Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

Table of Contents

Preface

Troll Blood

Ridiki

Wizand

Talaria

Scops

The Fifth Element

About the Author

Earth

and

Air

Tales

of

Elemental

Creatures

by

Peter

Dickinson

Big Mouth House

Easthampton, MA

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved.

Cover art © 2012 Jackie Morris (jackiemorris.co.uk). All rights reserved.

Big Mouth House

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

www.bigmouthhouse.net

www.weightlessbooks.com

info@bigmouthhouse.net

Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

First Edition

September 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dickinson, Peter, 1927-

Earth and air : tales of elemental creatures / Peter Dickinson. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: “Changelings, gryphons, and gods get in the way of us mortals who are struggling to find someone to fall in love with, something interesting to do, somewhere to run to”-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61873-058-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-038-1 (trade paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-058-9 (ebook)

[1. Supernatural--Fiction. 2. Trolls--Fiction. 3. Mythology, Greek--Fiction. 4. Animals, Mythical--Fiction. 5. Goddesses--Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.D562Ear 2012

[Fic]--dc23

2012023764

“The Fifth Element” was originally published in slightly different form as “Who Killed the Cat?” in Verdict of 13 (Julian Symons, ed., Harper & Row, 1979).

Text set in Minion Pro.

Printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by C-M Books in Ann Arbor, MI.

For ROBIN

Preface

Twenty-odd years ago, not long after Robin McKinley and I decided that we should get married and she should come to live with me in England, she was asked to write a short story about a mermaid. She didn’t have any ideas, so one fine evening we walked down to the village pub to try and think something up over supper. By the time we came home in the twilight we not only had several possible mermaid plots but also a grandiose scheme to collaborate on four collections of short stories about the mythical beings who inhabit the four natural elements: earth, air, fire and water.

I was in the middle of a full-length novel at the time, and when it got stuck, as novels tend to, instead of brooding on the problem I put it aside and wrote a story about a witch’s broomstick. I decided it would do for a start, so I put it in a drawer and went back to my novel. Next time I got stuck I did the same thing. The stories began to accumulate.

Robin had more of a problem. Her stories kept turning into full-length novels. The world would be a poorer place without them, but it meant that though we started about 1995, we didn’t get our Water volume published till 2002. Fire took another seven years. I couldn’t really complain, as one of my own stories had stretched itself into The Tears of the Salamander .

But I am now eighty-four. At this rate I’d be ninety-seven by the time Earth sees the light of day. I have no intention of hanging around that long, so when her current novel, Pegasus, originally begun as a contribution to Air, turned itself into two volumes, then three, I persuaded her to let me see if I could find a home for my long-finished stories about the other two elements.

Here they are.

—PD

PS On the excuse that the alien creatures of science fiction fulfil the same imaginative need as the creatures of myth did for our ancestors, outer space being their element, I have included as a make-weight a story I wrote even before these as a contribution to an anthology with the brief that all the stories must some way or other concern a jury.

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.