Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (11 page)

The tailor was well aware of this; but he was a sprightly man, and when the laird dared him to make the trews by night in the church, the tailor was not to be daunted, but took it in hand to gain the prize. So, when night came, away he went up the glen, about half a mile’s distance from the castle, till he came to the old church. Then he chose him a nice gravestone for a seat and he lighted his candle, and put on his thimble, and set to work at the trews; playing his needle nimbly, and thinking about the prize that the laird would have to give him.

For some time he got on pretty well, until he felt the floor all of a tremble under his feet; and looking about him, but keeping his fingers at work, he saw the appearance of a massive human head rising up through the stone pavement of the church. And when the head had risen above the surface, there came from it a great, great voice. And the voice said: ‘Do you see this great head of mine?’

‘I see that, but I’ll sew this!’ replied the sprightly tailor; and he kept stitching away at the trews.

Then the head rose higher up through the pavement, until its neck appeared. And when its neck was shown, the thundering voice came again and said: ‘Do you see this great neck of mine?’

‘I see that, but I’ll sew this!’ said the sprightly tailor; and he kept stitching away at his trews.

Then the head and neck rose higher still, until the great shoulders and chest were shown above the ground. And again the mighty voice thundered: ‘Do you see this great chest of mine?’

And again the sprightly tailor replied: ‘I see that, but I’ll sew this!’ and he kept stitching away at his trews.

And still the monster kept rising through the pavement, until it shook a great pair of arms in the tailor’s face, and said: ‘Do you see these great arms of mine?’

‘I see those, but I’ll sew this!’ answered the tailor; and he kept stitching hard at his trews, for he knew that he had no time to lose.

The sprightly tailor was doing the long stitches, when he saw the monster gradually rising and rising through the floor, until it lifted out a great leg, and stamping with it upon the pavement, said in a roaring voice: ‘Do you see this great leg of mine?’

‘Aye, aye: I see that, but I’ll sew this!’ cried the tailor; and his fingers flew with the needle, and he made such long stitches, that he was just coming to the end of the trews, when the monster was taking up its other leg. But before it could pull it out of the pavement, the sprightly tailor had finished his task; and, blowing out his candle, and springing from off his gravestone, he buckled up his coat, and ran out of the church with the trews under his arm. Then the fearsome thing gave a loud roar, and stamped with both his feet upon the pavement, and out of the church he went thundering after the sprightly tailor.

Down the glen they ran, faster than the stream when the flood rides it; but the tailor had got the start and a nimble pair of legs, and he did not choose to lose the laird’s reward. And though the thing roared to him to stop, the sprightly tailor was not the man to be restrained by a monster if he could help it. So he held his trews tight, and let no darkness grow under his feet, until he had reached Saddell Castle. He had no sooner got inside the gate, and shut it, than the monster came up to it; and, enraged at
losing his prize, struck the wall above the gate, and left there the mark of his five great fingers. You may see them plainly to this day, if you’ll only peer close enough.

But the sprightly tailor gained his reward: for Macdonald was impressed by his courage and paid him handsomely for the trews, and never discovered that a few of the stitches were somewhat long.

There was a giant once who was lonely. Most giants are, of course, or would be if they stopped to think about it. A giant needs a great deal of land to live off, which means that giants have to space themselves out very thinly, something like one to every shire. So the only time they see one another is on the rare occasions when two neighbouring giants happen to arrive at the borders of their territories at the same time. When that takes place they usually play catch for a time with a boulder or have a game of hide-and-seek among the mountains. Then they go their separate ways. You can hear them shouting goodbye for miles.

They don’t think about this loneliness, however, because thinking isn’t something they go in for very much. Mostly they just get on with the business of being giants, which takes up all their time and which is very hard work because it is laid down in the Rule Book for Giants that, when they aren’t actually eating or sleeping, they have to stamp around the countryside bellowing at the tops of their voices and looking very fierce. Looking fierce is hard work in itself as you’ll find out if you try it for half an hour. You keep forgetting that you’re supposed to have a scowl on your face and you find yourself smiling at something. Then you have to start all over again.

Being kept so busy means that giants don’t have much time for thinking. When a giant does manage to get a few minutes to himself he generally feels so tired that he just drops off to sleep. He sits down first of all with his back against the nearest hill. Then he opens his huge mouth and gives a huge yawn. Then he spits out all the birds that have got sucked into his mouth while the yawn was going on. Then off he goes to dream-land.

But the giant who was lonely was different. He had long since lost his rule book and had never bothered to get it replaced. He didn’t go around stamping and roaring because he couldn’t see much point in it. It only made your feet sore and gave you a headache. Besides that, it frightened people away and he didn’t want to frighten people away. He wanted to be friendly.

What made him especially different from other giants, though, was that he was always thinking, and what he was always thinking about was how much alone he was. It was true that he did have one or two friends among the creatures. There was Goldentop, the eagle, for example. But the creatures as a rule weren’t greatly interested in people big or little, considering them a very limited species, incapable of running at much more than a trot, or swimming farther than a few miles, or flying any higher than five or six feet and staying up any longer than one or two seconds, or burrowing underground, or carrying their houses on their backs or anything really worthwhile like that.

‘As for people,’ said Goldentop once to the lonely giant – whose name, by the way, was Angus Macaskill – ‘all that they are good for, whether they are big or little and with very few exceptions, is making a noise or making places dirty or breaking things. And all that pink naked skin on them without a single feather! Ugh!’ So all that Angus got from Goldentop, usually, was a dip of the wings in passing.

It was true, also, that Angus did have one or two friends among the ordinary-sized folk. There was Morag Matheson, for instance, the shoemaker’s daughter. He sometimes had quite good conversations with her. But in order for them to talk either Angus had to lie down to get his ear to the level of her mouth, which usually struck him as such a comical proceeding that he burst into fits of laughter, or he had to pick her up and hold her to his ear, which usually struck her as such a comical proceeding that she burst into fits of laughter.

It is difficult, as you will know from your own experience, to have a sensible talk with someone who giggles all the time. You can hear properly only one or two words in every sentence and you have to guess at the rest. If you guess wrongly, of course, it produces even more laughter. Morag had once told Angus that
her mother had been ordered by the doctor to eat two legs for breakfast every day. He was quite horrified until he discovered that she had really said ‘eggs’.

One day Angus’s loneliness became more than he could bear and he realized that he would have to do something about it. He thought that the wisest thing he could do would be to ask for advice and he decided to ask Morag first of all. He went along to her father’s house and saw her in the distance, as he approached, sitting at the front door, spinning and singing, the sound and the thread flowing out with equal sweetness.

I wish I were not a giant
, thought Angus,
then I could ask Morag to marry me. And if she said ‘Yes’ I would not be lonely any more.

But he
was
a giant, therefore he put that thought away from him, as a peasant lad might put away a thought of the king’s daughter. Instead, he picked Morag up so quickly that she was too much out of breath to start laughing.

‘Morag,’ he said, ‘listen to me carefully because I need your advice. And don’t laugh, please, because it’s a very serious matter. The trouble is that I am lonely. What can I do about it? Is there any cure?’

‘I wish you weren’t a giant,’ Morag answered. ‘Or I wish that I were. I would soon cure your loneliness.’

‘How?’ asked Angus.

‘Never mind,’ replied Morag. She thought long and hard and sadly. ‘The only cure for you, Angus,’ she said at last, ‘is to get married. You must find yourself a giantess somewhere.’

‘Where?’ asked Angus.

‘Well, now, that I don’t know,’ Morag answered. ‘Most of the people I have met in my life have been very small in one way or another. You’d better ask Goldentop the eagle. He’s always boasting that he knows every mountain in the whole Land of Lorne.’

‘Giants aren’t mountains,’ Angus pointed out.

‘No,’ agreed Morag. ‘Giants are lighter coloured and more gentle. At least, some of them are.’ She looked at the ground, where it dizzied away into the distance. ‘But there are certain resemblances just the same.’

Angus in his turn looked down at the ground. Somewhere down there were daisies and primroses and violets. ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘I know what you mean.’ He put Morag down very gently and set off in search of Goldentop.

The eagle was sat on a favourite perch. One of his eyes was watching the approach of Angus and it was more or less blank. The other was fixed on some hills that stuck up above the horizon and it was a calculating eye, the sort of eye that added up figures and got one less every time.

‘What are you watching with that left eye?’ asked Angus.

‘A flock of sheep leaving Hugh Henderson’s sheep-fold in the village of Carraig in the parish of Cray,’ answered Goldentop.

‘You have good eyesight,’ said Angus.

‘I have an empty belly,’ said the eagle. ‘It clears the vision of trivialities.’

‘Has this vision of yours ever rested on a giantess?’ queried Angus. ‘An unattached one, I mean.’

‘Island of Alva,’ replied Goldentop promptly. ‘Walk north along the coast until you come to the Blue Bay. Then swim due west.’

‘Ah, but are you sure she’s unattached?’ insisted Angus. ‘There might have been a giant there when you weren’t looking.’

‘Somehow I do not think so,’ remarked the eagle thoughtfully.

‘Anyway, I can’t go to this island,’ Angus told him, ‘even if I could swim that far. My mother told me on her deathbed never to go into the salt water.’

‘Then you must balance the commands of the dead against the requirements of the living,’ said Goldentop. ‘It is an old dilemma. But not for eagles.’ He left the perch and slid upwards, heading in the direction of the sheep.

Angus didn’t know what to do. He decided that while he was making up his mind he might as well walk to the Blue Bay. He had never been there and it sounded like a pleasant spot. Besides, he knew that there is nothing like a good long walk for getting rid of sadness. It flows out of your feet into the ground, which of course is where it comes from in the first place, only it enters through your bottom while you are sitting down.

By the time he reached the Blue Bay he was feeling a lot better.
He knew it was the right place because the surrounding hills were blue and the sea was blue and the sky was blue. Also there was a small stunted signpost near by, growing crookedly between two rocks, and on it there said in blue letters,
This is the Blue
Bay.

The tide was out when he got there. Indeed it was so far out that it might well need the help of a signpost itself to get back. It had left behind it, as a pledge perhaps, a mile or more of ribbed sand and stranded right in the middle of this sand there was a whale. If you think it was anything other than a blue whale you have not been following my story as closely as you should.

Angus approached the whale circumspectly, which means that he stopped about fifty feet away. He could see that it had worn a hollow in the sand by threshing around. When it saw him it shouted ‘Help!’ in a tiny squeaky voice, whales having very small throats.

‘What seems to be the trouble, Whale?’ inquired Angus.

‘The trouble, Giant,’ replied the whale, ‘is that I fell asleep on a sandbank in the middle of the bay. It was only a baby sandbank then but by the time I woke it had grown up. I am stranded. Unless I can get back to the water soon this hot white sun will shrivel my tender skin, which is used only to the coolness and moistness and greenness of the deep sea. I shall die. But what can I do? I cannot swim over the sand and I have neither legs to walk with nor wings to fly.’

It was plain that he spoke the truth, for already on his blue back two or three blisters were beginning to form.

‘It seems to me,’ remarked Angus, ‘that you creatures aren’t quite as superior as Goldentop is always saying you are. I may be only a giant but at least I would never get stuck in the middle of a flat piece of land. I have legs.’

‘Goldentop is a snob,’ said the whale. ‘It comes of continually looking down on the rest of the world. And as for legs, unless they are put to the service of the community they remain a private luxury.’

‘You are a heavy weight,’ Angus told him. ‘Even for me. But I think that with the help of my legs – and arms – I might just be able to pull you as far as the water’s edge.’

He caught hold of the whale’s tail and set to work. After a long hard struggle he managed to get it into the shallows, and with a flick of its powerful body it did the rest. It was so happy to be back where it belonged that it turned three underwater cart-wheels in succession.