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a valley, then west across the foothills. People scurried away, hiding in ditches, diving into cellars. Collosso didn’t stop to crush them. His armsswinging, his great thighs shaking, he marched along with his enormous boots smashing all in his path. Flights of white swans rose from fields and copses, and he swatted at them as though at mosquitoes.
    He went straight to the marshes, to the home of the Swamp Witch. He believed that she had lived a hundred years in the mud, and knew everything there was to know. He had gone to see her twice before, the first time to ask how long he would live. She had taken a frog and pulled off its legs, then stirred the pieces in the mud, reading the patterns they made. Then she had looked up and told him mysteriously, “You shall live to the end of your days.” Three years later he had gone again, to see if she could turn his hair from curly to straight, because he believed that giants looked best with straight hair. Again she had killed a frog and cast its pieces. “Wear a red hat,” she’d told him.
    The journey would have taken any man a year, but Collosso was there in hours. He stomped down the long slopes of barley and corn, through a forest of pines, to the edge of a swamp that seemed to stretch on forever.
    It was believed that the marshes were bottomless. It was said that an ancient city—with streets of gold—lay drowned in the swamp. A famous legend told of ‘the lost army’ that had marched out to find the city, only to vanish in the mud. Its leagues of men, its hundreds of horses, its wagons and chariots had disappeared in a moment, along with seven siege towers nearly as tall as Collosso. Some said that the witch had eaten every man and horse.
    Well, the stories weren’t utter nonsense. Collosso strode out into the mud and sank to his ankles. Then he sank to hisknees. Then he sank to his waist. As thick as tar, the mud sucked and oozed around his feet, and the black water swirled in torrents behind him.
    When the water was up to his armpits and getting deeper with every step, Collosso found the Swamp Witch. She had a little round house, like a beaver lodge, of sticks and mud, with a smoke hole at the top, and a little round door in the front. Collosso tapped on the top of the house, and the ducks and the alligators slipped away among the reeds.
    The witch came oozing from the mud behind her house. She was clotted with filth. Her hair was long, her face all wrinkles. She had the eyes of a lizard and the hands of a frog—each finger webbed at the base, tipped at the end by a fleshy knob. Her throat bulged as she breathed, and her voice was a croak.
    “I knew you were coming,” she said. Her neck filled like a red balloon.
    “You sensed it?” asked Collosso.
    “I
heard
it.” She was looking up at the face of the giant, into the caverns of his nostrils. “You wake the dead with your splashing.”
    Her voice drifted off across the marshes, through the bulrushes and the grasses. The birds were silent, the frogs as well, and the water beetles stood as still as possible on their trembly legs.
    “I had a dream,” said Collosso. “A horrible dream.”
    “Of what?”
    “A giant-slayer.”
    The witch pulled herself from the mud and sat in a chairof woven reeds. She felt nearly sorry for the giant because he looked so scared and worried. He didn’t seem to notice that he was sinking into the swamp, a little deeper every minute. The water now was nearly at his shoulders.
    “I had a dream. Or a vision,” said Collosso. “I saw the giant-slayer born of thunder. Oh, witch, is it true?”
    “It is true,” said the witch.
    “How do you know this?”
    “Because you dreamed it.”
    “Oh, curse my powers!” The giant looked up at the sky. His great fists came out of the water and he held them high above his head, as though trying to shake the clouds. “Curse me!” he roared again.
    Alligators swung their tails and backed away, their round eyes blinking. Snakes