‘There’s a big piece of that fish left, but not much else. When we get out of this maybe we can head across the river and round up some sort of lunch. I asked once before – do you remember? – that day after you quit Stover’s. You said that you wanted to wait a bit. Things have changed now, though. That was about a hundred years ago.’
‘At least,’ she said, sighing. ‘I wouldn’t mind lunch, actually.’
‘Right. Lunch it is, then. It’s a date, isn’t it? I’ll just be away for a few hours.’ In half an hour he found himself once again on the river bottom, striding along through the sand in weighted shoes.
He skirted the woods this time. He was fairly sure that wherever the dwarf was working his enchantments, it wasn’t within the oak woods. Besides that, he hadn’t any real urge to run into henny-penny men, not after the episode with the troll. Evidence seemed to indicate that through some odd fate he and the henny-penny men fought the same battle, both of them in league against the dwarf and his minions. But that was just a hunch. They hadn’t hesitated to come after him with rock hammers when he was under the ocean, had they? It was best to wait for them to declare themselves one way or another.
The afternoon was unusually fine for a late autumn afternoon. There was a chill on the breeze, but it had to work so hard to cut the radiant heat of the sun that by the time it set in on you it had already worn itself out. And there was just the hint of smoke on the air, like pruning fires burning miles away on the grassy floor of an orchard. It was unlikely, though, that there were any orchards nearby, not unless they were tended by goblins, who would as likely as not burn the orchard and leave the prunings lie about. Then they’d burn their hair off into the bargain, in order to avoid haircuts, perhaps.
Escargot stroke along through the shadows, watching the river road for elves and the woods for goblins and trolls, and wondering at the smoke on the wind. If it wasn’t from pruning fires, what was it from?
Dry leaves, newly fallen from the trees, scrunched underfoot, muffled by the moist, decaying leaves beneath them, and Escargot expected to see on each drifting leaf a frowning henny-penny man, navigating on windy currents. He half wished he was small enough to ride on leaves. He could make a boat out of a piece of bark and sail the day away in a rain puddle.
He reached the woods’ edge, finally, stepping in among the last scattered trees and peering out onto the meadows beyond. There was the stream that had undone poor Boggy. There were no elves on the meadow now. They weren’t out searching for Leta any longer. They knew she was beyond their grasp. Escargot wondered what they were doing. Holding powwows, probably. Captain Appleby was threatening, no doubt, and Collier was correcting him and Boggy was sticking his tongue out and generally ruining the effect. Every sort of person had his job to do, he thought, taking the long view of it. Henny-penny men mined fire quartz beneath the sea; elves built marvelous contraptions for people like Captain Perry to steal; goblins raged around in an effort to see that nothing ever ran particularly right for anyone, including themselves; dwarfs dug out rubies and emeralds and baked bread and acted very sure of themselves; and men – what did they do? – made fools of themselves, more often than not, while putting on airs. Escargot felt as if he saw things particularly clearly right then, as if the whole world and all its strange caper-cutting was laid out in color in a G. Smithers book on one big, illustrated page.
He shook his head and realized that he’d been standing there daydreaming in the shade of the woods. It was a dangerous sort of daydreaming too. He recognized certain symptoms in it; he had been feeling self-satisfied and clearheaded. It was a smug sort of attitude that seemed always to lead to disaster or humiliation – to goblins coming up out of a hole in the ground and grabbing his ankle, to someone hitting him with a stick, to his talking very solemnly and having a bug fly into his mouth.
Suddenly he heard, very low and distant – as if it were wafting in on the breeze off the river, or as if it were the river itself singing across the stones of its own bed – a sort of deep and tuneful humming. He cocked his head and listened. It had the tone of a church choir about it, and it brought to mind a sentence in Smithers about enchanted breezes drawing tunes out of the willows and cattails along river banks. Could this be part of the dwarf’s magic? Were things starting to stir? But that didn’t seem altogether likely. There was something solid and good about this; it was utterly unlike the random cacophony of noises that had surrounded him that evening in Bleakstone Hollow.
It seemed to be drifting downwind toward him, from somewhere deeper in the woods. He crept along toward it, hunched over, taking cover behind occasional trees and shrubs. Caution seemed to be worth riches to him just then. The music grew louder shade by shade, until it became a separate thing from the sighing of the wind in the trees and from the crick and crackle and rustle of the woods.
There was a movement among the leaves just ahead. He crept toward it, squinting, realizing all of a sudden what it was that was singing; it was henny-penny men, a gathering of them, rank after rank of them sitting atop pebbles, lounging back against leaves propped on their own stems as if the little men sat on hammock chairs.
Escargot lay on his stomach, peering through the brush. One wild-haired henny-penny man seemed to be leading the choir in the last strains of the song. It was a hymn, and no mistaking it. The song trailed off, replaced by the silent afternoon and the lonesome calling of a whippoorwill. There was the sound of henny-penny men clearing their throats and shifting round on their leaves, and Escargot could see some few of them tugging at their shirt collars like bored parishioners seated on Sunday afternoon church pews. The little man before them waved the tiny book in his hand and began declaiming.
Escargot had to cock his head and cup a hand to his ear in order to hear, and even then most of the oratory escaped him on the breeze. The speaker wore a black frock coat, the skirt ragged and tousled in the breeze. His face was fringed with a monumental beard, black and stiff, and easily as long as his hair. This last thrust away from his skull like rays from dark sun, and all in all he had the look about him of a man who had a fizz bomb concealed in a parcel. Escargot was reminded of Stover, somehow. It wasn’t the man’s appearance that did it; it was the starched and holy way he cut up and down in front of the crowd, thumping his book and carrying on. He would have made a first-rate pirate, Escargot decided, if he were about eighty times as big and had a glass of rum in his hand and a parrot on his shoulder.
Listening to the man’s oratory was useless; Escargot couldn’t make anything of it. They were there for some compelling reason. This was an army, is what it was, and the man in the frock coat was firing them up. He waved his volume in a passion, his beard wagging, and from the crowd there came scattered shouts of assent. Finally he fell silent, turned, and seemed to look straight into Escargot’s face. He stood scowling. There was something about the angle of his chin and the roundness of his face that made him seem vaguely aquatic, and brought to mind the Professor’s description of homunculus grass and the old story of how in the dim past henny-penny men had ridden to battle on the backs of trout.
For a moment Escargot considered leaping up and running. It would be a grim thing indeed to be swarmed over by the little men, and there was a good chance that if he ran for it he’d escape them before they had a chance to mount their leaves and follow. But in the time it took him to think about it, it became clear that the frock-coated minister hadn’t seen him after all, for the man set his book down upon a stone and turned back to his congregation. Escargot squinted at the book, trying to make out the tiny lettering on the cover. It was a three-word title, and the author’s name below it was an initial and ... Escargot blinked and nearly shouted in surprise. It was G. Smithers – The Stone Giants. The henny-penny men read G. Smithers too. Who didn’t read G. Smithers? Did the goblins have copies of Smithers, torn and greasy with fish slime and shoved beneath stones in the woods?
His wondering at it was interrupted when the henny-penny men, throug
h with their camp meeting, began filing away out of the clearing. Some of them dragged their leaves after them; others abandoned them. Escargot watched them leave, waiting until long after the last one had disappeared so that his own leaving – which must sound to a henny-penny man like the crashing of a bear through the forest – would go unremarked. He trudged away toward the meadow, finally, puzzling over the whole business, but vaguely happy with it, and wondering if, when the business with Uncle Helstrom was finished, he mightn’t be able to trade the henny-penny men something for a miniature copy of Smithers. It would be something like the eye of the gummidgefish and would be the start of his own collection of wonders. Perhaps somewhere out in the hills there was an ancient volume of The Stone Giants that was big as a house.
He saw the smoke clearly from the edge of the forest. It was off to the east, rising in curly little spires from beyond a jumble of rocky hillocks, looking for all the world like the smoke of an enormous pipe. It no longer reminded him quite so much of pruning fires. It was a weedy, muddy smell, weighted with the sharp chalk smell of burnt bone – an unmistakable smell, and one which a henny-penny man might easily find offensive. Escargot took a long, careful look about him, then set out at a run toward the nearest shelter a hundred yards off in the direction of the hills. He was bound to have a look at the source of that smoke. If he could do it, he’d settle the dwarf’s hash then and there. Uncle Helstrom, surely, wouldn’t welcome a rock in the side of the head any more than the next man would.
17
The Thing From the River
The temperature seemed to drop as Escargot crept up into the low-lying hills. The sun hung above the horizon, and its rays had grown thin and feeble, as if they wanted little to do with the deserted, rocky landscape and much preferred the open meadow. There was something strange about the hills, too. It might quite easily be a trick of his imagination or of shadow, but the rocks and fissures and humps of rising hills looked for all the world like bits and pieces of dismembered giants, heaped about the meadows and left, over the years, to petrify and to settle into the earth. Here was a ridge that looked overmuch like a half-buried leg, perhaps. And there was the top of a great, hummocky stone that might easily be a bald pate scoured by ages of weather and wind.
Escargot felt as if he were creeping through a graveyard, and he avoided stepping on rocks that his imagination might turn into old giants – if it was his imagination that was doing the turning. There were shadows aplenty, cast from the rocks by the declining sun, and Escargot stuck to them, crouching in the comparative darkness, stopping to listen once every minute or two, fearful that the dwarf, or more probably the witch, could sense his approach, could feel his own shadow passing over the enchanted ground.
The smell of smoke had almost disappeared from the air. The wind had turned around to blow from off the river. But he could see the smoke still, rising above the hills before dissipating like steam in the breeze. And he could hear a low chanting now, the voice of a single person, starting and stopping, rising and falling, somewhere just ahead. He looked behind him over the meadow, and was surprised to find that he stood some few hundred feet above the river. There was the Nora Dawn riding at anchor, and there were the oak woods, a dark patch against green. The body of the troll still lay where it had fallen, and above it, circling slowly in the sky, were a half dozen great birds.
Above him lay a castle-like rock, canted over as if it had once taken a notion to tumble onto its side and then given the idea up. It was split nearly in two, and through the split shone blue sky and distant mountains. The base of the rock was cast in deep gloom, and Escargot crept in between the two halves, wafering himself against the rock and listening to the chanting that was quite obviously proceeding from the other side. He slid along the crack, avoiding loose stones, smashing himself against the shadowed wall that rose sheer and black above him. At the far end of the fissure he stopped and peered slowly out, holding his breath.
There below stood the dwarf – Abner Helstrom, whatever his name might be – laboring over a fire that burned in a dish. Beside him was a heap of bone. There was his own basket, still holding waterweeds, although they didn’t appear to be lilac kelp; they seemed to be fresh weeds out of the river. The dwarf mumbled over the smoke, waving his staff through the spiraling reek, then bent and plucked up a bit of dripping, muddy weed and dangling a tendril of it into the flame.
The dwarf had tethered his horse and cart on a grassy swath of meadow at the base of the rocks, and the horse chewed moodily there in the shade, raising its head now and again and looking around itself suspiciously as if it sensed an impending storm. It seemed to like the smell of the curling smoke even less than did Escargot, for each time the dwarf dipped the weeds into the flame and a dense, steamy cloud went up, the horse seemed to shudder, as if it had seen a ghost ride by on the wind.
Not ten feet in front of where Escargot crouched lay a heap of leather bags, no doubt full of potions and philtres and maybe a spare pair of trousers. There was no getting at them, though, without revealing himself. If he’d had one of Captain Perry’s pistols with him he might have tried to shoot the dwarf where he stood. But both the pistols had fallen into the hands of the goblins, and even if he had pistols, his aim wasn’t good enough or his hand steady enough to accomplish anything. He’d do better with a rock, although a rock, unlike a pistol ball, would serve merely to make the dwarf mad. He could rush out at him, perhaps, and try to crush his skull with a really big rock, but it seemed, now that he gave it some thought, that such a plan would be doomed to failure. The dwarf would dodge the rock and then turn him into a toad or something, and he’d have to go hopping back to the submarine to try to apologize to Leta for having boggled things up again. He’d watch and wait; that’s what he’d do. Rushing in hadn’t served him very well in the past.
So he crouched there in the shadows, watching the horse fidget and whinny. The smoke, as it billowed and blew and rose skyward, seemed to take on strange and unlikely shapes, and now and then one would swirl and thicken and coagulate into a foggy, stretched spirit, its mouth agape as if frozen in a silent howl of remorse. The horse could see them too. It wasn’t Escargot’s imagination. But while Escargot could at least partly explain the terrible phenomenon, the horse couldn’t, and the poor beast jerked on its tether, which was trapped beneath a rock.
Uncle Helstrom poked at the fire, then carefully laid a skeleton hand atop. Escargot watched in horror as the hand twitched and hopped and the fingers closed over the coals as if the hand intended to squeeze them into powder. A monumental cloud arose, tumbling and writhing and looking for all the world like a grinning, smoky skull champing its teeth and tearing itself to bits in the wind.
The horse whinnied. Escargot cocked his arm and threw a lemon-size stone at the horse’s flank, hitting the beast on the starboard side of its tail. The horse shrieked and bolted down toward the broad meadow, yanking its tether free and heading downriver at a gallop.
The dwarf cast a fresh weed onto the fire, shouted, and set out in pursuit, whistling and commanding and thumping on the dirt with his staff. Before both of them had disappeared beyond the rocks, Escargot found himself leaping down toward the dwarf’s bags. Kicking the fire to bits and scattering the weeds and bones would probably accomplish nothing. The dwarf would merely light it again. But there might be something in the bags ...
He yanked one open and found nothing within but more bones. In another were dried herbs and the half-decayed head of a carp. In the third, down among a couple of old books and a cap smashed flat into a disk, lay a little wooden box with a clasp lid. Inside were his marbles – Escargot’s marbles, that is to say. Quickly he emptied the marbles into his pocket and hauled out the fish eggs, counting out the same number and dropping them into the box. Then he slipped the box back into the bag and yanked it shut, scuttling away into the little divide moments before the dwarf came puffing back into sight, his horse, apparently, having eluded him.
The dwarf beat
on the ground two or three times with his staff, mumbling half aloud, and then bent over and blew on his fire until the skeletal hand, balled up into a fist now, glowed red. Escargot crept away, step after silent step. His heart thundered, and he felt suddenly like shouting at the dwarf, laughing wildly at him, ridiculing him. But it was something like hysteria that made him want to do that, and so he forced himself to be slow and silent and careful until he was out of the rocks and onto the meadow, at which point he turned and ran, coattail flying, toward the distant oak woods.
He didn’t care who could see him then – the dwarf, the elves, the henny-penny men – it didn’t matter a bit. He had the marbles and he had Leta, and the dwarf had nothing but a bit of foolish smoke. He didn’t even have his horse anymore. He would not only fail to work his deviltry, but he’d have to walk home into the bargain. Escargot muffled his laughter and kept up his pace. He looked over his shoulder. The dwarf hadn’t seen him or heard him, apparently, for the smoky phantoms still rose over the rocks one by one as the dwarf fed his waterweeds to the coals, unaware that Escargot had dealt him a blow.
Stealing the marbles had been better than hitting the dwarf in the head with a rock – heaps better. It was better than a wink or a basket of kelp in a goblin cave. All else being equal, it might have been more to the point if he had merely stolen all three bags and kicked the fire to bits. Then he’d have the bones and the herbs and the marbles and all, and Uncle Helstrom wouldn’t have the price of a piece of pie. But that wouldn’t have been quite as clever, quite as subtle. Subtlety was what would turn this business into an art. The dwarf knew that, and Escargot respected him for it. That’s why it was so much fun undoing him. Captain Appleby was blind to it, though. Steal the girl and flee; that had been Appleby’s method.
The Stone Giant Page 28