kissed and chewed and swallowed and fought and struggled and waited for the world to end, which it did not, not yet. They ate each other, of course, in the end.
The skies thickened and thickened. Things – Dises – leathery winged female things – wailed in the wind and perched on the crags, staring and screaming. Nidhoggr the great worm who gnawed the roots of Yggdrasil came out and sucked the blood from the dead as they lay in the freezing slime. From the Kettlewood, where Loki lay bound amongst the geysirs – which still spouted hot – came a louder howl of wolves, wolves in the wood, wolves padding over the snow, wolves with blood on their fangs, wolves in the mind.
Wind Time, Wolf Time, before the World breaks up.
That was the time they were in.
In Asgard the sheen on the gold was dulled, but the magic boar could still be eaten at night and reborn for the next feast. Yggdrasil was shaking all over, leaves were falling, branches were wilting, but the tree still stood. Odin went down to the well at its roots and spoke to Mimir’s head under the black ruffled water. No one ever knew what he learned, but he came back set and cold. They waited. They did not act, they did not think, perhaps could not think. Idun lay, curled in her wolfskin. The apples of youth were withered and puckered.
Under the ice the earth boiled. South in Muspelheim the age-old fires raged, and shapeless fire-creatures wandered, flamed and flickered, as they always had. But now hot rocks, a rain of searing ash, and spreading tongues of glassy lava, red-gold and spitting, turning to red-black and sullen, pushed their way through the hard earth. Red domes rose and rose, bubbling and frothing, breathing death gases, falling on forests, making firewood of them. Loki’s place of torment was called the Kettlewood because the stones that tortured him stood in a cave amongst boiling geysirs. Now these blew more and more furiously, spouting cinders, and the earth shook itself, like a beast in great pain, and the shapeshifter’s bonds broke. He stood there laughing amid smoke, steam and a whirlwind of tossed stones, and set off south, striding through chaos. He went rapidly through the sacred wood where the Fenris-Wolf was bound, and the soil burst open at his tread, and the trees writhed and fell and the magic rope, Gleipnir, made of the trample of cats, the beards of women, the breath of fish and the spittle of birds, shrivelled and fell apart. Fenris yawned and dislodged the sword from his bleeding gullet. He shook himself and his hairs hissed like fires. Father and son loped on, going south to the land of flame. Crimson cracks opened under their feet in the thick glaze of the ice. They laughed. They howled with laughter.
The guardian of Muspelheim sat on its borders. His name was Surtr, the Black One. He held a hot sword, too bright to look at, and black smoke swirled round him. He rose to his feet – up and up – and shook his sword and called, and the hosts of Muspelheim, with white-hot weapons and slings of flame, were on the march.
Odin saw them, from his high seat, Hlidskialf. They were roaring on towards a field called Vigrid, a hundred leagues in all directions. This was the moment. This was the beginning of the end. These gods were gods who had existed in waiting, waiting to make a last stand. Heimdall the herald rose up and blew the great horn, Giallarhorn. It had been crafted with this last great cry in mind. The gods rose up and armed themselves, swords, shields, spears, hauberks, glimmering gold, and the Einherjar did the same. Odin went down again and spoke to Mimir’s head in the black water, now further blackened with falling soot, which was everywhere. The great tree trembled and shook. The surging earth was loose about its roots. Its branches flailed: leaves were ripped off in the gale and added to the hot air stream: the fountain of Urd began to boil.
The gods went over the bridge, Bifrost, the rainbow bridge that linked Asgard and Midgard. They were damaged already, when they set out. Tyr had lost his arm to the wolf, Odin his eye to Mimir, Freyer had given away his magic sword, Thor’s wife, Sif, had seen all her magical hair fall away from her bald head. Thor himself, according to some poets, had lost the hammer he had thrown after the Midgard-serpent. Baldur had lost his life. There are two ways, in stories, of winning battles – to be supremely strong, or to be a gallant forlorn hope. The Ases were neither. They were brave and tarnished.
Yggdrasil drooped. Its leaves hung and flapped. Its roots were shrinking. The columns of water inside the bark were troubled and feeble. The squirrel chattered with fear and the stag’s head hung. Black birds spun away from the branches into a red sky.
The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.
The ship was launched in the east. It was a terrible and a beautiful ship, made of a material buoyant and dully translucent, the horny afterlife of dead men’s nails, culled as they pushed out, after the blood stopped. It was a ghost ship, bone-coloured, deathly grey, as though all the floating mess in the water, that would neither rot nor disintegrate, had coagulated and clung into this ramping vessel. Its name was Naglfar. Its helmsman was the giant Hrym. As a small child the thin child had imagined it like a schooner with ghostly rigging and flying pennants. Then she came to see it was a dragon-prowed, long-necked, long-bodied raiding ship, like a dead snakeskin made of layers of scales from the toenails, shining dimly. It was manned by frost-giants and fire-giants, both together, and dashed on in a cloud of boiling steam.
As the crust of the earth boiled and spat, the skin of the sea began to dance madly, with geysirs blowing onto the waves, which were full of floating death, shoals of battered glimmering fish, carcases of whales and narwhals, orcas and giant squid and sea-snakes, all boiling up and torn apart by heat and cold and raw force.
Then, behind the stern of Naglfar the surface of the sea rose in a mountain, immense, streaming, with shifting clefts and gullies, pouring with ripped seaweeds and grains of crushed corals. In the midst of the mountain was the horrid head of Jormungander, the Midgardsomr, the band of snakeflesh that held the solid world in shape. Up and out she came, uncoiling and driving, her fleshy mane towering, her vast tail rising from rock and sand, stirring the whole sea. Naglfar floated lightly on the maelstrom of her motion, and Hrym, the frost-giant, shook his axe to greet the monster. Her body was wound in ripped-up weeds and dead men’s ropes and chains, with the dead men still dangling and gaping. She began to writhe in the water, making purposefully for the battlefield, Vigrid. Like her father and brother the great snake laughed out loud, and poison dripped from her fangs and made flames on the crests of the waves. Vast surges of seawater overran the coasts, beaches, rocks, harbour walls, delta, estuary, marsh. The world was unrecognisable.
When the bond round the earth was loosed, other bonds broke. The hell-hound, Garm, snapped his chain and leaped out to join his wolf kindred. The sun in her chariot, and the moon in his, whipped up their horses in their everlasting rush round the sky. But the tireless pursuing wolves, joined by Garm, with crimson eyes and gullet, knew that their time had come, galloped faster, and fastened their teeth in the haunches of the silver horse and the swarthy. The horses screamed and swerved, and light in the world went mad, black, blazing white, dark as hell, lurid red. The wolves tore the throats out of the horses and turned to the drivers of the chariots, sun-woman, night-mother, moon-boy and the boy in the bright chariot of day. Somewhere in the middle air, as the chariots rolled in their fall, the wolves tore apart sun and moon, day and night, drank their blood and swallowed them.
The stars, it was thought by some, were an outer light, shining through holes in Ymir’s dead skull. But now, as the wolves began to lope, laughing, through the sky towards Vigrid, the light began to drop out of the stars, they fell like spent candles or dead fireworks, raining down on the burning and boiling earth. Fenris saw his sky-brothers and howled to greet them. He had grown. His snout scraped Ymir’s skull and his jaw lay along the singed earth.
