by John Meaney
‘Not all the dark ones are in Svartalfheim, good Ulfr. Some wander the Middle World and wreak their foulness.’
‘Tell me of the—’
But he started awake then, and the hall was filled with ordinary shadows that did not speak, while the only sound was snoring - from warhounds as well as men - and then another long, plaintive fart that on some other night would have made him chuckle.
Stígr sang his saga, choosing the spine-tingling tale of Fenrir’s binding, beginning with a description of the dark god Loki, Father of Lies - evil and good, trickster and warrior, shape-shifter and gender-changer, so disturbing to ordinary men and women - and Loki’s three monstrous children: Hel, destined to rule the shades in Niflheim, realm of the dead; the loathsome serpent Jormungand; and the master-wolf Fenrir, destined to kill Óthinn the All-Father during the final days.
Fenrir, the gods bound by trickery with unbreakable cords, in what was supposed to be a demonstration of the wolf’s vast strength. To guarantee his own safety, Fenrir agreed to the binding only if one of the gods, the bright Aesir or Vanir, placed a hand in his, Fenrir’s mouth.
The war-god Tyr, bravest of the brave, put his right hand - his sword-hand - between Fenrir’s fangs, knowing that at the moment of binding those jaws would chomp down on his wrist and sever the hand forever.
As Stígr sang of Tyr’s handsomeness and courage, he noticed a young woman with red hair and fire-bright eyes who regarded him with absorption. He subtly altered his voice, directing the greater warmth of his tones toward her.
In truth, his spellbinding song captivated everyone - there were shivers and gasps at the right places, as he foreshadowed and then related the horrors - but for himself, the true awfulness was not in the dread entities he described nor the sacrifice of the war-god’s hand. For the saga, in order to place Loki’s children high in the hierarchy of evil, foretold events that had not occurred; and so it was the place to describe those dread sisters, Fate, Being and Necessity: the Norns who guide destiny.
After the saga was done and the cheering was over, it was natural that he should find a quiet corner in which to talk with the woman who was so fascinated by him. Her name was Anya, she was little Hildr’s sister, and she was neither married nor betrothed.
‘You’ve seen so much,’ she said. ‘I wish you could show me, with your magical words, all of the Middle World.’
‘I can show you, sweet Anya, but yours is the truest magic of all. The magic of touch.’
In the night, he held her. Wrapped in their cloaks, they made quiet love, softly gasping and shuddering when they came. Finally, she kissed him and slipped away, for little Hildr could not sleep without her older sister beside her. Not since their parents’ death some months before.
He fell asleep and dreamed of axes, blades bright as they whirled in firelight, flying toward their bound victim, the warrior-youth Jarl with lips as sweet as Anya’s, with skin almost as soft, his need as great.
But then his dreamscape shifted and he moaned, for everything that followed was exactly true.
As the dream began he had two eyes.
There was blood on his hands and sleeves as he staggered along soft ground. Heathland, clad in dull greens and purples, beneath a sky swept with greys and reds and violet: harsh, cold and beautiful. Behind him were strewn the corpses whose death he had caused.
With words.
Only with words. That was the magic and the horror of it.
How did I do that?
For he had found the inspiration in himself, the ability to subtly alter his tone and mark out certain words, to create the effects on warriors’ and warrior-women’s minds that he had desired, as if he had painted a scene and brought it to life, using only voice. It had been so easy to intensify jealous fantasies, to bring forth molten rage and make it spill over, and then back away from the swirling madness of blades and fists and teeth, and a well-remembered hammer crashing down and down, again and again, spattered with brains and blood.
But everyone had died, even the hammer-wielder, in a fury of mutual stab and thrust, of hack and smash, which only Stígr escaped.
He was a journeyman poet, but he had never dreamed of doing that: of the inspiration and the horror, the part of him that was in awed ecstasy, and the part that howled inside.
For an unknown time, he stumbled along that cold magnificent landscape, until he found himself on the cusp of an ice-patched dell, where on the far side a solitary ash-tree grew.
‘Are you the World-Tree?’ he whispered. ‘Can you be Yggdrasill in truth?’
Perhaps it was a manifestation of the true world-joiner that ran through all three realms, a small shoot springing from the greater reality, so that one who could travel its length might leave the middle world and climb to the gods’ realm in Asgard, or join the dark and the dead in Niflheim.
Before the tree stood a simple well, a few broken stones ringing a hole of blackness.
‘No.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘It cannot be his. Not Mimir’s.’
Surely this was ordinary, a well built by men who had moved on or died away, nothing more.
Not his.
Stígr was a wanderer, yes, but that was all he was. Wanderer and poet, singer of sagas, master of words, keeper of memories. It was a blasphemy to think of anything else, of the other who wandered the middle world and sought wisdom regardless of the price.
The painful, bloody price.
No. Don’t ask this.
A sacrifice, offered with determination, garnished with suffering.
I will not.
But still his feet stumbled down toward the well’s black centre, where he stopped.
‘Please . . .’
His right thumb, crooked and tensed, rose toward his face. Sinews trembled as he fought the movement, warring against himself; but the motion was inexorable. Slowly, slowly, his hand ascended, growing large to dominate his sight, then touched his nose, the bridge of his nose—
Please. Please, no.
—with his thumbnail scratching into the skin, sliding left, into the eye socket and down, to the inner corner of his eye—‘NO!’
—and pressed in with enormous strength, pushed inside, slickness coating his thumb as he ripped outward, a slick pop as it came free and half his world went dark forever.
Sweet All-Father, no.
But he had done it, as he had been commanded.
‘Why me? Why me?’
He sobbed with pain, hating himself. Then his dagger was in his hand and he made the final severance, cutting it free, changing his world for always.
The worst part was afterward, when it was too late to revert to his previous life, and he could not fight the motion of his hand again, this time as it held out his eyeball over the well - white, bloodied, glistening - and let it drop.
His eye fell forever into darkness.
Pain raging in his head, he could hardly see with his remaining eye, as he strained to focus through blood-mist on the ash-tree, where it stood in silent observation. So this was the first agony, not the last ordeal.
His tunic was belted at the waist with braided leather cords. Hands shaking as if palsied, he undid the cords, unravelling them. Then he carried them to the foot of the ash-tree, tears flooding down his right cheek, blood and fluid down his left.
Climbing the tree was torture.
When did it happen?
Twice he slipped, formed his hands into desperate hooks, and found a grip, tearing his skin. No matter: the ascent was everything.
When did the darkness take me?
His early childhood was happy. He thought he remembered that, through the roaring chaos of present pain. Or perhaps all his memories were false, and all of his existence was this: pure and bloody agony.
Two loops, with sufficient play, he placed around a branch. This was going to be it.
The other sacrifice.
For the eye, given to Mimir, was not enough. Nine days and nine nights: that was what the ordeal demanded. He knew it now, and fel
t the tiniest of respite from pain with the knowledge of giving in, accepting what was happening.
Turning outward, back against the trunk, he slipped one wrist inside a loop to his left, then the other to his right. Arched back, he could not maintain the pressure for long. Slowly, he worked his heels down the trunk, aware that a sudden slip now would wrench both arms from his sockets, dislocating them, and causing him to strangle as his damaged shoulders squeezed his neck.
For now, his body cruciform, he hung in place, his every sinew etched in pain.
By my own will.
If not his, then whose?
Or is it mine? Why are you making me do this?
When the wind rose, its passage through the tree was a metallic rustle that quickly magnified and then became lost in the tidal howl that grew up all around, and when the lightning flashed he felt no surprise.
The storm banged and growled, twisted, and tore the world away.
There was light in the world when something pushed him into wakefulness—
‘Stígr? My sweet?’
—but for a moment he was back there, at the beginning and at the end, nine days and nine nights, as he hung there ever closer to nothingness yet unable to die, wishing for cessation but knowing that it held a price, did knowledge, a price that every wandering poet should be prepared to pay, a tribute of pain, a toast of blood, a meal of eye-flesh, a sacrifice—‘It’s morning, and you should wake.’
—and at the end of the ninth night, the storm that had been ever-present grew stronger and stronger, black clouds rotating overhead, opening up the storm centre, and then it happened, because that was the moment—‘Stígr?’
—when the sky looked at him, and he was lost.
Her name was Anya and they had shared their bodies last night but this was agony, the remembrance and the reality of it, and the sweep of present momentary time - Being, the Norn whose true name was Skuld - was eclipsed by the past collapsing on him, the knowledge that darkness was omnipotent and he was nothing, the most terrified of thralls, no more than that.
Rubbing his face, he came into more ordinary wakefulness. There was a wetness on his left cheek, below the dirty eye-patch he wore. He sucked in his breath as Anya gently pulled the patch upward; then she shuddered and lowered it back.
Perhaps she had expected to see a covered eye, not this pink-red madness that sometimes wept clear fluid, nothing like tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told her.
‘I . . . I need to return to Hildr.’
But she paused and looked at him, and for a moment she appeared as enthralled as last night, when he felt his power upon him but no destructive imperative, so he could use his words to beguile for romance, for simple lust.
In this moment, he could change her mind, commit himself to her and her to him.
‘Then go,’ he said. ‘Do it now.’
She pulled away, trying not to sob, and then broke into a half-run, back toward the hall. He stared with his single, unwise eye. For that was part of what he had learned, during his nine-day crucifixion.
Pain is the eye of wisdom.
A socket full of never-healing rawness, that was the portal to reality, the lens of darkness.
All I deserve.
Perhaps Anya would find goodness; he himself already had his painful reward.
Almost as if the Norns knew what they were doing.
ELEVEN
FULGOR, 2603 AD
Carl rode the one-person speedcapsule back along the tunnel beneath Quiller Park, exited via the cavernous underground terminus, and rose to the surface in a flowgel column. When he stepped off the elliptical upper surface on to the plaza, he was scanning the environment only because that was natural for someone with his training.
He was energized because of his time in mu-space with her, his ship; but he was still careful, and there had been no signs during the return journey of anything untoward. The speedcapsule had been the same one he rode out in, with no sign of having been opened or deepscanned: he had left telltales on board, femtoscopic flakes that would have informed him of peacekeeper inspection.
A shaven-headed man was walking toward him. Xavier Spalding, from the meeting earlier. Behind Xavier rose the quickglass conference centre, the tower morphing with glacial slowness as it cycled through a variety of impressive but conservative forms, taking days to change from one to another.
Carl had not expected anyone else from the meeting to still be here. He wondered what Xavier’s objective was.
A discrete off-Skein discussion? Or something more?
Xavier was smiling.
‘How nice to run into you again, Carl.’
They touched fists formally.
‘Likewise, Xavier. Are you pleased with today’s outcome?’
‘Surely. And I was hoping you’d come back here.’
‘I was just wandering as I worked in Skein.’
‘So you could have been physically anywhere, and I could have just called you, of course. But since you’d booked an aircab pickup for twenty minutes from now, it seemed likely you’d return here.’
‘How could you know that?’
He did not like this. Covertly, he clicked his tongue and curled his left big toe. Warmth in both forefingers indicated that his tu-rings’ major defensive systems had responded, coming online and polling the surroundings for danger.
Nothing so far.
‘I’ve got many controlling interests,’ said Xavier. ‘Including the cab company and other transport providers. Your itinerary is confidential, as is every passenger’s.’
‘Uh-huh. So why meet in person, all the same?’
‘For the same reason we hold trade talks in reality, when they’re important. We’re brachiating primates, Mr Blackstone, with large brains, that’s all. Tactile and sociable.’
That, and ordinary Fulgidi felt safer off Skein when Luculenti were involved in negotiations, since the élite had full control of that environment. It was a habit they carried into other interactions, with purely ordinary people.
‘And of course,’ Xavier went on, ‘it’s why virtual education isn’t good enough, and why we send our sociable children to real colleges and multiversities.’
Carl smiled, made his voice sound natural, and said: ‘Funny thing, my son Roger has just started in Lucis Multi.’
‘Obviously I knew that, Carl, while you’ve not realized that my daughter Alisha is in Roger’s study group. I’m hoping they’ll become friends. As might you and I, let me add.’
‘Friendships and alliances are good things.’
‘My daughter is . . . particularly astute,’ began Xavier.
There was something in his voice, the tension of mixed emotions. Something worth following up, once this encounter was over.
‘She’s noticed that their primary tutor, Dr Petra Helsen,’ Xavier added, ‘has some unusual behaviour patterns. Not off the scale, you understand.’
Around them on the plaza, a few scattered travellers were passing by. No one was paying attention. Talking this way was more low-key than inside a privacy field of whirling diamond dust. Still, they were in the open, perhaps subject to SatScan surveillance right now.
‘So she’s an academic,’ said Carl. ‘Some of my tutors were a little odd.’
‘And that was—?’
‘A long time ago. Are you worried by this Helsen person, Xavier?’
‘She’s displayed some odd reactions toward your Roger.’
‘In what way?’
‘Look, Alisha’s trained in observing minutiae, just as you are, Carl.’
Obviously he meant his daughter was reading body language cues and verbal patterns, including tonality. Put it another way: Helsen was giving Roger funny looks.
But Carl was not dismissing such observations.
‘We all learn psycholinguistics, don’t we?’
‘Right, and it’s interesting,’ said Xavier, ‘to find someone as skilled as you are. We’d never have reached agreement this mo
rning, not so quickly and with such good feeling, without some very slick elicitation and guidance from yourself.’
There was still no reaction from Carl’s tu-rings. If this was the prelude to physical action, perhaps a snatch squad about to drop from the sky, then Xavier was taking his time in issuing the command.
Does he know about me?
Perhaps the man was thinking like a businessperson, no more than that.