Every day young men died and came quietly over her golden bridge. Only in Asgard could they die in battle every day, as a game, and live again to feast in the evening. In the hard world, and in the world of shadows, death was not a game.
But this death, said Hermodur, had diminished the light of the world.
So, said Hel. It is diminished, then.
Baldur sat listless and said nothing. Nanna leaned against his shoulder, but he did not embrace her.
‘Tell Frigg,’ said Hel, Loki’s child, hurled out of Asgard, ‘tell Frigg that Baldur may return if every being, every creature, in the heavens and on the earth and in the ocean and under the earth, weeps freely for him. Can she save him through grief, who could not protect him through love? If there is one dry eye, anywhere, Baldur stays here. As you see, he is honoured among the dead, and he is the chief guest at my table.’
Hermodur knew that he must take back this message. He knew also the shape of this story. But then, he thought, Frigg’s fierce will, and the ferocity of her love, and the power of her voice, may twist the shape of the story, and free Baldur to ride back over the bridge, where no man rode back. So he bowed his head, and Baldur opened his pale mouth and held out the magic ring, Draupnir, which Odin had put by his corpse. ‘Hermodur should take it back to Odin,’ he said mildly. ‘Hel is full of gold and silver. We have no need of this.’
Then the Ases sent out messengers, young gods and wise birds, horsemen and runners, with one message to the whole web of Midgard, living and lifeless, warm blood, cold blood, sap and stone, that they should weep Baldur out of Hel’s power. Dark Hodur wept in his forest lair. Cattle and sheep stood stolid and bellowed and snorted and wept. Howling monkeys and rambling bears brushed tears from their eyes; vipers and rattlers hissed and were still while the tears welled. Stalactites and stalagmites dripped; geysirs mingled warm tears in the boiling steam; the surfaces of boulders and outcrops sweated tearwater, as they do when they come from frost to warm weather. There was steam in the forests and the meadows from dripping leaves; the surfaces of apples, grapes, pomegranates, snow-berries and dewberries were slippery with weeping. The sky itself was full of thick cloud which was made of tears, and wept. Under the salt surface, in the kelp forest, the creatures crowded on Randrasill wept salt into salt, crown-of-thorns and purple squid, otters and slugs, whelks and winkles, made drops of salt water run into salt water. The lidless eyes of fish and the eyes of whales deep in blubber brimmed water into water and the sea level rose. So also did all quiet pools and rushy fountains, and even stone horse troughs inside which red threadworms wept for the brightness that was gone. Water climbed inside Yggdrasil’s channels and dripped from the soggy leaves onto the damp bark and the wet ground. The gods wept in their gold palace, even finally Frigg, who had been stony and tearless in her great grief. Tears lay like a veil on her face, a sheet of water like those that brim in the flooded grass round rivers that have burst their banks. The earth and the sea and the sky were one thing, which wept as one thing.
Except. Not the mistletoe, this time. Not anyone or anything forgotten through the negligence of the messengers of the gods. Something, or someone, encountered in a dark, dry, rocky hole in a black desert. The diligent messenger went in bravely through the weeping rockface, into lightless tunnels – still wet – and came at last to a black hole, stuffy, not damp, in which something vast huddled and swayed. Who was the messenger? Someone close to Frigg, maybe Gna her handmaid, a horsewoman who rode out over the world at her behest. The thing in the black hole made a sound like dry leaves, like tinder, its garments rustled and swirled. It was dry as a dry bone in a dry place, and its face was a dry bone face, black as its wrappings, with cavernous eyeholes and a lipless mouth full of black teeth. This, Gna thought, was some mountain giantess. She approached – quietly – and said she was come to ask the cave’s inhabitant to weep with the rest of the world, with the whole world together, so that Baldur might return to the land of the living and bring his light with him. She said, ‘Who are you, mother?’
‘Thock’ said the dry voice inside the dark bones.
The voice ground out:
‘Thock must weep with dry eyes
Over Baldur’s ending.
Neither in life nor in death did I have
need of him.
Let Hel hold what she has.’
Gna found herself out on the trail through the mountains. Everything dripped. She rode back dejected, and told Frigg that something called Thock would not weep.
‘Thock’, said Frigg, ‘means darkness, the dark. I do not believe your dry giantess was a giantess, any more than the old woman with the mistletoe was an old woman.’
The spring of the world was gone. There was a rainbow but it was watery and incomplete, patches of hectic colour here and there in the thick cloud, which never seemed to lift. The tides, swelled by tears, were irregular and unpredictable. Things on the earth drooped in their wetness which would not quite dry. Yggdrasil had stains of mould and decay. Randrasill was scraped bare, in places, by rasping tongues licking up tearwater. A kind of sloth was at the heart of things.
The gods decided that Thock was Loki in disguise. They blamed Loki for what he had done – the use of the mistletoe – and for many things he had not had a hand in, Baldur’s bad dreams, the wayward weather, too much wet, too much scorching, dark days, too much wind. He was an enemy and they decided he was
Loki’s House
Loki had a house in a high place, an eyrie on a cliff overlooking a wild waterfall, Franang, which hurled itself into a deep pool, which overflowed into a rushing stream. His house was simple: it had one room, with four great doors opening in every direction. Sometimes, in the form of a falcon, he perched on the rooftree and looked with eagle eyes in all directions for the chase he knew would come. The house was sparsely furnished; there was a great fire in the centre, under the chimney, and tables, on which the trickster spread things he was studying. Odin had acquired knowledge in danger and pain, and at the cost of an eye. Odin’s knowledge was the knowledge of the forces that bound things together, and of the runes that read and controlled those forces. Treaties were inscribed on his straight spear, torn from the living Ash. This spear both kept the peace and upheld the rule of the gods, who, we have seen, were themselves often referred to, by men, with words that meant bonds and fetters. Odin controlled magic, a form of knowledge that controlled things and creatures, including the societies of gods and men. Odin dealt death at a distance to those who displeased him. He interrogated the Norns, and the dead, and the powers under the earth, in the interests of the Ases and the Einherjar. His vengeance was fearful, and the sacrifices made to him were fearful. Culprits and enemies had their bleeding lungs torn out through their ribcages, making them into ghastly ‘blood-eagles’, twisted and dripping. No creature could meet his one eye. All lowered their gaze.
Loki was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and
