The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  reached All-Cold. The closer she came to it, the less she liked it. A great wall of steel girded it round. Its hateful black towers lost themselves in the darkness long before she could see the top of them. - Queen Hel knew that Freydis was here and did not care because She did not care about anything. Shivering, Freydis threaded her way between the death-mounds, blowing on her hands to keep them warm. The bale-fires dazzled her, and she was weary. But at Hell-Hall she might rest. The howes grew hoarier and more numerous, and the ground between them was churned up and littered with splintered wheels and crushed timbers and bits of carven wood, everything being frosty and moldy and pressed flat with the weight of earth; and skeletons were as plentiful as twigs: - Nidhogg had been digging there. - It was very dark and cold and silent. The wdnd had stopped, and she could no longer hear the roar of the river Slith. Ahead of her, the great Hell-Gate, from behind whose gratings and lattices streamed blackness, was shut. - Freydis strode up to it and struck it three times with the head of her axe.

  Now there was tumult under the ground where the raven-black skulls grinned! - The sentries at Queen Hel's gate were blackish dead mound-men who dwelled in spear-roofed howes beneath the snake-vines; they were Draugar, the battle-slain who leap up no matter how many times they were felled. - To the northeast, where All-Cold stretched to the borders of Jotunheim, an army of them wound among the hills like an immense dragon; its raised spears were its barbs, and its shields were its scales. At Hell-Hall they lay glaring. - When they could fmd no giants to fight, they senselessly fought each other in their howes. Their souls had decayed (for the snakes had eaten their hearts); warring was all they could do. Battle-moons clanged against battle-suns.* Nidhogg the Worm followed lustfully after, gnawing at the dead men's arms and legs. - It was the same at the other seven points of the compass. The sound of a stranger's footsteps now sank into their moldy howes; it reached their frozen ears, and then Freydis heard the clatter of spears. At the clang of her axe, the Draugar rushed out to fight her! - oh, they were so skinny and eaten-up: their ribs were their breasts, and their eyes glowed green in their skulls like lanterns. - "May the dogs eat you!" shouted Freydis. "May your dead eyes burst out of their sockets!" - And she hewed ofl' their heads with her axe. (Their blood spattered on her hands and left black burning spots.) - The heads laughed, and laughed, and the Draugar scooped them up and drove them down hard upon their bleeding necks; then they rushed at her twice as ferociously as before. Again and again Freydis hacked

  * Both common kennings for shields.

  at them, sobbing, but they spiraled about her and stabbed at her with coldly glittering sword-play until she called on Him again, gasping for breath; then they sank limply down to the ground, and the steel Hell-Gate flew open of its own accord, with a great grinding noise.

  So she entered the Hall of Hel, which was called Sleet-Cold, and she stepped over the threshold, which was called Pit-of-Stumbling. Snake-poison trickled down the walls; snakes spat upon her from the ceiling, which was domed and grey-glistening like the roof of a corpse's mouth (and a drop of venom burned her left hand and turned it entirely black); snakes dropped dovm around her neck and shoulders; they slithered up her sleeves and across her forehead; they wrapped themselves round her waist like loathsomely loving arms; they flowed about her as thick as blackest mist, and they had shadows for bones, and Freydis threw up her arms and shrieked. - At this they struck at her and sought to pierce her liver as we know from the Edda they had in the case of great King Gunnar: - they desired urgently to dissolve her flesh in the oils and acids of their hate; they longed to tighten and tighten about her until her bones burst; then nothing would separate them from the seat of her being, in which they might refresh themselves as we do with nut-kernels and wolf-hearts; - but because Freydis was still alive she was a mountain of adamant to them; her breast was a marble cliff-wall. Perceiving, therefore, that the nakedness inside her would not now be delivered over to them, they shd miserably dovm her legs like rain, and she shook them off*. - But the shirt she wore maddened the other dead. Themselves being ended, and therefore placed and exposed, they lusted to strip her bare like them. - "Is she Queen or carline?" they whispered. "How can we know her rank when she walks thus covered?" - So, like the snakes, they determined to rape her. They would see her birthmarks; they would learn if her breast was guilt-stained! Their purpose kindled fire in their cold self-ashes, for they remembered how transformed they had become when Queen Hel's hands undid their life-shirts, and those who died together thrilled to see the greyness overcasting each other's faces as they became at last no more and no less than themselves, which is to say unsteady nothingnesses, now that HEL had put their bright robes away in Her coffers (they thought, they hoped She cherished them when they could not see, but in fact Her coffers were but hungry mindless chests of brass with great teeth that gnawed and gnawed and remained always empty); so now the dead, lacking as they were, said to each other: "What sport it will be to see the life go forth from her! And perhaps our Queen will reward us when we present this woman's shirt to Her!" - So they fell upon her. Sweaty green ogresses with great breasts and huge eyes scratched her face and ripped at her

  serk. From the darkness glared naked trolls. They stretched out their arms to strip her, but she shoved her way past them and strode between the columns of that dark high hall where the snakes glistened; she seemed almost to be skating across some hard-frozen lake, so effortless did her way seem to her. As on Mount Blauserk, she seemed to see her image everywhere: she saw it in the snake-gleams, she saw it in the monsters' glaring eyes; and cried out, "You're all me, you witches; you all belong to me!" - And she brushed aside the trolls like so many mayflies, for the blacker her hands became the stronger she grew. - As for the dull dead men, she could see herself reflected in the black workings of their bones; they no longer dreamed the Greenland dream . . . Freydis jeered, "Did you take your shirts off yourself, or did Odin's birds do it for you?" - Their hands hung down. - Queen Hel ruled legions of these skulls; when they knelt before Her they made a yellow pavement of head-tops. Now they stood aside, being weak low wretches, and watched the trolls pinch and abuse her. - "You Skraelings!" she shouted at them.* "You cowards!" - But they never answered. So she knocked her way through the trolls, swinging with her silver-shining wound-gasher, cutting off the hands of those who sought to stop her, and took step by step toward the cold dark high-seat. - Then she saw a miserable sight that reminded her of the nightmares of her girlhood at Brattahlid: Against the wall, and facing it, sat ten thousand rotting women dressed in grey rags, working at dreary embroideries. Women who had died in sickness were FtEL's bondsmaids now, weaving Her endless tapestries of woe on the creaking clanking looms of that dark place.

  - There in fact sat Thjodhild, who had recently died; her features were sharp and blue, for the ice was heavy on her grave. - Freydis was very surprised to see her, for she had surely died a devout Christian. - "Mother, what are you doing here?" she cried. - Thjodhild never turned from her work. "I'm not your mother," she said, her loom clacking busily; "a troll was your mother."

  - Freydis ran to her in a fury and struck her head off with her axe, screaming: "That's right, you never were my mother; that's why you're here!" Then she stood nauseous and trembling. The black blood ran down her breast; it trickled down the handle of her axe and turned her right hand black. - But Thjodhild groped on the floor for her head and set it back on her shoulders like a Draugr, then she went on with her work as sternly as before.f

  * To the north, on the plain of All-Cold, sat the Skraelings, but she never saw them. These were the lazy men, the untattooed women. It was their fate to wait forever with bowed heads, eating nothing but butterflies.

  t But Thorgunna was not in Hell-Hall, for she was blameless; nor was King Harald Fairhair there: - he was not a bear, he was not a man; he was not anywhere.

  Meanwhile the fiends swarmed upon her with jealous hatred. She grappled with those wild-haired trolls, who gripped her elbows and s
ought to bite her; she gashed their necks and arms; she smote their heart-ships, their liver-ships,* she cried out that she was alive; but they paid no heed, so at last she screamed Amortortak's name at them; and then from somewhere in the dark high-seat ahead of her she heard a low liquid chuckle, and Hel the Concealer said, "Why, don't you know Me, My daughter?" . . . Then she saw Hel's head shining at her like a moon - but it was not the sweet moon of Gudrid's face that the dying Thorstein had seen; no, it was round and icy and brassy, and at first it did not seem to have any jaws, only a mouth of darkness cut into it, illuminated inside by the shining of many bronze fangs that went deeper and deeper back to the darkness of forever, and Hel's eyes were not eyes but shallow craters in Her cold blank head; and She wore a fetter of steel around Her neck that always choked Her so that Her head was canted to one side as if She were lunging; and all around Her was darkness; when She walked through Her hall the dead men nearest Her vanished into darkness until She had passed; but there in the center of Her own darkness Hel's head gleamed so fiercely bright; She towered so high; Her forehead glittered with rays of terror.

  She had BLACK HANDS.

  Queen HetLokVs Daughter

  Sometimes, when She chose to, Queen HEL took off Her flesh and went naked. Her toothy jaws grinning then no matter how sad She was, and She shook Her skull slowly from side to side and made Her unwilling lovers play tunes on Her ribs. Her breath was worse than the milky stench of the serpents. - "Oh, darling," she said, "sit beside Me and kiss Me; you can take your shirt off now ..." - The snakes lifted their heads whenever she spoke, and their round eyes glittered like the scales of fish, and their mouths were very black inside. - At other times She had the head of a rotting horse. Her broad teeth went on and on, like a horse's; they were yellow and black. She welcomed dead warriors to Her stinking arms. Freydis too She would kiss, for She was so far dead (and had always been so) as to care nothing for distinctions of sex. - "Come now," She said, beckoning Freydis to Her, and Freydis stepped up to Her high-seat while the trolls laughed, and she knelt before Her and

  * Le., their breasts.

  could not but smell Her horrible smell, and then Queen Hel bade her rise and stretched out Her BLACK HANDS to embrace her, and Her eyes shone cruelly. - Slowly, slowly, Freydis wrapped her arms around Her; she even smiled slightly (such was her resolution) as Queen HEL kissed her full on the mouth. - "Come sit beside Me on the high-seat and I will play with you!" laughed HEL as she fondled Freydis, and Freydis suffered Her to pull her down beside Her and nuzzle her with Her great black head whose eyes were like great green torch-fires; and HEL threw a leg over Freydis's leg and whinnied and nuzzled Freydis's breasts through her shirt with her terrible mouth and sucked her nipples until they bled; and so must Freydis sit, it seemed, until a new dead soul came to Corpse-Strand. - "Yes," thought Freydis to herself, "I really must become a Christian so that I do not have to suffer Her again when I am dead!" - It was only then that she saw that white BALDUR sat meekly beside her, bleeding and bleeding from His misdetoe-wound, and smiling sadly at her. At once Freydis became jealous: - she could imagine Queen HEL drawing Her bedclothes around Him and giving Him privileges; she could envision the same with Blue-Shirt. (But then she remembered that HEL was Blue-Shirt.)

  Tfxe New Concubine

  Queen HEL was always hungry. She ground Her teeth together so that they clacked, and every moment some blackish troll-carle would rush up to Her high-seat bearing a dish of nice tidbits, such as blood-dripping hands and feet roasted for Her and honey-seasoned to be sweet in Her mouth just as the sunlight was sweet to more fortunate creatures. - All around Her pattered Her familiars; they scuttered softly on mummy-palms; their round eyes were as bright and blank as shields. At the sight of Freydis, they curved down their mouths like sickles in their anguish, and meanwhile the serpents on the walls corkscrewed themselves round and round and prepared to spit at her again, but HEL said, "No, kinsmen, you have no right to treat the child so just yet," and then the familiars stroked their cheeks and whiskers with their paws and purred.

  At the foot of Queen Hel's high-seat were many soft skins such as the Skraelings had traded to Thorvard. The dead bears snarled with black square mouths, for their heads were on their pelts, and dead men trod on them unknowing. Baby trolls played on them and peeped out through the great bear-jaws; such was the jollity of Niflheim.

  Now Queen Hel brought Freydis into her bed, for the following two reasons: first, to have joy of her, and second, to keep her from learning the one truth that might have saved her from her doom: that some dead aid each other. Queen Gunhild, who had now arrived, would have said to her: "Daughter, wear my shirt and it will help you," and if Freydis had taken it she would have always had witch-help: she could have thrown herself down on icy ground to sleep, wrapping herself in Gunhild's cloak, which would instantly have become a soft warm wolfskin; she could perhaps have conjured with it to prevail against Gudrid, and black Queen HEL did not want that. - Hel's bed-hangings, finer by far than Thorgunna's, silkier than Sigrid the Haughty's, were called Gleaming-Bale. They glowed blue with death-fire, and stung and crackled against Freydis's naked skin when HEL drew them over the two of them. - "Oh!" cried HEL. "What a sweet dimple in your freckled belly! How becomingly your hair falls down your shoulders! - I'm in a hurry to eat your heart; I'm going to rip your heart from your ribs . .. Let Me drink more blood from your little paps, and then you may cut My head off with your axe." Her mouth was like a cloud-dripping cliff, like drowned men at the bottom of a river, like moist black earth crawling with worms. Hair grew between Her legs like dead grass.

  So Hel took Freydis to Her, riding her like a horse .. . and then She became Him, for She could put Her woman-shirt on and off like Her father LOKI, Who could grow with child from eating a woman's half-burned heart. (For She was Younger Brother.) Seeing Him, Freydis shuddered with fear and love and pleasure as He mounted her; closing her eyes, she saw Gudrid's naked body trampled by grinning horses. And this pleased her exceedingly well.

  "Well, now, My jewel-goddess. My necklace-tree," He said to her sarcastically, "what shirt will you wear today? What shirt shall I wear? Or would you rather be naked before Me and let Me bite your breasts again vdth My frost-teeth?"

  Freydis wept; she knelt and kissed His knees. He forced her head down on His chest. - "Ah," He said to her smiling, "I see you drop burning tears on My breast, as dead Helgi's wife Sigrun did. It certainly appears that we shall live out our lot together, you and I."

  Treydxs HeVs-Daughter

  "What was I changed into?" she asked Him. "Sometimes I think I'm different from what I was before, but then I feel the same again. - No, maybe I wasn't changed into anything. But I wanted to be - I wanted to be!"

  The Ice-Shirt

  "Everything must lose its shape to become free," said Blue-Shirt. "Is that what you want?"

  "No," said Freydis, trembling.

  "Well, you are changed forever. Look at your hands! You have no husband but Me; you have no mother save Me; you have no father but Me. Eirik Thorvaldsson is not your father anymore; you must call him 'Wealth-Hiding,' for he is but a greedy troll. Thjodhildjorund's-daughter you wall not see again. As for Thorvard of Gardar, what you call him matters not in the least. You are Mine; you must obey Me. You must be loving and faithful towards Me in all things."

  "What must I do?"

  "You must plant the frost-seed in the blood of your own kind."

  And so she came back to Gudrid's country. The trees grew magnificently high. The beaches there were as soft and white as the best flour.

  ASM-J:RUJT (^VNLAND^

  The First Axe-Tale

  Though necessity may force you into strife, be not in a hurry to take revenge; first make sure that your effort will succeed and strike where it ought.

  Speculum Regale, IV.85

  T

  JLh

  his story now begins to sprout its crop of war-flowers. The People saw Freydis come crawling out of the black-burned stump o
f Yggdrasil like a maggot; they saw that she carried her axe with her, then they clamored to Carrying the War-Club to attack her and take her good helm-biter, her wound-gasher, and Carrying the War-Club laughed to hear and shouted, "Yes, yes! Creep close to her, but stay behind the trees so that her Axe-Spirit cannot see you and slay you! Then shoot her in the throat! Ha, ha! His Spear Is Straight will be avenged!" - But Blue-Shirt protected Freydis now that she was wholly His; He sent a mist that deluded the Skraelings and led them away from her, while she returned home, unknowing of her peril. Her eyes glowed in the shadows; her mouth twitched; rays of darkness shone from her BLACK HANDS.

  Then Carrying the War-Club was enraged, and commanded all the men of the People to gather in a war-party to attack the Jenuaq. - "Kill them all!" he said. "Slaughter the demons; we will bum their ice-hearts!" And the People grinned to hear these words. They painted their bodies red for war and black for death; they put on their finest skins. The women boiled moose-bones; they skimmed off the creamy white marrow-foam and fed it to their men to give them strength for the battle. And the warriors agreed that the attack would take place on the morning after the moon began to wax.

  Irey
  "You have black hands!" cried Freydis's husband in excitement. "What does this mean?"

  "If you open your mouth so wide the bees will fly in," she said. "Can't you see anything, you fool? Those aren't my hands; those are black silk gloves that Gudrid gave me. Now get out."

  And it was seven nights to the waxing of the moon.

  Freydis and Gudrid

  Now it is to be told that Freydis's longhouse was at as great a distance from Gudrid's as it could be within the palisade; for both women would have it so. They hated each other so much by now that their very breathing, the very sound of their footsteps sickened each other. - One night when she was lying in Karlsefni's arms, Gudrid was sure that she heard Freydis breathing outside. She thought she heard the swish of an upraised axe. Her first thought was for her baby, and she lay there with her heart pounding so hard that it hurt her, while her husband slept unknowing. Then there was a long silence. Slowly her fear became rage, and she lay hoping as much as waiting for Freydis to come creeping in, so that she could have Karlsefhi kill her. But still there was nothing. At last Gudrid became drowsy again. Her eyelashes flickered in her sweet, pure face; she sighed and yavmed, and slept. . . Gudrid sprang up; she heard Freydis at the door, but when she rushed outside into the fragrant night of Vinland there was nothing. For a long time she stood there in the darkness, breathing heavily. Gudrid's breasts heaved. She smote her forehead in her anger. And she swore to CHRIST that she would find a way to have Freydis disgraced. She heard her little son Snorri crying, and she ran back to him and rocked him and kissed him . . . And it was six nights to the waxing of the moon.