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.