The Stone Giant (12 page)

It was air he needed – air and wind in his face. He’d be all right if he could feel ocean air on his forehead. It was just possible to walk, if he planted his feet wide and swayed to and fro as if striding along on either side of a stream. His stomach, all of a sudden, seemed to come unstuck from its moorings inside him and go sloshing away as it pleased, and just then the ship listed again to starboard. He lost his hold on the post, lurched along in a crouched run through the darkness, and sailed into a little hillock of burlap sacks, stuffed and stitched. He crawled up onto them and lay curled on his side.

Would the filthy crew that shanghaied him leave him to starve? He certainly hoped so. Starvation seemed to him suddenly to be a wonderful thing in light of his sausages and ale. How could he have consumed sausages and ale? They’d obviously poisoned him. He flopped onto his back momentarily, then folded up like a jackknife. It was hours later before he was awakened in the darkness.

‘Bit of biscuit for you,’ said a voice, and he felt a hand on his arm.

‘Good grief,’ he managed to croak, then shook the arm off.

‘Best to have something in the hold. Ballast, it is. Something dry to settle you out.’

Escargot mumbled. His head didn’t throb half so lively as it had earlier, but he could feel a bump where the back of it was pressed against burlap. ‘Lamp?’ he asked hopefully. His eyes felt as if they’d been screwed shut. The utter darkness was beginning to wear on him, and it seemed to him suddenly that he might stand a better chance of negotiating with his captors if he could see them.

‘No, no. No lamp. These here biscuits ain’t half as good in the light. Six weeks ago when we put out o’ Hailey there wouldn’t have been nothing like lamplight to sort of set them off. But not now. The captain ain’t an epicure.’

‘I don’t feel much like a biscuit,’ Escargot admitted, forcing himself to sit up, then flopping back onto his sacks in a single rhythmic movement.

‘Best eat ‘em before you go up. Sharp’s the word on deck. We been chased for three hours by deep-sea pirates. In another hour they’ll be all over us.’

‘Give them my best,’ said Escargot, clutching his stomach. ‘I’ll be up tomorrow. Leave the door ajar so I can find it. And don’t wait dinner for me. Let the captain have my biscuit.’

‘Now, laddie, there ain’t no room aboard the
Flyin’ Scud
for slackers. It’s all hands on deck now, isn’t it? So if you don’t want this bit o’ biscuit, I won’t hold it against you. If you’d seen it in the light o’ day you wouldn’t want it half so bad, yet. But my orders is to bring you up, and bring you up I will. Do you come on yer feet, or on my back?’

Escargot, in the darkness, had no way of knowing whether his benefactor was sizable enough to carry out his threat, but the man spoke in the tone of someone used to being obeyed. Escargot’s stomach, right then, spoke in very much the same tones. He was in no shape either to resist or to follow. All he could do, it seemed to him, was groan and pitch from side to side.

‘Here now!’ cried the sailor, hauling on Escargot’s arms. ‘If you soil the captain’s tea bags it’ll go bad. It’s the open sea, is what it is, that’ll put you right. Off the stern. An hour o’ watchin’ the horizon drop and you’ll be all of a piece again. Come along, quickly now. That’s it.’ And with that encouragement he tugged Escargot from his bed of tea leaves and steadied him as they lurched toward the door.

Escargot found that the sea had calmed. He no longer pitched this way and that with each passing swell. Now it was just a broad, continual rolling, so that he seemed to be walking uphill one moment, then downhill the next, not knowing exactly when it was he’d reached the crest, and dangling there waving a foot in the air for a bit before rolling away again. He could walk right enough, it seemed, but his stomach still hadn’t gotten the word and it rose and fell so giddily that it seemed to spend about half its time hovering in his throat.

Sunlight nearly blinded him. A sharp wind blew out of the northwest, scouring the sky clean of clouds and mist and chopping the surface of the sea. The galleon sailed before the wind, sails rigged, slanting past a rocky headland – the tip of what appeared to be a long, mountainous island. The wind bit Escargot’s neck and ear. He yanked his cap lower and turned up the collar of his coat, then looked about him at the casks and flotsam and coils of line that littered the deck. A grizzled sailor sat in his shirtsleeves mending a heap of dirty sail, and two others methodically stacked cannonballs in wooden troughs beside a half dozen wheeled cannon that were lashed to the deck.

‘Toyon Island off to starboard there,’ said the sailor with the biscuit. He was a small man, as it turned out, lean and craggy and burnt a deep brown-ochre from years at sea. He wore a Leibnitz cap, and, like the sailmender, wore no coat. ‘We’re beating up for the Isles with a load of tea and silk, and then it’s back we’ll come with rum and cinnamon and nutmeg.’

Two shrill whistles sounded from the crow’s nest, followed by a thump of feet in the companionway off to Escargot’s left. The wind and spray had revived him enough so that he was mildly interested to see the captain burst out, his face purple, followed by two men in mismatched uniforms – officers, quite likely. The second of the two staggered in a way that had nothing to do with the rolling of the ship.

‘Fill of tobacco?’ asked Escargot of the captain as the man pushed past him.

‘Shut yer gob!’ came the reply.

Escargot watched the three men disappear into the stern. He wondered exactly what it was he’d been commissioned to do. Haul on the bowline, perhaps, or lay about him with the marlinspike. Everything he knew about ships and sailing he’d learned from G. Smithers. In fact, it was becoming clear that almost everything that he knew about the world beyond Twombly Town he’d learned from G. Smithers, or from some writer or another who had made up the stories he’d written. Most of it had been lies, in other words, just like Professor Wurzle had insisted.

‘Don’t press it,’ said his companion, gesturing toward the stern.

‘Pardon me?’

‘I say don’t push the captain there. He ain’t safe to push even when there
ain’t
pirates in his wake. He’s like to pitch you overboard himself when there is. If he weren’t in such a blamed hurry he might have.’

Escargot leaned out over the rail and peered behind them. The ocean was empty. ‘Pirates?’ he asked.

‘Deep-sea pirates, like I said. Them two whistles means they was sighted. They ain’t on no pleasure cruise. For my money they’ll come up on us when we pass the headland there and wrap round off the lee shore. The captain’ll run for the shallows and blast away with the ten-pound guns.’

‘Good man,’ said Escargot.

‘Dead man,’ replied the sailor, spitting overside. ‘They won’t let us nowhere near the shallows. We’ll give the ship over or they’ll ram her, and we’ll all be swimmin’ ‘mongst the sharks. There’s a little port on the far shore o’ the island. Ships put in there often enough. I’d make for that if I was you.’

‘Would you?’ asked Escargot, surprised. ‘When?’

‘Hold on till we angle in through the gap there, then go over the starboard side and strike out for the rocks. That there headland wraps up into the hills and there’s a cut through the mountains that drops down the far side into town. It ain’t much, but you’ll be off the island in a month, one way or another.’

Escargot studied the man, who stood with his feet> planted and smoked his pipe, gazing out toward the island. It was hard to believe that after having helped shanghai him the man was advising him about effecting an escape. It could simply be that the sailor was an honest man who did as he would be done by, but one didn’t expect to run into such a man, not after being hauled feetfirst off a beach. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Escargot.

‘If I was them pirates I’d sink this tub. That’s what I’d do. What does a pirate need with eight tons o’ tea wrapped in burlap? They might use the silk – trade it, maybe. But the tea ain’t worth a penny, not to deep-sea pirates it ain’t. They can’t transport it. For my money they lays us by and demands the cargo. Then they finds out it’s tea, and down we go.’

‘For no reason beyond that?’ asked Escargot.

‘Bloodthirsty lot, pirates. Especially this lot. Stove in the side of a dwarf galley off Picaroon Bay down south of here, because they weren’t carrying nothing but pepper. Only so much a man can do with pepper. Down she went, and all hands aboard her. She was too far off the bay to swim for it. Most of ‘em drown, the rest of ‘em was eat by sharks.’

‘Sharks!’ Escargot exclaimed, looking out over the water. Suddenly the sailor’s plan seemed ill-advised.

‘Do you want to swim a quarter mile through ‘em or two mile? Like I say, if
I
was them pirates, I’d lay us to off the headland there when we wraps around. Then I’d board us and find out there weren’t nothing aboard to amount to nothing. And then I’d ask if there weren’t men aboard the ship that wants to go a-pirating. Half of ‘em steps forward then, you see, because they was commissioned with a marlinspike just like you was. But they don’t need ‘em all, do they? They don’t need but half a dozen, maybe, to take over for dead men. The rest goes overside or goes down. It won’t matter a hair to the pirates which it is.

Then they’ll back off a half mile and come on full tilt, bam, and lay open the starboard side. Then again, they might just smash us to bits for sport, and never mind the tea. Captain of that’ ere ship never give anyone quarter. Not him. That’s Cap’n Perry, is who that is. There now. There’s the p’int. We ain’t never going to be so close to any bit o’ land as we are now, ‘less it’s the sea bottom.’

‘Come along,’ said Escargot, noticing suddenly that the crew of the galleon seemed to have been suddenly sent mad. The captain shouted orders from the poopdeck. Sails were unfurled in a rush of plummeting canvas. The ship came about, angling in toward the calm waters of the leeward side of the island. Three cannon from the starboard side were unlashed and wheeled across toward the port. The sailor nodded meaningfully toward shore.

‘I ain’t much of a hand in the water,’ he said. ‘And I got three months pay coming to me and a triple share. I always did like to play the odds. Goin’ over is a sure thing – all but the sharks – and a lubber like you, just gettin’ out among it, is better off by a sight with the sharks than with the cap’n here.’

Escargot looked back toward the stern, where he could just see the shoulders and head of the captain, who barked orders, now at the men in the crow’s nests, now at the pilot, now at the dozen men shoving shot and powder into the cannons. The shore of the island slipped past, the rocks on the beach shadowed by cliffs above. The water looked powerfully cold. But the sailor was right. It wouldn’t be any warmer or shallower a mile out to sea.

‘Jump for it, mate.’

Escargot hesitated.

‘Jump now. There’s a current wraps round the p’int there that’ll sweep you out to sea if you wait. Jump and strike out hard for the beach. The captain’s too busy with his pirates to give a flying damn. Now jump!’

And Escargot jumped. He put both hands on the rail and vaulted over, sailing feetfirst into the sea and plunging in a rush of bubbles into the green depths. His jacket was shoved up around his chest and his pants around his knees. He thrashed and kicked and shot out into the sunlight gasping for breath.

‘There he goes, by heaven!’ thundered a voice from above, and Escargot spun round to find the galleon looming overhead, and the sailor whose advice he’d taken leaning out over the rail and shouting. Another man joined him, and then a third. This last carried a gun with a barrel that opened out into a sort of cone, and he rammed shot into the end of it with a singleness of purpose that sent Escargot diving once again beneath the surface.

His clothes and shoes made swimming cumbersome, but they also seemed to make the chilly water bearable. His head felt as if it were being squeezed between two frozen rocks. He surfaced again and at once heard the sound of an explosion followed by a curse. He’d fallen away astern, and it was the captain he saw now, shaking a fist at him, as his benefactor hopped along toward the captain, wrestling the gun away from the third sailor, who loaded it wildly, hoping to get in another shot. The biscuit sailor threw the stock to his shoulder and fired off a shot that zinged into the water ten feet to Escargot’s left, and as Escargot dove again, determined to stay under until he was out of range of the weapon, he heard the captain shout, ‘Blast! ...’ something or other. But whether he was generally blasting his ill-shooting crewmembers or was exhorting them to blast away again with the gun, Escargot never learned, for when he surfaced again the
Flying Scud
was pulling fast away and the island swept by at what seemed suddenly to Escargot to be a remarkable distance.

He’d swum often enough in the Oriel River to know what it was to swim against a current, and he knew that in a lake, say, or in the still water of the marshes below Stooton Slough, he could easily cover a mile of open water in a half hour and have wind enough left to swim back again. There was a rhythm to it; that was all. But in the ocean, with the cold brine slapping against the side of your face and with your jacket and shoes tugging you down, and with your mind on whatever it might be that swam in lazy circles beneath you, covering half that distance was another thing altogether. Just to
see
the island he was forced to swim with his head out of the water, and half his effort seemed to be spent keeping afloat. His beach, visible only because of the beetling cliffs over it, seemed to be edging away sidewise. He’d wind up, if he was lucky, somewhere to the west, among the rock reefs that made up the tip of the headland. Whether those reefs were visible only because of a low tide was an interesting question – one which Escargot pondered for only a moment. There was no profit in studying his fate, only in taking another stroke.

A shivering chill had gotten in under his clothes, and each stroke and kick surged a cold wash of seawater across him. He stopped to tread water and negotiate. There was the
Flying Scud
, a mile off the point and beating round in order to angle up the island. His beach was hopelessly lost to the east, and even as he sculled in place, kicking to stay afloat, he was swept along in the wake of the ship, as if doomed to catch her again. He struck out afresh toward shore. It mattered little where he ended up, as long as it was solid ground. He looked about himself and wondered at the play of shadow and light on the tossing ocean, thinking about sharks and whales and eels and wanting not to. But they kept swimming round and round in his mind as if to hurry him along, to force him not to quit again.