Asgard's Heart

16

The mist had faded into a light, silvery haze, and visibility on all sides of the ship had improved dramatically. A dead calm had fallen upon the sea. Where our oars disturbed the surface there was turbulence, and the ripples spread out slowly from each point of contact, but the viscous water damped them down and swallowed them. The wake which we left behind us was similarly impotent to disturb the waters for long; it too was calmed and soothed so that it stretched behind us for little more than a boat length, like gently-trailing tresses of weed.

I watched dark-haired Athene as she stared over the rail at the still and silent sea, clearly perturbed by what was happening, because it was so unexpected. I think she would have preferred a more recognisable menace, which could be opposed in straightforward fashion.

“What is happening?” asked Myrlin—not of her, though it was she who was surely best placed to answer—but of me.

“They appear to have made a temporary withdrawal,” I said. “I suspect they’re taking time out to think things over. A council of war, maybe. When they have another go at us, they’ll have a better idea of what to do. I have a suspicion that they may have done this sort of thing before, and know one or two tricks that our side hasn’t even thought of.”

She turned to look at me while I spoke, and the bleak look in her eye suggested that she had reached similar conclusions.

“It is too soon to despair,” she said, sharply. “While they withdraw, we make progress. Our weapons are still potent, and whatever monsters they may produce can only become solid enough to do us harm by rendering themselves vulnerable to our power of retaliation. You are more difficult to destroy now than ever you were as creatures of flesh and bone—remember that!”

While she instructed us to be brave, our surroundings began again to change. The mist began to thicken again, and draw about us, so that we could not see such great expanses of mirror-bright water to either side. The mist changed colour, too, so that it was no longer silvery-white but a roseate pink. At first I thought of this as if it were an infusion of something the colour of blood, which paled only because of its dilution in the mist, but there was too much yellow in the pink for that, and it was a colour I had only ever seen in the fragile petals of sweet-smelling flowers.

I had the strangest impression that this must be the most perfect of the colours which mist might have: a colour for sugar-sweet clouds in a child’s vision of paradise. I looked upwards, to the top of the mast, where the stirring of the wind had not completely ceased, and I saw wreaths of the mist thickening like radiant tongues of pink flame. The sea, beneath this glowing coloured vapour, could not help but lose its greyness, but the light that it reflected was by no means so pale. It was a red deeper by far, but still not like the colour of blood, tending more to the orange part of the spectrum. It put me in mind of films I had seen—the films by which I had learned the landscapes and appearances of the homeworld which I had never visited—where the camera’s eye had looked boldly into the face of the setting sun. It had stuck in my memory that the sun in such circumstances seemed hugely bloated by virtue of its proximity to the horizon, its image rippled by the hazy movement of the heated air.

I could easily imagine that the ocean upon which we floated was the surface of a dying sun, an infinite lake of quiet fire. Despite the redness, though, there was no heat at all. I no longer felt the need to draw my cloak tightly about me, but neither did I feel a need to discard it. There was still a hint of chill creeping in my bones.

“Look!” said Myrlin, pointing dead ahead. We could see very little beyond the figurehead which was carved to represent Medusa, whose serpentine tresses were themselves half-obscured by numinous tongues of rosy vapour, but we could see that the fog in direct line with the vessel’s course was beginning to thicken and to move in a much more agitated fashion. Its colour was darkening too, though not consistently, and as I struggled to make sense of what was happening I formed the notion that some kind of great arch was forming in the mist, through which the ship must sail, and that this arch was made of a blazing redness.

The sea was disturbed now, but not in the chaotic fashion of a surface stirred by eddying winds. It was as though there were some kind of force flowing from the points where the fiery arch met the water, which was causing great ripples and surges. As the ship began to meet these ripples, the bow began to dip and rise.

There was a sound, then, like the moan of some desolate creature slowly dying—a faint, hollow, hopeless sound which echoed eerily across the face of the water.

I concentrated on the arms of the arch into which we were sailing, which were thickening all the time from the gathering cloud, and now seemed like huge rotating pillars, far thinner at the bottom than the top—great vortices which slipped sinuously from side to side as ripples of expansion passed up from the water, loosening their hold on verticality.

“They’re sucking up the water!” I shouted as I realised what was happening. “Like a brace of tornadoes!”

The movement of the ship was increasing in its violence with every second that passed, and I moved in from the side, gripping the rail close to the position of the wheel, with which Myrlin was now trying to grapple.

They had sent no monster to fly at us or rise from the depths, but were raising against us the very elements of this world which we had made—they were attacking us with a storm, trying to upset the very fabric which we had imposed upon software space.

“Be calm!” commanded the gilt-clad goddess. “Hold hard, and we will ride it out. We are unsinkable!”

It was a promise which I longed to believe, but the sea boiled up beneath us as if it were a cauldron brought hurriedly to the boil, and there came into our faces a howling tempestuous wind like the voice of a wrathful god, while the mist fell all about us cloyingly, as though precipitated from solution in the air. There seemed little doubt that our ridiculous vessel would be smashed into matchwood, and our own bodies torn apart by the fury of the storm.

I could not stand before the forces that were beating and wrenching at me from all sides, and fell to my knees. But my hands gripped the rail all the tighter, and I ducked my head, trying to make myself tiny and huddle into the angle made by the deck and the balustrade.

Once I could not see what was happening it did not feel so very awful, and the storm’s power seemed much diminished. But still the ship was tossed about in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions, and still there was the sense of vaporous fingers clutching at me, first to tear and then to choke, and I knew that my sword was as impotent as my mere hands to turn them back. I stretched out my legs, trying to hook my feet into small gaps in the wooden face where they might help to anchor me. The bow and the quiver which I had not yet tried to use were pinned beneath me, their awkward shapes digging into my flesh as I tried to force myself down on to the deck.

I could still see Myrlin clinging to the wheel, refusing to let his giant frame be cast down by the angry wind. I could not see the goddess, but as the moaning of the wind paused for a fleeting moment I heard her, screaming at the storm with all the wrath which she could rouse to meet it. She was not screaming wordlessly—nor, I quickly realised, was she screaming impotently. Although the wind’s imperious howl tried hard to reassert itself when the brief pause was done, it could only enter into competition with her, and it seemed almost as if her voice now drew strength from the maelstrom of sound which whirled about us, as if the turbulence which was shaking the very foundations of the world added to her power instead of undermining it.

I raised my head, gaining confidence that I did not need to shrivel myself up in search of a hidey-hole, wondering if I might not fight too, if only I had words to do it with. I opened my mouth, and found it full of rushing, strangling air, which drove from my mind any thought of trying to form a coherent sentence—but I would not be silenced, and I shouted against the wind with all my might.

There was a brief moment when it seemed that the shout might empty my lungs and leave me helpless in the grip of the wind, helping it in its determination to choke me, but such sound as I produced seemed only to need a spark to set it alight before it grew of its own accord, plundering the force of the storm which tried to staunch it. There was a moment’s struggle, a second’s balance, and then I found the power to sustain the shout, to amplify it, and turn it into a cry of triumph, and I realised that Myrlin was shouting too, and that his stentorian voice was somehow adding its support to mine as we laid down a carpet of sound on which the goddess’ words could dance… and the louder we shouted, the clearer her words became, and though they were in some primitive, forgotten language which I did not know, they had meaning enough to terrify the wind which had come to pluck us apart.

There surged through me a sense of triumphant authority as I realised what power I had on which to draw. Magic was there to be worked, and although I had no knowledge of its working, the necessity which was the mother of improvisation could bring it forth. I could defend myself, not only with the curious weightless sword but with the sheer force of wishful thinking.

For the first time in my life I felt truly free, a commander of circumstance.

The boat plunged through the tiny eye of the storm, through the arch of rosy fire, and came out the other side, bursting from the thick and ruddy cloud into the thinner, sparkling mist once more.

Water rained down upon us as we passed beneath the vortices which sucked the water up, but they could not close upon the sides of our craft, and could not break our oars—and the water was only water, which could not hurt us in the least.

Our howls of wrath extended themselves into a long ululating cry of pure elation, and when I had come to my feet I saw that we were all three looking back at the dying thing behind us, whose fury seemed now only to be consuming itself, as the red that was not like blood faded to a pastel shade of rose, and finally evaporated in the silver mist.

“Did I not tell you?” she called, when at last we stopped our yelling and drew breath. Her voice was cracked, and it was an effort for her now to speak, but the elation in her words was clear to be heard, and it was obvious that this was a conflict she was delighted to have won. We knew now that she had underestimated the enemy, but we had the compensating hope that we might have underestimated ourselves. She turned to face us, while I staggered to Myrlin’s side, and we both leant on the wheel while we watched the storm expire in the bubbling waters far behind our stern.

I gasped for breath, thinking to join in the round of mutual congratulation, when I saw the expression of joy which was in her eyes begin to die. She opened her mouth to say something more, and when no words came I knew that it was not simply shortness of breath that would not let them come.

I turned, quickly, steadying myself upon the wheel, to look beyond the bows of the ship, at whatever terror now was to be thrust into our path.

Had I never seen it before it would have been a dreadful sight, but it was something I knew from the dream I had had when concussion had freed that parasite which clung to the underside of my soul.

Sailing directly toward us out of the mist was a ship four times the size of our own, which stood twice as high in the water, and looked as if it would break us in two if it could ram us squarely.

Its hull was made from strangely-knotted strands whose nature and origin I could never have guessed, had I not had my dream—but in that dream I had not had to guess, and had known what it was.

This was the ship of the dead, whose timbers were made from the fingernails of corpses, which had continued to grow long after the bodies were safe in their tombs, and whose fine white sails were woven from hair of the same strange kind. On the deck were its crew, who were made from the bare bones of the resurrected dead, all skeleton and sinew, eyeless, lipless, and heartless, yet bearing arms and fervent with the lust for life.

To the horror of the sight itself was added a sudden thrill of panic, as I realised that here was a figment of my imagination, a nightmare based in the ancient stories I had recalled. Such images had been seized and appropriated, it seemed, by the tapeworm in my mind, and now they were accessible to the others, whose object was my destruction. A moment ago, I had felt such a power within me that I had almost reckoned myself a god. Now, I remembered all too well that in the riot of Gotterdammerung the gods had perished, wiped out by the giants and their macabre armies.

Myrlin’s huge hand cast me roughly aside as he sought to spin the wheel, but there was not a doubt in the world that he was already too late. Although he steered the ship into a turn as sharp as she could possibly take, all he could do was to make the collision a glancing one. Our gleaming spur barely had strength to scratch the hull of the other vessel, and although the gorgon’s head which was mounted on our prow stared with baleful eyes at the host assembled in its bows, the enemy warriors had no eyes of their own by which her power could be known.

And as the honest timbers of the one ship grated harshly against the eerie fabric of the other, those skeletal warriors were already swinging onsropes of silvery hair, pouring like a troop of horrid insects on to the deck of our small, frail craft.