Odin’s Child (3 page)

While godis like Snorri and his friends grew great by feuding and suing, trading and marrying, and lavishing their money on the new churches that began to dot the land, Thorvald the Black, ignored and nearly forgotten, only grew angrier.

And little by little his mind gave way to melancholy, indecision, and sudden frights, until there was no spirit left in him. That was the worst of it. He was only a rag of the man he had been. Oh, he could rant and threaten us, but he walked on his knees.

My father's voice broke in upon my thoughts. “What are you gaping at, moon-calf? I said leave me. I'll not change my mind. I've chosen my way and that's an end of it.”

“Oh, yes!” I shot back, for I truly hated him at that moment. “Yes, and your way has led us to this, that we crawl before bullies like Hrut!”

“Odd!” My mother saw his face darken and the worm writhe on his temple. “Drop this quarrel at once. Beg your father's pardon and vex him no more.”

She looked from me to him, her eyes full, near to brimming over. She could still summon her tears for him.

My anger died even as she spoke. I too had tears though I kept them inside. I made my apology to his stony face and let her draw me away.

She sat Gunnar and me down on the wall bench and served us bowls of skyr and boiled mutton, and, for Gunnar, a big marrowbone she had saved especially for him. Our sister Gudrun Night Sun sat beside me and touched my forehead with her fingertip. She, too, was close to tears. She was a pretty girl of thirteen, all leg and no bosom, and hair so long she could tuck it in her belt. “Tangle-Hair, I'm sorry about Grani. He was beautiful, and I loved him as much as you. We'll fight those men, won't we?”

I shrugged. “You heard Father.”

At that Gunnar laughed harshly and said in a low voice, “What did you expect?”

For him it was simple. He despised our father in a quite uncomplicated way. For our mother's sake, he did not fight with him. He shouldered the work of the farm and managed it well, for underneath all his dash he was a serious farmer; but in his heart he was only living for the day when he would be master of this hall.

He cracked his marrowbone and scooped it clean with a finger. “Why don't you clear off and go to sea for a bit, Odd?” he said. “The farm could spare you and any trading ship would take you on. I know all the captains.” Gunnar managed our yearly bartering expeditions to the coast. “You moon about strange places all the time.”

That was true. But something held me back. I was Black Thorvald's child, a part of him in some way that Gunnar—blond and bold and good-natured—would never understand. My father and I had unfinished business, though when or how it would ever be finished I did not know. But it was pointless to say this aloud.

“What, and leave you here to wolf down all the best bits?” I grabbed his marrowbone. He pushed me back and we wrestled, laughing, ending up in a pile on the floor.

Late that night I lay awake in my place on the wall-bench, listening to the breathing of the others. My head ached and my brain teemed with restless thoughts.

A creaking noise—the door to my parents' bed-closet swung open. Ulf, my father's old hound, heard it too, heaved himself up from his warm place by the hearth, and trotted over to the shadowy figure that filled the doorway. The two shadows glided to the outer door, the bar was slid back, and they went out into the gray half-light of a northern spring night.

Going to piss, I thought idly. But another thought stirred in me. Visions come clearer out of doors, he always said. Our mother had scoffed at his dream vision, but he believed.
I believed
. Was he going out to seek a waking one? I lay still for a while, waiting to see if he would return. When he didn't, I pulled my cloak around my shoulders and followed.

A milk-white mist covered the ground. I stood shivering by the door, searching for a sight of him. Out on the heath, a nightjar cried. Behind me the river whispered between its stony banks. Black against gray, the slumbering bulk of Hekla floated in the distance. I had lived all my life under the shadow of the volcano. From that direction I caught a movement. Ulf raced back and barked around my legs.

I could just make him out. “Father, wait!”

“Go back!”

He started away and I followed, walking quickly because I knew what
great strides he took. I remembered too well how my little-boy legs had to work to keep up with him when he would take me on those midnight marches that filled my childhood with such terror and wonder. I didn't need to catch up. I knew where he was going.

Ulf raced back and forth between us, but soon tired and fell back, leaving us alone—two shadows in the void. I thought, as I did when I was a boy, that Chaos must have looked like this on the day before creation.

For it was of such things that my father would rant, as we tramped the countryside on those restless nights long ago. Dragging me behind him with his hard hand gripping my small one, the words would pour out of him, for whole hours at a time, in a howling mad torrent. He taught me how Odin All-Father hung for nine days and nine nights on the windswept tree, on Yggdrasil the Sacred Ash, pierced by a spear, himself a sacrifice to himself. How he peered into the depths, grasped the runes and, screaming in his frenzy, flung them up. And he told me what natures the other gods had—guileful Loki and handsome Balder, and Frey, who makes the grain grow, and Red-Bearded Thor, bluff and jolly, except when he stands on the thunderclouds and hurls his hammer. But always and always he came back to Odin—Sorcerer, Rune-Master, Lord of the battle-mad berserkers. The more that darkness closed in around his mind, the more my father turned his hopes on One-Eyed Odin.

But where was there room for hope? He had had a vision, he said, of the end of things.

First would come a long, killing winter, and after that an Age of Axes, an Age of Swords, and an Age of Wolves. Kin would slaughter kin. The sky would split, the sun turn dark, and in Hel's Hall a cock would crow, and the fettered monsters would wake and break their bonds—Garm the Hel-Hound and the Wolf Fenris, whose gaping jaws stretch from earth to sky.

Then would gather all the enemies of gods and men—the giant, Hyrm, driving from the east in a boat made of dead men's nails, and the Midgaard Serpent, hissing and dropping poison, and all the dead, marching back along the road from Hel. They would ring Asgard round, they would storm across the Rainbow Bridge, and the armies of gods and giants would clash on a dark plain in the Last Battle. The wolf would swallow Odin and in the end, all would be dead—gods, giants, ogres—all. He called it Ragnarok, the doom of the gods.

A hundred paces ahead of me I could see his back bent over double as he toiled upward
.

After such a night's excursion I would creep under my covers and shake. My mother would hold me then and, in comforting me, try to make me tell what I had heard. I told her nothing.

In the mornings I would reason with myself, for I am a reasoner by nature. If the gods were dead, or doomed, then why not let them go? Why not accept the Christian god as nearly everyone did and let life be simple? My mother believed in the White Christ and she was a good woman.

No. Almost … but, no. My father's hold on me was too great for that.

He raved because he knew things so deep that they drove him mad. He shook and bullied me because these were things so hard to tell that the words stuck in his throat. And he taught me—this above all—because I was his spirit-child. I was everything to him.

For his sake, then, I thought, let these doomed gods have my prayers, for what little good it may do them. The White Christ has all the rest.

That was what I said to myself in the morning. But oh, how he frightened me at night.

After some years the night marches stopped. His bouts of melancholy, which earlier had come only at intervals, mostly in the dark of winter, grew longer and more frequent. He would sink into brooding silences that lasted for days. It was then that I began to think he was bewitched.

I did everything to keep him from slipping away from me. Because I was gifted with word-wit beyond my years, I could recall every word he had ever spoken to me. Tales by the dozen, not all of them gloomy, and fierce poems on the deaths of heroes, composed in that knotty, riddling skaldic style of verse of which he, like many an old warrior, was a master. He used to declaim them to the mountains sometimes in a ringing drumbeat voice. Now, in an effort to please him, I shaped poems of my own, devising the most complex meters, the most elaborate kennings. Always only to please him.

As he had taught me the shapes and names of the runes, I begged him to reveal to me their secret uses, too. And he did teach me a little, but soon lost interest. He would grunt and put me off when I pestered him to teach me more, until at last, I ceased to ask. Perhaps he'd begun to doubt the magic himself and was afraid to put it to the test. But I feared it was some secret flaw in
me
that unfitted me to learn it.

Finally, I could find no way to break through the wall he had built around himself. As I grew older, I turned more and more to Gunnar,
whom I adored. I saw how my father hated that, and so I did it all the more. Let him choke on it!

†

We had tramped for miles now and the ground began to rise and leave the mist behind. A hundred paces ahead, I saw his back bent low as he toiled upward. I scrambled after him, my feet slipping on the loose pumice stones and the fractured lava rocks with edges like knives. I called his name, but he went on as though he didn't hear.

I remembered the boy I was, no more than ten, who came flying down this mountainside one night, half running and half falling, cut to ribbons by the stones and blinded by tears. In all the years since then I had not dared to go back.

But now—since the stallion fight, I told myself—I was no longer afraid. I had mastered fear itself. And so I climbed.

Hours passed. Now I had come as far as the snow-filled crevices that reached like skeleton fingers down the blue-black mountainside. The going was very steep as I neared the top. My palms and knees were bloody. An icy wind tore at my clothes and wailed in my ears like the shrieking of ghosts.

Here began the bottomless fissure that split the mountain lengthwise. A sulphurous steam rose from it. I climbed for another hour, working my way along the edge. I knew where my father would stop.

“Get away from me! Why d'you follow me?” He stood tottering on the rim of the crater. I sank down in the snow at his feet.

“To see what you see. Our fate.”

“I've seen that already. I told you.”

“Then, to see the Old Ones in the mountain.” I scarcely knew what I was saying, I only wanted to be near him.

“You had that chance, boy. It wasn't to your liking.”

“I was only a child….”

He had dragged me here one night, snorting like a bull in his fury, and pushed me to the edge to show me my tomb. For into Hekla, he said, die all the men of our family. In terror, thinking that he meant to kill me, I broke away from him and flung myself headlong down the slope. By the time I reached the bottom I was half dead and lay in a brain fever
for three days. When I recovered, I tried to excuse myself to him, but he only turned from me with a scowl and never mentioned that night again. Though later my mother told me he had not eaten or slept during those three days that I hung between life and death.

“Well, if it pleases you now,” he said, “look your fill.”

I crept to the edge and peered over. Far below, the fiery red muck rolled and spat like blood soup in a cauldron. I felt its scorching breath on my skin and sweat broke out on me. The stench of sulfur made my stomach heave.

“Well, boy, d'you see them? The Old'uns? Sitting at their stone table, feasting, banging their mugs, roaring for ale? D'you see how they grin and howl at us? They wait for us, boy, they wait for us!”

I stared until I could stand it no more. Weeping and retching from the fumes, I drew back from the edge. I had seen nothing. I shook my head, afraid to look at him.

For a time he was silent, and then he said in a gentler voice, “You haven't the sight, boy, and you're better off without it. It's a curse. If I could, I would never see again, for it can steal the heart from a man.” He sounded suddenly weary.

“No, Father, don't say so. Your heart is still in its place, ready to beat again. Believe me.”

“Believe
you
? Why, what have you seen of the world?”

“None of it, Father, I'm sorry.”

He gazed at me in silence for a time. “Well, not your fault. Not your fault. Go away now, Odd. We'll talk another time. Go home and sleep.”

“What about you?”

“I sleep best here.”

I stood, uncertain what to do. He turned me around by the shoulders and I began to pick my way down the mountain track.

“Odd,” he called after me, “the horse fought well?”