Winterfire

Chapter Twenty-one

Lucan

That night, we beached the Fýri on a narrow strip of sand. A dense forest reached nearly to the water’s edge, but we found a path that led to a small clearing, just large enough to built a fire and set up camp. The trees crowded closely around us, murmuring in the breeze, their branches blocking out the pale moonlight. I found an old stump to sit on; apparently, other sailors had camped here. I looked up. The sky, as always in this never-ending winter, was too overcast to see the stars. On the sea, there had at least been a weak light from the moon reflected on the water, but here, in this sheltered clearing, there was only darkness. Beyond the circle of flickering firelight, the black trunks of the trees hunched in the thick undergrowth like lingering phantoms.

 Agnar and Brother Wilfred filleted freshly caught fish and cooked them in a pan over the fire. They still had a bit of salt to season the fish, and Ryce passed around a skin of bitter wine he’d taken from Caldbergh.  After we’d finished eating, we shared the wine as Ingmar told us of the coming Ragnarok.

“Since the beginning of time,” he began, “conflict has existed between the cold, dark, winter and the warm, bright, summer. So too, it lives between the forces of order, the gods and goddesses and the men of Midgard, and those of chaos, the Giants and Dwarves. Each side has wrestled with the small matters—who will marry whom, who owns this or that, who has the most strength or the most cunning, and so on—in preparation for the Last Battle, the Doom of the Gods, Ragnarok. It has always been known that someday, a final, horrific battle will be fought between the two sides, in which nearly all the inhabitants of the Nine Worlds will perish.”

“But what’s that got to do with us?” asked Gadd. “I never heard of ‘Midgard’ till you took us. Can’t you just take us back to Beal, away from all this nonsense? These are not our  gods. This is not our fight.”

“Midgard is one of the Nine Worlds. It is our name for your homeland. It is not some ‘other’ place,” said Ingmar. “Not only will most of the gods die in the final battle, but save two, the men and women of Midgard will perish, also.” He looked slowly from man to man. “That means you and you and you. And me. It means your wives, your children, your parents. All will be destroyed. There is nothing any of us can do to stop it.”

Finn stared at the fire as if he were under a spell and took up the tale. “Beal will be destroyed, as will all of Midgard, in a cataclysm of fire and water. Brandishing his flaming sword, the giant Surtr will lead his army, the Sons of Muspelheim, from their world in Jotunheim to attack the gods on the Plains of Vigrid. Their tremendous weight will destroy the Bridge Bifrost, but not before Surtr gets across. Jormungandr, monstrous serpent offspring of the traitor, Loki, will heave his massive body ashore at Vigrid, in a move that will flood all of Midgard. We cannot save it. The people who have not yet starved to death in Midgard will be carried out to sea. Surtr will burn anything on land that somehow escapes the flood.”

Those of us from Beal looked at the Danes, but only Ingmar would meet our gaze; the others stared at the ground or the fire. At last Stedman spoke. “What can a man do? If we cannot save our families or even ourselves, are we just to wait until we are burned or drowned?”

“When a man dies bravely in battle,” said Ingmar, “any man, Dane or Saxon or Frisian—with his sword in his hand, Odin’s battle maidens, the Valkyries, will take him to Odin’s hall, Valhalla, where he will fight and die a thousand deaths in preparation for the Last Battle. That is the best a man can hope for: to fight on the side of the Good on the last day. That is why I was angered that Sigfred would have killed me when I was unarmed; I might not have gone to Valhalla to fight on the side of the Good, but would instead have descended to Hel and the sleep of the dead. I would not wish such a fate on any man.”