FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING
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Special Thanks to Wil Moss
© 2020 MARVEL
First published by Aconyte Books in 2020
ISBN 978 1 83908 054 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 055 5
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover art by Grant Griffin
Distributed in North America by Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, USA
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For Duane and Dolly at the Comics Club,
my suppliers of Marvel Comics for…
it can’t possibly be that many years, can it?
Prologue
The sun of Asgard gleamed on the armor and blunted double-handed swords of the boys and girls facing one another in pairs around the grassy field, each duo with an adult referee hovering to oversee the bout and award points. Some of the children looked tense as drawn bows, others were confident and relaxed, and still others grinned with the excitement of competition. Massive, with a bushy beard the tawny red of fox fur, clad in a scarlet doublet trimmed with cloth of gold, Volstagg was one of the parents relegated to the ring of spectators around the tourney area.
Like the other fathers and mothers, Volstagg was watching his own child with a mixture of pride, hope, and anxiety, so intent on young Bjarke that despite a legendary appetite that often provided fodder for his friends’ jests, a half-eaten goose pastry hung forgotten in his hand. Bjarke very much wanted to win the tourney, and so his father wanted it for him. Tall for his age, strong, and aggressive, the lad had eliminated his first two opponents, but now only the better competitors remained. He was likely to have a more challenging time of it moving forward.
“Begin!” the referee said.
Blunted practice sword raised high, Bjarke instantly charged. His opponent, a slim girl a head shorter than he was, didn’t move. Some people might have assumed Bjarke’s sudden assault had startled and frozen her, but Volstagg had survived centuries of combat, albeit often by keeping his head well down, and his instincts told him she was inviting the attack. He wanted to call out a warning, but that wasn’t how things were done. Besides, it might simply distract Bjarke at a critical moment.
Bjarke’s blade swept down at the top of her helmet, and sure enough, the girl spun out of the way and cut to the flank. Her weapon clanked on mail as it bashed Bjarke in the ribs.
“Halt!” the referee called. “Point for Ulrika!”
Now it was acceptable for Volstagg to shout, and he did so. “It’s all right, son! It’s only the first point!”
The children returned to their starting positions. The referee again gave the command to commence.
Bjarke advanced a little more cautiously this time, with Ulrika giving ground before him. Even circling, though, she couldn’t retreat too far lest she step over the chalk line defining the limits of the dueling ring. When he’d backed her up as far as she could go, Bjarke began a rapid series of cuts. Steel rang as Ulrika parried but seemed unable to riposte. Perhaps, Volstagg thought, the boy’s attacks were coming too fast, or the jarring impacts of sword on sword were weakening her grip on the hilt of her weapon, with its cross guard and heavy steel disk of a pommel. He hoped that was the case even as his instincts warned the girl was setting a trap.
Screaming a battle cry, Bjarke made a horizontal cut. Ulrika dropped to one knee, and the boy’s blade glanced off her helmet. She cut at the same time, and her weapon clashed against her opponent’s high boot with its reinforcing strips of metal.
“Halt!” the referee shouted. “Point for Ulrika!”
Scowling, Volstagg doubted he would have made the same call. Still, he resisted the impulse to call out to the official and argue. That wasn’t done either and would accomplish nothing beyond quite possibly embarrassing his son. It was for the referee to judge whether the attack that skipped off the helm would or wouldn’t have penetrated armor had the sword been an actual weapon of war, and to his credit, though he too frowned, Bjarke didn’t try to argue either. As he and the girl returned to their starting positions, Volstagg called, “Be careful, son! You can still win if you use what you know!”
The official set the children at one another again. Bjarke tried compound attacks to penetrate Ulrika’s guard, but the feints didn’t deceive her, and her blade was always in position to block the true cut. After a few such exchanges, she attacked while Bjarke was feinting, and he jerked his arms back just in time to avoid a stroke that, in a real fight, might well have severed a hand.
To Volstagg’s dismay, that was the end of Bjarke attempting finesse. The boy struck hard, fast, relentlessly until Ulrika skipped out of the way of a downward cut as she had before and landed another clanking counterattack to the flank.
“Halt!” the referee shouted. “Point to Ulrika! Match to Ulrika!”
Bjarke saluted her with his sword and shook the girl’s hand as he was supposed to. He even managed to smile. But as he pulled off his helmet and trudged toward Volstagg, the smile slumped into sullenness. Volstagg felt a corresponding disappointment but did his best to hide it lest the boy think he was disappointed in him.
Instead, he tousled his son’s sweaty hair, red like his own, but of a more coppery hue. “You did well.”
The boy twitched away from his father’s touch. “Not well enough,” he said.
“There’ll be other tourneys,” Volstagg told him. “Do you want to watch the end of this one?”
“No,” said the boy.
“As you wish. But there’s a stand over there selling cherry tarts. A warrior needs sustenance after a battle.” Volstagg noticed he was still holding the half-eaten goose pastry and tossed what was left to somebody’s wandering elkhound. The dog caught it in the air and gobbled it down.
“Can we just go home?” Bjarke asked.
“Leaving the poor vendor bereft of our coin? We’re thanes of Asgard, lad. It’s our duty to help the commons prosper. Now come along, and don’t let the blade of your sword drag on the ground. A man-at-arms respects his weapons.”
Father and son sat down to eat on a bench some distance from the action of the tourney, although they could still hear cheers and the clangor of metal. The warm cherry pastry was as tasty as Volstagg had hoped, the perfect juicy blend of tart and sweet, but Bjarke only nibbled, even though such treats were one of his favorites. By all indic
ations, the lad was even more demoralized than Volstagg had initially realized, and his father determined to set things right. Perhaps he could do so by giving Bjarke reason to believe he’d fare better next time.
“Very well,” Volstagg said. “If you can’t forget about the tourney, let’s talk about it. See what there is to learn.”
Bjarke gave his father a look that suggested he knew he should learn from the experience but was reluctant to suffer through a dissection of his mistakes and deficiencies. “All right.”
“When Ulrika wasn’t fighting a bout herself,” Volstagg said, “she watched those who were. She watched you. Did you watch her?”
“I guess,” Bjarke said. “I did watch some of the other bouts.”
To Volstagg, that sounded like an evasion. “But did you study her as she studied you?”
Bjarke frowned. “I don’t know.”
“If you didn’t, you weren’t prepared for her tactics and favorite techniques, while she was ready for yours.”
“I still should have beaten her. She didn’t deserve that second point.”
Although Volstagg had thought the same himself, that was the wrong lesson to take away from the bout, and he didn’t want it to take root. “Whether she did or didn’t,” he said, “it was one point out of three. When something doesn’t work out as you thought it should on the battlefield, are you going to dwell on it or set it aside and move on?”
Bjarke sighed. “Move on, I guess. But I tried! What else was I supposed to do?”
“You’re bigger and stronger than most children your age – you can thank your mighty father for that – and you rely on it too much. In a bout, you make the same basic attacks over and over again, counting on power and fierceness to carry you through.”
Bjarke frowned. “The way I fight won me the first two bouts.”
That too was the wrong lesson. Volstagg wished fleetingly that his beloved wife Gudrun were here. She was sometimes better at correcting the children than he was. She wasn’t, though, so he had to find a way. “But it lost you the third one,” he said.
“I did change –” the boy began.
“For a bit,” Volstagg said. “Then you grew impatient and went back to your old moves. As Ulrika wanted you to do.”
“Well, Thor’s the strongest of anybody, and he always wins.”
That remark prompted a thought, an idea of how Volstagg might get through to Bjarke. “Not every fight,” he said, “and when he does win, which is indeed mostly, it isn’t by dint of strength alone. A victorious warrior thinks. He observes and plans. He’s patient and persistent enough to see a plan through to the finish, but adaptable enough to change what isn’t working. Maybe a story will convince you.”
Bjarke finally perked up. He had always liked his father’s stories. “Is it about Thor?”
“Not this one,” Volstagg said. “It’s about Heimdall long ago, long before he was the guardian of the Bifrost, when he was barely grown to manhood, in fact, and Asgard had fallen on dark times.”
One
A final volley of arrows put the two frost giants to flight. They’d attacked by surprise, seemingly hoping that this – coupled with their strength, size, and ferocity – would carry the day, but Asgardian marksmanship had disabused them of that expectation.
The Jotuns were as tall as trees. They were blue skinned, wearing only horned helmets, other scraps of armor, crudely made iron and ivory ornaments, and loincloths, but mostly naked in the cold they didn’t feel. They fled down the defile that ran between a pair of hills. Their crunching footsteps left holes in the snow long enough for a man to lie in like a grave.
“After them!” Captain Ivar bellowed. He bore a battle-axe in one hand and a round shield on the other arm, and his yellow beard hung in three plaits.
Other members of the Asgardian patrol brandished their weapons and roared their eagerness to obey. Several months ago, at the command of its king, Skrymir, a mighty warrior, sorcerer, and illusionist, Jotunheim had invaded Asgard, and the two worlds were at war. Yet, in their weeks scouting this province on the outskirts of the Realm Eternal, the patrol hadn’t hitherto had the chance to strike a blow against the enemy. They meant to make up for that now.
Yew bow in hand, another arrow nocked, Heimdall, though he tried, couldn’t share their enthusiasm. It seemed to him that the frost giants had run away too easily. As if their intent was to lead the Asgardian warriors into a trap.
But then again, what did he know? He and his sister were the youngest warriors in the company. Ivar was by far the more experienced warrior and the war leader. It was his role to give commands and the role of callow recruits like Heimdall to obey them, preferably with the boldness that was the hallmark of an Asgardian warrior.
The boldness embodied by his sister, Sif. As she strode along beside him in her red war gear with white trim, her black hair hanging down her back in a ponytail, the fierce gaze of her blue eyes and the set of her jaw revealed her eagerness to pursue and to fight, to prove she was valiant and skilled as her older comrades. He told himself to be more like her.
The company trotted forward. Sif glanced over at Heimdall and evidently noted worry in his expression. “Cheer up, brother,” she said. “It will be fine.”
Heimdall hoped she was right. Certainly, the frost giants weren’t known for laying cunning traps or employing subtle tactics. In past conflicts, they’d generally charged into combat like berserkers.
Like the path before them, the wooded hillsides were cloaked in snow with icicles dangling from branches. Much of Asgard enjoyed a perpetual summer. Out here near the borders that wasn’t the case, but winter should have already given way to spring, and it hadn’t. Maybe that was because the invading Jotuns had brought their own preferred climate with them.
Or perhaps Odin’s will and magic were necessary to turn the wheel of the seasons, and with him inexplicably lost to the Odinsleep for months on end, it was stuck. In which case, unless the All-Father woke, it always would be.
Heimdall scowled and pushed such dismal reflections aside. Even if he’d been in any position to do anything about such high and mysterious matters, now would not have been the time to brood about them. He, Sif, and their comrades were heading into a fight, and he needed to concentrate on that.
Or maybe a fight was imminent. He wasn’t certain, but other than their footprints, there was no further sign of the frost giants. Maybe they simply had run away, their long legs allowing them to outdistance their pursuers. Maybe any danger was long gone.
But suppose, just suppose, the Jotuns had run to join more of their kind. In that case, perhaps the creatures were waiting where the terrain favored them. Heimdall had never been to this particular bit of the Realm Eternal before, but he had studied the maps, and he sought to recall the specifics of what lay ahead.
The warriors in the front ranks of the company slowed because they’d blundered into deeper snow. Cursing, they pushed onward, and it was at that point that Heimdall saw something that sent a jolt of alarm through him.
For an instant he hesitated, still reluctant to be the warrior who questioned his thane’s commands or looked timid in any way. But he couldn’t let his sister and his comrades advance obliviously into danger and not speak up.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Everyone, stop!”
Ivar looked over at him. “What?” the war leader asked, impatience in his tone.
“If I remember the map of this area correctly,” Heimdall replied, “it shows a long slope ahead. If we push down it, that snow will be over our heads.”
“Then we need a way around,” Ivar said.
“But that’s not all of it,” Heimdall replied. “The giants’ footprints stop here. Which way did they go? Maybe they didn’t go anywhere. I think–”
Like whales breaching, showering snow in all directions, frost giants burst from the gleaming white s
urface ahead. Some sorcery, or perhaps just their natural affinity for winter and all its works, had enabled them to lurk submerged in the low place and smooth away all sign of their presence as well.
Had the Asgardians floundered deeper into the snow, they would have been helpless to defend themselves. Even though they’d stopped short, the situation was dire. Roaring, eight frost giants tramped forward. Enormous clubs, swung low to the ground, smashed into men and women in the front ranks and hurled their pulverized bodies through the air.
“Shoot!” Ivar bellowed to his troops.
Heart pounding, Heimdall drew and loosed, drew and loosed. He aimed for the eyes and hoped others were doing the same. It was what Asgardian warriors were trained to do.
To his surprise, the volleys of shafts slowed the frost giants long enough for the few survivors in the front ranks to fall back. The creatures flailed their hands in front of their faces like men trying to swipe away clouds of midges. One of the blue-skinned Jotuns even toppled backward when Sif shot an iron-tipped length of birch so deep into his eye that it disappeared completely.
“Ha!” she cried. “One down!”
“Fall back!” Ivar bellowed. Unfortunately, the chance vanished before he finished speaking.
A frost giant with hammered gold and enormous crudely cut blue gems among his ornaments charged despite the flights of arrows, and the other Jotuns followed their leader’s example. They only needed a moment and a couple strides, and then they were looming over Heimdall, Sif, and much of the Asgardian patrol.
A huge spiked club swept down. Sif grabbed hold of Heimdall’s arm and yanked him out of the way of a blow that might otherwise have killed them both. She then dropped her bow and drew her blade. Meanwhile, Heimdall was slower to reach for the great sword hanging down his back.
He was a skilled swordsman. His father’s master-at-arms and pretty much everyone else on the estate had been surprised that the odd boy, who liked books and asked questions about what everyone else accepted as simply the way things were, had possessed the knack. Heimdall had been surprised himself.
The Head of Mimir Page 1