Gods of Fire and Thunder

by Fred Saberhagen

  Then it came. Again Hal heard the sound that had once wakened him from an exhausted sleep.

  His diving body had hardly struck the ground before the air around him seemed to ring like a great gong. Hagan had put on the Face and was just in the act of reaching with both hands—Hal saw dazedly that the Face of Loki had already restored the new avatar's missing arm—eager to embrace the gold.

  But before the new god touched the yellow metal, there was a blinding flash, a sense of surging power, ending in a stunning detonation. A small drop of something struck Hal on the forehead, with force that made a spattering of blood feel hard as stone.

  Hagan had achieved his apotheosis, and now the body of Loki's latest avatar lay still while a halo of small flames went dancing harmlessly around it. Hagan in his bright momentary life as Firegod might have willed to cut off the magic feeding the three burning curtains, for now they abruptly sputtered and guttered out. The calm daylight of late afternoon ruled the hilltop, and the world surrounding it had abruptly sprung into view. Not even Wodan could have blown those fires out so quickly, like so many candies. But Hagan/Loki had time to do nothing more than that.

  No, one thing more. Blooming momentarily back into existence, Loki's giant billows of fire reached out, dying powers only half-alive at best, doing their best to defend the newest avatar. Incidentally they incinerated a pair of bandits unlucky enough to be standing in the wrong place. But the flames of Loki were too late, and too relatively weak, to save their master.

  Hal, raising one arm to shield his eyes and squinting into a radiance of yellow light, caught one memorable glimpse of the Face of Loki spinning briefly in midair, after being blasted out of yet another human head. Now the small translucent oval was falling free again. Right into the pile of gold Hal saw it go tumbling, even as that pile melted under the last spasmodic output of the avatar's dying will.

  For a moment the glaring glow, the blasting heat, was such that Hal was forced to close his eyes. As he did so, it crossed his mind that Hagan/Loki had just been granted the most glorious cremation that any warrior or Trickster could ever want.

  When Hal was able to turn back, and dared to open his eyes again, he watched as the molten pile, seeming to boil with something more than mere natural heat, poured itself fuming down the slopes and crevices of the clifftop, to collide at last with the river at the bottom in a glorious explosion of steam that rose from a deep pool.

  The entire bandit crew had been scrambling for the Face. The two or three who had survived the blast, who had not been burned to death or hurled right off the crag, now went tottering and stumbling away in terror and shock. Scorched and blinded, one after another lurched scrambling across the clifftop and over the edge. Their screaming had a thin and hollow sound in the shocked stillness of the air.

  Hal was truly alone, and Loki's stronghold was no more. All of the tongues of fire were gone, save for a thin glowing channel in the rock, burned out by molten gold on its way to go trickling over the cliff's edge.

  Once again the Hammer of Thor had done its work. Now from atop the crag the view of the sky was completely open. Hal looked up—the fiery dot circling the crag had disappeared at last.

  As far as Hal could see, every last ounce of gold was completely gone. Not a drop of it, not a fragment, was left on the hilltop.

  Inching his way forward, avoiding the spots where naked, blackened rock still smoked with heat, Hal got his chin over the cliff's edge. He was staring down, hundreds of feet, to where a cloud of steam still hissed. The yellow metal would be undergoing a prolonged quenching and tempering in a deep pool of the river. The heat in several hundredweight of molten gold must have been awesome, but the Einar was bringing endless, irresistible resources to put it out.

  Even as Hal watched, the steam-clouds soon dispersed, and the river flowed on as before, the surface troubled only by occasional huge bubbles, showing something was still stirring in the depths. And presently even that disturbance ceased.

  One detail remained etched, brighter than all others, in Hal's memory—the Face of Loki going over, caught up in the flood of useless wealth. If Hal could rely on what his eyes had told him, the end result was going to be a god's Face embedded in the middle of a huge, crude nugget.

  Still looking down, he saw with fascination that the flying spark that was Thor's Hammer now circled over the deep pool—in which, even as he watched, the last bubbling and steaming ceased.

  Then Hal blinked. Abruptly the Hammer had gone out of sight again—where was it now?

  Pulling his head back from the edge of the cliff, he rolled over on his back and sat up, hearing the quick trampling of another Horse's hooves upon the flat, scorched rock nearby, followed by a familiar voice.

  "Hal, you are alive!" The gladness in Alvit's words was marvelous to hear.

  "So far. Just barely." He rubbed his head, which still felt as if a river of molten gold might be running through it. His eyes were dazzled, but he could make out Alvit's face and form as she bent over him.

  She was saying: "As I rode up, I saw something go—pouring—over the cliff. Something tremendously hot it seemed, burning, steaming all the way down—what was it?"

  Hal turned slowly to look down at the river again. "A farm and two fishing boats. All gone for good."

  "Will you talk sense?" Now the woman sounded unreasonably angry. "Stop gibbering about farms! Or have you been hit in the head too many times, like Baldur and Hagan?"

  And like Wodan too. But he did not say that aloud. "Hagan's dead," Hal began to explain. Then, straining his ears, he raised a hand. "Hush! Did you hear something?"

  Both of them froze, listening. Hal found himself intently focusing on a sound that might be the rumbling approach of the Chariot of Thor, carrying no passenger—or no living one at least—pulled by its two magic Goats. For a moment his imagination pictured the vehicle arriving at or near the crag, so he would be able to scramble near it somehow and look inside.

  But that was not happening. He could imagine any presence that he liked, but there was no sign of any Chariot.

  Quite near at hand, though, another noise startled Hal. He grabbed at his belt for an axe that was no longer there, then looked around him for a weapon, any weapon. A rapid, bouncing, scraping noise, like something hard on rock. Then he saw what it was. No, not Chariot wheels.

  The Hammer of Thor was no longer circling the crag or skimming the deep pool either. Having now entirely lost its glow of burning heat, it was bounding and skipping around the newly opened and exposed surface of the crag, from which Loki's fires had only moments ago been banished. The rocks were still marked with neat concentric rings where magic fires had blackened them. The four open holes of the two tunnels looked utterly pointless now.

  Again Hal was struck by the fact that Myelnir's handle seemed incongruously short, and he wasn't even sure that it was made of wood. Could the whole Hammer possibly be one piece of forged metal?

  Hal heard no voice, and yet had the distinct impression that he was being sent a message: You wanted a weapon. So here I am.

  His fighter's instinct, which he trusted more than any conscious plan, took over. Wodan, or the gods knew what, might be coming at him even now. Spurred by fear of what could happen if he did not act, Hal lunged for the Hammer and managed to seize its incongruously short handle in his right hand.

  A moment later he was hanging on for dear life as Myelnir yanked him to his feet, then right off his feet, as if he were a child trying to hold onto a god's hand. But the stubbornness that won in combat had sprung to life in Hal, and he would not let go. Before he had time to draw another breath, he was being swirled away, dragged up into the clouds in a flight at screaming speed. This time there was no Horse beneath him, and his whole weight hung on one hand.

  Alvit was crying out in fear. She had been standing right beside him only a moment ago, but now her cries came faintly to Hal's ears, from a great and growing distance.

  A plunge into the deep river from the
height of the crag's top would have been terrible, but that he might possibly have survived. But before he could wonder whether it was wise to hang on an instant longer, he was at such an altitude that it would have been sure death to let the Hammer go. Besides, now he was no longer over water.

  The wind of his passage was roaring in his ears. His weapons that he depended on had all been left behind, just like his gold. Just like his imaginary farm, that now he would never see. He could do nothing but hang on for dear life.

  * * *

  21

  Now Alvit had completely disappeared from Hal's sight, her screams swallowed by the rushing wind of his passage as the Hammer dragged him upward. The Hammer was the one thing in the world Hal could claim as a possession now, outside of a few rags of bloodstained clothing, cloak and leggings torn by the savage wind with every moment of his soaring, roaring flight.

  No prospects of a peaceful farm for Hal the Northman now—he could not even reach a handful of dirt. No fishing boats, not even a few splinters from a waterlogged hull. And not an ounce of gold. There was only the rush of air that caught and tore his breath away.

  His insane hurtling flight seemed to prolong itself for hours. Had he not earlier begun to accustom himself to flight on Horseback, sheer panic might have broken his stubborn, life-saving grip upon the Hammer. But as it was, his fingers stayed clamped tight. Presently he thought that if he tried, really made a great effort, he might be able to swing himself up one-handed, against the screaming pull of speeding air, to lock his left hand also on the Hammer's handle. Short as that shaft was, there certainly ought to be room for a man's two hands.

  With a gasping exertion he managed, on the third try, to accomplish that. Now his right arm had some ease from the killing strain of his full weight, and his dread of being torn loose at every moment was eased a little.

  In his current situation, he had gone far beyond being upset by looking down. Numbly he watched as a layer of broken clouds streamed by beneath him. What little he could see of the earth below, streaked with long slanting shadows as the time neared sunset, strongly suggested that he was being carried into regions that he had never been before. There were no mountains below him, or immediately nearby. At least he could be sure that he was not being borne back to Valhalla.

  How long the journey really lasted was impossible to say. After a flight wilder than any Horse had given him, Hal felt the terrible speed begin to lessen, and he could see that he was coming down. During the descent, the flying Hammer shifted its orientation so the handle was still pointing toward the earth.

  Land spread below him, dark and flat and unfamiliar. Trying to see where he was going to alight, Hal saw a flat dull expanse, and in the middle of it an object, dead ahead, that was soon close enough to be recognizable as Thor's chariot, the two Goats still in harness.

  Around the motionless vehicle, rapidly growing larger as he flew toward it, there spread what he now perceived as a vast, roadless and unnavigable marsh, clinging to the rim of some great river. Was it the Einar? He couldn't tell. This might well be some other river altogether. Just how many miles had he flown?

  At almost the last moment, he realized that his present trajectory would land him not just near the chariot, but right on top of it, and at a dangerous speed. He had no way to steer, no means of control of the force that bore him on. At the last moment, when a crashing impact seemed almost inevitable, Hal forced his cramped fingers to let go of Myelnir's stubby handle. His body went plunging down a few yards away from the hard wood, with a large but anti-climactic splash, headlong into a waist-deep chilly swamp.

  The Hammer, released, went bumping and thumping right down into the open vehicle, its landing loud and hard enough that you might think it would have gone right through the floorboards. But no, it simply banged and rattled to a stop—evidently those boards were made of sturdy stuff.

  The pair of huge Goats looked round with curiosity, then went on patiently cropping whatever their immortal jaws were managing to dredge up out of the swamp.

  Half-wading and half-swimming, spitting and snorting foul-tasting muck, Hal soon got his feet more or less under him. Around the chariot there stretched, for at least half a mile, a seeming forest, practically an ocean, of tall reeds. No one was going to walk to this spot or ride here on a cameloid. Forcing a passage through the masses of vegetation by boat would be a weary job. So no ordinary humans, unless they came somehow flying over it, would find Thor's Chariot here.

  Hal took note of the quiet, the loneliness, and the reddening light of approaching sunset. At least there were no sounds or sights of fighting anywhere nearby—it was hard to imagine how anyone could ever organize a battle here. It looked like a place where a man might easily drown, or starve, but he would not be attacked, at least not by his fellow humans.

  He hoped that the watery muck engulfing him was too cold to nurture snakes. Wading and swearing, scraping malodorous mud from his eyes and beard, Hal dragged himself right next to the Chariot—it was floating delicately, magically, with only a few inches of each wheel submerged, showing not a spot of mud—and looked inside.

  There on the floorboards lay not only the Hammer, now inert, but the body of Thor's previous avatar. The late embodiment of the god was still wrapped in exotic, spotless furs and still displayed enormous metal armbands and iron gloves. The countenance had changed, but it was the same man who had once spoken to Hal and Baldur, and spun his Hammer for them.

  At least Hal was reasonably certain it was the same. The body that Hal remembered as so mighty now lay sprawled on its back, shrunken, shriveled, almost mummified, though it was neither mangled nor decayed. There was no sign of spilled blood. The arms no longer came near filling the broad decorative bands. Doubtless the strange appearance of the corpse was some result of whatever Underworld magic had struck Thor down, at a moment when his most potent weapon was miles away. Automatically Hal looked for the Spear that Thor had taken from him, but could not find it. Perhaps Thor had turned it over to some Valkyrie.

  Anyway, the northman had little attention to spare for such details. Right beside the body's desiccated forehead, just where you would expect to find it, lay the great god's Face. To Hal's mortal eyes, the small translucent slab looked practically indistinguishable from Loki's.

  For a long moment Hal did not move to pick up this new treasure. This time it was not fear of any immediate catastrophe that held him back, but something deeper and more subtle.

  "Why me?" he muttered aloud, and one of the Goats turned an inhuman face to look at him.

  In all his years of wandering the world, he had never seriously thought that this choice would ever be his to make, but now it had come leaping out at him like a wolf from ambush. And not once, but twice in one day.

  What surprised him was that this time the wolf should be so toothless. Because, in truth, Hal had already made his decision, long minutes ago when he moved to pick up the Hammer. And Myelnir in some way had also chosen him.

  It was a sobering moment, not entirely one of joy. Before him lay a forcible reminder that becoming Thor's avatar did not guarantee survival. As in the case of Loki, whatever power had demolished the last avatar of Thor might be ready and waiting to destroy the next one too.

  Both Goats looked round this time, as if made curious by this strange mortal's actions. Still they seemed to be waiting patiently for something meaningful to happen—something that would call them back to duty. Maybe, Hal thought, they were wondering why this particular human seemed so reluctant to become their god.

  Not that it should make much difference to the Goats. Because if he didn't become Thor, someone else soon would. The same magic that preserved Faces from destruction also saw to it that they did not long remain unused. One variation of that magic had brought him here, and if he refused the offer, the challenge, the invitation, the same eldritch power would bring someone else. Or, perhaps, the Goats would somehow be inspired to move the Chariot to a place frequented by people. Either wa
y the result would be the same. The very nature of Faces prevented them from remaining for very long out of the reach of human hands. He thought the Face of Loki, locked in gold at the bottom of a river, would probably be out of reach for some time to come—but it was hard to make any safe predictions about a Trickster.

  Hal could remember very plainly how, in his last moment high on the crag, when he had reached to grab the Hammer for himself, he had known an inner conviction that Myelnir had chosen him as well.

  He wondered how many humans, down through the centuries, had covered their own human faces with these strange god-things, just out of fear of what would happen if they did not.

  Holding the strange, masklike shape in his hands, Hal studied it, even though he already knew all that he had to know about it, and all that he was likely to find out—until he put it on. He had roamed the wide world for some twenty years without seeing the naked Face of any god—and now, in the course of a single hour, he had held two of them in his hands. Well, it came as no news to him that life was strange.

  Hal was afraid, knowing that from the moment he pressed Thor's Face over his eyes and nose and let it sink magically into his brain, Haraldur the northman would permanently cease to exist. Oh, not that he expected to die. Not exactly. Hal's memories, his hopes and fears, the things that made him who he was, would all go on. But never again would he be alone in his own head. With him inside his very skull would be all the powers and cravings of the great god, along with all the memories mighty Thor had amassed over many centuries. Those things would henceforward be as much a part of Hal as his own nature, and he thought he could almost feel the pressure of them already, more than enough to fill his old head up to bursting. Over the hours and days to come, they'd stretch him into a new and different shape.

  —if the Underworld powers that had killed Thor should allow his new avatar to live that long.