Ghost Story
On the western coast of Asgard, on the shores of the sea that marks its border with Vanaheim, stood the palace of Sokkvabek. It began as the most lovely of all Asgard’s halls, with the possible exception of Odin’s Gladsheim and Valaskjalf. Built on Frigga’s orders for the sole purpose of being a seaside retreat, a pleasure palace for herself and her ladies, it was like a dazzling gem at the water’s edge, its pale white woods and gleaming white stone glittering in the sun and reflecting the shifting light of the waves. Standing right at the edge of the surf, its wide, airy rooms were filled night and day with the sound and smell of the sea. No luxury that a lady might want had been overlooked: there was a great circular mead hall with a central fire pit and cushioned benches—although the ladies gathered there for weaving, spinning, needlework, and general conversation as often as they did to feast and drink, a well-equipped kitchen with a great cauldron and a spit for cooking, a heated and perfumed bath that was big enough to swim in (although plenty of swimming took place in the ocean as well), and sumptuous bedchambers for each of the handmaidens, with Frigga’s the grandest and most elegant of all. Along the entire back of the hall ran a great porch that jutted out over the sea, and at the edge of this porch the ladies loved to sit, dangling their bare feet into the water as they worked on their sewing and knitting or sipped drinks and talked.
No men were permitted in Sokkvabek; it was the exclusive province of Frigga and the women she loved best: her sister Fulla, her messenger Gna, Gefion, Syn the door-warder and Hlin the protectress, Sofyn and Lofyn, Vor and Var, and Snotra the mistress of etiquette. They all came to Sokkvabbek to be free for a time (and to an extent) of the greater demands placed on them while at Fensalir, Frigga’s main hall which was often crowded with petitioners. Eir, physician to the gods as well as one of Odin’s valkyries, sometimes joined them in their retreats, although just as often duty kept her away.
Constructed as it was on the waters edge and on the outskirts of Frigga’s fenlands, it was considered a marvel of Aesir engineering as well as a testament to Frigga’s magic that Sokkvabek neither sank into the marshes nor was overcome by the waves and submerged into the sea. For years, it stood solid and habitable, its shining white walls washed by the waves, its rooms ringing with the bright laughter of goddesses. It was as unassailable a fortress, in its own way, as Valhalla itself.
And then the unthinkable happened. Sokvabbek began to sink.
At first, it was barely noticeable; the porch seemed to jilt a bit farther out into the sea than it had before, and some of the ladies fancied that their legs now vanished into the water nearly up to the knees, where before they had only been covered to just above the ankles. But day by day, it became more and more obvious that the great hall was slipping away from the marshy shoreline and sinking into the sea. Before long the water level reached the porch itself, and waves began to wash over its surface. Reluctantly, the ladies gave up sitting there and withdrew indoors, although they refused to consider abandoning the hall altogether. “This will stop,” they told one another reassuringly; “the Queen will put an end to it, and the porch will be reclaimed.”
But try as Frigga might, she seemed unable to halt the steady advance of the waters, and no help from her handmaidens availed—not Syn’s warding of the hall’s boundaries, nor Hlin’s protective spells. Var’s scrying to uncover the source of the problem or some solution to it likewise proved useless. Within a month, the water level had nearly reached the top of the door leading onto the porch. The porch was now completely inaccessible, and the waves slapped against the windows at the back of the hall. Another week, and those same windows were completely underwater. Where before they had looked out over sunlight sparkling on the waves, now they were portals into an underwater world of green murk and eerie shifting lights, with the occasional fish flitting by as if to mock them. Other areas of the palace began to be affected; the women noticed that the floor in the meadhall was beginning to slope seaward, and one could not set down a ball of yarn without having it roll off the table, or a goblet without having it slide towards the sea. Nor was the sea content with having claimed the western portion of the hall; as the days went on, the water level continued to rise, until all but the easternmost rooms of Sokkvabek—the rooms closest to the shore—were completely underwater. Finally, the waves began to wash around the entranceway itself, so that one had to wade in up to the ankles in order to enter, and only the easternmost side of the gabled roof was visible above the water while the rest of the palace vanished beneath the waves.
Miraculously, the water did not seep inside and fill the interior of the hall; some force—the same force, perhaps, that was pulling it into the sea—kept the hall watertight. But although the inside stayed dry, everything else about it changed. Gone were the wide rooms filled with sunshine and the fresh scent of salted air; now those same rooms were redolent of the brackish smell of brine and lit only by the eldritch flickering light of the sun shining wanly down through the waves. Everything in Sokkvabek—previously so white and pale and sparkling—began to take on a greenish, sickly tinge, like bronze aged by the elements. The warm sea breezes that had filled the rooms were replaced by a damp chill that seemed to penetrate right through to the bones. And the mood changed as well; rooms that had been bright with laughter and gaiety were now shrouded in somber, oppressive silence and fearful anticipation. A heavy, ominous presence seemed to have taken up residence in the hall, a presence that was alien, openly hostile to the other inhabitants, and growing stronger with every passing day. At night, the women sat huddled together in the meadhall speaking in hushed tones of the things they had heard and seen: footsteps in the now-abandoned rooms at the western end of Sokkvabek; the eerie and heartrending sound of a woman weeping in the dead of night; and, once or twice, the shadowy apparition of a beautiful woman in grey that vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Things began to go missing: a necklace belonging to Frigga, Fulla’s comb, a golden goblet. Several of the women could not sleep at all, and a few were having nightmares. Reluctantly, they began to talk of abandoning the hall altogether. “The place is haunted,” they whispered to one another, and each of them was convinced of it, even though such a thing had never been seen or heard of in Asgard before. What ghost would dare to invade the garth of the gods and take up residence in a hall belonging to the Queen of Asgard herself? What spirit could have overcome or evaded all of Frigga’s wards and the magic of her handmaidens, not to mention Odin’s sorcery and the wards protecting the perimeter of Asgard itself, in order to accomplish such a thing? “It isn’t possible,” the women repeated to one another, as if saying it would make it so. And yet, it was happening.
The breaking point finally came late one night when Frigga decided to make one last-ditch effort to reclaim the hall for her own. She summoned her women to the meadhall and bid them gather around the dwindling hearthfire. Words were spoken, words of command, words befitting Asgard’s queen. She made it clear to whatever spirit had invaded her hall that this place belonged to her and that she was prepared to defend it, by force if necessary. She called on the power of the land itself and the power of her husband to support her, and commanded the unwanted presence to depart, declaring it cast out of Sokkvabek and out of Asgard, back to whatever dark pit of Helheim it had arisen from. Her voice was calm and forceful, commanding, and her hands shook only a little as she took a handful of herbs she had prepared from a pouch at her waist and tossed it onto the fire. The little pile of herbs landed on the dying embers and sat there for a moment while her women collectively held their breath. And then, something in the air itself seemed to change, to shift; there was an electrical quality to the room’s atmosphere, not unlike the feeling before the onset of a storm. Instead of smoldering on the embers before releasing a gentle plume of fragrant smoke, the herbs sizzled and sparked for a moment, and then gave a sudden and explosive pop. With an angry hiss, tongues of flame shot up, rising almost to the ceiling. It was as if a flammable oil had been thrown into the fire instead of a handful of herbs, The women gasped and backed away from the hearth, their hair and eyelashes singed. Only Frigga stood her ground, waiting, sensing that it wasn’t over yet. And then the flames shrank and coalesced, forming a shape that grew more and more recognizable and solid as the horrified women watched. It was a great dragon, rising out of the flames, its monstrous batlike wings unfurling at its back, its spiked tail coiled sinuously about its serpentine body. They gaped at it, disbelieving. It ignored the rest of them and directed its glare at Frigga, a palpable hatred radiating from its baleful yellow eyes. And then the dragon opened its mouth and roared deafeningly, and flames spurted out towards the Queen of Asgard. Screaming, she and her women fled the hall, leaving it to whatever demon had claimed it.
Of course, it was only a matter of minutes before Odin heard of this. He was poring over an especially difficult book of ancient Jotun lore when a hysterical Frigga stormed into his private study at Gladsheim, her ladies trailing behind her like confused ducklings. Her hair, usually perfectly coifed, was wild and singed, her normally pristine clothing blackened with soot and scorch marks, her carefully made-up face lobster red as if she had suffered radiation burns (which she had, although Eir soon took care of these). With an effort, Odin suppressed a smirk of amusement at this aberrant sight, and calmly asked what he could do for her. For the next hour, he listened calmly as Frigga ranted and stormed and seethed about sinking palaces and dragons and demons and ghosts, as her handmaidens, who seemed to be in shock themselves, looked on dazedly. Finally, her fury exhausted itself. Assuring her calmly that he would look into the situation, he saw them out. At no time did he give any indication, any clue, that he was in the least bit alarmed or perturbed by anything he had heard.
But no sooner had they gone than he began to pace the room, agitated, hands clasped beneath his chin with his index fingers resting against his lips. It couldn’t be, he told himself repeatedly. He didn’t dare to believe it. And yet, what other explanation could there be? He knew, intimately, all of the wards that protected the boundaries of Asgard, that kept out unseen and unholy wights; he knew because he had placed most of them himself, and the ones he had not placed himself were the work of the landwights, secured by the blood of his son. The wards had never been known to fail, nor did he think that was even remotely possible. Asgard’s halls did not become haunted, not ever, because all wights and spirits who did not belong here, who had neither a tie to any of the Aesir nor an invitation to enter their garth, were specifically forbidden and barred. Which meant that the “invader” had to be someone who belonged here, who had a claim to this place, a claim so powerful that it could not be deterred by the wards or shaken by Frigga’s attempts to repel it. It also had to be, clearly, someone who had no cause to love Frigga. That left only one possibility. And the apparition of the dragon only confirmed it. Although he had never seen her take that form herself, she had told him, during their all-too-brief time together, that it was an ability she had, one she shared with certain other talented kinfolk in the bloodline of Surt.
When he left Gladsheim, he took with him no weapons or sorcerous implements of any kind, no banishing or protective charms. They would not be needed.
It took him only minutes to reach Sokkvabek—or the place where it had stood. Now only a sliver of the eastern roof remained above the waves, and the water had almost completely swallowed up the entrance. Yet when he struggled through the water and pulled hard on the handles of the front doors, they gave way easily enough. Strangely, no water rushed into the hall when the doors were opened; it was as if a thin, clear membrane had been stretched across the entrance, an invisible seal that kept the water at bay. Tentatively, he touched the membrane and then passed his hand through it. His fingers met dry air, and the membrane remained whole and undamaged. He stepped through into the dry entranceway, and looked behind him. A clear sheet of water filled the doorway, glasslike, the seal keeping it out of the hall. Shaking the water from his hair and clothing as best he could, he shut the doors behind him and proceeded into the murky interior of the hall.
Having never been in Sokkvabek before, he could not appreciate the changes to it as well as the women could, and yet he felt certain they must have been drastic; Frigga would never have designed a palace this somber and filled with gloom. And yet, there was something about the place that appealed to him more now than he suspected the bright, sparkling pleasure palace it had been would have. There was a deep sense of peace in the feeling of being surrounded and enclosed by the waters, in the muted green cast of the rooms and the flickering watery shadows that danced across the walls. The floor sloped steadily downward as he walked, making his way through dim hallways lit with feeble wall sconces until he reached the heart of the palace, the meadhall. And there he stopped, suddenly overcome by a sense of presence so powerful that for a few moments he could not continue.
He was sure of it now. She was here. He realized now why he felt so welcomed here, so at peace, so much at home, even: this entire place was steeped in her presence, and especially this meadhall. And yet, something was wrong, something was off. She was both here and not here, both the same and changed. He peered into the shadows of the meadhall, wishing he had brought a lantern; the only light in the room came from the dying red embers of the hearth. And yet there, sitting near the hearth, was a solitary figure, shrouded in grey, long auburn-gold hair spilling over her shoulders as she wept into her hands.
He stepped into the room, not daring to believe, almost not daring to go any closer, knowing that at any moment she would vanish, a phantom of his wishful imagination. Yet she neither vanished nor moved. Finally he stood above her, and still she showed no sign that she knew he was there; she simply continued to sob, unbearably. He reached out to place a hand on her shoulder—and it passed through her uselessly, meeting nothing but air. He let out a frustrated growl, and she gasped and looked up at him, her green eyes wide and frightened for a moment before recognition crept into them. He sighed; he could not touch her, perhaps, but at least she knew him.
She relaxed a little, and smiled, her eyes shining. “Odin,” she said, and he thought his heart would break at the sound of his name on her lips, the way her voice caressed each syllable. “We wondered when you would come.”
We? He stared at her, perplexed. Something was wrong, besides the obvious fact that she was an immaterial ghost. Something was different. What? “Gunnlod,” he murmured, reaching to touch her hair, having already forgotten that he could not.
She gazed up at him, and the frustrated longing he felt was mirrored in her own eyes. “Yes,” she said. Her smile widened, and then faltered suddenly, as if she were confused. “And…no.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
She shook her head slowly. “Neither do I.” She rose from her bench so that they stood face-to-face, although he was still taller, and his mind flashed back to the day they had met, the first time he had looked down into the green depths of those eyes, long ago and in a very different hall. He remembered how he had wanted her from the first moment he saw her, how he had given in to that yearning and pulled her against him, remembered the feel of her body, its inviting softness, its curves, against the hardness of his own. His whole body ached for her now, ached to possess her, to feel her beneath him. His hands trembled and clenched at his sides as he resisted reaching for her, knowing it would do no good.
She smiled at him, her eyes wide and luminous, and ran her tongue over her lips. “How she wants you to hold her, as you did that day,” she said, her voice breathless and smoky with lust. “How she wants to feel your lips on hers, your hands on her body…She has waited so long, so long…Oh, Odin…” And then she shook her head violently as if to clear it, her hands clutching at her own hair. “No, no…” And she began to sob again.
Forgetting, he reached for her. “Gunnlod?”
“No!” She looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “I have her memories, her feelings, her ability to look into the present and the past…” She stared as if at something far away as her lips moved, struggling for words, straining to grasp at some elusive concept. “But…I’m not her.”
“But you are,” he insisted. “You look like her, you speak like her, and you’ve said you have her memories. How could you not be her—I mean, yourself?” He realized how pathetically childish he sounded, but it wasn’t fair, after all these countless ages of waiting, of searching, to have her standing there before him and be denied, to think he had finally gotten her back only to be told that he hadn’t, really. “You are Gunnlod, my wife, my rightful queen. You must be; otherwise, you would not have been able to come here.”
She shook her head, biting her lip. “No…I have her memories, but I am not her. I am only a part of her, a residue. Her thoughts, her memories, given the form she once wore…A revenant.” Her gaze wandered again and she followed it, meandering around the room as if she had never seen it before. Her fingers touched and passed through an overturned golden goblet, a discarded ball of yarn. She spoke slowly, dreamily. “She remembers a household of giants that sheltered and fed her in times gone by, before you came to her. Nine worlds she knows, nine worlds within the great tree Yggdrasil. She sees far, and farther still. She knows all of your secrets, Odin. She knows where you have hidden your eye, how Mimir drinks his mead each morning from Valfather’s pledge.” Then she stopped and looked up at him suddenly. “She loves you so much, so much…and she has waited so long, all alone, wanting you, yearning for you. Her love for you is stronger than your enchantments, your wards. It was her love that pulled us here, so that some part of her could be with you, so that…” She stopped, a shudder passing through her, and looked over towards the glowing embers of the hearth, and then back at him. Her lip trembled. “I didn’t mean to scare them.”
“My wife, I know.” He took a step towards her. “It is all right; there is no need to be concerned about them. They will recover—even Frigga. It is mostly her pride that was hurt.”
A smile crept onto her lips again, only this time it was not a very pleasant smile. She glanced sidelong at him, and he saw the dragon in her eyes, the fire giantess. Instead of alarming him, it gave him hope. Perhaps her mind was unstable and fractured, perhaps even her soul was still splintered and divided after having been shattered by Soul Flayer so many ages ago, but if she could look like that, there was hope. There was hope that she could heal and be whole, that she could truly return to him someday. He clutched it and clung to it. But now she was speaking again, her voice low with malice and hissing like flame. “She looks like us, your proud queen. Is that why you chose her, Odin?”
He sighed. “Not exactly.” At least, he did not think so. But he had to admit there was a resemblance, nonetheless, a strong enough one that he had often wondered at his mother’s selection of Frigga as well as his own acceptance of her. “Bestla chose Frigga for me, my heart, and I agreed to marry her only because I had found no trace of you after many years of searching, and the land needed a queen. But my vows to you still stand. You would not have been able to come here if they did not.”
She gazed around her at the timbered ceiling, at the embroidered wall hangings. One of them was an artful rendering of Frigga crowned and enthroned as queen and surrounded by her maidens. She wandered over to it, lifting a hand to trace the intricate stitches. “We wanted to take something from her, from your proud queen…because she took what belonged to us, took our place at your side. The keys she wears at her belt, your queen, they should have been ours. This palace should have been ours…so we took it. We took it. Our uncle Aegir, he helped us suck it into the sea, under the waves. But it’s no good, no good…She still has everything that matters, your queen. She still has you.” The last word came out as a snarl, and in a sudden fury she clawed at the tapestry frenziedly, as if she wanted to rip it to shreds. Her fingers passed through it without harm, and after a while she collapsed against it, weeping in frustration. He stepped closer, cautiously. A violent tremble shook her and she raised her head, looking around at the room as if once again seeing it for the first time. Her eyes flew to his. “Will you let us stay? Please?” All traces of the dragoness were gone; now she was plaintive, childlike. “We won’t make any more of a mess, and your queen has other palaces to keep her occupied. She won’t mind if we keep this one, will she?”
“Stop calling her my queen,” he said, fighting to keep his voice gentle. His arms ached to hold her, to soothe her. He took another step closer. “You are my queen. And your place is not here, in this sunken ruin, but at my side in Gladsheim and in Valaskjalf.”
She shook her head, her gaze suddenly clearing and becoming more lucid again. “No. I am a ghost. See?” She reached out as if to caress his face, and her hand passed through him without even the faint chill of a breeze. “We are less material than she was when you last met her, in Hela’s kingdom—although we also have more power than she did then, in certain ways. Only part of her is here, only part of her…but that part of her wants to stay here, with you. Will you let her? She sees far, farther than she ever has before. She remembers much, about her people, about yours, about the days before counted time. She can tell you things, secrets about the past, about the future, stories no one has ever heard. Will you let us stay?”
The suggestion that she thought she had to somehow barter for her presence here was too much to bear, on top of everything else. “Will I let you? My wife, you are the joy of my existence. From the very first moment I laid eyes on you, all those ages ago, you have had my heart. The hope that I would someday have you by my side again—in whatever guise or whatever form…With all that I have been through, all the trials and sacrifices I have endured, I could not have survived without that. You need not offer me anything in return for being welcomed here; you belong here, in Asgard, with me.” He felt tears sting his eyes. “I, Odin, am begging you: please stay.”
She gave him a tremulous smile, and then glanced around at the greenish shadows, looking suddenly worried. “But this is her place; it belongs to your queen and her women, and they don’t want me here. They will come back, they will try to force me to leave again.”
He shook his head. “They will not. This is your place now, my heart, and from this day forward only you will decide who may come or go here. Only you, I swear it.” He smiled for her through his tears. “But if you will have me, I will come here every day and spend as much time with you as I can. We will sit together, here by the hearth, and drink and talk as we did in those days long ago when we first met. And I will bring the Mead here, and you will be its guardian once again, for me.”
She smiled radiantly and stepped closer to him, gazing up at him with wide and adoring eyes as if drinking in and memorizing every line, every plane of his face. “Yes.” She lifted a hand to trace the tears running down his cheeks, her index finger hovering just the barest fraction of an inch above his skin so that he almost—almost—fancied he could feel her touch. “Yes.” She leaned closer to him, touching—or almost touching—her lips to his. Again he almost fancied he felt something, some whisper of her lips against his own, and he smiled. Perhaps they could not touch each other in truth, but with a little imagination…there were possibilities to be explored, things to sustain them until the time when she could return to him completely.
“My Gunnlod,” he said, lost in the bliss of her nearness. But once again she shook her head.
“No. I have told you, I am not her. I am both less than what she was, and more, and I am far less than what she someday will be. You have given me this palace. Now you must also give me a new name.”
When he returned to Gladsheim hours later, he fully expected to find Frigga waiting there for an explanation, an accounting of what had happened and what he intended to do to reclaim Sokkvabek. He was not disappointed. Having changed into her usual pristine attire, with her hair flawlessly arrayed and her face once again unblemished and perfectly made-up, she was sitting in his private study, surrounded by a handful of her maidens. She looked up expectantly as he entered, still dripping wet and chilly from his visit to the sunken hall. He poured himself a glass of mead and called for his servants to bring towels and a change of clothing before calmly telling her that Sokkvabek could not and would not be reclaimed. Ignoring her protests and the disbelieving stares of the handmaidens, he went on to explain that a new goddess had taken a liking to the place and decided to claim it for her own, a goddess who was kin to Aegir and Ran. To insist on driving her out would be an unbearable insult to their allies, one that he dare not risk. His tone firm but reasonable, brooking no argument and yet at the same time making it impossible for any rational being to disagree with what he was saying, he suggested that it would be far better for Frigga, as the gracious queen she was, to swallow this insult to her pride and choose another place in Asgard to vacation with her ladies, rather than risk damaging their relationship with Aegir’s kingdom—did she not agree? Frigga’s eyes narrowed with envy as she asked who this new goddess was who was suddenly so important that she must command such consideration from everyone.
He smiled and paused before answering, aware of her suspicions, savoring his ability to evade them. “Saga,” he said at last. “Saga is her name.”
In the end, as he had known and intended, Frigga had no choice but to agree: Sokkvabek belonged to Saga now, and she and her maidens would stay away.
Just off the western coast of Asgard, a sliver of its roof barely visible above the waves that long ago claimed it, stands the sunken palace of Sokkvabek. It began as the most lovely of all Asgard’s halls, with the possible exception of Odin’s Gladsheim and Valaskjalf, but it would come to be treasured even more than either of those palaces by Asgard’s king. Built as a seaside retreat for Frigga and her ladies, it became a retreat of a very different kind—an underwater refuge for a goddess of mysterious origins whose vision penetrates deeper than the depths of the sea. Long ago, it was whispered by some that Sokkvabek was haunted by a demoness who could take the form of a dragon, that the sound of a woman crying could be heard there in the empty rooms in the dead of night, and that it was a place where no living soul could dwell in peace. But those whispers have long since been forgotten, lost to the mists of time, and even Frigga and her maidens now speak of the goddess who has become Odin’s most trusted advisor graciously, as if she had always been one of their own. Some say that the currents from Mimir’s well flow through the waters around Sokkvabek, so wise and all-seeing is the lady who dwells there. Washed by the waves, its chill, gloomy chambers are filled night and day with the brackish smell of the ocean’s depths and the eldritch greenish light of the shifting waters, but they are more comforting and inviting to the King of the Aesir than any sparkling pleasure palace could ever be. Every day, Odin walks through those murk-filled rooms to sit by the hearth with Saga, and drink with her from golden cups as they speak of the future and the past, of what has been and what will be. And as he drinks with her and gazes on the form of one long lost to him and long remembered, and listens to the voice he had for countless ages heard only in his memory and in troubled dreams, the heart of the High One for a time knows peace.
- Gunnlod-Hjarta
© 2008
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