Giantfall

A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale sinks to the ocean floor. This abundance of organic matter creates complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades

I grew up in lean times. It was fifty years since the last god fell when I was born, and the eighteen hence were the emptiest in a dozen generations. Mine was a hollow girlhood, suckled on legends of plenty and stale marrow mined from the deepest bone.

By the time she reached my age, my grandmother had already seen the city move twice, leaving a picked-over corpse for a fresh one across the desert. They stitched sails from the god’s tattered clothes, built mansions in its hollowed eyes. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but these bleached bones, couldn’t imagine sandships reporting anything but desolation, couldn’t imagine fending off scavenger raids because I had something anyone else would want. Couldn’t imagine even what a god looked like — all I’d seen of them was the skeleton I grew up in. And their shadows, of course, coursing over the dunes like rivers of night as the gods marched their kingdom in the clouds.

I watched my friends and family hollow out and drop year by year and I knew I deserved better. There would be no cities built on their corpses, no life in their deaths. Why wouldn’t a god just die? One life of theirs would save ten thousand of ours. It’d make my own life worth living, living in comfort.

So when I was eighteen I got it in my head that I’d rectify the situation myself - just go on up there and kill one of them. I asked anyone who listened, “How hard can it be?” They started to come around to my way of thinking. They pitched their tents next to mine. Nobody much was still alive that’d ever known my name, so I told them all to call me Jack, after that old messiah who’d gone once to the clouds and come back drowning in gold.

I went to the witch with her carved-out hut at the back of the god’s skull, a dozen or so following me, me following the scent of the fairytale. It was dark as pitch, the lights reaching through the distant sockets unable to see the back of their own head. Yet the witch had a garden in the shadows that flourished with vegetables and roots. Marvelous, marvelous — If only a single woman could feed a city — Well, if she helped me, I told her, I could do that. She was reluctant still to give me the beans, to risk the gods’ wrath, but by then I’d gotten half the kids my age and a good chunk of the city too on my side. She feared what they’d do if she refused. Now that I had the beans to back my promises, it was no trouble to get everything else I needed. The queen herself gave me a sword and a handshake and a big cleared area in the city center at the god’s ribcage in which to plant my stalk. Once she got involved the plan became all official. It was her order for me to just take a peek up there, bring something small back to show her it was worthwhile, and if it made sense she’d muster up a real force to send. Even with the pomp and celebration, she thought it was suicide, I could see that in her one good eye. But I knew better than her that there was no other option. And I intended, deep in the core of me, as I’m sure they all could see, to bring a god down myself.

I tucked earth over the beans. The stalk burst out of the earth like a whip from hell, and it was time to prove my name.

I climbed. I climbed until my muscles went slack beneath my skin and onward more. Come nightfall, I curled up in a knot on the vine and watched the crowd disperse below me, small as ants. The next day I climbed again. The sword bounced dull against my back. As I climbed I allowed myself for the first time to be scared and to wonder just how the hell I was supposed to kill a god with a sword the size of his toothpick. And then I realized I’d spent my whole life being scared and wondering and I was damn tired of it, so I stopped.

The stalk thinned as I got higher. The distance turned the skeleton below to the size of a normal man and turned my people to motes of dust. When a god’s shadow passed over my city below, it looked like nothing more than a splotch of ink on the sands.

Above me, I saw the place where the beanstalk broke through the clouds. My hands fit around it now. It swayed with my every motion, but I clung tight, and finally pulled myself over the embankment and found my feet on solid fog. Around me the sun refracted off the white clouds like the surface of a pearl. And in those clouds were the shapes of castles, columns, towering gates, and… people. A crowd of people gathering around me. A crowd of people just the same size as me.

My head was spinning. I whirled in a circle, wild and soaked in sweat, searching all their wide-eyed faces. I couldn’t catch my breath and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Where the fuck are all the gods?” I asked.

A plump young woman with ruby hair and emerald eyes, wearing a delicate crown, stepped forward from the crowd. “I am the princess of this place,” she said, in a voice like molten gold. “Stranger, are you alright?”

She brought me to her castle, a huge, billowing place of soft light and sourceless melodies, and ran me a warm bath. She gave me a plate of sweets, spun sugar in the shape of swans and vines, pastries with hot red jam. I ate until I could not eat, barehanded, let my stomach heave and ate more. She washed the sugar from my hands and hair. Under her coaxing hands, all my life spilled out. The princess listened close. She hummed her approval low in her chest and the sound wrapped me, pulled me under. “What are you thinking of now, little goose?” she asked me, and for my life I could not recall.

It took a few days before I’d recovered enough strength to go out again, and every day she cared for me, with her soft hands, her scented oils and confections. My belly was full. My sword lay somewhere forgotten. The baked sand sloughed from my skin, and for the first time in my life, I was bare and new.

When the princess brought me back onto the streets, I had to blink to convince myself the grandeur was true, that I hadn’t died on the way up the beanstalk and dreamed this all on my final breath. She took me to her father, who sat on a gold-gilt throne in a gold-misted room, gold goose on his lap, and he asked me in a voice like thunder to recite my story again. I told all, as I had told a hundred starving peasants, a city of the dead. The seeds of doubt pushed through the haze in my mind. But he laughed, and came down from his throne to shake my hand. “You made it, Jack,” he said.

His fingers cushioned my hand, so smooth I could hardly feel them. “I don’t understand,”

“A matter of perspective,” he told me. “It’s a complicated magic to explain. Come, follow me.” He led me to the window and looked out over his heavenly city. “My girl, the only reason any of this exists is because of those below. None of it could exist if just anyone could have it. That’s why our ancestors made the world the way it is. So you must be a very special person indeed, to climb so high above your birth.”

“Are you going to make me go back?” I whispered.

He clapped me on the back. “Of course not! It’s clear you deserve better. It takes a special kind of talent, smarts, and hard work to get where you are now. You aren’t made of the same stuff as those scavengers down there. You were meant to dine with gods.” He lowered his voice, conspiratorial, and side-eyed his daughter where she knelt next to his golden goose. “Perhaps to be a god, if the novelty of you continues to excite the princess this way.”

I flushed and looked at her too. She wasn’t like me — she was kind. If I stayed here, I could have her. I could have all the food I wanted. I could be clean. I could have a future. A future as a god, with a beautiful queen and a life of luxury, not as a tiny, doomed parasite.

I remembered the promises I’d made to my city. But what did promises mean? Everyone I knew, everyone I cared about, was dying or dead. What would a new god’s corpse give them but a momentary reprieve? To condemn people to live that ugly, filthy life — that was the real crime I’d be committing. What would killing a god do, really, but rob the world of beauty?

The king of the gods leaned close to my ear. “If that’s to happen, though, you have to do one thing for me. You have to go back and cut down that beanstalk, or else your former countrymen will come up here and eat you alive, once they realize it’s possible. Don’t worry. I’ll throw down a rope once it’s done for you to climb back up.”

I hesitated. I worried. But then I stopped worrying. Throughout my life I’d learned to take every scrap that came to me or starve. If I just took this one thing, I’d never have to starve again. I deserved to eat, didn’t I? I nodded.

He gave me a gold-toothed smile. “Smart girl,” he said. With his daughter and his glittering guards behind, he brought me to the hole in the clouds where my beanstalk poked through. Had I only been here a few days? It felt like a lifetime - it was a lifetime. My new life. The king handed me a huge golden axe, intricately carved and perfectly clean. He showed me the thick golden rope, looped at the end, that the guards would use to pull me up.

Already I couldn’t wait to be back, to return to my princess and my palace and my food. With a nod to the king and a smile to the princess, I wrapped my hands around the beanstalk and started my descent.

It took far less time to climb down. Each step now was an hour of progress before. As I climbed, I thought about the kind of grand wedding the giants would hold for me and my princess. We’d have a harp and a goose and a cake as high as a mountain, decorated in villages and streams. I couldn’t have dreamt of something so sweet before. I hadn’t even wanted to marry, couldn’t face the thought of hitching myself to someone and watch them starve, even if I could find anyone to match my ingenuity and strength. Now I could think about a wedding bed in a castle on a cloud to keep my spirit high as I climbed - and, giddy, I wondered how I could possibly make myself wait.

I looked down as I neared the bottom of the stalk. The shapes on the ground remained as puny as they had appeared when I gazed down upon them from the highest cloud. The city drowned in my shadow. Tiny specks gathered in the city center. They’d pulled out the ancient cannons from when they’d had anything worth fighting wars over. I realized with a laugh that they thought me dead, my mission failed, and expected a god’s wrath. I could do that if I wanted, I thought. I could break these bones and kick sand over them. I laughed and laughed.

They fired a cannon at me. It stung my ankle. Imagine fighting so hard for a life in a picked-over corpse! But they couldn’t do anything to me, not now. I set my foot down, crushing two buildings beneath my heel. They swarmed over my foot like fireants. I cursed. I’d have to hurry. I pulled the axe from my back and swung at the beanstalk. Thunk. Thunk. It took a few swings to fell the stalk. By then, the mob had climbed their way up to the small of my knee and started aiming cannons from the roofs of the buildings.

With a final chop, the beanstalk came ripping down from the sky and hit the ground with such force that huge waves rolled through the sand, unsteadying me. At that very moment, a barrage of shots concentrated on my knee buckled me, and I fell. A stabbing pain ripped through me as I crashed onto the jutting blades of the old giant’s ribs. Ropes flew over my limbs. I broke the first few easily, but they kept coming. Fuck, they’re going to eat me! I broke free with an almighty cry. Again the bindings came back. How dare they?

It didn’t matter - I was not alone. I looked up at the hole in the clouds, where the shadows of the king of the gods and my princess and the guards loomed. But where was the rope? I freed one arm and waved. I shouted. The tiny people surged over my neck and onto my face. I could not move. My heart pounded like a hammer against my skull. I shouted again.

And then, through the blur of people swarming over my eyes, I saw the faces of the king and his daughter far above, pressed to the hole, silhouetted by the sunlight, eyes glittering emerald, golden crowns casting black shadows across the city. I breathed a sigh of relief, reaching up a hand to my kingdom. “The rope!” I cried, coughing around the people in my throat. “Throw the rope!” Then I could not breathe for how they poured into me.

Through the spaces between my grasping fingers, I watched the princess grasp the edges of the clouds in her soft fingers and gently pull the hole closed.

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