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12

THE APPLES OF IMMORTALITY

I

This was another time that there were three of them, exploring in the mountain wastes on the edge of Jotunheim, the home of the giants. This time the three of them were Thor and Loki and Hoenir. (Hoenir was an old god. He had given the gift of reason to humans.)

Food was hard to find in those mountains, and the three gods were hungry, and getting hungrier.

They heard a noise—the lowing of distant cattle—and they looked at each other and grinned the grins of hungry men who would eat that night. They came down into a green valley, a place of life, where huge oak trees and high pine trees bordered meadows and streams, and there they saw a herd of cattle, huge and fat on the valley’s grass.

They dug a pit and built a fire of wood in the pit, and they slaughtered an ox and buried it in the bed of hot coals, and they waited for the food to be done.

They opened the pit, but the meat was still raw and bloody.

Again they lit a fire. Again they waited. Again the meat had not even been warmed by the heat of the fire.

“Did you hear something?” asked Thor.

“What?” said Hoenir. “I heard nothing.”

“I heard it,” said Loki. “Listen.”

They listened, and the sound was unmistakable. Somebody somewhere was laughing at them, vast and amused.

The three gods looked all around them, but there was no one else in the valley, only themselves and the cattle.

And then Loki looked up.

On the highest branch of the tallest tree was an eagle. It was the largest eagle that they had ever seen, a giant of an eagle, and it was laughing at them.

“Do you know why our fire will not cook our dinner?” asked Thor.

“I might know,” said the eagle. “My, you do look hungry. Why don’t you eat your meat raw? That is what eagles do. We tear it with our beaks. But you do not have beaks, do you?”

“We are hungry,” said Hoenir. “Can you help us cook our dinner?”

“In my opinion,” said the eagle, “there must be some kind of magic on your fire, draining its heat and its power. If you promise to give me some of your meat for myself, I’ll give your fire back its power.”

“We promise,” said Loki. “You can help yourself to your portion as soon as there is cooked meat for all of us.”

The eagle flew once around the meadow, beating its wings in gusts so powerful that the coals in the pit flared and flamed and the gods were forced to hold on to each other to keep from being blown off their feet, and then it returned to its perch high in the tree.

This time they buried the meat in the firepit with a good heart, and they waited. It was the summer, when the sun barely sets in the north lands and the day lasts forever, so it was late in the night that still felt like day when they opened the pit, to be met with the glorious smell of cooked beef, tender and ready for their knives and their teeth.

As the pit was opened, the eagle swooped down and seized in its claws the two rear haunches of the ox, along with a shoulder, and began to tear at it with a ravenous beak. Loki was furious, seeing much of his dinner about to be devoured, and he struck at the eagle with his spear, hoping to force it to drop its plundered food.

The eagle flapped its wings hard, creating a wind so strong it almost knocked the gods over, and it dropped the meat. Loki had no time to enjoy his triumph, because, he discovered, the spear was stuck in the great bird’s side, and as the eagle took off into the air, it carried him with it.

Loki wanted to let go of his spear, but his hands were stuck to the shaft. He could not let go.

The bird flew low, so Loki’s feet were dragged over stones and gravel, over mountainside and over trees. There was magic at work, and it was a magic mightier than anything Loki could control.

“Please!” he shouted. “Stop this! You are going to tear my arms from my sockets. My boots are already destroyed. You are going to kill me!”

The eagle soared off the side of a mountain and circled gently in the air, with only the crisp air between them and the ground. “Perhaps I will kill you,” it said.

“Whatever it takes to make you put me down,” gasped Loki. “Whatever you want. Please.”

“I want,” said the eagle, “Idunn. And I want her apples. The apples of immortality.”

Loki hung in the air. It was a long way down.

Idunn was married to Bragi, god of poetry, and she was sweet and gentle and kind. She carried a box with her, made of ash wood, which contained golden apples. When the gods felt age beginning to touch them, to frost their hair or ache their joints, then they would go to Idunn. She would open her box and allow the god or goddess to eat a single apple. As they ate it, their youth and power would return to them. Without Idunn’s apples, the gods would scarcely be gods . . .

“You are not saying anything. I think,” said the eagle, “I will drag you over some more rocks and mountaintops. Perhaps I will also drag you through some deep rivers this time.”

“I’ll get the apples for you,” said Loki. “I swear it. Just let me down.”

The eagle said nothing, but with a twitch of a wing it began to descend to a green meadow from which a fire’s smoke rose. A swoop, down to where Thor and Hoenir were standing openmouthed, looking up at them. As the eagle flew above the firepit, Loki found himself falling, still grasping his spear, and he tumbled onto the grass. With a cry, the eagle beat its wings and rose above them, and in moments it was a tiny dot in the sky.

“I wonder what that was about,” said Thor.

“Who knows?” said Loki.

“We left you some food,” said Hoenir.

Loki had lost his appetite, which his friends attributed to his flight in the air.

Nothing else interesting or out of the ordinary occurred on their way home.

II

The next day Idunn was walking through Asgard, greeting the gods, looking at their faces to see if any of them were beginning to look old. She passed Loki. Normally Loki ignored her, but this morning he smiled at her and greeted her.

“Idunn! So good to see you! I feel age upon me,” he told her. “I need to taste one of your apples.”

“You do not look as if you are aging,” she said.

“I hide it well,” said Loki. “Oh! My aching back. Old age is a terrible thing, Idunn.”

Idunn opened her ash-wood box and gave Loki a golden apple.

He ate it with enthusiasm, devouring it, seeds and all. Then he made a face.

“Oh dear,” he said. “I thought you’d have, well, nicer apples than this.”

“What a peculiar thing to say,” said Idunn. Never before had her apples been received like this. Normally gods talked only about the perfection of the flavor and how good it was to feel young again. “Loki, they are the apples of the gods. The apples of immortality.”

Loki looked unconvinced. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I saw some apples in the forest that were finer in every way than your apples. Looked nicer, smelled nicer, tasted nicer than these. I think they were apples of immortality too. Perhaps a better kind of immortality than yours.”

He watched expressions chasing each other across Idunn’s face—disbelief, puzzlement, and concern.

“These are the only apples like this that there are,” she said.

Loki shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I saw,” he said.

Idunn walked beside him. “Where are these apples?” she asked.

“Over there. Not sure I could tell you how to get there, but I could take you through the forest. It’s not a long walk.”

She nodded.

“But when we see the apple tree,” said Loki, “how will we be able to compare those apples to the ones in your ash box back in Asgard? I mean, I could say, They are even better than your apples, and you would say, Nonsense, Loki, these are shriveled crabapples compared to my apples, and how could we tell?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Idunn. “I will bring my apples. We will compare them.”

“Oh,” said Loki. “What a clever idea. Well, then. Let’s go.”

He led her into the forest, Idunn holding tightly to her ash box containing the apples of immortality.

After half an hour of walking, Idunn said, “Loki, I am starting to believe that there are no other apples and there is no apple tree.”

“That’s unkind of you, and hurtful,” said Loki. “The apple tree is just at the top of that hill there.”

They walked up to the top of the hill. “There is no apple tree here,” said Idunn. “Only that tall pine, with the eagle in it.”

“Is that an eagle?” asked Loki. “It’s very big.”

As if it heard them, the eagle spread its wings and dropped from the pine tree.

“No eagle am I,” said the eagle, “but the giant Thiazi in eagle shape, here to claim the beautiful Idunn. You will be a companion to my daughter, Skadi. And perhaps you will learn to love me. But whatever happens, time and immortality have run out for the gods of Asgard. So say I! So says Thiazi!”

It seized Idunn in one taloned claw and the ash-wood box of apples in the other, and it rose into the sky above Asgard and was gone.

“So that’s who that was,” said Loki to himself. “I knew it wasn’t just an eagle.” And he made his way home, hoping vaguely that nobody would notice that Idunn and her apples were gone, or that if they did, it would be long after anyone would connect her disappearance with Loki taking Idunn into the forest.

III

“You were the last to see her,” said Thor, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Loki. “Why would you even say that?”

“And you haven’t become old like the rest of us,” said Thor.

“I’m old but I’m lucky,” said Loki. “I wear it well.”

Thor grunted, entirely unconvinced. His red beard was now snow-white with a few pale orange hairs in it, like a once-proud fire become white ashes.

“Hit him again,” said Freya. Her hair was long and gray, and the lines in her face were deep and careworn. She was still beautiful, but it was the beauty of age, not of a golden-haired maiden. “He knows where Idunn is. And he knows where the apples are.” The necklace of the Brisings still hung around her neck, but it was dull and tarnished, and it did not shine.

Odin, father of the gods, held on to his staff with knobby, arthritic fingers, blue-veined and twisted. His voice, always booming and commanding, was now cracked and dusty. “Do not hit him, Thor,” he said in his old voice.

“See? I knew that you at least would see reason, All-father,” said Loki. “I had nothing to do with it! Why would Idunn have gone anywhere with me? She didn’t even like me!”

“Do not hit him,” repeated Odin, and he peered at Loki with his one good eye, now glaucous gray. “I want him to be whole and unbroken when he is tortured. They are heating the fires now, and sharpening the blades, and collecting the rocks. We may be old, but we can torture and we can kill as well as ever we could when we were in our prime and had the apples of Idunn to keep us young.”

The smell of burning coals reached Loki’s nostrils.

“If . . . ,” he said. “If I manage to work out what happened to Idunn, and if I were somehow to bring her and her apples back to Asgard safely, could we forget all about the torture and death?”

“It is your only chance at life,” said Odin, in a voice so old and cracked that Loki could not tell whether it was the voice of an old man or an old woman. “Bring Idunn back to Asgard. And the apples of immortality.”

Loki nodded. “Unfasten these chains,” he told them. “I’ll do it. I’ll need Freya’s falcon-feather cloak, though.”

“My cloak?” asked Freya.

“I’m afraid so.”

Freya walked stiffly away and returned with a cloak covered with falcon feathers. Loki’s chains were unfastened, and he reached for the cloak.

“Don’t think you can just fly off and never return,” said Thor, and he stroked his white beard meaningfully. “I may be old now,” he said, “but if you do not return, ancient as I am, I will hunt you down, wherever you hide, and I and my hammer will be your death. For I am still Thor! And I am still strong!”

“You are still extremely irritating,” said Loki. “Save your breath, and you can use your strength in making a pile of wood shavings beyond the walls of Asgard. An enormous pile of wood shavings. You will need to cut down many trees and chip them into thin shavings. I’ll need a long high pile, along the wall, so you should start now.”

Then Loki wrapped the falcon cloak tightly about himself and, in falcon form, flapped his wings and rose, faster even than an eagle, and was gone, flying north, toward the lands of the frost giants.

IV

Loki flew in the shape of a falcon without pause until, deep in the lands of the frost giants, he reached the fortress of the giant Thiazi, and he perched on the high roof, observing all that went on beneath.

He watched Thiazi, in giant form, lumber out of his keep and walk across the shingle to a rowing boat bigger than the largest whale. Thiazi hauled the boat down the strand into the cold waters of the northern ocean and rowed with huge strokes out into the sea. Soon he was lost to sight.

Then Loki flew as a falcon about the keep, peering into each window as he went. In the farthest room, through a barred window, he saw Idunn, sitting and weeping, and he perched on the bars.

“Cease your weeping!” he said. “It is I, Loki, here to rescue you!”

Idunn glared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “It is you who are the source of my troubles,” she said.

“Well, perhaps. But that was so long ago. That was yesterday’s Loki. Today’s Loki is here to save you and to take you home.”

“How?” she asked.

“Do you have the apples with you?”

“I am a goddess of the Aesir,” she told him. “Where I am, the apples also are.” She showed him the box of apples.

“That makes things simple,” said Loki. “Close your eyes.”

She closed her eyes, and he transformed her into a hazelnut in its shell, with the green husk still clinging to it. Loki closed his talons on the nut, hopped up to and between the bars of the window, and began the journey home.

Thiazi had a poor day’s fishing. No fish were biting for him. He decided that the best use of his time would be to return to his keep and pay court to Idunn. He would tease her by telling her just how, with her and her apples gone, all the gods were frail and withered—drooling, palsied, quivering hulks, slow of thought and crippled in mind and body. He rowed home to his keep and went at a run to Idunn’s room.

It was empty.

Thiazi saw a falcon’s feather on the ground, and he knew in that moment where Idunn was and who had taken her.

He leapt into the sky in the form of an eagle even huger and mightier than any he had been before, and he began to beat his wings and flew, faster and ever-faster, toward Asgard.

The world moved beneath him. The wind blew about him. He went even faster, so fast that the air itself boomed with the sound of his passing.

Thiazi flew onward. He left the land of the giants and entered the land of the gods. When he spotted a falcon ahead of him, Thiazi let out a scream of rage and increased his speed.

The gods of Asgard heard the screech and the boom of the wings, and they went to the high walls to see what was happening. They saw the little falcon coming toward them, the enormous eagle so close behind it. The falcon was so close . . .

“Now?” asked Thor.

“Now,” said Freya.

Thor set fire to the wood shavings. There was a moment before they caught—a moment just long enough for the falcon to fly over them and to settle inside the castle, and then, with a whoomph, they burst into flame. It was like an eruption, a gout of fire higher than the walls of Asgard itself: terrifying, and unimaginably hot.

Thiazi in eagle form could not stop himself, could not slow his flight, could not change direction. He flew into the flames. The giant’s feathers caught fire, the tips of his wings burned, and, a featherless eagle, he fell from the air and crashed into the ground with a bang and a thud that shook the fortress of the gods.

Burned, dazed, stunned, the naked eagle was no match even for elderly gods. Before he could transform himself back into giant shape he was already wounded, and as he changed from bird into giant, a blow of Thor’s hammer parted Thiazi from his life.

V

Idunn was glad to be reunited with her husband. The gods ate of the apples of immortality and regained their youth. Loki hoped that the matter was now done with.

It wasn’t. Thiazi’s daughter, Skadi, put on her armor, picked up her weapons, and came to Asgard to avenge her father.

“My father was everything to me,” she said. “You killed him. His death fills my life with tears and misery. I have no joy in my life. I am here for vengeance, or for compensation.”

The Aesir and Skadi bargained for compensation, back and forth. In those days, each life had a price on it, and Thiazi’s life was priced highly. When the negotiations were concluded, the gods and Skadi had agreed that she would be recompensed for her father’s death in three ways.

First, that she would be given a husband, to take the place of her dead father. (It was obvious to all the gods and goddesses that Skadi had set her heart on Balder, the most beautiful of all the gods. She kept winking at him and staring until Balder would look away, blushing and embarrassed.)

Second, that the gods would make her laugh again, because she had not smiled or laughed since her father had been killed.

And last, that the gods would make it so that her father would never be forgotten.

The gods let her choose a husband from their number, but they had one condition: they told her that she could not choose her husband by seeing his face. The male gods would all stand behind a curtain, with only their feet showing. Skadi would have to choose her husband by his feet.

One by one the gods walked past the curtain, and Skadi stared at their feet. “Ugly feet,” she would say as each set of feet went past.

Then she stopped, and exclaimed with delight, “Those are the feet of my husband-to-be!” she said. “Those are the most beautiful feet! They must be Balder’s feet—nothing on Balder could be ugly.”

And while Balder was indeed beautiful, the feet she had chosen, Skadi discovered when the curtain was lifted, belonged to Njord, god of chariots, father of Frey and of Freya.

She married him then and there. At the wedding feast that followed her face was the saddest any of the Aesir had ever seen.

Thor nudged Loki. “Go on,” he said. “Make her laugh. This is all your fault anyway.”

Loki sighed. “Really?”

Thor nodded, and he tapped the handle of his hammer meaningfully.

Loki shook his head. Then he went outside, to pens where the animals were kept, and he came back into the wedding feast leading a large, extremely irritated billy goat. Loki irritated the goat even more by tying a strong rope tightly around its beard.

Then Loki tied the other end of the rope around his own private parts.

He tugged on the rope with his hand. The goat screamed, feeling its beard tugged painfully, and it jerked back. The rope pulled hard on Loki’s private parts. Loki screamed and grabbed for the rope again, yanking it back.

The gods laughed. It did not take a lot to make the gods laugh, but this was the best thing they had seen in a long time. They placed bets on what would be torn off first, the goat’s beard or Loki’s private parts. They mocked Loki for screaming. “Like a fox wailing in the nighttime!” exclaimed Balder, stifling his laughter. “Loki sounds like a weeping baby!” giggled Balder’s brother Hod, who was blind but still laughed every time Loki screeched.

Skadi did not laugh, although the ghost of a smile began to haunt the corners of her lips. Every time the goat screamed or Loki wailed like a child in pain, her smile became a little wider.

Loki pulled. The goat pulled. Loki screamed and yanked the rope. The goat yelped and pulled back even harder.

The rope snapped.

Loki shot through the air, clutching at his groin, and landed smack in Skadi’s lap, whimpering and broken.

Skadi laughed like an avalanche in mountain country. She laughed as loudly as a calving glacier. She laughed so long and hard that tears of laughter glittered in her eyes, and as she laughed, for the first time she reached out and squeezed her new husband Njord’s hand.

Loki clambered down from her lap and staggered away, both hands clutching between his legs as he went, glaring in an aggrieved fashion at all the gods and goddesses, who only laughed the louder.

“We are done, then,” said Odin, the all-father, to Skadi, the giant’s daughter, when the wedding feast was over. “Or almost done.”

He signaled Skadi to follow him out into the night, and she and Odin walked out of the hall together, with her new husband by her side. Beside the funeral pyre the gods had made for the remains of the giant, two huge orbs sat, filled with light.

“Those orbs,” said Odin to Skadi, “those were your father’s eyes.”

The all-father took the two eyes and threw them up into the night sky, where they burned and glittered together, side by side.

Look up into the night in midwinter. You can see them there, twin stars, one blazing beside the other. Those two stars are Thiazi’s eyes. They are shining still.