The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky.  He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds.  At night he painted it black, with white for all the stars.  When the sun rose he dashed its arcing yellow lines across the heavens, and as it sank he brushed it orange and gold over the horizon.

He knew he had to paint the sky.  If he didn’t paint the sky, who would? Nobody would.  He knew that.  So he stayed, and he painted the sky.
He lived on the mountaintop alone.  Sometimes it was cold, and all he had were his brushes and some rags left from his once bright raiment.  He had been a king once, somewhere.  He had a crown, now cast to the floor and grown through with grass and creeping ivy.  Juniper bushes grew up around his feet and between his toes.
He never moved.  He only painted the sky.

And he was lonely.

Image from here.

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The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him.

“She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and he smiled back. “They say, when she dances, the earth quakes for miles around.”

Tarragon made googling noises. Then he saw Alegria. He saw her hand, batting and patting at the whuffs of cloud in the sky. He thought it was his father’s hand, but when he reached out to touch it, he couldn’t. So he watched it. He watched it balling up clouds, shaping them into elephants, stringing them across the sky.

As they drew closer he watched the hand stretch up into an arm, then into a shoulder, then into a neck, and then he saw the hair.

He clapped his hands in his blankets. He wrinkled his toes like monkey feet with happiness. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. It was like the sun, a brilliant spray of golden shine effervescing around a giant weathered face.

He saw the great chain of stolen wagons and rooftops across her naked chest, braided together in bent metal and warped oak, a giant necklace barely covering her vast pendulous breasts. He watched as she moved, shingles and chocks of wood falling free, rattling down her great earthen belly, wide as the Helakios amphitheatre and tanned as brown as the dirt, to rest in the folds of her thick sailcloth skirt. He saw her vast haunches, the cliff-top buckled beneath her feet, the behemoth staff be her side.

Most of all though, he saw her hair. He watched it for as long as he could. When they passed out of sight, he cried quietly into his blanket, and didn’t know why.

Image from here.

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