“Nay, I willna flee, or he’ll turn on ye.”
“He’ll have to fight me anyway,” said Holger. “You might as well save your own life.” But he couldn’t sound very heroic in falsetto.
He threw some more sticks on the fire and turned to the giant, who had sat down with knees under hairy chin. “Here we go,” he said.
“Good. You will be glad to know for your honor, I am the riddle champion of nine flintgarths.” The giant looked at Alianora and smacked his lips. “A delicate morsel.”
Holger’s sword was aloft before he knew what he was about. “Hold your foul tongue!” he roared.
“Would you liefer fight?” The vast muscles bunched.
“No.” Holger checked his temper. But that such a hippo dared look on his Alianora—! “Okay,” he snapped. “First riddle. Why does a chicken cross the road?”
“What?” The giant gaped till his teeth shone like wet rocks. “You ask me that?”
“I do.”
“But the veriest child knows. To get to the other side.”
Holger shook his yellow-maned head. “Wrong.”
“You lie!” The mammoth shape half rose.
Holger swung his sword whistling. “I have a perfectly good answer,” he said. “You must find it.”
“I never heard the like,” complained the giant. But he seated himself and tugged his beard with one filthy hand. “Why does a chicken cross the road? Why not, if not to get to the other side? What mystical intent is here? What might a chicken and a road represent?” He shut his eyes and swayed back and forth. Alianora, lying bound near the fire, gave Holger a cheer.
After an endlessness of cold wind and colder stars, Holger saw the eyes of the monster open. They glowed in the firelight like two blood-colored lamps, deep under the cavernous brows. “I have the answer,“ said the terrifying voice. “’Tis not unlike the one that Thiazi baffled Grotnir with, five hundred winters agone. See you, mortal, a chicken is the human soul, and the road is life which must be crossed, from the ditch of birth to the ditch of death. On that road are many perils, not alone the ruts of toil and the mire of sin, but wagons of war and pestilence, drawn by the oxen of destruction; while overhead wheels that hawk bight Satan, ever ready to stoop. The chicken knows not why it crosses the road, save that it sees greener fields on the far side. It crosses because it must, even as we all must.”
He beamed smugly. Holger shook his head. “No, wrong again. “
“What? Why, you—” The ogre surged erect.
“So you’d rather fight?” said Holger. “I knew you had no intellectual staying power.”
“No, no, no!” howled the giant, starting a minor landslide. He stalked about for a while before getting enough self-control to sit down again. “Time presses,” he said, “so I’ll yield on this one and ask for the answer. Why indeed does a chicken cross the road?”
“Because it’s too far to walk around,” said Holger.
The giant’s curses exploded over him for minutes. He was quite content with that; his whole object was to stall for time, if possible for so long that the first sunrays would fall on his enemy. When the titan finally made a coherent protest, Holger had marshalled enough arguments about the meaning of the terms “question” and “answer” to keep them shouting at each other for half an hour. Bless that college course he’d taken in semantics! He killed ten minutes just reconstructing Bertrand Russell’s theory of types.
At last the giant shrugged. “Let it go,” he said ominously.
“There’ll be another night, my friend. Though I think not you will win over me this next time. Go to!”
Holger drew a breath. “What has four legs,” he asked, “yellow feathers, lives in a cage, sings and weighs eight hundred pounds?”
The ogre’s fist smote the ground so that rocks jumped. “You ask about some unheard-of chimera! That’s no riddle, that’s a question on natural philosophy.”
“If a riddle be a question resolvable by wit, then this is,” said Holger. He stole a glance eastward. Was the sky paling, ever so faintly?
The giant cuffed at him, missed, and fell to gnawing his mustache. Obviously the behemoth wasn’t very intelligent, Holger decided. Given years in which to mull over a problem, the slowest brain must come up with the answer; but what a human child would have seen in minutes this brute might need hours to solve. He certainly had powers of concentration, though. He sat with eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. The fire died low; he became another misshapen shadow.