The Stone Giant
Page 27
They’d be frantic. They wouldn’t have any idea where Leta had gotten off to. The dwarf, in fact, might have her at that moment. They’d expect earthquakes, awakening giants, heaven knew what sorts of cataclysms. Escargot would stroll in among them, bowing. He’d pause to light his pipe and to puff on it for a moment with the air of a man who has studied things out and wants to phrase things particularly carefully in order not to be misunderstood by a precocious, but, perhaps, slightly scatterbrained audience. He stood for a moment, wiggling his toes in the sand, his arms crossed, trying to think up a really remarkable bit of something to impress Captain Appleby with. A quotation would be nice – something profound. A snatch of verse from Ashbless, perhaps.
He found himself, abruptly, looking at the galleon through the crossed cords of a fishing net. He shouted and flung his arms up, but they were borne back down to his sides and he was suddenly surrounded by a very serious lot of elves, including Collier and Boggy. He felt like a fool, with his nose pressed through the mesh of the net and a dozen elves grappling at him as if they expected him to cut up rough. He squinted through the net at Collier and said, ‘I was just coming along to see you fellows.’
‘That’s exactly what you’re doing,’ Collier replied staunchly.
This net, then ...’
‘No trouble!’ the elf shouted, cocking his head at Escargot.
‘Not a bit. Trouble from me? I’ve got to talk to Captain Appleby.’
‘Tie him up!’ Boggy shouted enthusiastically. ‘He’s a bad one. He didn’t do what we told him.’
‘Mr Bogger,’ Collier said, giving Boggy a look.
‘Well he didn’t, did he? We told him to go on back. That’s what the captain said. The Inn at Lanternwick Street. He was to wait there. And here he is. I told you he was a rum one, but no one listened. And here he is, come back with an eye to the girl. It was him that conked me on the head and let her loose. That’s what I think.’
‘Silence, Mr Bogger!’ Collier shouted, grimacing at the elf, who at once fell silent but continued to nod and to raise his eyebrows and glare at Escargot until Collier turned away. Then Boggy crossed his eyes and thrust his tongue out.
‘Bring him along,’ commanded Collier, at once setting out down the beach.
Escargot walked along, encumbered by his net, happy that Leta, at least, wouldn’t see him in such a costume. As a sort of lark he wiggled his hand up to his coat, pried his pipe and tobacco out, and set about filling his pipe, which, if he twisted and turned it just right, he could push through the net. Boggy insisted immediately that Escargot was trying to ‘burn his way out,’ but Collier apparently couldn’t see the harm in it, for he told Boggy once again to hold his tongue, and they led Escargot, net, pipe, and all onto the ship and into a low cabin where Captain Appleby sat glowering at the wall, apparently lost in deep thoughts.
Escargot sat down, working his hand out from under the net. He took the pipe from his mouth and said good day to the captain. Captain Appleby looked up slowly and nodded. He blinked twice very slowly and said, ‘Why are you wearing a net?’
‘That was my doing, sir,’ offered Collier.
Captain Appleby stared at him. ‘Remove it, then. I won’t speak to a man wearing a net. I don’t care who he is.’
Collier helped drag the net off, then bowed himself out of the room, taking the net with him and grinning weakly. ‘Where is the girl?’ asked the captain.
Escargot widened his eyes and shrugged.
‘One of my men saw you on the meadow this morning when the girl eluded us. It was your doing. Don’t deny it, man.’
Escargot shrugged again, by way of answer, wondering idly how a G. Smithers character would react. Dignity, of course, was called for, as was cleverness. There would be a bit of verbal fencing here; Escargot could see that. He smiled at the captain. ‘I won’t deny that I’ve had a hand in the girl’s escape.’
‘A hand, is it! You’ve sold us all, sir. That’s what you’ve done – hands and feet and all, right up to our noses and with our hats thrown in on top. You’ve quite likely had a hand in the girl’s death, is what you’ve had. She’d be aloft in the heavens now, if it weren’t for your getting your hand in. She’d live in comfort, in luxury, forever, in a place where the dwarf has no power. She’d have been beyond his grasp. Where is she now?’
Escargot shook his head. There must be another way around this business. She won’t go to the moon. She’s said as much. She’ll ...’
‘The moon! Who have you spoken to? If it’s Boggy, by heaven I’ll tie him into the crosstrees until he weeps us a river broad enough to float home on.’
‘Not a bit of it. I’ve got sources, as I’ve said. Have you seen one of these?’ And Escargot pulled out the truth charm, tossing it up into the air and catching it so that the eye carved into the stone seemed to be peering at Captain appleby.
‘Of course I’ve seen one of those! They were given away at penny carnivals for years. Are you waving it around because you suppose me to be lying, or because you’re particularly fascinated by a child’s toy? If it’s the truth you want, I’ll give it to you. Soon, very soon, the dwarf will enchant the sleeping giants out of their age-old slumber, and he’ll do it by killing the girl! Can you grasp that? There’ll be mayhem that you can barely imagine, and your marbles and your truth charms and the girl will be swept beyond your grasp forever. They’ll pluck your undersea device out of the river and comb their beards with it!’ Captain Appleby paused and glared at Escargot, who couldn’t tell whether he was blustering because he was honestly worked up or whether he was merely trying to be impressive. Escargot started to speak, but the captain interrupted him abruptly and asked again. ‘Where’s the girl?’
‘Aboard the submarine,’ Escargot replied without being able to stop himself. ‘That is to say ...’
‘That she’s aboard the submarine.’ Captain Appleby grinned at him. ‘Put way the charm, Mr Escargot. Better yet, throw it into the river. No man wants the truth too often.’
Escargot, smiling weakly, put the charm away. He wouldn’t throw it into the river, but he wouldn’t be quite so hasty in pulling it out of its pouch either. And he’d have to be a bit more on his guard than that, or Captain Appleby would get round him in a moment. ‘Of course she’s in the submarine. That’s what I’ve come here to tell you. How can she save herself? That’s the problem, isn’t it?’
‘In the submarine, do you say? Below the surface? If she’s under water she might be safe. Enchantment doesn’t travel in deep water as well as it might. The witch mightn’t even be able to find her.’
‘Ah. Well, yes, she is in the submarine. I thought it best to keep her out of sight, you know, until I’d talked to you. She’s thirty feet down – safe from goblins, and safe, as you say, from enchantment. Perhaps we can come to some sort of agreement here. I’ll say once again that she won’t go to the moon. I’ll kill the dwarf myself to keep her here.’
‘Huh!’ grunted Appleby in a tone that made it seem as if he thought it unlikely that Escargot could accomplish such a thing. ‘I don’t understand talk of striking bargains. The long and the short of it is that if he gets hold of the girl there’ll be trouble, and all the bluff talk in the world won’t have the slightest effect on it. Thirty feet of water, do you say?’
Escargot looked at him warily. ‘At least.’
‘Come now. Is it thirty feet, or is it more? If she’s too shallow she might as well be sitting on the shore waiting for them.’
‘Thirty-six feet, then.’
‘Mr Collier!’ shouted the captain, thumping his fist on the table. The cabin door opened and Collier stuck his head in. ‘Take her out fifty yards, Mr Collier, and cast anchor. Send all hands into the rigging. First man who spots the submarine gets triple pay. Except Bogger. He gets double pay, and if he don’t like it he can cry. She’s down six fathoms – should be easy enough to spot in this sunlight.’
‘Wait a moment!’ shouted Escargot, leaping to his feet.
‘Aye, aye, Cap’n,’ said Collier, shutting the door. Moments later there was shouting on deck and hurrying about, and then the door opened again and six elves pushed through with drawn pistols, ushering Escargot out into the sunlight briefly and then down the companionway below decks. He found himself finally in a cramped cabin lit by sunlight slanting through three tiny portholes along the starboard side. There was a chair in the cabin and a little table with a book on it, as if the book had been left there to entertain captives. Windowledge Gardening for the Homebody it was called, and was full of smudgy illustrations penned by an artist who might have been cross-eyed. Escargot thumbed through it and then put it down, wondering whether they were under sail and drifting out onto the river. He shoved his face up against a porthole and watched. They hadn’t even gotten underway yet. Captain Appleby assumed, quite likely, that there was no very considerable rush, as long as Escargot was safe below. Leta, he’d assume, would wait for Escargot’s return. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea of being a prisoner of the elves.
He pounded at the cabin door, and almost at once Boggy’s voice answered from the other side. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Let me out of here!’ shouted Escargot.
‘You prisoners always say the same thing,’ said Boggy.
‘For heaven’s sake, Boggy. You let Leta go. Why won’t you let me go too?’
‘She’s prettier than you.’
Escargot rushed back across to the porthole, but the little circular view of river and shoreline revealed nothing at all. There was the sound of footfalls on the deck above and more shouting, but from his prison he could make nothing of any of it. He paced up and down the small cabin – three steps this way, three steps that way – accomplishing nothing at all beyond working himself up. He felt like he’d explode if he didn’t get out. Shouting and crying would merely make him look like a fool. Waiting would mean allowing the elves to snatch Leta from the submarine to haul her away forever. He struck his fist into his hand. Boggy or no Boggy, he was getting out.
He slid the chairback under the latch on the door, so that the front legs of the chair angled into the air. Then he climbed up onto the table, brushing his head against the ceiling, and leaped down onto the front of the tilted chair. The door latch broke loose and spun away into a corner as the chair slammed down onto all four legs. The door flew open and Escargot threw himself after it, rolling out into the companionway and springing to his feet. Boggy lay curled up on the floor, holding his head.
‘Boggy!’ cried Escargot, worried at first that he’d hurt the poor elf.
Boggy looked up at him, grinned, and said, ‘I didn’t mean nothing by saying she was prettier than you.’
Escargot started to speak, saw the futility of it, and leaped away down the companionway instead. There was almost no chance that the elves above hadn’t heard the crash of the door flying open, and none at all that they’d fail to hear Boggy, who, as soon as Escargot ran, set in howling and hooting and shrieking in such a way that half the crew was likely to be on them in a second.
Sure enough; as he topped the companionway stairs, there were three elves, Collier in front, far more surprised to see Escargot leaping up at them than Escargot was to see them. Escargot bowled through them, scattering them onto the deck. He shouted a hasty ‘Sorry!’ as he vaulted the deck rail and fell on his back into the river. Before the hue and cry was sent up, he had struck out for shore, and he wasn’t three minutes getting there. He could hear Boggy’s shouts even as he loped away down the river road, and he could hear Captain Appleby shouting back. He felt a little like shouting himself. He’d done very nicely, and the best part of it was that the elves hadn’t the vaguest idea how he intended to get back aboard the submarine. They quite likely wouldn’t chase him, assuming that he was merely making good an escape, and that they could still sail out over the river and find the submarine and somehow drag it up out of there.
In ten minutes he was on the river bottom, slogging along in his rubber suit. He smiled at the occasional fish that swam by, wishing that he could say something to them, and he was half sorry that some deepwater monster didn’t poke its nose at him so that he could hit it. But no monsters appeared. He slipped aboard the submarine and tore off his seashell helmet and suit, leaving them in a heap on the wet deck. Then he dashed out into the companion-way, threw open the door to the library, and shouted, ‘They’re after us!’ to a startled Leta, who was reading a volume of Smithers.
In the pilothouse minutes later he navigated the craft upriver toward the Nora Dawn. It would be fun to give them a bit of a thrill. They’d be out of the cove by now and onto the open river. Leta watched him, saying little. There they were, at anchor, right at the edge of the deep channel. They could see him too; there was no doubt of that. He sped forward, angling to starboard into the channel, dropping to twenty, then thirty, then forty feet, until he was certain they could see him no more. He could imagine the faces that Captain Appleby would make. How he’d yell at Boggy now! Escargot grinned. He angled the ship up toward the distant surface. The dark shadow of the Nora Dawn floated suddenly above. He drove beneath it, close enough almost to scrape it, and burst from the water at the far side, the nose of the submarine hanging in the air for a moment, cascading water, before slamming down again into the river and settling there. Then slowly and deliberately, as if out on a Sunday outing, he made away upriver, leaving the elves to their astonishment.
He turned to smile at Leta, but he found that she wasn’t there. She’d returned to the library to read her book. Escargot immediately felt foolish. He’d been showing off; that’s what he’d been doing. And Leta wasn’t the sort of girl who cared for showing off. Still, the idea of Captain Appleby standing on the quarterdeck, a spyglass in his hand, about to say something weighty to Collier, and then the submarine, shooting beneath him like that ... Escargot grinned, then wiped the grin away and headed for the library.
Leta was cheerful enough, it turned out. He half expected her to say something about his prank, but she didn’t, which made him feel even more foolish.
‘Well,’ he said, pretending to look at the books on the shelves, ‘we’ve eluded them again.’
‘That we have,’ she said, simply, still reading. ‘Why?’
‘They locked me up when they discovered you were aboard the submarine. They intended to get you back, I think, and then heave away for the moon.’
‘So Boggy was right.’
‘Boggy was right. You’d be beyond the dwarf’s grasp there. But you could never return. I told Appleby that we’d find another way, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Kidnapping you would be the safest and quickest way to foil the dwarf. But I learned one thing anyway. Appleby tells me that you’re safe here. The witch can’t reach you here like she did when you were aboard the steamship. Her magic won’t work through water.’
‘So I live beneath the river?’
‘Well,’ said Escargot, pausing to tamp tobacco into his pipe. ‘No. Only for the moment. The dwarf, according to Appleby, intends to strike soon now – this afternoon, perhaps this evening. We’ll scuttle the lot of them, then, by spending some time under water.’
‘We?’
‘Actually, I’m going back out to have a look around. Something might suggest itself. I have a curious notion that there’s more to this than Appleby lets on. It’s not just a feud between the dwarf and the elves. The whole land seems to be alive with enchantment, and I intend to spy it out this afternoon.’
‘I’m not entirely sure that I like the notion of you spying things out while I sit around safe and wait.’
Escargot shrugged. ‘You’d step ashore and a fog would come up and you’d be gone. That would be the end of it, would
n’t it?’
Now it was Leta’s turn to shrug. What Escargot said was true. She had no choice but to let him play the hero. That was entirely satisfactory. It was what he’d been aching to get a chance at for weeks. And now with Leta safely aboard the submarine, aboard his submarine, he could wade away in his rubber suit and turn his attention toward the dwarf without worrying about her safety. He could slip in and out of shadows, peer at the dwarf from treetops. Something would suggest itself – some way to slide in and ruin things for the posturing Uncle Helstrom.
He stepped across to where his fish eggs reclined in their jar, uncorked it, and plucked out the red eggs, setting them along the valley between the pages of an open book and blowing them dry. They were squishy, to a degree, but not soft. Leathery was the word. If he wrapped them carefully enough he could haul them around in his coat pocket without smashing them.
‘Well, I’d like to be off,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you pilot us in toward the cove. Captain Appleby won’t be half quick enough to catch us even if he sees us – which he probably won’t. He won’t expect us to come cruising around now. Then you can take the boat out into deep water again until, what? – say five o’clock – then swing back in and pick me up. Don’t come up above thirty feet, though, especially on toward evening.’
‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ said Leta, saluting stiffly. ‘All hands to the pilot room.’
Escargot smiled back at her, altogether satisfied with himself, and already starting to daydream about how he would put an end to the dwarf’s deviltry, then stride into the river in his seashell helmet, knocking on the hull of the Nora Dawn as he trudged along beneath it to the vast amazement of the elfin crew that would be lined up goggling along the railing.