The land of Costren was a pretty nice place to live, except for the giant. There’s always something.
The giant, a hungry, hairy figure of a man eight times as tall as a tree, used to come around to Costren for his lunch every day, with the result that a family or two would never be seen again. The king pf Costren, whose castle was just over a hill and around a corner from the castle of he giant, begged him to take gold instead of people. With gold, he explained, the giant could buy food somewhere, or order in. The giant agreed to this. Once a week, he would send a great iron coal wagon pulled by three tigers over to the king’s castle. The king would fill this with gold and send it back whence it had come.
The people of Costren were happy about this for a while. But providing that wagonload of gold for the giant every week was emptying out the king’s treasury. There was no money left to build bridges or fix roads. So he had to raise taxes.
And so the people began to grumble. “More taxes. More taxes. He must be eating all our money.”
“I wouldn’t mind if all the money was going to the giant. But with everything this country needs, what must he do but build a big shiny bridge over a hole in the ground he dug himself!”
This was absolutely true. The king had ordered his men to dig a huge pit, with a tunnel leading to his castle from the bottom. And he had ordered his engineers to build him a high, shimmering crystal bridge. A staircase ran along the curve of this bridge to a shimmering silver chair at the highest point.
When this was all finished, he called a meeting of the people of Costren. Hundreds gathered to look at the bridge, which had guards standing at each end to make sure no one tried to walk on it.
“What do you suppose this is all about?” they asked each other. “He’d better have a good excuse for building this big shiny thing!”
At length, trumpets sounding, the gates of the castle opened. The king strode out and up to the bridge, holding the hand of his daughter, Princes Tinabula. He stopped at the base of the bridge, but the princess marched up the stairs. When she reached the silver chair, she curtsied to the crowd, gathered her skirts, and sat down.
Everyone applauded. No one had a notion what was going on, but it was all very pretty.
“Now that I have your attention,” called the king. “I would like to make a proclamation.”
People stopped applauding. Proclamations almost always had something to do with taxes, usually that there would be more of them, and everyone would have to work harder to turn this kingdom around, and this proclamation really didn’t count against last week’s proclamation that there would be no new taxes.
“There will be no new taxes,” the king proclaimed.
The people applauded just a little, polite but not convinced.
“Instead,” the king went on, “We are going to have a game, open to anybody who wishes to play. Every day, provided it doesn’t snow or rain, my daughter, the Princess Tinabula, will sit in this silver chair for four hours. Anyone who wishes to do so may step into the booth right there.”
He swung his scepter to point out a little wooden booth at one side of the pit. “Each player will throw a coin of his or her choice to the Princess Tinabula. Anyone whose coin touches her chair or her shoes will win seven silver coins.”
A few people applauded. The rest were digging pennies out of their pockets.
“But anyone whose coin touches the princess’s dress will marry her.”
The crowd dropped into complete silence, staring at the smiling princess, who waved at them. “Or, if the winner is already married or someone who does not wish to marry a princess,” the king went on, “Someone in the winner’s family will instead marry the princess, move into the palace, and become a prince.”
Nobody applauded. Everyone was running at the booth, holding coins in the air. The idea of being a prince, or at least having a prince in the family, sounded excellent.
Twenty-three fights about who was first in line had to be sorted out by the castle guards. Thirteen people fainted and fifty started to cry thinking they wouldn’t get a turn. But the line was finally organized, and people stepped up into the booth, where they found throwing their coins a little more difficult than it had looked from outside the booth. The sun glinted off the shining crystal bridge right into their eyes, and the booth wasn’t QUITE big enough to allow for a full wind-up. Nonetheless, everybody wanted to try, those who failed to hit any target cheerfully running to the back of the line and pulling out another coin.
Princess Tinabula stayed in tat silver chair until the sun went down, and people couldn’t see to throw anymore. The people of Costren went home to find more coins (except for the one or two who had actually managed to hit the chair, who made immediate plans to return the next day for seven more turns with their winnings.) And the king’s men came down through the tunnel from the castle to shovel the coins thrown that first day into wheelbarrows. The coins went straight up into the treasury.
The same thing happened the next day and the day after that, and day after day. The guards never took up fewer than six wheelbarrows full of coins for the treasury.
So the king was happy, because his nearly goldless treasury was on the way to being refilled. Princess Tinabula was happy to be of help through little more than smiling and waving. The people of Costren were happy, since there would be, after all, no new taxes, and they had a game to play which might win them a little silver and perhaps a princess of their very own. No one knew whether the giant was happy, but at least he wasn’t coming around and eating people.
One person in Costren was not happy. This was Princess Tinabula’s little sister, the Princess Drewvia.
“Don’t you get tired sitting up there all day?” she asked Princess Tinabula.
Tinabula shook her hair back. “Don’t be silly. I have a parasol to keep the sun off my face, and trousers so no one can peek up under my dress. As long as I have a book to read and a box of chocolates and cold lemonade to drink with them, it doesn’t matter where I sit.”
“But you’ll have to marry just anybody,” Princess Drewvia told her.
“Not just anybody,” said Princess Tinabula, glancing in one of the mirrors she always kept handy. “Only a young man with good, strong arms could manage to reach me with a coin way up there. Why, sometimes I have to stick out a foot just so somebody can win a little money.”
“But….”
Tinabula looked up from the mirror. “Drewvia, I just do not see what your problem is. Unless you’re jealous.”
Jealousy was not Drewvia’s problem. Her problem was that she had brains. And these brains told her that one day somebody with a good, strong arm (or hidden slingshot) was going to toss a coin hard enough to land it right in Tinabula’s lap. The princess would then be married, but the treasury would still need money. Someone else would have to sit in that chair and be the next grand prize. Of course, the obvious person to take over the job was the next princess, which was Drewvia.
And Drewvia didn’t want to marry just anybody from the crowd. She had already decided she was going to marry Geirge, the apprentice to the royal wizard. The only reason George and Drewvia weren’t married now was that it would have been severely improper for a princess to be married before her older sister. (That and the fact that Drewvia hadn’t told George yet that he was going to marry her.)
The next morning, while Tinabula was sitting in the silver chair, sliding her shoes toward the crowd and then jerking them back before a coin could hit them, Drewvia went off to the tallest tower in the caste. She found George stirring a big smelly kettle of the wizard’s latest experiment.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Drewvia told him. “One of these days, they’re going to hit her. And because we have to pay for roads and libraries AND a giant, I’ll have to sit there next.”
“We don’t know what to do either,” George told her. “Some of that money, you know, goes to pay for magic books. The wizard reads them, over and over, looking for ways to be rid of a giant. But to get him into our power, he has to say we’ve defeated him. And how can we defeat him if the only way to defeat him is to defeat him?”
“That has its drawbacks,” said the princess, wandering over to the cupboard where the wizard kept his completed potions. She opened the door, said hello to the grumpy pixy who guarded the potions, and studied the boxes and jars. “Isn’t there anything else we could do? Could the wizard turn you into a giant for just long enough to wrestle him?”
George made a face. “He thought of that. If you KNEW some of the brews I had to drink while he was trying that! I’d rather eat Swiss chard on a bed of squid with liver and bleu cheese dressing. He did find a recipe for a elixir which will make things twice as big. But that’s all, and it isn’t enough.”
“Twice as big?” said Drewva. “Why not just drink more of it?”
“You don’t drink it,” said George. “If you do, you explode. You just sprinkle it on. And it won’t make anything more than double in size. Here, hand me that white bottle on the second shelf.”
Drewvia found the bottle and passed it over, managing to touch his hand as she did so. He didn’t appear to notice, and looked around the room as he pulled the cork from the bottle.
“Ah!” He stooped down and scooped up a mouse that was slipping behind a box of crystal balls. He splashed the captive animal with the potion and let it drop before it knew what was happening.
“Oh!” Drewvia jumped back.
“Some princess!” George snorted. “Afraid of a mouse?”
“I’m not! It’s just the biggest mouse I ever saw and….” She pointed at the door. “It’s getting away! Shouldn’t you do something?”
The mouse was gone. “It doesn’t last long,” George explained. “Anyway, the cat’s big enough to deal with him.”
“Of course,” said Drewvia. “The cat’s big enough. But that was the biggest mouse I’ve ever seen.”
George corked the bottle, set it back into the cupboard, and went back to the cauldron. “If I let this new potion burn, the wizard will turn me into a mouse, and a little one at that. Je tells me half the mice in this castle were once salesmen who woke him from his naps.”
Drewvia considered the door the mouse had temporarily escaped through. Then she asked, “George, if the giant did say you defeated him, would he disappear right away?”
“No,” he told her, “It would just put him into our power. Then, according to the books, mind you, whoever defeated him has to say ‘scooper drooper’ three times and then tell him he’s a mouse, or a fly, or something. And he’ll turn into that forever…or until some other wizard with another spell comes by.”
“Ah,” said Drewvia. And then she started talking about what was in the cauldron, which turned out to be a new kind of paint remover and nothing at all to do with the giant.
Eventually, she went down to her own room, and opened her wardrobe to pick out her best walking shoes and some warm clothes for hiking. That night, somewhat after midnight, she put these on and crept up to the wizard’s workroom.
“What do you want?” asked the pixy guarding the cupboard when she opened the door.
“That bottle.” Drewvia pointed at the one with the double size potion in it.
“Did the wizard say you could take it?” the pixy demanded.
“Not exactly,” said the princess.
“Okay. Take it and go away. I need my beauty sleep.”
Drewvia picked up the bottle. “You aren’t going to make any noise or tell the wizard or anything?”
“My job is to watch his potions. I’m watching them. Now go away, will you?”
“But you’re supposed to be guarding this cupboard.” Drewvia tucked the bottle into her purse.
The pixy opened one eye. “Are you stealing the cupboard?”
“No.”
The eye closed again. “So be a good little princess and go away now, won’t you?”
Drewvia shrugged and sneaked back downstairs. She slipped out through the castle gate and started the long walk to the giant’s castle. The moon was bright enough to show her where she was going, but she was still worried. A place that had a giant living there, she reasoned, likely had other things wrong with it.
Of course, she was right. As she moved through the forest at the top of the hill, something moved toward her. Drewvia was on the alert, and saw it almost as soon as it saw her. But this did not do her much good. The tiger was so big that a horse could have stood upon its back, at least until the tiger got hungry. Pulling a coal wagon filled with gold once a week no doubt gave it a mighty
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