The Stone Giant (14 page)

Alive, he realized abruptly. The man inside seemed to be looking out at him, though the surface of the sea was too full of chop for him to be sure. He shoved his head under and opened his eyes, but that just made it worse—nothing but blurry lamplight and shadow confronted him. Then he cupped his hands across his forehead and blew them full of air, peering through the bubble into the face of the scowling, black-haired man, who piloted the thing, not a sea monster at all, but an undersea boat.

A moment later the craft was afloat, bobbing on the moonlit ocean. A hatch popped open amidship and a head poked out—not the head of the pilot, but of a short man with whiskers and wearing a striped stocking cap. He hauled a wooden ring out from within the ship and flung it at Escargot, nearly banging him atop the head. Escargot held onto the ring and to the rope it was tied to and was dragged to the boat, which had, it seemed fairly certain now, been the demise of the
Flying Scud
. The biscuit sailor had been right: deep-sea pirates, he had called them, accurately enough.

If they’d given the galleon and her crew no quarter, then what could Escargot expect but death at their treacherous hands? But better that than to drown. He half clambered and was half dragged up the side of the craft, and he hadn’t strength enough left to haul himself into the open hatch when he arrived at it. It felt as if he’d metamorphosed into some sort of jellyfish—a very cold jellyfish. His hands and feet were worthless to him. The whiskered man cursed him roundly and yanked on his arms, tumbling him head foremost into the hatch. He clutched at the iron rungs of the ladder, then collapsed all of a heap on the deck below, lying there like soggy old newspaper. The whiskered man strode away down the dimly lit companionway, leaving Escargot alone. In a moment, when the warmth of the interior of the vessel had begun to thaw him out and his feet had begun to feel like electrified sponges, he flopped over and pulled himself up to sit against the wall.

The companionway was aglow with the light of a thousand tiny stars—chips of fire quartz mined by dwarfs beneath the Emerald Cliffs on the edge of the White Mountains. Escargot had read about it in Smithers. And in the university at Monmouth there’d been an entire chandelier strung with it that lit the Hall of Geology. It burned, or so said Smithers, for close on to five hundred years once it was exposed to the atmosphere or was dropped into water, but it was wonderfully rare, most of it trafficked by light elves. Only occasionally did a crystal fall among men. Below the chips of fire quartz was a frieze of jade and copper, running the length of the companionway. It was all elf runes, depicting heaven knew what sort of story. Perhaps, thought Escargot, it was instructions—on how to open the hatch, say, or what to do in case an octopus climbed in at the window. The vessel, clearly, had been built by elves. It was laden with magic. The very contrivances that propelled it had to have been the product of enchantment.

He became aware of a low hum deep in the hull of the craft somewhere. It sounded for all the world as if it were coming from miles off—a sound carried on wind. He stood up and tested his pincushion legs, then slogged along toward the door through which the whiskered man had disappeared. It wouldn’t be at all a bad idea, he decided, to confront the captain of the ship, to inform him of the men on the mast, who might quite easily still be saved. There was profit in it. The captain could sell the lot of them into slavery in the Wonderful Isles.

There was no latch or knob on the circular copper door. Escargot poked at it, effecting nothing. Then he knocked and hallooed, but it was such a solid contrivance that it was like knocking on stone, so he gave off and sat back down. Almost immediately the door slid open and a face peered through; not the whiskered man this time, but a lean, squinting face with tarred hair and a long scar down its cheek. ‘What?’ said the face.

‘I’d like to talk to the captain,’ said Escargot stoutly, nodding at the man as if he meant business.

The head disappeared and the door slid shut. Escargot sat in silence for a time, then banged on the door once more. Again it opened and the same face thrust through. ‘What now?’

‘About talking to the captain ...’ Escargot began, but the man interrupted him.

‘You can’t talk to the captain,’ he said. ‘No one talks to the captain. The captain talks to you. He talks; you listen.’

‘There’s a half score of men from the galleon, afloat on the mizzenmast. They were drifting east when the sun set, and so was I. They can’t have drifted much farther or faster than I did, so they’re probably roundabout. We ...’

‘We don’t do nothing but sail on. We’re bound for the Isles. Your men on the mast are all dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Every blessed one. Eat by sharks, the whole lot of ’em. Nothing left of ’em now but trash for the smelts to pick over.’

Escargot sat staring. ‘Murderers,’ he said thickly.

‘Complain to the captain,’ said the man, and started to shut the door.

‘By heaven I will!’ shouted Escargot, leaping up. ‘Let me at him!’

‘No one talks to the captain. Didn’t I tell you that? Are you deaf, mate, or stupid? If I was you I’d shut up; that’s what I’d do. I’d shut up and keep shut up.’

And with that the door closed. No amount of hollering and threats would open it again. Escargot was awakened hours later and led toward the stern, where another door opened onto a wide room. A suit of clothes hung over the back of a tooled leather chair, and a plate full of food sat on a table. He was left without a word. The clothes fit well enough, and the food was good. He feared at first that it might be poisoned, but what sensible pirate would save a man from drowning and then poison him?

He was quite clearly in the captain’s quarters. Books lined the walls, thousands of them, tilted and stacked and braced with great gemstones and with corked specimen bottles in which floated tiny sea creatures. There were shelves of nautical books and of geology and geography and chemistry. Great, dusty atlases lay heaped on the floor, and Escargot recognized G. Smithers among the novels. A bank of lamps dangled from the arched, ebony joist that spanned the ceiling, each lamp a chunk of fire quartz dangling from a brass chain. The floor was wood—pegged rosewood and oak, from the look of it, inlaid with ivory and jade and silver and emerald. Much of the marquetry was lost beneath chairs and cabinets, but it seemed to depict the ocean bottom, aswarm with odd fishes and lorded over by a weedy, pale sea god leaning on a trident and casting four golden coins onto a shelf of rock.

In the middle of his peering at the floor, he heard what sounded like organ music. At first it blended with the deep and sonorous hum of the engines, but when he cocked his head and listened, it was quite clearly something else. It seemed for all the world to be coming from an adjacent room.

The door to that room he discovered, had a knob, which turned easily. The door swung open to reveal a room very nearly the size of the one in which he stood. One of the long walls was windowed with broad portholes, which looked out on the dark and silent ocean. A pipe organ stood against another wall, and sitting at it, moaning away on the keys, was an elf, his black hair combed back theatrically, his hands and arms hovering and dancing and sweeping back and forth with exaggerated intensity.

Escargot watched respectfully, looking around him at the oceanic wonderland of bottled specimens that lined the second long wall. There were squids in jars and the carcasses of dried devilfish. A collection of eyeballs of decreasing size was clustered on one shelf—the first eye big around as a hat brim as if it had been plucked from a nautical behemoth, and the last eye so small as to be invisible. There were jellyfish and chitons, octopi and urchins—the creeping denizens of tidal pools and the phosphorescent monsters of deep-sea grottoes.

The organ music gave off abruptly. The elf sat as if listening to the echoes of his playing, echoes that resounded in his mind. Escargot cleared his throat. Very slowly the elf turned on his stool, cocking an eye and screwing up his face. He ran the fingers of both hands through his hair in a gesture of tired despair, and then waved roundabout him, first with one hand, then the other.

‘With whom am I about to be acquainted?’ he asked Escargot, very formally but in a high, piping voice that was utterly at odds with his black hair and dramatic mannerisms.

‘Theophile Escargot. And you are Captain ...’

‘Perry. No more nor no less than Captain Perry of the
Omen
, my good fellow, cast off from the great mass of human misery and degradation in an undersea boat, and there to carry out a private struggle against all that smacks of the treachery of the surface world.’

Captain Perry’s eyes had an odd look in them, as if he’d just then seen some stupefying and terrible thing, crawling up the wall, maybe, right behind Escargot’s head. Escargot smiled, not knowing whether to look over his shoulder or to wait for Captain Perry’s fit to pass. He glanced around him, but there was nothing to explain the look, the rolling of the captain’s eyes. When he looked again into the face of his host there was only silent amusement painted across it. The elf winked at Escargot and nodded toward the bottled eyeballs.

‘These are my children,’ he said, gesturing widely.

‘Of course they are,’ agreed Escargot, edging back toward the door.

‘A man would guess that the greatest of them, the eye of the great, oceanic narwhal, is the one which pleases me most, the gem of my collection.’ He raised his eyebrows as if to allow Escargot to respond.

‘Of course,’ said Escargot, ‘of course. The great narwhal. It had quite an eye on it, didn’t it? Big as anything.’

‘But a man is a fool,’ cried the elf, squinting fiercely. ‘This, sir, this is the prize!’ And with that he clambered precariously up onto a chair and snatched down the last of the jars. ‘This, I say, is the purpose of my odyssey through the seas.’ He held the jar out for Escargot to inspect. In it was nothing at all, it seemed, beyond a scattering of sand grains on the bottom.

‘What do you make of it?’ asked the elf, almost whispering.

Escargot cleared his throat and bent toward it squinting. The elf waited. Here was another Professor Wurzle, thought Escargot, stark raving mad for salamanders and weeds. ‘Fine specimen,’ he said, nodding wisely. ‘You don’t see many like that one.’

‘Phaw!’ cried the elf, waving the sloshing jar in Escargot’s face. ‘You don’t see anything at all, do you? Admit it!’

‘Well, now that you mention it,’ said Escargot, peering uncomfortably into his pipebowl.

‘Hah! That’s because, my land-lubberly friend, to your halfblind eyes there is nothing at all in this jar. Nothing! But I can see it. It’s vast as the ocean to me, vast as the heavens that are nothing but fish, fish, fish! The beast I plucked from the sea was himself almost invisible. A gummidgefish, it was, that I searched half a year for. And if it weren’t for my powers of observation, I wouldn’t have found it either. I’d be searching still. But I excised its eye, didn’t I? When I say I’m a man who searches after trifles, you’ll know what I mean by it, won’t you?’

Escargot nodded sagely.

‘Hah! cried the elf, as if to imply that Escargot’s nodding was worth nothing to either one of them. He put the jar back and climbed down off his chair.

‘Captain,’ said Escargot, ‘there is a grave matter which I’d like to discuss with you if I might. Some few crewmembers of the
Flying Scud
, the galleon you sank off the island yesterday evening, were alive and floating on their dislodged mast. They could still be alive. Your man with the pigtail tells me that they were eaten by sharks, but I find it unlikely that he could be certain of such a thing. Now I have no understanding of your purpose in staving in the side of the galleon, but surely there is no profit in letting those men drift until they slip from their perch and drown. We must find them without delay, sir.’

‘Sharks is it!’ cried Captain Perry, slamming his fist into his open palm. ‘There’s precious little difference, my uninformed friend, between the common oceangoing shark and the thing that walks upright on the land with an eye toward murdering his brothers. No sir, not a thing. They’re creatures of a kind, mast or no mast. Drink?’

‘Thank you,’ said Escargot, accepting a snifter of brandy. ‘What I mean to say ...’

‘What you mean to say is that you understand nothing, sir. Not one blessed thing. My vow is to look upon the faces of men no longer, and it makes little difference to me if the faces sit astride a drifting mast or peer past spectacles in a haberdashery. And you, my fine, drowning gentlemen, must steel yourself for the same fate. Do you follow me?’

‘No,’ said Escargot. ‘Will you save the lives of those men?’

‘What men is that?’ asked Captain Perry, giving Escargot a look.

‘Why the men off the island! The crew of the
Flying Scud!’

‘Sounds rather like a cow, doesn’t it? I haven’t seen a cow nor any other land creature for half a lifetime.’ Captain Perry heaved a sigh and shook his head, as if remembering.

‘Listen to me!’ shouted Escargot, in a sudden rage.
‘Will
you search for those men?’

‘Off the island, do you say?’

‘Off the filthy island! Afloat on the mizzenmast!’

‘Impossible, sir. That island is two score leagues to westward in an ocean vast as the aether. We’re bound for islands smaller yet. For islands tiny as the eye of the gummidgefish. And any man that goes to sea on a mizzenmast is a fool and deserves what he gets, which will, if I’m any judge of it, be a deep and watery grave.’

Escargot stared at him. The man was obviously mad. He’d sailed all his sense away. Every last pennyworth of it. Humoring him, Escargot could see, would accomplish more than raging would. ‘Why did you save
me?’

Captain Perry smiled. ‘One might suppose that a man committed to warring against all that dwells on land and that ventures out onto the sea is a wicked man, a man without pity and compassion and remorse. But one is an ass. That’s the long and the short of it. In you lies the proof. You floated helpless there, adrift, food for the creatures of the sea. And I took pity on you, didn’t I? I fed you. And a very nice meal it was. What do you suppose the meat was? Pork shoulder? Veal?’