Giants of the Frost (38 page)

The sun rose weakly and set dimly day after day on this ship of ghosts. The rhythmic movement of the water and the unbroken silence of the crew worked on my mind, lulling me into a semidaze, where I cannot remember sleeping or waking. But I do remember the nightmares: the moment of finding your body over and over; or sometimes seeing your pale hair floating in the water beside the ship; or hearing your voice on the wind and turning around, expecting you to be there, and finding only the grim, blank gaze of an oarsman. I am certain that by the seventh day my gaze was equally grim, but the seventh day was also the day I saw land again and my thoughts began to wake within me. A journey awaited me, and at the end of it I hoped to see you and hold you again, or I hoped I would die. Either way, I believed my suffering was drawing to a close.

All morning the land drew closer and closer and I itched with excitement. The clouds hung low and the air was cool. The wind dropped and the oars were picked up again and the twenty-four dead men rowed me to shore.

The ship skidded up onto grey sand and stopped. I glanced around me. Every man still faced directly ahead of him. Not even the steersman turned my way. I climbed out of the vessel and landed on the sand.

"You will wait here for me?" I said, even though Grid had said there was no need for further orders. The steersman didn't answer. A breeze picked up and flapped the corner of the sail. I turned to survey the area around me. Black rocks waited ahead, a steep climb. Rain fell. My nerve fluttered but didn't fail. I took a deep breath and a first step, unarmed and alone on the shores of Niflheim. Niflheim is the northernmost of the lands that surround Asgard. Beyond it, there is a freezing void that spews mist and ice back toward the south, so Niflheim is very cold. The land appears flat and treeless, apart from a few brave pines here and there, but the land isn't flat, it slopes downward, imperceptibly at first, then opening into ravines and gorges where icy water moves and freezes. The path to Hel is not marked, but if you follow the source of the icy wind which buffets the beach, with not a degree of movement west or east, you will eventually happen on the narrow black road that winds down into the realms of the dead.

Of course, the easiest way to get there is to die, as you had. You wouldn't remember the journey, Victoria. Souls need not concern themselves with distances and directions; every place is one place, and Niflheim is just a point of access.

I left the beach, climbed the black rocks and set myself on a northern path. My feet crunched on the black gravel, the rain was gentle and I felt strong and hopeful. I had been a warrior and I was accustomed to hardship, to traveling great distances on foot and rationing my food. As the rain set in over the coining days, I pulled my oilskin close and endured. Sometimes the mist was so thick that I couldn't see the path in front of me. Yet, with one foot in front of the other, I continued to make my way forward. I thought back on battles I had fought and the discomforts I had suffered, and I made light of the cold and the damp and the mist. I ate frugally and kept hunger at bay, and there was enough fresh water to satisfy my thirst. Those first few weeks were easy on the warrior in me for all that I no longer carried a weapon.

The journey continued, the harsh conditions intensified, and I had to remind myself I was a lover and there was nothing more precious than the reward I would claim if I could just push myself forward. As the rocky plains fissured and cracked around me, I began to despair of ever being dry again. The oilskin could not protect me from those drips that trickled down my neck, or the damp which seeped into my boots, or the way the rain sometimes caught on a swirling wind and found its way under my protective clothing, then clung obstinately in the wool. My fingers were puckered and my ears ached. The ground had started its downward slope, and sometimes the gravel on a steep downpath was loose and treacherous.

By the end of each day my feet were aching from trying to cling to the path. Each morning when I rose from my cold, damp bed I found it almost impossible to stand: my feet felt bruised and shredded. The sulfurous air nauseated me and clogged my lungs. Sometimes, when the mist cleared and I saw the path snaking away from me toward the endlessly receding horizon, my heart grew as heavy as lead. I rationed more carefully, fearful that my journey would take much longer than I had anticipated. Hunger ate me more often than I ate my bread, and before two weeks had passed my clothes were hanging off me like they might hang off my hunting bow. But I was a lover, and a great love was worth any suffering. Then the snow came.

And I was an animal—a skinny, wet, filthy animal—all of its energy concentrated on simply trying to survive. My knees burned, my back ached, I couldn't feel my feet: I might as well have been walking on my bare anklebones. The path deepened, winding passes cut narrowly along the edges of black cliffs, which dropped vertically into a dark, mist below. Only an animal could survive the blizzard I survived on the side of that dizzying ravine, an animal clinging tooth and claw to life with no man's intellect to surrender to despair.

Finally, after the snow, as all the black twists in the road became one, as the emptiness of Niflheim permeated my skin and possessed me, I became nothing. What did it matter that all my food dropped in a dark lake while I was bent there drinking? Nothing needs no food. What did it matter that the gusting winds out of the deep gorge tore my fur hat from my head and carried it miles away? Nothing suffers no discomfort. I could not remember entering life, so perhaps I never had. I could not see an end to the path in front of me, so perhaps I never would. If my body moved, I don't remember it. If I had a thought or spoke a word, I didn't hear it. Nothing roams empty in the wilderness, and the wilderness and the emptiness neither sees it nor cares.

Only in this state of mind, stripped of my pretensions to be a warrior, or a lover, or even an animal, did I finally make my peace with the mystery of my existence. I was born, and I live, and someday I may die, and this is utterly baffling, but I accept it. I have loved, Victoria, and love infuses everything else, infuses the confusion and the blankness and the fear of emptiness, and brings to it a glimmer of meaning. Enough meaning to move forward, to keep moving, until I found that tiny cave hollowed into the cliff, small enough almost to escape my notice.

I had arrived.

A flurry of snow whirled around me and cleared, and I found myself staring at the entrance to the realms of the dead.

I hurried down the slope and climbed into the mouth of the cave. Strewn on the dusty ground were dozens of bones and three cracked skulls. I paused to listen, but heard nothing except the
drip drip
of melting snow outside. The cave narrowed into the dark, but I had traveled months in the rain and cold and had only one priority: to become warm and dry. There was no wood for a fire, so I stripped off my clothes and hung them on the rocks around me. Near one of the skulls I found the moldering scraps of an old tunic, and I put it on and curled up on the floor in the soft dirt, and slept. I don't know how much later I woke, but it was with a start. My mental senses, long confused by a veil of physical suffering, sprang sharply to life. I sat up and strained to hear. There was a scuffling and scratching, seemingly just past the bounds of my seeing, in the dark end of the cave. I looked at the bones around me with fresh eyes. Men had died here, trying to get past Garmr, Hel's hound who guarded this entrance. I was unarmed, weak and hungry. What chance did I stand?

Still, I imbued my voice with courage. "Who is there?" I called.

A deep growl thundered around the cave. I climbed to my feet, horribly aware of my vulnerability; the threadbare tunic was all that stood between my flesh and the teeth of this animal. I considered reaching for my other clothes, afraid to turn my back on the dark tunnel for even a moment. The scuffling approached. A huge figure loomed in the dark, its eyes glowing dimly, and I braced myself for the arrival of Garmr.

The hound emerged. Glittering eyes, ferocious teeth, a snarling maw, powerful shoulders; but he met my gaze, men sagged forward. In an instant, he was not a vicious beast at all. He was an old, old dog, with rheumy eyes and a grizzled nose. I took a step back as he approached, wondering if this were a trick to unsettle me. The enormous creature lay down, head on his paws, and looked up at me sadly.

"Garmr?" I said.

His tail thumped in the dirt. I sat and touched his ears, then gave his head a rub. He closed his eyes happily.

"You aren't a ferocious beast," I said.

He growled, low in his throat, and I pulled my fingers away sharply, but still he didn't rise, nor make any movement to stop me.

"Can I go to see Hel?" I asked. "Will you let me through?" The tail thumped again. I scratched behind his ears and he sniffed near my pockets.

"Sorry, old boy, I haven't any food for you. Are you hungry? Do you get much to eat here?" He lifted his head and nosed at the corner of my tunic, where a bloody rip had pulled the corner away. So Garmr had eaten the previous owner of these clothes; why was he not eating me?

"I don't understand," I said, "but I have to keep moving." He rolled over with his legs in the air and closed his eyes. I rose and changed into my own clothes—still damp and cold, but not wringing wet—and Garmr went to sleep. He was whimpering in a dream as I filled my water bottle from the melted snow outside, then headed back toward the tunnel. I walked for half a mile and the light faded behind me until I was walking entirely in the dark. For the first time in many months I thanked my Aesir blood, for we can see, if dimly, even in the darkest place. The tunnel narrowed. I had to bow my head to keep moving, then I had to bend my back, then I had to crawl on my hands and knees, and then I had to slither on my stomach. The rocky walls scraped my shoulders and back, and in some places I had to tum my head to the side and squeeze my body through narrower and narrower openings. Four hours later I had wriggled through the worst of the tunnel and could hear the nearby rushing of a river. The Slid. A breeze coiled down the tunnel and lifted my hair. I was not far from open space.

I moved forward, the tunnel widened, and I was on my feet when I came to the opening. The ground dropped out in front of me. I cautiously peered out and down.

And down and down.

A giant cavern spread out before me, hundreds of feet below. Through it ran a roaring river at least half a mile wide, the water glowing faintly green, lending an eerie light to the cavern. The river snaked off into misty distance in both directions, but to the east I could see the outline of a bridge. A narrow ledge, not more than six inches across, jutted out below me. It sloped steeply toward the floor of the cavern. I made my way down.

The banks below plunged into the furious icy water, which was pale green and choked with clattering objects. Bones, spears, helmets, skulls, pots and silver jewelry. I watched for a few moments and thought I saw the flash of a limb, then streaming hair. With a splash, the water broke and a man launched himself out of the river and toward the bank. I scrambled backward, and he was pulled under and carried away, but not before I had seen his bloated face and purple lips. He had drowned in this river and, like all drowning victims, remained in the water hoping to lure another victim to his death. Keeping a safe distance from the bank, I headed toward the bridge. From time to time a howling wind would surge down the river and I threw myself on the ground until it had passed. On two occasions, a grasping hand reached out of the water as though it wished to seize me and pull me nearer. I kept moving, determined, knowing that my goal was just across the raging waters. Yet it was three hours beyond the river, through a high tunnel, that I finally knew I was approaching Hel's abode. Burning torches hung on brackets and the cold lost its bite. The tunnel inflected sharply to the east, and I rounded the corner and was confronted by a gate. It was some hundred feet high, built from bones and skulls that had yellowed with age. A moldering plaque set into the bones read Nágrind: corpse-gate. This was the end of the tunnel; there were no other passages or crooked paths to explore. I approached and tried the gate. It wouldn't move. I pounded it and cried out. Nobody came. For more than an hour I tried to open it. I had arrived, but it seemed my arrival meant nothing, would avail nothing. The discomfort in my body grew less and less bearable as the realization sank in: perhaps this journey was meaningless. Perhaps I would have no satisfaction for my suffering.

I huddled in a ball on the ground in front of the corpse-gate and clutched my stomach and let the sobs tear at my throat. How careless I was to lose you. How empty eternity seemed. I would have been luckier if the drowned soul had pulled me under the water, or if Garmr had eaten me, or if the blizzard outside had claimed me. Exhaustion overwhelmed me and I lapsed into a deep sleep. A touch on my cheek woke me. I opened my eyes and tried to focus, reminding myself where I was. I saw a woman, ageing and plump, smiling down on me.

"Come in, Vidar," she said.

I sat up and looked around. The gates were open, the woman was holding out a warm blanket.

"My name is Hel," she said. "Come in, your journey is at an end." On the other side of the gates lay the fields of the dead, a nighttime pastoral scene lit by bonfires. Meadows and wheatfields stretched out under the livid light. I saw sheep and cows wandering in and out of the dark. She led me to her hall, little more than a cabin on a rise of rock. My relief at being found was immeasurable, even more so because of Hel's warm greeting. She allowed me to sit silently as she stoked her fire and ordered her maid to make me a meal. Hel herself fetched me warm skins to rest on, and blankets to heap on my cold, aching body. She clucked the whole time about how brave I was, what a handsome fellow I was, and on one occasion even bent to press me against her enormous bosom and reassure me that I was safe and warm and needn't worry about a thing. When the maid had brought me a trencher filled with hot rabbit stew, Hel sat cross-legged beside me. As she did, her skirt flipped up far enough for me to see her ankles and they were mottled and moldering. I remembered the stories that said she was half-alive and half-dead and shuddered.