Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “I’d like to read it some time,” Maire says.

  “In a moment,” Miniver says. “I’ve got it in my pocket, rather the worse for wear. But he does take all this nonsense so seriously. He’s even had Magog tattooed on his hand. I mean, I know it’s all very patriotic in these hard times to support the Navy, I’m sure it’ll save us all, but you needn’t go as far as a sailor and get pricked blue like a baboon’s bottom.”

  “I know,” Maire says. “But he’s always had to do every­thing the people did. I used to ask, what people? There’s a limit. One man can’t tread grapes and mend roads and hew coal and catch fish and hold down a university job all at the same time. It’s either one thing or the other. Nothing’s worse than playing at being part of the people – they loathe it, and quite right too. I sometimes think the proletariat even prefers being patronized to being enthused over. I mean, I know I resent being joined by those I dislike even more than I resent being loathed by them.”

  “But Magog!” Miniver says. “I know all that folklore stuff, about Gog fighting Magog, the old giants of England, and their images being set up in the City. But Gog still thinks he’s fight­ing Magog. He thinks we’re all agents of Magog, trying to kill him. I don’t mind a good healthy delusion of persecution, as long as I’m not included in it. Soon he’ll begin persecuting us because he thinks we’re persecuting him.”

  “But we are persecuting him,” Maire says. “And if he wants to call us all Magog, it’s as good as calling us They. He doesn’t mean anything specific by Magog. Something rather amorphous, like the spirit of ruling, of power, of persecution. Gog, naturally, stands for the people, the enduring ones, those who suffer, him. Trust him to want the beau role! Anyway, he thinks in rather black and white terms that the rulers and ruled, the torturers and victims, they and we, Magog and Gog, are all bound to fight forever and forever, world with end, and I hope that comes bloody soon to stop the boredom, amen.”

  “It’s probably just a new fad of his,” Miniver says. “Noth­ing serious. He gets galloping fads, and they may last a whole day. Do you remember the time he got all dreamy about chop­ping wood and he had to go and spend the whole day thwacking that oak with an axe? And when it fell down on his left foot, as of course it did, all he could say was, Theoretically it should have fallen the other way.”

  The woman laughs. “What’s the next step, Miniver?”

  “The mixture as before.”

  “So Magog’s still keeping after him?”

  “The more the merrier.”

  “What a born victim he is, Miniver. I really do adore him. I couldn’t live without him to screw.”

  “I’m glad you don’t adore me. Think how you’d make me suffer. I’d much rather adore you, my dear, and be kept at arm’s length.”

  “Except when Gog’s away,” Maire says, laughing.

  “When Gog’s away, I must admit you do occasionally agree to rub skins with me. But you couldn’t keep me further away, emotionally.”

  Gog outside the car feels a knot in his belly. His loins con­tract. His blood hammers. Jealousy? Why? He knows nothing of this woman now. But once?

  “I couldn’t make you suffer, Miniver,” Maire says, “how­ever hard I tried. Every ounce of feeling’s been squeezed out of you years ago.”

  “Except my feeling for you, my dear. If Gog’s really certifiable . . .”

  “He’s no more mad than you or I. And if I ever left him for you, Miniver, you’d know I’d accepted death.”

  “You’d better,” Miniver says. “Because death’s already accepted you.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Maire says. “I don’t like it. At least, he always likes life. Always makes things exciting. I mean, you can’t have two people sneering together, or it just makes one nasty noise. Gog always shoots things up and I shoot them down. A happy arrangement, don’t you think?”

  “Like the friend of the family,” Miniver murmurs. Gog hears the sound of him kissing Maire. “When the Gog’s away, the mice do play. I think you two are made for each other – to stay away from.”

  Here, Gog decides to rise and jam his head and two elbows through the window.

  “Exactly,” he says.

  He sees an unrecognizable Cluckitt-Miniver gaping at him. The skin on the man’s face is still wrinkled, but pasty pale. He is shaven and smoothed off, his black hair is singed back flat on his skull in the style of the male leads of the thirties. He wears a dapper, striped suit and a carnation in his buttonhole; his wide trouser legs sport creases fit to slice butter. While Maire’s face is blander and slightly fuller, it needs no cream to give it the oil of youth. Her hair is cropped to the nape of her neck, her dandy suit is of black and white checks, with black velvet lapels on her jacket and wide trousers like Miniver’s. She looks out at Gog quizzically through the clear glass of the copper monocle set in her left eye, and says, “Surprise, surprise.” Miniver jerks nervously on his seat, then tries to settle back casually, but he has to pull, pull away at the lobe of his left ear.

  Gog hears himself say, as if from a distance, “What would you say if I wrung your neck, Miniver?”

  “Quack,” Maire says, and laughs.

  “What for, my dear Gog?” Miniver says, uneasily.

  “Deceit,” Gog says.

  “Miniver wouldn’t deceive you, Gog,” Maire says with great conviction. “Unless he were pretending to deceive you because he knew you were eavesdropping. Just for a giggle, Miniver, wasn’t it? Pretending to be my lover.” Maire goes into a par­ticularly nasty laugh and pushes the edgy Miniver in the ribs with the point of the scalpel fingernail on her middle finger, which causes him to leap as if stabbed. Maire leans confidentially towards Gog in the window. “As if I could make love to that excuse for masculinity after you. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Looking down at that face of immediate innocence and infinite lies, at that guileless and knowing expression, at the woman who is a stranger and yet who is the only woman who declares her­self bound to him, Gog feels simultaneously the urge to strangle and the urge to embrace. His hands open in a curious groping clutch through the window into the interior of the car. Maire seizes his right hand and bites the thumb hard; then she sucks the thumb, kisses it, licks it, nibbles it, and turns yearning eyes up to Gog. And Gog feels his wrath melting; but he looks up to see Miniver smiling at Maire’s expert turning away of anger. A bubble of bile bursts in his gut and he wrenches at the handle of the car door with his left hand and he opens it and he pulls his right hand from Maire’s lips and he grabs at Miniver. Yet all he seizes is a few pieces of paper from Miniver’s pocket. For Miniver wriggles and squirms away, slips the far door open, and is off down the road, running at a spritely clip for all his air of decay. And as Gog turns to pursue, he sees the thin-shouldered chauffeur behind him with a wrench raised in his slight and long-­fingered hand. And Maire nods and the wrench is brought down and the iron stuns where the hawk has bitten and Gog falls into unconsciousness.

  When Gog comes to his senses, it is nearly night. There is no car. He is alone. His head is a hive of pain, where bees feast on his honey brains. He looks for the tracks of the car on the grass verge; but there is only one deep rut made by a heavy ribbed wheel, probably a tractor’s. Gog knows that he has fainted again, that is all he knows for sure. The hawk or the stone was certainly enough to give him a delayed concussion. And the conversation in the car was surely a returning memory of an incident long ago before the war. Yet there are a few sheets of paper lying near Gog, fallen from someone’s pocket. So he picks them up, and, when his head stops buzzing enough to allow his eyes to focus, Gog reads slowly through the pieces of typed paper by the bright light of the moon. The paper is headed:

  THE GOGWULF EDDA

  Author Anonymous: Undated

  Translated from the Norse by George Griffin

  And we come to the battlefield of the giants and the dwarfs. Great bones are white on the side of the hill; the grass is sown with the bones of the
giants, and the bones of the dwarfs, smaller than the bones of Northmen. In the ground, ribs; through the ribs, great swords. We grasp the swords and they are brown rust in our hands; we take up the shields and they vanish away. Six thousand six hundred and sixty and six skulls are there; above, the great skull of Ymir that holds up heaven. Two ravens sit on the thighbone of a great giant: Huginn and Muninn watch for their master Odinn; they shall bring him the news, that many shall join him in Valhalla. The sacred trees are burned on the hill by the fire-God Surt; King Aesir bids us hew and haul a mighty tree to the place; King Aesir, who has brought us over the dark sea in our winged ships along the dark river we call Tweed in answer to the command of the Wyrd. We set up the altar to Odinn; Magog, younger son of Aesir, son of the Gods, puts on his sacred cap of the raven for the sacrifice. The omens are good and the Wyrd abides; the dwarf natives call this place in their tongue, Camlann.

  Beyond is the country of the giants; they have built a mighty ditch and a wall as a boundary. The ditch is as wide as six men and as deep as a giant; the wall is the height of three tall men and topped by square teeth of stone and every two thousand paces a tower. The blocks for the building are large and square; six men cannot carry a fallen one, nor can they shape one without magic axes. We dare not cross the wall into the country of giants; did not Hrungnir the stone-giant break the skull of Thor himself with his whetstone? But Magog, younger son of Aesir, sacrifices a horned ram from the hills; and I Gog, elder son of Aesir, tall as an ash and leader of the warband, am ordained to pass the wall of giants.

  In fear and dread, I approach the mighty wall; shame on me, I wet myself, jelly is my marrow. My hands will not grasp the great stones, they are weak as a new-born babe; I am faint in my bowels and I cannot move. Behind me, I hear the jeering of the war band; Gog of the faint heart, shall you grind corn with the women? So I clamber over the wall that stretches from sunrise to sunset; the wall is deserted, the giants all perished or gone away. And I call to the warband, saying, “The giants are fled before me;” Magog waxes wroth, saying, “Gog, the ugly ogre, the giants are fled in fear to see your goggling ogle.” But Aesir, the King my father, says, “Gog, the brave one, he is my chosen son and he shall follow me.”

  Behind the wall, the giants have trodden a way with their feet; we follow it eastward, back to the sea about the Northland. We journey along the road, the wall to the left side; we meet many halls, camps and empty cities. There is grain in the storerooms, iron weapons in stone chambers; towers and turrets with no one to people them. Mint grows in the halls of the giants, mort and vervain; by great copper cauldrons, docks and nettles. And we meet no one, save only dwarf natives, they live in square broken houses about a courtyard, fit only to be slaves; they speak a strange tongue and we must slay them. For my brother Magog has made us swear the great oath; to Odinn is given all men and all booty. Gold and silver to be drowned in the river; war-coats and horses deep drowned under. Men to be hanged, and women and children; naught to be left to us, all to Odinn. So the oath taken by the great oak tree of the Northland, the true root of the world-bearing Yggdrasill;­ naught to be kept, if Odinn aids us in battle, naught to be kept save the empty land of the giants, all to be broken there and burned and buried.

  Then one morning, on the way eastward, by the bank of the river, we meet a way to the northward through a turreted city. Upon that way, ten armed horsemen; between them, a bier; round that bier burning one hundred torches. The leader wears a purple cloak of fine wool; his armour is silver and his helmet is gold; his horse bears a white cloth with red crosses on its side. And his nine horsemen wear red cloaks of thick wool; their armour is bronze and their helmets are silver; each horse bears a black cloth with white crosses on its side. And 1 say, “Let them pass, they go for a hero’s burial.” And Magog says, “Slay them for the oath to Odinn.” So we come upon the horsemen, and the battle is bloody. They are not men, but sons of giants, fighting furiously. They kill Snorri Baldhead and Gurmi Gaptooth; half a hundred heroes they send to Valhalla. I hack at their horses, hamstrings hewing; blood bursts forth bright and bloodily boil­ing. Nine horsemen we pull down and ring with our axemen; weary and woeful, they slay us with their short swords; like wolves we set about them and drag them down to death.

  Only the leader in the purple cloak of fine wool stands his back to the bier, slaying and slaughtering. Then Aesir my father says, “Odinn gives me this warrior.” And he walks forwards, his long sword held high as a fir tree; he brings it downwards and cleaves the warrior’s left arm from his shoulder. Yet the warrior lunges forward with right arm and short sword; between shield and war-coat the blade enters my father’s neck, it slips in sweetly as into its own scabbard. And my father is stricken and bows forward on his long sword; the warrior falls against him terribly bleeding; they hold onto each other, groaning, the blood spouting as a river; they look at each other as if they were brothers; they fall together and the Valkyries call them, to fight daily and daily die with the Chosen Warriors, and be reborn nightly to feast in Valhalla, that waits to perish on the day of the Ragnarok.

  And sorrow bursts forth in my belly; I fall down on my father’s body, bitterly lamenting. And I rise, waxing wroth, and I seize the bier boldly; without the dead hero, there would be no dying. The lid of the coffin is wondrously wrought, worked in amber and bluestone and jewels beyond telling, set in golden crosses over a sheet of silver, worth the ransom of a king and nine kings beside him. And I wrench off the lid, gold bolts bend­ing and bursting; I look down at the carrion that once was a hero. Tall is he and clad in iron armour, hewed and rusty; against his neck, a shirt of hair, his palms streaked with blood, marks of the scourge on his neck and bare feet, cheeks sunken inwards till they cleave to his skull, starved unto death as a dog forgotten on his chain. And I lift him from the coffin and I break off his armour, cracking it from his bones as the shell off a nut, until only his helmet sits upon his shrunken head, his helmet with two iron wings straight down his cheeks, his helmet with an iron beak down over his nosebone. And I bear him in my arms to the brown river, that flows under the stone bridge of giants by the temples, where stands a stone lion slaying a stone deer lying. And I cast him in the river and his weighted head sinks downwards, yet the summer river is shallow and his legs float upwards. So scraping on the pebbles, swollen as white weed, the dead hero is sucked out to sea, an offering to Odinn.

  I go back to the warband, to cast away the horses and the armour, the gold and the silver, the purple cloaks and the red cloaks, to cast out all the spoils as an offering into the river, for Odinn has given us the victory and asks for his sacrifice. But Magog has stripped the corpses and has them piled on faggots; yet the arms and the armour, the gold and the silver, are put on one side in a pile of glittering. Magog sets fire to the wood beneath the nine dead horsemen; the savour of their flesh rises sweetly to Odinn. “Tomorrow,” Magog says, “when we have raised up our new King, raised him up on our shields as the chosen of the warband, we shall carry the armour and the gold and the silver, worth the ransom of a king and nine kings beside him, we shall carry them with the body of Aesir down to the North sea, and build him a ship with the spoils set about him, and send him off burning to the gods in Valhalla.” The warband is silent, mourning its dead king Aesir; then the warriors shout, swarming about me, tall as an ash and the leader of the war­band; they raise me up, their new King, high on their long shields – all but Magog the priest, my younger brother, his eyes are as hot bronze under his helmet.

  There is mead and corn in plenty in the stores of the dead horsemen; I ordain a feast for the weary after battle. I drink deep from the King’s cup, the ox-horn wrought with silver. Straightway I fall into sleep, for Magog has put mandrake, cun­ningly mixed in a powder, in the sweetness of the mead. And I awake bound by the hands and the ankles, bound to a great cross of two timbers of oak, its form taken from the bier of the hero. And the warband lifts me, bound on the oak trees, lifts me high among the winds and leaves me hanging. And Magog
takes his spear and casts it upwards; it strikes me on the left side and the hot blood drips downwards.

  So it passes that I myself am an offering to Odinn, as Odinn offered himself to himself in the Lay of the High One, praying:

  I vow that I hung

  On the windy tree

  Swung there every night of nine;

  Gashed with a blade

  Blooded for Odinn

  Myself a sacrifice to myself

  Knotted to that tree

  No man knows

  Where the root of it goes.

  And below me the warband, feasting and chanting; they wear the spoils of the horsemen, the oath of Odinn broken. Magog has won them, sharing out the gold and the silver, risking the wrath of the gods, turning to new ways. He wears the purple cloak and the white cloth with red crosses; yet on his head still, the priestly cap of the raven, its wings folded down and its beak on his nostrils. And the warband rejoices they have put aside the law of their fathers; for their share of the spoils, they have put Magog over them.

  As I hang dying, the winds are my winding-sheet; and a bard comes up the South road, honoured among travellers, and speak­ing our tongue and the tongues of many warbands. His name is Taliesin, from the West and far country; he sings of a great battle, the battle of Camlann. It is not the place of the last battle of the giants and the dwarfs; but the place of the last battle of King Arthur, lord of the natives called Britons; he went down to the nether world to steal a magic cauldron, kindled by the breath of nine maidens; a cauldron that would not boil the food of a coward. And King Arthur brought it back from the nether world, where the noon is as midnight, and he made himself the hero of the people against the Northmen and warbands. He won twelve great battles and, on the thirteenth at Camlann, he slew his son the usurper Modred, begotten in incest, and he was taken wounded on a black ship to an island named Avalon. And his sinning Queen Guenevere, she perished long afterwards; also her lover, the voyaging Lancelot. I follow his body, sings the bard Taliesin, I follow his body with the nine knights and bishop attending, on the bier of Guenevere with one hundred candles burning, I follow it northwards to Joyous Gard, his castle glorious.