Jack

  I took a closer look at the man. He seemed familiar. He was tall and thin and bald, except for his face, which was scruffy with a beard and a curling mustache. “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Of course, of course,” he said. “We all know each other in this place, don’t we?” His mustache bounced and wiggled like butterfly antennae.

  “Baker Baker?” His eyes widened. Yes, it was him! And there was his bakery! A little crushed and cracked in spots, but the same bakery that used to stand in the village, all full of pies and sticky buns. What I wouldn’t give for some Nutty-Nutty bread.

  “Do I know you?” asked Baker Baker.

  “I’m Jack. I live on a farm near your bakery.”

  “Jack…” He twisted his mustache. “Yes, yes, I remember. The rascally boy. Do you still have a farm, then?”

  “Not really. I mean our house is still there, and some of the barn, but the giants took everything else.”

  “I still have a bakery, but I never bake bread anymore, only gold.” He sighed. “Gold, gold, gold.”

  “Have you seen my father?” I asked.

  “Your father?”

  “Henry. He used to sell you wheat.” I hoped that would spark his memory, but he just twisted his mustache some more, befuddled. “Henry…he could be here, but I don’t know. Not much time for visiting in this dull, dull dungeon. All we do is work, work, work. What does it matter if there’s a Henry or a Jack or…”

  “…Or a Baker Baker?” I asked.

  “Right, right, exactly. It doesn’t matter. We’re all just here, baking like bread.” Baker Baker slid a pot of gold into the oven where he used to bake bread. The front wall of his house had been torn open, so he didn’t have to go inside. I guessed there wasn’t really an inside or outside here anyway. Just trapped.

  We heard shouting down the path and turned to see.

  “Melt! Melt! Melt!” someone chanted in a loud voice. “Keep your fires going, lads! Chop! Chop! Chop those eggs! Keep the gold coming! Come, soldiers! Do not slacken your pace! We must hasten the work!”

  There, of all people, was Sir Bluberys. His rusty armor was blackened with soot, and his mule looked more tired and swaybacked than ever. He plodded along the well-trodden paths of the encampment, issuing commands and shouts of encouragement.

  “Very good! Faster now. More fuel for the fire!”

  People scowled as he passed.

  “Fool!” muttered Baker Baker. “Thinks he’s Lord of the Dungeon. Rides around on that mutt of a mule telling everyone what to do and never lifting a finger except to eat.”

  “When do we eat?” I asked.

  “Soon, I hope. We’ve made lots and lots of gold today. The king just throws the food down when he comes to collect his gold.”

  Baker Baker took out the pot of gold and poured it into one of the molds.

  I glanced up at the dungeon ceiling. It was dark now, no light glowed through the grate. People were slowing down on their work. They stopped chopping the eggs. A few fires were doused. The coins were being rolled and stacked in towers on the platform. People looked upward expectantly, waiting for food. I imagined melons and berries raining down. I’d catch them on my tongue.

  I saw Tom, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stood with another boy who looked like he had been here a long time. He was scrawny, his clothes were torn and sooty, and his eyes looked lifeless. Is that what fate had in store for me and Tom?

  The dungeon grew silent with anticipation. My neck grew sore from craning. Stomachs rumbled. And then…

  Boom, boom, BOOM!

  The cavern shook. The gold coins clinked together in their towers. The grate creaked open.

  “Your gold, Your Goldness!” shouted an elf, and the king turned a crank that caused the platform full of gold to rise.

  I wondered if I could get onto the platform and sneak out by hiding in the gold. I could tell Tom had the same idea, because he stepped forward, but his new friend pulled him back and whispered something in his ear. Tom’s face fell. I guessed it wasn’t a good idea. It had probably been tried before without success.

  We all remained still and silent as we listened to the king inspect the gold. He counted the coins, sniffed them, and spoke to them softly. It reminded me of Miss Lettie, singing to her cabbages.

  “Oh yes, aren’t you a pretty one? Oh, you have a spot there—I’ll shine you up good as new. Beautiful, lovely, perfect. Mine, mine, mine.”

  Finally the king held a sack over the hole. The whole dungeon took a collective breath.

  “It’s coming, it’s coming,” said Baker Baker, and his stomach growled. Twice.

  “Your reward, my elves,” said the king. He poured out the contents of the sack, and it rained. It rained grapes and apples and cheese, chunks of bread, scraps of potatoes and onions. Everyone dove for the food, ravenous and beastly as wolves.

  I snatched a chunk of bread and an onion and shoved them into my pockets. I caught a bit of cheese that fell down, but after that, every time I tried to grab something, someone else snatched it away. Two men fought over a potato. Another group was arguing over a chunk of cheese, each person with his hands on a side of it. I spotted Tom and his new friend just shoveling food into their mouths as soon as they picked it up. You didn’t have to fight over food that was already eaten.

  The food was nearly gone when I spotted an apple on the ground, shiny and red. No one seemed to notice it. Quick as a jackrabbit, I dove for the apple and collided with another body. We rolled over each other, each grasping to get the apple, which kept tumbling out of reach as we fought for it. Just when I thought I had it, the man pinned my arms behind me, but I wasn’t going to lose this battle. The apple was rolling toward me, so I opened my mouth and sank my teeth into it.

  The man started laughing and released me. “Well then, I guess you win,” he said, helping me up. “You know you remind me of my—”

  The man stopped talking. I looked at him and the apple fell out of my mouth and bounced and rolled in the dirt. In two seconds someone else came and snatched it off the ground, but I didn’t move. I just stared at the man right in front of me. He was thin and dirty, his hair long and unkempt, and a scruffy beard covered half his face. But his eyes were exactly the same. Brown and warm, like rich earth baking in the sun.

  “Papa,” I whispered.

  “Jack,” whispered the man.

  “Papa!” I shouted.

  “Jack!” shouted the man.

  It was Papa. It was Papa! He opened his arms and I crashed into him and we fell to the ground laughing, and maybe crying just a little.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Egg-Quake and Food Drought

  After we stopped laughing and wiped the muddy tears from our faces, Papa and I shared our meal. Between us we had a celebratory feast of bread and cheese and grapes and onion. I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “Where are your mama and sister?” asked Papa. “Are they safe?”

  “Mama is at home. Annabella was, too, until she followed me up the beanstalk.”

  “Beanstalk?” Papa scrunched his face in confusion, and I remembered that he didn’t know anything about Jaber’s giant beans, so I told him about how I’d gotten here and how Annabella had come up, too. “But she got away,” I assured him. I left out the details of exactly how she got away. The fact that she was here at all seemed to worry Papa enough. For Annabella’s sake, I hoped the pixies were as sweet as she believed.

  “Oh, Bells. I hope she’s all right.”

  “She’ll be okay,” I said. “I never thought I’d say this, but Annabella’s pretty smart. Smarter than me in some ways.”

  Papa chuckled. “She takes after your mama. She could always outsmart me and I wouldn’t catch on until the next day. She must be worried sick, your poor mama.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever see them again?”

  “I hope so,” said Papa. “I didn’t think I would see any of you again, but now I’ve got you, so I have to believe there’s a way.” br />
  Suddenly I saw Tom peering out from behind an egg. He stared at Papa and me.

  “Tom!” I said. “I found my papa! This is him! Isn’t that amazing? We found him after all!”

  I thought this would make Tom happy, or at least get him to forgive me a little, but Tom didn’t even smile. His eyes got all shiny and his chin started to tremble. He dropped the food in his arms and ran away. Within a minute it was gone, snatched up by other hungry workers.

  “He doesn’t seem too pleased that you found me,” said Papa.

  “He’s mad at me,” I said. “It’s my fault he’s here. He was helping me search for you when we got caught, but I don’t know why he wouldn’t at least be happy that I found you.”

  Papa gave me a pat on the back. “Sometimes people have things going on inside them that we don’t understand.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder. I understood enough. Tom didn’t have a papa and he was afraid. We had been captured by giants, and enslaved in a deep, dark dungeon full of smoke and fire, but in that moment I felt so light, I could almost float above it all.

  I had found Papa. We’d find a way out of here, too. We’d find a way home.

  “To work, Jack,” said Papa when morning came.

  The words filled me with happiness, because they came from Papa. I felt I could work a thousand years in this pit, as long as he was by my side.

  Papa whistled as he raised an axe and cracked it down on the egg.

  “I lost your axe,” I told him. “I brought it to fight the giants, and then I lost it fighting pixies.”

  “That’s all right. There are plenty of axes here.” Papa chopped on the egg again, so it split clean in half. I hadn’t paid much attention yesterday, but the eggs were actually hollow, the gold shells about as thick as my arm. Something fell out of the hollow middle of the egg and rolled right to my feet. I picked it up. It was dark brown, a smooth oval shape about the size of a regular egg from Below.

  “What’s this?” I asked Papa.

  “Just the stone that comes out of the eggs—you know, like a yolk. Look there.”

  He pointed to another man who was splitting open an egg. He pounded with a hammer and a chisel and finally cracked it in half. The “yolk” rolled out of the bottom. Another worker picked it up and tossed it into a fire, where is sizzled and smoked.

  I turned the yolk over in my hand. “Can we eat them?”

  Papa shrugged. “Go ahead and try it.”

  I looked at him, unsure, but he smiled and waved me on. I sniffed at the yolk and pressed my fingernail into it. It made sense. You don’t eat eggshells. You eat the gooey stuff inside.

  I sank my teeth in and then quickly spat it out. Blech! The yolk was dry and bitter, like green wood. It tasted like poison. I spat again and again, trying to get the disgusting taste out of my mouth.

  Papa laughed. “Bitter, huh? We’ve all tried it. I even tried to roast them, but that only made it worse. We just use them for firewood. They smoke a bit, but they burn all right. Just toss them in the oven when you find them.”

  I tossed it in the oven right away, glad to be rid of it. What a disgusting egg yolk! I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth for the rest of the day, and the metallic water only made it worse.

  Papa went on chopping gold, and I gathered it and took it to the fires. I noticed more and more of the yolks. They were all a little different—all shades of brown and black, some as big as melons and others no bigger than my pinky nail. Occasionally I’d slip a nice round one into my pocket with my sling. They’d be good for target practice sometime. Maybe I could throw one at Tom and he’d think it was funny and we could go back to having fun together like we used to. This place could use a good prank to liven things up.

  But the next time I saw Tom, I noticed how dark and glazed his eyes were and I slid my sling back inside my pocket. What was I thinking? Pulling a prank was all fun and laughs when times were good, but when things were tough, it was just spitting in someone’s eye, kicking a man while he’s down, and I couldn’t imagine that would feel very fun.

  In the dungeons the weather was always hot. It hailed gold and rained food, though never enough of the latter.

  “It seems like the more golden eggs we get, the less food we eat,” said Papa. “Is there any food left?”

  This reminded me of what we had seen in the Golden Court. I told Papa how that plant had shriveled up after King Barf made the hen lay golden eggs.

  “Do you think that could have something to do with the giant famine?”

  Papa paused and sat on the edge of the egg he was taking apart. It was cut in half now, and the yolk rolled lazily away, like it too was tired. “Could be. On a farm, you only reap what you sow. You can’t get something from nothing.”

  “So what’s the something the hen is making into gold?” I asked. “Could it somehow be taking from all the growing things? Growing is powerful, isn’t it?”

  “Very powerful,” said Papa. “From one tiny seed you can grow a tree as big as the giants. Now that’s magic, if you ask me.”

  The days blended together, and so did our brains, like melted cheese, hot and gooey. It was hard to not think of food. I wouldn’t have minded some of Martha’s cheese. I would have liked to swim in a pudding, or bean soup. Even Papa couldn’t help but talk of food.

  “You’re skinny as a beanpole, son,” he said. What I wouldn’t have given for some beans. Green anything sounded good. Leaves and grass and maybe even fuzzy green caterpillars. Giant juicy ones.

  One evening, after a long hot day of work, the king opened the grate. He lowered the platform and took the gold coins as usual. Then he lifted a bulging sack above the dungeons. We opened our mouths and held out our arms, but it wasn’t food that rained down.

  “Egg-quake!” someone shouted.

  Eggs crashed down like boulders. They tumbled down the egg mountain, creating an avalanche. Everyone ran and ducked for cover.

  “In here, Jack!” Papa flipped the hollow half of the egg on top of me, closing me in like a baby bird while eggs crashed and clattered over the dungeons. When the egg-quake was over, Papa lifted the eggshell off me. The mountain of golden eggs had been well replenished, and dozens of eggs wobbled and spun all around the dungeon, but no food had come down.

  We all looked up, waiting for more, but nothing came. The king replaced the grate and went away.

  We dragged through the next day’s work as though we had great chains about our ankles. I gathered gold. I drank water to fill my empty belly. By the end of the day I could barely move the cart. We gathered all the gold. It wasn’t as much as usual, but the king had to feed us. We wouldn’t be able to make his gold if we didn’t eat.

  Boom, boom, BOOM!

  The king arrived. He removed the grate and lowered the platform. Slowly, we lifted the gold and the king raised it up. He counted it. He ran through his usual ritual of sniffing and murmuring to it.

  We all waited, parched and wilting, for the food to rain down.

  Finally, the king made it rain bread and cheese. Moldy bread. Moldy cheese. The food shower stopped far too soon, and we looked up, waiting for more. All that work, practically starving, and this was our reward?

  “Hey! Hey!” shouted Baker Baker. “Where’s the rest? This isn’t enough to feed a chicken’s chick!”

  “Be grateful,” the king said. “You made very little gold for me today.”

  Baker Baker balled up his fists and turned red all over. Something in him seemed to snap. His patience. His hope. His sanity? “Grateful? Grateful? You steal from us and enslave us, and we’re supposed to be grateful? You’re nothing but a lazy, lying, thieving, stupid tyrant!”

  Angrily, the king shot down a pair of fire tongs and snatched up Baker Baker. King Barf lifted him up to the top of the grate and dangled him upside down.

  “I am your king!” he shouted. “Everything you have is mine. Everything you see is mine. The gold you make for me is mine, and whatever I choose to give t
o you, that is mine, too. When you are not grateful, it makes me angry.” He tore the food from the baker’s arms and then let him go with the tongs so he tumbled down the mountain of eggs and landed in a heap at the bottom. King Barf threw the food into one of the fires, and everyone watched it sizzle and melt and turn to ash.

  “Who’s next?” asked the king, whipping the tongs in the air. “Who dares to speak against me, your king?”

  No one said a word. No one breathed. It was one of those moments when Grandpa Jack would have stood up and fought the king: When all was lost. When no one else would. I was supposed to be Jack the Great, but I didn’t feel that way now. I was just another elf, doing whatever King Barf told me to, because I didn’t want to get crushed or roasted.

  I, Jack, the weak and lowly, could not vanquish the villainous giant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Overlooked Thing

  “Papa?”

  “Hmmm?” Papa was leaning against an egg, half awake. There was just a faint glow from the fires and most people were asleep, but I could not rest.

  “Will you tell me a story about giants? One where they get beaten.”

  “They always get beaten,” said Papa.

  “Tell me.”

  Papa spoke with his eyes closed.

  “Once there was a giant with two heads, named Thunderdell. He wanted revenge for all the giants Jack had killed.

  “Let him come!” Papa spoke in his valiant Jack voice. “I have a tool to pick his teeth!”

  But Jack used his wits. The castle was surrounded by a moat, over which lay a drawbridge. Jack ordered his men to cut through the ropes of the bridge until they were just about to snap. He brandished his sword of sharpness, and at length, the giant came.

  “Art thou the villain who killed my kinsmen? Then I will tear thee with my teeth, suck thy blood, and grind thy bones to powder.”

  “You’ll have to catch me first,” said Jack, and he ran onto the bridge. The giant followed after him, swinging his club. But when the giant reached the middle of the bridge, his great weight caused it to collapse, and he tumbled headlong into the moat.