Earth and Air Read online

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Troll Blood

  Ridiki

  Wizand

  Talaria

  Scops

  The Fifth Element

  About the Author

  Earth

  and

  Air

  Tales

  of

  Elemental

  Creatures

  by

  Peter

  Dickinson

  Big Mouth House

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved.

  Cover art © 2012 Jackie Morris (jackiemorris.co.uk). All rights reserved.

  Big Mouth House

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.bigmouthhouse.net

  www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  First Edition

  September 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickinson, Peter, 1927-

  Earth and air : tales of elemental creatures / Peter Dickinson. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Changelings, gryphons, and gods get in the way of us mortals who are struggling to find someone to fall in love with, something interesting to do, somewhere to run to”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-058-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-038-1 (trade paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-058-9 (ebook)

  [1. Supernatural--Fiction. 2. Trolls--Fiction. 3. Mythology, Greek--Fiction. 4. Animals, Mythical--Fiction. 5. Goddesses--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D562Ear 2012

  [Fic]--dc23

  2012023764

  “The Fifth Element” was originally published in slightly different form as “Who Killed the Cat?” in Verdict of 13 (Julian Symons, ed., Harper & Row, 1979).

  Text set in Minion Pro.

  Printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by C-M Books in Ann Arbor, MI.

  For ROBIN

  Preface

  Twenty-odd years ago, not long after Robin McKinley and I decided that we should get married and she should come to live with me in England, she was asked to write a short story about a mermaid. She didn’t have any ideas, so one fine evening we walked down to the village pub to try and think something up over supper. By the time we came home in the twilight we not only had several possible mermaid plots but also a grandiose scheme to collaborate on four collections of short stories about the mythical beings who inhabit the four natural elements: earth, air, fire and water.

  I was in the middle of a full-length novel at the time, and when it got stuck, as novels tend to, instead of brooding on the problem I put it aside and wrote a story about a witch’s broomstick. I decided it would do for a start, so I put it in a drawer and went back to my novel. Next time I got stuck I did the same thing. The stories began to accumulate.

  Robin had more of a problem. Her stories kept turning into full-length novels. The world would be a poorer place without them, but it meant that though we started about 1995, we didn’t get our Water volume published till 2002. Fire took another seven years. I couldn’t really complain, as one of my own stories had stretched itself into The Tears of the Salamander.

  But I am now eighty-four. At this rate I’d be ninety-seven by the time Earth sees the light of day. I have no intention of hanging around that long, so when her current novel, Pegasus, originally begun as a contribution to Air, turned itself into two volumes, then three, I persuaded her to let me see if I could find a home for my long-finished stories about the other two elements.

  Here they are.

  —PD

  PS On the excuse that the alien creatures of science fiction fulfil the same imaginative need as the creatures of myth did for our ancestors, outer space being their element, I have included as a make-weight a story I wrote even before these as a contribution to an anthology with the brief that all the stories must some way or other concern a jury.

  Troll Blood

  Mari was a seventh child, by some distance—an afterthoughtlessness, her father was fond of remarking. Moreover she had the changeling look, as if she had come from utterly different stock from her parents and siblings, with their traditionally Nordic features, coarsely handsome, with strong bones, blond hair, and winter-blue eyes. Mari was dark-haired, slight, with a fine, almost pearly skin that burnt in the mildest sun. Her face seemed never quite to have lost the crumpled, simian look of the newborn baby. Her mouth was wide, and her eyes, which might more suitably have been brown to go with her colouring, were of an unusual slaty grey.

  This look, though only occasionally manifesting itself, ran in the family as persistently as the more normal one. There were likely to be one or two examples in any group photograph in the old albums—a grandmother, a great uncle killed in the Resistance in the Second World War, somebody unidentified in a skiing party way back in the twenties.

  There was a story to go with the look. Thirty-odd generations ago a young woman was bathing in a lake when a troll saw her and took her to his underwater cave. Her handmaiden, hiding among the trees, saw what happened and carried the news to the young woman’s father. Her mother was dead, and she was his only child. He at once ran to the place and dived into the lake carrying an inflated goatskin weighted down with his armour and weapons. Breathing from the bag through a straw he found the cave, armed himself, and fought the monster until it fled howling. Then he brought his daughter safely home. Nine months later, while her father was away, the young woman bore a son, so clearly marked as a troll that everyone assumed that he would kill the little monster as soon as he returned. But the young woman stole from her room with the child wrapped in her cloak, and met him on the road and begged for his blessing on his grandson, saying, “Your blood is in the boy. If he dies, I will bear no more children.” The father took the child from her and unwrapped the cloak and saw for the first time the grandson his daughter had given him. He turned and dipped his finger into a puddle by the road and made the cross of baptism on the baby’s forehead. When the child did not scream at the touch of the holy symbol he said, “Whatever his face, there is a Christian soul beneath,” and he gave him his blessing.

  Even as a child Mari had disliked this story. She of course knew it was only a fairy story, but without being able to formulate the idea she felt in her bones that the problem was not that it was false, but that it was fake. Later, when she had learnt more about such things, she realised that it was probably only a product of the great nineteenth century Nordic folk revival, amalgamating several genuinely old elements—the abduction, the underwater journey, the fight with the cave monster—and tacking on the utterly inappropriate Christianising ending that she had so hated from the first. Be that as it may, that was how the look was said to have come into the family. They called it troll blood.

  Mari’s parents were second cousins, in a generation of small families among whom the look had had less chance of showing up, so, because they both carried the gene, the whole clan took an unusual interest in the birth of each of their children, only to be disappointed six times in succession. When Mari had at last been born, with the look instantly recognisable, her parents sent round the birth cards saying “To Olav and Britta Gellers, a troll-daughter.”

  It was a family in which everyone had a nickname. Mari’s, from the first, was Troll. She was used to it and never found it strange or considered its meaning, though differences from her brothers and sisters continued to appear. Their style, and that of t
heir parents, was extrovert, cheerfully competitive. They camped, sailed, skied, climbed rocks. The eldest brother just missed representing Norway at long-distance swimming. Two sisters did well in local slalom events. And they were practical people, their father a civil engineer specialising in hydroelectrics, their mother a physiotherapist. The children studied engineering, medicine, accountancy, law. They were not unintelligent, but apart from the acquisition of useful knowledge their academic interests were nonexistent. Their aesthetic tastes were uniformly banal.

  All these things were expressive of a more basic difference of character, of life attitude. They threw themselves into things. Mari held herself apart. This was not because she was cold or timid, but because she was, perhaps literally, reserved.

  “She is keeping herself for her prince,” her mother used to say, only half teasing.

  Mari went along with all the family activities, well enough not to be a drag on them, but seldom truly participated. She seemed to have no urge to compete, though she might sometimes do so inadvertently, pushing herself to her physical limits for the mere joy of it. She was an excellent swimmer, with real potential according to her brother’s coach, but she saw no point in swimming as fast as she could in a prescribed style in a lane in a big pool with other girls doing the same on either side. She thought it a waste of time in the water. In any case she didn’t much care for swimming pools. She liked the sea or a lake or river, in which she could swim in the living current or among the slithering waves, as a seal does, or a gull.

  Her academic career, though just as alien to the family ethos, was less of a surprise. She’d always been, by their active, engaged standards, a dreamy child, so they were prepared for her bent to be chiefly literary and were only mildly puzzled that as she moved up through her schools and was more able to choose her courses of study her interests moved steadily back in time, until at University she took Old Norse as a special subject, concentrating on the fragmentary and garbled remains of the earliest writings in the language.

  Doctor Tharlsen taught this course, a classically dryasdust bachelor scholar who conscientiously performed his teaching duties, but by rote, while all his intellectual energies were reserved for his life’s work, on which he had been engaged for the last twenty years, the reconstruction of MS Frählig 1884. This is what remains of a twelfth century copy of a miscellaneous collection of older MSS in Old Norse. It has some unusual features, the most striking of which is explained (as far as can be made out, since the whole volume is badly damaged by fire) in a Latin introduction by the copyist himself. The MSS he copied must already have been in the library of the Great Cistercian abbey of Dunsdorf, and the then Prince-Abbot, Al[fgardt?] had expressed a wish to know what they were about. The opportunity seems to have arisen with the arrival of a novice from Norway, who was promptly trained as a copyist and set to the task of translation. Thus the MS is interleaved with his attempts to fulfil his brief, with the ancient text on one page and the Latin facing it. The word attempts is relevant. Not only was much of the original texts characteristically obscure, but the copyist’s grasp of Old Norse was uncertain, and he knew no more Latin than he needed to read a missal. The Prince-Abbot can have been little the wiser after seeing the result. Nevertheless the manuscript was handsomely bound up, and remained in the library until drunken Moravian soldiery looted and fired the abbey after the battle of Stadenbach in l646. It then disappeared for three hundred years, only coming to light when American troops were billeted at Schloss Frählig at the end of the Second World War, and one of the officers who in civilian life had been a dealer in mediaeval manuscripts recognised the arms of the Prince-Abbot on the spine of the charred volume. How it had come to Frählig remains a mystery.

  Externally the damage does not look too serious, but this is not the case. The volume’s relationship to the fire was such that, from the first few leaves on, the outer edge of every page was rendered illegible, while the section nearer the spine can still be read, though often with difficulty. The damaged portion increases steadily throughout the volume, so that by the end all but the last few letters of each line on the verso sheet, and the first few on the recto, is lost.

  It can be seen that since the material is repeated in translation, page by page, each spread notionally still contains lines whose first part can be read in the original language and second part in Latin, or vice versa, and that from these materials it might in theory be possible to make at least a tentative reconstruction of what the whole original might have been. In 1975 funds were made available for Doctor Tharlsen to undertake the task. He had done little else since then.

  Doctor Tharlsen didn’t include the Frählig MS in his course, as being far too obscure and difficult, even in the sections for which he had so far published a reconstructed text. If a student happened to mention it he tended to assume that this was an attempt to curry favour, or to show off. This was his first thought when he started to read the separate note Mari had attached to an essay she had handed in. It concerned a paper he had published several years earlier, with the suggested text for a collection of riddling verses from the earlier part of the MS. Mari pointed out that an alternative reading of the Latin would result in a rather more satisfactory riddle. Doctor Tharlsen had already considered the possibility, rejecting it on grounds to do with the technicalities of versification. Still, her suggestion struck him as highly intelligent, and since the rest of her work showed a distinct feel for the difficult subject, he for once suggested that a student should remain after class to talk about it. Or rather, two students. With characteristic caution he asked one of the other young women to stay as well, lest there should be any misunderstandings.

  The friendship that followed was not as unlikely on his part as it may seem. There were perhaps half a dozen people in the world, none of them among his colleagues at the university, capable of talking to Doctor Tharlsen on equal terms about the Frählig MS. As for the students, he felt with some justice that he would be wasting both his time and theirs if he had bothered them with it. It took him a while to be persuaded that this was not also the case with Mari, but once he realised that her interest was more than passing, his life changed. His energies for the task, jaded by long isolation, returned. Fresh insights came to him, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in the course of explaining some current problem to her, and more than once stimulated by a suggestion of hers. No doubt this rejuvenation owed something to the fact that she was an attractive young woman, but he continued, despite her protestations, to insist that his housekeeper was always at least in earshot when she came to his rooms.

  Mari’s side of the relationship is harder to account for, since the true attraction for her was not to Doctor Tharlsen, though she both liked and admired him, but to the Frählig MS itself. Finding in a textbook a footnote reference to one of the riddles, she had felt an intense and instant impulse to know more. The more she learnt, the stronger her feeling became that the book somehow spoke to her. She never saw the object itself. That was in a library attached to Yale University. Doctor Tharlsen had studied it there several times over the years, but at home had to work from facsimiles. Confronted even with these ghosts of the real thing Mari felt an excited reverence, while at the same time being appalled by the difficulties it presented.

  From the first it was obvious to her that these would be enormously eased by the use of a computer. Doctor Tharlsen knew this in his heart, but had persuaded himself that he was too old to learn to use one. He had a tiresome liver complaint. He doubted that he had many more years to live, and felt he couldn’t spare the time to become proficient enough to make real use of the promised advantages, and even then there would be the enormous labour of putting onto the system the mass of material he had so far accumulated. Two years at least, he told himself. No, he must plod on.

  “I’ll do it for you,” Mari told him. “Of course I’ll get some things wrong, but I don’t think it’ll be too bad.”

  “No, I can’t accept that. It would i
nterfere too much with the rest of your work.”

  “This is more important.”

  “No, I really can’t accept it, Miss Gellers.”

  “Please, Doctor Tharlsen.”

  (Doctor Tharlsen maintained a formal relationship with his students, and Mari had guessed early on that he would be embarrassed by anything that suggested his friendship with her was other than straightforwardly professional.)

  As a compromise he agreed that she might stay on at the university through the summer vacation and make a start on the work to see how it went. He spent the first three weeks at Yale, where the library had recently installed a new fluoroscopic technique, combined with computerised image enhancement, to extract meaningful characters from damaged documents, and were eager to try it out on the Frählig MS. By the time he returned Mari had the legible parts of the Gelfunsaga on disc, including a whole series of extensions of lines revealed by the fluoroscope—on Mari’s suggestion he had asked an assistant at the library to email these to her. By the end of the vacation Doctor Tharlsen was himself online and exchanging email with distant colleagues.

  A word about the Gelfunsaga. This is the longest, most exciting, and at the same time most tantalising portion of the whole MS. Like Snorri’s later Prose Edda, it appears to be a prose recension of a much older verse legend, from which it occasionally quotes a few lines. The story it seems to tell is referred to nowhere else in the literature. It would clearly be of interest to the general reader, as well as to scholars. Unfortunately it is the last item in the MS, and so the most extensively damaged, less than half of any line being legible. And its being largely in prose inhibits reconstruction, for two reasons: the alliterative verse line of, for instance, the riddles obeys rules almost as strict as the rhymed and scanned lines of later European poetry, and these usefully limit the possibilities for supplying missing words and phrases; and then the copyist, though he had written the Norse verse sections out to fill every line and had translated them into prose, had marked the line endings on both sheets with a slash, thus relating them clearly to each other. Sometimes one half of the meaning could be read in each language. There was no such guide for the prose of the Gelfunsaga, and the copyist cannot have recognised the brief verse sections as such, and so failed to mark them.