The Stone Giant

by James P. Blaylock

  He hauled it back to the bow along with a plate of cold fish and two bottles of ale. His pocket watch had gone to the sea bottom along with his pants, and search as he might, he couldn’t discover any sign of a clock on board. But then what did it matter, really, what time it was? In the depths of the ocean day and night stopped amounting to quite so much, and at the moment he was feeling bucked both by the excitement of piloting his vessel and by the possibility, however thin, that the entrance to Balumnia, Smithers’ magical land, lay somewhere beneath the waves off the tip of the island.

  In moments the submarine slipped under the bright waves and angled toward the west. Escargot navigated slowly, with one eye on the account in Smithers. Smithers was full of descriptions of grottoes lit by enchantment and of sunken cities and vast treasures, but there wasn’t more than a handful about whether a navigator ought to angle down into this trench or ought to pop over that heap of rock or ought to be navigating sixty yards to the south beyond the craggy ledge that cut off his view of half the ocean.

  So the hours slipped by. Escargot, very soon, decided that he ought to plot a course so as to avoid cruising in and out and around the same bit of sea bottom. He headed due east for the count of eight hundred, then angled around to the north for the count of two hundred, then west, then north again, on and on, wondering at every turn if he mightn’t have missed what he was looking for by having counted to two hundred instead of one hundred seventy-five, or one hundred twelve. After hours of it he knew that he’d developed a navigational system that was no real system at all, only a way to trick himself into thinking that he was proceeding very logically and sensibly like a submarine captain might be expected to do.

  It must be growing late. He was hungry again. What would he do if he found nothing—no sign of Smithers’ enchanted door? He could hardly surface and anchor the submarine off the island, not with Captain Perry and his lot marooned there. They’d swim out in the night and cut his throat. The truth charm wouldn’t avail him much—not a second time. And if he simply floated atop the sea, what then? The submarine didn’t seem to be the sort of craft that would be satisfied bobbing on the ocean, not in heavy weather, anyway. It seemed to work more like a deepwater fish that slept as it swam.

  The color seemed to have gone out of everything, even near the surface—a pretty clear indication that the sun was setting or else had drifted behind heavy clouds. It grew darker and darker until nothing could be seen out the windows beyond the circle of lamplight generated by the fire quartz. Searching became nearly impossible; the bright light of the fire quartz seemed to make the darkness roundabout even more impenetrable. Great fish came looming out of the black water, gaping into the light, then vanished again in an instant. Angular rocks humped up as if to surprise him, and Escargot was forced to shake the weariness out of his head and to remind himself over and over to keep a sharp eye out lest he end his journey once and for all.

  He’d long ago stopped counting. That sort of thing couldn’t go on forever. The two hundreds had stretched themselves into twice that because he lost count forty times or so and had to start over or at some guessed-at number. The eight hundreds were utterly impossible. So he found himself wandering aimlessly once again. Then, purely by accident, when he supposed himself a mile or more offshore, he hove into sight of the steep side of the island. He was back where he’d begun. It was too late, certainly, to venture out again. He’d have to take his chances with Captain Perry.

  He followed the sweep of shoreline around, thinking to run into a bay. There had been one, he remembered, shortly after he’d rounded onto the leeward side of the island earlier that day. Captain Perry and his men had swum ashore to windward, and had, quite conceivably, murdered each other there out of general villainy and idiocy. Certainly, thought Escargot tiredly, they hadn’t trudged across the island to the other side. He’d be safe enough. There must be a way to lock the hatch, and they could do him little damage if they couldn’t get in.

  The rocky sea bottom gave off suddenly into a little, sandy slope. Escargot navigated shoreward, across the ripples of sand on the sea bottom, awakening no end of flatfish and rays. The water brightened a bit, the consequence, perhaps, of moonlight. But it seemed strangely as it the bright water was mostly away to seaward where the slope steepened and fell away into the depths. Unless he was completely turned around and befuddled, the shallow water toward shore was as dark as ever. There was nothing to do but surface and investigate.

  He found himself fifty yards offshore. He was in a bay, all right, some quarter mile across. A dark line of rock sheltered it from the sea to the north. There was no moon to be seen, only the silvery lightening of the edge of a great mass of cloud, blown by the wind. Treetops along the shore bent and tossed, and the surface of the bay scudded with little windwaves. All in all the night was dark enough for murder; certainly there wasn’t enough moonlight to explain the little patch of illuminated seawater that swirled as if by magic a hundred yards farther out.

  And now that he payed particular attention to it, the light was quite clearly emanating from beneath the sea, not from the sky. It seemed as if a great chandelier had been lit in a deep-sea grotto. Escargot was reminded abruptly of the jack o’-lanterns glowing through the fog on the meadow. There would hardly be witches gathered beneath the sea, though. This was something else. It was what Smithers had promised. Of course Escargot hadn’t seen it when he’d set out earlier. In the morning sunlight the watery glow hadn’t been apparent, at least not to a person who had no idea it was there. He’d passed it at the outset of his search and had been venturing uselessly about the sea ever since, counting his way past it a half dozen times.

  He stood gazing at the glow, his head poked up through the open hatch. The wind was fearsomely cold. The trees on the forest edge lashed in the darkness, swishing and moaning. The moon appeared briefly, as if to shout a warning through a rent in the clouds, and then was swallowed utterly, and the night grew doubly dark. A splintering crash sounded along the shore, followed by the solid whump of a tree flattening itself along the beach. It was no night to be anchored on the surface, and it was becoming less so by the moment.

  Escargot closed the hatch behind him and strode along back into the pilot’s room. He rolled his scattered charts and stowed them away. If he was setting in as captain, he’d best start by making everything shipshape. In ten minutes he was dropping into the abyss, down and down and down toward the source of light that grew brighter, fathom after fathom, until the sea was lit like a tidepool at midmorning.

  It was just as Smithers had described it. He could see nothing at first, beyond bright water and bubbles and an occasional drifting fish. Then, in the distance, there were the shadows of rock ledges that grew distinct, vanished, and then leaped again into clarity, as if the trench into which the submarine fell was narrowing. Soon he crept along a rocky precipice on which a whole nation of sea life carried on in perpetual brightness. Oddly shaped fish like sidewise plates and inflated balloons and long bits of stick hovered above the pink and violet branches of corals and sea fans.

  The wall was shot through with caverns and grottoes and long cracks into which Escargot might easily have piloted the vessel. It seemed to him entirely possible that through any one of them might lie submarine lands peopled by mermen or by talking fish that lived in palaces. Someday he’d have a look into it all. He’d search through Smithers to see if there wasn’t a reference to such places. But for now he’d press on. Whatever it was he searched for couldn’t be far below, for the trench threatened to narrow into nothing, and the light had grown dazzling.

  The wall of the trench along the port side fell away, revealing a long sort of plateau on which were heaped the ruins of an ancient city: broken columns and toppled statues, all of it wound in waterweeds and covered with sprouting polyps. A thousand nautili darted across the ruins, as if searching for something one of them had lost, and the long, cylindrical shadows of cruising sharks passed over them now and again and
then disappeared into the darkness of the ruins. Beyond, where the ledge narrowed again, there was a sprinkling of lights, like starlight bright enough that it shone at midday despite the sun. Escargot hovered along beside them. Fire quartz is what it was.

  The trench was shot through with fire quartz, tiny crystals at first, just chips that shone against the darkness of the rock ledge. But as the vessel fell even deeper, the light outside grew even more intense, and quartz crystals thrust from the wall like spikes, casting rainbows of shimmering iridescence as if the crystal itself were dissolving in the seawater.

  Escargot slowed and stopped the submarine, allowing it to drift slowly downward. If a man could break off even two dozen such crystals, that man might be able to trade them for—what? Anything. There would be no more bartering for boots and jackets and marbles and pies. He could buy what he chose. He could ride upriver to Twombly Town and buy up Stover and Smeggles and just about anyone else he was inclined to buy and then have them all pitched into the river. There must be some way to accomplish the task. Captain Perry’s bottled whale eyes and octopi, after all, must have been harvested from the bottom of the sea. How did Captain Perry go about it? It might, of course, be a little bit mad to attempt any such experiments at such depths as these. But then Escargot wasn’t in any terrible hurry. He was just launching out, after all, and here was an indication that he might do much better at the submarine trade than he had any reason to hope for.

  He’d dropped past fifty feet of crystal—so much that the fiery gemstones had begun to seem just a bit commonplace—when he saw, waving out from the face of the ledge, a succession of single strands of broad-leafed kelp that seemed to have been secured to the stones not by the fingery holdfasts with which kelp clung to wave-washed rocks, but by rope of some sort, or wire, or thread-like filament. They’d been tied there, it seemed, and were pulled surfaceward by a host of bubbles that clung to the leaves. The strands of kelp seemed to be almost crawling along the face of the ledge, nosing along like eels.

  Escargot angled the submarine in for a closer look. It was a curious business, kelp at that depth. And the bubbles themselves seemed to be creeping about, or rather something within them was creeping about. They quite clearly weren’t empty. He squinted through the glass, imagining that he heard a distant tinkling sound, like glass wind-chimes in a feeble little breeze. One of the kelp strands lazied along through the water toward the window of the submarine, as if the kelp were as interested in him as he was in it. It bumped gently against the glass, and a bubble that clung to one of the leaves seemed to hop along toward him, very slowly, elongating itself with each jump, flattening when it touched, then springing back into shape. It edged up against the window, and Escargot found himself looking into the tiny face of a henny-penny man.

  The hands of the little man were thrust through the sides of the bubble, as if he wore the bubble as an altogether suit with the pantlegs cut off at the knees, and in one hand he held a tiny rock hammer. He was altogether human, tiny as a field mouse, but with a jowly, elongated face that seemed to owe a good deal to fishy ancestors of one sort or another. And he was clothed. Escargot had always wondered if henny-penny men wore clothes. There was no reason to suppose otherwise, really. Everyone else did. It made it seem about twice as ghastly, however, that the horrible Uncle Helstrom smoked the bones of these poor devils in his pipe. It was like smoking an elf. He’d heard—or rather he’d read in Smithers—that henny-penny men lived in the sea, and that they migrated upriver to spawn, then drifted back down again on leaf boats and on pieces of bark. But he’d had no idea that they mined fire quartz.

  Another dozen kelp tendrils lazied along toward him, not drifting on currents, but propelled, somehow, by the tiny men. More bubbles pushed up against the window, looking in. They seemed to be unhappy henny-penny men. There wasn’t a one among them who didn’t have a scowl on his face. And who could blame them? It was a fearsome life they led, wasn’t it? Escargot waved cheerfully. Little men, after all. A person might carry such a thing in his coat pocket and hold conversations with it in his idle hours.

  He heard the tinkling again—just the echo of it—tink, tink, tink, very slow and very close. Then another tinkling joined in, and another. They were tapping on the glass of the window, tapping out a greeting, perhaps. Escargot waved again, then sat up horrified in his seat to see a little star-shaped bit of glass chip out from beneath the hammer of the first little man who’d come to investigate him. Three more joined him and set in at the chipped spot, hammering away now in a fury. Escargot slammed the propulsion lever downward, canting away into the abyss. Henny-penny men shooshed topsy-turvy off their kelp leaves and spun round in the sudden current. One, his bubble having burst, clung somehow to the window for a few wild moments, his face pressed against the glass, his hair roiling wildly about his gaping eyes, before he catapulted off and disappeared.

  The submarine careered off a jutting rock with a clank that made Escargot wince. He held his breath, fearing that the window might burst and that he’d ripped a hole in the hull, certain that in moments the sea would rush in on him and he’d drown, a victim of vengeful henny-penny men. What in the world, he wondered, did they want to attack him for?—savage bunch of little boggers. Did they think he was after their fire quartz? As if they didn’t have enough and to spare. Perhaps they thought he was Captain Perry and held a grudge against him from some earlier villainy.

  Then he realized that he had his pipe in his mouth. Maybe that was it. They thought he was going to smoke a bowlful of them. The mere sight of the pipe might have set them mad. Perhaps the dwarf had mixed so many of them into his water-weed blend that the entire race lived in fear of being smoked. Stealing their quartz, it seemed, would take a bit of doing, beyond the problem of venturing out of the submarine a thousand fathoms beneath the waves.

  There as no time to study it. Something loomed ahead—a vast, domed shadow—a wall perhaps, that would signal that he’d come to the end of his journey, that Smithers was wrong. But it wasn’t a wall. It was merely the edge of the broad vein of fire quartz. Beyond was darkness—a shadow so deep and vast that the glow of the gemstones dissipated in it like steam into the sky.

  It wasn’t solid; it was the vast arch of an open door, and beyond it Escargot could see a jumbled coral reef and a scattering of fish, startled, apparently, to see him suddenly appearing there out of the light. There was something about the darkness of Smithers’ door—for that’s what it had to be—that seemed to be the product of enchantment, ominous enchantment, as if he might drive into it and simply vanish.

  But he’d come too far in the last days to hesitate. He plunged along at full speed. The door seemed simply to disappear, puffo, into nothing. No shadow had passed over the vessel. There had been no moment of darkness. He turned the craft about, and there in front of him, a wash of light from the fire quartz glowing through it, was the dark, arched doorway again, hovering on the sea bottom as if someone had hung black muslin from sea-hooks. He’d gone through it, whatever it was. It had seemed to have been nothing, and yet the water surrounding the submarine now was lit by sunlight, not fire quartz. But it couldn’t be. It must be the middle of the night, and the submarine had been immensely deep.

  He was struck with the certainty that he had found exactly that land he’d hoped to find. He was in Balumnia, or at least he was on the bottom of one of the Balumnian oceans. He had to be. He’d certainly gotten to somewhere inexplicable, and there could hardly be such a passel of magical lands lying about on the sea bottom that he’d stumbled into one he hadn’t anticipated.

  A sea turtle, vast as the side of a house, swam lazily past, paying him no mind, and so Escargot set out to follow him, worrying idly that among all the charts in the ship, there wasn’t one that mapped Balumnian oceans. They were all worthless to him. He had quite likely lost himself entirely, and he’d wander round and round in uncharted waters, fishing out of the hatch, unable to find the shadowy door back into his own world, and he’
d have to satisfy himself with the knowledge that Smithers had been right again and that Wurzle, regardless how vast his knowledge of salamanders might be, knew nothing of the nature of books.

  The sea turtle was quite evidently bound for the surface, and he reached it, with Escargot in his wake, in minutes. The submarine nosed out of the water and settled down onto a rolling, overcast sea. He cast his anchor and pushed out through the hatch, pausing for a moment to breathe the cool, salty air and to pack tobacco into his pipe. He lit the tobacco, puffed once or twice, lit it again, and took a look around. Ahead of him was trackless ocean. He very slowly turned, tired, all of a sudden, of being a submarine captain, and there, humping up on the horizon, was a dark shoreline. If it was an island, it was a vast, low island, for the ends of it were lost in the gray distance. Balumnia; that’s what it had to be. Escargot slammed shut the hatch, leaped along the companionway to the pilot house, and set a course straightaway. He was bound to be in port by nightfall, and to be in the position once again of being able to choose his friends rather than falling in among lunatics and murderers by happenstance.

  9

  At Landsend and Beyond

  A great city stretched along the coast. Like Seaside, it wrapped around a shoreline formed by the merging of a river and the sea. The river, however, was several times the size of the Oriel, and the mouth of the delta was a confusion of islands and long, empty sandspits and vast bridges that humped up like the back of a sea serpent, connecting one island to the next. On the shore beyond the last of the islands and bridges was a forest, shady and dark beneath the midafternoon sun, spreading away into the distance and creeping down almost to the rocky beach. It was a wild and uninhabited coastline beyond the city, and long windblown wisps of low cloud, gray-purple in the distant sky, made it seem as if it were the painting of some ancient wildness, and that at any moment a giant might appear, striding along the trackless strand.