by Byatt, A. S.
The Sea-Tree stood in a world of other sea-growth, from the vast tracts of bladderwrack to the sea-tangles, tangleweeds, oarweeds, seagirdles, horsetail kelps, devil’s aprons and mermaid’s wine-glasses. Shoals of great fish and small fish went by, wheeling packed globes of herring, rushing herds of tunny. There were salmon on their long journeys – chinook, coho, sockeye, pink, chum and cherry salmon. There were green turtles grazing in the fronds. There were streamlined sharks in many forms, thresher, shortfin mako, porbeagle, tope, leopard shark, dusky shark, sandbar shark and night shark, the hunters of the hunters of the hunted. Great whales tore giant squid from the depths, or opened the vast sieves of their mouths to filter plankton. Creatures built homes in the canopy as creatures built homes in the World-Ash. Sea otters constructed cradles and dangled from the fronds, turning shellfish and urchins in busy forepaws. Dolphins danced and sang, clicking and whistling. Seabirds screamed overhead and plumped like arrows into the mass of water. The water was pulled this way and that by the sun and the moon. Tides crawled up beaches, were sucked into inlets, broke with white lacy spray on shells of rock, hurtled in smooth and rearing, or seeped and meandered in deltas.
The holdfast of the Sea-Tree was on an underwater mountainside, deep, deep down, as far as the last glimmer of sunlight or moonlight could penetrate. There were deeper things. There were creatures of the dark whose plated forms, or spiny or fleshy heads, were lit as though by brilliant lamps in the black gloom. Things that angled for prey with a fishing line of their own flesh, things whose eyes glared in the visible darkness.
At the foot of the World-Ash is the Fountain of Urd: still, cold, black water. At the foot of the Sea-Tree are vents and funnels, through which whistle steam, and spittings of molten stone from the hot centre of the earth. Here too, in darkness, worms crawl, and pallid prawns flicker glassy feelers. As the three women from Jotunheim, the Norns, sit at the edge of the fountain and feed and water the Tree, so Aegir and Rán sit in the currents that eddy about the holdfast of Rándrasill. Aegir makes music with a stringed harp and a pearly conch. Whales and dolphins hang motionless, sifting the singing through the echo-chambers of their heads. The sounds can act like oil on the ocean, making a dull calm, or a glistening calm, seen glassy from under, and sparking from above. There are other tunes which perturb currents, and send great tongues of water bellowing up, as high above the thin surface as the tree is above the holdfast. The mass of water, glassy green, basalt black, holds for an everlasting moment and then the crest crumbles down and drives deep again, shedding foam, and froth, and billions of bubbles of air. Aegir’s wife, Rán, plays with a vast net which she loops about dead and dying creatures as they fall through the thick depths. Some say things are caught in her toils that are neither dead nor dying, but only entranced by the welling sound. What she does with the bones and baleen, the skin and scrags, is not known. It is said that she plants them in sand, to feed what crawls and creeps under it. It is said that she collects the very beautiful – a luminous squid, a sailor with thick gold hair, blue eyes and a lapis earring, an errant sea-snake – and arranges them in a weed-garden, for the pleasure of staring. Those who see her see nothing else, and do not return to describe her.
Homo Homini Deus Est
The thin child in wartime considered the question of how something came out of nothing. In the story told in the stone church a grandfatherly figure who resented presumption had spent six delectable days making things – sky and sea, sun and moon, the trees and the seaweeds, the camel, the horse, the peacock, the dog, the cat, the worm, all creatures that on earth do dwell to sing to him with cheerful voices, to sing his praises that was, as the angels incessantly did. And he had put the humans in their place and had told them to keep their place and not to eat the knowledge of good and evil. The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had not asked to be made use of as a tempter. The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age
There was nothing
Nor sand nor sea
Nor cold waves;
There was no earth,
No sky on high.
The gulf gaped
And grass grew nowhere.
The empty gulf had a name, Ginnungagap, which the thin child repeated again and again. It was a wonderful word. It was not entirely formless. It was bounded by points of the compass. To the north was Niflheim, home of mists, the place of cold and wet, from which roared twelve violent streams of icy water. To the south was Muspelheim, the hot place, where fire scorched and smoked. Icebergs rolled from Niflheim and were melted to steam by the hot blast from Muspelheim. In the swirling chaos a human form was shaped from the spitting matter, the giant Ymir, or Aurgelmir, whose name meant seething clay or gravel-yeller. He was made, some said, of the pure white clay with which the Norns fed Yggdrasil. He was vast: he was everything, or almost everything. The thin child saw him spread-eagled, glistening all over, for some reason faceless, his head a rocky globe.
There was another creature in Ginnungagap, a huge cow, constantly making milk as she licked the salt on the ice-rocks. Ymir fed on the milk. The thin child could not imagine how. There was too much of him. He was the father of the Hrimthurses, the frost-giants, who budded from his bulk. In the pit where his left arm met his trunk, creatures formed, male and female; his feet coiled together and gave birth to a male being. Meanwhile the great cow, busily supping the salt with her hot tongue, uncovered, first the curled hair, then the sleeping frost-flesh of another giant, Burr, who gave birth to another, Bor, who found somewhere (where? thought the thin child, her head crammed with giants overwhelming Ginnungagap) a giantess called Bestla, who gave birth to three sons, the first gods, Odin, Wili and We.
These three set upon Ymir, slaughtered him and dismembered him.
The thin child tried to imagine this. It could be contemplated if she reduced everything in size, so that Ginnungagap and its contents resembled a thick glass ball, inside which the mist blew like ropes, and the clay man sprawled in space, glistening with frost. They crept up on him, the first gods, and tore him open – with fingernails, with teeth, with scythes, with hooks, with what? They tore him limb from limb, a phrase she knew well. They did not have faces, they were not persons, these three gods, they moved like running black shadows, like rat-men, stabbing and searching. This first act of the new gods took place in three colours, the first that humans see and name, black, white and red. The Gap was black, many shades of black, thick and fine, glossy and tenebrous. The great snowman was white, except where his own parts cast white-violet shadows, in the pits of his arms, in his monstrous nostrils, under his knees. The new gods hacked and laughed. Blood spurted from the wounds they made, poured from his neck over his shoulders, slid like a hot garment over his chest and flanks, flowed, flowed, filled the glass ball with running crimson, and drowned the world. It was unquenchable, it was the life that had been in him, under the clay and ice, it drained away into death. There was a story in the Asgard book that the thin child did not like, about a giant called Bergelmir who built a boat and survived the deluge, and became the ancestor of the other giants. She did not like the story because the German writer said it was perhaps an echo of the story of Noah and the Flood. She wanted to keep this tale separate.
The gods made the world from the dead giant. The thin child was disturbed at having to imagine this; there was no scale by which she could measure it, although she could grasp the shadowy semblances that linked the bits of dead Human to the creatures and structures in the world.
From the flesh of Ymir
The earth was shaped.
From his bones, the mountains,
The heaven from th
e skull
Of the giant cold as frost
And from his blood,
The sea.
The lakes were made from his sweat, and the trees from his curling hair. Inside the high cavern of his skull, his brains became the rolling clouds. The stars were perhaps wandering sparks from Muspelheim which the gods trapped and fixed under the skull bone. Or maybe they were lights above the bone, glimpsed through slits and bore-holes made during the murder.
Maggots and worms of all kinds fed on the festering flesh. The gods made these into cavedwellers, the dwarf people, the slow strong trolls, the dark-elves. They took the thick eyebrows of the corpse and fashioned them into a bushy fence, containing Midgard, the Garden of Middle Earth. At the centre of Midgard they built the home of the gods, Asgard. These gods called themselves Ases, pillars, and Asgard was circled by Midgard, which was circled by the bloody sea, outside which lay Utgard, the Outside, in which terrible things lurked and prowled.
The gods also made the sun and the moon, and with them, time. The earth was a sprouting corpse and the heaven was the bowl of a skull. Sun and Moon also were human in form. The Sun was a shining woman, in a chariot pulled by a horse, Arwaker (early-waker). The Moon was a bright boy, Mani, driving his horse Alswider (all-swift). Mother Night rode a dark horse, Hrimfaxi (frost-mane) and was followed by her son Day on Skin-faxi (shining mane). These figures, alternating dark and light, hurtled in an endless procession below the skull, above the clouds.
There was something strange about these shining and shadowy drivers and riders. Both sun and moon were hotly pursued by wolves, with open jaws, snapping at their heels, loping across emptiness. The story did not mention any creation of wolves; they simply appeared, snarling and dark. They were a part of the rhythm of things. They never rested or tired. The created world was inside the skull, and the wolves in the mind were there from the outset of the heavenly procession.
The gods built Asgard beautifully. They made tools and weapons, gold pots and beakers, for gold was plentiful, gold disks for hurling and carved gold figures to play games of draughts and chess. They had made the dwarves and trolls, the dark elves and the light. It was at this point that, almost casually, to please or amuse themselves, they made human beings.
There were three gods who left Asgard and went walking for pleasure in the green fields of Midgard. The earth was bright with grass and juicy leeks. The three gods were Odin, Hönir and Lodur, who was, the Asgard book explained, possibly the quick Loki in another form. The three gods came to the seashore and found there two lifeless logs, Ask, the ash, and Embla, who might have been an alder, an elm, or the stump of a vine. These things had nothing.
They had no mind
They had no sense
Nor blood nor sound
Nor lively colours.
The three gods turned them into living beings. Odin gave them minds, Hönir gave them their senses, and Loki the hot gave them blood and colour. So the three killer-gods became the three lifegivers, supposing, the thin child thought, that Wili and We who had disappeared from the story, had simply been replaced by Hönir and Loki. There were always three, it was a rule of stories, both of myths and fairy tales. It was the Rule of Three. In the Christian story the three are the cross grandfather, the tortured good man, and the white bird with beating wings. Here in this account of the world Odin was a maker, and the others too, to make up three.
The thin child imagined the new woodman and new woodwoman. Their skin was sleek, like new bark, their eyes were bright like watchful birds, they moved fingers and toes in slow surprise, like chickens or snakes emerging from eggs, stumbling a little as they learned to walk. They opened their mouths to smile at each other. They had eaten nothing; they were dead vegetable matter; but their mouths full of new strong white teeth included the canine spikes of the meat-eater, the wolf in the head.
No more is known of the joys or fates of Ask and Embla. Like many things in this tale, they hold together for a brief time, and then return to gaping darkness. But Odin, the god, was a mover of the story. Loki too, if the third wandering god was indeed that trickster, as the thin child liked to believe he was, for it strengthened the links of the chain of the tale if he was there at the making of men.
The thin child walked through the fair field in all weathers, her satchel of books and pens, with the gas-mask hanging from it, like Christian’s burden when he walked in the fields, reading in his Book. She thought long and hard, as she walked, about the meaning of belief. She did not believe the stories in Asgard and the Gods. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive. She read the Greek stories at school, and said to herself that there had once been people who brought ‘belief’ to these capricious and quarrelsome gods and goddesses, but she herself read them as she read fairy stories. Puss in Boots, Baba Yaga, brownies, pucks and fairies, foolish and dangerous, nymphs, dryads, hydras and the white winged horse, Pegasus, all these offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be. But they didn’t live in her, and she didn’t live in them.
The church had a real wicket-gate, like the one in Pilgrim’s Progress, where it was written, Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Through that gate she trotted, put down satchel and mask, and took up the burden of being required to believe what she could not believe – and, she knew, deep in the hollows of her head and body, in her wheezing lungs and space behind the eyes, did not want to believe. Bunyan would have found some horrible punishment for her, some slippery slide into a cauldron of boiling fat, some clawed fiend who would carry her away over the crowns of the woods.
The vicar talked gently of gentle Jesus and she felt rude not to believe him.
What was alive in the clean stony place that smelled of brass polish, wood polish, was the English language. Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.
The thin child knew these words by heart. Sometimes she chanted them as she walked along beside the hedgerow, stressing the words for the rhythm, imagining the lost sheep bleating and peering about in a grey field. But the creed she could not say. She believed in neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost. She tried to say the words and felt like the bad daughter in the fairy tale, whose throat and mouth were full of wriggling frogs and toads.
She made herself a myth of meadows as she hurried to school and loitered in long afternoons on the way back. They sang, in the church, in the school:
Daisies are our silver,
Buttercups our gold:
This is all the treasure
We can have or hold.
Raindrops are our diamonds
And the morning dew;
While for shining sapphires
We’ve the speedwell blue.
She liked seeing, and learning, and naming things. Daisies. Day’s eyes, she learned with a frisson of pleasure. Buttercups, glossy yellow, a lovelier colour than gold, and the ubiquitous dandelions, fiercely yellow with toothed leaves and seedheads finer than wool, their seeds black dots like the tadpoles in the clouds of jelly-spheres in the pond. In spring the field was thick with cowslips, and in the hedgerows, in the tangled bank, under the hawthorn hedge and the ash tree, there were pale primroses and violets of many colours, from rich purple to a white touched with mauve. Dandelion, dent-de-lion, lionstooth, her mother told her. Her mother liked words. There were vetches and lady’s bedstraw, forgetmenots and speedwells, foxgloves, viper’s bugloss, cow parsley, deadly nightshade (wreathed in the hedges), willowherb and cranesbill, hairy bitter-cress, docks (good for wounds and stings), celan-dines, campions and ragged
robin. She watched each one, as they came out, in clumps sprinkled across the grass, or singletons hidden in ditches or attached to stones.
The tangled bank was full of life, most of it unseen, though it could be heard, rustling in dead leaves, or listening to the child listening. You could hear the attention of a hidden bird, or a crouching vole. She watched the spiders weave their perfect geometrical traps, or lurk under an inviting thick silk funnel. There were, at different times of the year, clouds of butterflies, yellow and white, blue, orange and velvet black. The fields were full of sipping, humming bees. The branches and the sky were inhabited by birds. The skylark went up and up out of the bare earth into the blue sky, singing. Thrushes banged snails against stones and left a crackling carpet of empty shells. Rooks strode and cawed and gathered in glossy parliaments in the tree-tops. Huge clouds of starlings went overhead wheeling like one black wing, coiling like smoke. Plovers called.
The thin child fished in the pond for tadpoles and tiddlers, of which there was an endless multitude. She gathered great bunches of wild flowers, cowslips full of honey, scabious in blue cushions, dog-roses, and took them home, where they did not live long, which did not concern her, for there were always more springing up in their place. They flourished and faded and died and always came back next spring, and always would, the thin child thought, long after she herself was dead. Maybe most of all she loved the wild poppies, which made the green bank scarlet as blood. She liked to pick a bud that was fat and ready to open, green-lipped and hairy. Then with her fingers she would prise the petal-case apart, and extract the red, crumpled silk – slightly damp, she thought – and spread it out in the sunlight. She knew in her heart she should not do this. She was cutting a life short, interrupting a natural unfolding, for the pleasure of satisfied curiosity and the glimpse of the secret, scarlet, creased and frilly flower-flesh. Which wilted almost immediately between finger and thumb. But there were always more, so many more. It was all one thing, the field, the hedge, the ash tree, the tangled bank, the trodden path, the innumerable forms of life, of which the thin child, having put down her bundle and gas-mask, was only one among many.
