I like to sail. My dad had a forty-two-footer, back in Annapolis, where we used to live. A wooden boat, practically an antique. When I was younger we’d take it out on the bay on Saturdays. Him and my mom and me.
Then my dad retired from the navy and we ended up in Chicago. We brought the boat with us, but since then my folks got divorced. My dad remarried a woman with her own kids.
So I don’t see my dad as much. Anyway, you can’t compare sailing on Lake Michigan with sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.
The boat with the red-emblazoned sail was turning slowly as the wind caught the canvas. I could see that it was bigger than I’d expected. Longer. Riding low in the water.
Oars? Were those oars I saw? And… yes, there were figures moving about on deck. I caught faint suggestions of blond hair, flashes of polished metal.
Then I saw the figurehead. The graceful prow that rose high till it ended in an ornate carving of a dragon’s head.
I barked out a laugh. “No way.”
But it was true. There was no mistaking the unique lines, the very sight of which had once sent brave men running.
“It’s a longboat,” I said.
“Yeah, really long, who gives a rat’s ass how long it is?”
Christopher demanded. “Help! Help!”
“No. it’s a longboat,” I said, not believing my own words. “A Viking longboat.”
I kept my attention on the boat. It was something to focus on.
Something better than focusing on pain and fear.
Chapter
VIII
The fitful breeze was in our faces, and the longboat swiftly closed the distance to the castle.
It was easy to see the rows of shields arrayed along the sides, each painted with the identical red emblem: a snake, mouth open, fangs out, dripping venom onto an agonized, upturned face. It was the same emblem on the big, rectangular sail.
“Nice logo,” Christopher said darkly. “That’s right up there with the Pillsbury Doughboy and Betty Crocker. Those boys need a new sponsor.”
On deck, some sitting at oars, others standing around in conversation, were forty, maybe fifty men. They were big men, most of them. Big in size and in body language. Most were bearded. Not trimmed, Lincoln Park yuppie beards, but big, bristling, red or gold or brown beards, glistening with grease.
Their hair was long and wild.
They wore a motley array of garments: baggy trousers, long chain-mail shirts, and what might have been bearskins and goatskins draped down from their massive shoulders and cinched at the waist with wide leather belts. Some had crude high-top sandals laced over rag socks. Others had knee-high, buff leather boots.
At their sides most wore long, heavy swords. Others carried crude axes, some like tomahawks, others with handles maybe four feet long.
From time to time a few would look up at us, hanging a hundred feet or so above them. They pointed and guffawed loudly. But the laughter died quickly, followed by a cautious hush.
They were burly, rough-looking men. Fighters. Killers. But they were nervous. Afraid.
As they came within a few dozen yards of the rocks below, they struck the sail. They worked their oars till someone yelled a signal, at which point all the oars rose clear of the water. The helmsman leaned into the one long steering oar and guided the craft into a slow turn that brought the longboat kissing up against what I could now see was a dock.
Fore and aft, the men holding ropes jumped ashore and tied the ship off. But though they looked as if they’d done this many times before, there were frequent nervous glances up at the castle.
Baaa! Baaaa!
I heard the bleating of sheep. Three of the animals were being dragged up from the hold of the longboat. They were manhandled over the side onto the rock slab shore.
Half a dozen of the Norsemen jumped out after the sheep and wrestled the first one up onto a flat obsidian stone.
An altar, I realized.
I glanced at April. She was staring down, transfixed. Her hair kept blowing in her face. Even Christopher was silent.
“You may not want to see this,” Jalil warned in a quiet voice.
Talking to April? To me?
An old Norseman, big but stooped with age, climbed painfully out of the ship. No one offered him help. He looked like the kind of man who’d chop off a hand offered in help. His beard was mostly gray, but you could still tell that it had once been blond. He was mostly bald, and even from high above I could see a scar from an old wound that must have opened his skull.
The old man walked, with the cautious gait of arthritis, over to the sheep. The first sheep was bleating and squirming, stretched out on its back on the stone.
The knife flashed, coming up with surprising swiftness from the old man’s belt. Down it arced, slicing the sheep’s throat, silencing its stuttering cries.
“No!” April cried, but softly.
One after the other, the two remaining sheep met the same fate. Blood ran from the edges of the altar.
There was no ceremony. Simple slaughter, carried out hurriedly, nervously.
The old Norseman glanced up at the castle, as if he were looking at us. But I knew, as a chill of premonition tingled from my tailbone up to my neck, that it was not us he saw.
I craned my head back, looking upward. I could see nothing there. But I heard the deep, rasping breathing of some huge creature. A slow, long inhalation, followed by a blast of reeking, carnivore breath.
The wolf.
The Norsemen turned and boarded their ship. The oars were extended and the longboat backed swiftly away.
From above us, a hard, unnatural, animal growling said,
“Pull them up. Take them to my father.”
Suddenly I felt a sharp, excruciating jerk that made my chest and shoulders scream. My back and butt were scraping up along the stone wall. Jerk and agony, jerk and agony.
I was afraid, but mad, too. I tried to prepare myself for whatever might be happening, but pain overwhelmed me.
Tears came to my eyes.
Rough hands grabbed me, hauling me over the parapet.
They threw me down onto stone. I cried out. My kneecaps hit hard. I was on all fours. The second time in as many days.
April landed before me, flung down just as roughly.
I tried to climb to my feet, but pushing myself up, my arms gave way. They were weak, limp. My hands were numb.
A foot, iron-booted, was before me. A hand reached and grabbed my arm. A hand so big it closed all the way around my biceps.
A hand with only three fingers, each as thick as a salami.
I jerked my face upward, still fighting the pain, trying to shut off the flow of tears. I looked up into a face that had never been human.
“Who are you? What’s happening?” I heard Christopher ask.
Instantly came the thud of a short, hard punch. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Christopher crumple.
“Silence!” a brutish voice yelled. Then, more quietly, but with seething malice, “Be silent while you can. You will speak soon.
You will say all your words and pray for more words to offer when you come before Great Loki.”
They unlocked our manacles and tossed the heavy chains aside. They stood us up, supporting us as they trotted us along the stone walkway. And now I could see them clearly. They were maybe eight feet tall and almost as broad. They looked as if they’d been chiseled out of living rock, with limbs so thick they could have been live oak trees.
They had three fingers on each hand and clanking iron boots. They wore simple tunics, a rectangle of fabric with a hole for the head, a thick belt, a sword, and a knife.
Their heads were low, forward-thrust. Like rhinos without the horn. From the back they looked headless.
Someone shoved me in line behind Jalil.
“Jalil,” I whispered. “Lopi. What’s Lopi?”
He spared a quick, wondering glance for me. I swear he would have smiled if he wasn’t grimacing from the pain.
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“Loki,” he corrected. “The Norse god of destruction.”
Chapter
IX
There was only one thing keeping all four of us from falling apart: I don’t think any of us thought it was real. How could we?
It was completely impossible!
Life makes sense, mostly. Maybe not people’s behavior, but for the most part, one thing follows from another. Cause and effect. But what was the cause here? What was the effect?
It had to be a nightmare. A hallucination. Something.
Anything but reality.
But it did feel real. They marched us along a wide battlement. The walls of the castle must have been twenty feet thick. On our left, the tall, daggerlike teeth of the crenellated walls. In the gaps between the sharp merlons we could see the water, the valley. On our right we looked down on sharply pitched tile roofs. As we marched, the roofs gave way to reveal a large courtyard. Our guards slowed us down a little at that point so we could get a good look.
The courtyard was only vaguely rectangular. It was maybe two-thirds of a football field in size.
In the courtyard were half a dozen more like our lumpish guards. Tall, wide, thick, slow-moving creatures who seemed to be drunk and working on getting drunker. They sat against a wall on the ground and on low stone benches. Most held crude wooden bowls, like something your mom would make salad in.
They dipped the bowls into a cut-down keg and drew out something with a head on it. Then they threw back their rhino heads and quaffed it down.
Christopher gave me a look. His lip was split from the guard’s punch. He looked as bad as me now. “It’s a freak show kegger,” he whispered, winking to show he hadn’t been totally intimidated.
There were humans in the courtyard, too. Over wool trousers they wore tunics with the snake and face emblem. They had helmets the color of old bathroom faucets. The helmets came down to below the ear and had a nose guard. Nothing elaborate.
These men were practicing sword fighting. The clang, clang of steel carried up to us. A hard, one-armed man swaggered around among them, slapping whoever annoyed him with the flat of his own sword, yelling, berating.
But that’s not what our guards wanted us to see. What they wanted us to see was a man, black-haired, smooth-faced, with deep-set eyes. Not a Viking. He was dressed in rags, but rags that had once been an elaborate costume. He was being dragged across the courtyard toward a hole.
The hole was six feet across. A pair of the big rhino heads dragged the prisoner to the edge of this pit and bent him forward so he could look down into it.
I guess this was supposed to scare the prisoner. And maybe it did. But he wasn’t giving anything to the guards. Even as they were yanking him back and forth, teasing him, hoping for a few good screams, the man delivered a speech in high, fluty tones.
“I came in peace from my lord Amon-Ra as an emissary to Wise Odin. Hear me all, and witness! I came in peace carrying the words of Ra!”
The guards didn’t much like this show of spirit. They dragged the man back from the pit and took turns slamming pile-driver fists into his face. Only then did they throw the dark-haired man into the pit.
The guards laughed and slapped one another on the back.
Then they stood around the lip of the hole looking down, laughing and pointing. Bloodthirsty fans at a prizefight.
I don’t know what was in the pit. But the man who had been brave was now screaming. And each scream brought fresh hilarity from the brutes.
Our own guards shoved us to get us moving again. They’d shown us what they wanted us to see. Message delivered.
Through a dark arched doorway. Then down a winding stone staircase. Down and down forever.
Finally we reached a series of dank, torchlit tunnels. It took a while for me to notice the torches.
They were tarred sticks jammed into holders mounted in the walls. The holders were skulls.
We marched past a series of archways that opened into a vast kitchen. Dozens of filthy, grease-spattered men and women turned spits above roaring fires. The spits were long enough to impale four or five sheep and pigs. The smell of roasting meat reminded me of how hungry I was.
I should have had breakfast. Maybe lunch by now. Yes, I was hungry enough that I should have been getting lunch.
Maybe back at the same Taco Bell. Maybe just a Coke and a premade sandwich from the machines outside the school cafeteria.
I guess your mind looks for something normal to grab on to when you’re scared enough.
What was I doing here? I raged silently. What was happening?
We left the kitchen behind, with its charred meat and boiling black pots. Gradually we left the smell behind, too. Then it was up, up, up a long stairway. Three times as high as the one we’d taken down. We were going up into some sort of tower that was higher than the walls.
What was it they called them? I strained my memory. Hadn’t I read Ivanhoe? Sure. Oh, no, just the Cliff Notes. Yeah, and a B
minus on the paper, too.
A “keep.” Yeah, that was the word. The big tower, the castle within a castle, the holdout. That must be where we were headed. I’d seen it rising impossibly high above the courtyard.
But I’d been paying attention to the courtyard.
At the top of the stairs, just as my thigh muscles were screaming, we found ourselves in a hallway. We emerged suddenly up through one of several doors.
Here the décor improved. The ceiling arched high overhead, maybe ten stories. Huge, intricately carved timbers supported the roof. Dim tapestries hung on the walls. Along the left wall it looked as if something had disarranged the tapestries. A dozen pinched, dirty, anxious-looking women were using long-handled hooks to straighten them again.
The floor was paved in lustrous black flagstones. They echoed flatly with every footstep of our monstrous guards. Our own footsteps were slight, light, insignificant.
I saw an immense doorway ahead. It stood open, with flickering yellow light coming from beyond. And then a smell reached my nostrils. One of the guards muttered something under his breath. He jerked me rudely aside to walk around what looked like a pile of dog crap. But a pile that came up to my knees.
More of the anxious, starved-looking women in pinafores and cloth caps came rushing with shovels and mops in hand.
Suddenly we were in a room so big you could have lost a cathedral in it. It could have been a hangar for 747’s. it was more enclosed space than I had ever experienced. I felt like a bug.
Across the room, a football filed away, was a massive throne.
Someone had started with a slab of stone the size of my house and then chiseled it down into a throne. In one wall, high up, were narrow arched windows that glowed dully with gray light.
A man sat on the throne, with a wolf pacing the floor before him.
Only there was something wrong. Either I was confused about size and distance, or the man and the wolf were each impossibly large. The guards lowered their already low-slung heads and formed into two more or less straight lines with us between them.
We marched at a fast trot. My legs were cramped from all the climbing. My hands had gone from numb to painful. But I could keep up.
Christopher tripped on a flagstone. He was probably still woozy from the monster’s punch. He stumbled. A guard violently yanked him to his feet.
Closer and closer we came, and still the man and the wolf refused to retreat to normal size. The man sat in his throne, gripping the arms, slumped down with his chin on his chest. He was dressed much as the Norsemen had been, but in a version more like a Ralph Lauren designer-label Viking outfit. His boots were knee-high, shining supple leather trimmed in black fur. His trousers were deep green. The long, belted shirt was golden chain mail. Gathered across his collarbones with a golden chain was a fur from some huge white beast.
His hair was blond, long, and combed. His face was thin, cruel but not stupid. He was handsome in a way. Handsome like a poisonous snake can be beaut
iful. But he was nervous, too. Drumming his fingers on stone. Rocking just slightly back and forth. Yeah, nervous. Afraid despite his power.
Or maybe I was putting my own feelings off on him. Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see.
I could feel fear bubbling up inside me. But I had it under control. I was not going to show anything. I arranged my face into a rigid mask. Indifference. That’s all I would show.
Give him nothing, I told myself. Show no fear and he’ll at least have respect for you. Show fear and you’ll feel the fear even worse. And then it might get away, might boil up out of control.
I gritted my teeth hard. I clenched my fists. You don’t scare me, I said silently. You don’t scare me. Not me.
The wolf paced back and forth. It was a huge gray beast the size of an elephant, but it moved with the easy grace that comes from tremendous strength. It watched us with yellow eyes that burned with more than canine intelligence. The same eyes that had gloated as it snatched Senna from the end of the pier.
The wolf was so big he made the ten-foot-tall man on the throne seem small. And yet despite the teeth the wolf showed us, it was the man who held my attention.
He had not looked at us yet. Had not spoken. He didn’t need to. I could feel his power.
When I was little, my dad took me aboard his ship when it came in. it was an assault carrier. Mostly helicopters, but with a few Harriers, too. You know, jump jets. He showed me around the big belowdecks hangar where they keep the planes. I remember standing beneath a big, muscular Harrier, already loaded up with its complement of weaponry.
It’s funny about warplanes. You could live your whole life in a cave and never even see a Piper Cub, but when you see a warplane for the first time, you know it’s deadly. You can feel the power and the danger.
That was my first impression of Loki.
I had never seen a god before. Never known of such a creature, never suspected one existed, but I felt the power and the danger. I understood what I was seeing.
Then he looked at us. And I knew I was wrong. I understood nothing.