Anno Mortis

by Rebecca Levene

  Vali's eyes lingered on Boda, and Petronius thought he read regret in them.

  Or maybe it was just his own. "Because I've sent her to Mimir," he said. "And then I've instructed her to seek out our brother - and ensure he stays where he belongs."

  Sopdet threw back her head and howled. The sound was so deep and so loud, the temple shook with it. Even the dead cringed away from their mistress, covering their decaying ears.

  Petronius shrank back. His arms reached behind him, expecting the barrier of solid air that guarded the gate to death - and found nothing. Nero was pressed against his chest, the boy's wide blue eyes fixed on the howling woman. There were words in the howl, Petronius could hear that now, though he didn't know their meaning.

  "Quick," Vali said. "Go through while you can - she'll close it behind her."

  Petronius spun. He saw that one of his feet had already passed through the gateway. It disappeared into absolute darkness, invisible to him, only the sensation of his calf muscles clenching in fear to tell him it was still a part of his body. The green light had blinked out, but it left nothing behind, no clue to what lay beyond.

  "Do you trust me?" Vali said.

  Petronius laughed, almost hysterically. "What do you think?"

  "Well," Vali said. "Do you trust me more than you trust her?"

  Petronius couldn't help himself. He shot a look behind him. The noise cut out the instant he did. Sopdet's hair was suddenly white, and it took him a moment to realise why. It was full of the plaster flakes which had floated down from the painted ceiling with the strength of her howl. As if to compensate, her face was red, engorged with the blood of rage. And her eyes were luminous, blazing with the same sick green light that had once shone from the gateway to death itself.

  As she lowered her head and raced for the gateway, Petronius grabbed Nero and leapt across the threshold into the darkness.

  Boda shook her head. "There's nothing I can give," she told Mimir. "I've already lost everything I had."

  "Your life, you mean?" the giant said. She could see his huge pink tongue moving inside his mouth, each taste bud the size of a coin.

  "Yes. I brought nothing with me into death, not even silver for the ferryman the Roman's believe in."

  "Nothing at all?" There was a cunning note to his voice now. "What of your memories? Why did you fight so hard for them, if you hold them in no regard?"

  Boda felt a heart that wasn't real pounding in her chest. "You want my memories?"

  "Would you sacrifice them for this knowledge you seek?"

  Would she? "No," she told him. "I need my memories to understand the knowledge. One would be useless without the other."

  He chuckled. "A good answer. Then what will you give?"

  She spread her hands. "What do you want?"

  "I? It is the value of the sacrifice to the giver, not its worth to the recipient."

  "Name any other price and I will pay it."

  "So shall it be," the giant said, and his voice rang hollow with the sound of a vow given and sealed.

  Boda hesitated, suddenly unsure of what she'd done.

  "Drink then," Mimir said. "And you shall learn the price when you have the knowledge to understand it."

  She raised the horn, watching the light sparkle on its carvings as she dipped the open mouth beneath the surface of the water.

  "Fill it all," the giant said, "and drink it all. Your ignorance is far too wide, and only this can narrow it."

  When the horn was full to the brim, she raised it to her lips.

  "Drink," Mimir said. "Follow in the footsteps of Odin himself."

  She shivered, knowing that once done, this could never be undone. That she'd made a bargain with a god, and that was never wise. Here in the realm of the dead, there was much she could suffer if it was decreed, and she'd suffer it eternally. But she'd sworn an oath as a warrior to protect her people. That oath didn't end at the gates of the otherworld.

  The water felt cool as it gushed down her throat and it tasted of something she couldn't quite name. Was it rosemary? No, it was more bitter than that. Her mind chased the thought, chased the taste - and followed it out of the world of death and somewhere else entirely.

  She looked down on a hall, a great hall filled with laughter and music and light, and at the table's head, a one-eyed man lifted the horn of mead to pass to the thunder-browed giant at his right-hand side. Odin and Thor and all the Aesir feasted in the halls of Asgard, and only one forehead frowned, only one mouth turned down instead of up.

  Why was Vali sitting at the table of the gods? But the moment the thought was formed, Boda knew its answer. How had she confused this fierce, flaming being with the man she knew? This was Loki, god of fire and mischief and blood brother to Odin, but not brother of the heart. Not tonight.

  Odin's gaze passed over Loki and didn't see the hurt in his eyes. They sought only one thing, only one man, the sun-gold face of Baldur, his beloved son.

  He saw his son and didn't see the brother who scowled to see him smile. He didn't see the envy and the hate.

  A wrench, a twist in time, and Boda was back at Mimir's well. For a moment she thought that it was over, that that was all she'd see. But then she realised that she was floating above the scene, a vantage point different from her body's. And she saw the Allfather standing by the water as he reached up to his face and plucked out his own eye, brilliant and green and knowing, to place inside the giant's empty socket.

  Then Odin raised the horn, and as the water flowed in him and through him, so did she. She saw what he saw, the golden-haired Baldur dead, his red blood soaking the earth and his mother Frigga's face twisted in a grief that no goddess should ever know. Odin screamed with the same pain and rage and the scream carried Boda on.

  Now she followed a horse, galloping the length of the earth. Frigga rode its back, tall and proud and full of love, and everywhere she rode she asked a vow of every living thing she met.

  "Hazel tree," she said. "Will you swear never to harm my beloved son?" And the tree was filled with the same love she felt, and it took the oath. Next she asked a squirrel, a lion, an ant. Boda saw that there wasn't one creature in the world which didn't give its word.

  But there was one beneath it, one little sprig of mistletoe. "I'll take the oath!" it said, but Frigga said it was too young.

  And Loki - full of bitterness and envy - took the twig and nurtured it and grew it to a sapling. The god of fire looked on the spear he fashioned from the iron-hard mistletoe and smiled his crooked smile, beneath his long, sharp nose.

  Another twitch in time, and now Boda saw the gods standing in the flower-filled fields of Asgard, with Baldur in their middle. The sun god stood and laughed as rocks and swords and hammers were thrown at him and not a single one could touch him. We swore an oath, the weapons cried and turned their points away.

  Until, slinking and smiling at the side of the field, Loki placed a spear of mistletoe in the blind god Hodur's hands.

  The spear flew, strong and true, into the sun god's heart. Laughter turned to screams and all the world gasped at the fall of this golden child. Even Hel, goddess of the underworld, cold and hard and without love, felt a moment of pity for Frigga, for a mother's pain. Hel swore that if every living thing wept for Frigga's fallen son, she'd free him from the realm of death to walk in Asgard's sunlit fields again.

  Another twitch and Boda saw another horse, another journey the length and breadth of the earth. This time Frigga, tears streaming down her own face, looked for the same tears of mourning from every living thing on earth. The hazel tree wept, the lion, the ant, even the mistletoe which in its ignorant youth had killed her son.

  But just one person refused - a giantess, with a face as stony as the rocks of the cave in which she lived. "I will not weep," she said. "I do not mourn him." And so Baldur was condemned to remain in the realms of death.

  And when Frigga had passed on, cursing the giantess's name, the creature smiled a crooked smile beneath a sharp
nose, and shape-changing Loki thought that his work was done.

  Another twitch, stronger this time, and Boda found herself looking at a different scene in a different world - that she somehow knew was still the same as the one she'd witnessed before.

  This time the sun-god's name was Osiris, and it was his sister-wife Isis and not his mother who mourned him so extravagantly. The god-murderer was named Set, not Loki, and sometimes he had the body of a man and the head of a beast, a composite of all the creatures that roamed the desert, the curved snout of a jackal and the long square ears of an ass. But sometimes he had a man's face, a crooked smile beneath red hair and a long, sharp nose. And here, as before, he was a stranger and outsider - a god of the foreign and the forsaken.

  And then another twitch, and Boda saw that the Jews told the story a little differently, that Shaitan their red-haired desert god didn't kill the sun-god himself, but paid a living man thirty pieces of silver for his murder. And there were others - more and more images from all over the world until she thought her head would explode with them. A thousand and one stories but only one truth.

  The god of mischief who was sometimes called Loki and sometimes Set and sometimes other things, murdered the sun-god out of jealousy and spite. And the goddess who had many names, of which Isis was only one, mourned the dead sun-god - sometimes as her husband and sometimes as her son, but always far too much.

  She travelled the length of the earth, seeking a way to bring him back from the realms of the dead, where his mummified body sat in final judgement over the mortals who ended their short journey there. She failed, and her failure drove her mad and she hatched a final - fatal - plan.

  Her husband was in the realm of death. She couldn't join him there because she was a goddess of the earth, of green and vibrant things, and her duty lay among them. The realm of death would spit her out if she stayed in it too long. And Osiris, being dead, could never cross to the living realm. But what if the two realms became one? What if the land of life became a realm of death too - not a single living man or creature still abiding there?

  Then her husband could return. Then he could rule by her side.

  But Isis would have to be careful - she'd have to be cunning. If the other gods knew what she was planning, they would stop her. If Set found out, he would foil her once again. And so she disguised herself as a human woman named Sopdet, and found followers among the mortals who had their own reasons to wish for the gates of death to be opened.

  Sopdet, who was Isis - and also Frigga, and every other goddess who'd lost the god she loved - came to the realm of the living and opened the gateway to death. And only the trickster god Loki, who was also Set, and a red-haired man called Vali, could do anything to stop her. But he was the one who'd killed her husband-brother-son in the first place - and he was never to be trusted.

  And in the world of the living, the woman called Sopdet who was also the widowed Isis and the grieving mother Frigga, plunged through the gateway to death which she had created - the gate she was forbidden to cross.

  Isis was the mistress of the moon, of bread and beer and all green things. And those who worshipped her as Frigga knew that she presided over the making of new life, through love and birth.

  With the goddess gone from the land of the living, everything that she ruled went with her. The moon was on the far side of the world from Rome, invisible. No one in the city, huddled terrified in their homes, saw its silver light blink from the sky.

  But even inside their brick and marble they heard the distant roar of the sea, surging wildly as the force that governed its tides was taken from it. Huge waves crashed against the shore, against the grass that grew there and was dying too, without its mistress to nurture it.

  All over the Empire, at the height of summer, the leaves wilted on the trees and the flowers drooped and died, no pollen to spread on the wind and make new flowers. Without Isis in the world, there could never be new flowers again.

  And in their houses in Rome, women looked at their husbands and husbands looked at their wives and where there had been love there was only indifference and where there had been indifference there was now hate, and no one remembered what it felt like to love another person, because the idea of love was gone from the world.

  In Gaul, a man who'd been happily married for thirteen years passed the sixteen-year-old daughter of his best friend in the street. His cock twitched and suddenly he couldn't see why not. Why not take her right here, right in the street, if he wanted to? He covered her mouth to muffle her screams and the onlookers laughed and cheered as he had her.

  In Syria, two brothers played a game of dice for coppers they could well afford. They'd played the game since they were children and they played it now to remember that happy time. But when one of them threw two ones and the other laughed, suddenly he couldn't bear it. How dare his brother laugh at him - his brother, who'd stolen his parents' attention from him when he was only four years old. The knife was only meant for cutting bread but it slid through his brother's chest like butter and he smiled to hear him scream in pain.

  And in Egypt, a woman looked down in horror at this little creature suckling at her breast. What was this thing, this parasite, that was leeching the life out of her? She threw it away and stamped and stamped and stamped on it until there was nothing but a red and white mush on the floor and she could no longer remember what its little pink face had looked like.

  And all around Rome, the dead raised their heads to the moonless sky and howled. Their leader was gone, and now there was no one to command them - and no one to rein them in. What had been a planned assault deteriorated into chaos, and what had been a focussed attack became a mindless slaughter.

  All over the world, the green grass turned brown, the living forgot how to love each other, and the dead turned their mindless hatred on the living.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Boda blinked her eyes open, and found that she lay on her back, a strange blue sky above her and long, thin stalks of grass all around. Had she just arrived here? Was everything she had seen and heard a dream, the last imaginings of her dying mind?

  A part of her hoped so, but when she struggled to her feet she saw the well and the giant's head beside it. "Daughter of Midgard, now do you understand?" he said.

  She bowed her head, because she understood all too well. Her friend Vali, who had both saved and taken her life, was also the god Loki, who might have doomed them all when he contrived to kill his fellow god out of jealousy and spite.

  "And can you guess the price I demand?" Mimir asked.

  She shook her head. These were matters for gods, not mortals, and she couldn't see what her part in them would be.

  "Look beneath the roots of Yggdrasil," he said.

  She peered into the darkness, stretching miles beneath the vast tree, and for a moment a flash of lightning illuminated some of what was hidden there. She saw a slab of rock in a dark cave, and though the distance confounded all perspective, Boda knew that the rock was huge. The metal chains that lay on it were meant to hold a being more powerful than any that had ever been bound before. Above the rock the air seemed to twist and writhe and it took her a moment to realise that it was filled with snakes, hanging from the stalactites above, twining and twisting into each other and dripping their venom onto the slab below.

  "Loki's prison," Mimir said, "meant to punish him for all eternity. But the god of fire and mischief fled and now someone else must suffer in his place."

  Boda shuddered at the thought of lying there, in that impenetrable darkness, and knowing there would be no escape till the world itself had ended. She shuddered because she knew now what the price was to be. "You want me to take his place. He wanted it - that's why he sent me here."

  Mimir's eyes flickered in acknowledgement. There was no pity on his vast face and that made it easier to bear. "A killing demands a blood price," he said. "Someone must pay it. And the death of a god is so vastly more consequential a thing than the death of a m
an, it demands a vastly greater punishment."

  "I will pay it then," she said. "Though it was not I who did this wrong, I gave you my word and I'll keep it. But first you must let me complete my work."

  "Must I, Midgard's child?"

  Boda looked beneath the roots, but the darkness was complete again. She could remember it though, and always would, the rock and the snakes above it. She looked back at Mimir. "Yes. I took a vow to protect my people, to death and beyond."

  "An oath more powerful than that you made to a god?"

  "Yes," she said. "Greater even that that."

  The giant sighed, a large sound louder than the wind. "Go then, and find your friends. Find the dead god and face his judgement, and when it is done, your mortal spirit will return here to suffer for all eternity."

  She wanted to ask him how to find her friends - she wanted to ask him a lot of things - but his smile was already fading, and with it the rest of his face, and when it was gone entirely, she was somewhere else.

  Narcissus thought he'd been here a very long time, but he wasn't entirely sure. When he looked back into the past, it all seemed the same, the same wandering on the same grey and lonely river bank, and he wondered if he'd ever known anything else.

  There were others here, by the shore of this underground river. Their faces would drift towards him, out of the endless mist, and he would back away. They looked so sad. He didn't think he could deal with their sadness as well as his own.

  The rocky ground was uneven and he kept stumbling. His knees were raggedly cut and his hands abraded but there were no red beads of blood on his grey skin. Everything here was grey. He knew that soon he'd have forgotten what colours were. Maybe then he'd be content to stop wandering, and just sit still and wait for forever to pass.

  But not yet. Not quite yet. He still remembered that his name was Narcissus. He still knew that his master had loved him. And he knew that he needed to cross the river. There was something better on the other side, if only he could reach it.