by C. Gockel
Inclining her head, Amy says softly, “You threw your knife and hit it dead in the center of its head. You don’t remember?”
Bohdi looks back at the snake.
“So did they teach knife throwing in boot camp?” Her voice is so flat it almost doesn’t come out a question. She’s looking at him, but Bohdi has that weird idea that she’s looking through him, again.
Still eyeing the dead snake, Bohdi purses his lips and taps his chin. “No… Where is its head, and why is it all black?”
“I cut off the head and venom sacks, skinned it, and cooked it,” Amy says.
Bohdi jerks around and faces her, making his head spin a bit.
She sighs. “I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
“Maybe not that hungry,” he says, eyeing the blackened snake. In fact, he thinks he just lost his appetite. He looks to the bank. “Is the river narrower here?”
“It split into tributaries a while back,” Amy says. “Which means that it will be harder for Thor to find us. Night is coming, but we don’t have fire to protect us from the adze this time, and with all the ground cover burned away, we’ll have nowhere to hide. But I’m not worried.”
Bohdi sniffs, tries to hold back a sneeze, and fails. His spit and snot sprinkles in the water. Wiping his nose, he doesn’t look at her, feeling all of three years old.
“Do you sneeze when people lie to you, Bohdi?” Amy’s face and voice are unreadable. And for some reason, it’s creeping him out.
Bohdi snorts. Maybe he isn’t the only person who’s been hallucinating. Sounding more defensive than he means to, he snaps. “What are you talking about? I have allergies. I forgot my Zyrtec.” Not that meds had ever helped. He shivers, despite the heat and humidity.
Amy starts—maybe at the harshness of his tone. “Why did you come to Nornheim, Bohdi?”
“I’m…” Bohdi stops, his whole body going cold. “My wallet!” He frantically pats his back right pocket. His fingers close on the familiar shape…and then his heart sinks when he realizes it’s damp. Pulling it out with shaking fingers, he opens it and all the air in his lungs rushes out of him. The picture of his parents is smeared, the colors bleeding together, their faces hopelessly distorted.
Bohdi’s hands start to shake. The wallet falls open on his lap, his elbows fall onto his knees, and his head drops to his hands.
“Bohdi?” says Amy. He’s vaguely aware of her coming closer.
He feels tears form in his eyes and blinks hard to keep them from falling.
“Who are they?” Amy says, so close she can drag a finger over the useless slip of plastic covering the photograph.
Too choked up to speak, Bohdi barely grinds out, “No one.” He’s managed to destroy the one thing he had, the one connection to his past.
Amy’s hand closes on one of his. “Liar.” But there is only tenderness in her tone.
Bohdi can’t respond. His mouth is suddenly too dry. He licks his lips. Without looking at her, he says, “The phones?”
“Tied up in your pink shirt,” says Amy.
Unable to meet her eyes, Bohdi scrambles unsteadily to his feet. He has a picture of his parents on his phone, and he suddenly has to see them, to know they’re real. He is just unknotting the shirt from the root, when Mr. Squeakers gives a cheep. Bohdi looks to the shore. When had the current picked up?
Mr. Squeakers cheeps again. A movement downriver catches Bohdi’s eye. Two dark logs, suspended in the current.
“Amy?” he says.
Amy turns to look in the direction of his gaze. The dark shapes are getting very close very fast…in fact…they have to be swimming.
Cocking her head, Amy says, “Oh, it’s only alligators.”
Bohdi coughs. “We’re on a floating island, virtually unarmed, with no where to run, and you say it’s only alligators?”
Amy looks at him, eyes wide and hurt. “Well, it’s better than archaeopteryxes, giant spiders, or adze.”
Bohdi stares at her. And then he nearly falls over as laughter and coughs wrack through him. Amy starts laughing, too.
Wiping away a tear, Bohdi eyes a loose branch floating by. “Hey,” he says, “Can you knock that log over here?”
Amy swings her own branch around and knocks the floating branch toward them.
A few seconds later, Bohdi is armed with a new, slippery, wet pugil stick, and Mr. Squeakers has taken a position on top of Amy’s head—just in time for a giant green scaly to crawl onto the log close to Amy. It’s twice as wide as Bohdi at the shoulder, and its toothy snout is as long as his leg. As it tries to trundle aboard, the log rolls, and then gets stuck below.
The alligator opens its mouth and Amy pokes at it…rather half-heartedly in Bohdi’s mind.
“Harder!” he shouts, as another alligator gets closer. Bohdi wallops it on the nose and it disappears under the water.
“I’m trying!” Amy shouts. The alligator darts forward and bites down hard on her branch. The end snaps off, and Amy backs up into Bohdi. Reaching around her, Bohdi pokes it hard in the eye. With a snap of its jaws it backs up and slips below the surface.
He starts to see other shapes rising around them. “Get us unstuck, Amy.”
“Right,” she says, slinking past him and sticking the remains of her branch in the water.
Bohdi hits another alligator in the eye as it lifts its head out of the water. It disappears under the surface. Bohdi jams the end of the stick into another’s nose, just as the log breaks free and starts to head down river.
“Definitely better than dragons!” Bohdi says.
“Archaeopteryx,” Amy says, sounding mildly vexed.
Another alligator raises its head, Bohdi pokes its eye, and it disappears and joins his comrades below the surface.
Bohdi pants. “It’s like whack-a-mole!” It’s easy, which is a good thing. He’s kind of lightheaded with hunger, and his breathing feels shallow and strangely ineffective.
Amy gives a little yelp as another one raises its head beside the log and snaps its jaws. With a gasp, she pokes the air in the alligator’s direction.
“Don’t be afraid to hurt it!” Bohdi says, ramming his stick down its throat. It makes a strange gurgling sound, and Amy says, “Ooooo…you hit it right in the palatal valve.” The wonder in her voice makes Bohdi burst into laughter and coughing again.
The log bobs in the current as they wind around a wide bend in the river, passing through a smoldering stretch of forest. Bohdi and Amy stand armed with their branches. The alligators swim beside them, but, other than snapping their jaws occasionally, don’t do anything dangerous.
After a half an hour or so, the alligators dip below the surface.
Bohdi tenses up but then he sees them resurface upriver from them and swim in the opposite direction.
“Huh,” he says. “Guess they got bored.”
“Do you hear that?” says Amy, looking down toward the bend in the river.
“Hear what?” says Bohdi. But then he does hear it. The distant rush of water. “Rapids,” says Bohdi. “Let’s try to get to shore.”
“Right,” says Amy, already bending over, branch in hand. “Ugh,” she groans. “I can’t reach the bottom.”
Bohdi dips his branch in, too. He doesn’t connect with anything solid until he’s down on his knees, and has the branch almost completely submerged.
“There,” he says, giving a shove off the river bottom. “We’ll get to shore before we reach the rapids.”
“Not rapids,” Amy says.
Bohdi lifts his head. His jaw drops. Just a few meters ahead of them the forest ends. And so does the river. In fact, the whole world seems to end.
“Waterfall,” says Amy, falling down to her stomach, and jabbing her branch back into the water.
Bohdi does the same, but only half of his frantic thrusts seem to connect with anything solid. The sound of rushing water is getting louder too fast. He turns to Amy and shouts, “We have to swim for it!”
She meets his eyes
and nods, Mr. Squeakers bobbing on her head.
Grabbing the pink bundle that holds their phones and wrapping it around his wrist, Bohdi says, “Count of three…”
Before he can say another word, the log connects with something hard and rolls. They both fall off. He sees Amy’s head bobbing in the water just a few feet away, and the shore speeding by. His head slips under the water. He makes it up for air once more and hears Amy scream his name, and then he’s sucked along with the current over the edge of the waterfall.
Bohdi’s heart leaps to his throat, and just as he prepares for bone-shattering impact, his back and legs connect with something springy. For a few moments, he bobs up and down, completely disoriented, as water continues to pound on his chest and head, splashing into his mouth and pinning him in place. Rolling over onto his stomach, he opens his eyes and looks down…and sees he’s suspended in a net with palm-sized spaces between the fibers.
Fibers that look familiar. “Argh! More spider web!” He hears Amy shout, but the spray of the waterfall is so thick he can’t see her. He feels in front and behind him. The web seems to rise in both directions, like a giant hammock. But why would spiders hang a hammock in a waterfall?
There’s a loud plunk beside him. Bohdi turns to see a human-sized fish lying next to him. Bohdi screams. The fish begins thrashing madly, its tail and fins pummeling his side. And then it all comes together. Spiders are using this web as a giant fishing net.
Bohdi’s throat tightens. He crawls as fast as he can away from the dying fish, stopping a few times to tug at the bundle of their phone parts, still wrapped around his wrist. As he goes forward, the pounding of water on his back and neck subsides and he starts to see pinkish light ahead.
From behind him, he hears Amy shout, “Bohdi!”
He squints into the pounding spray. “Over here!” he shouts. “Are you stuck?”
There’s a pause, and then he hears her voice. “No! Just wet! I can’t see anything!”
Bohdi looks in the direction he was crawling. “I think we can crawl out of the spray,” he says. “Follow my voice!”
“Okay!”
Bohdi crawls forward up the sloped side of the web. There is plenty of room between the web fibers for his feet and hands.
“Amy,” he shouts, turning to look behind him.
“Here,” she says, crawling up beside him in the webbing. Mr. Squeakers is plastered to her wet head. As he waits for her to catch up, Bohdi looks from side to side. The spray is too thick to see what the web is suspended on.
When Amy reaches his side, they crawl together up the web’s sloped side. “Oh,” says Amy.
“Wow,” says Bohdi.
The waterfall continues to plunge for at least one hundred feet below them. It falls into the great well of an ocean that stretches as far as Bohdi can see.
“Thor said all rivers lead to the Norns…” says Amy.
A shadow falls over their heads. Bohdi looks up and squints…and then his eyes go wide. A dark shape with bat wings is diving from the sky in their direction.
“But how will we find the Norns in all of that ocean?” she says.
“Dragon!” Bohdi manages to grit out.
“Archaeop…” Amy starts to say, as she lifts her head beside Bohdi.
Bohdi hears her swallow as the large bat-winged creature becomes larger—a neck longer than a giraffe’s, and a whip-like tail coming into view, too.
“Nope, that’s definitely a dragon,” she squeaks.
Chapter 17
They both stare upward. Impossibly, the dragon keeps getting bigger. As it draws closer, its scales become distinctly dark maroon.
Shivering, Bohdi says, “Duck back into the spray!”
“Right,” says Amy.
They start crawling back down the side of the net, but not before they see the dragon veer slightly to their right. Bohdi has a brief glimpse of forelimbs with long clawed hands at the base of its bat wings, and a body he’s sure is the size of a school bus with wings too large to calculate…and yet still seem too small. And then the dragon disappears into the mist at the side of the falls.
Amy and Bohdi both freeze in place. Nothing happens. Turning to Amy, Bohdi whispers, “Maybe we’re too small to eat?”
“Maybe,” whispers Amy, her side pressed to his, her lips almost at his ear. “Did you see? He had forelimbs and forewings! I’d love to see his scapula!”
A chuckle rises in the mist, so deep it makes the spider web vibrate.
“Uh-oh,” whispers Amy.
An enormous shadow glides below them from the right, and hot humid air tickles Bohdi’s stomach.
Mr. Squeakers gives a cheep.
Before Bohdi can say or do anything, a maroon snout attached to a head as big as a VW bug rises in the space directly in front of them. The end of the snout has a slight beak; the base of the snout has two garbage-lid-sized green eyes that seem to glow from within. Tentacles that might be whiskers dangle from the snout and adorn the top of the dragon’s head.
The snout opens to reveal teeth as long as Bohdi’s arm. Amy and Bohdi both gasp and draw back. Squeakers gives a very unhappy squeal.
There is another deep reverberating chuckle, and the dragon rumbles. “And I would love to see your scapula, too.” Its accent is unmistakably Queens English, and for an odd moment, Bohdi thinks the creature’s interest might be as clinical as Amy’s. And then the dragon licks its lips, pushes its snout closer, and its eyes shimmer.
Beside him, Bohdi hears Amy swallow. “I feel I should warn you,” she says, “that humans are very dirty, disease-ridden animals and some carnivores develop chronic and sometimes fatal conditions after devouring our flesh.”
The dragon’s head whips back and it roars.
Bohdi jerks back. And then his eyes widen… The dragon is laughing.
“What you just told him, is that true?” he whispers to Amy.
“Happens to tigers,” she whispers back, eyes on the laughing dragon. Her gaze comes back to Bohdi, and she shrugs. “I thought it was worth a shot.”
Before Bohdi can answer, the dragon’s chortles subside. Lowering its head back down so its eyes are level with them, it says, “If I can eat adze, I can eat anything. However—”
“He’s not here to eat you!” shouts a tiny voice from the top of the dragon’s head.
Beside Bohdi, Amy sits up and beams “Ratatoskr!” she shouts.
Two of the whisker-tentacles on the top of the dragon’s head part, and a squirrel comes scampering out. Standing up on two legs, it stamps a tiny foot on the dragon’s forehead. The squirrel lets loose a flurry of chittering that ends with “Chit-a-chit-chit Nidhogg! You almost threw me off!”
Rolling its eyes, the dragon says, “There’s no need for obscenities.”
Amy puts her hand to her mouth and goes red. “Oh my God, I know what that last swear means.”
On top of the dragon’s head, the squirrel gives a small bow. “My language has the best swears,” he says.
Straightening, the squirrel lifts his nose to the air. “Babe, how is it that whenever I run into you, you manage to look like chat-a-chit-chat.”
Bohdi opens his mouth, a little offended on Amy’s behalf at the obvious derogatory comment. Not that she looks great at the moment, but neither does he, and there have been alligators, adze, and—
“Ratatoskr!” the dragon bellows, cutting off Bohdi’s words. “That is no way to speak to a lady!”
“Oh,” says Amy, perking up as the wind simultaneously leaves Bohdi’s sails.
Ratatoskr chitters. “Like you aren’t thinking about what she tastes like.”
“Oh,” says Amy, drawing back a little. Bohdi’s hand goes to his pocket and finds his knife. Maybe dragons have a palatal valve, too?
The dragon bobs and tilts its head in a sort of shrug. “Habit,” he says, eyes on Amy. “I can eat adze, but they’re all lean meat, gristle and—”
“Nidhogg!” says Ratatoskr. “Stay on task.”
&n
bsp; “Oh,” says Amy. “You’re the Nidhogg?”
“At your service,” says the dragon, bowing his head slightly.
Amy giggles. Which makes Bohdi’s skin heat for some reason. “Would someone tell me what’s going on?” he shouts.
Amy turns to him, all wide-eyed and happy like a puppy. “This is Nidhogg. In Norse myths, he’s a wyrm, but obviously, he’s a dragon, and—”
Ratatoskr lets loose a squeak. “We’re here to take your sorry asses to the Norns.”
Bohdi and Amy both turn to the dragon and squirrel duo. Nidhogg nods. “Normally the Norns let adventurers navigate the Sea of Sadness on their own, but given that you’ve already caused so much mis—”
The dragon stiffens and its eyes go wide. A puff of smoke comes from his nostrils.
Bohdi blinks. Ratatoskr has his front teeth buried in one of Nidhogg’s forehead tentacles. Nidhogg’s mouth drops open, and a giant tear comes to his eye.
Releasing his bite, Ratatoskr scampers down to the end of Nidhogg’s snout. “Being that you’ve already been through so much, the ladies have decided to help you out the rest of the way.” Giving another little bow, Ratatoskr adds, “Out of the kindness of their hearts.”
Bohdi sneezes so hard it ruffles the squirrel’s fur.
Lifting its head, the squirrel stares at Bohdi, tufted ears drawn back. “God bless you,” it says, voice dry.
Bohdi sniffs.
Nidhogg sniffles. “You bit me. I need a snack after that.”
“We don’t have time,” Ratatoskr says.
Nidhogg’s head lunges past Bohdi so fast Ratatoskr goes somersaulting through the air. The squirrel lands on Amy’s back with an indignant squeak.
Before Bohdi can even blink, Nidhogg's head jerks back with two fish in its jaws. The fish are about Bohdi and Amy’s size, but they look small in Nidhogg’s enormous mouth. Nidhogg lifts his head back, and the fish vanish down his maw.
