Charles De Lint - Jack, The Giant-Killer

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JACK, THE

GIANT-KILLER

Charles de Lint

the jack of kinrowan: a novel of

urban faerie

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

for MaryAnn and Terri

and dedicated to the memory of

K.M. Briggs

(1898-1980)

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

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 unembarrassed 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.

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

JACK THE GIANT-KILLER

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.

She remembered going to the window, reaching it in

time to see Will disappearing down the street. Then she’d

gone into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror

looking at herself. What was missing? Could you see it by

just looking at her?

Her waist-length blonde hair hadn’t been cut in twelve

years—not since she was, God, seven. She was wearing

her favorite clothes: a baggy plaid shirt and a comfortable

pair of old Levi’s. When she walked down the street, did

people turn to look at her and maybe… laugh? Did they

think she was some kind of hippie burn-out, even though

she’d barely been out of diapers during the sixties?

She wasn’t sure what had started it, but one moment

she was just standing there in front of the mirror, and the

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