Kevin Hearne - Hammered

There were questions I harbored in my heart, but no man could answer them; there were sights I would see, but no man could show them to me; there were tales I would hear told and songs I would hear sung, but no man’s voice could give them breath.

The whales, you see, had piqued my curiosity. There were older things than I in the deeps, and it was with them I wished to treat. I remained apart from men so that if my embassies skewed awry from their intended bent, no one but I would suffer the hammer’s blow. And after a month of fruitless attempts, in a gray twilight brooding over a choppy sea, I finally drew a monster from the deeps with nothing but my voice and my kantele .

I say “monster” only because that is what people tend to call creatures that could eat men like hors d’oeuvres. The surface boiled violently to herald its coming, and I sang of peace and conversation and the pleasure of knowledge won and knowledge shared, and then it erupted from the sea. It was a leviathan sheathed in blue-green scale, capable of swallowing a dragon ship whole, and it towered above me to the height of six men, with far more of its length remaining under the surface. It must have been supporting its body on the sea floor to raise its neck to such an altitude.

Five bony ridges swept back from its head, and between these a membranous tissue grew and fluttered in the wind, giving it the appearance of a crown. At the time I thought it merely looked impressive, but soon I learned that these were sensory organs that detected vibrations in the water. Its eyes were glossy tar pits twice the size of my head, the better to see in sunless waters. They found me standing on the shore, and the creature bellowed a greeting, displaying foot-long teeth and a black tongue. It had nostrils at the end of its snout, which I quickly deduced were more for olfaction than for breathing: Beneath its jaw and running some distance down its neck, gills flared and signaled it would not remain above the surface for long. But it had seen me, and I had seen it, and that was enough. It crashed back into the cold water of the fjörd, but it did not leave. After some thrashing about and repositioning of its bulky length, the top of its head reemerged, so that I saw its obsidian eyes and the teal fan of its sensory crown. It spoke to me as the whales did, in a song unfathomable to most men, but as plain to me as your speech, or yours. So it is with all animal speech, and so it is that they can understand me. I played my kantele softly, and we spoke together.

it said.

“I am a shaman,” I replied, “if I am any sort of man at all. A wizard, certainly. Some would say a folk hero. Some might say a god. But I am foremost a being of curiosity, and I am curious about you. What is your name?”

“What do you call yourself?”

“No, but I have a name by which others call me.”

“I am called Väinämöinen. Tell me, are there others like you?”

“You say you’re curious like it’s a bad thing.”

“You are a child among your kind?”

“I see. How many of your people are there in a chorus?”

She—for the creature was female—asked me to build a fire, to see how it was done. She asked me where the lights in the sky were tonight, and I explained they were hidden by the clouds. She wondered why the clouds would do that. She wondered whether men had given names to the lights. She wondered how men got their names and how they kept them clean.

She told me the Remarkably Short Saga of Sheerth the Excessively Dim, He Who Sought the Secret Lair of the Giant Squid. She sang to me the Ballad of Moth the Valiant Born, She Who Fought the Sirens in the Grotto of Lime and Decay. She told me many secrets of the deep, such as the fate of fabled Atlantis; its gold and marble splendor serves the mermen now. There are treasures lying along the coasts of all nations, and off the coast of South America, sleeping gods of cold evil rest until the day they are called by men with dreams of power.

she asked.

“No, of course not. I am merely pleased to meet you and exchange knowledge of our worlds. We have much to teach each other before you earn a name in the harvest of the blue whales. What can I teach you? What would you know?”

We had long since spoken into deep night, with naught but a fire lighting the waters of the fjörd. Flickers of lightning played about the billowing skirts of clouds, and these flashes occasionally lit up the shore. The great creature’s snout lifted up toward the low ceiling in the sky after a particularly bright display.

I chuckled. “There are many explanations for those. One god or another is usually credited for them.”

“The god of the Norse is named Thor. He rides a chariot pulled by two goats—horned animals with four legs—and wears a large belt that doubles his strength.”

“Where?” I turned to look over my shoulder and saw a bright ball of lightning writhing in the sky. It centered round the head of a hammer, beneath which was a raised hand and a scowling visage wreathed in blond hair. The edges of a chariot and the horns of two goats were starkly highlighted. Nothing else could be discerned, other than that the thunder god was quickly approaching, intent on the two of us.

Fearful of his intentions, I frantically began to wave. “No!” I cried. “Wait!”

But Thor threw forward his arm, and the coiled lightning arced down to strike the magnificent creature in the eye. She screamed and reared up in pain, then plunged herself into the fjörd, more lightning bolts following her and burning holes into her scaled hide wherever it showed above the surface.

I dropped my kantele and proceeded to jump and gesticulate and call him the brain-dead spawn of a lack-witted shepherd, but to no avail. He kept hammering the poor beast wherever he could as she desperately tried to make it out of the shallow fjörd to the open sea. I ran to my hut and retrieved a spear from my small cache of weapons. This I quickly enchanted for true flight and hurled at the nearest one of Thor’s goats. It spitted him cleanly and the chariot lurched violently to the side, spilling the thunder god into the sea.

This managed to secure his attention.

She who had sung to me was given a reprieve from the lightning, and I took up my kantele again to speak to her.

“Dive deeply and never rise again,” I told her. “I am so sorry.” Nothing coherent came in reply, just a sense of agony and bewildered betrayal. I berated myself for not concealing us with a seeming, and for not acting more decisively to halt Thor before he could unloose the destruction of the skies upon her. Here was a terrible price to pay for our mutual curiosity. But she was still alive. Perhaps she would live if I prevented the thunder god from attacking further.

He thrashed to the surface, collecting more lightning to his hammer held high above the waves. I targeted him with my voice and sang a song to calm his rage. His remaining goat strained to land the chariot on shore, dragging both his dead companion and the chariot behind him.

I could not see the leviathan anymore, but apparently Thor had some sense of her location, for he struck out with clear intent at a certain swell in the ocean near the entrance to the fjörd, heedless of my song and immune to its spell.

A flare of pain lashed out from the sea and seized my mind, and I staggered backward. Then there was nothing, simply nothing.

After that I needed to sing a song to calm my own rage. The flood of it nearly loosed itself upon him, with no dam to stop it save my will; yet I knew that Thor could stand against that tide if anyone could, and furthermore I knew that I was woefully unprepared to fight him at that time. I had no defense against lightning. Instead, I did what I should have done earlier and cast a seeming over my presence to hide myself from his eyes. As Thor pulled himself through the water with powerful strokes toward the shore, I cast another seeming on my small hut and yet one more on my voice, so that when I spoke next Thor would not know from whence it came.