Gods of Fire and Thunder

by Fred Saberhagen

  He paused to listen to the sounds of a steady hammering, accompanied by a clattering of broken rock, that came drifting out of the near mouth of the tunnel. Despite the eagerness with which the Earthdwellers had undertaken the new task, they now, in spite of all their industry, seemed to be taking a comparatively long time about it.

  When Hal called down into the tunnel to ask what was going on, he received answering cries in tense voices, telling him that they had run into especially hard rock.

  There was both strain and weariness in Andvari's voice. "The edges of our tools are blunted, from the work we have already done. There is granite just beneath the surface."

  "Are you encountering magical interference?" Hal demanded.

  He heard a mumble as Andvari and his comrade conferred between themselves in their strange dialect. Then one called back: "We do not think so. Just some very hard rock." The sounds of hammering resumed; Hal thought they seemed to be coming now from a greater distance.

  Hal chafed and grumbled to himself, but there was nothing he could do to speed up the digging. Then an idea struck him, and he sat for a time in silence, thinking.

  He was still sitting there when at last Andvari and his companion appeared to announce the job was finished. Having emerged from underground, the little men stood aside, and silently gestured that the way through the tunnel was open for Hal. He noticed in passing that the hands of both gnomes were sore and bleeding. But he made no comment.

  Seeing light at the other end of the tunnel, Hal started through at once, headfirst. For all the time that the miners had spent in digging it, this passageway was no longer than the first one, and he thought it might be even slightly narrower, as if perhaps the diggers had hoped to discourage the passage of anyone stouter than themselves, without quite daring to make it impossible, against his direct request. He had a real struggle, and once he heard his clothing tear.

  When Hal's head came poking up out of the exit, he was at once able to confirm what he had suspected: that the third circle of fire was indeed the innermost. He was emerging from underground very nearly at the center of the final ring. From here it was possible, as it had not been from anywhere else inside the fires, to see a circle of sky directly overhead. This took the form of a disk of orange-washed blackness. He thought he was beginning to lose track of time. Either night had fallen, or this was some strange effect of Loki's light, that the sun's illumination should be kept out even though snow-flakes could drift in.

  The light in this round chamber was peculiar, somehow not nearly as bright as it should have been, considering the luminous nature of the encircling wall. In fact the whole surface underfoot for some reason lay under a kind of blight of shadow, making it hard for Hal to tell just what he was stepping on, or looking at. There was a small litter of digging tools.

  The circular space enclosed by the third ring of fire was no more than about five yards in diameter, and basically level. But further details were hard to see, for the darkened ground was thickly scattered, all across its width, with the loose material of the gnomes' digging—for some reason, in carving out this most recent tunnel, they must have carried much of the excavated material through with them, along with their tools. Hal found that puzzling, but just now he had no attention to spare for such puzzles.

  At one side of the enclosed circle, the rocky floor of the space rose up slightly, just enough to accommodate a low mound of something that despite its earthy hue was neither rock nor soil. Whatever hopes Hal might have had for an immediately visible heap of gold went glimmering. But he had not really expected to see spectacular treasure at once. The gnomes would have seen it first, immediately on breaking through.

  Suppose they had. What had they have done then?

  The answer was simple and obvious. The Earthdwellers would have tried their best to hide the treasure so that no one else, on entering this inner sanctuary, would be able to see it. The only way to conceal a mass of metal would have been to bury it, which meant Andvari and his comrade must have dug yet another hole in solid rock. The surplus material dug from the new treasure pit must have been scattered round evenly with the rest. No wonder the diggers were in state of near-collapse, with bleeding hands, and no wonder this round of work had taken them so comparatively long.

  Hal had dragged his thick body only halfway out of the tunnel when his attention was sharply distracted from the mound by a sharp movement in his belt pouch. The jumping vibration was so intense that it startled him. His fragment of the Golden Fleece was twitching and jumping more violently in his pouch than he had ever felt or seen it do before. It grew relatively active every time he brought it into Loki's stronghold. Overall it had been giving him stronger and stronger indications the closer he brought it to the center of the rings of fire.

  But at the moment it was not signaling him to move toward the mound, but in the opposite direction.

  Slowly Hal tugged and scraped himself completely free of the tunnel. Getting to his feet, he studied his surroundings in puzzlement; the Fleece was hopping in its pouch like a live thing, but there was not the smallest spark of bright yellow to be seen anywhere. Squinting, he scanned the basically level floor of the enclosed space, which was everywhere heavily littered with loose dirt and chips of stone.

  Hal's fragment of the Fleece seemed to be trying to tug him, direct him, to the side of the inner chamber farthest from the mound.

  Pulling the talisman from his pouch, he held it in his hand, gripping it firmly so it could not jump clear of his fingers. Then he moved it from side to side, letting the strength of its activity guide him. Quickly he was led to one particular spot of rubble-covered ground, exactly opposite the shadowy mound. Here the scrap of fabric was glowing so that it seemed it must burn his hand, but in truth there was no heat. Hal tucked the fragment back in his pouch, the better to do the necessary digging with both hands.

  He had to displace only a few inches of loose rock fragments before the unmistakable glint of gold came into view. Now his hands began to work with great excitement.

  The treasure had been hastily but effectively buried, and Hal realized he would never have imagined it was there had it not been for the feverish activity of his fragment of the Golden Fleece.

  The uncovering of the treasure went very swiftly now.

  In the quarter of an hour or so they'd had available, Andvari and his comrade had carved into the solid rock a repository about two feet in diameter and of unknown depth, just big enough to hold the gold that must have been lying on the surface when they entered this inner chamber.

  Hal knew he was looking at what amounted to a king's ransom—no, make that an emperor's ransom, or a god's. He had little doubt that before him lay the legendary treasure of the race of Earthdwellers.

  Tugging at the upper layers of heavy treasure, lifting a few of the larger items completely out of their latest hiding place, he was able to see that the cavity was as deep as his arm Was long, and fairly solidly packed with gold.

  The treasure was in several forms. There were huge raw nuggets, as well as refined bars, and pieces of jewelry (though he could not see a single gemstone or any metal that was not yellow). Here and there, mostly sifted toward the bottom of the pit, were handfuls of minted coins, bearing faces and script Hal could not recognize, filling up the interstices. How such a great hoard had originally been gathered, and by whom, was more than Hal could guess.

  Altogether there was so much gold that he could hardly have encircled it with his two arms, far more than he could possibly have lifted. The sheer bulk of the find made it seem somehow less real than his own secret hoard of thin little horseshoes.

  But it was real enough.

  Hal's first elation swiftly turned to gloom. He had probed Loki's stronghold almost to its final secret, and his success seemed to present him with only another problem.

  Who but a god was likely to succeed in accumulating such a mass of treasure? It would seem to represent the hopes and efforts of a whole tribe or race. A
ctually Hal thought most gods would not bother to go in for hoarding precious metals. What need had deities for gold, when all the things that humans needed gold to buy were effectively theirs for the taking?

  With a grunt, Hal lowered himself to sit on the littered and stony ground, close beside his find. Aching as much as ever, feeling more tired than elated, he sat there staring morosely at it. This was what came of being cursed with insatiable curiosity—whatever fine things you might discover, you were sure to be saddled with new problems. Somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself seriously considering the idea of simply covering up the hoard again.

  But even before he made his decision on the hoard, there was, he was almost certain, one more treasure to be discovered here. A thing that might, he feared, have a greater impact on its discoverer than even a ton of gold.

  The sight of the immense trove had momentarily knocked everything else out of his mind. But only momentarily, because now the thought of the even more important object trumped everything else.

  Turning back to confront the dimly, strangely shadowed mound, Hal suddenly wished he had had more chance to talk with Alvit, discuss the situation with her. On the other hand, he was now somewhat easier in his mind knowing that Baldur was already far away.

  Before he could even approach the mound, he became aware that the gnomes were calling something to him through the tunnel. He called back to them to wait, and then went to take a closer look at what else lay on the other side of this inner, triply-defended room.

  Looking closely, Hal could see that the dim little mound was something more than earth. Those were bones, he could see now, as he had suspected, and bones of a special kind, part of a body that had once walked on two legs.

  Standing right beside the corpse, Hal confirmed that it was little more than a ruined skeleton, so disjointed that it was hard to say whether it lay curled on its side or stretched on its back. There were a few remaining tatters, burned and shredded, of what had once been clothing. The front of the skull grinned fleshlessly at Hal. Those particular bones were still more or less intact, as if something had halfway protected them from the impact that had shattered most of the rest of the body. The remainder of the head was entirely gone, not even enough of it left to tell what the hair had been like.

  There was nothing special about any of the bones—not in their present condition, anyway—to tell him if he was looking at the body of a man or a woman. The ruin of a human body, yes, but also of one that had been more than human. Had it not been for the nearby hoard of gold and certain other indications, Hal would have assumed that the remains must be those of another of Wodan's prisoners.

  If you assumed that this unfortunate was only another prisoner, then he or she had evidently been triply confined, inside three rings of fire instead of only two; and so perhaps she or he had been judged guilty of some offense even more serious than Brunhild's.

  But it would not be "she." Hal felt certain of that now, and certain the individual's confinement had been voluntary.

  Loki had been trying to hide. Hal had no real doubt of which god would have sought safety within a triple ring of fire.

  The appearance of the body testified eloquently to the force of the blast or blow that had driven the life out of it—Hal didn't see how any merely natural blow, struck by any mortal human hand and weapon, could possibly have mashed a human body, let alone a god, the way this one had been mashed. Not even if the masher had been Hercules. Somehow all the fires and all the magic that this Firegod and Trickster could put up had not been enough to save him.

  Hal needed just a moment longer, in the strange, dim light of magic fire, to locate the confirming evidence, but it was there all right. Holding his breath, he bent lower to examine the Face of Loki.

  Looking at the first god's Face that he had ever seen, Hal realized that there was nothing intrinsically impressive about it, compared with a pile of gold. All the essentials of Loki's divinity resided in an object no bigger than Hal's hand, and no more conspicuous than a piece of dull glass. It lay close beside the body, near what little was left of the head. There it had come to rest after the skull of Loki's most recent avatar was shattered by some god-blasting impact, an overwhelming force that had come smashing right through the triple rings of fire, penetrating what must have been very impressive magical defenses.

  In his wanderings over the past few years, Hal had learned a little about the strength of gods and their magic, and now he shivered slightly when he sought to visualize just what had happened here, tried to imagine the forces involved.

  Probably the gnomes had not even noticed the small, dull, ordinary-looking thing lying on the ground—they had been dazzled into ecstasy by finding what they did find, just what they were looking for, and consumed by their anxiety to hide the glorious treasure. Possibly they had looked right at the Face in passing, and simply had not realized what this inconspicuous object was. The Face of Loki, god of fire, and . . .

  A Trickster-god as well.

  Very few people had ever seen the Face of any god. Probably not many people in the whole history of the world, he reflected, for no Face was likely to be lying about, naked and unworn, free for the taking, for very long before someone picked it up. History seemed to confirm what legend taught: powerful forces of magic tended to prevent the Faces from going long unused. When the death of an avatar stripped away the human flesh from some god's divinity, supernatural powers came into play, bringing a suitable human replacement to the exposed Face, or somehow conveying the Face to a man or woman who would put it on.

  After looking at the Face for a long moment, Hal shot out suddenly unsteady fingers and picked it up. He was holding what appeared to be a fragment of a carved or molded image of a human countenance, broken or cut from a mask or statue. It weighed almost nothing.

  Hal drew a deep breath, and said a prayer to several gods—for years now he had been convinced such prayers were useless, but the habits of youth were hard to break.

  Suddenly he knew that he had to make sure the find was genuine, and not some Loki-trickery. Setting the Face back on the ground, he tried to cut it with his battle-hatchet, tapping the object warily at first, then winding up with a full swing. The only result was a recoil that bounced the weapon back, so that it almost hit him in the forehead.

  The Face itself jumped only a little on the hard surface where he'd set it down, and when he picked it up for close inspection the cloudy, translucent surface showed not the smallest sign of any damage.

  So, it was genuine, the handiwork of whatever unimaginable power had made the gods. Talk about treasure. Compared to this, a pile of gold was worth little more than a pile of lead.

  Enormous as the value of the hoard of gold must be, Hal suspected that the market price of this small object, so easily held in one hand, could be greater. There were surely men and women in the world who would pay staggering sums, give value on the scale of treasuries and kingdoms, for the small object Hal now held in his hand. He observed with a kind of awe that he could feel a tingling in his hand, almost a burning in his fingers where they touched the smooth surface.

  The eerie impression of life that the thing gave was quite accurate. For certainly something inside it was engaged in rapid movement, reminding Hal of the dance of sunlight on rippling water. Inside the semi-transparent object, which was no thicker than his finger, he beheld a ceaseless, rapid, internal flow, of—of something—that might have been ice-clear water, or even light itself, if there could be light that illuminated nothing . . . but when he looked a moment longer, his impression shifted, until it was more one of dancing flames, as if it mirrored the encircling barrier of heat . . .

  Again and again Hal kept coming back to the fact that Loki was one of the Trickster-gods, and you would expect his Face to have something uncertain, something deceptive, about it.

  It was practically impossible to determine the direction or the speed of flow. The apparent internal waves seemed to be unendingly reflected from the
edges, and they went on and on without any sign that they were ever going to weaken.

  The thickness of the strange object varied from about a quarter of an inch to half an inch. It was approximately four inches from top to bottom, and six or seven along the curve from right to left. The ceaseless flow inside it, of whatever it was that looked like dancing flame, went on as tirelessly as before.

  Whether the modeled face was intended to be masculine or feminine was hard to tell, except that there was no representation of beard or mustache . . . the most prominent feature of the fragment was the single eye that it contained—the left—which had been carved or molded from the same piece of strange, warm, flexible, transparent stuff as all the rest. The eyeball showed an appropriately subtle bulge of pupil, and the details of the open lid were clear. No attempt had been made to represent eyelashes. An inch above the upper lid, another smooth small bulge suggested an eyebrow. A larger one below outlined cheekbones. No telling what the nose looked like, because the fragment broke off cleanly just past the inner corner of the eye. Along the top of the fragment, in the region of the temple, was a modeled suggestion of hair curled close against the skull.

  Around the whole irregular perimeter of the translucent shard, the edges were somewhat jagged . . . now when Hal pushed at the small projections with a finger, he found that they bent easily, springing back into their original shape as soon as the pressure was released. Everything about the piece he was holding suggested strongly that it was only a remnant, torn or broken from a larger image, that of a whole face or even an entire body.

  The god who had fallen and perished here had once been on such friendly terms with Wodan that he invited the All-Highest to use one compartment of his stronghold as a prison for recalcitrant Valkyries. The same god who had somehow, somewhere, taken possession of the golden treasure the gnomes were now trying to reclaim. The same god who had brought the vast hoard here, in an attempt to hide it, keep it for himself.