‘He proved too weak to withstand the darkness of this world and we should leave him to it. That would be the greatest torment for such as he,’ William said distantly. ‘Yet he is one of us and he must be punished for a betrayal that must make the gods weep when they learn of it. As they will when we return.’
‘Return?’
William nodded. ‘It is time. Two nights from now when the sun sets, a way will open to the realm of the old gods by their grace. This once and once only. I have dreamed it and I have read the signs. If we turn from it, we will be trapped here forever in this land of cruelty and darkness.’
Ragnar had been too distraught to really listen. All she understood was that William had a plan that would punish Torvald for his seduction and betrayal.
‘What do you want me to do?’
William asked her to send Torvald a message to come over the water to them on Sunday afternoon. It was Friday and normally he would not come on weekends for fear he would be spotted and followed by Ridhurst students who might discover the truth. Or so he had told her, she thought bitterly. William told her to write that the tide would be high enough for him to negotiate the sandbar in the Ridhurst dinghy.
Coldly Ragnar wrote the note and slipped it into the internal mail box in Ridhurst after dark while her father snored in his bed. She had not known what William planned then or now. She didn’t care as long as Torvald suffered.
• • •
‘He comes,’ William breathed.
Ragnar squinted through a rising sea-mist and saw Torvald launch the heavy school boat. She sat, stiff-backed and still as a statue as the boat came over the water and William ran to meet him and bring him back to where a picnic feast was laid out.
‘Ragnar, my love,’ Tor said and bowed as he always did. But now Ragnar saw the gallant gesture for the mockery it had always been and her hatred weighed in her stomach, heavy as a stone.
‘Tor.’ She forced her lips to shape a smile but there must have been something wrong in it, because instead of smiling back, Torvald frowned questioningly at her. He would not ask aloud what was wrong though, because of William. He would wait as always until William withdrew and they could speak freely.
Ragnar bent her head to hide the rage bubbling within her and stroked Greedy with fingers that trembled. He would not settle – no doubt he sensed the turmoil in her.
‘Now we shall drink a toast, my lord, for this very night the way opens to the realm of the gods from whence we all came,’ William said, and passed a chipped enamel mug to Torvald.
‘What?’ Torvald asked.
‘Drink,’ William said and handed a plastic mug to Ragnar, who was staring at Torvald with such longing and loathing that her soul felt as if it were curdling in her breast.
‘Tonight we drink to the joy of William the Sage, who returns to the realm of the gods where he is an honoured Merlin.’ William drank and, like an automaton, so did Ragnar. Torvald shrugged and drank.
William spoke again with an almost hypnotic solemnity, holding up his own jam jar as if it were a jewelled goblet. ‘Tonight we drink to Thorn the mighty hunter as he returns to his airy realms . . .’ He drank again and so did Ragnar and Torvald.
‘Tonight the Princess in Exile returns to claim her kingdom . . .’
Ragnar drank her father’s cheap red wine, and found her head spinning because she had barely eaten for the last two days. But Torvald had not taken another drink.
‘You are leaving?’ he asked worriedly. ‘Would you go without me?’
‘I am not finished, my lord,’ William said sternly. ‘We drink the bitter dregs to you for a betrayal that will sunder you forever from the princess. We might have let that be torment enough, were you a creature of this dark world. But you are of the golden realms and so your treachery is too deep for us to let you live – even here in this shadow world.’
‘What?’ Torvald asked, but his words slurred so badly they could barely be understood. ‘Princess Ragnar?’
Ragnar’s confusion over William’s words dissolved in a boiling lava of bitter despair. ‘Don’t you mean Pig, Tor?
Don’t you mean Ragnar the Pig whom you would never introduce to your parents or bring to a dance?’
His eyes widened in shock. ‘But, Ragnar . . .’ His eyes clouded and he fell forward, catching himself on one hand. He stared at the spilled wine seeping into the pale sand. ‘The . . . drink?’
‘Not poison but enough tranquilliser from the Goodhaven store to kill a horse, or a lord who betrayed his true land and his deepest love,’ William said sadly.
Fear flowed over the handsome features, then acceptance. ‘William . . . I do not blame you for this.’ He looked at Ragnar. ‘I was trying to divert Roscoe and his friends from reporting your father when I spoke . . . as I did on the train. They would . . . never be held back by compassion or . . . honour, so there was no point in speaking of such things to them . . . had . . . had to . . . to play their game.’ He coughed and fell forward onto his elbow, twisting his head so that he could look into Ragnar’s horrified eyes.
‘Had to play . . . a cruel game they could understand and sympathise with. Even admire. I . . . did not want to tell you the truth until I had thought of a . . . solution. You see, in a way, I did betray you. They . . . they followed me, you see . . .’
‘Torvald!’ Ragnar screamed and gathered him into her arms, her terror too deep for words. Surely William had been joking. Surely he had only been trying to frighten Torvald.
‘I should have told you the truth sooner . . . my love. Shouldn’t have tried . . . being a hero . . .’
His eyes fell closed. Ragnar shook him and knelt to press her head to his chest. She could find no heartbeat nor breath in him. She tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, letting herself think of nothing but the rhythm of breathing and pushing on his chest. How long she tried she could not have said but when William’s hand fell on her shoulder and she sat up, her head spun.
‘Bring him to the boat, Princess. They will be able to revive him perhaps in the sunlit realm of the old gods where all things are possible.’
Ragnar stared at him hopelessly, thinking that she had let one of the two people she loved in all the world kill the other. It was not poor battered William’s fault, for he had never known any sort of normality. It was her fault Tor was dead, her fault William was a murderer.
‘I have made you a murderer . . .’ she whispered, stricken.
But William’s eyes met hers steadily. ‘Tor’s is not the first death at my hand in this dark world.’
‘What?’ Ragnar whispered.
‘I killed my father. He was trying to scalp my mother when I woke. So I took the gun he had thrown down and I killed him.’
All the horror of the night coalesced around the bleak dreadful image of a small boy forced to shoot his father, and Ragnar’s heart swelled with pity.
‘Ah, William . . .’ she whispered, blinded by tears. ‘What are we going to do?’
He reached out and took her hand in a surprisingly strong grip. ‘I have never lied to you, Princess. We belong to a world where there is hope and this is a world where there is none. Only come now, and help me get Lord Torvald’s body into the longboat.’
Ragnar stumbled to her feet and took Torvald’s legs as William instructed. She did not know or care what he wanted to do. She had brought him to murder. Now she supposed they would dispose of the body.
The body. They half dragged Tor over to the side of the Longboat which was anchored close to the water and, straining and pushing, heaved him over the edge. Ragnar felt sick at the thumping sound his body made as it landed in the bottom of the boat. She climbed in beside him, gagging at a queer acrid smell as she lifted Torvald’s golden head onto her knees.
‘Thorn!’ William called and Ragnar looked up in time to see the seagull stagger hippity-hop over the sand to his feet with a creaking caw of delight. He scooped the bird up and put it in the boat then pushed it off into the water and climbed in be
side them. Ragnar stared up at him as he lifted a plastic bottle from the bottom of the boat and tipped what looked like water over Torvald’s unconscious form. Greedy squawked as he was drenched, and the smell was intensified as William sprinkled it over Ragnar’s legs and dress.
‘What is it?’
‘It is the test,’ William said, emptying the last of the liquid over himself and the boat.
Ragnar watched him throw the bottle into the water and rummage in his pockets, before withdrawing something. ‘A test?’ she asked dully.
William lit a match that flamed the colour of the clouds on the horizon all shot through with the bloody brightness of the sun’s death, and smiled at her.
‘Do not be afraid, Princess. It is the last test of courage required by the gods – to know that we are worthy to dwell in their realm.’
‘William . . .’ The clouds in Ragnar’s brain dissolved as the match fell onto Torvald’s body. Flame made a feast of him, but he did not move because he was beyond pain.
She watched the flames play over him and William came to sit beside her. He took her hand, sticky with tears and petrol, in his own thin strong fingers and kissed it reverently.
‘What comes will be a moment of pain before the gods pluck us from the crucible.’ He looked down at Torvald. ‘Love was first born where we journey, Princess. Hold fast to that, for all love in this world is but the palest shadow of it. Where we go, love has magical properties and there may be a way to bring him back.’
‘We will die . . .’
‘No. It only seems so, else there would be no testing. But hold fast, Ragnar, for you are a princess and the gods are watching.’
Ragnar wondered if she was mad but as the flames tasted the petrol on her dress and licked along the hem almost teasingly, she felt a surge of hope, for it seemed to her she could hear the brassy call of a horn, peeling out an eldritch welcome for a long-lost princess.
She stroked Torvald’s face as flame licked flesh, and steeled herself not to scream, for she was a princess among the gods, and she was bringing her beloved home.
As flame rose around them like a winding sheet, Thorn the hunter lifted himself on crippled wings and flew.
PART III
THE WORLDROAD
‘The worldroad led everywhere, even home,
if you walked it long enough.’
LONG LIVE THE GIANT
You! Come over here. I want to tell you the story of death and of the fairies at the bottom of the universe.
My name is Forever.
No, you will not get into trouble for listening to me. Student groups are always brought to this wing because I am here and they think I am harmless. Like a friendly bear in the zoo, which will permit itself to be petted. The nurses are happy to have me to amuse those who come through, for it leaves them free to do their hair or call their boyfriends. They think that I am tame, but they are wrong. Oh, you need not be afraid that I will bite or froth at the mouth or tear my clothing off and caper naked before you. But I am dangerous just the same because I may cause you to think too much. You can die of that.
Oh yes, you can die of anything – of lonesomeness or homesickness, of a broken heart. You can even die of stupidity. And in the end, if you haven’t died of anything else, you die of life.
Yes, you are right. I am old and I talk too much. I will take your advice and get on with my story.
Is it a true story? Forgive me smiling. I know it looks as if I am laughing at you, but I am only amused by the irony of your question, for once my mother asked it of me in that same suspicious way. Or not quite. Her exact words were: Is that true or is it a story? You see how she used the word story as if it were the word lie?
I had told her, you see, that I was late home because the fairies had got hold of me and kept me prisoner. I created that story to make amends for having come home so late. I had not meant to deceive her so much as to offer her my story as a gift, little knowing how prophetic it was. The truth seemed a drab sparrow of a thing, and so I brought her a gorgeous plumed exotic instead.
She slapped me, and in the pain of that slap was an important lesson: no matter how wondrous a story is, if there is no truth in it, it is ugly. But truth is complex and rarely comes in the form of undiluted fact. Stories are facts with soul, and stories that have no truth in them are indeed lies.
The nurses here call me a liar, you know. They say: The woman in Room 304 tells lies. Just as they say of the woman in Room 303: She has Alzheimers. (She is dying of forgetfulness, I tell children, and they nod their little tousled heads with a wisdom that humbles me.)
Why am I here? I suppose you could say that what ails me is the opposite of what ails the woman in the next room. I am dying of too much knowledge. I am distended with truth, bloated with stories, while the woman in Room 303 is almost an empty husk, the knowledge of her life all bled out of her. I have told her many a story to try to nourish her shrivelled soul, but they leak out of her as fast as I put them in.
The nurses would probably tell you I am dying of lies, which they call senility, or of old age. Lies do come more easily as death approaches. They form a barricade against the tidal wave of fear that roars at me when I think of dying. Behind that flimsy barricade, life is piercingly sweet.
Stories give me the courage I need to keep my promise, and to laugh. I will tell you later of the promise.
My grandfather was a liar, you know. She probably gets it from your father, my mother used to whisper to my father, as if lies were hereditary. Perhaps she is a throwback, my father would respond, to dissociate himself from our bad blood.
My grandfather liked to answer questions with stories. How can she learn if you tell her such outrageous things? my mother would ask him in exasperation.
When a drunk driver annihilated my grandfather on a wet road one night, my mother shook her head and said it was a pity, but in her eyes I saw a certain satisfaction, as if he had got his just desserts.
One of the stories my grandfather told was this:
We were passing the city cemetery. Adjoining it was a field occupied only by a couple of amiable and moth-eaten horses, and a grey tower. I asked what the tower was for. My grandfather answered that it held a giant’s arm.
(I have told this more than once before. But I cannot tell this story without it. It shapes the two great preoccupations of my life – truth and death.)
In answer to the clamour of questions this tantalising titbit about the giant evoked, my grandfather explained that some aeons past, humans had stumbled on a giant’s body in a field during a cross-country trek. In those days this area, my grandfather had said in a dry aside, was completely deserted. This accounted for no one knowing the giant existed or noticing the body sooner.
Human doctors came to examine the enormous corpse and found that the giant had died stretched out flat, except for one arm. Rigor mortis had set in, and the arm was fixed in that position. The doctors could not shift death from his bones long enough to lower it, and even the engineers and builders had no luck with it. Finally it was decided to bury the giant normally, except for the offending arm, which would be encased in a stone tower.
This would also serve as his monument.
I do not know if it still exists. I never leave this place now. As a young woman I would avoid the cemetery and the field with its mysterious tower. It frightened me, that monument to death. But now, when I am afraid and my courage fails, I picture it in my mind and whisper: Long live the giant!
Oh, I was afraid of death after my grandfather died. I loved him and his loss grieved me. But the thought of him mouldering under the ground with the worms in his eyes haunted me. It drove me to seek out truth, for I had got it into my head that truth would save me from death – that somehow truth and immortality were the same thing.
Yes, I am laughing, but I am not so far from sorrow or terror. I laugh to give myself the courage to keep faith with the giant. I laugh because truth is a wild beast with teeth that rend.
I abandoned the magic and fairytales of girlhood to investigate the source of life in a search for truth that would fill my every waking hour. When the test-tubes and chemical equations of my prime yielded no answers, I turned in grey-haired middle age to philosophy. I was called wise and brilliant, but let me tell you, what lay at the bottom of all that studying and thinking and talking up a storm was my fear of dying.
At the last, I made up my mind to take the initiative with death instead of having it stalk me through the years. I was tired of waiting and it had come to me that perhaps death and truth were the same thing.
I walked out the front door of my house to the nearest bridge and jumped without bothering to leave a note or think twice.
One minute I was flying through the air towards the cold and stinking river with its rotted black teeth of stone; the next I was hovering in the air, surrounded by golden light.
The fairies had got me after all.
Oh, listen. That is not the end and it is rude of you to turn away when the going is rough. A story is a road and you have your feet upon this one. Kindly walk it to the end. This is the hardest bit, I promise you. It’s all downhill from here.
Now where was I? Oh yes, flying through the air and then – floating. For a minute I thought I was dead and truly it was something of an anticlimax. I had been taken up by a molecular refractor, though you might as well call it fairy dust. I woke naked in a cage of woven sunbeams, neither dead or even mortally wounded. I was pretty shocked I can tell you. Nothing had prepared me for this turn of events.
The creatures who had got hold of me were humanoid: their heads were devoid of hair, but they possessed two great chilly liquid eyes, two slightly pointed ears, flattish noses and lipless mouths. They were much bigger than we are – as big as a two-storey building. Truly giants. We talk of giants, but you can’t imagine what it was like seeing their great faces peering in at me, their pores open like little gasping mouths. I fainted straight away and several more times until I got used to the sight of them. And even when I began to study them, I could not like their hugeness for it dwarfed and utterly diminished me.