Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (28 page)

‘Baldur is dead! Baldur is dead!’

Then all the slaves and the grooms and the sweepers of Asgard, who must miss the feast that they might rise early in the morning, knew. Heimdall walked to the gate of Asgard, to the head of the causeway, and looked out across the salt marsh to all the villages of Germany. He shouted:

‘Baldur is dead! Baldur is dead! Killed by the Mistletoe Twig, Baldur is dead!’

For so it was the custom to announce the death of an Aser. As we stood around Heimdall at the gate, we saw lights on the ridge as the people came out of the village with torches lit from their Yule fires. And they called to each other across the snow, across the fields and the echoing snow:

‘Baldur is dead, Baldur is dead, Baldur the Beautiful is dead, is dead, dead …’

And as the news carried across the snow, the lights sprang up as far as we could see, to the edge of the Forest and beyond, and far beyond our sight, so that before morning Sweyn had heard it, and Edwin, and the Cheruscan King in the far south. Who told Sigmund I never knew.

All the women in Asgard stood by the body, and wept, and gashed their faces, and poured ashes on their heads, and swayed in groups with interlocked arms, and wailed:

‘Baldur is dead, Baldur the Beautiful is dead.’

Njord and Frederik threw their arms round each other’s necks, and wept. Heimdall, now his shouting was over, rolled on the floor and screamed and kicked like a baby. All was pandemonium and full of the sound of senseless sorrow. It was worse
than a Mystery, without the hope and reason of a Mystery. I began to worry.

Soon the peasants would all be weeping for dead Baldur. I knew the influence he had over them, and how he had gone out on his spring rides, telling them what to plant and where and when, and when to reap and how to store, planning the harvests to bring most profit to the Asers. If the peasants grow so much wheat, say, for Asgard, that they have no room to plant flax, then they have to buy their linen from us, at Aser prices. And there are those who plant no wheat at all, and must buy it. If this system failed, if we could no longer guarantee food for all the packmen, clothes and iron and silver for all the villages, then our trade was over.

I caught hold of two of the biggest and soberest Vandals.

‘Get my chair up on that table, there, over the body.’ This much I had learned from Taliesin. I sat there above the noise, my gold helmet on my head, my sword across my knees, my ravens above my shoulders, my wolves beneath my hands.

‘Listen to me, all ye Asers. Listen to me all ye traders and dealers, all men of war and people that till the soil, riders on roads and trappers of badgers and bees.’

They did listen. The voice that held a crew could fill a hall.

‘Baldur the Beautiful is dead … dead … dead … Baldur who-brought you sun and rain in their season, giver of all good things, who sent you corn and bread and beef and beer and all that you wished. Baldur who showed to your men and your maids the way of the world, who made your bulls and your rams and your goats to bring you flocks beyond counting. Dead in the spring of his youth, in the bud of his life, Baldur the Beautiful is dead.

‘Baldur is dead. There he lies at our feet. Baldur is dead. There he lies where he fell. There is no profit to dwell on the past, let the blame lie where it will, let Fate do its work. Evil will out and the murderer die at his time.

‘Baldur the Beautiful is dead, is dead … dead … Yet Baldur shall live, shall rise, shall stand before us again. Again shall he bring us the bread and the ale at our call. Baldur returns to the earth whence he came, whence came we all. When winter is over, we shall see him before us anew. He will stand in the Spring, in the furrows, green and straight. In the pride of the grain, in
the glory of corn, in the green shoot and the golden ear, shall Baldur stand again before us all. Each year, each winter let us mourn for Baldur dead. Yet in the Spring shall we rejoice for Baldur risen again. Baldur will come in the hawthorn shoot, in the blossom that brings the fruit and the honeybees.’

Never before or since had I sung the Mystery of the Lord Adonis with more fervour or to a more willing audience.

‘Go shout on the shore and say to the forest, call it from village to village and hill to hill, the glorious news that we shall never more despair. Baldur who died at our feet shall die no more. Baldur who died at the Yule shall live at the Spring. No more need we fear death for him who died. For ever shall we see him walk amid our fruitful woods and fertile fields. Baldur the Beautiful is dead, yet shall he live.’

All the crowd dissolved into paroxysms of joy mixed with their grief. Yet there were some who kept their composure. Bragi got together a handful of his apprentices.

‘Snorri, get in there now and measure him. Length and breadth, and don’t forget depth. I’ll go over to the stores and get enough cowhides and linen for lining, and coffin handles, if we have any. The rest of you, fetch your adzes and get up to the timber yard. I don’t care how cold it is. Get some pine billets for light, but be careful you don’t set fire to the place. There are half a dozen elm logs in the north-east corner; elm’s best, remember that, it takes the best polish. Pick out the two biggest, and start shaping, but don’t overdo it till Snorri comes up with the measurements. Go on, get started!’

Freda was getting, beating, her kitchen maids together. She was more shaken than Bragi, but still capable.

‘Get me a count of hams … yes,
hams
, you can’t have a funeral without ham, you always bury them with ham, why don’t we ever have enough ham? Then we need to bake bread for … let’s see, yes … Asers and kings, wheat bread for about a hundred and fifty … peasants and suchlike, rye bread for about … six thousand … yes, and make that one-third ground acorn. Get every woman you can find on to grinding. No, I
don’t
care if they have to grind all night. And ham, get me a count of hams …’

I went to bed. They seemed to be doing well enough, to me,
working on the details. They knew how a German funeral went, and I didn’t. So I slept. The next morning, of course, I was the only Aser fresh enough to receive the first Kings. Freda was furious, called me a lazy heartless brute, a shirker, callous. There were moments when I almost wished myself back with Bithig.

In the morning, of course, things were getting on famously, even though most of the Asers were dropping with fatigue. I sat at the gate with Heimdall, waiting for visitors and watching a party of Vandals hauling up on to the ridge a boat, called Ringhorn, in which Baldur had gone fishing several times that summer.

‘Is that where they will have the pyre?’

‘Pyre?’ Heimdall answered. ‘Why should there be a Pyre? We bury Baldur as an Aser.’

‘I thought the dead were burnt in Germany.’

‘Peasants are burnt. Kings and nobles and traders are burnt. Some are not burnt.’

‘Who are they who are not burnt?’

‘Who should know better than you? and yet how should you know? All who are sacrificed to the Gods, those who are hanged up between heaven and earth, those whose throats are cut to let their breath pass out to the air it came from, they are not burnt. Some are thrown into the mouths of the earth, into the bogs that suck and suck and are never satisfied. Some are left on the earth to rot away, open to the sky and the stars, and the beasts and the birds do not feed on them.’

‘And the others?’

‘Long, long ago, when the Mother ruled the land, before men had iron swords, the Great Kings of the North were buried in barrows. Wealth was wrought for the tomb, in gold and silver and in Amber. Then the King was a God, and the Amber shone as a sign of his Godhead.

‘Yet every Aser shadows Godhead forth, and his whole life is a sacrifice to the God. Every Aser is himself a God, whether he knows or not of the Godhead in him. Truly you told us of
Baldur risen again, how he lives on. All the Asers shall live although we die.

‘So an Aser is buried as a sacrifice. With treasure we fill the tombs, with gold the graves, in glory we go back to the dust we are made of.

‘Each Aser must choose his grave. Baldur chose his. Do you see the smoke rise there beyond the hill? There they have swept away the snow, and they light great fires to thaw the ground, where they will dig the grave. Bragi is fitting runners to the boat. We will take Baldur to his grave across the snow.’

So the Kings came to Asgard across the snow and across the frozen sea. The Lombard Kings came, for the sake of the ham. Sweyn Halffoot leaned on Edwin’s arm. Siggeir walked with Sigmund. Asers and Kings walked over the snow to Baldur’s grave. Njord came out of Asgard, and passed the Standing Stone and never did it more.

Loki did not come.

Over the snow we went to Baldur’s grave, across the forest to a meadow by a river. Feet had trampled the snow, and hands had swept it. The ground was black with charcoal, and the earth from the grave was spread about and trampled down into a hard floor. The smell of burnt wood hung in the air, though the fire had no part in what we did. Yet the memory of those great fires we lit to that the earth entered deeper into men’s memories than the grave we dug.

Kings came and merchants came, Lords and Princes and Asers came. And the peasants came, men without surnames and without fathers, men who till the soil and are of no account. As a Danish King drives out a Saxon, and the Goth king drives out the Black Dane, so the peasant calls himself Saxon or Dane or Goth in turn, and copies their fashions of pots or clothes or speech. Yet the peasant lives always in one place, and the wars go over his head and over his land, and he has not the wit to change.

And the peasant thinks only of his crops and never of glory or
love or wisdom or change, he worships only the Mother. And that is why, of all the Asers, only Baldur who, two-sexed and gentle, was Mother and Father and God to them, was ever mourned by the peasants. They came to his grave and stood in rows about it.

When the boat Ringhorn was drawn by oxen to the side of the open grave, two coffins, Baldur’s and an empty coffin, were placed at the edge of the pit. Then Skirmir’s wife stood on a wagon and shouted:

‘Baldur the Beautiful is dead, is dead. Alone he rides before us to Hell’s Gate. Who rides with Baldur?’

Her voice streamed to nothing over the silent crowd and the frozen plain. A woman pushed her way to the front and said:

‘I go.’

She was a fine woman, about twenty, and her name was Nanna. She lived in a village a little way from the grave field, and indeed it was because of this that Baldur had chosen it. It was to her house, where she lived alone, that Baldur came at the mid point of his every ride. For three years the country people had spoken of her as Baldur’s wife, and for his sake, unasked they had brought her food and cloth and fuel enough and to give away to every beggar that passed. Now on that bitter day, Nanna stood out before the Kings and Asers and all the people and said:

‘I go with Baldur to pour his beer and warm his bed as I have done these years past. Who else but I should go? Who has more right than I? Those who led him into evil ways?’ She shot a bitter glance at Hod, who, blind, did not see it, and still stood looking dimly before him.

‘I go with him where no one else dare follow.’

And she laid herself down in the empty coffin, and while she did so, and Skirmir’s wife helped her, a Vandal packmaster named Hermod, whom we never thought of except as a hanger-on of Tyr’s, stepped to the graveside and began a song he had made on Baldur.