“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 online 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 realized while on the airplane, 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 bailie 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 characteristically 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 as he had the rock poised to let go, something reached up out of the water—a four-fingered hand, twice human size, the color 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.
She ran for the door and headlong down the bank, and dived. No thought had taken place, but something in her had guessed at the speed of the current, so that she hit the water about twenty yards below the dinghy. The same something controlled her swimming, prolonging her dive and then driving into a breaststroke as it slowed, so that she could stay submerged as long as her breath held. Her eyes were wide open, searching. Immediately around her the water, a sky-reflecting mirror from above, seemed almost as clear as the outer air, but shaded into dimness at any distance. Straight ahead of her, close in against the rock shelf, on the border between the light and the shadows, something went surging past.
It was almost the same color as the rock, so she saw it only dimly, and couldn’t make out its shape. But its movement, the powerful pulse of the legs that drove it upstream, told her what sort of thing it was. Something like a frog or toad. A toad the size of a large cow. As she fought to follow, the current carried her out of sight.
She surfaced, changed to a racing crawl, and reached the shelf. As soon as the current ran less strongly she turned upstream. As a child, before she’d given up competitive swimming, she’d done better at the longer distances than the sprints. Now, automatically, she struck the fastest pace that came naturally to her. Every few strokes, instead of twisting her head to gasp for air, she kept it submerged, peering for some sign of the thing that had taken Dick.
That was what had happened, she was sure. Again it was the glimpsed movement of the creature that had told her, the action of the near forelimb as it swam—something awkward about it—the other limb wasn’t being used to swim with, because it was clutching Dick—clutching effortfully—Dick had been struggling still…
There! Less than a glimpse this time, a shadow-shift only, uncertain, but she put on a spurt, not bothering to peer below until she had counted thirt
y strokes, and then only briefly. But yes, she was gaining. Her heart slammed, the air she gulped rasped in her throat and wasn’t enough. By now, if she’d been merely racing, her stroke would have been losing its rhythm, but strength came from somewhere, came with a passionate energy that told her it would keep on coming until she caught up.
She had no thought about what would happen then, no fear for herself. Indeed, since the first violent shock of horror as the gray arm had come out of the water, she’d felt nothing at all except the urgency to do what she was doing, to follow the thing that had taken Dick, and take him back. Nothing else existed, not pain, not exhaustion, not the cold of the deep tarn water, nothing.
Ahead, the nature of the river changed. A steep stream fed in from the left just where the main river spilt down a slope of rock, a natural weir right across its width. Their confluence had scooped out a deep, turbulent pool. Only two days ago Mari had sat beside it under a parasol, reading and thinking and dreaming and watching Dick fish. Now, as she reached its lower edge, the creature that had taken him rose from the water on the further side of the pool, close against a vertical slab of rock that divided the river from the stream. If Mari hadn’t seen it emerge she wouldn’t have known it was there, or rather, all she’d have seen was a rounded boulder projecting from the water. There was no sign of Dick.
She switched to a breaststroke so that she could watch the creature while she swam towards it. After a couple of strokes either the boulder changed, or her perception of it. An inch above the water two wide-set eyes gazed steadily at her. She swam straight on. It erupted through the surface, turning as it did so, reached up with a long-boned arm, grasped the top of the slab behind it, and heaved itself out of the water, scrabbling for toeholds with paddle feet. Dick’s body dangled inert from under its other arm. Without looking back at her it disappeared.
She turned, chose a landing spot, and scrambled out and up the bank. The thing was clearly visible thirty yards up the steep side-stream, its huge-haunched hind limbs driving it on through the tumbling water with a powerful, toad-like waddle. Dick’s inert body was draped over its shoulder. Mari’s legs were rubbery and stupid with their own sudden weight, but she forced them forward, climbing like the creature straight up the stream bed, rather than try to wrestle her way through the heather thickets on either side.
Mostly the creature was hidden by the cragginess of the slope, but then she’d see it again, though she didn’t dare snatch more than the odd glimpse for fear of missing her footing. At first she seemed to be gaining, but then she started to fall back as her muscles drained their reserves away, however her heart slammed and her lungs convulsed in the effort to feed them.
The creature reached a waterfall, paused, and for the first time glanced back, looking, she thought, not at her but at the hilltop behind her. The movement twisted Dick towards her. Just below his head there was a yellowish streak down the dark gray rib cage. The creature turned back and plunged into the white curtain. Through the foam she saw it starting to climb. She couldn’t go that way, but there was a heather-free slope to her right which reached to the ledge from which the fall spilt. As she stumbled slantwise across it the creature emerged at the top of the fall, stood erect, and looked back, again not apparently at her, but at the eastern ridge behind her. She saw it clearly against the skyline, lit by the almost risen sun. The yellow streak was gone. With a surge of hope she realized what it had been. Dick’s vomit. The jolting of the climb had worked like emergency resuscitation and made him throw up. So he was alive. Oh God, let him not now have choked on it! The thing paused only an instant and hurried out of sight.
Mari knew where it had gone, knowing what lay beyond the ridge. She raced on up, reached the top, and stood there, recovering her breath. Desperate though the haste was, she must wait and do that. Breath might be life, both hers and Dick’s.
Now, as she waited, searching the unruffled surface for some clue to where the creature had taken him, the sun rimmed the sky behind her. Its long light sluiced across the tarn. She felt its touch on her shoulders, and knew there was another blazing day coming. An instant connection formed in her mind, without any process of thought. All her life, since she was a small child, she had liked to be up very early on days like this, because later on, as soon as there was any strength in the sunlight, she would need to be indoors, or cowering under a parasol or smearing herself every twenty minutes with sunblock. It was part of her inheritance, her troll blood. And the creature too. In its haste to climb the hillside it hadn’t been running from her, but from the sunrise. When it had looked behind it, it hadn’t been interested in her pursuit, nor in the hill behind her, but in the light itself, spilling above the far ridge. How much longer before the deadly moment? Sunfearer. Troll.
Though the thing she had seen was nothing like any troll she had read of or imagined, the identification came to her with complete assurance. Furthermore there would be a lair in the tarn, a cave with an underwater entrance. Something like that was necessary anyway, if Dick was to be still alive when she found him. He wouldn’t survive more than another few minutes underwater. Where? Not where she stood, on what seemed almost a natural earth dam holding the tarn in against the hillside; but over to her right and beyond, where the higher ground reached the water, was a line of low cliffs.
She stared towards them. There! Close in below the dark rocks, more to her right than straight across, the utterly still surface was broken by a sudden ripple and swirl, much like a large fish might make, rising almost to the surface to take a fly and then changing its mind and twisting suddenly back. There was a dip in the cliff just this side of the place. Using that as a landmark she jogged round the edge of the tarn, deliberately choosing a pace that wouldn’t instantly run her out of breath again. She dived in where the cliffs began and swam on, still well below a racing speed. The water was degrees colder than that of the river below. At the point she had marked, she stopped, gulped air, kicked herself upwards, and jackknifed into a dive. In the increasing dimness the cliff ran on down, still almost sheer. A good twenty feet below the surface she reached a floor of black, peaty ooze. She turned to her left, and just before her breath gave out glimpsed ahead of her a darker patch on the vertical rock. Madness to try it now.
She pumped herself to the surface and trod water, gasping for air. As soon as she dared she dived again. Yes, an opening in the rock, a triangular cranny like the entrance to a tent. Counting the seconds she swam straight into the darkness, and on through the blind black water. The tunnel seemed to run almost straight, and she could feel her way by the touch of her fingers against the rock on either side. Sometimes when all the family had been swimming together, they used to have timed contests to see who could stay under water longest. In those days she could last a minute and a half, but not swimming vigorously as she was now. Call it a minute, she thought, or a bit over. It would be quicker coming out. Forty seconds in, then… She reached the moment, and swam on.
At fifty-five, well past the point where there was any hope in turning back, she saw a change in the darkness ahead. At sixty the change was faint light. At sixty-eight she broke the surface. Retching for air she stared around.
The light was daylight of a sort, seeping in through a narrow crack overhead. It wasn’t a light to see by, no better than might have been shed at night in the open by a half moon behind a layer of cloud. She guessed she must be in some kind of cavern, part of the fault that Dick had talked about, perhaps, but in the dimness she could make out neither walls nor roof. She swam forward a few strokes and her feet touched bottom, a shelving rock ledge. As she climbed from the water the only sounds in the stillness were the heaving of her own breath and the patter of drops falling from her hair and limbs, and their fainter echoes.
Not six feet in front of her, a voice spoke. Not a human voice, a soft, deep, booming sound, a drum note that boomed back at her from the cave walls. But its note of questioning surprise told her that it was articulate speech. The thing in the
darkness repeated the sound with a different intonation, this time confirming what it had seen. A single word. The strangeness of the voice blurred the two syllables, but she could hear they had not been English. An echo in her mind repeated the sound, and she knew what the thing had said.
“Woman? ” And then, “Yes, a woman.”
“Who’s there? ” she whispered.
“I do not tell my name,” said the voice.
“Troll,” she said.
“Rock-child,” said the voice, correcting her without anger.
Given its voice to focus on she could make the creature out now, a vague dark mass about six feet from her. Its head seemed to be about level with her own, or a little higher, so she guessed it might be squatting, toad-like, on its haunches just above the waterline. It still hadn’t crossed her mind to be afraid, but now a shudder of cold shook her body, and she realized how far she had chilled through, and how little reserve of strength she had left to reheat herself.
“Where is my husband? ” she said. “You took him. Give him to me.”
“He is here.”
The creature moved, a sudden sideways shuffle, revealing a paler shape that had lain behind it. Mari waded forward, stumbled up the slope and knelt, feeling for Dick with numbed hands. He was lying face down on the rock so she heaved him over, felt for his face, and laid her ear against his mouth. Nothing. Her fingers were too frozen to find his pulse, but he too seemed to be deathly cold. She straddled his body and started to pump at his chest.
“What do you do, woman? ” said the troll.
“I bring his breath back,” she panted. “Else he dies.”
“He sleeps,” said the troll, uninterested.
“Rock-child,” she said, gasping the words out between pumps, “…we are… sun things… Sun’s heat… gives us life… Cold long… we die…”
She stopped pumping, knelt by Dick’s head, pinched his nose, and forced her breath between his lips. She backed off, let the lungs collapse, and tried again. And again. The effort was warming her, but she had little more to give. Even with her full strength, she wouldn’t have been able to keep this up for more than a minute or two. She straddled Dick’s body again and resumed pumping.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 38
