In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  They were behaving like arguing lovers he realized. “Just looking,” he’d said to Sarah. “There’s no harm in just looking.” But Karla had been looking back, and he knew it, and she knew it. He’d anticipated being given a key so he could slip upstairs some night. He’d even thought about taking an antihistamine to deal with her perfume. They’d been leading each other on, in a way. Neither of them had actually done anything, it wasn’t like he’d been sliding his hand up her skirt, but both of them had been thinking that something might happen. He’d heard that Horst had to go into the city to the hospital every so often. Frenchie took him in, dropped him off and picked him up in a couple of days. Tom had half wondered if that would be a possible night, and he wasn’t sure what he’d do if Karla did slip a key into his hand. Shit, he thought, he was just window-shopping.

  Freyja came by that evening at 6:45. He was ready. He’d put on a clean pair of tan jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt. He put on a white panama that he hadn’t worn in a long time.

  “Nice,” Freyja said. “Classy. Have you got something to take as a sacrificial offering? A gift of appreciation for the invitation?”

  “I never thought of it,” he said. “I didn’t ask to be invited. I don’t know them.”

  “That’s not the point. They know you. They’re giving you an audience. One of them knows everything about the past. One knows about the present. One plans for the future.”

  “You’re mocking them.”

  “A little. They’re okay. It’s just they take themselves a bit too seriously. You know, the we’re-one-hundred-per-cent-Icelandic thing. We can trace our ancestral line back to 894. We’re of royal blood. We have seven bishops, eight goði and one hundred and eleven poets in our lineage. We are related to Erik the Red, Leif the Lucky and Snorri Sturluson.”

  “My father was a direct descendent of King Arthur and Canute,” he said, replying to her exaggeration with his own, but his voice still had an annoyed edge to it. “My great-great-whatever sat on Shakespeare’s lap. William Wordsworth wrote his poems on their kitchen table. Ancestors are not an accomplishment. You don’t get to choose your parents. You don’t get credit or blame for your parents. My kids aren’t responsible for me.”

  “Shhh,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “Your genetic inheritance is the reason for the invitation. Not everyone is called into their presence.”

  “A gift?”

  “Yes, have you something sweet?”

  He thought for a moment and said, “Peanut butter cookies.”

  “We’ll have to divide them into three packages. One package for each. They’ll squabble over them if we just bring a dozen in one package.”

  She went to a closet in the smallest bedroom and came back with Christmas paper, a bag of coloured ribbons and a paper bag with Santa Claus on it. Santa had bright red cheeks and an enormous white beard, but someone had drawn spectacles around his eyes with a dark pen.

  “Is it necessary?”

  “When in Rome,” she said. She made three tidy packages and tied one with red ribbon, another with green and the third with blue. She put them all into the Santa Claus gift bag.

  “Christmas?” he said.

  “Every day.”

  “The Norns,” he said. “What do they do?”

  “They don’t just weave our destinies. They know all the days that are important. Þorláksmessa, when Icelanders eat skate. Dagur íslenskrar tungu. Jónsmessunótt, midsummer night. Þrottándinn, the old Christmas, when cows can talk and seals take on human form.” She counted them on her fingers. “Even the Odin group depends on them for explanations. They are our pride and our memory. They demand that we remember. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t know any of these things anymore. You’ll like Þorrablót. It’s a feast in March to celebrate the end of winter. In honour of the god Thor. Everybody goes. We even have visitors from civilization.”

  “Do Odin followers celebrate it?”

  “Brokkr stays through the winter. He’s sort of their caretaker. Sometimes there might be four or five others who overwinter. They’ll come, make up a table, but they don’t have a celebration of their own. It’s not Viking. It’s recent. The Norns can tell you about it chapter and verse.”

  He was going to take his truck, but Freyja said no, they’d walk. Their home wasn’t far, just north of the Odin group’s property.

  He thought they would follow the same cut in the bush that he’d followed the night he went to see the huts. Instead, Freyja led him to a footpath. The bush grew thickly on both sides of the trail, but branches and small bushes had been cleared away. Where there were trees of any size, the path curved around them and wound back and forth. There were hazel bushes, highbush cranberry. In places, the ground was boggy, with a few white birch, clusters of spruce, the occasional wild rose, and chokecherry bushes here and there. Freyja pointed out and named each one. “City boys need to learn all they can about their environment,” she said, mocking him a little.

  “There are trees in the city,” he said.

  “Elm trees, oak, ash. Nothing that’ll feed you, fill your jars with jelly and jam, your containers with nuts. We’re hunter-gatherers here.”

  “Anna used to take me to pick chokecherries and saskatoons. There’s lots of wilderness areas in Winnipeg. Along the river. We picked raspberries, mushrooms. You have to know where to look. Tanya and I helped her make jam and jelly.”

  “I’m impressed. The urban pioneer.”

  As they walked, they constantly waved away mosquitoes.

  “We should have worn netting,” he said, smacking himself on the forehead. His hand came away with the black remains of a mosquito and a spot of blood.

  “This is why I told you to wear a long shirt, long pants and a hat, remember?”

  She waved her hands around her head, turned around and started to walk more quickly. Although he feared that the pins in his leg might snap, he hurried to keep up. The difference in the length of his legs made him hold his weight to one side. It threw him slightly off balance and sometimes made him feel like he might stumble and fall. In school he’d been on the track team. It hadn’t cost much. Shorts and shoes. He’d sometimes won the hundred-yard dash and the hurdles. He missed running.

  The Norns lived in a simple cedar cottage. He was surprised. Because people treated them as if they were important, he’d expected their place to be elegant. A path curved away from the trail toward the front, where a veranda overlooked the lake. Large mountain ash sat on each side of the doorway. Before Freyja climbed the steps and knocked on the screen door, she pointed toward the trunk of one ash. Runes were carved in lines down the trunk.

  Someone from inside the house called, “Enter.”

  Freyja opened the door, and they made one last attempt to brush off the mosquitoes before ducking inside the screened veranda and quickly shutting the door behind them. Across from them was an open doorway. There were two looms, one to either side of the door, each with a partly finished weaving.

  Freyja led the way. Their hosts were waiting for them, seated, with the twins on either side of their older sister. A weak ceiling light with a cone-shaped shade cast a circle of light. Leaning back, the three women were in shadow; leaning forward, they were in the light. Their faces were veneered with makeup, their mouths red gashes, their eyes darkened so they looked unnaturally deep set, their blonde hair stiff, identical, shimmering as they moved in and out of the light.

  The eldest reached out a withered hand to greet Tom and Freyja and to indicate that they should sit on two chairs facing their hosts.

  Tom sat, but Freyja knelt on one knee, reached into the Santa Claus bag and said, “I’ve something you might like.” She took out the red package and set it on the low table in front of Skuld, then set the blue package in front of Urdh and the green in front of Verthandi. She folded up the bag and sat down.

  The three women leaned forward. Their eyes glittered. They smiled without opening their mouths. The bones of their foreh
eads and cheeks stood out prominently. Their ears, because of the emaciated condition of their faces, looked disproportionately large. They were all dressed in the same dresses they’d worn at Angel’s funeral. A white blouse, a coloured vest and long black skirts that covered everything but their leather slippers. Skuld’s vest was red, Urdh’s blue and Verthandi’s green. They wore black caps with a tail.

  It took Tom a moment to realize that there was something odd about the way they were seated. He finally realized that the legs of the Norns’ chairs were taller than the legs of the chairs where he and Freyja sat.

  “Thank you for coming,” Skuld said to Tom. “We met you at the funeral for that poor young girl.”

  “Your mother’s name?” Urdh asked.

  “She took my father’s name. Parsons.”

  “Her real name,” Skuld insisted.

  “Runa,” he said, “Gudrun Einarsdóttir. ”

  “What was the name of the farm from which your mother came?” Skuld asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She didn’t talk about her family very much.”

  “Her grandfathers’ names?”

  “Her father was Einar. One of her grandfathers may have been Ketill. Maybe not. Her parents rented a small croft. I really don’t know anything about it. When she met my father, the family was living in Reykjavik.”

  “Many farms have been long abandoned,” Urdh said. “But the Icelanders kept close parish records, and Iceland was never bombed. Icelanders can always find out who they are. If they want to know.”

  Tom squirmed. What she was suggesting threatened to open doors he had long ago closed, and he wished that his resentment at the funeral luncheon hadn’t pried open this one. He thought of the endless hallways and doors of the apartment blocks managed by Anna and her mother. When he’d been little, the hallways had intimidated him. They’d been filled with foreign sounds and smells, and the sudden appearances and disappearances of strangers. His mother’s warnings about not taking candy from anyone or going into anyone’s apartment had made him even more nervous, but it hadn’t stopped him from creeping up stairwells, hiding in corners behind large potted plants and, sometimes, even in unlocked closets with mops and pails, spying on all who came and went.

  Verthandi picked up a small brass bell that was sitting beside her. She rang it once.

  Dolly appeared with a silver coffee pot, sugar bowl and cream jug on a silver tray. She smiled broadly at Tom and said, “I’ve got about half of your meals in the freezer.”

  “Meals?” Freyja said.

  “I ordered thirty meals.”

  Freyja rolled her eyes, but the Norns beamed in approval. “Dolly,” Urdh said, “comes every Tuesday to make a week’s meals for us. She’s an excellent cook.”

  Dolly set the tray on the table, left, then came back with two oval glass trays, one with an array of sweets, the other with slices of brown bread cut diagonally. On the bread sat slices of meat, heavily marbled with fat. She smiled at Tom and ignored Freyja.

  “Rúllupylsa,” Dolly said. “Rolled and pickled lamb flank. Have you had it? It’s very good. I made it myself.”

  Dolly put a dessert plate and a paper napkin in front of each of them, but no one made any attempt to pour the coffee, so he sat waiting.

  Dolly returned to the kitchen and came back with five shot glasses full of a clear liquid and a small plate of white cubes with toothpicks inserted in them.

  Dolly said, “Brennivín. It’s a kind of schnapps with caraway.”

  “Hákarl. From Iceland,” Urdh added proudly.

  Freyja took a piece and pointedly said, “Thank you, Dolly.” She pulled the cube off the toothpick with her teeth, chewed, then picked up the glass and drank it in one gulp.

  The Norns watched Tom intently. Dolly held the plate up to him. He took a cube and put it in his mouth, stopped before he had taken out the toothpick, as his mouth filled with the taste and smell of urine. He pulled out the toothpick, bit down twice, then shot the brennivín into his mouth and felt it go instantly numb. He gulped down the hákarl and the brennivín.

  Dolly lifted up both plates, first to Skuld, then to Urdh, then to Verthandi. They smiled and nodded their thanks, then chewed with apparent relish and drank their brennivín without flinching. That done, Dolly poured coffee for all of them.

  As they tried the desserts, Urdh said, “I am interested in genealogy. If you can tell me the farm from which your mother came, I can trace your family line back to the beginning of Iceland. You may be related to poets and bishops and goði.”

  “Snæfellsnes,” he said. “That’s all I know. I’ve never been there.”

  “Under the mountain,” Urdh replied. “Snæfellsnes has many wizards. Magic was practised there. Good and bad.”

  Skuld, her chin slightly tilted, her mouth pursed, miffed by the attention her sister had drawn to herself, said, “You used to be a policeman, but now you have decided to live here. There are many other places. Why Valhalla?”

  He put down his coffee cup. “You are here.”

  Skuld tittered, lifted her hand with its withered fingers to cover her mouth. “So you came to be here with us. You couldn’t resist.”

  “I grew up in the city. I thought I’d try the country.”

  “And what are your plans for the future?” Urdh asked.

  “Jack of all trades. Do you need some carpentering, plumbing, drywalling, plastering? I’m your man.”

  “A simple life, like Thoreau,” Urdh added. “A cabin in the woods. Have you read Thoreau? Yes, you know his life was not simple. His diary shows that he was involved in his community. There is no escaping complications. Know where you came from to know what you are.”

  “You always want to talk about the past,” Skuld said, her voice stiffening a bit. “Everything isn’t governed by the past. We have to live in the present. We have to make decisions now. As a psychologist, I may discuss the past, but people have to live in the present.”

  They both looked at Verthandi. It was obviously an argument that had gone on for years, perhaps for a lifetime. The psychologist against the genealogist.

  “Everything affects the future. Kill a butterfly and you may change the path of history. Isn’t that right, Constable Parsons? Sometimes the most innocent decision can change a life,” Verthandi said in a barely audible whisper. They all leaned forward to catch every word. Although her face was stiff and she barely moved her head, her eyes shifted back and forth from Tom to Freyja.

  “Yes,” Tom replied. Sadness washed over him. “The best intentions can destroy lives.”

  “Dolly tells me that a casting of the runes might help you with your future,” Skuld said.

  Tom looked toward the kitchen. Dolly was standing just at the edge of the door. She nodded for him to agree. Tom said, “Yes, of course. That would be great,” and Skuld said, “Bring your chairs closer. But don’t drag them. You might scratch the floor.”

  Tom and Freyja stood up, moved their tables aside and shifted their chairs closer to Skuld. Urdh and Verthandi turned their chairs inward.

  As they sat closer, the difference in the height of the chairs became more apparent. The light was weak, and outside their little circle the room was filled with shadows. Dolly appeared and set aside Verthandi’s cup and saucer and plate. Urdh reached into a drawer and took out a blue cloth bag that Tom thought was the same colour as the bag in which his father’s ashes were buried. The bag he’d thought was a Crown Royal bag. Urdh spread the cloth, smoothed it with the palms of her hands. Skuld reached into another drawer and drew out a small leather bag and placed it on the cloth.

  “Your question of the oracle?” Verthandi whispered. Her eyes glittered in the light.

  He had not come for this. His father would have mocked it as mumbo-jumbo, witch-doctor stuff. His father had no time for folk tales or superstitions, would have derided his wife’s beliefs in huldufolk, in elves and dwarves, in ghosts who fought battles with the living. Henry thought it absurd that Ic
elanders believed in giants and trolls. He laughed at Anna’s Ukrainian belief in planting by the stages of the moon, her warning him when he was going fishing of the water dwellers who marry young drowned maidens and eat fishermen.

  “My question? How am I to proceed?” Tom replied.

  The Norns did not move but watched him intently. Then Verthandi’s skeletal fingers disappeared into the bag and drew out one tile. She placed it onto the cloth.

  “You must understand, Constable Parsons, this is not a telling of the future. It is not what is ordained, only what is possible if you continue on your present path,” Skuld said.

  “This is the past. Eihwaz,” Verthandi said in a harsh whisper, “a rune sacred to Odin, who gathered the dead souls for their journey to Valhalla. There is death. These deaths may have been both physical and spiritual. But this is a death that can be followed by regeneration and rebirth. Patience is needed.”

  Verthandi drew forth a second rune. “This is the present. Partho, sacred to Frigg, the wife of Odin.” It is reversed, so now there are hidden things that may be revealed and cast out into the open.”

  She pulled the third rune out of the bag with her middle finger. “This is the rune of the future,” she said. Although her face appeared frozen, emotionless, her eyes glittered with reflected light. But she looked at no one, only into the darkness. “Sowulu, a rune sacred to Baldur, the son of Odin and Frigg. It is not ordained, but if you continue on the path you have chosen, what is hidden will be revealed, though what is revealed will not necessarily be what you seek. There is a place in life for dark corners and caves. Secrets and the pain they hold are sometimes best left where they are hidden.”

  They had all been focused on the tiles and the words, but now that they were silent, Tom could hear large moths fumbling against the screens.

  Mumbo-jumbo, he thought to himself, Norns and fortune-telling and warnings of consequences. But a girl with a wide smile and large dark eyes was buried in a nearly abandoned graveyard. She’d drowned, and it didn’t matter whether it had been in three inches of water or thirty feet. He thought, perhaps, that was right, that secrets had their own place, the way the garter snakes and mice and rats had their own place beneath the soil, in cracks and crevices, in caves in the limestone. And he thought of Angel’s foot sticking out from under the blue tarp, obscene and vulnerable, and Mindi Miner striking the ground with one of his canes, and a snake disappearing in a flash into a hole, and Mindi laughing out loud at his power.