The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

He said he did not, even though he did.

‘The earth beneath us shifts on huge plates. There are many of these plates, moving in different directions, sliding slowly on vast seas of molten metal and rock. At first these plates are flat. But when they collide, the stronger plate crushes the weaker plate, making it buckle and rear up into the sky – just as if you were to push your blankets from the foot of your bed up to the head, so they would fold and buckle, and rise up. This is how mountains are formed. But the wind and the rain, the ice and the sea crash and break and run upon the mountains, and after many, many centuries they are crumbled and washed again into the oceans from which they first rose. And then the mountains that seemed to pierce the stars are again flat. Many mountains have been valleys, and many valleys mountains. When you find the fossil of a fish upon a snow-covered peak, you must think that nothing is as it seems.’

Fitz where he was sitting at a long table had a book open before him. He was reading the names of plants and of constellations, not in one language only, but in many languages. He turned the names over on his tongue: Orion the Hunter, the Shepherd and the Deer, Sah-Osiris, the Fool, al-Jabbar, or the Giant. Under his finger was the picture of a slender reed crowned with a magnificent head of bloom, as red as blood and as fire.

‘There is a secret to trees, little brother. If you were a giant to whom trees were as little weeds, so that you could pull them from the ground as you might a dandelion, you would notice a curious thing. Shaking the soil and rocks from the roots of the tree, and stripping the leaves and needles from all the branches, you would see that the tree is altogether symmetrical, that its lofty canopy in the sky looks no different from its spreading roots beneath the earth. And this is fitting, for a tree begins as a tiny seed, and then spends its entire life growing very large so that it may produce something no larger than the thought in your head or the dust in your eye – that is, another seed. And it lets this seed fall upon the earth, and at length, perhaps after thousands of years, it dies. When it dies, it does not disappear, or become a ghost and wander through the forest. Each twig, each scrap of bark, the heartwood and all that is in the tree very slowly break down into something smaller, into fine dust, into powder. Beetles and termites, worms and even other plants feed upon it, chewing and crumbling it into pieces so infinitesimally small that you cannot see them, so small that they are like the hairs upon your neck, that you know to be there only because you can feel that they must be. And the little seed, which the tree has long ago let fall, loves nothing better than this fine powder and loam from the tree that came before, and this and no other thing can make it grow.’

Fitz had turned over many pages that morning already. The breezes coming through the window, bearing birdsong from the court below, and from the trees that stood in it, ruffled in the pages before him. He always liked to watch the movement of the paper where it was stirred, intermittently, along its edges.

‘Have you looked up at the stars in the dark sky, little brother? Have you seen the way they wheel in the night, turning round the brightest light in the north, that they call the Pole Star? There is a constellation among them which some call Orion, but a thousand years ago they knew it as Giga, the Giant, the constellation that in Arabic is called al-Jabbar. This giant is a great hunter, and carries a sword above his head called al-Saif, the knife with which he cuts the skins from the beasts he kills upon the mountains or in the forests. When this constellation appears in the sky in winter, it is a sign that men must go on the hunt, for the summer harvests have ended, the fields are bare, the fruit has fallen from the trees, the seas are wild and perilous, and there is no other sustenance upon the earth or in the waves. Do you think, little brother, that the ancient hunters saw the stars and named them for themselves? Or did they look upon the stars and see al-Jabbar, and from him come to understand that they must learn to hunt? Where does the wheel begin to turn?’

The words of the books that had been set before him by the Registrar appeared for a time to shimmer in the breeze, and Fitz liked to imagine that they were ruffled into voice by the air that stirred them. Dina always by his side, he sat through the interminable hours of the morning awash in her tales, and in the histories of the chroniclers, and in the poems of the bards, and in the catalogues of names recorded by the botanists, and in the myths that bound the gods and their constellations to the circle of the seasons, to the harvests, to the rites of priests, and to the prophecies that they revealed.

‘My grandfather was very rich,’ said Dina. ‘He devoted his life to making miraculous and beautiful things, to buying and selling things, to discovering things throughout the world and in the quiet of his own contemplation. Over the years of his life he amassed a great fortune, not only in money but in objects, in rare and precious things of many kinds. He had many friends and associates. His name dropped from others’ mouths as honey from the hive in autumn, and all the world knelt at