The Stone Giant (24 page)

‘Nasty shame,’ Escargot admitted. The rain was setting in again – not so hard this time, but steady and solid. ‘Here.’ Escargot reached into his cloak to pull out one of his two remaining coins. It would half break him, literally, to give it to the man, but circumstances called for it. And it would go some way toward teaching himself a lesson too, about masquerading around waving pistols and ducking out from behind trees to surprise innocent men. ‘Here,’ said Escargot, handing it up.

The man took it and bent his head even more in evident puzzlement. ‘You’re paying me?’

‘The least I can do. Buy yourself a pipe and a fill of tobacco. And a pint of ale too, to keep off the damp. Forgive me this little treachery. It wasn’t what it seemed.’

‘What’s this?’ asked the man suddenly, peering at the coin. ‘This ain’t money. This is some sort of joke, isn’t it? What’s your game, giving me such a fright like that?’ He pitched the coin contemptuously into the woods and made as if to scramble down onto the road. ‘I’m a bit tired of this, I am,’ he cried, working himself up. His horse capered back a step or two, driving the cart behind it as if to give his master room. Escargot stepped back toward the oak tree, thinking about the disappearance of half his fortune.

The man rocked back onto his heels and spit into his hands, rubbing them together in the manner of someone who had some really serious business to attend to – business that involved Escargot’s nose. The rain slanted into Escargot’s face now. The forest was a blurred gray curtain. Abruptly, the man rolled back onto his heels and launched a fist, but the punch whirred past a foot from its mark, infuriating the man, who stepped forward and ripped loose another one, leaning into it too and nearly pitching forward with the exertion. Escargot stepped back, embarrassed. ‘I mean to say,’ he said, reaching in to take the man’s arm.

‘Brigand!’ the man shouted, flailing tiredly away at Escargot’s shoulder, then standing there heaving and puffing. Escargot felt worse than ever: poor man, trying to regain his lost dignity and having no luck at all.

‘No need for that, old man. Really. It’s all a mistake.’

‘I’ll say it is. Yours. I’ll beat the dust out of you!’ With that promise the man launched in again, catching Escargot in the chest and spinning him half around, then coming on again with the air of a man looking to get back his self-respect. He stopped suddenly, lunged toward the bushes, and came up with a stick. ‘Now I have you!’ he cried, waving the thing and twisting his face into a menacing leer. ‘Rob me, is it! Smash up
my
pipe! We’ll see what it is that gets smashed up now!’

Escargot turned to bolt for the river. Things had turned serious. The man had gone mad, clearly, and wouldn’t be satisfied until he had his way. He felt the stick whistle past his ear. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, sliding three feet farther and catching himself on a bush. He turned, ducked a wild, arm’s length swing, and hauled his second pistol from his belt. The man seemed to be blind to it. He stepped in carefully, hauling the stick back, his mouth working as if he were talking to himself. Escargot cocked the gun and fired overhead, blinking the rain out of his eyes. The report boomed like cannon fire, another fountain of sparks hissing out, and the man, stricken with fear, dropped his stick and bolted for the road, where his horse was leaping upriver with the empty cart, whinnying and tramping in a fury of mud and rain, the thudding of its hooves and the cries of its master hanging in the misty air long after the two had disappeared utterly from view.

Escargot stood heaving on the bank. Heaven knew what sort of story would be told in the nearby villages. He’d have to give up the cloak and hat business, that was sure. He hauled himself up the bank to the road once more, tucking his pistol into his belt, realizing that his hand was trembling mutinously. Rainwater ran from the brim of his hat in a steady stream, and his coat hung from him as if he’d swum from the submarine fully clothed.

Up the road twenty feet was a pair of oaks larger, if anything, than the one he’d hidden behind ten minutes earlier. One was hollow. He crouched into it out of the rain, watching the slanting drops fall outside. His own pipe, thank goodness, was in a single piece, and was dry, as was his tobacco. In a moment he was puffing away, watching the rain through a haze of smoke.

He
had
put the fear into the man, stepping out like that in the mist. He stroked his chin. He hadn’t shaved since the last day on the road outside of Seaside, and a serious beard had set in, giving him the look of someone who might quite likely haunt lonely, wooded roads with a brace of smoking pistols. It was a dirty shame it
hadn’t
been Leta and the dwarf. The thought occurred to him that if his sea captaining came to nothing he could set up easily enough as a highwayman, although doing so would require robbing people, of course.

Perhaps a man could learn such a thing. Or perhaps he could rob only people who deserved to be robbed – landlords, say, or politicians, or lawyers. But how would he work it? – quiz them first? Let them go if they did honest work? He’d as likely be shot by a carpenter or a writer or a farmer, come to think of it, before he had time to bow graciously and let them off.
They
wouldn’t know that he wasn’t going to rob them. He’d have to develop a reputation first – send out faked-up tracts, perhaps, carrying news of a desperate but benevolent bandit, complete with a craggy-faced likeness of himself, all shadowy and squinty-eyed.
He
couldn’t draw it, of course, unless it was a stick-man, or a man with a head shaped like a pie.

He grinned, gazing through the rain at nothing, warm enough in his hidey-hole and seeing no immediate reason not to smoke another pipe. The dwarf was as easily behind him as before him now. This whole case, in fact, had gotten ridiculous. He hadn’t had a moment to himself since he first arrived in Seaside. He was awfully hungry, he realized. Being a highwayman pretty much took it out of you. This Jack the Lad must give the local inns some business.

He focused on the hillside across the road. He’d seen something – a movement in the brush, a color that oughtn’t to be there. Was it his man in the cart, come back around to finish him off? He waited, watching the heavy shrubbery and the little rivulet that swept out from beneath it, obviously running down out of a cut in the hillside. There seemed to be a trail there, disappearing into the woods, a trail that was of no earthly interest to Escargot, except that through the pattering rain and the lazy pipesmoke there was something almost magical about it. The foliage was green as emeralds, and in among it, when the leaves would shift in the breeze, a brushstroke of bright red shone for a moment, then winked away.

He smoked a second pipe. There was something there, beckoning. It was mystery, is what it was – the sort of thing he’d set out to find those long weeks back, and unlike the other adventures that had befallen him, this one hadn’t been thrust upon him. This one he’d merely happened upon, and he could do with it as he pleased. He could leave it alone, easily enough, turn his back on it like a man so wealthy in adventures that he could
afford
to turn his back on them.

So he pulled his cap down and crouched out into the thinning rain. There was indeed a trail – just a game trail, it seemed, traveled by the occasional deer or bear or raccoon ambling along down to the river for a drink in the evening. The shadows of the trees closed around him, and the leaves and grass smelled musty and wet and sighed almost soundlessly underfoot. It would take a good pair of ears to remark his presence. Water plinked down onto the broad leaves of the bushes and onto the brim of his hat. The hillside steepened and opened into a little canyon cut by the rivulet, the trail winding along by its edge. Escargot peered about him, looking for the telltale trace of red, and saw it briefly, on ahead, farther into the woods than he had thought it to be from his lair in the hollow tree.

He trudged on, puffing on his pipe, stepping carefully and slowly like a man who had no intention of rushing into trouble. He peered back over his shoulder and was surprised to see that the road had disappeared, that the canyon had wound far enough around to obscure it and that he had been swallowed up utterly into the woods and had left his river and rowboat in a different world. For a brief moment it occurred to him to turn around, to slide back down the path, clamber into his rowboat, and set out. But the notion passed, dissolving in the enchantment of the shadowy, wet woods and the afternoon silence. He fancied himself a forest wanderer, perhaps with a log hut beside a river in the deep woods, and the magic of the turning seasons in his blood. He would live in a house that changed with the weather – diamond-paned windows glinting with tree-filtered sunlight on summer evenings and running with dark rainwater in an autumn downpour. Smoke would tumble up through a stone chimney and lose itself in the low, gray sky. Animals would know him. Trolls would wander past, perhaps steal the stones from his wall for supper. But they’d leave him alone, paying him little more heed than they’d pay the morning dew or the deepening color of autumn leaves. A Smithers story would have nothing on him. He’d
be
a Smithers story.

There was the color again, nearer now – the red of Christmas glass or of a jewel in sunlight. He bent beneath a canopy of leaves. In a depression in the wall of the canyon, half hidden by branches, stood an iron pot, rusted and with a heavy wire handle that had been bent into the shape of a triangle. Within the pot, heaped up in such a mound that it seemed as if not another would balance atop it, were diamonds big as river stones, watery red even in the shadow of the hillside.

Escargot stood listening to the silence. He blinked, half expecting the pot and its contents to be spirited away. But there it sat, looking as if it had sat so for ever so long – as if years past someone had hauled it there, laboring to drag it up the trail, but had left it, finding the task impossible, and had never returned, and in the empty, wild woods no one else had stumbled upon it – no one but Escargot, who was, after all, the sort who might quite likely wander in woods as wild as those.

He climbed in under the outcropping and picked up a gem, hefting it in his hand. Then he grasped the handle and tugged, but the rusted wire snapped loose and he very nearly jerked the whole pot over onto its side. The sheer quantity of uncut stones made Captain Perry’s treasure seem like nothing at all – so much costume jewelry. He held one of the diamonds to his eye and squinted through it at the sky. It was like looking into an almost bottomless pool of pink water, beyond which shone, distant and shifting, the mountainous landscape of a dream-world.

He pulled his hat off and heaped it full. Then he set the hat down and filled his pockets. The pot seemed easily as full as it had been, and diamonds lay now on the ground roundabout. He was determined not to leave a single gem behind. They were doing no one any good hidden away there in the woods, and would finance any of a number of capital adventures along the river.
One
in fact, would finance such adventures, but the thought of leaving a single gem lying in the wet grass was impossible. He’d haul his hatful back to the rowboat, dump it in, and come back carrying buckets. He blinked at the pot. There, thrusting up from the middle of the tumbled gems, was the jagged corner of an immense stone, big as his fist – big as his head maybe. It made the rest of them seem like sandgrains. He grabbed the great stone with both hands, and pulled on it, hauling it free.

It shimmered there, the reflections of clouds passing across it, the red color swirling and whirling and spiraling out slowly, seeming to stretch the jewel until he held in his hands not an immense diamond, but a great piece of stick candy, like a barber pole. His hat, too, was filled with stick candy: rootbeer and licorice and cinnamon and orange and cherry, all thrusting out and snapped off at the end as if broken from long cylinders. The iron pot was stuffed with it. He reached for it, unbelieving. Stick candy was well and good – magical enough in its own way – but it wouldn’t finance adventures. He thrust several sticks aside with his hand, reaching deeper into the pot, where he felt something fleshy and cold, like a fish just hauled out of a river.

He jerked back with a shout, but whatever it was had gotten hold of his hand. Something bit into the fleshy part of his palm, fingernails or sharp little teeth, and he cursed himself for not having seen the truth of the thing all along. He yanked his arm out, and in a shower of stick candy there appeared the head of a goblin, eyes wild as pinwheels, teeth champing, dressed in shreds of clothes, holding onto his hand like a child afraid to cross a street alone.

It shrieked at him – threw back its head and shrieked past filed teeth, gobbling along like a conversation in a barnyard. It clambered up his arm, hand over hand, eyeing his neck, drawing itself out of its goblin pot like a serpent out of a basket. Escargot hit at it with the great piece of stick candy in his free hand, smashing it along the ear, then again atop the head. The stick candy shivered to bits, falling into the muck, and the rain set in again furiously, the wind whipping it in under the rocky ledge above.

A hand grasped his ankle. Another caught him by the throat from behind. Suddenly there were little men everywhere, creeping out of bushes, dropping from the hillside overhead, appearing through a crack in the wall of the canyon and half hidden by foliage. He clutched instinctively at the goblin at his throat and tore it loose, pitching the thing bodily at a pair of his cousins who chattered along toward him, waving toasting forks. He stepped back toward the stream, dragging three of them out into the rain, and he fell over hard onto his back, smashing a goblin beneath him and rolling away down the canyon with the other two hanging on like monkeys. He leaped up, kicking and flailing, seeing that his way down was blocked by a score of the creatures, half of them carrying lit torches that spat and fizzled in the downpour.

Up the canyon was another score, and still more slipped out through the crack in the hillside, yowling and bleating and dressed in all manners of outlandish clothing, obviously stolen from riverside villages and farmhouses. Some wore hats, stove in and torn and with fishbone ornaments thrusting out at random angles. In moments there was nothing but goblins front and back. He remembered suddenly the pistols in his belt, but the guns weren’t loaded, and even if they were, what would they avail him? Goblins hadn’t sense enough to fear a pistol, and if he shot one of them point-blank, it would just excite the lot of them to see it, rather than cause them to run in fear. He was lost. He gave off struggling, and the creatures stopped leaping at him, though they seemed very much ready to set in again if given half a chance.