The Monstrous Child (11 page)
Read The Monstrous Child Online
Authors: Francesca Simon
STUMBLE SLOWLY
through the sleet over the frozen ground to her grave mound by the hall’s east door. I’d passed it many times and never wondered who was buried there. The nameless dead, swirling like smoke, scatter as I step through them. It’s like walking through mist, pushing through the massed cobwebbed ghosts.
Her mound is ringed with stones, in the shape of a ship. Modgud says she’s grumpy, but I can force her up. The great seeress, older than time, can surely tell me what I so desperately need to know.
I mutter a few charms, sprinkle herbs on her mound. There is a stirring, and a clinking, and slowly the gleaming spectre rises out of her grave. She looms above me, clutching her staff. Her face is chalk white, twisted in rage. The charm belt about her waist shudders and chimes as she trembles. The air smells ranker, and feels colder, with her there.
‘Who forces me up?’ she moans, her eyes tightly closed. ‘Why have you brought sorrow upon me? It’s death to mortals to raise the dead. On you and your children will be my curse for –’
‘Open your eyes, Seeress,’ I snap.
‘You can’t make me,’ she said.
‘Wanna bet?’ I say.
Her milky eyes flutter open. She grimaces.
‘Ugh. You’re so ugly.’
I resist, but the taunt hits me, like an axe to my belly.
‘Have you seen yourself?’ I hurl back. It’s quite something when even a corpse calls you ugly.
The seeress smiles, showing her shattered teeth. She gleams in the murk like a spluttering candle. The stink of the henbane buried with her wafts towards me.
‘What do you want, daughter of a pig?’ she moans, shaking her bald head, so that the wisps of twisted hair still clinging to her scalp shudder like dangling worms.
One advantage the dead have over the living is that you can’t threaten them.
‘Make it quick, Hel.’
I do nothing at speed, but I hesitate because … there is something familiar about her. Her harsh voice. Her insults …
‘How do you know my name?’
The seeress hovers above me, crackling with hate.
‘I am long dead; I’m not daft. I named you myself.’
It’s my mother.
I start to shake.
I stare at the spectre, and try to connect this enraged corpse with Angrboda, my gorgeous mum. The anger is the same; the body … different.
There’s a lot I could say. I say none of it. I feel a rush of pleasure that I am alive, however grimly, and she is dead.
‘What does my future hold?’ I ask, finally.
‘You don’t want to know,’ she says, waving her knotted staff.
I want to scream at her.
‘Obviously I do, or I wouldn’t have summoned you,’ I pause. ‘Mother.’
The seeress snorts.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I say, kicking away one of the stones marking her mound. I’m glad to see her flinch.
‘Nothing good,’ she gloats. ‘You brought me nothing but misery.’
‘And you?’ I say. ‘What do you think you brought me?
Why didn’t you rescue us? You didn’t even try.’
‘I was dead,’ said Angrboda. ‘The gods killed me after they kidnapped you.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ I screech.
‘You disgust me,’ she said. ‘I will say no more.’
‘And the End of Days? How long must I wait for my revenge?’
‘See my lips?’ she said. ‘They’re sealed.’
‘Will anyone live afterwards?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out. As you will, Wolf’s Sister. I am no longer prepared to speak. Now let me sleep.’ Slowly she begins to sink back into the ground.
‘Wait. You owe me this much. Will I see Baldr again?’
Her pale lips sneer.
‘You will. I don’t want to speak and I will say no more.’
For a moment I cannot breathe. I clutch my hands to my face. I feel as if a million suns have come out at once. But each answer gives rise to another question.
If he comes to me here, it means he has to die. But how could Baldr die? And yet, and yet, if dead, Baldr would be here, with me, forever. He would be mine. The slow crawl of my nights would be over, if only he were here to share them.
But if I saw him when he were alive … who knew what that meant?
Questions spill from my mouth. ‘Will I see him here or above? Will he be alive or dead?’
‘That’s all I’m telling you,’ snaps the seeress.
Is it any wonder I’m not the jolliest of goddesses?
‘What happens at the End of Days? My brothers will be in at the kill – but what about me?’
The seeress glares at me, and begins to dissolve.
‘That depends on the mortal hero who will come.’
More riddles.
‘What mortal hero? Come where?
Here?
How will I know him?’
Why could she not speak plainly?
‘I don’t want to speak and I will say no more.’
I am full of rage and move to strike her.
‘You will obey me, you – you – horrible hag!’ I shriek. ‘Tell me what I want to know. Spit it out, Mother.’
‘We’ll meet again when Fenrir and Jormungand break free and all the creatures of darkness storm the citadel of the gods and destroy them,’ she says. ‘When the world ends in ice and fire. Till then I …’ Her remaining words are lost to me as she sinks back into her mound.
I think … I think I won’t ever raise her again.
O WHAT’S IT LIKE
being Queen of the Dead I hear you ask?
Fabulous! A laugh a minute, best job in the world, everyone wants to be me …
What a stupid question. What do you think it’s like?
Here’s why I’d rather be where you are, and you be where I am.
1. It’s lonely.
2. It’s crowded.
3. It’s smelly.
4. It’s boring. Nothing changes except once every thousand years or so – who bothers to track time? – when something interesting happens. By interesting I mean – well, you’ll find out.
5. My abominable guests never leave.
6. The servant problem. I’m a queen and I live in a hall larger than any of the gods’. Yet my servants are impossible. They’re slow. They’re lazy. They’re insolent. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ said one corpse, before he was dispatched to Nidhogg’s mercies.
7. No one ever says thank you. You build the hall, you brew the mead, you let them through the gate and – no one is ever pleased to see you. Ever. Is it any wonder I look sad and grim? Wouldn’t you if you’d been banished to the underworld for no fault of your own and
forced to spend eternity with corpses? Too right you would.
8. No one treats death like an adventure. No one makes the best of things, as I have had to. They moan and whimper, despite the welcome I offer, which is insulting if you think about it. All that work, all that effort to build a hall, offer mead, and my guests would rather be anywhere but here.
9. And please don’t get me started about the headless corpses staggering around Midgard when they should be locked up down here. They’re the ones who die into the hills, who aren’t content to sit in their grave mounds and gloat over their treasure. Oh no, they have to rampage around their old home, haunting and killing till the living dig them up and deal with their angry souls by chopping off their heads and burning them. Why not make things easier for you and yours and just come straight down the fog road? Cut out the middleman, as people say.
I have to acknowledge that the newly dead are never very keen about being dead. But don’t blame me. I’m not killing people, remember? I’m only the … hostess. Not with the mostess, that’s for sure, zero out of five stars in every survey, but in my own small way I try to make my guests – well, if not comfortable, then not
too
uncomfortable.
Just think of me as the proprietor of a haunted hotel where no one ever checks out.
On the plus side:
1. I am the best-looking person here. You know what they say about the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind? Well, in Hel
anyone
with flesh on their bones has it over the skeletons. Actually, anyone
alive
is number one. My bottom half is hideous, but compared to the rest I’m the Goddess Freyja times a hundred. I even get wolf-whistled. (Yeah, by actual wolves.)
2. My hall is stuffed with precious gifts. I may live in a dung heap but it’s girdled with gold.
3. I’m the boss. Whatever I say, goes. Even One-Eye can’t order me around here.
4. I never have to see my family again.
5. Everyone smells worse than I do.
6. No one recoils –
Wait a moment. I am interrupted …
Oh gods. Just what I don’t need. Not
another
shaman chanting charms, trying to yank spirits back up to the living and taking on the shape of a reindeer or a bird to sneak into my kingdom. Frankly, I prefer the birds to the snake forms those sons of mares also assume. (And I’ll draw a veil over the time some poor idiot took on a whale’s body and blundered down here, though that provided a lot of fish oil for the lamps.)
Sorted. One more shaman who won’t be bothering me again.
Idiot.
Let this be a warning to you.
People are always trying to raise the dead and get their help, hoping the ghosts will teach them spells or reveal what is to come.
‘Awake at the doors of the dead, Mother,’ some feckless son will mewl.
And that poor spirit, safely passed into the earth and long gone from the world of men, will have to heave her weary bones and obey.
The living like tormenting the dead. The dead know the future, what is fated for those whom fate can still trouble. That’s a cruel gift, since it’s too late for them.
So the living try to rouse them and make them tell secrets, reciting runes to drag the ghost back into the body. The old wood-stick-carved-with-runes-under-a-corpse’s-tongue trick, to make it talk … Pulses, can I advise against this? The newly dead HATE being yanked back into the bonds of their bodies and won’t thank you for disturbing them.
In fact, they’ll curse you. I don’t care if they do,
because I certainly don’t care about them or about you. But it disturbs the peace here. And I don’t like being disturbed.
So don’t say you weren’t warned.
Such a bad idea to summon the dead. Really. Don’t do it. They’ll only get angry, and insult you, and foretell your death just to serve you right.
Trust me. You don’t want to know which day is the one decreed for you to journey from life to death. If you know, you’ll watch it coming closer and closer. It’s gonna happen, okay? Just live your brief, precious life. You’ll find out soon enough when the Fates have snipped your thread.
And as for trying to get down here before your time is up? NOOOOOOO! Even worse. You’ll be lost between the worlds and that’s a dangerous place to be.
What’s the rush?
You’ll be here soon enough.
