“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.