Chapter 8
Frigga and Heimdall sat huddled together near a smoky fire. Heimdall had deliberately caused it to smoke by throwing odiferous green herbs on it, in the hopes of keeping the swarms of biting insects away. Not that the insects could pierce Aesir or Vanir skin with their tiny mouthparts, but their incessant attempts to do so were annoying, and they wouldn’t respond to Frigga’s gentle repelling spell, being too unrelated to the creatures for which it was designed.
Their campsite, if it could be called that, was in the middle of a vast tessellated floor, the ballroom of what must once have been a very impressive palace. Now the walls and spires lay in ruins, crumbling in the damp and fetid air. Huge trees, hung with festoons of lichen, loomed overheard, and a chorus of night creatures croaked and shrilled in the swamp that had once been pleasure gardens.
Frigga looked at her dear friend’s face in the firelight.
“What is he doing?”
“I do not know,” Heimdall replied, looking pensive. “He sits with his head in his hands, the scepter lying untouched at his feet.”
“His master has driven him too hard, perhaps,” said Frigga, “It may be that he is beginning to balk.”
“And if he turns against his master,” Heimdall withdrew his gaze from the distance and turned to look at Frigga, “What shall that mean for us?”
Unaccustomed though Frigga was to making and executing plans, there was no one else here to whom they could turn. She and Heimdall had to be their own leaders, for the first time in either of their lives, and Frigga was of higher rank. She cast her eyes down, and set her mind to pondering Heimdall’s question.
“If Odin should be able to throw off his yoke, he will no longer be a thrall of the Titan. But he will still be Odin. He could become even more dangerous, for he would remember that he is king of Asgard and has all of Asgard’s might at his command. I believe that he would still want to own the Tesseract, not to bring the Titan here, but simply as he hoards all objects of great power.”
“He has ever been power-hungry,” Heimdall concurred, “And with two such objects in his hands, he might revert to his ways of conquest and warfare.”
Frigga nodded. She thought that very likely. Old age had somewhat blunted Odin’s rapacious edge in recent millennia but, if conquest were to become easy again, there would be nothing to halt him. She remembered well the days when Odin’s name had carried fear throughout all the branches of Yggdrasil. In his essence he had not changed, she thought, in all the intervening years, he had merely grown tired. Reinvigorated by a fresh source of strength, he would be as terrible as ever. A pang of twisting shame hit her, that she had been partner to such a man.
She looked again at Heimdall. She tried to picture him wielding such powers, claiming innocent worlds as his own, taking what he wanted without consent. The pictures wouldn’t come.
Frigga moved closer to Heimdall, and he lifted his arm for her to tuck herself against his side.
“Tell me truly, dear friend,” she said, “Do you believe that Thor and Loki can defeat Odin?”
Heimdall was silent for a disconcertingly long time. “The greatest obstacle they will face,” he finally responded, “Will be Thor’s memories, I think.”
“Hm?” Frigga urged him to explain.
“Thor, all his life, has been shown an Odin that no one else saw. Odin ever favored his elder son. More than favored – I believe he saw Thor as a second Odin. Being of a loving disposition himself, Thor will have interpreted that as love. Will he be able to strike the fatal blow, if the one under his hammer is someone he has loved, and who he believes has loved him?”
“You do not believe that Odin ever truly loved Thor?” Frigga asked sadly.
Heimdall shook his head, “From all that I have seen, I must judge that love is something that Odin has never felt for any.”
“You do not believe that Odin ever loved me?” Frigga’s heart was heavy within her. She had spent the great majority of her life bound in marriage to Odin.
“Not as I would define love,” Heimdall said softly.
Frigga pressed in closer to Heimdall’s side, and felt his arm tighten around her. “How would you define love, Heimdall?”
He paused to think, and eventually answered, “Love hates to see the loved one hurt. Or frightened. But, most of all, imprisoned or enslaved. Odin coveted you, as we covet an object, and an object must stay the same or lose its value. Love is what we have for a living being, which changes and grows. To love someone is to love their changes, to love their freedom, to love to witness their growing.”
Frigga thought about his words. She thought of how, through all the centuries of her marriage, she had felt like a rootbound tree in a too-small pot. She thought about how violently Odin had always reacted to Thor’s few disobediences. She thought of how distant and wary Odin had always been towards Loki, the one person who could not be controlled.
Then she thought of the other side of the coin.
“I could not bear to see you imprisoned, Heimdall,” she said evenly. “After all that I have borne, that I could not bear. After a marriage spanning millennia, I broke with Odin when he threatened to enslave you.”
She felt Heimdall’s body stiffen against her side.
“Do you think that I love you, Heimdall?” she asked quietly.
His answer was barely a whisper. “Yes.”
She turned to face him, sliding her arms around his waist. “And do you love me?”
Both of his hands had come up to cradle her head, and now his golden eyes met hers. “Yes.”
Frigga tilted her chin up and touched her mouth to his.
Perhaps she had expected it to be like kissing Odin – a cold gesture, intended only for display. This was nothing like that.
The kiss ignited, from warm to searing, in a flash. Heimdall was crushing her fervently to him, his hands clutching as if wild trolls might come and pull her away. It took Frigga several heated moments to realize that she was doing exactly the same to him. Never before in her life had she felt such a need, such a joyous, unbridled desire. To be as near as physically possible to Heimdall, to twine every part of herself with every part of him – she could not in this moment imagine anything better.
The kiss went on and on, and soon Frigga found herself lying fully on top of Heimdall, his arms wrapped tightly around her ribcage, hers around the back of his neck. An unmistakable bar of heat was imprinting itself against her inner thigh, and she was as happy and excited as she could remember ever having been. This was nothing at all like the duty she had performed with Odin. In fact, nothing could be more unlike. Her whole body and her whole heart were ecstatically engaged in this, and her mind was galaxies away, floating on an ocean of clouds where no worry could reach her.
She was sneakily sliding a leg between Heimdall’s, to bring the most interested regions of their bodies into closer contact, and delicious low rumbling groans were coming from Heimdall, when a familiar and hated popping sound began.
Heimdall actually whined as he reluctantly loosened his arms, causing Frigga to laugh rather breathlessly into his mouth.
“I think we have a few more minutes,” she said.
Heimdall rolled to his side, gently depositing her on the ground. “Frigga-Temptress,” he growled, “I always knew that you would be my undoing.” He was chuckling, a barely audible sound deep in his chest. As much as she loved that sound, Frigga could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions when she had heard a genuine, out-loud laugh from Heimdall, and she resolved that, if they lived, she would draw better than chuckles from him every day that the Norns permitted them to spend together.
In fact, they did have a few more minutes, but they spent them standing up and alertly waiting – except for a few brief, distracting kisses.
The popping and crackling sounds soon became flickers of light. This time Frigga waited until she saw the very start of the whirling blue portal, wanting to be sure that Odin was already on his way before she moved.
And then, for the first time in a long time, they were in a familiar place.
There was no need to search through the broad hallways of Odin’s vault; the Cube had taken them directly to what they wanted. On either side, long rows of magical treasures marched away into the darkness, but right before them sat the Bridal Veil.
It was an unprepossessing object, on the face of it, as the most powerful magical artifacts often are. A large eight-sided shape, of a severe simplicity, and made of some blackish stone, sat on the ground, too tall to need a pedestal.
Frigga had spoken with Heimdall about the choice of location for Thor and Loki’s battle with Odin. Of course, she could take them anywhere in creation, and Odin would follow, but she wanted to be clever, like her youngest son, and think beyond the current situation to the ones that would follow. She had often heard Loki tell Thor that “a good plan is one that serves several ends.” Thor, Norns bless him, had never been able to think in that way, depending always on his might to see him through, but Frigga thought that she understood what Loki meant.
If Odin defeated Thor and Loki, then there were no future issues that Frigga would have to think about. Her heart would break, and be poisoned with hatred for her former husband, and she would spend the rest of her life fleeing through the Cosmic Forest like a hart before the hounds. Sooner or later, she would be distracted, injured, or ill, and Odin would catch up to her and take the Cube, either to serve his own bloody purposes or the Titan’s.
If Odin was defeated by Thor and Loki, then there was quite a lot that Frigga would need to think about and plan for. Thor would be King of Asgard, hopefully with Loki as his advisor. An heir would be needed, and Thor would no doubt wish to marry his mortal as soon as possible. Frigga would have to look into the ways of bringing a mortal’s lifespan up to match an Aesir’s, and in the meantime it would be necessary to find some way of bringing the young woman’s rank up to match a king’s.
The young woman, Jane Foster, while very worthy and wise in and of herself, was difficult material for a royal marriage. As far as Heimdall had been able to observe, she had no noble lineage worth mentioning, no title beyond ‘Professor,’ no wealthy relatives, no remotest claim to any throne, no vassals except the even younger woman, Darcy, and no territories of any sort. Not so much land as a cape would cover. She seemed to live a sheep-herder’s life - sleeping and bathing and fixing her modest meals in a movable house on wheels - except that she didn’t even have any sheep. No livestock of any kind.
Lesser queens, or lesser mothers, might have been depressed by such an unpropertied prospective daughter-in-law, but Frigga saw only a happy challenge. Since the poor child had nothing, it was for Frigga to bestow something upon her. Since Frigga had nothing to bestow, it would be necessary to find something which nobody wanted, and make it into a worthy gift.
It had been while contemplating this matter that Frigga had seen how she could kill two birds with one stone. This stone in front of her now; the Bridal Veil.
She put out her free hand to touch it, and then she and Heimdall, the case and the Veil all vanished.