Earth and Air

Troll Blood

Mari was a seventh child, by some distance—an afterthoughtlessness, her father was fond of remarking. Moreover she had the changeling look, as if she had come from utterly different stock from her parents and siblings, with their traditionally Nordic features, coarsely handsome, with strong bones, blond hair, and winter-blue eyes. Mari was dark-haired, slight, with a fine, almost pearly skin that burnt in the mildest sun. Her face seemed never quite to have lost the crumpled, simian look of the newborn baby. Her mouth was wide, and her eyes, which might more suitably have been brown to go with her colouring, were of an unusual slaty grey.

This look, though only occasionally manifesting itself, ran in the family as persistently as the more normal one. There were likely to be one or two examples in any group photograph in the old albums—a grandmother, a great uncle killed in the Resistance in the Second World War, somebody unidentified in a skiing party way back in the twenties.

There was a story to go with the look. Thirty-odd generations ago a young woman was bathing in a lake when a troll saw her and took her to his underwater cave. Her handmaiden, hiding among the trees, saw what happened and carried the news to the young woman’s father. Her mother was dead, and she was his only child. He at once ran to the place and dived into the lake carrying an inflated goatskin weighted down with his armour and weapons. Breathing from the bag through a straw he found the cave, armed himself, and fought the monster until it fled howling. Then he brought his daughter safely home. Nine months later, while her father was away, the young woman bore a son, so clearly marked as a troll that everyone assumed that he would kill the little monster as soon as he returned. But the young woman stole from her room with the child wrapped in her cloak, and met him on the road and begged for his blessing on his grandson, saying, “Your blood is in the boy. If he dies, I will bear no more children.” The father took the child from her and unwrapped the cloak and saw for the first time the grandson his daughter had given him. He turned and dipped his finger into a puddle by the road and made the cross of baptism on the baby’s forehead. When the child did not scream at the touch of the holy symbol he said, “Whatever his face, there is a Christian soul beneath,” and he gave him his blessing.

Even as a child Mari had disliked this story. She of course knew it was only a fairy story, but without being able to formulate the idea she felt in her bones that the problem was not that it was false, but that it was fake. Later, when she had learnt more about such things, she realised that it was probably only a product of the great nineteenth century Nordic folk revival, amalgamating several genuinely old elements—the abduction, the underwater journey, the fight with the cave monster—and tacking on the utterly inappropriate Christianising ending that she had so hated from the first. Be that as it may, that was how the look was said to have come into the family. They called it troll blood.

Mari’s parents were second cousins, in a generation of small families among whom the look had had less chance of showing up, so, because they both carried the gene, the whole clan took an unusual interest in the birth of each of their children, only to be disappointed six times in succession. When Mari had at last been born, with the look instantly recognisable, her parents sent round the birth cards saying “To Olav and Britta Gellers, a troll-daughter.”

It was a family in which everyone had a nickname. Mari’s, from the first, was Troll. She was used to it and never found it strange or considered its meaning, though differences from her brothers and sisters continued to appear. Their style, and that of their parents, was extrovert, cheerfully competitive. They camped, sailed, skied, climbed rocks. The eldest brother just missed representing Norway at long-distance swimming. Two sisters did well in local slalom events. And they were practical people, their father a civil engineer specialising in hydroelectrics, their mother a physiotherapist. The children studied engineering, medicine, accountancy, law. They were not unintelligent, but apart from the acquisition of useful knowledge their academic interests were nonexistent. Their aesthetic tastes were uniformly banal.

All these things were expressive of a more basic difference of character, of life attitude. They threw themselves into things. Mari held herself apart. This was not because she was cold or timid, but because she was, perhaps literally, reserved.

“She is keeping herself for her prince,” her mother used to say, only half teasing.

Mari went along with all the family activities, well enough not to be a drag on them, but seldom truly participated. She seemed to have no urge to compete, though she might sometimes do so inadvertently, pushing herself to her physical limits for the mere joy of it. She was an excellent swimmer, with real potential according to her brother’s coach, but she saw no point in swimming as fast as she could in a prescribed style in a lane in a big pool with other girls doing the same on either side. She thought it a waste of time in the water. In any case she didn’t much care for swimming pools. She liked the sea or a lake or river, in which she could swim in the living current or among the slithering waves, as a seal does, or a gull.

Her academic career, though just as alien to the family ethos, was less of a surprise. She’d always been, by their active, engaged standards, a dreamy child, so they were prepared for her bent to be chiefly literary and were only mildly puzzled that as she moved up through her schools and was more able to choose her courses of study her interests moved steadily back in time, until at University she took Old Norse as a special subject, concentrating on the fragmentary and garbled remains of the earliest writings in the language.

Doctor Tharlsen taught this course, a classically dryasdust bachelor scholar who conscientiously performed his teaching duties, but by rote, while all his intellectual energies were reserved for his life’s work, on which he had been engaged for the last twenty years, the reconstruction of MS Frählig 1884. This is what remains of a twelfth century copy of a miscellaneous collection of older MSS in Old Norse. It has some unusual features, the most striking of which is explained (as far as can be made out, since the whole volume is badly damaged by fire) in a Latin introduction by the copyist himself. The MSS he copied must already have been in the library of the Great Cistercian abbey of Dunsdorf, and the then Prince-Abbot, Al[fgardt?] had expressed a wish to know what they were about. The opportunity seems to have arisen with the arrival of a novice from Norway, who was promptly trained as a copyist and set to the task of translation. Thus the MS is interleaved with his attempts to fulfil his brief, with the ancient text on one page and the Latin facing it. The word attempts is relevant. Not only was much of the original texts characteristically obscure, but the copyist’s grasp of Old Norse was uncertain, and he knew no more Latin than he needed to read a missal. The Prince-Abbot can have been little the wiser after seeing the result. Nevertheless the manuscript was handsomely bound up, and remained in the library until drunken Moravian soldiery looted and fired the abbey after the battle of Stadenbach in l646. It then disappeared for three hundred years, only coming to light when American troops were billeted at Schloss Frählig at the end of the Second World War, and one of the officers who in civilian life had been a dealer in mediaeval manuscripts recognised the arms of the Prince-Abbot on the spine of the charred volume. How it had come to Frählig remains a mystery.

Externally the damage does not look too serious, but this is not the case. The volume’s relationship to the fire was such that, from the first few leaves on, the outer edge of every page was rendered illegible, while the section nearer the spine can still be read, though often with difficulty. The damaged portion increases steadily throughout the volume, so that by the end all but the last few letters of each line on the verso sheet, and the first few on the recto, is lost.

It can be seen that since the material is repeated in translation, page by page, each spread notionally still contains lines whose first part can be read in the original language and second part in Latin, or vice versa, and that from these materials it might in theory be possible to make at least a tentative reconstruction of what the whole original might have been. In 1975 funds were made available for Doctor Tharlsen to undertake the task. He had done little else since then.

Doctor Tharlsen didn’t include the Frählig MS in his course, as being far too obscure and difficult, even in the sections for which he had so far published a reconstructed text. If a student happened to mention it he tended to assume that this was an attempt to curry favour, or to show off. This was his first thought when he started to read the separate note Mari had attached to an essay she had handed in. It concerned a paper he had published several years earlier, with the suggested text for a collection of riddling verses from the earlier part of the MS. Mari pointed out that an alternative reading of the Latin would result in a rather more satisfactory riddle. Doctor Tharlsen had already considered the possibility, rejecting it on grounds to do with the technicalities of versification. Still, her suggestion struck him as highly intelligent, and since the rest of her work showed a distinct feel for the difficult subject, he for once suggested that a student should remain after class to talk about it. Or rather, two students. With characteristic caution he asked one of the other young women to stay as well, lest there should be any misunderstandings.

The friendship that followed was not as unlikely on his part as it may seem. There were perhaps half a dozen people in the world, none of them among his colleagues at the university, capable of talking to Doctor Tharlsen on equal terms about the Frählig MS. As for the students, he felt with some justice that he would be wasting both his time and theirs if he had bothered them with it. It took him a while to be persuaded that this was not also the case with Mari, but once he realised that her interest was more than passing, his life changed. His energies for the task, jaded by long isolation, returned. Fresh insights came to him, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in the course of explaining some current problem to her, and more than once stimulated by a suggestion of hers. No doubt this rejuvenation owed something to the fact that she was an attractive young woman, but he continued, despite her protestations, to insist that his housekeeper was always at least in earshot when she came to his rooms.

Mari’s side of the relationship is harder to account for, since the true attraction for her was not to Doctor Tharlsen, though she both liked and admired him, but to the Frählig MS itself. Finding in a textbook a footnote reference to one of the riddles, she had felt an intense and instant impulse to know more. The more she learnt, the stronger her feeling became that the book somehow spoke to her. She never saw the object itself. That was in a library attached to Yale University. Doctor Tharlsen had studied it there several times over the years, but at home had to work from facsimiles. Confronted even with these ghosts of the real thing Mari felt an excited reverence, while at the same time being appalled by the difficulties it presented.

From the first it was obvious to her that these would be enormously eased by the use of a computer. Doctor Tharlsen knew this in his heart, but had persuaded himself that he was too old to learn to use one. He had a tiresome liver complaint. He doubted that he had many more years to live, and felt he couldn’t spare the time to become proficient enough to make real use of the promised advantages, and even then there would be the enormous labour of putting onto the system the mass of material he had so far accumulated. Two years at least, he told himself. No, he must plod on.

“I’ll do it for you,” Mari told him. “Of course I’ll get some things wrong, but I don’t think it’ll be too bad.”

“No, I can’t accept that. It would interfere too much with the rest of your work.”

“This is more important.”

“No, I really can’t accept it, Miss Gellers.”

“Please, Doctor Tharlsen.”

(Doctor Tharlsen maintained a formal relationship with his students, and Mari had guessed early on that he would be embarrassed by anything that suggested his friendship with her was other than straightforwardly professional.)

As a compromise he agreed that she might stay on at the university through the summer vacation and make a start on the work to see how it went. He spent the first three weeks at Yale, where the library had recently installed a new fluoroscopic technique, combined with computerised image enhancement, to extract meaningful characters from damaged documents, and were eager to try it out on the Frählig MS. By the time he returned Mari had the legible parts of the Gelfunsaga on disc, including a whole series of extensions of lines revealed by the fluoroscope—on Mari’s suggestion he had asked an assistant at the library to email these to her. By the end of the vacation Doctor Tharlsen was himself online and exchanging email with distant colleagues.

A word about the Gelfunsaga. This is the longest, most exciting, and at the same time most tantalising portion of the whole MS. Like Snorri’s later Prose Edda, it appears to be a prose recension of a much older verse legend, from which it occasionally quotes a few lines. The story it seems to tell is referred to nowhere else in the literature. It would clearly be of interest to the general reader, as well as to scholars. Unfortunately it is the last item in the MS, and so the most extensively damaged, less than half of any line being legible. And its being largely in prose inhibits reconstruction, for two reasons: the alliterative verse line of, for instance, the riddles obeys rules almost as strict as the rhymed and scanned lines of later European poetry, and these usefully limit the possibilities for supplying missing words and phrases; and then the copyist, though he had written the Norse verse sections out to fill every line and had translated them into prose, had marked the line endings on both sheets with a slash, thus relating them clearly to each other. Sometimes one half of the meaning could be read in each language. There was no such guide for the prose of the Gelfunsaga, and the copyist cannot have recognised the brief verse sections as such, and so failed to mark them.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 colour 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 grey 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 grey 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 realised 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 realised 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 facedown 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.

“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-baillie. 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 realised 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 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.