Earth and Air Read Online Free Page B

about twenty yards below the dinghy. The same something controlled her swimming, prolonging her dive and then driving into a breaststroke as it slowed, so that she could stay submerged as long as her breath held. Her eyes were wide open, searching. Immediately around her the water, a sky-reflecting mirror from above, seemed almost as clear as the outer air, but shaded into dimness at any distance. Straight ahead of her, close in against the rock shelf, on the border between the light and the shadows, something went surging past.
    It was almost the same colour as the rock, so she saw it only dimly, and couldn’t make out its shape. But its movement, the powerful pulse of the legs that drove it upstream, told her what sort of thing it was. Something like a frog or toad. A toad the size of a large cow. As she fought to follow, the current carried her out of sight.
    She surfaced, changed to a racing crawl, and reached the shelf. As soon as the current ran less strongly she turned upstream. As a child, before she’d given up competitive swimming, she’d done better at the longer distances than the sprints. Now, automatically, she struck the fastest pace that came naturally to her. Every few strokes, instead of twisting her head to gasp for air, she kept it submerged, peering for some sign of the thing that had taken Dick.
    That was what had happened, she was sure. Again it was the glimpsed movement of the creature that had told her, the action of the near forelimb as it swam—something awkward about it—the other limb wasn’t being used to swim with, because it was clutching Dick—clutching effortfully—Dick had been struggling still . . .
    There! Less than a glimpse this time, a shadow-shift only, uncertain, but she put on a spurt, not bothering to peer below until she had counted thirty strokes, and then only briefly. But yes, she was gaining. Her heart slammed, the air she gulped rasped in her throat and wasn’t enough. By now, if she’d been merely racing, her stroke would have been losing its rhythm, but strength came from somewhere, came with a passionate energy that told her it would keep on coming until she caught up.
    She had no thought about what would happen then, no fear for herself. Indeed, since the first violent shock of horror as the grey arm had come out of the water, she’d felt nothing at all except the urgency to do what she was doing, to follow the thing that had taken Dick, and take him back. Nothing else existed, not pain, not exhaustion, not the cold of the deep tarn water, nothing.
    Ahead, the nature of the river changed. A steep stream fed in from the left just where the main river spilt down a slope of rock, a natural weir right across its width. Their confluence had scooped out a deep, turbulent pool. Only two days ago Mari had sat beside it under a parasol, reading and thinking and dreaming and watching Dick fish. Now, as she reached its lower edge, the creature that had taken him rose from the water on the further side of the pool, close against a vertical slab of rock that divided the river from the stream. If Mari hadn’t seen it emerge she wouldn’t have known it was there, or rather, all she’d have seen was a rounded boulder projecting from the water. There was no sign of Dick.
    She switched to a breaststroke so that she could watch the creature while she swam towards it. After a couple of strokes either the boulder changed, or her perception of it. An inch above the water two wide-set eyes gazed steadily at her. She swam straight on. It erupted through the surface, turning as it did so, reached up with a long-boned arm, grasped the top of the slab behind it, and heaved itself out of the water, scrabbling for toeholds with paddle feet. Dick’s body dangled inert from under its other arm. Without looking back at her it disappeared.
    She turned, chose a landing spot, and scrambled out and up the bank. The thing was clearly visible thirty