The Gargoyle (58 page)

The thin robe was little protection against the cold, and the wind cut to my marrow. Something moved at the edge of my vision. I was already developing snow blindness, but I squinted to confirm the sight: a trudging bulk outlined against the vicious blankness. The figure seemed to be coming towards me, but it was hard to tell on such a flat surface. I headed towards it. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be any worse than standing still, awaiting hypothermia.

After some time I realized that the object moving towards me was a man. He must help me, I thought, for to not help me would be to kill me. The first detail I could make out was his thick red locks, which stood out against the snow like bloodstains on a bedsheet. Next I could see that he was wrapped in heavy furs and wore thick boots. His pants were thickly strapped leather and his coat was an animal thing. Over his shoulder, he seemed to be carrying a parcel of pelts. Puffs of steam exited his mouth. Ice frosted his beard. He was close now. Deep creases lined the corners of his eyes and he looked older than I believe he actually was.

When he arrived in front of me, he held out the package he’d been carrying on his shoulder and said,
“Farðu í Þetta
.” I understood what this meant:
You will put these on.

I unwrapped the package to find a full set of clothing, thick skins with fur that would protect me. I pulled them on as quickly as I could, and soon I felt the air between my body and the material starting to warm.
“Hvað heitir Þú?” What is your name?
I was shocked to hear Icelandic out of my mouth as well.

“I am Sigurðr Sigurðsson, and you will come with me.” His answer confirmed the identity that I had guessed; but only hesitantly, because here—wherever
here
was—Sigurðr was unburned despite the way his life had ended. Which made me wonder why my body was still damaged.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“When will we get there?”

“I don’t know.” He squinted against the horizon. “I’ve been traveling a long time. I must be getting close.”

Around his waist Sigurðr wore a scabbard, the same one that had been clanging against Sei’s hips when they were dancing. He extracted Sigurðrsnautr by its serpent handle, and handed over his belt and sheath. “Put this on. You’ll need it.”

I asked why. He answered that he didn’t know.

I threw away Sei’s robe, thinking it useless now that I had the skins. Sigurðr picked it up and handed it back to me. “In Hel, you must use everything that you have.”

I twisted the robe around my waist, as a second belt above the one that Sigurðr had just given me. I asked him how he could tell in which direction we should head.

“I don’t know,” he answered. Sigurðr was quite a conversationalist. He used his sword as a walking stick, the blade cutting into the snow with each step. For a man who didn’t know where he was going, he took very resolute strides.

“Is this a hallucination?” It struck me as supremely odd to be in a hallucination, asking whether it was a hallucination, in a language that I didn’t understand. (In fact, how many people in the entire world know the Icelandic word for “hallucination” is
ofskynjun
?) Sigurðr answered that he didn’t think it was an
ofskynjun,
but couldn’t be positive.

We walked. And walked. And walked. For days, but the sun never set. Perhaps you think this an exaggeration, that I really mean we walked for hours, which seemed like days. But no, I mean days. We traveled in constant fatigue but we never came to the point of needing sleep, and despite my bad knee, I felt I could continue indefinitely. I thought of the places in the farthest northern reaches of the world where the sun remains in the sky for six months at a time. Would we have to march that long?

Sigurðr remained a man of few, and confused, words; for the most part, the only sound that came from his body was a slightly musical clacking from under his pelts, around his neck. After a while I stopped talking to him, except to try to make him laugh. I never succeeded. Sometimes I stopped walking simply to break the monotony. I would beg Sigurðr to wait for just a minute but he would always state that there was no time for rest. When I asked why, he would answer, “Because we need to get there.”

When I asked Sigurðr where “there” was, he didn’t know. So I told him that, given the fact he didn’t know, I could see no reason to continue to follow him. He would snort, say that I was allowed to make this stupid decision, and continue walking without me. Just when he was about to disappear from view, I’d take off after him in a hobbling run. Because of course I needed him—what would I do in this place alone? And so we plodded ever onwards, heading to the place that he couldn’t define and I couldn’t imagine.

Hallucinations should be better than this, I thought. Walking the tundra for days is boring and I was surprised I could hallucinate anything that mundane, for that long. The cold was too piercing; the patterns of snow were too perfectly random in their swirls; and my tiredness ached too honestly to be imagined. The only thing that didn’t seem realistic was my ability to continue with neither rest nor food.

Of course it was a delusion. A damn fine, cold, protracted hallucination. Withdrawal should not be like this. Unless…

“Sigurðr, did I die?”

He finally laughed. “You’re just a visitor here.”

If this place was Sigurðr’s, as the coffin had been Sei’s, I wanted to know more about it. About everything. I decided to abandon all subtlety. “That sound coming from around your neck—is it made by the treasure necklace that once belonged to Svanhildr?”

He stopped walking, perhaps deciding whether to confirm. He did: “Yes.”

“Do you have the arrowhead necklace, too?”

“That went to Friðleifr.”

“His name was changed to Sigurðr, you know.”

He didn’t say anything for a few moments, until he answered in the softest voice I had heard him use. “Yes, I am aware. It was a great honor.”

“Will you tell me about Einarr?”

The question made him restart his stride. “That story is not for you.”

“I’ve already heard it.”

Sigurðr turned and leveled his eyes at me. “No. You’ve heard Marianne’s version of my story, which is a different thing. How do you dare to think you know my heart, when you don’t even understand your own?”

Leave it to a Viking to disarm you with eloquence when you least expect it. I shut up and started walking again.

I kept thinking that something was just ahead, but nothing ever was. I kept thinking that we’d encounter a ridge overlooking a valley, or moss sprouting out of granite crests, but each “ridge” was nothing more than the current horizon being replaced by a new horizon. I prayed for anything to break the monotony. A boulder. A moose’s hoof print. A frozen sled dog. A man’s name pissed into the snow with swooping yellow letters. But we encountered only more ice, more snow. On the third day (I think it was the third), I just stopped. Gave up.

“There’s nothing out there. Whatever you think you’ll find…” My voice trailed away. “Sigurðr, you’ve been going ‘there’ for more than a thousand years, and you don’t even know where there is.”

“You travel until you arrive,” he said, “and you have now come far enough.”

This place was absolutely no different from any other place on the tundra. I spun around in all directions, throwing my arms about to emphasize this point. “What are you talking about?”

“Look into the sky.”

My eyes went up. Despite the fact that no one was within miles, a single flaming arrow was arching directly towards me.

I wanted to move but was frozen to the spot, my only reaction to cover my head with my hands. (Although, after hearing all of Marianne Engel’s stories, a more logical decision would probably have been to cover my heart.) The arrow missed me by a few inches, striking the ground, and the earth broke open like an albino monster unhinging its jaw. Huge segments of ice lifted and twisted, throwing us wildly around. A large chunk hit my right shoulder, sending me bouncing into another ragged block. There was a moment of clarity, similar to that moment when I’d driven over the cliff, in which everything slowed as I watched it unfold. Water languidly erupted from a crack in the ground, and I finally understood why there had been nothing to distinguish the landscape in all the time that we’d been walking. We had not been on land at all, but on a massive sheet of ice. Frozen slabs pirouetted around me and soon I found that gravity was pulling me into the newly uncovered sea.

An immediate chill cut through me completely. My pelts were useless; worse than useless, actually, because they absorbed water and started to pull me down. At first I was able to claw my way along the bobbing ice at the surface, digging my fingers into any cracks I could find. I felt the warmth of my body suck itself into the core of my stomach, but soon the heat was not safe even there. I could feel my movements slow, and my teeth were clattering so violently that they drowned out the cracking of the ice around me; I wondered whether even my keloid scars were turning blue.

Sigurðr was nowhere to be seen. He must have been swallowed amid the bobbing ice. A block brushed up against the left side of my body and another smacked at my back. They were circling around me, closing in and pushing me down. Any scientist will explain that broken ice redistributes evenly on the surface of the water, and this is what it was doing in an attempt to cover the hole that the arrow had opened. So even in a hallucinatory ocean the basic laws of physics still seemed to apply; this, no doubt, would have brought a smile to Galileo’s face.

I could no longer hold my head above water, the ice tap-tap-tapping against my cauliflower ears, and I closed my eyes because this is what one does when going under. I felt my body shut down.
So this is how it ends. In water.
I slipped under, and actually felt some relief.
It’ll be easier this way.

I had no trouble holding my breath for many minutes, dropping the entire time, until I tired of waiting for my lungs to give out. I opened my eyes, expecting that I would not be able to see more than a few feet. Just as it had been difficult to gauge distance above the ice, so it was underneath: once again there was nothing to supply perspective. No fish, no other creatures, no weeds, only clear water. Bubbles escaped from the folds of my clothing and rolled up along my body until they caught at the corners of my eyelids. Funny. In the real world I couldn’t produce tears of water, but in an underwater world I could produce tears made of air.

A glow emerged, above me, in the distance. It refracted through my bubble tears and I wondered,
Is this the corridor of light that leads a dead man to Heaven?
Not bloody likely. The way things were going, it was probably one of those saber-toothed fishes that uses dangling phosphorescent flaps of skin to lure in other animals to eat. As it turned out, however, the glow was neither the path to Heaven nor a Machiavellian fish. It was the fire of the burning arrow that had crashed into the ice, now clenched in one of Sigurðr’s hands as he came plunging through the ocean towards me.

The light (a fire that doesn’t extinguish in water: so much for natural physics still applying in a supernatural place) played across Sigurðr’s beard and into the creases around his eyes. His long red hair stretched out around his head like a glowing kelp halo, and he was smiling serenely, as if something wonderful were happening. He held out the arrow like an Olympian passing the torch and, all the while, we continued our slow descent through the water. My fingers closed around the shaft, I felt glorious warmth spread through my body, and Sigurðr smiled like a man who had done his job. Like a man who would continue to be remembered. He nodded his approval and plunged far below, leaving me to continue falling liquidly alone.

I fell through the bottom of the ocean.

I dropped only a few feet before I hit the ground. When I looked up, the floor of the ocean—the water that should have been a ceiling above me—was gone. My feet were on solid matter and the light had changed from the ocean’s crystal blue to a dead gray.

I was now in a dark wood of twisted trees.

I heard the scurrying patter of feet across the forest floor, coming from at least three sides. Twigs snapping, brush rustling. I held up the arrow to use as a torch. The flash of a four-footed animal sliding among the tree trunks, then a glimpse of another creature. How many were there? Two—no, there went another! Three, at least! What were they? My mind ran wild with bestial imaginings: a lion, a leopard, perhaps a wolf. If they came for me, how could I protect myself? I had the Viking’s scabbard, but not the sword; I had the Buddhist’s robe, but not the faith.

Directly ahead was a path that led through the forest, over a small hill, and I could hear the approach of another, bolder animal. There, a hint of it through the trees. It appeared bipedal, so perhaps some sort of fabulous forest ape? Apparently not. When it came around the corner, I could see that it was a man, dressed in simple clothing, with a large stomach and stubble on his cheeks. When he saw me, a broad smile spread across his face and he lifted his arms out as if preparing to embrace an old friend after years apart. “Ciao!”