" 'We drank deep of the Fountain of Vaucluse
And where the northern Force incessantly
Stirs the still pool, were stirred. And shall those founts
Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?' "
Maud said "Say that again." Roland said it again. Maud said, "Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair. You listen to this. This is what Raimondin says to Mélusine after he is told she knows he has looked at her in her marble bath and broken the prohibition:
" 'Ah, Mélusine, I have betrayed your faith.
Is there no remedy? Must we two part?
Shall our hearth's ash grow pale, and shall those founts
Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?' "
Roland said, "Shall our hearth's ash grow pale."
"The image of the hearth runs all through Melusina. She built castles and homes; the hearth is the home."
"Which came first? His line or her line? There are problems about dating Ask to Embla-which we're obviously on the way to solving, among other things. It reads like a classic literary clue. She was a clever and hinting sort of woman. Look at those dolls."
"Literary critics make natural detectives," said Maud. "You know the theory that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery novel-everyone wanted to know who was the Father, what was the origin, what is the secret?"
"We need," said Roland, carefully, "to do this together. I know his work, and you know hers. If we were both in Yorkshire- "
"This is all madness. We should tell Cropper and Blackadder and certainly Leonora and marshal our resources."
"Is that what you want?"
"No. I want to-to-follow the-path. I feel taken over by this. I want to know what happened, and I want it to be me that finds out. I thought you were mad, when you came to Lincoln with your piece of stolen letter. Now I feel the same. It isn't professional greed. It's something more primitive."
"Narrative curiosity-"
"Partly. Could you manage a few days' field research at Whitsuntide?"
"It might present difficulties. Things aren't easy at home. As you may have noticed. If you and I-went up there-it wouldn't be liked. It would be misconstrued."
"I know, I understand. Fergus Wolff thinks. He thinks. He professes to believe-that you and I… "
"How dreadful-"
"He threatened me in the Library with finding out what we were up to. We must watch him."
Roland considered Maud's embarrassment and did not ask what were her feelings about Fergus Wolff. That they were violent was clear. Equally he did not intend to discuss Val.
"People who are going off on real naughty weekends manage to find excuses," he said. "Put up smoke-screens. It happens all the time, I'm told. I don't see why I shouldn't think of something. Money's more of a problem."
"What you need is a small research grant to look at something not too far away from Yorkshire and not too near either-"
"Ash did some work in York Minster Library-"
"Something like that."
Chapter 13
Three Ases wandered out from Ida plain
Where the Gods met in council, with clear brows
And joyous voices, knowing then no weight
Of sin, or the world's wryness. All was gleam
Of sun and moon well-wrought, and golden trees
With golden apples inside golden walls.
They stepped into the middle-garden, made
For men not made, drowsed in the lap of Time.
Round their divine bright faces, ceaselessly
Rushed the new air. Beneath their lovely feet
Rose the new grass, and leeks, untouched, uncropped
Green with the living Sap of that first Spring.
They came down to the shore
Where the salt breakers fell on the new sand
With road unheard, and curling crest unseen
Like nothing else, for no man-mind was there
To name, or liken them, in any way.
They were themselves alone, and rose and fell
Changing-eternal, new, not knowing time
Which their succession measures for the mind.
And these three Ases were the sons of Bor
Who slew the Giant Ymir in his rage
And made of him the elements of earth,
Body and sweat and bones and curly hair,
Made soil and sea and hills and waving trees,
And his grey brains wandered the heavens as clouds.
These three were Odin, Father of the Gods,
Honir, his brother, also called the Bright,
The Wise and Thoughtful, and that third, the hot
Loki, the hearth-god, whose consuming fire
First warmed the world, then grown beyond the bounds
Of home and hearthstone, flamed in boundless greed
To turn the world, and Heav'n, to sifting ash.
Two senseless forms, on the wet shore o'the world
Lay at the tide's edge, and were water-lapped,
Rising a little with the creeping wave,
Then slipping back, with motion not their own.
Log-like they lay uprooted, simple forms
Of ash and elder, shorn of their green pride
But not quite dead perhaps, but nourishing
A kind of quickening shrunk back to the core
Of all the woody circles of their trunks.
(Circles of years not lived by the new wood
But sempiternal years, a present past
Stirred into being by the hand of time
As lines of water spired in the new pools.)
The new sun stood in the blue; her chariot's course
Not more than twice completed, who has since
Circled and run from dawn to dawn as Earth
Grows cool and cloudy in the calmer light,
Nor ever fails, nor swerves a pace from true
Till all be swallowed in the final Fire.
All father in her heat felt his own force.
He said: shall these trunks live? and saw the life
The vegetable life, that sang i' th' quick.
Bright Honir said: if these could move and feel
And see and hear, the lines of leaping light
Would speak to ears and eyes. The garden's fruits
Would render life to life. This lovely world
Would be both known and loved, and so would live
An endless life in theirs, and they should hear
And speak its beauties, then first beautiful
When known to be so.
Last he spoke, the dark
God of the hidden flames. He said, "Hot blood
I give them, to make bright their countenance,
To move in them the passionate motion
Which draws them to each other, as the iron
Springs to the lodestone always. I give blood-
A human warmth, red with a human fire
A stream of vital sparks, which if preserved
Speaks each to each divinely, but which spilt
Is mortal ruin till the end of Time
For they are mortal."
And so the laughing Gods, pleased with their work
Made man and woman of the senseless stumps
And called them Ask and Embla, for the ash
And alder of their woody origins.
Odin breathed in the soul, and bright Honir
Gave sense and understanding and the power
To stand and move. The quick-dark Loki last
Knitted the veins of circulating blood
And blew the spark of vital heat, as smiths
Stir fire with the bellows. So a sharp
And burning pain of apprehension
Stirred life in those who had been logs of peace
And thrilled along new channels, till it roared
In new-forged brain and ventricles of blood
And curling membranes of the ear and nose
And last, opened new eyes on a new world.
Now these first men were quite unmanned by light.
The first wet light, of the first days, that washed
Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea
With liquid gold and silvered every crest
That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth.
What had lived by the whispering of the sap
Had feelingly discerned the shivering air
Known dark and light along the rugged bark
Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool-
Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light
Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold
And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot
With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes.
All this they more than saw and less than saw.
Then turning, saw those forms majestical
Wrought by the cunning of the watching gods,
White skins, blue-shadowed and blue-veined, with rose
And tawny gold inwoven, pearly-bright
Untouched unused, and breathing the bright air.
Those four eyes darkened by the burning Face
Of the bright lady of the sky, now saw
The milder circles of each other's gaze
Crowned with curls of glossy golden hair.
And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man
Saw answering lights in Embla's lapis eyes
The red blood Loki set to spring in them
Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she
Was like himself, yet other; then she saw
His smiling face, and by it, knew her own-
And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled
To see their goodly work, so fair begun
In recognition and in sympathy.
Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore
And touched the woman's hand, who clasped fast his.
Speechless they walked away along the line
Of the sea's roaring, in their listening ears.
Behind them, first upon the level sand
A line of darkening prints, filling with salt,
First traces in the world, of life and time
And love, and mortal hope, and vanishing.
- RANDOLPH HENRY ASH, from Ragnarôk II. I et seq.