The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  The temple itself always put on a bravura performance. It bustled with goði and gyðja attending to the carving of a new frieze or the blooding of a statue. The anguish of sacrificial goats filled the air with sounds and smells of a farmyard, and the clanging of the forge was so loud it was startling. Not as startling though as the monstrosity that took centre-stage—the huge phallus the ancients had carved on Frey’s statue. Iðunn was glad she didn’t have to compete with that. It made for an eye-watering welcome, very clearly erected to insist on male inadequacies; not even an urður could straddle it, however much pent-up frustration they might have.

  Any general misery Iðunn felt at returning to her alma mater was quickly lost in a wave of nausea. Stage fright might account for some of it—that the Urður weren’t going to be happy with her thesis was an understatement—but Iðunn knew the wooziness was from the journey itself. Osmosis was the technical—if borrowed—term for the transition; both water and data streamed between point A and point B, after all. Most Norse called it the Stakra—staggering—because landing felt exactly like trying to walk when five flagons into a feast. The effects were even worse when you travelled home from the Utangard. Most of the hinterworlds had stronger gravity than the imperial seat.

  The university itself was a short walk away, towards the lake. Half an hour perhaps, enough time to clear the head from the stagger. On the other side of the grove, she could always borrow one of the university boneshakers if she needed to make up time. She’d need to adjust her watch to the Midgard time. It wasn’t a big change, but Iðunn always felt a nagging sensation of being late when she was on campus.

  The path was quiet, with nothing but the crunch of gravel to provide company. The sacred grove itself seemed as ethereal as ever, although smaller than she remembered, like a spritely village elder, seen again after many years’ absence: diminished yes, but undimmed. The wellspring itself had been walled off, only the elite able to savour its holy waters. Iðunn felt a prickle of annoyance at that.

  “Fuckers.”

  She said it louder this time, knowing that if she was being watched anywhere, it was here in the holiest of holies.

  Time was always the enemy. Much of the land here had been transformed since the early days of the empire, not by man or god, but by geology: post glacial rebound, the slow thawing of the world after the crushing ice ages of prehistory. The old town had lost its strategic importance when it was no longer accessible from the sea. Now it was changing overnight because of man. Newer settlements had sprung up everywhere since she was last here.

  On the far side of her view she saw that Munsö, too, the island home of the great King Sigurd, had been merged with the neighbouring isle of Ekerö, geology conspiring with the fylkirs so they could claim to be the literal scions of oaks. The symbolism was more obvious than Frey’s penis; it was easy to spot the meddling hands of the Urður.

  Iðunn was startled to see that, down by the river, they’d reclaimed the Fyris Wolds, but then remembered that they’d started construction on a new Winter Palace. It was a grotesque heap of white marble and silver, but a ghoulish match for all the bog-blanched skeletons that it was paving over. That was certainly one way to make sure their secrets never surfaced.

  Usually, dignitaries of all kinds staggered between Uppsala and Miklagard. Seaborne trade might have moved south, but Gamla Uppsala was a Nexus, Knútr or Knot—terms used interchangeably by the wide range of peoples who passed through the greenways. While officially the Great City was still the crossroads of the world, of all the Nine Worlds in fact, and teeming with fifteen million people, Uppsala had silently reclaimed the true crown out of pure convenience. Miklagardians would protest they had their own great yew Knot, over 4,000 years old, but it was five hours travel outside the walls, in the mining town of Zonguldak. The Norse were never a patient people.

  The Vǫlur had controlled the Knots as they controlled all things, shrouding secrets with mysteries obscured in arcana. They’d always been shunned, even feared by the common folk, and the dread had only grown stronger in recent years. That might explain why no-one else was walking the path this side of the campus. It hadn’t been the case when Iðunn had been a student—it had always been bustling then—but she hadn’t been back in a decade. The Urður might have introduced a toll for all she knew. Either that or the waggoners were on strike again. They hated the Urður more than most.

  It didn’t matter. She was used to being alone. She adjusted her shawl and let her mind wander with her. It needed the exercise.

  IÐUNN HADN’T SPOKEN WITH A fellow vǫlur in days, and she couldn’t remember when she had last spoken to an urður. The eldest and most distinguished branch of the sisterhood, they dealt with the machinations of state—spycraft, politics and wars. They were midwives to the imperial family, as well as their mouthpieces when it suited them, curling the nobility around their fingers. They advised the emperor and his stallari, controlled security, propaganda, and censorship, and all from a vast subterranean tunnel complex around Uppsala: Urðbrunnr, or simply, the Well of Fate. Iðunn had long since seen through the charade. It boggled the mind that the Urður saw no irony in the fact they also stood as the final Court of Appeal for the Commonwealth. How could justice be blind if she saw everything?

  Iðunn belonged to a younger branch, the Verðandi. Like all vǫlur, she was a keeper of knowledge, but her discipline concerned understanding the here and the now, the interconnectedness of man, machine, and god. Biology, the Greeks had called it once, although her arts transcended the physical body. Her great-grandfather, the heroic Karl Lind, had spoken of a union of all creatures, including the spirits, teaching a holistic approach to medicine and the miracle of birth. He had founded the Verðandi Order in his image—most of his early acolytes had been men.

  Karl was rightly lauded for his many accomplishments—this was a man who mapped the heavens, after all—but he clearly had grown an outsized ego to match them. In his own taxonomy of the Nine Worlds, he considered the vast, uncompromising landscapes of Jötunheim to be the only place large enough for his intellect; literally, it became the home of a giant among men. Despite all his protests to the contrary, Iðunn knew her great-grandfather meant it to be an affront to the Urður, a constant reminder of how he had broken free of their shackles and saved men from the prejudices of the age. There was a portrait commissioned for the north stairwell to celebrate the various imperial ratifications and charters that supported the Verðandi, and if the grin of the fylkir was anything to go by, he was happily complicit in the whole scheme. Men were well practiced at closing ranks.

  Iðunn didn’t much care for most of the Nine Worlds herself. Intellectually, she knew their discovery was a staggering achievement, pun intended. To have mapped the heavens, to have criss-crossed the universe—who could aspire to more? But she’d grown up with the certainty that those worlds were within reach, and so their lustre faded, in the same way that no one marvelled at the first sailings to Vinland any more. It was a commonplace. Yes, she found the three so-called Worlds of Plenty—Asgard, Alfheim, and Vanaheim—beautiful, bucolic even, and there was a majesty to a sky full of alien constellations. The problem was almost anything thrived there, and she found no challenge in that. Nidavelir was coal-black and Hel was bleaker than the Markland steppe, so she rarely travelled to either if she could help it; the other hinterworlds were off-limits to non-military personnel.

  As to Midgard, well, Midgard was where all the problems began. There were people on Midgard, maybe a billion of them. Thankfully, none of the hinterworlds had much in the way of settlement—most people couldn’t use the greenways unless they were accompanied by a völva, and fewer still could tolerate the burden of greater gravity for long—so they all had a purity to them. Virgin worlds, holy worlds. It was like stepping back in time.

  Iðunn had been born on her great-grandfather’s farm, Hvergelmir (named after the fabled spring from “whence all waters rise,” another boast), and still lived on the world he
had claimed as his own. She loved the neat wooden railings, the straight avenues and the quaint Verðandi cottages, but above all, she loved the tracts of great walled gardens and sunken green-houses, the laboratories where Karl Lind had cultivated life. The volcanic soils were rich, the sunsets were violent; and she enjoyed the weight of the world, it made her strong and lean. She knew that she could snap an arm as if it were a twig.

  And then there was always a whisper of her family about the farm, their spirits still watching from the monolithic trees. She felt sad for them. Once all the hinterworlds were explored and the glory had evaporated, the Verðandi had fallen out of vogue. The men had, in the main, moved on, and it had fallen back to women to heal the sick, tend the gardens, and manage the songs of the greenways. Only the Finn, Lönnrot, had stayed with the Order, and even then, only barely. He was always off wandering the worlds, searching for the gods. Iðunn was more than happy with that arrangement; it gave her more time for her studies.

  The third branch of Vǫlur was where all male scholars flocked these days. The boy’s club moved on to play with other toys, proving that it is not only in infancy that men are pleased with a rattle and tickled with a straw. They called themselves the Skuld, a group of futurists and theoreticians, great minds with immense egos, maintained at vast expense by the admiralty. They claimed study of Sol and Mani, dreaming of stjarna skips from deep in their bunkers at Niflheim. The Skuld were determined to prove it was man who was the measure of all things, able to bend the Nine Worlds to their will. They worked in great secrecy, as prejudices still ran deep—it was only the bravest seiðrmen who risked the scorn of his kin to dabble in the black arts.

  Iðunn knew there was great comfort in that thought across the Empire, a fervent belief in the all-conquering, all-high Norse, reciting the creed of Valhöll.

  No-one bothered with questions anymore. The skalds recited tales mechanically, without bothering to ask where people were headed, whether here was better than there and if anyone had left anything important behind. Well, they were all fools, blithely unaware that they were a product of a thicket of philosophies grown in all manner of lands.

  That was why she was here, marching along a path between the oldest buildings she knew, a temple of the gods and a temple of learning.

  Karl Lind had forgotten something important. Iðunn could hear him whisper it in the rustles of the leaves, could hear him mourning. He had forgotten his place. He imagined himself to be greater than the world he inhabited rather than a mere part of it, losing track of the very insights that enabled his discovery in the first place. In his arrogance, he assumed the greenways were a gift. He didn’t ask why he had received it or how any of it worked.

  Iðunn blamed Miklagard. The Greek civil service was an infestation, the rotten core of a bad apple. They planted ideas, ancient convictions about the essential supremacy of man and the belief in progress, a progress marshalled by a professional army, built on land ownership, and presided over by a benevolent monarchy, all seeds that quickly took root in Commonwealth soil. As soon as fylkirs took the Great City and all its myriad libraries, they had ensured their skalds catalogued and memorized everything—and that was when the blight set in.

  From the heirs of Leo the Mathematician to the acolytes of Gemistus Pletho, the Greeks seized the opportunity to tutor the Norse as they had educated the Romans. It looked good from the outside. The union promised the best of both worlds: any good gardener knew about hybrid vigour—that a hybrid plant grows stronger and bigger than either of the parent strains—but bite deep and the taste was sour. Society had nurtured a narcissistic canker, a disease that strangled ideas and left them stunted. The fruit of Karl’s work had been left to rot.

  “A whole world full of vargdropi,” she muttered. The mess wolves left behind.

  Iðunn had dedicated the last eight years of her life to answering the questions Karl had left unanswered. It wasn’t just a familial duty, but a spiritual one too. She considered her work to be mending the thread. Perhaps it took the perspective of a new world and the home of a Jötunn, to realise the truth: mankind was not the centre of the universe. The worlds did not revolve around man. She sighed and marched on. It was time to upset the apple cart.

  WHILE THE PRACTICE VARIED ACROSS the Commonwealth, in Uppsala the defence of any new theory or discovery followed a simple formula. The University Speaker would hear the Mál, a debate so lively that knives were often drawn. He’d then adjudicate, either digesting the lessons into the current body of laws or starving them from the record.

  The Chief Speaker in Uppsala was a retired military man turned lecturer, Henrik Bohr. Iðunn hadn’t exactly had the time of her life as a student here, but Bohr had always been a saving grace. An artillery accident had left him wheelchair-bound, although no one ever talked about the specifics. He had a gloomy face, weighed down by the great unkempt whiskers of a hussar, with a mouth that turned down at the edges to match, which suggested he was perpetually miserable. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was a total transformation when he smiled or spoke. His whole face became animated and suddenly gave the impression he’d fly out of his seat in excitement if only he could. Iðunn always felt cheerier for talking to him and had kept up a vigorous correspondence after her graduation.

  The discussion would begin promptly; of that Iðunn was sure. Herra Bohr was known to be ruthless with timekeeping. If the students came in late, well, then that was their loss. One of his favourite aphorisms was that “while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings,” a phrase he mentioned so often, the students were known to repeat it spontaneously upon seeing him. There wasn’t any time to be apprehensive.

  Iðunn took her place at the podium and cleared her throat. She noticed some uniformed men in the back of the assembly, who looked decorated enough to be representatives of the stallari. Not unexpected, if the Varangians had gotten word of her conclusions. Her sister urður were there too, in force, like a pack of wolves, although she so rarely engaged with them, even on official business, she didn’t recognise any of the faces.

  The hall rippled with excitement, and an expectant hush descended.

  She shuffled her papers and then checked her watch. She hadn’t rehearsed or scripted much beyond a few jokes, and she’d told them so often that they’d become a routine. The only sane way to proceed through a Mál of this magnitude was to have fun; after all, you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. The forces of progress must inevitably clash with those of reaction and all that. The only problem was that she had no idea how long it would take to regurgitate the whole thesis or whether she’d be allowed to get through it in one go. The rules of engagement said she should be uninterrupted, but the Norse had never been good at fighting by the book.

  The room was silent now. She checked her watch again and wondered if it had stopped or whether Midgard time was actually this slow.

  “Góðan dag,” she said, with a slight nod of her head. She immediately realized that she sounded too formal and pretentious, but it was done now.

  “Honoured speakers and distinguished guests, today I present, on behalf of the Sacred Order of Verðandi, a defence of my thesis Mindless Mastery: Mimetic Osmosis and the Impact of Arboreal Sentience. I would begin with a quote from Askr’s Fylkirbok:

  I know that an ash-tree stands called Yggdrasil,

  a high tree, soaked with shining loam;

  from there comes the dews which fall in the valley,

  ever green, it stands over the well of fate.”

  She impressed herself sometimes. She was crisp, precise and authoritative. This was going to go well.

  “Yggdrasil the World Tree is the root and branches, pun intended, of our belief system. We have all been raised to understand that she is, literally and metaphorically, the pillar of existence. In some cultures, our people are even referred to as Ashmen. In her honour, for centuries, Northmen have planted what was called a ‘care-tree,’ or ‘guardian tree,’ in the cent
re of their homestead—a miniature version of Yggdrasil, and a stately landmark in any courtyard.

  “When the great Karl Lind’s father chose to become the first of his line to adopt a permanent surname, he chose the name Lind because of the giant linden tree that grew on the family homestead. If the care-tree witnessed many families growing up, the relationship between the tree and the family was said to be all the stronger. I am proud to be the fifth generation that now bears that name…”

  There was a burst of applause around the auditorium. It was always good to remind people of her illustrious forebears.

  “The story of Yggdrasil goes back not just five or even fifty generations, though. As children, as soon as we can understand the sagas, we learn we are the sons and daughters of the Ash and Elm tree: the first man was called Askr, born from the Ash, and the first woman Embla, born from the Elm. Askr and Embla sprouted from Yggdrasil’s seeds, and so it is said that every human being springs from the knot holes of Yggdrasil, there to be collected by two storks, who bring them to their longing mothers-to-be. Now, many of us know from experience that this isn’t literally true…”

  There was a smattering of laughter, but it took the beaming smile of Speaker Bohr to help her pick up pace, as the line fell flat and her delivery faltered. Nepotism one, charm nil.

  “We are reminded that the sagas are not to be interpreted literally; they are to be explored with fascination rather than fanaticism. Why, in these various tales of the emergence of the first human pair, do humans come from wood rather than some other element? Why not, for example, clay, from which humanity was created in many ancient Near Eastern worldviews—as in the Abrahamic Genesis or the Akkadian Atrahasis? Even after Ragnarok, an event foretold, but far in our future, the survivors Lif and Lifthrasir emerge from the shelter of trees and are nourished by water.”