Ragnarök

Thor Fishing

She came up from the depths one day and saw a head as horrid as her own, a horned head with glassy eyeballs and a bloody stump, a head with a thick brow and staring nostrils. She raised herself, swaying like the spyhopping orca, and gulped. Inside the bull’s gullet was a hook, a heavy hook, a hook for dangling cauldrons. She swallowed it before she had time to see it. It yanked, it pulled, the deadhead went up and the snake-head followed after, bursting through the sea surface in a fountain of stinking spray.

There was a boat, a fishing boat, like many she had wrecked, by accident, in play. In the boat was a frost-giant, grey and silver and bluish, with a massive fall of icy hair and a huge sprouting ashen beard. Attached to the line, attached to the hook, attached to the bull’s head was a face as fierce as her own, black with fury and effort, eyes glinting red under thick brows, crowned with fiery hair and surrounded by a flaming red beard. Thor, the thunder god, hauling her in on a rod and line. Up she came, and up, more and more of her, towering like the mast of the boat. She fastened her sore mouth on the bait, and pulled. The rod arched and quivered. The god held fast and the boat twisted in the water. The snake shook her fleshy mane and hissed poison. The god glared, and tugged, and glared. The giant said, ‘We’re done for.’ The sky darkened, clouds piled into black banks, the snake twisted and hissed, the god held fast, as lightning split the cloud cover. Nothing had hurt the snake like this. She threshed the sea-surface and snorted. The line bent the rod, but strong runes held it firm.

Then the giant, whose name was Hymir, moved across the boat, which was full of slapping water, took out a great hunting knife, swiped at the line, and severed it. The snake bellowed and sank. The god, bursting with fury, took his short-handled hammer and hurled it at her head. It struck a blow. Her thick dark blood swirled in the seawater. Then the hammer fell on and down into the dark, and the snake went after it. Hymir said dourly that Thor would regret that blow, and the god swung his fist at the stony head and knocked the giant overboard. The god swam and waded to the beach. The snake rubbed against the rocks, trying to tear out the hook and the trailing line. She coughed up the deadhead, bashing her cathedral-mouth on razor-rocks, and the hook came out, trailing black shreds from her gullet.

The snake was angrier after this meeting. She killed more wantonly, she stove in boat planks, she uprooted sea forests for the pleasure of her rage. Sometime later, in the kelp forest, she came across Rándrasill – not where it had been – in its gold and amber light, its holdfast in the depths, its great stipe buoyed up by cushions of air in bladders under the streamers. She had seen it once with delight. Now she moved in for a massacre, sparing neither bladefish nor seahorses, neither soft otters nor nesting gulls, neither crown-of-thorns starfish nor prickly urchins, nor those smaller jellies and fine eels, slugs and periwinkles which clung to the weed. She tore with her great jaw at the fronds of the weed itself, shaking her mane from side to side, stripping away whole households, wound in the stipe itself. Ripped arms hung limp, stirred and whirled in the water. Everywhere was murky, full of thick eddies of dust.

She travelled on, lumping her vast bulk over coral reefs and colonies of mussels, crushing, grinding. One day, in the dimness, she saw a wavering form, lumpen and twitching, which she took to be a great whale, maybe wounded, resting on the seabed. Jörmungandr, still bad-tempered, eased forward and snapped. The pain was excruciating, and travelled all round the earth, and back to the soft brain in her vast skull. She had met her tail. She was wound round the earth like a girdle. She thought of resting on the sea floor in an eternal knot. Where she was was desolate black basalt, thick empty depth. She raised her head and began to drag herself, and then to swim in long folds. If she was to rest, she would rest in populated waters, she would lie on beds of pearls and corals, where schools of fish floated past to be snapped up, where the shadows of ships danced on the surface, where there was living kelp to rest her head, where there was food and more food for her vast appetite.