Chapter 4
The cube gave a kind of power that Frigga had never encountered before. It was easy. She didn’t have to study for years, she didn’t have to deny her own desires, she didn’t have to be worthy, she didn’t have to be special. The power was simply hers now. It was strange, at this point in her life, to discover that something could be easy.
After Odin had located them on the mushroom planet, Frigga had taken a moment to think of some new characteristics that she would like in a location. Then she had grasped the handle of the case in one hand, and Heimdall’s large, warm hand in the other, and they were here.
‘Here’ was a silent world covered in a shallow sea. The sun, a very small but brilliant one, rose a few degrees above the horizon, and then slowly dipped back down to a few degrees below it.
They had appeared on this planet in a boat, because that was the location that Frigga had chosen. It was a flat-bottomed boat made of some oddly soft but buoyant material, and there had been a tarpaulin of waxed canvas in it and a slender pole a little longer than the boat itself.
Towards the horizon where the sun was playing a slow game of peekaboo, there was what might have been an expanse of reeds growing above the water. Heimdall had punted them in that direction for a while, but it didn’t seem to be getting any closer and, since there was no particular reason to go there anyway, he had desisted.
Now they sat very close together on the floor of the boat, wrapped together in the tarpaulin. Frigga rested her head on Heimdall’s shoulder and huddled into his warmth; the air was sluggish and a bit chilly on this planet.
“What is Odin doing now?” she asked.
“He is reporting his failure to his master,” Heimdall replied. A few minutes later, he said, “He is being punished.”
Frigga felt rather unpleasantly surprised by how little she cared. She meditated on the nature of marriage, as she breathed in the warm, woodsy scent that lived in Heimdall’s hair and skin. She had always found the scent of him very calming.
“Have you ever been in love, my friend?” she asked, after some time had passed in a comfortable silence.
“Yes, my queen,” he replied evenly.
“I think that I have not,” she told him. “Are you shocked?”
“Shocked, my Queen? Why would I be?”
She lifted her head a bit so that she could look at him, “Do you not think it is a wife’s duty to love her husband? Or a subject’s duty to love her king?”
“Love and duty, in my experience, are two widely separated things,” Heimdall said thoughtfully, “That must be why all languages have two separate words for them. I believe that you always did your duty to our king, as I strove to do as well. But, no, I am not shocked that you could not love him. I never could either.”
“Why could we not love him? Was he not a good king?” Frigga asked.
Heimdall’s brows drew down in thought. “Was he? I never had another, so I can make no comparisons.”
“My father was a king,” Frigga said, “and I loved him. I would say that he was a better king than Odin, because he was kinder, and yet he was subjugated to Odin for precisely that reason. Because he was a kinder man, he was a weaker king, and he had to give his own daughter as tribute, though I know it pained him greatly. I was the price paid for his weakness. And yet I cannot find it in my heart to wish that he had been more like Odin.”
“My own father,” said Heimdall, “Was a man full as hard and cruel as Odin, if not crueler. He was subjugated to Odin not because kindness made him weak, but simply because Odin was stronger. I do not think kindness is a weakness, nor cruelty a strength. Odin ruled because all of the sources of power were in his hands. As soon as he met one who held more power, Odin himself was subjugated.”
“I have never heard you speak of your father before, my friend,” Frigga said, looking curiously at Heimdall, “Who was he?”
Heimdall’s eyes still held the far-away look that showed he was watching Odin, but he apparently saw nothing to worry about at the moment. “He was the leader of a faction that opposed Odin’s succession. When he was defeated, Odin claimed me as part of the spoils of conquest. He said that I had a unique mind that would stand up to a spell he had invented. He gave me these eyes, and taught me not to go mad from seeing so much. At first I tried to love him as a new father. His words seemed kinder, and he made me feel important, as my own father never had. But as I grew up, I came to see that they were much the same. I never fully trusted Odin. Although he gave me these eyes for his own use, there was much that I saw and never told him of.” He paused before speaking into Frigga’s hair, “Do you think me ungrateful?”
“Did you ask him for those eyes?” Frigga wondered.
“No.”
“Then no gratitude was due.”
*****
An hour later, Frigga and Heimdall lay together under the tarpaulin. The air had grown chillier as the sun’s current dip below the horizon lasted a little longer than the previous one. She had spread her skirts over his legs, and he had laid out his arm to pillow her head. The tarpaulin covered them completely, and filtered the twilight to a golden-brown glow in their little pocket of warmth. Frigga was quite comfortable, and strangely happy.
“Do you think that Odin can be brought back to himself?” she asked Heimdall.
He seemed to consider his answer for a long time before he gave voice to it. “Yes, I believe so. Prince Loki fell under the thrall of the scepter and its master for some time, but he has now returned to himself.”
“Loki was sooner conquered than Odin, was he not?” Frigga whispered.
“Sooner, my queen, but not easier."
Neither of them knew what had happened to him during the year that they had spent mourning Loki. The Void itself was not impenetrable to Heimdall’s Sight, but it seemed that the part of it that Loki had fallen into was heavily warded by a formidable sorcerer.
When Loki had reappeared to Heimdall’s Sight, wild-eyed and spouting nonsense on Midgard, Frigga had begged Odin to send her to him. She was desperate to understand what had been done to him, and believed that she could soothe his madness. Instead Odin had elected to send Thor.
Frigga knew that her sons sometimes brought out the worst in each other, and she had dared to think, for a moment, that the All-Wise Odin had made a mistake. Only in her own mind, of course, had she dared to have that thought. She chided herself for it, thinking He must know something that I don’t know, he is the All-Father. Perhaps the outcome would somehow have been even worse if she had been allowed to go to her youngest son in his time of need? Who could know, at this point? The All-Father’s decision might very well have been the best one…
But now she began to seriously wonder. How might events have transpired if it had been Loki’s mother that had arrived on Midgard two years ago, rather than the brother with whom he had such a contentious relationship? She knew from Heimdall’s telling that Thor had arrived amid lightning and thunder, had attacked first and asked questions after, had blamed before trying to understand – in short, all the behaviors that Odin must certainly have expected from his brash older son. If Odin’s goals had been peace and the safety of the innocent Midgardians, had he really thought that that would be the best way to go about it?
Frigga, had she been in Thor’s place, could have used her stock of gentle spells to heal Loki’s body and mind, to calm him and uncloud his spirit. She could have spoken to him without angering him further. She could have identified the scepter he carried as a bad influence on him and separated him from it. She sighed. Such thoughts were useless now. Worse than useless, for they gave her only remorse and resentment, not proper feelings for a well-bred queen.
“If Odin does return to his right mind, will it be my duty to go back to him?” she asked Heimdall.
Again Heimdall paused before giving his answer. He seemed to be swallowing down some unspoken or unspeakable words. “That must be for you to decide, my queen,” he said, sounding subdued.
“I do not wish to,” she said suddenly, surprising herself, “I do not wish to see him ever again, Heimdall. I have been happier in these past hours than I have any reason to be. I know that we are fugitives, and homeless, and I cannot go to my sons for fear of bringing danger to them, and yet…my heart is light within me. Why is this?”
“I feel it too, Frigga-Queen,” he replied.
They were silent together for a few minutes. Frigga moved backwards, closer into the wall of warmth that her friend formed behind her. The sound of soft waves lapping at the sides of the boat had lulled her into a doze, when Heimdall’s voice brought her sharply back to awareness.
“Odin has recovered from his master’s chastisement. He is chanting again.”
In the stern of the boat the silver case began to sputter and spark. Frigga pushed the tarpaulin away so that she could move to kneel beside the case again. She opened it, and placed a fingertip to the cube, ignoring the discomfort of it. Again she straightened the nascent fold in space, and the crackling noises and swirls of blue flame were snuffed abruptly.
“How many more times will he try?” she wondered aloud.
Heimdall shrugged, “Until his master relents, I must suppose. And his master is not the relenting type.”
“Is there any point in going somewhere else? Does it slow him down to have to re-locate the cube each time?”
“That I do not know. I cannot understand his chanting. It is possible that it is a locating spell, or it may simply be a connecting spell.”
Frigga pursed her lips as she looked down into the blue light trapped in its cubical prison.
“Let us stay here, and see how long it takes him to try again. Then we can go somewhere terribly, terribly far away, and see if it takes him longer to attempt to follow us there.”
“It is a good plan, my queen,” said Heimdall approvingly.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I do not like this. If I become separated from the cube, or if I am distracted, or asleep, or injured when he makes his attempt, he could get through. If he once gets through, you and I are no match for the All-Father.”
Heimdall looked grim, but could only nod at the truth of her statement.
She crawled back into the warmth under the tarpaulin, and Heimdall tucked it carefully around both of them so that no cold drafts could sneak in.
They lay down again, this time face to face.
“If I renounce my first husband,” Frigga said, feeling an odd shyness, “I suppose it is possible that I may someday be wed to another. Do you not think?”
“If a husband is what you want, then nothing is more likely than that you will find one.”
Frigga thought that that was a rather quaint way of putting it, as if she were an amorous milkmaid who had only to shake her ringlets to bring all the village boys flocking to her. She chuckled at the image.
“Well, I only hope that my next husband proves easier for me to love. It is difficult when one’s duty is ill-matched to one’s inclinations.”
Heimdall hesitated. “Of course, you could simply choose to marry a man that you already know you love. That would remove that particular difficulty.”
She stared into his topaz eyes as astonishing new vistas opened before her.
“Choose?” she repeated the word, feeling dazed, “But I am a queen…”
“It is possible, even for a queen, to choose whom she will marry,” Heimdall assured her quietly.
“I have never made such a choice for myself before.” The very idea was alarming. “How will I know if I am choosing right?”
“You need not make the choice for yourself, Queen. Your heart will choose. You need only heed it.”
Frigga found that she could not raise her voice above a whisper, as if they were discussing something punishable by death. “How do I heed it? How does the heart speak of such a decision?”
Heimdall was whispering too, but his whisper did not sound fearful. It was low and warm, and made her want to move closer to him, to hear it through her skin and her limbs, not just her ears.
“It speaks by how we feel. When you are with the right one, you will feel good. To be near him will feel good. To touch him or be touched by him will feel good. Even to look upon him, even to think upon him will feel good. When you are with him, you will feel safe. It will seem to you that in all the infinite realms there is no better nor no safer place than where he is. If you know someone for whom you feel these things, it is possible that you love him.”
Frigga’s eyes were wide in the dim light. “It is possible that I love him.”