I didn’t run down straight away. Fafnir was dead all right, but I still didn’t trust him. Resurrection, even that might be possible, why not? After all that action everything had gone very still. The wind was blowing quite hard but there were no leaves or trees to sway. There were no birds flying over. And no Sigurd.
Come on, kid—you’ve done it, don’t die now! I thought. When he fell, Fafnir went down like an avalanche and Sigurd was underneath him. I stood waiting for a long time, maybe fifteen minutes thinking, My god, what have I witnessed? Because it was truly impossible. At every second you knew Sigurd was going to die, but somehow he’d pulled it off.
I kept bending to the scope, and there was nothing, no movement. I still couldn’t believe that it had actually happened. There were flies gathering on the monster’s eye but even they could be a trap. I was sure Sigurd had died too, and, god help me, I thought, Two birds with one stone. Because . . . well. He was such a good person, it could never work. This is politics—he was bound to mess things up. I felt that there was nothing to worry about for him anymore because the worst had already happened.
Then there was a small movement at the side. Love him! That dragon was a truck made of meat and there was this little piggy squeezing out from under him. Yes! And I forgot all my caution and I just shouted, “Oh, I love you, Sigurd, I do, I really do,” and without thinking I ran down on all fours to meet him, grunting and snorting like something off the farm.
Impossible! A boy against a thing like that! That’s our Sigs, he can do anything! About halfway down I suddenly worried that maybe that small movement was something else—maybe Fafnir was escaping from his own corpse? Well, you don’t know what they can do these days, do you? I stopped and looked again but it was Sigs all right, red with blood from head to foot, trying to drag himself out from under all those tons of dead meat. It made me weep to see him, that little thing, that baby. How could we have let him? How could we? We’re just a bunch of shits, the whole lot of us.
I thought he was dying when I got close up, covered in gore like that and babbling away about a lot of things that made no sense. The dragon was his brother, he said. He said he’d died under the ground, that he knew how to live without breath, that no weapon could ever harm him, that he knew the secrets Odin won from the dead, because he’d died himself. He said he’d become less than human now. Mad as you like. I kept saying, “Now stop that, shut up, will you!” I was scared he was injured, you see, and he was yelling so loud I thought he’d push out what blood was still left in him. I had to hack him out with an ax in the end, he was stuck so hard. I was certain that there’d be only half of him left to pull out, I could hardly bear to look when I finally got him free. But he was all there. No wounds, no broken bones, nothing. All the blood was Fafnir’s. It was like another miracle—not a scratch on him! I was weeping with excitement. He was shaking like a leaf and still ranting about this old man who’d slept with him underground.
“Look,” I said—he was scaring me with his mad talk, he needed to calm down. “I had the whole site plugged. There was no one else there. I’d have known. No old man, nothing, just you lying in the ground.” I paused a moment. It’s true that I’d lost track of him for a time—some failure of the equipment, it’d scared the life out of me at the time because I thought Fafnir was on to us. He might have been dead out there for a while so far as I knew, I couldn’t find his heat or heartbeat or anything. But there was no one else. I was sure of that.
“You were hallucinating, Sigurd. Three days in the dark, hardly any food and water. Straightforward sensory deprivation, that’s all it is.”
Sigurd waved me away. “There’re things even you can’t measure, Regin,” he gasped.
“Secrets of the dead, right?” I joked. I just wanted to try and bring him back to his senses. He glared at me.
“You don’t know what you can’t know,” he panted.
“Well, I can’t see inside your head, if that’s what you mean,” I told him. “But believe me, Sigurd, there was no living thing there but you and the dragon.”
“Who’s talking about the living?” he snarled. He leaned across and gripped my arm. “Regin, it was Odin. Odin came to me. Don’t tell me you couldn’t pick him up?” He laughed again. I thought, Look at you, always so sure of yourself. All he ever wants is the best for everyone, I know that, but this certainty he has of himself, it’s indecent. If you want to see a god, getting buried alive in fear of your life is as good a way to do it as any, I suppose, but he didn’t have to believe it. Just because it was him it happened to! Obviously he’d had some sort of experience down there, but being Sigurd, nothing on earth was going to convince him it wasn’t real.
But then—killing Fafnir was more than human. How else could he have done it unless he had the gods with him? I felt a chill go through me. If it was true he was Odin’s now and he knew things the rest of us could never understand.
“Odin has chosen me,” he said. He was lying flat on his back in the mud and gore, and I was leaning over him, with one hand on his shoulder. He wasn’t focused on me, he was staring up with his blood-covered eyes at the sky. What a sight, staring up through that mask of blood, with his mad eyes. I shivered and looked up over my shoulder, thinking I might see the god there myself but there were only the clouds and the sky above me.
I thought, He has everything—everything! Power, wealth, strength, youth—and the gods love him into the bargain.
“What did he tell you then, this underground god?” I asked, sarcastically. Sigurd looked at me, an unknowable look. I couldn’t meet his glance.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. He looked so sad for a moment. Then, before I could stop him—he was as quick as an adder—he snatched a steel knife from his belt and stabbed himself violently in the stomach.
“No!” I screamed. I made a grab for the knife, too late, but he just laughed.
“He told me, Regin, no weapon would ever harm me where the dragon’s blood had touched me.” He lifted up his shirt. As I say, he was covered in blood, but then he took my hand and thrust it onto his stomach—like Jesus putting Thomas’s hand in the wound. But with Sigurd, there was no wound.
“There,” he whispered. His eyes lit on my face and he smiled, as if he recognized me for the first time.
The hair stood up all over my body; I felt myself grunt and cringe back. I flattened down my ears, I shook my head. He smiled at me.
“You believe in the godworld right up until the moment you see it. Why’s that, Regin?” He pushed me away, got to his feet, and started to make his way down to the lake. I watched him for a minute. I was scared of him now. I used to dangle him on my knee and help him with his homework. Now he was unknowable. I ran after him and started going on about genetics and technology and normal explanations for things, but he waved his hand at me, and I had nothing more to say.
Well, it shook up me up at the time, I admit it—but I’m a scientist. I look for a rational explanation first. Fafnir was state of the art, see. All those onboard modifications were done using virus recoding. The point is, the viruses would still be active inside the body. That’s one of the things that makes virus work so dodgy. If you can catch it yourself, other people can too. There’ve been escapes before. You get these weird epidemics where a change gets loose in the general population. Of course it’s usually bigger boobs or more muscles, some silly rich kid trying to look more attractive. That’s right—tit-job virus, big-muscle disease. The papers have a field day. It’s usually babies and old people that get it, of course. Grotesque. So far none of the military viral hardware has escaped, but it’s only a matter of time, if you ask me. Like now, for instance. Sigurd had literally swum in the dragon’s blood. He’d be bound to have ingested some. He was contaminated—infected with Fafnir. He already had the skin. Once he washed off some of the blood you could see it shimmering, just like Fafnir’s had. Who knows what else he’d caught? Fafnir’s mind? He’d have recoded that, too, see? You can get rid of thing
s mentally, too. There are a lot of things a tyrant might not like—mercy, pity, love. It was said that Sigmund’s sister Signy eliminated love from herself, once it started getting in the way.
Fafnir had been human once. Sigurd still was. But for how long? The chances were pretty good that he was going to turn into a monster too.
He got into the water where Fafnir used to bathe, and when he took his clothes off, I saw something. It was a little leaf, an aspen, I think. I don’t know how it got there, there were no trees for miles. It must have blown in on the wind. Somehow it’d got in under his shirt, trapped between his skin and the fabric. In that one spot, that one little place in the shape of a small leaf, the blood hadn’t touched him.
I followed him into the water. I couldn’t help thinking that if I shot him in the back there and then I might be saving the world from a great deal of trouble—but I couldn’t do that. I loved him. We all loved him. That was how he worked. I walked into the pond after him and tapped him on the back.
“There was a leaf trapped under your shirt,” I told him. “There’s no blood on you on that spot.”
Sigurd looked at me over his shoulder. I couldn’t read his expression. “Prick me,” he said.
I had a badge on my coat—I’ve had it for years, one of my children gave it to me ages ago. Now I took it off and gently pressed it into the flesh between his shoulder blades. A drop of blood sprang out. I dipped my finger in and showed him.
To my surprise, Sigurd was delighted. “Prick me and I bleed!” he crowed. “So there’s one place left where I’m still myself. How about that? Even Odin never gets everywhere!” He put his hands on his knees and laughed weakly. “You’d better keep my secret, Regin,” he said. Then with another little smile, he ducked under the water and began to wash.
I thought, Do you have to be so pleased about everything?
Regin left the boy to clean himself up and went back to where Fafnir lay. He could feel the heat from the huge body meters away, but it was cooling rapidly. Going behind the corpse, out of sight of Sigurd, Regin took off his clothes, got down into the trench where Sigurd had hidden, and bathed in the blood himself. Carefully he ran his fingers all over his body, making sure that there was no part of him that was not covered. He took care to open his eyes and mouth under the blood, so that as much of him as possible would be touched with immunity. He even swallowed the blood.
A little later, as he climbed up, he was shocked to see Sigurd standing by the side of the body waiting for him with a curious little smile on his face.
“You want to be indestructible too, Regin?” he asked.
Under his dark covering of blood, Regin blushed.
“Don’t think badly of me, Sigurd,” he said. “Why should you be the only one to benefit? I have enemies too.”
Sigurd nodded. “I don’t think badly of you, why should I? Here.” He took his knife out of his belt and handed it to the pigman, who pressed it against his arm, tentatively at first, but then hard. He drew no blood; the skin was not even creased.
Regin looked up and smiled. “The virus was still alive. I thought it might have died as the blood cooled.”
Sigurd nodded at Fafnir, who lay so hugely and grotesquely dead before them. “Look at us,” he said, “stealing everything from him! What does that make us? More human or less?” And he laughed.
The boy turned and walked off. As he watched him go, Regin thought to himself, That may be, Sigurd. But I made sure every inch of me was covered with the dragon’s blood. I can kill you; but you can never kill me.
But it never occurred to Regin, that if by bathing in Fafnir’s blood Sigurd was contaminated, so was he, too, now.
Listen: I died down there. It wasn’t sleep. The air turned bad. I died and then the old man came and talked to me. Questions and answers. But what they were, I can’t think. You can’t know it. My body remembers, though. My body knows death. It knows how to go there and back.
Then when I had to fight, there was nothing left to be scared about.
After I found Regin bathing in the blood, I left him to it and walked off. I was horrified. He didn’t understand what he was doing to himself. When I looked back he was already making his way over to the door of the citadel, a great black rock as big as a hill, that looked as if it’d crashed out of the sky and stuck in the earth where it landed. He looked like a fly standing next to it.
But I had other business. There were such thoughts in my mind!
How could I have died and still be here? Was there more than one of me? Was I still there? Was I—was my corpse—still underneath the body?
I know it’s mad. But it’s not me that’s mad, it’s what happened. I got a spade and started digging out the pit where I had hidden. I heard Regin calling to me from the rock, but I took no notice; I wanted to see if I was still under there. I dug and dug, and the blood kept on filling up the trench. I heard Regin shout again.
“What are you looking for? Sigurd, do you know something you haven’t told me?” But I couldn’t say. Dying is a secret thing. We who come back have nothing to say you’d understand.
I had to dig another channel to carry away the blood—the first one was blocked with body debris. Suddenly, with a final spadeful, it all flushed out and I could get on my knees and peer under the dragon.
I wasn’t there.
I was so relieved! So relieved. I remember kneeling there on the ground, half weeping, half crying, “Thank you! Thank you!” over and over again. I don’t know why, it just seemed to be such a terrible, terrible thing that there could be more than one of me. I still wasn’t satisfied, though. I started getting scared then that I’d died inside him. Regin must have thought I was mad. But I knew I was dead—or had been. How could that be? I began hacking away, chopping the carcass to pieces—his belly, his chest, up to his neck, his hearts. I was so certain my body was in there somewhere, I had to see it. But there was nothing. If it was ever there, Odin must have carried it off. By the time I’d finished, Fafnir was disembowelled, dismembered, reduced to butchery. I stood back panting, looking at it, and I thought, I am mad. I must be careful now or I’ll never come back.
I started to feel myself all over. Was it still me? Was that scar still there that I got when I was young, only five or six, when I fell in the long grass on my hands and landed on glass? There it was, a pale, twisted crescent on the thumb muscle. And that small dent in my eyebrow that I got when I was drunk one day and ran into a concrete lintel that had just been put up—there it was.
Same body. But I was different. My skin had begun to shimmer like Fafnir’s had. I’d died and come back to life. I’d killed the dragon; I’d never be the same again. As I stood there, I felt this: that these were things that had been done to me. I wonder if it was the same for all the heroes in history. It isn’t us doing these things. We have no choice. It’s the gods, it’s the people—it’s you; the sheer weight of your belief in us makes us act the way we do. I felt it so strongly. None of it was anything to do with me at all.
Now I had nothing left. Everything had been taken away from me—my fate, my thoughts, my feelings, my whole life, stolen from within. The god was some kind of parasite. But at the same time, nothing had changed. All I had was the same as I had before I died: how I face my fate. My courage isn’t mine, my leadership isn’t mine—even my thoughts are not my own. I’m a puppet. But I do have this—my heart.
Then it came to me—the thing that makes me myself. It hit me like a blow, but I knew it was true. I could feel it all around me. Love. That’s what I have, that alone is mine and mine alone. The heap of butchered meat and chopped-up guts that was all that was left of Fafnir steamed beside me, the hugest death you could imagine, but good would come of this. I made up my mind that this was why I’m here, this is what I want in my life—not to rule and govern and win, not to unite the country and build peace—that was my fate, that would happen anyway. For myself, all I want is to love—love for everyone, alive or dead, treacherous or faithful
, with their daggers in my back or their hands in mine, with their hearts open or closed, for me or against me. Even if I had to kill them—and I knew I would have to kill a great many people—I would do it with my heart full of love for them, because that was all I had. I am so full of love, I want only this—to be able to give it freely, abundantly away.
It’s the only thing you can learn from death—the value of life.
Sigurd slept through the night and into the next day, but Regin lay awake, his mind in turmoil. Inside the sheer black rock of the citadel everything he had dreamed about was waiting. Dawn was not yet lighting the sky when he was up again, trying to find the way in.
A slow but steady rain had fallen through the night, turning the site into a mire of clay. Regin had to squelch his way through sticky mud, sliding and tripping over the clay-slicked rock to get there. It was exhausting just moving about. He was tempted to wake Sigurd at once—they had to work fast. As soon as it was known that the dragon was dead, everyone would be there for a share of the spoils. But he let the boy sleep on. He wanted to investigate the treasures of Fafnir’s hoard on his own.
There’s more than one sort of treasure. As he approached the steel doors set in a vast crown of rock, Regin’s mind was full of measurements and ways of measuring, of subatomic chemistry, of genetic change, self-cloning, cell-destructive blasts, and the creation and manipulation of emotion and destiny through space and time. Regin was a scientist and an engineer. What he wanted were tools. Tools to change and be changed. Tools to make or break power. Perhaps even Andvari’s ring itself. Good luck, Regin! With such a machine, anything was possible. Despite its reputation as a curse, a device to turn things out wrong, he had begun to believe that if he could understand it he could make something he could use, a device with which even a skinny old pigman such as himself could become another Sigurd. Not beautiful, not young perhaps, but with the strange gift of loving, of being loved, and of always being the right person in the right place at the right time.