Asgard's Heart

28

I was quite ready to believe that I was beaten, but I felt that I had to give resistance a try. After all, I had no idea how good I was at swordsmanship. Perhaps I was d’Artagnan as well as Robin Hood.

I moved forward, striking as best I could at one of the warriors. His own sword came up to meet mine, and when the two clashed, my blade shattered as if it had been made of delicate glass. I was left holding the hilt, foolishly looking down at the broken end.

The remaining fighting-men had remained quite still, their animation still suspended. The one I’d lunged at resumed the same position. Another man came between two of the warriors, and stood before me, looking me up and down with what seemed like frank curiosity. He bore a slight resemblance to John Finn, but the similarity was very superficial. This was a much taller and more handsome man, and though he had a Finnish slyness about him, he had also a self-confidence—a kind of authority implying aristocratic habits—which the sole remaining representative of the humble house of Finn could never have carried off.

He smiled. It was a nasty, cruel smile that reminded me of Amara Guur.

“I don’t know you,” I said, rather stupidly. I felt dreadful, and I knew that if I were to look down at my body there would be little to see but rags and tatters of putrefying flesh. I was quite convinced now that they really had beaten me. The language of my constitution was no longer arcane so far as they were concerned.

“No, Mr. Rousseau,” he said, in an oddly mellifluous voice which didn’t seem to fit his wicked face. “You’ve never seen me before—not even in your dreams. And yet, I am no less a figment of your imagination than the others. The appearance which I have is one which you have bestowed upon me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I didn’t even know why the game was continuing—there was no obvious reason why they would want to talk to me before they destroyed me.

“We are at home here,” said the tall man, sounding not unfriendly. “This is our world. You had power here, but you did not know how to use it efficiently. You never really had a chance of surviving here, and your friends the Isthomi were over-ambitious in what they tried to do. Believe it or not, we bear you no animosity. Our war is not with your kind, but we must do what we must do. Think of it only as a dream, Mr. Rousseau. The pain which you suffer here is not the pain which flesh is heir to. It is a mere passing incident.”

When a sleeping man is close to wakefulness while he is still dreaming, there is a moment when he can exert the power of his returning consciousness within the dream, to shape and control it. I longed for such a moment now, wishing that I could do something to change the emerging pattern, but I could not even lift my arm to offer some futile gesture of defiance. I was frozen into stillness like those unhappy souls held fast by the trees of the forest, and all I could do was look about me.

I saw that we were in a city—a city built from grey stone and white marble, almost incandescent beneath the blazing glare of the huge sun. The buildings were very tall, decorated with tall arches and mighty colonnades, their facades decorated with sculptured images of battle. My own position was in the centre of a vast square thronged with people, but the pavement on which I stood was raised, so that I and the circle of swordsmen who surrounded me were above the level of the crowd by half a man’s height. There was a great deal of noise as the people in the crowd moved about, chattering and shouting. I could make no sense of the few words that I caught within the cacophony, which were in some alien tongue that I could not understand.

Not everyone was looking at me, but I was the centre of attention here; it was as if I was a prisoner brought out for ritual humiliation and execution. This was the seat of judgment to which I had been summoned—dead or alive—in order to hear my condemnation. The elements of the city’s architecture had been dredged from my vague and ill-conceived notions of what the cities of ancient Earth must have been like, which owed far more to antique movies than to any real knowledge. It seemed oddly appropriate that I— the merest pretender to godhood—should go to my destruction on the set of a low-budget epic. My other self had only been capable of dreaming second-rate dreams, and I was suffering now from the absurdity of his meagre pretensions.

Somewhat to my surprise, I felt a desperate desire to know the answers to a few questions, although I did not doubt that I would take those answers with me to oblivion in a very short space of time.

I looked the godlike man in the eye as I had looked Amara Guur in the eye, and said: “Will you tell me what it is that I have been a part of? Will you tell me what I was supposed to achieve, and why you fought so hard to stop me?”

He smiled, wryly. “You could not begin to understand,” he said. He must have known what an infuriating answer that would be. And he added: “It was not such a hard fight. The Isthomi are very feeble, as godlings go.”

“They thought I might find friends here,” I said weakly, “who would come to my aid.”

“Poor fool,” he said, not ungently. “You have tried to intervene in a battle whose nature you could never comprehend. You have no friends here, but only those who would use you. Your flesh-and-blood counterpart is no better off—he too is just a pawn, and he cannot even be certain which side he is on. He does not know whether the passenger in his body intends him to save the macroworld or to destroy it.”

“Do you know?” I asked, with as much insolence as I could muster.

He spread his hands wide, as if to say that it could not matter. I could not tell whether it was simply an act of casual cruelty, or whether there was some point in this dialogue. I wondered why he was delaying, if he intended to destroy me, and I noted that although he stood less than two metres away he had made no attempt to touch me. Was I still dangerous, in some way that I could not quite fathom?

I stared hard into his face, wishing fervently that looks could kill, but I could not move my arms or my legs. My limbs had so far submitted to the forces of decay that they had no way of responding to the signals sent by my brain, and I had the sensation that the brain itself had little left of its own order and power. Yet the end was not yet come, and I felt sure that there must be some reason for the delay. If they had been able to blot me out, utterly and entirely, they would have done it. They had not yet attained that final dominance which would permit them to administer the coup de grace. Perhaps there was still hope—still something I could do if only I knew how.

But the only thing I could do, it seemed, was talk.

“Who are you?” I asked, trying with all my might to be contemptuous.

He laughed. “What answer can I possibly give?” he countered. “The appearance which you see is in your eye, the identity which I have is in your mind. I have no way to answer you save by reference to your ideas, your characterizations. There are no gods, and yet I am a god, because you have no way of thinking about the kind of being I am, and the powers at my disposal, save by linking them to your myths of gods and giants. The builders of the macroworld were humanoid in form, and their nature is already pregnant in the parent being from which you were copied, in the quiet DNA which is unexpressed within your every cell, but you have not the power of their imagination, and you cannot conceive of the nature and power of the beings they created within their machines—or the nature and power of the invaders which have come to displace them. We are not gods but you must dress us as gods in order to have any image of us at all. You named the macroworld Asgard, because it seemed to you the creation of godlike beings, and you have translated the danger that threatens it into the vocabulary of Gotterdammerung, because there is no other way in which your petty minds might encompass it.

“You ask me who I am. I can only say that in your mind’s eye I am the one who guided the hand of the blind slayer of Balder; I am the one who freed the great wolf Fenrir and rode with him at the head of an army drawn from the Underworld where the dead denied Valhalla groaned beneath the burden of their misery; I am the one whose call roused the fire giants and plotted the course of the ship of ghosts—you must call me Loki. Are you any wiser now, small creator of gods? Do you understand now what your little thread signifies within the infinite tapestry woven by the Norns? No, my human friend, you do not. You understand nothing—nothing at all.”

“Forget Loki, then,” I said. “Strip away the mythic mask. You’re one of the invaders of the macroworld: a tapeworm, programmed to disrupt and destroy. Why are you trying to destroy Asgard?”

He smiled. “The macroworld is in danger,” he said, coolly, “but we do not intend that it should be destroyed. We have other plans for it. We have sent our ambassadors to save it, and they will do so, unless your fleshly self intervenes. If anyone intends to let the starlet go nova, it is the ones who oppose us—the guardian gods of Asgard. What passenger they have placed in your counterpart’s brain we cannot tell, but we know only too well that those who fight against us would rather blow the macroworld to atoms than let us possess it. You do not know what kind of beings they are who have summoned you to this fight. You do not understand the game in which you are a pawn, and you owe no loyalty to those who have used you.”

He seemed to be working hard to make that point, and I wondered whether my acceptance of ignorance and confusion, or some fatal weakening of my resolve, was yet necessary to the final victory of the forces which were labouring so hard in the work of my destruction.

“You switched off the power,” I accused him. “It was the invaders, not the gods made by the builders, which sought to condemn thousands of worldlets to death.”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “We switched off the power. The Isthomi’s probing disrupted the stalemate that had long held us impotent, and we took advantage of it. But the robots which penetrated the starshell were of necessity very crude, and that was the only thing which they could achieve—the real space inside the starshell is too hazardous for our kind of being. We have no flesh-and-blood legions at our disposal, as the guardian gods once had, but the balance of power is more equal now. When we struck again at the Isthomi, we seized our chance to conscript a little flesh to our own cause. When we have won our victory, you may be sure that the power will be returned to the levels; we have need of Asgard, if we can only dispossess its jealous gods. But you, I fear, must be destroyed. We cannot tell what the clever Aesir may have made of you, and we must protect ourselves.”

There was an obvious hypocrisy in his regretfulness. He still wasn’t absolutely certain that I was harmless. He was still trying to delay while the forces of corruption worked their careful way with my rotting body. I knew that I couldn’t move, but I also knew that I could work magic. I had helped to calm a storm with the power of my voice, and though I knew no spells or words of power, I knew that there must be some key to unlock the forces in my mind.

“Loki died too,” I whispered—and my voice, though weak, sounded oddly loud over the clamour of the crowd who were waiting to see me killed. “On the field of Ragnarok, they all died! When it all began again, there was a new race of gods, unknown save for Balder, whose murder was undone. You’re all going to die. Do you hear me— you’re all going to die!”

My voice rose as I spoke to what I intended to be a stentorian shout, but it came out more like a cracked shriek. The effect was entirely ruined, and the person who called himself Loki, far from being intimidated by my defiant curse, laughed again, with every sign of genuine amusement. The crowd joined in with him, and suddenly the random noise generated by the throng coalesced into a single continuing sound: the sound of joyous laughter.

I burned with humiliation, and I tried with all my might to focus every last vestige of my waning spirit into a hot surge of pure hatred. I was certain that I had the power to raise my arm, to fight back. In that moment, the sheer magnitude of my rage made me feel like a god—like one whose power simply could not be denied.

But passion wasn’t enough. My arm wouldn’t come up, and when I looked down to command my flesh with the power of my gaze, I saw why. The maggots were already busy in my flesh. They had devoured me almost to the bone. Where once there had been white skin there was now a grey tegument like ragged cloth, pallid and writhing, foul to behold.

Helplessly, I looked up again into the vicious grey eyes of my accuser and executioner.

He had a sword in his hand now, whose mirror-bright blade shone like liquid fire in the angry sunlight. As he raised it to sweep it around in a deadly arc his lips drew back from his teeth in a way that linked him incontrovertibly with the predator whose appearance he had worn in his previous manifestation, when I had engaged him in debate before. Perhaps it was then that I had unwisely given him the opportunity to learn to understand me.

He was Loki the traitor; he was Amara Guur; he was the devil incarnate—and I had nothing left with which to resist his evil.

He reached out with his left hand to grab a handful of my scaly hair, and held me tight while he brought the sword across to cut cleanly through my neck.

My rotting body fell to the ground, seared by the heat of the sun-warmed stone, while he held my severed head aloft, displaying it to the assembled crowd. He let loose a great wordless howl of triumph, which said as clearly as I might have wished that he had still feared me, and that there had been something I could have done, if only I had known the way, but that I had failed to discover it.