скачать книгу бесплатно
The Story Giant
Brian Patten
A magical story which weaves together fifty world tales – of immense appeal to both adults and children.‘One day a story fell from heaven and landed on a giant’s tongue… ’The Story Giant is a master illusionist and the ur-storyteller. In his memory exists every tale ever told in the world – except for one, which has eluded him for millennia.In a last desperate attempt to track down this lost tale, he draws four children from the different corners of the globe into his castle while they sleep, there to exchange the tales they know from their own cultures, to see if between them they can piece together the elusive missing story. For if he cannot track it down and install it in his memory, the whole facade of the castle will crumble and fall, and the Story Giant himself will die. And if he does, so will all the stories, and the world will be a poorer, duller, grimmer place.Fifty tales are told within this magical framework in Brian Patten’s inimitable style – from Bruh Rabbit to the tale of how St George killed the Dragon (except it wasn’t St George – it was his mother, with a pudding…) but none of them are the missing tale. The castle falls; the giant dies. But all is not lost – the four children dream themselves back to the ruins to concoct the missing tale themselves…
THE STORY GIANT
BY
BRIAN PATTEN
Dedication (#ulink_ddab1058-5bdd-5461-978c-d2f6f54d3535)
For Linda Cookson
And in memory of Adrian Henri
Contents
Cover (#u80ccf738-0ecf-57b8-a4e8-f9583c205a96)
Title Page (#ua07db266-cc23-5c67-b0f9-18aaf3c5b371)
Dedication (#u8d50ff55-555c-586d-a3e8-f1e1b3cc31f8)
Part One (#ulink_52e1831b-dca2-576a-a4a7-969680bca870)
The First Story (#ulink_d57e2962-5e55-5ab7-9636-363607f543f0)
The Man Who Killed Two Thieves With a Chicken (#ulink_19f33639-5dce-5c99-b1d9-3c7314dbdb43)
How Wars Begin (#ulink_b495369d-c5a8-5eb9-9ba1-d833fa470b15)
The Little Monster That Grew and Grew (#ulink_fba771ad-37af-521a-8120-413403056c68)
The Tramp and the Outcome of War (#ulink_583d9330-9e75-570e-a97d-43dc5ed1cb3a)
The Difference Between Heaven and Hell (#ulink_068bbc79-9a9f-58e5-b7ab-5cb471ab9845)
When Immortality was Lost (#ulink_dc541393-9ba7-50a4-99cc-0ba01cfa8c4c)
Supremacy (#ulink_495907c9-c930-50da-9566-c954a7d63525)
John and Paul (#ulink_dc1fda6e-577e-5013-a9e7-9d2238acb8b8)
The Man who Bored People to Death (#ulink_8fb7b6b4-c38e-542a-bdfa-5e55cb893ef0)
The Spirit-Foxes (#litres_trial_promo)
Hope (#litres_trial_promo)
The Clothes That Were Invited to Dinner (#litres_trial_promo)
A Simple Trick (#litres_trial_promo)
Degrees of Sorrow and Happiness (#litres_trial_promo)
The Shadow (#litres_trial_promo)
A Handful of Corn (#litres_trial_promo)
The Lamp (#litres_trial_promo)
The Place Ahead (#litres_trial_promo)
The Monster in the Desert (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dragon Slayer’s Mum (#litres_trial_promo)
Tiddalik the Frog (#litres_trial_promo)
The Owl’s Trick (#litres_trial_promo)
Brer Rabbit and Brer Alligator (#litres_trial_promo)
The Talking Skull (#litres_trial_promo)
Man is Cunning, and Cunning is Man (#litres_trial_promo)
The Human Tongue (#litres_trial_promo)
The Band of Gold (#litres_trial_promo)
Worry (#litres_trial_promo)
Three of a Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
Death and the Trickster’s Name (#litres_trial_promo)
The Unfinished Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Dame Goody’s Eye (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
The Scent of Knowledge (#litres_trial_promo)
Gratitude (#litres_trial_promo)
Jan Coo (#litres_trial_promo)
Wistman’s Wood (#litres_trial_promo)
The Man Who Listened to the Lion (#litres_trial_promo)
Fear (#litres_trial_promo)
The Chicken That Laid a Goat (#litres_trial_promo)
A Girl in the Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
The Trickster’s Knife (#litres_trial_promo)
Slad, Not Vlad (#litres_trial_promo)
The Man Who Threw Away his Child (#litres_trial_promo)
The Man Who Followed his Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
Wealth (#litres_trial_promo)
Mrs Beppo’s Magic Bag (#litres_trial_promo)
Death and the Poet (#litres_trial_promo)
The Owls That Could Not See Beyond the Ruins (#litres_trial_promo)
The Story Giant (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Source Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ulink_907c4973-a3be-561f-9be8-58cc3e5c3a40)
The light of imagination transcends decay
THE STORY GIANT
Around the Castle he had woven an illusion of ruins that blocked it from the sight of mortals. To anyone out on the moor, the Castle appeared no more than a jumble of ancient stones and a few tall, roofless walls overgrown with lichen and ivy. The Story Giant was all but invisible, and his voice was often mistaken for the wind blowing over the tumbled stones.
It was how the Story Giant wanted it, how it had always been. He had created illusion upon illusion, mixing the real and imagined till they were one and the same. He was from a time before the ancient pharaohs. He had been intelligent when people were little more than apes, and had come into existence whole, as he was now. The Story Giant had never experienced childhood, yet his food and drink were the stories told and dreamt by humankind from its infancy onward. He was the custodian of those stories, and his castle was their storehouse.
Before writing had existed it had been hard to keep track of the world’s growing pool of knowledge and folklore. People forgot things. But not stories; they remembered stories. Into even the simplest story they had learnt to pour their understanding of each other and of the world around them. And the giant had learnt to sip wisdom and information from the stories, like wine from a glass.
But there was one story the Story Giant did not know. For thousands of years he had tramped the earth, always believing it would turn up sooner or later, carved in runes on an ancient stone, or found among the pages of a forgotten book. But it never had. And only tonight had he finally realized its importance.
Now, the thought of not finding the story filled him with dread.
In a city called Patna in Northern India a young girl called Rani curled up on the lattice-patterned floor of a small iron balcony and fell asleep. The clamour of the rickshaws and human traffic below her carried on into the claustrophobic, marigold-scented night, but Rani heard nothing. Having worked all day and a good part of the night in the steamy laundry of a hotel in a wealthy part of the city, she was exhausted. She slept deeply, dreaming of a cool, far-away castle in a land of gentle rain.
Hasan El Sedeiry’s father and mistress had been out most of the evening at an embassy dinner in Riyadh, and though he’d begged to stay up until their return the house-servants were set against it. They would not bend even the slightest against his father’s wishes, and so here he was, high up in his little minaret-like bedroom looking out over the mosques to the towers that edged the far side of the city.
He turned on the television, which was usually forbidden at this hour of the night, but it was an old film about goblins and giants and he’d seen it several times before. Sighing, he turned the room’s cooling system to a low setting so that its hum would not disturb him, and climbed into his bed.
Sometimes Betts Bergman found it difficult to sleep because of the red and blue neon lights that blinked on and off below the bedroom window of the Los Angeles apartment her mother rented. No matter how tightly she pulled the curtains some light managed to get through. Some nights it did not matter, but on other nights even the faintest glow was enough to keep her awake. Tonight was that kind of night. She switched on the bedside lamp, picked up a dog-eared book that had been a favourite when she’d been younger, and began reading. Ten minutes later she was asleep, the bedside lamp still on, her book on the pillow beside her, still open at an unfinished story about a giant.
Liam Brogan lay on his bunk bed in the converted fishing-trawler he and his father called home. The boat rocked almost imperceptibly as the incoming tide lifted it from the South Devon mud-flats where it was moored, and nudged its bow round to face the estuary mouth. Liam could hear the cry of owls and, less frequently, the barks of squabbling fox-cubs. The sounds were muted by beads of mist and the sea-fret that fell on to the woods and lay like a comforting blanket over his thoughts, most of which had to do with school, and a book of ghost-stories that had been confiscated from him during a maths lesson that afternoon.
The Story Giant woke and sniffed the air. Children had come again. He could smell four of them – two boys and two girls. They were puzzled, but not frightened, and he decided he would have no problem weaving them into a single, unifying dream.
But for the moment they were each still locked in their own private dream.
The one called Liam was in the Castle’s north wing, staring out of the thick mullioned windows at the falling snow.
Another child was leaning on a window-sill, looking down into a courtyard where lemon trees glowed in bright sunlight and a faint breeze rattled the polished green leaves. Now and then she would close her eyes, smile, and breathe in the lemon-scented air without a care in the world.
The third child, Hasan, was in the library pulling out books with which he immediately grew bored. He did not bother to replace them, no doubt thinking that one of the servants would do that later.
There was another visitor somewhere, but the Giant could not yet locate her.
He put down the book he had been reading and stood uneasily, his bones brittle and stiff with age. He descended a broad stone staircase flanked by wooden banisters, sections of which had crumbled away, leaving only sharp iron railings standing like rows of warriors’ spears.
He lumbered on, through corridors and rooms abandoned to the workings of woodworm and time, until finally he came to the Castle’s massive entrance hall. He pushed open its iron-studded door and stared out upon the moor.
It was neither snowing nor sunny outside. There were no lemon trees, there was no sound of rattling leaves. Instead, the moorland stretched in sombre isolation from one horizon to another. He sniffed the night air. The smell of heather and all the varied scents of the night drifted on the wind. He imagined he could even smell the moonlight that covered the gorse and bracken with an imitation of frost. He breathed in deeply once again, wondering if tonight would be his last chance to gaze upon the mortal world.
For the Story Giant was dying. The process had begun some time ago, and tonight, for the first time, he sensed that it was nearing its end. With each snuffle of the badger and hoot of the owl, Death rode faster and faster through the night towards him. Ahead of him, Death sent his messengers, world-weariness and pain. The Giant was not dying in the same way as most mortals die. There was no fear for himself, no on-going fight to stave off the inevitable decline into darkness. Rather, there was the kind of curiosity someone might feel about a sealed room they had passed endlessly without seeing inside.
But the Story Giant did not want to die. He knew that he needed to continue – not for his own sake, but for the sake of the stories he had nursed and cherished down the centuries. It was not Death he feared, but the consequences of death. He had caused the stories to be reinvented over and over again. Each retelling and twist had kept them alive and vibrant. His fear lay in the knowledge that if he were to die the Castle would die with him, and the millions of stories it contained would perish for want of retelling.
For that reason alone it was imperative he lived on. He knew there was only one thing that could save him. Somewhere there was a story that could rescue him from Death. It was the single story he did not know. Without it oblivion beckoned. But what was it? And where? And how had it had managed to evade him over so many centuries?
The Story Giant closed his eyes. And as he did so, a faint hope began to stir. He thought of the four new children who had suddenly appeared – tonight, on the very night he had finally accepted that he and the castle faced extinction. Could their arrival be a kind of omen? Could it be that one of the children knew the story – the tale that would bring with it salvation?.
His mind soothed by the moorland scents and by this one hope, the Story Giant pulled shut the door and turned his back on the night. It was time to weave the children together.
He made for the library where the child Hasan was now asleep, his head resting on a pile of discarded books.
Liam turned from watching the falling snow and stood with his back to the window. From a corridor up ahead of him he heard a voice whisper, ‘It’s weaving time, Liam. It’s weaving time.’ He followed the whisper, his tread on the cold flagstones muted by the dust of moths and the snow blowing in through fissures in the Castle’s dilapidated walls. The voice ceased the moment he arrived outside an improbably high door.
Standing at the window staring down at the lemon-trees had given Rani a thirst. She was convinced that somewhere in the Castle was a nice cool glass of lemonade just waiting for her to drink it. She set out to find it, and in a blink was standing outside an unusually tall door behind which she knew – absolutely knew – the lemonade was waiting.
