Out there in the brightness of the security lights I was like a black fly on a white plate. I was relying on Regin’s bag of tricks. He reckoned he could use Quiet Technology to hide me from Fafnir’s security system on the small area from where he was hidden to where I was digging. It was backbreaking work. Fafnir’s weight had crushed the mud into a dense clay; I had to lever out every spadeful. Every second I expected him to appear, but either Regin had done his work well or the dragon was asleep, or playing with me, or something. Gradually I scraped away a grave for myself, over a meter deep and just long enough for me to lie down in. It wasn’t done yet, though. I had to camouflage it. I had some short ribs of invisible plastic with me—I don’t mean invisible to the eye, I mean invisible to X-ray and so on—and some latex sheet in my pack. I laid the ribs over the hole and rubbed the latex in the mud before I stretched it over the pit and smoothed it over.
I wished Regin was there. I didn’t want to die alone. But this was my place, that was his. I had to die; he had to watch.
I’d come this far, though.
I was just about ready to push my pack in and follow it down when I heard a sound. I looked up and there was an old man standing by the side of the track watching me.
My heart leapt. Fafnir? Could it be him? Could he shape-change? No one ever said so. So what was this old bloke doing here, standing watching me like I was a workman digging a hole in the road?
“What are you doing?” I said, getting to my feet. Then I thought, A spy! I felt at my belt for my knife.
The old man took no notice. He simply pointed down at the trench. “Haven’t you thought what will happen when Fafnir’s blood pours out into the trench and his body slumps down on top if it? What will happen then, Sigurd? How will you escape?”
I was about to grab him, but he flashed me a warning look. “Listen to what I say, boy,” he snapped. I stopped. There was something about him. I was finding it difficult to think.
I glanced up the slope to where the dragon would come. I had to hide! But the old man had a point. I scowled, not knowing what to make of him.
“You’ll drown in his blood.” He pointed down. “Dig a channel out to the side, like the blood gully on a knife. The blood will run off and you’ll have a way out.”
“But I have no more latex. He’ll see!”
I was in a panic already, but the old man shook his head. “Dig the channel here, where the mud slopes up. It’ll be hidden from him when he comes down the track from his citadel . . . at least until it’s too late.”
He had a point. But I was suspicious. “How do you know so much about Fafnir?”
The old man smiled and glanced up at me. He was wearing a wide-brimmed trilby and a herringbone coat, dripping with the rain. He had a short gray beard and only one eye.
“Sigurd, my love. You were wishing you weren’t alone. I’m here now. Do as I say.”
I frowned at him, trying to work it out. What on earth was this—in the middle of this destroyed land with the dragon only half a mile away, and this old guy turns up in his herringbone coat like it was the high street in some little country town talking about blood gullies and reading my mind? But what he said made sense. I thought that maybe he was keeping me occupied until Fafnir got here, but I did what he said anyway. I was so tired, but I picked up the shovel and started to lever more clods of rock-hard clay out of the ground. He stood there with his hands behind his back and watched.
“But don’t try to avoid his blood. If you bathe in the blood of Fafnir, you’ll take its qualities. No weapon will ever harm you then, Sigurd.”
“You know too much,” I said; and as soon as I’d said it, I realized—my god! Who knows too much? Who has only one eye? It was Odin, the Allfather. Odin! He’d come here in person to help me.
How can I describe that feeling? Odin was with me! It didn’t mean I was going to live—not with him by me. Odin is the god of violent death. Maybe he’d come to take me with him—not that I needed any help to die here on the Heath, waiting to face the dragon. But—the god was with me. He had come to be with me.
My first thought was to bend my knee to him. But then I thought of my father, who had never accepted his fate but fought against it. I remembered the story of how he wrestled the god to the ground on the last night of his life. That’s something, to wrestle with god! I always thought that was the most glorious thing I ever heard of. And—I don’t know why, maybe because I’d already decided I was going to die, I’d lost everything already—but I suddenly threw down the spade, leapt over the trench that lay between us, and grabbed hold of him. I had the god in my hands! I twisted him round, forced him down. He grunted in surprise and I saw his face flush with anger. He was strong, but I was stronger, and I felt him yield to me. Then I had him, he was down in the mud and . . .
And then I was holding his coat in my hand and the man was gone. I thought to myself, What a fool! Fighting the gods! But maybe no worse than fighting a dragon.
“Thanks!” I called out into the rain. “Thanks, old man!” Why I should thank him after trying to fight him I don’t know. He was my god—my destiny. Everything that I felt that day was of Odin—the fear and the poetry of fear, and the blood lust and the embracing of death. I loved him almost like a lover. But although I had to accept, I didn’t have to go quietly, and I don’t think he held it against me, although I made him slip in the mud and lose his coat.
Then I bent my back again to the task he had set me. I dug a gully leading down, hidden by a ridge of mud, and then I was ready. I offered up a prayer—my father’s prayer. “And have the grace to leave us to our own affairs. Amen!” Then I slid down under the earth, into the grace of the grave. I pulled the latex over the gap where I came in, got out my rations, my water, and my weapons, and began the wait.
Regin had told Sigurd that the dragon would come to bathe at the pool that night, or maybe the next, but he was wrong. Fafnir changed his habits from week to week, day to day, even from hour to hour, so that there could be no predicting him. As luck had it, he didn’t come that night, nor the night after, nor the night after that. Sigurd had only a handful of dried fruit and a bottle of water with him and that was soon finished. In the total darkness underground, in growing fear, with his food and water all gone, the boy very soon lost all sense of time and reason. No light or sound crept into his little prison. The smell of the cold clay filled his nostrils and then seeped into his whole body until he felt he was a part of it.
Hours passed and he was already unsure of the day. By the end of the first night, Sigurd was so unhinged with fear and darkness that his dreams had become as real as the cold earth he lay in. In his mind the dragon came a dozen times; in his mind he died a dozen times and still he lay there and suffered, stiffening like a corpse.
In the shit and the piss and the cold mud underground, in the darkness that his mind populated with phantoms—surely none of them worse than the reality waiting for him above—Sigurd at last seemed to awake; someone, something, was approaching. He knew it wasn’t Fafnir, the tread was too light. It was the old man. He stood quietly above Sigurd for a minute or two before he began to work. He had come to heap more mud up on the latex, smoothing it down, sealing Sigurd even more firmly into his tomb. Grateful for something to listen to, Sigurd lay still and said nothing while the old man worked. It was a long job; Odin seemed to want to be sure that not even the air could get in or out of the little tomb underground. As the clay heaped up above him, the latex skin sank closer and closer to his face, and Sigurd lay still and listened until the work above his head was done, and the figure retreated.
Then came the bad air. The heaving of the chest, the tearing pain and desperation. Was this another nightmare? The blackness entering beyond his eyes and into his soul; the body begging for fresh air. But there was none. The god had sealed the tomb against that. Still Sigurd waited, faithful to his fate. Now his limbs began to twitch and shudder, his hands involuntarily to snatch and claw at the covering above him— but
it was too late now, the weight was too great, the clay too densely packed, the fiber sheet too strong for him to make any impact at all. At last, with the air all gone and his struggles exhausted, Sigurd ceased to breathe and began to turn blue.
Of that time, what can we say? The grave is the most private place. What words are heard? Who visits us, apart from the worm? It is said that there are secrets only the dead can understand and that the Allfather knows how to make them speak. Perhaps that’s why Odin murdered his favorite underground. But after death, came the divine. Odin opened the gully he had told Sigurd to dig, entered into the grave, and lay there with him. What passed between them? Don’t dare ask! This is death; it is beyond the understanding of the living. For us there is only silence to hear. Odin came; that is enough. Whether it was to question or to whisper his own secrets to the dead boy, we shall never know. But there he breathed new life into him. Odin, the god who turns soldiers into priests, poets and angels, blew death away, reversed decay, and turned the bitterness of fear and pain into joy—the joy of life, the joy of living. Sigurd would never fear death again.
After the god left him, Sigurd lay very still, not even breathing; he didn’t need to. He lay for another day in utter stillness until at last he felt the ground shaking around him and he knew that the dragon was coming. Then he lifted his head, drew in air, bared his teeth at the unseen sky above his head, and prepared to die again in a torrent of blood.
It was a simple plan, and like so much that is simple, it had to be done well. Sigurd was to plunge the sword up through the clay at exactly the right moment. Fafnir was traveling fast; too soon and the monster would see the sword and fling himself aside. Too late and he would miss the vital organs. In his dark cell underground, all Sigurd had to go on was the shaking of the ground around him.
Fafnir was sliding like an otter on a mud slide by the water’s edge. In the fifteen years that he had ruled Hampstead Heath and all that remained of London around it, this was his only sport—to slide out of his citadel on his belly and plunge headfirst into the water below. To Sigurd, it sounded like a train rushing toward him—every second he thought the monster was over him, but still the noise grew, still he held back waiting for the perfect moment. Odin would tell him when, he thought. Then suddenly the latex ballooned down above him. For a split second the thought was in his mind: Hold back, lie low, you can still live. Then he lunged upward with the blade with all his strength, up through the latex and the mud, up through the impossible, impassable skin and deep into the bowels of Fafnir.
The sword was wrenched violently along in the direction the dragon was traveling, and Sigurd was crumpled violently up against the end of the chamber with such force that the steel of the sword cracked. Stunned, Sigurd hung on for a moment longer while the dragon, forcing his claws deep into the clay to stop his flight, continued down the slope and the sword carried on with its deadly work. Then, as it hit the pelvic bone, the blade snapped. There was a terrifying scream above him like a bomb falling, and a torrent of blood and guts came tumbling down into the trench, covering Sigurd’s eyes and filling his mouth. Stuffing the stub of the sword into his belt, he began fighting his way upward, toward air and life.
He burst out of the ground in a rush of blood like a baby coming into the world for the first time. Fafnir had stopped himself just short of the water and lay there right by him, writhing on the ground on his side, swinging his great tail from side to side and scooping his arms in front of him in a desperate effort to force his spilled guts back into his body cavity. There was a three-meter wound in his belly, from his sternum to his tail. He saw Sigurd rise out of the ground and swung at him with a groan, but the boy danced to one side. In the same movement he pulled the machine gun from his back and fired, a hundred rounds in three seconds, raking up and down directly into the wound. Fafnir roared in pain and flailed. Inside the great wound he had cut, Sigurd could see his diaphragm moving as his lungs worked and the pulsing beat above where the great heart did its work. There was a deep gash in his sternum where the blade had first struck; exactly right.
The boy dropped the machine gun, pulled the shotgun off his back, walked right up to the monster, thrust the double barrels in under the breastbone and up until he felt them press against the beating muscle inside. Then he gave it both barrels.
“Got you, you fucker! Now die!” he screamed, and jumped back to watch. The wound throbbed violently as the shells exploded. Fafnir screamed and clawed at him but Sigurd was dashed to one side as a fountain of blood burst over him. The dragon groaned again and rolled back onto his front, reaching out with his great clawed hand in a last effort to recapture his spilled insides. He took a deep sigh, which Sigurd was certain would be his last, rolled over so that the wound was buried in the mud, and settled his great and beautiful head upon the bloody ground. But his yellow eye was still half open, and he fixed Sigurd in his stare. There was a long, still moment. Then the dragon spoke.
“A child, a beautiful child,” he whispered. “Who are you?”
“Sigurd Volson, son of Sigmund.”
Fafnir, who had closed his eye in pain, opened it again to stare at his killer. Sigurd frowned back. He was thinking—I blew your heart to shreds! Why aren’t you dead? What’s happening?
The dragon coughed and snarled. “Brother!” he hissed.
“No brother of mine!”
“This is the kind of hero you are. I’m Styr. Do you know me, boy?”
“They call you Fafnir.”
“They know nothing.”
Styr! Could it be true? Sigmund’s first son who had run off after killing his aunt and clone-brother. Had he spent all these years turning himself into this?
Sigurd was shaken, but he didn’t show it. “If you ever were my brother, you gave it away long ago. What sort of a man turns himself into this?”
“I was invulnerable!” boasted Styr. “I ruled. Lord of London!”
Sigurd laughed. “Ruled over what?” he demanded. “Burnt brick and gold? Some king. Some kingdom.”
Fafnir groaned again. His eye fluttered. But he wasn’t dead yet. “All those treasures brought me no joy, and no joy will they bring you either, Sigurd. You’ll end like me, don’t doubt it.”
Sigurd laughed. “If I was immortal like the gods, then maybe I’d fear death. But we all have to die, Fafnir. Why should I fear what can’t be changed?”
All the time the dragon was lying there with his clammy eye fixed on Sigurd, watching closely. And all the time Sigurd was getting more and more anxious and confused. What was going on? He’d destroyed the monster’s heart! What more did he have to do to? And why was the creature talking to him? What was going to happen next?
Fafnir—Styr—was keeping his arms wrapped over the wound, which he pressed closely into the mud beneath him. What was he doing—just holding on to life? But with no heart . . . ? As the dragon had passed over him, it had twisted to one side in an effort to escape the blade, and so the wound twisted up his side toward the pelvis. Sigurd suddenly took two rapid steps to the side, bent down to look, and managed to catch sight of the end of the wound, by the monster’s tail, before he rolled on his belly to hide it. He looked into it and saw . . .
. . . flesh knitting together; blood sucking its way back up, the tubes of his insides reuniting, muscle knotting and pushing back into place, bone forming splinters that reached out to bone, forcing themselves together, knitting, stitching, joining. Styr was healing himself before Sigurd’s very eyes.
There was a brief frozen moment; Sigurd knew; Fafnir knew Sigurd knew. They stared into each other’s eyes.
“You thought you were watching my death,” hissed the dragon. “But you were watching your own.”
And then he lunged.
There was to be no escape. You can catch the dragon unawares, but you cannot fight him. Sigurd had a few rounds left in the machine gun, but what good could they do, when so many had already failed? The monster was already partly healed. Wounded as he was, he wa
s a hundred times faster and stronger than Sigurd—better armed already, and getting better by the second. There was only one place to go. Sigurd did not run, but dived forward. He hit the ground behind the striking claw, right before Fafnir’s belly, rolled forward, and plunged headfirst back into the blood-filled trench. He dived down through the hot, thick blood and then up again, under the dragon. Here was the slit the sword had cut in the mud. Above it—skin. Frantically he pushed his way through the blood and abandoned guts—more skin! Bubbles escaped from his nose and mouth as he desperately hung on to his air. Lungs bursting, he groped farther along—and there! Right up at the end he found a gap; his hand plunged straight through into the hot, wet insides of his brother Styr. He pushed his hands into the lips of the wound and hauled himself right up inside the monster.
There in the pulsing dark, Sigurd fought his way up, pushing aside the dark coils of intestines, hacking as he went, gagging on spilled food, blood, and bile. He pulled himself forward, up to the tight ball of the stomach, chopped that open, felt the atrocious sting of acids, and still fought on, up past the diaphragm and into the ballooning lungs. Here he sucked in more precious air—then up again, up and up, deeper and deeper into the body of the dragon. Above him something pulsed and beat, pulsed and beat, pulsed and beat.
“Two hearts! The bastard has two hearts!” Dropping the sword to move faster, Sigurd pushed his way forward, toward the pulse of life and seized it in his two hands.
Fafnir hauled himself upright, howling in pain, clawing at his own chest, hacking and fighting to tear himself open. At last he got a claw into the place where Sigurd had entered him, and, ripping upward, split himself open for a second time along the new scar from his belly right up to his rib cage. He was screaming like a boiler ready to explode as he sawed through the plate of his own sternum, which stitched itself back together even as he fought to open it. Now the dragon began to pull himself apart, heaving on his own skeleton, forcing himself open in a last desperate attempt to save his life. He gave a huge final tug; there was a loud crack as his ribs stretched backward like bloody wings. He looked down into his center just in time to see Sigurd reach up to the football of the huge heart, wrap his hands around it, and with a terrific tug wrench it from its bearings with his bare hands. As his light died, Styr reached in to pluck out his tormentor, but the life was gone before his claws touched him, and with a great spout of blood from the torn vessels, Fafnir the terrible fell and died.