At the base of the third bridge was tied a scattering of coracles and canoes, pulled well up onto the shore. Escargot studied them from atop the bridge. There was enough moonlight for him to be sure that no one tended the little flotilla, unless, of course, they were far back in the shadow cast by the span. But that didn’t seem likely, so Escargot stepped down a stone stairs that wound round to the foot of the bridge.
‘Hello!’ he called cheerfully, and in a loud enough voice to awaken any sleeper. There was no one there. A dozen scurrying crabs fled away at the sound of his voice. Water lapped at the stones of the bridge, and in the pale starlight Escargot could see the humped tracks of moonsnails cutting the mudflats in little interlacing ridges. He found a coracle with oars slid beneath the thwarts. It wasn’t worth much, as boats went, and could use some scraping and some tar. The back thwart was cracked through and the oarlocks were rusted. That made it easier, certainly, to borrow it. He would leave something in return—one of Captain Perry’s sea creatures, perhaps, or a pair of the captain’s shoes. But his shoes were too small, actually, to do anyone any good. Escargot would think of something.
Of course it might easily be that the boat’s condition indicated that it was owned by a poor man, a man who hadn’t the means to own a newer craft, who hadn’t enough, perhaps, to keep his meagre boat in repair. Borrowing a boat from a man like that wouldn’t entirely do, regardless of what he left as payment. He looked around and straightaway found the sort of craft that would answer—a freshly painted boat with a carved pig as a fiddlehead. It was worth vastly more than the first boat, but borrowing it was less awkward, all in all, since the man who owned it was quite clearly a man of means.
Escargot untied the boat, tossed the line into the bow, and pushed it out into the shallows, then hopped aboard and rowed out from beneath the bridge, the boat humping up over the little dark swells that rolled in to sigh on the shore. Hauling payment back before morning would be a tiresome business, but there was his code to think about. He’d find something adequate—more than adequate. Maybe the eye of Captain Perry’s gummidgefish—that and the whale eye both. Whoever had owned the boat would possess the greatest and the smallest fish eyes in the sea. He could retire on that, perhaps tour the coastal cities in a cart, displaying the relics. He’d be a happy man, all in all, when he found his boat gone.
The next day but one, Escargot rowed north along the shore again, toward the city. In the bottom of the coracle lay a sizable basket of lilac kelp, moist beneath a layer of wet rags. If it was fresh kelp the man wanted, it was fresh kelp he would have, and at a price that would satisfy him. Escargot’s journey on the sea bottom had been a simpler matter than he could have wished.
The rubber suit with its seashell helmet and aerator box had been nothing to don and doff, and the only anxious moment had come when Escargot had turned the taps and flooded the little antechamber with seawater. The leaden soles of his boots clamped him to the deck, and he could do nothing but stand there transfixed as the dark ocean swirled up around his knees. What if his helmet should leak? What if the seal at the neck was imperfect? He had regretted in a rush that he hadn’t put the suit on and submerged himself in a tub of water by way of trying it out. But it was too late for such thoughts, and he found himself, suddenly lightened, stepping out through a circular trap and landing in a little spray of sand on the sea bottom.
At first the rushing of air in his helmet and the press of cold seawater against his rubber suit had been bothersome reminders that there was little between him and a watery grave. But the suit didn’t leak, and though the air smelled tinny and damp, it breathed just like any other air, and Escargot found himself eight feet beneath the surface, looking out at a vast garden of lilac kelp, shoulder high and undulating melodically in the soft current. Among the holdfasts crept chambered nautili and sea lemons, grazing on the kelp. The colors, muted by the depth, were ultramarine and violet, and a hundred feet or so away they faded to shadowy green where the seawater, finally, was obscured by distance.
He could have harvested kegs of lilac kelp, but he quickly determined that such a thing would be foolhardy. Here was a man’s livelihood, after all, waiting on the sea floor to be plucked up and put in a basket. If the man at the hotel was desperate for kelp, why Escargot would oblige him – half a day would do it. If kelp wasn’t in that sort of demand, then he wouldn’t have gathered a mess of worthless vegetation only to have to dump it overside when it began to smell.
So it was with the air of a man who had newly stumbled upon success that he rowed north along the shore, bound for Landsend. He was vaguely troubled by the idea that the man who he’d traded the coracle out of might catch a glimpse of him and try to make an issue of the transaction. The best thing, perhaps, would be to seek the man out, and pay him for the boat with the profits from his latest venture. He’d let the man keep the eye of the gummidgefish, of course, into the bargain. Call it interest. He could afford to be generous.
Things were looking up. Here he was with a basket of kelp. It might as well be a basket of money, after all. And the herb man, whatever his name was, owed him for the gold too. Who could say what the profits of all this transacting mightn’t finance? Kelp, certainly, couldn’t be the only profitable crop on the sea bottom. He mused on for a bit, imagining the wealth that lay scattered in the oceans, waiting for a man like him to sail in and take it.
Then he thought suddenly of Leta, burning atop the pyre in Seaside and his happy thoughts were spoiled. He knew, and had known for the past week, that he had come to the end of nothing in Seaside. There was something in him that was dissatisfied with loose ends, with unsolved mysteries, and he felt suddenly as if he were living in a house with one wall unfinished, and that even though he sat in a chair facing the three finished walls, every once in a while he’d glimpse out of the corner of his eye, when he turned his head just so, the unplastered posts and beams of the half-constructed wall.
It was a bothersome business, this Uncle Helstrom nonsense, and he knew that he was better rid of it. If he was. Somehow he wasn’t rid of the image of Leta’s face, which had become clearer over the past days rather than fading. He felt, when he thought about it, that he’d let someone down, that he’d failed in some way that he couldn’t at all explain, that he wasn’t the only innocent party involved in the mystery, and that he’d been so anxious to save his own fleeing hide that he’d given little or no thought what the whole business implied. Heaven knew, though, what it had implied. He honestly hadn’t been given much opportunity to find out.
He ran the coracle up onto the shore below the shanty-town, hauling it into the midst of half a dozen other boats, and set out into town. The herb emporium was dark. The same dusty debris cluttered the window, and it seemed, when he peered in past it, as if it were impossible that the store had ever been illuminated, that it had ever seen any customers besides mice and bugs. Escargot pounded on the door, then pounded again. He tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn.
He stepped into the alehouse next door carrying his basket of kelp. The tavern keeper slouched against the bar, his chin on his hands. He didn’t seem happy to see the door open. ‘Say,’ said Escargot to the man and laying his basket on a table, ‘when is the herb store open?’
‘Next door?’
‘That’s right. Next door.’
‘About two weeks.’
‘Excuse me?’
Two weeks. He’s out of town on business. Gone upriver after some sort of weed. He’s supposed to be back in a couple of weeks, but don’t wait up for him. Last time he was a month late. He don’t care. He don’t have no business anyway.’
Escargot felt his stomach sink. This, quite clearly, couldn’t be the case. ‘When did he leave, yesterday?’
‘No.’ The man shook his head, cocked his head down, and spat past his shoulder onto the floor behind the bar. Escargot blinked at him. ‘Been gone for days – nearly a week.’
‘The tall man, in the robe. With the hair?’ said Esc
argot, brushing his own hair back in an effort to ape the style of the man he’d given all his gold to. ‘The man with the bird skulls on a rope?’
‘Oh, him. He don’t own the shop. He don’t own nothing. That’s your man’s cousin. I don’t know where he is and I don’t care to. Nothing but trouble in a nutshell, if you want the truth of it.’
‘He said he owned the shop,’ Escargot insisted, but knowing that he’d been taken once again.
‘I don’t wonder. He thinks he owns just about everything, and if he can get his hands on it he does, too.’
‘I gave him a good bit of gold coin – you remember it – and he promised to exchange it for local coin. So if he lives near here I’d like to know.’
‘You gave him gold coin, you say?’
‘Almost all that I had.’
‘Expensive lesson then,’ said the tavern keeper, swabbing away at the counter and grinning. ‘It’s drank up by now – and you can quote me on that—and spent in one of the houses up in Fern Hill.’
‘Fern Hill?’ asked Escargot. ‘Where’s that?’
‘I’d leave Fern Hill alone,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘You won’t find him there anyway. A man don’t spend but one night at a time up on the hill, and knowing your man Kreslow he spent all the gold you gave him just about that fast. You’re wasting your time is what I’m saying. You’re from outside, ain’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ admitted Escargot.
‘Then you fell in straight off with the wrong man. That’s the long and the short of it. If I was you I’d move along. There’s work enough down toward the harbor, if you’ve a mind for work. Be happy you didn’t lose the gold at the end of a knife. There’s plenty around here who has.’ With that the man fell silent and set in to wiping out pint glasses, eyeballing the bottom of each before setting them upside down on a shelf behind him.
‘Which way to Royal Street, then?’ asked Escargot.
‘Three streets up, mate.’ The man shook his head tiredly, as if resigned to the foolishness of travelers like Escargot who failed to take a man’s advice. Escargot walked along back toward his boat, mulling over this latest defeat. The needle of luck had swung round the other way; there was no denying that. The man in Royal Street was probably a lie, cooked up to lend some detail to the general fabrication. On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, then what did Escargot need a middle man for anyway? He could sell the kelp to the man himself and keep all the profits. The loss of his gold wouldn’t amount to so very much then, would it?
He found himself on the outskirts of the shantytown when he finally had his mind made up. He’d return to town and find the Vance Hotel. He hadn’t any idea what the man’s name was, but he could go from door to door – pretend to be a vendor of some sort. Perhaps he ought to go back to the ship and work up a disguise or dress a bit more like a merchant. He’d bring around a gift for the manager of the hotel; that’s what he’d do. It might quite likely save him from being tossed out onto the road.
When he heard the lapping of the ocean on the shingle he looked up, realizing suddenly that for the last mile he’d been gazing continually at the toes of his boots as they swung along beneath him. Three men stood in the little cluster of boats, watching him, it seemed. One had his hand on the pig fiddlehead, not as if it were resting there, but as if it were laying claim to it. ‘Damnation!’ Escargot said to himself, forcing his feet to continue, steady on, toward the three. He’d brass it out, that’s what he’d do – claim he’d bought the boat from a man in town. The robed man, what was his name? Kreslow, that was it.
He glanced up at the men, forty feet away now, and grinned. They didn’t grin back. One, he could see, carried a truncheon. Another had his hand inside his shirt. The man with his hand on the fiddlehead hadn’t any weapon, but he was the size of a wagon – and not a dogcart, either, but a coach. His mouth was bent over almost sideways as if he’d been trying to chew up an entire stalk of celery and gotten it jammed into his cheek. It was the look of a man, Escargot thought, who had something stuck in his craw.
They weren’t police, that much was certain. Escargot stopped and pretended to examine the sole of his shoe. The entire affair was monstrously plain. The big man owned the boat and hadn’t been happy with the gummidgefish eye. He was hardly likely to believe that Escargot intended to look him up and share with him the nonexistent proceeds from his basket of weeds. They were going to beat him silly, that’s what they were going to do – Kreslow or no Kreslow. What did they care for Kreslow? Nothing.
Escargot lowered his foot to the pathway, turned on his heel, and bolted, the sound of running footsteps behind him lending him a certain amount of energy. He was through the shantytown in moments, pounding along toward the alleys that skirted the city. He glanced over his shoulder. They were shouting and roaring, stomping along waving their hands. Gathering behind them was a knot of shantytown dwellers, who shouted in chorus, racing at the men’s heels. Cries of ‘Murder!’ and ‘Thief!’ rang out as Escargot ducked away down the first alley he came to, praying that it didn’t dead end.
The alley wound sharply upward, and although Escargot could hear the sound of pursuit, he was invisible from his pursuers beyond a curve of wooden fence. He heaved along, breath tearing out of his throat, the cries diminishing behind him. He held the basket against his chest and wondered if he shouldn’t throw it away. His own greed, it seemed, would be the end of him. But he held onto it. He’d lost too much already to be hasty. And if worst came to worst he could always pitch it at the mob, who, like the goblins along the River Oriel, would likely fall upon it and leave the chase to the three bullies.
Ahead was the carcass of a flatbed wagon with only one wheel, the bed canted over on its axles, facing the alley. He angled across, counting on the mob’s being far enough behind him, and in three leaps pitched his basket over the fence beside the wagon, vaulted up the sloped bed, and flung himself after the basket, coming down in a tangle of fern. He scooped up the basket and scuttled across the lawn, creeping in under vines in a corner where he wheezed for breath, his hand over his mouth, certain that they’d hear through the fence his heart laboring and his lungs inflating. The sound of the mob surged toward him, led by particularly heavy stomping, then surged away again. If he was lucky the alley would wind along for miles. He hunched out from beneath his vines and made for the street, preparing to run again if the owner of the house caught sight of him. He was too winded to think of any lies.
The Vance Hotel loomed above the rest of the Royal Street residences. It was four stories high – a white painted building of cornices and columns and corbels and great mullioned windows wreathed in flowering vines. A man in a tight red suit opened the door for a woman who, despite the warm afternoon, wore a fur coat, and whose husband followed along behind her, his face pinched into a countenance of perpetual condescension. The red-suited doorman shut the door in Escargot’s face, giving him a look that suggested that Escargot was most likely lost.
‘Excuse me,’ said Escargot, realizing all of a sudden that his clothes were a rumpled mess because of the chase. He was sweating, too, after the exertion of it, and his pantleg bore the stains of the ferns he’d slid through. ‘This is the Vance Hotel?’
The man stared at him.
‘I mean to say, I’ve need of a room. For the night. Nothing too delicate, you understand. Something with a view, though.’
The man pursed his lips and shook his head, not in such a way that it seemed he was denying Escargot a room, but as if he simply wasn’t in the mood for jokes, however well intended. A gentleman with a pince-nez approached, having stepped out of a hansom cab with a dog the size of a pony. ‘Stand aside, sir!’ said the doorman in a stage whisper. And the man from the cab pushed past, dusting at his sleeve when it brushed Escargot’s basket. The kelp, it seemed, had somehow sloshed itself over the side, past the rags. It had begun to ripen in the heat. Escargot jammed it back in and covered it up, smiling weakly at the doorman
and shaking his head. ‘Very nutritional,’ he said, ‘kelp.’ Then, seeing that things had once again gone awry, he turned and strode away down the street.
He stood in the shadows of a shuttered house across the way for an hour before the doorman disappeared, then he sprinted to the hotel before another officious guard took the first man’s place. Inside was a tremendous, high-ceilinged lobby, overgrown with potted plants and carved mouldings and heavy pastel carpets thrown higgledy-piggledy about the marble floors. His basket was almost wondrously odorous, as if he were hauling an overheated tidepool along behind him in a wagon. People turned to scowl at him as he skirted wide of the long counter and headed for the stairs.
The futility of the whole business was apparent. There probably wasn’t anybody at the Vance Hotel who was interested in lilac kelp in the first place. That must have been a lie. And if there was, what then? There must be two hundred rooms in the place. The hotel stretched on for half a block. What in the world, he asked himself, was he doing there besides wasting his time? He could put out to sea tomorrow and collect no end of rare seashells to hawk to perfectly reputable curio shops in the harbor. But here he was chasing down a will-o’-the-wisp that was a product of a man who’d swindled him.
He trudged up the stairs to the second floor. He couldn’t just knock on the door, could he? He’d be out in a moment. He could claim in a surprised tone to have knocked on the wrong door if whoever opened it didn’t look like the sort who would be interested in kelp. But what would such a person look like anyway? Like Professor Wurzle, frazzled and rumpled? The third floor loomed into view. He strode across the landing and up the stairs toward the fourth, thinking to get as far away as possible from the lobby.
The Stone Giant Page 15