“Yes, but if all they wanted was life-force, the men didn’t have to . . . rape the woman and then murder her!” Adam tried to tamp down his reaction. Everyone’s culture, that far back in time, was barbaric. Even his own.
“The woman was supposed to be a volunteer. I can’t say she always was.” Sigrun’s tone turned leaden once more.
Lives were the only currency the ancients had, Nith said, raising his head. A life could be measured in terms of its worth in ransom money. Most people did not have gold or even silver. But they did have their lives to offer. And self-sacrifice, willingly offered? Is still the most potent currency there is. I saw this ritual performed. Many times.
“That went by the wayside, when Rome came, correct?”
The modern conscience is partially a Roman construction, yes. Nith rested his damaged jaw on Sigrun’s lap, where she gently stroked the enormous head.
“It all came out of ancestor worship, anyway. Trying to call back a beloved tribal chieftain, one with a strong spirit, as a protector.” Sigrun shrugged. “We know from Kanmi that it can work.”
And the crop rituals came out of an awareness and respect for duality. Night and day. Woman and man. The woman was meant to represent the cold earth, and the man was meant to be the plow and the sower, stirring it back into life. He was the Summer’s King, and their union was supposed to bring balance to the universe. What humans did, was supposed to reflect the cosmic order, and promote it. Nith’s teeth bared. The union of opposites, male and female, was supposed to renew the world. The Gauls have a tale about their King Brann, who was god-born, and ruled in ancient times in Britannia. They tell of how he was wounded with a spear in the thigh . . . .
“That’s usually code for ‘in the genitals,’” Sigrun noted, clinically. “He lost his potency, and therefore, the land withered. Because the king is the land, and the land is the king.”
Nith’s voice had a story-telling edge. And his seven followers went to the underworld to bring back a magic cauldron that could bring the dead back to life. Of course, with such legends, there is embellishment. The cauldron was the symbol of Ceridwen, the goddess of death and rebirth.
“A cauldron is a symbol of femininity, goddess or otherwise. Just as a spear is usually a male symbol.” Sigrun yawned, as the gray light of dawn stole into the room.
Correct. They did not go on a journey to find a magic item to heal their sovereign. They went on a holy quest to find the goddess of rebirth, so that she could join with their king, renew him, and through him, renew all the land, bringing it back from winter and barrenness. Rebirth. Yes, the king is the land. The land is the king. Many cultures center themselves around such beliefs. He paused and added, diffidently, The rituals surrounding these beliefs—the Great Marriage, the bonfires, all of them . . . re-enact the creation of the universe in the union of opposites. Not that I feel the effects of that belief, of course. The beast went silent, and Adam could vaguely understand why. He was the son of Hel. He was the son of death. He would have had no place at such festivities. And yet, Adam suspected that Nith was also trying to say something more.
“A pity it doesn’t seem to be working anymore.” Sigrun gestured at the clouds outside.
If there were a king somewhere, Nith said, delicately, a leader whom men would follow into battle, who had been rendered unable to lead, by injury, disease, or age, and if his people brought to him a chalice, a cauldron, or a goddess, and told him Here is your cure, I would think that he would enter into that union. Would restore himself, his lands, and his people. Nith’s tone was weary now. What happens in the tale, when the king pushes aside the cup that is his salvation?
Sigrun shook her head. “There is no such king,” she said. “Caesarion is god-born, I suppose. He’s middle-aged, and he has a wife, Livorus’ daughter, Aquila, whom I would not call a goddess. And though they seem happy together, I don’t see much lifting of the clouds.”
Nith sighed and put his battered head back down again. Adam felt Caliburn pressing against his spine, and Trennus’ old words about the sword they’d nicknamed the gun after came back to him. Tren had said that the earliest god-touched weapons had been swords so sharp that they could cut through stone—or, among Sigrun’s people, had been sunk into the hearts of ancient trees. And that a man who could draw such a sword—Siegfried, for instance—was considered worthy of kingship. And of course, swords, spears, guns were all very male symbols . . . .
Sigrun shifted a little, every movement slow and a little pained, and added, her tone faintly dismissive, “This was all before it was generally known that women contributed anything to pregnancy besides a womb. It took until somewhere in the nineteenth century to prove that pregnancy wasn’t the result of a tiny homunculus from the man’s seed entering the womb and growing into an infant. We learn. We progress. But the rituals tend to stay the same.” She shrugged, and went on, “We don’t wait ten days before cremation anymore. Sophia will be dressed in her best clothing . . . I still have the peplos she was so proud of, when she received it at the temple. No open pyre. A nice, clean, scientific cremation.” Her words sounded bitter. “Technically, her family should remain by her side, unsleeping, until the cremation. But I can’t stay long. And while I would like to put her ashes in the ground under the apple tree, Judean law is fairly strict about that. I’ll take her to one of the cemeteries that the jotun and nieten use. Leave grave gifts. Ritual bread. Mead.” Sigrun paused, and a distracted look crossed her face. “The other items buried with her ashes should be things she cherished in life. There’s little enough left that . . .” . . . attests that she lived. She covered her eyes for a moment. “I have some of her cosmetics. The brush and comb I used on her hair at the asylum.” Her throat had evidently closed down again. “I don’t think I could look at those again, anyway.”
The doll, Nith said, suddenly. The nesting doll you brought her from Raccia, when she was a child. Leave that with her.
Sigrun shook her head. No. That’s all I have left of her. It stays with me. Even if it hurts to look on. She turned towards where it stood on one of the shelves in the living room. She’d put it there after gathering Sophia’s effects from Delphi. I gave it to her when she was ten. She lost the smallest doll when she moved to Hellas, when she was eighteen. I offered to replace it. And she just laughed and told me it couldn’t be replaced. Sigrun crossed to the shelf, lifting the faded doll carefully. Opened it, and placed each inner doll, side by side, until she reached the fifth hollow doll . . . and then her expression turned fixed. Concentrated. And after a moment, she opened the fifth doll, and produced a sixth, tiny and solid, from inside. If only she’d let me do more.
Leaving the grave gifts is not just to comfort the spirit of the departed. It is done to allow the living to let go. Nith’s tone held gentle reproof . . . and understanding.
Somehow, the beast’s voice shook Adam. “He’s right,” he said, setting down his spoon, his oatmeal untasted.
Sigrun turned away from both of them. And I’m not ready to let go of her. Not yet. Let it be.
______________________
The next three weeks, pushing into Iulius, were bitter ones. Apollo was dead. Pluto followed his own energy signatures, tracking the worms of himself he’d left in Orcus’ flesh, and found the other death-god, hiding in the Veil. And fought him there until Orcus finally ran to the mortal realm to try to break the trail. Pluto followed him, and somewhere deep in what had once been Qin, tore Orcus apart.
As for the rest of the gods, Amaterasu scrambled to retrieve more of her people from where they were in hiding in parts of Australia and Qin. The Morrigan and Taranis, along with Quetzalcoatl and Sekhmet, tried to move as many of their people as they could to Judea and the remains of Carthage, such as Tyre, marching them straight through the Veil, but Tyre was hardly a refuge anymore. Athar may have been a hundred miles to the north, and Pluto may have taken the majority of the power loosed in the fight that had cost Artemis her life, but energy had still drained into
the ley-lines, spreading throughout the region. The earthquakes had been mild in Judea, but Tyre and Athar were in bad shape, as was Damascus. Few people had been twisted or distorted into madness or mutation—again, something for which Pluto was probably largely responsible. However, millions of people were without roofs or power, and the weather was harsh. Some came to the Caledonian Forest, looking for assistance, and Lassair and Inghean met them there, working to get the ground to bear enough fruit to feed another wave of refugees. Anyone who tried to cut down a tree for firewood, however, rapidly learned that the Forest was alive. They were often found impaled by branches, and bleeding out in the snow.
Satellite imagery, now the only form of intelligence gathering really left to Judea, indicated that hundreds of thousands of Persian troops were fighting ghul now inside their own territory, and were being forced west. Persepolis was a mass of smoking buildings, according to the images taken of the city. The once-beautiful city of Shiraz, with its gardens and fountains, was empty, but for ghul. Lines of motorcars and military vehicles lined the highways, motionless. Doors outspread, like wings, or windshields visibly shattered.
There had been seismic events centered near Persepolis. No one seemed to know if that meant that Ahura Mazda and his servant spirits, the Amesha Spentas, had been killed. Some of the Persian troops, like those who climbed over Trennus’ escarpment alongside Diocletian’s Wall, surrendered. There was, however, nowhere left to house them. As such, many of these prisoners of war were put to work, usually building fortifications that would help the jotun, fenris, harpies, centaurs, and the legion regulars defend the land. If they worked, they were fed.
Some of the prisoners spoke of what lay on the other side of the Wall, their expressions haunted. Entire provinces, depopulated except for ghul. Actual rocs flying through the skies—not lindworms, but feathered birds the size of a lindworm, which hunted ghul and humans alike for food. They spoke of shadhahvar, one-horned antelopes that could sing hauntingly, drawing humans to them . . . and kill them with horn and hoof, before eating them, in preference to grass.
Rumor had it that Antiochus XIII, himself, was in a camp on the island of Ikaros, which had fallen from Roman hands three years ago after nine months of vicious fighting. Surrounded by his Immortals, and waiting for his men to get enough of a toehold into Judea that he could enter the province, and set up camp there.
Judea’s factories were still turning out weapons and ammunition, if at a reduced rate. Persia’s factories lay in ruins. All the re-unified Roman Empire needed to do was to hold out, and pray that the gods could finish off the mad godlings.
The next council of the gods held in Valhalla, was a somewhat uncomfortable one. Sigrun immediately stepped forwards to Pluto and Juno, and lowered her head. Apollo of Delphi is dead by my hand, she said. Do you require weregild of me? A muscle twitched in her cheek, as she acknowledged inwardly that even if she’d had the power, she couldn’t have done this any sooner than she had. That she couldn’t execute a god for merely ruining a woman’s mind, life, and soul, but she could exact revenge for him having caused the death of the sister of a goddess.
The pair exchanged a glance, and then Pluto shook his cowled head. You put him down like a rabid dog. As I put down Orcus. No blame accrues to you, and we seek no recompense.
Juno inclined her proud head infinitesimally. The only ones who would have sought vengeance against you . . . Artemis, Apollo of Rome, and perhaps Diana . . . are already dead. And you were well within your rights, for his actions against your sister.
That more or less smoothed over the issue. And there were many more important matters to which they needed to attend. For example, Minori and Trennus, working together, had assembled data on every known seismological event in the past century, and were able to pinpoint which had been caused by mad godling or god deaths. Trennus was able to show which events had perturbed ley-lines. The resulting map they presented in Valhalla made Sigrun’s head hurt. Lines swarmed over it.
Odin was still recovering from the battle of Nimes, and looked pale and unwell at the large conference table. Have not the ley-lines been repaired, where they have been damaged? he finally asked, staring at the model.
Trennus lowered his head. I have done the best I could, but without Hecate’s assistance, everything I do is guesswork. The problem really is, that the cosmic strings that bind our reality together have not really had much of an opportunity to recover on their own. The system cannot come into equilibrium, with new power pouring through it every time we turn around.
Odin shook his head. And what would you have us do, then? Stop fighting the mad ones?
Pluto, slumped in his chair, whispered, That is not an option. The mad ones will wipe out every human on earth, if we stop fighting them.
Sigrun watched Trennus lower his head respectfully, aware of the powers gathered around him, but not intimidated by them. I’m not saying to stop fighting them. I’m saying, however, that we must be cautious where we fight them. The entire system is interrelated. Push one piece, and another, a thousand miles away, resonates. He pointed, carefully, at northwestern Caesaria Aquilonis. This is the Mitsi'adazi region, around the Yellow Rock River.
Minori’s head rose. The area is geologically unstable, and is one of the largest calderas on earth. It comprises a large amount of Nova Germania, and the last time it erupted, six hundred and forty-thousand years ago, it ejected two hundred and forty cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere. Rock, dust, and ash. If that happened today, I am not certain that the Fimbulwinter would lift for another thousand years. There are not many cities left in the eruption threat zone . . . but depending on the winds, an ash blanket several feet thick could cover camps outside of Cimbri-on-the-Caestus.
Sigrun’s stomach clenched. Her birth-city was one of her responsibilities. Many of the refugees were trying to rebuild in the ruins, but some had drifted away, when the weather turned bad. The Imperial highways were migratory pathways these days.
Thor growled under his breath. So where don’t we fight?
Well, definitely not in the Mitsi'adazi region. Here are the other places that resonate with ley-lines that intersect in the caldera area . . . . Trennus held up a list. It was lengthy. The magma plume beneath the fifty-mile wide caldera surface was a gyre about two hundred miles in diameter . . . and thus some thirty-one thousand square miles of earth was vulnerable. Over three thousand greater and smaller ley-lines touched the area. Each vibrated and resonated with two to five other lines. There are between six thousand and fifteen thousand ley-lines elsewhere in the world that could cause the region to destabilize further. And I’m not certain what that would do. Trennus’ big shoulders hunched for a moment, and then he shook himself. A volcanic eruption might be a better outcome, than having a large gate to another universe open in that area.
It’s hard to believe that he used to be the cheerful one, Sigrun thought, tiredly, and looked through the list of coordinates to avoid, shaking her head. Tyr spoke next. We can’t avoid every location. If a mad godling attacks, we might not be able to maneuver it to safe ground.
And what Worldwalker is undoubtedly about to tell us is that if each of the first lines connect to two to five others, Loki said, slowly, then each of the lines that they connect to, also connect to two to five others. Damaging a second-order string might not cause an eruption, but it will continue to weaken the system, correct?
Trennus looked down and nodded. Freya winced, and clearly did some math in her head. Then there are over seventy thousand threads that we must not allow to be cut.
Seventy-eight thousand, five hundred and thirty-seven, Prometheus replied, quietly. I have argued for the deaths of some gods, I will admit. Zeus. Jupiter. Obsidian Butterfly. I realize that every death weakens the structure of reality itself, putting us in danger of unraveling this world. But I believe that the deaths of those who would not allow us to work together were necessary.
There was a cold silence in Valhalla. Odin finally broke it
. Then we will continue to fight the mad ones. There are at least, no gods left who would fight us, just for the sake of fighting.
When we fight the godlings, it may help to lure them as far from the planet’s surface as possible, Quetzalcoatl recommended. That is how Sigrun Stormborn and others fought my brother, Tezcatlipoca. It reduced the effect of the shockwave to the surface and the humans.
Sif rubbed at her face. We learn. But we learn too slowly. The goddess’ tone was bitter. Pre-memory is useless. Nothing I see matches what happens. And I grow more certain, every day, that this war cannot be won. And I do not foresee any survivors beginning anew.
Thor put an arm around Sif’s shoulders. And again, all the gods went silent.
Then there is nothing to do, but fight well, and delay the end as long as possible, Tyr said.
And hope, Loki put in, unexpectedly, which got him looks from everyone at the table.
The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 143
