The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  Sigrun looked down at the picture being offered to her in big, thick-fingered hands, and took it, delicately. “How old is your son?” she asked, her eyebrows rising slightly. The boy was only a head shorter than his father, but his face had the softness of a child, and he leaned on his mother as if still very young in the family picture. His fangs were not as elongated as most jotun’s, either, nor his jaws so prominent.

  “He’s thirteen now. He was ten in that picture, and already six feet tall. He’s taller than his father now, and hasn’t even hit his growth spurt yet. If, well, if jotun children even have an adolescent growth spurt. We really don’t know yet, do we?” Marit sounded mildly concerned.

  Sigrun handed the picture back. “You’re lucky to have them both.”

  “Oh, I know. And, well, it’s proof that no matter how tall we are, and how . . . odd the bone structure has become . . . we’re still mostly human, right? Otherwise we couldn’t interbreed.” Marit shrugged a little. “I remember that much basic biology from school. Of course, there are those who say he’s going to be a mule. Sterile. Or too weak to be a jotun, or too . . . everything else, to be a human.” She grimaced. Female jotun didn’t tend to get quite the fangs of the males, or the heavily-underslung jaws. “Here’s hoping he’s at least strong enough to break the jaw of anyone who questions him.”

  Sigrun smiled faintly. “There’s that, certainly.” But every time you have to fight, it means that there’s been some other failure. Oh, sometimes there’s no choice. A despot invades. A murderer will kill again if not stopped. And sometimes the best defense really is a good offense. Punching someone in the face can be a deterrent. But almost every war is the result of . . . failure.

  War also tended to be long periods of boredom punctuated with frenetic activity, and this one was no exception. She’d fight in a battle alongside the jotun, maybe with Brandr or some other god-born in the ranks with her. She was usually tasked with taking out ornithopters these days, hitting them with lightning, buffeting them with her attendant winds, or just landing just behind their cockpits, and shooting the pilots through the glass enclosures. On the rare occasions where the canopy was made of heavy, laminated, bullet-proof glass (the laminates were heavy, and thus, not used much in aeronautics), Sigrun would instead rip the canopy up, using her spear as a lever, ignoring the frantic acrobatics of a pilot desperate to throw her from the vehicle . . . and would reach in, and either cut the pilot’s harness and take him as a prisoner, or, wincing internally, lift him free of the cockpit and let the wind take him away, screaming and tumbling, before riding the unmanned plane to the ground, to ensure that it didn’t hit any friendlies.

  Her conscience, so aware of the rules by which god-born were supposed to fight against mortals, was countered by the parts of her that took Persian bullets as she closed in on the ornithopters and the parts of her burned by errant Mongol rockets launched from under their ornithopters’ wings. And her conscience stilled entirely every time she landed after a battle, and walked through the lines of wounded, finding where the medics had triaged the worst cases.

  She couldn’t take the most life-threatening wounds, and the medics didn’t want her to do so; if she took herself out of the battle for a day or two to heal someone’s just-less-than-mortal wound, more people would die than she’d saved. But she was able to take less dangerous wounds, on a given soldier. She could heal the arms and the legs, while the medics worked on the heart or the head. There were more bullet wounds than she’d expected; the Persians, apparently impressed by Judean automatic weapons, and faced with jotun in the field, began sending out multi-barreled rotary guns mounted atop motorized vehicles. These were similar to cannons, but with smaller, more accurate, and continuous streams of fire, and based on the guns used on Persian ornithopters. And, naturally, all the bullets were enchanted. The Mongols didn’t favor this solution. Their preference was more explosives, and more spirits.

  The Romans, with a practical knowledge of battle alchemy, started firing grenades filled with fire-suppressant foam at fire elementals, and ones filled with sodium or potassium in their pure metal forms at the water elementals. The grenades fragmented, and the sodium or potassium hit the water elementals, and the chemical reaction ‘liberated’ the hydrogen in their bodies, resulting in massive secondary explosions, and a chemical reaction that would not stop until every bit of the metal had been consumed. It was ugly, but it usually resulted in the spirit limping home to the Veil, effectively banished.

  Sigrun stumbled onto Solinus in the triage area one day, and stared down at the young man for a long moment. His JDF unit had been called up as a levy to the legions, and it was decidedly odd to see the young Pictish man in the uniform of the Legion, not to mention the eagle and the star of David on the flash patch on the right arm of his uniform, which was half-on, half-off. He had a centurion’s rank badge—the JDF had looked at the spirit-touched young man, and pushed him through Officer’s Candidacy School as quickly as possible—and he’d cropped his hair Roman-short, too, but . . . Sigrun knew the face. She’d helped raise him, after all, and his left arm, though bandage-swathed, still had the tribal markings of Trennus’ people. Both of his legs were wrapped in bandages, as well. His eyes were closed, he was sweating, and the blood on the bandage was fresh. Her stomach turned, but the wounds weren’t mortal. “What in Hel’s name happened to you?” Sigrun asked, sitting down beside his cot, and taking his good hand in hers.

  His eyes snapped open. “Aunt Sig?” He paused, and eyed the fatigues she was in, at the moment. “Er . . . tribune, I mean.”

  “Do not even consider saluting,” she told him, sharply. “Just tell me what happened. I thought you could heal yourself by turning yourself to your flame form?”

  “I’m out of energy to make the shift,” Solinus admitted, tiredly. “It takes effort each time. I . . . should be able to, in the morning. Maybe.” He struggled to sit up. “As to what happened . . . you know how they wanted to make me a bomb-disposal specialist?” he said, wearily, “On the grounds that if it went off in my face, it probably wouldn’t hurt me?” That had been one of the operational specialties floated for him, but his superiors had taken a closer look at his temperament, skills, and abilities, and had made him a forwards-assault specialist, with an eye towards moving him to special-forces if he decided to stay in longer than two years.

  Wait, this is his third year of service, isn’t it? Gods, where does the time go? “I take it that you encountered a bomb?”

  “Land-mines, probably Mongolian. One of my people tripped one. Died instantly. We all just . . . froze in place. None of us knew whether we were already standing on one, or not.” Solinus sighed. “So, we tried to check each other, and ben Nacham was, sure enough, right on top of one. The rest of us cleared out of the way . . . carefully. Then I took off my uniform, walked over, and went flame-form, and stood where he was standing, so he could . . . step off safely.” Solinus shuddered. “It seemed like it should work. Then I did my ever-living best to throw myself out of the way.”

  Sigrun began to tug, gently, at the bandages. No burns, of course; Solinus was as functionally immune to fire as all the rest of Lassair’s children. Just blood, and a lot of it. “Shrapnel?”

  “So . . . ow . . . they tell me. Most of it just went through me, the way bullets go through me in flame-form. But some of it was . . . chemical . . . .”

  “They’ve been putting random additions to their explosives lately, to try to hit spirits, so if a Persian detachment sends elementals or whatever at them . . . .”

  “Great. So I got hit with, what, magic-instilled asbestos or CO2 or something?”

  “Probably. Which solidified you just enough for the shrapnel to hit, but only in places.” Sigrun gave him a look. “You are lucky to be alive.” An ordinary human wouldn’t have legs left. A belly. Genitals. Anything below the waist, really. And if they weren’t adding extra chemicals to the explosive mix, and magic, he’d have been perfectly undamaged.

&nbs
p; “I know. I just figured . . . I had a lot better chance of living through that . . . than ben Nacham did, you know? Wasn’t expecting this at all.” Solinus winced. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Masako about this, all right?”

  She ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. “How does she like your hair like this?”

  “Hates it. I kind of like it, though. Now people . . . don’t see my father . . . when they look at me.” Solinus was clearly drifting a little now. Poppy blood and exhaustion, probably.

  Sigrun sighed, looking down at him. She remembered him and Masako coming to her for advice. Even though Lassair was a fertility-spirit, she was Solinus’ mother . . . so of course they’d come to Aunt Sigrun for a little counsel. I’m everyone’s grandmother, she’d thought, as they explained, with some embarrassment, that they wanted to take their relationship to the next step. “So what’s preventing that?”

  “I . . . don’t want to get Masako pregnant. She deserves to finish her studies, and I of all people know how hard it is to concentrate on anything with a baby or two in the house . . . .”

  “So, use protection.” Sigrun had paused, and watched as both of them flushed. “No?”

  “He, ah. . . the whole . . . flame thing . . .” Masako had ventured. “It only happens when he’s really . . . oh, gods.” She put her face in her hands.

  Sigrun had blanked her face with almost inhuman strength of will. “The rubber melts, I take it?” Everyone’s grandmother, indeed.

  “Yes,” Solinus muttered, looking away, obviously caught between laughter and embarrassment.

  “Doesn’t that make . . . relations in general . . .” Sigrun tried to phrase it delicately, “difficult?”

  “Thermal deflection spell,” Masako choked out. “Very . . . localized.”

  Sigrun had bitten the insides of her cheeks to keep from reacting at that point.

  “I try to keep the fire localized just to me,” Solinus had muttered. “Then again, Masako doesn’t really need melted rubber going, well—”

  “Anywhere sensitive,” Sigrun had agreed, briskly, as they both turned in on each other, almost huddling, and the muffled giggles had started again. “Well, simple enough. Masako can take the pill.”

  “Well . . . I can get that now, without my mother knowing—” Masako looked at Sigrun, entreaty clear in her eyes: Don’t tell her! I’m eighteen and everything! “But there is one small problem.”

  Sigrun had squinted at them. “And that is?”

  “Have you met my parents?” Solinus had jerked a thumb at the house next door, covered as it was, with grapevines, honeysuckle, and wisteria, most of which bloomed year-round, and the grapes were always ripe. “What happens if I . . .” He’d cut himself off, and his face had bloomed red again.

  “What if you’re just so virile that you knock science on its ass?” Sigrun had supplied, biting her lower lip now.

  “Well, when you put it that way . . . .” Solinus had sounded rueful.

  “The pill suppresses ovulation. Now, on the off-chance that Lassair’s ability to influence her body’s own chemistry somehow transmitted to Solinus here as an ability to induce ovulation in spite of chemical correctives . . . .” Sigrun considered it. “I’ve heard that there are anti-implantation charms developed by Chaldean magi.”

  “Ah . . . that sounds . . . a little embarrassing to buy,” Masako said, squirming.

  “Your other choice is to continue as you’ve been going along—and I am certain there has been some going along going on—and wait until one or the other of you slips.” She raised her eyebrows at them. “Want a cookie?”

  They’d left, and Sigrun’s suppressed amusement had drained away. Here they are, concerned that they might accidentally have children, and I’ll never have one. But then, winter and death aren’t really fertile fields, so . . . it all fits. Play your damned part and don’t whine, valkyrie.

  Back in the here and now, Sigrun sighed, looking at the young man. Trennus’ first-born son, engaged to Kanmi and Min’s daughter. And practically her own son, in many respects. Lassair had never disclosed how much of Sigrun’s DNA was in the various children, but there were traces, Sigrun was sure, in all of them. You did the right thing. You did the heroic thing. You saved a life today. She put her hand on his head. She’d taken countless bloody knees from Trennus’ children over the years. Solinus’s eyes snapped open. He knew exactly what she was about to do. “Hey! Wait!”

  She winced as the deep cuts appeared on her own limbs, blood welling, and then her head lolled back against the chair. She’d actually bitten her lip to keep the scream in, and Solinus sat upright, staring at her in horror. “Aunt Sig—” He waved down a medic, frantically—one who had, fortunately, seen the show before, and just sighed and started wrapping Sigrun’s wounds so she wouldn’t drip blood on the floor.

  “It’s fine,” she gritted out.

  “Aunt Sig, I didn’t ask for this!” Pure distress in his voice now.

  “Not your choice. Mine. This is what a valkyrie does. Now, get out of here. Go write Masako. See if you’re due for phone privileges. Anything like that.” Sigrun closed her eyes. Anyone who wanted to tell her that she should have healed someone else could bite her, as far as she was concerned. Whom a valkyrie healed was entirely her choice. No one else’s.

  That night, still sore in body, she stared up at the ceiling of her tiny tent, and sweated. There was just enough room inside for one person to stretch out, and for her small duffel of personal goods. The material was infrared-resistant—the Persians had, apparently, stolen some infrared night-vision goggles off a patrol of Judeans who’d been caught on the wrong side of the Wall, and had reverse-engineered the technology so as to be able to find armies moving at night without spirits, and were now trying to use as a guide for their missile systems. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing? Sigrun thought, watching the rippling sheets of material over her head.

  At the moment, it was summer, and miserably hot for everyone. Half the fenris had been shaved down to no more than a millimeter or two of fur, enough to keep them from being sunburned, and spent most of their downtime panting clouds of frost to cool themselves and drinking large quantities of water. Most of the jotun went around only half-dressed. Vidarr and Ima had their hands full, breaking up a half-dozen scraps each week, mostly between troops, who, however seasoned, were uncomfortable and bad-tempered because of the persistent heat. Slights escalated rapidly into confrontations in such conditions.

  Sigrun finally slipped off into a fitful doze . . . and was awakened by a whump that vibrated through the ground. As her eyes shot open, she realized, hazily, that there was a pleasant chill in the air. She heard cries of mingled alarm and recognition in low, rough voices from the tents all around her, and called her spear to her hands, before warily poking her head out of the tent flap . . . and found a massive paw barring her path. Sigrun looked up, just as Niðhoggr exhaled again, showering her with ice crystals. “Thank you,” Sigrun called up to the dragon. “That is much better!”

  She scrambled upright, suppressing a groan. Every muscle screamed at her. Some of Solinus’ wounds had been achingly deep. “Am I required somewhere?”

  A snort of assent. “Then let me inform the legate that I will be leaving.”

  Another snort, this time of disgust. “This is not Gotaland. At the moment, I am subject to the Legion’s orders and rules. I cannot just pick up and leave whenever I wish.”

  Nith leaned down, as if to let her ride his neck. “I can walk to the legate’s tent, Niðhoggr. My feet still work—”

  A rumble of displeasure, and Sigrun spread her hands. “Well, if it will cause offense to refuse, then I accept. But no popping to the Veil as soon as I am astride your neck. No tricks.”

  A ripple of muscles along his neck as Nith hissed, the sound almost a laugh, and then took her to the legate’s tent. The legate took one look at the massive dragon outside, and agreed, without objection, to Sigrun taking some leave. “On the one hand, you cut thr
ough red tape,” Sigrun informed the dragon. “On the other hand, this is probably grossly unfair to . . . everyone.”

  Nith snorted what he thought of that, and ducked them into the Veil, popping out over what was, clearly, the nighttime sprawl of Jerusalem. So odd to see bright city lights—almost disorienting, in fact. And she began to recall little pieces of Adam’s letters, as she managed to get her head out of Chaldea and Media. Recollections of rumblings from other places. That there were cells of Potentia ad Populum in Nahautl and Quecha, and even up in Novo Gaul, of all places, all stirring the pot in local affairs. Nith came in for a landing in the street outside her house, and Sigrun slipped down. “Is Adam all right?” She looked up at the dragon. “Who sent you? Why did you bring me here?”

  The door of the house opened. “Sig? I thought that every shelf in the house rattling was probably that damned dragon touching down.” Adam sounded unnerved. “Have to say, good timing. Come inside.”