The gods and the warriors of Valhall advanced like berserkers onto the battle plain. They roared defiance – this was what they knew how to do – and the wolves, the snakes, the fire-giants and the frost-giants howled and hissed back, whilst Loki stood smiling in the leaping light of the red flames, which was all the light there was.
Odin advanced on the Fenris-Wolf, balancing his ash-spear, Gungnir. The wolf’s hackles bristled. His mean eyes glittered. He yawned. The god drove the spear into the gaping jaws. The wolf shook himself, snapped the spear, took three steps forward, gripped the great god, shook him, broke him, swallowed him. Wailing swept through the Einherjar. They staggered, fell back, and then advanced again, mute now. There was nothing else to do.
Loki’s children towered over the field, the wolf-laughter joining the hissing mirth of the snake. Thor, full of grief, threw himself at the snake with flailing fists and a thunderous hammer, breaking her skull. She writhed, fell and spat poison. Thor turned to tell the gods all was not lost, the snake was down. He lived for nine paces in the stream of poison she had poured over him, and then fell, dead.
There were other duels. One-armed Tyr, still in his wolfskin, fought with the hell-hound, Garm, until both were exhausted and beaten down, never to rise again. Freyer was despatched by the bright sword of Surtr. A young son of Odin, whose name was Widar, crept across corpses and stabbed the Fenris-Wolf through his blooded pelt. The wolf coughed and fell, smothering the avenger under his weight.
Loki watched the kills and killing of his monstrous children. Then, as the battlefield began to settle into a welter of bloody slime, he fenced with Heimdall, the herald, the far-sighted, both with the recklessness and eagerness of the doomed. They killed each other; their bodies fell across each other and were still.
The earth was Surtr’s. His flames licked the wounded branches of Yggdrasil and shrivelled the deep roots. The homes of the gods fell into the lake of fire. Grieving Frigg, on her gold throne, sat and waited as the flames licked her door sills and ate up the foundations of the house. Unmoving she flared, shrank black, and became ash amongst the falling ash.
Deep in the kelp forests Surtr’s fire boiled in the foundations of the sea. The holdfast of Randrasill ripped loose and its lovely fronds lost colour, lost life, tossed in the seething water amongst the dead creatures it had once sheltered and sustained.
After a long time, the fire too died. All there was was a flat surface of black liquid glinting in the small pale points of light that still came through the starholes. A few gold chessmen floated and bobbed on the dark ripples.
RAGNAROK, THE LAST BATTLE
THE THIN CHILD IN PEACETIME
The thin child stored this picture of the end of things, like a thin oval sliver of black basalt or slate, which was perpetually polished in her brain, next to the grey ghost of the wolf in the mind, and the gleaming coils and blunt snout of the snake in the mind. She read for what she needed, and chose not to imagine, not to remember, the return of gods and men to the refurbished green plain of Ida, which was related in
The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.
She had stored Ragnarok against the time when it would become clear that her father would not come back. Instead, one night, after midnight, when the blackout was still over the windows, he came back, unexpected and unannounced. The thin child was woken, and there he was, standing in the doorway, his red-gold hair shining, gold wings on his tunic, his arms out to hold her as she leaped at him. Walls of defence against disaster crumbled in the thin child’s head, but the knowledge of Ragnarok, the black disk, held its place.
They went back home, the thin child and the family. Home was a large grey house with a precipitous garden in the steel city, which had its own atmosphere which could be perceived as a wall of opaque sulphurous cloud, as they came in from the countryside to which they had been evacuated. The thin child’s lungs tightened desperately as the fug closed in on her.
There was something of Bunyan’s allegory about the places to which they returned. The old house was in Meadow Bank Avenue, an oval space like a long pan, from which a steep, narrow path sloped down to a place called Nether Edge. The thin child was quite a bit older when she understood the beauty of the words, Nether Edge, as opposed to just saying them quickly and thinking of the place where the butcher had his shop, with his hatchets and knives and bloody limbs of creatures, where the huge buses raced and boomed, where the stationer sold sherbet, newspapers and gobstoppers.
In the midst of Meadow Bank Avenue was a large oval patch of grass which was the Green, surrounded by a low fat grey stone wall on which you could sit. At one end was a group of tall trees, beech and oak. It must once have been a village green, where Blake’s children were heard at play. Modern children still played on it, but it had been immured in the spread of suburb.
The thin child’s father, in his spare time, which diminished as he became more and more successful, took to building a garden. There was a small flat lawn and a wash house, behind the house, and at the end of this exiguous lawn a wooden arch which the child remembered from the days of her infancy, an archetypal arch, covered with archetypal roses, red, white, sugar-pink. Under the arch the garden fell precipitately down towards Nether Edge. The roses had run wild in the war. They spread in thorny thickets like those in fairy tales. The thin child’s father, singing as he worked, curbed and trained them, fastened them to the rustic poles of the arch, licked his pricked fingers and laughed. He ordered stones from the countryside, grey stones like those which were cleverly built into the walls that kept in the moorland sheep. He began to set the plunging garden in order with dry-stone stepped terraces, holding in flowerbeds with lilies, Shirley poppies, rose bushes, lavender, thyme and rosemary. He made a pool from an old stone sink, in which swam tadpoles and a stickleback the thin child caught in a net on a picnic, a furious red swimmer she named Umslopogaas. It was a pretty garden in its newness, despite the soot in the air. The thin child loved her father, and loved the garden, and wheezed.
The thin child’s mother, who had been gallant and resourceful in wartime, might have been expected to find a happy ending in the return to the comfortable home from which she had been exiled. In fact she suffered what the thin child, much later, learned to call a fall into the quotidian. She was not a mother who had ever been any good at playing with her children, and the thin child could not remember her reading aloud, however inexhaustible the books and stories she gave the child. During the war, when she was teaching, she had had friends. There was Marian who
