The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Go to the sun, then,” said the troll.

  “I must take… my husband… under the water… Too far… we die… Oh, troll… rock-child… help me… I am of… your blood.”

  Desperate, she flung herself round to breathe again into Dick’s mouth. Nothing. Nothing.

  A huge, cold hand gripped her shoulder and hauled her upright. It turned her and she found herself facing the creature, held by both shoulders, looking up at the enormous head. The light seemed stronger now. Perhaps the sun had risen far enough to shine further into the opening, but she could make out the wide-set bulbous eyes and the V-shaped mouth that seemed to split the face from side to side.

  “My blood, sun-child? ” boomed the troll.

  “It’s a story in my family,” she gabbled, desperate to get back to Dick, but at the same time not to waste this first apparent wakening of the creature’s interest. “One of my forefathers—his daughter was taken by a troll…” She raced through the first half of the tale… No, not the stupid Christian end—that wouldn’t mean anything to it. On impulse, she switched to the fragments that could be gleaned from the Gelfunsaga—the inconclusive contest in the cave, the oath-taking—and wrenched herself away, but then crumpled to the floor. She managed to crawl back to Dick but couldn’t raise herself to start the resuscitation again. She collapsed against him and lay there.

  A voice was booming overhead. With a huge effort she concentrated on the syllables.

  “Child of my blood, rock-born and sun-born, I give you your man back. Go now to your place. Wait there. The sun must set. I will bring him.”

  She managed to raise her head.

  “Rock-child,” she sighed. “I am too weary. I cannot swim so far. I cannot hold in my breath so long beneath the water.”

  She felt herself being turned over and lifted. With limp muscles she struggled against the creature’s grip.

  “My man will die,” she protested. “It is too cold in this place.”

  “Woman, we are oath-bound,” said the creature. “He will live. I will bring him this dusk. Now, breathe deep.”

  She closed her eyes as it carried her into the water, and concentrated on making her breath last as long as possible. As soon as they were under the surface it shifted her to beneath its left arm so that her body could trail against its own. She could feel the steady driving pulse of its hind limbs, and tell from the flow of the water against her skin that they were moving faster than any human swimmer could have done. It wasn’t long before the grip changed again, held her beneath the arms, pushed her forward and let go. As she opened her eyes she was already swimming.

  There was light ahead. She was at the tunnel mouth. Weakly she swam on and up to the silvery surface.

  She made it to the shore beyond the cliffs and climbed out, shuddering, too weak to stand. But the sun was warm enough now to be some use, and life began to come back to her as she crawled round the edge of the tarn. By the time she reached the outflow she could just about totter to her feet. Painfully she climbed down the way she had come, first across the grassy slope by the waterfall and then in the stream bed. By the time she reached the pool at the bottom she could feel her skin beginning to scorch. She slid into the water, and barely bothering to swim let the current carry her home.

  Already she had decided there was nothing she could do except trust the creature and wait till nightfall. No point in going for help, to the police, to the water-bailie. How could she hope to persuade them that though Dick had fallen into the river just outside the house the place to look for him was in the tarn halfway up the hill? But at least she could get herself warm, and then fed, and rested. She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. As the kindly heat seeped into her she realized there was indeed something she could do.

  There was no instant hurry. Doctor Tharlsen had set times for all he did. He wouldn’t look at his email until Helge brought in his luncheon tray. Mari went into the kitchen, turned on the kettle, made herself a pot of tea and a Marmite sandwich, and carried them into her desk. Her patient window cleaner was still repetitively saving her screen. “Thanks,” she whispered, as always, when the touch of her hand on the mouse made him vanish.

  She had post, but not from Doctor Tharlsen. Monday, he’d said. She downloaded, not bothering to read more than the subject headings, wrote out her brief message and sent it off. Then she finished her sandwich, set the alarm, and lay down on the bed, not knowing whether she would sleep or not. She did so, almost instantly, and forgot everything.

  It came back the moment the alarm went. She went at once to the PC. While she waited for the server to connect she looked, just as she had done that morning, out of the window. Noon blazed down on the moving river. The dinghy bobbled, empty, on its rope—without Dick’s weight in it the current flowed smoothly beneath it and it hadn’t shifted more than a few paces downstream. She herself felt like that, empty, weightless, with a powerful current sweeping by and herself unable to do more than float on its surface, waiting, waiting…

  The server connected. Yes, she had post. Only the line of her address, and the note that there was an attachment. Her fingers moved steadily over the keys, and the text came up. Runes, of course, four four-line verses, one more line of verse and three of prose. She started to read, translating in her head as she went.

  Then spoke Raggir, the rock-born marvel,

  “No longer yours, O Jarl, is the woman.

  “Mine I have made her in my mountain hall.

  “A dark cave her body. There breeds my son.”

  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 passage 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 behavior 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 fertilizes 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 fertilize 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!”