Ragnarok

the hot gave them blood and colour. So the three killer-gods became the three lifegivers, supposing, the thin child thought, that Wili and We who had disappeared from the story, had simply been replaced by Honir and Loki. There were always three, it was a rule of stories, both of myths and fairy tales. It was the Rule of Three. In the Christian story the three are the cross grandfather, the tortured good man, and the white bird with beating wings. Here in this account of the world Odin was a maker, and the others too, to make up three.

The thin child imagined the new woodman and new woodwoman. Their skin was sleek, like new bark, their eyes were bright like watchful birds, they moved fingers and toes in slow surprise, like chickens or snakes emerging from eggs, stumbling a little as they learned to walk. They opened their mouths to smile at each other. They had eaten nothing; they were dead vegetable matter; but their mouths full of new strong white teeth included the canine spikes of the meat-eater, the wolf in the head.

No more is known of the joys or fates of Ask and Embla. Like many things in this tale, they hold together for a brief time, and then return to gaping darkness. But Odin, the god, was a mover of the story. Loki too, if the third wandering god was indeed that trickster, as the thin child liked to believe he was, for it strengthened the links of the chain of the tale if he was there at the making of men.

The thin child walked through the fair field in all weathers, her satchel of books and pens, with the gas-mask hanging from it, like Christian’s burden when he walked in the fields, reading in his Book. She thought long and hard, as she walked, about the meaning of belief. She did not believe the stories in Asgard and the Gods. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive. She read the Greek stories at school, and said to herself that there had once been people who brought ‘belief’ to these capricious and quarrelsome gods and goddesses, but she herself read them as she read fairy stories. Puss in Boots, Baba Yaga, brownies, pucks and fairies, foolish and dangerous, nymphs, dryads, hydras and the white winged horse, Pegasus, all these offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be. But they didn’t live in her, and she didn’t live in them.

The church had a real wicket-gate, like the one in Pilgrim’s Progress, where it was written, Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Through that gate she trotted, put down satchel and mask, and took up the burden of being required to believe what she could not believe – and, she knew, deep in the hollows of her head and body, in her wheezing lungs and space behind the eyes, did not want to believe. Bunyan would have found some horrible punishment for her, some slippery slide into a cauldron of boiling fat, some clawed fiend who would carry her away over the crowns of the woods.

The vicar talked gently of gentle Jesus and she felt rude not to believe him.

What was alive in the clean stony place that smelled of brass polish, wood polish, was the English language. Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.

The thin child knew these words by heart. Sometimes she chanted them as she walked along beside the hedgerow, stressing the words for the rhythm, imagining the lost sheep bleating and peering about in a grey field. But the creed she could not say. She believed in neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost. She tried to say the words and felt like the bad daughter in the fairy tale, whose throat and mouth were full of wriggling frogs and toads.

She made herself a myth of meadows as she hurried to school and loitered in long afternoons on the way back. They sang, in the church, in the school:

Daisies are our silver,

Buttercups our gold:

This is all the treasure

We can have or hold.

Raindrops are our diamonds

And the morning dew;

While for shining sapphires

We’ve the speedwell blue.

She liked seeing, and learning, and naming things. Daisies. Day’s eyes, she learned with a frisson of pleasure. Buttercups, glossy yellow, a lovelier colour than gold, and the ubiquitous dandelions, fiercely yellow with toothed leaves and seedheads finer than wool, their seeds black dots like the tadpoles in the clouds of jelly-spheres in the pond. In spring the field was thick with cowslips, and in the hedgerows, in the tangled bank, under the hawthorn hedge and the ash tree, there were pale primroses and violets of many colours, from rich purple to a white touched with mauve. Dandelion, dent-de-lion, lionstooth, her mother told her. Her mother liked words. There were vetches and lady’s bedstraw, forgetmenots and speedwells, foxgloves, viper’s bugloss, cow parsley, deadly nightshade (wreathed in the hedges), willowherb and cranesbill, hairy bitter-cress, docks (good for wounds and stings), celan- dines, campions and ragged robin. She watched each one, as they came out, in clumps sprinkled across the grass, or singletons hidden in ditches or attached to stones.

The tangled bank was full of life, most of it unseen, though it could be heard, rustling in dead leaves, or listening to the child listening. You could hear the attention of a hidden bird, or a crouching vole. She watched the spiders weave their perfect geometrical traps, or lurk under an inviting thick silk funnel. There were, at different times of the year, clouds of butterflies, yellow and white, blue, orange and velvet black. The fields were full of sipping, humming bees. The branches and the sky were inhabited by birds. The skylark went up and up out of the bare earth into the blue sky, singing. Thrushes banged snails against stones and left a crackling carpet of empty shells. Rooks strode and cawed and gathered in glossy parliaments in the tree-tops. Huge clouds of starlings went overhead wheeling like one black wing, coiling like smoke. Plovers called.

The thin child fished in the pond for tadpoles and tiddlers, of which there was an endless multitude. She gathered great bunches of wild flowers, cowslips full of honey, scabious in blue cushions, dog-roses, and took them home, where they did not live long, which did not concern her, for there were always more springing up in their place. They flourished and faded and died and always came back next spring, and always would, the thin child thought, long after she herself was dead. Maybe most of all she loved the wild poppies, which made the green bank scarlet as blood. She liked to pick a bud that was fat and ready to open, green-lipped and hairy. Then with her fingers she would prise the petal-case apart, and extract the red, crumpled silk – slightly damp, she thought – and spread it out in the sunlight. She knew in her heart she should not do this. She was cutting a life short, interrupting a natural unfolding, for the pleasure of satisfied curiosity and the glimpse of the secret, scarlet, creased and frilly flower-flesh. Which wilted almost immediately between finger and thumb. But there were always more, so many more. It was all one thing, the field, the hedge, the ash tree, the tangled bank, the trodden path, the innumerable forms of life, of which the thin child, having put down her bundle and gas-mask, was only one among many.