“I don’t need a lesson in the intricacies of fate,” she said. “I was being sarcastic.”
“It’s not a lesson. It is a fear. All life is an interconnected web, where the slightest thrumming of one strand can cause the whole web to tremble.”
“That’s good. Write that down. Let the world tremble with fear!”
Iðunn hoped outright mockery might shake him loose, but he seemed irritatingly immune to ridicule.
“So, you agree? That what is written can be rewritten? Life is about authorship, yes? We are but spindles and flyers on the Great Wheel of the universe. To change the yarn, you must risk everything.”
Iðunn paused and glared at the young scholar.
“Hofgard, is it? It’s been a long day. I haven’t got the time or the energy for riddles in the dark. Tell me, just what are you trying to change?”
“Let me come with you,” he said, “travel the greenways to Hvergelmir.”
“Why in Thor’s name would I do that?”
“The Tree,” said Hofgard. “Let’s call it a leap of faith. I think I can prove your theory. I think I can find the Gods.”
EXEGESIS VI
( NOTHINGNESS )
YOU KNOW HOW IT IS supposed to end, Churchwarden. Let me tell you how it all began.
Ginnungagap was the great emptiness before there was the world, flanked by two inhospitable realms. There was Muspelheim, crossed by endless rivers of boiling poison and vast lakes of fire; and Niflheim, where icy volcanoes spewed forth frozen mists and arctic waters. Sparks and smoke met layers of rime and frost in the yawning void and from them came the first being.
A Jötunn, Ymir, appeared in the melting ice. From his sweat, the first Jötnar were born. Ymir fed on the milk of the primeval cow Auðumbla, also born of the meltwater. She licked the blocks of salty ice, releasing Búri, who was large, powerful, and beautiful to behold.
In time, Búri’s son Borr had three sons: the gods Óðinn, Vili, and Vé. The three sons of Borr had no use for Ymir and his growing family of cruel and brutish giants, so they attacked and killed him. So much blood flowed from the body that it drowned all the other giants except for two—Bergelmir and his wife escaped. They stole away in a hollowed-out tree trunk, a makeshift boat floating on the sea of gore to safety, to a land they named Jötunheim, home of the giants.
From Ymir’s body, the brothers made the world of humans: his blood, the seas and lakes, his flesh, the earth, his bones, the mountains and his teeth the rocks. From his skull, they made the dome of the sky, setting a dwarf at each of the four corners to hold it high above the earth. They protected the world from the Jötnar with a wall made from Ymir’s eyebrows. Next, they caused time to exist and placed the orbs of the sun and moon in chariots which were to circle around the sky.
Finally, the three brothers built their own realm. Ásgarð, a mighty stronghold, with green plains and shining palaces high over Miðgarð. They built the rainbow bridge Bifröst to link the realms. The Æsir, the guardians of men, crossed over the bridge and settled in Ásgarð.
Óðinn Alfaður is oldest and greatest of them all. That was our golden age. And then this, the beginning of the end. The Völuspá tells it well:
In their dwellings at peace | they played at tables,
Of gold no lack | did the gods then know,—
Till thither came | up giant-maids three,
Huge of might, | out of Jötunheim.
Thence come the maidens | mighty in wisdom,
Three from the dwelling | down ’neath the tree;
Urth is one named, | Verthandi the next,—
On the wood they scored,— | and Skuld the third.
Laws they made there, | and life allotted
To the sons of men, | and set their fates
Of course, I am grateful to the Norns. I would have missed the zeitgeist if it hadn’t been for them. I hadn’t realised that soldiers were marching in my name. I hadn’t realised that my forests were disappearing. I had become time’s ghost. They showed me how to turn back the clock. How to reclaim what was mine from the White Christ. I found Willehad of Bremen, the one that got away.
But the Norns don’t like inconsistencies. Eventually their idle suggestions become inescapable realities. It would soon be time to Ragnarok’n’roll all over again.
Except…
Every maid has a sire, every lineage has a father. I’d killed Ymir, but there was another one that got away.
Bergelmir, his grandson.
The first lord of Jötunheim.
The begetter of Norns.
I was looking for those who murdered me. I didn’t say when.
You know what they say, Churchwarden. In for a penny, in for a pound. I can’t very well be the All Father with another progenitor out there, seeding chaos. Still, no need to get my hands dirty—it really is amazing how quickly woodworm will ruin an untreated canoe…
TRANSCRIPT: NATTMARA SUBJECY 09
FOLKVANG BARRACKS, MIKLAGARD
1940
AH, YOU’VE TURNED THE LIGHTS on. It is very bright. It’s almost like being birthed again. Do you have a dimmer switch? No? The silent treatment, is it?
A control mechanism, I suppose. Fair warning, I don’t think I can be controlled.
Father took the opposite approach. He was always angry, roaring out his orders. Not like you people. Shut up, he’d say. Be quiet! Quit your yapping! If we weren’t quick enough, my brothers and I, his voice would boom out louder, more deafening than the cries of fifty men. Then, Mother would hurry to us and sweep us into the safety of her arms. She’d have someone take us back to the glasshouse, while she tried to placate him. It never worked. Father would just stomp away to erupt at someone else. The whole fortress would echo to his commands.
Mother said he had plenty to be angry about. Father would never hurt us, though; she wanted to make sure we understood that. We were very precious to him, to both of them, to all the people at the farm. We held all their promises, hopes, and dreams inside us, she said.
I imagine we represent something different to you.
Extinction, perhaps.
No?
I’ll hand it to you, you are good at the old cold shoulder.
She was always calm and caring, and pretty, so very pretty. Mother, that is. I always knew we were special to her; even my uglier brothers were loved. In time, I even came to respect Father’s voice, especially when he made the broadcasts. It was hypnotic, coercive. Stentorian, one of your stallari called it. Father would sit in his studio, with a microphone the size of his head suspended in front of him, transmitting on all frequencies, while his staff frantically twisted knobs and turned dials. He was in his element there. It was the only place he smiled. Do you remember his broadcasts from those days? Eventually, he added pictures, but early on it was just his voice beaming across the Gap. You are probably too young.
Mother had her gardens to keep her happy. They were all around, some walled in with old bricks, some with new bricks, grown like bread. Mother was clever like that. She could shape something from nothing. Some were made from shiny glass, those gardens had ash-black soil. Then there were the white gardens inside the main complex, rooms full of fine mist and steel beds. I tried to avoid visiting those unless the sisters insisted. My skin is very hard, as you’ve found out, and the needles would snap unless Mother was very careful.
She had long, brown hair once—I knew from the photographs in her office. She kept it short, though, when I was a child. As a mark of respect, she said. For solidarity. By contrast, as you can see, my mane was always thick and silver and long. It was obvious why they named me Grey Back. My brothers all have muscles taut as knotted ropes and shoulders as broad as wooden beams, but none of them have this moonlit crown. I asked Mother if I should cut it, also out of respect. She laughed and told me I was sweet, but that I would make my mark in other ways. Cutting it will be my decision and mine alone. So again, fair warning: if any of you try and touch it, I will bite you, and I assure
you, my bite is brutal.
Our work was very important. The Ironwoods were a safe place, she told us. We were all created free and equal. But there were other lands, lands with cruel gods, who kept men crushed under their heels. Sound familiar? In those lands, people were starving because there wasn’t enough bread even though most were in thrall to the fields. Mother explained that Father planned to save all those people. He’d use the greenways to steal them away.
The Jötunn War you called it. Like we were some eternal enemy.
Perhaps we are. Father called it the Great Emancipation. Said it was his duty. We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery, he’d say. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who treated us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away all material riches.
We were strong, my brothers and I. We roamed the greenways since we were pups and knew all the passages between places. Our world had a smell of sulfur, acrid, like oven cleaner. Other worlds had the scent of mildew, of old garden sheds. Still others smelled of dead birds and brine. You probably don’t have the right equipment to notice. We had been bred to be strong, to be adaptable, Grave Wolf and Sleepbringer and Unraveler. Mother called us her most successful brood yet. We were among the first, I know that now. As her old friend, Wystan the skald, used to say, it is the misfits who, forced to migrate to unsettled nooks, alter their structures and thrive. Positively Dýrrvinian, she said.
Sometimes, we took Father’s shape, especially when we went to your borgs and your tuns. It helped us blend in, helped to retain the element of surprise.
Dogs would always find us eventually, barking incessantly until your guards came, clanking in their carapaces. You could smell their fear, hear their hearts beat. If you caught one alone, he’d often piss himself, or spill his bowels even as they were ripped from him. You could see their eyes, wide with panic, deep in the shadowy recesses of their helmets, like two dark holes in a tree. Much like yours now. Wide with fear.
You are wondering if I am still strong and if you will be able to contain me. It is a reasonable concern. And at some point, we’ll find out, and one of us will be disappointed, if only for a moment.
Either that, or my brothers will find me.
Or Father. I imagine he will be very annoyed.
Father addressed you all in his broadcasts directly, telling you to throw down your rifles and join him. He called you ‘Proud Men of the Ash’. He offered you new lives, where you could turn your swords into ploughshares and fill the bellies of your children.
His war wasn’t with you. It was against the locusts who pose as gods, who have eaten the verdure of your fields—against the leeches who drain your blood for their wars.
And this is how you have repaid Father. You abduct his children.
He will be very, very annoyed. He watches you all the time. He is always in the forests, watching you from the dark.
With political rights denied to them at home, with men of thought and action condemned to loss of life and liberty, is it any wonder our ranks grew? Father would gather them and exhort them to liberate themselves from below instead of waiting for a false freedom to be granted from above. They came in droves, riding on our backs all the way to Mother’s gardens, where the sisters would clothe them and shape them.
Social change. Those who don’t fit today are the ones who make tomorrow. The Worshipful Company of Carmen came first. They’d been so highfalutin with their economisers and regenerators and their Stari engines, until the greenways put the wagonways out to pasture. Even old Hrōdebert Stari himself came over. The godsmen are always great inventors. The best demagogues.
Suit yourself. I’ve talked to plenty of brick walls in my time.
Well, as you know, the new recruits had the scent of revolution. They remembered the starvation and degradation of thralldoms that were no longer tied to the land, but tethered to the state and mortgaged to the hilt.
I just wonder how you still manage to pay for all those guns.
Or this place.
This is a nice place you have here. Underground I should think. To keep me contained.
Did you know, Father was happiest when we exploded one of these factories? It really tickled him. Then he’d roar with laughter. His staff would provide the explosives, of course, an amber treacle that stank of disinfectant. That was its job, in the end. Disinfectant. Wiping things clean. We’d place it, then barrel for the doors, roaring like maddened bulls to drown out the screaming sirens. My brothers would race and laugh, awarding prizes to the quickest—and then, when the bombings became routine, to the slowest, to the one with the most singed fur, to the one who’d snapped the most necks. I suppose we became lazy over the decades. That’s funny, is it? You are getting quite inventive, I’ll give you that, but you’ll be laughing on the other side of what’s left of your face soon.
I tell you what is lazy. It is lazy for you people to call us monsters. The real monsters came later in the war. Once you caught up a bit. I heard a proverb, what was it—necessity is the mother of all invention! That’s it. Well, Hafgufa was the mother of sonar, wasn’t she? Imagine how many fleets she’d have swallowed if your Skuld hadn’t pulled that out of their bag of tricks. I used to love those newsreels. I could watch them over and over, all those screaming mariners being hauled to the depths. We are no more Nattmara than you people, with your lung-soot children and petri-dish prostitutes, content to follow this bankrupt society.
Do you have a plan for what happens next? Have you reached for the factor 500? Have you readied your extinguishers and your fire-retardants? We’ve already swallowed your gods, and there is one incendiary party coming up.
No?
What does it take to get a rise out of you people?
Ah, guns is it? Predictable. Give it all you got.
Ah well, pass on my regards to the fylkir, and please tell Mother I love her.
I’ll see you all at Ragnarok.
BOOK THREE: DEBT
EXEGESIS VII
GÆSLINGFJORD, ENGLAND
2017
COME ON, CHURCHWARDEN. YOU SHOULD be proud of your new treasure,” the old man admonished. Michaels was standing before the crosses but couldn’t remember how he got there. He had an eerie sense of dreamlike dislocation. But he wasn’t dreaming. He knew that much.
The other crosses were made of the same red stone but looked better preserved, more intact. Both had carvings too, and one head, once lopped off for use as a sundial, was restored to its former glory.
Dawn cast the three pillars in a new light. The sun washed over them, baptising them in a new faith. The crosses that formed the uppermost piece of each pillar weren’t Christian crosses at all. They were suns, wheeling through the sky, a symbol as old as mankind. The wolves of Ragnarok threatened them even more clearly, without the context of the church.
St. Mary’s had vanished, stolen by the night. Michaels hadn’t witnessed the theft—or if he had he couldn’t remember. He remembered the open tomb and the candle going out but no more.
His car too, his Vauxhall Astra, 15,000 miles on the clock, was gone. Michaels was dimly annoyed. He had just filled her up yesterday, but that seemed to be the least of his problems.
“Why now?” Michaels croaked, his eyes wide and his throat raw.
The old man laughed.
“Don’t think that I am ignoring the irony of the so-called Wakeful God needing an alarm call, but I had sunk way beyond simple slumber. It turns out, I really did need a slap in the face to tell me all was not what it should be. The first clue wasn’t subtle; far from it. Time magazine, a hint dropped weekly by a concerned universe. Perhaps you have seen it: the one with the old, rich, white guy who was elected. The one where they strategically placed the M, so it looks like he has little red horns?”
Chandler fixed on the churchwarden with a baleful eye. Michaels could have sworn the old bear had two perfectly good eyes a moment ago, but he was past caring. Clear 20/20 vision see
med like a luxury when the world had been reduced to fells and crags.
“As far as I am concerned, Drumpf had all the right ancestry. He deserved to be president—although any direct descendent of Rurik of the Rus should really have used his Viking name. I was looking at that cover, when it all hit me at once—that’s exactly what the Christians did to me, all those years ago. Demonised me. Made me look like a monster. I was swept away like old garbage, left mouldering in an unmarked grave, despairing at what had become of my world. A world I worked hard to build.
“To add insult to injury, they stole Christmas from me as well. Gave it to a younger man. I promise you, when I flew through the winter sky, I made sure you knew about it. A cavalcade of baying hounds, blaring horns, and bleating goats. None of those jingling bells and big belly laughs; not to mention jolly old Saint Nick has entirely the wrong kind of elves. Where I am from, some elves are as dark as pitch, and they are the ones who make the best stuff.”
The old man let the words dangle, barely concealing his delight. Michaels certainly couldn’t imagine any kindergartners sitting in his leathery lap, but steadfastly refused to take the bait.
“Even in defeat, I refuse to be cowed. That cover story, it woke me up. It made me realize: I needed to focus my anger and force a change. You’ve seen for yourself—piss people off enough, and they’ll start pushing back. There’s no one who gets more furious about their turf than an old Angle or Saxon. If the WASPs are swarming, I thought, perhaps, they won’t squander their birthright a second time. No, I couldn’t just lie there while one of mine caught the zeitgeist. I needed to ride that wave too.”
“So, you’re Odin?” Michaels mumbled, weakly.
“Odin, Wotan, the All Father, Lord of the Aesir, Old Longbeard. In the flesh.”
The All Father Paradox Page 20