The Stone Giant (39 page)

‘The witch!’ shouted Appleby, spearing at the troll. ‘Kill the witch! Cut her head off! Push her into the fire!’

Escargot turned to do the captain’s bidding, but knew at once that he couldn’t. As long as he couldn’t say for sure what the witch was, what part of her was Leta and what part a devil, he couldn’t push her into any fires or cut off her head, not to save himself, not to save the world. Even as he thought about it Captain Appleby was gone, swept up into the battle and hollering something over his shoulder about duty.

Escargot had nothing against skewering Uncle Helstrom, though, and he turned and struck straightaway toward the dwarf. The stone giant bent toward him, cocking its head, opening and closing its hands. Escargot veered away from it, thinking suddenly that he’d attend to the dwarf later and seeing for the first time two very remarkable things. From the hills to the south, clacking along with moonlight glowing through rib cages, endless disheveled ranks of skeletons strode spindlelegged onto the meadow. There were hundreds of them – thousands, perhaps, torn from opened graves along the river. They shone like old ivory in the light of the silver moon, and even at a distance of half a mile and over the din of the battle, Escargot could hear their bones clattering like dominoes falling in a heap onto a wooden tabletop.

At the same moment came a movement in the sky. It suddenly seemed as if the low heavens were full of moving stars – innumerable stars that slanted down past the dark oak woods, whirling along on the wind as if the Milky Way itself had been blown to bits and swept to earth in a rush. The lights shone brighter by the moment, and Escargot could see, finally, that they weren’t stars at all, but were tiny lanterns, below which flew small, dark shapes on moonlit wings.

The dwarf’s bats, still swooping and darting over the meadow and worrying the elves aloft in their galleons, flew in a cloud to meet the pinpoints of light, and Uncle Helstrom himself shrieked in a fury and looked around, hollering at the witch, who huddled now in a dark alcove in the rocks.

At the moment the dwarf turned his attention away from his magical fire the moon seemed to plummet earthward, once again brightening the meadow. The goblins and the trolls and even the lumbering giants paused in the middle of battle, falling back in the face of the awakening moon. Three stone giants, heavy and slow and ponderous and striding now in the wake of the skeletons, shook themselves like a man might shake his head when waking up from a long afternoon nap, and the shaking seemed to dismember them. Fingers flew off here; stony ears tumbled onto the meadow there; a great head shivered into scree and rained down onto a host of raging goblins, scattering and crushing them. One giant sat down heavily on a troll, then slumped backward, the ground shaking with the thud. It was as if in the suddenly brightened moonlight they were disintegrating, bit by bit.

The dwarf shrieked, pulling at the arm of the witch with one hand and stoking his fire with the other, and the sky, suddenly, was full of henny-penny men, each of them wearing a necklace of fire quartz and brandishing a spear. Trolls howled and fled, goblins fell onto their faces. The little men sat astride owls that swooped down onto darting bats, rending the things with their talons.

A great cheer arose from the elves, and the ships, afraid now that cannon and pistol fire might as easily hit friend as foe, swept south toward the hills to meet the advancing giants. And even as they sailed before the wind, rope ladders dangled from the sides of the galleons, sweeping along the plain, and elves scurried down them, tumbled onto the meadow grasses, and sprang to their feet, rushing up and into the fray.

Their ships drove on toward the giants, who lumbered down toward the meadow now, bellowing and lurching, awakened at last to the task at hand. Three of the galleons ranged abreast of each other once again and advanced on the foremost of the giants, a shaggy monster, hairy with trees and grasses still rooted in the creature’s earthen skin. The galleons fired as one, a dozen guns in all, the ships swerving round and running down the meadow again as the monster reeled and creaked. Its left arm fell to rubble and half its midsection disintegrated in a spray of rock and dirt, leaving the creature wavering there in mute surprise until the great weight of its head and chest pulled it over and it thundered down onto the grasses in a cloud of flying debris.

Its fellows, eight in all, and more moving among the distant hills, seemed not at all to notice the plight of the first, and the galleons were among them once more, this one delivering a salvo from its twelve pounders and blowing an enormous leg into fragments, that one firing away with its chase guns as it swept past on the wind, the smoke and brimstone swirling about the heads of the giants, who staggered and swatted and lumbered forward in confusion.

One galleon, its billowed sails painted with the visage of a round-faced, bespectacled, cloud-cheeked man, came around too soon, and an enraged giant, half his granite face blasted away moments before, swiped at the ship, snapping its mizzenmast like a piece of stick candy. The ship shuddered under the blow, listing crazily as the giant struck again, sweeping the mainmast by the boards and staving a great, gaping hole in the starboard bulwark. The ship sank to the grass like a leaf drifting out of a tree on a windless day, and elves scurried out of her like bugs as the giant brought a stony foot down onto the ship, smashing her afterdeck to flinders before collapsing himself, the remains of his face breaking to smash on the meadow beyond the crushed galleon.

The night was full of booming guns and the creak of toppling giants. Goblins raged beside trolls, seeking to tear at elves with their teeth. Half the goblins had lit their hair aflame in the melee, and they capered wildly and with no particular purpose, perhaps assuming in their dim way that the mere sight of them would throw fear into the elves. But what the elves fought for lent them a bravery that a goblin or a troll couldn’t fathom, and for every elf struck down with a troll’s club or smothered beneath rushing goblins, two more surged in shouting, flanked by henny-penny men and sending the goblins scurrying in howling confusion.

The battle had ascended the hill toward where Uncle Helstrom tended his fire. The dwarf watched warily, casting his glowing cinders by the handful as if the little pinwheels of spark and flame were a wall against the warring armies. Escargot charged at the dwarf. The stone giant, sitting behind Uncle Helstrom like a genie waiting for a command, looked at Escargot, then raised his hand slowly, intending, perhaps, to swat him like a fly. Moonlight suddenly shone off the enormous, grass-covered hand, bathing it in opalescent radiance, and the hand broke free at the wrist and disintegrated from rock to sand to dust before it sprinkled onto the ground. Then the moon lit the giant’s wondering, upturned face, and the creature fell over backward as if in a sudden faint, the ground shuddering with the impact.

Escargot, who had been anxious to avoid the threatening giant, found himself hurtling now toward the dwarf, who cast into his face a scattering of glowing coals that fanned out in a bright arc before him. Escargot seemed to smash against an invisible wall formed of enchantment, the dwarf grinning at him from beyond it and reaching once again into the coals. Another spray of sparks and embers sent Escargot reeling sideways. He fell, rolling across the grass toward where the witch stood snatching at the air again. There was the milky cloud roiling about her, more substantial now, as if the mist were turning to ice. Escargot plucked himself up, astonished. The witch spoke with Leta’s voice. She
became
Leta for one startling moment, but it was Leta with the face of a cat, then Leta with no face at all, then the witch again, stumbling toward the dwarf as if she were in a terrible hurry to finish the evening’s work.

Escargot shouted, and his shout was returned – not by the dwarf or by the witch, but by Leta herself. She stood behind the witch, against the sheer, tilted rock on the hill. Escargot could see straight through her, as if she were some sort of clever, magical projection. The dwarf cast the witch aside and snatched at Leta, but his arm passed through her arm. Bathed in heightening moonlight, seemed to solidify suddenly. She swung wildly at the dwarf, who had spun halfway around with the force of his own blow, and her open hand clipped him on the ear and sent him reeling. He lurched after his staff, kicking through his little heap of bags. Escargot bounded in before him, snatching up the staff and flinging it end over end into the midst of a howling mob of goblins below, and the staff, glowing in moonlight, seemed to cleave them like a scythe through wheat.

Bracing himself to meet the dwarf’s onslaught. Escargot was surprised to see his foe flee across the meadow after his staff. He didn’t, obviously, care a rap for Escargot, but was intent only on holding onto as many of his magical trappings as he might. Escargot plucked up one of the bags and upended it, shaking out a dried bundle of homunculus grass and flinging it onto the fire.

The air was at once saturated with the smell of mud and waterweeds, and a great reek of smoke billowed out into the wind. The dwarf stumbled among his goblins, hacking with his staff at whoever or whatever came near him, shivering two skeletons into scattered bones at a blow. Captain Appleby appeared suddenly before him, cutlass upraised and a look of stony resolve on his face. But the dwarf smote the ground with his staff, mouthing a curse, and the captain tumbled over backward and lay still. Boggy stood over his fallen captain, slashing away tiredly at a knot of skeletons, bones skittering away across the meadow and the skeletons clacking and lurching and plucking up fallen swords which they swung clumsily with both hands.

Abner Helstrom stopped and looked about him, eyes narrowed as if he were wondering what smell it was that filled the air, and then he shrieked and ran toward the fire, carrying his staff in both hands. The henny-penny men suddenly went mad. They gave off thrusting their little spears into the sides of goblins and trolls and wheeled toward the fire, infuriated by the smell of smoke.

The air roundabout Escargot was filled suddenly with swooping owls and with the tiny scowling faces of henny-penny men, set upon murder. He would discover now, he thought to himself as he crouched and ran toward the rocks, whether he counted as friend or foe among the henny-pennies. To his vast dismay Leta seemed oblivious to the flashing spears of the little men and to the fiery thundering of the dwarf. She bent toward the fire, which leaped and roared with a fury born of enchantment gone awry. The witch fled before her, bent and hobbling.

The girl grabbed the witch’s shoulder and spun her around, looking into the face of a blank, eyeless, staring thing, drooling onto the webby lace at its throat, the face of a thing dead and buried. Leta shrieked at the sight of it and then hurled herself forward, slamming stiff-armed into the witch and tumbling her over backward into the fire.

There was a great gasp of flame and reek, and the fire went out as abruptly as it had flared up moments before. The witch was gone, as if evaporated. The goblin fires on the meadow, one moment leaping and burning and winking, snapped into darkness the next like snuffed candles. The moon sailed back into the heavens and in a moment bobbed there pleasant and serene, as if it hadn’t witnessed anything at all out of the ordinary that night. Goblins and trolls and clacking skeletons fled into the hills, pursued by henny-penny men. The elves threw down their weapons and cheered, their victory assured, the threat to the valley, to the wide world itself, seeming to have been doused in an instant.

The dwarf screamed and struck at the cloud of whirling owls. Hundreds of the birds winged roundabout overhead, their tiny riders watching for an opportunity to sail in and take a poke at the dwarf, who fled away down the meadow toward the southern hills where the last few giants even then collapsed back into stony, ageless sleep. The dwarf ran trailing his staff and holding onto his slouch hat with his free hand as henny-penny men flew at his back. And as he ran, a wind devil sprang up from the scree and dirt and torn vegetation that had been a giant, and scoured roundabout the meadow as if searching for something. Shouting incantations, Uncle Helstrom ran toward it. The wind devil, as if abruptly having caught sight of what it was looking for, spun toward him in a swirl of leaves and dust and making the sound of wind whistling through tree branches.

Just as the dwarf reached the whirling perimeter of the little spiraling cloud and burst into a peal of wild, conceited laughter, an owl swooped before him and the henny-penny man astride it thrust his spear into the dwarf’s face. The laughter changed abruptly to a shriek; the owl and its rider were swept into the wind devil and spun round like paper whirligigs; and the dwarf seemed to turn to dust, consumed by the wind and borne away toward the south, the faint, strange sounds of moaning and laughter lingering on the suddenly still night air.

‘You can have them with my blessing,’ said Escargot to Captain Appleby, who sat with a bandaged head on the sandy shore of the river.

The elf held in his hand the box of marbles, the droplets of giant’s blood stolen from the dwarf. Escargot hadn’t any use for them. He’d keep the truth charm, though. That was a thing that a man could trade, if it came down to it. It had served him well a time or two, and he was just getting the knack of using it to his advantage. He looked into his own hand at a marble Appleby had just given him. It was made of glass that was almost invisible, it looked so clear, and swirling through it was a translucent rainbow of spiraling color.

‘Shake it in your hands,’ said the elf.

Escargot cupped his hands over it and shook. It felt as if the marble had gone to bits, and when he peeped in, there were six marbles, not one, and each utterly different from the rest. He looked at the elf in astonishment.

‘Works on the principle of the kaleidoscope, actually. The principle of the rotund mirror, we call it. Only they don’t shiver to bits after they appear, like the reflections in a kaleidoscope do. Shake them again.’