‘That’s clever,’ said Escargot, nodding his head. ‘And I wish I had something to put in that vault of yours. I’d sleep easier if I knew I had something in a vault, but I’m not the kind of traveler they make vaults for. Give me a room and a bite to eat and I’m gone in the morning when the sun comes up. I’m happy enough to settle the bill tonight.’
‘Good,’ said the innkeeper, turning away down a narrow hall. ‘First unlocked room off the second-floor landing.’
The second-floor landing was a ruin of warped floorboards and cracked plaster, and the rooms fronting the open stairwell were in pretty much the same shape. Escargot stepped into one, then stepped back out again when an enormous rat scuttled across the corner of the floor and winked through a rathole gnawed in the floor moulding. The next room was a copy of the first, except that the floor mouldings were ungnawed, so he threw his bag onto the bed and then sat next to it, wondering if destinations weren’t just a little less grand when you arrived than they had seemed when you set out.
He bent down and peeked under the bed, then sat back up, relieved to find no rats. He stepped across to a cracked and dusty window, hung with cobweb, and looked out onto the rear yard where his horse munched grass next to a tumble-down barn. Directly behind the barn was a woods, dark and silent in the gathering evening. Cider. He might have known it. A man rides along the open road from dawn to dark until he’d kill for a bottle of ale – even a bottle of the sort of ale sold by an inn like The Smashed Hat – and what does he find, dusty and weary as he is, his throat dry as an old rock? Cider and a poison pudding for rats that live in the room next door.
He flopped back onto the bed and stretched out. He was tired enough so that if he fell asleep, there’d be no need to bother with supper at all – probably a good thing, taken all around. But somehow he wasn’t inclined to let the innkeeper get away with feeding him nothing, so he promised himself he’d just doze for a moment, then go back downstairs and choke down some cider.
It was a half hour later that he lurched awake in the darkness, jackknifing up into a sitting position, his boot thrashing out into the footboard and kicking loose the corner post, which fell to the floor with a bang. It seemed as if he’d heard something – a noise, a rattling on the doorknob. But there was nothing now. It was just as likely that he’d jostled the footboard in his sleep and rattled himself awake – a good thing, since if he hadn’t, he’d have slept till noon the next day. He instinctively felt for his pouch, where his money and his truth charm hung together in their leather bag. They were safe – far safer than they’d be in the innkeeper’s vault. An affidavit indeed. That’s all he’d have had in the morning; his truth charm would be gone along with his money, and he’d have an affidavit.
He lit the oil lamp by his bed and reached into his shirt, plucking out the truth charm. As he stared at it he began to feel like a fool. How could a carven stone, for goodness sake, tell the truth about anything? How could it tell anything at all? It hadn’t any mouth. But it did look like a truth charm, or some sort of charm anyway. Perhaps, he thought, in a sudden fit of inspiration, it was never expected to tell anyone anything. Perhaps it answered only specific sorts of questions – questions with yes or no answers. What had he asked it before? To elaborate on the validity of G. Smithers. Of course it hadn’t answered. What had he expected, a treatise?
He set the charm on the little deal table, under the lantern. The yellow light seemed to sink into the stone like water into a brick; the eye peered up at him, regarding him, waiting. He cleared his throat. ‘Should I have brought little Annie?’ he asked, steeling himself for an answer he didn’t half want to hear. The stone, however, sat silent in the lamplight. ‘Is Leta a witch?’ Nothing happened. Was it the eye that told the tale? Would it wink, perhaps, when he’d stumbled upon the truth? ‘What ...’ he began, when the door burst open and the innkeeper strode through, a carving knife in his hand.
Behind him, leering in the open door, stood the pudding-faced stable boy, his cuffs rolled up halfway to his knees and his teeth set in determination. Escargot snatched at the charm in order to thrust it into his pocket, but he knocked it off onto the floor instead and it rolled toward the window. He leaped after it, away from the bed. His heel kicked the fallen bedpost. He stooped, snatched up the heavy, turned post, and menaced the innkeeper, who endeavored to circle round behind so as to trap Escargot between himself, the bed, and the stable boy.
‘We’re a-going to rob you!’ shouted the innkeeper, strangely honest. ‘We rob nearly everyone who stops here, we do. Then we beat them silly. The last one we rode up to McVicker and said he’d tried to rob us, and they hanged him, they did, as a thief. They’ll hang you too. See if they don’t.’
Escargot watched the man in amazement, and held his post like a ballbat, wondering at the man’s speech. ‘I deserve it,’ he found himself admitting. ‘That and more. I’ve abandoned my daughter to her horrible mother and a bent-up hypocrite of a preacher and there’s not a thing I can do about it but run. Do you understand what that means?’
The innkeeper nodded. Apparently he understood very well what that meant. The stable boy nodded too, stepping into the room and crossing to the bed, as if to creep across it and confront Escargot from the other side. ‘I wanted that horse to kick you out on the yard today,’ he offered, squinting at the astonished Escargot. ‘A horse like that kicked me once. More than once. Kicked the stuffing out of me. But it didn’t hurt, not until the next day. I hate horses.’
‘I don’t hate horses,’ said Escargot, ‘but I can’t stand my wife. And it’s not just for the pies, either. She was after me every minute. Do this; do that. There was no such thing as peace.’
The innkeeper lunged at him with the carving knife. Escargot lurched backward, folding up in the middle so that the knife swished past his belly, ripping his shirt. He swung the bedpost, clipping the innkeeper in the shoulder. The stable boy shouted and rushed at him, but Escargot thrust the end of the post into his chest and knocked the wind out of him. The stable boy collapsed in a heap on the floor, gasping and wheezing.
‘That hurt!’ cried the innkeeper, clutching his shoulder and staggering back, the knife angling ceilingward past his ear. ‘I had a wife once and she left with a traveling hat salesman in the night. So I followed them down toward the river and I bashed him and bashed him and bashed him and all his hats until they run off down the river road howling like tea kettles. Them two did, I mean to say, not the hats. And I come back and changed the name of this inn and swore I’d bash some more people before I was through. That’s what I did.’
The stable boy had crawled back a foot or two, leery of the bedpost and of the look of resolve in Escargot’s face. ‘I’m a-going to leap on you!’ he shouted, throwing himself at Escargot’s legs. The innkeeper, seeing his chance, loomed in with the knife upraised, his lip curled back, his eyes screwed half shut like pig eyes.
Escargot swung his club at the stable boy’s head, but the post was too long for close work, and he managed only to bounce it off the floor before going over backward in a tangle of arms and legs. He slid his left hand down the post and whipped it up into the looming face of the innkeeper, catching the plunging knife midway between his own two hands. The force of the blow pushed the post down against the back of the stable boy’s neck, wrenching the knife away from the innkeeper. Escargot rolled onto his back, banging himself clumsily in the knee with the bedpost, then wedging it against the throat of the stable boy, who bit wildly at his shoulder, grinding his teeth into a mouthful of jacket.
‘I hates you!’ cried the lad, letting loose. ‘I hates everyone!’
Escargot jerked the bedpost away, surprised to see the knife still dangling from it. The innkeeper lunged for the knife, caught the blade instead of the handle, and shrieked with surprise and pain. Escargot slid away under the window, his elbow cracking down on the escaped truth charm. ‘I’ll club you senseless!’ he shouted, waving the bedpost. The innkeeper, grasping his hand through h
is shirt, fell back in horror.
‘On him, Grimes!’ he hollered.
‘No!’ hollered the stable boy.
‘I’ve wanted to murder you in your bed for years!’ shrieked the innkeeper.
‘Don’t think I haven’t robbed you blind ever since I came to this filthy inn!’ the stable boy hurled back at him.
‘I’ll bash anyone who gets in my way,’ said Escargot, striding purposefully toward the door. He snatched up his bag, turned one last time to threaten the two with his bedpost, then leaped out of the room, shouting over his shoulder as he hurtled down the stairs, ‘Do yourself a favor and shave your mustache!’ In a trice he was in the yard, clambering into the saddle on legs renewed with fear and excitement and listening for the sound of pursuit. But the only sounds were of the two shouting at each other, still on the second floor. Escargot cantered toward the road, leaving his bedpost on the lawn. There was a last cry from above, followed by a crashing and a long howl cut off abruptly.
Escargot flicked at the reins, kicking the horse into a gallop and scouring through the night until he angled round onto the river road and away toward Hightower. It seemed to be a good night for traveling after all – certainly a better night for traveling than for putting up at inns. He found that he was shaking so thoroughly that he could hardly take the truth charm out of his pocket.
It had been a weird fight, to say the least. Obviously it had been the innkeeper who had awakened him – probably trying to sneak into the room and slit his throat while he slept. It was puzzling that the man had thought it necessary to announce all his intentions in a loud voice. Why, when it came to that, had Escargot seen fit to drag little Annie into the conversation? And why had they compared notes on their wives? He looked again at the truth charm in his hand, its eye glowing dully in the moonlight. A truth charm – of course. It had nothing to do with the sort of truth he’d been trying to draw out of it. It worked the other way around; it had drawn the truth out of him, and, of course, out of the other two, who had fallen under its spell when they’d stepped into the room. He slipped the stone into his pouch and hunkered down in the saddle, drawing his coat around him. It would be a weary three or four hours yet into Hightower, and then there wouldn’t be an inn with a light left lit.
5
The Harvest Festival
Escargot slept that night in a boat in Hightower Harbor, and breakfasted, wrinkled and sore, on steak and eggs in Hightower Village. No one had heard of any Abner Helstrom – not a living soul. But they knew the dwarf in the slouch hat well enough to steer clear of him when they heard him tapping along the road. He dwelt, they said, in the stone castle on Hightower Ridge. But he’d been gone for a month nearly, and no smoke had issued from the tower chimneys. If there was any such thing as luck, said one old man in the cafe, the dwarf would be gone for good.
As for Leta, no one knew the first thing about her. Witches, on the other hand, were a dime a dozen, especially at that time of the year. It was Halloween, wasn’t it? The air at night was full of them, and no one with both oars in the water would be out and about after dark.
Escargot grinned at the idea. He rather fancied running into one or two, he said, but he knew when he said it that it was partly an idle boast. There was part of him that wanted to run into nothing at all, that longed for a wainscotted parlor and a hearth and locked and shuttered windows. Another part of him, though, longed to be away, riding beneath the moonlit sky, pressing on downriver toward the sea.
Four days later he was almost there, cantering through drizzling rain, the Oriel delta stretching away on either side. There was salt on the breeze, the smell of spindrift and tar and oyster beds and the musty, smoky smell of> autumn. The road was full of people on foot, and rattling along in carts and on horseback, all of them bound for Seaside and the harvest fair. Parties of light elves hummed along down the river in long, cylindrical canoes, paddles dipping wildly and the canoes skimming wonderfully fast as if they raced on skids atop a frozen river. Early in the afternoon, when his horse tramped wearily up a long, slow rise, there lay Seaside, spread out far below him and running down into the endless gray ocean.
It was a walled city, prodigiously old, that wrapped around the swerve of shore like a quarter moon. Off toward the western edge the steep wall dropped almost forty feet into the bay, where the salty ocean mingled with the water of the Oriel River. The wall had crumbled here and there, and heaps of stone and scree lay tumbled on the mud flats of the bay. A party of dwarfs, wielding trowels, crept along like bugs on precarious scaffolding that dangled from the top of the wall, and more dwarfs on the wall above lowered hods of mortar and stone down to them for the purpose of patching the crumbled sections of seawall.
From where Escargot sat on his horse atop the rise, the city seemed to be an illustration from G. Smithers book, all turreted and alley-crossed and with the seawaves crashing beyond along the rocky, open shoreline and long washes of cloud-drift blown across the afternoon sky. Standing out to sea was a swell-tossed galleon, riding at anchor, its sails furled. It wasn’t hard to imagine a fleet of such ships on a moonless night, flying the skull and crossbones from the mast, the cannon exchanging shot for shot with the long guns mounted in the high seawall of the city.
The streets of Seaside spread out like the spokes of a cartwheel from the central palace, disappearing and then reappearing from beneath arched stone bridges, full of milling people. Smoke rose from a thousand cooking fires, and even from his aerie a mile above the city Escargot could catch on the wind the grease and charcoal smell of roasting sausage and the sharp, hoppy tang of breached kegs of dark ale.
He flicked the horse’s reins, but the beast needed little urging. In minutes they’d descended the rise, and the city disappeared behind another, lesser, hill in front of them. Then there rose into view directly ahead a massive arched gate in a wall of hewn granite blocks. He filed through the open gate along with a half dozen other travelers – men from Monmouth and the City of the Five Monoliths, and in moments he was swallowed by the crowds of people and the old, tilted houses, the shouts of sidewalk vendors, and the cries of reeling seabirds.
Now he had arrived at his destination. There was nothing in front of him but the sea, and though its shifting mystery was part of what had drawn him down the river road, it hadn’t yet become the object of his journey. There was the harvest festival to see to first, that and a month’s explore along the coast. The place names on the maps of the coastline below Seaside were almost magical in themselves: Thrush Haven, Manatee Head, Emerald Bay. It would be a shame not to have a look at them. After that, he’d quite likely have enough gold left in his pouch to book passage on a sloop bound for Oceania. And in the tropics, it seemed to him, a man might get by on nothing.
He clip-clopped into the city, swept up in the spirit of the fair. Despite the cool of the evening, windows were thrown open in almost all of the houses that lined the street, and people leaned out, shouting and gesturing, appearing and disappearing. The sidewalks were jammed with chairs and tables, and front porch stoops were littered with sleeping people. It struck Escargot suddenly that there would be little chance of finding an inn. Food and drink he’d already found in plenty, but it was moronic to think that a bed would be left unspoken for in the middle of such a crowd of people. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He didn’t much fancy a front porch stoop. And what would he do with his horse? If he put up at an inn he’d have a place to stable her. But if he merely tied her to a lamppost and wandered away, the next person who walked past would climb onto the beast and ride off. He’d sell her; that’s what. What did he want with a horse? He’d arrived, hadn’t he? He could easily travel the coast road on foot, after all.
Selling he horse turned out to be an easier thing than he would have guessed. It didn’t take five minutes, once he put his mind to it, to find a willing buyer: a gyroscope salesman who’d walked downriver from Stooton for a week and a half to get to Seaside, but who didn’t half fancy walking another week
and a half upriver to get home. It was a sad business, he found, selling the horse, but he’d come too far already to let sentiment stand in the way of getting on, so he patted her once or twice on the flank, threw his bag over his shoulder, and let her go, wealthier enough only to regret how much he’d spent on her in the first place, but lighter in step for having one possession the fewer.
‘Say,’ he said to the man, yanking his bags back off his shoulder, ‘what do you do, sleep on the sidewalk?’
‘That’s just what I do. And a hard sidewalk it is, after a few days. But if I put up at an inn, there ain’t no profit in it. I might as well stay home. This ain’t a pleasure trip.’
‘Of course not. I’m not putting up at an inn myself. What would you say if I left my bags with you? I’ll be back around tonight, maybe, or tomorrow. I’ll make it worth your while.’
The fellow scowled at Escargot, as if he half supposed that Escargot were up to something. But it didn’t seem so. Here he was being given a man’s bags. ‘What’s in ‘em?’
‘Nothing but clothes,’ said Escargot. ‘See for yourself. I just don’t want to be cluttered up, you know. I’ve been carrying that stuff for two weeks and I aim to be rid of it for a night. What do you say?’
‘How much?’
‘A silver half crown?’
‘Yep,’ said the man, holding out his hand. Escargot immediately regretted having offered so much. The man had accepted more readily than he ought to have accepted. But Escargot could afford it. Why be a cheapskate? There was the spirit of the festival to think of. In the end he left the bags with the man and set out, carrying only his pouch and his copy of The Stone Giants. He hated to go anywhere without something to read, just in case.
He spent the late afternoon walking, savoring the idea of having no place to go, of finding himself on a street corner with no earthly reason to turn right rather than left. A man on foot might travel six miles in a day, if he was leisurely: stopping here to sleep for an hour in the sun, dawdling there over a glass of ale. On horseback he could do better, of course. But he might easily ride past that spot of sunshine, or feel less inclined to climb down and open his book. And what did it matter if he wandered along six miles of coastline in a day or if he hurried past twenty? He hadn’t seen any of it yet. He was getting a grip on this business of time; that’s what he was doing. And here on the sunset streets of Seaside, faced with doing nothing, or, rather, with doing anything in the world he pleased, it seemed to him that never before had he felt so certain that he had time by the neck.
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