The Stone Giant (35 page)

He pounded at the cabin door, and almost at once Boggy’s voice answered from the other side. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Let me out of here!’ shouted Escargot.

‘You prisoners always say the same thing,’ said Boggy.

‘For heaven’s sake, Boggy. You let Leta go. Why won’t you let me go too?’

‘She’s prettier than you.’

Escargot rushed back across to the porthole, but the little circular view of river and shoreline revealed nothing at all. There was the sound of footfalls on the deck above and more shouting, but from his prison he could make nothing of any of it. He paced up and down the small cabin – three steps this way, three steps that way – accomplishing nothing at all beyond working himself up. He felt like he’d explode if he didn’t get out. Shouting and crying would merely make him look like a fool. Waiting would mean allowing the elves to snatch Leta from the submarine to haul her away forever. He struck his fist into his hand. Boggy or no Boggy, he was getting out.

He slid the chairback under the latch on the door, so that the front legs of the chair angled into the air. Then he climbed up onto the table, brushing his head against the ceiling, and leaped down onto the front of the tilted chair. The door latch broke loose and spun away into a corner as the chair slammed down onto all four legs. The door flew open and Escargot threw himself after it, rolling out into the companionway and springing to his feet. Boggy lay curled up on the floor, holding his head.

‘Boggy!’ cried Escargot, worried at first that he’d hurt the poor elf.

Boggy looked up at him, grinned, and said, ‘I didn’t mean nothing by saying she was prettier than you.’

Escargot started to speak, saw the futility of it, and leaped away down the companionway instead. There was almost no chance that the elves above hadn’t heard the crash of the door flying open, and none at all that they’d fail to hear Boggy, who, as soon as Escargot ran, set in howling and hooting and shrieking in such a way that half the crew was likely to be on them in a second.

Sure enough; as he topped the companionway stairs, there were three elves, Collier in front, far more surprised to see Escargot leaping up at them than Escargot was to see them. Escargot bowled through them, scattering them onto the deck. He shouted a hasty ‘Sorry!’ as he vaulted the deck rail and fell on his back into the river. Before the hue and cry was sent up, he had struck out for shore, and he wasn’t three minutes getting there. He could hear Boggy’s shouts even as he loped away down the river road, and he could hear Captain Appleby shouting back. He felt a little like shouting himself. He’d done very nicely, and the best part of it was that the elves hadn’t the vaguest idea how he intended to get back aboard the submarine. They quite likely wouldn’t chase him, assuming that he was merely making good an escape, and that they could still sail out over the river and find the submarine and somehow drag it up out of there.

In ten minutes he was on the river bottom, slogging along in his rubber suit. He smiled at the occasional fish that swam by, wishing that he could say something to them, and he was half sorry that some deepwater monster didn’t poke its nose at him so that he could hit it. But no monsters appeared. He slipped aboard the submarine and tore off his seashell helmet and suit, leaving them in a heap on the wet deck. Then he dashed out into the companion-way, threw open the door to the library, and shouted, ‘They’re after us!’ to a startled Leta, who was reading a volume of Smithers.

In the pilothouse minutes later he navigated the craft upriver toward the
Nora Dawn.
It would be fun to give them a bit of a thrill. They’d be out of the cove by now and onto the open river. Leta watched him, saying little. There they were, at anchor, right at the edge of the deep channel. They could see him too; there was no doubt of that. He sped forward, angling to starboard into the channel, dropping to twenty, then thirty, then forty feet, until he was certain they could see him no more. He could imagine the faces that Captain Appleby would make. How he’d yell at Boggy now! Escargot grinned. He angled the ship up toward the distant surface. The dark shadow of the
Nora Dawn
floated suddenly above. He drove beneath it, close enough almost to scrape it, and burst from the water at the far side, the nose of the submarine hanging in the air for a moment, cascading water, before slamming down again into the river and settling there. Then slowly and deliberately, as if out on a Sunday outing, he made away upriver, leaving the elves to their astonishment.

He turned to smile at Leta, but he found that she wasn’t there. She’d returned to the library to read her book. Escargot immediately felt foolish. He’d been showing off; that’s what he’d been doing. And Leta wasn’t the sort of girl who cared for showing off. Still, the idea of Captain Appleby standing on the quarterdeck, a spyglass in his hand, about to say something weighty to Collier, and then the submarine, shooting beneath him like that ... Escargot grinned, then wiped the grin away and headed for the library.

Leta was cheerful enough, it turned out. He half expected her to say something about his prank, but she didn’t, which made him feel even more foolish.

‘Well,’ he said, pretending to look at the books on the shelves, ‘we’ve eluded them again.’

‘That we have,’ she said, simply, still reading. ‘Why?’

‘They locked me up when they discovered you were aboard the submarine. They intended to get you back, I think, and then heave away for the moon.’

‘So Boggy was right.’

‘Boggy was right. You’d be beyond the dwarf’s grasp there. But you could never return. I told Appleby that we’d find another way, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Kidnapping you would be the safest and quickest way to foil the dwarf. But I learned one thing anyway. Appleby tells me that you’re safe here. The witch can’t reach you here like she did when you were aboard the steamship. Her magic won’t work through water.’

‘So I live beneath the river?’

‘Well,’ said Escargot, pausing to tamp tobacco into his pipe. ‘No. Only for the moment. The dwarf, according to Appleby, intends to strike soon now – this afternoon, perhaps this evening. We’ll scuttle the lot of them, then, by spending some time under water.’

‘We?’

‘Actually, I’m going back out to have a look around. Something might suggest itself. I have a curious notion that there’s more to this than Appleby lets on. It’s not just a feud between the dwarf and the elves. The whole land seems to be alive with enchantment, and I intend to spy it out this afternoon.’

‘I’m not entirely sure that I like the notion of you spying things out while I sit around safe and wait.’

Escargot shrugged. ‘You’d step ashore and a fog would come up and you’d be gone. That would be the end of it, wouldn’t it?’

Now it was Leta’s turn to shrug. What Escargot said was true. She had no choice but to let him play the hero. That was entirely satisfactory. It was what he’d been aching to get a chance at for weeks. And now with Leta safely aboard the submarine, aboard
his
submarine, he could wade away in his rubber suit and turn his attention toward the dwarf without worrying about her safety. He could slip in and out of shadows, peer at the dwarf from treetops. Something
would
suggest itself – some way to slide in and ruin things for the posturing Uncle Helstrom.

He stepped across to where his fish eggs reclined in their jar, uncorked it, and plucked out the red eggs, setting them along the valley between the pages of an open book and blowing them dry. They were squishy, to a degree, but not soft. Leathery was the word. If he wrapped them carefully enough he could haul them around in his coat pocket without smashing them.

‘Well, I’d like to be off,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you pilot us in toward the cove. Captain Appleby won’t be half quick enough to catch us even if he sees us – which he probably won’t. He won’t expect us to come cruising around now. Then you can take the boat out into deep water again until, what? – say five o’clock – then swing back in and pick me up. Don’t come up above thirty feet, though, especially on toward evening.’

‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ said Leta, saluting stiffly. ‘All hands to the pilot room.’

Escargot smiled back at her, altogether satisfied with himself, and already starting to daydream about how he would put an end to the dwarf’s deviltry, then stride into the river in his seashell helmet, knocking on the hull of the
Nora Dawn
as he trudged along beneath it to the vast amazement of the elfin crew that would be lined up goggling along the railing.

‘There’s a big piece of that fish left, but not much else. When we get out of this maybe we can head across the river and round up some sort of lunch. I asked once before – do you remember? – that day after you quit Stover’s. You said that you wanted to wait a bit. Things have changed now, though. That was about a hundred years ago.’

‘At least,’ she said, sighing. ‘I wouldn’t mind lunch, actually.’

‘Right. Lunch it is, then. It’s a date, isn’t it? I’ll just be away for a few hours.’ In half an hour he found himself once again on the river bottom, striding along through the sand in weighted shoes.

He skirted the woods this time. He was fairly sure that wherever the dwarf was working his enchantments, it wasn’t within the oak woods. Besides that, he hadn’t any real urge to run into henny-penny men, not after the episode with the troll. Evidence seemed to indicate that through some odd fate he and the henny-penny men fought the same battle, both of them in league against the dwarf and his minions. But that was just a hunch. They hadn’t hesitated to come after him with rock hammers when he was under the ocean, had they? It was best to wait for them to declare themselves one way or another.

The afternoon was unusually fine for a late autumn afternoon. There was a chill on the breeze, but it had to work so hard to cut the radiant heat of the sun that by the time it set in on you it had already worn itself out. And there was just the hint of smoke on the air, like pruning fires burning miles away on the grassy floor of an orchard. It was unlikely, though, that there were any orchards nearby, not unless they were tended by goblins, who would as likely as not burn the orchard and leave the prunings lie about. Then they’d burn their hair off into the bargain, in order to avoid haircuts, perhaps.

Escargot stroke along through the shadows, watching the river road for elves and the woods for goblins and trolls, and wondering at the smoke on the wind. If it wasn’t from pruning fires, what was it from?

Dry leaves, newly fallen from the trees, scrunched underfoot, muffled by the moist, decaying leaves beneath them, and Escargot expected to see on each drifting leaf a frowning henny-penny man, navigating on windy currents. He half wished he was small enough to ride on leaves. He could make a boat out of a piece of bark and sail the day away in a rain puddle.

He reached the woods’ edge, finally, stepping in among the last scattered trees and peering out onto the meadows beyond. There was the stream that had undone poor Boggy. There were no elves on the meadow now. They weren’t out searching for Leta any longer. They knew she was beyond their grasp. Escargot wondered what they
were
doing. Holding powwows, probably. Captain Appleby was threatening, no doubt, and Collier was correcting him and Boggy was sticking his tongue out and generally ruining the effect. Every sort of person had his job to do, he thought, taking the long view of it. Henny-penny men mined fire quartz beneath the sea; elves built marvelous contraptions for people like Captain Perry to steal; goblins raged around in an effort to see that nothing ever ran particularly right for anyone, including themselves; dwarfs dug out rubies and emeralds and baked bread and acted very sure of themselves; and men – what did they do? – made fools of themselves, more often than not, while putting on airs. Escargot felt as if he saw things particularly clearly right then, as if the whole world and all its strange caper-cutting was laid out in color in a G. Smithers book on one big, illustrated page.

He shook his head and realized that he’d been standing there daydreaming in the shade of the woods. It was a dangerous sort of daydreaming too. He recognized certain symptoms in it; he had been feeling self-satisfied and clearheaded. It was a smug sort of attitude that seemed always to lead to disaster or humiliation – to goblins coming up out of a hole in the ground and grabbing his ankle, to someone hitting him with a stick, to his talking very solemnly and having a bug fly into his mouth.

Suddenly he heard, very low and distant – as if it were wafting in on the breeze off the river, or as if it were the river itself singing across the stones of its own bed – a sort of deep and tuneful humming. He cocked his head and listened. It had the tone of a church choir about it, and it brought to mind a sentence in Smithers about enchanted breezes drawing tunes out of the willows and cattails along river banks. Could this be part of the dwarf’s magic? Were things starting to stir? But that didn’t seem altogether likely. There was something solid and good about this; it was utterly unlike the random cacophony of noises that had surrounded him that evening in Bleakstone Hollow.

It seemed to be drifting downwind toward him, from somewhere deeper in the woods. He crept along toward it, hunched over, taking cover behind occasional trees and shrubs. Caution seemed to be worth riches to him just then. The music grew louder shade by shade, until it became a separate thing from the sighing of the wind in the trees and from the crick and crackle and rustle of the woods.

There was a movement among the leaves just ahead. He crept toward it, squinting, realizing all of a sudden what it was that was singing; it was henny-penny men, a gathering of them, rank after rank of them sitting atop pebbles, lounging back against leaves propped on their own stems as if the little men sat on hammock chairs.

Escargot lay on his stomach, peering through the brush. One wild-haired henny-penny man seemed to be leading the choir in the last strains of the song. It was a hymn, and no mistaking it. The song trailed off, replaced by the silent afternoon and the lonesome calling of a whippoorwill. There was the sound of henny-penny men clearing their throats and shifting round on their leaves, and Escargot could see some few of them tugging at their shirt collars like bored parishioners seated on Sunday afternoon church pews. The little man before them waved the tiny book in his hand and began declaiming.