Fiery Edge of Steel (Noon Onyx #2) by Jill Archer

Author:Jill Archer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

Well, as Haljan bedtime stories went, this one was pretty typical, designed to ensure a plethora of nightmares. It was easy to imagine a mother reading her children this, and then, just at the line “EVERYONE!” scaring them half to death with a mock attack. I’d never heard it, but that didn’t mean anything. Our culture was rich in myths. There were likely a hundred different versions of this story and just as many names for Grimasca. The real question was whether Grimasca was real. Was he still living? And, if so, where?

The folktale itself seemed allegorical, rather than literal. The whole point of the story seemed to be that postwar famine killed indiscriminately. Paulus’ father deciding to let Grimasca have his boys was probably that character’s way of acknowledging he could no longer feed his sons. And the part of the story where Paulus’ father took the boys to the meadow definitely seemed to be a wish fulfillment fantasy. No poor New Babylonian family in the immediate post-Apocalyptic era would have been able to row a boat down the Lethe and go for a picnic. (No one did that now!) The “resting” the boys did after their day of merriment was likely a gentle euphemism for death.

Unlike Grimasca, however, I knew giants were real. They were small in number now and weren’t very social. There’d never been much written about them—no accounts of heroism during the Apocalypse or anything that you might expect from huge, immensely strong beings. But then again, giants didn’t have magic and they generally shunned humans. They lived in the forests and swamps and weren’t usually prone to violence. They weren’t usually prone to intelligence either, as this story suggested. It was, unfortunately, all too easy to imagine a drunken giantess mother locking her own children out of the house while a monster ate them.

That said, the giant part of the story was probably just a continuation of the allegorical tale about hunger. With fourteen children instead of seven, that would mean that Grimasca (or starvation) would be more likely to come. A story about a giantess mother putting half her kids out to starve (or to be eaten by the Demon of Hunger) made about as much sense as any other Haljan folktale did.

My guess was the author tried for a celebratory tone at the end, what with all the rejoicing over new births, etcetera, but by then they’d been too traumatized by the war and its aftereffects for their efforts to be successful. The author clearly felt that hunger (demon or not) would always be out there waiting and that Hunger, or the Grim Mask of Death, would be the only one really rejoicing after a war.

So did this story prove that Grimasca was real? Hell if I knew.

What I did know was that sleeping after a story like this would be impossible so I packed up my books and shuffled quietly down to the kitchen. Sooner or later, I’d have to make amends with Ari.

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