The Tricking of Freya Read online

  So fear not, Cuz. There's no turning back now. Just reassure me that once you see this last Birdie, this end-of-the-road reckless madwoman, you'll still remember the Birdie of before, a kind of star I had no name for yet fervently revered, the Birdie who enchanted me with kennings, who told me I was named after a goddess, the Birdie who promised to teach me to By.

  Rarely in life are the fateful roads we turn down actual.

  "Askja?" My heart pounded.

  "Askja, Freya min!" Birdie spoke gaily, her eyes shone. The paranoid urgency of the last several hours lifted. Askja, she assured me, guiding Ulfur's jeep down a road better called a dirt track, would shield us. Askja was our light-mother, the volcano that gave birth to us, its steaming crater our own embryonic lagoon. No one on earth would ever look for us there.

  Right you were, Birdie mine.

  Askja Way, rutted like the corrugated tin roof of a decaying Icelandic farmhouse, made the Ring Road seem a velvet ribbon. Soon we were deep into the terrain known as grjot, a black-pebbled wasteland stretching out to the ends of the visible earth. Through the grjot charged a muddy river, whose source was the immense Vatnajokull glacier. Askja Way followed the river's twisted path; what else was it to do? That river was the only sign of life; to leave its side would be suicide; even the road knew that much. Birdie never hesitated, steering the jeep with fierce certainty over ruts that bounced us like jackhammers, impervious to fear. I had no such immunity. I would have preferred apprehension by the authorities and a tidy little prison cell with bars to the anxiety I felt riding unfettered through the reeling grjot, the menacing taunt of flat black deadland and the glowering clouds pressing down on us from above. Marna wouldn't like this. Marna wants me out!

  "This place is creepy," I said out loud. No, that sounded too adolescent. I tried to summon adult reason. "I think we should turn back. We won't be in trouble, Birdie. We'll just say it was a misunderstanding about the jeep. That we thought Ulfur loaned it to us. No one will care." I paused. "This is dangerous, Ingibjorg." I'd never called her Ingibjorg before. I was hoping to sound like Stefan, the most steadfastly rational person we knew. It didn't matter. Birdie had counter-reasons all her own.

  "We can't turn back. She awaits us at Askja."

  "Who?"

  "Freyja."

  I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, as gently as I could, "I'm right here, Birdie. I'm sitting right here next to you."

  Birdie shrieked with laughter, slapped the steering wheel with both palms. "Of course you are, little fool! Do you think I've lost my mind? I refer, dear girl, to Freyja the goddess."

  Worse yet. "Birdie ... she doesn't exist."

  "Slander! Was it not said of Freyja, a full two centuries after the onslaught of Christianity, that she alone of the gods yet lives? That entire marvelous pantheon-Freyja's twin brother, Freyr, hung like a wild ox; brawny Thor, an occasional cross-dresser but man enough to challenge Christ the interloper to a duel; Baldur, son of Odin, fair and beautiful and doomed to die by one of Loki's lowliest tricks; Loki himself, who consorted with giants and demons, who bedded a giantess that bore him three monsters-the Fenris Wolf, the Midgard Serpent, and a daughter named Hel-instigator of Ragnarok and the end of the world; and finally Odin, the All-Father, the One-Eyed God of inspiration who intoxicated men in battle and infused poets with verse-all vanished. True, gods come and gods go, forcibly retired mostly: banished, outlawed, discredited, disgraced. But this was not the End-Time they'd envisioned for themselves, no pitched Armageddon, no wild doomed battle with cataclysmic demonic forces, but instead a pathetically peaceable usurpation by a lone god and his tragic son. Whoosh! An entire pantheon relegated to the grinning void. Except Freyja. She alone of the gods yet lives! Fertility goddesses die hard, my girl. Yes, Freyja awaits us. Mistress of divination, bestow on me your mantic gifts-"

  I interrupt her now, Cousin, because I can. At the time I was helpless, it was not possible to slip a word in edge- or any-wise. She was uninterrupt- ible, she was hemorrhaging words. Hour after mile after hour after mile we bounced and jostled at tortoise speed on rutted track through tortured landscape, and hour after mile after hour after mile Birdie talked on on on. Sometimes I listened, sometimes I managed to block her out, sometimes I could scarcely decipher the gush of words bleeding together in a bewildering mix of English and Icelandic. Thought interrupted thought, idea generated idea, her brain a Big Bang of associations impossible to track.

  Yet she was not stuck in her head. Or rather, she was, she inhabited her mind, but she inhabited the world too. Her senses grew acutely sharp. She noted every rut, every knife-sharp rock, and deftly steered the jeep to avoid them. When we got stuck in a sand pit, Birdie, without missing a beat, without skipping a word, slipped the jeep into neutral, leapt out, and singlehandedly pushed the jeep out of the ditch. I was watching, I saw her. Mania endowed her with physical strength and acuity beyond human. She believed herself godlike and she was. She kept an eye on the sky, on the clouds, the wind, the temperature, the road conditions, talking talking all the while. It is impossible to replicate, Cousin, this state of your mother's. Or at least, I am not up to the task. The fluidity of thought and motion, the concordance and elegance of her speech, the perfect symbiosis of world and mind. A pile of stones on the road could spark a discourse that ranged hundreds of years in mere minutes. Something like this:

  "Cairns," Birdie began, pointing to a tower of rocks out the window, "are called prestar because like priests they point the way but do not follow it. An old Icelandic joke. Ha! Are you aware of the Icelanders' long history of resistance to religious authority, how even as pagans they were for the most part inconstant and opportunist, switching allegiances on a whim? Don't think for a minute they abandoned the old beliefs wholesale when Christianity was announced as the national religion, and Thor's and Odin's men accepted sprinkling with water right there at the Althing in the river Oxara, though some waited until the horse trek homeward when they could dunk themselves in hot springs instead of cold ones. True they built churches and attended them, baptized their babes, but when it came to matters of real import, old ways readily resurfaced. What fool would pray to the new White God before a fishing trip when Thor was still ready to assist? Remnants of lost beliefs persist to this day in transmuted forms, rural superstitions, the old pagan land spirits, the vaetir, transmogrified into folklore's Hidden People. Iceland is a numinous island, is it not? A paradise for pagans, for all who believe that every thing lives and is imbued with spirit. What is the Icelanders' obsessive interest in dreams but a leftover of the Norse practice of seidur, shamanic divination by a seeress. Prophecy, Freya min, is a woman's gift! Write your dreams down. Pay attention. No one rivals your namesake in the art of augury. Our Mistress of Vaticination!" And then glancing out the side window, indicating the entire moonscape before us, she began speculating on the ratio of glaciers to lava deserts. ". . . the primordial nature of Iceland's habitat. What looks like destruction is actually creation. Earth is being thrust up, birthed beneath our feet! Iceland is a baby, Freya, a geological and political infant, the last settled of the European nations, the penultimate holdout against Christianity, dragged a thousand years later kicking and screaming into NATO. Independent people, indeed. Protesters teargassed, nearly blinded. Freyja's eye-rain or eye-hail or eyelid-showers or cheek-storm or eyelash-cascades, all kennings for gold. Gold itself is moving-current sun. Sun-month. So much more poetic, the old names for the twelve months: sun-month, hay-month, harvest-month, slaughter-month, frost-month, ram-month, Thorri, Goi, single-month, cuckoo-month, seed-time, lamb-fold time. Eagles are lamb-enemies. Arm is falcon-perch, ships are surge-horses. Heathens practiced pre-Christian baptismal water rites. Good Lutheran fourteen-year-olds receive confirmation, Freya. You turn fourteen this winter, do you not? I've never seen you on your birthday. Summers only! Your Connecticut winters must pale, my dear. Manitoba boasts colder mean temps than Iceland mean being the operative word, hoary and hoarfrost and hoar. Yes, they called F
reyja a whore! Reviled our Mistress as a she-goat in heat, the gods' own slut and a shameless brother-fucker. Ah, the degradation of fertility cults and dominance of all-father sky deities! Of all my enemies is Ulfur not the worst, cloaked in his Arni Magnusson, rescuer-of-manuscripts holiness? Only in this book-sick ancestor-worshiping nation could a man like Ulfur be revered. Don't forget, the Fenris Wolf is the demon bastard of Loki. I am the true poet of the age, Freya min! Wisdom cannot be stolen, only divined. Look at Odin, hanging from the World Tree, sacrificing himself to himself, self-revealing the mysteries of the runes. Let Ulfur call it eagle shit, Word Meadow is divine divination, I tell you. Odin, I know where your eye is concealed, hidden in the well of Mimir but where are Olafur's letters concealed? Hidden in the well of Askja! Askja means box, caldera, but aska means ashes, box of ashes, ash districts. Ash blew as far as St. Petersburg. Fleers of ash. We descend from those who fled, who bid Iceland good-bye and in some cases good riddance. Did you know that some emigrants refused to speak again of that barren land, never wrote home, reinvented themselves as Canadians and Americans, passed down no stories, only bitter glimpses, `life in Iceland was a living hell,' a distinct lack of nostalgia for wasted lives of near-indentured servitude, nineteenth-century Iceland a semifeudal society, while back in Iceland emigrant became synonymous with traitor? Of course not all newfoundlandlings turned their backs so decisively, many indulged in homeland sickness, misty-eyed longings. Olafur foremost among them. You can only have one mother, one motherland, and so descendants of pioneers invent a New-Iceland-of-the-diaspora, an Iceland-of-the-mind and -memory, a mythic homeland, an oddly old newworld Gimlian golden age-"

  It took a river to shut her up. A tributary of the glacial river drew a line in the sand and dared us to cross it. I was sent to scout the shallowest spot. "Like Saemundur taught us!" Birdie yelled. I cursed Saemundur. Was he the one who made her think she could do this? The odd thing-and I swear I remember this though it seems implausibly impossible, hallucinatory even at the time the river's banks were blanketed with bright pink flowers, lurid as Birdie's salmon coat against the jet-black sand. I blinked my eyes; the pink vision remained. What had Saemundur advised? You just try to judge the most shallow spot, which is often where the river runs widest. The widest point was easiest enough to find-about twenty yards downstream from where Birdie waited in the jeep-and it was calmer, too, a flattened pool compared with upstream's muddy torrent. But what if it contained unexpected depths? The glacial sediment, Saemundur had said, makes it hard to judge. Jeeps and trucks being towed from rivers are not uncommon sights in Iceland. They make for good rescue photos! If our jeep got stuck in this river, there'd be no one to rescue us. So bootless I waded in. Glacial melt instantly flooded my sneakers. Ankle-high, then shin- and knee-deep in ice water. Any deeper than my thigh and we'd be sunk for sure. I glanced upstream and nearly lost my balance and plunged in. Birdie was waving me out of the river. I waved back, motioning her downstream to where I stood. "This is the best place to cross," I announced, climbing into the jeep, hoping it was true. The jeep lurched through wheel-deep, and when we made it to the opposite bank a wildchildish pride surged through me: If Marna could see me now!

  If Mama could see me now she'd fall into another dead faint, that's what she'd do. On the other side I climbed out of the jeep to shed my waterlogged sneakers and jeans, exposed in my underwear for all the world meaning no one in the world-to see. A blast of wind sent me scurrying back into the jeep barefoot. Why does Birdie get to stay dry? She's the driver, the road-story maniac. I shivered and chattered and all Birdie said as she steered the jeep back onto the track was "It's going to rain" and it did. Fat wet plops blurring the windshield. I closed my eyes and when I finally opened them again the rain had stopped and the jeep had stopped and we were staring at an oasis. A gigantic patch of desert-defying green stuff.

  "Rises the earth out of the foam, fair and green," Birdie intoned, quoting Voluspa, and for the first time in hours what she said made perfect sense.

  Life is persistent, I'll say that for it. Where nothing should grow sprang some of the richest vegetation I'd seen in Iceland, against the backdrop of the magnificent table mountain Herdubreid, shaped like a birthday cake with ice cap icing. We sat awestruck in the jeep, Birdie reciting the last stanzas of Voluspa by heart.

  "I'm hungry," I said finally, but Birdie of course could not hear me, lost in the currents of her verbal spew. "I'm starving!" I shouted.

  That she heard. And stared at me as if I were insane. "No need to yell, elskan. There's food in the back, help yourself."

  Food indeed: an entire shopping bag full of licorice. Twenty-some packages of multiple varieties: salty, super salty, and sweet. Why? I didn't have to ask. The answer was clearly printed on each package: Freyja brand. With a black cat logo. Was this Birdie's idea of a joke? I was far too old by then any remnants of my child status were rapidly vanishing-to think candy for dinner either funny or fun. But there was nothing to say, or rather, no one who would listen. So I sat in the jeep sucking salty mouth-puckering licorice while Birdie surveyed the oasis on foot, a tall blond flash of salmon pink weaving through tall green grasses.

  Singing woke me from a sitting sleep, a haunting melody, Birdie serenading me outside the jeep window. Ride, ride and follow over the sand ... the outlaws of the Odadahraun are herding sheep ... "I've found it, Freya rnin, Fjalla-Eyvindur's hideout, his very shelter, one of the greatest outlaws of all time, sheep rustler, Icelandic Robin Hood, folk hero who survived here in this very hut through the horrendous winter of 1774 on angelica root and raw horse meat-"

  I would say it was the most miserable night of my life except the next was far worse. To call it cold would not do it justice; assume from here on the meanest of temps. Birdie and I in a cramped stone hut huddled in sleeping bags sucking licorice. The little I slept I dreamt, not unreasonably, that I was back in the ice cave, hearing Saemundur's name as I shouted it echoing off the frozen walls unanswered.

  Signs awaited us come morning: antler and sand.

  I woke alone, stiff and hungry with a licorice-thick fuzz coating my mouth, my clammy sneakers oozing glacial silt. Outside the hut it was a sunny day bit by razor-sharp wind. I found Birdie kneeling on the blackened bank of the river, holding something in her hand. A single enormous reindeer antler. Artfully sculpted. Freyja left us this sign, elskan. See the shape of Fehu, rune of Freyja and Frey; Fehu the first letter of the Runic alphabet, now we learn our ABC's, good pagans knew their futhark: Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kenaz. She is near, elskan. She is near.

  I left Birdie scratching rune shapes with the antler tip in the riverbank's black sand. I knew we had to get out, turn back, and it was up to me to make this happen. I squatted in the grass to pee, filled the plastic water jug from a spring, rolled up our sleeping bags, and tossed them into the jeep. By this time the wind had picked up and as I took Birdie by the hand and led her to the jeep, still clutching the antler, we got slammed by a wall of sand. It swirled so thick we couldn't see, could only run toward the dark shape of the jeep, arms covering our faces. The jeep was a haven but a stationary one. There was no going anywhere, even Birdie could see that. Curtains of sand blew over us, spattering the windows, a weird desert blizzard that trapped us for an hour or more. For once Birdie wasn't talky. She fell into a deep, almost catatonic, silence, head slumped on the steering wheel. Wouldn't answer when I spoke, wouldn't move when I shook her. What if she was slipping into a coma? When she finally spoke her words came slowly, heavy as stones.

  "We're doomed, Freya min. Doomed."

  "Then let's turn back."

  "Impossible," she declared, after another long silence. You see, the doom she referred to was not our own, hers and mine, but the world's. Slowly, as if she were only just learning to speak, she explained it to me. Ulfur was a sign. The second coming of the Wolf who will swallow the sun as the volva foresaw. Only Birdie had the power to forestall the end. But she needed instruction. Freyja would tell us wh
at to do. She alone of the gods yet lives. And Freyja was at Askja. We were stuck in the jeep while the doom of the world was unfolding! Excitement crept into Birdie's voice again, she brushed a tangle of hair from her eyes, the sand died down, and she was steering us back onto that rutted wretch of a road, Askja Way. As we drove, the river turned rougher, foaming and surging through banks of dark lava. We were nearing its source, the Vatnajokull glacier. Then the road veered sharply west and we left the river behind us. Now there was nothing between us and Askja, nothing but the Odadahraun: Burnt Land of Evil Deeds, in the old days a desolate refuge for criminals outlawed to the interior of Iceland, the most expansive lava flow on the island, training ground for astronauts.

  "Astronauts?" I interrupted, and for once she heard me, spared a moment to explain.

  "It's true, Freya win! I kid you not. NASA stationed them here in the Odadahraun to train for the moonwalk in 'sixty-eight. It's the most moonlike spot on the planet."

  For a time she was silent, navigating the jeep over the treacherous mounds of lava just as Saemundur had trained her.

  The road to Askja ended in snowdrifts. Not a problem, Birdie declared. We would ascend the crater on foot. She turned off the jeep calmly, then began preparing herself. First she belted the salmon pink coat tightly around her waist, then reached in the back of the jeep and pulled out the animal skins she'd stolen from the farm. One mink she wrapped around her neck; the other she slung from her belt. The large one, a sealskin, she draped over her shoulders like a cloak. Cat fur would be best, she explained. But Freyja will understand. Everyone has to improvise. We trudged up a long rocky slope. I carried the water jug and Birdie carried the antler high in the air like a torch, though we had no need of one: the sun sparkled and the sky was mocking blue. A fierce cheer. Wind knifed us in the back as we climbed, I stumbled again and again in my slushy sneakers over the loose rubble. And still Birdie talked. Her delusions gradually took on a clarity for me. Your mother, Cousin, believed she was the next volva, a prophet, a seeress, chosen by Freyja herself to deliver to Iceland, to the world, the next fateful prophecy.