‘My word, you don’t ask much, do you? Oblivion — whose lure is deeper than rubies and gold, to be as unmindful as a stone — the gods grant that rich prize to so few who ask.’
‘I ask,’ said Loys.
‘I know,’ said Loki. ‘Your task here is to seek death. King Death.’
He could not tell how long they had been sailing. A long time, it seemed. A week? Many years? Under the moonlight his hands were strangely beautiful, delicately wrought. God’s work, he said to himself. God’s work.
The boat was slowing and approaching the bank. The night was windless, and the trees stood shining in the moonlight, as still as if the smiths of the emperor’s court had made them from silver to stand in the palace courtyard. The longship grounded by the broken wall, Bollason jumping ashore to tie a mooring rope around a stump.
‘Alight,’ said the god, ‘for a light, a light from which old grim guts cannot hide.’
Loys stepped onto the riverbank. The night was cool but not unpleasant, and the woods were fragrant, noisy with insects and the calls of owls.
In the wall he saw a single little lamp burning, others beside it dead and cold. He went to it. The flame seemed weak. He touched it and saw her — Beatrice in the frosty woods, her horse steaming in the dawn sun, Beatrice naked in the bed next to him, standing by the prow of the merchant ship that had brought them to Constantinople, the blue waters of the Aegean turning her eyes to turquoise. The warmth of the flame was like the warmth of her touch, the sound of the wind in the woods like the sound of her voice and the moon hung above him, like God’s eye, judging his worthiness to call her his wife.
‘The dead do not wait,’ said the pale god from the ship. ‘Make the needful action, that necessary gesture.’
Loys took another lamp from the wall. It was wet so he dried the wick on his tunic and upended it so oil ran onto the wick. Then he lit it off the flame of the single burning lamp. It flared, guttered and finally caught.
‘This is my lamp,’ said Loys, standing back from the wall.
‘Yet you will not use it to see your way.’
‘What will I use it for?’
‘What is a lamp ever used for? To banish darkness.’
Carrying his lamp carefully, Loys climbed back onto the ship, which pulled away from the bank and glided forward again. At first he thought they were bound for Constantinople, for the sky ahead seemed to bubble with black clouds and fires flashed and flickered in the far distance.
The shore disappeared. The white of the moonlit river faded as red, gold and blue replaced it, three separate streams of light playing beneath the keel of the ship, shooting rays from its spars and sails. Loys put out his hands to watch the beams stream from his fingers.
‘Where are we?’
‘Bifrost.’
‘What is that?’
‘The bridge between the realm of men and the realm of gods. The rainbow in its colours three.’
‘We can sail across a bridge?’
‘Is it less marvellous that you could walk across light?’
‘The women at the well spun light.’
‘They spin everything. We are an expression only of their spinning.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the lands of death. To the Dark of Moon plain.’
‘Who are these who travel beside us?’
Loys was aware of other shapes in the streams of light. Men? Spirits? Demons? He couldn’t tell. Some seemed like giants with burning heads, some like corpses with eaten-away faces and rotted eyes, some like misshapen men, stooping and running, some like giant women. Demons all, he was sure.
‘The enemies of death. They follow you and your light.’
‘I do not want followers like these.’
‘The world hears too much of wanting. There is no choice here. Only destiny.’
‘Where shall I go?’
‘Where you are fated to go.’
The streams of light intensified until Loys had to shield his eyes to see. A great roar, screaming and a smell of burning. Loys fell to the deck of the ship, cradling his little lamp as he did. The light around him was intense and even with his eyes tight shut he saw red on the inside of his eyelids. The roaring grew louder and louder, and he recognised it for the sound of battle — the monstrous smithy sound of steel on steel, thumps and crashes along with the stink of earth and fire. The longship smashed into solid ground, and Loys was thrown out, the impact as he landed driving all breath from him. A taste of ash and grit was in his mouth. Miraculously the little lamp he’d carried from the wall was still in his hands.
When he opened his eyes he saw its light still burned, but the world was wild.
53
He lay in the mouth of a great cave in a hillside. Below him was a starlit plain. In the far distance a gigantic city, its walls even greater than those of Constantinople, burned like a night sun. The fierce fire reddened the clouds above it, as if the sky was a beast with a wound in its side. Closer to him, Bollason and some Vikings fought a huge red-bearded man who swung a terrible war hammer. Bollason was fast for a big man, and danced, ducked and thrust as the hammer thundered above his head, around him, past him, never quite touching him. Elsewhere a twisted figure, the one-eyed fellow he’d seen in the well, his body stained and tattooed, his one eye mad with battle lust, a spear in his hand, thrust at enemies three times his size who attempted to pluck him from his horse. The horse! It had eight legs and kicked and bit at the giants as its rider thrust with his spear. One of the giants was engulfed by flame but fought as though it was no bother to him at all, another bore a terrible sword and cut at the rider but could not hit him. Loys realised the rider and the man with the hammer were not simply trying to defeat their opponents, they were trying to get at him.
He became aware of a deep animal stink behind him.
Just inside the cave was what he first took for a pile of rubble, but his eyes only took a moment to adjust. It was not a heap of stones but an animal, an immense wolf as long as five men from nose to tail and so bulky its side rose to twice Loys’ height. The wolf was tied with fine threads almost like spider silk, which cut and marked its flesh. It strained against the threads as if in a delirium, its green eyes vacant, its tongue lolling. A stream of drool dripped from its mouth, which was propped open by a good thick sword. It was bound to a huge black rock that reached up into the cave, a terrible thing. The wolf had rubbed a big sore into its side and its blood glittered in the light of the burning city.
Beside Loys was the woman with the burned face, the one he’d seen drowned at the well.
‘The threads,’ she said. ‘Burn through the threads.’
‘How are you here?’
‘I found a way to die. Now burn through the threads.’
‘Why?’
‘So the story will end. So the cycle of agony will end. Your lover will be free of what has hunted her all those years. Free of the past — of me, for that is what I am.’
‘Those men down the hill will kill me.’
‘They are gods and they will fight there forever unless you release the wolf or step out of the cave.’
‘Then I might stay here for ever.’
‘Then your lover will die.’
‘My lover is dead.’
‘I think so. She will die again and again, as horribly, if you do not act.’
