Earth and Air by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t know about want . . . oh, darling . . . I just don’t know!”
    â€œYou feel somehow, as it were, compelled? A moral duty, perhaps?”
    His voice was drier, more remote than she had ever heard it.
    â€œSomething like that,” she whispered.
    He thought for a long while, still holding her hand as he stared out across the motionless tarn.
    â€œI meant what I said about faith,” he said at last. “If you believe you’re right, then I believe too.”
    â€œOh, my darling . . .”
    â€œDo you want me to keep your side of the bargain?”
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œSpit image of you,” said Dick cheerfully.
    â€œTroll blood,” she whispered.
    â€œBoth sides?”
    (Gently. Carefully teasing.) She smiled back.
    â€œJust 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.
    â€œHorned 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