The Monstrous Child Read online

  No legs (Jormungand)

  Corpse legs (yours truly)

  I’m getting a leggy theme here. What’s next in the progeny department, Dad – a centipede?

  What lovely siblings I have. My new half-brother is an eight-legged horse that Dad gave birth to while he was prancing around as a mare. (His saga gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?) Then my full bad-blood brothers: a wolf and a snake. Then assorted man-eating hags. (I never asked him about the ogresses. I guess I didn’t really want to know the answer. Would you?) Dad and all his hideous brats, popping up everywhere. What was he trying to do, create his own crèche of horrors?

  He got away with everything, my flickering, deceitful, shape-shifting father. Sometimes he was a handsome god. Sometimes an old woman. Sometimes a mare, or a salmon, or a fly.

  That’s Loki, turning a disaster into a triumph.

  Shame he could never work the same miracle on me.

  I used to pretend I could shape-shift like my father. I’d look at my half-dead body, close my eyes and imagine myself transformed into a whole living one. Not even anything special, just legs that were ivory-pink instead of festering, gangrenous black.

  *

  So why didn’t the gods just kill us, Loki’s monstrous children? Stupid question.

  We were related to the gods, the children of a god. You don’t pollute a place like Asgard with gods’ spilled blood. Even bad blood.

  Bet they wished they could. Bet they wished they had. But you can’t change your fate. You can only try to hide from it.

  For a while the gods thought they could tame Fen. Maybe they hoped Asgard’s balmy air would sweeten his breath and ease his rage. Ha. I could have told them that was a non-starter. Especially as he got bigger and bigger, less and less playful.

  Instead, they came up with subtler plans.

  15

  HE GODS GATHERED in one of their glorious meadows and whistled for Fen. I saw Tyr and Heimdall lugging a massive, iron-linked chain between them. It clumped and thudded, each fetter broad as an oak trunk. I remember the breeze, warm on my skin and the smell of apple blossom.

  Fen sidled up.

  ‘Wolf,’ said Tyr. ‘Are you eager for fame?’

  Fen said nothing, watching them with his burning yellow eyes.

  ‘Are you as strong as this chain? I’ve bet you are – Heimdall insists that you’re not.’

  Fen sniffed the chain then sat back on his haunches. He’s got bigger, I thought. A lot bigger. His mighty paws no longer looked too large for his body.

  ‘If you can break it, you’ll be renowned for your strength throughout the nine worlds.’

  I watched Fen eye up the fetters. The gods gathered round, eager for the sport. Magni, Thor’s son, tried to push one of the links, and gave up.

  Suddenly Fen bared his terrible teeth.

  ‘Bind me,’ he said.

  Fen let the gods wind the heavy fetters round his neck, his legs and his hairy belly till he was trussed like a ham. I could feel Fen playing with them as he sank beneath the chain’s weight. I knew he was pretending; I don’t think the gods did.

  ‘Ready?’ they asked.

  Fenrir flexed his muscles. The chain shuddered, but didn’t crack.

  The gods held their breath.

  Fenrir lashed against it, straining his muscles, bracing his heavy paws. Then suddenly the chain exploded, every link shattering, flying through the air like rocks. The gods leaped back. Magni shrieked and burst into tears as a link gashed his shoulder. His father slapped his face.

  The next day, they tried again. This time with a chain twice as strong as the first, a chain with links so huge that even Thor struggled to lift them.

  Again Fenrir, eager for fame, and keen to mock, let the gods bind him.

  There was a clinking and clanking as my brother heaved and strained. This time I knew he wasn’t pretending. He dug his paws into the ground, filled his chest with air, straining and growling and flexing every muscle in his body. Then – TWANG! – the bonds burst, the links breaking into a thousand pieces.

  The next time they tried it was with a fetter as soft and smooth as a silken ribbon, but woven by dwarves with cunning and magic, from the sound of a cat walking and a woman’s beard, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, the spit of a bird. Deep dwarf magic, infecting chains with what is invisible and unheard. Fen of course was suspicious, but he craved glory and renown. (Let his fate be a lesson to all fame-seekers.)

  ‘You’re sure to be able to break it,’ said Tyr. ‘And, if you can’t, we’ll free you.’

  (We all know how much a god’s oath is worth. Stupid, proud Fen.)

  Fen agreed. ‘On one condition,’ he snarled. ‘That one of you place his right hand in my mouth.’ Actually, he should have insisted one of them stuff their head in his maw.

  The gods shifted nervously. I certainly wasn’t volunteering. I wanted nothing to do with the gods and their games. Dad also kept quiet.

  Tyr looked round at the cowardly gods. All avoided his eyes. Then he stepped forward and slowly put his right hand in Fen’s mouth. Fen I knew wanted to bite it off immediately, just for fun. The others wound the ribbon tightly round Fen’s neck and legs and body.

  I couldn’t breathe. I prayed to the ancestors that Fen would be bound and I’d be rid of him.

  ‘Go on, Wolf, break free!’ urged the gods.

  But the more Fen strained, the tighter the ribbon imprisoned his body. He twisted and grunted and fought, but he was caught.

  ‘Free me,’ growled Fen, panting.

  The gods laughed instead, whooping and rejoicing at his binding.

  All except Tyr, who screamed when Fen bit off his hand and swallowed it.

  Then Fen threw back his head and howled. He bared his steel-sharp teeth and thrashed and roared his eternal vengeance. Fires burned from his eyes and nostrils. He looked nothing like a cub any more. He looked like a wolf of Ironwood.

  The gods recoiled. I also lurched back, and that’s when Odin seized me by my hair and hurled me high into the sky over Asgard’s high walls.

  Dad did nothing to save me. His mouth was full of air.

  ‘Hel!’ bellowed One-Eye. I heard his voice as I somersaulted through the clouds, the citadel of Asgard shrinking in the distance. My death tumble. My skyfall.

  His voice was like the crashing of the ocean onto jagged rocks. ‘You will rule the worlds below the world. You will provide drink and lodging to all those sent to you, host everyone who dies of sickness or old age. They are your people – you are their queen. Go and rule Niflheim.’

  What was this fearsome decree?

  Day slowly turned to night, and still I tumbled through the air, a shrieking, screaming speck falling through the universe into a geyser of light plumes rising into the darkness. Billowing blood-red, seaweed-green and sun-orange lights poured up like a roaring curtain as I tore through the swirling spirals of colour. The sky was studded with stars.

  I heard a wolf howl and then I crashed through the worlds into the void of eternal darkness. Icy frost reached for me, and I fell into its shrouded embrace.

  PART 3

  16

  TUMBLED INTO THE dark and huddled within its folds. Murky black. Mist. Ice. The stink of sulphur. Did I lie stunned and shocked on the clammy rocks for hours, nights, weeks, years? Who knows? Time means nothing to me. I fell out of time long ago.

  I’d always been lost between worlds and never more than now. Half alive. Half dead. Half goddess. Half giant. And now I was trapped in Niflheim, the ancient fog world beneath the worlds. A living queen presiding over the dead: that was One-Eye’s cruel decree. I howled like a wolf pack, screaming at my bad fate, hurling curses at One-Eye and the merciless gods until my throat was parched and all I could do was choke and rasp. Remember, I was only a child. I was no more than fourteen winters old. They entombed a living child in a gigantic grave mound. I didn’t think about Jor trapped beneath the waves, or Fen raging in his fetters, chaine
d to a boulder deep underground. All of us monstrous children, each in our own prison, waiting for the doom of the gods and our deadly revenge.

  If I am in a charitable mood – which is rare, but when I am I think, If I knew that someone or something was out to kill me, I’d do whatever I had to do to stop them.’

  So, fair enough, do what you want with my evil brothers. But I wasn’t out to kill anyone. The Fates said nothing about me. There was no prophesy. No threat. SO WHY WAS I THROWN DOWN HERE? What danger did I pose?

  None.

  Yet the gods feared me. The great gods, so scared of a crippled girl that they had to exile her below the worlds.

  One-Eye had clearly said Niflheim. That I’d reign over the dead. Just what I’d always wanted, to rule the fateless. I mean, who wouldn’t long to spend their eternal life hanging out with corpses in a land of perpetual winter’s night? I’m to be a queen. But of whom? Odin said people. What are people? I had never seen or heard of such creatures. Whatever they were, I was ordered to be their host. What did that mean? Provide canapés and nibbles, wheel out a welcome feast? Would I be managing a zoo filled with ghostly beasts and headless trolls?

  And then I thought, Where are all these decomposing guests, anyway?

  I peered through the swirling death mist. I was surrounded by sheer cliffs and hills of dizzying steepness. Above me, no sky, just the spreading roots of Yggdrasil, the ash tree, whose leafy top branches I’d seen in Asgard. I felt as if I were in some claggy cave, but more dismal than any cave I’d ever known. And so cold. Colder than Ironwood. The icy air stung my throat. It was like breathing knives. I opened my clenched hands, and black sands etched with silver poured from my fists.

  All around me burned fires, hissing and spitting in the gloom, strange fires that gave no heat but offered pinpricks of light. The noise was terrible: moaning winds, tumbling rocks, lava spurting high above islands dotting a boiling river studded with ice. I covered my ears while the ancient fog world belched, steam shrieking as it burst from fissures in the rocks into the fetid air. For once, the toxic smell wasn’t me.

  From somewhere far, far away I heard the rumble of water. A waterfall?

  Why hadn’t I listened when giants told tales of how Niflheim existed long before the worlds were created? I knew nothing about it. I’m an immortal goddess – what did I care where mortal things went when they died?

  I couldn’t take in the full horror of my vicious fate, the wretched outcome of my bad blood. Yet I, guilty of nothing, was banished to this storm-wracked world. I would never see the sun or the moon again. I would never smell anything fresh or sweet. I would never feel warm. I would putrefy here.

  I would never see Baldr again.

  I sat on the rocks and cried. I only stopped when the far-off howls of a dog joined my shrieks.

  I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. But the dog sounded unearthly, frightening, a wolf of Ironwood, and I didn’t want to be caught in the open like this.

  I crept away on my hands and knees through the scouring sleet, feeling my way along the cliffs. I pushed through the blackness, like wading into curtains of squashed flies. Eventually I found a cave and crawled inside. I crouched against the slimy walls and huddled there, bellowing my hate for One-Eye and the gods. The cave – a dank, fumy hole – echoed my wails back to me till I was surrounded by sobs. Stench seeped like silt into every crevasse.

  Was this cesspit to be my home? Never. Anywhere had to be better than this despairing place.

  And then another thought struck me: maybe I could discover a way out, a way back to the world of the living.

  Yes! The dead arrived from somewhere. If I could find that fog road, or that sea on which they sailed, I could go back to the light. Not to my mother who was probably dancing with joy that she was rid of me. Dear old Dad certainly didn’t want me. But I’d seek somewhere out of sight so even all-seeing One-Eye wouldn’t uncover me. I’m clever, my father’s daughter. I know how to hide. I was alive and the land of the dead was no place for me.

  One-Eye had banished me to rule here, but his decree didn’t say I had to stay here, did it? Kings and queens travel. One-Eye was always slipping out of Asgard.

  I had to escape.

  I shuffled through a deep valley towards the sound of water, sidestepping chasms and bogs. I groped my way through the throttling blackness, trying to breathe despite the choking mist, frost crunching under my feet. I passed sulphur lakes, boiling springs, foaming torrents crackling with ice. The only light came from the occasional spurts of flames. And always precipices, fumes, cold and –

  Oh, enough local colour. I’m boring myself. Frankly, if you’ve seen one sulphurous pit, hideous precipice and poisonous, hissing, foaming river you’ve seen them all. When it’s your turn to travel down the lonely fog road, you can describe its horrors to your heart’s content.

  I followed the sound of water, as far as I could go. My robes were damp and heavy with sleet. I hoped to find a ship, something that would float me out of this nightmare. The noxious air was growing thick and poisonous. I appeared to be stumbling into a squelching pit. I hesitated, not sure whether to keep going or to retrace my steps.

  And then I heard hissing.

  I froze.

  17

  OILED ROUND AN enormous tree root, half in and half out of a seething swamp, was a dragon. It gnawed viciously at the tree roots, which shuddered as if they were alive.

  The dragon stopped chewing. He swung his heavy head and opened his mouth, thrashing towards me, splattering me with freezing water.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ I screamed. An avalanche of boulders crashed onto his heaving body and sand swirled into his lava eyes.

  The dragon stopped. He threw his head wildly about, blinking and shaking. I stood back behind the largest boulder, which had rolled in front of me. I needed to put something, anything, however small, between us.

  He sniffed.

  ‘You’re a corpse,’ he rasped. ‘And not a corpse.’

  ‘I’m your queen,’ I shrieked. ‘Queen of Niflheim. You will die horribly if you touch me.’

  The dragon shook his feathered head, his eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘And I am Nidhogg!’ bellowed the monster. His breath was venomous and rank. ‘I’m sick of gnawing on tree roots. I want real food. I want corpses. Feed me.’

  ‘You’ll have your corpses soon enough,’ I said.

  ‘Make sure you send them here,’ roared the dragon. He curled back around Yggdrasil’s roots and savagely bit them.

  ‘Never leave this place,’ I ordered.

  Nidhogg lowered his gleaming head.

  ‘Keep me fed. I won’t budge,’ he hissed, blasting me with his poisonous breath.

  I crept away from the deepest part of Niflheim, the gruesome sound of the dragon’s crunching gradually fading, and headed upwards, feeling my way slowly through the pitch dark. It was a long while before my heart stopped thudding. What other monsters were lying in wait for me in this infernal place?

  Another thought struck me. The boulders that had rained on Nidhogg, and the sand that had blinded him. Where had they come from?

  But there was no one to answer me.

  My feet kept tripping over the slippery rocks as I clawed my way upwards through the gloom out of Nidhogg’s venomous valley.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ I screamed, stumbling over a rock for the millionth time and falling in the slimy ooze.

  The rock immediately rolled off the path into the crevasse below, landing in the churning river with a distant plock.

  Feeling foolish, and for a moment glad no one was here to witness my idiocy, I ordered a boulder to roll.

  It did.

  Another to stack itself on top of another.

  It did.

  I appeared to have power here to command stones.

  I made rock after rock smash against the cliffs, screaming and laughing as they splintered and cracked. Shards rained down, splashing into the water below. I punched
the air, shrieking, clenching my fists.

  I had power. I had power. I felt the fiercest joy. I could destroy anyone or anything that threatened me.

  And I would. Fate, for once, had smiled on me.

  At the bottom of the next valley I came upon the river. It was fast-flowing, filled with chunks of ice, crashing and hurtling against one another. Frost rose from the grey water.

  And then I saw I wasn’t alone.

  18

  ALKING TOWARDS me through the gloom was a shadow, a sort of shade. I watched, horrified, as she drifted closer, moving soundlessly on bare feet. She was wrapped in skins, but her body was translucent. The reek of death was overpowering.

  She was neither troll (head not big enough), nor ogre (not enough heads), nor giant. Nor was she an elf or a dwarf. What kind of creature was she? Whatever she was, she was definitely dead, and definitely coming towards me.

  ‘Stop,’ I ordered. ‘Don’t come any closer.’

  Had some baneful fiend sent her to harm me, or to stop me escaping? I’d crush her with a boulder if she took another step. Though, could you kill the dead twice?

  The thing obeyed. Enough was left of her face for me to see she was lost and bewildered. And clearly frightened.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  The thing pointed behind her.

  ‘I crossed the Echoing Bridge,’ she said faintly. ‘After walking down the long fog road for many nights.’

  I drank in her words. Bridge? Road? Surely if the dead whatever-she-was could walk down it, I could walk up it? After so much searching, I had found an exit.

  Holding my nose, I brushed past the cadaver, desperate to find the bridge she spoke of. In the distance I caught a glimpse of gold, and faint shadows billowing and fluttering. Were these dead … people?

  I stopped.

  ‘What are you? I asked.