She had believed in it – until it was her womb that was filled. Until it was her who might bear a son, only to see that son cast into fire. From the moment she felt life stir inside her, she believed it no more.
He began to shake. And – a miracle! – he was crying. Yet from his sadness she took a joy. For these tears could only mean one thing: that he loved her enough to do what must be done. To change the way it had always been. She would be a star for ever but their son never would be.
She pulled away from him then, looked deep into the flowing eyes, with love, that love reflected back. She knew, she was certain now, had seen the man-god’s sadness. Was certain too that she had discovered the way to banish it in him for ever. His At-ish-a. So when she said, ‘I am with child,’ she said it in joy not fear.
He started. His arms rose and fell. He stared at her for a long moment, his face, his eyes unchanging. She could feel both their hearts now, beating faster. When at last he spoke, there was neither honey nor ice in his voice. ‘You are certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
She smiled. ‘You know how, my love.’
‘You mistook your times?’
‘I did. It was the night before you went to campaign in the north. You sent for me. I … I had to come.’
‘And will you … ?’ He paused, swallowed. ‘Will you have it?’
She’d considered it. There were ways. But she felt the joy still. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried. ‘Yes I will!’
He stared at her for a moment longer. Then he nodded, looked above her, then back down. His eyes were filled with infinite kindness when he reached his hand to touch her cheek. She laid her face in it and closed her eyes, waiting for the words that would change the world.
‘Goodbye, At-ish-a,’ he said.
She opened her eyes. He untangled from her, stepped from the pool. She watched him, her own words frozen by the ones he’d spoken. Only when he reached the door of the chamber did she rise, cry out, ‘Wait! Wait, my love!’ But he did not pause, did not look back, and by the time she’d grabbed her dress and run to the door, it was already closing, and the man closing it was a guard not a god, a guard who held a key, turning it now in the lock. And all her lamentations would not open it.
Her cries now in the birthing pool were wrenching, agony and terror combining. The two women, who had slipped in beside her, murmured encouragement.
‘Yes, little one! Little doe, little puma. Push down, push. Yes. Push!’
She screamed – and the child came in a rush. Slipping into the waters, tethered to her by the cord, floating free, kicking even, driving itself through the pool, a water creature still. Moving and twisting so she could not see, could not answer the question and know their fate. ‘Hold her,’ she wept, wish and command both. ‘Show me.’
The women were as anxious to know. One reached, lifted. All looked.
‘It’s a girl,’ the one holding her cried in joy.
‘No,’ the other groaned, ‘No, look! It’s a boy.’
A new sound came – the scraping of a chair, pushed back. In the shadowed corner of the room, the woman with the raven’s mask had risen and was coming forward.
Atisha peered, desperate to make sense of what she saw. Between the baby’s legs was a protrusion. But it was rounded, not long, a bulb not a stem. Beneath it were sacks … that looked like lips.
She shook her head, tried to clear her eyes, looked again. Nothing would resolve. A new voice came. ‘Give him to me,’ commanded the woman in the raven mask.
‘No!’ Atisha threw off the women still holding her. Though it was agony to move, though she knew that she would drag the child with her in the effort to reach the puma on the other side of the pool she had to try, she had to …
‘Wait!’ the woman with the laugh lines around her eyes cried out. ‘I have seen this once before, just once, in my village.’ She still held the baby up, and turned her now to the masked figure looming above the pool. ‘This child is not a boy. She is not a girl. This child is … neither.’
Atisha looked again, at the wriggling, pink flesh before her. Saw what the woman saw, and didn’t see. What was there and what was not. She half rose from the water. ‘Neither. She is neither! See! See!’ she cried. ‘You cannot take her.’
The masked one bent to look. Spoke, though now her tone was hesitant. ‘I will … I will go to the palace. Keep the mother and … that … apart till I return.’
She went. The women did what they needed to do. Cut and bound the cord, helped Atisha pass all that was within her. The baby was taken, fully wailing now, its cries an agony for Atisha who was taken to another pool to be cleaned, then dried with soft cloths, wrapped in others. Though her every instinct made her want to rush across to her crying baby, she knew they wouldn’t let her. Besides, now she could clutch the puma they’d brought her, gather her strength. If the word which came from the palace was the wrong one she would take her chance. She had made up her mind. She would kill if she had to, seize her child. Below the temple were paths she knew well. One led to the river. Boats were tied up there.
It didn’t take long for the raven-masked woman to return. Atisha would have liked longer but, painfully, she sat up, put her legs to the floor, reached into the mouth of the puma to clasp the comforting coldness of sharpened stone.
The woman came to the middle of the room. ‘Bring the child here,’ she commanded. She was obeyed immediately, the kind woman bringing the baby, who was still crying. She held Atisha’s child up.
But the masked woman didn’t reach for it. ‘Intitepe, Fire God and Fire King, in his wisdom has decreed …’ she paused a moment and looked straight at Atisha, who gripped the knife even harder, ‘that you may keep the child.’ To her gasp and the gasps of all the other women there, she continued. ‘For now. When you are well enough to travel, you will be taken south, to the City of Women. There you will await,’ she glanced at the baby again, ‘developments.’ She nodded. ‘Give the mother her baby.’
Atisha sat, dropped her shift off her shoulders. The wailing child was placed in her arms, and she put it straight to her breast. There was a fumbling, a moment of uncertainty displaced by joy as the babe latched on and began to vigorously suckle.
With the two women cooing beside her, Atisha could only stare at the question in her arms. Yet she had an answer of her own, at least for now, for she had a little time. How much, she couldn’t know. She was bound for the City of Women. There she would regain her strength, keep her blade sharp, prepare for any development that came. Because this she knew, clearly, certainly:
No man, king, god – all three! – was going to throw her baby into a volcano.
3
Luck of the Gods
Far down the fjord, at the base of a glacier – a place the sun had not reached for five months – lay the town of Askaug. Winter still gripped it, snow banked to the height of a tall man against every wall, and icicles the length and heft of boar spears descended from the turf roof of the largest building there.
The occupants of the mead hall were not cold. Indeed, many had thrown off their bear-skin cloaks and wool shirts to expose their red-pelted chests to the huge fires. Some of the men were completely naked, provoking awe or disparagement depending on what was revealed. The ones recently returned from a cooling roll in the snow banks were especially mocked.
Most nights a good crowd gathered in the hall. This night only the very old or very young were absent. Despite the contrary evidence of snow and ice outside, tomorrow would be the first day of spring. It had to be celebrated – in drink, in roasted meats, in tales of war and magic, sung and spoken. As words and liquor flowed, old stories were remade, new ones created. Later, furs would be pressed down by heated bodies and another generation begun.
There was an expression in Midgarth, spoken during the day of preparation, anticipating the night’s raucous c
elebrations: ‘The mouse on the roof beam will look down on some fine doings this night.’ Like all such Midgarth expressions, it was not meant to be true, merely a representation of something else. Yet this night it was true. For there was a mouse up there, gazing upon all the doings below.
A mouse who was also a god.
His name was Luck. He’d often wondered if that was a joke his parents had made when they name-gave him. Or had it been a ward against a doubtful future? That if the scrawny baby born that day with the outsized back, the stumpy right arm and shorter right leg, was to survive he would need plenty of good fortune, so they might as well begin with his naming? He’d been unable to ask them for they’d died shortly before his second birthday, long before he could talk, which he then held off doing till he was nearly ten. Died violently on this very day, the one before the spring came.
Four hundred years ago.
Congratulations on the day, Luck thought, bitterly, as he did every year. Luck was never lonelier than when he was in company; even more so at this feast which seemed a mockery, to him, of all he was. It was everything he didn’t like to do. Drink, because he’d learned from too many attempts to disprove it that he did not have his people’s traditional capacity for mead or ale. Fatty meat, which revolted him. Tale-telling, which always dealt with heroes, and he was palpably not one of those. And, especially, the carnal acts that followed. There was a freedom on this day, amongst a people who were quite free about such matters anyway. Husbands abandoned wives, wives sought out old lovers or took new ones. Since nearly all was forgotten the next day, there was little need to forgive. There was a reason the celebration of the season’s change was known as Oblivion’s Feast.
Yet he liked to observe, part and apart too. Many of these people would visit him in the next weeks, seeking to learn their fortune for the coming year. And though he did see visions – in the tala stones he threw, in birds’ flights, in the shimmer of light on water – he also knew that visions were only one portion of any person’s fate. Who they were now, what they brought to their question, that was also a way in for him. So he watched, and took note of many things.
Now, as Luck gazed down on the crowd, he singled out his fellow gods – the three who lived in the town, and the one who was visiting, Einar the Black. Watched how the Widow Agnetha was keeping his goblet filled, his platter crammed, his back and thighs … kneaded. If a mouse could smile, he did then, for Agnetha had come to Luck for a telling the week before. He’d cast his tala, and the stones with the different shapes carved upon them had shown him, as clear as fjord water, that if she took a god to her bed during the feast she’d have triplets, each a hulking son. Since her husband had been killed a year before by one of the ferocious bears who shared the land, she would need all the help in her business – the dyeing of cloth – that she could get.
But the resident gods of Askaug would not play their part in this prophecy. Luck’s brother, Bjorn Swiftsword – they did not share parents but all the gods in a village were brothers – Bjorn was older by a mere quarter century, and the handsomest being, man or immortal, in the district, perhaps in the whole of Midgarth. He always had his pick of the maidens at Oblivion’s Feast – and rarely restricted himself to one. Five were competing for him now. He could have one, all, or none. Though if he keeps drinking mead at this rate, Luck thought, none is the likeliest outcome.
Luck looked now at his other brother-god, the eldest, Hovard; who, if he was not as handsome as Bjorn, could have twice as many lovers for his silver tongue, his golden laugh and the simple reason that he cared. Listened and cared and so was irresistible. Yet Hovard would have none, even with the dispensation of the night. He would leave with the one he came with. Loved her alone, most unusual amongst the gods. As she loved him.
Freya.
She’d been there a moment before, sitting at Hovard’s right hand. Now that space was empty. Luck sought her among the throng, did not find her. Because, he suddenly realised, she was now sitting beside him on the beam. Not as a woman, nor a god, both of which she was.
As a cat.
When a god dissolved their own body into that of a living beast, the thrill of it was in the sharing of that beast’s whole being, its lusts, hungers and all. Instincts too. Bears would snarl and charge to the fight when surprised and the god would often let the beast have its vicious way. Hawks would fold their wings and drop from danger, yet turn suddenly to the attack. Salmon would weave and flip through the water, exhilaration for the god within in every turn.
A mouse would run away.
So Luck turned as fast as the creature he possessed yearned to. Yet not fast enough to elude the paw that dropped hard onto his haunches. He felt the sudden prick of claws. ‘Do not run off, little god,’ Freya purred. ‘I wish to talk to you.’
Instinct, once thwarted, soon passed. Now he did not seek escape; welcomed her paw on him, as he would her hand on his crooked back were they in human form. They sat in easy silence for a time, studying the crowd. Until Agnetha rose, took Einar the Black by the hand and led the visiting god from the hall.
‘She goes to make her triplets.’ Her voice was in his head, the way they spoke when they were animals. ‘Did you not think of fulfilling the prophecy yourself?’
He smiled. ‘Might that not be considered self-serving? “Find a god to get your babies. Oh look! There’s one right here!”’
If a cat could laugh, Freya did, an extended purr. ‘Most gods are not so moral,’ she said.
‘Most gods are not shaped like me,’ he replied, his smile gone.
A silence again. Then, ‘You should take another. It’s ten years since Gytta—’
‘I want no other.’ He took a breath, held it. I shouldn’t speak it, he thought. Spoke it. ‘None but you.’
She lifted her paw from his haunch. ‘I have told you. You must not talk to me that way.’
‘Because of Hovard? Or because I look like I do?’
‘I will go.’
She rose, and headed, cat-graceful, along the beam. He called. ‘Freya.’
She stopped but did not look back. ‘Yes?’
‘Do you think it strange that but one god visits us for the festival?’
‘A little, yes. But the passes are still so thick with snow.’
‘Which a god could fly over as eagle or run over as a winter-lean wolf.’ He sniffed. ‘Besides, there have been worse snows. Ten years ago, ten gods came. Even last year, four.’
‘Maybe there are better feasts elsewhere.’
‘Or maybe there are fewer gods.’
She turned back at that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have heard that some gods have vanished.’
‘Heard?’
‘Seen. In the mirror. In the waters. In my stones.’
A silence, then. ‘It is hard for us to die.’
‘Hard. Not impossible.’
‘Then how are we dying?’
‘I think … I think someone may be killing us.’
She stared at him. ‘That is hard too.’
‘Hard. Not impossible.’
A longer silence. Then the cat took a step back towards him. ‘What is it you have seen?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I have not truly … seen. I have felt … a shadow only. Something … something turning our way. In the east. Far in the east, beyond the strongest eagle’s flight.’
‘You are frightening me.’
‘Good. I think you need to be afraid.’ He looked down into the raucous crowd. ‘I think we all do.’
The cat looked too. ‘Shall I tell Hovard?’
‘Not yet. He will want answers that I do not possess. Let me … explore a little more. I may journey.’
‘As man or beast?’
‘Both. Though, as you know, I move swifter as a beast.’
‘But not for long.’ She turned back.
‘How many days can you remain an animal?’
‘A mouse? Many. A bear? Perhaps a day.’ He sucked in air, let it whistle between his sharp teeth. ‘They struggle to get their lives back, don’t they? And the stronger they are, the swifter they expel us.’
‘It is just as well. I sometimes think that it is they who possess us. If we sink too deep—’ She laughed, but the cat she was just cried. ‘Once it took me a week to get Hovard to give up being a wolf. I had to enter the body of a she-wolf in heat to make him.’
The cat cried again and the mouse turned away. ‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘Hovard is Hovard.’
‘He is. And see, he is missing me.’
She turned, went to the beam end. He called again, ‘Take the cat with you, Freya,’ but she entered the loft, didn’t pause or acknowledge that she’d heard – though when she emerged a moment later onto a ladder as a woman, she was holding the cat in her arms. She stroked it as she crossed to Hovard, who greeted her with a kiss and filled her goblet. Freya set the cat down, raised the cup to her lover but didn’t drink straight away. Instead, she looked up to the roof beam.
A mouse was still up there, cleaning its whiskers, witnessing the doings below. But the god had gone.
It was snowing again, huge flakes falling, already filling the boot prints of the visiting god Einar and his desirous partner. Agnetha’s hut lay halfway between the hall and Luck’s own on the edge of Askaug, so he began to follow along their path, his weaker right leg as always dragging a little, obliterating their tracks, leaving the long trough of his own. Icy white pressed against him and part of him wished he had stayed a mouse and now had fur to ward off the storm. He thought of going back – but it was hard on the god’s body to inhabit a beast twice in a night. Besides, the village cats or a keen-eyed owl would have eyes out for a snack and it hurt to be struck by claws, to feel teeth sink in, the moment before he gave up the animal form and regained his own shape. Harder on the mouse, whose instincts might have warned against attack if it were not possessed by a distracted god.
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