Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,316

they would come racing down pell-mell and run on ahead until Burr and Brindle checked them. Lyne turned half around and said, “According to Weaver’s stories, Pluto didn’t make all of this anyway!”

Weaver got the hunched, furtive look she always did when someone was trying to draw her into the conversation, and scuttled on ahead, leaving Prim to answer: “Of course he did!”

“What I’m saying,” Lyne replied, “is that in those stories this all snapped off and got redone after Pluto and the rest had been flung into the sky and got rid of. So maybe if you don’t like the way these rocks are set down you should complain to Edda. When and if we actually see her.”

“No soul went to the trouble to shape these rocks one by one, as a baker’s hand shapes a loaf,” Corvus ruled, banking slowly over their heads on a cool breeze coming up the valley.

“Then how did they come to be here,” Prim asked, “with the shapes that they have?”

“Why, when you step wrong, do you fall down?” Corvus replied. “The Land is so constituted that it has laws, which all things heed without the need for souls to observe, think, act, and do other soul-like things. So everything falls. Fall simply is. And besides fall there are other such laws and tendencies. Hill-giants maybe are aware of the slow forces that splinter cliffs and shape rocks, but not the likes of us.”

“So maybe Edda will have something to say about it!” Mard put in. He was only joking, as Prim could tell from the look he threw Lyne. But if Corvus understood it as a jest, he had no patience for it. “If I see one more of you ground-pounders craning your necks and scanning the skyline for a glimpse of her kneecap, I’ll croak!” he exclaimed. “Attend to the rocks. It won’t be much longer.”

But it was much longer, and so after a while Prim took up the theme again. She had a hidden motive; these debates made the time go by faster, and kept Lyne and Mard nearer the rest of the group.

Prim required further convincing. “I have not seen the Palace,” she began.

“I have,” said Corvus.

“But I have seen many depictions of it, and heard it described in the songs of Weaver, and if there is any truth in those, it perches on a spire of rock that is so tall and slender it cannot answer to the same laws that, according to you, govern . . . this.” And after a brief pause to be sure of her footing she looked up and spread her arms to indicate the cliffs all round them.

“It is an exception, to be sure,” Corvus admitted.

“It was so shaped in the Before Times,” Weaver assured them, “when there were many such prodigies that could never be brought into being today. It was the last such, and some say that in making it Egdod spent his powers and made himself too weak to overcome . . . the Usurper.” This last word she spoke quietly, in confidence to Prim, for it was a forbidden word, not safe to say aloud in certain company. But Prim took no note. For as she had raised her gaze just now from the next rock and the next, she had spied, around the next bend in the valley, a patch of blue sky above a field of green.

“You have to understand,” Corvus remarked, as the party lengthened its strides into Edda’s valley, “that being a giant, or a giantess, is not about being giant—or even large. That’s just a common misconception.”

Mard and Lyne turned back to gawp at him. They simply could not believe the things Corvus said sometimes.

“People have got impossibly confused,” Corvus went on, “because of hill-giants and other wild souls—who actually are unbelievably enormous. Edda has a form like ours.”

Lyne was beyond exasperated—ready to turn on his heel and walk home, it seemed. “Then why denote her as a giantess?” He threw a look at Weaver, as if it were her fault. “F’relsake, can’t we come up with a different term?”

“The First Children of Eve are known by many names, if you only listen with care to the old songs,” said Weaver. “Angel Eaters, Adam’s Woe, Cairn’s Care . . .”

“Fine!” Lyne snapped. “All better names than ‘giantess.’”

Burr had stopped a few hundred paces short of a cottage that they had all, without discussing it, been heading for since it had hove into view.