wind. 

He bent his charge around the base of the hill and behind the throne, a piece of cover that could be useful. 

Instead of another strike from that club, the Giant King brought up his other hand. It held a bloody mammoth-skull, both tusks broken off at the root.

The ancient bone-ritual, the connectedness and the knowing, hammered at Walks-like-a-Rockslide in a twisted and amplified form despite the distance between him and the skull. That was his mother’s grief and loneliness bearing down on him in detail. Her love for him had brought her pain so many times, and miserable disappointment. When she died alone, she’d wondered where he was.

Walks-like-a-Rockslide stumbled against the side of the throne-hill. The worst of his mother’s life poured down, unrelenting as a waterfall of ice. It did not end or relent. The Giant King’s own sorcery let him warp the ancient ways that Grass-Whisper had guarded. Her skull would be just another trophy and weapon, like the club that had been a matriarch of the trees. Or placed on a mountain shelf and forgotten as a trinket, and Walks-like-a-Rockslide wasn’t sure what would be worse.

He’d come up here, the magic told him, not to honor her but to give him a target for his hate, a target other than himself. And he knew the magic was telling the truth.
 

But the magic was also being selective, wasn’t it, about what parts of his mother’s life it forced on him. She’d laughed in unfeigned happiness as she shared dried fruit and the greenest trees with him, the last time he’d visited. He’d seen a grudging pride in her eyes as she bound the blades to his tusks with rope she’d rolled herself. 

With one eye missing, the club came out of nowhere, a backhand swing. The oaken crown smashed him against the side of the throne. Broken, ground-down branches broke skin, sank in, cracked his ribs. He coughed out a roar and backed up around the throne-hill. 

The giant planted a hand on the back of the throne and leaned over, leering down. Decades of blood darkened his gray beard. Each tooth could have been one of the great chunks of tusk he’d left behind. He’d probably eaten Grass-Whisper in a few eager bites once he ripped off her pelt. 

Walks-like-a-Rockslide ran. Wild visions came to mind: charging up the side of the valley, slamming his head against the base of the peaks until the rocks rolled down to cover them both and the pelt fell free. Instead he lurched down the hill and charged.
 

Guilt was a distraction, and an intentional one on the Giant King’s part. Grief was a distraction. The comfort of death was a distraction. His mother would want him to win, and she would want him to live. If he was being honest with himself—he’d come up here to die as much as to kill.

He drew back his trunk and lowered his head. His curved tusks slammed into the giant’s right ankle. The forward points of the quartz blades punched in, not deep but enough for purchase, enough to anchor the strike. The force of the impact rocked Walks-like-a-Rockslide all up his spine. Agony drove deep into his left eye. 

A return strike would come soon, but he threw caution to the wind, ripped the blades free, and swung like a human chopping a tree. Dull quartz ripped through the giant’s skin and grated on the bones of the ankle.

The Giant King screamed. The noise punched into Walks-like-a-Rockslide’s skull like spikes in his ears and his missing eye. He sidestepped and swung again, hooking with the tip of his right tusk. The scarred ivory point sank in behind the tendon on the back of the ankle, a cord as thick as the tusk.

And tore through.

Ivory and quartz lurched free in a gout of blood that sprayed higher than a mammoth’s head. The giant fell slowly. Wind whistled in shaggy hair, in that bloody beard. By the time the giant’s head cracked against naked stone, Walks-like-a-Rockslide had pivoted and shook the ringing from his ears. 

Now he spoke, in the gestures and postures and words that made up the speech of his people. 

<I’ve been selfish,> he said, <to dwell on what I feel and why I came. Perhaps killing you will comfort me, but I doubt it. What matters is this: you will kill no more elders.>

Perhaps the Giant King understood, perhaps not. The giant shook his head, slow as skidding clouds, and started to rise.

Walks-like-a-Rockslide reared up and came down on the giant’s ankle with his full weight, heavy even for a mammoth. Bone cracked and grated like rock. 

Grass-Whisper’s skull tumbled from the giant’s fist in pieces. The sight spiked grief into Walks-like-a-Rockslide’s heart, but he dragged the largest pieces and the oak-trunk far out of the giant’s reach, to the edge of the valley. 

The work progressed from there. Quartz tusk-blades chopped into the soles of the feet, the sides of the knees, as the giant fought for purchase on smooth bloody rock. 

The Giant King gripped a stony ridge and pulled himself away, and Walks-like-a-Rockslide followed implacably, swiping at whatever he could reach. Huge hands stayed out of reach, or he’d have crushed the fingers too. 

Blood surged sluggishly along the base of the valley, ankle-deep for a mammoth. Sloshing through the giant’s gore sapped effort like nothing else so far. Once the threat was well and truly gone, Walks-like-a-Rockslide backed away. 

He’d lost the pieces of the skull, he realized. The few chunks he found, fishing in the blood with trunk and tusks, were so small and so defiled as to offer little comfort. These fragments were no true memorial, no more than the fragments of tusk had been, back at the place where she died.

In the end, Walks-like-a-Rockslide dragged himself up the smooth path where he’d entered the valley. Each slippery step took his full effort, as if saving no strength for the next step. When he succeeded in reaching the top of the pass, it came as a surprise.

Wind blasted him, turned bloody grime to dark frost in his fur as he paused to look back at his handiwork. The Giant King slumped against the side of the valley, surrounded by a lake of blood that rippled as he trembled. The oak-tree club bobbed and twisted in the blood, just out of one huge hand’s reach, as if taunting its murderer. 

High overhead, torrential wind caught Grass-Whisper’s pelt and unfurled it like a sheltering wing, a comfort that welcomed everyone whether they deserved it or not. Unsure if he felt relief or shame or anything but pain, Walks-like-a-Rockslide sighed and turned away.

Down in the valley, the giant sighed too, and went still.

 

 

 

About the Author

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Jonathan Olfert writes Stone Age fantasy and lesser genres. He has made and used a plethora of Paleolithic tools. He and his family live in Atlantic Canada. He is not a mammoth. 

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