The Stone Giant (40 page)

Escargot did, and found himself holding a whole handful of marbles. He emptied them into the bag containing the truth charm, started to thank Appleby, but was interrupted by a tiny voice emanating from just above and beyond his ear.

‘What’re they for? Are they bullets?’

‘No, no,’ said Escargot, turning to the little man perched next to his head, on a tumble of driftwood. It was a henny-penny man, the orator from the oak woods. He regarded the bag full of marbles dubiously.

‘They don’t do anything at all,’ explained Escargot. ‘You just sort of have them.’

The henny-penny man blinked at him, uncomprehending. ‘And you say that’s why you want the book, too?’

‘That’s it. Exactly.’ Escargot had been bold enough to ask the henny-penny man for the tiny copy of Smithers, then had examined the thing with a magnifying glass, astonished to find that it was the same edition and printing as his own and had been signed, too. It was baffling, to be sure, and neither the henny-penny man nor Captain Appleby could explain it to him – the henny-penny man because he didn’t know or didn’t understand the question; the elf because the mystery was too deep for the minds of mortal man, or so he said. Escargot didn’t press him, largely because the captain seemed to wax theatrical now at any opportunity, and the subject of his superior knowledge of the mysteries was certainly such an opportunity.

He hadn’t been able to think of anything to offer the henny-penny man in trade. Unlike marbles owned for the sake of owning marbles, trade was something henny-penny men understood. In a rush of inspiration, however, Leta had folded sheets of Captain Perry’s stationery into paper airplanes, and the henny-penny man had spent most of the morning aloft, planing across river breezes at speeds unattainable by mere leaves.

The submarine lay at anchor once again. There was the dent from a cannonball in her side and sucker marks the size of bucket mouths along her stern, these last etched into the brass and copper hull, too deep, quite likely, even to polish out with a pumice stone. Leta had put most of the interior right – shelving books, cleaning up the mess from spilled bottles and jars, ordering maps and charts that had fallen from niches in the walls.

A single elfin galleon floated yet on the river. In a half hour it would be gone, scaling through the heavens until it lost itself in cloud drift. Escargot could see the top of Boggy’s head, almost hidden among kegs piled on the poopdeck, among which Boggy had been hiding most of the morning in order to avoid being put to work. Henny-penny men had been disembarking in driftwood fleets for the last half hour, sailing down the Tweet toward Land-send and the sea. The sun shone overhead like an orange on a pale blue plate, and the air was silent but for the hum of dragonfly wings over the still green waters of the cove. Even with the thin chill on the westerly breeze, you might have thought it was a midsummer noon – except that faint and thin from across the river hovered the smell of pruning fires, and every now and then, drifting from the woods, a leaf would come sailing and bumping and painted red and orange and brown with an autumn brush.

Escargot, for the first time he could easily remember, felt free of the webs that he had managed most of his life to entangle himself in. He felt as if at last he could stand up and stretch without cracking his elbow against something. He smiled at Captain Appleby, thinking that the elf was an awfully pleasant sort. Then he smiled at the henny-penny man, who tugged his paper airplane across the sand now toward a little crisscross raft of twigs he’d lashed together. Aboard the raft stood a paper hut, moored to the timbers of the deck with straight pins. The little man had shrugged at Leta’s warning that the thing probably wouldn’t last out the trip to Landsend. For a few good miles, anyway, he’d be the envy of all henny-penny men. Escargot watched the raft swirl away in the current, and although he waved, the henny-penny man didn’t wave back. They weren’t, apparently, much given to sentimentality.

Escargot was full of it, though. He smiled again at Captain Appleby, who was stirring and looking uncomfortable, as if being landbound didn’t suit him and he thought it was high time the galleon was aloft.

‘Ever visit the Oriel Valley?’ asked Escargot.

‘Oh, yes. We’re bound there in spring, in fact. There’s a gathering in the White Mountains.’

‘How about Twombly Town? Ever stop there?’

‘We elves don’t much meddle in the lives of men, actually, though we certainly might, if there was cause to. Why?’

‘Oh,’ said Escargot. ‘I don’t know. My daughter’s there, actually, and I’m bound for somewhere else. I just thought that if you were going that way, don’t you know, you might give her something for me. But I won’t even ask if there’s trouble in it for you.’

‘No trouble at all.’

‘Then give her one of these.’ Escargot pulled a marble out of the bag and handed it across to the captain, who nodded profoundly, as if he understood very well why delivering the enchanted marble to little Annie was important enough to compel Escargot to ask such a favor of him. ‘Best not to let her mother know. She won’t understand it. A marble is just a lump of glass to her, and if it comes from me it’ll seem like a wicked lump of glass at that. But Annie will catch on. I’m afraid that if I don’t give her such things, she won’t be very likely to get them at all.’

Captain Appleby nodded again. He understood that too. He slipped the marble into his pocket and assured Escargot that elves were on tolerably good terms with children. Children were far more closely related to the elves, he said, than were men and women, whose vision, by the time they were grown, had as often as not begun to fail, and they saw everything through a mist, even though they were convinced that they saw very clearly indeed.

Leta climbed out of the hold of the ship just then, wiping her hands on a towel with the air of someone who’s finished a substantial bit of work. ‘It’s eleven-thirty,’ she said to Escargot, and then threw the towel at him. ‘Are you rested yet?’

Escargot grinned at her. ‘I was just telling the captain here that it wouldn’t hurt me to polish the glass in the portholes before we launch. Wasn’t I, Captain?’

Captain Appleby coughed into his hand and then nodded, widening his eyes. Leta nodded too. She wasn’t at all convinced. ‘I won’t eat another fish,’ she said.

‘Lunch!’ cried Escargot, fired by the idea. ‘I was forgetting lunch. Eleven-thirty, do you say? Are we shipshape – all the spars varnished and the bowlines heaved out?’

‘Aye, aye,’ she said, saluting with two fingers.

They sailed across the water fifteen minutes later, watching the north shore where the distant spire of a church steeple rose beyond a cluster of riverside houses. A steamship was just then putting out from a dock, and they could hear the airy cheer of wellwishers ashore and see the rising billow of white, cloudlike steam from the smokestacks.

Then Leta grabbed his arm and pointed, and there behind them, sailing into the cloudless sky, was the elf galleon, with Boggy and Collier and Captain Appleby aboard, bound for the heavens, for the moon itself, perhaps. It tacked across the wind, rising and rising and shrinking as it rose, until it was impossible to say that it wasn’t merely a bird that they watched, winging its leisurely way across the sky in the warm radiance of a noonday sun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel
Homunculus
won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in
Unearth
magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include
Knights of the Cornerstone
,
The Ebb Tide
, and
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled
The Aylesford Skull
, to be published by Titan Books.