Free Snow White and the Giants by J. T. McIntosh Page A

giants' camp was to swim or use a boat.

I started to run. I wanted to be in the copse before Miranda, to hide and

see what happened. Unless I ran I had no chance of beating her there,

because I had to run past the copse to where Jota and I had left the

dinghy, row myself over and get myself established in the copse before

Miranda arrived.

I made it. I was across the river and well hidden at the bottom of the

garden just before Miranda swam up the first inside leg of the W bend.

I saw her climb onto the bank, shaking the water from her hair . . . then

she said, not loudly: "Come out, Val."

There was no point in going on pretending. I stood up, pushed my way

through the bushes, and joined her on the small strip of grass at the

edge of the river.

"You saw me?" I said.

"I saw your boat."

At the point where I crossed, only a tiny stretch of river past the bends

was visible. By a piece of bad luck, Miranda must have been exactly at

that point when I was rowing myself across.

She sat down on the grass. Her swimsuit was a brief white two-piece,

and I had never seen anything so lovely as her in it. Not sexy -- that,

too, of course, but she was genuinely beautiful rather than provocative.

"Where were you?" she asked.

I sat down too. "At the camp. With Jota."

"What happened?"

I told her.

For a moment she was furiously angry, though silent -- the first time

I had seen her really alive. But all she said was: "That Greg . . . Of

course he'll ruin everything. We knew that. Everybody knew that."

"Ruin what?" I asked.

She ignored that. "And in this crazy duel, Jota just died?"

"He fired his gun in the air."

She nodded. "That figures."

"He said -- and everybody seemed to make sense of it but me -- he let Greg kill him."

She nodded.

"But . . . that's ridiculous. I mean, Jota didn't know the clock was

going to be put back. He didn't, I'm certain. So why would he . . . ?"

"That's not what he meant."

"Greg used the word 'loop' . . . 'Next time we won't loop you back.' "

She sighed.

"Ifs some kind of time warp, obviously," I said. "The same thing that

enables you to be here, when anyone can see you were born in some other

century."

Miranda said: "Val, please give up. I've told you a few unimportant things.

There aren't many unimportant things left that I can tell you. But if you

promise to stop fishing, we can talk if you like."

An idea stirred in my mind as I noticed that even in a bikini she managed

to be more elegant than a Paris model.

I had, of course, no intention of stopping fishing. What I wanted to

do was pull this beautiful fish so far out of water that, gasping for

breath, she'd tell me what I wanted to know before I let her off the

hook. It might not be possible, but I meant to try.

Her white two-piece was already quite dry. Her pale, creamy skin had

already stopped steaming and only her damp hair showed that she had been

in the water a few minutes ago.

Until that moment I had thought a bikinl was just a bikini, and a girl

wearing one was not so much dressed as censored. But Miranda's two-piece

was subtle . . . the bra, with shaped straps, not too small, concealed

and revealed her thoughtfully and tastefully, as if a talented artist

had painstakingly drawn and re-drawn the lines until his critical

eye was satisfied. The briefs, not too tiny either, harmonized with

and complemented muscles and curves. Superficially similar, the white

two-piece was actually in a completely different class from the brutally

utilitarian kind of bikini which is merely insurance against arrest.

"Well?" she said. "Shall I turn round so that you can inspect the other

side too?"

"I'm thinking," I said. "Suppose a girl from the seventeenth century were

here now. Just an ordinary pretty girl, not the daughter of a duke. She

probably wouldn't be very clean. She would have bad teeth. Her face

would be marked with smallpox and maybe worse things. Makeup, if any,

would be crude. Scars, not properly