by Jann Burner
"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up, you wastrel!"
Harry opened his eyes slowly to the noisy din. He seemed to be laying on a floor in a room crowded with awesome foul-smelling creatures. Now, as his eyes adjusted to the torchlit twilight, he could see that his head was laying on a table and apparently there was some sort of celebration going on. All about him strange, longhaired humanoid creatures were making great loud noises attempting to rouse him into consciousness. They had an accent, a dialect, almost a brogue. He found their speech pattern familiar and yet hard to place. Each and every syllable had the metallic clink of a small coin dropped onto a hard marble surface.
"Wake up! You can't be here! What are you doing in this hallowed place?"
None of this made much sense to him at the time. He raised his head off the long slab of wood and tried to sort through the mass of tangled thoughts that crowded his mind. He felt like a fisherman with a bad backlash. He was apparently at some sort of primitive feast and, where was Asher?
"You shouldn't really be here, you know?" said a friendly voice close to his head.
"REALLY!" said an exaggerated male voice with great indignation from across the table.
"Pass the wine and bust 'is head!" said another.
"Out with the bastid'!"
"A pretender, for sure," commented yet another.
Suddenly, Harry felt someone nudge him in the side. It was the friendly voice. He looked to his left and a dour-looking manbeast creature with leather breasts and a great horned helmet pushed a silver flagon of wine into his hand.
"Go ahead, boy. Put Christmas in your eyes, keep your voice low and speak of Paradise, and see where it gets you, ha-ha-ha!"
"He's a fraud! He don't belong here. Heave him out!" screamed a loud voice from far down the table.
"Yeah! This is a hero's hall. We're all heroes here and he just don't belong."
"Hold on now. Hold on." cried a deep rich authoritative voice. "He's a fraud for sure and he don't belong here, for certain, but he's still a hero, only he don't know it yet. I say every man, woman and child that's ever put on skin and walked this green and sacred globe is a hero!"
"A hero, each and ever one!"
"Aye!" said another gravely
"Here, here," cried the group as a whole, raising their silver chalices, "Three cheers for mankind!"
"But to be a true hero, one's got to know he's a hero. How one handles that knowledge, that's what makes him a hero!"
"Aye, and I say 'cause he ain't realized it yet, he ain't no hero--he's just another pretender."
"Yeah, just another flat spot on the wheel..."
So here they were, the warriors, the victors and the victims, the killers and the killed, who, having died gloriously in battle, were sharing a last feast in Valhalla. They sat around the table like personified violence. Horned steel and silver helmets, encrusted with precious stones, and shields and flags, heavy with clan symbols, hung from the walls along with swords and knives and daggers and bloody battle axes. There were at least fifty of them circling the entire table; hairy with muscles stacked like thick steaks beneath a shoplifter's coat. There was Cumin and Turmeric and Cardamon and his brother, Fenugreek, and all the rest too numerous to mention and, of course, the leader, the lord of this celebration, Coriander.
Suddenly there came a great crash from the head of the table as a goodly portion of the long wooden slab exploded into splinters and pulp.
"Who is this CREATURE!" cried the great Coriander, smashing his short broad sword into the once living oak.
In the ensuing silence, all eyes turned slowly in Harry's direction.
A friendly face to his left inquired politely, "Friend, how did thou get here without the traditional garments of a true Viking lord?"
"Well...ahh" Harry began, trying to voice a suitable response, but the words just bubbled uselessly in his throat.
"Well...?" said an isolated voice from somewhere down the line, "if you can't see it from wisdom, then you must obviously be forced to live, or die, through the experience!"
"How true...how true." responded yet another.
"SILENCE!" bellowed King Coriander from his position at the head of the table. "BIND THIS MAN HAND AND FOOT AND CAST HIM INTO THE OUTER DARKNESS!"
"But, sir..." Harry sputtered, trying to explain his way out of this most difficult situation. "I'm just a tourist. I really don't belong here, don't you see. I'm just passing through. This is just...practice."
"PASSING THROUGH!" cried Coriander, "PRACTICE! What blasphemy. Practice, indeed. Seize this, this person, this hu-man and cast him and his hu-man desire into the outer darkness!"
The sentence had scarcely been uttered when the entire warrior horde began to descend upon Harry as if he were a bag of garbage and it was collection day. He stood, panic stricken, and retreated to the door as the paradisal forms advanced. As they closed with him, ropes and weapons in hand, he reached for the door and found it quick to open at his touch. He turned and ran into a wall of night, pursued by anonymous voices. He ran and ran, until he could run no further, and when he could no longer run, he walked fast, and when even that became too much of an effort, then he walked slow until rested, at which time he would resume running again. He ran with nothing but his pipe and his pouch and his red wooden flute. He ran because he knew that he was a pretender in Paradise. He felt certain that the Viking horde would not really harm him, but he also knew that this was their Paradise and not his. The longer he ran the more confident he became that by this action he would be led eventually to find his own particular vision of Paradise.
In the distance, Harry saw lights on the horizon and as he drew closer, he saw that these were small fires and sitting around these fires were ragged- looking men with tattered clothes and scraggly beards. These he discovered were the hobo?s of Heaven, crouching about their campfires at the base of the Rock Candy Mountain, drinking from a whisky stream and eating from a pool of hearty stew. These were the ones, who, in life, made the tragic mistake of becoming professional humans. These were the work-obsessed, taking advantage, now, of the freedom offered in Paradise. Harry stopped for a while to listen as they swapped lies and spoke of their earthly adventures, exchanging pieces of paper and cutting deals. Now they shared the great, good comradeship that was denied them in life. Soon though, they admonished him to move on, least they, too, join the crowd and pursue him to the very edge. For they, too, could tell at a glance that Harry did not belong in Paradise. And so, with the sounds of the Vikings growing ever closer, he turned to run once again. As the cycles of running, jogging and walking continued on and on and on, only to be replaced one by the other, he became gradually aware of a growing lightness on the horizon. The darkness was retreating, and soon it was to be the dawn of a new day.
Through the course of his long dark night he had left the mountains and the foothills, and had crossed the wide grassy plain which, with the light, had become a hard flat rocky ground. Now that the light was in the sky and his pursuers were far behind, he found himself standing, incredulous, at the very edge of a sudden and apparently bottomless abyss. He ran along the edge of the great break, first in one direction and then in the other, looking for a passage, a natural bridge over which he might quickly pass. There was no bridge. Nor was there any natural substance: wood, reed, or rope with which to fashion a point of passage. He sat down upon the very edge and reflected upon his rather grave situation. He felt trapped by his frustrations. He felt like a cat on a blackboard with claws engaged futilely trying to rise above himself. Though the break was only about twenty feet wide, it appeared to be bottomless and he dared not risk a running jump, for if he should fail...he would surely spend the rest of eternity experiencing the phenomena of falling. How deep was it, he wondered, and what lay at the very bottom? He scooted close to the edge and pushed over a small rock. He watched as it was quickly swallowed up by the darkness of the abyss and then he listened for its report, but the sound
never came. He felt saddened; to have come so far only to be caught, trapped by a crack in the earth.
At that very moment, Harry's eye caught a movement in the distance, on the far side of the break in the ground. Approaching across the barren prairie of mind ground was a large cream-colored horse and riding atop the beast was what appeared to be a young woman with long yellow hair that trailed out behind her in the wind as she rode. He watched her intently as she approached, for she seemed to take a most indirect route. She moved back and forth in the distance, as if she were approaching over a stream, jumping from rock to rock, negotiating a most difficult course in order to reach him.