They stood on the road, while the clouds scudded by, their vague, grey shadows passing over them towards the enigmatic hills.
It was twilight.
Popolac could stride no further. It felt exhaustion in every muscle. Here and there in its huge anatomy deaths had occurred; but there was no grieving in the city for its deceased cells. If the dead were in the interior, the corpses were allowed to hang from their harnesses. If they formed the skin of the city they were unbuckled from their positions and released, to plunge into the forest below.
The giant was not capable of pity. It had no ambition but to continue until it ceased.
As the sun slunk out of sight Popolac rested, sitting on a small hillock, nursing its huge head in its huge hands.
The stars were coming out, with their familiar caution. Night was approaching, mercifully bandaging up the wounds of the day, blinding eyes that had seen too much.
Popolac rose to its feet again, and began to move, step by booming step. It would not be long surely, before fatigue overcame it: before it could lie down in the tomb of some lost valley and die.
But for a space yet it must walk on, each step more agonizingly slow than the last, while the night bloomed black around its head.
Mick wanted to bury the car-thief, somewhere on the edge of the forest. Judd, however, pointed out that burying a body might seem, in tomorrow’s saner light, a little suspicious. And besides, wasn’t it absurd to concern themselves with one corpse when there were literally thousands of them lying a few miles from where they stood?
The body was left to lie, therefore, and the car to sink deeper into the ditch.
They began to walk again.
It was cold, and colder by the moment, and they were hungry. But the few houses they passed were all deserted, locked and shuttered, every one.
‘What did he mean?’ said Mick, as they stood looking at another locked door.
‘He was talking metaphor —, ‘All that stuff about giants?’
‘It was some Trotskyist tripe —‘ Judd insisted.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I know so. It was his deathbed speech, he’d probably been preparing for years.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mick said again, and began walking
back towards the road.
‘Oh, how’s that?’ Judd was at his back.
‘He wasn’t toeing some party line.’
‘Are you saying you think there’s some giant around here someplace? For God’s sake!’
Mick turned to Judd. His face was difficult to see the twilight. But his voice was sober with belief.
‘Yes. I think he was telling the truth.’
‘That’s absurd. That’s ridiculous. No.’
Judd hated Mick that moment. Hated his naiveté, his passion to believe any half-witted story if it had a whiff of romance about it. And this? This was the worst, the most preposterous .
‘No,’ he said again. ‘No. No. No.’
The sky was porcelain smooth, and the outline of the hills black as pitch.
‘I’m fucking freezing,’ said Mick out of the ink. ‘Are you staying here or walking with me?’
Judd shouted: ‘We’re not going to find anything this way.’
‘Well it’s a long way back.’
‘We’re just going deeper into the hills.’
‘Do what you like — I’m walking.’
His footsteps receded: the dark encased him. After a minute, Judd followed.
The night was cloudless and bitter. They walked on, their collars up against the chill, their feet swollen in their shoes. Above them the whole sky had become a parade of stars. A triumph of spilled light, from which the eye could make as many patterns as it had patience for. After a while, they slung their tired arms around each other, for comfort and warmth.
About eleven o’clock, they saw the glow of a window in the distance.
The woman at the door of the stone cottage didn’t smile, but she understood their condition, and let them in. There seemed to be no purpose in trying to explain to either the woman or her crippled husband what they had seen. The cottage had no telephone, and there was no sign of a vehicle, so even had they found some way to express themselves, nothing could be done.