Hammered

hell? «
    » You are concerned about hell? « He waved a hand at me and laughed. » This man is not your husband, am I right? «
    Rannveig’s face turned red. » God forgives weakness. He does not forgive … abomination! « She shouted the last word and then hurriedly began to dress herself. I should probably pause to explain at this point that Rannveig was a Lutheran—as was I, at the time, along with most of the rest of Iceland. But throughout Scandinavia, the Old Norse religion persisted among some individuals, as I believe it still does today. Úlfur, a Danish transplant, was one of those who still followed the old gods. (We had a steady trickle of Danish immigrants because Iceland was under Danish rule then, but Frederik IV largely ignored us, occupied as he was in the Great Northern War with Sweden.)
    » It all depends on which god you’re talking about, « Úlfur said. » The Æsir are perfectly content with dual natures. «
    » You see? « Rannveig said to me. » He spouts pagan nonsense. He is damned, and now so are we. «
    Úlfur threw his head back and laughed heartily. » You are blessed, not damned. You will come to know this in time. Run with me under the moon and hunt, taste hot blood on your tongue— «
    » Gah! « Rannveig covered her ears and ran away. She did not want to hear about hot blood on her tongue. I grabbed my clothes and chased after her. Úlfur laughed again and called after us.
    » Run now if you wish! But don’t be near any men when night falls, or the hot blood you taste will be human! «
    Rannveig didn’t slow down for half a mile. She hurtled as fast as she could to where we had left the horses, and I couldn’t close the gap between us until we were nearly there. She was gasping and crying by the time we reached the spot where we’d staked them, and when we got there only one remained. The other was a mess of blood and bones and bits of skin and flesh.
    » Oh, God! Oh, God! « Rannveig cried. » He ate my horse! Gunnar, he ate my horse! «
    » Well, if it kept him from eating us, I’m grateful to the horse, « I said.
    She whirled upon me and started pounding my chest with her fists. They weren’t weak punches either. She was letting loose with everything she had, fury erupting from her like a volcano. » How! Can! You! Be! Grateful! « she yelled, landing a blow with each word. » We are fucked! Fucked , you hear me? We heal like demons! We are no longer human! Our salvation is gone! Gone! « She dissolved into sobs and sank to the ground, clutching me. I knelt to hold her, but I did not know what to say. I could not tell her everything would be all right. She was going to have a hard time explaining to the men at the farm what happened to the horse. And if she truly turned into a wolf that night, everyone there would be in mortal peril. Rather than expose them to such danger—and to give us more time to concoct a tale if we found we could return—we decided to continue on my westerly path to Kirkjubæjarklaustur. That proved enormously difficult, because the remaining horse would not suffer our touch. It neighed in fear and reared up defensively whenever either of us approached, and we finally had to cut it loose and let it run away. It ran back in the direction of the Hnappavellir farm.
    Seeing no other choice, we began trudging after it. A day without food or water we figured we could survive, and then we would make the farm by early the next morning. We did not see or hear from Úlfur all that day.
    Rannveig and I were exhausted. We had not slept at all through the previous night and had been traveling all day. By mutual agreement, we collapsed together underneath a tree as the sun set. We both feared what was to come but no longer had the energy to waste worrying about it. I actually managed to take a short nap.
    My awakening was the rudest possible. My skeleton snapped in a hundred places and knitted together again in alien shapes, organs squished and remade themselves, and you know those headaches you get between your eyes? They are worse than excruciating when there’s a snout growing out of that spot. Being confined in human clothes didn’t help the process along either.
    Rannveig was enduring a similar transformation. Her cries and snarls of pain were even louder than mine, and I wasn’t holding back. Our clothes eventually tore and the shifting stopped. The pain faded as we lay still under the tree, whimpering. I turned my head and saw much better than I