The Stone Giant (16 page)

When he had put it back into its pouch and slung the pouch around his chest, it was as if a rush of voices in his head had fallen abruptly silent, as if he’d been hearing the faint sounds of a distant crowd of squabbling orators, all of them exhorting and warning and reminding and haranguing and generally shaking their fingers and heads. He’d wondered at first if his—what was it—‘borrowing’—of the submarine wasn’t an act every bit as loathsome as some of the thefts committed by Captain Perry. And although he worked at priding himself on having pitched the treasure into the sea, one of the voices whispered that what he
probably
intended to do was sail back and retrieve it. But he’d silenced the voices by putting them in a bag, so to speak, and then he had hummed happily around the sea bottom for an hour until the thrill of it wore thin and he began to wonder in earnest exactly where he was going and what he was going to do for supper.

So he surfaced, no great distance from where he’d set out an hour earlier, and with wrinkled maps and charts strewn everywhere. He’d even unfolded the dried-out G. Smithers map—a flowery, extravagant sort of map compared with the more seaworthy charts aboard the
Omen
. It seemed to him that every inch of ocean within a thousand sea miles of the Oriel River delta had been charted, and that it would take a man a lifetime to unroll each and every chart and study them long enough to come to conclusions. He searched among hundreds of islands, though, until his eye picked out one in particular—Toyon Island. It had been double luck that the biscuit sailor had seen fit to put a name on it, and even more luck yet that Escargot had been listening.

He discovered that he could lay the charts out, one beside and above the other, in order to piece together an increasingly larger picture of the top of the ocean. There was Seaside; there were the Isles of the Seven Pirates, clustered off the delta; and there was Toyon Island, a speck on the map some fifty miles beyond that, far enough to be over the horizon and lost on the broad sea. What had Captain Perry said, or had it been Spinks?—that they’d sailed forty miles from Toyon Island. But forty miles in which direction? If it was west, then the volcanic island off the port bow might be one of the Pirate Isles. But then surely another of the same islands would be visible; the air was clear as rainwater.

He tied a bit of string—forty miles worth according to the scale on the map—around his finger, and, covering Toyon Island with his fingertip, drew an imaginary circumference around the gathered maps. Four islands, roughly, fell anywhere near the line. Two of the islands were part of clusters. The island inhabited now by Captain Perry and his men was solitary. A third island was itself nearly twenty miles across, and was dotted with three villages, Captain Perry’s island couldn’t have been five miles from end to end, and if there were any villages on it, they were lost in the forests of the interior. It had to be the fourth island, a flyspeck on the chart, almost as small as the eye of the captain’s gummidgefish. Lazar Island, it was called.

Escargot rooted around in the captain’s quarters until he found a pen and ink, then renamed the island on the chart ‘Captain Perry’s Salvation.’ It seemed to him that the island must have been named by some intrepid explorer or another—somebody named Lazar, probably—who had been dead these long years since and so wouldn’t mind if Escargot, setting up as an intrepid explorer himself, meddled with the name.

But as he sat and studied the map it began to occur to him that there was something curiously familiar in it all. It was suggestive, perhaps, of something he’d heard or read. He tood a look at the Smithers map. There it was—the Isle of Lazarus. It was possible, surely, that the two were the same. They sat in the same far-flung corner of the ocean. He folded Smithers in half and carried it along down the companionway, shoving out through the hatch to have another look.

Smoke lazied along from the volcano, soaring straightaway skyward until the wind caught it and drifted it to the south, losing it in cloud drift. The picture on Smithers’ map wasn’t at all a bad representation, once one got around all the spirally writing and the here-lies-this-and-thats. There were the cliffs along its westward-facing shore. There was the tumble of rock at the far end. And there was the cone of the volcano, slumped and crumbled along one edge as if an earthquake had thrown half the rim into the sea.

It had to be the same island. Why shouldn’t it be? Smithers had access to the same charts that cluttered the floor of the pilot room of the submarine. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to merely muck up his own map by glorifying what he had in front of him. Off the end of Smithers’ island, in the depths of what must have been an oceanic trench, lay the ‘door,’ such as it was, to Balumnia. How there could be a door on the ocean bottom was a mystery, an impossibility. Surely that was where the truth left off and the storytelling started. But then why should it? Smithers seemed to be full of curiosities that at least cast a shadow into the real world, why not another one here?

And what had Escargot to do with his time anyway? Even with his charts, with his certain knowledge that he lay south of here and north of there, there was no one port that attracted him more than the others. He’d certainly have to save his wanderings along the Seaside coast until things had simmered down in that quarter. There was no good reason to stride back in grinning after he’d made such a lucky escape. And it
had
been a lucky escape, all in all. There had been a tight moment or two, but in the end he’d inherited a submarine as well as a great lot of books and a pipe organ, which he couldn’t begin to play.

He strode into the captain’s quarters and searched out Smithers’ books from among haphazardly shelved volumes. Captain Perry hadn’t, apparently, given a rap for order of any sort. Escargot had piled forty volumes on the top of the sideboard before he found, finally, buried beneath an account of the culinary practices of the marvel men of the Wonderful Isles,
The Stone Giants
. It appeared to have been unread, as if Perry had bought a job lot of Smithers books, then immediately shoved them into whatever gaps presented themselves in the stacks.

He hauled it back to the bow along with a plate of cold fish and two bottles of ale. His pocket watch had gone to the sea bottom along with his pants, and search as he might, he couldn’t discover any sign of a clock on board. But then what did it matter, really, what time it was? In the depths of the ocean day and night stopped amounting to quite so much, and at the moment he was feeling bucked both by the excitement of piloting his vessel and by the possibility, however thin, that the entrance to Balumnia, Smithers’ magical land, lay somewhere beneath the waves off the tip of the island.

In moments the submarine slipped under the bright waves and angled toward the west. Escargot navigated slowly, with one eye on the account in Smithers. Smithers was full of descriptions of grottoes lit by enchantment and of sunken cities and vast treasures, but there wasn’t more than a handful about whether a navigator ought to angle down into this trench or ought to pop over that heap of rock or ought to be navigating sixty yards to the south beyond the craggy ledge that cut off his view of half the ocean.

So the hours slipped by. Escargot, very soon, decided that he ought to plot a course so as to avoid cruising in and out and around the same bit of sea bottom. He headed due east for the count of eight hundred, then angled around to the north for the count of two hundred, then west, then north again, on and on, wondering at every turn if he mightn’t have missed what he was looking for by having counted to two hundred instead of one hundred seventy-five, or one hundred twelve. After hours of it he knew that he’d developed a navigational system that was no real system at all, only a way to trick himself into thinking that he was proceeding very logically and sensibly like a submarine captain might be expected to do.

It must be growing late. He was hungry again. What would he do if he found nothing—no sign of Smithers’ enchanted door? He could hardly surface and anchor the submarine off the island, not with Captain Perry and his lot marooned there. They’d swim out in the night and cut his throat. The truth charm wouldn’t avail him much—not a second time. And if he simply floated atop the sea, what then? The submarine didn’t seem to be the sort of craft that would be satisfied bobbing on the ocean, not in heavy weather, anyway. It seemed to work more like a deepwater fish that slept as it swam.

The color seemed to have gone out of everything, even near the surface—a pretty clear indication that the sun was setting or else had drifted behind heavy clouds. It grew darker and darker until nothing could be seen out the windows beyond the circle of lamplight generated by the fire quartz. Searching became nearly impossible; the bright light of the fire quartz seemed to make the darkness roundabout even more impenetrable. Great fish came looming out of the black water, gaping into the light, then vanished again in an instant. Angular rocks humped up as if to surprise him, and Escargot was forced to shake the weariness out of his head and to remind himself over and over to keep a sharp eye out lest he end his journey once and for all.

He’d long ago stopped counting. That sort of thing couldn’t go on forever. The two hundreds had stretched themselves into twice that because he lost count forty times or so and had to start over or at some guessed-at number. The eight hundreds were utterly impossible. So he found himself wandering aimlessly once again. Then, purely by accident, when he supposed himself a mile or more offshore, he hove into sight of the steep side of the island. He was back where he’d begun. It was too late, certainly, to venture out again. He’d have to take his chances with Captain Perry.

He followed the sweep of shoreline around, thinking to run into a bay. There had been one, he remembered, shortly after he’d rounded onto the leeward side of the island earlier that day. Captain Perry and his men had swum ashore to windward, and had, quite conceivably, murdered each other there out of general villainy and idiocy. Certainly, thought Escargot tiredly, they hadn’t trudged across the island to the other side. He’d be safe enough. There must be a way to lock the hatch, and they could do him little damage if they couldn’t get in.

The rocky sea bottom gave off suddenly into a little, sandy slope. Escargot navigated shoreward, across the ripples of sand on the sea bottom, awakening no end of flatfish and rays. The water brightened a bit, the consequence, perhaps, of moonlight. But it seemed strangely as it the bright water was mostly away to seaward where the slope steepened and fell away into the depths. Unless he was completely turned around and befuddled, the shallow water toward shore was as dark as ever. There was nothing to do but surface and investigate.

He found himself fifty yards offshore. He was in a bay, all right, some quarter mile across. A dark line of rock sheltered it from the sea to the north. There was no moon to be seen, only the silvery lightening of the edge of a great mass of cloud, blown by the wind. Treetops along the shore bent and tossed, and the surface of the bay scudded with little windwaves. All in all the night was dark enough for murder; certainly there wasn’t enough moonlight to explain the little patch of illuminated seawater that swirled as if by magic a hundred yards farther out.

And now that he payed particular attention to it, the light was quite clearly emanating from
beneath
the sea, not from the sky. It seemed as if a great chandelier had been lit in a deep-sea grotto. Escargot was reminded abruptly of the jack o’-lanterns glowing through the fog on the meadow. There would hardly be witches gathered beneath the sea, though. This was something else. It was what Smithers had promised. Of course Escargot hadn’t seen it when he’d set out earlier. In the morning sunlight the watery glow hadn’t been apparent, at least not to a person who had no idea it was there. He’d passed it at the outset of his search and had been venturing uselessly about the sea ever since, counting his way past it a half dozen times.

He stood gazing at the glow, his head poked up through the open hatch. The wind was fearsomely cold. The trees on the forest edge lashed in the darkness, swishing and moaning. The moon appeared briefly, as if to shout a warning through a rent in the clouds, and then was swallowed utterly, and the night grew doubly dark. A splintering crash sounded along the shore, followed by the solid whump of a tree flattening itself along the beach. It was no night to be anchored on the surface, and it was becoming less so by the moment.

Escargot closed the hatch behind him and strode along back into the pilot’s room. He rolled his scattered charts and stowed them away. If he was setting in as captain, he’d best start by making everything shipshape. In ten minutes he was dropping into the abyss, down and down and down toward the source of light that grew brighter, fathom after fathom, until the sea was lit like a tidepool at midmorning.

It was just as Smithers had described it. He could see nothing at first, beyond bright water and bubbles and an occasional drifting fish. Then, in the distance, there were the shadows of rock ledges that grew distinct, vanished, and then leaped again into clarity, as if the trench into which the submarine fell was narrowing. Soon he crept along a rocky precipice on which a whole nation of sea life carried on in perpetual brightness. Oddly shaped fish like sidewise plates and inflated balloons and long bits of stick hovered above the pink and violet branches of corals and sea fans.

The wall was shot through with caverns and grottoes and long cracks into which Escargot might easily have piloted the vessel. It seemed to him entirely possible that through any one of them might lie submarine lands peopled by mermen or by talking fish that lived in palaces. Someday he’d have a look into it all. He’d search through Smithers to see if there wasn’t a reference to such places. But for now he’d press on. Whatever it was he searched for couldn’t be far below, for the trench threatened to narrow into nothing, and the light had grown dazzling.