The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

1980

After basic training at the Patrol Academy, I returned to Laurie on the same day as I’d left her. I’d need a spell to rest and readapt; it was rather a shock transferring from the Oligocene period to a Pennsylvania college town. We must also set our mundane affairs in order. For my part, I should finish out the academic year before resigning “to take a better-paying job abroad.” Laurie saw to the sale of our house and the disposal of goods we didn’t want to keep—wherever and whenever else we were going to establish residence.

It wrenched us, bidding goodbye to the friends of years. We promised to make occasional visits, but knew that those would be few and far between, until they ceased entirely. The required lies were too great a strain. As was, we left an impression that my vaguely described new position was a cover for a post in the CIA.

Well, I had been warned at the beginning that a Time Patrol agent’s life becomes a series of farewells. I had yet to learn what that really meant.

We were still in the course of uprooting ourselves when I got a phone call. “Professor Farness? This is Manse Everard, Unattached operative. I wonder if we could meet for a talk, like maybe this weekend.”

My heart bounded. Unattached is about as high as you can get in the organization; throughout the million or more years that it guards, such personnel are rare. Normally a member, even if a police officer, works within a single milieu, so that he or she can get to know it inside out, and as part of a closely coordinated team. The Unattached may go anyplace they choose and do virtually anything they see fit, responsible only to their consciences, their peers, and the Danellians. “Uh, sure, certainly, sir,” I blurted. “Saturday would be fine. Do you want to come here? I guarantee you a good dinner.”

“Thanks, but I’d prefer it was my digs—the first time, anyway. Got my files and computer terminal and things like that handy. Just the two of us, please. Don’t worry about airline schedules. Find a spot, as it might be your basement, where nobody will see. You’ve been issued a locator, haven’t you?… Okay, read off the coordinates and call me back. I’ll pick you up on my hopper.”

I found out later that that was characteristic of him. Large, tough-looking, wielding more power than Caesar or Genghis ever dreamed of, he was as comfortable as an old shoe.

Me on the saddle behind his, we skipped through space, rather than time, to the current Patrol base in New York City. From there we walked to the apartment he maintained. He didn’t like dirt, disorder, and danger any better than I did. However, he felt he needed a pied-a-terre in the twentieth century, and had grown used to these lodgings before decay had advanced overly far.

“I was born in your state in 1924,” he explained. “Entered the Patrol at age thirty. That’s why I decided I should be the guy who interviewed you. We have pretty much the same background; we ought to understand each other.”

I took a steadying gulp of the whisky and soda he’d poured for us and said cautiously, “I’m not too sure, sir. Heard something about you at the school. Seems you led quite an adventurous life even before you joined. And afterward—Me, I’ve been a quiet, stick-in-the-mud type.”

“Not really.” Everard glanced at a sheet of notes he held. His left hand curled around a battered briar pipe. Once in a while he’d take a puff or a sip. “Let’s refresh my memory, shall we? You didn’t see combat during your Army hitch, but that was because you served your two years in what we laughingly call peacetime. You did, though, make top scores on the target range. You’ve always been an outdoorsman, mountaineering, skiing, sailing, swimming. In college, you played football and won your letter in spite of that lanky build. In grad school your hobbies included fencing and archery. You’ve traveled a fair amount, not always to the safe and standard places. Yes, I’d call you adventurous enough for our purposes. Possibly a tad too adventurous. That’s one thing I’m trying to sound you out about.”

Feeling awkward, I glanced again around the room. On a high floor, it was an oasis of quiet and cleanliness. Bookshelves lined the walls, save for three excellent pictures and a pair of Bronze Age spears. Else the only obvious souvenir was a polar bear rug that he had remarked was from tenth-century Greenland.

“You’ve been married twenty-three years, to the same lady,” Everard remarked. “These days, that indicates a stable character.”

There was no sign of femininity here. To be sure, he might well keep a wife, or wives, elsewhen. “No children,” Everard went on. “Hm, none of my business, but you do know, don’t you, that if you want, our medics can repair every cause of infertility this side of menopause? They can compensate for a late start on pregnancies, too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Fallopian tubes—Yes, Laurie and I have discussed it. We may well take advantage someday. But we don’t think we’d be wise to begin parenthood and my new career simultaneously.” I formed a chuckle. “If simultaneity means anything to a Patroller.”

“A responsible attitude. I like that.” Everard nodded.

“Why this review, sir?” I ventured. “I wasn’t invited to enlist merely on the strength of Herbert Ganz’s recommendation. Your—people put me through a whole battery of far-future psych tests before they told me what it meant.”

They’d called it a set of scientific experiments. I’d cooperated because Ganz had asked me to, as a favor to a friend of his. It wasn’t his field; he was in Germanic languages and literature, the same as me. We’d met at a professional gathering, become drinking buddies, and corresponded quite a bit. He’d admired my papers on Deor and Widsith, I’d admired his on the Gothic Bible.

Naturally, I did not know then that it was his. It was published in Berlin in 1853. Later he was recruited into the Patrol, and eventually he came uptime under an alias, in search of fresh talent for his undertaking.

Everard leaned back. Across the pipe, his gaze probed at me. “Well,” he said, “the machines told us you and your wife are trustworthy, and would both be delighted by the truth. What they could not measure was how competent you’d be in the job for which you were proposed. Excuse me, no insult intended. Nobody is good at everything, and these missions will be tough, lonesome, delicate.” He paused. “Yes, delicate. The Goths may be barbarians, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid, or that they can’t be hurt as badly as you or me.”

“I understand,” I said. “But look, all you need do is read the reports I’ll have filed in my own personal future. If the early accounts show me bungling, why, just tell me to stay home and become a book researcher. The outfit needs those too, doesn’t it?”

Everard sighed. “I have inquired, and been told you performed—will perform—will have performed—satisfactorily. That isn’t enough. You don’t realize, because you haven’t experienced it, how overburdened the Patrol is, how ghastly thin we’re spread across history. We can’t examine every detail of what a field agent does. That’s especially true when he or she isn’t a cop like me, but a scientist like you, exploring a milieu poorly chronicled or not chronicled at all.” He treated himself to a swallow of his drink. “That’s why the Patrol does have a scientific branch. So it can get a slightly better idea of what the hell the events are that it is supposed to keep careless time travelers from changing.”

“Would it make a significant difference, in a situation as obscure as that?”

“It might. In due course, the Goths play an important role, don’t they? Who knows what a happening early on—a victory or a defeat, a rescue or a death, a certain individual getting born or not getting born—who knows what effect that could have, as its results propagate through the generations?”

“But I’m not even concerned with real events, except indirectly,” I argued. “My objective is to help recover various lost stories and poems, and unravel how they evolved and how they influenced later works.”

Everard grinned ruefully. “Yeah, I know. Ganz’s big deal. The Patrol has bought it because it is an opening wedge, the single such wedge we’ve found, to getting the history of that milieu recorded.”

He knocked back his drink and rose. “How about another?” he proposed. “And then we’ll have lunch. Meanwhile, I wish you’d tell me exactly what your project is.”

“Why, you must have talked to Herbert—to Professor Ganz,” I said, astonished. “Uh, thanks, I would like a refill.”

“Sure,” Everard said, pouring. “Retrieve Germanic literature of the Dark Ages. If ‘literature’ is the right word for stuff that was originally word of mouth, in illiterate societies. Mere chunks of it have survived on paper, and scholars don’t agree on how badly garbled those copies are. Ganz’s working on the, um-m, the Nibelung epic. What I’m vague about is where you fit in. That’s a story from the Rhineland. You want to go gallivanting solo away off in eastern Europe, in the fourth century.”

His manner did more than his whisky to put me at ease. “I hope to track down the Ermanaric part,” I told him. “It isn’t properly integral, but a connection did develop, and besides, it’s interesting in its own right.”

“Ermanaric? Who dat?” Everard gave me my glass and settled himself to listen.

“Maybe I better backtrack a little,” I said. “How familiar are you with the Nibelung-Volsung cycle?”

“Well, I’ve seen Wagner’s Ring operas. And when I had a mission once in Scandinavia, toward the close of the Viking period, I heard a yarn about Sigurd, who killed the dragon and woke the Valkyrie and afterward mucked everything up.”

“That’s a fraction of the whole story, sir.”

“ ‘Manse’ will do, Carl.”

“Oh, uh, thanks. I feel honored.” Not to grow fulsome, I hurried on in my best classroom style:

“The Icelandic Volsungasaga was written down later than the German Nibelungenlied, but contains an older, more primitive, and lengthier version of the story. The Elder and the Younger Edda have some of it too. Those are the sources that Wagner mainly borrowed from.

“You may recall that Sigurd the Volsung got tricked into marrying Gudrun the Gjuking instead of Brynhild the Valkyrie, and this led to jealousy between the women and at last to his getting killed. In German, those persons are called Siegfried, Kriemhild of Burgundy, Brunhild of Isenstein; and the pagan gods don’t appear; but no matter now. According to both stories, Gudrun, or Kriemhild, later married a king called Atli, or Etzel, who is none other than Attila the Hun.

“Then the versions really diverge. In the Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild lures her brothers to Etzel’s court and has them set on and destroyed, as her revenge for their murder of Siegfried. Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth who took over Italy, gets into that episode under the name of Dietrich of Bern, though in historical fact he flourished a generation later than Attila. A follower of his, Hildebrand, is so horrified at Kriemhild’s treachery and cruelty that he slays her. Hildebrand, by the way, has a legend of his own, in a ballad whose entirety Herb Ganz wants to find, as well as in derivative works. You see what a cat’s cradle of anachronisms this is.”

“Attila the Hun, eh?” Everard murmured. “Not a very nice man. But he operated in the middle fifth century, when those bully boys were already riding high in Europe. You’re going to the fourth.”

“Correct. Let me give you the Icelandic tale. Atli enticed Gudrun’s brothers to him because he wanted the Rhinegold. She tried to warn them, but they came anyway under pledge of safe conduct. When they wouldn’t surrender the hoard or tell Atli where it was, he had them put to death. Gudrun got even for that. She butchered the sons she’d borne him and served them to him as ordinary food. Later she stabbed him as he slept, set his hall afire, and left Hunland. With her she took Svanhild, her daughter by Sigurd.”

Everard frowned, concentrating. It couldn’t be easy to keep track of these characters.

“Gudrun came to the country of the Goths,” I said. “There she married again and had two sons, Hamther and Sorli. The king of the Goths is called Jormunrek in the saga and in the Eddie poems, but there is no doubt that he was Ermanaric, who is a real if shadowy figure around the middle and late fourth century. Accounts differ whether he married Svanhild and she was falsely accused of infidelity, or she married somebody else whom the king caught plotting against him and hanged. In either case, he had poor Svanhild trampled to death by horses.

“By this time, Gudrun’s boys, Hamther and Sorli, were young men. She egged them on to kill Jormunrek in vengeance for Svanhild. Along the way they met their half-brother Erp, who offered to accompany them. They cut him down. The manuscripts are vague as to the reason why. My guess is he was their father’s child by a concubine and there was bad blood between them and him.

“They proceeded to Jormunrek’s headquarters and the attack. They were two alone, but invulnerable to steel, so they slew men right and left, reached the king, and wounded him severely. Before they could finish the job, though, Hamther let slip that stones could hurt them. Or, according to the saga, Odin suddenly appeared, in the guise of an old man with one eye, and betrayed this information. Jormunrek called to his remaining warriors to stone the brothers, and that is how they died. There the tale ends.”

“Grim, hey?” said Everard. He pondered for a minute. “But it seems to me that whole last episode—Gudrun in Gothland—must’ve been tacked on at a much later date. The anachronisms have gotten completely out of hand.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “That very commonly happens in folklore. An important story will attract lesser ones to it. Even in trifling ways. For instance, it wasn’t W. C. Fields who said that a man who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad. It was somebody else, I forget who, introducing Fields at a banquet.”

Everard laughed. “Don’t tell me the Patrol should monitor Hollywood history!” He grew serious again. “If that sanguinary little yarn doesn’t really belong in the Nibelung canon, why do you want to trace it? Why does Ganz want you to?”

“Well, it did reach Scandinavia, where it did inspire a couple of pretty good poems—if those weren’t just redactions of something earlier—and did hook up to the Volsung saga. The connections, the whole evolution, interest us. Also, Ermanaric gets mention elsewhere—in certain Old English lays, for instance. So he must have figured in a lot of legend and bardic work that was since forgotten. He was powerful in his day, though apparently not a very nice man himself. The lost Ermanaric cycle might well be as important and brilliant as anything that has come down to us from the West and the North. It may have influenced Germanic literature in scores of unsuspected ways.”

“Do you intend to go straight to his court? I wouldn’t recommend that, Carl. Too many field agents get killed because they got careless.”

“Oh, no. Something horrible happened, from which stories sprang and traveled far, even reaching into historical chronicles. I think I can bracket when it happened, too, within about ten years. But I mean to familiarize myself thoroughly with the whole milieu before I venture into that episode.”

“Good. What is your plan?”

“I’ll take an electronic cram in the Gothic language. I can read it already, but want to speak it fluently, though doubtless my accent will be odd. I’ll also want a cram on what little is known about customs, beliefs, et cetera. That’ll be very little. The Ostrogoths, if not the Visigoths, were still on the bare fringes of Roman awareness. Surely they changed considerably before they moved west.

“So I’ll begin well downtime of my target dates; somewhat arbitrarily, I’m thinking of 300 AD. I’ll get acquainted with people. Next I’ll reappear at intervals and learn what’s been going on in my absence. In short, I’ll keep track of events as they march toward the event. When it finally comes, I shouldn’t be caught by surprise. Afterward I’ll drop in here and there, from time to time, and listen to the poets and storytellers, and get their words on a concealed recorder.”

Everard scowled. “Um-m, that kind of procedure—Well, we can discuss the possible complications. You’ll move around a fair amount geographically too, won’t you?”

“Yes. According to what traditions of theirs got written down in the Roman Empire, the Goths originated in what’s now central Sweden. I don’t believe that numerous a breed could have come from that limited an area, even allowing for natural increase, but it may have furnished leaders and organization, the way the Scandinavians did for the nascent Russian state in the ninth century.

“I’d say the bulk of the Goths started as dwellers along the southern Baltic littoral. They were the easternmost of the Germanic peoples. Not that they were ever a single nation. By the time they reached western Europe, they were separated into the Ostrogoths, who took over Italy, and the Visigoths, who took over Iberia. Gave those regions fairly good government, by the way, the best government they’d had for a long while. Eventually the invaders were overrun in their turn, and vanished into the general populations.”

“But earlier?”

“Historians make unclear mention of tribes. By 300 AD, Goths were firmly established along the Vistula, in the middle of what’s currently Poland. Before the end of that century, the Ostrogoths were in the Ukraine and the Visigoths just north of the Danube, the Roman frontier. A great folk migration, apparently, over the course of generations, because they seem at last to have abandoned the North entirely; there, Slavic tribes moved in. Ermanaric was an Ostrogoth, so that’s the branch I mean to follow.”

“Ambitious,” Everard said doubtfully. “And you a new chum.”

“I’ll gain experience as I go along, uh, Manse. You admitted yourself, the Patrol is shorthanded. Moreover, I’ll be acquiring a lot of that history which you want.”

He smiled. “You should, at that.” Rising: “Come on, finish your drink and let’s go eat. We’ll need a change of clothes, but it’ll be worth the trouble. I know a local saloon, back in the 1890’s, that sets out a magnificent free lunch.”