by Rivka Spicer
“Afterwards I was astonished. I never knew that love-making could be that way. Odin had so many mistresses he didn’t have to bother pleasing them. It had become almost a chore. Hedin was a good lover and he made me feel things I didn’t even know existed.” She smiled softly. “Over the days and weeks we became inseparable and my feelings for him grew until they were overwhelming. One day he presented me with a necklace...Brisingamen. It was as famous for its beauty as I was and from the moment he placed it around my neck I was constantly touching it and admiring it like it was an obsession. Hedin used to joke that I loved Brisingamen more than I loved him but we both knew it wasn’t true. I felt like the most special woman on earth... And then Odin came.”
Jen swallowed a sudden lump in her throat as she remembered that day and it took her a few moments to recover herself enough to describe what had happened.
“A boy came rushing into the village and announced that Odin was on his way having discovered where I had been taken to and he was bringing an army with him. They were two days away on foot but their intent was clear. They were going to slaughter everyone and burn the village to the ground. There was no fuss. The villagers calmly packed up their meagre belongings, gathered all the ripe fruit and vegetables, herded up their animals and decided on a heading.
“Hedin had begged me to go with them. They were planning to take the ships across the sea to Orkney. They had heard that the climes were warmer there and the lands were lush, ripe for farming. But I could not go. In my heart of hearts I knew that Odin would not rest until he had found me. Having a wife captured in a raid was a humiliating blow and I was his possession. He could not allow the insult to go unpunished. We had argued right up until the last moment and then I had kissed him fiercely and desperately one last time before knocking him out with a stone and telling his men to carry him away.
“I watched him leave and cried until I thought I was going to split in two. That’s how they found me – alone in the village and wailing like a lost orphan. Needless to say they burnt the place to the ground and sowed the fields with salt so that the villagers could not return. Odin had dragged me behind a cluster of trees and lustily reasserted his claim on my body and then they dragged me bruised and uncomfortable all the way home back to Odin’s steading where I was returned to the long house with the other wives and mistresses.
“I had hidden Brisingamen under my winter furs and when I got home I had buried it under my cot but I got careless and one day the urge overcame me to look at it and I dug it up, thinking that everyone else would be out in the fields. Odin’s brother Loki had found me admiring the gold and snatched it out of my hands, hauling both me and the necklace in front of Odin.
“The king had been furious. He had beaten me severely and then raged for days before disappearing one day with a large group of his warriors. They were gone for weeks and rumours began to abound that perhaps they had been lost at sea or killed in a battle but I knew better than to hope and I was right. It was a foggy late spring morning when they returned, the mist swirling about their legs like the ghosts of the underworld, and Odin had come straight to me, hurling a leather sack at my feet with a dull thud. He ordered me to open it and I couldn’t, my hands were shaking so badly, so he opened it himself and emptied the contents onto the ground in a rush of blood and tissue. It was too badly damaged and decomposed for me to recognise the face but I recognised the hair, that beautiful hair that matched my own with the fine gold chain that shone dully in the spring sun. I had turned away and vomited everywhere while they laughed at me. When my stomach was empty and there was nothing more to bring up, Odin had held me up by my hair and had one of his men fasten Brisingamen around my neck. He told me I would wear it every day for the rest of my life as a reminder of what would happen if I ever allowed my heart to betray me again.” Jen shuddered. “It cured me of my obsession with the necklace. In my happier days I touched it often and remembered the good times with Hedin, but in my nightmares I could not help but feel it as a shackle around my neck, constantly reminding me of the sound of Hedin’s severed head hitting the floor and rolling towards my feet.”
Jen switched the recorder off and spent a moment reflecting on the life she had just spoken of. Without Mara to put her into a deep state of relaxation, recalling her memories didn’t seem so traumatic. They were still vivid and they still made her sad but she felt more able to be rational about them. Suddenly curious she booted up her computer and swigged half the bottle of juice while waiting for it to load up.
When she finally got on the internet she googled Bint’Anath. It confirmed everything that Kim had said. With a shudder, Jen cleared the search and typed in ‘Marcus Aurelius and Faustina’ instead and this time the result wasn’t so definite. She read a lot about their lives before finally coming across the story of the gladiator. His name was not mentioned and they had the details slightly wrong but she couldn’t argue with the fact that it was there on the screen in front of her in black and white.
With slightly trembling hands she cleared that search and typed in Odin and Freyja. The results were totally not what she expected and she had a short burst of hysterical laughter at the thought that anyone would have regarded her as a goddess or Odin as a god. Even Loki was in there, trouble-making bastard that he was he had been remembered as the god of chaos. There was no mention of Hedin in the first couple of pages of search results so Jen looked for ‘Brisingamen’, guessing correctly that a necklace of such fabled beauty that she had worn each day of her adult life had to have been mentioned somewhere. To her astonishment the myth of how she came to own Brisingamen was clearly recorded although they had got most of it completely wrong, details probably lost and expanded over the centuries it took her to achieve goddess status.
She grinned when she saw that Hedin of the Brisinger tribe was somehow recorded as being four brother dwarves known as Brisings that she had to sleep with over four nights in payment for the necklace. He would have found that hilarious. Continuing in her search she finally came across mention of Hedin but again the details were all wrong. He was mentioned as being locked in an eternal battle with the King of Norway on the island of Orkney. Some legends said that Freyja started the fight in recompense to Odin for her shameful behaviour over the necklace but others said that it was started over a woman called Hild. Jen frowned, she had never met a Hild and she was pretty sure that the timescales were all wrong. It was interesting that a necklace was offered as payment for peace though...Jen sighed. The writers of the sagas had a lot to answer for. They had totally screwed the history up but then at least they had recorded parts of it for future generations so that people like Jen could sit in front of their computers and read about events that happened hundreds of years before.
For a few moments she added up the dates in her head. Rameses had been about a thousand years before Christ and Marcus Aurelius had been about 130 after Christ. According to her research the Viking age started around the 700’s after Christ but by that time she was already deified as a goddess, so allowing for several generations in which the story of her life was turned into mythology, she would guess that Freyja and Odin had lived around 500 years after Christ. She wondered why there was a much smaller gap in between her lives as Faustina and Freyja than there had been between Bint’Anath and Faustina and where had her soul been in between for all that time? Were there other lives that she couldn’t remember yet or had she just been in some sort of broken limbo? The thought was unsettling and she automatically resolved to ask Mara those questions next time they met.
Then she remembered her situation and shook herself out of these unhelpful thoughts, firmly closing the lid of the laptop. It didn’t matter. She was marrying Tom and that’s all there was to it. Mara couldn’t help her now and it would be easier for all concerned if she just forgot the whole sorry mess. Hiding the Dictaphone and tapes in her handbag, Jen had one final cup of tea and went to bed.
That night she had terrible nightmares. When she was a child she had a book of Grim
m’s fairy tales, the original full-on gruesome versions and for years she had been horrified by their version of Cinderella where the ugly step-sisters had to chop off parts of their feet to get the slipper on and as they had walked past the dove it had sung from the tree:
“Go back! Go back!
There is blood in the shoe!
The shoe is too small
This bride will not do!”
In her nightmares Jen was walking down a hallway all painted in shades of grey and as she passed a doorway she heard Mark’s voice whispering and had turned to look at him. He looked strangely pale with a blue tinge and he was whispering the rhyme over and over again. Shaken, Jen had backed away and run further down the corridor but each doorway she passed had another wronged lover standing in it whispering the words in their sinister zombie-like state. Ankhmet, Hedin, Julius, others she vaguely recognised clamouring in their deathly voices until the sound was taking over her head and ringing round like a canon..GO BACK! GO BACK! THIS BRIDE WILL NOT DO!
She awoke in tears with her hands clamped over her ears to try and stop the noise but it was all in her head. Weeping she leapt out of bed and ripped the tape from the machine in her handbag, unspooling the black spaghetti in a frenzy until her recording was totally destroyed. With the echoes of the rhyme still filling her head Jen threw the Dictaphone on the floor and fetched a rolling pin from the kitchen, battering it into tiny little pieces that scattered everywhere on the granite tiles. She didn’t realise she was shrieking with rage until the doorbell rang and it startled her into sudden silence. Letting the rolling pin slip from her hand she stumbled numbly to the door, opening it to find two concerned Police officers standing outside.
“Madam is everything okay?” The female officer asked gently. “The neighbours called – they heard screaming.” Jen was absolutely mortified.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” She clapped her hands over her mouth, burst into tears and then promptly fainted.
She woke up to find the lights streaming past overhead and voices talking somewhere close by. She turned her head slightly to see who was speaking and although she was feeling a little woozy she was awake enough to realised she was being unloaded from an ambulance. Someone was holding her hand and she followed the arm up to a familiar face.
“She’s pregnant.” Nkara was explaining to one of the paramedics. “She’s been overdoing it I think – she’s getting married on Christmas eve.” The paramedic didn’t have to tut, Jen could practically feel him thinking she must be some kind of masochist.
“Kar?” She whispered and Nkara squeezed her hand.
“Hey Jen.” She smiled softly down at her, concern clouding her face. “How are you feeling? Do you hurt anywhere?” Jen did a slow mental assessment of her body.
“My arm hurts.” She replied eventually. “How did you get here? Where are we? Oh my god! Am I losing the baby? Is this because of the amnio?”
“No, you’re not losing the baby. You just passed out. They did a quick exam on the way here and the baby is fine. We’re at the private hospital. We’ll talk in a bit when the doctor has seen you.” Nkara promised with a meaningful look that said it wasn’t something they could discuss in front of others and Jen managed a slight nod.
Over the next couple of hours the doctors poked and prodded her, scanning her belly and taking blood samples but in the end they couldn’t find an exact cause as to why she had fainted so they decided to admit her for the rest of the night and possibly the next day for observations.
Once that had been decided it was the turn of the Police to ask questions about the screaming and the battered Dictaphone they had found in pieces all over her flat. Wearily Jen explained that she had a terrible nightmare and wasn’t really awake when she did it. They didn’t look like they believed her until she admitted she was pregnant and her hormones were all over the place. At this news their faces softened and they started to wind up the interview, putting away their notebooks and nodding sagely as though being pregnant meant you could get away with anything. They finally departed just after three in the morning leaving Nkara and Jen alone in her private room.
“What really happened? I felt your distress all the way from my house.” Nkara asked softly and Jen burst into tears, describing what she had done before she went to bed and the nightmare that had followed.
“It was my own stupid fault.” She wept. “I was so fixated on getting Kim back that I didn’t think what stirring it all up would do to me.”
“Oh Jen!” Nkara climbed onto the bed and wrapped her arms around her, holding her tight as she sobbed. “Don’t worry. I’ll speak to Kim. You can’t go landing yourself in hospital like this – it’s not healthy for you or the baby. You’re under so much stress right now. We’ll have to find some other way of making this work because you need to take some time out.”
“But there’s so much to do!” Jen wailed and Nkara drew back slightly so she could look her straight in the eye.
“If you can tell me that having a fabulous wedding is worth killing yourself or losing your baby over then I won’t interfere.” She said bluntly. “But if you can’t, then we need to compromise here.” Jen opened her mouth to protest but then shut it again. Nkara was right. There was no sense in arguing with her when she was just trying to do what’s best for Jen.
“Maybe Tessa would help finish the dresses.” She conceded eventually, not quite ready to let it all out of her grasp but making a concession to the fact that she needed more help and Nkara nodded.
“I’ll call her in the morning.” Something else occurred to her. “Do you want me to call Tom?” She asked. “I don’t think he knows you’re here.”
“No.” Jen replied thoughtfully. “I just got a little overwrought. He’d come rushing back if he knew I was in hospital and I’m really okay.”
“Okay, we’ll keep it between us and we’ll see what happens tomorrow, okay?” Nkara made to get up now that Jen had dried her eyes slightly but Jen held her back.
“Please stay.” She begged. “I don’t want to be alone again. The nightmare was...” She shuddered as she tried and failed to look for the words. “Can you help me sleep?” She tailed off lamely and Nkara gave a soft throaty chuckle.
“Of course. Close your eyes.” Jen obediently settled into a comfortable position on her side and closed her eyes. Within moments she could feel a gentle warmth swelling through her and after a few moments automatically fighting her sleepiness in the way that a small child does, she drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep.
They kept her in until the following evening, utterly perplexed by the episode, and by that time Hailey had discovered the mess in the flat and had called her mobile in a near state of hysteria thinking that Jen had been kidnapped or worse. Feeling seriously guilty Jen swore her to silence and then she admitted that she was in the hospital. That of course sent Hailey off into an even worse state and she insisted on rushing right round with flowers to demand what had happened.
“I just got a little stressed out and then I had a nightmare.” Jen explained when she arrived. “It’s nothing to worry about and Tom does not need to come back. I’m fine.” Overcome with relief, Hailey planted the vase of flowers firmly on the table and then burst into tears, flinging herself into Jen’s arms.
“Don’t ever do that to me again!” She wailed. “I thought I’d lost you!” Slightly embarrassed, Jen awkwardly patted her back and looked beseechingly at Nkara for help but Nkara clearly had her own agenda.
“You need to be careful.” She told Hailey gently. “This is a worrying time for Jen and the baby right now – she’s under too much stress.” Carefully releasing Jen as though she had suddenly transformed into a fragile and priceless piece of glass, Hailey wiped her eyes.
“Well that’s it!” She declared. “I am officially absolving you of all responsibility towards the wedding. You are going to go home and rest if I have to tie you down.”
“Good words of advice.” The doctor said from the d
oorway, clearing his throat in amusement when they all three jumped. “We’ve reviewed your latest round of tests and everything seems normal.” He told her. “It seems to have simply been a stress related episode. Your blood pressure is slightly on the low side though so make sure you drink lots, eat red meat and green vegetables and don’t get up suddenly. Gentle exercise is recommended.”
“Does that mean I can go?” Jen asked hopefully and the doctor nodded, smiling.
“I’ll just fill out the discharge papers and then you’re ready to leave. You can get dressed if you like.” The girls all looked at each other, mouths pursed into little o’s. This was going to be a problem. Jen had passed out in her night dress and Nkara had travelled in to the hospital with her in the ambulance.
“I’ll go.” Hailey laughed. “I’ve got the car here. I’ll pop round to the nearest shop and get you something to wear.”
An hour and a couple of wardrobe mishaps later Jen was in Hailey’s car on her way back to the flat. When they arrived she instantly went to clear up the mess but Hailey and Nkara blocked her way, glaring at her until she sat on the sofa while they cleared up around her.
“You sure did a number on this!” Hailey giggled, examining the contents of the dustpan when she had gathered up as much as she could. “Remind me never to upset you!”
All day they fetched her tea and food and dared her with their mutinous eyes to move or complain. It was driving Jen crazy. Finally she got to her feet and reached for her coat.
“Where are you going?” Demanded Hailey and Jen sighed.
“I can’t sit here all day.” She complained. “The doctor said gentle exercise was recommended so I’m just going to go and walk around the block, get some fresh air, clear my head a bit.” Hailey and Nkara looked at each other and then Nkara finally nodded.
“Take your mobile. If you feel dizzy or anything sit down and call us immediately, is that understood?” Feeling bizarrely little, Jen nodded.