The Stone Giant (38 page)

Whatever the dwarf was about, he’d gotten underway, and in earnest, too. A thin thread of moonlight glowed through the fissure between the great, tilted rocks. Escargot made for it, wary of goblins, and peered through at the sloping meadow on the far side. There was Abner Helstrom, conjuring with his bones and his weeds. Beyond, bivouacked on the meadow, were no end of goblins, clustered around fires that burned with the brightness of metal glowing in a forge, but which cast almost no light at all beyond a very small circle. The goblins nearest the flames were almost white with the radiance, but some few feet away they were cast in shadow, so that it was impossible to say how many goblins were massed there. In among them were the great, humped shapes of trolls, sitting stupidly in the darkness. Overhead, flitting and wheeling, flew thousands upon thousands of bats, as wild, it seemed, as the goblins themselves and swooping and darting above the flames with unnatural energy. The goblins danced and leaped and wrestled and cackled, and it seemed certain that the dwarf had situated them a distance from his conjuring so that they could cut their foolish goblin capers without spoiling his work.

Why
he’d encamped them there was impossible to say, but it seemed reasonable that they were the dwarf’s army, waiting, perhaps, for the arrival of the elves. Captain Appleby and his men would be sorely outnumbered, even if they were joined by a flotilla of elf galleons. The dwarf would be very happy, most likely, to merely waste the elves’ time away in pointless battle with goblins and trolls, in order to allow him to work his mischief unencumbered.

With a suddenness that threw Escargot onto his face, the ground heaved and shook and then grew still. Uncle Helstrom skipped before his fire, laughing shrilly, delighted with himself. He pounded on the earth with his staff, blasting sparks out of dirt and setting off more rumbling in the earth. A great cheer arose from the massed goblins, who almost certainly had no idea what it was their master was about, but happy with the idea that the night was filled with first-rate confusion.

Escargot pulled himself farther along through the defile, crawling on his belly into the open shadows. He could see the witch then, stooped among some stones below and to the left. She seemed to be asleep, or in some sort of muddle, and there hovered roundabout her head what seemed to be a little misty cloud, torn by the night breeze but continually re-forming, only to be torn to shreds again. He wondered momentarily if the cloud was Leta, or rather was the wraith that was all that was left of Leta at the moment. His wondering was interrupted when, as if he were lying atop a rug that had been jerked out from under him by unseen hands, he found himself rolling and bumping across the stones, smashing finally against the wall of the sheer rock, which was tilted now at an even more precarious angle than it had been moments before. The rumbling beneath him in the earth grew louder, and the echo of the beating heart, which he’d first heard downriver days before, seemed to be the sound of someone beating with a tree trunk on the stretched hide of the hollow earth.

There was a movement behind him – not the punchy capering of goblins, but the slow, creaking heave of moving ground. The half-buried ridge of rock that had seemed to him to resemble a leg hours earlier shifted and tilted and thrust up suddenly, cascading dirt and pebbles. There could be no question now about imagination. It was an awakening giant, is what it was, and almost as soon as he realized it and leaped away so as to get out from under the towering rock, he saw the smooth hummock of stone that he’d taken for the top of a giant’s head stir itself suddenly, shift, and jerk over sideways, revealing a deep and cavernous eye that seemed to stare up at the moon.

Escargot suddenly had no further desire to hide among the rocks. He stepped down in a crouch, keeping well out of sight of the witch and well to the back of Uncle Helstrom. He threw himself into the high grass of the meadow, rolling down a little decline and then scuttling up again until he could just see over the top of a rise. He expected that at any moment the ground would heave and he’d find himself standing on the shoulder of a giant, or that the goblins, seeing him suddenly from below, would come cackling up toward him.

The dwarf meddled in his bags, yanking out the little wooden box. Escargot smiled. He had no idea what would happen, but he smiled anyway. The hills that hid the southern horizon seemed to have come suddenly to life, and where moments before there had been a valley, now there was a precipice, and then the precipice would shake itself and seem to become the hunched back of a crawling giant. The goblins and trolls capered in wild abandon below, and there arose the sound of great copper gongs being beaten, and the noise of a multitude of flutes blowing in weird harmony. It was as if the night and the countryside had been animated by the dwarf’s enchantment and that even the trees standing in little copses roundabout the meadow would in moments begin dancing in slow circles.

Escargot squinted at the firelight above. He could see that the dwarf held in his hand a little heap of marbles –or rather of eggs. The witch had struggled to her feet and waited there as if in expectation. The fire leaped and died and leaped again, and in the sudden glow the dwarf held in his hand not a half dozen marbles, but a tangle of little wriggling creatures. Fish! Escargot cried, half aloud. The dwarf shook his hand as if he’d just then discovered a spider on it, and he leaped back grimacing, dumping the little fish into the fire. Nothing at all happened. The goblins continued to cackle and dance and whistle on flutes, but the hills and rocks seemed suddenly to slump.

Half-risen, giants collapsed in heaps, whumping up clouds of dust, and the rising heartbeat dimmed as if a door had been shut in front of it.

Uncle Helstrom raged around his fire in an absolute fury, stomping and kicking and scrabbling in his heap of dried bones. Escargot could hear him cursing and railing as he piled fuel onto the coals, flinging on a tangle of river weeds and fanning the whole smoking business with his hat. He beat with his staff against the ground and shouted incantations, and once again the heartbeat filled the night air and the mountains shifted and moved.

The piping and gonging fell off, and was replaced by the bellowing of trolls and wild gabbling of goblins. The multitude on the meadow seemed to surge up toward the hills, but Escargot couldn’t at first see what it was they were rushing at. Then, rising above the rocky prominence, their tattooed sails illuminated by moonlight, three elf galleons scoured along on the wind, and following them in formation sailed three more, the cannon of the first trio already thundering brimstone and sparks as they came around in a line and fired a broadside into the surging army on the plain, driving toward the massed goblins and trolls, elfin archers firing from the rigging, pistols blazing along the rails.

Escargot cheered in spite of himself, then fell silent and dropped flat onto the grass. When he looked up the dwarf was still at it, working furiously now, but the witch seemed to have stirred. She stood some few feet farther along in his direction, and she stared straight at him. He stared back. Some little part of her, he knew, was Leta. The two of them – he and the witch – had a score to settle between themselves. Maybe she knew that too. Even as he thought about it, the moon edged out from behind a rocky hilltop, and moonlight illuminated her. For a moment it was Leta who stood there, but only for a moment, and Escargot realized, when he saw her, that he’d been thinking that he might, if he moved very quickly, dash across the few yards that separated them and bowl the witch over – knock her down, bang into the dwarf’s fire. But the glimpse of Leta, false as it was, evaporated the idea.

The witch seemed to stumble, as if she’d been pushed from behind by a ghost, and she waved both arms before her, waggling her fingers in the air as if wrestling with a spirit or conjuring wildly. Escargot could see what appeared to be a swirling little cloud above and behind her, pale against the dark stone and almost opaque in the moonlight. And the moon, just then, seemed to Escargot to be many times its usual size. It filled a quarter of the sky – maybe a trick of the dwarf’s enchantment, or maybe the doing of the elves.

A stone the size of a grapefruit banged down next to his head, and he shouted in surprise, cutting it off instantly for fear of being heard. But of course the witch already knew he was there, and what she knew Uncle Helstrom knew, or so it seemed. It was time to move. If he’d been serious about taking center stage, well, here was the curtain call. He leaped up, feeling at his belt for his pistol and dashing toward the comparative shelter of the rocks, where the witch still grappled with spirits.

The meadow, suddenly, was bright as day. The moon seemed to have
become
the sky. It spread across the sky from the treetops of the oak woods to the southern hills. Silhouetted against it, their sails billowed and their bowsprits cleaving heavenly seas, three more elf galleons drove toward the meadow. There sounded a flourish of trumpets that sent a thrill through Escargot. Here was something to see. They’d have the dwarf now for sure. They’d sail over his head and douse the boneyard fire with a hose. They’d drop a piano on the head of Uncle Helstrom and smash him into pudding. The goblins would flee; the witch would melt into syrup.

But just then, just when one of the galleons – the
Nora Dawn
– seemed intent on doing just that, the awakening giant in the rocks behind the dwarf stood up and shook itself out. It towered above the meadow, gray in the moonlight, its face creased with fissures, its head swiveling on a creaking, stony neck. The dwarf cast handfuls of sparks toward the four corners of the compass. He stretched his hand into the fire, plucked out heaps of glowing coals, and pitched them this way and that. The
Nora Dawn
swept down upon him, running before a wind that seemed to blow straight out of the face of the moon. Elves lined the rail, archers and marksmen, waiting for Captain Appleby’s command – waiting until they couldn’t miss.

The dwarf paid them little heed. He pounded with his staff, flinging hot coals at the moon now, and just as Appleby shouted, just as the archers drew their bows taut and the dwarf looked up at his fate, the stone giant stretched out a vast, crumbling hand and plucked the
Nora Dawn
from the sky. He looked at it wonderingly, like an enormous baby peering at a windup toy. The elves, still on deck, stared at him in frozen horror, hearing, no doubt, the wild laughter of the dwarf below them.

Escargot shut his eyes, thinking of Boggy and Collier and the captain, and when he opened them a second later, the ship was gone, disappeared behind the pinnacle of stone. The giant had set them down on the meadow, and stood now looking at his hands as if mystified by them, as if he hadn’t seen them in a long, long time. Then he opened his mouth and croaked, like two stones being rubbed together. He looked at the moon, and a frown of sudden hatred crossed his face, as if he remembered an old grudge. His arm swept out, striking at it, and a hail of rock rained down over the meadow, scattering goblins in a wild panic.

Uncle Helstrom danced before his fire. More giants loomed up from among the distant hills, creaking and moaning. The elfin ships scattered before them, anxious to avoid the fate of the
Nora Dawn,
whose crew appeared from beyond the rocks, running along onto the meadow to engage the goblins. A half dozen crew members, Captain Appleby among them, rushed in at the dwarf, weapons upraised, but the stone giant swept the lot of them onto their backs like nine pins, then set about trying to squash them with the tip of his first finger. The elves, though, were quicker than he, and they scuttled away after their companions, who by now were into the thick of the goblins, and were shooting and hewing and shouting.

The galleons above swept along beyond them as close as they dared, firing into the goblins, chasing down trolls. But even as Escargot watched, two of the ships collided, one of them splitting open and tilting sideways, spilling elves onto the heads of the throng warring on the meadow.

The broken ship sank heavily in their wake, and cracked asunder when it struck the meadow grass. The other galleon limped toward the woods and the river, intending, perhaps, to set down in the cove.

An explosion of spark and flame erupted from where Uncle Helstrom conjured at the feet of the giant. The dwarf himself crouched behind the great foot of the creature, peering past the dirt and roots clinging to it. At first nothing changed, except that the moon seemed at once to have shrunk and its brightness to have diminished. The old woman ceased her struggling and hobbled toward the dwarf. Escargot bounded after her.

He could hear little above the booming of cannon and the creaking of the hills and the shouting of the multitude on the plain, but just then, in the middle of the cacophony, a voice seemed to shout into his ear. ‘Drop!’ it commanded, and he dropped, hearing the thunk of a wooden club smash into the rocks above him. He rolled sideways, lurching to his feet and drawing his pistol at the same time. Before him, crouched and ponderous and with its mouth open and drooling, lurched a troll half again taller than himself. And behind the troll, his cutlass glinting in the moonlight, stood Captain Appleby. The cutlass clanked off the heavy, rusted chain wrapped about the beast’s head and shoulders, and shivered in Appleby’s hand, then dropped to the meadow, the captain grabbing at his wrist.

Escargot fired straight into the troll’s face, managing to astonish the creature and to shatter its ear, but to miss doing any telling damage by a remarkably wide inch or so. The thing bellowed and raised its club, swinging ponderously at him. Escargot turned and ducked. There was no time to meddle with pistol balls. It hadn’t been Appleby who had shouted the warning. The voice had been the voice of a woman – Leta’s voice. He was sure of it. But Leta was nowhere around, and the troll was lurching forward even as Appleby retrieved his cutlass and took another swipe. Escargot drew his own blade and swung the ponderous thing like he was clearing brush, and though neither one of them managed particularly to hurt the beast, it was dumbfounded, it seemed, by being accosted from two sides at once, and it turned first toward Appleby, then toward Escargot, flailing away ineffectively at both.