Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Now they began to hear sounds below them, as if people were cutting up a stranded whale.

  Kristina whispered: Dig more quietly, because if any of them hear us, we’ll be hard pressed—

  Wife, your advice is always good.

  Holding her breath, she pricked their course downward with Eyvind’s awl, which suddenly broke through into phosphorescence—at which point the dirt gave way, and the Pedersons tumbled down into a cavern where there were ever so many weird flames like the points of a skull’s yellow smile. In the air, smooth old Saami ships kept swimming through the long diagonals like rain or sunrays which possibly had already existed in the rock; perhaps it was rock they were in, not earth; or might it be the case that when darkness gets dark enough, the atmosphere itself thickens into something approaching coal? Anyhow, it was certainly a wide open country they’d fallen into. As far as the Pedersons could see, tall grey she-trolls, naked but for necklaces of whorled silver beads, stood smoking corpses over bone-fires. Although she said nothing to her husband, Kristina thought she recognized Bendik Hermansson’s carcass. In fact she was reminded of the cannery, with the lines of herring hanging down from skewers passed through their heads.

  Howling like dogs and seals, the monsters now rushed toward them, ready to scream and harry, to burn and bite. Their lank grey hair was fishy-wet, and their teeth resembled the cracked dark rock between glaciers. Kristina overcame her horror by pretending they were women with bad skin from the burns of the herring-brine; she had known many like that back home in Stavanger.

  Well, goodbye, wife, said Øistein.

  Squeezing his hand, Kristina pityingly replied: It may be worse than that.

  Indeed, Captain Gull’s skeleton now arrived, enthroned on the rotten coffin-lid which was all that remained of the Hyndla. Rising, the thing raised its yellow hand, at which the she-trolls halted and gruntingly returned to their business.— Well, well, you certainly made a fool out of me! it chuckled. Got both yourselves here, yes indeed, the full pair. Made an even shorter passage, you did . . . Quite an occasion, it breezed on.— Welcome, welcome to America! Now stand up tall, both of you, because it’s time to present you to the Great Troll. Kristina, my dear, have you saved the jewel that the reverend left you? You know, the one I helped you with—

  Although she felt nothing for that monster but hatred and terror, the woman now found that she could not remove herself from its ascendancy. With a fixed smile she grabbled in her pockets, while Øistein quietly wiped the ooze out of her hair.

  Perfect! the skeleton chortled, clapping its fingers together with a hateful hissing noise. Give it here.

  The most unpleasant errand Kristina ever undertook was touching that bony hand, but she had to do it, so she did, and the skeleton received her talisman.

  Thank you, my dear, it said. Now let me think . . . Oh, yes!— Capering and sniggering, it lobbed the dark stone into the nearest corpse-fire, while the troll-women ducked back, wiping their sweaty foreheads. For a moment nothing happened, and then the jewel exploded, giving off a sweet incense of blackberries, sunlight and church candles. The trolls wrinkled their noses. The vapor hung there for a moment, then darkened into dust.— One more illusion disposed of! explained Captain Gull.

  It now began to lead them downward, into the same cold stillness which comes to Stavanger at the beginning of a rain, deeper and deeper, until the Pedersons had practically forgotten their names, and eternity glowed like blue cloud-light on the domes of their grey skulls.

  Øistein said bitterly: A narrower passage than we expected, captain!

  Well, man, you paid your money, so make the best of it, and after that no words were said.

  Further they went, to Skullheim and below. Øistein felt ever more hopeless, although there was nothing to do but keep Kristina’s spirits up, after the example of that rich man in Stavanger who bought his family a grave beneath the choir, just in case they could still hear the music. Troll-women, muck-furred corpse-gulpers, stretched out their hands to touch them, cold yet hideously active. Everyone was toiling—and on that account, hope returned to the Pedersons like sunlight seen through many columns of drying sardines; they began to realize that they might do well enough for themselves, even here. For all they knew, there might be a passage back to Stavanger—a long one, to be sure, but given time enough they could dig their way with Cousin’s Eyvind’s awl. So, following their master, they entered the monsters’ larder as inevitably as baskets of herring getting winched up the sides of those narrow sharp-roofed warehouses; and there was even a simulacrum of the great wooden hand, ever so familiar, which pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, with a necklace of amber and carnelian looped about its wrist; at this sight the Pedersons’ memories flew out of their hearts as bright as new wet clots of wool in a farmwife’s dark doorway, and Kristina, feeling ever more at peace, recollected from her girlhood, although she could not have said why it now so consolingly haunted her, the great dew-studded spiderweb of a nettle colony, all plants growing outward from an empty ring, interlacing their bristly leaves. As for Øistein, he contented himself with the faith that at least he and his wife would remain like-minded forever.

  The passage was as dark as the nets which hung in the fishermen’s empty houses, but there began to be great phosphorescent side-chambers at left and right. All the people who had ever died lay smoked and gutted like Norwegian brisling, Mediterranean sardines; imagine the cans of sardines laid out in double rows of five in each pan, four pans per rack, on the bed of the lidding press and you can imagine how the human corpses looked, with she-trolls busily laying them in iron coffins and slathering them with oil.

  This way, said the skeleton. Here’s where you Pedersons will find yourselves most useful. Øistein, you can still make barrels, I hope?

  It led them through the row of furnaces—crisscrossed logs in their dirt—then nine times nine racks of corpses getting smoked; the Pedersons had to admit that even this was better than sharing a house with twenty people forever. But for a moment Øistein impractically wished that he could have seen Kristina once more in some more pleasant place, even the most verminous street of Stavanger, and even with her back turned as she crept wearily away with a bucket of dirty clothes to wash; if he only could have known, he would have run after her, kissed the striped hem of her long grey skirt—

  And they came into another cavern, nearly as large as the first, where to support any conceivable silver-weight in their winches’ grasp, slant beams ran down much of the oozy fronts of the tall, narrow warehouses, most of which still sported pointed roofs as in Old Stavanger; within their lightless rooms, dead women, including Kristina’s mother, toiled waist deep in a stream of silver treasure, and the kerchiefs were open like flowers on the women’s heads . . . and so at last, their hearts like wet grass on an autumn’s evening, Øistein and Kristina saw where all the herring of Rogaland had gone.

  THE QUEEN’S GRAVE

  But how is that future diminished or consumed, which as yet is not? or how that past increased, which is no longer, save . . . in the mind . . . ? For it expects, it considers, it remembers . . .

  Saint Augustine, Confessions, bef. 430 A.D.

  1

  My mind bloomed white as yarrow on the queen’s green grave. On the queen’s green grave I lay all night, my face down in the cold wet grass, my purpose right-angled like a wool comb, because Ingrid, beautifully cruel, had promised to leave me unless I brought her a true swan-shirt. It was hardly the first thing she had asked of me, and I wondered how soon she would finish weaving the cloth of her discontent. So far I had wisely bowed my head to her demands. My obedience was resistance, because it delayed our separation. On this occasion her bright and narrow lips had smiled so freshly that I could not imagine refusing her—all the more since she so evidently hoped I would fail. When one is young, and sets his heart on another person, whatever unwillingness she raises may be interpreted
optimistically, as mere admonition, rather than as the dreary verdict that it impels: convicted of unloveability; sentenced to loneliness! So I gave Ingrid’s evasions and commandments their most splendid possible construction, hoping that we might yet get along; and because we are all of us passing changeable, at least until our bones get exposed, what could prevent her from possibly discovering more use for me? Three years she allowed me, most of which I spent wandering uselessly among the bird-lakes of Lapland, whose dark shore-rocks are scratched with fleets of swan-necked picture-ships. I importuned goosegirls and witchwives, haunted rookeries by moonlight and was gulled out of all my silver by knowing cormorant-trappers. Guarding my breath within me, I even sought beneath the water the horse, the fish and the iron snake. My perseverance lacking sorcerous qualities, I surfaced with nothing but muck and ice. When I look back on that time I can see that its sorrows and difficulties prepared me for my interview with the queen—but these had begun the instant I met Ingrid; and, for that matter, what would have caused me to love her, had my elders not raised me to love trials for their own sake? To submit, not to Ingrid but to suffering, in order to pay my weird fates their fair price, that was what I did, while the cold water ran out of my aching ears, and I coughed up mud. With what contempt Ingrid would have beheld me then, she who dressed herself so perfectly in black, silver and white, just like the autumn sea! Once more I dove, grappling myself down by the reed-roots, caressing the ooze in those same breaststroke-arcs by which a bellycrawling mason lays down tile, but the most promising thing I could grasp was a pebble. When I crawled out, goose-flocks overflew me, as white and perfect as the breasts of Ingrid.

  To be honest, I cannot tell you why I should ever have appealed to her. Almost any other man would have paid three years for the privilege of hunting her a swan-shirt; at least, so the cormorant-trappers told me, grinning. As for me, I loved her, to be sure; I adored the sweet hands of my Ingrid, and the way she watched me with that soft smile of hers whose meaning I thought I knew, not to mention her dark eyebrow-arches. But what does a woman do with a swan-shirt but throw it over her shoulders early one morning and fly away? By now you can tell that my mind circled round and round Ingrid, with more longing than understanding. My dreams and desires concerning her, whatever else they might once have been, had long expressed themselves as mere directional pressure, much as the pallid grasses point downriver from beneath some black current where the salmon no longer spawn.

  A certain cormorant-trapper’s widowed daughter, pitying and desiring me, offered not only to weave me a swan-shirt but also to love me and care for me until death, in the fine turf house her dead husband had left her, on the top of a windy hill of reeds. She was a woman of such kind ways that when she came out her door in the morning, ducks, geese and even seagulls would alight in a circle around her, upstretching their necks and opening their beaks, as if for food; what they truly yearned for were caresses, which she gave them. In the side of the hill she had dug a secret cave, which could be reached only through a tunnel behind the kitchen stove; here she hid away cormorants from her angry troll of a father, and when she brought me into that place, simply trusting and loving me, I upraised my candle and saw that in that vast hall of dark dirt she had even made a black lake, glittering with fishes of copper and gold, so that her cormorants could feed and entertain themselves. She and I might well have found joy together. But since I had made up my mind to something else, there was no help for it.

  In other words, this story does not exactly begin on the night when Ingrid first asked me for her heart’s desire, nearly closing her heavy eyes as she lay there naked, slyly, sleepily watching me, with one hand on her knee and the other between her gaping thighs. Naturally I wanted to make love right then, but Ingrid refused. Sweetly faithless she had smoothly become, so soon as she felt herself sure of owning me. Whenever I for my part begged for some assurance to keep, my entreaty was as a stone dropped down a dark well; I never even heard the splash. But Ingrid did smile, calmly and beautifully; that was what she gave me just then; I longed to lick her white teeth. Or if she had only slapped me a few times, sharply, so that I could taste each sting, that would have nourished me equally well. I informed my Ingrid that what I wished was for her to trust and depend on me. I desired her to be my linen-goddess—the one I lived for. She replied that she had tried such an experiment once, with someone who brought her such jealous misery that she became abject.

  What happened to him? I said.

  Oh, one morning he turned into a white pig. Do you want to see him? He’s in the swineyard. You two might find common topics to grunt about.

  Well, I’m not him, I told her; you can depend on me.

  Then do bring me that swan-shirt, said Ingrid. In not a day more than three years, and in the meantime I don’t promise to be faithful.

  I’ll set out in the morning. Will you give me some bread and cheese to carry?

  What you don’t understand, said Ingrid, is that any help I gave you would only make it worse.

  2

  The cormorant-trapper’s daughter warmed me in her bed, beat the dirt out of my clothes, fed me the best she had, saw me to the door, kissed me, and for a parting token gave me a twisting arm-snake of good red gold. I thanked her with all my heart.

  I’ve spoken with the swans, she said, and it seems that swan-shirts are even rarer than they used to be. I wish you’d take mine; it would save so much effort! I’ve only worn it once, to make sure I wove the right magic. Surely Ingrid wouldn’t mind that.

  Well, I would, I said.

  Have it your way, she answered. All the Valkyries who used to turn into swans have flown away. So you’d need to find a witch to make you one. From what the wind tells me, the greatest witch alive is this Ingrid of yours. Tell me, does she do anything in bed that I can’t do?

  Well, she has a certain way of smiling that’s not a smile, and she knows how to leave me lonely when she opens her legs, so that no matter how deep inside her I go, I can never reach her, which makes her a goddess, or at least an infinite dream. And since she never gives me anything, nothing from her appears imperfect.

  I wish you joy of her, said the cormorant-trapper’s daughter. My advice is to inquire about swan-shirts at the queen’s grave.

  I asked her which queen—for there are as many queens as there are women—and the cormorant-trapper’s daughter replied: Good Queen Hnoss was the wisest of all, or at least so the seagulls tell me, and they’ve flown even to the other side of the sea.

  I thanked her again. She smiled at me, quite cheerfully, then went inside and shut the door.

  As I set off into the wind, I had to wonder whether I were doing the right thing. The cormorant-trapper’s daughter truly was so goodhearted. Besides, her bed was a veritable nest of eiderdown; no chill could ever get in there. And for some reason I could never even imagine dwelling forever with Ingrid, in her tall narrow house on her meadow of butter-rich grass. But I could see no help for it, so I kept walking, in search of the queen’s grave. Soon the night was as dark as an iron axehead.

  3

  Yes, the queen’s name was Hnoss, meaning jewel, which so many precious women have been called since the time of Freya’s elder daughter. She lived in the time when the sea was higher than now, and keys’ heads more complex than their stems. But in her day as in ours the highest human office was that of giver; and indeed this woman gained strange renown for her generosity, as you will hear; for when a friendless old thrall fell down sick before her hall, she had him carried to the hearth and nursed; once he strengthened sufficiently to go his own way, she gave him a gold ring for his family. And as I tell this over, it strikes me that this Hnoss was not so unalike to the cormorant-trapper’s daughter—still another reason I might have done just as well remaining in her company. But how are we to know what others are? Ingrid’s soul, for instance, was lightless, and of course that ancient thrall was not what he seemed. What woe he might
already have worked upon our kind is unknown; for what malice he had come there is likewise concealed; but thanks to her kindness and healing leechcraft, the queen became the one and only member of humankind who receives praise in the Jötunsbok, the Book of Giants; and I have even heard that on her account the end of the world was put off by seven years. As for the king, his lendermen and thralls, and all the other hard people who grubbed over that turf until it devoured them, they doubtless took what they could of her. All the Morkinskinna says of her is that she was a good queen, who received everybody well, and furthermore brought good seasons, although ordinarily those are said to be brought about by kings. Never a wife gave birth but the queen sent something to her, be it a cooking-pot or a length of wadmal cloth. She was an unparalleled weaver, and introduced the lovely elf-stitch, which no one alive can duplicate—all the more reason to inquire at her grave about swan-shirts. Besides, when she died she must have gone to her friends, and one of them might know where I could get a swan-shirt for Ingrid.