by Eric Flint
Jerry shrugged. "I am an expert of sorts on the competition. The trickster is a common motif in mythology. Nearly every culture has one, from Hanuman to Glooskap. They are usually neither good nor evil, but do help men when the fancy takes them. Loki is held as the greatest of them all. They are all thought to be at least in part created as good bad examples."
"Maybe," said Loki dreamily. "Maybe once they were chieftains of small tribes on leafy islands, who helped their people to survive by guile and cunning, when strength would not prevail. Yes, I was the friend of humans once. But did they come to my aid when the Ás killed my son and used his entrails to bind me?"
"Did they know?" asked Jerry. "And could they? Your enemies made sure that they would not wish to."
"That is true enough," admitted Loki. "One-eye found me a useful thing to blame for most things."
"Almost half of which you had nothing to do with," said Sigyn.
"Well yes. But the other half I did, often as not," said Loki, with disarming honesty. "It usually seemed worth it, at the time."
"And now?" asked Jerry.
"Well, some of the tricks were worth it," said Loki. "I probably shouldn't have done Sif's hair. It served her right for being a tease, though. But Freyja deserved what she got. Even she admitted it later. And Skadi deserved it too, I don't care what she says."
Jerry nodded. "And, if I recall right, a fair number of those pranks of yours involved changing your size and shape?"
"That and my powers over fire are my aspects, mortal. Uh, Jerry. That is how we have a fire in this damp pit, though we have little else. Fire is my name and fire is my nature, they say. Friend and destroyer both."
There was indeed something very flamelike about the mercurial Loki. "Well, how about we try the friend part on these thongs tying my hands together?"
"An easy gift to give," said Loki, fixing his sparkling eyes on the thongs. They began to smolder, and then, as Jerry strained against them, they broke and burned fiercely.
Jerry flung them away hastily, and the fire promptly died. It was good to have his hands free. "Thank you." He gave Loki a bow. "Now all you have to do is transform yourself and we can be out of here."
"If it were that easy, O man from a far-off place," said Loki, "I would have been gone for many ages and Ragnarok would have been. Odin has bound me here with a tie that cannot be broken. A blood tie. A tie that goes deeper than the iron that Odin changed Narfi's entrails to, once they had bound me. I am bound by my son. I cannot break or escape that bond."
Jerry pondered the matter. "I think I understand. It is symbolic magic, isn't it? The chain that bound Fenrir is much the same thing. Tangible things can be broken. Intangibles . . . are much harder."
"Indeed," said Loki. "I should have guessed from what they did to my Fenrir. It was that that turned me against them, finally. As you say, any fool can break a leg or a sword. To break the spirit or destroy hope is indeed much harder. The bond between father and son is not easily broken. Odin used that to shackle me, as nothing else could. Sigyn cannot free me of the entrails of our son, either."
Jerry chewed his lip and put more effort into thought. If only he knew Norse myth better! "Then how did you get free before . . . you would be free at the end of this cycle of time, if I have it right."
"By slow determination," said Loki. "I cannot break the iron which was Narfi. But I can wear through the rock. And if that is what must be done to avenge my fine sons, I will."
By his face Jerry could tell that was no exaggeration. The rock would eventually crumble. "There is one other possibility," Jerry said cautiously.
"And what would that be?" asked Loki with gentle irony. "That I burn myself free as I burned your bonds? That too I cannot do against my own child's body."
Jerry shook his head. "No. That I could free you. To you . . . those are your son Narfi's guts. To me it is just iron . . . or am I misunderstanding this?"
"No. You have it right. There is just one detail. It is iron, and you are not the biggest or strongest of mortals, unless your looks deceive me—in which case I do apologize."
The iron bonds were only about an inch thick. Nothing to Thor, perhaps. "I'm feeling a little poorly at the moment," Jerry admitted. "Normally, it'd be like a few strands of wool."
Loki smiled. "You are quick, for a mortal, Jerry. I suppose if you weren't, you'd be dead."
Jerry realized he'd just met up with the god of Norse punsters, which, all things considered, was both alarming and hardly surprising. The various sagas, as he remembered a colleague complain, were just about impenetrable to outsiders because of the various word-plays or "kennings." He supposed that long Scandinavian and Icelandic winters lent themselves to that. "It's one of those things about being mortal, Loki, although it cuts me to the quick to admit it. And the pain of that makes me lithp. Then I'll be Thor, and Thor being thtrong, I could break your bondth."
Loki laughed helplessly. Eventually he got control of himself. "Don't tell the Thunderer. He's a bit slow and always suspects people are making fun of him. It is a good thing I understand the tongues of all mortals or some of it would have been wasted on me."
"Yeah. Well, its a good thing my friend Lamont didn't get nabbed and put in here too. Or we might just end up making bad puns while your Ragnarok comes and goes. I wish like hell he was here. Him or Liz, although she'd have killed me for that pun. They're both better at practical solutions than I am. And there has to be one. Here I am—free, able to avoid Odin's spell and help you, and I haven't got the strength or the tools to do anything about it."
Jerry felt through his pockets, hoping against any kind of logic to find a file or a crowbar, or a pair of bolt-cutters . . . instead of . . .
A couple of pens that felt like goose-quills, a used handkerchief, a small pocket diary that Liz had given him in the vain hope that it would help him remember appointments, a plastic bag that Liz's candy supply (officially for Lamont's kids) had come in, his wallet, and a remarkable shortage of bolt-cutters or even something as useful as a penknife. Of course, transition would have changed the items. The plastic bag felt leathery.
Loki sighed. "If wishes were enough to bring them here, or any others that might befriend me, I would have this place so full of my kin among the mountain and frost giants, and my living children, that we'd have to stand on each other's shoulders. This place is proofed against the magics and summonsing of both the giant-kind and of the Ás. Even if we were free, only that vindictive bitch Skadi can get in and out of the pit."
"And she does not come down here when the bowl is nearly full, or I would dash it in her eyes," said Sigyn. "She knows I have to protect my husband from her snake's venom."
"Speaking of bowls, how much time do we have left?" asked Loki.
"It nears full, beloved," she said despondently.
He sighed. "Friend Jerry. You had better find somewhere well clear. Sigi. Try to note where he is. He's a mortal, and that poison would burn him far worse than it does me. It might kill him and we need him. Even if it takes a little longer, have a care throwing the stuff out. I can endure a little longer. Jerry. It will take me a while to recover, before I can be rational again. And my writhing shakes the place. I am sorry."
Jerry felt the contents of his pocket again. "I think . . . I think I have something we can try." He pulled out the once-plastic bag, the couple of quills, and the handkerchief. Liz might prefer Kleenex but there were things you could do with handkerchiefs that defied Kleenex. He could tear strips off them and use them to hastily lash two goose quills into a cross, and then use that to hold open the oiled leather bag. He felt around and found some of the burned thong . . . Now all he needed was something to tie it onto, and he'd have a sort of bag-on-stick to hold over Loki's face. There was nothing remotely sticklike in the prison. Then it occurred to him that he was being needlessly inventive. He pulled the bag of out his pocket, and flattened it out. "If I can just put this over your face, Loki."
The bound god grinned. "It'll
improve it. Try it."
"And quickly," said Sigyn. "The bowl grows heavy."
Jerry eyed the snake warily, but the huge serpent resting on the ledge above seemed semitorpid. The creature seemed content with just dripping its venom onto the face of the bound god below. So he put the bag over Loki's face and backed off hastily.
Sigyn took her sheltering bowl away, and poured it out. And Loki lay . . . still. And then spoke from under the bag. "Sigi. Rest your arms for a while. I don't like the view under here, but there is no pain. There is no pain," he said again, almost incredulously.
"We will make something of a tent of it first," said Sigyn, holding her now empty bowl back in place, and flicking the moisture off the bag. "It would have run down onto your face soon."
She smiled at Jerry, and he could suddenly see that under the exhaustion, under the sorrow and the bitterness, she was a very beautiful woman. "Thank you. You have been the first good thing to happen since Loki was trapped."
"The second," said Loki. "You coming here to sit with me was the first, and the greatest."
"He always did have a silver tongue," she said, smiling again. "Now. With those quills, can you make some kind of prop to make the bag into a sort of tent?
Jerry had taken out his billfold. The credit and bank-cards were ivory by the feel of them. "If I made a V of this above his eyes. And I have some coins . . . we could weigh the edges down with that."
"A personal face tent," said Loki.
"You will have to lie still, husband."
"I'll do my best, if it will give you a rest. Keeping still when I know I have outsmarted Helblindi and his tart Skadi will be a pleasure."
"Who is Helblindi?" asked Jerry, ever curious.
"Our One-eye. My accursed half-brother. Just one of his myriad aliases. It means Hell-blind, which is appropriate."
That explanation left Jerry puzzling at the genealogy of the Norse gods, as he organized Loki's personal face-tent. He wasn't that familiar with the relationships of the Norse pantheon, but he hadn't known that Odin and Loki were related. Loki was one of the giants—and Odin was one of the Æsir . . . wasn't he?
A little later Sigyn triumphantly lowered the bowl. "My arms. It has been centuries. Thank you, Jerry."
"Hey," said Loki. "She's mine." You could hear him laughing under that tent.
"Keep still," said Sigyn sternly. "Why I put up with you, I do not know." And when he started to speak again, she said, "Hush." And he did.
Jerry was impressed. One had to be careful around women who could shut someone like Loki up. "I want to explain something," he said calmly, knowing that it was her that he had to convince, not Loki.
"For the favor of a rest from holding the bowl, I will happily listen. Loki will too, but he is not going to say anything."
"Right. Well, it would seem that your Mythworld—your Asgard, your gods—have somehow been taken over by this device called the Krim. It takes humans from our world—the world you once called Midgard—and reenacts the old stories with them to see and believe. This revitalizes the old beliefs. We know from our last encounter that it can do the same scene many times. It does this, not for the old gods, but for some reason of its own. It takes over for purposes we do not fully understand."
"So?"
"I suspect the myths, the stories and sagas have to be reenacted over and over again," said Jerry. "You want vengeance. I can understand that."
"But you cannot understand the depth of that desire," said Sigyn grimly. "I do not mind if we destroy Odin many, many times."
Jerry nodded. "I accept that. But do you want your son Narfi to die many times? Do you want Loki to suffer many times?"
She was silent for a long, long time. The only sound was the splash of venom on the oilskin bag. Then she said, "No. But I want my vengeance, Jerry."
"And I want mine," said Loki quietly, forgetting his injunction against talking. "Thph. The bowl, Sigi. Quick."
She had it ready, and Jerry carefully rearranged the face-tent. It gave him a chance to think.
"I'm not saying that you can't have your vengeance," he said eventually. "It seems that the right way to stop the pattern . . . is to stop the myth being reenacted according to the pattern."
"So?" said Sigyn.
"So I need to break Loki out of here . . . and let you succeed, without Ragnarok. You would accept vengeance without destroying the world, would you not? It would stop all this repeating, again."
She was silent for a long time. "Yes. But a number of the Æsir were involved. I want them all."
"We can agree on principle, though. And sort out the terms between us." Jerry said that last with a confidence he didn't really feel.
"Spoken like true trickster," said Loki. "Now please hold the bowl for a bit, because I need to talk."
Sigyn held the bowl over his face. "Poor love. To have to hold your tongue for so long!"
"And I almost succeeded too," said Loki, with mocking self-admiration. "Oh, I am great! So what do you plan, Jerry?"
"My first project has to be to deal with that snake."
Sigyn shook her head. "Skadi would know if you interfered with her pet. It's not intelligent enough to tell her what goes on, but she'd know if it were killed. And the huntress is probably stronger than I am," she admitted reluctantly.
Jerry tugged his ear thoughtfully. "We'll need her to get out of here then, won't we?"
"It'd be one possible way," said Loki. "Odin has given her the galdr that allow her in and out. But if need be I can burn my way out. It might take a while though."
"Longer than a mortal can do without food or drink," said Sigyn. "Besides, as I have explained to you, lava has to go somewhere."
"And if I burn upwards it will be here that it comes to, if I recall right," he said with a grin.
"What about steps or pockets in the rock?" asked Jerry.
"That could work. Less lava. Still, it takes rock a while to cool."
"You can melt any kind of rock?"
Loki nodded. "Burn rather than melt. Some things are harder than others, but everything burns . . . after a fashion."
"Even iron?"
Loki snorted. "Yes. But if I don't pay attention to it, it just rusts."
Jerry strained to remember shreds of the chemistry that he'd never paid that much attention to anyway. Rust. It had to be that Loki could somehow cause oxidization reactions. He only remembered redox reactions because his first take had been to wonder if school lessons had finally wandered into the fascinating realm of mythology, and whether he could explain it had actually been a red bull . . .
He recalled, vaguely, being told that rusting was exothermic. So what caused rust? Salty water, obviously. Heat? He'd attended an archaeological seminar on some Greenland dig once, by accidentally wandering into the wrong room and then being too embarrassed to leave. They'd said something about the rates of corrosion. But that could also have been because of the cold causing dryness.
It didn't matter too much, though. Loki's "binding" could rust because it would be the sort of iron that the Norse had had—not precisely stainless. But it would take time. And time was not on his side, unless he could somehow think of a way of making it pass a lot faster for the iron than it did for him. That'd be some magic trick!
And that had to be the answer, he suddenly realized. He'd learned to command Pan's sprites. He learned to deal with the magic of the Egyptians—where belief had bound magic to words and names. Even their gods could be compelled. The Norse, like the Greeks, had had a troll or a dwarf or a giant anthropomorphism for everything from the sea to thunderstorms. Their magic was definitely at least partly symbolic—hence the guts of Narfi binding Loki. And there were chants, and appealing to the gods, if he remembered right.