Authors: James P. Blaylock
The wall of the trench along the port side fell away, revealing a long sort of plateau on which were heaped the ruins of an ancient city: broken columns and toppled statues, all of it wound in waterweeds and covered with sprouting polyps. A thousand nautili darted across the ruins, as if searching for something one of them had lost, and the long, cylindrical shadows of cruising sharks passed over them now and again and then disappeared into the darkness of the ruins. Beyond, where the ledge narrowed again, there was a sprinkling of lights, like starlight bright enough that it shone at midday despite the sun. Escargot hovered along beside them. Fire quartz is what it was.
The trench was shot through with fire quartz, tiny crystals at first, just chips that shone against the darkness of the rock ledge. But as the vessel fell even deeper, the light outside grew even more intense, and quartz crystals thrust from the wall like spikes, casting rainbows of shimmering iridescence as if the crystal itself were dissolving in the seawater.
Escargot slowed and stopped the submarine, allowing it to drift slowly downward. If a man could break off even two dozen such crystals, that man might be able to trade them for—what? Anything. There would be no more bartering for boots and jackets and marbles and pies. He could buy what he chose. He could ride upriver to Twombly Town and buy up Stover and Smeggles and just about anyone else he was inclined to buy and then have them all pitched into the river. There must be some way to accomplish the task. Captain Perry’s bottled whale eyes and octopi, after all, must have been harvested from the bottom of the sea. How did Captain Perry go about it? It might, of course, be a little bit mad to attempt any such experiments at such depths as these. But then Escargot wasn’t in any terrible hurry. He was just launching out, after all, and here was an indication that he might do much better at the submarine trade than he had any reason to hope for.
He’d dropped past fifty feet of crystal—so much that the fiery gemstones had begun to seem just a bit commonplace—when he saw, waving out from the face of the ledge, a succession of single strands of broad-leafed kelp that seemed to have been secured to the stones not by the fingery holdfasts with which kelp clung to wave-washed rocks, but by rope of some sort, or wire, or thread-like filament. They’d been tied there, it seemed, and were pulled surfaceward by a host of bubbles that clung to the leaves. The strands of kelp seemed to be almost crawling along the face of the ledge, nosing along like eels.
Escargot angled the submarine in for a closer look. It was a curious business, kelp at that depth. And the bubbles themselves seemed to be creeping about, or rather something within them was creeping about. They quite clearly weren’t empty. He squinted through the glass, imagining that he heard a distant tinkling sound, like glass wind-chimes in a feeble little breeze. One of the kelp strands lazied along through the water toward the window of the submarine, as if the kelp were as interested in him as he was in it. It bumped gently against the glass, and a bubble that clung to one of the leaves seemed to hop along toward him, very slowly, elongating itself with each jump, flattening when it touched, then springing back into shape. It edged up against the window, and Escargot found himself looking into the tiny face of a henny-penny man.
The hands of the little man were thrust through the sides of the bubble, as if he wore the bubble as an altogether suit with the pantlegs cut off at the knees, and in one hand he held a tiny rock hammer. He was altogether human, tiny as a field mouse, but with a jowly, elongated face that seemed to owe a good deal to fishy ancestors of one sort or another. And he was clothed. Escargot had always wondered if henny-penny men wore clothes. There was no reason to suppose otherwise, really. Everyone else did. It made it seem about twice as ghastly, however, that the horrible Uncle Helstrom smoked the bones of these poor devils in his pipe. It was like smoking an elf. He’d heard—or rather he’d read in Smithers—that henny-penny men lived in the sea, and that they migrated upriver to spawn, then drifted back down again on leaf boats and on pieces of bark. But he’d had no idea that they mined fire quartz.
Another dozen kelp tendrils lazied along toward him, not drifting on currents, but propelled, somehow, by the tiny men. More bubbles pushed up against the window, looking in. They seemed to be unhappy henny-penny men. There wasn’t a one among them who didn’t have a scowl on his face. And who could blame them? It was a fearsome life they led, wasn’t it? Escargot waved cheerfully. Little men, after all. A person might carry such a thing in his coat pocket and hold conversations with it in his idle hours.
He heard the tinkling again—just the echo of it—tink, tink, tink, very slow and very close. Then another tinkling joined in, and another. They were tapping on the glass of the window, tapping out a greeting, perhaps. Escargot waved again, then sat up horrified in his seat to see a little star-shaped bit of glass chip out from beneath the hammer of the first little man who’d come to investigate him. Three more joined him and set in at the chipped spot, hammering away now in a fury. Escargot slammed the propulsion lever downward, canting away into the abyss. Henny-penny men shooshed topsy-turvy off their kelp leaves and spun round in the sudden current. One, his bubble having burst, clung somehow to the window for a few wild moments, his face pressed against the glass, his hair roiling wildly about his gaping eyes, before he catapulted off and disappeared.
The submarine careered off a jutting rock with a clank that made Escargot wince. He held his breath, fearing that the window might burst and that he’d ripped a hole in the hull, certain that in moments the sea would rush in on him and he’d drown, a victim of vengeful henny-penny men. What in the world, he wondered, did they want to attack
him
for?—savage bunch of little boggers. Did they think he was after their fire quartz? As if they didn’t have enough and to spare. Perhaps they thought he was Captain Perry and held a grudge against him from some earlier villainy.
Then he realized that he had his pipe in his mouth. Maybe that was it. They thought he was going to smoke a bowlful of them. The mere sight of the pipe might have set them mad. Perhaps the dwarf had mixed so many of them into his water-weed blend that the entire race lived in fear of being smoked. Stealing their quartz, it seemed, would take a bit of doing, beyond the problem of venturing out of the submarine a thousand fathoms beneath the waves.
There as no time to study it. Something loomed ahead—a vast, domed shadow—a wall perhaps, that would signal that he’d come to the end of his journey, that Smithers was wrong. But it wasn’t a wall. It was merely the edge of the broad vein of fire quartz. Beyond was darkness—a shadow so deep and vast that the glow of the gemstones dissipated in it like steam into the sky.
It wasn’t solid; it was the vast arch of an open door, and beyond it Escargot could see a jumbled coral reef and a scattering of fish, startled, apparently, to see him suddenly appearing there out of the light. There was something about the darkness of Smithers’ door—for that’s what it had to be—that seemed to be the product of enchantment, ominous enchantment, as if he might drive into it and simply vanish.
But he’d come too far in the last days to hesitate. He plunged along at full speed. The door seemed simply to disappear, puffo, into nothing. No shadow had passed over the vessel. There had been no moment of darkness. He turned the craft about, and there in front of him, a wash of light from the fire quartz glowing through it, was the dark, arched doorway again, hovering on the sea bottom as if someone had hung black muslin from sea-hooks. He’d gone through it, whatever it was. It had seemed to have been nothing, and yet the water surrounding the submarine now was lit by sunlight, not fire quartz. But it couldn’t be. It must be the middle of the night, and the submarine had been immensely deep.
He was struck with the certainty that he had found exactly that land he’d hoped to find. He was in Balumnia, or at least he was on the bottom of one of the Balumnian oceans. He had to be. He’d certainly gotten to somewhere inexplicable, and there could hardly be such a passel of magical lands lying about on the sea bottom that he’d stumbled into one he hadn’t anticipated.
A sea turtle, vast as the side of a house, swam lazily past, paying him no mind, and so Escargot set out to follow him, worrying idly that among all the charts in the ship, there wasn’t one that mapped Balumnian oceans. They were all worthless to him. He had quite likely lost himself entirely, and he’d wander round and round in uncharted waters, fishing out of the hatch, unable to find the shadowy door back into his own world, and he’d have to satisfy himself with the knowledge that Smithers had been right again and that Wurzle, regardless how vast his knowledge of salamanders might be, knew nothing of the nature of books.
The sea turtle was quite evidently bound for the surface, and he reached it, with Escargot in his wake, in minutes. The submarine nosed out of the water and settled down onto a rolling, overcast sea. He cast his anchor and pushed out through the hatch, pausing for a moment to breathe the cool, salty air and to pack tobacco into his pipe. He lit the tobacco, puffed once or twice, lit it again, and took a look around. Ahead of him was trackless ocean. He very slowly turned, tired, all of a sudden, of being a submarine captain, and there, humping up on the horizon, was a dark shoreline. If it was an island, it was a vast, low island, for the ends of it were lost in the gray distance. Balumnia; that’s what it had to be. Escargot slammed shut the hatch, leaped along the companionway to the pilot house, and set a course straightaway. He was bound to be in port by nightfall, and to be in the position once again of being able to
choose
his friends rather than falling in among lunatics and murderers by happenstance.
A great city stretched along the coast. Like Seaside, it wrapped around a shoreline formed by the merging of a river and the sea. The river, however, was several times the size of the Oriel, and the mouth of the delta was a confusion of islands and long, empty sandspits and vast bridges that humped up like the back of a sea serpent, connecting one island to the next. On the shore beyond the last of the islands and bridges was a forest, shady and dark beneath the midafternoon sun, spreading away into the distance and creeping down almost to the rocky beach. It was a wild and uninhabited coastline beyond the city, and long windblown wisps of low cloud, gray-purple in the distant sky, made it seem as if it were the painting of some ancient wildness, and that at any moment a giant might appear, striding along the trackless strand.
Escargot floated some two miles out, a spyglass cocked to his eye. Along the mouth of the delta a dozen fishing boats worked the ocean with nets. A scattering of pleasure boats tilted before the wind, driving along in a cluster toward the city. It mightn’t, of course, be a good idea just to go sailing in among them in the submarine. Like the enraged henny-penny men, they might suppose him to be some sort of nemesis, and bang at his submarine with hammers. It was possible even that Captain Perry and his men had ventured into Balumnian waters, playing pirate and then disappearing into the depths. If so, the Balumnians wouldn’t be likely to be in a welcoming mood. He’d take a lesson from the entire Seaside fiasco, he decided. Stealth would profit him most.
The fishing boats either clustered together at mid delta or struck out north into the open sea. None sailed south along the forested shore. Escargot, then, angled toward the last few lonesome bridges and surfaced in the still water beneath a vast and stony span. The tide was out. Wide mudflats stretched away up the shore, revealing clusters of oysters in the silty delta sand and scallops on exposed rocks. Floating on the sunny ocean was the shadow of a bridge-tower, the pinnacle of its roof shorn off and a turret on the side crumbled and decayed, as if the city had, years past, held out against an enemy that had stormed the bridge. Escargot had vague memories of such a bridge in Smithers, but in a Smithers he’d read as a boy, for the memory was as decayed and deserted as the bridge-tower above, and it served only to make him wonder once again about the books. Smithers, quite clearly, had been to Balumnia. No other answer would do. And if Escargot was smart, he’d spend a few weeks rereading Smithers, from end to end, since it seemed he was doomed to stumble into mysteries that Smithers in some lost chapter or another had warned of.
He seemed to be comparatively safe there beneath the bridge. Not another living soul was visible—a fact that was unsettling. Why the local fishermen shunned the southern shore was a mystery worth thinking about. It seemed to him that the sooner he learned something about the world he’d found, the less trouble he would fall into. He’d swim ashore and walk into the city, trying to make it seem as if he hadn’t strolled in from the south—there was no use arousing suspicion—and, if nothing else, he’d find some way of buying or borrowing a rowboat to replace the one demolished by Captain Perry’s treasure.
Entering the city was simple. Unlike Seaside, Landsend hadn’t any gates or guards. It was too big, perhaps, to be easily enclosed. There was a ragged seawall that held out> the tide along the oceanside, but it was a defense only against the sea. Broad meadows and tidal flats, cut with placid canals and hedgerows of willow, separated the city from the seawall and from scattered fishermen’s huts that stood on stilts among the shore grasses. Hulks of rowboats lay gray and rotting and curled through with trumpet flower vines, and here and there a fisherman sat on a tilted stoop mending a net, none of them showing the least bit of surprise as Escargot trudged past smoking his pipe.
The occasional huts gave off into a shantytown of plank leantos and tents made of old patched sails. Cooking fires burned beneath cast-iron pots, and a score of ragged children raced and shouted, whacking a wooden ball along between the shanties with curved pieces of driftwood. It wasn’t at all cold. In fact the breeze that blew at Escargot’s back was a warm breeze, scented with the muddy smell of marshland and the deep, silent smell of warm evening ocean.