One of the men was Asian, presumably Zhang Guo Lao. Wispy tendrils of white hair grew sparsely along his jaw and in a nimbus around his temples, reminiscent of half-formed clouds through which the sky is still visible. He wore traditional garb in the formal shenyi style, royal blue embroidered with a silver and gold chrysanthemum pattern, save for bands of sky blue at the collar, belt, and the edge of his sleeves. Though clearly advanced in years, he seemed faintly amused that we might think him frail because of it. I knew from experience that the loose folds of those clothes often disguised the true movements of shoulders and elbows, even fists. I would leave it to Leif and Gunnar to underestimate him; I was not deceived. His English, when he spoke, was quite excellent and only slightly accented. He bowed to us and said, “You honor me with your presence.”
The other man was Väinämöinen. He gestured at my goatee and said, “Cute beard.” His own was white and epically intimidating. I couldn’t possibly call it cute; he could be hiding anything in there. There might be weapons or exploding powder pellets to help him disappear in a cloud of smoke, or there might just as easily be a family of starlings nesting in it. Beginning under his sharply bladed cheekbones, it flowed like an avalanche all the way down to his belly. His mustache was an even brighter shade of white than his beard, and it draped luxuriously over his upper lip, falling in thin tendrils on either side of his chin like ridges of fresh powdered snow.
His eyebrows were similarly impressive and snow white. They hung like rolled-up awnings over a prominent brow and deep-set sockets. His eyes were thus completely cast in shadow, pools of ink that were as likely to be amiable as angry. A black skullcap of the Finnish cut with earflaps on the sides was fastened with a bright red band around his forehead, giving the overall impression that he was a fearsome man to cross. He looked like an evil version of Santa Claus, lean and hungry and only liable to say “Ho-ho-ho!” when he was jumping up and down on your face.
He wore a tunic of forest green belted in black leather at the waist, and over this he wore a sturdy red wool cloak, clasped invisibly somewhere underneath his beard. A short sword rested in a scabbard attached to his belt, and he wore light-brown cloth breeches tucked into knee-high furred boots, which were cross-tied down to his ankles.
His grip was strong as I shook hands with him. “That hat is darling,” I told him. If he wanted to damn me with faint praise, I had no compunction about doing the same. This was not a diplomatic mission. Besides, I had a feeling he was jockeying for baddest of the badasses.
Väinämöinen confirmed this when he turned to Gunnar and said, “What happened to your shirt?” as if it were more manly to be well dressed than to not care about the cold.
“It was astonishingly ugly,” I explained, implying that at some point it had been destroyed and no one had mourned its passing. Gunnar glared at me as he shook hands with the Finn, but he let the comment stand.
Any additional efforts by Väinämöinen to proclaim himself Manliest of Men were forestalled by the arrival of a bona fide deity. An eagle swooped out of the night sky—presumably from a perch in the tree above—and shifted before our eyes to a heavily muscled thunder god. It wasn’t Thor; it was the Russian god, Perun, and the third man I had missed.
His name—or some variation of it—still means “thunderbolt” in many Slavic languages today. His muscles moved like slabs of architecture, sculpted yet not smooth; the sharp lines of muscle were blurred by thick thatches of hair, for he was impressively hirsute, with hair growing even on the tops of his shoulders. His beard was full and copper-colored; the tangles on his head were wild and full of bravado.
His blue eyes crackled briefly with lightning, a much more impressive version of the special effect they did on the eyes in Stargate, and then he beamed merrily at all of us. Suddenly I could see him in a Saturday morning cartoon vehicle: He’d be Perun, the Happy Hairy Thunder God.
He asked us in cultured Russian if he could speak to us in that language. Looking at the blank stares on the faces of Leif and Gunnar, I explained to him in Russian that not everyone could speak it.
“English, then?” he said, his accent thick. We all nodded or murmured assent. “Is bad luck for me. Not my good language.” He shrugged off his misfortune. “I make work.”
Perun shook hands with everyone, delivering tiny shocks to us all and chuckling softly at our reactions. Then he held up what looked like stone straws.
“I bring gift,” he said, and passed one out to each of us. “I am not knowing English word for these. They are shield for lightning.”
Comprehension followed quickly. “Ah, they’re fulgurites,” I said—hollow tubes of lightning-struck sand, superheated to smooth glass on the inside, rough on the outside.
Perun asked me to repeat the term and I did so. He practiced it a few times, then said, “Keep fulgurite with you always, protect you from Thor. Now his lightning no bother. See?”
Leif looked at his fulgurite doubtfully. “This will protect me from a lightning strike?”
“Wonderful!” Perun clapped and smiled at Leif. “We have volunteer for demonstration.”
“I beg your pardon?” Leif said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. Perun raised an axe that he’d had strapped to his back into the air. I’m not sure where that had been when he was an eagle; I wondered if he’d teach me how he did it. “I think he means it works like a talisman.”
“You may recall that the last talisman I had failed to protect me fully,” Leif pointed out with some asperity. He spoke of the cold iron amulet I’d given him to protect from hellfire-throwing witches. “My flesh is highly combus—” At this point, a thunderbolt struck Leif square on the head. We saw the lightning travel down his body and dissipate into the ground. The crack of thunder startled us all, and I, for one, thought surely that Leif would keel over, a smoking, charred ruin. Curiously, though, he was fine. “—tible?” he finished on a querying note.
“Ha! You see?” Perun cried. “Better than shield. You feel no heat, no spark, yes?”
“It … sort of … tickled,” Leif said.
Everyone grinned. “That is most extraordinary,” Väinämöinen said. “Will you strike me next?”
Perun’s answer was another thunderbolt from the sky. Not a hair on the Finn’s face was singed. This time we all voiced our appreciation effusively. Perun seemed to glow with validation, and he proceeded to strike the rest of us with our very own bolt of lightning “for practice.”
“Do these have a limit to their protection?” I asked, pointing to my fulgurite. “Good for only twelve strikes or something like that?”
“No, these blessed for all time by me,” Perun assured us. “You safe from all lightning in future. Thor, Zeus, you name, no lightning bother you as long as you carry.”
“Begging your pardon, exalted one, but do you speak of carrying it in a pouch or some other pack?” Zhang Guo Lao wondered.
“Eh?” Perun’s brows met together like amorous hairy caterpillars. “No. Must touch skin somewhere. Hand, foot, backside, no matter. Place in pack, fulgurite protect pack, not you.”
The enormity of the gift began to sink in, and we thanked him effusively.
“Is no big deal,” he said, though it was clear he enjoyed the big deal we were making of it.
“Now that we are all here, I will cast a seeming,” Väinämöinen announced. “We will not appear to be here to anyone who snoops around.”
I rather thought it would have been a good idea to do that before the five lightning strikes in the same small area, but perhaps it would still be effective. “Pardon me if I’m being impertinent, but do you know if this seeming will deceive the eyes of Hugin and Munin, Odin’s eyes in Midgard?” I asked.
The wizard’s dark eye sockets swung around to regard me. “An excellent question. The answer is yes. I have had occasion to hide from him before.” He strode back to the rock he’d been sitting on and withdrew a strange instrument from a pack there. It looked like the lower jaw of som
e animal, teeth still prominently attached, and wound tightly around these teeth were fine yellow strings.
“This is my kantele,” he explained. “Made from the jawbone of a giant pike and the hair of a fine blond woman.” I was stunned speechless. What does one say to that sort of thing? “Who was the blond woman?” or “Why didn’t you pick a brunette?”
Väinämöinen began to sing, and I flipped on my faerie specs to appreciate what he was doing in the magical spectrum. The normal bindings present in the air around us began to haze or fuzz over; he was cutting us off from the normal scheme of things, creating a pocket dimension. When he finished, his mustache raised slightly at the corners and I understood that he was trying to smile. “There. Has everyone eaten? We have something cooking,” the wizard said, gesturing to a cast-iron pot hanging over the flames.
Gunnar indicated he’d eat anything, and we all moved around the fire. We stood until Perun and Leif secured a few more boulders for us to sit on; they may have competed to find the largest, heaviest ones nearby.
“It is a humble meal. A couple of hares, together with carrots and onions. We have no potatoes,” Zhang Guo Lao said apologetically. “But it has been cooking since before sundown. We have added salt and pepper. It should be seasoned and tender now.”
I smiled. “You guys seriously made a stew?” One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about twentieth-century fantasy novels is how bloody fast the heroes whip up a pot of stew from scratch over a campfire. To me that’s more magical than slaying dragons, because it takes a good four hours to make a passable stew—often longer over a fire in winter—yet those folks in the books always seem to manage it in less than an hour, without explanation. Though it was still an hour past sundown in Prague, it was approaching midnight in Nadym, and the stew should indeed be ready to eat.
Väinämöinen and Zhang Guo Lao’s packs were well stocked with cutlery and plates. Both were accustomed to spending nights in the open. Everybody chowed down—except for Leif. He drank a cup of my blood. Perun approved of the cooking but seemed wistful about the small portions.
“Is good. But next time, eat bear,” he said.
No one seemed anxious to do the dishes; it was as if they had each become Hemingway Code Heroes (with all the concomitant chauvinism that implied), and they’d rather die than do “women’s work” in front of all the other men. So I volunteered for the duty as a sop to their egos, and accepted their relieved thanks as I took everything down to the lake.
“Honored Druid,” Zhang Guo Lao said, “I have heard few details from Mr. Helgarson beyond an assurance that travel to Asgard is possible. Please explain to us how this is so.”
“I will shift us all there. Physically this is not an issue. Mentally it’s a gigantic issue. I was able to shift my two companions here across the globe,” and I gestured to Leif and Gunnar, “because I’ve now been acquainted with them for more than ten years. I know how they think. I know what gives them joy and I also know how to push their buttons. They are friends.
“But you are new acquaintances,” I said, gesturing at the three sitting across from me. “I am unfamiliar with the essence of who you are. When I must hold Zhang Guo Lao and Väinämöinen and Perun in my mind, what are they to me but names? You are more than a name. You are experience and wisdom, wit and folly, hatred and sorrow, strength and weakness. You are motivated by different forces; you have different goals in mind. All this I must hold in my mind, so that when we shift to the Norse plane, I do not leave parts of you here.”
“So we must tell you all of these things?” Väinämöinen asked.
“Not only me. You must tell us all. If we are to survive, we must each see into the windows of our comrades’ houses. We will open our windows by telling stories.”
“Stories? What kind?” Perun wondered.
“All kinds. In America they call it male bonding, and that is an accurate term for what we must accomplish here. We need to be bound, mentally and spiritually, if I am to take us all physically to the Norse plane. So we will remain here until I am confident we can leave, and we will tell stories. I suggest that your first tale concern what you all have in common—that is, why you want to kill Thor. We can move on to lighter topics from there. Agreed?”
A general murmur of consent accompanied their nodding heads, but every visage scowled at the fire—imagining the Norse thunder god in it, no doubt.
“Who would like to go first?” I asked.
All five spoke at once, but four of them almost as quickly deferred when they saw Gunnar bristling, lest he begin to doubt that we thought him dominant.
Chapter 15
The Werewolf’s Tale
I am probably the youngest being here, with only slightly more than three centuries to my name, but it seems I have hated Thor for longer than that—though he wronged me personally only ten years ago. It is strange how raw emotions can expand time or contract it. It is stranger still how a god can cultivate a reputation for being a friend to man when he is so often an enemy—for I know that Thor has done you all a great wrong, else you would not be here. I also know that we are not the only men in the world to whom he has offered injustice. I have heard whispers and stories, rumors of casual cruelties and petty behavior. It is, perhaps, his nature to be capricious and shockingly vicious, since his body is a bottle for extremely bad weather and his will makes for a weak stopper. His sense of right and wrong is no doubt somewhat storm-tossed.
Yet that is not an exculpatory condition. Werewolves contain ruthless predators within, and we must control our wolves if we wish to survive in the world. We must firmly adhere to pack law at all times and to mortal law where it does not conflict with pack law. Law is all that separates us from barbarism and the howling within; it is a necessary leash on our darker natures. The same should be true of gods. As we are subject to law and order, they should be also. We hear in tales that their justice is administered by a supreme god, if at all. But it is never commensurate to the crime, while the punishments they deal out to mortals are often excessive and eternal. I think it is time a god received his comeuppance.
To appreciate fully what Thor did to me, I must take you back to Iceland in the year 1705.
In that time I was a courier and peddler. I circuited the island in the summers, delivering messages and doing a little trade out of my pack, sharing news and providing some isolated farmers the sense that they were not alone in the world. Often they were just as glad to see me as I was to see them. I got free room and board for the gossip in my head, and they had the opportunity to reconnect with friends and relatives by entrusting me with a letter for a small bit of coin or provisions for my horse.
The visit I made to Hnappavellir farm that summer changed my life. Most of the household was out in the field; the only person at the farmhouse was a girl named Rannveig Ragnarsdóttir, nineteen years old and disaffected with rural existence. She had hair like summer wheat and a soft blush to her cheeks when she smiled. When I arrived, she was wrestling with a ball of dough in the kitchen, flour on her dress and completely unprepared for company. My presence flustered her as she tried to remember manners she’d learned long ago but had never practiced until now. I thought her completely lovely, and once we were seated with drinks and talking across a table, she thought my humble existence was somehow romantic and adventurous. The way she looked at me began to change after a few minutes; she became flirtatious, and I admit that I encouraged her. I had not known a woman’s touch in weeks. Before long, she was suggesting a short excursion to look for lost sheep. She packed some dried strips of meat and some biscuits along with a blanket, then selected a mare from the stables and led me to what is now Skaftafell National Park. There was a special place there, she said, that I should see. It was a waterfall called Svartifoss that tumbled over black columns of volcanic basalt, which had slowly cooled and crystallized into hexagonal shapes. It was a place of dark, musical beauty, and after the sun went down she said she wanted to have me there. I let her.
/> There were few escapes to be had in Rannveig’s life. Twenty people lived at Hnappavellir, most of them related, and there was nothing for a young girl to do in such a situation except be obedient. I was supposed to be a happy interlude, quickly enjoyed and long savored afterward, and I understood that and was grateful for it.
She was ravenous in her lovemaking, and I remember that she told me she wanted to do more than merely dwell on the earth; she wished that she could truly live. She and I interpreted this to mean that a nice shag under the light of a full moon sure beat the hell out of snoring through the night and then scrambling all day to bake the bread and keep the hearth fire burning. But that particular comment of hers was overheard and interpreted much differently.
The wolf who savaged us called himself Úlfur Dalsgaard. While we were locked in each other’s embrace, he bit deeply into my hamstrings and then tore at Rannveig’s calves. Utterly crippled and unable to flee or fight effectively, we thought we were finished. We half expected an entire pack to descend upon us, but soon enough we realized that there was only one wolf—a huge wolf, to be sure—and he’d backed off to watch us bleed.
I couldn’t believe my eyes at first: There had never been any wolves in Iceland, but of course I had heard tales of them. This one didn’t act like the wolves in stories. I didn’t understand the behavior. We were wounded, bleeding, and scared, and that should have been more than enough encouragement for him to kill us, but he wanted us to stay there, nothing more. If we tried to drag ourselves away or call for help, he growled and lunged at us. We were being saved for something special.
“What does he want?” Rannveig asked me.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I don’t think we have any choice but to wait.”