The Stone Giant (11 page)

Escargot shouted. A man beside him clutched at his arm. Escargot turned and swung at the man’s face with a fury born of sudden terror, then ducked through the straddled legs of the puppet and ran. He heard cries of pursuit and the pounding of feet as he was swallowed by the blessed fog, rebounding off people who loomed suddenly up before him. He had no idea where he was going – only that he had no intention of stopping until he got there.

The square gave out onto a broad thoroughfare and a thinner crowd, most of the people having pressed along farther to watch the burning. Running, Escargot could see, was attracting attention. It was better, to be subtle, to slow down and become a part of the crowd again, rather than a hunted man who flew in the face of it. He was winded anyhow. He could circle back around and rejoin the crowd at the square – no one there had the foggiest notion who he was; no one but the dwarf, anyway. But it was late, and he was in no mood for further revelry, so in the end he decided to hunt down his man with the gyroscopes and fetch his bags, then set out in search of a doorway in which to spend the rest of the night.

Twice as he walked he heard the sound of hurrying feet. He ducked into the safety of a dark alley the first time; then, five mintues later, he was forced to take refuge behind a cart. In each case it was a party of dwarfs in uniform, striding along. Leading the first party and chattering breathlessly was the man whom Escargot had hit. In the midst of the second, tapping along purposefully in dignified silence, was Uncle Helstrom.

This wasn’t apparently, going to be as easy as it had seemed. The crime he’d committed by meddling with the sacrifice had quite clearly been more grand than one would think, either that or the dwarf carried with him some of the authority he’d boasted of two weeks back on the meadow. Rats, thought Escargot, edging along toward the river gate. He’d hoped to extend his stay in Seaside a bit. And here he was a hunted man not ten hours after he’d ridden in. What a fool he’d been to sell his horse! It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d want to leave the city quick. He’d fancied a walking tour of the coast, not desperate flight from the local guard.

He hadn’t any real notion of direction, only that the coast road wound around to the river gate. So as long as he chose alleys and byways that ran down toward the ocean or bay he’d get there right enough. The darkness and the fog were his allies for once, and when he thought about it, there was a certain relief in knowing that the old woman wouldn’t come looming out at him, that she’d been burned to nothing on the pyre.

The problem, as he saw it, was that he’d been trusting entirely to destinations – to the notion that mere wandering would somehow free him from becoming entangled in the cobweb of other people’s lives. But that very apparently wasn’t the case. He’d managed to leave Twombly Town far behind him, or most of it anyway, but he’d simply blundered deeper into the affairs of Uncle Helstrom.

The only hope lay in walking purposefully in the other direction. If he’d ridden
upriver
out of Twombly Town, Uncle Helstrom would be little more than a shadow in his memory, and he wouldn’t be hunted through the late night streets like a criminal. He’d leave straightaway then –walk up the coast road, sleep by day for a week until he’d put a few miles between himself and Seaside. It was simple as pie, really, all but one thing: the hunted look he’d seen in Leta’s eyes when she’d fled down the misty alley, running from what, from whom? It was pretty clearly the case that she’d metamorphosed into the old woman, but why had Uncle Helstrom led the mob that rah her down? There were too many uncomfortably loose threads dangling about the mystery to entirely satisfy him.

But he wasn’t a detective, was he? He had no stake in the mystery, had he? Cut and run, that was the smart thing. If he nosed deeper into the affairs of the curious Uncle Helstrom, he’d quite likely have
his
nose tweaked. Leta or no Leta, it was high time to move on. It was true that he’d like to have his marbles back, especially since they seemed to be as valuable as the devious Uncle Helstrom had claimed they were. But they weren’t worth spending a few months in a dwarf prison. And it was entirely possible that they’d been pitched into a cauldron long ago and turned into some sort of bloody soup.

He strolled with his hands in his pockets out of a skinny alley and onto the High Street, just a block up from the coast road. He’d been two hours sauntering up and down the maze of Seaside avenues. It was time to collect his gear and be gone; there weren’t enough hours left to the night to make it worth sleeping. The fog had risen and had blown on onshore winds up the hillside, and the moon had risen over the sea and hung now amid a wash of stars like an opal among diamonds. People slept everywhere: on benches and lawns, on wagons and front porch stoops, The wares of vendors still littered the curbs and sidewalks, but were covered with tablecloths and newspapers and blankets to keep out the wet and the prying eyes of late night passersby. Now and again people would approach, usually stumbling, and Escargot would give them the street, sinking back into moonshadow and waiting until their footfalls had echoed into nothing before stepping out into the open.

Ahead of him rose the north wall and the river gate. One sleeping guard sat slumped on a chair before it, his hat having tumbled off, his axe leaning against the timbers of the gate beside him. All was quiet. There lay his gyroscope vendor, his devices stowed in the steamer trunk next to which he slept, the trunk cutting the sea wind and shading his face from moonlight. Beside him were Escargot’s bags. It would be an easy enough thing to pluck them up and be gone.

He tiptoed past the sleeping vendor and grasped the bags, then turned and reached into his shirt for his pouch. The leering face of the gyroscope man hovered a foot from his own. In the man’s hand was a club.

‘My stuff,’ began Escargot, nodding toward the bags slung over his shoulder.

‘That’s the man!’ cried a figure that crouched out from under a cart at the curb. Escargot spun around to face him. It was a tall man with a bruised cheek – the man he’d hit that evening. Three dwarfs in uniform sat up in the bed of the wagon, shrugging off the tarpaulin beneath which they’d been waiting.

Escargot leaped atop the trunk, swinging his bags at the gyroscope trader. The man waded into them, tangling his stick into the straps and pushing forward in an effort to topple Escargot onto the ground. The dwarfs clambered off the wagon, shouting to wake the street, and ran round to cut off his escape. Escargot yanked his bags, hoping at first to pull the stick from the man’s hands, then hoping merely to free the bags. He felt himself going over backward. The gyroscope man grunted at him, flailing away with the trapped stick like an eggbeater.

Damn the bags, thought Escargot, landing in a crouch. One of the dwarfs was upon him, brandishing an axe.

‘Cease!’ the dwarf cried.

Another hopped toward him from the other side, grinning smugly. The gyroscope man tugged his stick free, dropped Escargot’s bags, and backed away, leaving Escargot to the guards. But Escargot had had enough of the guards – the guards meant being hauled deeper into inexplicable plots, a sudden end to his new life as a wanderer. The dwarf to his right dropped his axe and reached into his tunic, hauling out a set of manacles.

Escargot grabbed the bill of the dwarf’s circular hat and yanked it down over his eyes, then jumped past him. He heard the rush of air from the hurriedly swung axe of his companion, and stormed into the face of the third dwarf who sailed in, axe upraised.

Escargot jumped onto the front stoop of a row house, grabbed a long, wooden flowerpot full of geraniums, and hurled them into the faces of all three dwarfs as they swarmed up the several stairs. Two went over in a heap, the third pressed himself against the stone bannister and then came on again, just as Escargot, his luck with him this time, wrenched the door open and leaped in, smashing the door shut on the hand of the pursuing dwarf, then opening it for the instant it took for the hand to be jerked free. He threw the bolt and spun round to confront a wizened little man in a nightshirt.

There was no time to exchange histories. ‘Sorry,’ said Escargot, pushing past him and running down a long, low hallway. ‘Quite,’ shouted the man after him, almost apologetically. The end of the hallway opened onto a kitchen, and the kitchen onto a walled backyard. Escargot was out through the kitchen door even as he heard the clatter of feet behind in the hall. He loped across a cropped lawn, jumped onto a wooden table, and boosted himself onto the stone pilings of the wall, ready to leap down onto whatever it was that lay on the other side. But what lay on the other side was a rocky beach, forty feet below. Already the three guards shouted on the lawn, scrambling toward the table. The dwarf in the nightshirt held his back door open, watching the melee in wonder. Escargot bent onto his knees, reached down, and hauled the table up the wall, nearly losing his grip, then swinging it up and over, not stopping to watch it sail down onto the beach. He was off, loping along the top of the wall, watching the copings and the flying backyards on his left.

The wall was broad enough, certainly. It was like running along a road. But he avoided looking off the edge to the right anyway. He would put some distance between him and the guards, then find his way – where? Out of the city? They’d watch the gate for a week. He was a doubly desperate criminal now that he’d beaten the guards with a planter box and broken into an innocent man’s house. A glance back over his shoulder betrayed the running forms of the three dwarfs, but they rapidly fell away. In a moment they’d give off the chase and set out to alert their companions. Ahead of him lay a good two miles of seawall, then the coast road gate. He could reach it before the news of his flight could; there was little worry about that. But what would he find there? Uncle Helstrom, perhaps. Something cluttered the wall a hundred yards down – machinery of some sort. It was the scaffolding of the masons who had been working at the face of the seawall the day before.

Escargot looked back; no one pursued him. The beach below was dark and empty, and the galleon still tossed on the moonlit ocean offshore. A long rowboat pulled along just beyond the breaker line, as if it had launched from the galleon. But it couldn’t conceivably have anything to do with him. His way lay clear. He stepped out onto the scaffolding, looping one of the safety ropes under his arms and tying it in a bowline. Then he unlatched the ratchet catch and played out line. The scaffold jerked toward the sand a foot at a time. He cast one look downward, just to keep an eye on the rising beach thirty feet below, then twenty, then fifteen. The scaffold dropped once again and hung there, the rope going slack in his hand. He slouched out from under the noose round his chest, crawled from beneath the safety net that stretched around the perimeter of the scaffold, latched onto the wooden boards, and jumped, falling with an ankle-twisting scrunch into the soft sand.

He rose to his feet and hobbled a few steps, unsure of his ankle but finding that the pain disappeared with each step. He set out to the west, intent on clambering across the rocks on the seaward side of the gate and fleeing up the coast. The rowboat had run up through the surf, and half a dozen men clambered out, hauling it up onto the sand. One of the men waved at him as the six of them trudged up the beach. Escargot waved back. There was no need to be uncivil – or to seem suspiciously hasty, for that matter. Although, heaven knew, lowering himself as he had down the seawall in the middle of the night must seem suspicious enough.

The men on the beach seemed pleasant sorts; they were grinning, anyway. One wore a billed captain’s hat, and was limping and bearded. He waved his pipe in Escargot’s direction.

‘Have you got a fill of tobacco, lad?’ he asked from ten feet off. ‘Mine fell into the drink when we come in through the surf, and none of these lads can help. I’d be happy if you’d got just enough for a fill.’

Escargot stopped. Of course he had enough for a fill. A man shouldn’t be tobaccoless at that hour of the morning. He looked back toward the wall, half expecting to see an army of dwarfs scouring along the copings. But there was no one. They’d wait for him at the gates. It would be hours yet before they realized that their scaffolding had been messed with. By that time he’d be gone, and the captain would have had his smoke. ‘Certainly,’ he said to the smiling captain, pulling his pouch from his coat. He smiled back, offered up the pouch, and was bashed on the head from behind. He saw the gray-brown sand rushing up at him, then saw no more.

* * *

He awoke in the hold of a ship. It was dark as coal dust: neither day nor night, just black. The ship heaved on the swell, nosing up so that Escargot nearly slid down the deck into the stern, then plummeting down the back face of the swell so that when Escargot tried to stand, holding onto the back of his head to keep the throbbing from cracking his skull in two, he pitched forward onto his hands and knees, nearly somersaulting into a heap of gunnysacks.

He’d been shanghaied. That was the long and the short of it. The galley offshore had been after crewmembers, and had put in at Seaside thinking that there’d be no end of drunken revelers to haul away to sea. And they were right, all except for the drunkenness, anyway. It had happened just like it might have happened in a G. Smithers book. He should have seen it coming. But how could he have? A man offers another man a fill of tobacco and gets bonked on the conk. It wasn’t the most predictable thing in the world, was it? At least he was safe from the guard and from the clutches of Uncle Helstrom.

There was something unsatisfactory in the rolling of the ship. Each rise and fall seemed to tug on whatever it was that connected his stomach to his throat. And the closeness of the hold – the smell of bilgewater and mildew and rot – lent an air of desperation to his plight. He was sick, or was going to be. There were no two ways about it. He stumbled forward, cracking into a post, then held on as the ship heeled to starboard in a plunging rush.