The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

1980

Manse Everard was not the officer who raked me over the coals for my recklessness, and barely agreed to let me continue in the mission—largely, he grumbled, at Herbert Ganz’s urging, because there was nobody to replace me. Everard had his reasons for holding back. Those eventually became evident, as did the fact he’d been studying my reports.

Between the fourth century and the twentieth, I’d passed about two years of personal lifespan since losing Jorith. My grief had dwindled to wistfulness—if only she could have had more of the life she loved and made lovely!—except once in a while when it rose in full force and struck again. In her quiet way, Laurie had helped me toward acceptance. Never before had I understood in full what a wonderful person she was.

I was at home on furlough, New York, 1932, when Everard called and asked for another conference. “Just a few questions, a couple hours’ bullshooting,” he said, “and afterward we can go out on the town. Your wife too, of course. Ever see Lola Montez in her heyday? I’ve got tickets, Paris, 1843.”

Winter had fallen uptime. Snow tumbled past the windows of his apartment, making a cave of white stillness for us. He gave me a toddy and inquired what I particularly liked in the way of music. We agreed on a koto performance, by a player in medieval Japan whose name the chronicles have forgotten but who was the finest that ever lived. Time travel has its rewards as well as its pains.

Everard made a production of stuffing and lighting his pipe. “You never filed an account of your relationship to Jorith,” he said in a tone almost casual. “It only came out in the course of the inquiry, after you’d sent for Mendoza. Why?”

“It was… personal,” I answered. “Didn’t see that it was anybody else’s business. Oh, they cautioned us about that sort of thing at the Academy, but regs don’t actually forbid it.”

Looking at his dark, bowed head, I had the eerie knowledge that he must have read everything I would write. He knew my personal future as I did not—as I would not until I had been through it. The rule is very seldom waived that keeps an agent from learning his or her destiny; a causal loop is the least undesirable thing that could all too easily result.

“Well, I don’t aim to repeat a scolding you’ve already had,” Everard said. “In fact, between the two of us, I feel that Coordinator Abdullah got needlessly stuffy. Operatives must have discretion, or they’d never get their jobs done, and plenty of them have sailed closer to the wind than you did.”

He spent a minute kindling his tobacco before he went on, through the blue haze: “However, I would like to ask you about a couple of details. More to get your reaction than on any deep philosophical grounds—though I admit to being curious, too. You see, on that basis, maybe I can give you a few useful procedural suggestions. I’m not a scientist myself, but I have kicked around history, prehistory, and even posthistory, quite a lot.”

“You have that,” I agreed with enormous respect. “Well, okay, for openers, the most obvious. Early on, you intervened in a war between Goths and Vandals. How do you justify that?”

“I answered that question at the inquiry, sir… Manse. I knew better than to kill anybody, since my own life was never in jeopardy. I helped organize, I collected intelligence, I inspired fear in the enemy—flying around on antigrav, throwing illusions, projecting subsonic beams. If anything, by making them panic, I saved lives on both sides. But my essential reason was that I’d spent a lot of effort—Patrol effort—establishing a base in the society I was supposed to study, and the Vandals threatened to destroy that base.”

“You weren’t afraid of touching off a change in uptime events?”

“No. Oh, perhaps I should have thought it over more carefully, and gotten expert opinions, before acting. But it did look like almost a textbook case. That was merely a large-scale raid the Vandals were mounting. Nowhere did history record it. The outcome either way was insignificant… except to individuals, certain of whom were important to my mission as well as me. And as for the lives of those individuals—and the line of descent that I started myself, back yonder—why, those are minor statistical fluctuations in the gene pool. They soon average out.”

Everard scowled. “You’re giving me the standard arguments, Carl, same as you did the board of inquiry. They got you off the hook there. But don’t bother today. What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all.”

“I believe I am beginning to see that.” My humility was genuine. “In the lives I’ve been following downtime. We have no right to take people over, do we?”

Everard smiled, and I felt free to savor a long draught from my glass. “Good. Let’s drop generalities and get into the details of what you’re actually after. For instance, you gave your Goths things they’d never have had without you. The physical presents are not to worry about; those’ll rust or rot or be lost quickly enough. But accounts of the world and stories from foreign cultures.”

“I had to make myself interesting, didn’t I? Why else should they recite old, familiar stuff for me?”

“M-m, yeah, sure. But look, wouldn’t whatever you told them get into their folklore, alter the very matter you went to study?”

I allowed myself a chuckle. “No. There I did have a psychosocial calculation run in advance, and used it for a guide. Turns out that societies of this kind have highly selective collective memories. Remember, they’re illiterate, and they live in a mental world where marvels are commonplace.

What I said about, say, the Romans merely added detail to information they already had from travelers; and those details would shortly be garbled down to the general noise level of their concepts of Rome. As for more exotic material, well, what was somebody like Cuchulainn but one more foredoomed hero, such as they’d heard scores of yarns about? What was the Han Empire but one more fabulous country beyond the horizon? My immediate listeners were impressed; but afterward they passed it on to others, who merged everything into their existing sagas.”

Everard nodded. “M-m-m-hm.” He smoked for a bit. Abruptly: “What about yourself? You’re not a clutch of words; you’re a concrete and enigmatic person who keeps appearing among them. You propose to do it for generations. Are you setting up in business as a god?”

That was the hard question, for which I’d spent considerable time preparing. I let another swallow of my drink glow down my throat and warm my stomach before I replied, slowly: “Yes, I’m afraid so. Not that I intended it or want it, but it does seem to have happened.”

Everard scarcely stirred. Lazily as a lion, he drawled, “And you maintain that doesn’t make a historical difference?”

“I do. Please listen. I’ve never claimed to be a god, or demanded divine prerogatives, or anything like that. Nor do I propose to. It’s just come about. In the nature of the case, I arrived alone, dressed like a wayfarer but not like a bum. I carried a spear because that’s the normal weapon for a man on foot. Being of the twentieth century, I’m taller than the average for the fourth, even among Nordic types. My hair and beard are gray. I told stories, described distant places, and, yes, I did fly through the air and strike terror into enemies—It couldn’t be helped. But I did not, repeat not establish a new god. I merely fitted an image they’d long worshipped, and in the course of time, a generation or so, they came to assume I must be him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Wodan, among the Goths. Cognate to western German Wotan, English Woden, Frisian Wons, et cetera. The late Scandinavian version is best known: Odin.”

I was surprised to see Everard surprised. Well, of course the reports I filed with the guardian branch of the Patrol were much less detailed than the notes I was compiling for Ganz. “Hm? Odin? But he was one-eyed, and the boss god, which I gather you are not.… Or are you?”

“No.” How soothing it was to get back into lecture gear. “You’re thinking of the Eddie, the Viking Odin. But he belongs to a different era, centuries later and hundreds of miles northwestward.

“For my Goths, the boss god, as you put it, is Tiwaz. He goes straight back to the old Indo-European pantheon, along with the other Anses, as opposed to aboriginal chthonic deities like the Wanes. The Romans identified Tiwaz with Mars, because he was the war god, but he was much else as well.

“The Romans thought Donar, whom the Scandinavians called Thor, must be the same as Jupiter, because he ruled over weather; but to the Goths, he was a son of Tiwaz. Likewise for Wodan, whom the Romans identified with Mercury.”

“So mythology evolved as time passed, eh?” Everard prompted.

“Right,” I said. “Tiwaz dwindled to the Tyr of Asgard. Little memory of him was left, except that it was he who’d lost a hand in binding the Wolf that shall destroy the world. However, ‘tyr’ as a common noun is a synonym in Old Norse for ‘god.’

“Meanwhile Wodan, or Odin, gained importance, till he became the father of the rest. I think—though this is something we have to investigate someday—I think that was because the Scandinavians grew extremely warlike. A psycho-pomp, who’d also acquired shamanistic traits through Finnish influence, was a natural for a cult among aristocratic warriors; he brought them to Valhalla. At that, Odin was most popular in Denmark and maybe Sweden. In Norway and its Icelandic colony, Thor loomed larger.”

“Fascinating.” Everard gusted a sigh. “So much more to know than any of us will ever live to learn… Well, but tell me about your Wodan figure in fourth-century eastern Europe.”

“He still has two eyes,” I explained, “but he already has the hat, the cloak, and the spear, which is really a staff. You see, he’s the Wanderer. That’s why the Romans thought he must be Mercury under a different name, same as they thought the Greek god Hermes must be. It all goes back to the earliest Indo-European traditions. You can find hints of it in India, Persia, the Celtic and Slavic myths—but those last are even more poorly chronicled. Eventually, my service will—

“Anyhow. Wodan-Mercury-Hermes is the Wanderer because he’s the god of the wind. This leads to his becoming the patron of travelers and traders. Faring as widely as he does, he must have learned a great deal, so he likewise becomes associated with wisdom, poetry… and magic. Those attributes join with the idea of the dead riding on the night wind—they join to make him the Psycho-pomp, the conductor of the dead down to the Afterworld.”

Everard blew a smoke ring. His gaze followed it, as if some symbol were in its twistings. “You’ve gotten latched onto a pretty strong figure, seems,” he said low.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Repeat, it was none of my intention. If anything, it complicates my mission without end. And I’ll certainly be careful. But… it is a myth which already existed. There were countless stories about Wodan’s appearances among men. That most were fable, while a few reflected events that really happened—what difference does it make?”

Everard drew hard on his pipe. “I dunno. In spite of my study of this episode, as far as it’s gone, I don’t know. Maybe nothing, no difference. And yet I’ve learned to be wary of archetypes. They have more power than any science in history has measured. That’s why I’ve been quizzing you like this, about stuff that should be obvious to me. It isn’t, down underneath.”

He did not so much shrug as shake his shoulders. “Well,” he growled, “never mind the metaphysics. Let’s settle a couple of practical matters, and then get hold of your wife and my date and go have fun.”