The rise finally crested at the edge of a low granite cliff, and as the sun burnt through and the mist retreated into the trees, we at last had a view.
I stopped breathing.
The panorama was lovely enough. We overlooked a vale of pond, meadow, birch, and aspen, a lush natural depression in the prairie that seemed hidden from the rest of the world. But that wasn’t what stunned us. On a low hill in the middle of this dell grew a tree of a size I’d never seen before, and never dreamt of. We stared, confused.
The tree was so immense that our heads tilted back, and back, and back, to follow its climb into the sky. It was a tree that dwarfed not just all others in this forest, but all others in this world, a green tower of ash with a top lost in the haze that persisted overhead. I’ve no idea exactly how high the patriarch was but we should have seen it from twenty miles. Yet we hadn’t because of cloud and mist. It was a tree far taller than a cathedral steeple, a tree with branches longer than a street, a tree of a scale never painted, suspected, or dreamt of – except, perhaps, by the ancient Norse. The butt of its trunk was wider than the biggest fortress tower and its branches could shade an army. It was as if we’d been shrunken to the scale of ants, or the ash tree had been inflated like a hot-air balloon.
‘Yggdrasil,’ Magnus murmured.
It couldn’t be! The mythical Norse tree that held the nine worlds, including Midgard, the world of men? This behemoth wasn’t that big. And yet it wasn’t normal, either, it was a tree that towered over the forest the way an ordinary tree towers over shrubs. Why? The ash is one of the noblest of trees, its wood supple and strong, a favourite for bows, arrows, staves, and axe handles – but while tall, it is not supernaturally large. Here we had a freak colossus.
‘There’s enough wood there to build a navy,’ I said, ‘but not to hold up the world. This isn’t Yggdrasil.’
‘Enough to mark Thor’s hammer,’ Magnus replied. ‘Enough to serve as a gate to power. Do you doubt me now, Ethan?’
‘Your hammer is there?’
‘What more likely place? What better landmark?’
‘Why is the tree so big?’ asked Namida.
‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’ His one eye gleamed.
‘And what is this here?’ I gestured at a small boulder nearby. Curiously, it had a hole the diameter of a flagstaff bored through it.
‘Ha! More evidence yet! A mooring stone!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Vikings would tether their boats to shore at night by pounding a peg with line into a hole drilled like this. They’re common in Norway.’
‘This isn’t the seashore, Magnus.’
‘Exactly, so why is it here? A marker, I’m guessing, to find Thor’s hammer if the tree somehow didn’t work. I’d wager there’s another mooring stone on the far side of the tree, and another and another. Draw lines between them and you’ll find what you’re looking for where the lines intersect.’
‘Clever.’
‘Proof.’ He set off along the brow of the low cliff to find its end, dragging the rune stone with him. We followed, and eventually came down into the vale, across a clearing, and under the goliath’s shadow.
By any measure the tree was old. I don’t know if its girth has been seen on this world before or since; but I do know I counted a hundred paces just to round its circumference. Great roots sprawled out from its trunk like low walls. There were folds and furrows in the bark deep enough to slide into, and burls as big as hogsheads. One could climb the plant’s crevices like cracks in a cliff to the first branches. These were thirty feet overhead and wide as a footbridge. The foliage was greenish yellow, heralding the turn of the year, and the tiers of branches were so numerous that it was impossible to see the top from the base.
‘This turns botany on its head,’ I said. ‘No normal tree can grow this big.’
‘In the Age of Heroes they were all like this perhaps,’ Magnus speculated. ‘Everything was bigger, as Jefferson said of his prehistoric animals. This is the last one.’
‘If so, how did your Norse Templars know it was here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And where is your hammer?’
‘I don’t know that, either. Maybe up there somewhere.’ He pointed into the branches. ‘Or inside. It is told that when Ragnarok spells the end of this world, a man and woman who hide inside Yggdrasil, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive the holocaust and flood and repopulate the world.’
‘Well, there’s a note of cheer.’
Could the colossus be climbed? I walked away from its radiating web of roots to study the tree. Even as the fog was dissipating in the sun, an odd halo of cloud was forming around the crown as if the ash strangely attracted weather. The effect was to shield the tree from sight from any distance, I realised. I wondered if the dark thunderstorm we’d observed yesterday would be repeated.
I also noticed the tree’s top seemed oddly truncated, as if the height had been clipped. While the summit was too high and hazy to see clearly, there was a blackened stub as if hit by lightning. Of course! This was the tallest object around, and would serve as a natural lightning rod. And yet why wasn’t the tree even more stunted by ceaseless lightning strikes in this stormy climate? There’d been enough bolts yesterday to set it afire. How had it ever succeeded in growing so tall in the first place?
Nothing made sense.
I walked back down to the others. ‘There’s something odd here. The tree seems to attract cloud, or weather, and yet it hasn’t been killed by lightning.’
‘I don’t like it here,’ said Little Frog. ‘Namida is right. This is a place for the Wendigo, eater of human flesh.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s a holy place.’
‘The Wendigo carries people off to places like this one.’
‘There’s no such thing as the Wendigo.’
‘But your fables are true?’ Namida challenged. ‘Little Frog is right. There is something wicked about this place.’
‘So we’ll look for the hammer and leave,’ I said. ‘Quickly, before Red Jacket finds us. I’m going to climb.’
By jamming hand and feet in the crevices of the aged trunk, I managed to work myself up the first branch, hauling myself onto its log-like girth. It was broad as a parapet, and I waved more bravely than I felt to the trio below. Even at this modest start, the fall looked disconcertingly long.
Better not to think about that and keep climbing. So I did.
In some places the climb was a relatively simple process of hauling myself from one branch to another. In others I had to climb the main trunk like a spider to get to the next horizontal platform, using the deep corrugations. The trunk was so twisted, rent, and studded with bowls that I always had plenty of handholds; I was a human fly! I was the squirrel Ratatosk, carrying insults from the dragon Nidhogg to the sacred eagle at the topmost branches! Up, up, and up I went, the ground lost to the wicket of branches below and the sky equally invisible above. I was in a cocoon of leaves, the tree homey and snug in its own way. It was also wrenched and cracked, and when I came to a place where a branch had half broken but still hung, I was surprised at the width of the growth rings. They were half an inch wide, suggesting this giant was incredibly fast-growing.
The further I went the slower I crept, the height dizzying and my muscles beginning to ache. Even hundreds of feet off the ground the trunk and branches were still thick and firm, but as more sky filtered in and my view improved, I saw just how terrifyingly high I was. The surrounding forest looked low as a lawn. My companions were entirely lost to view, and birds orbited below. The circle of clouds around the tree had thickened, like the rotating clouds of the day before, and their bulk was building high like a thunderhead. The wind was picking up, and this castle of an ash was beginning to sway. It was slightly sickening to ride it, like clinging to a rolling ship.