Read The Monstrous Child Online
Authors: Francesca Simon
The Monstrous Child (12 page)
ONIGHT, FOR THE
first time ever, candles flicker in my rain-damp hall. The hearths are lit and whale oil glows in the lamps, casting rays of light in the watery darkness. (Unfortunately, because misfortune tails me everywhere, that also means I can see my guests.) A poet waits before my throne, bony hands gripping his harp, about to play and sing at my
command. Barrels full of shining mead stand brimming and ready. Drinking horns are slowly being filled. Gold rings flash on the benches and tables and fresh rushes have been piled on the fetid floor.
I am holding a feast.
Modgud had suggested it after I told her all about my evil mother.
‘A feast?’ I said.
‘A hall-warming feast.’
‘You mean a hall-cooling feast.’
‘Call it what you like,’ said Modgud. ‘You’ve built a kingdom, raised a hall, welcomed so many guests. It’s always so gloomy and sad here. Why not?’
I’d heard tell of feasts. Of course I’d never been to one. But I had mead. I had gold. We could have singers and skalds like Egil, son of Bald-Grim, and Audun the Plagiarist, reciting poetry and telling sagas. I probably had enough plates and cups ripped from graves to lay before twenty thousand.
That brought me up short. Who would my
company be? Assorted skeletons and corpses … Not exactly crème de la crème. Not exactly a who’s who of humanity.
‘Would you come?’ I asked.
Modgud shook her head.
‘I can’t leave the bridge. But you’ll visit again and tell me all,’ she said. ‘What you wore. How your hall was decorated. That way we will enjoy it twice.’
A chance to be a tiny bit happy.
Why not?
I thought.
Why not.
So many silver spoons, so many bowls, so much gold piling up. Why not make an effort just once?
So here I am, covered in jewels, wearing furs and fine, soft robes threaded with gold and silver, swishing to the ground, enduring the
plinky plink
of a harp and watching my guests trying to dance without ripping each other’s rotting arms off. My servants, Slowpoke and Lazybones, move at their sepulchral pace filling mead horns.
Am I having a good time?
Do you really have to ask?
The glutton, unless he stands guard, will eat himself to death. No fear of gluttony here. No one will be racing for the buffet table and stuffing their faces. It’s a feast, but no food is offered. And yet the visitors will never, ever, leave.
What am I doing?
The skeleton skald rises to start his poem. That will pose a challenge – a skald is meant to proclaim poems to honour his chieftain and his glorious deeds. I allow myself a tiny smile as I wonder how the poet will contrive to praise me. For what? My beauty? I don’t think so. My kindness? Don’t make me laugh. And which great deeds exactly will he hymn? My grave-goods snatching? My pitiless reign? My kidnap by the gods and my exile here? Wait, I’ve got it! My shapely legs, the envy of women everywhere.
Yes, I’m definitely entering into the party spirit.
It’s far better, truthfully, that I am my own skald. They say all rulers must have one, for who else will sing their praises or scold them for their errors? Who
else will write their names upon the gates when they are gone? Yet my fame does not concern me. I alone, of all goddesses, am known to all.
No one
wants to know me better. I need no greedy poet to spread my fame. Somehow I don’t think you’ll forget me, poems or no.
But for tonight I am content to listen. Audun the Plagiarist starts with the saga of how the giants created the worlds – good move. If he’d begun by praising the gods, I’d have had his skull.
The dead gradually cease their dancing and gibbering, and pause to listen. My brooding hall is silent, except for the poet describing how Midgard was created out of the great void from the body of the giant Ymir. Yes, you heard right, a
giant
. Midgard was made from his skin. The sea from his blood. The mountains and rocks from his bones, and the trees from his hair. Look up! See the sky? That came from Ymir’s skull. Those little fluffy clouds? Ymir’s brains. (So every single one of you, still living, walks on a giant, eats food grown from a giant, bathes in water from a giant, lives surrounded by a giant.)
Just saying.
And who created the world of gods and people? asks the skald. Who was big enough, mighty enough, to kill a giant like Ymir, hurl his body around the cosmos and carve out Midgard from the slime with his flesh and blood and bones? Why, none other than Odin, son of the giantess Bestla, shaped the world. And using the body from his own kinsman on his mother’s side. That’s a family gathering I wouldn’t want to be at, he sings.
‘So where’s Uncle Ymir? Haven’t seen him lately.’
‘Uhhmm, dead.’
‘What do you mean, dead?’
‘Dead. We chopped him up …’
I am actually enjoying this poet’s words, telling the tale of my giant ancestors. Even the corpses grin. Though that could just be rigor mortis.
And then music strikes up, the benches are pushed back and suddenly everyone is dancing and stomping. Someone sweeps me off my throne and before I know what I’m doing I’m dancing too. Everyone wants to
dance with me. I drink a horn of mead, then another, and another, admiring my glittering hall as I whirl from partner to partner, closing my eyes and pretending that each one is Baldr, the music roaring in my ears and filling my soul.
Maybe my life isn’t all bad.
More mead! More dancing! I want more, more –
Then I hear Garm baying, louder than I’ve ever heard before. Crazed and frantic with fury, his yowls reverberate from his cliff cave down to my hall. I hear him straining and lunging against his chains, aching for the kill.
Then hoof beats. The pounding of an eight-legged horse is like no other. In Hel, it sounds like thunder. The frozen earth hums under Sleipnir’s hooves. My half-brother is being ridden –
I jerk to a standstill. The music stops. The swirling dead fall silent.
My enemy is here.
NE-
E
YE HAS COME.
Why? Why has he come? Why has he travelled down the gods’ rainbow road to the long, sloping path the fateless walk between Midgard and Niflheim? To join our revels? Impossible.
The hall is in uproar. The dead smell the heat of the living; they sense the presence of the Lord of the Gods,
Father of the Slain. I’ve never heard such shrieking, such wailing, such terror. Winds gust. The candles splutter and go out.
I stagger to my throne.
Does he mean to kill me? He means to kill me.
And I also realise that I don’t want to die.
I am frozen on my High Seat. I’m not a queen any more – I’m a terrified child. I can’t fight him; the old wizard is too powerful for me. If I brought my hall crashing down on his head, he’d walk away and I’d be crushed.
And then he does something very strange.
One-Eye stands at the entrance, holding Sleipnir’s reins and then
peeks
inside.
I sit very still. He surveys the hall overflowing and crammed with the dead, shields shimmering, gold decorating the benches. He looks – he looks afraid. And I don’t know why.
He says nothing. Then he vanishes.
I hear his footsteps, heading for the eastern door,
leading Sleipnir. I am shaking.
He hasn’t come for me. He has come to question the seeress, tear her from her grave and force secrets from her. That’s One-Eye, always seeking to control the present and the future with his ripped knowledge of the past.
I won’t let him leave me here. He can take me to Baldr.
I slide from my throne, abandoning my heavy furs, and haltingly make my way to the eastern door, cursing my legs, my stumbling gait. Never before have I so longed to be able to run. The dead scatter like scythed weeds, but I can only lurch slowly to the door. What are they saying? What am I missing?
I hear voices arguing and cursing one another before I can see anything through the choking vapour.
‘I am unwilling to speak more!’ shouts the pale spectre who was once my mother.
‘You are no seeress,’ I hear One-Eye bellow. ‘You’re a fool and the mother of monsters.’
I hear my mother’s gloating voice. ‘All the forces of darkness will gather at your doom,’ she says, before
sinking back into her grave.
One-Eye slumps at the mound, sleet swirling around him. His head is bowed, as if he is shouldering the nine worlds on his back.
‘Free me,’ I scream. ‘What harm did I ever do you? What harm is foretold about me? None! Take me back with you!’
One-Eye appears not to notice me. I am far from his thoughts. Whatever knowledge of the future he has forced from my accursed mother, it is not what he wants to hear.
He swings up onto Sleipnir’s back. Now I am begging and pleading, without pride.
I am an ant talking to a giant.
OMETHING IS
happening. My trembling kingdom shakes, as if my brother Fen is roaring and raging in his chains. Bones clatter to the ground. Jagged cracks tear open the walls. Benches slide and crash along the heaving floor while the chandeliers sway on their chains. The mead goat flees, bellowing.
Is it the end of the world? Has the doom of the gods crept up so quickly, without warning? Or is it just one of my brothers thrashing his tail?
And then again, another quake. And another. Thunderbolt upon thunderbolt. The shades moan and mutter, whining like wasps as they teem through my shuddering hall.
Something is happening. First Odin, full of woe, raises the seeress, and now this.
I question every new shade. Is the world ending? Why did Odin come? Have the giants attacked? Have my brothers escaped and avenged me? I can smell it, even here in my forsaken kingdom.
I, who have not felt impatience for aeons, suddenly cannot be still. I flit from my bed to my throne, and then back to my chamber, opening and closing my curtains till they moulder in my hands. I pace restlessly, as unsettled as any newly buried corpse.
Why can no one answer my queries? News travels so slowly between the worlds. Yet the slumbering wolf
misses his prey.
I cannot wait here. I go to Gjoll. Modgud is full of questions about the feast, then stops when she sees my grim face.
Modgud knows nothing. I want to scream.
‘Ask them,’ I say. ‘Forget their names – find out what cataclysm has happened.’
She does.
No one knows anything.
I join Modgud by Gjoll’s bridge. I shove her aside, and pepper the dead with questions myself.
‘Has the Axe Age come? Has winter strangled Midgard? Are there biting winds, ice, no summers in between?’
The dead shake their heads. ‘It is always the Axe Age,’ they moan, recoiling when they see me.
My shoulders are up to my ears. My black nails are bitten. I don’t know what to do. I am shaking with rage.
And then through the sleet I see something small
darting down the Fog Road, weaving past the trudging corpses. It gesticulates frantically, whimpering and bellowing by turns.
Modgud leaps to her feet.
‘I demand to see Hel!’ shouts a gnobbly voice. Then the agitated shade of a dwarf oozes past, screeching as he struggles to reach me through the swarming wraiths.
‘There’s been a terrible mistake!’ he wails.
Amazing. Even dead dwarfs have no manners.
‘I’m dead before my time!’ he screams. ‘If only I hadn’t gone to the funeral! I demand to go back where I belong!’
Oh gods, one of those. I yawn.
‘Boo hoo for you. Now get out of here.’
The dwarf sets his hands on his hips – or where his hips would have been if he still had any.
‘You don’t know what’s happened, do you?’ he said.
‘To you? I couldn’t care less,’ I said. ‘Look around you, dwarf.’
‘The great god Baldr is dead. Baldr, god of light, is dead.’