Dustin Long - Icelander

“I’m sorry, miss, I’m going to have to ask you to stand back for your own protection.”

The fireman placed his smoke-smeared glove on her shoulder and led her back onto the street.

“Isn’t there anyone who can tell me what’s going on?”

“There’s a fire, and I’ve got to go finish putting it out. I’m sorry that I can’t assist you any more than that right now, but if you’ll excuse me…”

The street around her was crowded with neighbors and tourists.

“I do not want this,” she mumbled.

She imagined the books inside flaring one by one and her father in there with them.

“Pardon me, could I trouble you for an autograph?” spat a fat, graybearded fellow bumping abruptly up behind her.

“Now’s not the time—”

“Oh, but please! Yours is the last I need.”

She removed her eyes from the fire and frowned at the old man.

“Fine.” She took his pad and scrawled her pseudonym illegibly upon it. She handed the pad back to the man, and he grinned maliciously up at her from behind his grey mass of beard and moustache.

“Thank you so much,” he said as he wobbled off out of the crowd.

Our Heroine didn’t notice her father until he grabbed her by the arms.

“This is the flame-work of Surt,” Ymirson bellowed.

Smoke stung her eyes. “Papa! You’re okay. Oh, we should get you to the hospital. Were you inside there? What happened? Did you inhale any smoke?”

“I have no need of a hospital, my dear. I have not been inhaling smoke, and I was not inside the blazing, either, so you should not be afraid for me.” He was wearing his long brown heavy coat.

“How did this happen?”

“These are the flames of Surt.”

Our Heroine saw the library reflected in her father’s eyes. The firemen had reduced it almost to a smolder.

“Did you see someone start this fire, Pa?”

“We must catch him. That is all that is important. Then I may cry on my throne for having no more to do.”

“I’m gonna take you back to my house, okay, Pa? You should lie down. We can talk to the fire department later. But let’s just get out of here before they start asking questions.”

“Yes, perhaps I should rest for the final fight that is yet to come.” He straightened his spine to something like the full height he once had known. Still six feet, yet thinner and gray. It was no longer a tall six feet. He turned to walk with Our Heroine homeward.

“Are you sure you didn’t try to work the oven by yourself or something, Pa? Do you remember anything about what happened? What were you doing when you realized the library was burning?”

“I don’t know, dear thing. Do not ask me these questions right now. I am trying to think of what is to be done.”

They walked without speaking. At least he was all right. More sirens sounded in the distance, Dopplering their direction. How did a fire start on such a snowy day? Just audible beneath the melody of the approaching engines, then, Our Heroine could discern a vague counterpoint. Somewhat familiar. Her eyelids opened wide when she recognized it as the howl of Garm.

“We’re going to take a little detour, now, Pa.”

Despite the ceaseless sunlight of high summer, the air was bitter with the prevailing Arctic winds. My Vanatru guides seemed warm enough in their fox-fur parkas, but me, I was shivering like an idiot in the vintage Richard Roundtree black-leather jacket and brown turtleneck that I’d bought before leaving New Uruk. Three layers of thermals, too. This get-up had kept me feeling warm and looking cool in Denmark, Reykjavik, and all the way up to the northern coast, but honestly I almost would have skinned the horses if we hadn’t had to leave them at the last outpost.

My guides were father and son. The son looked about my age, and I hit it off with him well enough. Told him stories about Hollywood, actors and actresses that I’d worked with—he mostly wanted to hear about the actresses. I just told him random shit about America, like how people hand you your change instead of setting it on the counter. But I felt that his father resented me somehow. Maybe it was just that he spoke no English, but he laid this silence on me like I’d done something so horrible he couldn’t even yell at me about it. He hardly said anything to his son, either. Just a few sporadic barks, like “keep up,” or “this way.” Some sort of orders, I was sure.

“Don’t worry about him,” the son told me. “For three hundred dollars he likes you fine.” Even so, the only acknowledgment he showed me at all was when I began to lag behind with my aching legs and he slackened his pace to brisk. I said thanks, but he just mumbled something to his son.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“He says hurry up, tired legs are better than frozen ones. He says we’d have more energy to walk if we didn’t talk so much.”

A long silence followed. I started to feel like quiet was appropriate, though; the landscape looked quiet, the cold air smelled quiet. It almost made me forget how miserable I was with my moustache stuck to my face in frozen snot and my hands slipping into frostbit senselessness. I didn’t think it was supposed to get this cold here, at least at this time of year. I was contemplating living the rest of my life without any fingers when the son tapped me on the shoulder and said, “This is it. We’re there.”

I looked around but couldn’t see anything particularly notable.

“I was born here,” the son told me. I ignored him and looked over at his father, who was lighting up a Marlboro that I could smell even through the snot-glacier in my nose. My last pack was still sitting on my bedside table in Reykjavik. I’d left it there out of some perverse idea I had about making my little pilgrimage in purity. It smelled like post-coital bliss, but I didn’t want to bum one from him. At least I didn’t want to ask. I coughed emphatically a few times, and he just looked at me and took a drag, holding the cigarette with both hands between fingers laced together in front of his mouth. I’d never seen anyone smoke that way before. It reminded me somehow of a documentary I’d seen about this sad old gorilla who’d never gotten used to life in the zoo. After a few quiet minutes while he finished his cigarette, I followed the two of them down the crater’s steep incline.

God. I’d lost my only pair of contacts in a drunken stumble down the Strøget in Copenhagen—the less said about which the better—so maybe it was just my eyes. Or maybe it was the blood freezing in my brain, or just a trick of the steam rising up from the earth to tumble like a lover with the condensation in the frigid air… But the sky seemed suddenly to bend and shimmer around me as we approached the archway at the crater’s bottom. Like in a movie when the hero passes through some invisible barrier into another dimension. The stink of sulphur got stronger. We were there. Beneath me I could feel the vulcanopneumatic power thrumming like Brando’s Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild Ones . I stared hard into the depths of the cave, standing still for a moment and trying to take it all in, and I swear I could already make out the vague green glow of the ormolu lichen within. The son’s words no longer seemed so absurd to me. This was it. I was about to enter Vanaheim.