The Stone Giant (33 page)

Ahead of him though, not fifty yards up the path, a shadow slipped along silently, making for the river. It was Leta. It had to be. She leaped across a broad patch of sunlight suddenly, hurrying back into shadow. Where she was running Escargot had no idea. Perhaps she was just running. She had to be utterly unaware of the nature of her plight, the reason she was hauled in leaps and bounds up a strange river through an even stranger land.

Escargot clambered out of the tree and set off at a dead run. She’d hear him coming, of course, and would try to outrun him, not knowing who it was that pursued her. But by then he’d have the jump on her, and they’d be far enough ahead of the elves for him to risk calling out. Suddenly, there she was. She turned and held a broken-off oak branch in her hand, thinking, as likely as not, that it was a troll that raced up behind her. Escargot stumbled to a stop, grinning and gasping and waving at the stick, miming wildly that he’d rather she didn’t hit him with it. She lowered it slowly, puzzled to see him there.

‘Come on!’ he wheezed, nodding toward the river. ‘They’re right behind us. I’ve got a boat on the river. You’ll be safe there.’

‘Safe!’ she said, laughing at the idea, but she ran along just the same, carrying her stick with her, and the two of them didn’t stop until they’d broken from the river edge of the woods, flown across the meadow, and hauled the rowboat out of the mouth of the creek. Then they were off, pulling for the submarine, Escargot watching the edge of the forest for the issuance of the elves. It made precious little difference now, of course, for he and Leta could be aboard ship and sunk out of sight beneath the river long before the elves could rally round and set out in serious pursuit. They
were
safe, in a word, and the sudden realization of it made Escargot laugh out loud.

‘Care to share the joke?’ asked Leta, smiling at him.

‘It just occurred to me that we’ve made it. We’re safe as babies.’

She stared at him, looking round her at the wide river. ‘Are you suggesting that we row to the other side?’

‘Not at all,’ said Escargot, grinning at her as she caught sight, for the first time, of the submarine, floating like a behemoth in the current. Her eyes widened. Escargot grinned some more, then forced the grin to relax a bit, and not look foolish. He could hardly contain himself though. This was more like it. He’d imagined, weeks past, finding her in Seaside and slipping up behind her unseen to tap her on the shoulder. That would have been fun, of course, but it would have been nothing to this. The ruined Escargot she had taken a fancy to in Twombly Town had not only journeyed mysteriously to this faraway, exotic land, but he’d appeared like a phantom in the oak woods, and had led her out safely, outwitting two dozen elves, snatching her, as it were, from the grip of the dwarf, and spiriting her away to an astonishing submarine. It was all very satisfactory.

She looked thin and hunted, although the hollowness that the weeks of turmoil had bestowed upon her cheekbones made her rather prettier than otherwise. It was a daunting sort of prettiness, though. She regarded him coolly, with a look of suspicion in her eyes. He tried another grin, but got none in return. The rowboat bumped against the hull of the submarine with a suddenness that almost pitched him into the river. He barely noticed it, though, and was so clumsy at securing the rowboat to the submarine that they nearly slipped away down-river before he could get it right.

Leta wasn’t smiling at all. She sat as if in deep thought, and he was afraid for a moment that she’d decline to come aboard. If she did, he was lost. He couldn’t very well demand it, could he? But why
wouldn’t
she want to come aboard? He’d come halfway across two worlds looking for her. He’d fought goblins and outfoxed elves and harassed a very dangerous dwarf, all on her account. Well, that wasn’t true either. To a degree he’d done it on his own account. But he
had
done it, and she’d appreciate that, surely. He started to speak, but the words seemed to run up against each other in his neck and wedge together there, so that he croaked like a frog with a throat condition.

She followed him up the ladder, though, and watched as he stowed the rowboat; then she climbed down the hatch, looking wonderingly roundabout – at the fire quartz and the carved companionway. She peered in at the pilothouse, oohing and aahing at the sunlit river that pressed against the windows and at a school of river squid that happened, at just that moment, to be passing by in a wide-eyed rush. She turned toward him, pointing at them. Thank you, squids, Escargot said to himself, and he gestured roundabout as if to say, ‘Well now, how d’you like it?’ But actually he said nothing, for Leta was frowning at him again and looking at him sidewise, as Captain Appleby must sometimes look at young Boggy when he suspected the little elf was up to some sort of trouble.

‘I’ll take it down a ways, if you don’t mind,’ said Escargot, slumping into the pilot’s chair, ‘I’d rather the elves didn’t know I’m about. The less anyone knows about my presence the better.’ He felt satisfied with that; it had the right air of mystery to it. And it wasn’t boasting, either; it was true enough.

‘Surely,’ she answered, moving across to watch through the windows. ‘What is it you’re up to, anyway?’

‘Up to!’ cried Escargot, taken aback. ‘I’m not
up to
anything. Really. My only interest is to ... to ...’ He faltered there, not being entirely able to define his interest in so many words. He was blushing, he knew, but Leta wasn’t watching him, so it didn’t matter so very much. ‘The dwarf, you know, stole my bag of marbles.’

‘Marbles?’ she looked at him curiously.

‘That’s right. You remember the marbles. In the leather bag. I showed them to you at Stover’s that day. It turns out that they’re enchanted in some way, and that the dwarf is going to use them to ...’ At that point a grim thought occurred to him. It was possible, barely possible, that this wasn’t Leta at all. Or was it? She’d been in full sun – hadn’t she? – and the sunlight hadn’t turned her into the witch. And yet the whole sunlight and fog and darkness theory was only a hunch, really. What if he’d stumbled into a trap of some sort here? What if this
wasn’t
Leta, but was the old woman. He hadn’t been able to tell the difference between the two on the meadow that one evening. He messed in his coat for a moment and pulled out the truth charm, very nonchalantly, as if he were hauling out a pocket watch or a pipe. He didn’t want to seem to hide it, and yet he didn’t want to make an issue of it either. He grinned at her and started in again.

‘What is that?’ she asked suddenly, interrupting.

‘A truth charm,’ he found himself saying before he had a chance to force himself to shut up.

‘A truth charm? Why?’

‘I’m afraid you might be the witch.’

‘Why are you afraid of that?’ she asked, grinning slightly.

‘She scares the devil out of me, that’s why. I’m pretending to be some sort of hero here, posing around in this submarine, but really I’ve been sort of forcing myself along, you know, talking myself into pushing farther upriver.’

‘Why? To get your marbles back.’

‘N ... no,’ said Escargot, struggling to hold his tongue. ‘I’ve been hoping that you ... that is, I’m in ... I mean to say ...’

‘What?’ she was smiling now. ‘Could you put that charm away?’

‘Yes, for goodness sake!’ cried Escargot, dumping it back into its pouch. He’d started to sweat, he realized, and there wasn’t any way at all that he could carry on with the conversation. He’d wait for her to speak.

‘I saw one of those once. The Seaside dwarfs used to sell them – very cheap, actually. Almost no one wanted one. They were clever, but dangerous The trick is that you only ask questions when one is exposed. You never make statements, unless, of course, you’ve got some particular reason for forcing yourself to be truthful. They’re really rather insulting, aren’t they?’ she asked, suddenly serious.

‘How’s that? I certainly didn’t
mean
anything by it. One has to be careful, though, with this dwarf. And the old lady. I almost believe she’s worse than he is.’

A shiver seemed to go through her right then, as if she were reminded of something. She grew abruptly irritated and gave him a stern look. ‘You’ve come upriver after
me?

Escargot grimaced, but nodded, feeling like a child who’d been caught creeping through the watermelon patch carrying a carving knife.

‘I’m grateful for that,’ she said. ‘Really. It’s a chivalrous thing. But I’m afraid you’ve presumed a lot, haven’t you?’

He shrugged.

‘What did you have in mind, spiriting me away to a safe port, kissing my hand and saying good-bye?’

‘Something like that,’ he mumbled. ‘I guess.’

She smiled at him. ‘I tried it already. Two days ago at sunrise I stole a canoe, right below a town called Grover, and paddled across the river and hailed a steamship. We were four hours down-river when a fog came up. It rose off the water and seemed to chase me from deck to deck, and I even tried to climb up the handholds on one of the stacks to stay in the sunlight. But it was futile. I found myself next morning outside that deserted village where I ran into you. What that means, unless I’m mistaken, is that we’d sail away, you and I, until the sun went down or the fog came up, and I’d be gone again. I’m afraid this thing has to be seen through, although I don’t know how.’

Escargot watched her. He wished he could say that
he
knew how it was going to be seen through, but he didn’t; he couldn’t. He hadn’t gotten half enough information out of Captain Appleby. What did the dwarf intend to do with Leta? What did the elves intend to do with Leta? Shoving her below decks and locking her in wouldn’t answer. He nodded his head and squinted his eyes in a knowing fashion, but the only thing that he knew for certain was that his squinting and nodding wasn’t going to fool her one bit.

He’d half imagined that Leta would be overjoyed to see him. But he could see that such an idea was built largely on fancy – on the incident in Stover’s tavern and the few words they’d exchanged on the street afterward. He wished, for the twentieth time, that he’d thought all of this out long ago. He’d come to no end of trouble in his life because he failed to think things out. Ten minutes of good, hard, squinty-eyed thought might have saved him from a doomed marriage, and from the pie and cream trick and the midnight fishing, and he might have done something about his having been swindled out of his house and out of his marbles ... and, well, it was all in the past, wasn’t it? There were more immediate troubles, to be sure. He couldn’t at all read the half smile that played across Leta’s face. It wasn’t, entirely, the look of someone filled with irritation at another person’s presumption.

‘How did you kill the troll?’ he asked, tacking onto a new course.

‘I didn’t kill him. He dropped dead. There were little men in the woods.’

‘Elves?’

‘No. I think they were henny-penny men. They were riding leaves, anyway.’

‘Henny-penny men saved you from the troll?’ Escargot was astonished. Here was an unlooked-for mystery.

‘I don’t think they killed the troll to save me. They were killing the troll when I walked into the clearing. The troll looked like he was buried in a leaf pile, but he wasn’t. The leaves were swirling around him, thousands of them, and henny-penny men riding them, sticking the thing with little spears. You wouldn’t think that a henny-penny man spear would amount to much when it came to trolls; they must be dipped in poison of some sort. The thing saw me, I ran, it chased me, and not fifty yards out onto the meadow it dropped. And I saw a curious thing, too, when I made for the woods again. There was a party of goblins, I don’t know how many, and the henny-penny men were after them too. There was a goblin dead already, lying in the stream, and another that was dying.’

‘Vicious little things,’ muttered Escargot, mystified.

‘Goblins?’

‘Yes, them too. I meant henny-penny men. Lucky they didn’t get onto you.’

‘They might have easily enough. The goblins might have drawn them away, though; they must have been following me, and have been, off and on, since we started upriver. They’re all minions of the dwarf, you know, are goblins.’

‘But not henny-penny men. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose. What do you have to eat?’

‘Fish!’ cried Escargot, brightening. He was happy, for once, to be able to do something for Leta, even if it was simply to cook her up a piece of fish. They went off to the galley together by way of the library and captain’s quarters. Escargot was mightily proud of the enchanted quality of his craft, although he knew that such pride was foolish, since the building and outfitting of the ship had had nothing to do with him. So he kept himself from saying anything that sounded boastful, although he did point out that he might quite likely possess one of the largest G. Smithers collections in two worlds, counting those he’d left with Professor Wurzle.

They ate fish, but Leta was quiet and moody, thinking, no doubt, that at any moment a fog might rise or that evening lay only a few short hours away. Escargot didn’t say much about his conversation with Captain Appleby. He knew only enough about the mysteries that were afoot to alarm her, not enough to explain much. She, however, told him a thing or two that
he
didn’t know, and that set him to thinking that whiling away the afternoon talking over fishbones mightn’t be wise, even though somehow or another he couldn’t think of a more satisfactory way to while away an afternoon. Not that he was particularly fond of fishbones.

Leta had, indeed, been fleeing from the elves. They’d slipped up on her early that morning and had hauled her off to their galleon and locked her away below decks. Captain Appleby had been full of assurances that they’d see to her safety, that she wouldn’t be harmed, that within the hour they’d be airborne and they’d carry her beyond the reach of the dwarf, who intended, they claimed, to kill her. The dwarf needed a blood sacrifice, and the blood must come from a harvest maid. The dwarf was a necromancer, said Captain Appleby, an enchanter from the Dark Forest, and was bent on launching – or finishing, as it were – a battle that had been partly decided millennia past. He would destroy the elves if he could. He would bring the moon plummeting out of the sky. He would cast the land into darkness. There was a certain collection of what seemed to be marbles, oddly enough, that he needed in order to accomplish his task. He had those now, due to the stupidity of a man named Escargot. He had his harvest maid too. He’d arrived, finally, on the meadows where the last great battle had taken place. That very evening might spell doom for them all.