Asgard's Heart

18

It was time for our blond Vikings to come to life and do their stuff, but there was one awful moment when they simply stood, inanimate, while the walking dead streamed all over them.

“The bow!” cried Myrlin as I reached reflexively for the sword at my belt. I knew that it would be useless to protest that I had never fired an arrow in my life, from a longbow or any other contraption; not knowing what magic had gone into my present making, I might easily discover myself a match for Robin Hood.

I snatched up the quiver from its resting place and slung it over my shoulder; then I snatched up the bow and notched the first arrow in the string. It was a stoutly-timbered weapon, and I could well imagine that it was first cousin to the one which Penelope’s suitors had toiled in vain to bend, but it offered little resistance to me as I drew the string back and took aim at one of the skeletons which had a little more flesh on it than most, and which had established a coign of vantage on the figurehead. I loosed the arrow, and saw it fly with a speed that belied the apparent slackness of the string. It hit the bone-man square in the sternum and exploded his entire rib cage, sending slivers of bone in every direction.

The Vikings were moving now, lashing out with their swords and spears. A couple were whirling battle-axes around their heads, and wherever the blades met the brittle skeletons the bones came apart with satisfying ease. Automata our fighting men might be, but they were none the less fearsome for that—they never hit one another, and they commanded nearly every square metre of space on the deck with their flashing blades. The skeleton men poured from their macabre craft in such profusion that they seemed sure to overwhelm our forces by sheer weight of numbers, but they were mostly smashed to bits as soon as they came within range.

One bony warrior leapt to the mast, and climbed like a gibbon to a place of relative safety, then grabbed a spear right out of the hand of one of our burly supporters. It made as if to hurl the weapon at the deck where we stood, but Myrlin knocked it from its perch with an arrow that went into its eye-socket, plucking its steel-helmed skull from the vertebral column and carrying it over the side into the sullen water.

The scraping impact of the two ships had brought us to a virtual standstill, and the entire length of our small vessel, save only for the afterdeck, was alongside the hull of the other. The platform where Myrlin, the goddess, and I were standing was not quite as open to attack as the main deck below, but it was no longer beyond the reach of the corpselike warriors as they swung on their silvery ropes. The bow was no longer any use and I cast it down again, drawing my sword from its scabbard. I had to swing it with unseemly haste as two of the vile things came swinging through the air at me, reaching with their own rusted blades. I caught them both between the pelvic girdle and the bottom rib, and cut them in half.

I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too easy, and that these creatures, for all their revolting ugliness, were far too feeble to be used as serious instruments of intimidation. But then I saw a blond swordsman stagger, and watched him pulled down by groping hands which had no right to be active at all, and I realised that it was not enough to break the skeletons, because the scattered bones were somehow able to reconnect themselves, reassembling new bodies from the shattered parts of the old.

The automata had cut down so many opponents in such a brief space of time that the deck was already littered with bones of every kind, and from that debris a new generation of enemies had already begun to form. Rising unheeded from the timbers they had struck more than one deadly blow at our defenders, and even those which no longer had swords to wield were ready and able to grapple and hinder their opponents.

Upon our raised afterdeck things were not yet set to become so troublesome. The bones which I had scattered had mostly fallen to the lower deck or gone over the side. Better still, Myrlin was wielding his great hammer now, whirling it about him one-handed, striking with such force that the creatures he assaulted were not merely broken but pulverized. But there was danger nevertheless in the detritus which threatened to accumulate about our feet as skeleton after skeleton dropped from above, eager enough to be broken, and equally avid to rise again.

One cannot truly kill the dead.

There was no point at all in trying to cry a warning to the Vikings below, who surely could not heed it, but I looked wildly about for the goddess who was our guide, wondering if she knew an answer to the kind of menace we were facing. Only she had the wit and skill to produce some magical effect that might turn the tables yet again, as she had when the fiery arch had tried to swallow us up.

She stood alone at the furthest corner of our tiny fortress, wrestling with the bow I had discarded. She was struggling to fire an ungainly arrow whose tip was wrapped in lacerated cloth. The trailing tatters made the task unduly difficult.

I did not know what she was doing, but I saw immediately that she needed a defender, because a skeleton bearing a dagger clenched between its rows of rotted teeth was scuttling like a monkey along the rampart, ready to pounce and drag her to the ground.

I lashed out with the flat of my sword, not trying to cut the thing in two but endeavouring instead to thrust it whole over the edge and into the sea. I caught it as I had intended and swept it away, but even as I did so I felt a bony arm wrapped around my neck as one of the creatures closed on me from behind.

I could not strike backwards with my sword, but as the fingers, slimy with decayed flesh, closed upon my windpipe I reached back with my free hand to hook my fingers into the vacant eye-sockets of the thing, and heaved upwards with all my might. The creature had hardly any weight, and I pulled it up with ease, twisting to hurl it over the parapet in my determination not to strew the deck with deadly litter.

When I turned again to strike at another monster that was groping for the goddess, I saw that she had managed to draw the bow, and I watched her loose the arrow. As it passed within a metre of my head the fibres loosely wrapped about its head burst brightly into flame, and I spun around to watch it bury its point in the weird carcass of the giant ship.

The flames leapt from the arrowhead along the knotted lengths of keratin, and within an instant had caught the edge of one of those great grey sails. The sail caught alight as though it were tinder-dry and hungry to burn, and the entire rigging of that remarkable vessel immediately became sheeted in blue fire, the ropes falling about the decks in eerie cataracts of flame. Those skeletons which were still crowding the decks of the huger vessel, ready to swarm down upon us, were wreathed and cloaked by the burning fabric’of the tumbling sails, and thrown into dreadful disarray. Although their brown bones would not easily burn, the fire seemed to attack whatever spirit it was which held the bones together and gathered them again if they were parted. The skeletons aboard the ship of the dead seemed almost to melt as they fell in disarray.

There were others which had already attained the platform on which we fought, but Myrlin was striking out now with tremendous force. The hammer, far more effective in his hands than any mere sword, wrought a destruction as complete as the woman’s witchfire, and the giant paused only a moment more before leaping over the parapet to the deck below—one giant coming to the aid of an entire company. He danced a complex path between the stabbing blades of the harassed automata, striking downwards and across to splinter skulls, crush fingers, and shatter leg-bones, so that wherever a new warrior tried to rise from the relics of those struck down, there was insufficient substance to give it effective shape.

One last skeleton heaved itself over the rail, sword high in hand, and struck at the goddess, but I shot out my own sword to intercept the blow, then lashed out with my boot to bundle the thing over the side and into the water.

The whole of the attacking ship was now sheathed in flame, and the heat was intense, but our oars were working furiously to draw us away. Those which had been trapped between the hulls had somehow lost their rigidity, and were thrusting like the legs of a desperate insect to push us away from the fire.

The expanse of water which appeared between the two hulls seemed to have an anger of its own, roiling and swirling as the oars whipped its surface, and the ships did come apart, slowly at first and then more quickly as the oars, free to operate with all their power, skated our smaller vessel away from the burning wreck.

The warriors in the horned helmets, despite the fact that they were not sentient, did not lack the intelligence required to begin sweeping the remains of their erstwhile attackers into the water, to prevent any chance of their forming again to renew the assault. Half a dozen of the blond defenders had been struck down and had taken fatal wounds, but no more, and what was left of the mock-men of bone and sinew could pose no further threat.

I dared not pause to relax, but made sure that our own enclosed platform was quite free of cadaverous parts. When this ugly task was finished, my first instinct was to look again to the sea before us, lest another enemy should already be rearing its ugly head from the waters. But there was nothing to be seen save for another bank of cold grey mist, and that some distance off.

“Is it over, for a while?” I asked our patroness, as she put down the bow and scanned the scene with her radiant eyes.

She shook her head. “They need not give us time to rest or confer,” she said. “We are unlimited by the heaviness of matter and the emptiness of real space, and so are they. I have no doubt now that they are clever, and that they have established a bridge of common meanings across which they may launch their assaults. Whatever is hidden within that bank of fog will be just as anxious to destroy us as the things which we have so far faced, and it will be upon us very soon.”

I managed a small but humourless laugh, and asked: “Are we near to our destination? Can we hope that help will come?”

“I cannot tell,” she replied. “I do not know what strength we have, let alone what the enemy will use to draw it from us. We have spun the fabric of this world from the thread of your wayward dreams, Michael Rousseau, and none of us can be sure just what our present state will permit, or how it might be conclusively disrupted. They are exploring the imagery of assault, and we the imagery of defence. There is no way to know what ingenuity they have to bring to bear, or what we have within us to defy it. Do what you can, and time will tell us whether we have done enough. Remember that you may be the most powerful of us all, with assistance already given to you.”

As I turned to face the mist that waited to swallow us up, I could not help reflecting that this was poor encouragement. This might be a world concocted out of my dreams, but it was nevertheless a world where I felt myself to be a stranger. If I had ever been here before, in my waking fantasies or my deepest slumbers, I was not aware of it, and I had so far seen little evidence that my subconscious resources were uniquely fitted to the magical metaphysics of this realm. My sword might be a featherweight in my hand, my aim with the bow as unerring as my heart’s desire would have it, and my voice the forceful instrument of my will, but I was still a man in a world where forceful spirits moved which had more power than I could ever muster. Behind the appearances which we must fight to maintain were entities which had brought Asgard itself to the brink of destruction, and they did not need to understand us wholly in order to crush us as comprehensively as Myrlin’s magical hammer had crushed the rotting bone-men.

The mist closed about me, then, forcing a shiver from my body. I felt by no means tireless as the damp greyness chilled the sweat of exertion that stood upon my forehead.

For a moment, I felt our movement through the fog as though it were a wind, but then that movement slowed abruptly as the ship seemed to be gripped by a giant vise, which closed upon its hull and held it tight—and though I could not see the oars straining to pull us on, I knew that they strained in vain, and that we were caught fast. However close we might be to the mysterious shore ahead of us, we had ceased to make progress toward it.