The battle had ascended the hill toward where Uncle Helstrom tended his fire. The dwarf watched warily, casting his glowing cinders by the handful as if the little pinwheels of spark and flame were a wall against the warring armies. Escargot charged at the dwarf. The stone giant, sitting behind Uncle Helstrom like a genie waiting for a command, looked at Escargot, then raised his hand slowly, intending, perhaps, to swat him like a fly. Moonlight suddenly shone off the enormous, grass-covered hand, bathing it in opalescent radiance, and the hand broke free at the wrist and disintegrated from rock to sand to dust before it sprinkled onto the ground. Then the moon lit the giant’s wondering, upturned face, and the creature fell over backward as if in a sudden faint, the ground shuddering with the impact.
Escargot, who had been anxious to avoid the threatening giant, found himself hurtling now toward the dwarf, who cast into his face a scattering of glowing coals that fanned out in a bright arc before him. Escargot seemed to smash against an invisible wall formed of enchantment, the dwarf grinning at him from beyond it and reaching once again into the coals. Another spray of sparks and embers sent Escargot reeling sideways. He fell, rolling across the grass toward where the witch stood snatching at the air again. There was the milky cloud roiling about her, more substantial now, as if the mist were turning to ice. Escargot plucked himself up, astonished. The witch spoke with Leta’s voice. She became Leta for one startling moment, but it was Leta with the face of a cat, then Leta with no face at all, then the witch again, stumbling toward the dwarf as if she were in a terrible hurry to finish the evening’s work.
Escargot shouted, and his shout was returned – not by the dwarf or by the witch, but by Leta herself. She stood behind the witch, against the sheer, tilted rock on the hill. Escargot could see straight through her, as if she were some sort of clever, magical projection. The dwarf cast the witch aside and snatched at Leta, but his arm passed through her arm. Bathed in heightening moonlight, seemed to solidify suddenly. She swung wildly at the dwarf, who had spun halfway around with the force of his own blow, and her open hand clipped him on the ear and sent him reeling. He lurched after his staff, kicking through his little heap of bags. Escargot bounded in before him, snatching up the staff and flinging it end over end into the midst of a howling mob of goblins below, and the staff, glowing in moonlight, seemed to cleave them like a scythe through wheat.
Bracing himself to meet the dwarf’s onslaught. Escargot was surprised to see his foe flee across the meadow after his staff. He didn’t, obviously, care a rap for Escargot, but was intent only on holding onto as many of his magical trappings as he might. Escargot plucked up one of the bags and upended it, shaking out a dried bundle of homunculus grass and flinging it onto the fire.
The air was at once saturated with the smell of mud and waterweeds, and a great reek of smoke billowed out into the wind. The dwarf stumbled among his goblins, hacking with his staff at whoever or whatever came near him, shivering two skeletons into scattered bones at a blow. Captain Appleby appeared suddenly before him, cutlass upraised and a look of stony resolve on his face. But the dwarf smote the ground with his staff, mouthing a curse, and the captain tumbled over backward and lay still. Boggy stood over his fallen captain, slashing away tiredly at a knot of skeletons, bones skittering away across the meadow and the skeletons clacking and lurching and plucking up fallen swords which they swung clumsily with both hands.
Abner Helstrom stopped and looked about him, eyes narrowed as if he were wondering what smell it was that filled the air, and then he shrieked and ran toward the fire, carrying his staff in both hands. The henny-penny men suddenly went mad. They gave off thrusting their little spears into the sides of goblins and trolls and wheeled toward the fire, infuriated by the smell of smoke.
The air roundabout Escargot was filled suddenly with swooping owls and with the tiny scowling faces of henny-penny men, set upon murder. He would discover now, he thought to himself as he crouched and ran toward the rocks, whether he counted as friend or foe among the henny-pennies. To his vast dismay Leta seemed oblivious to the flashing spears of the little men and to the fiery thundering of the dwarf. She bent toward the fire, which leaped and roared with a fury born of enchantment gone awry. The witch fled before her, bent and hobbling.
The girl grabbed the witch’s shoulder and spun her around, looking into the face of a blank, eyeless, staring thing, drooling onto the webby lace at its throat, the face of a thing dead and buried. Leta shrieked at the sight of it and then hurled herself forward, slamming stiff-armed into the witch and tumbling her over backward into the fire.
There was a great gasp of flame and reek, and the fire went out as abruptly as it had flared up moments before. The witch was gone, as if evaporated. The goblin fires on the meadow, one moment leaping and burning and winking, snapped into darkness the next like snuffed candles. The moon sailed back into the heavens and in a moment bobbed there pleasant and serene, as if it hadn’t witnessed anything at all out of the ordinary that night. Goblins and trolls and clacking skeletons fled into the hills, pursued by henny-penny men. The elves threw down their weapons and cheered, their victory assured, the threat to the valley, to the wide world itself, seeming to have been doused in an instant.
The dwarf screamed and struck at the cloud of whirling owls. Hundreds of the birds winged roundabout overhead, their tiny riders watching for an opportunity to sail in and take a poke at the dwarf, who fled away down the meadow toward the southern hills where the last few giants even then collapsed back into stony, ageless sleep. The dwarf ran trailing his staff and holding onto his slouch hat with his free hand as henny-penny men flew at his back. And as he ran, a wind devil sprang up from the scree and dirt and torn vegetation that had been a giant, and scoured roundabout the meadow as if searching for something. Shouting incantations, Uncle Helstrom ran toward it. The wind devil, as if abruptly having caught sight of what it was looking for, spun toward him in a swirl of leaves and dust and making the sound of wind whistling through tree branches.
Just as the dwarf reached the whirling perimeter of the little spiraling cloud and burst into a peal of wild, conceited laughter, an owl swooped before him and the henny-penny man astride it thrust his spear into the dwarf’s face. The laughter changed abruptly to a shriek; the owl and its rider were swept into the wind devil and spun round like paper whirligigs; and the dwarf seemed to turn to dust, consumed by the wind and borne away toward the south, the faint, strange sounds of moaning and laughter lingering on the suddenly still night air.
Epilogue
‘You can have them with my blessing,’ said Escargot to Captain Appleby, who sat with a bandaged head on the sandy shore of the river.
The elf held in his hand the box of marbles, the droplets of giant’s blood stolen from the dwarf. Escargot hadn’t any use for them. He’d keep the truth charm, though. That was a thing that a man could trade, if it came down to it. It had served him well a time or two, and he was just getting the knack of using it to his advantage. He looked into his own hand at a marble Appleby had just given him. It was made of glass that was almost invisible, it looked so clear, and swirling through it was a translucent rainbow of spiraling color.
‘Shake it in your hands,’ said the elf.
Escargot cupped his hands over it and shook. It felt as if the marble had gone to bits, and when he peeped in, there were six marbles, not one, and each utterly different from the rest. He looked at the elf in astonishment.
‘Works on the principle of the kaleidoscope, actually. The principle of the rotund mirror, we call it. Only they don’t shiver to bits after they appear, like the reflections in a kaleidoscope do. Shake them again.’
Escargot did, and found himself holding a whole handful of marbles. He emptied them into the bag containing the truth charm, started to thank Appleby, but was interrupted by a tiny voice emanating from just above and beyond his ear.
‘What’re they for? Are they bullets?’
‘No, no,’ said Escargot, tur
ning to the little man perched next to his head, on a tumble of driftwood. It was a henny-penny man, the orator from the oak woods. He regarded the bag full of marbles dubiously.
‘They don’t do anything at all,’ explained Escargot. ‘You just sort of have them.’
The henny-penny man blinked at him, uncomprehending. ‘And you say that’s why you want the book, too?’
‘That’s it. Exactly.’ Escargot had been bold enough to ask the henny-penny man for the tiny copy of Smithers, then had examined the thing with a magnifying glass, astonished to find that it was the same edition and printing as his own and had been signed, too. It was baffling, to be sure, and neither the henny-penny man nor Captain Appleby could explain it to him – the henny-penny man because he didn’t know or didn’t understand the question; the elf because the mystery was too deep for the minds of mortal man, or so he said. Escargot didn’t press him, largely because the captain seemed to wax theatrical now at any opportunity, and the subject of his superior knowledge of the mysteries was certainly such an opportunity.
He hadn’t been able to think of anything to offer the henny-penny man in trade. Unlike marbles owned for the sake of owning marbles, trade was something henny-penny men understood. In a rush of inspiration, however, Leta had folded sheets of Captain Perry’s stationery into paper airplanes, and the henny-penny man had spent most of the morning aloft, planing across river breezes at speeds unattainable by mere leaves.
The submarine lay at anchor once again. There was the dent from a cannonball in her side and sucker marks the size of bucket mouths along her stern, these last etched into the brass and copper hull, too deep, quite likely, even to polish out with a pumice stone. Leta had put most of the interior right – shelving books, cleaning up the mess from spilled bottles and jars, ordering maps and charts that had fallen from niches in the walls.
A single elfin galleon floated yet on the river. In a half hour it would be gone, scaling through the heavens until it lost itself in cloud drift. Escargot could see the top of Boggy’s head, almost hidden among kegs piled on the poopdeck, among which Boggy had been hiding most of the morning in order to avoid being put to work. Henny-penny men had been disembarking in driftwood fleets for the last half hour, sailing down the Tweet toward Land-send and the sea. The sun shone overhead like an orange on a pale blue plate, and the air was silent but for the hum of dragonfly wings over the still green waters of the cove. Even with the thin chill on the westerly breeze, you might have thought it was a midsummer noon – except that faint and thin from across the river hovered the smell of pruning fires, and every now and then, drifting from the woods, a leaf would come sailing and bumping and painted red and orange and brown with an autumn brush.
Escargot, for the first time he could easily remember, felt free of the webs that he had managed most of his life to entangle himself in. He felt as if at last he could stand up and stretch without cracking his elbow against something. He smiled at Captain Appleby, thinking that the elf was an awfully pleasant sort. Then he smiled at the henny-penny man, who tugged his paper airplane across the sand now toward a little crisscross raft of twigs he’d lashed together. Aboard the raft stood a paper hut, moored to the timbers of the deck with straight pins. The little man had shrugged at Leta’s warning that the thing probably wouldn’t last out the trip to Landsend. For a few good miles, anyway, he’d be the envy of all henny-penny men. Escargot watched the raft swirl away in the current, and although he waved, the henny-penny man didn’t wave back. They weren’t, apparently, much given to sentimentality.
Escargot was full of it, though. He smiled again at Captain Appleby, who was stirring and looking uncomfortable, as if being landbound didn’t suit him and he thought it was high time the galleon was aloft.
‘Ever visit the Oriel Valley?’ asked Escargot.
‘Oh, yes. We’re bound there in spring, in fact. There’s a gathering in the White Mountains.’
‘How about Twombly Town? Ever stop there?’
‘We elves don’t much meddle in the lives of men, actually, though we certainly might, if there was cause to. Why?’
‘Oh,’ said Escargot. ‘I don’t know. My daughter’s there, actually, and I’m bound for somewhere else. I just thought that if you were going that way, don’t you know, you might give her something for me. But I won’t even ask if there’s trouble in it for you.’
‘No trouble at all.’
‘Then give her one of these.’ Escargot pulled a marble out of the bag and handed it across to the captain, who nodded profoundly, as if he understood very well why delivering the enchanted marble to little Annie was important enough to compel Escargot to ask such a favor of him. ‘Best not to let her mother know. She won’t understand it. A marble is just a lump of glass to her, and if it comes from me it’ll seem like a wicked lump of glass at that. But Annie will catch on. I’m afraid that if I don’t give her such things, she won’t be very likely to get them at all.’
Captain Appleby nodded again. He understood that too. He slipped the marble into his pocket and assured Escargot that elves were on tolerably good terms with children. Children were far more closely related to the elves, he said, than were men and women, whose vision, by the time they were grown, had as often as not begun to fail, and they saw everything through a mist, even though they were convinced that they saw very clearly indeed.
Leta climbed out of the hold of the ship just then, wiping her hands on a towel with the air of someone who’s finished a substantial bit of work. ‘It’s eleven-thirty,’ she said to Escargot, and then threw the towel at him. ‘Are you rested yet?’
Escargot grinned at her. ‘I was just telling the captain here that it wouldn’t hurt me to polish the glass in the portholes before we launch. Wasn’t I, Captain?’
Captain Appleby coughed into his hand and then nodded, widening his eyes. Leta nodded too. She wasn’t at all convinced. ‘I won’t eat another fish,’ she said.
‘Lunch!’ cried Escargot, fired by the idea. ‘I was forgetting lunch. Eleven-thirty, do you say? Are we shipshape – all the spars varnished and the bowlines heaved out?’
‘Aye, aye,’ she said, saluting with two fingers.
They sailed across the water fifteen minutes later, watching the north shore where the distant spire of a church steeple rose beyond a cluster of riverside houses. A steamship was just then putting out from a dock, and they could hear the airy cheer of wellwishers ashore and see the rising billow of white, cloudlike steam from the smokestacks.
Then Leta grabbed his arm and pointed, and there behind them, sailing into the cloudless sky, was the elf galleon, with Boggy and Collier and Captain Appleby aboard, bound for the heavens, for the moon itself, perhaps. It tacked across the wind, rising and rising and shrinking as it rose, until it was impossible to say that it wasn’t merely a bird that they watched, winging its leisurely way across the sky in the warm radiance of a noonday sun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in Unearth magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include Knights of the Cornerstone, The Ebb Tide, and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled The Aylesford Skull, to be published by Titan Books.
The Stone Giant Page 31