Hel

The Rider at the Gate

The old woman had almost threaded her needle when a horse landed on the other side of Hel’s gate.

The impact shook dust from the rafters. Her thread slipped. Around the long tables, the dead lifted their heads.

Hel set down her knife.

No one knocked at that gate. Those sent to her came through it, and those who tried to leave found it shut. Yet hooves were striking the courtyard stones, too many and too quickly for an ordinary horse.

The old woman gathered her wool against her breast.

“Has someone come for us?”

Hel went to the door without answering.

An eight-legged gray horse stood in the courtyard, its breath smoking in the cold. The man climbing down from it had chafed hands and dirt stiffening the knees of his breeches. He looked up at the height of the gate he had crossed, then toward the hall.

For a moment Hel saw Odin on the horse instead. She remembered his hand pointing downward, the strange country opening beneath her, the wolf and serpent taken elsewhere. But the rider had two eyes, both fixed on her.

“Where is Baldr?” he asked.

“Inside.”

“Alive?”

The question stopped him as soon as he heard it.

Hel stepped aside.

Baldr rose from the foremost seat. His brother reached him in three strides, caught him by the shoulders, and searched his face. Baldr put his hands over Hermod’s. They remained that way until the old woman behind Hel cleared her throat.

“My name is Runa,” she told the rider. “If they sent you for—”

Hermod did not turn.

Hel laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Through the worn cloth she felt bones drawn close together by a lifetime of work. Runa had arrived that morning with a little mitten still attached to a ball of yarn. Her granddaughter had lost its fellow. She had explained this twice, as though the explanation might shorten her stay.

“Let him speak to his brother,” Hel said.

Runa looked at the horse through the open doorway.

Then she went back to her place.

What the World Must Give

In the morning, Hermod found Hel at the end of the table. Before her lay her knife and a loaf he had brought in his saddlebag. She had not touched the bread.

He took out a second loaf and placed it beside the first.

“I did not know what you would ask.”

“For food?”

“For anything.”

He pushed both loaves toward her. The movement left a pale streak in the dust.

“Let him come home.”

Behind Hermod, Baldr sat with Nanna. At the far end of the hall, Runa worked the same short length of yarn between her fingers. Hel could hear every scrape of it against her skin.

“Your brother has a place here.”

“He has a place with us.”

“So did she.” Hel glanced toward Runa.

Hermod looked back, impatiently at first. The old woman straightened. When he turned to Hel again, his voice had changed.

“I cannot carry them all.”

“You have not asked to.”

He drew in a breath.

“Frigg cannot eat. She cannot sleep. Everywhere she turns, something reminds her of him. She has sent me down a road I could scarcely see, on a horse no one else could have brought here. Tell me what to take back to her.”

Hel watched his hand close around a fold in his sleeve. The knuckles were split from holding the reins.

When she herself had been sent away, no horse had followed.

“Does she alone weep?”

“All Asgard.”

“All?”

“The whole world would, if it could bring him back.”

At the far end of the hall, the yarn stopped moving.

Hel looked past the rider to Baldr. He was waiting for her answer without rising, without reaching for a weapon, without trying to make himself less dead than anyone else in the room.

“Then ask it,” she said.

Hermod leaned across the table.

“Ask everything. The living and the lifeless. Men, beasts, trees, stones. If all weep for Baldr, I will release him.”

“And if something cannot?”

“If anything refuses, he stays.”

The rider’s face tightened. “A stone has no eyes.”

“Then you should not have promised me the world.”

For a while he said nothing. Hel could have withdrawn the offer. She felt how easily the words might be made smaller now, while only a few people had heard them.

Then Hermod stood.

“I will take your answer.”

Baldr walked him to the courtyard and gave him Draupnir, the ring Odin had laid on his funeral pyre. Nanna brought gifts for Frigg and Fulla. Hel watched the little bundle disappear into the saddlebag among the things a living man needed for a journey.

At the mounting block, Hermod turned back.

“When they have all wept, your gate will open?”

“Yes.”

“Even for Odin’s son?”

Hel held his gaze.

“Even for Odin’s son.”

The Unfinished Mitten

After he left, the dead began looking toward the door.

A man who had lain down on a bench sat upright. A child brought her shoes to her mother. Runa shook the tangles from her yarn so fiercely that the unfinished mitten fell beneath the table.

Baldr retrieved it.

“It is very small,” he said.

“She is very small.”

He sat beside her and held the yarn while she drew it straight. Hel watched from the doorway. Each time his fingers moved, she expected the ring to flash, and each time there was only his bare hand.

Runa looked up.

“If the world can weep for him, my daughter can weep for me.”

“She already has,” Hel said.

“Then I have done what you ask.”

Hel came to the table. A knot had drawn tight in the yarn, no bigger than a grain of barley. Baldr held it close to the lamp while Runa worried at it with her needle.

“The condition was for Baldr.”

“I heard.”

Runa kept working. The needle shook.

“I heard every word.”

Hel reached for the knot. The woman pulled it away.

That small refusal stayed with her as she crossed the courtyard. At the gate she put both hands beneath the bar. One hand was pale; the other, blue-dark. The timber shifted reluctantly in its iron sockets.

She had meant only to see whether it could be moved quickly. Instead she lifted it clear.

The gate opened onto the winding road, empty as far as she could see. No summer entered with it. No scent of cut hay. Only cold air, and the faint sound of the river beyond the bends.

Behind her, a foot scuffed stone.

Baldr had followed her out.

“Do you think they can do it?” he asked.

“I think they will try.”

He touched the place on his wrist where the ring had rested.

“Do you want them to fail?”

Hel looked at him. She could have sent him back inside. No one in her house had the right to question her.

But he had asked quietly, and waited as if the answer mattered more than the asking.

“I opened the gate,” she said.

Baldr looked through it for a long time. Then he went back to Nanna, and Hel remained beside the bar.

The Last Refusal

When the messenger came, his boots were wet.

He stumbled on the final bend and caught himself against the wall. Water dripped from the hem of his cloak. Hel heard chairs shifting inside the hall before he had spoken.

“They wept,” he said.

She stepped into the opening.

“Tell me.”

He told her of men who had stopped their work and beasts that had lifted their heads. Water had run over stone. Trees had shed it from their branches. Even metal had gathered drops upon its face.

He was smiling now, exhausted and eager to be believed.

“Everywhere we went.”

Hel took hold of the gate’s inner edge.

Baldr stood a little behind her, Nanna beside him. Farther back, Runa had put her yarn into the pocket of her dress. Her hands were empty.

“Everywhere?” Hel asked.

The messenger rubbed water from his mouth.

“You should have seen it.”

“Did anything refuse?”

His eyes moved from Hel to Baldr.

The gate was open. He could see how little stood between the dead man and the road.

“Nothing that loved him.”

Hel’s hand tightened on the wood.

“Name it.”

“A woman in a cave. A giantess. Thokk.” He spoke quickly now. “She would give nothing. The others begged her. She would not listen.”

Runa edged nearer the opening.

“One,” the messenger said. “Against everything else.”

Hel could hear her father making a bargain out of that word. One thing overlooked. One small part of a promise set aside. She had heard the tone often enough as a child. It could make a closed hand seem empty.

The messenger stepped toward Baldr.

“Come. There is still time.”

Baldr did not move.

But Runa did.

She slipped between him and the wall, light and quick in her worn shoes. Hel caught the sleeve of her dress just as she reached the threshold.

The cloth tore.

Runa turned on her, suddenly fierce.

“I can walk. You needn’t carry me. I know the way once I reach the water.”

Hel held her wrist. The old woman tried to twist free, and the ball of yarn fell from her pocket. It rolled through the gateway, unwinding a thin gray line across the stone.

For an instant Hel nearly followed it. She saw herself bringing Runa up the road, knocking at the house where a child lacked a mitten. She saw Hermod’s gray horse waiting for Baldr, and the astonishment on Odin’s face.

Then Runa’s wrist shifted in her hand: dry, weightless, without a pulse.

Behind them, the child in the hall had put on her shoes.

Hel drew the old woman back inside.

“You promised him a way out,” the messenger said.

“I gave you the condition.”

“One woman!”

“Yes.”

She bent and gathered the yarn from the road. The messenger planted his boot against the gate.

“Frigg will curse your name.”

Hel looked down at his foot, then up at his face.

“Take it away.”

He did not.

She began to push. The timber pressed against his boot. He braced his shoulder against it, his wet cloak scraping the iron studs. Hel leaned into the weight, both hands flat, until the gate moved another hand’s breadth.

The messenger staggered back onto the road.

Through the narrowing opening, Hel saw him reach toward Baldr. Baldr’s hand rose in answer, but his feet stayed beside Nanna’s.

The gate closed between them.

Hel lifted the bar into its sockets. The sound traveled through the courtyard and into the hall.

A Place at the Table

Runa was sitting where she had sat before.

The torn sleeve hung loose around her wrist. She had found the mitten, but the needle lay beyond her reach and she would not ask anyone to fetch it.

Hel picked it up.

“Leave me,” Runa said.

Hel put the needle beside her hand. She could still feel the weight of the gate in her shoulders.

Across the hall, Baldr drew his bench closer to Nanna’s. The child’s mother was undoing the little shoes.

Runa tried to lift the yarn. Her fingers would not hold the edges of the unfinished seam together. She tried again, bent almost double over the table.

Hel sat beside her and took the unfinished mitten in both hands.

For a long while the old woman stared at it.

Then she picked up her needle.