surface so that the fish gasped, stiffened and floated upwards. She made lazy movements and swallowed, fat fish and poison together.
She swam on, meeting miles of floating jellyfish, pulsing glassy umbrellas, trailing fine poisonous filaments, all of which she sucked in, indiscriminate. The poison did her no harm. But it collected in sacs behind her fangs; it ran like quicksilver in her blood. She spat her venom into the eyes of porpoises and monk seals, blinding them, swallowing them, spitting out undigested stuff which sank slowly and swayed in the currents. Once, she dived and pursued a stingray, a vast, flat, smoky beast with a whiplash tail and half-hidden eyes. But something in its motion made her hold off, with her head poised to strike, and the ray, briefly, failed to hold its elegant shape. It dissolved into inky shadows, like veils, and re-formed as a small shark, oil-grey, grinning, and she saw it was her father.
Once, by accident, worming her way through the kelp forest, she came upon Randrasill and its underwater gardens. It is possible that the sea-tree was not always in the same place: the great snake had traversed the weed-beds many times and had not seen the golden fronds, the amber stipe, the gigantic holdfast. This first time, she was the size of an anaconda in the swamps, the fattest, longest anaconda there could be. Not far from Randrasill storms whipped up the surface. Not far from Randrasill underwater craters spouted crimson and scarlet pumice and thick black smoke. But here, everything was as it was, everything was abundant. Sponges, anemones, worms, crayfish, snails of every colour, ruby, chalky, jet, butter-yellow, sea slugs magnificently striped and mottled, supping up jelly from the fronds. Abalone were anchored round the holdfast, throngs of the shells in pink, red, green and the most succulent white. Sea urchins, bristling with fine live spines, grazed the thick algae and hundreds of eyes peered out between the sheltering fronds of the great plant as it swayed in the slow currents. Elvers moved like needles through cushions of sargasso. Jormungandr, lying limp, and staring with delight, picked out the sargasso fish, trailing coloured flags of flesh indistinguishable from the weeds, by its watchful eye, like a pinhead amongst the growths. There were sea-dragons, lurking in the wavering thickets; there were giant kelpfish, with bladed bodies like the thick fronds themselves. Above on the surface things had made nests from the kelp itself. Seabirds floated on cushions; soft-furred otters reclined in weedy hammocks, turning the abalones in their clever hands, sucking out morsels.
Jormungandr, this first time, watched almost wistfully. She could not enter into this magic thicket: she was already too fat, too heavy. She was like an onlooker, through a street window, staring in from the dark and damp at brilliantly lit treasure trove. She backed off. She bowed her monstrous head and turned away. When she next saw the tree she would be changed utterly.
She grew. She was no longer the size of any earth-snake. She was as long as an estuary, as a road across moorland. She needed more food. She sucked in krill, like the great whales, she swallowed schools of fleeing herrings. She went down into the dark. On the ocean floor were the corpse-coloured monstrous squid and the sperm whales that tore at them with heavy jaws. She was not ready to take on whales, though she ate the remaining flesh on a dead one, swallowing with the tangy blubber whole colonies of burrowing hagfish, their heads deep in the dead beast. She was prepared to take on the long, streaming squid, tearing off tentacles, driving her fangs into the pale eyes, sipping and swallowing in a cloud of ink in the dark lightless water.
She ate now because she was ravening. She was the length and width of a great river. She went round an iceflo and found herself in pursuit of a shadowy flickering beast that turned out to be herself, following herself. Her head which had been sleek was growing craggy and lumpen. She pursued a pod of orcas, who were pursuing a school of dolphins, all of them making arched surges in the cold water. One orca, a little apart from the group, was unusually glistening and polished, black and white, like wet marble. Its huge mouth seemed to be laughing, was laughing, and its eye was improbably ironic. Demon and daughter greeted each other, she with shakes of her snaky crown, he with whistles and clackings, and slappings of flukes.
Orca and snake fished together. They took big fish – the fat, slow, lazy cod, some the size of a man. They were prodigal feeders: they ripped out livers and eggs and discarded fins and bones. Perhaps the most amusing to chase were the bluefin tunny, a warm-blooded, sleek-skinned, speeding race, bright-eyed and shield-shaped, purple and pearly. They came across human traps for these beasts, cities of nets, with intricate entries, corridors and inner chambers, leading one way, to the slaughterhouse. The two of them ripped these houses apart, with fang and tooth and muscle, enjoying the rush of liberated fish, smiling at some, swallowing others. They headed the shoals and picked off the fish on the flanks. They caught seals as orcas catch seals, the black and white smiling beast spy- hopping, erect in the water, then lobtailing, slapping with its flukes, so that crabeater seals, leopard seals, basking on flat rocks, were washed away in the commotion of water towards the seasnake’s wide grin.
They played together and their play ended in crimson water and choking.
All this time she grew. She was as long as a marching army on land. She was as wide as underwater caverns, stretching away and away into the dark. She spent more and more time in the darkest depths, where no sunlight came, where food was sparse and strangely lit with glowing reds and cobalt blues. She came across mountain ranges in the water, and belching chimneys and columns of hot gas. She sipped at the blank white shrimp down there, and picked the fringed worms from their crevices. Nothing saw her coming, for she was too vast for their senses to measure or expect. She was the size of a chain of firepeaks: her face was as large as a forest of kelp, and draped with things that clung to her fronds, skin, bones, shells, lost hooks and threads of snapped lines. She was heavy, very heavy. She crawled across beds of coral, rosy, green and gold, crushing the creatures, leaving in her wake a surface blanched, chalky, ghostly.
Thor Fishing
She came up from the depths one day and saw a head as horrid as her own, a horned head with glassy eyeballs and a bloody stump, a head with a thick brow and staring nostrils. She raised herself, swaying like the spyhopping orca, and gulped. Inside the bull’s gullet was a hook, a heavy hook, a hook for dangling cauldrons. She swallowed it before she had time to see it. It yanked, it pulled, the deadhead went up and the snake-head followed after, bursting through the sea surface in a fountain of stinking spray.
There was a boat, a fishing boat, like many she had wrecked, by accident, in play. In the boat was a frost- giant, grey and silver and bluish, with a massive fall of icy hair and a huge sprouting ashen beard. Attached to the line, attached to the hook, attached to the bull’s head was a face as fierce as her own, black with fury and effort, eyes glinting red under thick brows, crowned with fiery hair and surrounded by a flaming red beard. Thor, the thunder god, hauling her in on a rod and line. Up she came, and up, more and more of her, towering like the mast of the boat. She fastened her sore mouth on the bait, and pulled. The rod arched and quivered. The god held fast and the boat twisted in the water. The snake shook her fleshy mane and hissed poison. The god glared, and tugged, and glared. The giant said, ‘We’re done for.’ The sky darkened, clouds piled into black banks, the snake twisted and hissed, the god held fast, as lightning split the cloud cover. Nothing had hurt the snake like this. She threshed the sea-surface and snorted. The line bent the rod, but strong runes held it firm.
Then the giant, whose name was Hymir, moved across the boat, which was full of slapping water, took out a great hunting knife, swiped at the line, and severed it. The snake bellowed and sank. The god, bursting with fury, took his short-handled hammer and hurled it at her head. It struck a blow. Her thick dark blood swirled in the seawater. Then the hammer fell on and down into the dark, and the snake went after it. Hymir said dourly that Thor would regret that blow, and the god swung his fist at the stony head and knocked the giant overboard. The god swam and waded to the beach. The snake rubbed against the rocks, trying to tear out the hook and the trailing line. She coughed up the deadhead, bashing her cathedral-mouth on razor-rocks, and the hook came out, trailing black shreds from her gullet.
