On the eighty-third day, we find the giant, ramshackle and shattered.

Its bones arise like ancient stone columns, its moss-crowned skull a slip-shod hillside. And for the first time since we set out, as I gaze upon its devastation I doubt our course.

But Grandmother’s already out of the saddle, her packbird giving irritated chirrups as she pulls ropes and pulleys from his pannier.

This isn’t her first reconstruction.

The rest of the family aren’t so blasé.

My father’s heard her tales a thousand times, but faced with reality he sits in the dust and stares in wonder. My tiny cousins run circles around him, their awe short-lived, their legs restless after hours on birdback.

I have a job to do. I scramble up those bedraggled limbs; I hammer pitons into cracked stone-flesh where time and erosion have yet to finish their work; I set pulleys at precise angles to fragmented bone.

Grandmother follows, clipping ropes into spring-hooked carabiners, safety lines for the work to come.

I reach the giant’s face, naught but a sharp-angled depression, but in that instant it sees me. I resist the instinct to fling myself from that high place and prostrate myself beneath its ire.

But now Grandmother is beside me, speaking soft words in a tongue long-forgotten.

The giant settles like a rockslide in a rainstorm, and we begin our work.

It takes all my aunts to haul the bones into place, my uncles to secure the weights while the bone-weld sets.

And then Grandmother and I once more brave that giant visage, ropes locked as we powder those welds. We brush them clean and polish the seams until they gleam gold in the setting sun. And when it rises, so does our revenant, stronger for having been broken.

When we return to civilisation, we’ll do so riding the shoulders of giants.