The God of the Fairy Tale by Jim Ware

Author:Jim Ware [Ware, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55269-3
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

GOLDEN TRUMPET

Free in Christ

“Jack the Giant-Killer,” an English folk tale

Whoever shall this trumpet blow,

Shall soon the giant overthrow,

And break the black enchantment straight;

So all shall be in happy state.

Raising her soft brown eyes, she cast a despairing look up at the impassable stone rampart that encircled the courtyard. A tear trembled at the end of one dark eyelash, then fell and splashed off a cloven black hoof.

Once upon a time she had been the daughter of a duke, a young duchess of incontestable beauty and grace. Every day she wore silk and cashmere and rustling damask. Her feet had been shod in fair slippers of white satin embroidered with thread of spun gold.

But now she was a prisoner. A prisoner of the giant. And though, even in captivity, she retained traces of her former beauty, it was no longer the beauty of a nobleman’s daughter. It was not, in fact, the beauty of a maiden at all.

It was the beauty of a doe—a three-year-old white hind.

Try as she might, she could not recall exactly how it had happened. Now and again, as she stared down at her cloven feet, snatches of a remembered walk in the garden would flash through her mind. Images of a storm, of wind and fire. A struggle. A face as big and as broad as the moon, distorted and blotched. A hard, cruel laugh. And then the huge hand of her captor, the giant Galligantua, blotting out the light.

She had come to herself in this dismal gray courtyard, in the company of a multitude of beasts, birds, and crawling things. Here lived rabbits and horses, antelope and deer, ravens and doves, snakes and toads—every sort of creature imaginable, each with the same shattered look of loss and utter despair in its eyes.

It was an enchantment, of course. She knew that. She knew that these beasts were not beasts at all but maidens like herself and young knights and noblemen, all of them kidnapped, carried away, and cast under the giant’s spell.

She knew it because the giant himself bragged about it incessantly. He was boasting about his feats now, standing on the steps of the castle and browbeating the helpless creatures with the hopelessness of their position, telling them for the thousandth time that, though many brave knights and heroes had tried, none had been able to breach his walls or break the enchantment.

“It’s too bad!” he mocked. “For if a man could only reach the gate, the game would be up! All he’d have to do is blow the golden trumpet that hangs there. But no one can do it! No one can get past my terrible, sharp-clawed griffins! No one can—”

He stopped in midsentence. For at that moment a high, clear note rang out from someplace just beyond the courtyard wall. The young doe saw the giant’s face turn pale.

Again that pure clarion call! And then a rumbling, a trembling as of the castle’s very foundations. Can it be true? Her heart was fluttering like a leaf.

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