by Ron Miller
The sun rises and noon approached. It does not take long for word to spread through Diamandis Antica that there is a bizarre phenomenon in front of Fish-eye’s place, and a small crowd soon forms around the giant. They aren’t bothering him, so he takes no particular notice of them. To the occasional curious question, such as “Waitin’ for someone, mister?”, he replies with a polite answer, such as “Uh-huh”, “Yuh” or, sometimes, “Yup.”
Fish-eye has taken notice of Thud as well, and having an excellent reason for possessing a guilty conscience, refuses to come out of his hotel. The only sign of him is a milky orb peering through the slightly parted slats of a blind. He has no idea what could have gone awry last night, but this fearsome creature at his doorstep can not be there for any reason that boded well for the continued well-being, or even corporeal existence, of Fish-eye Gunther. But if something has gone wrong, he asks himself, why isn’t the giant already dismembering him? The uncertainty is maddening. Eventually it occurs to Fish-eye that the giant is showing every sign of becoming a permanent fixture and, if that is the case, there is a good chance that he could make a successful exit by means of the same route the girl had taken the night before: the back door. He has no idea who that strange girl might have been, he had accepted a modest honorarium to look the other way, as he has done on countless other occasions, no questions asked, but neither had he known at the time that she had friends like the creature that lurked at his very doorstep.
Thud, meanwhile, with so many unoccupied hours to work with, had developed a Thought: where is the princess? Why had she been gone so long? He is getting hungry and thinks that perhaps there would be nothing wrong with going to the door and asking her if it might be all right if he were to go and find something to eat. Having come to this decision, he acts upon it.
Fish-eye sees the giant come suddenly to life, heading for his front door. “Holy Musrum!” he whispers, panicking. He looks frantically around the room, to see if there is anything he immediately needs, just as a series of heavy blows at the door vibrate the entire building. He gathers a fistful of money that had been hidden inside a souvenir vase, stuffs this into his pockets, pulls a gun from the drawer of a desk, and leaps into the front hallway just as Thud opens the door and peers in.
“Princess?” he asks.
Princess? repeats Fish-eye’s subconscious as his conscious stares in horror at the bulk that looms at his threshold.
“There’s no one here!” Fish-eye squeaks. It is the only thing he could think of to say, even if it made no sense.
“You’re here,” Thud points out perceptively.
“What do you want with me?” begs Fish-eye.
“I don’t think I do want you. Who are you?”
“No one! I’m nobody! No one at all!”
“Is the princess here?”
“There’s no princess here!” he squeaks.
“She’s not?”
“No!” he squeaks an octave higher.
Thud thnks about this for a long moment, a moment that seems like an hour to the increasingly paretic Fish-eye.
“I don’t believe you.”
To this Fish-eye has no ready answer other than to try and pull his gun from his waistband, but the weapon slips from his sweating, nervous fingers and crashes to the floor. Thud looks down at the revolver, then back up at Fish-eye. Their eyes meet for a terrible second; then Fish-eye, with a wail, bolts for the rear of the house. Thud listens to the sound of a door slamming. Then the house is silent.
It is all beyond him.
“Princess?” he calls again.
Thud searches the building as systematically as only the truly unimaginative can. The man had been right all along: there is no one else here. So where could the princess have gone?
He returns to where they had left the carriage the night before. It is still there, attached to an annoyed-looking horse. It is clear even to Thud that Bronwyn had not left town.
Then where is she?
Thud becomes worried.
He knows there had been considerable danger in what they had been doing the previous evening, though he had only a hazy notion of the nature of the peril, or even of the full nature of their mission other than that they had been trying to find the person who had tried to blow up the princess. He hadn’t told Bronwyn, but he had looked forward to doing something terrible to the villain. The attempt to hurt the princess had made him very angry. He knows that she is very angry about it, too, but he is afraid that she might not approve of the full extent of what he wants to do. He had planned to wait until they found this person; then he was going to ask her if it might be all right to punish him. He is certain that she would let him.
What is his villain’s name?
He stops in the middle of the boardwalk and tries to remember. He tries as hard as he can, his face screwing itself into such a complicated knot that a stevedore coming around the corner and suddenly seeing Thud swoons at the sight.
He can’t remember, but the man at the tavern had known. Thud finds the tavern again and goes in. It is virtually empty this early in the day, and the proprietor is taking advantage of the lull to clean. Chairs are propped up on the tabletops while the owner sweeps the floor.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“Who are we looking for last night?”
“What?”
“Me and the princess. Who are we looking for last night?”
“What princess?”
“My princess.”
“Where’s this princess now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait a minute. You’re looking for the Princess, then?”
“Yes! The princess. Have you seen her?”
“I get it. Look here. Go on down to the end of this street . . . got that? Turn right, then go straight on down to the pier. The Princess is there. You’ll see her easy.”
“Thank you very much!”
“Yeah. Don’t mention it.”
Thud hurriedly follows the tavern-keeper’s directions and arrives at the end of the pier a few minutes later. Now what? He doesn’t see the princess anywhere.
There is only a big iron ship.
“Hey! You down there !” someone shouts. Thud looks around for the voice; he finally looks up and sees someone waving at him from the bridge of the ship.
“You down there! Looking for something?”
“I’m looking for the princess!” he shouts back.
“You found her! Come on aboard!”
Thud lumbers up the gangway as quickly as he can. The man who had called him is waiting at the other end.
“Looking for work, eh? I could use a man like you! Look like you’d be worth ten others!”
“No, I’m looking for the princess,” Thud replies. He turns his head in every direction, but there is no sign of her.
“—like I said, you found her.”
Thud stares at him, not certain what to say.
“You found her; don’t you understand?”
“No.”
“This is the Princess.”
Thud stares again.
“This ship,” the man explains patiently. “It’s called the Princess. That’s its name. Understand?”
Thud stares again and the man begins reexamining his original and apparently hasty opinion of Thud’s worth. Still, the big man is built like a two-hundred-horsepower steam winch, which is certainly not something he ought to lightly let get away. With sudden inspiration he asks the big man, “You hungry?”
“Sure!”
“Come on with me, then, and you can explain what you’re talking about over some food.” Thud follows the man to the ship’s mess and while he shovels plate after plate of beans into his enormous mouth, he explains as best he can that he is looking for someone. He is even able to make it apparent that the person he is looking for might have been abducted.
“All right, then,” says the man. “You don’t think this princess of yours could’ve gone back to Diamandis?”
“And I take it you are some sort of bodyguard, so she wouldn’t’ve gone without you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, then, the only other way out of this place is by sea.”
“Sea?”
“Yes! I think the only chance you have of finding this princess of yours is to go to sea yourself.”
“You think so?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s settled, then. You sign aboard this ship and we’ll look for your princess. Don’t you think that it’s kind of an omen? The name of the ship, I mean? The Princess?”
“I guess so.”
“Wonderful! We sail in an hour. You go see the loading boss, tell’im the first mate sent you to help finish with the cargo, then you can go below and relieve the stokers.”
So Thud goes to sea in search of the princess. The first mate of the Princess feels more than vindicated by his decision: Thud is indeed worth any ten of his regular crew. He has proved this so well in just the first hour that the mate had felt no compunction in letting ten of his regular men go. There is a good deal of hard feeling about this, which makes no impression whatever upon the mate.
Thud works harder than he had since the day he had left Groontocker and Peen. He shovels tons of coal in the red-hot cavern of the boiler room, stripped to the waist, the white sphere of his torose body glistening with waves of perspiration. He looks and works like the machine the mate had compared him with.
At every port of call, after he has finished almost single-handedly unloading the ship, Thud searches for Bronwyn. Invariably no one knows what he is talking about.
How many weeks, or even months, Thud repeats this routine, he has no idea, nor even much considers the matter. For him, the individual disappointments are discrete, not cumulative. He approaches each succeeding port with as much optimism as he had the first.
The mate never fails to give Thud as much reassurance as possible. This is insurance that the single most valuable crew member he has ever recruited will remain with his ship. With every leg of the Princess’s route, he and the captain are able to pocket the wages that would have been paid to the ten men Thud replaced. Thud himself has apparently forgotten that he is to have been paid and they see no particular reason to remind him.
The extent of their loyalty and their appreciation of Thud’s services is proven when a crate of leather-bound Musrums (St. Thacker and St. Earnshaw, trans. and ed.), bound for missionaries in Peigambar, proves too much for the hoist, breaks loose and falls directly onto Thud’s head. A similar accident occurring to a normal human being would have been catastrophically fatal, since nearly half a ton of books is involved. The first mate and the captain look down from the bridge at the spread-eagled body on the dock below, the fluttering pages of the black-bound volumes swirling around it in the breeze like carrion crows. They shrug their shoulders philosophically, find a replacement crew at a nearby grog shop and sail that same morning, leaving Thud for dead.
For a day or two, Thud is something of a minor tourist attraction. People from all over the village come to see the huge body, some even bringing their children, who nervously took turns seeing who dared go closest to the unconscious giant. There is some considerable debate among the local merchants and shop-owners about what to do with the corpse; though it is clearly still breathing, it is just as clearly not in the best of health, either. The question is partly one of simple hygiene and partly one of economics. When the inevitable happened, how should the body be disposed of? Some argued for taxidermy, others for pickling. The former would preserve the natural colors better and make a more attractive display. Since this is undoubtedly true, the pickling advocates would change the subject by turning the debate to the question of ownership. The pier is city property, so there is some substance to the argument that the giant be placed on public display, perhaps in the City Hall, where it would prove to be an attraction that would draw tourists to the town to everyone’s profit. There are then debates concerning just who is going to finance the taxidermist (or pickler), with a few heatedly arguing that whoever paid for the work ought to have the right to display the giant. But no one wanted a fellow merchant to have exclusive rights; such a giant would be worth thousands.
The debate continues long into the night, and while it does a circus arrives in town. As the tent is being erected on a vacant lot on the edge of the village, the owner of the show strolls into town, a fat roll of posters under one arm. It does not take him long to learn of the wonder down on the pier and a kind of professional curiosity causes him to wander that way to see for himself. The circus impresario is a man far more inured to the marvelous than any of the townspeople, for whom the sight of a two-headed calf six years earlier is still a topic that causes hushed expressions of awe, and while he has never seen anything quite like Thud before, neither does he attach a particularly supernatural dread to it, either.
A few of the more enterprising villagers had strung lanterns from cords in a circle around the vast body and those spectators that have remained to view the corpse in the uncanny, flickering light are doubly rewarded by the sight of the showman. It is almost a surfeit of wonders. He is an enormous grizzly bear of a man, not half as large as Thud, of course, but far larger than any normal human being ought to be. He had long ringlets of black hair that bounce over his shoulders, a curly beard like a black lambskin, black eyes that flash like faceted obsidian and bushy black brows that swoop upwards like the wings of a pouncing hawk, an image his huge, hooked nose does nothing to dispel. His chest is as broad as a hogshead and it is covered with a blanket of coarse black hair that bursts from between every button of his shirt like an overstuffed armchair.
Besides being owner of the circus, he doubles as its strong man.
He places an ear next to Thud’s chest and seems satisfied with what he hears. A coin purchases the services of a goggle-eyed boy who is sent off to the vacant lot with a message. This produces, a half hour later, a flatbed wagon and a half-dozen husky roustabouts. A block and tackle and some skids are all that is needed to haul the elephantine body into the wagon.
It is not until then that it occurs to someone that their Wonder is being taken away.
The boy who had been sent off to fetch the wagon has returned with it and he is now being sent off again, this time to alert the merchants, who are no doubt wholly unaware that their arguments about the disposition of the giant are at that very moment being rendered academic. Whatever else might happen that night, there is one lad who has found it highly profitable.
By the time an indignant delegation of merchants arrives at the circus ground, there is no sign of the purloined giant. Their demands to see the owner are ignored. Finally, after sufficient threats involving sheriffs and license revocations, the burly owner materializes. His aboriginal appearance cows them.
“Gentlemen,” he chastises, “the first show will not be until tomorrow morning! Here, please accept these complimentary passes.”
“We’re not here about any show,” says the delegated leader. “We’re here about the giant.”
“What giant?”
“See here, there’s no need to take that stance. We know you took it. There are witnesses!”
“Witnesses to what?”
“To your theft of the giant, that’s what!”
“Theft? Theft from whom?”
“What?”
“Theft from whom? Did I take someone’s property?”
“You had no right,” put in another villager, “to take the giant away!”
“What law did I break?”
“Law? Who says anything about law?”
“Didn’t you?”
“That is city property,” says the first man.
“Really? Did the giant know this?”
“What?”
“Did the giant know he is property? Did you ask him?”
“How could we do
that? He is virtually dead.”
“But not literally. I think there’s every chance of his recovery. I know you’ll be glad to learn this.”
“What?” they all cried more or less in unison. “You can’t do that!”
“It is but common charity.”
“We’ll bring the sheriff, then we’ll talk about charity!”
“An excellent subject, a worthy subject. I look forward to it.”
“You haven’t seen the last of us!”
“A reassurance I will treasure through the night.”
The sheriff is a taciturn, practical, unimaginative man who has held his post uninterruptedly for nearly twenty-five years and who knows personally every one of the men who have awakened him at three o’clock in the morning. He listens to as much of their complaint as he can, then refuses to have anything to do with anything less than cold-blooded murder at that hour. The merchants argue, but the sheriff is adamant and finally shuts the door in their faces, warning them that if anyone is asking to be arrested, it is them.
There is some talk about going to the mayor and the local magistrate, but cooler heads prevail and any further action is deferred until later that morning.
Thud finally awakens at dawn, after two days and two nights of unconsciousness. He lay on a bed of hay under a canvas dome that glows warmly from the early morning light. He has no idea where he is, but someone brings him a bucket of chicken soup and when he asks, “Where am I?” the response is a shrug and, “Somewhere. Who knows?”
A few minutes later someone else comes in and asks, “How are you feeling now?”
It is a nice voice, a sweet soprano compared with Bronwyn’s throaty contralto, and when Thud deliberately focuses on its source he sees that it had been issued by a girl who looks very much like a dark version of the princess. Like Bronwyn, she is tall and has a bony, strong-featured face. Unlike Bronwyn, this girl’s hair is as black as wet licorice and cut in a kind of shoulder-length pageboy. She is dressed in a tight-fitting outfit of black sequins that clings to her torso and just barely covers her breasts. A short ruffly skirt flares at her hips, but it is purely decorative as it leaves the entire length of her almost supernaturally long legs exposed. He thinks she looks very pretty, though not half so pretty, of course, as his princess.