by James Comins
Lenna's Fimbulsummer
by James Comins
Smashwords Edition
Published on Smashwords by James Comins
Lenna's Fimbulsummer
Copyright 2012 by James Comins
Arthur Rackham's "Maid Maleen" published in 1917. No longer under copyright.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, places, events or locales is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: The Rainbow
Chapter Two: Gimli
Chapter Three: The Story of Loki
Chapter Four: A Rescue
Chapter Five: Breidablik
Chapter Six: The Tower of Fire
Chapter Seven: The Ormalaster
Chapter Eight: Andvar
Chapter Nine: A Door in the Tree, a Door in the Magic
Chapter Ten: The Verdance of Verdandi
Chapter Eleven: Time Magic
Chapter Twelve: Isengrim
Chapter Thirteen: Renard the Weasel
Chapter Fourteen: Loki's Side of the Story
Chapter Fifteen: Mousebones
Chapter Sixteen: Deadvood
Chapter Seventeen: The Story of Anna and the Stranger
Chapter Eighteen: The Opening of the Mouth
Chapter Nineteen: Seth
Chapter Twenty: The Story of Osiris
Chapter Twenty-One: Judgment
Chapter Twenty-Two: Food of Dead Gods
Acknowlogies and Apoledgements
About the Author
Prologue
The man carried a carved curved mastodon tusk like a staff, walking alone through the Icelandic afternoon up the snow-thick road toward the white clapboard farmhouse. He screamed and cried, gasping. Red anger and blue sadness shot from both ends of the tusk and melted streaks of snow in a U. The dead grass under the Icelandic barrens caught fire and burned orange along the prairie. With a wave of his hand, the man caused new water to fall from a string of small clouds, putting the fire out dead. The man proceeded up the driveway.
He crossed the threshold of the unlatched gate, pushing it carelessly open with the toe of his boot, and stood at the slight rise in front of the mailbox. Across the yard, a yellow-haired girl was singing foolish songs to a pen full of piglets. Unobserved, he watched as she picked up a particularly nosy piglet and pulled it away from the food. A smile touched the man’s lips, and he laughed boyishly, wiping his tears away. He had not seen her in years.
The girl was his grandmother.
As she washed the muddy animals, the yellow-haired girl looked over her shoulder and saw the man. She had never seen him before. She left her pigly tasks, washed her hands in the bleachy-white snow, which stuck to her cold red fingers, and ran across the farmyard toward him.
“So little time left,” he told her. She blinked.
He turned abruptly away and went into the farmhouse without knocking. The wooden door clicked closed ahead of the girl, who remained behind on the stoop.
The man stood in the narrow foyer and called into the house. A cook appeared, carrying a plate of lamb short ribs drenched in soppy celery chunks. The visitor laid his mastodon tusk against the wall beside the front door, removed his boots and went in. Finding a floral-print chair, he sat. He took the plate and tasted a short rib.
The Lady swept down the stairs in white linen. She looked much the same as she had ten years ago. Identical, really. She spoke breezily about her progress towards world domination. The visitor listened attentively to her crazy ideas about the power of crystals. He understood something of what she said, but he didn’t care about it much. It wasn’t one of his reasons for visiting. He told her about his love of Eastern mysticism and Japanese culture. She smiled indulgently and nodded.
As the conversation tapered off, the yellow-haired girl and black-haired girl were summoned inside. The man sat the girls down on the sofa and asked them strange questions. The questions were Zen koans designed to test the limits of human patience and understanding.
The yellow-haired girl was thoughtful and persistent. The black-haired girl demanded a sensible explanation for everything.
They supped together at a magnificent ruby the size and shape of a banquet table. It was polished and laden with a fine seven-course meal. The visitor brought the yellow-haired girl to sit at his side, looked at her between bites, smiled, spoke little.
This would be the last time he would ever see her.
It hit him all at once. These were the last moments they would ever have together. After this was a life without her, the woman who had taught him everything.
Stages of grief burned through him all at once, unexpected, dangerous. They disrupted his carefully managed stock of balanced emotions. He hadn’t completed his training in the East. If he let go and cried, the released magic could burn through the house, scalding and scarring everyone. He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry.
He excused himself from the table and walked to the freezing yard in his socks.
The cold did him good, brought him back, and he sat in lotus position on the bare snow, meditating. He brought the raging emotional magic back to stillness, grappled with the joy and the sorrow and the anger, realized he was wasting moments he could be spending with his grandmother. At length he rose, his backside and socks soaked with melted snow. He returned inside, put on his boots, declined an invitation to stay for the night. Kissing the yellow-haired girl on top of her head, he took his tusk and boots and departed.
The visitor walked alone up the road.
Chapter One
The Rainbow
or, It’s a Way of Looking
Lenna’s feet hurt. She’d been walking nonstop up the side of a rainbow from the dipping of the sun on the horizon through the evening and into the night. Her feet scuffed between the yellow and green stripes. It was dark now, the long swallowing invisibility of night. She followed the hazy glow emanating from the rainbow itself. Followed its mystic sparkle. Followed her feet. She walked, and she walked, and her feet hurt, and she walked. Time passed. Now the night had ended; now here was the sun. It was a glassy sphere filled with jagged spirals. The sun’s surface was patterned with Japanese characters. It crept up the opposite rim of the Earth. A burst of color was the Changed world below. Still she walked.
It was harder than it looked, climbing a rainbow. First of all, it wasn’t a normal U-shaped rainbow, a parabolic arch that arrived after the rain. It was a wandering winding road. It zigzagged and looped across the sky like a rollercoaster. It had a texture like warm cellophane, crinkly and gooey. Her shoes were attached to the surface by the rainbow’s own cosmic gravity.
That unusual feeling of walking in any direction, a feeling that had started out so magical and heartburstingly charming for the first mile or two, now just grated on her nerves and made her feet feel sticky. They must have walked twenty miles by now, sometimes straight up, sometimes upside-down, without anything but sky and clouds to look at.
Ahead of her was Aitta, wearing a British-style mod orange onesie dress with baggy shorts legs bunched like some sort of Shakespearean pantaloons. Her short dark hair swished as she walked. The tips were frosted blonde. Her breath was heavy and slow. Her footsteps were heavy and slow. She was slowing Lenna down, and Lenna was grumping about it inside her head.
Beyond Aitta was her husband Talvi, skinny and beardy, his curly red hair bouncing as he walked. He was lonely-looking even beside his wife, his hands shoved d
eep into the pockets of his orange jacket. Lenna kept an eye on him. He had once kept a postcard in those pockets, a postcard that had made his father get burned up. He was so full of secrets, Talvi. Who knew what else he could do?
In the very front, Baldur set the pace. The Norse god was as tall as a house. He had four bodybuilder arms, a smooth bare shirtless back, sealskin pants secured with a rope belt, and massive brown combat boots. He was taller than a giant, his bald head disappearing into the clouds. With his mighty stride carrying him so far, he would take one step, then bring his feet together, then wait for the humans to catch up to him.
Behind Lenna, tiny Binnan Darnan scurried in her voluminous spooky black dress and funeral-veil hair ribbon and lacy Victorian boots. Apparently, in Lady Joukka Pelata’s crystal world, servants didn’t have to wear plain brown dresses any more. Lenna wished it had been a crystal world when she had been a servant. But then there wouldn’t have been any pigs for her to look after or dragons to watch. Sigh. Binnan Darnan was always lucky.
Walking walking. Lenna and Binnan Darnan had already talked about everything that had happened in Ireland, all through the night. Afterward they’d had a stupid argument about nothing and decided to stop talking. She wished they could start talking again. It helped pass the time. But they weren’t talking.
She stared at the swinging spiky back of Aitta’s black-and-bleachy hair in silence. There was only the squeech sound of the cellophane rainbow and the thump of Baldur’s feet.
The shine of Baldur’s bald, tree-tall pate reflected the faint colors of the rainbow. His enormous body lumbered forward with each of his sloping giant steps. Behind the god, Talvi was steadfast under his messy curly dark hair. Binnan Darnan’s lacy tights made irritating skiff skiff sounds as she walked. Lenna sighed and kept walking.
She felt like she could sleep for a week. Her eyelids hung low, like a two-swing swingset, and her shins had those sparkly cold popping zaps shooting through them as she pushed them to walk forward. She could feet her footbones inside her chilly feet and she had a stitch in her abdomen and her feet hurt. And then, at last at last at last, there was the end of the rainbow. In a better world it would be some sort of giant delight, full of candy and unicorns or something. But it looked cold, the place beyond the rainbow. Mountainous and cold.
The wandering arc of the rainbow bridge of Bifrost ended. The land loomed ahead. Finally, a solid surface to stand on. The land was huge stone cubes, sharply hewn. It looked like a tumble of houses. The blocks had all slid down from some great godly building, knocked over into a heap. It had been a great castle, Lenna thought. Or a wall, yes, a castle wall big enough to hold back an army of gods. A wall fallen down.
The stones led up from the rainbow’s end to a gray horizon beyond. Diffuse colorless light formed a looming mirage far above. From here, Lenna thought, it looked as if the rainbow was spilling off of this hidden gray kingdom like a waterfall. Or maybe it looked like the rainbow was holding this hazy ruined landscape up. Either way.
Baldur looked over his shoulder at the four. “My uncle Honnur was supposed to clear this mess away centuries ago,” he rumbled. “But he’s too lazy to do it himself and too foolish to hire someone to do it for him. We’ll have to climb it, I’m afraid.”
Binnan Darnan whimpered. She slipped a black shiny boot off and rubbed her foot, balancing with the other arm waving.
Lenna sat on the edge of the first stone and looked down through the see-through rainbow at the Earth below her. It was so far away. The oddly bright colors of Joukka Pelata’s crystal-powered world were all blue from distance. Earth was covered in a patchy layer of puzzlebox clouds, lit at the far horizon by the rising orange spirals of the sun. The sky was painted with a picture of a luff-sailed junk on the high seas. The picture slid over the clouds as if it were sailing.
Talvi took a foot off the Scotch tape rainbow and placed it onto the first fallen stone. He leaned in and got himself stabilized, then pushed himself forward. He balanced, pushed again, sliding like an ice skater up to the sharp corner of the stone block. He put out a hand for Lenna to come after him.
Pushing off from the rainbow, she got halfway up, skidded forward, and slid back down into Aitta’s arms. Next Binnan Darnan gave it a try, getting a running start from further down, stomping up the surface of the stone, teetering halfway up and waving her hands. Talvi leaned out and picked her up and set her back down on the level ground above.
At Aitta’s suggestion, Lenna climbed onto the woman’s shoulders. Baldur picked them both up and set them down on the top of the first block. Together they began a long, slow scramble up the dusted gravelly face of the ruined curtain wall. When someone missed their footing, the four hands of Baldur halted them. The god braced his way uphill, wedging his broad leather boots into the spaces and crevices between the stones, muttering about how scuffy the boots were getting.
The way got tougher the further they went. The stones got steeper and the air got thinner. Aitta gasped so much that Lenna finally jumped off her and insisted on climbing herself. She found that the weight of her own body got heavier the more she dragged herself up the mountain. Ahead, Talvi was sweating like a soldier on a hot day. He tied his orange jacket around his waist. Yucky sweat had soaked through the underarms of his t-shirt.
“Can’t we stop? Maybe forever?” moaned Binnan Darnan, climbing with four limbs like a baby elephant in a goofy dress.
“Once we’re at the top,” Baldur panted. Lenna looked back at him. The god looked exhausted too, as if he were ready to close his eyes and fall back down to the bottom at any moment. “Getting to Asgard is no small doing,” he gasped. “You will be the first mortals to travel by this road in many centuries.” He grabbed his forehead with a palm and squoze it back and forth, then slicked a pool of sweat away. “Just reaching it will be a famous achievement. Skalds would sing songs about it, if there were any skalds left.”
Eventually, after an aching forever of climbing, the incline leveled off. Tufts of stubborn scabby plants had broken through the unmortared cracks between the stones. The way crested to a flat surface laden with pebbles, the last piece of the ancient wall itself. Beyond, the sheer side gave way to a dirt ramp wending down to a godwide field. They were in Asgard.
Talvi leaned over at the top of the wall with his hands on his bent knees and panted. Lenna sat on the gritty rock and stuck her painfully stiff legs straight out in front of her. Her body was wasted and her head was woozy. She looked out across the fierce, gray-skied world.
Binnan Darnan came up behind her, smiling that smug smile she always wore. She sat cross-legged and started braiding Lenna’s hair. Relaxing, Lenna let the little girl tug her sweaty yellow locks apart. The climb was over. They were in the home of the gods. They could probably relax now. Nothing would get them. Nothing would be bad. Not here. Hopefully.
She looked out, wincing as sweaty mats were tugged loose.
Asgard.
It was very big and very empty.
Gray skies. They weren’t cloudy, but empty of color itself. There was no sun. The air was gray.
Below the dull sky lay a rocky plain. Maybe it had once been a battlefield. It was overgrown with low grasses and waving prairie chapparal. Tiny twisted trees clung to the parched land. No water and thin air. The plain was spare of color, darkened under a sky that looked like crouching sheets of stormclouds. The land was broken and irregular; mighty, yet forgotten. It was utterly forgotten and overgrown.
Lenna sat at the top of the wall. Shimmerlight danced across the rocky plain. They were five people in emptiness.
She looked further out. In the corners of the land, miles and miles from the wall, other shapes arose: towers, ruins, desolate bridges and fallen walls and lonesome standing pillars with halves of arches hanging off them, all twined up with ivy and moss and ferns. A fairy kingdom, all torn down.
“Where is everybody?” Lenna asked Baldur.
A sigh like a gravel avalance. Baldur didn’t answer. He s
tood motionless atop the ruined wall, still as an empty house, his four arms limp, facing the land.
“Don’t you get lonesome here, Mister Baldur?” Binnan Darnan asked, looking up at him. “Is it just part of being a god?”
“And where are Thor and Odin and everybody?” added Lenna.
“Dead,” whispered Baldur, staring out at the vacant expanse. “Thor and Odin are dead. All of them are dead, except we six sons who were fated to live, and my wife Nanna. She and I had to climb back here from Hell.”
He stood and gazed in timeful wonder across the grassy blankness of Asgard, a pillar on the wall. “So empty,” he said. His voice was a thin, lonely thing. “All washed away. Only one house here is belifed. You’ll meet my brother and uncles in the enchanted stronghold of Gimli. The others live outside the fields of Vigrid that lay before us.
“Thor had two sons, Magni and Modi," Baldur continued. "They live in the sacred garden of Idavold. My wife Nanna waits for us in my home of Breidablik, under the sea. There is no one else.
“Come,” he went on. “The last leg of our journey isn’t long if we start now.” Saying nothing more, he heaved himself forward and began to walk down the dirt way leading down the wall. They stood and sighed and trudged after him.
The ground was soft and sandy-dry, just giving under their feet, as if it hadn’t been trod in awhile. Small squiggly trees dotted hills. Above them was a gray so endless and cloudless it became a solid joyless smear. Bare chill warmth came from the air. Eventually Talvi untied his jacket sleeves from his waist and put the orange coat back on over his sweat-crusted t-shirt. The sound of wind matched the beach sound of their walking feet: losssss.
“Look,” whispered Binnan Darnan, pointing to a round, blaringly blue spot beside one of the hills. Baldur waited as she and Lenna ran over to look at the spot. As they approached, it tilted and became a puddle of colors beneath a muddle of patterned blue. They bent over it, side by side, and wind swept out at them.
