Poul Anderson: The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

I shook my head, not in negation but in bewilderment. “Did I go wrong? How? I filed my reports regularly. If I was straying off the reservation again, why didn’t some officer call me in and explain?”

“That’s what I’m doing, Carl.” A ghost of gentleness passed into Everard’s voice. He sat down opposite me and busied his hands with his pipe.

“Causal loops are often very subtle things,” he said. Despite the soft tone, that phrase shocked me to full awareness. He nodded. “Yeah. We’ve got one here. The time traveler becomes a cause of the selfsame events he set out to study or otherwise deal with.”

“But—no, Manse, how?” I protested. “I’ve not forgotten the principles. I never did forget them, in the field or anywhere, anywhen else. Sure, I became part of the past, but a part that fitted into what was already there. We went through this at the inquiry and—and I corrected what mistakes I had been making.”

Everard’s lighter cast a startling snap through the room. “I said they can be very subtle,” he repeated. “I looked deeper into your case mainly because of a hunch, an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. It involved a lot more than reading your reports—which, by the way, are satisfactory. They’re simply insufficient. No blame to you for that. Even with a long experience under your belt, you’d probably have missed the implications, as closely involved in the events as you’ve been. Me, I had to steep myself in knowledge of that milieu, and rove it from end to end, over and over, before the situation was clear to me.”

He drew hard on his pipe. “Never mind technical details,” he went on. “Basically, your Wanderer became stronger than you realized. It turns out that poems, stories, traditions which flowed on for centuries, transmuting, cross-breeding, influential on people—a number of those had their sources in him. Not the mythical Wodan, but the physically present person, you yourself.”

I had seen this coming and mustered my defense. “A calculated risk from the outset,” I said. “Not uncommon. If feedback like that occurs, it’s no disaster. What my team is tracing are simply the words, oral and literary. Their original inspirations are beside the point. Nor does it make any difference to subsequent history… whether or not, for a while, a man was there whom certain individuals took for one of their gods… as long as the man didn’t abuse his position.” I hesitated. “True?”

He dashed my wan hope. “Not necessarily. Not in this instance, for sure. An incipient causal loop is always dangerous, you know. It can set up a resonance, and the changes of history that that produces can multiply catastrophically. The single way to make it safe is to close it. When the Worm Ouroboros is biting his own tail, he can’t devour anything else.”

“But… Manse, I left Hathawulf and Solbern bound off to their deaths… Okay, I confess attempting to prevent it, not supposing it was of any importance to mankind as a whole. I failed. Even in something that minor, the continuum was too rigid.”

“How do you know you failed? Your presence through the generations, the veritable Wodan, did more than put genes of yours into the family. It heartened the members, inspired them to become great. Now at the end—the battle against Ermanaric looks like touch and go. Given the conviction that Wodan is on their side, the rebels may very well carry the day.”

“What? Do you mean—-Oh, Manse!”

“They mustn’t,” he said.

Agony surged higher still. “Why not? Who’ll care after a few decades, let alone a millennium and a half?”

“Why, you will, you and your colleagues,” the pitying, implacable voice declared. “You set out to investigate the roots of a specific story about Hamther and Sorli, remember? Not to mention the Eddie poets and saga writers before you, and God knows how many tellers before them, affected in small ways that could add up to a big final sum. Mainly, though, Ermanaric is a historical figure, prominent in his era. The date and manner of his death are a matter of record. What came immediately afterward shook the world.

“No, this is no slight ripple in the time-stream. This is a maelstrom abuilding. We’ve got to damp it out, and the only way to do that is to complete the causal loop, close the ring.”

My lips formed the useless, needless “How?” which throat and tongue could not.

Everard pronounced sentence on me: “I’m sorrier than you imagine, Carl. But the Volsungasaga relates that Hamther and Sorli were almost victorious, when for unknown reasons Odin appeared and betrayed them. And he was you. He could be nobody else but you.”

Night had lately fallen. The moon, while little past the full, was not yet up. Stars threw a dimness over hills and shaws, where shadows laired. Dew had begun to gleam on stones. The air was cold, quiet save for a drumroll of many galloping hoofs. Helmets and spearheads shimmered, rose and sank like waves under a storm.

In the greatest of his halls, King Ermanaric sat at drink with his sons and most of his warriors. The fires flared, hissed, crackled in their trenches.

Lamplight glowed through smoke. Antlers, furs, tapestries, carvings seemed to move along walls and pillars, as the darknesses did. Gold gleamed on arms and around necks, beakers clashed together, voices dinned hoarsely. Thralls scuttled about, attending. Overhead, murk crouched on the rafters and filled the roof peak.

Ermanaric would fain be merry. Sibicho pestered him: “—Lord, we should not dawdle. 1 grant you, a straightforward raid on the Teurings’ chieftain would be dangerous, but we can start work at once to undermine his standing among them.”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” said the king impatiently. “Do you never weary of plots and tricks, you? Tonight is for that toothsome slave maiden I bought—”

Horns clamored outside. A man staggered in through the entryroom that this building had. Blood smeared his face. “Foemen—attack—” An uproar drowned his cry.

“At this hour?” Sibicho wailed. “And by surprise? They must have killed horses traveling hither—yes, and cut down everybody along the way who might have outsped them—”

Men boiled off the benches and went for their mail and weapons. Those being stacked in the entryroom, there was a sudden jam of bodies. Oaths lifted, fists flailed. The guards who had stayed equipped sprang to make a bulwark in front of the king and his nearest. He always kept a score of them full-armed.

In the courtyard, royal warriors spent their lives on time for their comrades within to make ready. The newcomers bore against them in overwhelming numbers. Axes thundered, swords clanged, knives and spears bit deep. In that press, slain men did not always fall down at once; wounded who dropped never got up again.

At the head of the onslaught, a big young man shouted, “Wodan with us! Wodan, Wodan! Haa!” His blade flew murderous.

Hastily outfitted defenders took stance at the front door. The big young man was first to shock upon them. Right and left, his followers broke through, smote, stabbed, kicked, shoved, burst the line and stamped in over the pieces of it.

As their van pierced through to the main room, the unarmored troopers beyond stumbled back. The attackers halted, panting, when their leader called, “Wait for the rest of us!” The racket of battle died away inside, though outside it still raged.

Ermanaric sprang onto his high seat and looked across the helmets of his bodyguards. Even in the dancing gloom, he saw who stood at the door. “Hathawulf Tharasmundsson, what new misdeed would you wreak?” he flung through the lodge.

The Teuring lifted his dripping sword on high. “We have come to cleanse the earth of you,” rang from him.