The Stone Giant

by James P. Blaylock

  Ahead of him rose the north wall and the river gate. One sleeping guard sat slumped on a chair before it, his hat having tumbled off, his axe leaning against the timbers of the gate beside him. All was quiet. There lay his gyroscope vendor, his devices stowed in the steamer trunk next to which he slept, the trunk cutting the sea wind and shading his face from moonlight. Beside him were Escargot’s bags. It would be an easy enough thing to pluck them up and be gone.

  He tiptoed past the sleeping vendor and grasped the bags, then turned and reached into his shirt for his pouch. The leering face of the gyroscope man hovered a foot from his own. In the man’s hand was a club.

  6

  The Flying Scud

  ‘My stuff,’ began Escargot, nodding toward the bags slung over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s the man!’ cried a figure that crouched out from under a cart at the curb. Escargot spun around to face him. It was a tall man with a bruised cheek – the man he’d hit that evening. Three dwarfs in uniform sat up in the bed of the wagon, shrugging off the tarpaulin beneath which they’d been waiting.

  Escargot leaped atop the trunk, swinging his bags at the gyroscope trader. The man waded into them, tangling his stick into the straps and pushing forward in an effort to topple Escargot onto the ground. The dwarfs clambered off the wagon, shouting to wake the street, and ran round to cut off his escape. Escargot yanked his bags, hoping at first to pull the stick from the man’s hands, then hoping merely to free the bags. He felt himself going over backward. The gyroscope man grunted at him, flailing away with the trapped stick like an eggbeater.

  Damn the bags, thought Escargot, landing in a crouch. One of the dwarfs was upon him, brandishing an axe.

  ‘Cease!’ the dwarf cried.

  Another hopped toward him from the other side, grinning smugly. The gyroscope man tugged his stick free, dropped Escargot’s bags, and backed away, leaving Escargot to the guards. But Escargot had had enough of the guards – the guards meant being hauled deeper into inexplicable plots, a sudden end to his new life as a wanderer. The dwarf to his right dropped his axe and reached into his tunic, hauling out a set of manacles.

  Escargot grabbed the bill of the dwarf’s circular hat and yanked it down over his eyes, then jumped past him. He heard the rush of air from the hurriedly swung axe of his companion, and stormed into the face of the third dwarf who sailed in, axe upraised.

  Escargot jumped onto the front stoop of a row house, grabbed a long, wooden flowerpot full of geraniums, and hurled them into the faces of all three dwarfs as they swarmed up the several stairs. Two went over in a heap, the third pressed himself against the stone bannister and then came on again, just as Escargot, his luck with him this time, wrenched the door open and leaped in, smashing the door shut on the hand of the pursuing dwarf, then opening it for the instant it took for the hand to be jerked free. He threw the bolt and spun round to confront a wizened little man in a nightshirt.

  There was no time to exchange histories. ‘Sorry,’ said Escargot, pushing past him and running down a long, low hallway. ‘Quite,’ shouted the man after him, almost apologetically. The end of the hallway opened onto a kitchen, and the kitchen onto a walled backyard. Escargot was out through the kitchen door even as he heard the clatter of feet behind in the hall. He loped across a cropped lawn, jumped onto a wooden table, and boosted himself onto the stone pilings of the wall, ready to leap down onto whatever it was that lay on the other side. But what lay on the other side was a rocky beach, forty feet below. Already the three guards shouted on the lawn, scrambling toward the table. The dwarf in the nightshirt held his back door open, watching the melee in wonder. Escargot bent onto his knees, reached down, and hauled the table up the wall, nearly losing his grip, then swinging it up and over, not stopping to watch it sail down onto the beach. He was off, loping along the top of the wall, watching the copings and the flying backyards on his left.

  The wall was broad enough, certainly. It was like running along a road. But he avoided looking off the edge to the right anyway. He would put some distance between him and the guards, then find his way – where? Out of the city? They’d watch the gate for a week. He was a doubly desperate criminal now that he’d beaten the guards with a planter box and broken into an innocent man’s house. A glance back over his shoulder betrayed the running forms of the three dwarfs, but they rapidly fell away. In a moment they’d give off the chase and set out to alert their companions. Ahead of him lay a good two miles of seawall, then the coast road gate. He could reach it before the news of his flight could; there was little worry about that. But what would he find there? Uncle Helstrom, perhaps. Something cluttered the wall a hundred yards down – machinery of some sort. It was the scaffolding of the masons who had been working at the face of the seawall the day before.

  Escargot looked back; no one pursued him. The beach below was dark and empty, and the galleon still tossed on the moonlit ocean offshore. A long rowboat pulled along just beyond the breaker line, as if it had launched from the galleon. But it couldn’t conceivably have anything to do with him. His way lay clear. He stepped out onto the scaffolding, looping one of the safety ropes under his arms and tying it in a bowline. Then he unlatched the ratchet catch and played out line. The scaffold jerked toward the sand a foot at a time. He cast one look downward, just to keep an eye on the rising beach thirty feet below, then twenty, then fifteen. The scaffold dropped once again and hung there, the rope going slack in his hand. He slouched out from under the noose round his chest, crawled from beneath the safety net that stretched around the perimeter of the scaffold, latched onto the wooden boards, and jumped, falling with an ankle-twisting scrunch into the soft sand.

  He rose to his feet and hobbled a few steps, unsure of his ankle but finding that the pain disappeared with each step. He set out to the west, intent on clambering across the rocks on the seaward side of the gate and fleeing up the coast. The rowboat had run up through the surf, and half a dozen men clambered out, hauling it up onto the sand. One of the men waved at him as the six of them trudged up the beach. Escargot waved back. There was no need to be uncivil – or to seem suspiciously hasty, for that matter. Although, heaven knew, lowering himself as he had down the seawall in the middle of the night must seem suspicious enough.

  The men on the beach seemed pleasant sorts; they were grinning, anyway. One wore a billed captain’s hat, and was limping and bearded. He waved his pipe in Escargot’s direction.

  ‘Have you got a fill of tobacco, lad?’ he asked from ten feet off. ‘Mine fell into the drink when we come in through the surf, and none of these lads can help. I’d be happy if you’d got just enough for a fill.’

  Escargot stopped. Of course he had enough for a fill. A man shouldn’t be tobaccoless at that hour of the morning. He looked back toward the wall, half expecting to see an army of dwarfs scouring along the copings. But there was no one. They’d wait for him at the gates. It would be hours yet before they realized that their scaffolding had been messed with. By that time he’d be gone, and the captain would have had his smoke. ‘Certainly,’ he said to the smiling captain, pulling his pouch from his coat. He smiled back, offered up the pouch, and was bashed on the head from behind. He saw the gray-brown sand rushing up at him, then saw no more.

  * * *

  He awoke in the hold of a ship. It was dark as coal dust: neither day nor night, just black. The ship heaved on the swell, nosing up so that Escargot nearly slid down the deck into the stern, then plummeting down the back face of the swell so that when Escargot tried to stand, holding onto the back of his head to keep the throbbing from cracking his skull in two, he pitched forward onto his hands and knees, nearly somersaulting into a heap of gunnysacks.

  He’d been shanghaied. That was the long and the short of it. The galley offshore had been after crewmembers, and had put in at Seaside thinking that there’d be no end of drunken revelers to haul away to sea. And they were right, all except for the drunkenness, anyway. It had happened just like it might ha
ve happened in a G. Smithers book. He should have seen it coming. But how could he have? A man offers another man a fill of tobacco and gets bonked on the conk. It wasn’t the most predictable thing in the world, was it? At least he was safe from the guard and from the clutches of Uncle Helstrom.

  There was something unsatisfactory in the rolling of the ship. Each rise and fall seemed to tug on whatever it was that connected his stomach to his throat. And the closeness of the hold – the smell of bilgewater and mildew and rot – lent an air of desperation to his plight. He was sick, or was going to be. There were no two ways about it. He stumbled forward, cracking into a post, then held on as the ship heeled to starboard in a plunging rush.

  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.’