فصل 16

16

THE LAST DAYS OF LOKI

I

Balder was dead, and the gods were still mourning his loss. They were sad, and the gray rains fell unceasingly, and there was no joy in the land.

Loki, when he returned from one of his journeys to distant parts, was unrepentant.

It was the time of autumn feast in Aegir’s hall, where the gods and elves were gathered to drink the sea giant’s fresh-brewed ale, brewed in the cauldron Thor had brought back from the land of the giants so long ago.

Loki was there. He drank too much of Aegir’s ale, drank himself beyond joy and laughter and trickery and into a brooding darkness. When Loki heard the gods praise Aegir’s servant, Fimafeng, for his swiftness and diligence, he sprang up from the table and stabbed Fimafeng with his knife, killing him instantly.

The horrified gods drove Loki out of the feast hall, into the darkness.

Time passed. The feasting continued, but now it was subdued.

There was a commotion at the doorway, and when the gods and goddesses turned to find out what was happening, they saw that Loki had returned. He stood in the entry to the hall staring at them, with a sardonic smile on his face.

“You are not welcome here,” said the gods.

Loki ignored them. He walked up to where Odin was sitting. “All-father. You and I mixed our blood long, long ago, did we not?”

Odin nodded. “We did.”

Loki smiled even more widely. “Did you not swear back then, great Odin, that you would drink at a banqueting table only if Loki, your sworn blood brother, drank with you?”

Odin’s good gray eye stared into Loki’s green eyes, and it was Odin who looked away.

“Let the wolf’s father feast with us,” said Odin gruffly, and he made his son Vidar move over to make room for Loki to sit down beside him.

Loki grinned with malice and delight. He called for more of Aegir’s ale and gulped it down.

One by one that night Loki insulted the gods and the goddesses. He told the gods that they were cowards, told the goddesses that they were gullible and unchaste. Each insult was woven with just enough truth to make it wound. He told them that they were fools, reminded them of things they thought were safely forgotten. He sneered and jeered and raised old scandals, and would not stop making everyone there miserable until Thor arrived at the feast.

Thor ended the conversation very simply: he threatened to use Mjollnir to shut Loki’s evil mouth for good and send him to Hel, all the way to the hall of the dead.

Loki left the feast then, but before he swaggered out, he turned to Aegir. “You brewed fine ale,” said Loki to the sea giant. “But there will never be another autumn feast here. Flames will take this hall; your skin will be burned from your back by the fire. Everything you love will be taken from you. This I swear.”

And he walked away from the gods of Asgard, into the dark.

II

Loki sobered up the next morning and thought about what he had done the night before. He felt no shame, for shame was not Loki’s way, but he knew that he had pushed the gods too far.

Loki had a home on a mountain near the sea, and decided to wait there until the gods had forgotten him. He had a house on the top of the mountain with four doors, one on each side, allowing him to see danger coming toward him from any direction.

During the day Loki would transform himself into a salmon, and he would hide in the pool at the bottom of Franang’s Falls, a high waterfall that tumbled down the mountainside. A stream connected the pool to a little river, and the river led directly to the sea.

Loki liked plans and counterplans. As a salmon he was fairly safe, he knew. The gods themselves could not catch salmon as they swam.

But then he began to doubt himself. He wondered, Could there be a way of catching a fish in the deep waters of the pool beneath the waterfall?

How would he, the craftiest of all, the most cunning planner, catch a salmon?

Loki took a ball of nettle yarn, and he began to knot and weave it into a fishing net, the first such net ever to be made. Yes, he thought. If I used this net, I could catch a salmon.

Now, he thought, to work out a counterplan: what will I do if the gods weave a net like this one?

He examined the net he had made.

Salmon can jump, he thought. They can swim upstream, even travel up waterfalls. I could jump over the net.

Something drew his attention. He peered out from first one door and then another. He was startled: the gods were coming up the mountainside, and they had almost reached his house.

Loki flung the net into the fire and watched it burn with satisfaction. Then he stepped into Franang’s Falls. In the shape of a silver salmon, Loki was swept over the waterfall, and he vanished into the depths of the deep pool at the base of the mountain.

The Aesir reached Loki’s house on the mountain. They waited by each door, cutting off Loki’s escape, if he was still inside.

Kvasir, wisest of the gods, walked in through the first door. Once he had been dead, and mead had been brewed from his blood, but now he was alive once more. He could tell from the fire and from the half-drunk cup of wine beside it that Loki had been there only moments before he arrived.

There was no clue to where Loki could have gone, though. Kvasir scanned the sky. Then he looked down at the floor and at the fireplace.

“He’s gone, the sniveling little weasel,” said Thor, coming in through another of the four doors. “He could have transformed himself into anything. We’ll never find him.”

“Do not be so hasty,” said Kvasir. “Look.”

“It’s only ashes,” said Thor.

“But look at the pattern of it,” said Kvasir. He bent down, touched the ash on the floor beside the fire, sniffed it, then touched it to his tongue. “It is the ash of a cord that has been thrown into the fire and burned. Cord just like that ball of nettle twine in the corner.”

Thor rolled his eyes. “I do not think that the ashes of a burned cord are going to tell us where Loki is.”

“You think not? But look at the pattern—a criss-cross diamond shape. And the squares are perfectly regular.”

“Kvasir, you are wasting all our time admiring the shapes that the ash makes. This is foolishness. Every moment we spend staring at the ash is time in which Loki is getting farther and farther away.”

“Perhaps you are right, Thor. But to make the squares in the cord that regular, you would need something to space them with, like that piece of scrap wood on the floor by your foot. You would need to tie one end of the cord to something as you wove it—something like that stick jutting from the floor over there. Then you would knot and thread your rope, weaving it, so that one piece of cord would form a . . . Hmm. I wonder what Loki called it. I will call it a net.”

“Why are you still jabbering?” said Thor. “Why are you staring at ash and at sticks and scraps of wood when we could be chasing Loki? Kvasir! As you ponder and talk your nonsense he is getting away from us!”

“I think that such a net as this would be best used to trap fish,” said Kvasir.

“I am done with you and your foolishness,” sighed Thor. “So it’s to be used to trap fish? Well, bully for you. Loki would have been hungry, and so he must have wanted to catch fish to eat. Loki invents things. That’s what he does. He always was clever. That’s why we used to keep him around.”

“You are correct. But ask yourself, why would you, if you were Loki, invent something to trap fish with, and then throw the net you made onto the fire when you knew we were coming?”

“Because . . .” said Thor, creasing his brow and pondering so hard that distant thunder could be heard in the mountaintops. “Er . . .”

“Exactly. Because you would not want us to find it when we arrived. And the only reason for not wanting us to find it is to stop us, the gods of Asgard, from using it to trap you.”

Thor nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. Then, “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. And finally, “So Loki . . .”

“. . . is hiding in the deepwater pool at the foot of the waterfall, in the shape of a fish. Yes, exactly! I knew you would get there in the end, Thor.”

Thor nodded with enthusiasm, not entirely certain how he had come to this conclusion from ashes on the floor but happy to know where Loki was hiding.

“I will go down there, to the pool, with my hammer,” said Thor. “And I will . . . I will . . .”

“We will need to go down there with a net,” said Kvasir, the wise god.

Kvasir took the remaining nettle twine and the piece of spacing wood. He tied the end of the twine to the stick, and he began to wrap the twine around the stick, to weave it in and around and through. He showed the other gods what he was doing, and soon each of them was weaving and knotting. He attached the nets they made one to the other until they had a net as long as the pool, and they made their way down the side of the waterfall to the base of the mountain.

There was a stream that ran out of the pool where it overflowed. That stream ran down toward the sea.

When they reached the base of Franang’s Falls, the gods unrolled the net they had made. The net was huge and heavy, and long enough to go from one end of the pool to the other. It took all the warriors of the Aesir to hold up one end of it and Thor to hold up the other end.

The gods started from one end of the pool, beginning immediately underneath the falls and wading until they reached the other side. They caught nothing.

“There’s definitely something living down there,” said Thor. “I felt it push against the net. But it swam down deeper, into the mud, and the net went over it.”

Kvasir scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Not a problem. We need to do it again, but this time we will weigh down the bottom of the net,” he said. “So nothing can get underneath it.”

The gods gathered heavy stones with holes in them and tied each stone to the bottom of the net as a weight.

The gods waded into the pool again.

Loki had been pleased with himself the first time the gods had entered his pool. He had simply swum down to the muddy bottom of the pool, slipped between two flat stones, and waited while the net had gone above him.

Now he was worried. Down in the dark and the cold, he thought about this.

He could not transform himself into something else until he left the water, and even if he did, the gods would be after him. No, it was safer to remain in salmon shape. But as a salmon he was trapped. He would have to do what the gods would not be expecting. They would expect him to head for the open sea—he would be safe there, if he got to the sea, even if he would be easy to spot and catch in the river that led from the pool to the bay.

The gods would not expect him to swim back the way he had come. Up the waterfall.

The gods hauled their net along the bottom of the pool.

They were intent upon what was happening in the depths, and so were taken by surprise when a huge silver fish, bigger than any salmon they had ever seen before, leapt over the net with a twist of its tail and began swimming upstream. The huge salmon swam up the falls, springing up and defying gravity as if it had been thrown upward into the air.

Kvasir shouted at the Aesir, ordering them to form into two groups, one on one end of the net, one on the other.

“He will not stay in the waterfall for long. It’s too exposed. His only chance is still to make it to the sea. So you two groups will walk along, dragging the net between you. Meanwhile, Thor,” said Kvasir, who was wise, “you will wade in the middle, and when Loki tries that jumping-over-the-net trick again, you must snatch him from the air, like a bear catching a salmon. Do not let him go, though. He is tricky.”

Thor said, “I have seen bears pluck leaping salmon from the air. I am strong, and I am as fast as any bear. I will hold on.”

The gods began to drag the net upstream, toward the place where the huge silver salmon was biding its time. Loki planned and plotted.

As the net came closer, Loki knew that this was the critical moment. He had to leap the net as he had done before, and this time he would race toward the sea. He tensed, like a spring about to whip back, and then he shot into the air.

Thor was fast. He saw the silver salmon glitter in the sun, and he grabbed it with his huge hands, just as a hungry bear snatches a salmon from the air. Salmon are slippery fish, and Loki was the slipperiest of salmon; he wriggled and tried to slip through Thor’s fingers, but Thor simply gripped the fish harder and squeezed it tightly, down by the tail.

They say that salmon have been narrower near the tail ever since.

The gods brought their net, and they wrapped it tightly around the fish and carried it between them. The salmon began to drown in the air, gasping for water, and then it thrashed and twitched, and now they were carrying a panting Loki.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you taking me?”

Thor just shook his head and grunted, and did not reply. Loki asked the other gods, but none of them would tell him what was happening, and none of them would meet his eye.

III

The gods entered the mouth of a cave, and with Loki slung between them, they went down deep into the earth. Stalactites hung from the ceiling of the cave, and bats fluttered and flickered. They went down lower. Soon the way was too narrow to carry Loki, and now they let him walk between them. Thor walked immediately behind Loki, his hand on Loki’s shoulder.

They went down a long, long way.

In the deepest of the caves there were brands burning, and three people stood there, waiting for them. Loki recognized them before he saw their faces, and his heart sank. “No,” he said. “Do not hurt them. They did nothing wrong.”

Thor said, “They are your sons and your wife, Loki Lie-Smith.”

There were three huge flat stones in that cave. The Aesir set each stone on its side, and Thor took his hammer. He broke a hole through the middle of each stone.

“Please! Let our father go,” said Narfi, Loki’s son.

“He is our father,” said Vali, Loki’s other son. “You have sworn oaths that you will not kill him. He is a blood brother and an oath brother to Odin, highest of the gods.”

“We will not kill him,” said Kvasir. “Tell me, Vali, what is the worst thing that one brother could do to another?”

“For a brother to betray his brother,” said Vali, without hesitating. “For a brother to murder a brother, as Hod killed Balder. This is abominable.”

Kvasir said, “It is true that Loki is a blood brother to the gods, and we cannot kill him. But we are bound by no such oaths to you, his sons.”

Kvasir spoke words to Vali, words of change, words of power.

Vali’s human shape fell from him, and where Vali had stood was a wolf, foam flecking its muzzle. The intelligence of Vali was fading from its yellow eyes, to be replaced by hunger, by anger, by madness. It looked at the gods, at Sigyn, who had been its mother, and finally it saw Narfi. It growled low and long in the back of its throat, and its hackles rose.

Narfi took a step back, only a step, and then the wolf was on him.

Narfi was brave. He did not scream, not even when the wolf that had been his brother tore him apart, ripping open his throat and spilling his guts onto the rock floor. The wolf that had been Vali howled once, long and loudly, through blood-soaked jaws. Then it sprang high, over the heads of the gods, and it ran off into the cave-darkness and would not be seen in Asgard again, not until the end of everything.

The gods forced Loki onto the three great stones: they put one of the stones beneath his shoulders, one under his loins, and one beneath his knees. The gods took Narfi’s spilled entrails, and they pushed them through the holes they had made in the stones, binding Loki’s neck and shoulders tightly. They wound the entrails of his son around his loins and his hips, tied his knees and legs so tightly he could barely move. Then the gods transformed the intestines of Loki’s murdered son into fetters so tight and so hard that they might have been iron.

Sigyn, Loki’s wife, had watched as her husband was bound in the entrails of their son, and she said nothing. She wept silently to herself for the pain of her husband, for the death and the dishonor of their sons. She held a bowl, although she did not yet know why. Before the gods had brought her there, they had told her to go to her kitchen and bring the biggest bowl she had.

Skadi, giant daughter of dead Thiazi, wife of Njord of the beautiful feet, came into the cave then. She carried something huge in her hands, something that writhed and twisted. She bent over Loki and placed the thing she carried above him, winding it about the stalactites that hung from the ceiling of the cave, so that its head was just above Loki’s own.

It was a snake, cold of eye, its tongue flickering, its fangs dripping with poison. It hissed, and a drop of poison from its mouth dripped onto Loki’s face, making his eyes burn.

Loki screamed and contorted, writhing and twisting in pain. He tried to get out of the way, to move his head from beneath the poison. The bonds that had once been the entrails of his own son held him tightly.

One by one the gods left that place, with grimly satisfied looks on their faces. Soon only Kvasir was left. Sigyn looked at her bound husband and at the disemboweled corpse of her wolf-murdered son.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Kvasir. “You are not being punished. You may do whatever you wish.” And then even he left that place.

Another drop of the serpent’s venom dripped onto Loki’s face, and he screamed and threw himself about, writhing in his bonds. The earth itself shook at Loki’s threshing.

Sigyn took her bowl and went to her husband. She said nothing—what was there to say?—but she stood beside Loki’s head, with tears in her eyes, and caught each drop of poison as it fell from the snake’s fangs into her bowl.

This all happened long, long ago, in time out of mind, in the days when the gods still walked the earth. So long ago that the mountains of those days have worn away and the deepest lakes have become dry land.

Sigyn still waits beside Loki’s head as she did then, staring at his beautiful, twisted face.

The bowl she holds fills slowly, one drop at a time, but eventually the poison fills the bowl to the brim. It is then and only then that Sigyn turns away from Loki. She takes the bowl and pours the venom away, and while she is gone, the snake’s poison falls onto Loki’s face and into his eyes. He convulses then, jerks and judders, jolts and twists and writhes, so much that the whole earth shakes.

When that happens, we here in Midgard call it an earthquake.

They say that Loki will be bound there in the darkness beneath the earth, and Sigyn will be with him, holding the bowl to catch the poison above his face and whispering that she loves him, until Ragnarok comes and brings the end of days.