And then it did stop and the night was silent. Everything had changed and for ever. It seemed to Saitada that she stood in the middle of a glade that was bathed in the silvery light of a flaming moon.
‘See the beauty of the garment you have made,’ said the man.
He was in front of her, but the cloak was not her cloak but a cloak of feathers that might not have been feathers but silvery flames or just points of light. It engulfed him and lifted him so he seemed to hover a stool’s height above the ground. The farmer and his wife were nowhere to be seen.
‘You have never been loved,’ said the traveller.
‘Sir, I have not,’ she said.
‘And you have not known until this moment that you could be loved,’ he said.
‘I have not.’
‘I can only love your kind,’ he said. ‘Who could love the princes and the heroes with their murders and their wars?’
‘I know no princes or heroes, sir.’
‘Bide your time,’ he said. ‘You’ll be sick to your back teeth of them before you’re done.’ He smiled at her. ‘You, my dear, are perfect.’
‘My face is not, sir.’
‘You chose imperfection — what could be more perfect? You saw your imperfection was perfection and therefore remedied it by imposing an imperfection on yourself thereby becoming perfect again. The logic is imperfectly flawless.’
He descended to the earth, and the cloak he had been wearing became a carpet of white feathers that covered the glade, deep as midwinter snow. She lay down upon it and, having only ever known straw before, was overwhelmed by its comfort.
The stranger spoke. ‘To strive to be the best, to excel and have the skalds sing your praises. They’re all at it. What better than to spit at what the gods gave you and spite your fate?’
‘I did it because I would not give them a moment’s more pleasure from me.’
‘They will have no pleasure ever again. Would you know their fate?’
‘If it is a bad one.’
‘I have repaid them,’ said the burning beautiful god, for now Saitada was sure this was not a mortal before her. ‘You should have seen the smith’s face when I spoke to him from the fire and he knocked that smelting pot onto his bollocks. He’s got his cock out of his breeks for a different reason now, I can tell you. Are you grateful?’
‘It is not enough,’ said Saitada.
He stretched out his hand and she saw the smith asleep in his bed. He was drawn and pale but something obscured her vision. It was smoke. The thatch was on fire. The smith woke and tried to move but his wounds wouldn’t allow him to. She saw him panic as the fire took hold.
Saitada smiled as she watched.
‘You are a power, lady, a power,’ said the god. ‘The elves sing your fame and the dwarfs of the earth despair for they know that in all their art they will never make anything to compare to your depthless beauty.’
‘I would know your name, sir,’ said Saitada. She felt something strange sweeping over her, something she had never felt from a man before: love as more than an idea, as something present and intense, like her forgotten mother might have cherished her baby girl.
‘My name?’ said the traveller. ‘Name? Lady, like you my magnificence cannot be contained by just one. First, you must know me better. You must see what I am up against.’
The odour of blood and fire filled the glade. There was a clamour and a hammering like the sound of the smith’s shop increased a thousand-fold, metal on metal, metal on wood. Saitada knew it by instinct — the noise of battle. At the edge of the glade stood a tall grey man with a beard, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He had a patch over one eye and two huge wolves lay panting at his feet, their teeth as big as knives. The expression on the man’s face was terrible. Saitada had seen it before. It was the look men wore at cock fights or when cheering two dogs to rip into each other, the look the smith’s friends had worn as they’d held her down — a look of delight in violence and lust for more.
‘See Odin, the king of the gods in his hungers,’ said the traveller. ‘See how he would know and consume and control. Father, let go!’
The old man said nothing, just stood there frozen in his expression of malicious joy. The traveller went across and flicked the old man on the nose, but he did not respond.
‘He would eat the world!’ said the traveller. ‘He would know it all, devour every mystery until the whole of creation came at his call. He’s mad, you know. He drank so deeply of the knowledge well but the waters splashed on that burning hunger and boiled all his brains. Yet still he wants to know, ever more, ever more.’
‘I would forget,’ said Saitada.
‘Of course you would. It’s the only sane thing to do. Not knowing is what gives the world its beauty. Who would know why the sun on the dew on a May morning makes the heart sing? That pervert would. Would you have no love, old man Odin, would you snaffle down even a girl’s secret heart’s desires for a gorgeous flame-haired fellow and spew them out on a table in maps and runes? Would you chart the very stir-rings of the heart? Well, lady, I think we should give this greedy knowledge glutton, this filthy wisdom hog, a right royal bite on the bum, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Saitada, though she didn’t really understand what he meant. She only knew she wanted to please him.
‘That’s where you and I come in,’ said the traveller. ‘Would you know my imperfections, lady?’
‘I know all I need to know of the imperfections of men,’ she said, ‘though I think you are not a man.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ he said as the fiery moon turned green and points of emerald light began to dance around the glade. The old man disappeared, then one wolf, then another, its body first, then its head apart from the mouth. Finally the tongue snapped back into the teeth and lips and the glade was empty in a blink.
‘I want you,’ she said.
‘Well, that’d be a clue, wouldn’t it? You could never love a man, and yet you love me.’
‘I do,’ she said.
The pale god took her in his arms and kissed her. She felt at one with the moonlight, with the stars in the heavens and, stranger than that, she felt all her fears and dreams consumed by the strange traveller and then fed back to her, sweet as honey on his lips.
She took him to her and held him, and as their bodies joined it seemed that so did their minds. A searing laughter filled her up, somewhere between malice and wild delight. But there was love there too. She felt connected to every living thing on earth, felt the earthworms moving beneath her, the forests teeming, the cold spaces of the stars delicious and beautiful above her. The world felt precious and the gods, who she sensed like a pressure at the back of her head, the gods with their bloodlust and their battles, seemed ridiculous, terrible and contemptible.
She stroked his skin, and it was wet with the blood of the wolf pelt. She found the crimson on the white of his flesh fascinating. Her hand was red with the wolf’s blood. She licked it and the taste of it seemed to fizz through her, as if tiny bubbles went popping all the way down inside her from her mouth to her knees.
The god now had the wolf’s head over his face. He peered through the animal’s bloodied lids with cold eyes. The tongue that slithered from between the dead wolf’s teeth was long and lascivious.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Names are like clothes, lady. I have many.’
‘And which one do you wear tonight?’
The god smiled. She could see he liked her words. He pulled her to him, pressed his wolf lips to hers and said, ‘My name is Misery, and would you know yet more?’
‘Yes,’ said the girl, breathing in his scent, the scent of something beautiful, strange and burned. ‘I would know more.’
He flicked at her lips with his tongue and whispered, ‘So is yours.’