The union of two such attractive, dashingly heroic figures led to a decade of magazine covers and idolization; the storybook couple of the hyperhominid world was considered the marriage to emulate.
But it was all a sham. Despite the passion of the relationship, by 1974 the milk of loving-kindness had curdled under the heat of acrimony whose causes neither spouse ever revealed. Separating from his wife, Hector El Santo returned to Mexico to raise both his children in a remote Mayan fortress in the Yucatán. From that familial stronghold he rebuffed her ever-increasing attempts at reconciliation and rejected her ever-greater declarations of devotion, devotion that burned far more hotly during separation than it ever had during their togetherness.
Finally, in 1981, after seven years of separation, El Santo filed for divorce.
One month later to the day, Iron Lass declared the Götterdämmerung.
“I always wanted more for myself,” said Syndi, concluding her matriography, “than the barren, angry, cruel life my mother’d hacked out for herself. All she knows, Eva, is how to keep people away, keep people on the wrong end of her swords, how to keep herself cold and hard. Like iron.”
I turned to Hnossi, expecting rage. Instead I saw exhaustion: rust craters dimmed her appearance as if she were fading into a red dusk, the medical webs strewn across her seemingly weighing her down like steel cables.
“Inka,” said Iron Lass, releasing a sigh over thirty full seconds, as if the effort to form the words was a mountain-sized yoke, “grow up.”
Inga glared at the ceiling.
“Alvays it is ze same viss you. Vut do you sink zis vurlt is made uff, hmm? Nussing but canties unt sugar cakes unt parties unt dencing unt booze-soaked sex?”
“Oh, right! Because there certainly were never any parties or drinking or sex in Aesgard!”
“Joy unt luff…zese are illusions, my daughter. If you luff a men he vill alvays hurt you—if you trust a friend she vill stab you in ze guts. Life is hard vurk, drutchery, boredom, exhaustion. At its finest it’s honor unt devotion to higher ideals zan oneself, unt ja, higher even zan one’s family, vhich you could never see! You’re a demigoddess, Inka…You must rise to assume your true status. Beingk in an organization such as ze FOOCH means protecting mortal civilians, but not beingk like zem, not vallovink in zeir veakness unt self-pity unt ridiculous neet for ‘luff’—”
“Like you did?” said Inga. “So why bother devoting your life to protecting people you despise, Mother? Why not just abandon them, like you abandont Daddy and us?”
“I dit not abandon any of you! You all abandoned me, remember?”
“Even when you were with us,” said Inga, “you weren’t!”
The Battle of All Mothers, or, Not F*O*O*J but FOOI: Family of Origin Issues
Throughout their argument, both goddess and demigoddess walked the brink of discussing what I suspected was the trauma that had caused the greatest tragedy between them. For a daughter to side with a father following a parental separation, and then to develop two nested secret identities to sever her connection with her mother, indicated a profoundly violent amputation in the body of mother-daughter connection.
Despite Inga/Syndi’s paradigmatic divergence from her mother, Hnossi raised no objections to the biographical facts recounted by Inga. Nor did she say anything to rebut the charge that she both admired and despised the powerful males she pursued, squeezing from them whatever professionally nutritive juices she could before shoving them into the relationship composter, as her own mother Freyja had done before her and as Syndi would do after.
The sole counterpoint in Hnossi’s behavioral script was her adulation of Hawk King. Because Hnossi’s contempt for men had always become directly proportional to their desire for her, the Egyptian strong man’s unavailability to any woman only magnified Hnossi’s adulation of him, guaranteeing that the elder god’s death would crack valleys into the lowlands of Hnossi’s flattened affect. Arguably, the disruption of her immortal immune system that had led to her terminal condition could have been assigned in part to the psychemotional devastation caused by her true icon’s death.
But Hawk King’s allure for Hnossi went beyond his now permanent unattainability. Hnossi had inherited her mother’s magical feather cloak; while she could not transform herself into a falcon, in her possession the cloak transmuted into giant hawk wings. Hawk King had been famous for his impartiality, wisdom, and strict but compassionate leadership and guidance. His epithet among the supercommunity as simply “the King” spoke to the esteem in which he was held by all.
Unfortunately for Hnossi and her family, even while she’d admired Hawk King’s character, Hnossi had failed to manifest his kindly demeanor. She didn’t deny Inga’s charges that on their rare family “adventure” camping trips to Jotunheim and Pacari, Hnossi would become so enraged at her family’s refusal to follow her strict camping protocols (for instance, prohibitions against sleeping late or intrameal snacking) that she would go so far as to throw things at her husband—things such as boulders. Once when Hector failed to have the morning coffee ready at the instant of sunrise, she ripped down a butte and struck him over the head with it, terrifying the children, destroying their chariot and badly denting their iron cats with the resulting rubble.
Mothering had come no easier to Hnossi than had wifing; despite his nickname “Lil Boulder,” her son Baldur possessed neither superstrength nor invulnerability. Instead, much to his father’s delight, he was a brilliant painter and muralist who emitted scented paints from his fingertips as a spider would secrete webbing.
Considered by many to be a prodigy of Diego Riveran proportions, the eight-year-old took it upon himself to paint the entirety of Spectre Valley with a mural depicting the Mayan story of creation and doomsday.
