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Inigo failed us."
"But I can't fence, I don't know how to fence "
"
Your way." The Sicilian could barely control himself now.
"Oh yes, good, my way, thank you, Vizzini," Fezzik said to the hunchback.
Then, summoning all his courage: "I need a hint."
"You're always saying how you understand force, how force belongs to you. Use
it, I
don't care how. Wait for him behind there" he pointed to a sharp bend in the
mountain path "and crush his head like an eggshell." He pointed to the
cannonball-sized rocks.
"I could do that, yes," Fezzik nodded. He was marvelous at throwing heavy
things. "It just seems not very sportsmanlike, doesn't it?"
The Sicilian lost control. It was terrifying when he did it. With most people,
they scream and holler and jump around. With Vizzini, it was different: he got
very very quiet, and his voice sounded like it came from a dead throat. And
his eyes turned to fire. "I tell you this and
I tell it once: stop the man in black. Stop him for good and all. If you fail,
there will be no excuses; I will find another giant."
"Please don't desert me," Fezzik said.
"Then do as you are told." He grabbed hold of Buttercup again and hobbled up
the mountain path and out of sight.
Fezzik glanced down toward the figure racing up the path toward him. Still a
good distance away. Time enough to practice. Fezzik picked up a rock the size
of a cannonball and aimed at a crack in the mountain thirty yards away.
Swoosh.
Dead center.
He picked up a bigger rock and threw it at a shadow line twice as distant.
Not quite swoosh.
Two inches to the right.
Fezzik was reasonably satisfied. Two inches off would still crush a head if
you aimed for the center. He groped around, found a perfect rock for throwing;
it just fit his hand. Then he moved to the sharp turn in the path, backed off
into deepest shadow. Unseen, silent, he waited patiently with his killing
rock, counting the seconds until the man in black would die. . . .
FEZZIK
Turkish women are famous for the size of their babies. The only happy newborn
ever to weigh over twenty-four pounds upon entrance was the product of a
southern Turkish union.
Turkish hospital records list a total of eleven children who weighed over
twenty pounds at birth. And ninety-five more who weighed between fifteen and
twenty. Now all of these 106
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cherubs did what babies usually do at birth: they lost three or four ounces
and it took them the better part of a week before they got it totally back.
More accurately, 105 of them lost weight just after they were born.
Not Fezzik.
His first afternoon he gained a pound. (Since he weighed but fifteen and since
his mother gave birth two weeks early, the doctors weren't unduly concerned.
"It's because you came two weeks too soon," they explained to Fezzik's mother.
"That explains it." Actually, of
course, it didn't explain anything, but whenever doctors are confused about
something, which is really more frequently than any of us would do well to
think about, they always snatch at something in the vicinity of the case and
add, "That explains it." If Fezzik's mother had come late, they would have
said, "Well, you came late, that explains it." Or "Well, it was raining during
delivery, this added weight is simply moisture, that explains it.")
A healthy baby doubles his birth weight in about six months and triples it in
a year.
When Fezzik was a year old, he weighed eighty-five pounds. He wasn't fat,
understand. He looked like a perfectly normal strong eighty-five-pound kid.
Not all that normal, actually. He was pretty hairy for a one-year-old.
By the time he reached kindergarten, he was ready to shave. He was the size of
a normal man by this time, and all the other children made his life miserable.
At first, naturally, they were scared to death (even then, Fezzik looked
fierce) but once they found out he was chicken, well, they weren't about to
let an opportunity like that get away.
"Bully, bully," they taunted Fezzik during morning yogurt break.
"I'm not," Fezzik would say out loud. (To himself he would go "Woolly,
woolly." He would never dare to consider himself a poet, because he wasn't
anything like that; he just loved rhymes. Anything you said out loud, he
rhymed it inside. Sometimes the rhymes made sense, sometimes they didn't.
Fezzik never cared much about sense; all that ever mattered was the sound.)
"Coward."
Towered. "I'm not."
"Then fight," one of them would say, and would swing all he had and hit Fezzik
in the stomach, confident that all Fezzik would do was go "oof and stand
there, because he never hit back no matter what you did to him.
"Oof." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]