derange the heat and light of the sun, and give rise to violent winds, which would rage everywhere and destroy forests, and human habitations, and fields and plains. Coasts would be lashed and crumbling, and the stable order of things would shiver.
Jormungandr
The flung snake fell through the firmament in shifting shapes. With her spine locked she was a javelin, swift and smooth, her mane of flesh-fronds streaming back from her sharp skull, her fangs glinting. But she also fell in loops and coils, like a curling whip, like a light ribbon on the eddies of the air. She was angry to have been ripped from her kin. She was a sensuous beast: the rush of air pleased her: she snuffed up the scent of pine forests, heathland, hot desert, the salt of the sea. She saw its restless wrinkles, cream-crested, steel-blue, and met its skin like a diver, head first and the strong tail following smoothly. Down she went, through this new element, down to the sandy floor, stirring up eddies of grains, sliding smoothly between rocky outcrops. She was a land-beast, reared in the Iron Wood; she had played in dark green shadow, coiling in dust. She began to learn saltwater, feeling a new lightness in her muscles, floating lazily to the surface, like silver, like an elver, where the light caught her wet skin. At first she stayed in the shallows, breathing shore air through her blood-red nostrils, making her way through rock pools, sliding along the tidelines, snapping up crabs, limpets and oysters, cracking open razor-fish with her sharp fangs, flicking out the succulent flesh with her forked tongue. She took pleasure in detecting disguise. She noticed the scuttle of hermit crabs, crouching in abandoned shells.
Her sharp eyes, lidless in her sharp head, admired and detected dabs, sprinkled with sand-spots like the sand itself, two black eyes on a flat head like anxious pebbles. She admired the fine edge of the frill of the fin and tail, a shadow-line between sand-skin and sand itself. She blew at the sand, and hooked up the creatures with her spiked tongue. She loved, and sucked, and swallowed, and spat out the debris. She was always hungry, and always killed more than she needed, out of curiosity, out of love, out of insatiable busyness.
She grew therefore. And she grew gills, among her fleshy mane, until she no longer needed to surface for air, or visit the shore unless it amused her.
She had no particular disguise of her own, but in those early days she was hard to see, because her movements were swift and cunning. She was encased in smooth, glassy scales, under which her skin was black, and ruddy, and weed-green as the light caught it, deflected by the scaly armour. She took pleasure in lying in wait in the carpets and cushions of bladderwrack, moving with their sluggish movement as they moved with the tide, going in, sucking out, her coils randomly heaped, as natural as the wet weed, her crown of feelers like a vegetable tuft through which watchful eyes peered.
She played a game of her own in lonely bays. She swam out to the smooth bulk of water, lay along the wave and rode in with it, muscles slack, floating like flotsam or jetsam. When the wave rose in a crest, the snake rose with it, liquid eyes glittering like the coins of sunlight on the surface, arching herself to swoop down with the white water full of air and light until snake and wave hissed on the sand together and rolled idle. After one such plunge she looked upward and saw a cloaked figure, towering above her, a hat pulled over the eyes. For a moment she thought this was one-eyed Odin, come to torment her, and she reared her head back to strike. Then he turned, and peered at her from under his brim, and she saw that it was Loki the dissembler, Loki the quick-witted, Loki her father whose form was hard to remember, even for her, since it changed subtly not only from day to day but from moment to moment. He raised his hat, and his bright curls sprang out. He grinned.
‘Well met, daughter. I see you grow, you prosper.’
She coiled herself round his naked ankles. She asked why he was there. He said he had come to see how she did. And to study the wild waves. Whether there was a form in their formlessness. They came in, one after another, in a regular swell. But the water in them was wild, the eddies streamed every which way. Was there an order in the foam? The snake said that it played like needles on her skin, and that that was a delight. The demigod squatted down beside her and made a line of wet pebbles and translucent rainbow shells. He said he had a project to map the shoreline. Not in great regular half-moons as gods and men might draw this bay, to make a haven for dragon- ships. But small, stone by stone, rivulet by rivulet, promontory by promontory, even as small as these fingers, even as fine as a fingernail. A map for sand-fleas and sand-eels, for everything hangs together, and the world may be destroyed by too much attention, or too little care, towards a sand-eel, for example. ‘Therefore’, said Loki the mocker, to the snake his daughter, ‘we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know.’ He kicked aside his brief barrier, into the platelets of water. He listened with his fingertips, scraped away sand, tugged out a bristling lugworm, black and jerking, which he offered to his daughter, who sucked it in.
After this meeting she met him often, not only where the dry land met the water, but also in the depths. In her hungry journeys she brushed against human hooks, snaking down on long lines, and against cages and netted pouches out of which living things stared, furious, resigned, stupefied. She took pleasure in lifting a fat cod from a bent hook, or in ripping open a basket full of moiling bodies. Some cod she swallowed; some she watched shake themselves and swim away. She let a hundred herring rush from a net and snatched at the next hundred, biting and gulping, leaving blood and bones staining the seawater. Where a hook was impossibly intricate and manifold she rose to the surface to greet the fisher in his spray-streaked cloak. His nets were tied in complicated knots unlike any others; she would swim in huge circles round his boat, waiting for his call, and then rise, streaming wet, and laughing as snakes laugh.
They played a game of disguise and recognition. ‘Catch me’, he said, and vanished, leaving the dissolving shadow of his cloak against the blue sky. He was hard to find when he was a mackerel, a single insignificant mackerel, away from the shoal. A mackerel’s skin is a vanishing trick. Along its sleekness are lines of water ripples, imitating sun and shadow, cloud light and moonlight dropping through the thick water, imitating trailing weed and rushing waves flickering as the mirror-scales twist. He was there, this visibly invisible fish, and when she made a dash he was a patch of daylight, or nightlight, staining the water only, not solid. He led her to the shoals of mackerel, shimmering and speeding, and changed himself to a spearfish, a swordfish, to join the snake in the pursuit. The rushing shoal was like an immense single creature, huge-bellied, boiling, twisting and turning, green and pink and indigo and steely. The snake and the shapeshifter herded the wild fish for the sheer pleasure of the changing shapes of the turmoil. Then they plunged in, again and again, dividing the entity into spinning segments, catching at stragglers, supping them up, rushing the wheeling flank and swallowing the whole of it. The snake was always hungry because she was always growing. She had been like the muscle of a man’s arm, and then like a hard thigh, and still she swelled, one long hawser of pure muscle smacking the surface when she rose and fell, bruising the weeds as she pushed her way through, grinding the things that grew on the sea floor.
Her gaping jaw opened wider; her terrible teeth grew stronger and sharper, thickened by the swallowed skeletons and shells of myriads of underwater creatures.
She surged round the world, from icy pole to icy pole, or through the hot oceans under the burning sun. She swam under ice-shelves, in aquamarine tunnels and spyholes, fastening her fangs on the wings of a diving albatross, spitting out the matted fur of a plump seal pup. She swam in mangrove swamps, amongst the maze of roots in the mud, snapping up fiddler-crabs and mudskippers, spitting shell into the inspissated mess of mud, leaf skeletons, seaweed. She lay in the mud, staring up, and watched the shapes of humans, pouring poison over the
