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The sack was tied up in the limb of a tree, and when Crush woke up the next morning, he saw the male giant, Mouchard, sleeping on the ground below him. The giantess was awake, and she appeared to be preoccupied with listening to the sounds of the morning forest. From the conversations that he had spied on between the two the night before, she could not remember her own name, though Mouchard had told her that he thought she looked like someone that he had known before. Daylight was just breaking, and with nothing else better to do, Crush watched her as she stood next to the tree with her hand leaned against the rough bark. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh air as if she had held her breath for an eternity. A glow surrounded her, an all too familiar radiance with a hint of light green, like that of the pendant which he had found in the treasure chest. She held her hand aloft in the air as if she was the director of an orchestra, and she waved it back and forth as she crooned a soft, happy song. Oddly enough, though the giants spoke some distant version of accented English, he did not recognize any of the words from the song that she sang. Crush watched as the forest mysteriously came alive around her, and then the sound of distant footsteps trudged along through the woodland. The leaves of the surrounding shrubbery rustled, and a great horned beast stepped from behind the tree to stand humbly before her. The beast was shaped similar to a bull, yet it was enormously sized like the giants in height. Crush fell backward in disbelief, and the sack began to sway nervously from the tree.
“I’m glad we didn’t come across one of those things the first time we hiked through,” he thought, and then Crush realized that he and Simon were dangling like a piñata from the tree within reach of the gnarled horns. He gulped a breath of air anxiously and watched as the giantess laid her hand on the head of the beast, stroking its fur down to its nose. The beast was known as a malcoon, and it closed its eyes and snorted a relaxed grunt as she sang. All the while her hand gently caressed the creature’s nose. She then turned around to gaze upon the sack that hung from the tree. She had not been privy to what was in the bag. With a flick of the wrist, she dismissed the malcoon back into the forest and walked over to the bag where it dangled loosely from the wood. Undoing the string, she tilted her head downward and looked inside to find Simon and Crush staring up at her. Crush found her stunning gaze intoxicating, and he heard a voice speak aloud within his mind.
“Who am I?” she asked him as her eyelashes gently blinked.
“That is a great question that I do not know the answer to, my lady,” Crush thought in his mind and waited for her acknowledgement, but she simply stared at him. “Maybe, she can only talk to me this way. She doesn’t seem to hear me when I speak in my mind,” he reasoned and decided to talk aloud to her. Crush cleared his throat and then replied aloud in a calm, slow voice, “I do not know your name, my lady. But I recognize your face. It was engraved on a pendant that I dropped within the cave.”
“With the dragon,” she said, but this time aloud with her voice. She seemed to remember catching a glimpse of Crush somewhere in the dark. But it was not the cave. It was somewhere within a much smaller confinement. In a box . . . ? Bits and pieces were coming back to her slowly. She had seen his face and called to him for help, and he had responded by picking her up. Then the memory faded, and even more questions desperately came to mind as she pondered the possibilities. “You saved me. But how? And why?” she asked him and then began to place her open hand within the bag so that he could step onto her palm. Before she could bring her hand out, Mouchard’s feet began to stir with the waking of the morning, and she quickly withdrew her hand and resealed the bag. After she had secured and resealed the sack, the soldier opened his eyes and inhaled the fresh morning air. Realizing where he was, Mouchard looked up to see the lady standing over him next to his prisoners, and he held his hand over his eyes to block the light.
“Good morning,” he said as he stood to his feet and stretched. She smiled at him and feigned any interest in the bag or its contents which hung securely from the tree. Mouchard was a giant of few words, and he wasted no time in gathering his belongings, including the sack which held Crush and Simon. He tightened his belt and strapped the bag over his shoulder. With everything secured in place, he looked through the forest to Scalus Mountain, and he listened most intently to the sounds that surrounded him. There were the footsteps of the malcoon as it wandered away deep into the forest, the rustle of the leaves in the wind, and the sound of the lady as she sighed to see Crush confined in the bag on Mouchard’s back. Hiding her true feelings, she smiled on command at him, not a happy smile, but the forged smile of someone who was uncomfortable with her present company. Mouchard picked up on her emotions, and he sensed her hesitancy, though there was nothing that he could do to change the circumstances which they found themselves. He turned, and reaching for her hands, he sought to soothe her uncertain feelings for the time being.
“My lady, we are alone and in danger in this wild forest,” he said, and he emphasized the severity of their situation. “There are many wild animals that would harm you out here,” he spoke with a toothy grin that reeked of morning breath. “We must find our way back to the river where we will cross on a makeshift raft that I have crafted.” She could tell that he was hiding some important truth behind his eyes, yet she nodded her assent.
“You said last night that I look familiar to you. If that is true, and I have no doubt that it is, please tell me who you believe I am,” she asked him. Mouchard was not quick to answer her, and he smiled for a moment as he thought over how best to address her.
“You look strikingly like my sister,” he said very wisely. “When we were young, we lived in a castle across the river and through the forest, but she has been missing for many years, since childhood in fact. Do you remember?” he asked her.
“Your sister?” she replied as her eyebrows crinkled up at the ludicrous idea. She could tell a lie when she heard one, and she looked in his eyes and thought to answer him with how outlandish that sounded. His face began to harden as he sensed that she was not buying the lie which had just passed his lips, and his jaw began to tense as his hand moved to the handle of his sword. Quickly she reacted to deflate the issue that her doubt was causing. “That seems possible,” she said, and the muscles of his wrist loosened upon the handle of his sword. “Yes, it could be,” she continued, though knowing all along that it was a lie. She had no brother, and if she did, he would not be purposely deceiving her. “Wait a minute,” she thought as she realized that she could remember that she had no brother. Slowly, familiarities and ideas from her past were returning to her memory. “Maybe it would be best to play along with this charade, at least until I know who I am,” she thought and smiled at him.
“Yes, it may be. What was my name then?” she asked in a soft, quiet voice. Before Mouchard could answer, thunder rolled, and the ground shook as the rumblings from Scalus Mountain reverberated across the land. She grabbed the trunk of the tree to stabilize herself as the quaking diminished, and she knew that the scourge of the dragon could scarcely be over. She had escaped the terrible fury of the colossal harbinger of fiery death, and now it was time to put some distance between herself and the mountain where it lay buried under hundreds of tons of rock. She stood to her feet as the trembling of the ground eased, and Mouchard motioned for her to follow him. Feeling some pangs of guilt for lying to her, he stopped once to give her some bit of truth.
“Beni,” he answered her as they walked through the forest. “That was your name,” he said as they started down the hill where he had fled the malcoons the day before. She repeated the name in her mind several times, and the word rolled like a bowling ball toward the pins that surrounded her trapped memories. Striking the sturdy pins mightily, a few were knocked down, and a trickling of memories began to drip back into her consciousness.
“Beni. That was my name. That . . . that is my name,” she thought to herse
lf, and she smiled. This time the smile was genuine, and she was thankful that Mouchard had given her something to latch onto from her missing life that lay elsewhere in the past. As she followed the soldier through the forest, she saw the bag bouncing to and fro on his back, and she suddenly remembered Crush. She knew that he had saved her, though she still could not quite recall what it was that he had done. At any rate, there was no way that she was going to let Mouchard continue to beat him to a pulp by bouncing the bag around on his back.
“Mouchard, just a minute, please,” Beni said as she placed her hand on the bag that hung over his shoulders. “May I carry this for you, please?” she asked him politely. “Whatever is in there will be pummeled by the jostling back and forth on your back.” He stopped and turned his head toward her as she picked up the sack to untie it from his shoulder, and for a moment she thought that he was going to object to her request. She could see that the wheels were turning in his head, that he may be searching out an excuse, but he had his prize, or rather Queen Dowager’s prize, and he let her gently take the sack with the prisoners away from him.
“Very well,” Mouchard agreed and nodded once in assent. Then they continued the long hike through the forest of malcoons to the river that waited at the edge of the woods.
**********
In the dark of the mountain, the eyes blinked once in the small open space within the fallen rock. The belly of the beast glowed a hot and fiery white hue as the beast opened its mouth and melted out a new space to crawl forward several more feet. With every breath, the creature burned inside with a growing anger. They had stolen his tooth, his last tooth, and he would make them pay. The roar of indignation that followed shook the mountain to its core as the monster crept forward a few more steps.
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Next Issue
Can Pound escape from the deadly clutches of the Queenmother??? How will Crush break away from Mouchard and get the dragon’s tooth safely back to the mountain??? Who is Princess Beni, and will she help Crush in his latest assignment, or will she stand in the way of his mission??? Come back in June for more of Crush, Pound, Simon, and Beni in the continuation of the Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound!!!!
About the Author
Christopher Carter is an engineer by day, and transforms into a writer and artist by night. He lives with his wife and cat in central North Carolina.
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