The Head of Mimir

by Richard Lee Byers - (ebook by Undead)

  “We can hope,” Heimdall said, “they’re only stories.”

  “Even if they are, nobody ever taught either of us to ride a flying horse. Wait, don’t tell me. We’ll figure it out.” Sif grinned, her doubts abruptly giving way to boldness in the way they often did. “And maybe we will. I know I’ve always wanted to ride a Valkyrie’s steed across the sky ever since I was a little girl.”

  “On to the barn, then.”

  They crept to the adjacent structure, where, as warriors obeying the exigencies of war, the Valkyries had turned out the abandoned cattle in the stalls to fend for themselves before putting their mounts in their places. As the door creaked open, Heimdall tensed and held his breath at the thought that the equines might raise an immediate commotion that would bring Quy and the other Valkyries. That didn’t happen, though. The moonlight shining through the door revealed the horses standing placidly, majestic magical creatures incongruous in such mundane surroundings.

  Brother and sister moved down the central aisle of the barn, and Heimdall found a roan steed with feathered wings sunset red and another horse that was black except for golden eyes and a golden mane.

  “These are the two that lost their riders,” he said. He saw no reason to affront one of the surviving Valkyries by taking her particular mount.

  “Are you sure?” asked Sif.

  “Fairly.”

  “Let’s get to it, then.” Sif eased toward the roan and swung open the stall door. “Hello, beautiful boy.”

  Heimdall did his best to approach the golden-eyed horse with the same gentleness. “Hello, my friend.” Nonetheless, the winged stallion whinnied and reared as soon as he entered the stall. Startled and dismayed, recalling how the steed had hammered the face of the downed frost giant with his hooves after the Jotun killed his rider, the Asgardian made a hasty retreat.

  Sif shot him an irritated look. The Valkyries had left the horses’ accouterments hanging on the wooden sides of the stalls, and she already had the roan’s bridle on. “What are you doing?”

  “He doesn’t seem to like me,” Heimdall said. “I don’t know why. I generally get along with animals.”

  Sif frowned. “The stories that only a Valkyrie can ride a Valkyrie horse may be false – let’s hope – but I doubt a male has ever tried to ride him before, and after losing his rightful owner, he’s not having it. Let’s see how he responds to me.” She scratched the roan’s withers with her fingertips. “Wait for me, beautiful boy. I’ll be right back.”

  With that, she entered the black steed’s stall humming a Vanir lullaby about a little girl and the pony that carried her to the Moon and under the sea before the two decided the meadows of home were best. The stallion snorted and permitted her to stroke his nose.

  “I know,” she crooned, “I know. My brother is an ugly, stupid man. But he has a kind heart, and he’ll treat you well.” She looked back at Heimdall. “Shall I saddle him for you?”

  “No,” Heimdall said. “If I can’t even get him ready to ride, I’ll never manage him well enough to get far from here before the Valkyries start hunting us. Just keep him calm for another moment.” He cautiously eased back into the stall and stood beside his sister. This time, the black stallion allowed him to approach. As he looked into the animal’s golden eyes, he fancied he once again saw understanding surpassing the comprehension of ordinary horses.

  “You just lost the rider you loved,” he said, “and I’m not what you’re used to. For all I know, someone taught you never to let someone like me on your back. But I promise you, your rider wanted the same thing Sif and I want: to protect Asgard, home to all of us, from its foes. If you’ll carry me, we’ll honor your rider by accomplishing her purpose. We’ll avenge her too, along the way.” He glanced at his sister. “Let me pet him.”

  Sif pulled her hand back.

  Heimdall stroked the black steed’s nose as she’d been doing, and the winged horse didn’t shy or try to bite. Instead, he nickered. “I think it will be all right now.”

  “Maybe so.” Sif returned to the roan.

  Heimdall found the black stallion’s saddle blanket and laid it across his back. The winged horse allowed it. “My name is Heimdall,” he said, crooning as Sif had done. “My people the Vanir will tell you I have nine mothers, but really there’s just the one mother who bore me and eight godmothers. It’s a silly way of speaking, isn’t it? I wish I knew the name your Valkyrie gave you, but since I don’t, I’m going to call you Golden Mane. I hope that’s all right.”

  The steed tossed his head in a way that might have been intended for a nod.

  When the winged stallions were ready with the two Asgardians’ packs, quivers, and bows secured to the saddles, they led the animals out of the barn, closed the door behind them, and mounted up. “Let’s ride them on the ground a little way,” Heimdall said. “Get used to them and get them used to us. Then we’ll figure out how to manage them in the air.”

  That, however, was not the way it worked out. He and Sif rode the horses away from the barn at a walk. Slightly in the lead, she then urged her steed into a canter, and he did likewise.

  The roan stallion’s wings beat, and he and his startled rider rose into the air. A moment later, Golden Mane and Heimdall ascended too. Apparently, the steeds’ nature and training were such that it never occurred to them that their new riders might want to remain on solid earth.

  Heimdall’s saddle and stirrups were essentially the same as those of any ordinary mount and suddenly seemed very inadequate contrivances to keep a rider from falling off. Pushing fear away, he told himself that if the Valkyries kept their seats, he could too, and forced himself to keep his head upright, his back straight, his weight evenly distributed on both seat bones, and not grip with his knees, all as his boyhood riding tutor had instructed. After a few moments, he felt somewhat more confident.

  Up ahead, the roan accelerated, and Golden Mane’s wings, like those of a raven grown to enormous size, lashed faster to keep up. Heimdall allowed the stallion to fly as he would, and they pulled up even with the red horse and Sif.

  His sister was grinning. “This is fun!” she called.

  Heimdall smiled back. “You know, it is, once you stop worrying about falling to your death.”

  “Do you think we’re far enough from the farmstead to study how to guide the horses?”

  “Yes, and we’d better. I don’t want to go riding into Jotunheim on a mount I’m not sure I can control.”

  He found that the familiar commands delivered via tugs on the reins and nudging heels worked well for telling Golden Mane to go right or left or faster and slower. The trick was communicating to the stallion that he wanted to ascend or descend. There was no way to discover how to do that except pure experimentation.

  At one point the black horse seemed to fall like a piece of stone. Some frantic pulling on the reins made Golden Mane level out, and in the aftermath, panting, sweating despite the ambient chill, Heimdall decided he hadn’t really inadvertently given a command that would prompt the steed to smash himself and his rider to bits on the ground far below. Rather, he’d stumbled on the way to tell Golden Mane to furl his wings and dive at a foe like a hawk plunging at a hare.

  Gradually he worked out what he needed to know. Where up and down were concerned, the black horse responded to light little flicks of the reins, the number of flicks conveying exactly what his rider intended him to do. Heimdall rode close enough to call to Sif across the intervening distance, told her what he’d learned, and she found that the roan responded to the same commands.

  With that, they flew north, still experimenting, but now to make the new commands second nature to themselves, and, if Heimdall was being honest, because flying and maneuvering in flight were truly exhilarating. The steeds performed what must have seemed to them all the unnecessary swooping and climbing obediently although Heimdall could imagine the moment wou
ld come when they’d exchange some sardonic comments in the language of their kind.

  “We made it this far!” Sif called to him. “Which means no more misguided Asgardians trying to take us prisoner. There’s nothing ahead but enemies!”

  She sounded happy about it, and Heimdall supposed it might indeed make life simpler. But it plainly wouldn’t make it any less dangerous.

  Seventeen

  Enfeebled by the cloud cover though it was, the light of dawn sufficed to clearly reveal the border mountains of Jotunheim, jagged snowy crags like swords up and up and up where, a year ago, a person would have reached the edge of Asgard and, had they been bold enough to stand at the very brink, peered over and gazed into the infinite gulf below. Now, thanks to the conjunction that was a recurring natural phenomenon of the cosmos, the Realm Eternal and Jotunheim sat fused together as seamlessly as adjacent lands on the same continent.

  Initially Heimdall had thought to fly so far above the snow-covered peaks that no frost giant lurking on them would even notice him and Sif, but it proved impossible to go that high. The cold was too bitter and the air too thin. It quickly became plain that the altitude was likely to kill both the winged horses and their riders.

  Accordingly, Heimdall and Sif had no choice but to fly through one of the mountain passes with walls of gray rock, white snow, and glittering ice to either side. He warily scanned the steep slopes and narrow, crumbling ledges and thus far had seen no signs of trouble. Maybe, he thought, with the frost giants on the offensive, pushing across Asgard and driving its defenders before them, the creatures had neglected to guard the ways into their own country. Given that the Jotuns had Mimir’s head to advise them it seemed unlikely, but anything was possible.

  “Now that we’re in Jotunheim,” Sif called, “I trust you know the way to the fortress of the frost giant king?”

  “I think so,” he replied, drawing on the reins to steer Golden Mane closer to the center of the pass. “Jotunheim’s not like the Realm Below. There are maps. Crude ones, but still.”

  “Then I’m glad you’ve looked at them,” she said.

  He smiled. “Someone had to give our childhood tutors something to do while you were skipping lessons to roam the fields and woods and practice swordplay.”

  “I did what a warrior in training… what’s that?”

  Heimdall looked where she was looking. A figure was peering at them from the shadow of an overhanging jut of stone with icicles dangling underneath.

  The creature was as big as a frost giant, but the skin wasn’t blue, and his proportions were less manlike, lending him a brutish, uncouth appearance to Heimdall’s eyes. His hide was a blotchy, ruddy pink, and he had two stubby little horns spouting from his bald head and only four fingers on each hand. He was wearing a brass-studded leather tunic, more clothing than many of the Jotuns Heimdall had seen, but appeared equally indifferent to the cold. He glared at the travelers with rage on his ugly, twitching face.

  If Heimdall wasn’t mistaken, the watcher was a storm giant. The chronicles his boyhood curiosity had led him to read both described the creatures and said they’d once dwelled in Asgard alongside the Aesir. Eventually, however, there was a war, and the storm giants lost their lands and relocated to Jotunheim. Not willingly, though. Their enduring hatred of Asgardians was notorious.

  This particular storm giant didn’t appear to have a bow, spear, or any weapons for that matter. Relieved by that at least, Heimdall kicked Golden Mane into what, for a common earthbound horse, would be a gallop. He hoped he and Sif could race on by before it occurred to the massive creature to throw stones.

  The storm giant shook his fist at them, and a frigid, howling wind sprang up to blow straight in the Asgardians’ faces. Golden Mane whinnied, and his wing muscles bunched as, to Heimdall’s dismay, the black steed suddenly had to struggle to make forward progress. Hoping to escape the effect, he sent the stallion swooping lower, but it didn’t help. The wind was blowing just as hard at that altitude, the force increasing every second.

  Sif snarled an obscenity, unlimbered her bow, and started loosing her few remaining arrows at the storm giant. Heimdall urged Golden Mane higher again and did the same. The attacks didn’t help. The screaming gale tumbled every shaft off target.

  The storm giant laughed a rumbling laugh and shook his fist again. Hail pummeled down with stinging force, the white stones the size of a child’s fist and growing larger by the moment.

  Grimly aware that he and Sif couldn’t withstand the painful battering for long, Heimdall drew his great sword and rode Golden Mane straight at the storm giant. Sif readied her broadsword and followed.

  The horned creature shook his fist a third time. Bolts of lightning blazed down from the clouds above to the snow-choked floor of the pass far below.

  For a terrifying second, Heimdall felt as if one of the thunderbolts had struck him and his steed. Then he realized his senses had simply been overwhelmed. The constant flashes were blinding, and the booming thunder was deafening. It started avalanches pouring down the mountainsides, and the rumble and crash added to the cacophony.

  Dazzled though he was, Heimdall thought he could still see where the storm giant was standing beyond the searing, stabbing brightness. Desperate, he kept charging – if Golden Mane’s struggling progress could be called a charge – toward the foe.

  The icy screaming wind blew harder still, so hard that Golden Mane strained in vain to stay on course. Then, suddenly, the black steed wasn’t flying any more. Screaming, he was tumbling like a gale-blown leaf.

  As the horse flipped upside down, Heimdall felt his feet slipping from the stirrups and his body starting to drop out of the saddle. Frantic, he kicked his feet forward, bent forward too, and flung an arm around Golden Mane’s neck. Thus anchored, he stayed with the winged steed through the next terrifying, nauseating spin and the one after that.

  Golden Mane lashed his wings. The moment was too chaotic and Heimdall’s sight too crippled for him to perceive how the black horse managed it, but suddenly he and his rider were upright again and stayed that way. He realized Golden Mane was flying before the wind, racing back down the pass the way they’d come, and he gave the stallion his head.

  Heimdall’s vision was a cloud of afterimages from the lightning strikes, and he didn’t see how Golden Mane’s could be any better. Periodically he spotted a vertical gray escarpment before him only when he and his mount were a scant instant away from crashing into it, and he desperately hauled on the reins to turn the stallion in time. At other moments, Golden Mane veered to avoid perils the warrior astride him only discerned afterward.

  As his eyesight gradually improved, Heimdall cast about for Sif and felt a jolt of fear when he saw no trace of her. Then she called, “Here!” She was overhead and behind him, and he’d simply missed her. His shoulders slumped, and he heaved a sigh of relief.

  They set their weary, trembling mounts down in the foothills that were the borderland of Asgard and ran up to the mountains. They gentled and praised the animals, and then, just as spent and frazzled themselves, sat down on the leeward side of a ridge that provided cover against the wind and any frost giants who might come marching out of the pass.

  “Thank the Fates you made it,” Heimdall said.

  “It was all thanks to Bloodspiller,” Sif replied. “He’s a good horse.”

  Shaken though he was, for a moment, the name roused Heimdall’s sense of humor. “That’s what you called him?”

  “He’s red, and he’s a warhorse. It’s a better name than Golden Mane.” Sif removed her water bottle from her belt, took a drink and then passed it over to him. The contents were nearly as cold as if he’d scooped up a handful of snow and put that in his mouth. There were flecks of soft mushy ice floating in the liquid.

  As he passed the bottle back, his sister said, “So. That could have gone better.”

  Heimdall grunted. �
��I think that’s a fair statement.” Thanks to the trials of the journey thus far, he’d been gaining confidence in his martial prowess. The prospect of fighting frost giants no longer seemed as daunting as it had before. But the encounter with the storm giant had been different. He and Sif hadn’t landed a single attack, and it was only luck that had allowed them to escape with their lives. He held in a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold.

  He suspected Sif was still as rattled as he was, but, as usual she was doing a good job of masking any such feelings. “I wonder why the frost giant king is holding the storm giants back,” she said.

  “We can only guess,” Heimdall replied, trying to match her calm, practical demeanor, “but he hasn’t needed them to win battles so far. So why not use them to prevent incursions into Jotunheim and otherwise keep them in reserve? I imagine they’ll turn up as an unpleasant surprise if the giants lay siege to the city of Asgard itself.”

  “Someone,” said Sif, “should warn the queen what’s coming.”

  “I agree. But even assuming Frigga would listen to us traitors, we can either turn around and tell her what we’ve learned, or we can press on and recover Mimir’s head. We can’t do both at once.”

  “Assuming we can even get into Jotunheim,” Sif replied. “Does every storm giant have the magic we were just facing?”

  “I think probably just the sorcerers and witches. But I don’t know how many of those there are. For all we know, enough to protect every path into Jotunheim.”

  “Even if there aren’t,” Sif said, “we have no way of knowing which passes they’re watching and which they aren’t. Or what defenses are waiting in any passes the weather workers aren’t protecting. Something nasty, I imagine.”

  Heimdall hated the thought of his sister daring one of the passes again. “It occurs to me that maybe we can handle both tasks at once. You can turn back and find a way to convey what we’ve learned to Frigga. I can keep trying–”