Earth and Air Read online

  Answered Gelfun, “Goblin, sun-fearer,

  “From me you take a treasure of amber.

  “No gold in my hoard is half so precious.

  “Let her say farewell, have a father’s blessing.”

  At his knee the woman knelt for his hand.

  By the hair he grabbed her, grasped the bright ringlets,

  Fiercely lifted her, laid her against him.

  Lean at her neck his knife glinted.

  Then said Gelfun, grimly mocking,

  “Does she die here, demon? Dies your son also.

  “Does she come with me from the mid-earth darkness

  “To bear your son in the sweet daylight?”

  Raggir the rock-born roared in his anger . . .

  This is as much as I am sure of. The actual oaths are still mainly conjectures, too much so for me even to guess at their gist. Let me know if you need them also. It will take a while to transcribe into a form you can make any kind of sense out of. I must go out now. If you are free this evening, call me and tell me what this is about. I am troubled for you.

  E.L.T.

  Mari turned away, weeping. She longed to speak to him. He wouldn’t doubt her. There was no one else of whom she could say that, not even her own family. She told herself she must get her strength back, so made lunch of a sort and forced it down, but this time couldn’t sleep, and after a while got up and dusted and cleaned the bedroom and living room and scrubbed the kitchen floor and polished Dick’s shoes and her own high boots, painfully hauling the dreadful minutes by. As she worked she wondered what she was going to tell people if the creature didn’t keep its promise. That Dick had gone fishing somewhere out of sight and not come back in the evening? By now she would have started to search, surely. It was only a half mile of river. His waders were still in the house. If he’d fallen in from the bank he’d have left some trace, his net, gaff, creel . . . Her mind wouldn’t stick to the problem. The creature kept dragging it back to the cave.

  She was unable to eat any supper. It was still too warm an evening for anything but shorts and a loose blouse, so as soon as the sun slid below the ridge opposite she smeared herself with mosquito repellent and went out and sat on the bank and waited. A little downstream the stupid dinghy bobbled at the end of its rope. It crossed her mind to fetch it ashore, but that would mean putting the mosquito cream on again, so she left it. She assumed that the creature would carry Dick back as it had taken him, swimming down the river, and bring him ashore where she sat. The current moved soundlessly past, its surface sometimes heart-stoppingly broken by the rise of a fish. Each time, as the swirl broke the smoothness, she thought it was the creature beginning to surface, and then knew that it wasn’t. Hope faded with the fading light. It was almost dark when she heard the click of a dislodged pebble, and turned and saw Dick stumbling towards her down the track from the top of the valley.

  She rose and ran up the bank and flung her arms round him.

  “Oh, darling,” she whispered.

  He didn’t reply, but hugged her clumsily in return. He seemed utterly dazed, unsure where he was, who she was. He found his way beneath her blouse, and his hands began to explore her back as if for the first time. They were stone cold, and her body refused to respond. She had to will herself not to shrink from his touch, and then to answer his caress. Through the fabric of his shirt she could feel the chill of his body. Stone cold. She slid her fingers up, as always when they started an embrace, to the inner edge of his right shoulder blade, and found the little nodule, like an old scar, where the skin dipped towards the spine. It was a birth defect, apparently, that ran in his family. Some rearrangement of the nerves beneath made it supersensitive to touch, causing him to sigh and half shrug the shoulder as she stroked it. Not now. Too stone cold, even for that.

  Stone cold. He shouldn’t be alive, or at least in a coma. Stone.

  “Rock-born,” she whispered. And then, continuing the guess, “Raggir.”

  His hands stopped moving. She loosed her hold on him, took him by the elbows, and pushed herself away. He didn’t resist.

  “Where is my husband?” she asked softly.

  “He is here also.”

  It was Dick’s voice, but not a language Dick knew. She wasn’t surprised, or angry, or frightened. Her mind seemed utterly clear. There was still one hope only, and she knew how she must achieve it.

  “No,” she said again. “I must have my husband. Him only. Listen, Raggir, rock-born, and I will tell you a tale. Long ago, in a country across the sea, you took a woman to your cave. She was Gelfun’s daughter. Gelfun came to your cave. You said, ‘This woman is mine now. She carries my son in her womb.’ Gelfun took her. He put his knife to her throat. He said, ‘Give her back to me or I kill her, Then your son dies also. But let me take her, and I will raise your son as mine.’ You and he swore oaths and made it so. Now I, Mari, of the lineage of Gelfun, say this. Take me, rock-born, by guile or by force, put your seed into me, and I will kill myself, as Gelfun would have killed his own daughter. Then you will lose both your new child and your old child, by whom your blood is in me. But give me back my husband, him alone, him living, and I will give you a gift as great to you.”

  He stood for a while, simply looking at her in the late twilight.

  “Do you drive me from my place, as Gelfun drove me?” he asked. “He would have brought an army of men, to dig out the rocks, to drain my lake away, to beset my cave and take me and bind me with chains and drag me into the sun. I am the last of my kind. Therefore I took the ship he gave me and came to this land. Long I lived sadly before I found my cave. I would not live so again.”

  “This is my gift to you,” said Mari, and explained to him as best she could about the hydroelectric scheme. He didn’t seem to find it strange.

  “It is in my husband’s hands,” she finished. “At his word it will be done or not done. Therefore he must live, so that I may persuade him.”

  “Unfasten the boat,” he said. “Take it to the rock in the middle of the river. Wait there.”

  He turned and walked down the bank. At the river’s edge he leaped, frog-fashion, into the water.

  Mari stripped off and followed. Reaching the dinghy she used the anchor rope to haul herself down to the river bed, untied the anchor rock by feel, and surfaced gasping. Then she turned on her back and kicked across the current to the stiller water close by the rock shelf. Once there she could take it more easily, simply maintaining her position. The first she knew of the creature’s return was the boom of its voice close behind her.

  “That is good. Stay there.”

  Nothing happened for a while, though she could tell from the slackened current that the creature was still there, sheltering her from its flow. She assumed it must be doing something concerned with separating itself from Dick’s body, though it was already speaking in its own voice, not his. Then it grunted and she heard the splash of its heaving itself up onto the shelf. It waddled past her with Dick inert in its arms and lowered him into the dinghy.

  “Child of my blood, farewell,” it boomed. “I leave you with a choice.”

  It leaped neatly into the water and disappeared.

  Mari towed the dinghy ashore, somehow heaved Dick out onto the bank, and dragged him on up and into the house. By the time she had got him into the living room she was almost spent. She knelt beside him and felt for his pulse. It was there, faint and slow. She switched on all the heaters, stripped off his sodden clothes, dried him and rolled him into a duvet, flung another one over him, and then dried herself and wriggled in beside him, holding him close, trying to warm him through with her own warmth. Now she could actually feel the movement of his breathing. She slid her hand under him, felt for the cicatrice and stroked it gently. His shoulder stirred and she heard his sigh.

  He slept almost till noon next day, but Mari woke at the usual time, slipped out of bed and stole away to her desk. There was a long email from Doctor Tharlsen, with further fragments from the oath-taking p
assage of the Gelfunsaga. Several of them now slid into place. Likely links emerged. She wrote back briefly:

  Take this for the moment as a dream. It was not, but I would rather not tell you in writing, even in runes. I have met Raggir. He took Dick, and I followed and took him back, using the same threat Gelfun used about killing his daughter. I couldn’t have done it without you. This is what Raggir told me about what happened next. It is not the words of the MS, but the gist of the events. You will see where it fits . . .

  When she had finished her account she went to Britannica Online and read up about the mating behaviour of the amphibia.

  “What happened?” said Dick as he wolfed his way through an enormous breakfast. “Something tipped the dinghy over. That’s the last I remember.”

  She had never lied to him, and wouldn’t do so now.

  “I’ll tell you this evening,” she said.

  She did so in the dusk, sitting at the edge of the tarn, with the stream beside them racing towards the waterfall.

  “I suppose you could get a wetsuit and oxygen mask and go down and find the cave,” she said as she finished. “I think I’d have to go first and ask his permission. Otherwise I don’t know what he’d do.”

  “I don’t need to,” he said. “I would have believed you in any case, but in fact I saw his arm come out of the water, only I thought I was hallucinating. What did he do it for? Trolls eat people, don’t they?”

  “He needed you alive. He is the last of his kind. He told me that. He can’t father any more trolls, but he’s found a way of passing something on. Look at me. I’m human all through, but I still have troll blood. Look how I scorch in the sun. That’s inherited from him. He wanted to come to me in your body—I don’t know how he does that—he made himself into a rock for a moment or two when he came out of the pool at the bottom, but that isn’t the same thing. I don’t think we’re the first ones. I think he looks in through people’s windows at night. He wasn’t at all surprised when I told him about electricity.

  “Anyway, he was going to make love to me in your body and we’d have a baby. It would still have been your child—I don’t believe he and I could actually cross-breed, we’re too different—but he’d have passed something on again—troll blood on both sides . . .”

  “You know, I have a sort of dream memory of walking towards you. It was almost dark. You ran to meet me and we hugged each other, and then you suddenly pushed me away.”

  “He said you were there too.”

  “I’m still believing all this. It’s an act of faith.”

  “But you are believing it?”

  “I think I have to . . . there’s something else?”

  “Yes . . . This is . . . well, see what you think. I read up about frogs and toads and so on this morning. Most of them mate in water. The female releases the eggs and the male fertilises them. I told you he made me go and fetch the dinghy and take it to the rock shelf. I waited for a bit, and then he popped up close behind me and just stayed there for two or three minutes before he climbed out and put you in the dinghy . . .”

  Her voice had dropped to a shaky whisper with the strain of telling him. He took her hand and looked at her with his characteristic half-tilt of the head.

  “Frogs and toads. I’ve seen them at it. They hug each other pretty close, don’t they? And it goes on for hours.”

  “It was only a couple of minutes. And no, he didn’t touch me. But . . .”

  “You didn’t release any eggs?”

  “I’m due to ovulate in a couple of days”

  “And then . . .?”

  “I think it depends on us. He said he left me with a choice. He can’t fertilise me by himself.”

  “And you want to have the child?”

  Mari had managed to suppress consideration of this. What she, personally, wanted had seemed of no importance beside Dick’s possible reactions. But now that he himself asked the question, she knew the answer, knew it through every cell in her body. It was as if a particular gene somewhere along the tangled DNA in each cell had at the same instant fired in response.

  “I don’t know about want . . . oh, darling . . . I just don’t know!”

  “You feel somehow, as it were, compelled? A moral duty, perhaps?”

  His voice was drier, more remote than she had ever heard it.

  “Something like that,” she whispered.

  He thought for a long while, still holding her hand as he stared out across the motionless tarn.

  “I meant what I said about faith,” he said at last. “If you believe you’re right, then I believe too.”

  “Oh, my darling . . .”

  “Do you want me to keep your side of the bargain?”

  “If you can find a way.”

  The birth wasn’t abnormal, except that it was far more difficult and painful than even the midwife expected. She sent for a senior colleague to confirm there was nothing more she might be doing, and the colleague stayed to help. Mari was barely conscious when it was over. Her hand was clenched on Dick’s and wouldn’t let go. Through dark red mists she heard a low-voiced muttering, the younger woman first, doubt and disappointment, and then a reassuring murmur from the older woman. She forced herself to listen and caught the last few words in a strong Scots accent. “. . . a look you get round here. I’ve seen three or four of them like that, and they’ve turned out just grand.”

  They put the still whimpering baby, cleaned and wrapped, into Mari’s arms, and she hugged it to her. The mists cleared, and she looked at the wrinkled face, the unusually wide mouth, the bleary, slightly bulging eyes.

  “Spit image of you,” said Dick cheerfully.

  “Troll blood,” she whispered.

  “Both sides?”

  (Gently. Carefully teasing.) She smiled back.

  “Just one and a bit,” she whispered. “Wait.”

  She slid her hand in under the wrap and explored for what she had already felt through the thin cloth. Yes, there, on the other shoulder from his, and lower down. Delicately with a fingertip she caressed the minuscule bump in the skin. The whimpering stopped. The taut face relaxed. The shoulder moved in a faint half shrug, and the lips parted in an inaudible sigh of pleasure.

  Ridiki

  For Hazel

  He found her between the vine rows on the parched hillside below the farm.

  He already knew something must have happened to her. This time of year school started early and finished at midday, and she hadn’t been waiting for him in her usual place under the fig beside the gate, at the end of his long his trudge up the hill. Papa Alexi, sitting under the vine by the door of his cottage, hadn’t seen her, and everyone else was resting out the heat of the day, so there was nobody about to ask. He’d already spent over an hour looking for her, calling softly so as not to disturb the sleepers, so he was more than half prepared. But not for this.

  She was lying on her side. Her lips were drawn back, baring her gums in a mad snarl. Her swollen tongue stuck out sideways at the corner of her mouth. The eye that he could see was as dull as a piece of sea-rubbed glass. Her left foreleg—the one Rania had dropped the skillet on—stuck out in front of her chest as straight as it could ever go, while the other three, and her tail, were all curled up under the tense arch of her body.

  When he picked her up everything stayed locked in position, rigid as stubs of branches sticking out from a log. Only as he staggered back up the slope with her—his face a stiff mask, his stomach a stone—the feathery black tip of her tail flicked lightly to the jolt of each step.

  “Horned viper,” said Papa Alexi, when he showed him. “Got her on the tongue, see? Vicious bite he’s got. Much worse than the common one. Kill a strong man. Bad luck, Steff, very bad luck. Nice dog.”

  He carried her on and laid her down beside the fig tree, covering her body with the old sack she used to sleep on in the corner by the mule shed. He tied the fig branches out of his way, fetched a crowbar and spade, and sweated the rest of the afternoon away
prodding and scooping and chopping through roots, picking out the larger rocks from the spoil and setting them aside. When the farm woke and people started to come and go, some of them asked what he was up to. He just grunted and worked on.

  By sunset the hole was as deep as the reach of his arm. He changed her everyday collar for her smart red Sunday one with the brass studs, wrapped her in the sack and lowered her into the grave. Gently he covered her with the larger rocks he’d kept, fitting them together according to their shapes and then ramming earth between them in a double layer, proof against any possible scavenger.

  Finally he filled in the hole and spread what was left of the spoil back under the fig. The stars were bright by the time he fetched a small flask of oil from the barrel in the larder and poured it slowly over her grave.

  “Good-bye, Ridiki,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  He scattered the remaining handful of earth over the grave, let the fig branches back to hide and shelter it, and turned away.

  The evening meal was long over, but he couldn’t have eaten. He sat until almost midnight on the boulder beside the vegetable patch with her old collar spread between his hands and his thumbs endlessly caressing the wrinkled leather. The constellations wheeled westward and the lights of the fishing-boats moved quietly around Thasos. When he was sure that there’d be no one about to speak to him he coiled the collar tightly in on itself, put it in his shirt pocket, went up to his cot in the loft over the storeroom and lay down, knowing he wouldn’t sleep.

  But he did, and dreamed. He was following Ridiki along a track at the bottom of an unfamiliar valley, narrow and rocky. She was trotting ahead with the curious prancing gait her bent leg gave her, her whole attitude full of amused interest, ears pricked up and cupped forward, tail waving above her back, as if she expected something new and fascinating to appear round the next corner, some odour she could nose into, some little rustler she could pounce on in a tussock beside the path—pure Ridiki, Ridiki electric with life.