One by one my brothers embraced me. Their flesh was rubbery, worn lifeless in the wind. The youngest explained that, cursed as they were, they must fly all day in the shape of swans, in the face of the sun, and never set their feet on earth or water. When night came, since they reverted so swiftly, they must find land—or fall, like Icarus, in a shower of useless feathers.
We sat on the shore, softened and white in the moonlight, in silence for a while. Their plumage, all around us, was warm and fluffed out with air. It looked very much as if we were in the wreckage of their attic room, in pleasanter, more innocent times, after an enthusiastic pillow fight.
But there never were innocent times. Now, as then, my brothers were animals. They were pornographers of the vilest kind; desire had no context for them. It was a raison d'etre, having nothing to do with identity. The pillow fights then would end as this feather shower was now ending: two or three were ignoring my presence entirely, were sprawled upon the bracken, one slipping another a length of his grubby cock, happy to be human again.
My youngest brother talked me through the night.
‘We do not usually come here. Today has been an unusual day, to return so close to our place of origin. We rest at night, in human form, on a little rock in the sea, far from here. We must huddle together. If the sea is rough, the foam spurts over us, but we cling on for dear life.’
‘Why did you come back here?’ I asked.
‘Twice a year are the days long enough for us to fly as far as this place. We come to see you, Eliza. We watch over you, and then we return to our rock.’
My guardian angels! Gabriels all, though you would hardly credit it. Most of them seemed vastly unimpressed by the business of the night, fingering and pulling at each other in the most desultory fashion.
‘We have been wrongly punished, our sister. You must break this spell.’
I let this settle in, implications coaxing their way through the deceptive silence. The surf’s gloating throb and boom, the grunting of the lovers on the freckled shore. I let him stew for a while. I owed them nothing.
But before dawn came I realised that I had no answer for Hilde. Which was the odd one out? There was no way of telling. The boys were set out like a debauched football team, smeared in each other’s juices. The youngest had left me still deciding whether to help their cause, while he submitted to a swift and surly fuck from another whose name, I am pleased to relate, I had forgotten. But they left me alone. Obviously they needed me.
So it was because I was none the wiser that I went with them. That morning, as the sunlight eased into the gloom and their silhouettes were broken up, smoothed out in its casual wash, I told them I would come with them to their rock in the sea for that day. Their torsos constricted, became round and pregnant bird breasts, their sculpted necks stretching painfully into white serpents. They howled as their faces were broken off into stubby beaks, their feet splayed into clumsy webs, their cocks reared up into their bodies. My brothers made a raft of their wings and closed about me in tight formation, carrying me surely into morning.
Justice? I’m not so sure what it is. When Valkyries succeeded in getting a chosen warrior to fall in love with them, there were always problems. They weren’t blind, those girls. Why, by the watersides as they were doing their fan dances with assumed swan’s wings and enticing old Ethelred or whoever, they were always aware of a certain niggling doubt. Odin would bring them to justice for attempting to articulate their desires. It isn’t fair, none of it is fair. Is Ethelred or whoever punished? No, but neither is he fairly exercising his desires. He has been hoodwinked by the feathered Salome from the skies. Odin was, in those cases, absolute. His not so tender mercies came like the thunderbolts that shattered the poor and virtuous Justine in de Sade’s tale. As I grow older I wonder about de Sade; was he such a monster after all? He opposed, with every perverted fibre of his being, the likes of Odin. It was on Odin’s instructions that the Valkyries would alter the course of great battles. Unseen they would stab, slaughter and whisper in the ears of their victims. But if a Valkyrie fell for a member of the away team, the team that Odin had decreed must fall… well, then there was a ruckus. Justice, you see, is a moot point. Who am I to say what my brothers deserved? Or Hilde for that matter. All I can relate, and not wholly impartially, is what they got.
* * *
We flew all day across the limitless seas. The land slipped away behind us, and I could hardly credit my earlier fear at being sent away to a school for bad girls. What fear could hold me now, aloft?
They were flying slowly, much more slowly than usual, as my youngest brother informed me. I was weighing them down and already, as we entered the latter half of the afternoon, there were mutinous squawkings in the squadron’s hindquarters; ‘We aren’t going to make it before nightfall. She’s brought us disaster.’
Curiously, I felt
