A hero's welcome

The one thing Hagnar Hagnarsson had not expected to experience was doubt after he died. He was a true Viking, a man who believed – as did all his people – fully and faithfully in the gods; a man who knew, without any question whatever in his mind, that if he died as a warrior he would be admitted into the hall of heroes, the sacred final rest of all warriors, Valhalla.

There simply was no question of this in his mind.

And he had, so far, been proven right. If the tiniest niggle had persisted as he opened his eyes in the afterlife that there might not be an afterlife, it vanished like the dying screams of his enemies gurgling their last breath as he beheld the famous rainbow bridge. Bifrost looked impressive.

And clean.

Very clean.

In fact, the rainbow bridge all but sparkled.

He didn’t remember the stories saying it sparkled.

But then, his memory was bound to be a little faulty, he reasoned. Having your head clove in twain with a double-bladed battleaxe would do that. Also, he was dead, and never having been dead before, this was, naturally, a new experience for him. So maybe he was misremembering. Maybe Bifrost did sparkle.

But he couldn’t remember his mother or his grandfather, when they had related the wonderful tales of the gods, ever mentioning that it sparkled.

And it certainly did. It looked like someone had given it a real going-over with a bucket of sudsy water and a mop. Well, if they had, he admitted, they had done a damn fine job. The whole thing... well, vikings had little use for the word, but there really was none other that fit. The whole thing sparkled.

And another thing that troubled him: he was fairly damn sure that none of his forebears had ever spoken of small yellow creatures that waddled in unbroken lines across the bridge, preventing him crossing. A word came to his mind, one he was not familiar with: ducks.

He wondered if these were some sort of magical animals that brought with them their own annoyingly infectious music, a very upbeat, cheery, happy sort of tune.

Hagnar Hagnarsson, he noted with dark fury, waited for no man, and for no beast either. He should have just used the sword which had been laid on his funeral pyre and cut them to ribbons.

But something stopped him.

They were so...

Another word came to him, its meaning unknown.

Cute.

Cute?

What did that mean?

Cut, now he knew that word. Cut was a word he was very familiar with. But cute?

Perhaps it referred to the strong magic which stopped him from taking the sword which had been laid on his funeral pyre and cutting these – these ducks - to ribbons.

Powerful magic indeed, he admitted. Few things could stop Hagnar Hagnarsson from cutting things to ribbons when he had a mind to, and that was often. As he had just noted, the word loomed large in his admittedly limited vocabulary.

Having waited like some milk-maid to let these accursed (but very cute) ducks waddle past (and how he knew the word waddle was another mystery – warriors don’t waddle, not if they wish not to be, you know, cut to ribbons by their enemies) he proceeded to the border which would take him onto Bifrost. There, as expected, was the guardian, the watcher, but he was busy wrestling with some fearsome beast, seeming to be endeavouring to hold onto it as it moved first left, then right, pulling the powerful watcher this way and that.

He had both his powerful hands wrapped around the horns of the beast, its long neck reaching to the ground where what was presumably its head, circular and flat, turned in dizzying circles, emitting a low growl as it resisted the guardian of Bifrost and dragged him along. Heimdall did not look up as Hagnar approached, and he had to tap the guardian on the shoulder to get his attention. This had the twin effects of allowing the beast to all but escape, as it pulled sharply to the right, dragging Heimdall with it, and causing the watcher to take one hand off its left horn and raise it to his helmet, where Hagnar could now see he had affixed some sort of soft earmuff. As he lifted the thing, a sound hissed out of it like thunder and demons shouting, all mixed up in the melee of a good battle.

“Sorry!” roared Heimdall, reaching towards his tunic. “Didn’t see you there, son. Let me just turn off the music -” As he finished speaking the words and withdrew his hand, the cacophony issuing from underneath his earmuff ceased suddenly, and he realised belatedly that he was shouting, dropping his voice to normal volume. “One of their best.” He tapped at the earmuff. When Hagnar looked blank, he elaborated. “Cannibal Corpse? Evisceration Plague?”

“...” said Hagnar.

“Oh man, you got to hear this shit!” Heimdall was enthusiastically ripping the muff from his head and jamming it on top of Hagnar’s before the dead Viking could even protest, and suddenly his brain was being pounded by noise as if someone were smashing into it with a hammer. Or a double-bladed battleaxe. He thought his head was about to explode. Heimdall’s lips were moving and his hands were gesticulating, but to Hagnar the Guardian of Bifrost was silent. He could hear nothing but the pounding onslaught pulverising his brain and threatening to blow his ears off.

Suddenly, it stopped, and he realised Heimdall had removed the magical cap. The silence was deafening. His ears were ringing with the remembrance of the assault of noise. Heimdall was grinning.

“Never heard anything like that back down on Midgard, I bet!”

Hagnar had to admit he had not.

“Not a classic of theirs,” the guardian went on, “but one of my favourites. You can’t fault these songs, I mean, look: “Scalding Hail”. “Beheading and Burning.” “A Cauldron of Hate”. “Skewered – the one you just listened to – Skewered from Ear to Eye”. And let’s not forget “Shatter Their Bones”!”

Hagnar did at least like the names of these – what had Heimdall called them? Songs? He knew battle anthems of course, and drinking songs, but these, well, these sounded like nothing he had ever heard before.

“Sorry.” Heimdall grinned again. “Maybe a bit much for someone who hasn’t heard the band first. Still.” His grin vanished like the sun behind a cloud. “Got to do something to pass the time. I mean, look at this!” He turned, sweeping his broad arm out to take in the entire length of the rainbow bridge. “She insists the entire thing is buffed every morning. Like, I know I’m a god and all, but come on!”

Unsure how to respond, Hagnar croaked “Buffed?” The word meant nothing to him, though he had a sudden and rather disturbing vision of men showing off their muscles. Heimdall pointed down at the beast he had been wrangling, and Hagnar saw it was in fact not alive, but some sort of artificial thing, almost certainly magic though.

“The whole bloody bridge!” Heimdall either ignored or had not heard him, lost in his own sense of disgust and outrage. “I’m supposed to be watching for the approach of frost giants, ya know?” Hagnar certainly did know. Heimdall was not called the Watcher for nothing. It was he who would sound the last trump, the warning that the end of days, Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, was upon the world. It was, he knew, a solemn duty, and very important.

He could only assume this buffing of which the Watcher spoke was also important, otherwise why would he do it?

“Um.” Feeling the conversation, which was certainly not going how he had expected it to, was getting away from him, Hagnar made an attempt to return to the original subject of his enquiry. “Valhalla?”

Snapping the cap back on his head, Heimdall nodded, pointed. “Right across the bridge, turn right at the end and follow the -” here he repressed a shudder - “singing butterflies. Can’t miss it. Not bloody likely.” This last, again, to himself in a mutter. “Oh, and word to the wise?”

“Yes?”

“Wipe your feet before you go in. She gets real mad when people track mud across her nice clean hall.”

Hagnar looked confused. “Who?” he asked. “Who doesn’t like it? Freya?”

But Heimdall had lost himself in his music again, his head banging in time with the arcs of the buffer as it swung left, then right. He seemed to have forgotten Hagnar Hagnarsson, so the Viking left him there, a little nonplussed, and began walking across the bridge.