The Stone Giant Read online

  Escargot told himself it was a woodpecker of some nocturnal variety, tapping holes in the bark of trees to hide acorns. But he didn’t half believe it. And more than once he heard the titter of laughter somewhere off in the fog. It was as if someone were laughing at him, an unsettling notion altogether, and one which led him to keep an eye out for goblins, although it did seem unlikely that any of the little men would leave the darkness of the woods. There was no good in being careless, though, it had already been made very clear to him that goblins wandered by night farther up the Oriel River valley than most villagers liked to believe.

  His thoughts always returned home, however, even though he’d never cared much about such things before. A home had simply been shelter, and one shelter was as good as another. A man ought to have any number of them, he told himself, so that if one wore out he could move on to another. He wouldn’t grow too fond of any that way and go moping about through the silent evening streets if his house burned down or was blown away in a hurricane or if he was pitched out of it for eating a pie with cream. Perhaps it was the same way with children. It mightn’t have been a bad idea to have a couple in reserve. But he hadn’t any except little Annie, had he?

  After a week of such nights he found his clothes and books and assorted odds and ends in a heap on his front porch, or on her front porch, such as it was. He left most of them. It was then that he began to feel very sorry for himself. It was all very well to be tramping about in the foggy darkness when one knew that just over the hill lay a bed with a feather comforter, a fireplace loaded with last year’s oak logs, and a waiting family. But it was another thing when just over the hill lay nothing at all but more hills.

  Perhaps it had been his fault. He’d been hasty, compounding the pie crime by leaving without a word. What had happened, he wondered, to his marriage. He wasn’t prime husband material; that was certain. When it came to being husband material, he was pretty much tangled together out of old rags. He liked fishing a little too much, and he believed that work was something a man did when he had to. He had always been able to get along well enough without it, especially for the last couple of years. A little bit of barter at just the right moment would keep things afloat – a squid clock, perhaps, for a pair of boots; the boots for a brass kaleidoscope and a penknife with a bone handle; the knife for a hat and the hat for a coat and the kaleidoscope rented out for a penny a glimpse. A man could keep busy forever, couldn’t he?

  It made him tired to think about it, but not half as tired, apparently, as it had made his wife, who had pointed out that he was ‘too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work.’ Escargot’s defence – that he had an artistic temperament suited more to philosophy than to work – had rung false even to him. He had no excuse; that was the truth of the thing. But why should a man go about with an apology on his lips? Why, in fact, did a man have to beg to eat his own pie? The thought of pie reminded him somehow that the nights were getting longer and colder, and he slipped once again into remorse. He took to hanging round the old house in the mornings, careful not to be seen but half hoping that he would be, as if by magic something would appear to make everything all right again.

  What appeared was Gilroy Bastable, heading along very officiously toward town, happy with himself. Bastable shook his head. Everyone in the village, by that time, was familiar with Escargot’s fate, and sympathy, said Bastable, was pretty much on the side of the wife, lamentable as it might seem. Stover had preached an entire sermon on it. It was something in the way of a lesson, wasn’t it? And this business about stealing pies ...

  Tie,’ said Escargot.

  “Pardon me?”: asked Bastable amiably.

  ‘There was only one pie involved. And stealing doesn’t enter into it, does it? A man’s own pie, after all, made of peaches from his own well-tended garden.’

  Mayor Bastable cast a glance toward Escargot’s weedy orchard with its overgrown trees. He widened his eyes and shrugged, as if to say that he’d only been passing on what he knew about the case. ‘You shouldn’t have walked out on her, old man.’

  ‘I went fishing,’ said Escargot, forgetting in a rush everything he’d convinced himself of only moments before. ‘She pitched me out without a backward glance. Two years of bliss up the flume. Women are mad is what I think. Chemistry is what it is. I’ve ...’

  Bastable put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head, a set smile on his lips. ‘We know just how you feel,’ he said, as if such a thing might be vastly calming. ‘We all of us hope you’ll come to terms with this little sadness.’

  ‘We!’ cried Escargot, shrugging off his friend’s hand. ‘Terms! Damn all terms!’ And with that Escargot stormed away toward the village, his teeth set with determination. He’d leave; that’s what he’d do. There were grand places in the world. He’d go to the coast, to the Wonderful Isles. Twombly Town could writher in its own slime; that’s what. He smiled grimly. He rather liked that last bit. Writher was a good word – if it was a word. If it wasn’t, it should be, he decided, slowing down and angling toward Stover’s Tavern.

  The tavern was almost empty. It was early, after all. Candles burned in wall sconces, throwing cups of sooty yellow light up the plaster walls. A half hour earlier the floor had been covered with sawdust and shavings and littered with nut shells and sausage rinds and greasy newspaper. It was swept clean now, though, and the tavern maid, Leta, was scooping up heaps of debris with a broad, flat shovel and emptying it into a bucket. A lock of dark hair had fallen across her forehead, and she shoved at it, pausing to poke it in under a red bow at the top of a heavy braid. Immediately the lock mutinied and fell back across her forehead. She looked up and frowned at Escargot, who stood in the doorway gaping at her.

  He’d seen her for the first time a month earlier at Professor Wurzle’s lending library. They’d both been after the same book, or at least books by the same author: G. Smithers of Brompton Village. There was nothing Escargot liked to do more than to lie up with a book and a pipe in the afternoon heat, under an oak if one was handy, or beneath the docks along the River Oriel. He couldn’t much read at home. The interruptions set him crazy. There was always something to do – trash to be hauled away, weeds to be pulled, boxes to be got down off closet shelves, a roomful of furniture to be rearranged a dozen ways, only to end up back where it started. His wife would say something to him from another room in a voice calculated to carry about eight feet. What! he’d shout, knowing that he was expected to drop the book, frivolous thing that it was, and trot round to lend a hand – to squish a harmless bug most often, a bug that was minding its own business, looking for a quiet place to read a bug story and put its feet up, but finding instead the business end of a shoe. Escargot had been the unwilling accessory to countless murders. But he was being petty. He had promised to catch himself if he was in danger of becoming petty, especially out loud. That sort of thing made a person tiresome.

  He watched Leta shove the bucket out the back door and pick up a fat gunny sack. She dumped shavings from it onto the cleaned floor, kicking them under tables with her feet. At the lending library she’d found a book about the harvest festival at Seaside, and Escargot, catching sight of the title, had said truthfully that he’d always wanted to visit Seaside, days away down the Oriel, for the yearly festivals held at the time of the autumnal equinox. She had been to more than one. She’d been born in the foothills above Seaside, on the eve of the festival, and so was a harvest maid, even though she wasn’t a dwarf. She was about five feet ten inches tall, only an inch shorter than Escargot.

  He’d made her promise to bring the book back quickly, certain at the time that his interest would appear feigned and that she would think he was being fresh. He wasn’t, though. He was married, wasn’t he, and had been for two years, and although some might say he was lazy and thought of himself as often as he thought of anyone else, he had his code. He hadn’t had his fingers crossed when he’d promised to be true to his wife. But he had found himself worrying that
Leta would think his attentions at the library less than sincere, and then he had worried about being worried, because the worry seemed to throw a cloud of doubt over the code he prided himself in having. Fat lot of good all the worrying had done him. He might as well have tossed all codes out the window for good and all. But he knew he couldn’t do that, even now. He was still married, even if he was living in an abandoned windmill and eating fish and berries. Who could say, the condition might prove to be temporary.

  He sat down at a table against the wall and smiled at Leta when she looked up at him. She pulled a pocket watch out of her leather apron and gave it a look. ‘It’s an hour before we open,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Escargot, taken aback. Did she think he was after a glass of ale at that hour? This is an unfortunate start, he thought, and realizing as he did so that he had been after a glass of ale at that hour and that he hadn’t ought to be intending to ‘start’ anything. He grinned – foolishly, it seemed to him. ‘I was just wondering how you liked the book. I was passing by and saw you through the open door, so I thought I’d come in out of the fog and keep you company.’

  ‘Which book was that?’

  ‘Harvest Moon, by G. Smithers. From the Professor’s. Remember?’

  ‘I remember having told you I liked it very much, just days ago. Next to the melon bin at Beezle’s market.’ She looked at him strangely, as if beginning to suspect he was either stupid or up to something.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. I’ve been a bit ... upset, I suppose is the word for it.’ He started to go on, to explain things, but he caught himself and stopped. There was no use boring anyone. ‘I’m about halfway through it. I always have a hard time with Smithers. I can’t tell what’s true and what’s not. A few years ago, before the Professor took over the library, old Kettering had Smithers filed under history. The Professor says that Kettering was an idiot, that Smithers is full of tall tales. But that wasn’t the way Kettering saw it. I figure that half of what anyone says is nonsense, including Professor Wurzle – especially Professor Wurzle. And including G. Smithers, for that matter.’

  Leta scattered one last handful of shavings under a corner table, hefted the half-empty sack onto her shoulder, and set out toward the back of the tavern. Through the leaded glass of one of the front windows, Escargot could see that the fog was thinning. Pale sunlight shone through it, turning the mist white, as if the windows were glazed with milk glass. The appearance of the sun, for some reason, made him feel almost contented for the first time in two weeks. He pulled his pipe from his coat pocket and pushed tangled tobacco into it, wondering idly if it wouldn’t be a good idea to mix a few shavings of aromatic cedar into the tobacco, just to give it a try. Probably not, he decided. It would likely blaze up like a torch and burn the whole pipe. Leta would be certain he’d gone mad.

  She appeared again, rolling up her sleeves. ‘So which half is true and which half is made up?’ she asked, pulling a handful of pint glasses out of a sink full of clear water.

  Escargot shrugged, eyeing the glasses. ‘Have you read the Balumnian books?’

  ‘Only one. The Stone Giants. Do you know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Escargot. ‘That’s just the one I want to ask you about. I’ve been having the most amazing dreams. Foolish, of course, like all dreams, but different too. There’s this sort of face, you see, watching the dreams.

  And it’s not my face. That’s the peculiar part. Take a look at these.’

  Escargot removed his coat. Slung around his left arm and neck hung his pouch on a long leather thong. He yanked his arm through the thong, and without pulling the bag from around his neck, emptied into his hand agate marbles – blood-red and big as cats’ eyes.

  ‘Marbles?’ asked Leta, raising her eyebrows at Escargot as if she didn’t share his peculiar enthusiasm.

  ‘I’m not at all sure. There was a bunjo man through a month or so back. You might have seen him around the village hawking whales’ eyes. I bought one of those too. Massive thing in a jar. When I saw it I told myself, this is just the thing you’ve been waiting for. They weren’t cheap, but my wife’s got a pile of the gold stuff. She’s pretty much swimming in it, though it’s precious little of it that she lets me on to.’ Escargot caught himself. Here he was speaking in the present tense. As if he had a wife in any real sense. Leta had gone back to washing glasses. ‘Anyway,’ he said, gazing out the window at the dwindling fog, ‘ever since then I’ve had these dreams, like I said. I don’t think the whale’s eye had anything to do with it, because I traded it away to Gilroy Bastable a week later for Smithers’ White Mountains books. All twenty-five of them. The first volume is signed and there’s a page of manuscript laid in.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Escargot proudly, noting that mention of the Smithers books had seemed to warm Leta up a bit.

  ‘Would you like a pint?’ She asked, raising a glass, it’s close enough to eleven to warrant it, I suppose.’

  ‘No he would not like a filthy pint!’ shouted a voice from the hack, and Stover, bent and scowling, strode in and slammed his fist onto the first handy tabletop. Stover, who doubled on Sundays as a church parson and tripled on Saturdays as a judge, was taller by a head than anyone else in the village. But he was opposed on moral grounds, in spite of his owning a tavern, to eating and drinking, or at least to eating, and so was astonishingly thin. The weight of his head seemed to have bent him almost double, as if he were always looking along the ground for some lost object – a penny, perhaps. His eyes, to balance things, rolled upward and half disappeared under his eyebrows, which beetled out over his nose like the eaves of a house. He leaned against the table and glowered at Escargot.

  ‘That dear woman ...’ said Stover, wrinkling an acre of forehead and scowling slowly and deliberately.

  Escargot thought at first that Stover was referring to Leta, who rolled her eyes, set down the glass she was holding, and walked past Stover toward the rear of the tavern. A door slammed shut. Stover heaved with exertion. What in the world, wondered Escargot, did the nitwit suppose was going on?

  ‘The great shame of it,’ cried the tavern keeper, raising a finger aloft and twirling it in a tight little circle, ‘is that the law hasn’t a cage to pitch you into.’

  Escargot looked over his shoulder, wondering briefly if there wasn’t someone else in the room who had so excited Stover. But there was no one. Escargot raised his eyebrows theatrically and pointed at himself, cocking his head in a questioning way.

  ‘Laugh if you will!’ shouted the enraged Stover, squinting and pounding again on the table. ‘But let it be known to you, sir, scoundrel that you are, that that dear, poor woman and her precious baby child are a dozen times better off alone than they were two weeks past. It was a charitable thing you did, abandoning them that night. Robbing your own wife blind while she slept. Lying up in a drunken stupor until dawn, then stumbling home, intent, no doubt, on some further mischief. But that sort of charity, sir, will...’

  Escargot stood up slowly, interrupting the innkeeper. I’ll have to hit him, he thought, taking a step forward. He was struck suddenly by the notion that there might easily be more to the affairs of the previous weeks than he’d known. Stover trod back, gaping at Escargot in fear and surprise, and groped in his own coat pocket, unearthing a silver flask. He unscrewed the lid, tilted the bottle back, and swallowed three times, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fishing float jerked by a trout.

  ‘Medicine,’ Stover gasped, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. He stepped back, fumbling at a chair as if to use it as a weapon. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

  A door slammed and Leta reappeared, stopping abruptly at the sight of the scowling Escargot, who had slipped the leather thong from around his neck and was slapping the heavy bag full of marbles into the palm of his hand. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ she said, pulling out her pocket watch and twisting the stem in order to force the issue. Time to open. Put that away,’ she
said to Escargot. ‘Don’t turn yourself into more of a fool than you already are.’

  ‘Listen to the little lady,’ croaked Stover, pulling at the top button on his shirt.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Leta, giving him a look. She stepped across to the keg and drew a pint of ale, knocking off the head with a wooden ruler and sliding the glass across the bar in Escargot’s direction.

  ‘I won’t serve his kind here!’ cried Stover, working himself up again.

  ‘I know,’ said Leta, ‘that’s why I did it. But that’s the last pint I draw, old man, so you’ll serve everyone else. You paid me yesterday evening. You don’t owe me a thing for this morning.’

  ‘You can’t!’ began Stover, but he found himself storming at nothing. Escargot glanced through the window at Leta disappearing through the thin fog, walking briskly up Main Street in the direction of Beezle’s market. ‘You’ll have to pay for that pint,’ said Stover weakly, sliding in behind the bar. He fumbled out his flask one more time and had another go at it. Escargot stared at him, drained the glass, set it on the nearest table, and dropped a coin into the dregs. He turned and walked out without a word – very cool, it seemed to him. Once on the street, though, he set out at a run.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted, catching sight of Leta’s red blouse a half block up. She stopped, gazing in through a shop window until he puffed up behind her, ‘Perhaps I can buy you lunch.’ He took off his hat and gave it a nervous twist, grinning at her. Then it struck him that the grin looked foolish, so he wiped it off and looked serious instead.

  ‘I don’t think that would work, would it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Give it a while,’ she said, smiling just a bit. ‘Maybe I’ll see you at Wurzle’s.’

  ‘Maybe you will,’ said Escargot, watching her fade into the fog for the second time in five minutes, having no idea on earth what to make of her.