Magnus had to suppress the impulse to project a call to Herkimer on radio frequency out of sheer loneliness.  If it hadn't been for the road, he'd have found it hard to believe there were people on this planet, never mind the photographs he'd seen from orbit.  Even then, the road might have been only an animal track, if it hadn't been ten feet wide.  It seemed unusually broad for a medieval road until Magnus remembered that giants might have laid it out.  That gave him a strange chill down his spine.  He found himself trying to believe giants were only fairy tales.

Well, true enough, these weren't forty feet tall, and no human being could hide in their beer steins or spend the night in one of their gloves - but they were big enough to call giants.  From what Magnus had seen in the orbital shots, though, this buffer zone between Midgard and the giants' country might very well have had ordinary-sized people as well as giants walking about.  It was barren enough, Heaven knew - a broad plain with knee-high grass, and a line of trees to his left that presumably shaded a watercourse.  But there was genuine forest to his right; it seemed that the road had been built along some sort of natural boundary.

Then some people came around the bend, half a dozen in armor and with battle axes at their hips, with two adolescents along.  Magnus was surprised that the bend was so close - it had looked much farther away, but the people made it seem much nearer.

Then he realized that it wasn't the bend that was so close, it was the people who were so tall.

He stopped and stared, eyes wider and wider as the strangers came nearer and nearer.  For the first time since his adolescent growth spurt, he found himself looking up at someone - up higher and higher.  As they came close, their th sheer size overwhelmed him - not just their height he only came up to the chest of the shortest grownup, and was still a head shorter than the boys.  It was their mass that made him feel so small, for each of the grown giants was easily twice as broad in the shoulder and hip as Magnus was.  Their legs were virtual tree trunks, and their arms would have shamed a gorilla.

They weren't looking any more friendly than that gorilla' either.  The oldest man - at least, to judge by the gray in his hair - rested his hand on the haft of his axe and demanded, "Who are you, Midgarder?  And why are you here?"

"My name is Gar Pike," Magnus said, trying, to imitate their accent.

The leader couldn't help it; his face quirked into a smile.  "Your parents didn't really name you that!"

They hadn't, so Gar decided on belligerence.  "And what's wrong with my name, I'd like to know?"