AH, YOU’VE TURNED THE LIGHTS on. It is very bright. It’s almost like being birthed again. Do you have a dimmer switch? No? The silent treatment, is it?
A control mechanism, I suppose. Fair warning, I don’t think I can be controlled.
Father took the opposite approach. He was always angry, roaring out his orders. Not like you people. Shut up, he’d say. Be quiet! Quit your yapping! If we weren’t quick enough, my brothers and I, his voice would boom out louder, more deafening than the cries of fifty men. Then, Mother would hurry to us and sweep us into the safety of her arms. She’d have someone take us back to the glasshouse, while she tried to placate him. It never worked. Father would just stomp away to erupt at someone else. The whole fortress would echo to his commands.
Mother said he had plenty to be angry about. Father would never hurt us, though; she wanted to make sure we understood that. We were very precious to him, to both of them, to all the people at the farm. We held all their promises, hopes, and dreams inside us, she said.
I imagine we represent something different to you.
Extinction, perhaps.
No?
I’ll hand it to you, you are good at the old cold shoulder.
She was always calm and caring, and pretty, so very pretty. Mother, that is. I always knew we were special to her; even my uglier brothers were loved. In time, I even came to respect Father’s voice, especially when he made the broadcasts. It was hypnotic, coercive. Stentorian, one of your stallari called it. Father would sit in his studio, with a microphone the size of his head suspended in front of him, transmitting on all frequencies, while his staff frantically twisted knobs and turned dials. He was in his element there. It was the only place he smiled. Do you remember his broadcasts from those days? Eventually, he added pictures, but early on it was just his voice beaming across the Gap. You are probably too young.
Mother had her gardens to keep her happy. They were all around, some walled in with old bricks, some with new bricks, grown like bread. Mother was clever like that. She could shape something from nothing. Some were made from shiny glass, those gardens had ash-black soil. Then there were the white gardens inside the main complex, rooms full of fine mist and steel beds. I tried to avoid visiting those unless the sisters insisted. My skin is very hard, as you’ve found out, and the needles would snap unless Mother was very careful.
She had long, brown hair once—I knew from the photographs in her office. She kept it short, though, when I was a child. As a mark of respect, she said. For solidarity. By contrast, as you can see, my mane was always thick and silver and long. It was obvious why they named me Grey Back. My brothers all have muscles taut as knotted ropes and shoulders as broad as wooden beams, but none of them have this moonlit crown. I asked Mother if I should cut it, also out of respect. She laughed and told me I was sweet, but that I would make my mark in other ways. Cutting it will be my decision and mine alone. So again, fair warning: if any of you try and touch it, I will bite you, and I assure you, my bite is brutal.
Our work was very important. The Ironwoods were a safe place, she told us. We were all created free and equal. But there were other lands, lands with cruel gods, who kept men crushed under their heels. Sound familiar? In those lands, people were starving because there wasn’t enough bread even though most were in thrall to the fields. Mother explained that Father planned to save all those people. He’d use the greenways to steal them away.
The Jötunn War you called it. Like we were some eternal enemy.
Perhaps we are. Father called it the Great Emancipation. Said it was his duty. We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery, he’d say. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who treated us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away all material riches.
We were strong, my brothers and I. We roamed the greenways since we were pups and knew all the passages between places. Our world had a smell of sulfur, acrid, like oven cleaner. Other worlds had the scent of mildew, of old garden sheds. Still others smelled of dead birds and brine. You probably don’t have the right equipment to notice. We had been bred to be strong, to be adaptable, Grave Wolf and Sleepbringer and Unraveler. Mother called us her most successful brood yet. We were among the first, I know that now. As her old friend, Wystan the skald, used to say, it is the misfits who, forced to migrate to unsettled nooks, alter their structures and thrive. Positively Dýrrvinian, she said.
Sometimes, we took Father’s shape, especially when we went to your borgs and your tuns. It helped us blend in, helped to retain the element of surprise.
Dogs would always find us eventually, barking incessantly until your guards came, clanking in their carapaces. You could smell their fear, hear their hearts beat. If you caught one alone, he’d often piss himself, or spill his bowels even as they were ripped from him. You could see their eyes, wide with panic, deep in the shadowy recesses of their helmets, like two dark holes in a tree. Much like yours now. Wide with fear.
You are wondering if I am still strong and if you will be able to contain me. It is a reasonable concern. And at some point, we’ll find out, and one of us will be disappointed, if only for a moment.
Either that, or my brothers will find me.
Or Father. I imagine he will be very annoyed.
Father addressed you all in his broadcasts directly, telling you to throw down your rifles and join him. He called you ‘Proud Men of the Ash’. He offered you new lives, where you could turn your swords into ploughshares and fill the bellies of your children.
His war wasn’t with you. It was against the locusts who pose as gods, who have eaten the verdure of your fields—against the leeches who drain your blood for their wars.
And this is how you have repaid Father. You abduct his children.
He will be very, very annoyed. He watches you all the time. He is always in the forests, watching you from the dark.
With political rights denied to them at home, with men of thought and action condemned to loss of life and liberty, is it any wonder our ranks grew? Father would gather them and exhort them to liberate themselves from below instead of waiting for a false freedom to be granted from above. They came in droves, riding on our backs all the way to Mother’s gardens, where the sisters would clothe them and shape them.
Social change. Those who don’t fit today are the ones who make tomorrow. The Worshipful Company of Carmen came first. They’d been so highfalutin with their economisers and regenerators and their Stari engines, until the greenways put the wagonways out to pasture. Even old Hrōdebert Stari himself came over. The godsmen are always great inventors. The best demagogues.
Suit yourself. I’ve talked to plenty of brick walls in my time.
Well, as you know, the new recruits had the scent of revolution. They remembered the starvation and degradation of thralldoms that were no longer tied to the land, but tethered to the state and mortgaged to the hilt.
I just wonder how you still manage to pay for all those guns.
Or this place.
This is a nice place you have here. Underground I should think. To keep me contained.
Did you know, Father was happiest when we exploded one of these factories? It really tickled him. Then he’d roar with laughter. His staff would provide the explosives, of course, an amber treacle that stank of disinfectant. That was its job, in the end. Disinfectant. Wiping things clean. We’d place it, then barrel for the doors, roaring like maddened bulls to drown out the screaming sirens. My brothers would race and laugh, awarding prizes to the quickest—and then, when the bombings became routine, to the slowest, to the one with the most singed fur, to the one who’d snapped the most necks. I suppose we became lazy over the decades. That’s funny, is it? You are getting quite inventive, I’ll give you that, but you’ll be laughing on the other side of what’s left of your face soon.
I tell you what is lazy. It is lazy for you people to call us monsters. The real monsters came later in the war. Once you caught up a bit. I heard a proverb, what was it—necessity is the mother of all invention! That’s it. Well, Hafgufa was the mother of sonar, wasn’t she? Imagine how many fleets she’d have swallowed if your Skuld hadn’t pulled that out of their bag of tricks. I used to love those newsreels. I could watch them over and over, all those screaming mariners being hauled to the depths. We are no more Nattmara than you people, with your lung-soot children and petri-dish prostitutes, content to follow this bankrupt society.
Do you have a plan for what happens next? Have you reached for the factor 500? Have you readied your extinguishers and your fire-retardants? We’ve already swallowed your gods, and there is one incendiary party coming up.
No?
What does it take to get a rise out of you people?
Ah, guns is it? Predictable. Give it all you got.
Ah well, pass on my regards to the fylkir, and please tell Mother I love her.
I’ll see you all at Ragnarok.