Elementals - A. S. Byatt [12]
And the reptiles. An amphisbaena, leathery-brown, long harmless local snakes, asps in jars. Aspic commun. Vipère aspic, vipera aspic, Lin. And mummies of crocodiles from Egyptian tombs, boneless, long, leathery parcels, Nîmois.
‘Le crocodile, animal sacré des anciens prêtres égyptiens, était embaumé après sa mort. On le trouve en abondance dans les tombes.’
Nils Isaksen loomed behind her. He pointed out, to please her, that the text engraved above the roof-arch was English, from Francis Bacon, 1626.
Interprète et ministre de la nature L’homme ne peut la connaître Qu’autant qu’il l’observe.
‘Curiosity,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘You see.’
A very large cayman was rampant on the wall behind him, not discreetly tubular like the Egyptian mummy, but clawed and brightly glazed.
‘We are the only people here. The dust makes me want to sneeze. The poor beasts should have been let die decently.’
‘Look at the love, in the pose of those bulls, in the stitches.’
‘Love?’
‘Of a sort.’
‘Horrible.’
‘Interesting.’
That night, as usual, they dined separately, and then drank together in the bar. Patricia was disinclined to speak. The glass angle of the bar was brightly lit in the shadowed garden. The fountain bubbled and splashed. Nils Isaksen said he had something he would like to show her. He emptied out the pockets of his blue-green linen jacket on the glass table between them. There was a scattering of stones – one or two mosaic tesserae, a fragment of the golden Lens stone, a sphere of black shiny stone, a handful of sunflower seeds, a crudely carved amulet of an iron hammer on a ring.
‘I found it in an antique shop,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘In a tray of little things dug up by workmen, bottles and coins and beads. I know what it is. It is Thor’s hammer. It is Mjölnir. It will have come from a grave, maybe of my berserker gladiator. They were everywhere in those days, these little hammers. In marriage-beds and graves. To help the spirit on its way to Valhalla, perhaps. Or perhaps to prevent the ghost from rising to stalk the living. Maybe there are more under this pavement. Maybe.’
‘Are you sure it is so old?’
‘Decidedly. It is my profession.’
Patricia picked up the little dark ball. When she turned it in the candlelight it sparked with a blue fire that ran in veins and flakes in its glossy substance.
‘Pretty,’ she said.
‘Labradorite,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘A kind of feldspar.’ He hesitated. ‘When I put up the tombstone of my wife, Liv, I made it of a single slab of labradorite. It is a costly stone. It flashes like the Northern Lights in the land of the Northern Lights. I wrote on the stone only her name, Liv, which is to say, Life. She was my life. And her dates, because she was born, and died. It is in a small churchyard, surrounded by bare space. It is too cold for trees or bushes, mostly. I put a hammer in the grave with her, Mjölnir, as my ancestors would have done. Thor was the god of lightning. There is lightning in the labradorite.’
Patricia put the stone down, quickly. Nils Isaksen stared through the glass at the cedars and olives and flouncing water.
‘In the town beyond my own, towards the Arctic Circle, there is a single tree. Those towns, you know, are as far from Oslo as Rome is. Further than Nîmes. Every winter, people wrap the tree, they shroud it against the cold. The sun does not rise for months, we live in the dark, with our shrouded tree. We imagine the south.’
He pushed his stones, his seeds, and his amulet around the glass table-top, like counters in a game.
Patricia slept deeply, at first. She woke suddenly, from a confused dream of long corridors, lined with high glass cases. She went to the window. The square pane framed the huge liquid ball of the moon’s light, a full moon. The sky was spangled with stars. The light poured from the moon on to garden walls, and the great stone bowl of geraniums, fiery in daylight, now silver-rose. The air-conditioning cranked and hummed. She put her forehead on the glass. A rhythm struggled to be remembered. ‘This case of that