Giants and Ogres (5 page)

I blushed at that, but Ekatu didn't notice. “Aren't
there?” I asked. “Others of your kind?”

Ekatu shrugged. “There were. There could be. But—no. I fear that I am, truly, alone.”

I felt an uncomfortable rush of sympathy and was at once struck by the impossibility of it all—this place, this … person. I took refuge in what I know best.

“Your name,” I said. “It's familiar. It reminds me of a word we have in Urdu. Ekka. It means ‘Unique.'”

“Yes,” he said. “They are surely related. My name means ‘the One' or ‘the Only.'”

He smiled then. “And your name means ‘Hope.' I'm glad to have met you, Amal.”

I glanced away, suddenly self-conscious, when a thought occurred to me, and I had to stifle a snort.

“It is funny?” Ekatu asked.

“I was just thinking of my father,” I said. “He'd be so happy to see me talking to someone my own age—although I don't think this is what he had in mind.” And as soon as the words had left my mouth, I leapt to my feet. “My father!”

Outside, the storm had long-since ceased. The jeep would be back by now; everyone would be looking for me.

“I have to go,” I said.

Ekatu nodded. “You will keep my secret?”

“Yes.”

“Close your eyes.”

Not a moment later, I was back at the tree, the scraggly tree, my notebook barely visible under a hill of sand. They were calling my name in the distance. I grabbed my journal and ran.

When I made it back to camp, my father was frantic. “What were you thinking, Amal? You can't wander off like that. It's not safe. The dunes, they're like the ocean. They can swallow you whole.
Ya 'Ali
, if your mother were here—”

We looked at each other, stunned.

He never mentions my mother. Never. Not once, in the six years since she left us.

I waited for my heart to start beating again.

Finally, without a word, my father stepped through the flap of the tent. I followed him inside.

Naturally, we didn't speak of it, and by the next morning, everything was back to normal, with one difference: I was now in possession of one half of a walkie-talkie pair (so my dad could reach me if he started to get worried), and a whistle (in case the
walkie-talkie failed, and I needed help). Such are the low-tech options for “checking in” when you're miles away from cell reception.

Of course, I was also in possession of a secret, and I could barely wrap my head around its consequences. There was my father, in the excavation pit, struggling to uncover this figurative “City of Giants” that, it turns out, may have been a city of actual giants. And I couldn't say a word about it.

Sometimes, a problem is just too big. If I couldn't think, I would wander. I took my journal, my walkie-talkie and whistle and headed back out to the far edges of the field site. Maybe Ekatu would find me again.

Spoiler alert: he did.

This time, I was walking up a large dune just past the hidden storehouse when the sands began to spill away, and Ekatu's head rose up like one of those Easter Island statues pushing out of the ground.

“Ekatu!” I said, with a backwards glance at the dig site. “They'll see you!”

He shook the sand off his face and smiled. “They will not see me. But if you prefer ….”

And for the second time in as many days, I was whisked off my feet by hands big as arm chairs and
released in the underground room.

I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the relative dark. “I don't suppose there's a less dramatic way in here, is there?”

“I'm afraid not.”

I found it mildly frustrating that Ekatu could take this all in stride; but of course, he'd known about humans his entire life. There was no … acceptance curve like there was for me.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“No, I hide here. And other places. Many other places.”

I laughed. “I find it ironic that your strategy for living in this world is hiding, considering you're twenty feet tall.”

“Well, I am good at it. We all are.” Ekatu sat down, his back against the wall. With me standing, this brought our heads closer together, though still comically apart.

“Was your father angry?” he asked.

“Yes, a little,” I said. “More worried than angry.”

“And your mother?”

I shook my head. “I don't have a mother.”

“Hmmm. Neither do I. She died when I was quite
small.” I gave him a curious look, and he raised his eyebrows. “I was small once,” he said. “I'd have had to be. I was born to a human woman.”

At that moment, the walkie-talkie crackled, and the voice of my father rang out, calling me to lunch.

“You'll find me again?” I said, and Ekatu nodded.

“I will find you.”

Over the next few days, I realized some things about Ekatu. One, he was the ultimate Rosetta stone, an archaeologist's dream. He could be my native informant, the best of all possible sources of information about that inscription—not to mention this five-thousand-year-old civilization that we knew so little about.

And two, despite his intelligence and his courtly manner, he was also just a big teenage boy. There was no question of “meeting at the scraggly tree at midday.” He insisted on appearing to me in the most unlikely and the most risky of places: he'd wave a log-like finger at the entrance of the mess tent, lie down in trench nine and press his giant face against the tarp. He even stretched out under the mechanical digger and was utterly unbothered when Hassan Uncle maneuvered its tank treads along his ill-concealed frame.

It astounded me that he was never seen.

But while Ekatu was giving me heart attacks, I was pumping him for information. Most of my questions he answered with good humor. (“Are you immortal?” “I don't think so. But we are very long lived.” And “Do you eat what humans eat?” “Yes, but in larger quantities, and less often.”)

Some questions he treated with a strange reluctance—especially if they had anything to do with the inscription.

I was deeply disappointed when I found out that Ekatu could not read the writing on the pillar, could remember little of his first language.

“I am sorry, Amal,” he said. “I was so young when I went into hiding. I have not heard that language spoken in thousands of years.”

Still, I was undeterred.

“But you know of the inscription, right? ‘They gave their daughters to the God of Death, and the children they bore were monsters?'”

Ekatu looked away, clearly discomfited. “Yes, it is known.”

Well. I may be bad with people, but I'm an expert at awkwardness. I quickly changed the subject. “Do you
know how to play Ghost?” And I proceeded to teach a five-thousandish-year-old teenage giant my favorite word game. Of course he proved to be annoyingly good at it.

That's what occupied the next few weeks: word games, Ekatu's pranks, and my never-ending questions. I woke each morning with a sense of urgency. There was so much I needed to know and so little time. And somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, I had allowed myself to look forward to the company of someone other than my father. It was another secret that I held close.

Meanwhile, new discoveries at the dig site were making my interactions with my father distinctly uncomfortable.

“It's a real puzzle, Amal,” he said to me one evening over dinner. “We're finding artifacts that are as disproportionately large as the architectural features—ordinary, mundane things you don't normally associate with ritual practice.” And then he showed me a few: a three-foot long lice comb, carved out of bone, with desiccated lice eggs still attached. An enormous copper pickaxe, missing its handle. And a row of glazed
beads, clearly fashioned to be strung on a necklace. “I can't imagine anyone wearing these,” he said, with a laugh. “They're as big as watermelons! And it would take nautical rope to hold them.”

“Maybe they were made for statues of a deity or something,” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” my father said. “But this is the nature of archaeology, Amal. One uncertainty after another and discoveries that bring more questions than answers.” Which of course made me feel very guilty, knowing that a few words of truth from me could make such a difference in his interpretations (or give me a one-way ticket to the nuthouse). And it only increased my own determination, to dig deeper.

Ekatu and I grew still easier with each other; we laughed more, shared more, but I also pushed more. I was desperate to get to the bottom of things. I returned, again and again, to the question of the inscription. What did it mean? Who wrote it, and why? Was it a warning? Was it allegory? Was it myth?

Ekatu's answers were frustratingly vague. “Perhaps.” “Who can know, for sure?” and my favorite, “What does it matter, Amal?”

But I kept up my stealth campaign: pressing,
retreating, pressing, retreating. Ekatu was slow to anger, but like anyone, he had his limits. Once, after a particularly intense session of “badgering” (Might the daughters have been priestesses, given in tribute to the temple? Or wed to barbarians? Or sold into slavery?), Ekatu accused me of “only wanting answers,” whereas he “only wanted a friend.” Which, of course, was ridiculous. He just didn't seem to understand what was at stake.

The dig would soon be winding to a close. I felt so close to something—something fundamental. We were in the storehouse, Ekatu hunched low to the ground, me pacing. I could barely contain my frustration.

“Come on, Ekatu!” I said at last. “Aren't you curious? Don't you want to know? This is your life we're talking about, your story. Don't you care?”

I had finally gone too far. Ekatu flew to his feet in one great rush. “Enough!” he shouted. I staggered backwards, off balance. His face was so far above me that I couldn't see his expression. But I could feel his anger.

“Is it not obvious, Amal?”

I looked up at him, heart pounding.

“Must I say it?” he said. “That my mother was one of the daughters, from your precious inscription? Given to
the God of Death—”

“Ekatu—”

“—the God of Death, who, I have to believe, is my father? Else,” he said, his voice bleak; “why would I and those like me be monsters?”

I was dumbstruck. Sick with shame. How could I have been so blind?

I tried to speak; Ekatu silenced me with a shake of his head.

“Why do you think we went into hiding, Amal? There is not a single place on earth that is safe for ‘monsters.' My life, you say? My story? I only know what is said of us. I do not know my own story. And I don't believe I will find it in rock or stone.”

I looked at the ground. I had never felt smaller.

“I have asked myself these questions, Amal, asked them all. Why her? Why any of them? Why were they given? Were they the oldest in their families? The youngest? The least fair? Perhaps they were a confederacy of the slightly less loved, that their parents could stand to part with them. Then I thought, maybe they were the strong daughters, and their loved ones knew they could survive it.”

Ekatu drew a long breath in and out, his emotion spent. But I was shaking. With shame, anger, panic, I didn't know. I was utterly closed off to myself.

Ekatu clearly noticed, for he fell into a low crouch, bent forward, and looked me right in the eyes.

“Why does it matter so much to you, this inscription?”

I couldn't speak. It was Ekatu's turn to press.

“Why, Amal?”

“Because,” I said, my voice breaking. “Because … it's important to know what things mean.”

Ekatu leaned closer still. “All things?” he asked. “Or one thing?”

I spun away, breaking our gaze. I focused with all my might on the storehouse wall. Baked bricks, tidily stacked. Such an ordinary wall to have lasted so long.

When I spoke, it was almost a whisper.

“She left me a note,” I said. “In an envelope with my name on it. It was one line. One line! ‘I love you. I'm sorry. I don't know how to stay.'”

I looked back at Ekatu, my eyes beginning to fill. He folded me into his hand in a makeshift embrace.

Ekatu and I sat quietly for a long time. When we
were ready, we talked of small matters. And then of larger matters. And then we laughed a little and knew though things were different, they were different in a good way.

Winter break was nearly over, and I would be leaving soon. We didn't speak of it—didn't want to mar the pleasure of those final meetings. But our last evening together, I simply had to ask: Will you find me, Ekatu?

“Yes,” he said. “I will find you, Amal. That is, when you are off on a dig somewhere. As you can imagine, we tend to avoid cities.”

“You know what?” I said. “For someone who claims to be ‘the Only,' you say ‘we' an awful lot.” That made both of us smile.

“Ekatu, are you sure there are no others?”

He grew thoughtful for a moment.

“I don't know,” he said at last. “I've told you that I remember little of my mother.” I nodded. “But I remember her last words. ‘I will come back for you, Ekatu.' I was too young, then, to understand death. So I waited.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Years. Centuries. And then later when I did understand, I thought, well, my father is supposedly the God of Death. Perhaps one day he will release her.”

“Oh, Ekatu.”

“Over the years, when it became more and more dangerous for us, we went into hiding. Everyone left. But I stayed.”

“Waiting,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But I think, perhaps, I might be done now.”

Our tent was empty, the rented Pajero packed. I stood at the edge of the field site with my father, taking in the excavation pit, the pillar, my scraggly tree.

The barest sliver of sun was rising, and everything was still—like the silence before the
aandhi
. I'm sure my father couldn't see him, but there was Ekatu, stretched out like a dune, his sand-covered hand propped up in farewell. I lifted my own in return.