Fall Hard (3 page)

I swallowed, tried to collect my scattered wits and not leave an awkward gap in the conversation. “What were we like together?” I asked, suddenly desperate to know. “Were we…” I shrugged. “Happy? Affectionate? Comfortable?” Brisk footsteps passed us continually, reminding me this wasn’t the best place for a private conversation. But damn it, I had to
know
.

Her brow furrowed. “No-ooo… I wouldn’t say comfortable, exactly. And of course, neither of you was really, well, demonstrative, even here.” Her certainty startled me. It didn’t sound like me. At least, not how I’d been with boyfriends I could remember back in England. “But I’m sure you loved him,” she went on. Unlike her previous statements, it didn’t quite ring true.

“You didn’t like him.” I’d meant it as a question, but it came out more like a challenge.

“I—well, Sven wasn’t an easy man to like. I’m sorry, Paul.”

“Don’t be. I’d rather you were honest with me.” I
needed
her honesty. “What was it about him?”

“Well, he was very intense. The sort of man you didn’t want to get into an argument with. And he really didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humour.” I’d been right about the yeti slippers, then. “Sometimes I wondered…”

“What I saw in him?” I guessed. She looked away, confirming it. “But if we were so alike—”

Her gaze snapped back to mine, piercing and earnest. “But you weren’t! Not at all, not really. Not once you got to know you.” A smile flickered. “If you asked some of the students who only met you both casually, they’d tell you differently, but anyone who knows you well—anyone you taught, even—they’d know. You’re always ready to compromise, to see the other person’s point of view, and you, well—sorry, I really can’t say that.”

“Yes, you can. It’s
me
, Mags. You can tell me.” I put a hand on her arm and gave her a crooked smile. “It’s not like I can contradict you, is it?”

She hitched up the strap on her bag, and I had to curb an impulse to offer to take it from her. She’d be hardly likely to accept help from my damaged self. “Well… You’re
nice
. You care about people, about their problems.”

And Sven hadn’t? Just exactly what
had
I seen in him?

“Oh, here’s Alex.” Mags directed a shy smile over my left shoulder, and her cheeks reddened.

I turned automatically. The adjective that sprang to mind on seeing the young man striding towards us was “boyish”. Not that he looked adolescent—I guessed him to be in his late twenties, perhaps even early thirties—but he had an open, engaging face and a ready smile. His skin was pale and almost luminously clear, and his hair was a rich dark red, like beaten copper. It was cut short, fluffier than a new-hatched chick, and despite his clothes being rather better than average for the university, he had an informal, casual look. You could easily imagine him relaxing after work with a drink or two.

“Wow, intense stare,” he said, his accent as American as I supposed Sven’s must have been. “Hey, Mags, how are you doing? You must be Dr. Ansell,” he added, turning back to me.

“Paul,” I corrected him. He had blue eyes, I noticed. But then, so did a lot of people.

He gave a self-deprecating smile. “Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting these guys aren’t big on formality. I’m Alex. Alex Winter. Here for the summer, no pun intended. Observing the sagas in their natural habitat.”

We shook hands. His grip was firm but didn’t linger. “It’s more that Icelanders don’t use surnames as other nationalities do. The patronymic system—but I’m sure you know this already.” I shrugged, smiled a little self-consciously. Slipping into lecture mode already?

Alex raised an eyebrow, but all he said was, “Of course, I read up about the place before I came here, but it still takes some getting used to. Still, as long as they don’t actually make me call myself Alex Jacksonson, I’m good.”

I grimaced in sympathy. “Not all American first names are really designed for the system, are they?”

“I, uh, heard about your accident, by the way,” Alex carried on. “I’m very sorry for your loss. It must have been terrible, losing your partner like that.”

My emotions were the usual mixture of guilt and embarrassment at his well-meant sympathy. I still hadn’t worked out a way to deal with it gracefully. A bald,
that’s okay, I can’t remember him anyway
had never seemed to go down all that well.

“If you’ve heard that much, you’ve probably also heard I don’t remember anything about my previous time in Iceland,” I said apologetically.

He gave me a disarming smile. “But you remember your subject, right? Hey, maybe we could go for a drink some time? I’d love to pick your brains on the sagas.”

I’d almost forgotten Mags was with us, and I jumped when she spoke. “Bother! Sorry, I’ve got to go. Late for a meeting.” She scurried off lopsidedly to the sound of our good-byes, and Alex gave me an expectant look.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take him up on his offer or not. He unnerved me. “You’re from America?” I asked, hedging.

The smile broadened. “I guess the accent gave it away. I’m from Boston. It’s a great city. Have you been to the States?”

“No.” I supposed Sven would eventually have taken me there, if he’d lived. Regret stabbed me with surprising force. “Maybe I’ll get there someday,” I added lamely.

“I’m sure you will. I’d love to show you around.” As he spoke, his tone warmer than his words and our short acquaintance warranted, Alex placed a hand very deliberately on my arm. Its heat seeped through my shirt sleeve with an intensity that scared me. I only just managed not to jerk my arm from his grasp.

“Just so we’re clear,” I said cautiously, “are you…hitting on me?”

Alex looked me in the eye, gave me a smile I realised was unsettlingly suggestive. “Would you have a problem with it if I was?”

I swallowed. “I…you just offered me condolences for my dead lover. Don’t you think it’s a bit weird to flip straight from that to asking me out?”

He shrugged, and although his smile didn’t falter, there was a look in his eye that was almost calculating. “Maybe. But hell, have you looked in a mirror lately?”

It was one jolt too many. I hadn’t been able to stay with him a moment longer. I’d muttered something unintelligible even to myself and fled to the safety of the bathroom. Once there, I stared at my face in the mirror. The light reflecting off the ugly green tiles made me look sickly and sallow. Steeling myself, I took out the picture of Sven from my wallet and compared it to my reflection.

Twins. Yes, it seemed blindingly obvious now, and it unnerved me—appalled me—I hadn’t seen it before. Was this my mind still protecting itself? Denying the evidence of my own eyes? Why the hell hadn’t Gretchen mentioned the likeness? I supposed she must have thought it obvious—and it wasn’t as if I could have told her anything more about it than she knew herself.

I took several deep breaths and tried to compose myself. A splash of cold water from the sink helped. I’d had a traumatic injury, I told myself, and lost my lover at the same time. Of course there were lingering effects. And coming back to Iceland was bound to stir up emotions. I wondered if my close resemblance to Sven had somehow been the cause of our first meeting—had an acquaintance of one of us mistaken the other for his friend? Perhaps an offer of a drink had followed, and then an introduction to the real Paul or Sven?

It was all conjecture, of course—and then I remembered what Mags had said. No, it hadn’t been like that at all. We’d met through Egil Skallagrimsson.

Ever since my teens, when I’d first dipped into the sagas, I’d had a fascination for that dark, twisted character. It was an odd thing to have in common—but then maybe that was precisely why he’d drawn us together. Egil was a strange combination to modern eyes: the fiercest of warriors but also a brilliant poet, wielding words easily as well as he wielded an axe or a sword in battle.

The opening of the door brought me back to myself. A tall, blond man walked in, nodded to me and went about his business. Was he someone I’d known before? I couldn’t handle this right now. I grabbed my stick and went to bury myself in my books.

After that, the day got a bit easier. The fall semester hadn’t started—wouldn’t start for nearly a month, in fact—so there were no hordes of students to face just yet. I did have to cope with the other staff, none of whom apart from Mags seemed sure how to treat me. For everyone who smiled or nodded a greeting in passing, there was another who just looked away, embarrassed, the minute our eyes met.

It was frustrating, this display of legendary Icelandic reserve, but it had its good points. It gave me a chance to settle in, to reaccustom myself to my place of work and start dealing with the mountain of correspondence that had built up over my absence. Thankfully, a good deal of it had been intercepted by my colleagues here, but the amount that remained was still formidable. I was fervently glad I’d started dealing with e-mails back in England as soon as I’d been able.

Most of what remained consisted of journals, department memos and the like. Things that didn’t require an answer but probably shouldn’t be filed in the round filing cabinet—virtual or otherwise—just yet. After a couple of hours wading through it all, I decided I deserved a break and dug out my half-finished research notes.

I’d been looking into the nature of heroism in the saga, with particular reference to Egil himself, who was a very different sort of hero from the classical idea of one. Tall and strong, yes, but also boastful, murderous and ugly, he was more a dark, brooding Batman than a clean-cut Superman. A postmodern hero, maybe. If you could say such a thing about a man who’d lived over a thousand years before the term had been invented. It was said he committed his first murder at the age of seven, killing another boy with an axe in a fight over a ball game. When he got home, his mother praised him for having the makings of a fine Viking, and he immortalised her pride in verse. At twelve, Egil killed a full-grown man—although his motive this time was revenge on his father Skallagrim, who’d killed Egil’s best friend and his old nurse in a rage in front of him.

With that kind of family background, Egil was never going to have a peaceful life—but then, I doubt he’d have wanted one.

I’d worried I might return to my research to find I’d lost interest in the subject, but in fact it seemed the long hiatus had, if anything, whetted my appetite. Here and there, in my notes, I’d find cryptic comments scribbled in margins or inserted into documents:
Tell Sven
, or occasionally the annoyingly brief
Hah!
It seemed almost as if Sven and I had been competing somehow. I wished I could recall what his book was supposed to have been about. It couldn’t have been just about the alleged shape-shifting, as the comments seemed most often to crop up in connection with Egil’s brother Thorolfr. Or Asgerdr, Bjorn’s daughter, who was first Thorolfr’s wife and then, after his death, married Egil.

Unlike myself and Sven, the brothers were an intriguing contrast: where Egil was dark, Thorolfr was fair; where Egil was ugly, Thorolfr was handsome. Egil was brooding, gloomy and often downright unpleasant, but Thorolfr was cheerful and well-loved by all. Thorolfr, in fact, was the image of the classic hero Egil so spectacularly failed to be—all the more intriguing that it was Egil who, in the end, superseded him in every way. A rare instance in myth and literature of the dark overcoming the light.

I wandered over to Mags’s little cubbyhole to see if she might be able to tell me anything about Sven’s work. Her desk was a riot of papers and books—and apparently a breeding ground for little plastic trolls of varying size, with hair all the colours of a psychedelic rainbow. No prizes, then, for guessing where the one in my car had come from. “Have you talked to pest control about that infestation you’ve got there?” I asked drily.

Mags looked up and blinked at me for a second, while her eyes refocussed. Then she raised them briefly heavenwards. “Not that again. Trolls are an important part of Norse cultural heritage, you know.”

It felt like an old ritual—my teasing, her semiserious protests. It was reassuring. I had, not surprisingly, read up on the possible effects of head injuries. It had worried me, that I might have changed, personality-wise—and worried me even more that I might not have known if I
had
changed. Which seemed, on reflection, absurd: surely I should be more concerned for the survival of the
me
I was now than of what I might have been before? At any rate, I was glad to find my friendship with Mags still intact.

“I’ve been reading through my research notes,” I said, leaning on the one square inch of her desk that wasn’t elbow-deep in papers—or trolls. “And I keep finding references to Sven’s work. Do you happen to know what angle he was working on? Was it just the werewolf thing, or was there something else?”

“Me? Oh, no.” She said it as if the very idea was ridiculous. Then her face changed. “I’m sorry—you must be wondering what I’m on about. No, Sven was very, well, possessive about his research. I don’t think anyone knew what he was working on. Apart from you, of course.”

“Of course?” Was it really self-evident? She hadn’t given me the impression of the sort of relationship where everything was shared.

“Well, I assumed you did. At least…” She frowned. “Actually, I think that was one of the things you argued about. But I don’t really
know
,” she added hastily.