Mauve Wall. Above a gray cornice loomed a black-shingled roof, which had architecture of its own, allowing for an attic room or three and their concomitant windows. Movement up there drew my eyes, and I spied two enormous ravens perched on the eaves, seeming to look straight at me with equal parts gravitas and gloom. Each one of them had an eye that gleamed white.
“That’s an overdose of Poe, isn’t it?” I said.
The Morrigan, seeing the ravens, gave a short bark of laughter. “There’s no Poe involved at all. Use your head, Siodhachan.”
I remembered we were supposedly meeting members of the Norse pantheon and said, “You don’t mean he is here-”
The Morrigan slapped me. “I said use your head, not your mouth.”
“But how can he-”
I got slapped again.
“Right. Sorry.”
The Morrigan took a deep breath and closed her eyes, clenching her fists at her sides. It was the first sign I’d seen that she felt the least bit nervous about this encounter.
“How do I look?” she asked, and I wondered again at how she could be simultaneously so ruthless and insecure.
“Fearsome. Deadly. A bit delicious.”
She smiled. “You always know what to say. Let’s go. And, remember, no magic.”
Once inside, we were greeted with a large smile by the maitre d’, an impeccably scrubbed and barbered man dressed in black-tie livery. He ushered us to a window table in the Cleopatra Room, where waited none other than the goddess who gave her name to Friday. She rose to receive us.
Frigg glowed the way stained glass does; she had that sort of beauty, very colorful and beatific yet flat and gauzy with the suggestion that you’re missing quite a bit of depth. The question was whether the depth was carefully hidden or if it was simply missing.
She appeared cordial yet tense, like a little boy who’s being forced by his mother to be nice to his aunt Ethel or else, except that Aunt Ethel is the one with the hairy mustache and it’s all he can do to keep from screaming when she arrives and wants a kiss. The pleasant expression on Frigg’s face, with a ghost of a smile, didn’t reach her eyes; they were cold and unfriendly. She wore a royal-blue sheath gown circled with a wide black sash just beneath her ribs. Circling her neck was an extremely shiny something, set with enough diamonds to feed several families and a stable full of ponies for a year. I was about to check her out in the magical spectrum when the Morrigan grabbed my jaw and yanked it right to face her. She spoke in Old Irish so Frigg wouldn’t know what she said.
“Remember what I said about magic?”
“Not supposed to use any,” I managed to say while she had an iron grip on my chin.
“That’s right. None. But you were about to cast magical sight, weren’t you? See my eyes? They’re brown instead of red because I can’t use magic right now. Pretend they’re red, Siodhachan. I’m watching you.”
“Got it.”
She let me go and then I felt like the little boy, except I’d failed to greet Aunt Ethel properly and received a royal chewing out as a result. I blushed and muttered a quick apology in Old Norse to Frigg for my manners. “Call me Atticus, please.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said, then waved a hand at the chairs across from her. “Please, sit.”
I pulled out the Morrigan’s chair for her, and after she was seated I took the spot nearest the window. The sommelier showed up to welcome us to Statholdergaarden and discuss wine before we could say anything. Frigg ordered a bottle of Australian Shiraz, surprising me somewhat. It must have shown on my face, because she explained the order afterward.
“One gets so tired of mead from the teats of a magic goat every night. Not that I’m complaining about the quality-I dare anyone to find a better brew flowing from the udders of a she-goat-but one does need a bit of variety now and then. The food and drink here will be a welcome change.”
I was completely unprepared to answer her. Not only had I not drunk the same thing every night for centuries, I had never made small talk about goat teats before. I realized that my mouth had dropped open after the Morrigan reached over and pushed up on my chin. My teeth clacked together audibly, and then Frigg’s face turned crimson, realizing she’d introduced an awkward topic of conversation. The Morrigan seemed determined to embarrass everyone tonight.
Unsure of what to say, I kept silent and waited. I couldn’t think of a safe topic of conversation-not even the weather, because that might be interpreted as a reference to Thor. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or anyone else, and I didn’t want to earn another rebuke from the Morrigan for saying the wrong thing-like, for example, inquiring after the missing occupant of the chair next to Frigg’s. There was a place setting there, and Frigg had asked the sommelier for four glasses, but there was no other sign of the last member of our party. Unless you counted the two ravens on the roof.
I suppose there was a statistical non-zero probability that this could be a coincidence-two normal ravens just happened to be perching on the roof of a restaurant in Oslo where I was about to meet unnamed Norse gods-but I felt it was fairly improbable. It was far more probable that I was about to have an extremely uncomfortable formal dinner with two deities who had a long list of reasons to kill me.
Granuaile asked me once how it could be possible for all the world’s gods to be walking around without anybody noticing. The answer was (and is) simple: cosplay. Most gods cosplay as humans when they visit earth and do their best to stay in character. If they perform miracles here and there, they’re always small things that no one outside the local area will notice. But, more than anything else, they don’t show themselves because humanity doesn’t truly believe they ever will. We imagine them chilling out in their heavens or nirvanas or planes of punishment, and they’re generally expected to stay there. And if they’re going to work their divine magic on earth or pull a deus ex machina, then they act through surrogates or from afar. In a sense, deities are incapable of showing themselves because most people don’t believe they’ll meet their gods before they die. I am a notable exception to the rule. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed they could run into the Olympians, though, so that allowed Zeus and company to start all kinds of shit in the old days.
The silence lengthened. I couldn’t believe Frigg’s entire repertoire had been exhausted on goat teats and mead, but for the nonce, at least, her speech was on hiatus. Taking a deep breath, I employed the architectural- history gambit: “Why is this called the Cleopatra Room?” I asked.
The Morrigan pointed up. “The ceiling,” she said. Craning my head back, I saw an elaborate stucco on the ceiling. Back in Arizona, they just sprayed stucco on the outside of houses and called it an exterior. But long ago, back when this building was originally constructed, artists used it as a medium to create permanent bas-relief sculptures. This one-undoubtedly one of the finest I’d ever seen-depicted the suicide of Cleopatra, who’d famously decided to leave this world by snakebite. Seeing it made me immediately miss Oberon, because I knew he would find the opportunity for parody irresistible, and I knew what he would say if he could see it now, complete with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson: ‹Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking ceiling!›
“Beautiful,” I said, and hoped my smile would be interpreted as art appreciation rather than amusement at my hound’s fondness for movies.
“Yes,” the Morrigan agreed.
Our scintillating conversation was blessedly interrupted by the sommelier, who returned with the bottle of Shiraz. He poured a little out for our suspiciously missing homie, then left us to fill the silence once again. We had nothing, so we drank a bit and speculated about all the different flavors we could taste in the fermented grapes. The Morrigan opined that it had a layered flavor, stony but finishing with a lush reglisse. Frigg tasted spice, whatever that meant; I doubt it was an allusion to the planet Arrakis. I am not proficient in the language of wine, so I was just about to suggest there was a faint top note of mango chutney when Frigg’s eyes shifted over my shoulder and her expression softened. She rose from her chair, and the Morrigan and I followed suit. Turning to follow Frigg’s gaze, I saw a tall man in a tuxedo approaching our table. Gray hair flowed about his head and down to his shoulders, but it wasn’t thin and receding; it was somehow virile and imbued with badassery. The simple black eye patch over his left eye didn’t make him look like a pirate but instead communicated wisdom-precisely the prize for which he gave up his eye. It spoke of his suffering and his willingness to sacrifice-to stop at nothing-to
