The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  He clapped -

  ... and black trees fell to the ground.

  Amortortak crashed down like a great rock, and a hollow sound rang fi-om His stony, icy chest.

  Freydis^s Dream

  In a dream KLUSKAP came to Freydis and said, "I have killed MUSKUNAMU'KSUTI again; that is how I have fiilfiUed your wish to be rich in everything. Now you need not be bound by your word to Him. Load your ships with My maple-wood; trade cloth with the People for My skins, and cheat them as much as you like; gather My grape-vines, and everything else besides. Your Ice-Shirt is melted, and you may put on any other shirt you choose." - But when Freydis heard these words she turned pale; she wept; she sickened like a fir-tree stripped of its boughs.

  A

  B(ack Hands

  You will remark, sir, that nothing rots or becomes corrupt in this land; corpses, which have been buried for thirty years, are as fine and sound as when they were alive ... To say the truth of these northern countries, dead bodies keep well, but the living always fare ill.

  Isaac de la Peyriere, Relation du Groenland (1646)

  ((

  H

  o, ho!" laughed Blue-Shirt, clapping and clapping underground. He had wanted to die.

  I

  Qianis and Trees

  I remember of yore were bom the Jotuns,

  they who aforetime fostered me:

  nine worlds I remember, nine in the Tree,

  the glorious Fate-Tree that springs 'neath the Earth.

  Twas the earliest of times when Ymir lived; then was sand nor sea nor cooling wave, nor was Earth found ever, nor Heaven on high, there was Yawning of Deeps and nowhere grass:

  ere the sons of the god had uplifted the world-plain, and fashioned Midgarth, the glorious Earth. Sun shone from the south, on the world's bare stones -then was Earth o'ergrown with herb of green.

  Sun, Moon's companion, out of the south her right hand flung round the rim of heaven. Sun knew not yet where she had her hall; nor knew the stars where they had their place; nor ever the Moon what might he owned.

  The prophetess Vala

  ,f I have passed over the tale of Leif's foster-father, Tyrkir the Hun, who discovered the grapes and became drunk on them; if I have omitted the account of Thorhall the Hunter, who invoked a whale from Thor that made all the Christians sick, it is not because I washed not to tell them, but because no one can land on every story-island in Breidafjord in one lifetime, not even Thorgest of Breidabolstead, as we saw when he sought for Red Eirik to slay him; and Gudrid found the same when she sought to devour every fresh lake-island in her country, searching for the Tree she refused to call Yggdrasil. - "Why do you wander so much in the forest?" said her husband. "You wdll end by becoming fey, like crazy Freydis." -"Have no fear of that," smiled Gudrid, "for I am already that." - "But what of the Skraelings?" he cried in despair. "You know they lurk about.

  You know they killed your dead husband's brother. Surely they will kill you, too, if they can, for we have done them an injury." - Gudrid could say nothing to that, for she knew that it was true. But Freydis had thrown the Gold-Shirt over her, and she could not escape its dazzlement.

  Carrying the War-Ciub andDreaminq of Bad Days

  Although she knew it not, Gudrid was perfectly safe in her travels for the present. - "There she is!" cried Carrying the War-Club's men. "Look - the white she-devil with young! Shall we take revenge for the death of His Spear Is Straight?" - "Shame on you!" said old Dreaming of Bad Days. "What honor will you gain by killing her?" - "We have heard your views before," said Carrying the War-Club scornfully. "Yes, you are a man of peace; perhaps you weep when your sons bring you beaver-meat to eat. Yet this once I say that you are right, for this Jenu woman carries no axe, and that is what we want to transform ourselves. Let us wait and watch; if once she brings an axe among the trees I will shoot her in the throat. Meanwhile, warriors, send runners to the other villages, and we will prepare to attack the demons in their houses."

  KorCsefKi^s Preparations

  Karlsefni gathered his men together. (But Freydis's men were absent. They traveled in the forest in packs, and though they carried axes and spears the Skraelings feared to ambush them.) - "Now we must make a good plan," said Karlsefni. "The Skraelings have visited us before. I expect that they will visit us one last time, and their trading then will be blood for blood. I want ten men of good spirit to set up camp on the headland north of the river. The Skraelings will see you first, and attack you first. The rest of us will move into a clearing in the forest. We will build a palisade around it, higher than the one we have here. We will keep our cattle inside with us. I have noticed that the Skraelings fear the roaring of our bull. When you men on the headland send word of their coming, I will come out with the other armsmen and we will set the bull on them."

  Everyone listened closely, and agreed that it was a good plan. Gudrid mourned somewhat about abandoning the houses they had built, but when she raised the subject she saw a gleam of ill-temper in her husband's eye for

  the first time, and wisely said nothing more. The next day, while he and his men sharpened their axes, she put her baby on her back and slipped away once again to the forest. . .

  How GndridFoimdTggdrasit

  Although Vinland seemed but a promontory to the Greenlanders, the truth was that it went south and south and south, widening as it traveled into the places of hot and steamy darkness. Gudrid's country was by no means at the end of it; it seemed not impossible that Vinland might stretch all the way to the MARE OCEANUM that was so black and cold and misty, where the Midgaard Serpent waited with its tail in its mouth ... I am maddened by the impossibility of describing Vinland, how it was in the Sun's light with golden trees rising higher and higher the farther Gudrid went into the forest -golden trees that Freydis could never have found, for the landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us, so that Freydis found mainly crooked black trees; or when she walked into the golden light she was tormented by it, as I have described; and from leagues away sardonic Kluskap could see her pale head swimming disembodied in its own inky darkness, bereft at last even of desperation and despair so that she strode calmly; but for Gudrid the trees rose harmonious and golden, their leaves more velvety than pell, which was why the Skraelings sometimes clothed themselves in those green skins. - As she went on her way, with her baby on her back, Gudrid hummed a tune to make him sleep, and she never thought what the tune was, but it was one of the songs that her dead foster-mother Halldis had taught her, and the words were:

  An ash I know called Yggdrasil, the mighty Tree moist with white dews; thence come the floods that fall adown; ever green overtops Fate's well this tree.

  and Freydis knew the same song, but she sang it thus:

  I know an ash called Terror's Horse,* the sky-cliff Tree slimed with snow-dews; thence roar the floods that death-foam down; ever green this tree over Well of Weird.

  * The real meaning of Yggdrasil. One name for Odin was "Ygg," meaning "Terror." Yggdrasil was Odin's horse because He once rode it as men ride the gallows, hanging Himself as a sacrifice to Himself so that from His suffering He might learn the sacred runes.

  for there are two kinds of everything; and Freydis's forest-dreams were haunted always by Yggdrasil's clammy green shadow rippling on that Well of Weird at the bottom of which lay Odin's eye, ripped from His head as payment for one drink of that water; but Gudrid's song was happy, the happier still for her because she did not remember what it was; and she came almost at once to a Tree that was gold and green in the sun (although much of it was dead) and birds of many colors nested in the crooks of its branch-arms and they sang for her; and a spring bubbled out of the moss between two roots; and the Tree's leaves made music in the sun for her, and all its dead leaves were real gold. - Gudrid laughed and clapped her hands. - "It is beautiful, by Christ!" she said. - But at that Name, of course, there came a terrible screeching noise from inside the Tree and the birds flew away and the leaves withered and the Tree became b
lack and dead.

  Then Gudrid understood at last that she must have been involved in some plot of Freydis's to do a thing unholy; so she cursed both Freydis and her thrall Skofte, and resolved, insofar as the teachings of CHRIST permitted, to revenge herself upon them both. But for the time being she said nothing. - Skofte, who had followed her lurking among the trees (but he had seen nothing that she had seen) soon reported to his mistress that Gudrid seemed disinclined to go out anymore. - "Should I question her?" he asked. - "No, fool," said Freydis sharply, "for then she'll know for certain that you have been spying on her. Do you think she'll like that?" She thought for a moment. "Take me to that spot where you say she exclaimed to her CHRIST. Maybe I can see something there."

  They set out the following day. Freydis took her axe and a great candle of deer-tallow.

  How Freydis ToxmdYqqdrasii

  There was a narrow lagoon over which leaning oaks made a roof, and the black silhouettes of their branch-arms and leaves were reflected in the water, which was almost perfectly black with those reflections, and when the breeze blew, the real branches shook but their reflections moved very differently because the water streamed and rippled with them, so that it appeared to Freydis that they had bones no more than did an octopus. Here she made her way with Skofte, and the trees grew thicker and thicker around her. Yet because she was not trapped in that black world upon the water, she was not stifled; she did not feel as if she moved in darkness; and indeed, all through the forest

  that morning spiderwebs and tree-hairs were white in the sun. Spiderwebs brushed against her lip. A lightning-struck tree-wreck, long since hollowed after burning, remained like a fencepost set into the forest floor. Caterpillars had eaten archways in it. - "This is where Gudrid cried out," said Skofte. -"Oh, it is, is it?" said Freydis. She went and stood inside the stump, gazing at the spider-strands that quivered in the sunlight like hairs, until, sighing, she closed her eyes. Time passed. Presently she stared down at the darkness she stood in, but still no notion of how to achieve her purpose came to her. Outside, Skofte waited patiently until she remembered him and sent him away. Then she turned her face upward, peeping through that hollow tree-bone around her, and spied the round boles of trees around her rising up into the sky until they ended in spoked wheels of branches in the clouds, and the sunlight marched dovm them in rings, down, down, until it reached even Freydis in that dark burned trunk filled with dried needles and horrid white moths, and a single bough creaked and clicked somewhere as Freydis stood there with her eyes very big in her pale lost face. - Where was Yggdrasil? - She stared up at those great trees that disappeared in the clouds - and then at last the thought came to her that maybe they were not trees, but roots! What if this entire forest comprised the great Tree; what if those wide and branchy boles met above the clouds in a trunk as vast as the world? - As soon as she had thought this, Freydis became certain that she was right. But her pleasure in herself was quickly succeeded by despair, for if this were so how could she possibly destroy these woods that seemed to have no end? And what if the forests of Markland were but other snake-roots of the same Tree? She flung herself down, there inside that dead place, sobbing bitterly.

  The Pfiiiosophy of Skofte Canion-Crow

  As for Skofte Carrion-Crow, he spied on his mistress as he had done with Gudrid, and thought her mad. He decided to leave her service as soon as he could conveniently do so. Among the ships in Karlsefhi's convoy, Bjami Grimolfsson's was well-ranked in the minds of men. Like Carrion-Crow, Bjami was an Icelander - a tie to seize upon. Indeed, he was known for his liberality. By experience, Carrion-Crow knew that such men did not pay careful heed to their stores, so that it was easy to steal from them. This suited him well. - "At any rate I have not done so badly with Bastard-Freydis," he said to himself as he went his way home. "She may not have spread her legs for me as I thought she did with all her thralls, but for all her abuse

  she has paid me well. And it may be that she will find this gold Tree she prates about. Afi:er all, I found a leaf of gold. So I will not leave her just yet - not until after I am rich." - It could truthfully be said that other men did themselves no credit to despise Skofte. Freydis's temper aroused no more anger in him than a rainstorm. Her very blows were no worse than hailstones. So, though he was a doleful dog to be sure, Skofte at least never lay down to whimper under the drizzle of his own ill-luck.

  The Way Beneatfi the Tree

  Meanwhile, Freydis whimpered in the hollow stump. But just as the moon is called "Wheel" by the monsters who serve Queen Hel, for in their country, which lies in the extremity of the north, the moon seems only to whirl round and round upon itself like a yellow skull in an eddy; but the Frost-Giants call it "Speeder," for to them in Jotunheim the wind roars through the mountains and the black clouds flee across the sky and the very moon tosses and turns frantically above the clouds (yet it is the same moon in both kingdoms); -just as the Hell-folk call wood "seawood-of-slopes," for to them in their lightless realm it is of no more account than any other jetsam at the bottom of the deep sea; but the Giants call it "firewood," because they must always be throwing cartloads of fuel on the Wall of Flickering Flames that guards their castles; - just as Gudrid sang the mild song of Yggdrasil but Freydis sang the song of Terror's Horse; so in time, when she was calmed fi-om her despondency, Freydis thought to herself, "I can call these trees roots if I choose to, or I can call them shoots of one root, in which case I can follow any hole that goes down deep enough." - So that day she wandered through many a lightning-struck clearing, where the trees were fire-hollowed. Freydis searched inside them every one. Finding nothing, however, she returned at last to Gudrid's tree.

  It had been burned, and was scaly inside with black shingles. Near the open top, this tree-well had taken on a greenish color thanks to the mosses and lichens that stained it and let down their frond-hairs, but where Freydis was it was dark and cool. Toadstools glistened in the darkness like wet round sea-rocks. A quilt of twigs lay upon the ground. Through the dead tree's many shattered windows rolled the green light, louder and more certain than any hymn she had ever heard in church. This dead stump was hidden in a hill-hollow, wrapped in a conspiracy of trees, but Gudrid had found it because she was not the sort of woman who stops short; and of Freydis one had to

  say the same. It rose tall and wide like a chimney. It was completely dead and rotten. It had died, Freydis supposed, when Iceland was Christianized.

  If then this was the Tree; if Skofte had not misled her, if Gudrid had seen something here; if Blue-Shirt had advised her truly in directing her to follow Gudrid in this matter, how was she to enter it? And how far down must she go? (After all, if this was Yggdrasil, its root descended all the way to Hel.) And what could she do to destroy the Tree when she got there? And could she even serve any purpose by so doing, now that GloOSKAP had defeated Him? - "Let me recollect," said Freydis to herself "When I visited Him in Greenland, first I crossed the Frozen Sea, then I followed valleys upward beside a great river, then I called on Him, then I ascended His mountain to the glacier, then I ... then I ..." - She sat down and shook her head stupidly. She could not really remember anything except that she had called on Him.

  To one side of the stump was a canted boulder. A stunted cypress sapling stood before that rock. Its trunk grew low and snaky against the ground, and moss covered it, so that there was a tunnel of branches between the rock and Gudrid's tree, floored with cool black dirt in which moss grew sparsely; and she saw fat wriggling worms in there when she ducked her head inside, and filth smeared her hair and she felt sick and so knew at once that Blue-Shirt must want her to enter there. Sweating and grimacing and shying away from the worms where she could, she forced her shoulders inside and began to crawl along. The sunlight dappled her at first in her wood-cage, but by the time she brushed against the charred and sodden flank of Gudrid's tree the thicket about her had grown very dense, and it was hard to see. In many places she was forced to lay about her with her axe to clear a way ah
ead of her; but at last she reached a black and slobbering mouth between two half-burned roots from which blew a draft of cold stale air, and then she was certain that there was her road downward. The entrance to this cave was choked with a great ball of dense-packed twig-bones, all dry and brittle and grey-bleached like trees. Among the twigs grew pale plants with fat, broad-lobed leaves, whose like for unwholesomeness Freydis had never seen before; there was also to be seen much dead white grass, as thick as human hair, in which the black ants swarmed. Among the tree roots was no treasure or battie-gear as there might have been in Norway or Iceland, but only twigs, as numerous and ill to deal with as Skraelings. - Here Freydis was between kingdoms, but she was not yet between worlds. - She swoing her axe; she pulled the severed branches aside. She bit her lip; she went on her way. Mold and mud slimed her all over, and the twigs crackled with her every movement. Once she looked behind, and the sky shone astonishingly through the twig-screen like many pale blue jewels;

  later she looked again and could see only darkness. Still for a long while she heard birdsongs in the twigs around her. But these died away in time, and then her only companions were horrid spiderwebs, in which there was not even a living spider to scuttle across her face. Freydis wormed her way on her belly. The passage twisted between dripping roots, burrowing into the cool black dirt, scraping between walls of gravel. Now thoughts of things her father had told her flickered in her mind. She was entering his bench-boards. She remembered something about the dog with the bloodstained breast, the horse rushing over the echoing bridge, the high wall of Hell . . . Because she did not know when she would first see troll's eyes gleaming at her like treasure-fires, she stopped, she struck spark to tinder, and so lit her candle, which she held at arm's length in fi-ont of her. The reflection of the flame glistened in the wet earth, and she crawled down and down until presently earth gave way to cold wet clay around her, and the passage steepened, and she slid down through the slime; she sped down faster and faster - how much easier than in Greenland! - and so she fell into a great cold cavern, and her belly was black with slime.