Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (18 page)

‘That is Donar’s chair.’

Loki stopped short, rigid, his body bowed a little forward, toward the chair that he had almost reached. Then he straightened up very slowly, and he turned to look at Bragi while a man might count five, slowly.

Let me tell you, that in all my years on land and at sea, I have never heard language like Loki used that night. I never did find out what some of the words meant. I may have learnt some German. I certainly learnt a lot about the Asers, and I did not enjoy hearing it. He didn’t take long over Bragi. I can’t remember the exact words, but the gist of it was,

‘And who are you to tell me where to sit, you stupid little Vandal turd? There you sit, chip-chop, chip-chop, all day, and stuff yourself all day with crusts from your betters’ table. What do you think you can puff yourself up into? Whoever heard of a carpenter who behaved like a human being? And that bag from the forest with you, heather still growing between her toes, enough dirt there for an oak. Had she ever seen a plate before she came here? And now she dines off silver. There she is, cramming herself. Look at her, with her mouth full, and open too. Wind change, dear?’

Hod was unwise enough to snigger.

‘And that blind beggar, harping for ha’pence on the heath he was, never a rag to his back, and even the harp he pawned for a muttonbone and stole it back again in the dark when all men are blind. And who dragged him here like a rat to gnaw at our stores?’

He spat at Baldur and missed.

‘You great hermaphroditic bastard, there you sit, shame on you, cuddling him in front of everyone. Once the Spring comes, off you’ll go, waggling your fat buttocks around the villages, and as long as it’s young and fresh you’ll take it.’

In truth, this spite was at the root of all.

‘Fertility blessings, indeed, any field’ll crop if you manure it. Don’t like me saying that, do you? And who’s going to stop me? Not that fat drunken slob at the gate, snoring like a pig, deserter from the baggage line of some second-rate legion, he couldn’t guard a pot of ale.’

Yet Heimdall had come softly into the hall not five paces behind Loki, and now he stood at the door and brought his spear up ready to throw. But Njord moved his finger and the spear came down again. Loki had never noticed, he had rounded on Tyr, and here he really let himself go. He flung at Tyr a stream of precise and circumstantial accusations, a highway robbery here, a rape there, a kidnapping at this place, a merchant who was never seen again after that.

‘And your hand, how do you say you lost that? Bitten off by a Wolf? Cut off for theft, more likely. Steal a bone from a dog, a crust from a child, steal anything you like, and not even because you want it, but only because it is there to steal. And as for you, you great stupid block’ – this was to Frederik – ‘can’t count, can’t read, can’t think, can’t fight, can’t talk, what use are you to the Asers? What good are you to the world? What good are you to anybody but your father, and only good to him to remind him that once only he played a man’s part.’

He spat again, on the Whetstone.

‘Njord Borsson, Lord of the dust of the Amber Road! You vain old man, you sit there stroking your beard and looking fine. What do you think you are? You think that because you are the oldest of the Asers you are the greatest of the Asers, that you are the strongest of the Asers. Once indeed you were the strongest of the Asers, when you drove out Bergelmir, when you sent Mymir to drown on the winter sea. Now you are the weakest of the Asers, your strength is gone, you can turn no one out. What are you good for now but to sit at the gate and drink the liquor better men make? For ten years now you have not walked on your own feet.
She
has held you up!

‘And look at her, all of you, look at her, where she sits, loaded with rings, hung with gold chains, in linens and silks and furs. How did she get them? Don’t you all know? If you want any special favours, any cheap rates, any cut prices, go to Freda, she’ll
fix the old man. It’s no good offering just any silver or bronze or gold; but something to wear, jewels or foreign cloth … anything, she’ll do anything. And if you had something really fine, and there wasn’t anything else you really wanted, you could have Freda herself. Hands up any man, Aser or Vandal or serf, who hasn’t had Freda? Any man in the Hall? Any man in all Germany? Tyr? Baldur? Heimdall? even Frederik?

‘And there Votan sits by her, the fatherless man, come out of the forest from nowhere to be a professional cuckold for the sake of a free dinner every night, come down like a monkey out of the tree to sponge on old monkey Njord. And what’s he do for it? He’ll give you Honeydew free, and have the shirt off your back, and the skin too, while you sleep it off. He’ll not kill himself, but he’ll arrange your death for you, so long as he makes a penny profit. And he’ll arrange a peace treaty that brings in a hundred years of war, and then he’ll sell swords to both sides, and buy in the plunder, cheap. And in between – look at the randy stallion of the Shallow Sea, and watch for your wives. He wants to have as many loves as Freda, but his taste is better;
he
goes for queens. Mark him well. At the end he will bring down Asgard on your heads; but on your heads, not on his.’

And with that he turned and walked down the hall, to leave us all still and silent as if nothing had happened, as if his speech had taken no time at all. Unfortunately his dignity could not resist temptation, and he paused on the way to spit copiously, and, now having had some practice, in Skirmir’s eye. That broke the tension and, the tight drumskin of the air once pierced, it was Baldur who stood up and screamed in his high voice,

‘And what if Votan has slept with a thousand women? What if every one of us has slept with her? When did you ever sleep with a woman? Or with a grown man, come to that? Little boys are more your line, that can’t argue, or worse, the wild beasts of the forest. Are the cattle of Outgard safe? Loki! Who fathered Sleipnir on the Mare?’

Everyone laughed. They laughed and laughed, they beat their hands on the benches, drunk or sober they shouted, they hooted, they rolled about and fell backward. In that gust of laughter, they forgave Loki his blistering scorn. Perhaps I was
too sophisticated for that kind of humour, and Loki didn’t find it very funny either.

He stood glaring at us all, white-cheeked. Then he did something that checked all laughter, that shook us all into a shocked and frightened silence. Loki sat at the table of the Dead. He drank the wine of the Dead, and he ate the Dead men’s bread. He drank of every cup, and he ate of every dish. He poured out the beer of the Dead, and he tore the Dead men’s meat with his fingers, as he ate the Meal without Salt, the Meal without Iron, the Meal of Old Time. With every bite, with every sip, he cursed us all, he cursed Asgard, silently, without a word, to death, to misery and poverty and death, death, death.

He went from the hall. Next day there were those who said that he had not come by any mortal means, that he left no footmark in the snow, coming or going. That may well have been true, in that the falling snow covered up any marks he may have made. But from that moment, when Loki went through the door, though we did not see it at once, all our luck left us, and all the threads of our destruction began to draw together.

All that Loki had done, and that was enough, was, not even to tell the truth, but only to shout aloud what each of us knew already in his heart. Who cared where Tyr had lost his hand? Better to say he lost it in a drunken brawl than under the gallows. Better to talk of faith and chastity and honour even if we know of lies and theft and adultery. Once you burrow to see the foundations, the whole wall falls on you.

When Donar came back in the spring, the paint was back on our faces, and the lies were true again. Again we were the great Asers, wise and good and rich, and so we must have seemed to the Scrawlings who came in, rowing Donar home themselves. They unloaded ivory, mostly, great bags of it on the jetty. But when Donar came up from the ship two men walked behind him, and another two behind them, and each pair carried between them what no one there but me had ever seen before, and that was an
Elephant Tusk. And what tusks! You have never seen tusks like them, and never will, not out of Africa. Huge they were, and curled, and yellow with age, and each stood two men high.

So Donar came in state, marching to the gate of Asgard. He stopped before us Asers, grouped before Valhall, and the two pairs of bearers brought up one tusk on either side of him, upright, reaching far above our heads. Donar stuck his chest out and said,

‘Here are the teeth of the World Serpent. No more will he wander the dark and bring down the hillsides, for I have killed him. With my little hammer I did it, all alone with my little Mollnir,’ and he waved the hammer around his head, and I would not have called it a little hammer, though it was not of the largest, but there, I am no craftsman. The Asers all cheered, and the Scrawlings all screamed, and the Vandals shouted their warcries and banged their spear-butts on their shields. That night in Valhall, Donar stood up and told us all about it.

‘Here I stand,’ he began, ‘too drunk to fall.’

‘You’re not,’ shouted a number of the drunker Vandals but indeed he was, for he hadn’t stopped drinking since I gave him his first horn, no not a cup, a horn, of Honeydew in the courtyard that morning.

‘Here I stand,’ he started again, ‘as soused as a herring. I am only a poor smith, I can only hammer, I can’t make up songs like some I could touch with a short stick, only hammer, hammer, hammer with my little Mollnir.’ He was waving the hammer about, and suddenly flung it straight down the Hall. It just missed the minstrel, who flung himself flat in time, but scattered a brazier. And so he got first singed, and then wet, for someone threw over him one of the buckets that we kept standing round in case of fire, full of marsh water to start with, but of course they usually got topped up by anyone who had a skinful of beer and couldn’t make it to the open air. But Bragi put out his hand and plucked the hammer out of the air, gently, and sent it back hard and fast to Donar, who went on:

‘Here I stand, a poor smith who had some luck in the north. I’m not going to make a song about it, I can’t, I can see two whetstones, two boars, four of those horrible birds. We didn’t have any birds in the ship, just me and the Scrawlings, and we
rowed the old barge north till we came to the edge of the ice. My hands were horny, my bottom was blistered, I’d had enough of rowing I’ll tell you that. We left it there, and we got off and walked in the snow, and on our feet we wore great big boats for shoes.

‘Far in the north we came to the hall of the Scrawling King. He had not built it of timber and turves and plaster, but of birchen boughs and deer skin over all. There we stopped to feast and to drink all through the winter and all through the night. There were Scrawling matrons to pour us our beer, and Scrawling maidens to help us to bed, and Scrawling magicians who did us great wonders such as we never see in Valhall the Great.’

At this he threw me Mollnir, and with rolled up sleeves I tossed the hammer up into the rafters and it didn’t come down again. Instead, at intervals I plucked out of the air and passed to Donar a rose, a silk handkerchief, a couple of live pigeons, some horse-dung on a leaf which he passed to the minstrel, a gold cup of Honeydew, and an egg. When he had drunk the Honeydew he broke the egg into the cup, stirred it round with the point of his knife, and poured it over Baldur’s head. And all that with never a pause in his flow of speech.

‘Now the way that the sun goes round and round brings a snag you may not have noticed. Where the night is half a year long, there is only one night in the year. You eat when you’re hungry, go to bed when you’re … sleepy, and snore when you’re dead beat. And better it is to sleep than to wake when the Earth Serpent walks. Aye, better it is to die without waking, to sleep and not see the Earth Serpent approaching, with great teeth for tearing and crunching the breast bone. His breath strikes cold, it is rank, and it stinks of the holes and the caves at the roots of the earth. There dwell the Scrawlings he kills in the Northlands, for any man who goes out in the snow, who goes out in the dark, to wander alone, the Earth Serpent takes him, to be, to exist, not to die, not to live, in anguish and misery down in his burrow under the roots of the earth.’

To rub in this point I passed Donar a human skull, which he stood fondling till it turned of a sudden into a sheep’s stomach, stuffed and boiled, a dish of which the Germans are extremely
fond, and then he threw it to the minstrel who ate it all, even the casing.

‘When morning was near, or spring, whichever you like, and once in a while for a space the sky would lighten and show us a morsel of twilight in the gloom, I heard once at dinner, as we often did, the howling and skirling and scream as the Serpent went by. I was full as an egg, I was oiled as an owl, I was drunk as a Lord, as a King, as an Aser, I said to the King, to old Jokuhai-inen, I’ll go out today and I’ll kill the Earth Serpent!

‘I put on my boats and I went out in the snow, and all I took with me was my hammer, my own little Mollnir, my dear little Mollnir.’

I let him have it back, and it dropped from the rafters on to the table with a crash and he picked it up and brandished it in the most dangerous manner all the rest of the evening.

‘They were all drunk or they’d never have let me go, and old Jokuhai-inen, well he was the drunkest of all. But of course, if you’ve got to stay and stew up there, in darkness from summer’s end to summer’s beginning, what else is there to do but drink to drown your dreams? So out I went, my hammer in my hand, my belly full of beer, to meet the Serpent and the terror that wanders in the winter woods.

‘I walked through the pine wood, I walked through the fir wood, I walked through the scrub land of birches and alders, I met the hare and I met the fox, I met the wolf and the lynx and the stoat, I met the creatures that walk in the winter, but nowhere could I find the Serpent tracks, though I could hear his voice shrill in the air, and feel the snow tremble beneath my boats. The dark was thick about me, it filled my lungs, my eyes, and my mouth and my hands, it flowed like water or tar, and all I could hear was the noise of the Serpent as he hunted me, as I hunted him.