The Stone Giant (31 page)

‘They were
ripening
the things, lad. He’s got them, all right, and if we could discover a way to get them back we’ll knock a hole in his boat for sure. It wouldn’t sink him, maybe, but he’d be foundering.’

‘The girl,’ asked Escargot, nodding as if satisfied, ‘what about the girl?’

‘I was rather hoping that
you
could shed some little light on that subject.’

‘Me?’

‘Don’t tell me, sir, that you saw her for the first time this afternoon arid that you took such a sudden fancy to her that you risked your hide scrapping with my men? You were in frightful danger there, my man, frightful danger.’

Escargot shrugged. ‘Any gentleman would have done the same.’

‘I daresay,’ snickered Boggy, imitating the captain’s voice and hinting, through the tone of it, that a gentleman like Escargot might quite likely be interested in more than mere chivalry.

Now it was Escargot’s turn to give Boggy a look, and he considered suggesting that they put Boggy into the tree again, but he held off. The conversation was cockeyed enough as it was.

‘What do you know of her?’ asked Captain Appleby. ‘Come, man. It’s been good faith all the way along. Now it’s your turn to spill. There’s more riding on this, I tell you, than you can conceivably suppose. Far more. The girl’s life hangs in the balance. At least I think it does. If you’d save her, speak.’

‘Her name is Leta something-or-other. I don’t know what. The witch, as I understand it – the old blind woman – holds her in thrall, and steals her body whenever the sun fails, to shine. At night, or in a fog, Leta becomes little more than a wraith. I’ve seen it happen. It did just now, on the hillside in the river fog.’

‘The fog,’ said Appleby, nodding. ‘That’s no common fog. The dwarf, you see, is a necromancer from the Dark Wood. He’s what Smithers would call a fog dwarf – a dweller-in-the-mists, to put it more artistically, which is usually his way,’

‘That must be in a Smithers book I haven’t read.’

‘My good fellow,’ said the captain, ‘there are no end of Smithers books you’ve yet to read. No end that he hasn’t writ yet. He’s in no hurry, is Smithers.’

‘Who
is
Smithers?’

‘Just a fellow from up in the village. You wouldn’t have seen him, I think.’

‘Which
village, exactly?’

‘Any village you please, I shouldn’t wonder. But this is all Smalltalk, my man, and Smalltalk must wait. About the girl – where does she come from?’

‘Seaside,’ Escargot said promptly. He didn’t have to think about it. He had reviewed in his mind the little bit he knew about Leta’s history so many times that it had become as familiar to him as his name.

‘When?’

‘Don’t know. She’s eighteen, nineteen.’

‘That don’t help. The day is what I need.’

‘Just before the harvest festival. She was what they call a harvest maid.’

Captain Appleby’s jaw dropped again, even farther this time than it had when he’d heard about the marbles. ‘I knew it,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And we’re fooling away time here. Back to the ship!’ he cried suddenly, taking Escargot by surprise.

‘What on earth are they going to do with her?’ he asked, frightened by the captain’s sudden seriousness.

Appleby shook his head grimly. ‘Nothing at all if you don’t keep us here with your empty talk. The dwarf, as I say, is going to roust these giants out of bed, and he’ll awaken heaven knows what sorts of creatures in the deep water of the Tweet. There’s no bottom to that river, as you and I know river bottoms. Its waters flow out of antiquity. Things of dirt and stone will reign again. We’ll save the girl – don’t be afraid of that – but I’ll tell you that the girl won’t be saved for the sake of the girl, not that alone, but for the sake of ... of ... more than I can tell you now. I’ve said enough. Wait for us in Landsend, sir, at the Blue Head in Lanternwick Street. If we don’t find you by the weekend, then you won’t be in a position to worry about marbles or girlfriends or anything else but your seagoing hide. I bid you farewell!’ With that he turned and stalked away, followed by Collier and the rest of the elves, including Boggy, who did a little ridiculing dance atop the captain’s shadow, which, in the deepening gloom of evening, stretched ghostly long across the beach and out onto the river.

Escargot sat once again in his rowboat, alone. ‘Not for the sake of the girl,’ he muttered half aloud. He didn’t at all like that. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, it seemed to him then, for the sake of the girl. And for the sake of twisting the dwarf’s nose. He knew, finally, what it was that, as Smithers himself might have put it, ‘was abroad in the land,’ but the knowledge didn’t bring him six inches closer to being able to do anything about it.

A sudden creaking and clatter arose in the sky behind him, and he turned to see Captain Appleby’s galleon setting sail on the sky tides from its mooring in the adjacent cove. It slanted up past the trees, its sails billowing out in the wind that blew upriver, and as it looped around and made away to westward, he could see Captain Appleby on the afterdeck and Collier standing beside him. The captain had a fresh feather in his hat, a red feather this time, and he wore a greatcoat now, to ward off the windy night chill. In a moment the ship seemed to be no more than a cleverly built child’s toy, disappearing toward the rising moon.

He found them again at anchor, twenty miles upriver. The forested slopes of the south shore had given way, finally, to low, rolling hills and meadows with here and there a stand of oak and sycamore. The earth was cracked and had been heaved up in ages past and shaken out and shuffled and tossed so that long cuts of exposed stone angled across meadows and hillsides. It seemed unlikely that the hills and meadows had ever been the retreat of men, despite their green and sunny appearance, and there was something about the place – some low-lying atmosphere – that proclaimed, as loudly as if it were spoken through a trumpet, that the dark earth thereabouts was seeded with magic, and that when it rained, a mist of enchantment rose from the rivulets that cut the meadows and that fell away finally into the Tweet.

There was no sign of the elves, or of anyone else for that matter, although off in the distance, scrabbling across the top of a heap of shrub-covered stone, was a heavy, bent, shaggy-headed troll. Escargot felt suddenly lonely and sad in a way that he couldn’t at all explain. He could hear the papery hum of dragonfly wings and the occasional splash of a fish somewhere off over the water. Far away, unseen in the cloud-drift sky, geese passed along above him, and their honking, distant and faint, reminded him of something – something he’d lost, perhaps, or something which had been promised to him and would never appear, but would be always pending, waiting, just out of sight beyond a clover-covered hillside or a stand of trees or a broad bank of cloud that obscured the horizon. He scratched his head and wondered at it all, listening to the silence.

Way off across the river, a mile or more away, the smoke of a steamship lazied up into the morning air and the thin blast of the ship’s whistle sounded. The presence of a ship-load of people, playing cards and eating and leaning on rails to watch the river flow past, increased the feeling of loneliness, as if they occupied a world too distant for him to return to – a world which he had occupied for a time but had been cast out of, largely because of his own laziness and pigheadedness. In a melancholy mood, he dawdled there, smoking his pipe and calling up memories which were as much a product of the morning stillness as of anything else.

After twenty minutes of that sort of thing he realized that he was powerfully hungry and that he had almost nothing left to eat. He held a glass tumbler in his hand, half filled with the contents of the last skunked bottle of ale. When he’d opened it, it had seemed to him better than nothing, even though he wasn’t normally given to breakfasting on ale – especially bad ale. But even the jerked beef was gone. He had nothing else. There were a half dozen apples, but he was sick of apples, and these had so thoroughly gone to mush anyway that he couldn’t bear the thought of eating one. He’d been too caught up in revelations yesterday evening to remember to ask the elves for food, which, without any doubt, they would have given him generously. He’d eaten elf chocolate once, heavy with coffee and brandy. And he’d drunk elfin ale at the fair in Monmouth several years back. He remembered it as being sharp and sweet at the same time with the tang of very cold mountain water about it. Then there were elfin pies, of course, which weren’t, perhaps, quite the equal of the pastries baked by field dwarfs, but were easily worth a journey on foot of several hundred miles and half a dozen other sacrifices thrown in.

He decided to fish. It seemed as if it had been an age ago that he’d wound up his trout and squid lines and left them beneath the log along the Oriel. He wondered if they were still there – if they would be there when he got home finally, and whether the hooks would have rusted themselves to nothing. He’d catch a fish and eat it, is what he’d do, then set about the day’s heroics. If Captain Appleby could be believed, and it
seemed,
at least, that he could be, then the afternoon might tell the tale. He’d have to look sharp then, and for that he’d best have a full stomach. If he caught some sort of prehistoric monster out of the river he’d throw it back; that was all. He wouldn’t be
forced
to eat horrors.

Somehow it seemed more sporting to fish from the rowboat than from the open hatch of the submarine, so holding his ale glass between his knees, he rowed carefully in toward shore, into the slack water of a shallow little inlet, and cast his anchor. Almost at once there was a nibbling on the line, as if about twenty tiny fish were reducing his bait to nothing. He jerked it once or twice to discourage them and to catch the eye of something bigger. Then he let the bait sink to the bottom and lie there while he filled his pipe.

Clouds drifted across the sun, now casting the river into shadow, now clearing out and letting the sunlight turn the river into diamonds and glint. In the passing shadows the river seemed to darken and deepen, and Escargot could see way down into the moving water where waving tendrils of weed grew in clumps. He could make out the stones of the river bottom, vague and indistinct below him, disappearing utterly in the sunlight, then reappearing, dark and mysterious, as if they were a product of cloud shadow. He watched, looking for his bait, which lay hidden under there somewhere, and he saw the silver glimmer of a long fish nosing along the sand. They were down there all right. One of those would feed him for a week. He could salt it up and stow it in the larder. He squinted, trying to find it again, and he jerked on his line to see if he could spot the baited hook.

He peered at the scattering of stones on the river bottom, nearly putting his face into the water. The sun looked out briefly from behind the clouds and then accommodated him by hiding itself again. The rocks – or whatever they were – were long and curved, and were laid out far too regularly to be the product of chance. They looked for all the world like ribs in a rib cage, and above them, lying off to one side, was a tremendous weed-strewn boulder of such strange and suggestive shape that he was certain at once that it wasn’t a boulder at all. He poured the warm ale overboard, rinsed the glass in the river, and shoved the bottom of it into the water, leaning over and squinting into the open end of the glass.

Now the shadow worked against him, and what lay below seemed to be nothing but a peculiarly arranged jumble of rock. He waited, swinging round in the current, until the sun shone once again and the river bottom was illuminated. There lay almost directly below him now the rib cage and skull of a giant, the skull half obscured by waterweeds. In its lower jaw clung half a dozen stony teeth. Escargot gazed at it in wonder, seeing suddenly the drooping curve of his fishing line, faintly aglow in the sunlit water, descending into the weeds that grew in profusion roundabout the skull. With a suddenness that nearly toppled him from the tilting thwart, the silver fish darted from the mouth of the great skull, jammed itself into the waterweeds, and darted back into its weird hidey-hole.

Escargot’s fishing pole jerked out from where it was pinioned beneath his leg. He dropped the ale glass into the river, lunged at the pole, and caught it and himself before falling overboard. The rowboat was half awash with the effort, though, and Escargot found himself pulling and tugging and sloshing around, utterly unable to reel in even an inch of line.

He pushed the pole in under the thwarts finally, grasped the line with both hands, wrapped it twice around his palms, and yanked, throwing himself back, determined either to have the fish or break the line. When it went suddenly slack he thought he’d done just that – broken the line. But almost as soon as he thought so there was a ferocious pulling, and the line went weaving away, as if the fish had abandoned the skull and were running for deeper water. Now the line was caught on nothing but the fish. He pulled and reeled and reeled and pulled, and slowly, in shrinking circles and with the fish making occasional little darts toward the bottom, he hauled the great fish alongside the boat. He shoved a hand in under its gill and heaved it over the side, into the six inches of water that covered the deck. The fish flapped there, gasping in the shallow water. It was three feet long if it was an inch, but there was nothing in the least monstrous about it.

He pulled in the anchor and rowed back to the submarine. The entire fishing venture hadn’t taken more than an hour, but somehow it had made him fearsomely hungry, as if he’d added three or four hours worth of hunger to the hunger he’d started the day off with. He dragged the fish through the hatch, letting it fall to the floor below where it flopped tiredly, and he stowed the rowboat before climbing in himself.

He was whistling in the galley two minutes later, whisking a carving knife across a stone. He’d never much liked the idea of cleaning fish; in the past, he’d as often as not let his wife do it. She’d cooperate, unnecessarily frugal as she was, because she knew that if it was left to Escargot it might easily not get done at all until it was too late and the fish was ruined. He was vaguely embarrassed to think about it. But it was fishing he liked – that and eating. Cleaning the fish and hacking them up had never seemed a part of either of those two pastimes. So he’d get home with his catch, wave them at Clara, and promise to get at them in an hour or so. But then there’d be Smithers to read or Annie to play with and he’d find, as often as not, that the hour had come and gone and that Clara, frowning silently, had taken care of the fish.