April barked out a laugh. “He can barely talk because someone rammed a sword through his mouth.”
I nodded. “You know the difference between him and me?
We’re both about sixteen. But he’s a man. And I’m a boy.”
April made a face, angry, dismissive, frustrated. “What is it with you guys? Is it the testosterone? You know, David, it’s the dawn of the twenty-first century, and you live in the richest, most powerful nation on Earth where there’s almost no one starving and no one enslaved and no one invading to murder and pillage and rape. And finally, finally, after thousands of years of men slaughtering men, women, and children over nonsense, we have a few places on Earth where there’s a little peace, a little decency. A few places where most people get to be born and live their lives without total horror being rained down on them, and your reaction is, ‘This has to stop!’ “
Christopher had wandered over, drawn by the sound of harsh words, I guess. He laughed. “Don’t blame me, April. I’m a lover, not a fighter. Would you like a demonstration?”
April and I stood glaring, both angry, not angry at each other, not really, but glaring at each other because neither of us could find a real enemy to take out our frustrations on.
“Come on, peace,” Jalil said. “As bizarre as it sounds, we’re on our way to a war between Vikings and Aztecs. Probably not much point having a little battle of the hormones between you two.”
April and I backed away, but it was a phony peace. We were making nice for Jalil and Christopher. And because we looked like idiots in front of the men.
The breeze had gone slack, and Harald reluctantly ordered the men to their oars. I went to my bench and rowed and wondered how much I believed what I’d said.
I noticed Christopher taking a bench toward the bow. One of the crew had smashed his hand up the day before, and Christopher took his place. He fouled the oars a few times till he got the rhythm.
Harald called for a song and April obliged. She sang “Blue Skies.” I think she faked about half the words, but the Vikings thought it was great. Other boats rowed closer, keeping station with ours.
The calm didn’t last long, a couple of hours. And then we got more wind than the landlubbers wanted. But it was a sailor’s breeze, the big square sail bellied out, the bow slicing the waves, sending up explosions of spray.
The wind held through the night. I fought sleep. But sleep came anyway, and I crossed over into p.e. in the middle of a scratch basketball game. I wanted to quit the game but I couldn’t because you don’t just quit, even though no one cares but the one jerk who wants to prove he’s some hardcore jerk.
I went through p.e. and my last two periods and made it home, where my mom had made veggie lasagna for dinner and we watched some sitcom and she laughed and told me I should laugh, too, so I did.
None of it mattered. Had it ever mattered? If it ever had, it didn’t anymore. I was far away from it. Real seemed unreal.
Familiar was strange. I’d gone to sleep in living color and woken to black and white and all the shades of gray.
This wasn’t it for me, not anymore. My world wasn’t about condescending teachers and hypocrite parents and ‘Why don’t you take out the trash?’ and ‘Where’s that two-thousand-word paper, Mr. Levin?’
I’d lived sixteen years’ worth of shiny malls and dark school hallways and narrow homes and TV blaring and smiley face e-mail and don’t do drugs, don’t do sex, don’t smoke, don’t eat junk food, don’t don’t don’t because your boring, boring life, your robot march from kindergarten to grammar school to junior high to high school to college to work to the condo in Florida to the grave where you’ll slowly decay for all eternity, should be nothing but leafy green vegetables and happy thoughts and G-rated lyrics about puppy love.
I knew where I was. I was aboard a Viking ship on my way to bat le. I wasn’t here, I wasn’t in my chair in my living room, watching two-dimensional images of people pretending to be other people. I was asleep, and all this was a memory.
I hooked up with Christopher later that night and we talked about school, and some girl, and some team in some game that neither of us cared about.
We went our separate ways, unable to figure out how to relate in the now-strange universe where we’d lived our entire lives.
I went for a walk over to the big Borders store. I decided if I was going to sail the seas of Everworld, I’d see if I couldn’t make some improvements. I looked up a book on the history of sailing, trying to figure out what I could do to enhance the sailing characteristics of a Viking longboat.
She was in the coffee shop. Sitting at a table.
I saw her and the world, the brightly lit world, swirled around me.
Senna. Sipping tea from a paper cup.
Chapter
XXXI
“Senna?” I whispered. “Senna?”
“Yes, David. It’s me.”
I couldn’t talk. Not for what felt like a long time. I just stood there, staring, swaying back and forth a little, like I might fall over.
“You’re not here,” I said. “Everyone says you’re missing. It’s been days. You’re not here.”
She smiled a cool, easy smile. “I’m here,” she said. “For now.”
With numb fingers, I pulled out a chair and sat down hard.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Lots of things are going on,” she said.
That made me mad. “Don’t jerk me around, Senna.”
She sipped her tea carefully, like it was too hot. “There’s going to be a battle,” Senna said.
“Yeah, I know. I’m there, thanks to you.”
“Stay out of it,” she said. “When the moment comes and you see a chance to run away, run. Run and keep running.”
I flushed. “I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t your fight, David. It is a single battle in a war that will spread, inevitably, throughout Everworld. Great forces are at work, I know that now. Greater than I could ever have guessed.
But I still need you, David. I still need you to be my champion.
Not to die in battle.”
She put her hand on mine. It felt real. The way my body reacted felt real.
“Loki does a very good impression of you,” I said harshly.
“Does he?” She leaned into me. And kissed me. “Run, David.
Run away.”
And then she was gone. And the people at the next table were carefully not looking at me. The way you ignore a lunatic in a public place. Only I had seen her.
I woke in Everworld to a cry that has dragged many sailors from their sleep down through the ages.
“Land! Land!”
Chapter
XXXII
Not just land. Not some bare cliff or tree-covered point of land.
The sun was rising, bright and buttery yellow, as if we’d been traveling south for weeks and months rather than east for two days.
We were approaching the mouth of a wide river. Numerous small craft plied back and forth, primitive even by Viking standards.
I saw no warships, no ships at all that would merit the word.
Nothing that would sail out to challenge us as we stood in toward land, menacing, closer and closer, silent and deadly.
On the left bank of the river was what might have been a fishing village. It looked not very different from the Viking village but was more sprawling, a collection of mud and thatch huts without defensive walls or a definable perimeter.
It might almost have been picturesque, except that it was totally overshadowed by the city on the right bank. Not a village, a city.
The city looked ancient and modern all at once. The walls of shining white stone were perhaps a hundred feet high. I saw no towers. It wasn’t a castle built for defensive war; it was a wall raised against the jungle that pressed in all around the wall, a sea of dark, almost black-green that flowed down from distant mountains. Green, unbroken green, as far as the eye could see.
The city rose be
side the river, from the edge of this jungle, a brilliant, blinding Escher print rendered in color. Since the town sloped uphill, I could see some of what was beyond the walls: straight-as-a-ruler streets lined with white stone buildings and tile roofs.
Here and there at intervals, pyramids rose, peeking over the wall. They were stepped, not smooth. Two or three times the height of the walls. And these pyramids would have seemed fabulous and incredible, except that one pyramid made the others look like foothills next to Mount Everest.
It rose so high I think it could literally have touched the clouds. It was so vast, so monumental, I wondered that the ground could support it. The entire rest of the city, every stone in buildings and walls, could not have built a quarter of that mountain of rock.
Down the center of the pyramid was a broad stairway, steps shorter than the step-back construction of the pyramid itself. A rust-red stain ran down the top third of the steps.
“The city of Huitzilopoctli,” Thorolf announced with satisfaction.
“We’re attacking that?” Christopher asked.
“That is what we must do, yes. There lies the ransom demanded by Loki. There, atop the great pyramid, within the temple itself.”
“What is the ransom?” April asked.
“The head of Huitzilopoctli.”
“Say what?!”
“Isn’t he a god?” April pressed. “You can’t just chop off a god’s head, can you?”
“Mere mortals? No. A mortal may not kill an immortal, as anyone knows who has heard the sagas and eddas, the great poems and tales, knows. But we have a…“ He hesitated and frowned. “Perhaps I will leave that unsaid.”
I heard Sven Swordeater’s thick, mangled speech coming from behind me. “Tell them, good Thorolf.”
Thorolf grinned. “Great Thor is lost to us, we know not where or how, but his hammer, Mjolnir, is not.”
We all stared stupidly, having no idea what this might mean.
“King Olaf Ironfoot has the hammer of Thor,” Sven said.
“Mjolnir carries the power of Thor’s own mighty arm within it.
With Mjolnir we may kill Huitzilopoctli as Thor slew the frost giants.”
So that was the weapon Olaf had bragged about. Thor’s hammer.
Christopher turned to April. “Nurse Ratched, I’ll take my medication now.”
A new level of activity broke out aboard the ships as we glided toward landfall. Men sharpened their swords and axes.
Officers went over their chain-mail shirts, carefully checking for any small defect. The archers laid out their arrows, trimming the feathers, filing the iron arrowheads.
I asked Thorolf for a sword. He didn’t argue, but he didn’t have a spare: He wasn’t a rich man, he protested. Besides, he preferred an ax.
It was Sven who armed me. He sent his man for a sword and had the servant buckle it around my waist.
“I have no mail shirt for you, nor any helmet, nor shield,” Sven said.
“Thanks for the sword,” I said, trying not to feel too much like an idiot amateur.
“The Aztecs fight with spears and swords of obsidian. Our iron blades will break theirs, and their shields are like cutting through cheese. But be careful of the throwing spears. They are very quick with their throwing spears.”
The guys on the shore weren’t standing around idly as we approached. They’d have had to be blind not to see us, and they weren’t blind.
We heard distant horns echoing from the city walls. Tiny human figures could be seen racing along the wall.
But an hour went by, with us almost ashore, before a column of troops, fantastically arrayed in bright turquoise and crimson feathers, came trotting out of the main gate down toward the puny sand beach where we would land.
We were in the river’s current now, so we went to the oars, moving with surprising ease upstream.
Closer, closer, closer.
My heart more and more in my throat.
Jalil stood beside me as I rowed. “This is a real war, David,”
he said. “This is for real. These guys are going to be hacking one another up here.”
I nodded, conserving energy.
“This isn’t our fight, man. This isn’t about you hating your life or whatever. This isn’t about some macho pose. This is real, serious, screaming and dying war.”
I shot him a quick look. He sounded like Senna. Run away, David.
“Question for you, Jalil,” I rasped out between strokes. “You see those guys on shore?”
“You have a point to make?”
“You figure those guys know we’re not Vikings?”
He bit his lip. I don’t know why, but it made me glad to see Jalil was scared. I’d have been more scared myself, only I was focusing on rowing. And focusing on what had happened when I’d gone up against Loki. Focusing on maybe wiping that out. Maybe putting that behind me.
Or maybe getting killed. Blade biting into me, cutting me, tearing me open, my insides spilled out into the sun.
I had to focus to keep my grip from tightening to a panic cramp on the oar.
“Screw it,” Jalil said bitterly. “If I’m getting killed, I’m inflicting some pain first.” He went off in search of a weapon.
I had a sudden, clear image of a spear thrusting right through my body. Right through my stomach. First the point pressing against cloth and ripping through to flesh. The wound widening as the spearhead flared out. The blood seeping out around the black stone blade. The spear pushing through my internal organs, out through my back, between the ribs. Pierced through and through. Impaled.
It was an image from dreams I’d had since I was six.
Impaled. Helpless.
I missed my stroke and felt the oar behind mine whap hard, sending an impact up to my hands.
For once Jospin didn’t come over and scream bloody murder. I guess he was focused on battle, like everyone on that boat. Like everyone on all longboats.
The beach was close now. I could see individual faces of the wall of soldiers facing us. I could see sun glinting on black spears.
“Take in the sail!” a voice roared. Crewmen, already expecting the order, shinnied up the mast, while others hauled on ropes.
“Archers!”
“Oars up!” then, a scraping sound that shook the ship.
We were beached. Beside us were other ships, the ship we had raced. Carved prows hit the sand.
It was going to happen!
Right now, it was going to happen.
“Fire!” a dozen bowstrings twanged, a dozen arrows flew from all around me, and dozens more from the other ships.
Ships were still coming in, still landing, and arrows flew, flew, flew.
The first Aztecs began to die, howling, screaming, tugging at arrows that stuck in their shoulders, bellies, legs, groins, necks, eyes.
“Arise!” Harald bellowed, appearing at the bow of the ship and waving his sword in the air. The Vikings leaped up, grabbed their shields, gripped their swords, and began a sustained, bloodthirsty roar.
“Attack!” Harald cried, but some of his men hadn’t waited.
A huge, blond Viking leaped to the sand, screaming like a madman, screaming in throat-tearing rage, insane, uncontrollable. Berserk. He landed, stumbled, caught himself, and went barreling toward the Aztec line.
Then it was pandemonium. I couldn’t have resisted if I’d wanted to. A mass of men all around me, running, climbing onto the gunwale, leaping, falling, staggering, running, pushing.
All of us shouting, all of us pulsing with adrenaline, all mad and scared.
It was electric. I can’t find another word. It was electric! My body tingled, my brain was somewhere else, I wasn’t David Levin anymore. I wasn’t me, an individual; I was lost in the mass madness. Raw screaming fury, I ran.
We roared into the Aztec line. Spears thrust at me, dodge!
Ah! Stab me? I’ll chop your head off! I’ll kill you, kill you, kill.
I raised my sword high over my head
, shot wild looks left and right, panting, gasping, as my heart refused to let up and let me catch a breath.
Eyes locked on me. Dark, deep-set, ferocious eyes. I saw him.
Saw him lunge with the spear, quick as a snake. The black spearhead aimed right at my stomach.
I twisted right, swung my elbow forward, caught the spear point on its flat side, and felt it slice through my shirt and graze flesh. I swung back, left elbow twisting toward the Aztec’s face.
He was unbalanced, leaning forward. I caught him on the side of his head. He staggered. He fell facedown in the sand at my feet.
Another spear, this one wide. I swung my sword down and cut into the Aztec’s helmet. I didn’t see what happened next, didn’t know if I’d injured or killed the man. Too much was happening all around me, yelling, cries, grunts of effort as men swung heavy weapons.
From the center of the line of battle there came a new note, a roar of triumph, laughter! And moans of despair.
And suddenly I saw him: Olaf Ironfoot. He stood alone, tall, wild, bellowing. In his hand was a massive hammer with a short handle, just enough to grip.
He swung the hammer into the head of an Aztec. The warrior didn’t just drop, he flew. It was as if he’d been hit by a truck. He tumbled across the sand into his brothers.
“The hammer of Thor!” Thorolf cried.
The Viking army began to chant.
“Mjolnir! Mjolnir!”
The Aztec line broke and ran.
They ran and we were on them, stomping over the wounded, screaming ourselves hoarse yelling. “Mjolnir! Mjolnir!”
Me as insane as the rest, as caught up in the frenzy of slaughter.
We chased the Aztecs as they ran for the walls of their city.
Across the sand onto paved road.
And then I felt a shadow.
I looked up. A cloud? No, darker than any cloud.
The sun had risen behind the huge pyramid. It almost seemed to be sitting atop the pyramid. And from that sun, at the top of that monstrous pyramid, a shape appeared.
Huitzilopoctli.
He was shaped like a man. Blue, the blue of the sky late on a summer day. His face was striped horizontally with bands of blue and yellow. Around his eyes were glittering white stars, stars that seemed real and hot and explosive.
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