The Stone Giant (13 page)

The island, in minutes, was dropping away behind him.

He was in the current that the sailor had warned him against and would be swept out to sea, food for the fishes. A half hour earlier he’d been sick at his stomach aboard a galleon bound for the Wonderful Isles; now his stomach wasn’t sick at all – it was tip-top – and he was afloat in the open ocean bound for nowhere. Even his gunnysack tea bed had been a positive comfort in comparison. He found that his teeth were chattering and the ends of his fingers were numb. He seemed to be able to move only very slowly, as if the cold water were coagulating his blood.

Little clusters of exposed rock drifted past to his right, one by one, shrinking in size as they fell away to sea. There was one last cluster, weedy and angular, looming toward him. He swam for it, plunging along with deep, purposeful strokes, holding his head above the chop, correcting his course as the reef drifted alarmingly away, out of reach. He wouldn’t catch it.

He found himself swimming straightaway in toward shore, hauled along sideways in the current. Black shadows swept beneath him – angular shadows like the black bulk of waiting sharks – best not to think about it at all. He stopped again and drifted with the current. Maybe it would drop him somewhere on the leeward side of the island. Of course he’d be drowned and eaten by then.

He kicked himself upright, banging his heel against something sharp. ‘Shark!’ he shouted, certain for one desperate moment that his swim had drawn to a fateful end. He thrashed, turning in a ragged circle, feeling in his pocket for his foolish penknife and promising himself that he’d buy a real knife if only he’d be spared to. It would have a blade eight inches long. A foot long. He’d buy a knife and a sword and he’d carry a leather sap full of lead beads. He lived in a world that required such a thing, apparently. Water rushed about him. A swell humped up and pushed him toward the island but dropped him again before it had done any good. No shark appeared, only more shadows.

A tendril of leafy kelp wrapped round his legs and arm, and he pulled and kicked at it until he was lifted by another swell, clear green with the afternoon sun shining through it. He found himself dragging across barely submerged rocks, and he scrabbled for a handhold among tufts of eel grass, ripping loose handfuls of the slippery weed when another swell swept him along, off into deep water again. He bumped across a narrow ledge, caught a thick kelp stalk and held on, washing on the surge up onto yet another rocky plinth, knee deep in water.

He stood up on shaky legs and collapsed immediately, tumbling off, struggling back onto the shelf, cutting his hands on the rough edges of the rock. The ocean dropped away and he was lying on a bit of exposed reef, watching as a new swell humped up and surged across him, tearing him loose and dumping him headfirst into the ocean once more and then pushing him into a farther ledge where he fought again for a handhold. He struggled upright, forcing his numb and shaking legs to cooperate, to carry him along toward a higher shelf.

When the next swell washed over the rocks he was only ankle deep and he held onto handfuls of waterweeds, feet planted, then stepped delicately away when the ocean fell off. He crossed from rock to rock toward what had been the last exposed bit of the headland. There he would rest. He could dry himself in the sun. He could spend the night there and hoof it for shore at low tide the next day. It wasn’t exactly the Widow’s windmill, but it beat The Smashed Hat all to bits if hospitality was the issue.

He struggled one last time with a swell, letting it lift him along the edge of the rock, then caught and held when it dropped him, hauling himself up the edge, higher and higher until the next wave lapped past below him, then higher yet until he collapsed atop the rock, shivering with his face to the sun and his head in dried weeds. The boom of cannon fire jerked him upright.

For one fearful moment he assumed they were shooting at him—that the captain had seen his deliverance onto the reef and had decided to blow him off his perch with the ten-pound guns. But it wasn’t so. There lay the
Flying Scud
, wallowing in the leeward calm and the rising swell. Smoke and brimstone belched from the guns along her starboard side. She seemed to be firing at nothing. From his rock, Escargot could see little geysers of water sailing skyward in the direction of the island, but there was no pirate ship to be seen; there wasn’t a thing besides the sunlight glinting on little wavelets and the scattered rocks in the shallows.

Yes, there was something—what was it? There was a shadow on the surface of the sea. Escargot stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand, shivering in the afternoon breeze. The thing in the water seemed to be a whale, lolling in the shallows. But why was the captain taking potshots at whales when there were desperate pirates about?

The ship tacked before what little wind there was, making away up the island, perhaps toward the village at the far end. The shadow in the water seemed to drift after it, out of the turquoise of the shallows and into the deep green of the open ocean. Cannonballs hailed roundabout it, volley after volley, and more than once, echoing over the sea with a resounding bong, one of the balls apparently struck home, bouncing skyward with the impact and falling harmlessly into the sea.

Escargot could see the thing’s eye as it dropped away into the deep. It glowed like lantern light, unblinking, and a row of phosphorescent circles like portholes shone along its flanks. The
Flying Scud
gave off its firing and slanted along miserably slowly in the wind. The biscuit sailor had been wrong, apparently; they were round the headland and beating up island. Before nightfall they’d reach a safe port and be drinking rum out of casks. Escargot had, apparently, gotten into the habit of taking bad advice. He wondered if he was lucky or just the opposite. He’d taken the advice of a man who’d helped assault him on a beach and had been caught up in the very current the man had assured him he might avoid. But then he’d washed up onto the rocks just when he’d given himself up for drowned, in time to watch the ship he’d sailed on, back when he was warm and dry and had a biscuit at hand, making away toward civilization. And where was
he?
On a weedy rock, contemplating a dinner of raw periwinkles and limpets. He plucked a periwinkle off the rock and peered into it, wondering how many of the little things he’d have to crack and eat before they’d do him any good. They wouldn’t need any salt anyway.

There was the distant boom of cannon fire and a sploosh of water, out to sea now. The
Flying Scud
had come round into the wind and was booming away, shot after shot. He could hear, between explosions, whistling from the crow’s nest and the shouting of the captain on the poopdeck. The sun lay almost on the sea, setting fire to a long orange-red avenue that ran right along to the foot of Escargot’s rock. But it was a cold sort of a fire. And all at once, as if someone had drawn a curtain, evening seemed to rise out of the ocean in the east, carrying a chill along with it.

Escargot could do nothing save wait it out. He wouldn’t freeze, surely, out there on his rock. The tide had risen enough to cover half the rocks that had been high and dry a half hour before. An attempt to gain the shore would mean thrashing across the current again, an obviously futile business. There would be another low tide sometime in the early morning. If the moon was cooperative, perhaps he’d try for the island then.

He peered across the hundred yards of broken water toward the shore, then jerked around in the direction of the galleon at the sound of a tearing crack, monstrously louder than the occasional explosions of cannon fire. The
Flying Scud
listed crazily, as if she had no ballast in her hold, and her mizzenmast and a tangle of rigging lay sprawled across the tilted deck. She seemed to be going down even as Escargot watched, spinning lazily around so that the bowsprit swept past the island, pointed briefly at Escargot, then angled skyward as the stern settled beneath the waves. Sailors crowded the bowrail, hanging off and dropping into the sea. A half dozen seemed to be working at the fallen mizzenmast. They chopped away with axes at lines that secured the mast onto the deck until it fell with a splash into the water and swung round, drifting away from the settling hulk. A dozen men jumped after it, grabbing hold of the floating mast and hanging on.

Escargot could hear shouts and cries and curses drifting over the water, and he watched in numbed horror. The galleon, perhaps, had struck a reef. Only the bow was visible, sinking quickly now, settling into the sea like the sun. It slid away, the bowsprit saluting the heavens for a quick moment before the ship was gone. It was as if he were watching a play, seated as he was atop his rock. So distant was the tragedy that it seemed staged, and only the memory of the biscuit sailor made it seem that the sinking ship had any connection with him. Luck was with Escargot after all. He hoped mightily that his benefactor was one of the sailors clinging to the mast, but even in the deepening twilight Escargot could see that the mast, a floating bit of flotsam now on the sea, was drifting away across the dark, empty ocean, leaving the island in its wake.

Below him the cold tide swirled against the reef. Finger kelp and eel grass that had lain limp against exposed rock ten minutes earlier washed now with the surge. It occurred suddenly to Escargot that the periwinkles and limpets that crept across his rock were waiting for something; they hadn’t simply trudged up out of the ocean on holiday. And what they were waiting for lapped and splashed a bare foot from the top of the rock with each surge. Between him and the shore there were no rocks visible. The evening might have obscured one or two, but it didn’t seem so. It seemed, to the contrary, that Escargot’s lucky streak, short as it was, had ended.

A dark wave humped up out of nowhere and rolled straight across the top of the rock, filling his shoes. Another appeared, big enough this time to feel the shallow reef beneath it and break across the rock rather than roll past. Escargot dropped and clutched a kelp holdfast, thinking optimistically that there hadn’t been much to the wave after all. He could stick it, he told himself. The tide would peak and then fall away. He looked up, shaking the water out of his face, and stared straight on into a rushing hillock of ocean. He sucked in a quick breath, then sailed over backward with the force of the wave, onto his back on the rocks before being lifted and tossed into deeper water.

He was afloat again, gasping, kicking away from the rocks where another wave broke and roiled, a mass of tumbling white foam against the dark sky and ocean. Escargot swam into it, hoping that the force of the wave would push him toward the island, up onto the next reef, perhaps, where there’d be a chance of being swept even farther. But the wave lost its fury abruptly when it passed him, and he found himself once again in the current, sweeping offshore. He swam, but swimming did nothing but tire him. And if he was destined to drown, it seemed to him he’d be a happier drowned man if he hadn’t tired himself out first with a lot of futile swimming.

Escargot drifted in the current, dead tired, his legs kicking feebly and his arms sculling in quick, ineffective little jerks. He’d shed his jacket and trousers and shoes when they threatened to drag him under. Beneath his shirt hung the truth charm pouch, a few coins, and the maps torn from the front of
The Stone Giants
. It had been difficult to part with Smithers, but a few hours soaking might quite likely turn the book to mush anyway, and, as was true of books, there was more than that one copy in the world.

He lay on his back and rested more and more often, watching the silvered moon pole its way up the sky like a rocking gondola, floating lonely and cold amid the far-flung stars. The long shadow of the island had edged entirely into view, and when he bobbed over the crest of a passing swell he could see a scattering of lights away off in the distance—the village, no doubt, that would have to get by without his company.

His floating wasn’t worth much. It seemed less and less possible to steady himself, and after a minute or two of dipping to port or starboard he’d find himself with a mouthful of seawater, and he’d be sputtering and floundering and gasping. How long
could
a man float on the ocean? Until morning? Another hour was pushing it. And what good would morning do him anyway?

The water brightened around him, as if the moon had slipped in closer to the earth to see what manner of thing it was that floated there on the ocean. He could see his feet all of a sudden, treading below him, and beyond them the shadows of two plate-size fish kicked away into the depths as he watched. The light wasn’t coming from the moon; it was coming from below. A wash of fine bubbles burst on the surface, and the ascending light shaped itself into two spheres—the eyes of the deepwater creature that had so confounded the cannon fire from the
Flying Scud.

The thing surfaced beneath him—not in a rush, but in a lazy drift, an enormous shadow in the green depths. There was nothing to do but wait for it, for the opening of ponderous jaws as the beast flopped over onto its back to feed, thrashing for a brief moment in its silent journey through the seas. Luck was a fickle thing indeed.

The beast stopped. It hovered there. In the clear water it might have been twenty feet down or it might have been ten. A score of angular dorsal fins rose along its spine, disappearing in the depths, and wide pectoral fins undulated slowly behind its glowing eyes. It drifted closer, eyeing him. Escargot braced himself. He watched horrified, unable to look away, needing to know the precise moment that doom would overtake him.

He peered into the thing’s face. The front of its head between its eyes seemed curiously transparent. He could see straight into it. Things moved in there. My heaven, thought Escargot, there’s a man afloat in the beast. It’s consumed the crew of the
Flying Scud
, and it’s cruising about, looking for survivors. It’s a sea monster, a thing part serpent and part whale, and it’s swallowed the men whole.