When Women Were Warriors Book I: The Warrior's Path

Giant's Bones

The next day it was our turn to stay at the farmstead with Donal and Kenit. The farmers were busy this time of year. Even the children had work to do. I would have helped them, but Maara reminded me that I had another responsibility. We were to be ready to challenge travelers and to warn cattle raiders away. While it sounded exciting, what it meant was that we all spent a great deal of time doing nothing.

The weather had turned quite warm, and the byre was stifling, so we set up a camp outdoors, under a sprawling oak tree in the farmer’s yard. Donal and Kenit amused themselves by playing a game that involved tossing sticks onto the ground and finding certain patterns in them that were supposed to mean something. I had seen the game played before, but I’d never learned it.

Maara sat gazing up at Greth’s Tor.

“Giant’s bones,” Donal said to her.

Maara looked at him. “What?”

“Looks like a giant’s bones,” he said. “There’s a knee there.” He pointed to a place halfway up the hill, where a knob of bare rock emerged through the thin soil. “A shoulder there.” He pointed to a similar place higher up. “Teeth there.” He pointed to the craggy hilltop. “My mother used to tell me a story. Let’s see if I remember it. I was never much for storytelling.”

Donal scratched his head and knit his brow. “A giant got hurt somehow. I forget that part. But he lay down to die and pulled a blanket of sod up over him. My mother pointed to the hill behind our house. Looked a lot like that one. ‘And there he died, and there he lies to this very day,’ she’d say, ‘and those crags are his bones.’” Donal chuckled. “Used to scare me silly when I had to go up that hill looking for a lost sheep. I was always afraid the giant might wake and any minute he’d stand up and sheep and I and all would tumble off his lap.”

Donal laughed quietly to himself, a deep rumbling sound that I found comforting.

Maara turned to me. “Do you know that story?”

I shook my head. It sounded like a lot of giant stories I’d heard, but I couldn’t remember any of them well enough to tell just at that moment.

“Do you know any others?” she asked. “Any about giants?”

Her eyes were bright with the eagerness of a child. I would have been glad to tell her a story, but the presence of the men made me shy.

“Well,” said Donal, “will you help us pass the time?”

His voice was so gentle and his eyes so kind that my shyness left me.

In ancient days, when only women were warriors, lived three brothers, herdsmen in a country still half wild. In those days, in that half-wild land, giants walked the earth. They were few and, for all their size, not often seen, but on stormy days they could be heard arguing amongst themselves in their deep rumbling tongue.

One day the eldest of the brothers took his sheep out to graze. He had far to go into the wilderness, and there he spied what he took to be a stone house, built lonely far away from the houses of men. When he approached it, he saw that it was no house, but a huge table made of stone. Two great stones set on end thrust up out of the earth, with an immense stone slab across the top of them.

A holly tree grew in the shelter of the stones, and by climbing it the eldest brother was able to reach the tabletop. There he saw a golden platter that held an entire lamb, roasted to a turn, an enormous silver goblet filled with wine, and a stone the size of his foot.

“Well now,” he thought to himself, “there are no sheep but mine here in this wilderness, and no lambs but belong to my sheep, so this lamb must belong to me.”