The Stone Giant (28 page)

His rowboat lay where he had left it, undisturbed, and in a moment he was in it and spinning out onto the silent river. He was beset by the unaccountable fear that his submarine would be gone—spirited away by the insidious dwarf. But it wasn’t. It lay as he’d left it, safe and secure. It was his single trump card. Uncle Helstrom, sly and clever as he was, couldn’t know that he possessed it. If he
had
known, it would be piloted by goblins now, or by the dwarf himself, more likely. How he’d use his trump card he couldn’t say, but he was determined to use it.

On the peaceful river, though, when he had time to catch his breath, it occurred to him that it would be easy enough to turn around and just sail away. He could be free of the dwarf entirely—right then, if he chose. His goal upon leaving Twomly Town had been freedom and adventure, hadn’t it? Well, there was no better time than now to launch out onto those waters. He had his submarine; he could go where he chose. He could be his own master for once.

But he could see after wrestling with the problem as he drifted off to sleep that night, that sailing away wouldn’t do. The dwarf was meddling with things that he shouldn’t meddle with – causing vast trouble, it seemed, for no end of innocent people. The Leta who had served him the pie of broken meats in the house on the hill hadn’t been the Leta he had met earlier in the street. He could see that now. The difference was apparent, like the difference between soda glass and crystal, between a halloween mask and a smiling face, between a bird and a bat.

* * *

The sun next morning found him on the river again, well above Bleakstone Hollow and idling along slowly. He wondered whether the cart he’d been given by the dwarf had been the cart that the two had ridden upriver on, or whether it had been a different cart – perhaps the cart owned by the poor traveler Escargot had tried to rob. If it were the dwarf’s cart, then it argued that he and the witch had reached their destination, or had very nearly done so. And yet Bleakstone Hollow, when he had moored offshore at dawn and studied it through the glass, seemed to him utterly deserted again. There had been no roads thereabouts that led inland, or at least none that he’d seen. And why on earth, he wondered, would they have made such a hasty dash of it upriver just to arrive at a long-deserted village? They must have gone along, he had determined, and very shortly he’d done the same, studying the river road when he could see it, dipping occasionally into the depths of the river, half fearful and half curious about what he might find there.

Once, in a depression some hundred yards offshore, lay a scattering of what appeared to be more of the strange blood-red marbles in the weedy shadows of the river bottom. He was inclined, at first, to break out the rubber suit and gather them up in a net. But there was something about the darkness of the river and about the cold silence of it that dissuaded him. This was no time, after all, to be out after trinkets. And even if the marbles, if that’s what they were, amounted to some sort of very powerful magic, so what? What did he want with magic? Nothing. Less than nothing. When he finally won free of the dwarf and his snares and plots, there was nothing he wanted to meddle with less than magic. Just last night he’d had enough of it to last him two centuries and with some left over.

But there was nothing else to meddle with, apparently.

The morning came and went and then the afternoon did the same. He hadn’t seen a single thing to convince him that he wasn’t chasing shadows now, and by three o’clock he began wondering just how far up the river he’d sail before he’d call it quits and turn around. He had intended, when he set out from Landsend, to stop now and then at a village and inquire, and had guessed, wrongly, that there would be any number of such villages along the way. But there had been nothing but danger in stopping along the shore – nothing but goblins and stewpots and scattered, terrified, untalkative people, all of them going somewhere in a passion. Upriver from Bleakstone Hollow there were no villages at all, just miles and miles of forest and river bottom and backwater, all of which would have served him very well if he were a sightseer, but which wasn’t worth a penny under the circumstances. He’d stick it for two days, he said to himself, puffing on an afternoon pipe, and then he’d come back downriver slow and have another look. If there was nothing to see, then he’d quit worrying about it and go home, wherever that was.

A half hour later the pressure seemed to drop. The late afternoon air was heavy, as with storm clouds, but the sky was blue and empty. The wind gave off and a calm settled over the river and the shore as if someone had lain a pane of glass over everything. The dipping swallows and insects that swooped and hovered over the river simply disappeared, and the water grew calm like the still surface of water in a cup.

It was a very curious business, and if the sky had turned gray and black he would have been reminded of the tornado weather he remembered as a boy, when he lived on the plains beyond the City of the Five Monoliths. But the sky stayed blue. And then, almost imperceptibly at first, the shoreline seemed to wiggle like a snake, or like a throw rug being shaken out from one end. There was a sort of rippling wave that ran across the hills. Trees, very slowly, as if surprised at themselves, toppled over and smashed into the river. Then the land grew calm again. Silence descended, although Escargot hadn’t been aware, until then, that there had been any noise. With the silence he recalled the distant rumble that had accompanied the tremor, something between rocks cascading down a hill in an avalanche and the overloud beating of a human heart. He puffed at his pipe and watched little dust clouds settle where trees had gone down.

He patted his pants pocket, looking for his matches, which he’d tucked away with his marble. His matches were there, but the marble, to his surprise, was gone. He had the habit of lounging around with his right hand in his pocket when he smoked his pipe. He could haul out matches and pipe tools that way. It had become a habit with him, and, as had happened in the past, he’d probably pulled his hand out of the pocket and accidentally hauled the marble out with it. He’d lost a gold piece that same way once and had gotten into no end of trouble from his wife.

He noticed that the outside of his pocket was sticky with something, as if he’d left an unwrapped bar of chocolate inside and it had melted through. He drew out the matchbox and it was covered with dark, ochre-colored goo that smelled coppery and vaguely sickening. What had gotten onto his pocket he couldn’t say – some insect, perhaps, that he’d managed to squash by leaning up against the edge of the hatch.

The river ran placid and silent, and once again it seemed to him that the air thickened and hung still. He braced himself against the open hatch. This time it was more than just the toss of a throw rug. This time the rug was having the dust beaten out of it The landscape shifted and groaned. Hillsides heaved up in a swirl of dirt and debris and uprooted trees. A cavern appeared suddenly in a mountainside where there had been no cavern moments before, exactly like an immense mouth yawning open. As if to complete the illusion, a long ridge of stone angling down from it arched up suddenly like the arm of a giant who had just that moment waked up and stretched. He heard the noise of it this time – the tearing and the moaning and a thump, thump, thump, slow and rhythmic like somebody whacking against the trunk of a hollow tree with an immense rubber mallet.

He dropped down the hatch and slammed it shut over him, just before the wave hit. He’d seen it coming, tossed up along the shore and growing as it surged toward mid river. It had sprung out of nothing and was on him in an instant. It swept the submarine onto its side, and a great green mass of frothing river washed across the bow, the shock of it throwing Escargot onto his back in the companionway, waiting for another wave. When it didn’t come he scuttled forward into the pilothouse and hauled away on the rudder, angling the ship down into deep water. In moments he cruised along beneath the surface – twenty feet down, then thirty, then forty. A submarine, he told himself, was the sort of ship a man wanted when the top of a river decided to shake itself out.

The river bottom had been stirred to life. Waterweeds tore loose and tossed in sudden currents, and as Escargot watched, a long, dark crevass split the sand and muck, and no end of debris and startled fish and water plants rushed into the widening hole. The submarine itself seemed to falter, as if the engines were suddenly paltry things, and Escargot could almost feel the ship slipping sideways and backward, being hauled along in an increasing rush, as if the entire river were being sucked into the earth like water down a drain. There was nothing at all he could do but hold on and watch. He’d end up someplace, sure enough, and he could easy enough navigate up out of a hole. He’d navigated
down
one without too much trouble when he’d come to Balumnia in the first place, hadn’t he? But he could imagine, all the same, the crack in the river bottom swallowing him up and then slamming shut, cracking the submarine like a nutshell.

Then the rushing water slowed and stopped and he seemed to eddy there for a moment, as if the river couldn’t make up its mind to quit fooling away the afternoon and get back around to the business of being a river. He found himself, as his craft surged forward once again, staring into the face of an enormous fish – a great, dark, finny monster that had been drawn out of the mid river channel by the quake and the fissures in the river bottom. It eyed him through the glass ports, illuminated by fire-quartz lamps. It was vast and seemed to be armored instead of scaled, as if it were the invention of a deranged blacksmith. It floated goggling at him, deciding, it seemed, whether to swallow the submarine at a gulp or search for more substantial prey. Escargot throttled forward, watching out of the ports as the creature turned lazily and followed, then fell away astern. In the shadows beyond it things were moving – not just swirling flotsam stirred up in the quake, but great gliding fish and eels; many-armed, octopus-tike beasts that crept across the sandy river floor; and finned lizards, their hooked teeth glinting in the light of the fire-quartz. Lamp-like eyes stared at him out of the darkness. One passing shadow glided past for what seemed like an age, as if it were long as the river itself. Whatever creatures inhabited the deepwater grottoes and bottomless river caverns had been shaken to life by the tremor – awakened, it seemed, from ages of stony sleep, as if the quake were a summons, were a door creaking open onto a primeval landscape, and the ancient creatures that had slept there were stirring and blinking and angling up out of the shaded depths toward daylight.

The sun looked uncommonly good to him when he surfaced – like an old friend or a comfortable hat. He hadn’t been threatened, really, by any of the river creatures, although heaven help him if he had been. They’d seemed to be half drowsy, surprised to find themselves there at all. Escargot wondered for the hundredth time, as he idled along upriver, what, exactly, was going on. The innkeeper’s fears, the goblins carrying on as if there was some design in their capering and howling, the enchantment at Bleakstone Hollow, things stirring in the river, the elf galleon – there could be little doubt that he was sailing into something.

He nibbled at a long strip of jerked beef and uncorked a bottle of ale. His food supply was meagre, and it certainly seemed as if there was little likelihood of replenishing it at riverside villages. Hunting in the woods was out of the question. If his ale and water gave out, he supposed, he could drink river water—boil it up and filter it first. And he could always catch fish, if it came down to it. But somehow it seemed a bad moment to start eating things out of the river; the water was too oddly murky, too full of the unsettling dust of magic.

A broad plume of smoke appeared beyond the tree line a half mile upriver. Trouble, he said to himself, throttling forward, grinning to think that he was running straight into it by choice. It was broad daylight, and would be for a good three hours yet – time enough to have a glimpse at the goings on. It might very easily be a farmhouse afire, torched by goblins. It might as easily be the dwarf and the witch. They needed a good thrashing; that’s what. The idea appealed to him immensely, with the sun overhead and evening still hours away. He felt bucked up suddenly, perhaps because his bottle of ale had been an uncommonly good one and because sailing along there out on the river he was in a position to feel less threatened than he had yesterday evening, when he was alone in the dark and stumbling through an enchanted village.

The submarine rounded a long curve, hugging a high, alluvial bank and taking care not to run aground. Escargot realized that he had developed an aversion to deep water, and for very good reason, he told himself, and he was anxious to be in toward shore so that he could move quickly if it was necessary.

Tucked away in a broad cove a hundred fifty yards ahead was the elf galleon—the one that had flown from the sky – riding at anchor, and off through the trees, almost obscured by foliage, was a burning farmhouse, just as he’d guessed – a vast and roomy mansion with steep slate roofs and about a dozen chimney pots that rose above the tops of the oaks. Flames and smoke coursed out of an attic gable, and through the open hatch of the submarine Escargot could hear shouts and cries and the yammering of goblins.

Leta appeared from behind a stand of trees, running along the road toward the farmhouse as if
she
, at least,
was
determined to throw herself into the middle of things. Behind her, running along and holding onto their pointy hats, were two elves, obviously chasing her.

Escargot couldn’t tell then whether she was running from the elves or toward the burning farmhouse or both, but the mere sight of her running at all sent him clambering after his rowboat. Something within him knew that it
was
Leta running along the road; it wasn’t the witch. Perhaps he’d rubbed up against so much dark magic over the past days that he could sense it finally, or at least could sense its absence.