The Stone Giant (37 page)

The cannon aboard the elf ship fired off another twin round, one of the balls geysering into the river, the other smashing into the back of the mottled creature and disappearing like a stone in a pudding. It threw itself sideways, splashing a great sheet of water across the edge of the cove, and for a moment seemed to relax its grip on the submarine.

The hatch flew open and Leta appeared, hoisting herself out and rolling across the steep deck. She clung for a moment to one of the forward fins, then slid across the brass and copper hull and into shallow water, out of the reach of the thing from the river. It seemed not to notice her escape, but tore once more at the submarine, lifting the stern free of the river. Water cascaded from the screw and hull and fins, and the brown and orange metal, turquoise with verdigris and lined around the ports with silver, glinted for a moment in the sunlight before the beast shook it out like a dog worrying a rat, and then dropped it into the river again and disappeared. The ship swung round into the current as Escargot ran along the bank, fearful that he’d lose it entirely, that it would wallow out into mid river and fill with water, sinking dead and silent in the deep channel. But it scrunched up into the shallows instead, driven farther onto the beach and canting half over onto its side.

Leta stood on the beach alone. A longboat full of elves put out from the
Nora Dawn,
and rowed furiously shoreward, anxious both to settle their account with Leta before she eluded them again, and to avoid running up against the monster that had dealt so handily with the submarine. Before either party could reach her, though, goblins broke from the cover of a little grove of trees upriver and rushed toward where Leta stood on the bank.

Escargot shouted, forgetting about his submarine. One of the elves stood up in the bow and pointed, urging the rowers to haul on the oars. Leta spun round and knocked two goblins aside with the back of her hands, but then the rest were upon her, chattering and cackling and swarming like rats in a cellar, and she went over backward in a tangle of writhing little men, the lot of them rolling down toward the water as goblins dropped off and hollered and tore at each other like mad things.

Escargot found himself plucking them up and sailing them into the river before he stopped to think what he was about. There seemed to be nothing else to do with them. Hitting them in the head made them cackle even louder with laughter, if such a thing were possible. More goblins appeared now, rushing toward them down the road, their sharpened teeth gnashing and their sparse hair wild and blowing.

There sounded a great splashing from the river all of a sudden, like a dozen great serpents beating the water. Rising in a mass of bubbles and steam stained pink by the thing’s blood, the river monster plucked up floating goblins and whirled them skyward, throwing some of them into deeper water, holding onto others and slapping them down onto the roiling surface of the river.

The elves in the longboat rowed more furiously than ever, but downstream now, away from the thrashing, blowing creature. The
Nora Dawn,
her anchor hauled abeam, drifted in the current as sails unfurled along the masts, Captain Appleby wisely seeking to put some distance between his ship and the carnage atop the river. The monster, in a gulp, ate a goblin, shoving it past its beak and into its horrible tearing mouth. Then another goblin, limp as a cloth doll, followed it. Another crowd of goblins that had been rushing along furiously toward him and Leta had slowed and stopped. They stood gabbling in low tones, blinking in wonder, then broke and ran toward the meadow. Escargot tumbled the last two of their brethren in the same direction, opening his mouth to shout a warning, just for good measure, at the retreating mob.

Then he saw, standing beneath the mossy, overhanging limbs of a barren and twisted oak, the old woman, very still and with her head bent slightly sideways as if she were listening to the wind.

Escargot’s shout died on his lips. He knew at once why it was that the witch hadn’t been with her master a half hour earlier. He’d sent her after Leta. The river monster had been doing her bidding, had delivered the submarine to her with Leta inside. There wasn’t anything in the least bit subtle about it; the thing had picked up the submarine as if it were a salt shaker and had dumped her out.

Escargot grabbed Leta’s hand and hauled her along the sand, toward the beached submarine. The sun, he realized suddenly, had vanished beyond the river, and the misty gray of evening crept across the beach even as they ran. He pressed her hand in his, as if clutching it tightly would keep it from evaporating, from slipping away into nothing, and he glanced once into her face, which was lined, it seemed to him, with terror and resignation.

And then suddenly he was holding nothing at all – only a handful of fog that his fingers closed over, just as the skeletal hand that the dwarf had thrown into the fire had closed over a powdery heap of ash. She was gone again, and he fancied he could hear on the wind the faint echo of her cry, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was she’d said.

He turned in a fury, forgetting about the submarine and about the thing in the river. He ran toward the lone oak tree, leaping across a driftwood log, thrashing through a stand of willow scrub, then stopping and staring when he realized with an abruptness that nearly knocked the wind out of him that it wasn’t the old lady who stood now beneath the tree, listening at the wind; it was Leta. The shadow of the oak, dim in the dark of evening, spread out before her along the ground, looking for all the world like a vast black cat with its back arched and front legs stiff. And then, as quickly as he understood what it was he saw and set out once again at a run, Leta vanished, or rather the witch vanished, and there
was
a black cat, sitting on its haunches beneath the tree. By the time he’d struggled up the hill, the elves racing and shouting up the river road behind him, the cat was gone, lost on the shadowy meadow.

‘Well,’ said Captain Appleby, drawing slowly at his pipe and regarding Escargot through squinting eyes, ‘you’ve rather made a hash of this one.’

The complaint infuriated Escargot, even though it was largely deserved. But then what could he have accomplished if he had stayed behind in the submarine, if he hadn’t left Leta alone and gone out after the marbles? His presence there wouldn’t have confounded the river monster in the least, and he certainly wouldn’t have been capable, when it came down to it, of jerking the sun back into the sky and warding off evening. There was nothing that he could have done. That was clear. He’d told himself that about a dozen times and he found himself ignoring Captain Appleby and telling himself again, replaying in his mind all of the possible scenarios that
hadn’t
happened that afternoon, and finding that none of them would have ended any differently.

He’d been outfoxed again; that was the long and the short of it. He’d trumped the dwarf on the meadow, but the dwarf had had cards in his hand that he wasn’t showing–aces in his sleeve. Now evening was drawing on and they sat uselessly in the captain’s cabin, either or both of them standing up now and then to peer out of one of the portholes. Smoke rose again from beyond the first rocky hills. Appleby had sent out calls for help, but what more could they hope for than another galleon or two of elves? Even that was hoping for too much.

‘What can they do without the marbles?’ asked Escargot tiredly.

‘They can kill the girl. They don’t need marbles to kill the girl.’

‘But
why
would they kill the girl if they don’t have the marbles? You told me they needed both.’

‘They need both, perhaps, to defeat us utterly, at a blow. But they don’t need both to turn the valley upside down. Better we’d kept the girl and left him the marbles, which are nothing but blood anyway, like I said. They’ve got blood enough in the girl to wreak no end of deviltry.’

Escargot winced. ‘Aren’t your men ready yet?’ Hurrying feet clumped along over the deck above. Shouted orders rang out. Collier stuck his head into the cabin, started to say something, then hastened away leaving it unsaid. The night was dark and clear outside, and in an hour a full moon would have risen above Landsend. Escargot decided that he couldn’t wait for Captain Appleby. Elves or no elves he was setting out.

‘My men are ready,’ Appleby said, ‘I haven’t decided yet what it is we’re going to do. Steady-on, is my motto, and you’d do well, lad, to take heed of it. Waging war is something like playing chess. Drink another bottle of this ale.’

‘No, thank you.’ Escargot shoveled cold fragments of a meat pie into his mouth and drained the last half inch of ale from his glass. Steady-on was right. He’d had enough sitting about. He’d lost a battle that afternoon; there was no denying it. But he’d won another, hadn’t he? And so far Captain Appleby had done little about the menace save lobbing a cannonball into the head of the squid. The time for waiting and planning was past. ‘I’m setting out.’ Escargot stood up and put a hand on the door latch.

Captain Appleby nodded, apparently satisfied. Escargot had been vaguely afraid that the captain would attempt to lock him up again. He’d think, perhaps justifiably, that Escargot had been working a bit too often at cross purposes with them, and he’d decide that Escargot was better off out of the fray. But that wasn’t to be the case, apparently.

‘Good luck to you, then,’ said the elf.

‘Thank you. I just can’t wait about, you know.’

‘Of course you can’t. I wouldn’t either. And it might easily be best if we had a go at this villain from different angles confuse the issue a bit. Do you want company? I could sacrifice Boggy, perhaps.’

‘No, thank you anyway.’

‘I thought not,’ said Appleby, sighing. ‘Cheerio, then.’

‘Bye.’ Escargot let himself out and left Captain Appleby smoking alone in his cabin. He wondered what plans revolved in the elf’s mind. Something was up, certainly, but there was no guessing it out. The captain was troubled. Most of his bluster and drama had left him – ironed out by the spectre of doom that had risen with the night. Escargot rather liked him better for it.

The moon, when it rose, glowed like an illuminated pearl, and it seemed to Escargot as he stepped along the path through the dark woods that it was a heavenly lantern, hung on a hook in the sky for the sole purpose of lighting his way. It disappeared behind dense foliage and then appeared again in a wash of silver and then was gone once more, and he had to pick his way like a blind man over deadwood and half-exposed rocks. Then suddenly there it was in the sky again, seeming to hover between the waving, upper branches of great trees and casting its cool glow across the trail.

The pale lights playing over mottled trunks and patchy, sun-starved grass were like so many flitting ghosts, shifting and sighing and entrapped, somehow, within the silent depths of the moonlit woods. He wondered if there were henny-penny men about, perhaps watching him from tree branches through black, brooding eyes and combing the tangles out of their beards with thin fingers.

But soon he stepped out of the tree line and onto the open meadow, and the clutching darkness fell away and disappeared. The moon smiled down on him like the face on the clock on the wall in little Annie’s room, and once again it seemed to him to be the face of a friend. He remembered again having sat by the riverside weeks back, thinking that Annie might ride along with him on adventures. All that business about her learning elfin tongues and deciphering the gabble of goblin talk – all of it was nonsense. He could see that now.

Almost nothing, it seemed, went along according to plan. You could spy everything out from a thousand lofty hilltops, could peer through telescopes fitted with elf glass, until you convinced yourself that you saw everything clearly, that the future, surely, could be mapped with a quill pen and the ink dusted and dried. But it would turn out that there were
two
thousand hilltops, half of them invisible beyond the crests of the others, and that beyond them were ten thousand more, and that all the telescopes in the wide world, strung end to end and twisted into focus by the steadiest hand, weren’t enough to spy them all out. And then, marching out from beyond those hills would come a bank of rainclouds, hidden moments before, and the sudden downpour would reduce your little ink and paper plans to a wash of blue haze.

But you’d make another map – wouldn’t you? – thought Escargot, hurrying along across the meadow. You’d patch one up out of the fragments of the others and you’d convince yourself that this time, surely, what you held in your hands wouldn’t go to bits in the rain. You might just as well do that or stay home. You couldn’t admit, ever, that your hopes and dreams were just goblin gold, turning to bugs and trash in the light of the noonday sun.

One day he’d reach Twombly Town again; the winds would blow him home. But for the moment the winds blew elsewhere, and there was nothing for him to do but to trim the sails and drive with a will toward shore.

Ahead of him now lay the stony hills, dark and jagged against the gray, rolling meadows. From beyond them glowed a light. It wasn’t the pale radiance of the moon; it was the yellow, dancing flicker of firelight. Escargot felt suddenly exposed out there in the open night, and it seemed to him as if half a hundred goblins watched him from hidey-holes among the rocks. The dwarf, surely would expect trouble. And it was trouble he’d get.

No one accosted Escargot on the meadow. No goblins appeared; no trolls hunched out to chase him. No leaves navigated by henny-penny men tilted toward him. He found himself in minutes among the moon shadows cast by the scattered rocks at the base of the hills. He could hear the dwarf’s chanting now, much clearer than he’d heard it that afternoon, as if it carried better on the empty night air. It seemed to him too that far away and all around him sounded a peculiar straining creak, like the slow closing of a screen door on complaining hinges. The night, he realized suddenly, was alive with noises, most of them mysterious. They weren’t the scattered, random noises that had drifted on the air in Bleakstone Hollow; they were noises made by the stirring landscape, by the shifting, it seemed, of the hills themselves.