“He is the King and Father of the AEnseis,” they told him. “He is overlord of that unimaginable folk who dwell in Ydalir; and who do not kill their deformed and weakling children, as we were used to do, but instead cast from the ivory ramparts of Ydalir all such degenerate offspring, to be the gods of races who are not blond and Nordic.”
Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, could only shake his head over such nonsense, and the innumerous other errors by which these heathen were being misled to everlasting ruin. Aloud, Donander repeated his final verdict as to the pretensions of this Sidvrar, by saying again, “I never heard of him.”
Nevertheless, Donander went without real discontent among the pleasures of paradise, and he joined in all the local sports. In common with the other dead, he ate the flesh of the inexhaustible boar, and with them he drank of the strong mead which sustained them in perpetual tipsiness. And he sedately rode out with the others, every morning, into the meadows where these blessed pagan lords fought joyously among themselves until midday. At noon a peal of thunder would sound, the slain and wounded warriors were of a sudden revivified and cured of their hurts, and were reunited to whatsoever arms and heads and legs the contestants had lost in their gaming: and the company would return fraternally to the gold-roofed hall, where they ate and drank and made their brags until they slept.
“Yet perhaps our banquets might, messieurs,” Donander had suggested, after a century or so of these rough-and-ready pleasures, “be not unadvantageously seasoned with the delights of feminine companionship, if only for dessert?”
“But it is one of our appointed blessings to have done with women and their silly ways,” cried out the vikingar, “now that we have entered paradise.”
And Donander, who had always been notable for his affectionate nature, and who had served vigorously so many ladies par amours, seemed grieved to hear the uttering of a saying so unchivalrous. Still, he said nothing.
Much time passed thus; and the worlds were changed: but in the eyes of Donander of Evre, as in the eyes of all who feasted in the Hall of the Chosen, there was no knowledge nor any fear of time, because these blessed dead lived now in perpetual tipsiness. And, as befitted a loyal son of the Church, Donander, without any complaining, in the surroundings which Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him, awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.
Chapter LXI. Vanadis, Dear Lady of Reginlief
Then, from the highest part of this paradise, and from the unimaginable yew-vales of Ydalir which rose above the topmost branches of the tree called Laerath, descended blue-robed Vanadis, the lady of Reginlief, dear to the AEnseis. She had disposed of five inefficient husbands, in impetuous mythological manners, but still a loneliness and a desire was upon her; and with the eternal optimism of widowhood she came to look for a sixth husband among these great-thewed heroes who jeered at women and their wiles.
But Donander of Evre was the person who for two reasons found instant favor in her eyes when she came upon Donander refreshing himself after the pleasant fatigues of that morning’s combat, and about his daily bath in the shining waters of the river Gipul. So did the dead call that stream which flowed from the antlers of the monstrous stag who stood eternally nibbling and munching above the Hall of the Chosen.
“Here is an eminently suitable person.” Vanadis reflected. Aloud, she said, “Hail, friend! and does a stout fine fellow of your length and of your thickness go languidly shunning work or seeking work?”
Stalwart Donander climbed out of the clear stream of Gipul. He came, smilingly and with a great exaltation, toward the first woman whom he had seen in seven hundred years. And, so constant is the nature of woman, that divine Vanadis regarded Donander in just the reflective wonder with which, more than seven hundred years ago, barbarian Utsume had looked at Coth in the market-place of Porutsa.
Donander said, “What is your meaning, madame?”
Vanadis replied, “I have a desire which, a fine portent has informed me, agrees with your desire.”
Then Vanadis, with godlike candor, made wholly plain her meaning. And since Donander’s nature was affectionate, he assented readily enough to the proposals of this somewhat ardent but remarkably handsome young woman, who went abroad thus unconventionally in a car drawn by two cats, and who, in her heathenish and figurative way, described herself as a goddess. He stipulated only that, so soon as he was dressed, they be respectably united according to whatever might be the marriage laws of her country and diocese.
The AEnseis were not used in such matters to stand upon ceremony. Nevertheless, they conferred together,—Aduna and Ord and Hieifner and Ronn and Giermivul, and the other radiant sons of Sidvrar. It was they who good-humoredly devised a ceremony, with candles and promises and music and a gold ring, and all the other features which seemed expected by the quaint sort of husband whom their beloved Vanadis had fetched up from the Hall of the Chosen. But her sisters took no part in this ceremony, upon the ground that they considered such public preliminaries to be unheard-of and brazen.
Thus was Donander made free of Ydalir, the land that was above Laerath and the other heavens and paradises: and after Donander’s seven hundred years of celibacy, he and his bride got on together in her bright palace lovingly enough. Vanadis found that she too, comparatively speaking, had lived with her five earlier husbands in celibacy.
Chapter LXII. The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr
Now the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.
“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have been dead for so long now! and, just looking at it sensibly, it does seem such a waste of eternity!”
“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so friendlily and happily?”
Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the AEnseis were adored, had been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of the Man-God, Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the AEnseis desired must happen instantly, thus Ydalir knew but one endless day: and immeasurably beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the jumbled wreckage of time.
But it befell, too, after a great many of those aeons which Ydalir ignored and men cannot imagine, that Donander saw one of his smaller brothers-in-law about a droll-looking sport. Donander asked questions: and he learned this dark brisk little Koshchei was about a game at which the younger AEnseis were used to play.
“And how does one set about it?” Donander asked then.
“Why, thus and thus, my heart,” his wife replied. Fond Vanadis was glad enough to find for him some outdoor diversion which would woo him from that stuffy chapel and its depressing pictures of tortured persons and its unwholesome fogs of stifling incense.