The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  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 realized 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, odorless 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 children 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 check 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 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 thirty 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 movemen
t 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.