The Monstrous Child Read online

  I rarely went outside. I hated being shouted at as I lurched around on my corpse legs, wind-blown and bent over in the hail, my ice-white hair shrouding my face, hoping no one would notice me.

  Fat chance.

  ‘Aren’t you the lovely one?’ said a two-headed troll, smacking his rubbery lips.

  Compliments from a troll.

  It was easier just to stay hidden in our cave.

  When I say ‘cave’, I’m exaggerating. Did you imagine I lived in a dank pit like some ogre? Underground like a dwarf in a furnace? Ha. Our cave was more like a great hall than some low hole. Remember who’s talking to you. Hel. I’m a goddess.

  Unfortunately (a word bound to me with iron fetters), wherever I shuffle about in our cave the smell hits me. Heavy. Foul. Overlaid with the perfume of rancid wet dog (thanks, Fen) and anything noxious and maggotty he’d dragged home from Ironwood on which to snack.

  And then, of course, there was me. I brought my own stink with me wherever I went. We kept a smoking lamp, filled with oils, to mask the odour but it never did.

  We’ve been avoiding the subject. Let’s take a look at my bottom half, shall we? You know you want to. Go on, have a good gape at my carrion legs. I’ll lift up my furs and unwrap the bandages, set aside the rosemary and mint I use to try to hide my stench. What colour will my twisted legs be today? How much more decayed the flesh? They moulder and stink, blotched with gangrene. And yet they never rot away: corpse legs suspended in life. My immortal flesh never peels off. It just stays attached, reeking and putrefying.

  And what about my face? What about it? I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Do you really think anyone gets close enough to me to take a second look? One whiff and they’re off.

  Seen enough? Smelled enough?

  Sometimes I dream my legs are whole. I run, or fly, I move gracefully through the worlds. Then I wake and I’m back to my monstrous self, jerking like a cart with a broken wheel. Walking is hard for me. I spend a lot of time lying on my mat or sitting on a cushioned chair, a bearskin pulled over my legs. I watch the slaves gut fish and hang it to dry on racks by the fire. (Yes, of course we had slaves. We weren’t savages. They fetched firewood and water, fed and cleaned the animals, made butter and cheese, brewed ale and mead. Occasionally one of them would unwrap my bandages and wrap my corpse legs in fresh ones – as if new cloth could make any difference.)

  My father visits every so often, but then I’m banished immediately. He picks Fen up by the scruff of his neck and hurls him out of the cave. Jor slithers away before he can be caught. I move towards him –

  ‘Go away! You stink of death. My gods,’ he’d yell, before sweeping my mother up in his arms. Mum is kinder when Dad’s not around. When he is, I might as well be a fish bone.

  I remember huddling on the floor while Mum and Dad screamed and hurled benches and platters. Once Dad smashed a plate of food to the floor, which no one touched for nights. Even Fen left it alone. And I thought, Just go away, Dad. We don’t need you. Just go away.

  When they fought, it was easier for Fen and Jor to scuttle out. I couldn’t really move, so I hid, made myself small. Dad cursed Mum for breeding monsters. She cursed him for siring us. ‘Trolls take you!’ they screeched at each other.

  I would take cover under a bench, humming oh so quietly to myself, sending my thoughts far away. I’d heard that two of the goddesses had falcon capes that gave them wings to fly and I wished with all my heart I had one too.

  When it was just Mum and us, which was more and more often, what can I say? Once she made a rattle of bones for me. I clacked them together a few times, more in shock because I’d been given a toy. Then I dropped it and Fen chomped it up. Mum never made me another. Actually, I didn’t need any noisemakers. What with the hissing and the howling and the fighting and the shouting, there was enough noise to fill the cave without me adding a few rattles of my own.

  I’ve heard there are parents who smother their children with love. Give them the choicest tidbits. Wrap them in the softest furs. Tickle them under the chin and call them ‘dumpling’ and ‘honey lamb’.

  Ugh. I can’t imagine that.

  6

  E’RE COMING TO THE end of my miserable life in Jotunheim (what? So soon?). It was a golden time of enchanted beauty compared to what followed. Let’s drop in at the last supper, bid a final farewell and good riddance to the monstrous family.

  Fen is asleep, snarling with his gravel growl. His legs shake.

  ‘He’s dreaming of savaging sheep,’ said Mum. She was a seeress for all the good that power did her. (And, no, I’m not sharing her charms with you. What, and have everyone chanting away, raising the dead, demanding knowledge? I shudder just thinking about it.)

  I can still see Mum sitting by the fire draped in her wolf pelts, their tails dangling over her shoulder, her hair twisted and tumbling, the colour of wet earth. When she’d let me, I liked to play with the skinned heads, inventing little conversations. She is gripping a bloody wolfskin in her teeth, cleaning and scraping the hide with a sharp stone. The scratching sound always made me shiver. She’d attach the skins round her waist with my favourite carved bone in the shape of a bear claw. Some dwarf must have made it for her – giants don’t carve anything.

  Wolf bones lie scattered around her, tufted with flecks of flesh and sinewy with muscle. Fen darts up to grab the bones, then retreats to his bearskin, gnawing and chewing.

  Slaves fill the stone lamps with fish oil and light them, clogging the cave with smoke. A cauldron is bubbling. Fish and apples on the table, soup in bowls, mead in cups. Like all gods, I don’t need to eat, but we do it for pleasure. Mum and I are sitting on benches at the table, my troll-tempered brothers scrabbling around and eating off the floor, growling and hissing.

  I can hear ravens cawing kraa kraa kraa as they circle above the forest, and the wolves in Ironwood howling, more like the screaming of corpses than any living thing. It’s a comfort being inside, deep in our cave, listening to evil creatures shrieking at the edge of night as they seek prey other than you.

  The High Seat is empty, in case Dad should drop by. Talk about hope over experience. The damp walls glisten and the shrines are laden with offerings to our ancestors, Blood Mother, Volcano Father, Mountain Crusher and Earth Spewer. The daily sacrifice of fresh meat is laid out, to keep the ancestors sweet, and Mum has intoned the charms. The Old Ones stir and rumble when they’re ignored.

  So what’s spoiling the happy suppertime scene? Yes, you got it, having to eat with a drooling wolf and a poisonous snake.

  Fenrir tears apart joints of deer meat, swallowing in great gulps, bone, gristle, flesh. Then he licks the blood from his jaw. Jor prefers mice. Luckily our cave was full of them. His snaky body is lumpy with vermin.

  But let’s move our disgusted gaze off the ground and up to the table and benches, and pretend my brothers aren’t there.

  Sitting at the table was my favourite thing. The table hides my lower body. Protects me from horrified eyes. Sitting there, barely tall enough to see above the top, resting my plump arms on the scratched wood for balance, I look for a few moments like the goddess that I am. If you were to walk in – and not get torn to pieces by my brothers – you’d think I was just a fair young goddess sharing a mead horn with her, to be honest, far, far better looking mother. Sometimes I wonder what that was like for her, such a beauty, to give birth to … us.

  My monstrous brothers scrabble about on the floor, brawling over rats.

  ‘Stop fighting!’ Mum screams. ‘Or bloody Thor with his hammer will come smash your skulls.’ That shut them up – for a moment. Even Fen and Jor don’t like the giant-killer’s hammer mentioned.

  But I’m at the table. Eating with a knife. I’m never forced to eat on the ground. It means I am different from the beasts. Better. More like Mum. I sit up straight. I am careful not to slurp. Anything to make Mum like me, just a little. I give Mum a little present of carved bone – I have no talent; it was awful, pathetic scratching
s on walrus tusk, which she looks at and throws away, her face scrunched in distaste. I guess when you’re beautiful it’s hard to have ugly things around you.

  My sweet-smelling, scary mother. Once she lightly brushed my shoulder with her icy hand when she strode past me, and my whole body arched towards her. Was it possible, in her fierce, proud, detached way, she loved us?

  7

  E WERE ASLEEP WHEN the gods came. Jor and Fen curled on their mats in the corners, snorting and spluttering, me stretched out on one bench, Mum on another. It happened so fast even Fen didn’t have time to bite or Jor to spit poison when gods blasted into our cave and seized us.

  I heard Mum screaming. I jerked awake and then someone grabbed me. I saw them bind and gag her, squirming and wriggling, her club useless by her side as I was bundled into a scratchy sack. I punched and shrieked. I heard Fen yowling and Jor hissing. Mum couldn’t break free of her bonds. My mother, Angrboda, the distress-bringer, whom I never saw alive again.

  A part of me thought, Mum cares! The gods had to tie her up to grab us. I’d assumed she’d just hand us over to anyone who asked. In fact, I don’t know why they didn’t. Bet she’d have said yes, take them, praise the giants, I’m free of the brats.

  And then up, upside down, flung over a shoulder and carried out. Thump. Thump. Thump. Stomping, stumbling, jolted from side to side and up and down, like a smoked salmon. Splashing through water again and again. I was soaked. I was dizzy. We were moving so fast, crunching through ice and snow, then twigs snapping and branches whipping past and the smell of mould and leaves and the hooting of owls and snarling of wolves. Our captors moved swiftly, pounding through forests and splashing through lakes.

  And all the while I was thinking, Dad loves us after all. Maybe Mum threw him out for good, and now he’s kidnapped us. He couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing his children again. A love-snatch.

  What a surprise. What a shock.

  ‘Dad wants us with him in Asgard,’ I shouted to my brothers.

  ‘What will I eat?’ said Fen.

  I don’t know why Fen expected me to know the answer.

  What would our life be like living with Dad in a gleaming gold palace? I wasn’t sure what a palace was. An extra big cave, maybe? I was excited, stunned. Dad loved us so much he’d had us kidnapped.

  What other reason could there be?

  PART 2

  8

  HE LIGHT BLINDED me as the sack was yanked off. I blinked, my eyes smarting, my head spinning. My body ached and my throat was parched. Everywhere I looked I saw gleam and glitter, half-built luminous halls studded with silver and gold. It was too bright. Above us the billowing blue sky enfolded me like a soft cloak, and Yggdrasil, the World Tree that holds the heavens, branched out above me. Asgard, sky fortress of the gods, green and golden, with breezes and eternal sunshine. The air was sweet, perfumed, and my nostrils twitched. The smell was cloying, like too much honey swallowed at once. There was no snow, no ice, no pelting rain and gnawing winds. I raised my face to the sky and felt my skin tingling in the warmth.

  The lush plains and meadows stretched out further than I could see in all directions, the gilded palaces, the flaming rainbow bridge arching into the sky. Towering walls encircled the gods’ glowing citadel. I’d always thought Dad was lying when he boasted about Asgard’s golden halls. In fact, he had not even begun to describe its wonders. I thought of our raven-dark world, our glacier mountains, our belching volcanoes and ironwoods.

  I didn’t think about my mother.

  There was a buzz of talk, murmurings. I focused my eyes, shielding them from the glare. I thought we’d be taken to Dad’s palace. But we weren’t. We were beside a rippling pool of blue-black water. If I cared about such things, I might have thought it was beautiful.

  We’d been dumped in the middle of a circle of newly carved, ivory-white thrones, one High Seat much larger and greater than the others. The gathering gods wore soft clothes in purples and mauves and blues. I felt hot and ugly in my long bearskin, like an animal. I was dazzled by so much colour, so much light. I couldn’t believe where I was, a guest of these glittering beings who stalked about like a herd of shining beasts.

  Jor was still thrashing and hissing in his sack, venom dribbling. Fen was rolling in the grass, waving his paws. I was sitting, huddled, hiding my legs.

  I didn’t understand what was happening. The gods have strange ideas of hospitality, I thought. Since when do you bundle visitors into sacks, then drop them on their heads like carcasses instead of leading them to a place of honour, offering warm water, towels, food and drink?

  All around me, the gods took their seats. I recognised some. Who wouldn’t know Thor, red-bearded, built like a volcano, swinging his hammer over his shoulder and glaring at us from his throne? And a beautiful goddess with tumbling hair like spun flax, holding her nose, eyes as bright as dragon fire, fiddling with the necklace of twisted gold that gleamed on her white neck. That was Freyja. And another, Idunn, the keeper of the gods’ immortal youth, clutching her basket of golden apples, pressing a cloth to her face as she gagged at my stench.

  The one I didn’t see anywhere in the throng was Loki, father of lies, father of us. I was surprised – he’d gone to so much trouble to snatch us, you’d think the least he would do is show up. Had he already changed his mind?

  Children, some older, some younger than me, hid behind their parents’ thrones, the bolder ones peeking out to point. Others approached Fen, daring to get too close till their parents yanked them back.

  Why did Loki’s children merit such a gathering?

  Little Hnoss, Freyja’s radiant, honeyed girl, pretty face, pretty feet, pretty everything that I am not, screamed when she saw us. Hnoss, with her nose in the air. ‘What’s it doing here?’ she screeched, till Freyja jerked her eyes at her husband, who snatched the squalling brat up in his arms and carried her off, wailing.

  ‘It stinks!’ she shrieked. ‘Make it go away.’

  It’s not my fault I smell, you sow’s daughter. I was born like this.

  I want to curl up, hide, vanish.

  Jor thrashed and writhed in his sack, tearing at the hemp with his fangs, spitting poison. The seated gods shuddered. A few of the children screamed.

  I glanced at Fen. He was shaking himself out, pretending to be a playful cub. Fenrir was more vicious than Jor – he just looked more cuddly.

  ‘Loki’s monsters,’ I heard someone mutter. They scowled at us, stiff with dislike. You’d think we’d gatecrashed a party instead of being dragged here in a bag.

  I reminded myself I was an immortal goddess, as much as them.

  I looked around the assembled gods once more. Could Loki be hiding, waiting to leap out and yell, ‘Boo!!’? Because Dad loved practical jokes. Did you know he once sneaked into Thor’s wife’s bedroom, lopped off her rippling gold hair while she snored and left her bald? I remembered him telling Mum about it and both of them hooting with laughter.

  Ha ha. Not.

  Deformity fails to amuse me. Actually, to be fair, nothing amuses me. But I digress.

  Nope, no Dad. And then it occurred to me that perhaps he had nothing to do with bringing us here.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid.

  Were we being judged at a gods’ council? But judged for what?

  The assembled gods fell silent as an immortal, bristling with majesty, strode into the circle of thrones. He wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, his boiling single eye fixed on us. I knew this must be Odin, the One-Eyed King of the Gods, Dad’s blood brother. The Wizard King, Spear God, Battle Wolf, Lord of Poetry (gag), Father of Magic, King of the Slain. Two ravens perched on his shoulders; two huge wolves skulked by his sides. Power poured from him. I had never felt so crippled, so small. I struggled to stand but I was shaking too much.

  His wolves bristled at Fen, and Fen snarled back, fur prickling, hackles rising. One-Eye whispered to his pair, and they sank to the ground.

  Fen strutted off, bayin
g his victory, then sat back on his haunches, lifted his leg and started licking his rear.

  The gods roared with laughter. Even I almost smiled.

  One-Eye walked towards the sack containing the squirming Jor and without a word grabbed him by the tail and hurled him high into the sky over Asgard’s walls.

  I still remember that moment. Jor’s looping body, his maddened hissing shrieks as he tumbled and vanished. It was so fast it took me a moment to realise what had happened.

  My snake brother Jor was gone.

  Good riddance.

  9

  FELT A FLICKER OF pure joy.

  ‘He is fated to harm us so I’ve hurled him into the sea,’ announced One-Eye.

  ‘What sea?’ I whispered. As if I were planning a visit to the ocean depths one day. I guess I was in shock.

  I could feel the gods suck in their breath. I didn’t know the rules. You don’t ask a king questions – you answer them. Remember that when you find yourself in front of me.

  ‘He will grow large enough to circle the world and bite his own tail in the ocean surrounding Midgard. The snake was a threat to us all,’ said One-Eye. I felt him boring into me, reading my thoughts. I shrank, waiting for the blow to fall.

  ‘The other two will be kept here.’

  The gods muttered, shook their heads, scowled. But One-Eye is their chieftain, what he says, goes. He rose and left, his blue cloak sweeping behind him.

  I’m safe. I’m safe.

  Shaking and swaying, I tried to stay upright, then sank into the soft grass. Jor’s fate wasn’t mine. My body ached and my legs trembled. I felt as gnarled as a troll. I realised I’d been holding my breath.