Earth and Air Read online

  The story, as far as it can be made out, has affinities with the first two episodes of Beowulf. The hero, Gelfun, to rid the neighbourhood from the depredations of a monster (who may or may not be the troll twice referred to in the surviving portions of the text—the Latin uses the word monstrum throughout, but at one point adds the epithet sol timens, presumably the copyist’s attempt at sunfearer), goes to the underwater lair of the beast, using a hollow reed(?) to breathe through. His weapons are useless to him, since the creature’s limbs are made of rock. (This is one of the passages where the Latin and Norse complement each other enough to make the gist fairly clear.) Gelfun then wrestles with it, apparently inconclusively (the text is once more very obscure), and there is then an exchange of oaths. But he seems to have won the contest, because he takes a treasure of amber from the cave, and then puts the monster onto a ship and dispatches it to sea. The final section is the most seriously damaged part of the manuscript. It seems to have little relation to what went earlier, but apparently deals with Gelfun’s choice of an heir.

  Because of its near intractability Doctor Tharlsen had kept the Gelfunsaga till last. At the time Mari came into his life he was about to start serious work on it.

  All this occurred in the summer of Mari’s second year at University. For the last fortnight of that long vacation she joined her family at their holiday home on one of the northern fjords. There, disruptingly, she fell in love.

  Fell, for once, is the right word. The event was as unforeseen and overwhelming as the collapse of a cliff face, altering the whole landscape of her life. She had, of course, had a few tentative involvements with fellow students during the last two years, trial runs, as much to explore her own emotional responses as the physical sensations, and had found, even when the sensations had been enjoyable enough, that the event had left her dissatisfied. She was, she came to realise, one of those people who need to commit themselves, heart and soul as well as body, to anything of importance they undertake. Before she could love, she must choose, choose with her whole being, for all of her life.

  She had expected, or at least hoped, to do so as she did most things, deliberately, to find a man of her own age whom she liked, get to know and admire him, while he did the same with her, and then, as it were, build their lifelong love together step by step, much as she had watched her parents and elder siblings building the house on the fjord together. The last thing she had looked for was a cliff-fall.

  Dick Vesey was an Englishman, like her father a hydroelectric engineer. They had met at a conference and liked each other, and since Dick’s main interest outside his work was fishing, Mari’s father had invited him to the fjord for the late salmon run. He was twelve years older than Mari, with her sort of build, slight and active, but his face was different, the skull squarish, and the features moulded in definite angular planes. (One night on their honeymoon, tracing those planes with her fingertips, she wondered aloud whether his parents had conceived him in a bed with a Braque painting on the wall above it. “Far from it,” he answered. “It was on open moorland during a cycling trip in the Cheviots, I believe. They didn’t intend it to happen. She was married to another man, and didn’t want to divorce him.”) The effect was to give him a misleadingly merry look, almost droll. In fact he laughed seldom and spoke little. His humour when he chose to deploy it was dry and understated, but quirky, poised between the gnomic and the surreal. Occasionally he produced a remark that might have come straight out of the riddles. He was an excellent and attentive listener. When Mari told him about her work with Doctor Tharlsen, though he had no knowledge of the languages involved, he not only grasped the difficulties but, as her family never in their heart of hearts had done, accepted the importance of the work. She used her laptop to show him some examples of what she was doing. It was while they were sitting together gazing at a laptop screen filled with fragmentary lines of runes that Mari realised what had happened to her.

  Later she came to feel that the occasion had not been random, as it had seemed at the time, but utterly appropriate, almost willed. She had fallen for Dick because something about him spoke to her, just as the Frählig MS had, but even more urgently and insistently. The same, he said later, had happened to him, but since each felt there wasn’t the slightest chance of the other returning feelings so irrational, they had managed to conceal it from each other.

  But not, it turned out, from anyone else. As they waved his car away and watched it vanish behind the pines Mari’s father said to her, “Well, when does he propose?” and the rest of the family—ten, including a brother and sister-in-law—bellowed with cheerful northern laughter.

  They became engaged by email. She visited him in Scotland over the New Year, staying in a hotel near Dumfries because he had no home of his own but lodged wherever his current work happened to be. Nor was there any family for her to meet. His mother had returned to her husband soon after he was born, the husband making it a condition that she didn’t bring the baby, so his father had brought him up, marrying when he was five, but had had no more children, and had then emigrated to Canada with Dick’s stepmother when Dick was a student. Dick was now between jobs, and the reason he had chosen Dumfries was that it would allow them to look for a house within easy reach of his next one, which involved the installation of a small hydroelectric plant in the hills above the town. They narrowed the field down drastically by telling the agents that the property must have fishing rights attached. They found nothing they liked.

  The failure didn’t seem to matter. They spent their eight days together in a state too deep and broad and solid-seeming to be called excitement, too electric with the passing seconds to be called just happiness or contentment. Kissing Dick good-bye at the barrier, turning away, walking through the passport check, Mari felt as if she were putting herself into a coma until she next saw him, able to move, talk, eat, think, but no longer to feel as she had felt while with him, technically alive only.

  Superstitiously, Mari hadn’t told Doctor Tharlsen of her engagement before her visit to Scotland. Though emotionally certain what she wanted, the sheer irrational force of it seemed to put her into a realm where there are powers that must not be taken for granted, or they will suddenly withhold what they had seemed to give. She and Doctor Tharlsen had assumed that she would be staying on after completing her degree, to work for a Ph.D. on some aspect of the Frählig MS, and thus continue to help him. Why bother him with the unsettling news before it became a certainty in the rational, bread-and-butter world?

  Outwardly he took it well, congratulated her, grasped her hands and kissed her gently on the forehead. Without thought she released her hands and hugged him, as she and her family had hugged each other when she had told them the same news. After a few seconds he eased himself from her grasp and sat down. His mouth worked painfully for a moment or two, but he controlled it.

  “I am happy for you,” he managed to say. “Very happy. All this”—he shrugged towards his littered desk—“is nothing beside it.”

  Mari dropped to her knees and took his hands again.

  “Oh no!” said Mari. “No, please! If I thought marrying Dick meant I couldn’t go on helping you, I . . . I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  This, she realised with a shock, was literally true. Her love for Dick filled and suffused her world. It was the light she saw by, the smell of the air she breathed. But so, more gently, odourless as oxygen, a waveband beyond the visible spectrum, did the Frählig MS. Without either one of them, she would become someone else. Someone less. Moreover, though there was no logical or causal connection between them, through her, inexplicably but certainly, they were interconnected.

  “You’ve got to finish it,” she said. “You’re nearly there. It’s just the Gelfunsaga now.”

  He drew a large yellow handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and smiled at her.

  “Yes,” he said in his usual voice. “We will finish it. Between us. And you will take your childr
en into your lap and read them our Gelfunsaga.”

  Dick found their house. It had been a ghillie’s cottage, but had fallen into ruin. New owners of the estate had started to do it up for holiday lets, but had overstretched themselves and their bank had called in its loans. It wasn’t actually on the market, but Dick had spotted it, fishing, asked about it, and found that the receivers of the estate, to get a minor problem off their hands, would let him have a three-year lease provided he completed the repairs and refurbishment. Mari dropped everything to fly over and see it, and having done so couldn’t then imagine wanting to live anywhere else.

  She brought photographs to show Doctor Tharlsen. Though they continued to address each other as formally as before, something had happened between them since she’d told him she was marrying Dick, an unspoken acknowledgement that they were now more than colleagues in the Frählig enterprise. They were friends. Mari guessed it was a relationship unfamiliar to him, and she was careful not to strain it, but he seemed positively to like to hear something of her life and interests outside their work, and they’d fallen into the habit of chatting for a few minutes before they began.

  “That’s what you see when you come out of the door,” she said. “The river’s fuller than usual, Dick says, because of the snow melt, though it’s nothing like we get here, but there’s always plenty of water in it. They’ve had terrible fishing seasons in a lot of the Scottish rivers for the last few years—hardly any water at all , but this one’s fed by several tarns up in the hills—they’re using some of them for the plant Dick’s building. The fishing isn’t all that good, actually, not enough pools and spawning grounds, which is why he could afford a day on it in the first place. And he’s not going to get a lot more days like that, poor thing, till we’ve finished doing up the house. The receivers are being very tough about that, and it’ll take every penny we’ve got.”

  He looked with appropriate interest at the rest of the photographs, and then they settled to work. But after their next session, as she was leaving, he handed her an envelope. There were three words on it in Old Norse, in his meticulous script. “A season’s fishing.”

  The envelope was unsealed, so she opened it. The cheque inside was made out to Richard Vesey for thirty thousand krone.

  He interrupted her protests.

  “I beg you, Miss Gellers. I have made enquiries as to the cost. It would give me the greatest pleasure. I have little use for my money, and I needed a suitable present for your husband, that he can enjoy immediately, since you will have to wait for yours. It will give me an incentive to finish.”

  She telephoned Dick, who, of course, was appalled.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to take it,” Mari told him. “My present’s going to be his Gelfunsaga. That matters to me almost as much as it does to him. He doesn’t think he’s got that long—his liver’s getting worse—and if you don’t accept this it’ll be a way of telling him we don’t think he’s going to get it finished. Taking it is an act of faith, if you see what I mean. And listen, the very first thing you can do by way of saying thank you to him is get that telephone line in, so we can be on line from the moment we get back.”

  “Doubt if we’ll get broadband this far out.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  They returned from Iceland to, in Mari’s case, thrilling news. While they had been away Doctor Tharlsen had been in Yale, where a new and improved image-enhancer had revealed great stretches of hitherto indecipherable text. He had emailed Mari some of the results. Baffling half-phrases had leaped into sense. Fresh overlaps between the Latin and Norse had made obvious what must have lain in the remaining lacunae. Doctor Tharlsen of course would not bring himself to suggest that the end of his task might now be in sight, but between the lines of his dry text Mari could read his excitement.

  Dick had less welcome news. Some results of the seismographic survey had come in, showing an apparent rock fault running across a stretch of the hillside upstream from their house. There was a tarn there that he had planned to incorporate into the hydroelectric scheme. They walked up a winding hill track that evening to look at it. When they reached it Mari caught her breath and stood, staring.

  In front of her lay a strange feature like a miniature volcanic crater half way up the hillside, holding in its hollow a still, dark tarn that brimmed almost at her feet. The tarn was fed by several streams from the sunlit hills beyond, and spilt out down to the valley by way of a waterfall. Mari could both see and feel that this was a magical place. Dick, in his very different way, had seemed to sense so too.

  “There’s something pretty big in here,” he’d said. “I’d like to have a go at it some day.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just a hunch. You get them. They seem to work.”

  “What will your scheme do to this? I hope it doesn’t spoil it. It’s perfect now.”

  “We’ve got some very stringent guidelines from the conservation people. We’re running everything underground as far as possible, but there’s bound to be a bit of upheaval while we’re working on it, especially if we have to find a way of filling the fault in. I’m going to have to go into that in detail.”

  “Well, don’t spoil this. It’s part of the place.”

  When they had been back a fortnight Doctor Tharlsen returned to Norway. Mari found a brief email from him waiting for her next morning. For the first time in their correspondence he had permitted himself an exclamation mark. More than one.

  “Amazing! The whole of the oath exchange is in Old Story Measure! Terribly garbled, but unmistakable. I realised while on the aeroplane, and worked on it for the rest of the journey. I have the first seventeen lines as certain as they will ever be. I can barely stop to sleep. By Sunday night I may have enough to send you to read at your breakfast on Monday. Perhaps even earlier. Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!”

  At first light next day, Dick slithered out from under the sheet, bent over the bed, and kissed Mari’s ear.

  “Catch me some breakfast,” she murmured.

  “Don’t count on it,” he said, kissed her again and left to catch the dawn rise. She lay listening to the hiss of the shower, and relishing her own contentment. She could feel it filling the whole valley, brimming along the hilltops, just as the still summer heat seemed to do. Normally she might have lain like that for the hour or more until sunrise before getting up, but today was clearly going to be a scorcher, literally so in her case by the time the sun had any strength in it, so she allowed herself only as long as it took Dick to finish his shower, and then rose and followed him.

  She showered, washing her hair, and dried, then walked naked to the kitchen to make herself some morning tea. She was used to wandering round the house like that. The weather was more than warm enough for it. Even at the weekends there was no likelihood of anyone coming by. The nearest house was two and a half miles down the pot-holed track, with the public road another two beyond that, the entrance clearly marked as private. She brought her cup back to her desk in the living room and switched on her PC to check her email.

  While she waited for the server to connect she watched Dick out of the window. Doctor Tharlsen’s gift covered a bit over half a mile of the near bank, as far as midstream. The bank plunged steeply down at this point, and continued the slope below the waterline, where the main current had carved out a deep channel, through which it ran steadily, with barely a ripple. No salmon would rise in such water. But a rock shelf jutted out from the further shore, creating broken and turbulent shallows, with stiller pools. Part of this reached within Dick’s rights, and the river baillie had told him that good fish had been caught here, and had lent him the dinghy to fish from. Using a rock for an anchor, he could moor in the current, which would then drag the anchor very slowly downstream, so that he could start at the top of the rock shelf and cover the whole length of it and then paddle upstream and begin again. He was now just about to start the process. Mari liked to watch him doing it, because of the c
haracteristically deft fashion in which he accomplished everything on the unsteady little dinghy.

  Now he was out in the middle of the river, shipping his oars, letting the current swing the dinghy down towards the shelf, picking up the anchor rock, balancing himself to slip it over the side . . .

  Because she was watching, Mari saw exactly what happened. From the very first she was in no doubt about it.

  Just he had the rock poised to let go, something reached up out of the water—a four-fingered hand, twice human size, the colour of granite, webbed to the top knuckles—and grasped the gunwale and dragged it violently down into the water. Unprepared, unbalanced by the rock, Dick toppled over. When the splash and pother had cleared he was gone. The empty dinghy bobbled at the end of its rope. His rod was being swept away downstream.