Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

For a long moment he lay face-down, his head reeling with the insane rush of emotions. When his mind finally began to clear and he realised it was not all over, he slowly looked up to see Freyja standing next to a tree, her smile teasingly sexual, but her eyes dark and unfathomable.

‘Mortals can never resist the golden apples,’ she said.

‘Save them,’ Tom pleaded.

Freyja plucked one of the apples and held it before her so that the glow illuminated her beautiful face. ‘You are offering your life in exchange for theirs? Of what value is that to me?’

‘The All-Father ordered you to give us safe passage,’ Tom gasped.

‘And so I did. But this is a new matter. A transgression greater still. The golden apples are the very power of the gods. To steal one is a crime that demands the highest penalty.’

‘You set a trap. You knew once we were in the grove it was only a matter of time until one of the apples was taken.’

Her laughter was soft and gentle and contemptuous. ‘Your little sister has a great mastery of seior , but she is far beneath me. After all, I brought seior to the gods. When she conjured here in our Great Dominion, she presented an … opening.’

‘What do you want? Revenge?’

‘Revenge implies some notion of equality. You are mortals, for all your great abilities, and consequently barely worthy of my attention.’ Holding the apple delicately, Freyja sat on a fallen tree. As she examined the fruit’s gleaming skin, Tom had the strangest feeling that it was not an apple at all, but something sentient.

‘This is the axe-age, the sword-age,’ she continued, ‘that precedes the great catastrophe Ragnarok. The seeds of this destruction were sown in the beginning, when this flawed existence emerged from the fire and the ice.’

Tom was struck by how Freyja’s mythic account echoed the Gnostic beliefs that Church had come to understand as the truth: of a flawed universe ruled by the Void.

‘The one your people know as Loki has a part to play and now he has already joined the forces of dissolution. Will the World Serpent curled around Midgard with its tail in its mouth soon burst forth? Will Asgard fall? Will Bifrost burn? Can such wonder and beauty ever fail?’

Her haughty expression faltered. Tom instantly recognised the familiar emotion.

‘You think you know what this means, but you do not,’ she said. ‘Fenrir will break free and roam the Fixed Lands with his savage brothers, spreading death everywhere. The wolves will swallow the sun and the moon, and Yggdrasil, the Life-Tree, will shake to its roots. Hel will rise from misty Niflheim with her armies of the dead and sweep across the Vigrid Plain. And all the worlds shall burn, and Earth shall fall into the boiling ocean.’

A silence followed her words that extended far into the forest. The images she had conjured reminded Tom of the biblical Revelations he had read as a youth. There was only one story, filtered through different cultures, different beliefs.

Freyja stood before him, and her face was almost too fierce to look upon. ‘If you wish to live — if you wish to save your comrades at this moment — you must make a bargain with me. Even though it could mean the betrayal of your own and all they stand for.’

Tom steadied himself against a tree, fighting the deep chill of desolation rising through him. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

Church coughed and retched until his throat was raw. Finally he cleansed the last of the blood from his system. His gore-soaked clothes clung to him. Hunter and Shavi coughed up blood nearby, but Laura sat in a daze.

‘Okay, I am not taking the blame for that one,’ she said.

They were back in Vigeland Park. On the other side of the pond, a couple feeding the ducks watched them uneasily.

‘Drenched in blood in a public place. Not the best look for a bunch of wanted terrorists.’ Hunter helped Shavi to his feet. ‘We need to get cleaned up and out of sight. Where’s the Grateful Dead?’

On cue, Tom lurched out of a nearby copse. They were all transfixed by the intensity of his haunted expression.

Shavi took his arm. ‘What happened?’

Tom took a second to steady himself. ‘I persuaded Freyja to give us this.’

He showed them a gold ring in the shape of a dragon eating its tail. ‘It’s called Andvarinaut,’ he said. ‘When you wear it, you feel a pull in the direction of whatever you are searching for.’

‘Ruth,’ Church said, relieved.

Tom nodded non-committally.

‘Better give it to Church-’ Hunter began.

‘No!’ Tom’s eyes blazed. ‘Only I can wear this! Do you understand?’

‘Take a stress pill,’ Laura said. ‘Bit of a Frodo moment there.’

‘Only I can wear this,’ Tom repeated. He held out his hand. It twitched with the pull of the ring. ‘We head south.’

Church shifted his posture so he could feel the comforting weight of the sword on his back. ‘Whatever else happens, Veitch has had his last chance. If he’s hurt Ruth in any way, I’m going to kill him.’

The emotionless intensity of his words shocked them. Church went to the pond to wash some of the blood from him. No one followed.

‘This world is a beautiful place.’ Shavi stood at the rail looking out over churning black waves towards a sunset of red and gold against which storm clouds roiled, occasionally throwing out bolts of lightning.

Laura thought how delicately handsome his features looked in the depths of the hood of his bulky parka. The winds across the Baltic were biting. ‘You’ve just done too many drugs,’ she said.

Shavi laughed. They had grown easy in each other’s company as their memories of past times returned. ‘There has been a lot of pain on our journey together, but I would not change any of it.’

‘Not even the old git’s rambling stories about the good old days of the sixties?’

‘We come from such different backgrounds, but events have forged us into a unit. Underneath it all there are bonds of friendship that run so deep they are profound. Who would have thought such people could come together and like each other?’

Hunter lurched out of the door that led to their rough-and-ready quarters alongside the crew. ‘Bloody hate ships,’ he moaned. His words belied the effort to which he had gone to secure their passage after they had only just slipped through the fingers of a Security Service sting while crossing the border into Sweden. There had been roadblocks every mile of their eight-day journey south, forcing them to double-back, abandon vehicles, march miles through the cold and eventually stow away on a river barge before they eventually made their way to the port of Malmo.

‘Where is Church?’ Shavi asked.

‘Sleeping, finally — he was determined to keep going until he dropped. Bit worried about the old guy, though. Something’s eating away at him. But you know what he’s like — he won’t talk about it.’

Laura clutched at the rail as the ship crested a swell. ‘On the bright side, at least when he’s moping he’s not being a pain in the arse.’

‘What are our plans when we reach Germany?’ Shavi asked.

‘Steal a van. We can cut through the country pretty quickly on the autobahns, depending on which route Veitch takes. If we get past security, that is. I thought we’d have more trouble in Sweden.’

‘ More trouble?’ Laura said. ‘It was touch and go all the way.’

‘Trust me, we’ve had it easy.’

Laura watched the sunset colours swimming on the ocean. ‘Why didn’t Veitch just kill the guy we were after? That would have stopped us dead in our tracks.’