Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

by Byatt, A. S.

  They made a strong fetter, which was named Leyding, and they went in a gang to the wolf in the woods, and spoke to him pleasantly and said they had brought this plaything for him, to show off his power. They would bind him in it, for fun, and he would break out, and show them the power of his sinews and nerves. The wolf’s hackles rose: he looked at them with cold, calculating eyes, the pupils narrowed to pinshots. He could do that, he said, rolling his wiry muscles under his glistening hair. But why should he? They had been betting, they said, facing the beast at the edge of the clearing, from where he could vanish into the dark wood, or spring tooth and claw upon the gods – they had been betting on how long the breakout would take him. Heimdall, the herald, who guarded the high gate of Asgard, could hear the grass grow on the earth, and the wool springing from the hide of sheep. He could hear the wolf’s blood pounding and pumping, he could hear his pelt expanding. ‘Play with us’, he said to the beast, who took a calculating look at Leyding and lay down on the forest floor and held out his great clawed pads. So they took the fetter, and bound his feet, trussed them together, bound his jaw, avoiding the smell of his hot meaty breath, and left him like an ox made ready for roasting. He made a strangled sound, and shook his head from side to side, and coughed in his constricted throat, and coughed again, and shook himself, swelling all his joints, and the fetter cracked and buckled and fell to the earth. The wolf stood on his feet and glowered at the gods and made a sound between howl and purr, which they knew was laughter. He looked at them, almost expecting further play, but they fell back and returned to Asgard.

  They told their smiths they must do better. They made a new chain, with double links, cleverly fused together. Its name was Dromi. They took this to the wolf, who put his head on one side, measuring its strength. He said it was very strong. He said also that he himself had increased in size since he shattered Leyding. He would be a famous beast, said the gods, if he could deal with such an intricate piece of smithcraft. He stood and thought, and told them that this chain was indeed stronger. But then, he himself was also stronger. So he allowed them to truss him again. And then he shook himself violently, twisted and strained, kicked with his feet and broke the fetter into fragments which flew this way and that. And he smiled at the gods, his tongue lolling out, and snickered. And went on growing; Heimdall could hear him.

  The gods sent Skirnir, a young messenger, down to the dwarves, who lived deep down in the home of the dark-elves. And the dwarves made a supple skein from unthings. There were six, woven together: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. The thing was light as air and smooth as silk, a long, delicate ribbon. This they took to the wolf, to whom they said with cunning that this band was tougher than it looked. They tore at it with their own hands, one after the other, and it was unmarked. The wolf was suspicious. He wanted to decline, and feared they would mock him. He told them that he suspected them of bad faith. Of trickery. He would play this game if one of them placed his hand in between his jaws, as a gage of honesty, of their bond of good faith. Then Tyr put his hand on the hot head of the beast, as he would with a nervous hound, and then put his hand quietly into Fenris’s mouth. And the gods wound their floating ribbon round and round flanks and thighs, pads and claws, neck and rump. And the beast shook himself, and twisted himself, and the fetter clung and tightened. This was inevitable. And it was inevitable that he should snap his teeth together, slicing through flesh, skin and bone. And the gods watched the wolf gnash and swallow, and they bound Tyr’s bleeding stump. The wolf glared, and said that if a god’s hand can be eaten, it will be possible, in the time of the wolf, to kill the gods. The gods’ answer to this was to take the cord which was part of Gleipnir – the name of this rope was Gelgia – and thread it through a great stone slab, which also has a name, Giöll. And this they drove into the earth, and attached to another great rock, Thviti. The wolf howled horribly, and gnashed his teeth. So the laughing gods took a great sword and thrust it into his mouth. The hilt is lodged against his lower gums; the point in the upper ones. The great beast writhes in pain, and amongst his howling a river springs from his open jaws. Its name is Hope.

  Hope for what?

  The gods knew, Odin knew, that the time of the wolf would come. The wolf would join his kin at the end of things. Terrors were foreseen, like the loosing of the wolf, or hound, Garm, which was the watchdog at the gate of Hel’s underground kingdom. This beast was related to the two wolves who raced perpetually through the firmament in the skull of Ymir, following the chariots of the sun and moon. The thin child, reading about the solid world that was made when Ymir was dismembered, had seen an engraving of day and night, sun and moon, in racing chariots with fine horses. They went so relentlessly fast, the thin child saw and understood, because they lived in perpetual fear. Behind the sun, behind the moon, were wolves stretched out in full gallop, their hackles bristling, their tongues lolling, untiring, as wolves are in pursuit, waiting for their prey to falter or stumble. Where these terrible creatures had come from, the thin child did not know. The legends said they were the progeny of the dour giantess in Ironwood, kin of the Fenris-Wolf. In the thin child’s mind, there must have been a time when the sun and the moon, created by the gods, moved at their own sweet will, meandering maybe, pausing maybe, extending a lovely day, or a lovely summer, maybe, or a dark dreamless night. In one ancient tale the wolves had names. Skoll pursued the sun, and Hati Hrodvitnisson galloped on, intent on catching the moon. The movement of light and dark, the order of day and night and the seasons, was thus, the thin child understood, a product of fright, of the wolves in the mind. Order came from bonds and threatening teeth and claws. The thin child in wartime read, grimly, the prophecy of yet another mighty wolf to come, Moongarm, who would fill himself with the lifeblood of everyone that dies, would swallow the heavenly bodies and spatter the heaven and all the skies with blood. And this would disturb and derange the heat and light of the sun, and give rise to violent winds, which would rage everywhere and destroy forests, and human habitations, and fields and plains. Coasts would be lashed and crumbling, and the stable order of things would shiver.

  Jörmungandr

  1. The Shallows

  The flung snake fell through the firmament in shifting shapes. With her spine locked she was a javelin, swift and smooth, her mane of flesh-fronds streaming back from her sharp skull, her fangs glinting. But she also fell in loops and coils, like a curling whip, like a light ribbon on the eddies of the air. She was angry to have been ripped from her kin. She was a sensuous beast: the rush of air pleased her: she snuffed up the scent of pine forests, heathland, hot desert, the salt of the sea. She saw its restless wrinkles, cream-crested, steel-blue, and met its skin like a diver, head first and the strong tail following smoothly. Down she went, through this new element, down to the sandy floor, stirring up eddies of grains, sliding smoothly between rocky outcrops. She was a land-beast, reared in the Iron Wood; she had played in dark green shadow, coiling in dust. She began to learn saltwater, feeling a new lightness in her muscles, floating lazily to the surface, like silver, like an elver, where the light caught her wet skin. At first she stayed in the shallows, breathing shore air through her blood-red nostrils, making her way through rock pools, sliding along the tidelines, snapping up crabs, limpets and oysters, cracking open razor-fish with her sharp fangs, flicking out the succulent flesh with her forked tongue. She took pleasure in detecting disguise. She noticed the scuttle of hermit crabs, crouching in abandoned shells.

  Her sharp eyes, lidless in her sharp head, admired and detected dabs, sprinkled with sand-spots like the sand itself, two black eyes on a flat head like anxious pebbles. She admired the fine edge of the frill of the fin and tail, a shadow-line between sand-skin and sand itself. She blew at the sand, and hooked up the creatures with her spiked tongue. She loved, and sucked, and swallowed, and spat out the debris. She was always hungry, and always killed
more than she needed, out of curiosity, out of love, out of insatiable busyness.

  She grew therefore. And she grew gills, among her fleshy mane, until she no longer needed to surface for air, or visit the shore unless it amused her.

  She had no particular disguise of her own, but in those early days she was hard to see, because her movements were swift and cunning. She was encased in smooth, glassy scales, under which her skin was black, and ruddy, and weed-green as the light caught it, deflected by the scaly armour. She took pleasure in lying in wait in the carpets and cushions of bladderwrack, moving with their sluggish movement as they moved with the tide, going in, sucking out, her coils randomly heaped, as natural as the wet weed, her crown of feelers like a vegetable tuft through which watchful eyes peered.

  She played a game of her own in lonely bays. She swam out to the smooth bulk of water, lay along the wave and rode in with it, muscles slack, floating like flotsam or jetsam. When the wave rose in a crest, the snake rose with it, liquid eyes glittering like the coins of sunlight on the surface, arching herself to swoop down with the white water full of air and light until snake and wave hissed on the sand together and rolled idle. After one such plunge she looked upward and saw a cloaked figure, towering above her, a hat pulled over the eyes. For a moment she thought this was one-eyed Odin, come to torment her, and she reared her head back to strike. Then he turned, and peered at her from under his brim, and she saw that it was Loki the dissembler, Loki the quick-witted, Loki her father whose form was hard to remember, even for her, since it changed subtly not only from day to day but from moment to moment. He raised his hat, and his bright curls sprang out. He grinned.

  ‘Well met, daughter. I see you grow, you prosper.’

  She coiled herself round his naked ankles. She asked why he was there. He said he had come to see how she did. And to study the wild waves. Whether there was a form in their formlessness. They came in, one after another, in a regular swell. But the water in them was wild, the eddies streamed every which way. Was there an order in the foam? The snake said that it played like needles on her skin, and that that was a delight. The demigod squatted down beside her and made a line of wet pebbles and translucent rainbow shells. He said he had a project to map the shoreline. Not in great regular half-moons as gods and men might draw this bay, to make a haven for dragon-ships. But small, stone by stone, rivulet by rivulet, promontory by promontory, even as small as these fingers, even as fine as a fingernail. A map for sand-fleas and sand-eels, for everything hangs together, and the world may be destroyed by too much attention, or too little care, towards a sand-eel, for example. ‘Therefore’, said Loki the mocker, to the snake his daughter, ‘we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know.’ He kicked aside his brief barrier, into the platelets of water. He listened with his fingertips, scraped away sand, tugged out a bristling lugworm, black and jerking, which he offered to his daughter, who sucked it in.

  2. The Depths

  After this meeting she met him often, not only where the dry land met the water, but also in the depths. In her hungry journeys she brushed against human hooks, snaking down on long lines, and against cages and netted pouches out of which living things stared, furious, resigned, stupefied. She took pleasure in lifting a fat cod from a bent hook, or in ripping open a basket full of moiling bodies. Some cod she swallowed; some she watched shake themselves and swim away. She let a hundred herring rush from a net and snatched at the next hundred, biting and gulping, leaving blood and bones staining the seawater. Where a hook was impossibly intricate and manifold she rose to the surface to greet the fisher in his spray-streaked cloak. His nets were tied in complicated knots unlike any others; she would swim in huge circles round his boat, waiting for his call, and then rise, streaming wet, and laughing as snakes laugh.

  They played a game of disguise and recognition. ‘Catch me’, he said, and vanished, leaving the dissolving shadow of his cloak against the blue sky. He was hard to find when he was a mackerel, a single insignificant mackerel, away from the shoal. A mackerel’s skin is a vanishing trick. Along its sleekness are lines of water ripples, imitating sun and shadow, cloud light and moonlight dropping through the thick water, imitating trailing weed and rushing waves flickering as the mirror-scales twist. He was there, this visibly invisible fish, and when she made a dash he was a patch of daylight, or nightlight, staining the water only, not solid. He led her to the shoals of mackerel, shimmering and speeding, and changed himself to a spearfish, a swordfish, to join the snake in the pursuit. The rushing shoal was like an immense single creature, huge-bellied, boiling, twisting and turning, green and pink and indigo and steely. The snake and the shapeshifter herded the wild fish for the sheer pleasure of the changing shapes of the turmoil. Then they plunged in, again and again, dividing the entity into spinning segments, catching at stragglers, supping them up, rushing the wheeling flank and swallowing the whole of it. The snake was always hungry because she was always growing. She had been like the muscle of a man’s arm, and then like a hard thigh, and still she swelled, one long hawser of pure muscle smacking the surface when she rose and fell, bruising the weeds as she pushed her way through, grinding the things that grew on the sea floor.

  Her gaping jaw opened wider; her terrible teeth grew stronger and sharper, thickened by the swallowed skeletons and shells of myriads of underwater creatures.

  She surged round the world, from icy pole to icy pole, or through the hot oceans under the burning sun. She swam under ice-shelves, in aquamarine tunnels and spyholes, fastening her fangs on the wings of a diving albatross, spitting out the matted fur of a plump seal pup. She swam in mangrove swamps, amongst the maze of roots in the mud, snapping up fiddler-crabs and mudskippers, spitting shell into the inspissated mess of mud, leaf skeletons, seaweed. She lay in the mud, staring up, and watched the shapes of humans, pouring poison over the surface so that the fish gasped, stiffened and floated upwards. She made lazy movements and swallowed, fat fish and poison together.

  She swam on, meeting miles of floating jellyfish, pulsing glassy umbrellas, trailing fine poisonous filaments, all of which she sucked in, indiscriminate. The poison did her no harm. But it collected in sacs behind her fangs; it ran like quicksilver in her blood. She spat her venom into the eyes of porpoises and monk seals, blinding them, swallowing them, spitting out undigested stuff which sank slowly and swayed in the currents. Once, she dived and pursued a stingray, a vast, flat, smoky beast with a whiplash tail and half-hidden eyes. But something in its motion made her hold off, with her head poised to strike, and the ray, briefly, failed to hold its elegant shape. It dissolved into inky shadows, like veils, and re-formed as a small shark, oil-grey, grinning, and she saw it was her father.

  Once, by accident, worming her way through the kelp forest, she came upon Rándrasill and its underwater gardens. It is possible that the sea-tree was not always in the same place: the great snake had traversed the weed-beds many times and had not seen the golden fronds, the amber stipe, the gigantic holdfast. This first time, she was the size of an anaconda in the swamps, the fattest, longest anaconda there could be. Not far from Rándrasill storms whipped up the surface. Not far from Rándrasill underwater craters spouted crimson and scarlet pumice and thick black smoke. But here, everything was as it was, everything was abundant. Sponges, anemones, worms, crayfish, snails of every colour, ruby, chalky, jet, butter-yellow, sea slugs magnificently striped and mottled, supping up jelly from the fronds. Abalone were anchored round the holdfast, throngs of the shells in pink, red, green and the most succulent white. Sea urchins, bristling with fine live spines, grazed the thick algae and hundreds of eyes peered out between the sheltering fronds of the great plant as it swayed in the slow currents. Elvers moved like needles through cushions of sargasso. Jörmungandr, lying limp, and staring with delight, picked out the sargasso fish, trailing coloured flags of flesh
indistinguishable from the weeds, by its watchful eye, like a pinhead amongst the growths. There were sea-dragons, lurking in the wavering thickets; there were giant kelpfish, with bladed bodies like the thick fronds themselves. Above on the surface things had made nests from the kelp itself. Seabirds floated on cushions; soft-furred otters reclined in weedy hammocks, turning the abalones in their clever hands, sucking out morsels.

  Jörmungandr, this first time, watched almost wistfully. She could not enter into this magic thicket: she was already too fat, too heavy. She was like an onlooker, through a street window, staring in from the dark and damp at brilliantly lit treasure trove. She backed off. She bowed her monstrous head and turned away. When she next saw the tree she would be changed utterly.

  She grew. She was no longer the size of any earth-snake. She was as long as an estuary, as a road across moorland. She needed more food. She sucked in krill, like the great whales, she swallowed schools of fleeing herrings. She went down into the dark. On the ocean floor were the corpse-coloured monstrous squid and the sperm whales that tore at them with heavy jaws. She was not ready to take on whales, though she ate the remaining flesh on a dead one, swallowing with the tangy blubber whole colonies of burrowing hagfish, their heads deep in the dead beast. She was prepared to take on the long, streaming squid, tearing off tentacles, driving her fangs into the pale eyes, sipping and swallowing in a cloud of ink in the dark lightless water.

  She ate now because she was ravening. She was the length and width of a great river. She went round an iceflo and found herself in pursuit of a shadowy flickering beast that turned out to be herself, following herself. Her head which had been sleek was growing craggy and lumpen. She pursued a pod of orcas, who were pursuing a school of dolphins, all of them making arched surges in the cold water. One orca, a little apart from the group, was unusually glistening and polished, black and white, like wet marble. Its huge mouth seemed to be laughing, was laughing, and its eye was improbably ironic. Demon and daughter greeted each other, she with shakes of her snaky crown, he with whistles and clackings, and slappings of flukes.