JACK, THE GIANT-KILLER

  Charles de Lint

  THE JACK OF KINROWAN: A NOVEL OF URBAN FAERIE

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  Contents

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  Once there was an ordinary city…

  But behind the everyday streets there lies a Faerie world, where trolls and goblins lurk under motorway bridges—and giants walk the earth.

  Once there was an ordinary girl…

  Who didn’t believe in giants. But now Jacky Rowan’s been marked for destruction, and sent on a quest that only a fool would dare.

  Once there were no more heroes…

  Until one mortal woman set out to save the city —human and otherworldly alike—from a nightmarish demise.

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  JACK, THE GIANT-KILLER

  A book from Fairy Tales. a series of fantasy novels retelling classic tales

  FEE FI FO FUM

  He was big, this giant. Bigger than any creature Jacky had ever seen. His head alone was more than two feet high, almost a foot and a half wide. Legs, three yards long, supported the enormous bulk of his torso and carried him across the park. He was going to be right on top of her in moments and she didn’t know what to do. She was too petrified with fear to do more than shake where she was crouched. Her fingers plucked nervously at the hem of her jacket and she chewed furiously on her lower lip.

  Run, she told herself. Get up and run, you fool.

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  Charles de Lint is one of the major pioneers of the modern “contemporary fantasy” novel-stories that bring ancient folk tales, themes and characters into modern settings. His acclaimed novels Moonheart, Mulengro and Yarrow are, like Jack, the Giant-Killer, tales of fantasy set in the Canadian city of Ottawa, where de Lint makes his home. He is also the author of Greenmantle, Svaha, and numerous works of short fiction.

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  ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  This Ace Book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film.

  A NOVEL OF URBAN FAERIE

  An Ace Book/published by arrangement with The Endicott Studio

  The Fairy Tales series is produced by

  Terri Windling, Endicott Studio,

  63 Endicott Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02113.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace hardcover edition/November 1987

  Ace mass-market edition/January 1990

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ® 1987 by Charles de Lint.

  Cover art by Jim Warren.

  Frontispiece by Thomas Canty.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  ISBN: 0-441-37970-2

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  The name “ACE” and the “A” logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  for MaryAnn and Terri

  and dedicated to the memory of

  K.M. Briggs

  (1898-1980)

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  Red is the colour of magic in every country, and has been so from the very earliest times. The caps of fairies and musicians are well-nigh always red.

  —W.B. Yeats,

  from Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

  Rowan am I and I am sister to the Red Man my berries are guarded by dreamless dragons my wood charms the spells from witches and in the wide plain my floods quicken

  —Wendlessen, from The Calendar of the Trees

  Though she be but little, she is fierce.

  —William Shakespeare, from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream

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  INTRODUCTION

  FAIRY TALES

  There is no satisfactory equivalent to the German word märchen, tales of magic and wonder such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm: Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Six Swans and other such familiar stories. We call them fairy tales, although none of the above stories actually contains a creature called a “fairy.” They do contain those ingredients most familiar to us in fairy tales: magic and enchantment, spells and curses, witches and trolls, and protagonists who defeat overwhelming odds to triumph over evil. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his classic essay on Fairy Stories, offers the definition that these are not in particular tales about fairies or elves, but rather of the land of Faerie: “the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in the country. I will not attempt to define that directly,” he goes on, “for it cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.”

  Fairy tales were originally created for an adult audience. The tales collected in the German countryside and set to paper by the Brothers Grimm (wherein a Queen orders her stepdaughter, Snow White, killed and her heart served “boiled and salted for my dinner” and a peasant girl must cut off her own feet lest the Red Shoes, of which she has been so vain, keep her dancing night and day until she dances herself to death) were published for an adult readership, popular, in the age of Goethe and Schiller, among the German Romantic poets. Charles Perrault’s spare and moralistic tales (such as Little Red Riding Hood who, in the original Perrault telling, gets eaten by the wolf in the end for having the ill sense to talk to strangers in the wood) was written for the court of Louis XIV; Madame d’Aulnoy (author of The White Cat) and Madam Leprince de Beaumont (author of Beauty and the Beast) also wrote for the French aristocracy. In England, fairy stories and heroic legends were popularized through Malory’s Arthur, Shakespeare’s Puck and Ariel, Spencer’s Faerie Queen.

  With the Age of Enlightenment and the growing emphasis on rational and scientific modes of thought, along with the rise in fashion of novels of social realism in the Nineteenth Century, literary fantasy went out of vogue and those stories of magic, enchantment, heroic quests and courtly romance that form a cultural heritage thousands of years old, dating back to the oldest written epics and further still to tales spoken around the hearth-fire, came to be seen as fit only for children, relegated to the nursery like, Professor Tolkien points out, “shabby or old-fashioned furniture… primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.”

  And misused the stories have been, in some cases altered so greatly to make them suitable for Victorian children that the original tales were all but forgotten. Andrew Lang’s Tam Lin, printed in the colored Fairy Books series, tells the story of little Janet whose playmate is stolen away by the fairy folk—ignoring the original, darker tale of seduction and human sacrifice to the Lord of Hell, as the heroine, pregnant with Tam Lin’s child, battles the Fairy Queen for her lover’s life. Walt Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” bears only a little resemblance to Straparola’s Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, published in Venice in the Sixteenth Century, in which the enchanted princess is impregnated as she sleeps. The Little Golden Book version of the Arabian Nights resembles not at all the violent and sensual tales recounted by Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights so that the King of Kings won’t take her virginity and her life.

  The wealth of material from myth and folklore at the disposal of the story-teller (or modern fantasy novelist) has been described as a giant cauldron of soup into which each generation throws new bits of fancy and history, new imaginings, new ideas, to simmer along with the old. The story-teller is the cook who serves up the common ingredients in his or her own individual way, to suit the tastes of a new audience. Each generation has its cooks, its Hans Christian Andersen or Charles Perrault, spinning magical tales for those who will listen—even amid the Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century or the technological revolution of our own. In the last century, George Mac Donald, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde, among others, turned their hands to fairy stories; at the turn of the century lavish fairy tale collections were produced, a showcase for the art of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielson, the Robinson Brothers—published as children’s books, yet often found gracing adult salons.

  In the early part of the Twentieth Century Lord Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, J.R.R. Tolkien— to name but a few—created classic tales of fantasy; while more recently we’ve seen the growing popularity of books published under the category title “Adult Fantasy”—as well as works published in the literary mainstream that could easily go under that heading: John Earth’s Chimera, John Gardner’s Grendel, Joyce Carol Gates’ Bellefleur, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin, Mark Halprin’s A Winter’s Tale, and the works of South American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel Angel Asturias.

  It is not surprising that modern readers or writers should occasionally turn to fairy tales. The fantasy story or novel differs from novels of social realism in that it is free to portray the world in bright, primary colors, a dream-world half remembered from the stories of childhood when all the world was bright and strange, a fiction unembarr assed to tackle the large themes of Good and Evil, Honor and Betrayal, Love and Hate. Susan Cooper, who won the Newbery Medal for her fantasy novel The Grey King, makes this comment about the desire to write fantasy: “In the ‘Poetics’ Aristotle said, ‘A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.’ I think those of us who write fantasy are dedicated to making impossible things seem likely, making dreams seem real. We are somewhere between the Impressionist and abstract painters. Our writing is haunted by those parts of our experience which we do not understand, or even consciously remember. And if you, child or adult, are drawn to our work, your response comes from that same shadowy land.”

  All Adult Fantasy stories draw in a greater or lesser degree from traditional tales and legends. Some writers consciously acknowledge that material, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of themes and imagery from the Icelandic Eddas and the German Niebelungenlied in The Lord of the Rings or Evangeline Walton’s reworking of the stories from the Welsh Mabinogion in The Island of the Mighty. Some authors use the language and symbols of old tales to create new ones, such as the stories collected in Jane Yolen’s Tales of Wonder, or Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. And others, like Robin McKinley in Beauty or Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber (and the movie “The Company of Wolves” derived from a story in that collection) base their stories directly on old tales, breathing new life into them, and presenting them to the modern reader.

  The Fairy Tales series presents new novels of the later sort—novels directly based on traditional fairy tales. Each novel in the series is firmly based on a specific, often familiar, tale—yet each author is free to use that tale as he or she pleases, showing the diverse ways a modern story-teller can approach traditional material.

  The novel you hold in your hands brings the old tales of Jack the Giant-Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk, as well as other bits of fairy lore, to modern day Canada—by an author who has gained a wide following for his ability to weave mythic motifs with modern characterizations and settings, creating Fairy Tales for the Twentieth Century. Other novels in the Fairy Tales series include a romantic retelling of Rose White, Rose Red; Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale as a Japanese historical fantasy; a reworking of the Hungarian The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars into a thought-provoking modern novel; a moody and beautiful retelling of The Briar Rose… and much more. Fantasy and horror by some of the most talented writers in these two fields, retelling the world’s most beloved tales, in editions lovingly designed—as all good Fairy Tale books should be. We hope you’ll enjoy them.

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  FOREWORD

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  It was in the late summer of 1984 that Terri Windling first told me of her concept for a series of novel-length retellings of traditional fairy tales and asked me if I’d be interested in doing one. The idea was so intriguing—especially when she mentioned that said stories could take place in any setting—that without waiting for a contract, or even to find out if she could place the series, I immediately sat down to work on my contribution to it.

  The principal reason for my interest was that I’d been wanting to write a high fantasy placed in a contemporary setting for some time. I liked the novels that I’d written to date using this general concept, but I felt that the actual blending of faerie with an urban setting had worked with only varying degrees of success. In them, faerie was still an intrusion into the real world, rather than something that was always present, but invisible to the casual glance. This fairy tale series of Terri’s seemed the perfect opportunity to try to get it right.

  My first inclination was to pick an obscure fairy tale to work with but, as I reread those old stories, I kept coming back to the trickster figure of Jack—the Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” “Jack the Giant-Killer,” or the Wee Jack stories of Scottish folklore. Jack wins out as much by luck as by pluck; Jack’s both foolish and clever. And enamoured as I am with the role of the trickster in all his guises, I soon realized that I had no choice: It had to be a Jack tale. The creative process being what it is, the words came to paper as soon as I settled on “Jack the Giant-Killer” as the principal framework for The Jack of Kinrowan.

  As the novel grew, other tales and bits of folklore kept adding themselves to the brew. And so you’ll find traces of “Kate Crackernuts” in here, elements of the seven brothers who became swans, the youngest son of three who sets off to make his fortune, and all sorts of traditional folkloric material, from Billy Blinds to the restless dead of the Scottish Highlands.

  I owe a great debt to Terri Windling, not only for sparking this particular story in my mind, but for her friendship and astute editing over the years. My wife Mary Ann also plays a major role in my creative processes, serving as the most discerning and beneficial of first readers. (And I used to just think that I was lucky that she married me.) My friend Rodger Turner has also provided valuable feedback on works in progress on an ongoing basis and I’d like to thank him here as well.

  The source material for this novel of Urban Faerie has its roots in a lifetime of reading folk and fairy tales, and from years of listening to and playing traditional music. Some specific sources would include: K.M. Briggs, author of studies such as The Anatomy of Puck, A Dictionary of Fairies, and a couple of outstanding novels, of which I’d particularly recommend Hobberdy Dick; Alan Garner, known better for his Young Adult fantasies perhaps, but also a fine collector and reteller of traditional English fairy tales; and Jane Yolen, who over the years has produced a body of beautiful fairy tales that rivals any of the masters. The gruagaghs I got from Robin Williamson, one of the few surviving bards still practising his craft.

  For those of you who are interested in more Urban Faerie stories, I currently have a second novel in draft form entitled Drink Down the Moon, a loose retelling of “The Ogre, or Devil’s Heart in the Egg.” This one centers more on the fiaina sidhe, the solitary faerie briefly mentioned in The Jack of Kinrowan, and deals primarily with one Jemi Pook, a faerie sax player in an r&b band. Perhaps we’ll meet again in its pages.

  —Charles de Lint

  Ottawa, winter 1987

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  JACK THE GIANT-KILLER

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  CHAPTER ONE

  ^ »

  The reflection that looked back at her from the mirror wasn’t her own. Its hair was cut short and ragged like the stubble in a cornfield. Its eye make-up was smudged and the eyes themselves were red-veined and puffy. She hadn’t been crying, but oh, she’d been drinking…

  “Jacky,” she mumbled to the reflection. “What’ve you done to yourself this time?”

  Five hours ago she’d numbly watched the door of her apartment slam shut behind Will.

  “You’re so goddamn predictable!” he’d shouted at the end. “Nothing changes the routine. It’s just night after night of burrowing away in this place. What do I have to do to drag you away from your books or that glass tit? This place is a prison, Jacky, and I’m not buying into it. Not anymore. I’m tired of going out on my own, tired of… Christ, we’ve got absolutely nothing in common and I don’t know what I ever thought we did have.”

  He’d stood there, red-faced, a vein throbbing at his temple, then turned and walked out the door. She knew he wasn’t coming back. And after that outburst, she didn’t want him back.

  There was nothing wrong with being a homebody. There was nothing wrong with not wanting—not needing—the constant jostle and noise of a party or a bar or… whatever. Maybe it was better this way. She didn’t need what Will offered any more than he seemed to want what she had. So why did she feel guilty? Why did she feel so… empty? Like there was something missing.

 

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