by James Comins
Binnan Darnan shrugged. She didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
They walked on, flanked by tall men hauling backpacks. Lenna’s ears were continually assaulted by heavy machine sounds. Over time it became a headache rhythm. Aitta seemed much, much angrier in her silence. She growled and hated. You could feel it.
Lenna had only started to figure Aitta out a couple of years ago. There had been a time, when Lenna was very young, when Aitta hadn’t lived on the farm at all. Then Talvi met her, and after that point she was always part of the family. When Lenna was growing up, the young housekeeper had been a hardly-there sort of person, neither a friend nor an enemy, just sort of ghosting around. Forgettable and grumpy. Cleaning the house in silence. Gradually Lenna had figured out that Aitta was making lots of decisions inside herself and would tell the other grown-ups when she thought no one else was around. Talvi especially seemed to know all about her inside ideas. Eventually Lenna learned that they were married, so they had to know all about each other. That was what being married meant.
She’d learned to tell the difference between a Brugda decision, like going to the store to pick up feed, and a Momma Joukka Pelata decision, like a day Lenna had to spend completely outside, and an Aitta decision, like visiting a neighboring dragon farm just to be social. You could tell which was which by the way that grown-ups looked at you, the way they looked at each other. Aitta would make social-type decisions, but Talvi would be the one who announced to everybody what Aitta had decided.
Lenna wondered what it was like, not talking, forever.
Gullvig scampered ahead like a brown frog, rubbing her hands together and giggling. Nanna slopped mud in wide arcs with her black hiking boots, marching right in front of the platoon of soldiers, but only the girls and the women seemed to be aware of the goddess’ presence. Six soldiers walked behind Aitta, and six walked ahead of Gullvig. Their uniforms were dull hazel. Packs and guns and machines and things were strapped to their backs. Heavy. Despite the mud, their steps were almost in unison, as if they were trying to match each other’s marchings. Mud fell from their feet. On a hillslope beside the mud path, they passed a patch of steamy lava, hiss. Lenna and Binnan Darnan linked arms.
As they neared the tower, a thin wail emanated from the fiery entrance. It was a shrill yeeeee that sounded like escaping steam, but it turned out to be screaming. Lenna could tell it was screaming because it stopped with a sick yelp. Something creepy ran up Lenna’s back, like ice dripping upwards.
“Mrs. Nanna. Don’t tell me not to ask questions. Mrs. Nanna! What’s an ormalaster?”
The goddess pointed to Aitta and snapped her fingers. Aitta grimaced and ground her teeth, looking back to Lenna.
“A good soldier accepts whatever she sees. This isn’t a field trip.” The voice was completely not Aitta’s.
Lenna glared up at the smug blonde goddess. “Mrs. Nanna. I’m not a soldier. I’m a silly villain, or whatever you said.”
“As long as you’re in a warzone, you’re a soldier, Lenna,” grated Aitta, her throat pinching words away. “If you want to stay safe, you have to follow orders. Hup.” A frown tightened across her pale freckles.
“Rrr,” said Lenna.
Another scream, like someone was falling out of the tower. But no one did. A Nord-blonde soldier ran screaming out of the fiery doorway. His folded brown cap caught fire as he passed through the flaming portal, and he scrabbled it off his head and threw it into the lava as he ran. His feet slapped the mud, bapbapbapbap, and he flung his arms around like he was being chased by a lion.
“So,” clapped Nanna. “Who’s first?”
“Ono.”
“Shouldn’t we have weapons or things?” asked Binnan Darnan.
“And shouldn’t Ms. Gullvig go get the gold herself?” Lenna added.
“No. Head along inside, you two,” said Nanna crisply in her crispy soprano. No one heard the goddess but the women.
“Why?” snapped Aitta up at the goddess ahead of her.
Thorstein nudged a soldier beside him. “Yeah, why,” he muttered, chuckling.
Nanna’s finger spun over Aitta. “Those are the orders. In, you two,” came out of Aitta’s strained mouth.
“But the fire--”
“I can get us through, Lenna.” Binnan Darnan took a metal spatula and a very narrow pointed spoon from the pocket of her teacozy dress.
“Duck!” yolped Thorstein as a tank shell hit the tower and exploded.
Lenna had learned this word from Annie Morgan. Binnan Darnan didn’t seem to know it, so Lenna pulled her down, squatting as low as she could without getting too muddy. Nanna dropped like a cut tree into the mud, thudding and splattering. Gullvig was already low enough to avoid the explosion.
Aitta, who stood proudly at the head of the line, was flung away like a Raggedy Ann doll. The rear guard of soldiers broke toward her and scooped her up.
“Out cold!” the soldier called, feeling her neck. “We need to get her out of here!”
“Aitta!” Before anyone could grab her, Lenna ran between the soldiers to hold Aitta’s hand. “Why didn’t you duck?” she said to the limp pale face in the soldier’s arms.
“She didn’t follow orders--” said Nanna.
“Shut up! Mrs. Nanna, take her somewhere. We shouldn’t be here.”
The Lieutenant Commander looked confused. Above him, a muddy Nanna waved a finger.
Aitta opened her eyes, but she was glassy. When she spoke, her voice was the voice of a sleep-talker. “Thorstein. Gullvig. These two girls are the key to completing the mission. I can make it back. Follow your orders.”
“Yes, ma’am!” said Thorstein with a look of respect and heroism.
Nanna reached down, took up Aitta’s limp body in her arms and disappeared.
Chapter Seven
The Ormalaster
or, Let the Fear Flow Around You Like the Wind
Lieutenant Commander Thorstein adjusted his backpack and rolled his muscley shoulders. He bent down with his hands on his knees in that petty smug way that grown-ups do around children and addressed the two girls.
“All right, kids. Let me tell you, I don’t like this. You’re supposed to get into the tower and defeat the ormalaster. I don’t know how. I’ll try to organize a temporary cease-fire. Now, when I wave, you get inside. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Binnan Darnan. Lenna stared at her.
“You’ve also lost your mind.”
“I can carve the fire open!” said Binnan Darnan.
“This does not mean that you’re not-crazy.”
“I just hope they don’t shoot you when you go in,” Binnan Darnan said, grinning.
“Me? We have to go in together!”
“I don’t have magic. I open the door and you go in. That’s the plan. Lenna. Those are the orders. And you must always follow orders when there are wars going on.”
Lenna folded her arms. “You don’t even know what was on those papers.”
“He’s waving! Let’s go.”
Binnan Darnan darted forward low, her long hair swishing. Lenna reluctantly followed.
“Bring me th’ gold, dearies,” Gullvig called after them.
“Rrr.”
The fire door radiated sweaty back-of-your-neck ugly summer sunburn heat. A sheet of rickety bouncing aluminum siding was perched over the lava moat as a temporary bridge. They crossed it slowly, step by step, feeling the metal buckle and sway under their mudsticky shoes. Binnan Darnan stepped off onto the thin ring of cobblestone in front of the hot, hot flickering crackling arch-topped entrance. The heat really was smothering, sickening, a pressure that Lenna had to press herself into headfirst, had to withstand. The fire roared as loud and as enveloping as falling water.
From her big dress pocket Binnan Darnan took a metal chisel, held it up to the broiling air, took a tiny hammer, held a pinky up to check the wind, maneuvered the chisel to just the right spot, and tapped the chisel against the air.
Whoooaaaaaam
.
The heat cracked open and split along its length, bending away and flaring tendrils to either side. Cold air from behind Lenna rushed in to fill the space.
“Wow,” said Lenna, shivering involuntarily, both at the cold and at the strangeness.
“Mm-hm.” Binnan Darnan went right up to the fire door and began scooping it away with her metal spatula. Fire twisted like heavy clay into bent lily petals. Gradually the room behind it was revealed. The girl pulled the middle outward, leaving a cold-air door inside the throbbing fire door.
“Hhh.” Lenna tapped her foot, looking at the snaky threads of fire to either side.
“Go,” hissed Binnan Darnan.
“There’s a monster in there.”
She bent down and peered through. Something gold-colored shone, reflecting the orange fire in a vertical stripe. Lenna imagined a golden golem or a pyramid monster with metal legs stomping around inside.
Binnan Darnan put her chin up on Lenna’s shoulder and whispered in her ear. “Maybe it’s an empress, Llenowyn. Maybe it’s unicorns. Maybe it would be your friend.”
Gullvig snuck up beside Lenna on the other side. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
Lenna jumped a foot into the air, knocking a chin away. She spun. Nodnodnod. Binnan Darnan frowned at the goblin woman and rubbed her chin.
“Let the fear flow around you like the wind,” Gullvig said, flicking the side of her nose conspiracywise.
“What?” Lenna said.
“Let the fear flow around you like the wind,” Gullvig repeated. “Off you go.”
And Lenna was walking through a steady rushing wind, past fingers of fire. The wind of fear was real wind, fluttering her hair and pushing her off-balance. She leaned forward through it, walking without thinking. She felt the fear inside of her reach out and get swept away. If she stopped walking forward, the fear went electric and made it harder to think and harder to start walking again. But if she kept moving, past the fire door and through the short stone hallway, kept each foot pushing through the fear, moving toward the ormalaster’s lair, steadily, without flinching or backing away, kept her eyes open and her feet feeting and her arms swimming, pushing through the wind, she didn’t feel afraid at all. She felt brave.
And she was through.
The tower was circular, an empty stone space. It stood tall above her, bricked in by square gray stones, but with no stairs or upper floor, just a column of empty air.
A freshly made brass bed sat on the floor in the middle of the space.
A sign on a string dropped down from the roof of the tower, bouncing and turning as it landed. Lenna grabbed it and held it steady. It read: “SLEEP.”
The winds of fear still gushed a gale. Lenna walked through them, her teacozy dress fluttering lazily in the fear breeze, and, lacking anything else to do in here, she climbed into the bed. Comfortable sheets tucked themselves in around her. Enchanted. The fiery windows and door disappeared, puff. The light faded, and
Lenna’s eyelids fluttered open. Dark. The thick dark of bedtime. A room of shadows full of faces. A pillow. Under her body, bouncing bedsprings. She was in her bed, her old familiar saggy-middle poky-spring bed in the dim attic of the big house. Croaking dragonvoice came from the distant dragon tower. The sheets were all tangled up around her legs, wrapped like a spider egg. She lifted her chin reluctantly from the pillow, slashing her feet up and down to get loose from the captor sheets. A white-gray glimpse of an Iceland winter in the evening lay out the frost-sheened window. She tried to get out of bed, sliding her feet out, but the bedsheets came alive and bunched around her legs and arms tight, spookingly and slippery and clumpy and alive. She shrieked. Laying back down nervously, she found that the sheets relaxed around her.
So this was how it worked.
Thump, thump, thump. Someone was hitting Brugda. The crooked beige wood floor and creaky walls amplified the sound. Brugda, nasty Brugda, was being hit. Downstairs in the middle floor, where the adults hid.
Lenna pulled the sheets over her head. She couldn’t find her thick squishy reliable blanket, her shield, the one that night creatures couldn’t find her in. It must have slid down to the floor during the night. Instead she wrapped her face in thin white linen, like a dead person, like a specter, pulling it over each arm like shield sleeves. She pinched the sheet shut in every place that ghosties might sneak through and steal her. It was so thin. A clever monster could diffuse through the pilled gaps in the fabric.
And here they came.
They were coming.
The monsters knew she was under the sheet. They knew. Things fell apart.
They would get her.
It was better to look at them. If she was lucky, she would see them first, before they got her, and they would go.
The threadworn picture rug rippled at the foot of the bed, a manta ray, a spy, brought to life by deadmonsters. A floor lamp tiptoed maliciously to a new location, waiting for her to call for help. A fallen cloak was a slinking griling gruel ghoul. The silent posts of the four-poster bed got taller, bent up around her, their strange pointed bulbs glooming. Something clattered against the far window. A shadow.
Brugda’s old voice called out, crying.
“Don’t hit her!” Lenna tried to scream, but “oo-woo-woo” was all the sound that came out. Nothing could move her, and no one was coming to help her. Even the adults were being swallowed up. Strange music played very gently, then stopped. Played like a music box full of bones. It wasn’t Brugda getting hit. It was never Brugda getting hit. It was Lenna getting hit, long ago, deep in her mind.
There was someone else in the room. The ringleader, the troll king, the skeleton man, waiting to creep up on her. Waiting to get her. A face full of faces, a smile full of smiles, all of them curling. It was under the bed.
Right.
Below her.
A globe of sunlight turned itself on. It was the lamp. Ahhh. Now all Lenna had to do was look over the edge of the bed and see that nothing was there. The sheets were just sheets. The ghosts were just clothes. She edged nearer and nearer and peeked over the side ...
A bulbous white face slid out from under the bed on a thin neck and gupped its mouth like a fish. Its tail curled around the other side of the bed and twitched above Lenna. For a moment, for a moment, for a for a for a ...
The winds of fear blew Lenna’s hair straight back. The oven mitt ribbon in her hair was pulled off and flew away. Sheets were blown across the room by the force of her hurricane fear. But Lenna didn’t let the rushing wind move her.
“You’re the ormalaster,” Lenna informed the squishy giant head thing on the floor. “You were a man, right? You shouldn’t want so much gold. And you shouldn’t fight people for it.”
The fiery windows of the stone tower blew out, quench. The fiery door briefly illuminated the cleanshaven face of a young soldier who sat on the hard floor beside the bed. He wore the same beigey-gray-green uniform as Lieutenant Commander Thorstein. A gun was slung over his backpack, wagging, sticking out from either side. He wore a small foldy hat. His lips trembled and his jaw shook and he winced in shame.
“You’re right. You’re right. I’m so sorry.” His English was accented and polite. He bowed his head. “For a moment,” he whispered, “for a moment, when I fought down all my fear and shot the ormalaster, I was a real hero.” He covered his face miserably. “A real hero. And rich. And then I became a monster. And for days I’ve seen one terrified face after another. People screamed whenever they saw me.” He shuddered. “But you didn’t scream. What’s your name?”
“Lenna.”
“Hallo, Lenna. I’m Sigurd. I’m nineteen. I joined the military to serve Norway.” He gasped a cry back. “But what I really wanted was to be the one who defeated the ormalaster.”
“You did,” she said.
“I killed the ormalaster. I shot it. But it was just a guy from Denmark. He’s dead. Dead. And I can’t take it back.”
“I’m sorry.”
&
nbsp; “I’m just lucky it was you who found me and not another brave soldier with a gun.”
Lenna nodded. Sigurd sat on the stone floor and curled up and gasped, gasped, cried.
From the top of the tower, something red-black and glowing appeared, filling the tower with darklight. Lenna looked up. It was the sky. The tower was melting away, drizzling down, pouring and fizzling. The fire in the doorway dried up and vanished. So did the lava moat. The bed went away, and Lenna fell, plump, onto a hill of coins and bones. Sigurd landed beside her. Binnan Darnan peered down from the rim.
“You did it!” she yelled.
“Gold! Gold! Gold!”
Then horrible shouting.
“All right, men, the ormalaster’s been neutralized. Let’s take the hill. The Danageld is for Sweden!”
“For Norway!”
“For Finland!”
“For Denmark!”
Gunshots rang out. Binnan Darnan jumped down into the hill of coins beside Lenna and Sigurd. The young soldier stood and shouted and shouted for everyone to stop, to listen to reason, to only understand, but they didn’t. Huge cannons smashed Lenna’s ears with colossal boggling bangs and thwacks. Covering her ears barely helped. Her eardrums shot a foot into her head with each explosion. Her hair still streamed straight up statickly like the Bride of Frankenstein from the winds of fear.
“Where’s Gullvig?” she asked Binnan Darnan.
“What?” shouted Binnan Darnan.
“What?” shouted Sigurd.
“Where’s Gullvig?”
“Still up top!” shouted Binnan Darnan.
“What?” shouted Lenna.
Binnan Darnan pointed.
Lenna inhaled as deep as she could and screamed over the explosions: “Gullvig Gullvig take the gold! It’s for you! It’s for you!” The dirty pepper smell of gunpowder was everywhere.
Sound stopped. Thunder boomed, then faded. Gullvig stood at the lip of the hill over the pit of coins and corpses. Lenna’s feet went out from under her and she tumbled backward as the coins flew up into the red sky and down into Gullvig’s open mouth. Clicking and clinking, the gold streamed into the goblin woman’s gullet, the only sound in the silence. As the coins went, Sigurd and the girls sank deeper and deeper into the hoard in the hill. The density of decaying soldiers gradually increased as the gold flew out from ribcages and skulls. They slid deeper into the hollow, pressed in by all the people who had been the ormalaster. Deeper and deeper. Clinkety.