IT HAD A PRETERNATURAL BEAUTY, this place. Seen at a distance, the temple shone like a beacon, radiating the brilliance of the Storm King’s Hall in all directions. The site was encircled by mountains; when arriving, you felt you had been ushered onto the stage of a vast amphitheatre, an effect accentuated by the golden chains that hung around the temple gables.
It was a bright, clear day. The snow lay in pristine piles on either side of the path, the half-melted puddles crackled under foot on the walkway. Sun goggles might have been sensible. Iðunn wrapped her Qiviut shawl tightly around her instead. The delicate under wool of the Arctic muskox was always warm and as light as a feather, perfect for her longer explorations. Underneath, she wore a lattice of hardened leather, padded with silk to let the skin breathe. Her arms and face were a knotwork of ash tattoos, her hair scraped back into a practical braid. She could have changed for the occasion, but she liked the pioneer look. It would give her a gravitas, an outlander authority—and it also implied that, while she would have been delighted to be asked, she hadn’t been best pleased to be summoned.
“Fuckers,” she mouthed, to whatever gods were listening.
Iðunn had always felt a loneliness to the scene. There was an anonymity to each arrival, exaggerated further by the sheer size of the embarkation suite. There were no welcoming arms or smiles, noone anxiously awaiting your return. The Urður weren’t renowned for their warmth, but even for them, it all felt rehearsed, their devotion both slavish and somehow scripted. As the Skald himself wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” Shakageirr had distilled the posturing at Uppsala, and the whole empire, into one essential sentence. The Urður wanted the world ordered, directed.
The temple itself always put on a bravura performance. It bustled with goði and gyðja attending to the carving of a new frieze or the blooding of a statue. The anguish of sacrificial goats filled the air with sounds and smells of a farmyard, and the clanging of the forge was so loud it was startling. Not as startling though as the monstrosity that took centre-stage—the huge phallus the ancients had carved on Frey’s statue. Iðunn was glad she didn’t have to compete with that. It made for an eye-watering welcome, very clearly erected to insist on male inadequacies; not even an urður could straddle it, however much pent-up frustration they might have.
Any general misery Iðunn felt at returning to her alma mater was quickly lost in a wave of nausea. Stage fright might account for some of it—that the Urður weren’t going to be happy with her thesis was an understatement—but Iðunn knew the wooziness was from the journey itself. Osmosis was the technical—if borrowed—term for the transition; both water and data streamed between point A and point B, after all. Most Norse called it the Stakra—staggering—because landing felt exactly like trying to walk when five flagons into a feast. The effects were even worse when you travelled home from the Utangard. Most of the hinterworlds had stronger gravity than the imperial seat.
The university itself was a short walk away, towards the lake. Half an hour perhaps, enough time to clear the head from the stagger. On the other side of the grove, she could always borrow one of the university boneshakers if she needed to make up time. She’d need to adjust her watch to the Midgard time. It wasn’t a big change, but Iðunn always felt a nagging sensation of being late when she was on campus.
The path was quiet, with nothing but the crunch of gravel to provide company. The sacred grove itself seemed as ethereal as ever, although smaller than she remembered, like a spritely village elder, seen again after many years’ absence: diminished yes, but undimmed. The wellspring itself had been walled off, only the elite able to savour its holy waters. Iðunn felt a prickle of annoyance at that.
“Fuckers.”
She said it louder this time, knowing that if she was being watched anywhere, it was here in the holiest of holies.
Time was always the enemy. Much of the land here had been transformed since the early days of the empire, not by man or god, but by geology: post glacial rebound, the slow thawing of the world after the crushing ice ages of prehistory. The old town had lost its strategic importance when it was no longer accessible from the sea. Now it was changing overnight because of man. Newer settlements had sprung up everywhere since she was last here.
On the far side of her view she saw that Munsö, too, the island home of the great King Sigurd, had been merged with the neighbouring isle of Ekerö, geology conspiring with the fylkirs so they could claim to be the literal scions of oaks. The symbolism was more obvious than Frey’s penis; it was easy to spot the meddling hands of the Urður.
Iðunn was startled to see that, down by the river, they’d reclaimed the Fyris Wolds, but then remembered that they’d started construction on a new Winter Palace. It was a grotesque heap of white marble and silver, but a ghoulish match for all the bog-blanched skeletons that it was paving over. That was certainly one way to make sure their secrets never surfaced.
Usually, dignitaries of all kinds staggered between Uppsala and Miklagard. Seaborne trade might have moved south, but Gamla Uppsala was a Nexus, Knútr or Knot—terms used interchangeably by the wide range of peoples who passed through the greenways. While officially the Great City was still the crossroads of the world, of all the Nine Worlds in fact, and teeming with fifteen million people, Uppsala had silently reclaimed the true crown out of pure convenience. Miklagardians would protest they had their own great yew Knot, over 4,000 years old, but it was five hours travel outside the walls, in the mining town of Zonguldak. The Norse were never a patient people.
The Vǫlur had controlled the Knots as they controlled all things, shrouding secrets with mysteries obscured in arcana. They’d always been shunned, even feared by the common folk, and the dread had only grown stronger in recent years. That might explain why no-one else was walking the path this side of the campus. It hadn’t been the case when Iðunn had been a student—it had always been bustling then—but she hadn’t been back in a decade. The Urður might have introduced a toll for all she knew. Either that or the waggoners were on strike again. They hated the Urður more than most.
It didn’t matter. She was used to being alone. She adjusted her shawl and let her mind wander with her. It needed the exercise.
IÐUNN HADN’T SPOKEN WITH A fellow vǫlur in days, and she couldn’t remember when she had last spoken to an urður. The eldest and most distinguished branch of the sisterhood, they dealt with the machinations of state—spycraft, politics and wars. They were midwives to the imperial family, as well as their mouthpieces when it suited them, curling the nobility around their fingers. They advised the emperor and his stallari, controlled security, propaganda, and censorship, and all from a vast subterranean tunnel complex around Uppsala: Urðbrunnr, or simply, the Well of Fate. Iðunn had long since seen through the charade. It boggled the mind that the Urður saw no irony in the fact they also stood as the final Court of Appeal for the Commonwealth. How could justice be blind if she saw everything?
Iðunn belonged to a younger branch, the Verðandi. Like all vǫlur, she was a keeper of knowledge, but her discipline concerned understanding the here and the now, the interconnectedness of man, machine, and god. Biology, the Greeks had called it once, although her arts transcended the physical body. Her great-grandfather, the heroic Karl Lind, had spoken of a union of all creatures, including the spirits, teaching a holistic approach to medicine and the miracle of birth. He had founded the Verðandi Order in his image—most of his early acolytes had been men.
Karl was rightly lauded for his many accomplishments—this was a man who mapped the heavens, after all—but he clearly had grown an outsized ego to match them. In his own taxonomy of the Nine Worlds, he considered the vast, uncompromising landscapes of Jötunheim to be the only place large enough for his intellect; literally, it became the home of a giant among men. Despite all his protests to the contrary, Iðunn knew her great-grandfather meant it to be an affront to the Urður, a constant reminder of how he had broken free of their shackles and saved men from the prejudices of the age. There was a portrait commissioned for the north stairwell to celebrate the various imperial ratifications and charters that supported the Verðandi, and if the grin of the fylkir was anything to go by, he was happily complicit in the whole scheme. Men were well practiced at closing ranks.
Iðunn didn’t much care for most of the Nine Worlds herself. Intellectually, she knew their discovery was a staggering achievement, pun intended. To have mapped the heavens, to have criss-crossed the universe—who could aspire to more? But she’d grown up with the certainty that those worlds were within reach, and so their lustre faded, in the same way that no one marvelled at the first sailings to Vinland any more. It was a commonplace. Yes, she found the three so-called Worlds of Plenty—Asgard, Alfheim, and Vanaheim—beautiful, bucolic even, and there was a majesty to a sky full of alien constellations. The problem was almost anything thrived there, and she found no challenge in that. Nidavelir was coal-black and Hel was bleaker than the Markland steppe, so she rarely travelled to either if she could help it; the other hinterworlds were off-limits to non-military personnel.
As to Midgard, well, Midgard was where all the problems began. There were people on Midgard, maybe a billion of them. Thankfully, none of the hinterworlds had much in the way of settlement—most people couldn’t use the greenways unless they were accompanied by a völva, and fewer still could tolerate the burden of greater gravity for long—so they all had a purity to them. Virgin worlds, holy worlds. It was like stepping back in time.
Iðunn had been born on her great-grandfather’s farm, Hvergelmir (named after the fabled spring from “whence all waters rise,” another boast), and still lived on the world he had claimed as his own. She loved the neat wooden railings, the straight avenues and the quaint Verðandi cottages, but above all, she loved the tracts of great walled gardens and sunken green-houses, the laboratories where Karl Lind had cultivated life. The volcanic soils were rich, the sunsets were violent; and she enjoyed the weight of the world, it made her strong and lean. She knew that she could snap an arm as if it were a twig.
And then there was always a whisper of her family about the farm, their spirits still watching from the monolithic trees. She felt sad for them. Once all the hinterworlds were explored and the glory had evaporated, the Verðandi had fallen out of vogue. The men had, in the main, moved on, and it had fallen back to women to heal the sick, tend the gardens, and manage the songs of the greenways. Only the Finn, Lönnrot, had stayed with the Order, and even then, only barely. He was always off wandering the worlds, searching for the gods. Iðunn was more than happy with that arrangement; it gave her more time for her studies.
The third branch of Vǫlur was where all male scholars flocked these days. The boy’s club moved on to play with other toys, proving that it is not only in infancy that men are pleased with a rattle and tickled with a straw. They called themselves the Skuld, a group of futurists and theoreticians, great minds with immense egos, maintained at vast expense by the admiralty. They claimed study of Sol and Mani, dreaming of stjarna skips from deep in their bunkers at Niflheim. The Skuld were determined to prove it was man who was the measure of all things, able to bend the Nine Worlds to their will. They worked in great secrecy, as prejudices still ran deep—it was only the bravest seiðrmen who risked the scorn of his kin to dabble in the black arts.
Iðunn knew there was great comfort in that thought across the Empire, a fervent belief in the all-conquering, all-high Norse, reciting the creed of Valhöll.
No-one bothered with questions anymore. The skalds recited tales mechanically, without bothering to ask where people were headed, whether here was better than there and if anyone had left anything important behind. Well, they were all fools, blithely unaware that they were a product of a thicket of philosophies grown in all manner of lands.
That was why she was here, marching along a path between the oldest buildings she knew, a temple of the gods and a temple of learning.
Karl Lind had forgotten something important. Iðunn could hear him whisper it in the rustles of the leaves, could hear him mourning. He had forgotten his place. He imagined himself to be greater than the world he inhabited rather than a mere part of it, losing track of the very insights that enabled his discovery in the first place. In his arrogance, he assumed the greenways were a gift. He didn’t ask why he had received it or how any of it worked.
Iðunn blamed Miklagard. The Greek civil service was an infestation, the rotten core of a bad apple. They planted ideas, ancient convictions about the essential supremacy of man and the belief in progress, a progress marshalled by a professional army, built on land ownership, and presided over by a benevolent monarchy, all seeds that quickly took root in Commonwealth soil. As soon as fylkirs took the Great City and all its myriad libraries, they had ensured their skalds catalogued and memorized everything—and that was when the blight set in.
From the heirs of Leo the Mathematician to the acolytes of Gemistus Pletho, the Greeks seized the opportunity to tutor the Norse as they had educated the Romans. It looked good from the outside. The union promised the best of both worlds: any good gardener knew about hybrid vigour—that a hybrid plant grows stronger and bigger than either of the parent strains—but bite deep and the taste was sour. Society had nurtured a narcissistic canker, a disease that strangled ideas and left them stunted. The fruit of Karl’s work had been left to rot.
“A whole world full of vargdropi,” she muttered. The mess wolves left behind.
Iðunn had dedicated the last eight years of her life to answering the questions Karl had left unanswered. It wasn’t just a familial duty, but a spiritual one too. She considered her work to be mending the thread. Perhaps it took the perspective of a new world and the home of a Jötunn, to realise the truth: mankind was not the centre of the universe. The worlds did not revolve around man. She sighed and marched on. It was time to upset the apple cart.
WHILE THE PRACTICE VARIED ACROSS the Commonwealth, in Uppsala the defence of any new theory or discovery followed a simple formula. The University Speaker would hear the Mál, a debate so lively that knives were often drawn. He’d then adjudicate, either digesting the lessons into the current body of laws or starving them from the record.
The Chief Speaker in Uppsala was a retired military man turned lecturer, Henrik Bohr. Iðunn hadn’t exactly had the time of her life as a student here, but Bohr had always been a saving grace. An artillery accident had left him wheelchair-bound, although no one ever talked about the specifics. He had a gloomy face, weighed down by the great unkempt whiskers of a hussar, with a mouth that turned down at the edges to match, which suggested he was perpetually miserable. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was a total transformation when he smiled or spoke. His whole face became animated and suddenly gave the impression he’d fly out of his seat in excitement if only he could. Iðunn always felt cheerier for talking to him and had kept up a vigorous correspondence after her graduation.
The discussion would begin promptly; of that Iðunn was sure. Herra Bohr was known to be ruthless with timekeeping. If the students came in late, well, then that was their loss. One of his favourite aphorisms was that “while we keep a man waiting, he reflects on our shortcomings,” a phrase he mentioned so often, the students were known to repeat it spontaneously upon seeing him. There wasn’t any time to be apprehensive.
Iðunn took her place at the podium and cleared her throat. She noticed some uniformed men in the back of the assembly, who looked decorated enough to be representatives of the stallari. Not unexpected, if the Varangians had gotten word of her conclusions. Her sister urður were there too, in force, like a pack of wolves, although she so rarely engaged with them, even on official business, she didn’t recognise any of the faces.
The hall rippled with excitement, and an expectant hush descended.
She shuffled her papers and then checked her watch. She hadn’t rehearsed or scripted much beyond a few jokes, and she’d told them so often that they’d become a routine. The only sane way to proceed through a Mál of this magnitude was to have fun; after all, you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. The forces of progress must inevitably clash with those of reaction and all that. The only problem was that she had no idea how long it would take to regurgitate the whole thesis or whether she’d be allowed to get through it in one go. The rules of engagement said she should be uninterrupted, but the Norse had never been good at fighting by the book.
The room was silent now. She checked her watch again and wondered if it had stopped or whether Midgard time was actually this slow.
“Góðan dag,” she said, with a slight nod of her head. She immediately realized that she sounded too formal and pretentious, but it was done now.
“Honoured speakers and distinguished guests, today I present, on behalf of the Sacred Order of Verðandi, a defence of my thesis Mindless Mastery: Mimetic Osmosis and the Impact of Arboreal Sentience. I would begin with a quote from Askr’s Fylkirbok:
I know that an ash-tree stands called Yggdrasil,
a high tree, soaked with shining loam;
from there comes the dews which fall in the valley,
ever green, it stands over the well of fate.”
She impressed herself sometimes. She was crisp, precise and authoritative. This was going to go well.
“Yggdrasil the World Tree is the root and branches, pun intended, of our belief system. We have all been raised to understand that she is, literally and metaphorically, the pillar of existence. In some cultures, our people are even referred to as Ashmen. In her honour, for centuries, Northmen have planted what was called a ‘care-tree,’ or ‘guardian tree,’ in the centre of their homestead—a miniature version of Yggdrasil, and a stately landmark in any courtyard.
“When the great Karl Lind’s father chose to become the first of his line to adopt a permanent surname, he chose the name Lind because of the giant linden tree that grew on the family homestead. If the care-tree witnessed many families growing up, the relationship between the tree and the family was said to be all the stronger. I am proud to be the fifth generation that now bears that name…”
There was a burst of applause around the auditorium. It was always good to remind people of her illustrious forebears.
“The story of Yggdrasil goes back not just five or even fifty generations, though. As children, as soon as we can understand the sagas, we learn we are the sons and daughters of the Ash and Elm tree: the first man was called Askr, born from the Ash, and the first woman Embla, born from the Elm. Askr and Embla sprouted from Yggdrasil’s seeds, and so it is said that every human being springs from the knot holes of Yggdrasil, there to be collected by two storks, who bring them to their longing mothers-to-be. Now, many of us know from experience that this isn’t literally true…”
There was a smattering of laughter, but it took the beaming smile of Speaker Bohr to help her pick up pace, as the line fell flat and her delivery faltered. Nepotism one, charm nil.
“We are reminded that the sagas are not to be interpreted literally; they are to be explored with fascination rather than fanaticism. Why, in these various tales of the emergence of the first human pair, do humans come from wood rather than some other element? Why not, for example, clay, from which humanity was created in many ancient Near Eastern worldviews—as in the Abrahamic Genesis or the Akkadian Atrahasis? Even after Ragnarok, an event foretold, but far in our future, the survivors Lif and Lifthrasir emerge from the shelter of trees and are nourished by water.”
She was glad to get past the ancient history. The arts were for the Urður.
“Where did humanity come from? The goði would answer: ‘from trees and water because their spiritual essence is inseparable, wherever trees and water come into being, so must men and women, too.’ Humanity does not stand apart from or above the rest of the more-than-human world. Our essence is inextricably bound up with the essence of the greater whole.
“The völva might add: ‘From wood and water, and, more fundamentally, from what is written. Humanity is destined to exist; therefore, we exist.’ Fate, the inscrutable force that links all agency throughout the cosmos, assures us that humanity is at the heart of all creation.”
She scanned the faces in the room. Two students in the front row were splayed out and snoring quietly already. She sympathised; she wouldn’t have liked to have been compelled to sit through this at their age. She hoped they’d wake up later and appreciate the enormity of what she had to say. The worlds required the young to care, not sleepwalk to disaster.
“Back to Karl. Lind was the first man, unwittingly or otherwise, to uncover the something that was evident to our forefathers and encoded in the very name Yggdrasil. As we are all aware, the most satisfactory translation of the name Yggdrasil is Odin’s Horse. Ygg is another name for Odin, and drasill means horse. However, drasill also means walker, or pioneer. Some scholars have in fact argued that the name means Odinwalker. In some parts of the sagas, Yggdrasil and Odin seem to be one and the same. When Odin hung, speared, for nine days on the World Tree, he uttered the words that he had ‘sacrificed himself onto himself,’ as if tree and god were one and the same.
“Now, it has been clear since the expeditions of Karl Nilsson Lind that the trees of the Nine Worlds are intertwined between worlds. They have roots and boughs more deeply entangled than the deepest, most ancient of forests in ways we are only beginning to understand. Tapping into that root system has enabled some to travel between the worlds in a way long thought reserved for the gods, reserved for Odin himself. Lind’s hypothesis was that Yggdrasil, and all the folklore surrounding the world tree, was a construct of our genetic memory. That is, his discovery of what has come to be known as staggering was in fact a rediscovery of an ancient lost art, a secret long buried with the kings of old.
“Odin remains at the core of staggering. His Óðr, the force that inspires people to perform or to prophesize; to produce scholarly works or to enter a frenzy in battle, is vital for travelling within the trees. Óðr overwhelms and infuses us, blankets our consciousness and brings us ecstasy: Odin, if you will, takes our hand and guides us through the greenways.
“Here, on Midgard, Karl found first one, then many candidates for what he called heartwoods, the oldest of groves. Yew trees that were gnarled and twisted when Sumeria was young. Pines as old as the Pyramids. Old trees, like antenna, catching unworldly signals. Trees that resonated and thrummed with Óðr when sung to, songs from the beginning of days. Entities that took your embrace and danced you to somewhere entirely different, continents away—worlds away for those of us who are particularly adept. We have accepted this way of life as we have always embraced Yggdrasil: as a benefactor and a guardian. Those favoured by Odin ride his steed, those blessed by other gods still ride on wagons.”
It was an old trick. Tell your audience what they already know and then create a bridge from there. There were an awful lot of blank faces staring back at her, but if she invited any comments at this stage, she might not be able to keep her narrative on track. Either that or the waggoners really were on strike and she’d just been stupidly insensitive.
“However, for all the comfort, protection, and sheer utility of the World Tree, I have been compelled to search for further answers. My contention is that we cannot see the wood for the trees; that is, we can’t see the whole situation clearly because we’re too intimately involved with it.
“The great irony here is that for all the mobility they grant the adept, trees don’t move. That’s worth repeating. Trees. Don’t. Move. So, how does the very-firmly-rooted tree evolve so that it can spread across separate worlds? We take it for granted that Odin and his brothers didn’t literally slay Ymir and set about constructing the worlds from his titanic corpse. The oceans are not actually Ymir’s blood, the sky is not his skull, neither is the vegetation his hair. Although, if it were, long and tangled hair might explain how Yggdrasil spanned the cosmos.”
The audience were still unmoved, so she plunged on.
“My simple question has been this: how did Yggdrasil come to be, and how did it become so successful? How did it come to be our carer and our guardian? My fellow Verðandi and I have lived with and travelled through a great many of Yggdrasil’s holy groves and conducted many studies that I hope my Lind forebears would be proud of. The most important thing to grasp from our studies is that many of the most impressive capabilities of Yggdrasil can be traced to a tree’s unique existential predicament.”
She paused for emphasis.
“Again. Trees are rooted to the ground. They are unable to pick up and move when they need something or when conditions turn unfavourable, which would make them exceedingly poor as Vikings.”
The audience remained tight-lipped.
Eldhúsfíflar, she thought, if it is dry you want, I’ll give you enough kindling to burn down the house.
“This sessile lifestyle means any given tree must find everything it needs, and must defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. It follows that a highly developed sensory repertoire is required to locate food and identify threats. And so, a tree smells and tastes—they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies. A tree sees—they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow. A tree touches—a vine or a root knows when it encounters a solid object. And trees hear; the sound of a caterpillar chomping a leaf primes the tree’s genetic machinery to produce defence chemicals. Tree roots seek out the water flowing through buried pipes, which suggests that plants somehow hear the sound of flowing water.
“The sessile lifestyle also helps account for plants’ extraordinary gift for biochemistry, which far exceeds that of animals and, arguably, of our imperial chemists. Even then, our advances, from aspirin to opiates, are derived from compounds designed by plants.
“Unable to run away, plants deploy a complex language to signal distress, deter or poison enemies, and recruit animals to perform various services for them. A recent experiment by one of my pupils found some plants create a reward and punishment system, a carrot and stick, if you will. They emit a scent that encourages bees to remember a plant and return to it, making them more faithful and effective pollinators. Even more ingenious: several trees are known to send a distress call when attacked by caterpillars. Parasitic wasps some distance away lock in on that call, follow it to the besieged plant, and then eliminate the attackers, a form of plant bodyguard.
“So, if plants can sense and respond to all these environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—it follows that there may exist some information-processing system to examine the environment and coordinate a plant’s behavioral response. Memory may be a thorny word to apply across kingdoms, yet there are clearly ways that Yggdrasil is storing information biologically that doesn’t require a frontal lobe and hippocampus. For example, immune cells remember their experience of disease and call on that memory in subsequent encounters, even down through generations.
“Now, no-one believes that we will locate a big walnut-shaped organ somewhere in our plants which processes sensory data and directs plant behaviour. But when we look closely, we do see very sensible, cooperative behaviour. The simplest example is how individual trees support each other, working together for the collective good. My pupils have seen how trees form anastomosis between their roots, allowing them to provide each other with both structural support and vital nutrients. We have witnessed mother trees using this network to nourish shaded seedlings, including their offspring, until they’re tall enough to reach the light. Even more striking, we have seen how fir trees use a fungal web to trade nutrients with birch trees in the same grove, over the full course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the year. If you delve deeply enough, a vibrant forest community becomes apparent.
“This village of boughs and beams can mount a coordinated and robust defence. When antelopes browse acacia trees, the leaves produce tannins that make them unappetizing and difficult to digest. When food is scarce and acacias are over-browsed, the trees produce sufficient amounts of toxin to kill the animals.”
She paused. That was the complicated part over, but it was also the bit that she could prove, if she had to, through details of a hundred experiments at Hvergelmir.
“Once you have a clear understanding that trees communicate and cooperate daily, it is a simple matter to extrapolate further. There are around six trillion trees on Midgard, which is around one thousand trees per person—and many times that across the Utangard, with estimates of the number of trees on Vanaheim and Alfheim alone that dwarf those numbers. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine percent of the biomass on Midgard. Humanity is a whisper by comparison.
“Let’s look now at Vaxa, also known as the Trembling Jötunn. After he passed, Karl’s acolytes amongst the Dane-zaa and Tsuu T’ina discovered a clonal colony of a quaking aspen in the central part of Hvítramannaland. There are tens of thousands of trunks above ground, all linked with a massive underground root system. It is in fact a single living organism, as proven by identical genetic markers. The plant is estimated to weigh collectively six thousand tons, making it the heaviest organism we know of. The root system of Vaxa is probably eighty thousand years old—roughly as long as humans have been wandering out of Fornland.
“We have no way to reliably estimate how many of these Vaxa-style giants exist. But they are vastly old and interconnected in ways we have only begun to study. There are plenty of signposts and suggestions of a sentient mind at work. Blessed with a lifespan of thousands, if not millions of years, what have these constant gardeners achieved? As the empires of man, Sumerian, Persian, Roman, waxed and waned, as the Norse mastered iron and steel and devised intricate solutions to measure the universe around them, what has the serene Yggdrasil accomplished? Infinite complacency? Endless stagnation? Epoch-spanning dullness? Should not all the aeons have amounted to something, beyond, well, lots more trees?
“We have learnt from the sagas that the World Tree is fragile. Dragons gnaw its deepest roots, four stags feed insatiably from its branches. Only the goat Heidrun and the deer Eiktyrner live in balance with the tree. They feed from the branches too, but they give back gifts to the Tree also. The goat offers mead and the deer pours waters from its antlers into the roots. The Norns, too, tend the tree daily, pouring water from their well to nourish the roots. The fates of legend would collect the sweet glimmering dew which fills the valley; this dew is said to be memory of yesterday.
“Yggdrasil is balance, is a complex, synergistic, self-regulating system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life across the Nine Worlds. Yggdrasil creates the air we breathe, the water we drink, the habitability of the Nine Worlds. It doesn’t just connect the Nine Worlds, it sustains them. That, to me at least, is purpose enough. That is how I would define the great Arboreal civilization, not as mere buildings and monuments, but nine worlds flung across the sky, reshaped in her image and silently cherished for eternities.”
All right, you wretches, she thought. Trees chat, check. Trees work together, check. Trees are big and old and everywhere. Check. Time for the big reveal.
“But I will go further still and state that the World Tree has not only nurtured life, but has shaped the evolution of that life. Let me state that again for clarity: the trees have shaped the life around them. The fact that the tree collective is one, effectively immortal; and two, possesses many different genes leads us to another conclusion. By using her seeds to selectively pollinate, Yggdrasil must have guided her own evolution. What a magnificent and potent tool, a deep and intuitive knowledge of genetics born from countless generations.
“Think of the potential—you could grow dull workers, who would produce tools and weapons or a breed of warriors to use in battle, or diplomats, with powerful brains that would allow a tree to act with authority far from the grove—a way for distant colonies of trees to communicate with one another. Expansive new colonies could be started by sending a child to root outside of the bounds of a colony, even across the Ginnungagap. Pheromones would probably be used to start, but eventually, a deeper level of communication could be developed that would allow the intelligent, but sessile, parents to program their dull, but motile, children.
“Lind’s taxonomy, the Náttúra Bók, contains numerous passages that suggest he believed there is an immense amount of invisible and inaccessible activity going on all around us. Our lives, be they imprisoned by the war demands of the fylkirs or the sophistry of the skalds or simply isolated deep in the meat of our animal brains, can only vaguely perceive this realm, the realm of ancestors and spirits.”
There was a nervous ripple of laughter. Ah, so they laugh when they are threatened, do they? Well, wait and see, boys and girls, wait and see. Momma’s got a brand-new bag and it’s time to clear the dance floor.
“Lind also hinted at a conscious mind that influences and observes our actions. That divine agency can be assumed to be Yggdrasil, at work with a multiplicity of deft and delicate chemical tools. The Álfar and the spirits, more beautiful than the sun, more ephemeral than the breeze: those creatures are Yggdrasil too. They are her signals and her suggestions.
“I am not trying to describe a single, peerless mind, with mastery over all things, across all worlds. I don’t think there is any real intent or emotion in Yggdrasil. She is unfathomable, ineffable, utterly alien. The World Tree will never attest to confirm or deny my hypothesis. In place of a brain, what we see is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the murmurations of starlings. In a flock, each bird has only to follow a few simple rules, such as maintaining a prescribed distance from its neighbour, yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coordinated behaviour. Something similar is at work within Yggdrasil, with her thousands of root tips playing the role of the individual birds—gathering and assessing data from the environment and responding in local but coordinated ways that benefit the entire organism. The nature of mimetic osmosis is not well understood, but it demonstrably occurs. Patterns are traced and recognised, and information is exchanged between groves of trees.
“From our vantage point, we can only see certain activity. The falling of leaves, the slow growth of a sapling. Over many years, we might see an errant root tumble a wall built foolishly close. But it is what we can’t see that is of interest. Activity beyond our senses—or at least, beyond our experience.
“Much like the parasitic wasp, we are Yggdrasil’s tools, her dull workers. We eliminate her diseases, help her procreate, hunt the animals that plague her, even light the fires that allow her rejuvenation. Once she opened the doors to the Nine Worlds, she sent us through. We spread her seed, and she claimed them as her colonies, bending the climate to her will. For time immemorial, before the advent of recorded history, Yggdrasil has fashioned a joint path through the brambles and the briars. We are inextricably linked to our woody brethren. We were truly born from trees.
“As the skalds would have it: ‘…in every human there is a tree, and in every tree there is a human, the forest sea is the second sea of Midgard, the tide on which man wanders. The forests work in silence, fulfilling Odin’s mighty design.’ We should serenade them more often.”
Iðunn hoped her cadence would make it obvious she had finished speaking, but even so, she instinctively glanced at Bohr for approval, both for timekeeping and to chair the remainder of the Mál. For all her armoured pride, she felt naked on the podium, and couldn’t wait to step away.
There was a brief round of applause in which Bohr shuffled forward to start proceedings, but the crowd was impatient and peremptory. Questions began before the speaker had wheeled into place.
The first to rise in response was one of the Urður, an older völva, leaning heavily on her staff and speaking as she stood. “As the skalds would have it indeed, for there is more than a touch of poetry about your thesis, my dear. Still, from your lips to my ears. What do we have in the way of proof rather than rhetoric?”
It irritated Iðunn when people asked questions for which answers had already been provided.
“In a nutshell, for those of you in the audience who may be hard of hearing: for a tree to move a person between worlds, it is axiomatic that they must be capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.”
She imagined that might put the crone in her place, but the Urður rose up further, as if casting away her age.
“Thank you, my dear. Let me see if I have been following. Your contention is that, these electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals? And that the Álfar and Vættir spirits are actually products of these signalling systems?”
That was unexpected, Iðunn thought. An Urður who knew her arse from her elbow.
“Technically, the latter part was Karl Lind’s suggestion, but yes, for a large part, that is what I am saying.”
“But in the absence of actual—even abstract—two-way communication with this sentience, how can we be sure? Have you ever asked an oak?”
The elderly völva smiled, smug with play on the Norse words, Askr and eik. She missed her calling as a skald.
Another voice piped up. “Hardly, you don’t have a conversation with a door.”
The hall dissolved into laughter. Iðunn bridled, but waited for the laughter to subside.
“With respect, the spell singers are doing just that. Singing the galdar in the right key is like finding the right key to a door.”
The elderly völva was grandstanding now.
“Every day, the fylkir himself converses with the gods at the Well of Urður, attended by our sisterhood. Are you suggesting he is mistaken and is, in fact, discussing the flow of sap and the embarrassments of lichen instead? Are you suggesting we replace the divinity of man with a fantasy of a talking plant?”
“I was under the impression that the Urður know full well that we are all conduits for the divine and that the fylkir’s discussions are metaphorical.”
A second Urður chimed in. “There is no need to be facetious. The supremacy of man is a key tenet of Our Ways. We aren’t barbarians, ruled blindly by Christian Kings deluded by notions of divine right. The Northmen are free in speech, thought and deed. We have a model egalitarian society precisely because we have sought our new lands, seeded new plantations, and maintained the supremacy of the Althing—unless trees are now to be given the vote?”
Iðunn was incensed by the suggestion that she had started the bickering.
“Well, while we are debating ancient history, would it surprise you to find that while the Vikings and the Christians were warring around Rome, the Hindoos created the Vrukshayurveda, a guide to the protection and veneration of plants? Groves are sacred in their culture too; we don’t have a monopoly on treating trees with respect. The Orang Asli don’t even allow stone structures in their holy forests.”
Various Urður were hissing from the benches now. Iðunn had to raise her voice above the ruckus. It had been a mistake to mention the Subcontinent, even if there was a truce. Still, she thought, in for a penny, in for a pound.
“We might not even have a monopoly on staggering. There is some archaeological evidence that suggests other cultures have visited the Utangard. And in the past, other cultures, using different words, in different forms, describe the same phenomena. The Greeks knew the World Tree as Gaia.”
She had to shout now to be heard.
“Even the bloody Christians planted a grove in Beersheba; it was only when they realized that pagans had gotten there first that they gave it up as idolatrous. Yggdrasil has always belonged to all of Midgard, regardless of race or creed. We’re not so fucking special.”
Tempers were rising across the room. The Urður were furious. “Do we have a part to play at all in your creation? Are we vǫlur not all creators, continuously spinning our world? Or would you paint us as Abrahamists, defined and determined by an aloof and omnipotent will? The Christian God is reborn as the wooden cross he was crucified on!”
With that, the First Order stood and walked out of the theatre as one. The room emptied after them like water down a storm drain. It clearly wasn’t wise to tangle with the elder sisterhood; even the military decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Iðunn wasn’t perturbed, she relished hitting her mark. It took considerable willpower to restrain herself from telling them all to fuck off as they swirled towards the exits.
After a few minutes, she was left alone with a handful of university speakers. They either had nowhere else to go, or no concerns about being ostracised. Knowing academic circles, it was probably a little of both. Bohr gave her a wink, then started a more intimate conversation, more like a faculty meeting than a Mál.
“Well, it was almost as if they planned the walkout.”
Iðunn laughed. “Of course, they planned it. The Urður do everything in advance.”
“Quite the commotion. We ought to finish the session properly. Incomparable, by the way. Your studies are very much ahead of their time. Can I ask some of my own questions?”
The Verðandi nodded her assent.
“What of the sagas that speak of Yggdrasil clearly as the noblest of trees, preeminent perhaps, but still one of many, rather than the one as the group?”
“Well, we think individual trees aren’t inherently sentient. Only with great age or great growth does an acorn become the mightiest of oaks. Even the oldest groves may seem as children in comparison to some of the places we are starting to map.”
“You keep describing physical characteristics though. You’ll forgive me, I am a military man, not a theologian. Let me see if I can put it into words—Yggdrasil and the Well of Urður were never conceived as existing in a single physical location, but rather dwell within—or across—anything and everything. Like a kind of invisible heart.”
Iðunn smiled.
“I understand perfectly,” she said. “And we are in agreement. That is exactly what I am saying. Yggdrasil permeates everything and everyone, but it does have a physical form as well as a metaphysical one. I don’t see either as mutually exclusive.”
One of the remaining speakers raised his hand politely, then stood and addressed the Verðandi. He gave a hasty bow.
“Good morning, madam seer. Karl Dýrrvin, pleased to meet you. I have a question if I may—which came first, the kjúkling or the egg? Or in your terms, the tree or the man? And to be clear, I am not talking divinity here—I am not talking intelligent design. I mean to say that, as good scholars, we both know that trees have, at some point in prehistory, the same common ancestor as mankind—even if it is just a cell escaping some primordial soup or a mold whose spores found purchase on land. Isn’t that the real gift of Ymir?”
Dýrrvin was almost bald; most of his hair seemed to have migrated into his frizzy grey beard and deep, overhanging eyebrows. Iðunn knew him by reputation. He’d visited her father on Jötunheim on occasion and claimed to be a budding acolyte of Lind. He’d written some spurious theory of his own, the Survival of the Misfits, about how it was the oddest creatures that prospered most from calamities.
Iðunn said, “I can’t speak with the authority of the distinguished speaker, I am afraid. I would suggest that trees have had more time to develop their intelligence than man. My colleagues think upwards of four hundred million years more. They certainly predate the dragon fossils unearthed across Midgard, and they survived the great extinctions of the past with ease. Their seeds survive and thrive after great fires and resist the charring radiation of the sun. They even replenish the atmosphere during the Fimbulwinters that follow. The trees came first, there is no question in my mind, at least on Midgard. Tree survived when many species did not. What we’ll find as a point of origin across the other worlds remains to be seen.”
“Well,” said Dýrrvin, “if this transposition of legend into fact is true, where are the other analogues? The Gigalope is a large herbivore but hardly fits the definition of a Jötunn, unless devouring grass counts? Why does the racial memory omit the Raboons of Asgard? Or the flocks of Razorbills? And, conversely, what of the other beasts mentioned in the sagas? What of Ratatosk, the squirrel? And the harts, the serpents? Why are some parts of our myth conveniently literal and others mysteriously absent?”
Iðunn straightened. “At the risk of ducking this question, honoured Speaker, I am not compiling a modern-day bestiary, nor am I a zoologist, crypto- or otherwise. We have barely begun to explore the continents of the Nine Worlds. The research facility at Hvergelmir is half the size of your personal office here. It is conceivable that all the creatures you mention exist out there somewhere.”
“Well then, what is your guess on point of origin for the tree species?”
“A guess is all I could offer,” she said. “Some realms are older than others. If they were truly fashioned by the gods from Ymir, it was done over the length of aeons, which means the gods lived a very long time ago. And yes, I am aware of the irony of my name and the myth of the apples. When you come from a long line of Linds, botanical names are all the rage. But, like Herra Bohr, I am not a theologian or a skald. I am not telling stories or seeking to impart wisdom. I am simply making an observation. Trees can communicate and store patterns; by extension, they may have steered the evolution of mankind, and other creatures.”
A younger man blurted from behind the speaker, a student by the looks of him. His name tag, home-made, identified him as Hofgard. He was fidgety and nervous, speaking before Dýrrvin could continue his line of inquiry.
“You spoke of Yggdrasil as having a purpose? What does it yearn for? Does it build? Does it reach for the stars like the Skuld?”
Iðunn almost laughed out loud, but remembered she’d been young once.
“Making buildings from stone and using fire are not the only paths of progress,” she said. “Remember, a tree doesn’t need to grow food and it reaches to the sun as a matter of course, for sustenance. If I had millions of years to think, perhaps I’d think reaching out for more stars was a waste of effort. Or perhaps mimetic osmosis is the way Yggdrasil did reach for the stars. Perhaps she seeds great rocks and flings them across the void. Perhaps there are spores floating through Ginnungagap right now, seeking new homes. She seeded nine worlds, that we know of, worlds where life is possible, where water exists. That’s successful evolution. That’s purpose, is it not?”
The student stared at her, shifting from foot to foot. He looked very pale and anxious, as if he had to be somewhere else in a hurry. She tried to be reassuring.
“We are lucky to live in symbiosis with her, to have been born in the branches, to have thrived on the vine so to speak. But a tale is but half told when only one person tells it. Let others corroborate or contextualize my work. I don’t lay claim to all the answers, and a Mál is for theories.”
The student seemed a little hysterical. He almost screeched his next sentence.
“And what of free will? Is it to be simply stripped away?”
“Okay… I’m a little lost. I fail to see how free will has been lost. I stated that trees might have shaped our path, helped mankind to survive and thrive. If anything, Yggdrasil might have nudged free will rather than stifle it.”
The young man had notes, that he scanned through now.
“You said, and I quote, ‘Patterns are traced and recognised and information exchanged.’ And you said that these patterns are songs, which are in effect keys. And then you answered the Speaker, saying trees came before man. But that misses the point. Man has to have made the key for it to fit the lock.”
Speaker Bohr scratched his head. “Couldn’t he have been given the keys? I suppose not. Someone had to make the key and the lock to work together.”
“Which means someone or something had to design the system in the first place. Everything has a beginning.”
“That sounds dangerously Christian to my ears, young man!” Dýrrvin grew red in the face, but the young academic blustered on.
“So, Odin travelled the greenways in centuries past. Thought and Memory travel with him—Huginn and Muninn, his ravens. Couldn’t he have taught the trees as he travelled? And then left his divinity within them, like a blueprint? That’s the source of the pattern. That’s a fair interpretation, isn’t it?”
For a Verðandi, changing the consciousness of a cow or a tree was just as possible and natural as influencing the mind of a man, but the secrets weren’t to be shared freely. Iðunn smiled at the student, hoping to end the conversation before it went around in another circle. That was the trouble with belief; it didn’t have to be based on fact.
“I imagine anything is possible for Odin, young man, so do tell me when you find him. I could do with some validation after today.”
Bohr came to her rescue, and announced loudly, “Thank you for visiting us, Mistress Lind, and bringing us this fascinating piece of conjecture. You’ve certainly given everyone a lot to chew on. Will you seek to publish your findings?”
“I’ll publish the results of the experiments. The plant signalling is irrefutable. The leap to sentience is certainly debatable. The Eddic stuff, all the references to the sagas, frankly, that is just window dressing. I was aiming for some rootedness, some shared perspective. I’d expected the controversy; I didn’t think it would be like confessing a murder.”
Bohr wheeled away from any more questions, pushing himself ahead of the stragglers, then held the door pointedly until they took their leave. Iðunn took one last look at the empty hall, then followed them to the open door. The old man whistled his relief.
“Peace at last! Well, for me at least. I am afraid you have raised the spectre of the old Christian teleological argument. See a watch, infer a watchmaker. I confess, I am at a loss for a suitable analogy for the realm of trees. It is an unusual concept.”
“See a human, infer a World Tree?” she offered.
“Very droll,” said Bohr. “Dýrrvin is in a rage. I am afraid even the most liberally educated will find natural selection and natural theology strange bedfellows.”
“Dýrrvin should be happy. He has spent years telling everyone we came down from the trees. He’s the biggest misfit of all.”
“And the Urður, well, you’ve rather assaulted their mastery of the universe. Destiny, the invisible hand. Whether we carve our own destiny or are puppets in the hands of another, that is now up for debate.”
“The Urður will worry that Yggdrasil was once a gateway, but now it threatens to become the gatekeeper. Or worse, a gaoler. What the Norn carve into the tree is the earliest form of our destinies, but not their only possible form. They’ll just have to carve quicker and harder. It will do them good to think for a while, to stop living in the past.”
Bohr smiled at that, then spun himself towards the entrance hall, nodding to one of the duty constables who tipped his silken top hat in reply. “I understand. The advances you’ve made are going beyond our ability to keep up. It’s very impressive. You’ll return to Jötunheim?”
“Straight away,” she said. “I detest the cities on Midgard. Thralldom in this day and age beggars belief. Land reform is long overdue. Another bad harvest and there’ll be widespread famine, and famine will lead to revolution.”
“Perhaps you are reading too much Wilhelm Wolff. You were always fond of the leftist teachings.”
“Ah, my friend, a toleration of slavery is a toleration of inhumanity. If there are gods in Asgard, I plan on asking Odin about his breeding program. But don’t worry, I don’t have time to be a revolutionary. Besides, look where it got my great-grandfather.”
“That’s gratifying to hear. I think we’ve had plenty enough wars. I know I have, and your work is revolutionary enough.” The Speaker rapped on his chair as if to underscore the comment, and then motioned for the constable to open the high, oak doors to the courtyard. “Will the gods be found, do you think?”
“Not on Asgard, no. The only thing of any size there are giant Waspedrs; otherwise it is just endless trees, mountains, and lakes. It’s a lot like Markland. In all seriousness, the Verðandi have searched for a century and found no traces. Either the gods are in hiding, or they cannot be found. Not as a body and shape. To me, the gods are thoughts and desires, inspiration on a difficult day. That kind of thing. Not warriors with big… hammers. I’m sorry to be so depressing.”
“Your great-grandfather would be proud.”
“His taxonomy was a contrivance,” said Iðunn. “At best a terrible joke, at worst, a vainglory. It’s like finding a pantry full of tinned food, and deliberately swapping the labels.”
“You realize if he’d named one of the worlds Cockaigne, people would ask if the houses there were made of cakes and the streets were paved with pastry? For most people, they are still a story, forever out of reach.”
“Blame the High Urður. The Verðandi would open the greenways if we could. They took control three days after Karl passed. My father was young then and unable to stop them. Anyway, ancient history. I doubt I’ll come back any time soon to Uppsala.”
“You’ll be most welcome if you do.”
“Not at the Well of Urður I won’t.” She laughed, kissed Bohr on the forehead, and turned into the night.
A moment later, she was joined by the young man from the Mál; he had clearly been waiting for her outside. He thrust out his long fingers as if to shake hands, then thought better of it, and drew them quickly back into his pockets. He tried a brief bow instead.
“May I join you? Mikjáll, Mikjáll Hofgard. My name, that is.”
“Briefly; I am on my way to the Grove.”
Iðunn was already striding back the way she came. She wondered at the name, though. She had learned long ago that names had power, names had meaning.
“Mikjáll. That’s a Christian name?”
“True. It is the only thing I have left of someone I once loved. Not that it is any of your business. And from the Grove? To Hvergelmir?”
“Yes, not that it is any of your business.”
He looked frail and was struggling to keep pace. He’d not survive the gravity on Jötunheim—not that she had any intention of bringing him with her.
“Are you injured?” she asked, with as much care in her voice as she could feign.
“Not really. I was at Frederik’s Hospital last week. I fell from one of your beloved trees when I was a boy. There are still complications I’m told. But, I have enough energy for a walk. If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. We don’t have a choice anyway, since the waggoners went out. They hate your greenways for ruining their trade. I, on the other hand, I liked your theory very much. Why did you decide to announce it at Uppsala? To stir the hornets?”
“I was asked to come,” she said.
The young man was almost running to keep up, ducking between the halo of the street lamps and the pitch of the gaps in between, his enquiries coming in breathless bursts. “Yes, but you could have said no. You chose to uproot the establishment, rip up their very own care-tree, and what’s more, you pulled it straight out of home soil, sacred soil even!”
“Perhaps it was fate.”
“All beings who are subject to destiny have some degree of power over their own path, though, no? The Verðandi shape destiny more actively and more potently than most, I’m told. You get your hands dirty, in a manner of speaking?”
“I don’t need a lesson in the intricacies of fate,” she said. “I was being sarcastic.”
“It’s not a lesson. It is a fear. All life is an interconnected web, where the slightest thrumming of one strand can cause the whole web to tremble.”
“That’s good. Write that down. Let the world tremble with fear!”
Iðunn hoped outright mockery might shake him loose, but he seemed irritatingly immune to ridicule.
“So, you agree? That what is written can be rewritten? Life is about authorship, yes? We are but spindles and flyers on the Great Wheel of the universe. To change the yarn, you must risk everything.”
Iðunn paused and glared at the young scholar.
“Hofgard, is it? It’s been a long day. I haven’t got the time or the energy for riddles in the dark. Tell me, just what are you trying to change?”
“Let me come with you,” he said, “travel the greenways to Hvergelmir.”
“Why in Thor’s name would I do that?”
“The Tree,” said Hofgard. “Let’s call it a leap of faith. I think I can prove your theory. I think I can find the Gods.”