by Kevin Hearne
Ten years ago I took the entire pack on holiday in Norway. We visit someplace special every year, and since most of the Pack was of Norwegian or Icelandic background, they wanted to visit the homeland. We were to be there for a week, hunting and playing and indulging our wolves. On our third night there, the night of the full moon, the eight dear friends I’d saved in 1918—including Rannveig’s husband—were struck down by lightning bolts. All the Scandinavian members of the Pack were left untouched. And I stress to you that we were not out in a storm. The sky was only partially cloudy, and I knew immediately that this could not possibly have been some accident of nature. My proof came when Thor descended in his chariot and spoke to me briefly. He took care to hover out of the Pack’s reach.
He said, “Regards from Úlfur Dalsgaard, one of the finest Einherjar in Valhalla. He urges you to rethink your pack law regarding the recruitment of mixed races.” And then he laughed at us as we snarled and barked at him, enjoying how powerless we were to confront him. He flew away without saying another word, leaving us to howl and mourn.
Rannveig, as you might imagine, was devastated. The howling she did that night for Honorato, her murdered husband, still haunts me to this day.
Thor is not part of my pack. He will never be part of my pack, nor can he have any voice in what pack law says or doesn’t say. He had no business renewing a feud that I had justly settled long ago by sending Úlfur to Valhalla. And, from a human perspective, he had no business murdering people for any reason, much less for the color of their skin. There is nothing Úlfur could have offered him to make it worth his while, you see? He did it solely for his own entertainment. Can he therefore be called anything but evil?
Rannveig … well. She fell in battle two months ago against witches armed with silver knives. Though I miss her, I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t a mercy. She was suicidal after her husband’s death. I think she would have done it were it not for her wolf and her Lutheran faith.
And now you see why I must go to Asgard. I cannot kill Úlfur again—and even if I could, it wouldn’t help, since he learned nothing from the first time I killed him. But I can kill Thor to avenge eight lives and one woman’s heart, and I will. Then, perhaps, I will not hear the howling at night.
Except for the crackling of logs in the fire, there was no sound when Gunnar sat back down on his boulder. I was thinking about the two werewolves that had fallen in the battle against Aenghus Óg at Tony Cabin. Their deaths had always been a touchy subject with the entire pack, and now I understood a bit better why that was so.
“I’m sorry about Rannveig,” I said to Gunnar, breaking the silence, and he nodded sadly, though I wasn’t sure if he thought he was accepting an apology or sympathy.
Zhang Guo Lao spoke up. “It pains me to hear that Thor has treated you and your pack so abominably. I am sorry to say it seems consistent with what I know of his character.”
“Is monstrous fuckpuddle,” Perun asserted, and everyone turned to stare at him with equal parts amusement and bemusement. “What? Is this not English word?”
I suggested that if it wasn’t a word, it should be, and the others agreed.
“I, too, have a crime to lay at Thor’s door,” Väinämöinen said after the levity of Perun’s neologism faded. “His feeble mind insists that his arrogant trespasses are somehow justifiable since he is a member of the Æsir. Any criticism levied against him is met with a thunderbolt. Listen, and I will tell you how he violated a wonder of the world.”
Chapter 16
The Wizard’s Tale
Outside of Finland I am not widely known, and even there I am largely forgotten. Like so many other gods and folk heroes, I was shoved aside to make room for a new savior, who turned out to be a man with neither music, nor sex, nor any laughter, just a promise of paradise later in exchange for meek obedience now. I am not the son of yesterday’s grouse: I could see that my people wished to swap me for something softer, and no matter how much I railed against it, no matter how much I struggled and strained, it wouldn’t produce either a baby or shit.
The best thing for me to do would be to exit gracefully. So that is what I did: I sang myself a copper boat, packed my belongings, brushed out my beard, and my purpose held—like the Ulysses of Tennyson—to sail beyond the sunset, vowing to return one day when my people needed me. Someday, I thought, someday soon, they will tire of this pale, weak god, and then they will clamor for my homecoming. That was in the year of cone and helmet.
Now we are come many years forward, and still no one calls my name. I am tired of waiting. They will never shift back to my paradigm; my glory is centuries gone.
But in Asgard there is plenty of work for an axe.
I was bitter for a time, thinking myself cast away like the stale biscuits of a fortnight ago. But slowly, rising and falling with the swell of the ocean, a new rhythm emerged within me, a sense of the tide and what it washes away, and likewise what it brings to new shores. Music swirled from my kantele as the ocean waters swirled about my keel, and thus I sang myself into a finer state of mind.
I did not lack for food on my journey: I sang to the fish whenever I had stomach, and they leapt into my boat. Nor did I lack for company. I sang to the whales of sun and wheat and the animals of the earth, and they sang to me songs of currents and krill and ceaseless peregrination. More than this, they sang of old creatures still lurking in the depths, giant serpents that men sketch fearfully in the corners of maps.
Eventually I longed for land again and made fall on a green isle with clouds of steam rising from lakes of white water, spumes of spray erupting from the earth, each hotter than the anger of a wounded bear. Today this isle is called Iceland. There were Norsemen living on the western side, in modern-day Reykjavík, but I kept to myself on the opposite side, settling on the northern shore of a fjörd that later became the site of a town called Eskifjördur. A small shelter I built there, partly with my hands and partly with my voice, to break the wind’s chill and keep my few treasures safe from the elements. This I did for solitude’s sake, but not for misanthropic reasons. No, I so loved men that I shunned them to save them.
There were questions I harbored in my heart, but no man could answer them; there were sights I would see, but no man could show them to me; there were tales I would hear told and songs I would hear sung, but no man’s voice could give them breath.
The whales, you see, had piqued my curiosity. There were older things than I in the deeps, and it was with them I wished to treat. I remained apart from men so that if my embassies skewed awry from their intended bent, no one but I would suffer the hammer’s blow. And after a month of fruitless attempts, in a gray twilight brooding over a choppy sea, I finally drew a monster from the deeps with nothing but my voice and my kantele.
I say “monster” only because that is what people tend to call creatures that could eat men like hors d’oeuvres. The surface boiled violently to herald its coming, and I sang of peace and conversation and the pleasure of knowledge won and knowledge shared, and then it erupted from the sea. It was a leviathan sheathed in blue-green scale, capable of swallowing a dragon ship whole, and it towered above me to the height of six men, with far more of its length remaining under the surface. It must have been supporting its body on the sea floor to raise its neck to such an altitude.
Five bony ridges swept back from its head, and between these a membranous tissue grew and fluttered in the wind, giving it the appearance of a crown. At the time I thought it merely looked impressive, but soon I learned that these were sensory organs that detected vibrations in the water. Its eyes were glossy tar pits twice the size of my head, the better to see in sunless waters. They found me standing on the shore, and the creature bellowed a greeting, displaying foot-long teeth and a black tongue. It had nostrils at the end of its snout, which I quickly deduced were more for olfaction than for breathing: Beneath its jaw and running some distance down its neck, gills flared and signaled it would not remain above the surface for long. But it
had seen me, and I had seen it, and that was enough. It crashed back into the cold water of the fjörd, but it did not leave. After some thrashing about and repositioning of its bulky length, the top of its head reemerged, so that I saw its obsidian eyes and the teal fan of its sensory crown. It spoke to me as the whales did, in a song unfathomable to most men, but as plain to me as your speech, or yours. So it is with all animal speech, and so it is that they can understand me. I played my kantele softly, and we spoke together.
“I am a shaman,” I replied, “if I am any sort of man at all. A wizard, certainly. Some would say a folk hero. Some might say a god. But I am foremost a being of curiosity, and I am curious about you. What is your name?”
“What do you call yourself?”
“No, but I have a name by which others call me.”
“I am called Väinämöinen. Tell me, are there others like you?”
“You say you’re curious like it’s a bad thing.”
“You are a child among your kind?”
“I see. How many of your people are there in a chorus?”
She—for the creature was female—asked me to build a fire, to see how it was done. She asked me where the lights in the sky were tonight, and I explained they were hidden by the clouds. She wondered why the clouds would do that. She wondered whether men had given names to the lights. She wondered how men got their names and how they kept them clean.
She told me the Remarkably Short Saga of Sheerth the Excessively Dim, He Who Sought the Secret Lair of the Giant Squid. She sang to me the Ballad of Moth the Valiant Born, She Who Fought the Sirens in the Grotto of Lime and Decay. She told me many secrets of the deep, such as the fate of fabled Atlantis; its gold and marble splendor serves the mermen now. There are treasures lying along the coasts of all nations, and off the coast of South America, sleeping gods of cold evil rest until the day they are called by men with dreams of power.
“No, of course not. I am merely pleased to meet you and exchange knowledge of our worlds. We have much to teach each other before you earn a name in the harvest of the blue whales. What can I teach you? What would you know?”
We had long since spoken into deep night, with naught but a fire lighting the waters of the fjörd. Flickers of lightning played about the billowing skirts of clouds, and these flashes occasionally lit up the shore. The great creature’s snout lifted up toward the low ceiling in the sky after a particularly bright display.
I chuckled. “There are many explanations for those. One god or another is usually credited for them.”
“The god of the Norse is named Thor. He rides a chariot pulled by two goats—horned animals with four legs—and wears a large belt that doubles his strength.”
“Where?” I turned to look over my shoulder and saw a bright ball of lightning writhing in the sky. It centered round the head of a hammer, beneath which was a raised hand and a scowling visage wreathed in blond hair. The edges of a chariot and the horns of two goats were starkly highlighted. Nothing else could be discerned, other than that the thunder god was quickly approaching, intent on the two of us.
Fearful of his intentions, I frantically began to wave. “No!” I cried. “Wait!”
But Thor threw forward his arm, and the coiled lightning arced down to strike the magnificent creature in the eye. She screamed and reared up in pain, then plunged herself into the fjörd, more lightning bolts following her and burning holes into her scaled hide wherever it showed above the surface.
I dropped my kantele and proceeded to jump and gesticulate and call him the brain-dead spawn of a lack-witted shepherd, but to no avail. He kept hammering the poor beast wherever he could as she desperately tried to make it out of the shallow fjörd to the open sea. I ran to my hut and retrieved a spear from my small cache of weapons. This I quickly enchanted for true flight and hurled at the nearest one of Thor’s goats. It spitted him cleanly and the chariot lurched violently to the side, spilling the thunder god into the sea.
This managed to secure his attention.
She who had sung to me was given a reprieve from the lightning, and I took up my kantele again to speak to her.
“Dive deeply and never rise again,” I told her. “I am so sorry.” Nothing coherent came in reply, just a sense of agony and bewildered betrayal. I berated myself for not concealing us with a seeming, and for not acting more decisively to halt Thor before he could unloose the destruction of the skies upon her. Here was a terrible price to pay for our mutual curiosity. But she was still alive. Perhaps she would live if I prevented the thunder god from attacking further.
He thrashed to the surface, collecting more lightning to his hammer held high above the waves. I targeted him with my voice and sang a song to calm his rage. His remaining goat strained to land the chariot on shore, dragging both his dead companion and the chariot behind him.
I could not see the leviathan anymore, but apparently Thor had some sense of her location, for he struck out with clear intent at a certain swell in the ocean near the entrance to the fjörd, heedless of my song and immune to its spell.
A flare of pain lashed out from the sea and seized my mind, and I staggered backward. Then there was nothing, simply nothing.
After that I needed to sing a song to calm my own rage. The flood of it nearly loosed itself upon him, with no dam to stop it save my will; yet I knew that Thor could stand against that tide if anyone could, and furthermore I knew that I was woefully unprepared to fight him at that time. I had no defense against lightning. Instead, I did what I should have done earlier and cast a seeming over my presence to hide myself from his eyes. As Thor pulled himself through the water with powerful strokes toward the shore, I cast another seeming on my small hut and yet one more on my voice, so that when I spoke next Thor would not know from whence it came.
The thunder god emerged from the sea looking every bit as angry as I felt. He took the hammer from his belt, where he’d secured it during his swim, and shook it threateningly in my general direction.
“Coward! Show yourself! You who slew my goat! Answer for it!”
“Will you answer for slaying the leviathan?” I said. My voice boomed from every direction, and the thunder god spun, trying to locate me.
“I have nothing to answer for!” he shouted. “I did the world a service.”
“Do the world another and slay yourself. That creature was harming no one.”
“Foolish mortal! It was about to eat you!”
“We were speaking peaceably and you murdered it without divining its true intent. And I am not mortal.”
His expression turned incredulous, then composed itself into a contemptuous sneer. “What are you, some sorcerer who keeps serpents as pets?”
I replied in the same tone, “What are you, a thickheaded, arrogant god who thinks immortality excuses all sins?”
The sneer left his face, which reddened as he
shouted in a circle, making sure I heard him. “That creature was a spawn of the world serpent and as such was my rightful prey! I merely practice for Ragnarok. What was your purpose? Jörmungandr will not wait for any man’s permission to attack Asgard, so I shall not stay my hand against those who would hasten its coming.” He stalked over to his chariot and yanked my spear out of his slain goat before tossing it into the fjörd. Then, with a touch of his hammer, he resurrected the beast, who looked a bit wild-eyed but otherwise none the worse for having been dead.
“Witness the power I wield, whoever you are,” he said. “I am life and death. Vex me further at your peril.”
He waited for a reply, but I made none. The time to vex him further is now; it was not then.
Satisfied that he had cowed me sufficiently, he mounted his chariot and snapped the reins, flying back into the dark clouds that had concealed his approach.
From that day to this I have mourned the loss of my unnamed friend and cursed the name of Thor. He ripped from me the wonder of the ocean; he stole from all men the knowledge of a world they can never inherit. The Finns may no longer need an old wizard to watch over them, but Thor still needs to answer for his callous murder.
I have salted my hatred and cured it, stored it in a dark cellar of my mind against the day when I could let it be my only nourishment. The day is finally come, and I will tear into this meat and savor its taste.
Väinämöinen’s last words were a guaranteed applause line with this crowd. Perun suggested that it called for a toast. He pulled a bottle of vodka from somewhere and started pouring. I joined in, more out of appreciation for his lyricism than from any bloodthirsty sentiment against Thor. What had stunned me from the moment he described his unnamed friend was how it recalled what Odysseus had told me in Hades—I hadn’t been lying when I told Granuaile that the sirens had spoken to him of hasenpfeffer and sea serpents. What they’d said, essentially, was a bunch of rubbish to the fabled king of Ithaca, but to me it all made perfect sense. They had sung to him a series of prophecies that were far more accurate than anything Nostradamus spewed forth.