Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (53 page)

1. Abyss

With the Great Host of Asgard I stand, ready
for battle. To my left and right are peerless Einherjar, mighty
Valkyriar, and every man and woman of the Aesir and Vanir capable
of wielding ax, spear, or sword. Leading us is Tyr, son of the
All-Father Odinn. Two more Odinnsons stand among us. A fourth has
fallen already to our innumerable, world-devouring foe.

It will devour this world next, should our
Host fail. We know not from whence our enemy came. It knows no
reason, no purpose but the annihilation of life, and its onslaught
has made allies of the bitterest foes. Within the ranks of the
Great Host this day are towering frost giants and the undead
thralls of the exiled sorceress Hel, forces more accustomed to
challenging Odinn's rule than heeding it. My own people stand with
the Host, too, wanderers between worlds, mistrusted Interlopers in
these eight realms. Of all who were summoned this day, only the
fighters of Svartalfheim have declined to take the field. The sons
of Odinn have sworn that once the threat is past, they shall be
made to pay for their refusal.

If the threat passes, and if any sons
of Odinn survive it. If Odinn himself survives. Those things are
hardly certain. For I have drunk of the Well of Mimir, and its
waters granted me four visions of the future. One thus far has come
to pass. Three remain. The worst of them.

It was not always thus. I was not always
sworn to serve Odinn and Asgard. A short while ago, I had not yet
heard of Baldr or Tyr, of Freya or Loki, for I was not born of
their folk, the Aesir and the Vanir. Two lives have I lived, in two
worlds. My second life has brought me here, to a battle which may
be the last this world ever knows, its Ragnarok.

It was a short while ago, but seems an age,
that I had sight in both of my eyes. I did not know at the time of
my second birth in a place called Hades that my name was Thamoth. I
had no name then, no past, no inkling of who I was or what path I
would tread.

***

My first breath sends fire down my veins.
Muscles tighten inside the limbs of a body I did not know until
this moment that I possessed. The pain drags me up from an abyss of
nothingness into—what?

I know not.

Pain fades, body remains. Owning flesh is
familiar, yet there is something alien about the arms and legs and
head that seem not to have been mine until mere heartbeats ago.

Mind is just as new as body. But I do have
thoughts, and I sense that I am not new to thinking. I just have
not done it lately. Long ago, perhaps, before—

Sleep? Oblivion? Something must lie beyond
that abyss from which I came. But my freshly functioning  mind
cannot delve deeply enough to retrieve from it so much as a broken
shard of memory.

I know I must have a name, but it is lost
somewhere in that pit from which I came.

I know I must have a home, but I cannot
think what it is called or what it looks like.

I have a mouth. Warm, heavy breaths rush
past its dry lower lip. If I tried, I think I could speak. I know
words.

One stands out from all
others. 
Wellspring
.

It causes my newly started heart to skip a
beat, though I cannot guess why. Is this my first memory?

The other words which fill my head are
different somehow. Their forms, their sounds, are alien, yet I
grasp their meanings anyway. A vague sense tells me that these
other words did not arise with me from the abyss. Here, at the
surface, wherever here is, the words of an unfamiliar language
waited, embedded in the tongue that goes with these unknown limbs,
this flesh and blood and bone and breath that are mine and yet not
mine.

I have eyes. I open them.

The red surface before me teems with dark,
flitting shapes. I lie on my back, and the shapes are shadows set
to dancing by the flickering red light cast on an irregular
surface. Rock. I remember that I have a head and that heads are
attached to necks which can be turned left and right. I employ that
function to take in more of this place where my body finds
itself.

I am not alone. Just beyond what I may now
conceive as arm's reach, I see another man. The harsh red glare
lights his profile as he sleeps serenely with arms by his sides. On
my other side the same sight is repeated. All around me lie the
dark, still forms of men, all similarly dressed, with arms and legs
bare and torsos covered by dark armor, feet clad in high-laced
sandals.

I do not know my name or where I have come
from, but I gather based on their garb that these men are warriors.
Reason, which I also find I possess, tells me that if I have
awakened among warriors, I must likewise be one. Such conjecture
fails to ring either true or false. I do not know myself.

I lift my head a little, finding it heavy,
and see that the red light is cast by torches bracketed to the
distant walls of a large cavern. Their flames are not the color I
think fire should be, though I may be wrong. Over their hissing I
hear another sound which I recognize as the echoing footfalls of
someone moving toward me. Newborn instinct compels me to spring up
and defend myself, but I am not yet capable. My new limbs are
leaden.

A red-lit figure enters my field of vision,
towering over me. I angle my eyes to look up at the arrival
and  find it to be a man similar in appearance to those lying
inert around me. He crouches, putting his face over mine, and his
upside-down smile suggests that he is pleased.

He sets a hand on my chest. I see it rather
than feel it, since like him and all the rest, I wear a stiff
breastplate.

"Welcome," he says. He whispers it, but the
cavern turns it to a shout.

The spoken word sounds oddly foreign to me,
but I understand it. After licking my lips and drawing fresh
breath, I am able to answer.

"To where?" I return in the same tongue as
he.

His smile fades. "A cave. Full of dead
people. And a witch." He points. "We are not to disturb her."

The strangeness of his answer imbues me with
the strength to sit up—almost. My new companion quickly slides an
arm under my back and lends welcome assistance. Looking in the
direction he pointed, past a dozen irregularly-spaced sleeping
warriors, I see a woman sitting in a red-lit alcove. She is naked,
her bare skin decorated with the finely painted characters of some
arcane script. She kneels and gently sways, head lolling back and
forth. Now and then her body jerks violently, as though a hot ember
has landed on some part of her.

A second ago, I might have asked my
companion how he knew she was a witch, but having seen her myself,
there is no need; I would have guessed. I also would not dream of
disturbing her, with or without his warning.

Something else my companion has said piques
my more immediate interest.

"Dead?" I ask. I turn my gaze back to the
cavern floor around us and know instantly that he is right. These
men and a few women around me are not just sleeping.

He nods grimly. "One by one, we return to
life." I surmise from his tone that he is only slightly less
mystified by the occurrence than I. "I say 
return
,
but..." He hesitates, mouth twisting in thought.

Guessing the cause of his hesitation, I
finish for him: "These bodies are not our own."

My companion's eyes, pink in the unnatural
firelight, suggest I have stolen his thought. "We all felt
thus."

I accept the hand he offers to help me rise
and take another look around the cavern at the warrior-corpses on
the floor. All lie on their backs, heads facing a common direction,
arms straight by their sides. Someone has deliberately laid
them—
us
—out. There are more than twenty bodies at present,
but large swaths of empty space suggest there were at one time many
more.

I draw the conclusion that the missing
bodies already have risen and are the others to which my companion
refers.

"Where did the rest go?" I ask.

He brings my attention to a dark spot at one
end of the cavern. "The tunnel. I am to wait for four of you to
rise. You are the second. When we number five, four will leave
while the last remains here to greet the next batch of four, as I
have done."

"Second?" My eyes sweep the chamber, but the
only other presence to catch my eye is that of the witch, who
frightens me and thus does not long hold my gaze. She is lost in
her trance, and I wish it to remain that way. I see nothing else of
note, but the cavern is large and its walls alive with pulsing
shadows capable of hiding much.

"This way." My companion leads me toward the
tunnel mouth. "I don't suppose you have a name," he  asks as
we pick our way over and between corpses. His hopeless tone tells
me what answer he expects.

"No," I tell him, fulfilling
expectation.

"None of us did. One man knew a few words in
some other language than this one we seem inclined to speak.
Another had visions of the sea."

"I know such a word," I inform him, proudly.
It is a stupid thing to be proud of. "
Wellspring
. Does it
have meaning to you?"

He ponders for the space of a few steps. "I
understand it," he concludes. "A place to get water. Does it mean
more to you?"

"I know not," I admit. "I suppose it
must."

We reach a boulder not far from the black
tunnel mouth. There, in its shadow, sits a figure clad as we are,
in armor. Its back is against the big rock, greave-shielded shins
drawn up beneath a pensively drooping chin. The chin is delicate,
as are the limbs. A female.

She looks up, our eyes meet, and I freeze.
Even in the faint crimson glow, and even in these bodies which are
not our own, I know her.

Syllables form on my tongue. I cannot resist
speaking them.

"
Ayessa
." The sound fills the
cavern.

Like all the dead I have seen, she is
physically beautiful. Her hair, which is tied back, is of some dark
shade. Her eyes, their color unidentifiable in the low, flickering
light, are wide and reflective over smooth cheeks that glow softly
pink in the torchlight. It is not the face of the Ayessa I once
knew, even  if I cannot recall what other face she once wore.
It is not her face that I know, not even her eyes, but it is her,
of that I am sure. It is some power other than sight which informs
me, something within her which screams out to me and makes me want
to weep. With joy, I think, but maybe something else, too.

The woman I have named as Ayessa stares up
at me, cold and confident. She evaluates me as a stranger might,
her look containing no recognition. I blink a few times and realize
that she 
is
 a stranger. We have
no memories, and so what else can we be but strangers to anyone,
including ourselves?

Yet I know her, I feel certain. Not only
that. She is important to me... or was.

"Is that her name?" our male companion asks
excitedly. "How do you know it?"

"That is her name," I say. "I know no more
than that." The admission deflates me.

Our guide grabs the woman's arm and urges
her to her feet, making her face me. Frowning, she complies. "Look
at him," he insists. "If he knows your name, then maybe you know
his. 
Think!
"

She looks, and I think I catch a glimmer of
something in her red-lit eyes, but she only shakes her head.

"Speak that word of yours to her," our
companion suggests.

My chest constricts. I swallow to prepare my
throat to speak the word which I suddenly feel certain must pertain
to her: "Wellspring."

Ayessa's expression does not change, but a
minute movement draws my eyes downward, where I see both hands ball
into fists. Her jaw tightens. A heartbeat later, she relaxes,
slowly shaking her head once more in defeat.

"Ah, well," our companion sighs. "At least
one of us has a name. Perhaps another who has gone ahead will have
one for me."

"Crow."

It is Ayessa who says this, the first word I
have heard her speak. It is in the 
other 
language,
the fragmentary one which has come up with us from the abyss, not
the alien one in which we are comfortably and fluently conversing.
I only stare at her red lips in wonder, picturing a black bird,
until she answers our companion's quizzical look.

"Your hair," she explains to and of him. I
look again and notice what I had not bothered to until now, that
the man's hair is long and sleek and darker than Ayessa's. His
appearance does call to mind that of the bird she named. Ayessa
adds, in a tone just short of insult, "That, and you won't stop
cawing."

The target of her annoyance laughs, a sound
which graces the ears in this place of the dead. "Crow," he muses.
"I suppose it will do until a better one comes along."

He turns sharp, appraising eyes on me. I
know his intent and stop him with a raised hand.

"I will take no name," I tell him. "None
other than the one which is truly mine."

Crow shrugs and yields to my wish. Ayessa
resumes her seat. It is she who must be the one to give me my name,
as I gave her hers. But for now, her lips remain sealed.

There is not much else for us to talk about,
we whose present lives can be measured in minutes. And so we sit
silently, each delving blindly into the abyss within, endeavoring
to drag forth whatever might drift into reach. That is what I do,
at any rate, with no success. I am compelled to stare at Ayessa,
but manage to resist, mostly.

It is not long before the painted witch in
her alcove spasms and groans, which Crow tells me is the sign of a
new awakening. We scan the cavern floor and see a corpse begin to
stir. Crow brings him to join us. He is a big man, a head and a
half taller than me, with arms as thick as Ayessa's thighs. He has
no name and no memory, and looking into his dark eyes stirs nothing
inside me.