Too little, too late. Did he expect me to thank him? No, I felt nothing but hatred now, for him and all his people. When I got free – and I swore that I would – I’d make them pay for what they’d done. And after that, I’d find Mimir’s Head and kick it from here to World’s End, and then bury it as deep underground as the Aesir had buried me.
Well, a man can always dream. Dreams were what sustained me then, between those terrible slices of pain. And Dream was so close; almost close enough to touch. I could hear it through the rock on which I lay; rushing through the Underside, bearing its load of ephemera off into the outside world . . .
Skadi’s parting gift to me had a twofold purpose. One was, of course, the sheer pleasure of making me suffer. The other, I suspected, was to keep my mind from thoughts of escape. There’s not really much you can think when your eyes are burning and blind, except for wanting the pain to stop. But during those long intervals when Sigyn held the snake at bay, I managed to regain some clarity, and my mind began to work again.
One thing I did was go over and over the prophecy of the Oracle. Especially the part relating to myself, and the precise wording thereof.
I see one bound beneath the court,
Under the Cauldron of Rivers.
The wretch looks like Loki. His wife
Alone stands by him as he suffers.
At first I’d assumed that Sigyn was mentioned simply as the only one who might stay loyal to my interests. Now I realized that the truth was more literal – I was apparently stuck with her from now until the End of the Worlds. I could expect nothing more from her. I went over the fragment of text again, checking the small print for loopholes.
I see one bound beneath the court,
Under the Cauldron of Rivers.
The wretch looks like Loki . . .
The wretch looks like Loki.
Looks like Loki.
Looks like Loki.
I thought about that for a long time. Why that phrase? I asked myself. To fit the metre of the verse? Or for some other reason, as yet unknown?
The wretch looks like Loki.
I suffered. I screamed.
The wretch looks like Loki.
I slept. I dreamed.
LESSON 12
Dream
What is it that the slave dreams?
He dreams of being the master.
Lokabrenna
DREAM IS A RIVER that runs through Nine Worlds, even Death and Damnation. Even the damned can dream – in fact, it’s a part of their torment. To escape, even for a second or two, to forget reality and drift, only to be yanked back into the waking world like a fish caught on a line . . .
Yes. In some ways that’s even worse than to have no relief at all. That second or two, on awakening, when anything still seems possible, including the possibility that the past few days – or weeks, or months – might themselves have been a dream . . .
And then it hits you in the eyes. This is real. This is now. And dreams are just ephemera. In such a case you might almost be forgiven for trying not to dream at all, for refusing to swallow the barb of hope that catches at the back of your throat. But I had the germ of an idea. Not quite a plan – not yet. Not quite. But the hope of escape had not yet quite abandoned me.
It was the phrasing of that verse. The wretch looks like Loki. Not he is Loki, but he looks like Loki. Looks like Loki. Raising the faint possibility that Loki himself may be somewhere else.
That would be nice, I told myself. If only I could make that work. But how could I seem to be in one place while actually being somewhere else?
Dream was the only answer. If I could somehow escape through Dream, leaving my physical Aspect behind, then maybe I could be free again. Free to rejoin Chaos, maybe; free of Odin’s vengeance.
Of course, there would be serious risks. Dream is a dangerous element, subject to dangerous forces. Here, at its source, it could be lethal; a river of savage ephemera that could destroy a person’s mind. On the other hand, everything dreams; and if I could manage to link myself with the mind of a suitable dreamer, then perhaps I could manage the seemingly impossible task of being in two different places at once.
Yes, I know. I was naïve. But I was also desperate. Ready to risk my sanity, my life, for the chance to get away. And so I practised dreaming; not as a means of passing the time, but doggedly, laboriously, as a convict scrapes away the floor of his cell with a sharpened teaspoon, hoping one day to dig a hole large enough to make his escape.
There are two kinds of dreaming. The kind that takes you in completely, and the lucid kind, in which you’re aware of being between worlds and travelling. It was the second kind I sought. It took practice, and all the time I ran the risk of falling foul of one of the creatures that plumbed those depths, creatures all too eager to lure an unsuspecting dreamer before consuming him mind and soul, leaving his body to die in the waking world. A rare thing in the Middle Worlds, although it sometimes happens. But close as I was to the source of Dream, it was almost certain. And yet I considered the risk worthwhile. Anything to get off that rock, away from Sigyn and Snakey.
And so I began to sharpen my spoon. Gods, it was laborious. There were no days or nights here, of course. I slept when I could, which was seldom. Little by little, I came to know the perils and joys of that river and its islands of ephemera, some as small as a soap bubble; some as large as continents. I learnt to explore these islands; to skirt their dangers; to touch the minds of the dreamers who had created them. Little by little, I narrowed my search, all the time seeking a dreamer who would suit my purpose.
It had to be a strong mind, though not so strong as to resist my influence, or to try and consume me. An open mind; imaginative; not too constrained by moral issues. I tried many, only to find them all unsuitable in some way; and then, after an eternity of searching, I found the perfect one – or should I say, the dreamer found me. A strong mind, and imaginative, filled with familiar landscapes. A kindred soul, in fact, I thought; playing out scenarios that I almost recognized.
Some were tactile; comforting dreams of half-forgotten sensations. Dreams of sweet, cool water; of hands on my face; of linen sheets; of shady trees and the good scents of wet soil and vegetation. Trapped as I was, deep underground, barely able to breathe the air, always fearful, always in pain, always hungry and thirsty and sore, those dreams were my link to a sweeter world, and I embraced them fervently.
But as time passed I found the dreams becoming increasingly violent. The arc of a fountain of lava erupting from Chaos into the Worlds, bringing destruction in its wake. The journey of a flake of ash ascending from a bonfire. Dreams of fire; dreams of smoke; abstract dreams of Chaos. Burning buildings and fortresses falling into twilight; visions of the Folk at war; the Maggots; the Rock Folk; the Ice Folk; the gods . . .
At first it seemed almost too perfect. That violence, so akin to my own; I sensed the potential for a trap. And so I entered carefully, skirting the dreams with caution, occasionally adding a couple of small details of my own to see if he would take the bait.
Well, I say he. It isn’t always easy to identify a dreamer. Dreams are complex structures, difficult as prophecies to interpret or understand. Identities are particularly hard to determine, as the dreamer tends to appear in many different Aspects. I took a different Aspect every time I entered Dream; one day a hawk; the other a cat; the next perhaps a frog or a spider. At first I had to force myself not to move too quickly, exploring the dreamer’s landscapes without trying to make any obvious attempt at communication, or trying to make him reveal himself.
I’ll admit, it was frustrating. But I knew I had to be patient. I’d found myself the perfect mind – clever, receptive, imaginative, and with just the right level of repressed violence to make us nicely compatible. I didn’t want to frighten him (or her) away with my eagerness. I already knew so much about my dreamer; his thoughts and feelings; his intelligence; his imagination; everything but his identity.
And then, one night, I fo
und myself more than just a spectator. At last, I had made a connection beyond the mere subconscious. In spite of my attempts to hide, the unknown dreamer had spotted me.
The dream was an oddly comforting one; a long, deserted summer beach, with trees almost up to the waterline and the scent of flowers and ripening fruit.
At one end of the beach, a small girl was busy building a sandcastle. Could she be the dreamer? I thought.
I moved a little closer. I’d assumed the Aspect of a little redhaired boy – an Aspect which I found both practical as well as nicely unthreatening.
The girl seemed wholly preoccupied with the task in hand; I ventured closer still, keeping in the background of the dream so as not to attract attention. But the girl had seen me. Her gaze was strangely penetrating, and when I tried to shift my ephemeral Aspect, to make myself inconspicuous again, I found that I couldn’t. I was caught.
The little girl looked at me. ‘Who are you?’
‘No one. Nothing.’
‘That’s not true. I’ve seen you before. Won’t you tell me your name?’
She must be the dreamer, I told myself. But like myself, she was lucid; clearly able to exercise control over aspects of her dream – and that included Yours Truly, trapped on a little island of Dream that might at any moment vanish into ephemera as soon as my dreamer chose to awake . . .
Perhaps, despite my precautions, I thought, I hadn’t been quite wary enough. I’d relied too much on my camouflage, believing myself invulnerable. And now I was caught between realities, unable to shift, at the mercy of the dark intelligence I’d wooed for so long, and which, whatever else it was, was certainly not a little girl.
‘Who are you?’ I asked, to gain time.
‘Heidi,’ said the little girl. ‘Did you see my sandcastle?’
I looked beyond her down the beach. The sun was going down, and the light was suddenly ominous. In its glow, the sandcastle looked even larger than before, and all at once it occurred to me that it looked a lot like Asgard.
I looked a little closer. Yes: there was Odin’s hall; the walls; the turrets and bridges and towers and gates. There was my place; and Sigyn’s; Idun’s garden; Freyja’s boudoir; all painstakingly built in sand, with the Rainbow Bridge arching out from the parapet.
The tide had suddenly started to turn. The wind, so clean and fragrant a few moments before, now smelt of mud and seaweed. In the glow of the setting sun, the waves were crested with frills of blood.
Once more I tried to shift my ephemeral Aspect. I was getting a bad feeling about this dream; the bloody light; the turning tide; the Sky Citadel built in sand. But again I found that I could not shift. The dreamer’s will was stronger than mine.
I looked up at the sky. It was purple. The waves had reached the outer walls of the sandcastle. The bridge of sand fell almost at once; the battlements might hold longer.
‘This is the bit I always like best,’ said Heidi, in a bright voice. ‘Watching it fall. Don’t you agree? Watching as the sea takes it back, grain by grain, until there’s nothing left?’
Silently, I nodded. Whoever she was, she had a point.
‘Of course, these things aren’t made to last,’ Heidi went on in a dreamy voice. ‘Order and Chaos have their tides. It’s futile to resist them.’ She looked at me. ‘I know who you are. You’re Loki, the Trickster.’
I nodded. ‘Right. And you’re Heid, otherwise known as Gullveig. The Sorceress. The mistress of runes. Cunning, greedy, vengeful. Big fan, by the way – those are my favourite qualities.’
She gave me a mischievous smile. Behind the little-girl Aspect she was complex; troubling. And, let’s admit it, alluring; alluring as only a demon can be.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you, too,’ she said. ‘You’re clever, ruthless, self-obsessed, narcissistic, disloyal . . .’
I shrugged. She had me there, I thought.
‘I’ve always wanted to meet you,’ I said. ‘But you’re not an easy woman to find.’
Gullveig smiled. ‘I was waiting for the right time.’
Interesting. ‘Why?’ I said.
‘I want to offer you a deal.’
A deal. You’d have thought that by that time I would have learnt to read the small print. But after an unknowable time chained to a rock in World Below, I was hardly in a position to haggle. I thought of the Oracle’s prophecy and said:
‘This deal. Does it involve you freeing me from torment, putting me at the head of a fleet and doing to Asgard what the tide just did to your sandcastle?’
‘Kind of,’ said Gullveig.
I said: ‘I’m in.’
LESSON 1
Heidi
Seriously. That thing I told you in Book about never trusting anyone? That.
Lokabrenna
AND SO I TURNED MY COAT AGAIN. What choice did I have? The Old Man had abandoned me. The Worlds had unleashed their dogs on me. And here was the Sorceress, Gullveig-Heid, offering me a chance to strike back and to regain my place in Chaos . . .
I would have been a fool to refuse. Anyone would have taken the deal. Heidi was powerful, and she wanted revenge, especially on those Vanir who had betrayed her by allying themselves with Odin. Technically, I was the enemy, but I was counting on the fact that my desertion from Asgard would find favour in her eyes. And anyway, I was star-struck. This was the legendary Gullveig-Heid, first mistress of the runes, for whom I’d searched the Worlds in vain since Odin had first tricked me into taking corporeal Aspect.
And the first thing I needed her to do was to release that corporeal Aspect, currently suffering torment in a cave by the River Dream. So I took what she offered me, without reading much of the small print. And awakening now from the dream state from which she had recruited me, I was so relieved to find myself free of Snakey, the mixing bowl, the chaise-longue rock and my rune-inscribed chains that I never thought to ask her for specific details of – for instance – just what had happened to Sigyn, or how I was to be reintroduced into Chaos’s fiery fold. Turns out that wasn’t the plan at all, but I imagine you’ve already guessed that. Used and betrayed by one set of friends, I was soon to find myself in virtually the same position with my shiny new demon companions.
In my defence, however, I was experiencing a number of exhilarating new sensations that had temporarily robbed me of my suspicion. Overwhelming gratitude; relief; release; the ecstasy of rubbing my eyes; the joy of drinking water without getting a faceful of venom; my reintroduction to food and drink (though I suspected cake would be off the menu for ever); the astonishing pleasures of bathing – first in cold water, then in warm, then in a multitude of different soaps, oils and various bath products.
Then there was Heidi – alluring, and with a demon’s ability to take on any Aspect she (or I) most desired. Now she was golden from head to foot; a ring on every finger; eyes like those of a lynx and hair like waterfalls and rainbows. Tattooed all over in runes of gold, from her fingertips to the soles of her feet, sleek and lithe and wild and perverse and, like Angie of Iron-wood, curiously attracted to men with red hair.
So shoot me. I took advantage. Not the wisest move, I’ll admit, especially after what happened with Angie, but I’d been underground too long to deny myself the pleasure of a little harmless dalliance. Demon sex was a pleasure I hadn’t had for a long time, and now I revelled in it again, as Order and Chaos prepared for war, burning up the winter nights in the fires of our passion.
Meanwhile, on my rock in World Below, a surrogate, an ephemeron made from runes and glamours, suffered torment in my place – just in case Skadi or one of the others came along to check on how I was doing. The ephemeron was not alive in any real sense of the word. It was simply an assemblage of thoughts and images selected by Heidi during my imprisonment, then given just enough substance – not difficult, so near to Dream – to deceive the eyes of the casual observer. Closer investigation, of course, would reveal the deception, but soon that wouldn’t matter. War was coming; and before long the Aesir would have mo
re on their hands than dealing with Yours Truly.
The plan was in three stages. One: preparation. Two: subjugation. Three: confrontation. Nice and clean. The first (and rather tedious) stage was actually almost complete, which meant that when I joined Gullveig’s camp, the fun was just about to begin.
And it was fun – Wildfire, unleashed, bigger and badder than ever. Heidi and I had set up camp at the edge of Ironwood, where we could observe Bif-rost unseen. It was safe; there was plenty of game, and the river Gunnthrà that ran through the wood led straight down into World Below, providing a conduit for all kinds of beings to enter the Worlds through the River Dream.
This was the place from which our army would come, led by Heidi’s incantations. Beings of all kinds would be summoned there, from the fears and dreams and tears of the Folk. You see, the human race had become a reservoir of power. Unsuspected by the gods, who still viewed them as little more than a fanbase, the Folk had an almost inexhaustible capacity to dream; to imagine; to conjure up the most intricate, the most explicit, the most enduring of fantasies – all of which the Sorceress could weave into the makings of the most advanced army the Worlds had ever known.
This was what she’d been doing during the years that I had searched for her. Living half in and half out of Dream, she knew how to surf its waters; how to coax them with her mind; how to ride the rapids that would have destroyed a lesser being. Gullveig-Heid was the most powerful manipulator of dreams that the Worlds had ever known, and it was through Dream that she planned to bring about the subjugation of the Worlds.
Of course, I’d be a key part of that. I knew Asgard’s defences. I had lived with the gods for so long that I knew all their weaknesses, both strategic and personal. For instance, I knew that if we introduced certain elements into the fray (the World Serpent, or the Fenris Wolf, for instance), then members of Asgard’s key personnel could be counted upon to drop everything, to leave their position, however strategically valuable, and to confront the enemy on whatever ground we chose. Timing is so important. And we had the advantage there; we could choose when the war would start, and how it would continue.
The Gospel of Loki Page 23
