The Goddess Embraced

by Deborah Davitt

  The armored gauntlets she was wearing were cold to the touch as Maccis accepted the letter, and fumbled with it. He was spending so much time in wolf form lately, his fingers felt clumsy. He read the words, and a band of pressure around his chest that he hadn’t even been aware of released. “Well, if she’s mad at me, she’s not saying so, at least,” he muttered, quietly.

  “Loved ones rarely express their anger when you are in the field, and they are not.” Sigrun’s words were succinct. “Do you want to send her a reply? I have a fountain pen and a notebook.”

  “You’re not exactly a letter-carrier, Aunt Sig.”

  “No, but it’s important to keep you in touch with your humanity.” Chill touch of armored fingers against his chin, lifting his head. He blinked in surprise; he had no idea when his beard had grown in, but he could feel her fingers moving hair aside. “You need to talk to your mother more often. She gave the fenris the power of speech. She would not like to see you lose yours. Nor would I.”

  “I’ll . . . reach out to her.”

  “Please do. She has enough worries at the moment, with the Wood moving to Judea—”

  “What?” Maccis tipped his head to the side, feeling as if his ears should be pricking up.

  “You really haven’t been talking to her.” Sigrun gave him a look. “It’s a long story, and damn it all, I’m not the one who should be telling you. Short version: your father moved the Caledonian Forest from Britannia to Judea, with the aid of powerful spirits and a god. It and most of the Pictish people are there now. Many of the trees appear to be alive. They move. Hellene dryads go out into the woods and claim to be able to talk to the live-trees. I don’t know much more. I can barely keep track of where I’m supposed to be half the time. That is all on your mother and father.” She’d fumbled out a pen and paper for him, and now tapped the pen against the pad impatiently. “Oh, and your Aunt Lassair moved out.”

  Maccis numbly took the pad and held the pen awkwardly. “When did this happen?”

  “It’s late September now, so . . . four months ago.” Her hand on his shoulder was gentle in spite of the death-cold chill of the gloves. “Talk to Saraid. Fenris wouldn’t stop you. And you’d feel less disconnected.”

  “Point taken,” he agreed, and stared at the paper. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Find something. I have little time to spare.”

  I would recommend the truth. That you miss her, long to be with her, and will see her as soon as you are able. And that you are about to go to battle. Nith’s tone was pragmatic.

  “I am taking advice on the writing of love letters from a dragon, while crouching naked in the snow,” Maccis muttered.

  “I didn’t want to point that out,” Sigrun noted, and Maccis chuckled faintly as he stabbed the pen at the paper, trying to ignore the curious noses of the pack advancing on him, and the head of one of the unattached females—Tofa—over his shoulder, looking down at the page. “A little room, please.” Pack life had little privacy. In fact, privacy in a fenris pack only really revolved around mating. Everything else tended to be public and communal. They ate together, slept together for warmth and protection, hunted together, fought together, and even raised children together, in the cities. A pack could be as small as one family, or as large as seven.

  Forgive me. A matter between mates should stay between mates. She slipped away, to his unspoken relief.

  In the end, all he could think of was exactly what Nith had advised. I love you. I miss you. I really wish I could see you soon. He handed that, and Zaya’s own letter back to Sigrun. “You’re sure? I’d thought you’d want to re-read it a few times.” She held Zaya’s missive out to him.

  “I can’t keep it,” he said, gesturing down at himself. The transformation removed some of the dirt and all the fleas, but no matter what, he was left without pockets. “I’d just lose it, and I’d rather be able to . . . re-read it again some other day. When this is all just a bad dream.”

  The expression on her face was unreadable. “I hope someday it will be,” she told him, gently. “Battle tomorrow. Be safe, but be true.”

  He watched the dragon leave, and settled back down into wolf-form, and reached out for his mother in his mind. And listened and watched for almost an hour as Saraid relayed, with words and visions, all the things that had gone on in his absence. I hesitated to call to you. I do not wish to distract you when you might be in battle, or about to be attacked. The thought was like an ephemeral kiss to the forehead.

  I’ll call to you more often, he promised, and really did feel better.

  The next day was as brutal as advertised. Fenris called a blizzard to disguise their advance, and halfway through the battle, the snow turned abruptly to ice rain that pelted through Maccis’ coat like stinging needles. The wind’s howling carried away sounds, and the wall of thunder generated by the half-dozen valkyrie in the air covered almost all other noises, rendering the brrrraaaaaat of the guns on the helicopters and the barks and yips of his fellow wolves muted at best. Only Fenris’ howl carried over all other sounds, spine-tingling and terrifying.

  The battle was a blur, anyway, biting, dodging, ripping, changing form. Anything that would get the job done, really. Wolf, lindworm, landing on a grendel’s shoulders and shifting from lindworm to the form of a lethal black mamba, and slipping around, his much-lighter weight now hardly noticeable as he clamped down just at the carotid artery, injecting his venom directly into the bloodstream before dropping away before his body’s warmth could be stolen by the storm. The venom might not kill the grendel, but it would render the giant unconscious or incapacitated while its body fought the poison.

  Shifting again, yelping in pain as a crushing blow came down on his hindquarters, wondering if his hips had just been cracked, and yanking himself away. Pivoting, setting himself as another fenris came in from behind on the giant who’d attacked him. Watching the giant’s head arc back as hands blindly reached up to scrabble at the wolf’s jaws at the base of his neck, and then, paws planted deep in the snow, Maccis pushed off and leaped up, his own muzzle clamping around the giant’s throat. Worrying the body, managing to separate head from shoulders. Seeing, over the giant’s shoulder, that it was Tofa who’d intervened . . . and dimly, he realized that they’d been cut off from the others. Find the pack! he snarled, and they both heard Fenris’ blood-curdling howl cut through the wind . . . and they both turned and staggered in the direction of the call.

  The resistance around the grendel leader was intense. Most of the giants had some measure of resistance to cold, so the average fenris’ frost-breath did no good at all. Fenris himself, however, exhaled cold clouds that made the giants pull back in pain . . . and Maccis, back-to-back with Auda this time, sensed a dark shadow go by overhead, and then frozen death rained down from above, punctuated with lightning bolts . . . and half a dozen giants went up in flames as a result of the twin attacks.

  One of the handful of ettin with this grendel band picked up a boulder, wrenching it free from a fresh coating of snow and ice, and hurled it up at the dragon. No time to wonder where it was going to go if it missed or bounced; so long as it didn’t land on his head, it didn’t matter. Breaking through the last ring of defenders, Maccis shoved his way through, taking the throat of one of the body-guards in his jaws, just as Fenris leaped forward and snatched the grendel leader in his mouth. A snap of his powerful neck, and he threw the leader up into the air . . . where again, the dark shadow appeared, caught the rag-doll like figure in its claws, and tore off through the howling winds once more. Fenris turned and began lifting and shaking grendels, throwing them to the side.

  After what felt like hours, the grendels broke and ran, and the snow and ice finally started to die down. Maccis stumbled through the bloody drifts, trying to help in any way he could, and got a triage line started for the fenris. He shifted back into human form, gritted his teeth at the cold, and shook himself until fur sprouted from his body again, even covering his feet. To Tartarus
with looking human. The fenris all know what he was, and it was well below freezing at the moment. He didn’t need his hands to shake any more than they were as he worked with the utility knife from his collar and the pair of tweezers that unfolded from it.

  It took until halfway through the line for him to realize that they were missing a few people. The recovering fenris were out, sniffing through the drifts of snow, looking for those who weren’t there, and they set up a howl—we need a healer!—that got Maccis to trudge through the knee-deep snow as quickly as his leaden legs would let him. When he reached them, however, he dropped to a crouch, and just stared. Tofa had been separated from him before they’d reached the grendel leader. And she’d paid the price. One of the giants had landed a boulder on top of her, breaking her spine. She wasn’t conscious. She was, in fact, barely breathing. Maccis put a hand on her shoulder, and shook his head. His ‘greening power,’ as he often thought of it, wasn’t really healing, or at least, he hadn’t learned how to use it that way, yet. At the moment, it was a fertility power, and thus, somewhat useless here. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, quietly, and looked up at the other fenris as they crowded in around him, feeling tears spring to his eyes, unbidden. She took a grendel off me early in the fight. I lost track of her as we pushed in towards Fenris’ call. And I can’t do anything for her. A sudden wild flare of hope. Aunt Sig can help. Sigrun! Sigrun Stormborn! We need you!

  Another rush of dark wings, and Nith landed nearby. Sigrun slipped down, pulling off the mask that protected her face in combat, and then let the scale hood of her armor drop off her hair. Confronted with a ring of anxious fenris faces and drooping tails, the valkyrie moved in and rested a hand on Tofa’s shoulder. “Nith, if you would, please?”

  The dragon used a massive forepaw to lift and toss the rock away. After a long moment, Sigrun shook her head. “I cannot take this from her. Too much damage—many of her internal organs are damaged, in addition to the spine. However, I have been practicing healing wounds without actually taking them onto myself. I will try. But I can make no guarantees.” She looked over at Maccis. “Give me your hand. Pour your strength into her. And see if that might do some good.”

  He placed a fur-covered hand in Sigrun’s and concentrated, hard, on life. He could feel his own power being used. Reshaped. And after several long minutes, Tofa moved. Whined. And her back legs twitched. The wolves surged in, licking and sniffing Tofa, and Maccis did, too, patting her with his hands. But he looked up in time to see Aunt Sig stagger back to Nith to lean against the dragon, who spread his wings over her now. “Thank you!” Maccis shouted to Sigrun.

  Don’t thank me yet. She still has internal bleeding, which her regeneration will heal, but she may also have continued numbness in her extremities. I am not sure how long it will take for a fenris to heal nerve damage, and I do not know enough yet to fix everything. Take her to Eir. She is at the lower end of the pass. She may be able to help. Sigrun’s mental tone was tired.

  Sigrun watched as Fenris trotted over and picked up the injured female by the scruff of her neck, as if she were a puppy, and loped off with her, the rest of the pack following in his wake. But she put a hand to Maccis’ fur-covered shoulder, and prevented him from shifting form and following in their wake. She was concerned about the glassy, distant expression in Maccis’ eyes, behind all the white fur that he’d sprouted across his human form. He’d only been in combat for six months, but fenris units were generally a combination of stealth and shock troops. Their version of combat was far more visceral than what a marksman experienced while taking out enemy targets from a mile away.

  It was best compared to the way the Legion and the Goths had made war two thousand years ago. Except that thousands of years ago, war had had a season. Rulers couldn’t keep farmers out of the fields during the planting season or the harvest, else there would be famine. And travel in winter with an army was also difficult, particularly in terms of impassable mountains and provisioning. High summer had thus been the season for war, most of the time. Rome, like Sparta and Macedonia before it, with a permanent group of soldiers, dedicated solely to war, had been somewhat unique in that respect. A standing army of dedicated soldiers could make war at any time . . . but required the populace to support them all the time. But in the main, even in the early Roman era, fighting had gone on for limited amounts of the year, and while wars had ground on for decades, it had taken until the modern era and the advent of firearms for them to grind on all year, without pause.

  “We have to get more artillery in this area,” Sigrun told Maccis, trying to stir his human mind as they crunched through the seven inches of snow and ice that had fallen in the past several hours. “Difficult terrain to do more than position them once, and then hope you’re facing it in the right direction, though. Modern units are fairly mobile, but . . . .”

  She watched the wheels grind in his head. She could read guilt, turmoil, and exhaustion in his eyes, though his expressions were masked by the fur. But he got himself together. “The grendels are more mobile,” he said, blinking rapidly. “They come through the trees. Don’t rely on roads the way most modern armies do. Artillery will take them down, but it’s . . . not mobile enough. Old-fashioned rifles don’t do much against the armor plates in their chest. A blunderbuss doesn’t do much more than break the skin. They bleed. They get angry . . . I’ve seen infantrymen with a blunderbuss just get ripped apart.”

  “Needs to be a headshot with a high-powered rifle and either an armor-piercing round or an incendiary bullet,” Sigrun replied. “Either with enchanted or phosphorus rounds. The artillery can field incendiaries; that’s not a problem. The real issue is the mobility of the current artillery.”

  “Need to get them to come to us, through chokepoints.” Maccis looked around in sudden realization. “This pass . . . it was a chokepoint, wasn’t it?”

  “Not intentionally. We didn’t want to risk this many civilians, but grendel go where the prey is.” Sigrun sighed.

  They reached the bottom end of the pass, having watched military ambulances race past them, carrying people to the medical center, and Sigrun watched the reactions of the soldiers in the vicinity as a twelve-foot tall wolf, carrying another one in his teeth, shouldered through the lines. Everyone gave way.

  Maccis received decidedly odd looks, in Fenris’ wake—he looked like a wildman, even more so than most nieten. “You want me to find you some clothes?” Sigrun asked him, mildly, and watched without much surprise as he shifted into full wolf-form again.

  Don’t trouble yourself. I’d just have to return them after an hour or so of wearing them, so what’s the point, really?

  “The point is finding little ways to hold onto your humanity,” Sigrun told him. Just because I failed, doesn’t mean you have to, Maccis. She kept that one unspoken, however.

  The fur is warmer, and fenris are human, too. Just a different type of human. His tone was slightly defensive. Though most of them prefer to be called people and not human at all anymore.

  She shook her head. Maccis would figure it out on his own, and come to some internal balance or another . . . or he’d need help. Trennus and Saraid could handle it, but neither of them were here at the moment. All Sigrun could do was point out patterns that she saw, and stand back.

  Eir’s triage area was filled with badly-injured soldiers of all stripes, even a handful of bear-warriors who’d gotten caught in a grendel-started avalanche, and who’d had to be dug out. Some of them had crushed limbs, or severe frost-bite, but they were at the back of the triage line, even the ones with severe concussions and skull fractures. Their regeneration could help them live, where a bleeding human soldier didn’t have that chance.

  The goddess of healing had been born a valkyrie of Odin in a very different era. When iron was the newest technology, and steel was stuttering along in fits and starts. The earliest known production of steel had been in Anatolia, four thousand years ago, and some had been produced in East Africa fourteen hundred years bef
ore Caesar, but in both cases, the technology simply hadn’t been adopted on a wider scale. The earliest large-scale production had been in India and Sinhala, and it had been picked up and spread north through Qin and west through Persia. By four hundred years before Caesar, steel had been in use in the Roman Empire . . . but only for weapons. It was into this age, more or less, that Eir had been born, and it showed.

  The onetime valkyrie had set up a small hut, into which each soldier could be carried in turn, and there were herbs drying in bunches, dangling from their roots from the rafters above. Sigrun eyed these, and thought, strongly, about mentioning the need for hygiene practices, but kept her mouth shut. Eir had been alive at least as long as Nith had. And thus commanded respect.

  Then Fenris gently deposited Tofa at Eir’s feet, and stared down at the goddess of healing. Like almost every goddess, Eir chose to manifest as well above human-norm in height, or about seven and a half feet tall. The jotun and Fenris dwarfed her, but the slender woman with her pale gold hair dressed into twin braids still carried herself with an aura of power. She stared up at the great wolf now, her blue eyes narrow. What are you doing here, Fenris?