The Stone Giant (25 page)

They pushed him along, through the crack in the cliffside and into the hill itself. The sound of the rain was replaced with deep silence and the echo of scuffling feet. From below him, somewhere in the rock and earth, came the sound of a distant rush of water, of a cataract tearing along through subterranean caverns like blood coursing through veins. It was dark as pitch, save for the light of a dozen flickering torches that threw the shadows of the goblins across the cavern walls. At first Escargot concentrated on remembering the twistings and turnings of the tunnel and counting the number of adjacent tunnels they passed, but it was like the counting he’d attempted in his first submarine outing; it soon came to nothing and he lost all track of direction and distance.

The tunnel opened out finally into a great, high-ceilinged hall. Bats swooped and darted in the light of a bonfire, smoke curling away overhead into dark crevices. Torches ringed the walls, and the hall was alive with shadows and lights and goblins. The greatest of them wasn’t above three feet tall, and all were skinny and disheveled and dirty and with hair that seemed to grow in tufts and sprigs and needed cutting.

A great iron tripod sat square in the center of the fire, and from it dangled a pot not at all unlike the cauldron full of diamonds and stick candy, only this one was many times the size of the other – suitable for stewing up a horse. Or a man. Escargot looked around. There must have been a hundred of the creatures, none of them engaged in anything that made a lick of sense, except one, who kept pinching at Escargot’s legs as if to assess how meaty those legs might be. Others gabbled and spit and wrestled and threw fishbones at each other in a continual wild fury, and it was a restful few moments when at least one of them didn’t have his hair set on fire by a prankster messing with a torch or by rolling straightaway into the bonfire. They’d rage back and forth shrieking, wisps of hair sparking and flaming, until by sheer wild effort the fire was beaten out.

A throne made of sticks and dried bones and with human skulls as ornament sat in one low corner. On it slouched a tremendous goblin – fatter than the rest and less given to burning off his hair. He grinned past filed teeth, eyes rolling. He yelped and stood up when the lesser goblins hauled Escargot toward the throne, and he clapped his hands together like a child who’s been told there’s something wonderful, perhaps, for dessert. Escargot didn’t at all like the look of it.

He considered for the tenth time the likelihood that he could kick his way free, that he could bowl enough of the little men over to get some running room. But they would trip him up for sure. He’d have to wait and watch. If they tried to pitch him into the stewpot... He’d heard stories about what goblins ate—fish and river trash mostly, but now and then a lost traveler as a delicacy, and his horse too, which they’d consume hide and hoofs and head. The great goblin sat himself down on the throne once again, picking at his teeth with a sliver and smacking his lips as if in anticipation. He reached idly down the side of his grisly chair and came up with a clump of weed, which he thrust into his mouth and champed away at, shreds of the stuff raining across his chin.

Escargot stared at him, unbelieving, as he stuffed another clump between his teeth. It was kelp that he chewed – lilac kelp, a little heap of it that sat half dry and half rotten in a basket next to the throne. Escargot had been out-trumped and wildly so. Apparently when Uncle Helstrom had a running start he could do far better than a wink. This beat the highwayman pose all to smash, and it suggested, suddenly and finally, that Escargot had muddled along into the middle of some trouble far more vast than he’d bargained for. It appeared from just about every angle that he’d quite likely come to the end of that trouble at almost the same moment that he’d realized he’d come to the beginning of it. The stew pot, it seemed, was meant for him.

A trio of goblins shuffled past, bent beneath the weight of double buckets on sticks stretched across their shoulders. They clambered up onto a rickety platform beside the fire and dumped the contents of the buckets – water, it looked like – into the cauldron, then crept away after more. Others tossed in fish, tearing out mouthfuls on the way, and still others appeared with heaps of water-weeds and cave snails and dead bats, tossing the lot of it into the pot. The fat goblin giggled the whole time, smacking and nodding and, Escargot was astonished to see, gnawing on a piece of stick candy in between handfuls of kelp, letting the sticky drool run down over a leather jerkin that had been stitched up out of hastily tanned bat skins.

‘Your lordship,’ Escargot began, thinking that there was nothing to be lost by exercising some diplomacy.

The goblin grunted and looked at him through eyes reminiscent of Captain Perry. He ran the back of his hand across his mouth, then licked it, then, apparently forgetting himself, bit it with a certain amount of satisfaction before howling and jerking it away, then giving Escargot a hard look, as if to blame
him
for treachery. Escargot tried again, bowing this time and saying, ‘I’ve journeyed far, O goblin king, and ...’ before the goblin stood up and spit – not at Escargot, but at one of the goblins that flanked Escargot and who had, apparently, fallen asleep as he stood there. The spitting, however, had no effect on the creature, so the fat goblin reached across, twisted his nose, and pulled out a great tuft of his hair, at which the sleeping goblin awoke with a shout and bit Escargot on the arm.

‘Hey!’ cried Escargot, surprised. His cloak and jacket and shirt kept the teeth from reaching his skin, but the whole idea of it was ghastly enough that Escargot picked the little goblin up and threw him spinning into a knot of water-carrying goblins, buckets and bats and snails cascading away across the stone floor of the hall and a general shouting and tumult arising. I’ve had it now, Escargot muttered, and he set his feet, fearing an onslaught. But the goblins howled and raged, beating each other with empty buckets, scratching and biting. Even the fat king, who’d gone back to eating kelp and stick candy and squinting suspiciously past his nose, didn’t seem particularly put out with Escargot’s having misused one of his subjects.

Escargot reached into his shirt on an impulse and drew out the truth charm. It had worked Captain Perry over fairly thoroughly, and it seemed to Escargot that Captain Perry was only a step or two removed from being a goblin himself. It couldn’t hurt, he reasoned, to try it on the goblin king.

The king arose, slowly, staring at the truth charm, like he was setting in to address the multitude before him on a particularly weighty issue, a saddening issue, perhaps, and he knuckled his brow with the back of one filthy hand. He seemed to reel there, remembering past treacheries, past sorrows, and he stepped down onto the floor of the cavern, gabbling suddenly in a rush of nonsensical jabber. He strode back and forth before Escargot, who clutched the truth charm in his hand, hiding it as much as possible. Then, bursting into sudden tears and leaking away like a faucet, he howled and shook his fists at the distance, smoky ceiling, and he stomped his feet as if he’d just as soon pound the whole place to dust as to go on living in it another moment.

The goblins in the hall went back to filling the cauldron and squabbling among themselves, as if that sort of theatrics was entirely in keeping with daily routine. Pitiful lamentations and shrieks were nothing to such creatures, who seemed, in fact, to oppose any other sort of behavior. In moments the king had played himself out. He shook his head and sighed, then sat back down, clapped a particularly fresh-looking hat onto his head, and chomped away at a bulging mouthful of kelp. There hadn’t been much remorse on his part, quite possibly because he wasn’t able to remember anything that had happened longer ago than the week before last. One way or another, Escargot hadn’t understood a word of it. The truth charm was worth nothing here, save, perhaps, to bean the king over the head with when it came down to it.

Escargot was struck suddenly with the hat. He’d seen it before – a flat-brimmed crush hat with a feather. A blue feather. It had been the hat worn by the man in the wagon, the man who’d called him a brigand and chased him with a stick. Around the throne were greasy, recently gnawed bones, any number of them, and behind, in a dim corner half hidden in shadow, was a slumped figure. Escargot couldn’t say for certain that it was a man, or that it had once been a man, because the darkness was too deep there to say that it was anything more than a heap of something– old rags, perhaps. If he’d peered more closely, adjusted his eyes to the shadow, he could have told for sure. But he didn’t. He was suddenly sickened, and the stupid squinting look on the face of the fat goblin, who worked at his teeth again with his sliver, sickened him even more. Come what may, he decided, it would go hard on them when they came for him. It was entirely possible that the poor driver of the cart, with his foolish chin whiskers and his bitten-off pipe, had given Escargot a reprieve, if only a momentary reprieve, by taking the edge off the king’s hunger. The stick candy was dessert. What, or rather who, the next meal was to be seemed monstrously clear.

The king of the goblins grunted suddenly and waved Escargot away, as if he were tired of looking at him, and the little band of goblins that still clustered around hurried him away to a corner, where they left him sitting, unbound, watching the preparations for the coming feast. His thoughts kept coming back around to the slumped whatever-it-was in the shadows and to the basket – his basket – of kelp by the throne and to the self-satisfied dwarf who, by now, was safely gone. He looked around, blinked, stood up, and began to stroll away. Immediately a host of goblins rushed down upon him, gnashing their teeth in such a way that it seemed as if they’d eat him then and there, without salt. He sat back down and they gave up, a shade disappointedly, it seemed to him. Now and then a goblin or a knot of goblins made another rush at him, just for sport, anticipating, probably, that he was going to have another go at escape.

He waited until such interest died down, then set about priming and loading his pistols. At best he’d get two of them, although given his lack of familiarity with pistols of any sort, it was unlikely that he’d hit anything farther off then ten feet or so. Then, of course, they’d be upon him and would be very unlikely to leave him in peace. He managed to spill powder down the front of his jacket, and he lost the first ball when he dropped it and it rolled away out of sight. Crawling around and searching for it would do nothing but attract attention. The spilled gunpowder, however, gave him hope. He knew nothing about gunpowder except that it was wonderfully explosive. A man with a bag of it might cause some concern in a party of idiotic goblins.

He finished loading the pistols, tucked one back into his belt, and jammed the barrel of the second into a little vein of stiff clay that ran along the cavern wall, twisting the gun and digging it into the clay until the barrel was packed with the stuff. Then he stood up. Immediately a half score of goblins turned toward him, ready at the slightest movement to rush at him tiresomely once again. He nodded at them and waved cheerfully at the goblin king, who had slumped on his throne until most of him was on the floor and only his head, neck, and shoulders were still seated. His face had drooped into a jowly frown, like he was thinking of having been cheated once or having been served up a bloody haunch, perhaps, that was tough and needed another hour’s boiling.

Escargot slowly removed the bag of powder from his coat and opened the top. He shouted and rushed toward the bonfire, bowling goblins out of the way to the left and right. With a wild flourish he pitched the bag end over end into the fire so that the powder spiraled out of it, then dove sideways toward the throne of the goblin king in order to be out of the way of the blast when it came. There was a sparking, he could see, and a breathy little whoosh and a bit of blue flame. That was all.

Goblins stood staring, first at the fire, then at Escargot, understanding even in their cheese-like minds that so much capering and throwing and diving must herald
something
. But when nothing at all came of it, they advanced upon him, wary this time. The goblin king waved his stick candy and danced atop his throne. Escargot stood up, pulled a pistol out of his belt, calculating and recalculating whether or not he’d gotten the right one, and fired almost point-blank into the half-empty kelp basket, which catapulted backward, throwing its contents over the floor.

The king looked at it in mild surprise, happy, it seemed, with the noise of the thing and the magic that attended it. He peered warily at Escargot, stepped down off his throne, and snatched the pistol. Abruptly he pointed it at Escargot and shouted, ‘Boom!’ then tilted his head warily at the absence of any further development. The lesser goblins stood fearfully roundabout, chattering among themselves, while their king discovered the moving parts of the pistol and set in to experiment with them. He cocked, then uncocked it, peered down the barrel, and shook the whole works at his ear. Then he cocked it again and pulled the trigger, effecting a click when the hammer fell, but little else save general approval from the gathering goblins, who hooted and yowled and fell upon each other tearing and gouging. Escargot pulled the second pistol from his belt and handed it across, smiling broadly. The goblin king snatched it up, cocked it immediately, and yanked at the trigger.

A terrific explosion crashed off the walls of the cavern, sending the goblins into a wild rout and toppling Escargot over backward in surprise. He had hoped to be a bit farther off when the report came. He rolled toward the fire, dropping the remaining, empty pistol. He was up and running straightaway, not waiting to see what had happened to the fat king, but sprinting toward the entrance of the cavern, which was choked by maddened and befuddled goblins, who rushed down upon him even as he turned and ran in the opposite direction, deeper into the caves.

He cast off his cloak as he ran through torch-lit halls, deeper and deeper, sliding now and then along scree-slippery declines, tripping and falling and jumping up and step by pounding step leaving his pursuers farther and farther behind. What he’d do if he came upon another crowd of them he couldn’t say. Finally the torches gave out and he ran into darkness. He fell once and then decided to slow down. Then he crept along, one hand on the cave wall, one in front of him, conscious in the sudden darkness that the sound of a river filled the passage.