The Stone Giant (2 page)

A light glowed ahead, bobbing slowly on the path as if someone carried a lantern toward him. He wasn’t certain he wanted to meet anyone, lantern or no lantern. But it wasn’t lantern light; it was flames – a halo of weird fire dancing round the head of a waist-high, wizened little man. Beside him stood another, grinning, his hair standing up in a frizzle of thin spikes. Both were thin, almost skeletal, and wore clothes which hung from them like sacks. Both had sharpened teeth – not fangs or canine teeth, but flat, slab-like teeth that had been filed to points.

‘Goblins,’ Escargot said, half aloud, and knew, as he said it, that more of the little men had stepped out of the woods behind him. The one with the flaming hair stretched his eyes until they seemed to be round as plates. He extended a thin, clawed finger and said, ‘Give us.’

Escargot cocked his head. ‘Certainly,’ he said, supposing they meant the squid. It was better not to argue with goblins, after all, better not to get all clawed up saving a few squid when the river was full of them. Catching them was half the fun anyway. He opened his creel, pulled two of the squid from the bed of wet grass that lay within, and tossed them to the goblins. The creatures watched stupidly as the squid flopped onto the trail and sat there in the dirt.

The goblin with the burning head looked at Escargot in amazement, then leaped on the squid, poking his fellow goblin in the ear with his finger and pushing him against the trunk of an oak. A flurry of steps sounded on the path behind Escargot, and three more goblins, gabbling like raccoons, rushed past, throwing themselves onto the first goblin, who swatted at them defiantly, half a squid protruding from his mouth. He held the other in his hand, and as the quickest of his brethren rushed upon him, he flailed at the creature with the rubbery squid, effecting nothing but the squid’s ruination. He champed down on the squid in his mouth, razoring it in half with his filed teeth, the protruding bit falling onto the road and vanishing beneath all five of the shrieking goblins, two more of whom had managed, in the struggle, to catch fire. Escargot tiptoed past. There was no weapon like a squid, apparently, for defeating a party of goblins. For good measure he pitched three more of the leggy beasts in among them, then took to his heels, dodging round bends that appeared suddenly in the fog, leaping over a fallen tree that he’d remembered from the journey out four hours earlier.

The gabbling receded behind him, and he slowed to a walk, gasping in lungfuls of fog, looking over his shoulder and listening between breaths for the sound of pursuit. It wouldn’t do to stop. This was no time to rest; he had a quarter mile of woods to get through before he’d be onto the relative safety of the meadow. The meadow was close to the lights of town, and goblins, like wolves or trolls, hadn’t any use for towns.

A twig snapped above him. He lurched and sprawled forward, tumbling onto the roadway, yanking at the thing that had landed suddenly on his back. It shrieked inhumanly into his ear, gabbling out a continual stream of gibberish. The goblin’s tiny hands were around his throat, scrabbling after something, tugging at the drawstring of Escargot’s pouch. The little devils were trying to rob him! It hadn’t been squid at all they were after. He rolled toward the river, crushing the little man beneath him, half dislodging the thing as it whooped and gibbered. It peered around into his face, grinning past pointed teeth, eyes whirling like pinwheels. Escargot got a hand round the goblin’s neck and jerked the thing loose. He grabbed its skinny leg with his other hand, hefted it over his head, and threw it headlong into the river.

His pouch was safe. His creel, however, was a ruin. The spindly willow basket was crushed almost flat, and the head of one doleful-eyed squid had been forced out through a split in the bottom. Escargot snatched the creel open, yanked out the half dozen flattened squid that remained, and scattered them over the path, leaping away toward the village as the first party of goblins rushed toward him, their flaming heads advertising their appearance like beacons. Escargot pounded along for all he was worth, his creel and fishing pole tossed away into the river grasses. Within five minutes he was clear of the woods and free of goblins. The fog was lightening with the morning, and he could smell on the breeze the smoke of pruning fires and chimneys from the village ahead.

The church bell rang six when he trudged up the path to his house, thinking to slip in at the back door and have a go at falsifying the utterly obvious evidence that his wife would find, at any moment, in the kitchen. He found the back door padlocked. A note On the front door invited him to leave and not to return. There was no use pounding and railing; his wife had gone to Stover, who knew about morality and the law both.

For a week he slept by day in the abandoned Widow’s windmill. By night he fished and wandered through the autumn streets, holding imaginary coversations with his wife and developing the suspicion that she was never going to give him the satisfaction of actually carrying on one of those conversations. Protestations through the locked windows effected nothing. His wife was gone far more often than she was in.

On more than one night, very late, when the fog had risen and obscured the oaks and the hemlocks that ran down out of the foothills and lined the road, Escargot slouched along, hands in his pockets, and fancied that he heard in the distance someone coming along toward him, tapping along the road with a stick, feeling his way through the fog. The sound seemed to be carried on a breath of cool air. Always it faded into nothing, as if the stroller were walking away from him, an odd thing altogether. For whoever it was hadn’t passed him; the tap, tap, tap of the stick on the road simply started up out of the mists and echoed its way into nothing.

Escargot told himself it was a woodpecker of some nocturnal variety, tapping holes in the bark of trees to hide acorns. But he didn’t half believe it. And more than once he heard the titter of laughter somewhere off in the fog. It was as if someone were laughing at
him
, an unsettling notion altogether, and one which led him to keep an eye out for goblins, although it did seem unlikely that any of the little men would leave the darkness of the woods. There was no good in being careless, though, it had already been made very clear to him that goblins wandered by night farther up the Oriel River valley than most villagers liked to believe.

His thoughts always returned home, however, even though he’d never cared much about such things before. A home had simply been shelter, and one shelter was as good as another. A man ought to have any number of them, he told himself, so that if one wore out he could move on to another. He wouldn’t grow too fond of any that way and go moping about through the silent evening streets if his house burned down or was blown away in a hurricane or if he was pitched out of it for eating a pie with cream. Perhaps it was the same way with children. It mightn’t have been a bad idea to have a couple in reserve. But he hadn’t any except little Annie, had he?

After a week of such nights he found his clothes and books and assorted odds and ends in a heap on his front porch, or on
her
front porch, such as it was. He left most of them. It was then that he began to feel very sorry for himself. It was all very well to be tramping about in the foggy darkness when one knew that just over the hill lay a bed with a feather comforter, a fireplace loaded with last year’s oak logs, and a waiting family. But it was another thing when just over the hill lay nothing at all but more hills.

Perhaps it
had
been his fault. He’d been hasty, compounding the pie crime by leaving without a word. What had happened, he wondered, to his marriage. He wasn’t prime husband material; that was certain. When it came to being husband material, he was pretty much tangled together out of old rags. He liked fishing a little too much, and he believed that work was something a man did when he had to. He had always been able to get along well enough without it, especially for the last couple of years. A little bit of barter at just the right moment would keep things afloat – a squid clock, perhaps, for a pair of boots; the boots for a brass kaleidoscope and a penknife with a bone handle; the knife for a hat and the hat for a coat and the kaleidoscope rented out for a penny a glimpse. A man could keep busy forever, couldn’t he?

It made him tired to think about it, but not half as tired, apparently, as it had made his wife, who had pointed out that he was ‘too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work.’ Escargot’s defence – that he had an artistic temperament suited more to philosophy than to work – had rung false even to him. He had no excuse; that was the truth of the thing. But why should a man go about with an apology on his lips? Why, in fact, did a man have to beg to eat his own pie? The thought of pie reminded him somehow that the nights were getting longer and colder, and he slipped once again into remorse. He took to hanging round the old house in the mornings, careful not to be seen but half hoping that he would be, as if by magic something would appear to make everything all right again.

What appeared was Gilroy Bastable, heading along very officiously toward town, happy with himself. Bastable shook his head. Everyone in the village, by that time, was familiar with Escargot’s fate, and sympathy, said Bastable, was pretty much on the side of the wife, lamentable as it might seem. Stover had preached an entire sermon on it. It was something in the way of a lesson, wasn’t it? And this business about stealing pies ...

Tie,’ said Escargot.

“Pardon me?”: asked Bastable amiably.

‘There was only one pie involved. And stealing doesn’t enter into it, does it? A man’s own pie, after all, made of peaches from his own well-tended garden.’

Mayor Bastable cast a glance toward Escargot’s weedy orchard with its overgrown trees. He widened his eyes and shrugged, as if to say that he’d only been passing on what he knew about the case. ‘You shouldn’t have walked out on her, old man.’

‘I went fishing,’ said Escargot, forgetting in a rush everything he’d convinced himself of only moments before. ‘She pitched me out without a backward glance. Two years of bliss up the flume. Women are mad is what I think. Chemistry is what it is. I’ve ...’

Bastable put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head, a set smile on his lips. ‘We know just how you feel,’ he said, as if such a thing might be vastly calming. ‘We all of us hope you’ll come to terms with this little sadness.’

‘We!’ cried Escargot, shrugging off his friend’s hand. ‘Terms! Damn all terms!’ And with that Escargot stormed away toward the village, his teeth set with determination. He’d leave; that’s what he’d do. There were grand places in the world. He’d go to the coast, to the Wonderful Isles. Twombly Town could writher in its own slime; that’s what. He smiled grimly. He rather liked that last bit.
Writher
was a good word – if it was a word. If it wasn’t, it should be, he decided, slowing down and angling toward Stover’s Tavern.

The tavern was almost empty. It was early, after all. Candles burned in wall sconces, throwing cups of sooty yellow light up the plaster walls. A half hour earlier the floor had been covered with sawdust and shavings and littered with nut shells and sausage rinds and greasy newspaper. It was swept clean now, though, and the tavern maid, Leta, was scooping up heaps of debris with a broad, flat shovel and emptying it into a bucket. A lock of dark hair had fallen across her forehead, and she shoved at it, pausing to poke it in under a red bow at the top of a heavy braid. Immediately the lock mutinied and fell back across her forehead. She looked up and frowned at Escargot, who stood in the doorway gaping at her.

He’d seen her for the first time a month earlier at Professor Wurzle’s lending library. They’d both been after the same book, or at least books by the same author: G. Smithers of Brompton Village. There was nothing Escargot liked to do more than to lie up with a book and a pipe in the afternoon heat, under an oak if one was handy, or beneath the docks along the River Oriel. He couldn’t much read at home. The interruptions set him crazy. There was always something to do – trash to be hauled away, weeds to be pulled, boxes to be got down off closet shelves, a roomful of furniture to be rearranged a dozen ways, only to end up back where it started. His wife would say something to him from another room in a voice calculated to carry about eight feet. What! he’d shout, knowing that he was expected to drop the book, frivolous thing that it was, and trot round to lend a hand – to squish a harmless bug most often, a bug that was minding its own business, looking for a quiet place to read a bug story and put its feet up, but finding instead the business end of a shoe. Escargot had been the unwilling accessory to countless murders. But he was being petty. He had promised to catch himself if he was in danger of becoming petty, especially out loud. That sort of thing made a person tiresome.

He watched Leta shove the bucket out the back door and pick up a fat gunny sack. She dumped shavings from it onto the cleaned floor, kicking them under tables with her feet. At the lending library she’d found a book about the harvest festival at Seaside, and Escargot, catching sight of the title, had said truthfully that he’d always wanted to visit Seaside, days away down the Oriel, for the yearly festivals held at the time of the autumnal equinox. She had been to more than one. She’d been born in the foothills above Seaside, on the eve of the festival, and so was a harvest maid, even though she wasn’t a dwarf. She was about five feet ten inches tall, only an inch shorter than Escargot.

He’d made her promise to bring the book back quickly, certain at the time that his interest would appear feigned and that she would think he was being fresh. He wasn’t, though. He was married, wasn’t he, and had been for two years, and although some might say he was lazy and thought of himself as often as he thought of anyone else, he had his code. He hadn’t had his fingers crossed when he’d promised to be true to his wife. But he had found himself worrying that Leta would think his attentions at the library less than sincere, and then he had worried about being worried, because the worry seemed to throw a cloud of doubt over the code he prided himself in having. Fat lot of good all the worrying had done him. He might as well have tossed all codes out the window for good and all. But he knew he couldn’t do that, even now. He was
still
married, even if he
was
living in an abandoned windmill and eating fish and berries. Who could say, the condition might prove to be temporary.