by Dave Freer
"I would have thought Urd had put away such child-like pastimes," said Odin, sounding suspicious.
"It's my second childhood," said the smallest Norn in a quavering treble. "I had a terrible first childhood, and I'm going to enjoy this one. And it keeps Skuld happy."
"That is wisdom," said Odin. "Great Norns, I would give my right eye for a horn of water from Mirmir's well."
"The price has gone up," said the tallest Norn. "The price is now a human sacrifice."
"Push him over the edge into the water," said the second childhood Norn.
"Throw him into the well," said the third.
"To drown and enrich the pool with his blood," clarified the tallest.
"Do you want me to cut his throat first?" Odin pushed Jerry to the lip of the pool.
"No!" said the Norns in hasty chorus.
"He's got to struggle."
"Otherwise it doesn't work."
"Push him in!"
So Odin did.
It couldn't have been more than ten feet down to the water, but it felt like fifty.
* * *
Jerry's screaming was the sweetest sound Liz had heard in long time. He hit the water with a terrific splash, and Liz went after him. The water they were hiding in was deliciously warm, and tinglingly effervescent. Unfortunately, the green color was due to the dense mats of water-weed.
Liz battled through the muck, and reached the threshing figure. She tried to grab Jerry and pull him to the edge, under the lip, but got a kick that nearly drowned her instead. It knocked all the air out of her, and she had to thrash for the surface.
Then a strong hand grabbed her.
* * *
Jerry had two shocks when Odin casually pushed him over the edge into Mirmir's well. The first was not that unpleasant. He was going to drown in warm water.
The second—that someone was pulling him down—was terrifying. He swallowed a fair amount of water trying to scream, and kicked with all his might. He was rewarded with a meaty impact. Then something grabbed him and flung him in against the lip. Moments later he was joined by a gasping Liz, who was weakly trying to push something into his hand. It was a sort of pipe, and she put a similar thing in her mouth. Then the same strong hand pulled him under. He had the intelligence left to put the pipe in his mouth and try to breath through it.
He felt a hand find his and squeeze gently. And a layer of something was pulled over him.
* * *
"What happened there?" Odin demanded.
Ella couldn't think quite what to say. She'd seen Liz burst out of the water herself. And then a black form—probably, she hoped, her daddy. And a fair amount of splashing.
A sudden horrible thought occurred to her. Maybe there really was some kind of monster down in this water. Maybe it had eaten all of them. She leaned over the edge, not caring about anything else except finding out if he was all right. She saw the bamboos in the misty water.
"It's the water demons," said Ty. "It's like... this drowned woman that lives in a cave near the bottom of the well, and she pulls them down and sucks their brains out through their noses."
"Oh," said Odin. "But I thought I also saw some dark shape attack."
"That's the water-wolf," Ty explained. "It lives at the very bottom of the well in between all the dead men's bones and treasure and it tries to get them first. It uses the blood to wash the bones and it likes to gnaw the flesh off their toes. And it eats their guts like spaghetti, and..."
"Stop giving away our secrets," said Tolly.
"Yes. Go and fetch Odin a horn full of water," said Ella, hastily. Once Ty got going he was nearly impossible to stop, especially with anything ghoulish.
Odin drank the horn of water. "I thank you, wise Norns. Now I will escort you back to Urd's well."
"No," said Ella firmly, trying to remember exactly how the Norns had spoken. "Now go. Great danger threatens you if you stay."
"Tell me more," said Odin.
"Only if you give us your other eye," said Tolly.
Odin put his hand over it, protectively.
"Samurai Jack is coming," warned Ty sepulchrally. "And he is a giant giant and he's dead already, so you can't kill him and... and he's got snakes for hair. And even if you cut his head off he just grows another two."
Odin backed off.
"Samurai Jack?" said the man with him. Ella placed him. The one that had been there when Thor's wife had come home. He was the creep who'd stolen Thor's gloves and belt of strength and then made the whiskey-smelling stuff that had got Thor so drunk!
"Thjalfi," she hissed, "you are a lowlife asshole." Ma wasn't around to hear it.
* * *
Odin was already heading away, so he didn't see a Norn kick his henchman on the shins. Hard.
"Creep. Lowlife. Scumbag. Bottom-feeder," he heard, as Thjalfi scrambled and limped after him.
These Norns were certainly knowledgeable. But Thjalfi was a useful creep, scumbag, and lowlife bottom-feeder.
* * *
The Krim device tried furiously to get Odin-Krim's attention. He was right on top of them, positionally!
But Odin was not responding. He was even more strong-willed than Krim. Prukrin transfer selection involved the gullible, the easily-manipulated, and those with various emotional energy keys. Odin had none of those features. Instead he was very Krim-like.
* * *
Lying under the water, covered in a layer of weed and Liz's skirt, Lamont waited for the inevitable to happen. How could he watch the kids and stay under water? He had to go and look. Had to.
Just then there were two almost simultaneous splashes. Lamont shot his head out of the water like a submarine launched cruise missile. A grinning Ty and Tolly were swimming towards them, splashing and laughing.
"I told them not to," said Ella from above.
"Honey," said Liz. "Why don't you join us too? You were absolutely brilliant." She was hugging a bemused but smiling Jerry Lukacs. "I'm never letting you out of my sight for one instant, ever again. You've got so thin, love."
"It's... been a bit of a rough journey." He squinted at her. "And the last time I saw you, you were busy kissing someone else."
Liz blushed. "It wasn't what it looked like. And I think you saved me from getting raped."
"She went there to look for you, Jerry," said Lamont, "without realizing that Valkyries are the Norse equivalent of boom-boom girls. She was acting the part and trying to get her partner blind drunk. So don't make a fuss about it, because she's been tearing herself apart to think how she's going explain it to you."
Jerry blinked. "She doesn't have to explain anything."
"But I want to," said Liz. "First, though, we need to get you out of here, get you dry, fed, and your hands untied."
She looked as if she was about to start crying any moment, with the chin definitely quivering slightly, which was not something you expected from Liz. She also looked as if she was going to devour him with her eyes.
"Sounds good," said Jerry. "Especially the fed part. I've eaten half a magic apple, thirty six nuts, four birds eggs, and bowl of gruel in the last nine days. Does anyone know what has become of Loki and Sigyn, by the way?"
"He took the Norns back off to Urd's well. Sigyn went along to keep an eye on Skuld," said Lamont.
"Skuld-uggery! She wanted to make sure he Urd on the side of caution," said Jerry. And then gaped as Liz, instead of groaning, burst into a flood of tears and hugged him fiercely.
"It wasn't that bad," he said warily, once he could breath again.
"It was bloody awful," she said, smiling through the tears. "But it's so very you."
"Are you absorbing wisdom through the skin?" asked Thor from the edge of the water. "What did you do to Odin? He and his troops are still galloping their horses away from this place."
"That," said Ella, with a scowl, "Was my little brother. He's a menace."
"I thought it was way cool," said Tolly admiringly. "Especially the part about the drowned woman. Ho
w did you find out all this neat stuff?"
* * *
Agent Stephens watched the black bird warily. It did have a large beak. It also had a roll of parchment around one leg. "The message is for you," said the bird. "I could peck it off, but it probably would be illegible. I was told to tell you Tom Harkness sent me."
Agent Stephens had had a hard time in the last while reconciling himself with the fact that his entire purpose in life was now something he had to reassess, in the light of being somewhere where the US was not even a concept, and from where he had no chance of return or even of fulfilling his mission. He and Bott had tagged along with the party of moderns simply because they did not know where else to go. Preparation and briefing for the Harkness mission had of necessity been scanty. And then not only had they lost their guides, their destination and their way home, they'd also lost their mission... or so he'd believed.
Now, unless someone was deceiving them, he had to reassess again. With trembling fingers he undid the little scroll. What he saw there was enough to convince him that Tom Harkness was still alive—and in this myth-world, the Norse one, not still stranded in the Greek myth-world.
He was filled with righteous indignation. How dare these people mislead him like that? Not only had this Liz, Lamont and these children wrecked the mission, and destroyed his way home, they'd also deceived him about his mission objective.
"I have a message for you from Harkness," the raven continued. "The Americans you are associating with are known collaborators and sympathizers with unfriendly foreign powers. We need you to act as our eyes and ears in their midst."
Chapter 29
"So now we need to know what you plan, Jerry," said Loki, once they returned to Ran's cliff dwelling. "After all, you have now received two of the perceived sources of wisdom in the Norse world. You should be, if not a match for Odin, at least able to see through some of his strategies."
"Yes," rumbled Thor. "I've heard Loki's side of the story. There is some truth in what he says. Actually, to be fair, everything I've looked closely at proved to be true. Not polite, but true. Odin bespelled Loki and Sigyn's son Vali—a blameless boy—and thereby killed their son Narfi. That calls for a blood-price. Loki has put that price as Odin's own life. Many of us, myself among them, played a part in Loki's capture. Odin, Heimdall and Skadi imprisoned Loki for what Odin told us it was for the benefit of all. Odin was always too good at talking us into doing things for his benefit."
Loki snorted. "And he was very good at telling us we would not understand his reasons for doing them, because they were high matters which only he could understand."
"It's always a mistake to hand over too much thinking to someone else," said Liz. She nudged Thrúd. "Especially men."
Thor's daughter giggled.
Jerry rubbed his brow. "Wisdom is maybe the wrong word for what I've acquired. Or rather maybe it is the right word, but we understand it wrongly. We all drank from the well. I didn't mean to, but I swallowed enough."
Lamont held out his hands. "And I can't say it gave me any insights into how to treat Marie's cancer or that it made Tolly and Ty any older or wiser."
"If I have my geography right, Mirmir's well is one of the deepest places in this Ur-universe. You've got to understand the symbolism here. The water in Mirmir's well has passed through every place in this world, filtering ever downwards. By the laws of contagion it's therefore still part of all the things it has passed through. You were drinking in the land... I suspect you would find it very hard to get lost, or starve now. You wouldn't know precisely how you knew, but you'd know."
"Great. Really useful," said Lamont. "Especially to someone wanting to find his wife, and cure her. Not to mention organizing a great apocalyptic battle."
Jerry raised an eyebrow. "If you think about it, Lamont, it at least would help you find her. And to a general it should be priceless."
"But how does it help us to capture Odin? We should have struck when he was at Mirmir's well," said Thor, cheerfully ignoring the fact that they had been vastly outnumbered.
Counting, Jerry suspected, was not one of Thor's strengths. Or perhaps his strength lay in the fact that he didn't count, before he got into a fight.
Jerry tugged his straggly little goatee-beard. "I need to think about it. Asgard's defenses are designed to keep out frost and mountain giants. If I recall rightly, it is the flood caused by Jörmungand and the fire caused by Surt, which destroys the world at Ragnarok."
"Surt and the sons of Muspel did figure in my plans," admitted Loki. "An alliance of convenience against a common enemy, as it were."
"A mistake," rumbled Thor. "We've got a sort of common background with the frost and mountain giants. We've married them, had them live amongst us, like Loki, been friends with some like Ægir, and Grid, fought with them, wandered their lands. We share much of the same opinions and attitudes. The South and East are closed lands. Muspel and Surt's dominions have an ancient enmity with the Vanir, but no common blood or traditions."
Jerry was surprised by the perspicacity of Thor's analysis. "Yes, culture," he said knowledgeably. "You know why Americans stir the honey into their tea clockwise, and South Africans like Liz, do so counter-clockwise?"
"What is clockwise?" asked Thor.
Jerry demonstrated with a twirling finger. "Like this. Counter-clockwise is like that."
Thor thought hard. "To symbolize the movement of the whirlpool... but then why the other way?"
"Coriolis force!" said Emmitt. "It goes the other way in the southern hemisphere."
"Nope," said Jerry. "To dissolve the honey and make the tea sweet."
Loki cracked up. Liz scowled. Thor was still standing and tugging at his beard. "So: what you are saying is that we may do things entirely differently for the same reason? That despite our differences we have similar needs?"
"I suppose that's true. But what I was saying was that sometimes the superficiality of culture and tradition stop us thinking about things clearly and differently. They set our patterns of thought and hide the underlying truth. We come from outside your culture without that baggage. Maybe we can find the right answers."
"And there I thought that you had just found an opportunity to make a dumb joke," said Liz. "How I maligned you."
"Well, that too," admitted Jerry, grinning. "But seriously, I need more information, preferably inside information about Asgard, and about what Odin plans."
"I have a spy. A very greedy spy and I am nearly out of his price," admitted Liz. "One of Odin's ravens, Hugin. He's not the brightest, but he did tell us that you were being taken to Mirmir's well."
"What do you bribe him with? Roadkill?" asked Jerry.
"Sort of," said Liz. "You know how all our American stuff changed to being whatever was contemporaneous here?"
Jerry nodded. "It at least has to be within the framework of reference for the Ur-universe."
"Well, I had a large box of those multi-flavored jelly beans. I bought them for Lamont and Marie's kids, not just because we don't get them in South Africa," she said defensively. "And one of the flavors they changed to is something quite gross, but Hugin regards it as a sort of gastronomic heroin. But I only have one left."
Loki coughed. "Ran, dear. Would there be any chance of using Grotti's hand-mill?"
The giantess who had been quietly listening nodded. "If you are careful." She got up and walked out.
"A grotty handmill?" Liz asked.
"As I remember the story," Jerry said, "Some king of Denmark bought the mill and two giant slave-girls. The mill would grind out whatever you told it to. So he made it grind gold, but he did not give the slave-girls any rest so they ground out a hoard of Vikings."
"Mysing's horde," said Loki. "A terrible menace."
"And Mysing set the slave-girls to grinding salt," said Thor.
"Salt?" Liz looked puzzled.
Jerry grinned. "It was very precious in those days. It was the chief preservative before we had deep freezes, Liz."
/> "True. We still salt tons of fish on the west coast in South Africa."
"And in those days the sea itself was not salty," explained Thor. "So Mysing made them grind salt."
"But once again he neglected to give them rest," said Loki, in a sing-song voice. "So they ground faster and faster until Mysing's ships sank under the weight of the salt, and they went on churning the wheels in a whirlpool, spilling salt into the sea."
"That's labor activism!" said Liz. "So what happened next?"
Loki shrugged. "The giantesses Fenja and Menja fell into Ran's embrace, which is what happens if you cling onto a millstone in the open ocean. The stones stopped turning before the sea became solid salt, and the stones found their way into Ran's net, as all the treasures lost under the sea do."
Ran came back carrying two enormous millstones linked with a rusty contraption.
"And here I thought I'd said goodbye to rusted bolts forever," said Lamont. "Give it to me. I'll do my best to fix it." He looked critically at the rust. "No guarantees, though."
"Lamont, if anyone can fix it, it'll be you," said Liz.
"Flattery gets you time sanding and oiling." Lamont tried to pick it up, and failed. "And I'll need some help from Thor and his belt of strength to carry it to the workshop."
* * *
Lamont restored the handmill to working order with some patience, a lot of swearing, more oil, and a grave shortage of Miles Davis to listen to. It was the latter he complained about most. "Unfortunately, I didn't find any giantess attached to it to restore. And the idea was plainly that with the heavy wheels inertia would keep them turning. But trust me, starting them is not going to be easy."
"A job for you and I, Papa," said Thrúd.
Thor looked alarmed. "It's hardly a job for a warrior. Or even a male, working a mill-stone."
Liz prodded him in the kidneys. "The times they are a changing."
"And not always for the better," Thor grumbled, taking the handle.
"Consider it an opportunity to get in touch with your feminine side, which every artist needs to do," said Liz. "You need it for your Ikabena skills to flourish. And if you need more help with it I'm sure I can find you a mop."