The Stone Giant by James P. Blaylock

Author:James P. Blaylock [Blaylock, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781936535644
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency
Published: 2012-06-26T06:00:00+00:00

He was up with the dawnlight, navigating past a low island in the river. Hovels on stilts lined the water’s edge, and a score of fishermen waded in the low water, tossing nets into the departing tide. There were a good two miles of coastline cut by jetties and piers along which Leta and the dwarf could have moored their rowboat. Looking for it in among the quayside bustle would have been futile. There was nothing to do but press on, to assume that they’d been bound upriver and that they hadn’t any intention of returning. Escargot could see, through the periscope, the long, broken-down row of canneries and old houses where he’d lost them two hours earlier. From a quarter mile out to sea some of the houses looked stately and grand, for the broken windows and cracked doors and peeling paint were masked by distance. Farther along lay the new harbor. Fishing boats were docked along the wharves, and hundreds of sailors and laborers scurried like bugs, loading kegs and bales, shouting orders, and generally carrying on.

In ten minutes the harbor was behind him, and the houses and shops along the shore thinned to nothing. Boatyards with skeletal hulks on trestles took their place, and then those too gave in to low marshy tidelands peopled by pelicans and gulls and an occasional dilapidated shack. Beyond rose a range of forested, coastal hills, covered on the lower slopes by houses. Then there was nothing but open land and trees, and the delta funneled down into a real river, broad as a lake. A wide channel cut the river in two at midstream, and it seemed to Escargot, in the glow of the fire-quartz lamps, that the channel was prodigiously deep. He sped up, taking a look through the periscope now and then just in case a village would sweep into view. There was nothing, though, but an occasional farmhouse above the river, with an acre of pasture along either side and now and then a short dock running out into the water.

It seemed futile to stop. It was no more likely that the two had put up at one farmhouse than at another, and although there were boats tied up at the docks, it was impossible to say that they were the rowboat he was looking for. Somehow he had the idea that if the two had gone ashore at some house along the river, it would be a particularly gloomy and uninviting sort of house, that the nice, cheerful houses with their happy cattle and smoke from cooking fires lazying up the chimneys wouldn’t agree with the two.

It was late afternoon when he passed the first village. It was on the southern shore, and he’d sailed entirely past it before he spied it through the scope. It wasn’t much of a village, in the shadows of the overgrown forest, only a scattering of houses along the bank, backing up onto what might have been its only real street. Escargot piloted the sub around in a big circle, looking for a place to heave out the anchor.

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