Sigrun touched her face, and Sophia stilled. She could see a single tear course down her sister’s cheek, and it froze halfway down. “Actually, I prefer to think of it as the hope that your future won’t happen at all,” her sister said, quietly. “That we can successfully spit in Apollo’s face, and save the damned world, in spite of itself.”
“Who . . . Sigrun, you can’t do this—you have to live—”
“Oh, I understand that now. In the end, there’s duty. But it’s not just me. I’ll give you this much, Sophia, before I take it all away. Prometheus awakened me, Sophia. He made me understand who and what I was. And now we’re going to break your future to pieces, if we can.”
“No!” It was a heartfelt wail of protest. If they broke the future—it shouldn’t be possible, but they were doing it!—then they’d break everything. There would be nothing left. Nothing at all.
Sigrun sighed. “I’m sorry, sister. It’s time to forget again.”
. . . she touched Sophia’s face with hands as cold as death . . . .
She touched Sophia’s face with hands as cold as death . . . and when Sophia opened her eyes again, she was standing in the middle of the room. She had her paintbrushes, and she looked over at Sigrun, puzzled. “I don’t remember when you came in.”
“You often don’t,” Sigrun reminded her, tossing her white swan-cloak over the end of the bed. “Tell me about what you’re painting.”
“Oh, this! This is Jormangand fighting Loki. It hasn’t happened yet, has it?”
“No. Not at all.” Her sister’s voice was sad, but Sophia let it pass her by, and kept working on her painting. She was running out of time. Or . . . maybe she wasn’t.
It was hard to tell.
Martius 16, 1993 AC
Sigrun took the two young people back with her to the house by taxi, telling Maccis, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just didn’t know how to deal with her . . . condition.” She sighed. “I used to argue with her, when she was well. Now, it’s just better—and safer for everyone—if she thinks everything is going according to the visions in her head.” She gave Maccis a sidelong glance, to her left. “Also, don’t believe anything she says about your future, in particular. She was mad before the centaurs. Now, she’s worse.” And there’s nothing I can do for her that Apollo of Delphi won’t undo, except the memory wipes, of which he’s unaware. I hate this.
“It seems like telling her the truth would help free her of the delusions,” Maccis said thoughtfully.
“If she were a true schizophrenic or paranoiac, with the right balance of medications . . . assuming her god-born metabolism didn’t entirely absorb them in the first hour or so . . . we could work at that,” Sigrun agreed, feeling coldness wash through her. “We could try to show her where reality and her visions had parted step, and she’d be able to hold onto a rational framework that denied the visions. But she’s not mad in the way a human goes mad. She’s suffered a trauma that’s given her what the Judean psychologists like to refer to as a ‘memory-triggered psychosis’” Sigrun mimicked the intonations of the doctors, acerbically, “and her gift of vision doesn’t help. She’s always taken what she sees to be the truth. It might drive her even more mad to realize that what she sees as truth isn’t . . . necessarily a valid guide anymore. No reference points. Just the howling abyss inside her own head.”
Maccis and Zaya both shuddered, and huddled together a little. Zaya cleared her throat. “I’ve never heard of a god-born going mad before.”
Sigrun looked out the window. “It happens. Most of the time, if they cannot be cured, they have to be . . . put down. Quietly. Kindly. Out of human sight.”
The taxi pulled in at her own house, and Sigrun paid their fare as the two youngsters hopped out of the motorcar. Sigrun had already spotted the tiny fragments of leaves on their cloaks and on Maccis’ kilt, the faint green stains that suggested they’d lain in long grass somewhere, and had smiled faintly at the sight. “Come in,” she offered them. “Always more food at our place. I’ll take Maccis up to the Caledonian villa after you two have finished visiting.” And trysting.
“If you’re sure we won’t be intruding,” Zaya said, hastily.
“You are not. Adam expected me back this evening. If I am early, and have brought you young people over . . . he will have someone else to talk to. That will stimulate his mind. It’s a good thing.” Sigrun left unspoken that she thought it would be a good thing for Maccis, too. The young man had shed a great deal of his humanity in the past year, and he needed to find it, and a solid center in himself, before he was sent back out into the field again. You’re still young. You don’t have to sacrifice your humanity yet. When Zaya is eighty, and has passed on peacefully in her sleep . . . go be god of the hunt then. Not before. You don’t have to make my choices.
She’d shaken her cloak back into its sable hue after leaving Sophia’s room, and she’d let her armor dissipate, leaving a simple, workaday outfit with a long-sleeved tunic, a leather bodice, and her usual laced jeans and boots. Nothing Adam wouldn’t be expecting. Maccis had seen her in armor in the north; it was nothing new to him, though he seemed to take it . . . for granted, really. Then again, his mother is Lady of the Wilds, his father walks the worlds, and his aunt is fire and fertility. He’s part of a pantheon of small gods, and doesn’t even realize it. His life is so extraordinary, he doesn’t see it as anything other than normal that I should put armor on and off at a whim. And Zaya had been present for Prometheus’ forceful conversation with Sigrun, over a year ago. She had little to hide from these young people.
She let them in the house, and hung up her cloak. “I’m home,” she called to Adam. “With guests.” She paused, and looked, stoically, into the mirror she’d hung beside the cloak pegs in the foyer. Freya had warned her that belief would begin to shape her appearance. Sigrun did her best not to court belief, but she had to keep track of her appearance now. Otherwise, people might shape her before she realized it. A quick survey showed that nothing had changed. Same hair. Same eyes. Same bone structure. Rune-marks, currently suppressed, and not visible as scars. No extraneous or highly visible marks, like Lassair’s fiery feathers, or Saraid’s wolf ears and tail. No shifts in her eye color . . . at least, not yet. So far, so good.
Adam trudged down the stairs, holding his cane, but not leaning on it. Nothing like his old, quick, light steps . . . but he’d caught her looking into the mirror, and raised his eyebrows at her for a moment. He’d tried not to let his shock show when she’d brought the damned thing home and hung it up; it remained the only one in the house. “Primping?” he asked now, smiling a little, and came off the stairs. “The world ended and I didn’t even notice it.”
Sigrun put a smile on her face that she didn’t feel, and avoided his joking question. Just gestured at the young couple with her. “I can smell dinner, Adam. I’ll handle dishing up. Sit, talk.”
Adam smiled and stumped over to clasp wrists with Maccis. “I’m glad you made it back in one piece, Maccis. The first year on the line is always rough, and was worse for you than it was for me. We can talk after dinner. And I think we’ll have good visibility tonight for Mars, if you want to peek through the telescope with me.”
“I could find it in the sky wherever I was,” Maccis said, clearly moved. “Felt like an old friend.”
Sigrun headed into the kitchen, and busied herself, listening to the rest of them. She checked the oven, and discovered that Adam had tossed together a chicken dish with rice, apricots, paprika, and some garlic. It might have been enough for the two of them; he didn’t have a large appetite anymore. She’d been careful to ‘eat’ in the Veil yesterday, but she was starving now, and Maccis was eighteen, six-foot-four, and had, as far as she could tell, eaten little but raw meat every three or four days for the past year. He was far too thin for his frame. This isn’t going to be enough. Thankfully, it’s chicken breasts. Adam might be suspicious if we suddenly had four drumsticks and two necks, but when it’s all cut up lik
e this . . . who’s to say how much anyone really ate? She began dishing it out onto plates, looking away as she did so. It was harder to do this if she concentrated on it. It almost needed to be subconscious. She hadn’t even been aware of the damned cookie jar, for instance. Or the coins she’d once handed out to pay for the windows Nith had broken, long ago, when they’d assisted with Rig and Inghean’s bullies.
Sigrun peered under the lid now, and nodded in satisfaction. It looked as if she’d taken a few pieces out, but she’d heaped Maccis’ plate with food, and she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone going hungry. My contribution to the question of rationing: make more food.
“Adam,” she called over the counter in a lull in conversation. “Did you break the rules and turn the stove on?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve been known to bend the rules for important phone calls and moon landings. I decided to bend them again, in the interests of feeding us more than flatbread stuffed with cheese.”
The question, as intended, diverted him from looking at the plates too closely as she set them down on the table. She took a seat with them and listened to the talk swirl on around her. Maccis, when pressed, began to talk about his old favorite pipe dream . . . the terraforming of Mars. “We could build an atmosphere there with comets,” Adam agreed, pushing his plate away. “Even oceans. But the main problem is, and always will be, the fact that solar wind will tear that atmosphere away, probably faster than we can build it. Mars doesn’t have the molten, rotating core that creates a magnetosphere.”
“Well, what would it take to make the core molten?” Zaya asked. “The kind of spell-work Dr. Eshmunazar is looking at with my mother is probably too small-scale.”
“It would require a god,” Maccis said, glumly. “One that specializes in fire.” He grinned for a moment. “Send Aunt Lassair there.”
“Lassair wouldn’t like Mars. Not enough people, and she enjoys people.” Adam shrugged.
Sigrun stared down at her plate. The name was fresh in her mind, for many reasons, not the least of which happened to be Sophia’s mural. “Jormangand,” she muttered.
“What?” Adam turned and looked at her. “Jormangand?”
“He is meant to be a symbol of the unending cycle of life and death. Legend had it that he coiled around the heart of the world. At the moment, he is needed as a weapon. But would not something of his size and power be . . . better suited to a dead world like Mars, in the hopes of making it live? And where there are few people for him to harm?”
Adam’s mouth dropped open. Maccis sat bolt upright and practically quivered in place. “How would you get him there?” Adam asked, after a moment. “He wouldn’t fit in any rocket.”
“And he’s barred from the Veil, isn’t he?” Zaya asked. “Like Dagon, he put all of his power into his physical presence here, in this world.”
Sigrun looked off into the mid-distance. “I don’t know,” she said, thoughtfully, but the back of her mind whispered, Talk to Prometheus. Talk to Hecate. We can’t afford to have Loki injured by Jormangand. We can’t send the world-serpent away now . . . it would be an unfair exile. But we could offer it to him as a reward for good service. A world to renew, one without mad godlings . . . with the option of calling him home again, if need arises. We need a two-way door, so that options aren’t closed off entirely . . . I can ask Freya, Tyr, and Loki for their counsel on this. She shook her head at her thoughts; a year ago, she’d have considered them effrontery.
Now? Loki spent as much time as he could at the house across the street, slipping into Judean territory unseen, often in the guise of Radulfr the bear-warrior. Whenever he and Sigrun happened to be outside at the same time, he’d wink at her from across the street.
It was “bad manners,” probably, but no one wanted to point out to the world that there were gods and demigods currently living, unmolested, in Jerusalem. Sigrun had a private tally. Amaterasu, Saraid, Lassair, Zhi, Prometheus, Hecate, Loki, and possibly Trennus and Sigrun herself. Arguments could be made for adding Rig and Reginleif to the list. Brandr was still at work here in the city, and on the Wall, as needed. But he might not qualify for Sigrun’s mental list, though he had managed to resist a blow from Hel that would have killed probably any other god-born. And who knows? Perhaps he and Erikir absorbed some of her essence that day, as well. But publicizing this population might make the area look open to invasion by other gods. The ones being pushed out of their home territories might see this land as both untouched by the mad gods, and undefended, at the same time.
Sigrun made a point of getting Maccis to agree to go to see the lindworms soon, in spite of his inexplicably uneasy expression when she broached the topic. “Nith and I have looked in on them periodically. Your brothers are doing a good job with them. They are actually remarkable, when they’re raised in captivity. Intelligent, even affectionate. Responsive to training.”
“Do they have voices?” Maccis asked, urgently.
“As you pointed out last year, a human child doesn’t do more than babble the first few years of life. Word particles start to emerge after the first birthday, usually, but while these lindworms are almost fully grown, physically, there’s no way to tell how fast they develop mentally, and they’re not even three years old yet. A human three-year-old would be doing well to say ‘No! Yes! Yummy! Icky! and That tickle me.’” Sigrun shrugged.
“Yes, but physically, they should be well into adolescence at this point, if not full-grown.”
Sigrun shrugged. “Nith hears more and more sense in what he terms their babbling, and I can see patterns in their minds, in othersight.” She smiled faintly. “The lindworms are getting used to him. He’s taken to the air with them a few times, and they seem to enjoy that. Or they climb up on him, and hang off him. He tolerates it with remarkable patience.”
Adam gave her a glance askance. “I didn’t know you had spent so much time over there.”
“An evening, once a week, if I can manage it.” Sigrun shrugged. “After you’ve gone to sleep.”
A frown. “I would have gone with you. And you have to get more sleep than you’ve been getting, neshama.”
Sigrun bit her tongue as she finished clearing the plates. There was no way to tell him that she was awake all night anyway, and she got a day’s worth of sleep in the Veil after she left every morning. She needed to be careful about making him feel even remotely excluded from her life, but she was all too aware of the distance that was growing between them. She was balancing on a knife’s edge between ensuring Adam’s health and safety and the need Eir and Nith had both expressed to her. The need to protect herself, insulate herself from pain. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d wish to go. The barracks are far to the south of town, and you haven’t been fond of long drives for the past several years.” The vibration of a long car ride and bouncing over rough roads was hard on Adam’s body these days. Sigrun had gone with him to his last doctor’s appointment, and the physician had spoken with pleasure of the fact that the arthritis had halted in its progression, and that the pain had reduced, but Adam had been concerned about the fact that his ankles and shins were swelling periodically now. It was the very beginning of congestive heart failure, they’d been told, and Adam had been directed to wear elasticized socks to try to force the water back up into the rest of his body . . . and Sigrun had subsequently sat down with Himi and even Lassair, to discuss what could be done to fix the issue. Little steps. Nothing radical that would upset the tenuous equilibrium of his body.
“I’ll go. Wouldn’t miss it. I never would have thought they could be tamed . . . or maybe even talk.” Adam’s voice had started off grouchy, but held a touch of wonder by the end. It was the wonder she loved, more than anything. It reminded her of the young Adam, and she had to turn her face aside for a moment, to keep the tears from falling.
“Then I will see you all tomorrow,” Sigrun told them, politely. “In the meantime, I am called elsewhere. Maccis? I can drop you off on my way.”
&n
bsp; “On Nith?” Maccis’ eyes went wide. “I’ll make sure to give myself fenris fur. Else I’ll literally freeze my arse off.”
Sigrun permitted herself a faint smile. “Zaya, give your mother a call, so she’ll send the car for you, if you would. It’s getting late.”
“The Odinhall never sleeps,” Adam grumbled, pushing himself up to give her a kiss. “Doesn’t mean you never get to, Sig. Your body clock is seven different kinds of off—even when you spend the night here, I can’t even remember the last time you actually fell asleep in bed beside me. And apparently, you go off to the landsknechten barracks at night now, too.” That, quietly, as he walked her to the door. “I meant what I said before. You’ve got to get more sleep.”
The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 45