Read The Monstrous Child Online
Authors: Francesca Simon
The Monstrous Child (3 page)
E’RE COMING TO THE
end of my miserable life in Jotunheim (what? So soon?). It was a golden time of enchanted beauty compared to what followed. Let’s drop in at the last supper, bid a final farewell and good riddance to the monstrous family.
Fen is asleep, snarling with his gravel growl. His legs shake.
‘He’s dreaming of savaging sheep,’ said Mum. She was a seeress for all the good that power did her. (And, no, I’m not sharing her charms with you. What, and have everyone chanting away, raising the dead, demanding knowledge? I shudder just thinking about it.)
I can still see Mum sitting by the fire draped in her wolf pelts, their tails dangling over her shoulder, her hair twisted and tumbling, the colour of wet earth. When she’d let me, I liked to play with the skinned heads, inventing little conversations. She is gripping a bloody wolfskin in her teeth, cleaning and scraping the hide with a sharp stone. The scratching sound always made me shiver. She’d attach the skins round her waist with my favourite carved bone in the shape of a bear claw. Some dwarf must have made it for her – giants don’t carve anything.
Wolf bones lie scattered around her, tufted with flecks of flesh and sinewy with muscle. Fen darts up to grab the bones, then retreats to his bearskin, gnawing and chewing.
Slaves fill the stone lamps with fish oil and light them, clogging the cave with smoke. A cauldron is bubbling. Fish and apples on the table, soup in bowls, mead in cups. Like all gods, I don’t
need
to eat, but we do it for pleasure. Mum and I are sitting on benches at the table, my troll-tempered brothers scrabbling around and eating off the floor, growling and hissing.
I can hear ravens cawing
kraa kraa kraa
as they circle above the forest, and the wolves in Ironwood howling, more like the screaming of corpses than any living thing. It’s a comfort being inside, deep in our cave, listening to evil creatures shrieking at the edge of night as they seek prey other than you.
The High Seat is empty, in case Dad should drop by. Talk about hope over experience. The damp walls glisten and the shrines are laden with offerings to our ancestors, Blood Mother, Volcano Father, Mountain Crusher and Earth Spewer. The daily sacrifice of fresh meat is laid out, to keep the ancestors sweet, and Mum has intoned the charms. The Old Ones stir and rumble when they’re ignored.
So what’s spoiling the happy suppertime scene? Yes, you got it, having to eat with a drooling wolf and a poisonous snake.
Fenrir tears apart joints of deer meat, swallowing in great gulps, bone, gristle, flesh. Then he licks the blood from his jaw. Jor prefers mice. Luckily our cave was full of them. His snaky body is lumpy with vermin.
But let’s move our disgusted gaze off the ground and up to the table and benches, and pretend my brothers aren’t there.
Sitting at the table was my favourite thing. The table hides my lower body. Protects me from horrified eyes. Sitting there, barely tall enough to see above the top, resting my plump arms on the scratched wood for balance, I look for a few moments like the goddess that I am. If you were to walk in – and not get torn to pieces by my brothers – you’d think I was just a fair young goddess sharing a mead horn with her, to be honest, far, far better looking mother. Sometimes I wonder what that was like for her, such a beauty, to give birth to … us.
My monstrous brothers scrabble about on the floor, brawling over rats.
‘Stop fighting!’ Mum screams. ‘Or bloody Thor with his hammer will come smash your skulls.’ That shut them up – for a moment. Even Fen and Jor don’t like the giant-killer’s hammer mentioned.
But
I’m
at the table. Eating with a knife. I’m never forced to eat on the ground. It means I am different from the beasts. Better. More like Mum. I sit up straight. I am careful not to slurp. Anything to make Mum like me, just a little. I give Mum a little present of carved bone – I have no talent; it was awful, pathetic scratchings on walrus tusk, which she looks at and throws away, her face scrunched in distaste. I guess when you’re beautiful it’s hard to have ugly things around you.
My sweet-smelling, scary mother. Once she lightly brushed my shoulder with her icy hand when she strode past me, and my whole body arched towards her. Was it possible, in her fierce, proud, detached way, she loved us?
E WERE ASLEEP WHEN
the gods came. Jor and Fen curled on their mats in the corners, snorting and spluttering, me stretched out on one bench, Mum on another. It happened so fast even Fen didn’t have time to bite or Jor to spit poison when gods blasted into our cave and seized us.
I heard Mum screaming. I jerked awake and then
someone grabbed me. I saw them bind and gag her, squirming and wriggling, her club useless by her side as I was bundled into a scratchy sack. I punched and shrieked. I heard Fen yowling and Jor hissing. Mum couldn’t break free of her bonds. My mother, Angrboda, the distress-bringer, whom I never saw alive again.
A part of me thought,
Mum cares! The gods had to tie her up to grab us
. I’d assumed she’d just hand us over to anyone who asked. In fact, I don’t know why they didn’t. Bet she’d have said yes, take them, praise the giants, I’m free of the brats.
And then up, upside down, flung over a shoulder and carried out. Thump. Thump. Thump. Stomping, stumbling, jolted from side to side and up and down, like a smoked salmon. Splashing through water again and again. I was soaked. I was dizzy. We were moving so fast, crunching through ice and snow, then twigs snapping and branches whipping past and the smell of mould and leaves and the hooting of owls and snarling of wolves. Our captors moved swiftly, pounding through
forests and splashing through lakes.
And all the while I was thinking,
Dad loves us after all. Maybe Mum threw him out for good, and now he’s kidnapped us. He couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing his children again. A love-snatch
.
What a surprise. What a shock.
‘Dad wants us with him in Asgard,’ I shouted to my brothers.
‘What will I eat?’ said Fen.
I don’t know why Fen expected me to know the answer.
What would our life be like living with Dad in a gleaming gold palace? I wasn’t sure what a palace was. An extra big cave, maybe? I was excited, stunned. Dad loved us so much he’d had us kidnapped.
What other reason could there be?
HE LIGHT BLINDED
me as the sack was yanked off. I blinked, my eyes smarting, my head spinning. My body ached and my throat was parched. Everywhere I looked I saw gleam and glitter, half-built luminous halls studded with silver and gold. It was too bright. Above us the billowing blue sky enfolded me like a soft cloak, and Yggdrasil, the World Tree that holds
the heavens, branched out above me. Asgard, sky fortress of the gods, green and golden, with breezes and eternal sunshine. The air was sweet, perfumed, and my nostrils twitched. The smell was cloying, like too much honey swallowed at once. There was no snow, no ice, no pelting rain and gnawing winds. I raised my face to the sky and felt my skin tingling in the warmth.
The lush plains and meadows stretched out further than I could see in all directions, the gilded palaces, the flaming rainbow bridge arching into the sky. Towering walls encircled the gods’ glowing citadel. I’d always thought Dad was lying when he boasted about Asgard’s golden halls. In fact, he had not even begun to describe its wonders. I thought of our raven-dark world, our glacier mountains, our belching volcanoes and ironwoods.
I didn’t think about my mother.
There was a buzz of talk, murmurings. I focused my eyes, shielding them from the glare. I thought we’d be taken to Dad’s palace. But we weren’t. We were beside a
rippling pool of blue-black water. If I cared about such things, I might have thought it was beautiful.
We’d been dumped in the middle of a circle of newly carved, ivory-white thrones, one High Seat much larger and greater than the others. The gathering gods wore soft clothes in purples and mauves and blues. I felt hot and ugly in my long bearskin, like an animal. I was dazzled by so much colour, so much light. I couldn’t believe where I was, a guest of these glittering beings who stalked about like a herd of shining beasts.
Jor was still thrashing and hissing in his sack, venom dribbling. Fen was rolling in the grass, waving his paws. I was sitting, huddled, hiding my legs.
I didn’t understand what was happening.
The gods have strange ideas of hospitality
, I thought.
Since when do you bundle visitors into sacks, then drop them on their heads like carcasses instead of leading them to a place of honour, offering warm water, towels, food and drink?
All around me, the gods took their seats. I recognised
some. Who wouldn’t know Thor, red-bearded, built like a volcano, swinging his hammer over his shoulder and glaring at us from his throne? And a beautiful goddess with tumbling hair like spun flax, holding her nose, eyes as bright as dragon fire, fiddling with the necklace of twisted gold that gleamed on her white neck. That was Freyja. And another, Idunn, the keeper of the gods’ immortal youth, clutching her basket of golden apples, pressing a cloth to her face as she gagged at my stench.
The one I didn’t see anywhere in the throng was Loki, father of lies, father of us. I was surprised – he’d gone to so much trouble to snatch us, you’d think the least he would do is show up. Had he already changed his mind?
Children, some older, some younger than me, hid behind their parents’ thrones, the bolder ones peeking out to point. Others approached Fen, daring to get too close till their parents yanked them back.
Why did Loki’s children merit such a gathering?
Little Hnoss, Freyja’s radiant, honeyed girl, pretty face, pretty feet, pretty everything that I am not, screamed
when she saw us. Hnoss, with her nose in the air. ‘What’s it doing here?’ she screeched, till Freyja jerked her eyes at her husband, who snatched the squalling brat up in his arms and carried her off, wailing.
‘It stinks!’ she shrieked. ‘Make it go away.’
It’s not my fault I smell, you sow’s daughter. I was born like this.
I want to curl up, hide, vanish.
Jor thrashed and writhed in his sack, tearing at the hemp with his fangs, spitting poison. The seated gods shuddered. A few of the children screamed.
I glanced at Fen. He was shaking himself out, pretending to be a playful cub. Fenrir was more vicious than Jor – he just looked more cuddly.
‘Loki’s monsters,’ I heard someone mutter. They scowled at us, stiff with dislike. You’d think we’d gatecrashed a party instead of being dragged here in a bag.
I reminded myself I was an immortal goddess, as much as them.
I looked around the assembled gods once more. Could Loki be hiding, waiting to leap out and yell, ‘Boo!!’? Because Dad loved practical jokes. Did you know he once sneaked into Thor’s wife’s bedroom, lopped off her rippling gold hair while she snored and left her bald? I remembered him telling Mum about it and both of them hooting with laughter.
Ha ha. Not.
Deformity fails to amuse me. Actually, to be fair, nothing amuses me. But I digress.
Nope, no Dad. And then it occurred to me that perhaps he had nothing to do with bringing us here.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid.
Were we being
judged
at a gods’ council? But judged for what?
The assembled gods fell silent as an immortal, bristling with majesty, strode into the circle of thrones. He wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, his boiling single eye fixed on us. I knew this must be Odin, the One-Eyed King of the Gods, Dad’s blood brother. The
Wizard King, Spear God, Battle Wolf, Lord of Poetry (gag), Father of Magic, King of the Slain. Two ravens perched on his shoulders; two huge wolves skulked by his sides. Power poured from him. I had never felt so crippled, so small. I struggled to stand but I was shaking too much.
His wolves bristled at Fen, and Fen snarled back, fur prickling, hackles rising. One-Eye whispered to his pair, and they sank to the ground.
Fen strutted off, baying his victory, then sat back on his haunches, lifted his leg and started licking his rear.
The gods roared with laughter. Even I almost smiled.
One-Eye walked towards the sack containing the squirming Jor and without a word grabbed him by the tail and hurled him high into the sky over Asgard’s walls.
I still remember that moment. Jor’s looping body, his maddened hissing shrieks as he tumbled and vanished. It was so fast it took me a moment to realise what had happened.
My snake brother Jor was gone.
Good riddance.