Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

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

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

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

“He said you were there too.”

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

“But you are believing it?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You didn’t release any eggs?”

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

“And then . . .?”

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

“And you want to have the child?”

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

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

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

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

“Something like that,” she whispered.

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

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

“Oh, my darling . . .”

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

“If you can find a way.”

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

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

“Spit image of you,” said Dick cheerfully.

“Troll blood,” she whispered.

“Both sides?”

(Gently. Carefully teasing.) She smiled back.

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

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

Ridiki

For Hazel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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