Asgard's Heart (26 page)

Upon our raised afterdeck things were not
yet set to become so troublesome. The bones which I had scattered had mostly
fallen to the lower deck or gone over the side. Better still, Myrlin was
wielding his great hammer now, whirling it about him one-handed, striking with
such force that the creatures he assaulted were not merely broken but pulverized.
But there was danger nevertheless in the detritus which threatened to
accumulate about our feet as skeleton after skeleton dropped from above, eager
enough to be broken, and equally avid to rise again.

One cannot truly kill the dead.

There was no point at all in trying to cry
a warning to the Vikings below, who surely could not heed it, but I looked
wildly about for the goddess who was our guide, wondering if she knew an answer
to the kind of menace we were facing. Only she had the wit and skill to produce
some magical effect that might turn the tables yet again, as she had when the
fiery arch had tried to swallow us up.

She stood alone at the furthest corner of
our tiny fortress, wrestling with the bow I had discarded. She was struggling
to fire an ungainly arrow whose tip was wrapped in lacerated cloth. The
trailing tatters made the task unduly difficult.

I did not know what she was doing, but I
saw immediately that she needed a defender, because a skeleton bearing a
dagger clenched between its rows of rotted teeth was scuttling like a monkey
along the rampart, ready to pounce and drag her to the ground.

I lashed out with the flat of my sword, not
trying to cut the thing in two but endeavouring instead to thrust it whole over
the edge and into the sea. I caught it as I had intended and swept it away, but
even as I did so I felt a bony arm wrapped around my neck as one of the
creatures closed on me from behind.

I could not strike backwards with my sword,
but as the fingers, slimy with decayed flesh, closed upon my windpipe I reached
back with my free hand to hook my fingers into the vacant eye-sockets of the
thing, and heaved upwards with all my might. The creature had hardly any
weight, and I pulled it up with ease, twisting to hurl it over the parapet in
my determination not to strew the deck with deadly litter.

When I turned again to strike at another
monster that was groping for the goddess, I saw that she had managed to draw
the bow, and I watched her loose the arrow. As it passed within a metre of my
head the fibres loosely wrapped about its head burst brightly into flame, and I
spun around to watch it bury its point in the weird carcass of the giant ship.

The flames leapt from the arrowhead along
the knotted lengths of keratin, and within an instant had caught the edge of
one of those great grey sails. The sail caught alight as though it were
tinder-dry and hungry to burn, and the entire rigging of that remarkable vessel
immediately became sheeted in blue fire, the ropes falling about the decks in
eerie cataracts of flame. Those skeletons which were still crowding the decks
of the huger vessel, ready to swarm down upon us, were wreathed and cloaked by
the burning fabric'of the tumbling sails, and thrown into dreadful disarray.
Although their brown bones would not easily burn, the fire seemed to attack
whatever spirit it was which held the bones together and gathered them again if
they were parted. The skeletons aboard the ship of the dead seemed almost to
melt as they fell in disarray.

There were others which had already
attained the platform on which we fought, but Myrlin was striking out now with
tremendous force. The hammer, far more effective in his hands than any mere
sword, wrought a destruction as complete as the woman's witchfire, and the
giant paused only a moment more before leaping over the parapet to the deck
below—one giant coming to the aid of an entire company. He danced a complex
path between the stabbing blades of the harassed automata, striking downwards
and across to splinter skulls, crush fingers, and shatter leg-bones, so that
wherever a new warrior tried to rise from the relics of those struck down,
there was insufficient substance to give it effective shape.

One last skeleton heaved itself over the
rail, sword high in hand, and struck at the goddess, but I shot out my own
sword to intercept the blow, then lashed out with my boot to bundle the thing
over the side and into the water.

The whole of the attacking ship was now
sheathed in flame, and the heat was intense, but our oars were working
furiously to draw us away. Those which had been trapped between the hulls had
somehow lost their rigidity, and were thrusting like the legs of a desperate
insect to push us away from the fire.

The expanse of water which appeared between
the two hulls seemed to have an anger of its own, roiling and swirling as the
oars whipped its surface, and the ships
did
come apart, slowly
at first and then more quickly as the oars, free to operate with all their
power, skated our smaller vessel away from the burning wreck.

The warriors in the horned helmets, despite
the fact that they were not sentient, did not lack the intelligence required
to begin sweeping the remains of their erstwhile attackers into the water, to
prevent any chance of their forming again to renew the assault. Half a dozen of
the blond defenders had been struck down and had taken fatal wounds, but no
more, and what was left of the mock-men of bone and sinew could pose no further
threat.

I dared not pause to relax, but made sure
that our own enclosed platform was quite free of cadaverous parts. When this
ugly task was finished, my first instinct was to look again to the sea before
us, lest another enemy should already be rearing its ugly head from the
waters. But there was nothing to be seen save for another bank of cold grey
mist, and that some distance off.

"Is it over, for a while?" I
asked our patroness, as she put down the bow and scanned the scene with her
radiant eyes.

She shook her head. "They need not
give us time to rest or confer," she said. "We are unlimited by the
heaviness of matter and the emptiness of real space, and so are they. I have no
doubt now that they are clever, and that they have established a bridge of
common meanings across which they may launch their assaults. Whatever is hidden
within that bank of fog will be just as anxious to destroy us as the things
which we have so far faced, and it will be upon us very soon."

I managed a small but humourless laugh, and
asked: "Are we near to our destination? Can we hope that help will
come?"

"I cannot tell," she replied.
"I do not know what strength we have, let alone what the enemy will use to
draw it from us. We have spun the fabric of this world from the thread of your
wayward dreams, Michael Rousseau, and none of us can be sure just what our
present state will permit, or how it might be conclusively disrupted. They are
exploring the imagery of assault, and we the imagery of defence. There is no
way to know what ingenuity they have to bring to bear, or what we have within
us to defy it. Do what you can, and time will tell us whether we have done
enough. Remember that you may be the most powerful of us all, with assistance
already given to you."

As I turned to face the mist that waited to
swallow us up, I could not help reflecting that this was poor encouragement.
This might be a world concocted out of my dreams, but it was nevertheless a
world where I felt myself to be a stranger. If I had ever been here before, in
my waking fantasies or my deepest slumbers, I was not aware of it, and I had
so far seen little evidence that my subconscious resources were uniquely fitted
to the magical metaphysics of this realm. My sword might be a featherweight in
my hand, my aim with the bow as unerring as my heart's desire would have it,
and my voice the forceful instrument of my will, but I was still a man in a
world where forceful spirits moved which had more power than I could ever
muster. Behind the appearances which we must fight to maintain were entities
which had brought Asgard itself to the brink of destruction, and they did not
need to understand us wholly in order to crush us as comprehensively as
Myrlin's magical hammer had crushed the rotting bone-men.

The mist closed about me, then, forcing a
shiver from my body. I felt by no means tireless as the damp greyness chilled
the sweat of exertion that stood upon my forehead.

For a moment, I felt our movement through
the fog as though it were a wind, but then that movement slowed abruptly as the
ship seemed to be gripped by a giant vise, which closed upon its hull and held
it tight—and though I could not see the oars straining to pull us on, I knew
that they strained in vain, and that we were caught fast. However close we
might be to the mysterious shore ahead of us, we had ceased to make progress
toward it.

19

I had an uneasy feeling that I had been dead to the
world for a long time—and by "the world" I do not simply mean the
world of material objects, but also the private world inside my head.
Ordinarily, of course, the fact of my unconsciousness would have rendered
meaningless any reference to that private world, which could not be said to
exist independently of my perception of it, but my existential situation was no
longer ordinary. Like 994-Tulyar, I was harbouring a mysterious stranger,
which could take advantage of any loosening of the grip of my own personality
to increase the measure of its own dominion within my brain and body.

Because of this curious state of affairs, I
awoke from oblivion not once but twice—first into a dream which seemed not to
be my own. I experienced it only as a spectator, from a perspective more
remote than any I had ever experienced before, in normal dreaming or under the
influence of a psychotropic drug.

The dream that I interrupted was a dream of
Creation, but I cannot say when it had begun, or how long it had been going on.
I was too late to witness the birth of the universe, if that had indeed been
its starting-point; nor was I in time to study the intricate dance of the atoms
which must have long preceded the origin of the complex organic molecules from
which the first living systems were built. I do not know whether dozens or
hundreds of self-replicating molecular systems had already been born

and superseded, or how those systems had been
propelled up the ladder of evolution by whatever chain of cause-
and-consequence overruled the logic of random chance. When I invaded this dream
the youngest stars of the nascent universe were long dead, and in their
explosive dying had given birth to scores of heavier elements which decisively
altered the context of opportunity in which the adventure of life was due to
unfold. There was already a molecule in existence which was a rude ancestor of
DNA, and others which joined with it in an intricate game of transferred
energies.

The habitat of these molecular game-players
was not to be found on the surfaces of worlds, but in vast heterogeneous
clouds of gas and dust extending over distances of such magnitude that light
took years to traverse them. These clouds were the wombs of new stars, and it
was in the energetic haloes created by such births that the molecules of proto-life
pursued their game with the greatest avidity. Elsewhere, their more ingenious
transactions failed, and darkness stilled their enterprise; but the players
and their game were rarely obliterated, even in the least promising regions of
space; they merely waited patiently for the light of new stars to renew their
efforts. With each new sun-birth, the molecules came closer to producing the
phenomena of authentic life, and each sun-death would blast the spores of
proto-life into distant regions of every cloud, destroying all but a few, but
leaving those few to resume their unfolding story at some future time.