The Bride of Nothingness
There was a cold dark river, so blue as to be almost black, and Freydis strode along beside it singing to herself, "/ know an ash called Terror's Horse . . .", and the words sounded sweeter to her than they ever had before, but they had a hard flat echo. The river was sluggish, and smelled of death. - Freydis Eiriksdaughter was dead! She had always been dead! - But she was brave nonetheless; she was Freydis Fell-Farer. Her way presently steepened; the river Sltth became a cataract beside her, and she clambered down a wall of wet and icy stones not unlike the one she had clambered up when she first sought Blue-Shirt; - "the world," she thought, "is mainly weary stone-wastes of one kind or another." She held her candle high to see her way down into that darkness; and the waterfall and the black rocks flickered around her in that feeble light; the ceiling of her world flickered like a mass of snakes, and her heart leaped, but it was only a frieze of Yggdrasil-roots; yet still they flickered and seemed to move, and dank water dripped on her fi-om them like venom-drops, so that she shuddered. But the truth was that this was her third such journey, and Darkness-Horror and Darkness-Terror might strive with each other, but scarcely with her; by now she was a hardened witch. Indeed, after a time she joyed in what and where she was, as she had done
in the storm on Blue-Shirt's mountain, and once again the delusion came upon her that she saw her face in every pool, that scores of Freydises walked behind her in her footsteps, that she was legion, and her heart thrilled as she descended with her spirit-army, and she began to march as the hired Vikings did in Constantinople, and she cried out, "Come on, sisters; we'll all kiss Him together!" and in her thoughts she saw Blue-Shirt's cool black serious face, and He was handsome in her sight because she had never seen Him as AmoRTORTAK (although she thought she had), and she laughed to see His face swimming there in the darkness; the candle-flame was one of His eyes, and the other - He had no other! He was ODIN the One-Eyed to her now, the bearded Wanderer Whose face was smiUng and shadowed and mysterious behind His cowl; He was dead and waiting for her at the bottom of His Tree because Gudrid and the other Christians had buried Him; perhaps He loved her and would come galloping up on His eight-legged horse Sleipnir so that she would not have to walk anymore; He would pull her onto His horse and kiss her, and all her sisters would climb on, too, and sing wdnd-songs and the Warlock-Songs for Him and then He would make her pregnant and she would give birth to a god! - "Come on, sisters!" cried Freydis, and then she stumbled and out went her candle. - Then again He was Blue-Shirt, chilly and grim; and the darkness dripped upon her and smeared her with its BLACK HANDS and she screamed.
Freydises Mother
The reason that Freydis never felt alone anymore was because she did have sisters. There were many troll-hags and giantesses and corpses down there, and she had become one of them. - This was not one of those shirts that a person can take off! It tightens and tightens about you; all of its threads are snakes; they sear you and brand you wdth their venom so that even if through some desperate miracle of strength you were able to burst that horrible garment and you threw it oflf and crushed the snakes underfoot and pulled the broken snake-heads out of your flesh, you would still be marked by it forever; you would have to flay yourself to be naked . .. There was an old song that went:
Elf-Candle will have a daughter Before Fenrir takes her. The maid will ride her mother's highway When all the High Ones are dead.
Who was Freydis's mother? Who gave birth to the giantesses? - Oh, fellow corpses, you know very well!
Jotunfieim
Later, when Freydis had followed the black river Slith to its end at the Stagnant Place that stank of snakes, so that she had twice passed through the wall of flickering flame that encircled Jotunheim, and each time a great black fiend was standing behind the flames; when she came to the high wall called Strangle-the-Intruder and threw stones over it so that the wall snapped its jaws and clanged until the dark Watchman came; when she shook her fist at the Watchman so that she would not be scared and screamed, ''Open up, thrall; Fm Blue-Shirt's wife! Where's thejotun who'd dare to keep me out now?'' so he must scowling open the gate called Loud-Grating, made by the sun-blind dwarves; when she had passed by the House of the Giantess with the gates of towering stone; when she had passed the great hall of Thrym, King of the Frost Giants, and Thrym's house-carles, who were as tall and black as mountains, stared at her with dull yellow eyes as wide as mill-ponds; when she had passed the castle of the good giantess Mengloth, who stood sighing and waiting and looking up into the sky, whose clouds were ash-boughs (for Yggdrasil was rooted in this World, too); when she had passed the prison-cave of LOKI, Who stared silently fi*om His nest of chains while the Serpent spat at His eyes and His loving wife Sigyn stood catching the venom in a basin; when she had crossed the kingdom fi-om snow-peak to ice-peak, with the savage Jotun hounds ever growling at her heels, so that she must raise her blue-shining axe against them; when she had followed that black river Slith down to the wall of flickering flames and saw the great squat Fiend of Niflheim waiting for her in the darkness beyond; when she had crossed through the wall of flames by clinging to the icy riverbank, cutting handholds and footholds with her axe, not daring to go left because there the fire would bum her, not daring to go right because there the river Slith would freeze her with its black cold-breath, trudging on and on through the steam of nightmares; when she had come at last into the World of Niflheim, where Hel the Concealer was Queen, and the riverbank widened and flattened somewhat so that she fell trembling on a boulder and rested; when she looked back at Jotunheim and saw how now the wall of fire, hidden behind the grim guardian peaks, imparted to them a lovely pink pastel color, and by degrees she began to forget the terrors of that journey, then she forgot everything but the voice of the wind; for in low
dead Niflheim the wind is but a mourner, and so is called by the Hell-folk "Whisder," but in Jotunheim they call it "Roarer." It shrieked louder than Freydis ever could; it tumbled rocks; it whined and moaned and sobbed like a monster in pain.
S(ab'L(mdl987
There was blue light all night, and the birds sang. The ice was thick on the fjord. All through that cold and sunny night I kept coming awake, hearing sounds that I could never recognize, could never place. Very early in the morning there came a noise like something in pain, monotonously droning and sobbing to itself, and at first I thought that it must be some river trying to trick me again into believing in clammy voices that could not hurt me, but the voice became louder, a horrid psychotic Thing's voice whining across that dreary plain of cold stones above the fjord. - "Where am I?" the voice sobbed. "Danny, if you don't fucking tell me where I am, I'm gonna fucking do you know what. I don't fucking care. I don't fucking care!" - Moaning to itself, the voice came closer and closer, and there was no other sound but the sound of the wind far away in the mountains. - Presently my tent was shaken violently as the Thing stumbled against a guy-rope. The voice was abruptly silent for a moment. Then the Thing began to claw at my tent dreamily, fumbling at the netting of the window (which was zipped shut fi-om the inside), scratching at the rain-fly with its fingernails, shoving against me through two fi-agile thicknesses of nylon already stretched close to breaking, pushing wdth its hips and chest and knees. It wanted to tear my tent up; it wanted to uproot it, but it was too sick or too feeble. - At last I unzipped my window so that I could look into the Thing's face. "I'm here," I said. - Again the Thing stopped dead for a moment. Then slowly it stumbled back around to the window and peered in with its round, brown, astonished face - an Inuit face.
"Who are you?" the Thing said.
"I'm Bill," I said. "Who are you?"
"Kimberly."
"How old are you?" I said.
"Sixteen. I'm looking for Goodie, but I can't see her."
"If I find her, I'll tell her you're looking for her," I said.
"Thank you very much," she said.
Kimberly went away, and soon was screaming, "I don't fucking care if I
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BAFFIN 15LAND ^3*7
die! I don't care!" Her voice echoed dully among the rocks. A little later she was at my front door again, trying to undo the zipper. "Is Goodie in there?" she said. "I want to see Goodie. Please. Goodie's dead."
"There's no one here but me."
"I want to see."
I opened the door, and she fell in, crying and breathing drunk-breath. She lay across my backpack, and her feet were outside. Her upside-down face glowed like copper, and her black eyes blinked slowly. She vomited, sighed, and closed her eyes.
A semicircle of grinning Inuit teenagers stood outside the doorway. "You fuck her?" they said. "You fuck Kimberly?"
"No," I said.
"Why she in there? What you do in there with her?"
"Kimberly wants to sleep," I said.
They laughed. Their eyes shone. They had not decided yet what to do with me.
"All right," I said finally. "Help her go home."
As they dragged her out of the tent she clung to me, so a boy hit her with a board.
Niflfieim
That black stream flowed westward from the iron-black mountains of Jotunheim. It was rightfully called Slith, the Frightful, being so poisonous with cold, so cutting with cold, that it seemed that sharp knives whirled rushing in its eddies, cutting the legs of all who must wade it. In its swirling shallows, between icy black rocks, rushed naked sour corpses, whirling round and round and bleeding; they were unsheltered by grave-earth; they were forgotten by their kinsmen; they lay yellow and disgraced among the dreary ice, and Slith whirled them in its foaming black pools and the rocks scraped them and tore at them and Slith's black waterfalls laughed and the boulders sang whirling and whirling in their beds and the corpses spun bleeding; and great black ravens hovered, ripping their bellies when their bellies were uppermost, and otherwise riding upon their shoulders and digging their beaks greedily into their necks and cheeks; their beaks were matted with gory hair; their claws were sticky with flesh. But it was not only Odin's birds who fed upon the dead, for in that place there also lived Nidhogg the Dragon, whose yellow worm-coils flowed sluggishly between the rocks like a stream of urine beside the black river Slith; he raised his head high above the mountains, peering all around for the rottenest corpse he could see; he yawned and flickered his black tongue; then he slithered into the river and seized a body from the screaming ravens; he gnawed it with his brown fangs, and the ravens flew like midges around his jaws to catch the drops of corpse-dew that fell when he ground his teeth together with the sound of crunching icebergs; and Nidhogg swallowed and yawned and snatched up another dead man; he bit oflf a dead woman's frozen breast and swallowed it and the disappointed ravens watched the lump of it working slowly, slowly down into his coils; then Nidhogg screeched suddenly and unfolded his brown-black wings; he fluttered into the icy air like a bat and rose high.
high, high above the mist-clouds and ice-clouds into the blackness of cold as hard as iron; there he found the root of Yggdrasil and gnawed at it until the great Tree groaned. - "Well done!" cried Freydis, laughing and laughing ... A drop of spray struck her hand and left a black spot on her palm.
The Changers
In the river Slith there waded all the mainsworn men, and all the murderous ones. Now was proven the truth of those words of ODIN the High One:
Cattle die and kinsmen die,
you yourself soon will die; but one thing will wither never: the doom over each one dead.
- for there was that misnamed King Dag the Wise, who went to war over a bird, and must now stand until world's end in that icy stream, searching numbly from pool to pool for that little feathered corpse; there was King Harald Greycloak, seeking in death as in life cautiously to cross that sword-stream he could never cross; there were dead Alric and Eric who had killed each other to be each other: their wound-blood was frozen on their faces; - there was King Ingjald the Evil-Worker with his daughter-wife, hairy Aasa (whom Gudrod of Skaane had called "Wolfling" before she burned him up); they stood clinging to each other in that torture of cold-knives that was so much worse than the fire-torture to which they had delivered so many, including themselves; and the river bled them white. - "Ha, ha!" cried Ingjald; "let us turn into wolves and have at those corpses!" for he was mad with the pain of ages; but before he could change himself his daughter did so, and sprang at him with rending jaws.* They both fell, and a waterfall snatched them up and threw them out of sight. - There too was old King On who had sacrificed his sons because he had not dared to die; he shrieked with toothless fear as his bier bolted down the river; it struck a rock and flung him down upon a bed of ice-spears; and he screamed because he could feel the ravens swooping near his blind eyes. - There was Halfdan the Black, who had been untrue in faith to his son Harald: now the falls were untrue to him, and continually buffeted him to his knees, so that cold-fire dripped from his hair and burned him (and
* What a mercy that Queen Hel had let her keep her jaws! I have seen Dire Wolf skulls without any lower jaws; and though they have deep eye-sockets they seem nonetheless to have no consciousness, because they cannot bite.
his fate was doubly pleasing to the Norn-Sisters since he had died thus in Midgaard also, when the ice he crossed was untrue to him). - There stood grim stout Eric Bloody-Axe, known to men as "Brother-Sinker" because he had killed so many of his own kin; now sunk he too must be, as their corpses rushed down the sword-sharp rapids and struck him in his knees, in his belly, piling up around him and reddening that blue-black water; and though he grimaced and thrust them away, though his wife Gunhild the witch screamed in grief and horror on the bank, in the end he could not stand against his own dead, and toppled at last like a cut tree; the brother-arms fell limply about him as he sank and dragged him down in that poison-cold water and entangled him among the rocks of the riverbed, so that he never rose * -As for Queen Gunhild, she clapped her hand to her mouth in terror; she looked from side to side; then she lashed together dead men's bones with strips of cloth torn from her dress, so that she had a polestaff; for she loved Eric always and now meant to rescue him; but when she took her first step into the water she shrieked aloud, and her dainty white foot turned black forever with the coldness; and then she fell and was swept down the river to the shore called Dead-Strand.
Wearing the Snake-Shirt
On Dead-Strand rose the snake-clad Hall of Hel, fi*om whose walls dripped ceaseless drops of venom. Hell-Hall's gate faced the north, for that was the direction of ill omen. It looked out upon the plain called All-Cold, where rose the hall of the giant Brimir, it rose high above its many death-mounds, which were open so that Freydis could see the dead men sitting inside and gloating over their treasures by the glare of their own rotting-light; in one of them she saw her father Eirik the Red, who sat admiring himself in a mirror of ice because he wore the Blue Shirt that she had seen in her dream in Greenland, but its patterns were snakes and they slithered on his shoulders and sometimes bit him, at which dead Eirik's numb white fingers fumbled slowly at the Blue Shirt, trying to pull it away fi-om his flesh. - "Father, do you know me?" said Freydis. - "Oh, I know you," he said, "you were the only one who was true to me. My grave is open to your sight." - "Father, tell me the truth! What was the bargain you made with Blue-Shirt?" - As soon as she had said the name, she saw the gloating eagerness come back
* The Eiriksmdl has it that he went to Valhalla, but this is just one of many places where the skalds have surely lied.
into his face, and at once he began caressing the shirt he wore, and the snakes bit his hands and he cried out. - "Father, why should your dead lips not speak to give me wisdom? Tell me what I need to know." - "I know how He lives inside the frost," said the mound-man haltingly. "I know how He once climbed to Aasgaard and was welcomed there because They could not keep Him out, and They named Him Tuture,' at which the Third Norn was jealous because that was her name; I know how He ordered the m
arch of glaciers down the mountains and ODIN nodded His head; I know how He forged seven great chests of ice to keep His frost-seeds in; I saw how He planted His seeds all over the world and ODIN nodded His head; I saw how you received His seed to plant in Wineland beside your brother Thorvald's grave - and yet you want my wisdom?" - Eirik's hands returned to his shirt again, and she let him be. He was like her husband Thorvard now, as he had never been in life, Thorvard who hoarded his Skraeling-traded pelts in a long low sea-chest, fitted with metal nailheads as numerous as seeds; at night, since Freydis would not let him touch her anymore, he opened that chest and gloated. - Oh, everything was dead! - Brimir was dead. All-Cold was dead. The Niflheim-folk were dead. Even their barley-plants, which the Frost-Giants called "eating," the Hell-men called "hanging" because the ripe ears drooped like the heads of hanged men in the noose. And the wind was called "Whisder," and the snakes hissed bitterly like blood on embers, and all else was silent. - Oh, yes, said Freydis to herself; she loved Him; she loved Him now. Just as in the Saga of the Ynglings the Horse-Goddess, black HEL, took King Dyggvi for Her delight, so Blue-Shirt could take Freydis for His lover if He chose; she wanted Him to; she was so sick to her heart of everything. Her grief was as green as Greenland; it exploded in all directions like a Greenland meadow bounded by low sharp ridges that cut into other meadows that went on and on, dully on and on to the ice; she could smell the lovely little bell-flowers of her grief that tolled so fragrantly in the ice-wind; the sun went round and round, and the moon went round and round, and her grief was still there, and the ice was still there, but above everything stretched the arms of the Ash-Tree, and she could almost feel the warmth of Vinland. How she hated Vinland! She prayed for its black dead decay.
Wearing the Horse-Sfiirt
Thus came Freydis Eiriksdaughter to the Hall of HEL, which rose as high, cold and windowless as a dream. She had never lost sight of it once she
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