Exhaustion mingles with the joy of the Work, even when I’m beyond knowing I’m good at what I do. Every step I take makes a thump and sends ripples. Out of my way, twigs and pinecones! I trot inside a circle of shrooms, kicking a penny bun’s cap off its leg for good measure. Underground, something twitches.
An immortal with the name of Morena has been walking on tangled roots and crusty leaves of many colours for three days and three nights. Like any self-respecting minor deity, she wears an indistinct fur-lined robe and trekking breeches and bare feet, the grey hair unadorned, careful to not flaunt any little power she might have. She carries no weapons, for mortal wounds are no more than pain. Immortals only fear the inevitable.
The leaves under her steps grow hoarfrost and rime. Highways of ants catch colds and sneeze and die. Monarchs take flight lest their wings freeze and snap. Oaks of all kinds drop their acorns in deadly hail, then let their last leaves float down to cover them. Sunlight forms dancing patterns through the trees before her, but at her back a thick fog rises.
This is known.
I step past a cluster of beeches, leaning together for warmth. Old man’s beard grows on all sides of the pines and spruces here where foliage is thickest. Black trumpets – the trumpets of the dead, some mortals call them – tilt their horns towards me, playing a song with no sound. I stumble; I close my eyes to listen.
As the third night turns to a fourth dawn, the immortal with the name of Morena lays down against an old birch of far-reaching roots and rugged bark. For the longest time, we have been tied to his roots, trading messages for sugar and life. For the shortest time, we have let our upper parts climb the old bark that gives such good hold, to spread our mycelia in its cambium, stealing what is not ours from the oblivious giant.
As the immortal drowses, Sun falls twice and twice more. Somewhere in the east, walking-creatures that resemble her like an ailanthus sapling resembles a fallen redwood are drowning her images. It won’t last. They no longer remember what she looks like.
They used to drown her every cycle to soften the frost. For this, we forgave them picking our ground-parts, grinding down our caps and frying our legs. As they stopped the drownings, they forgot about us too. There is nothing more to forgive.
The drowning is Ours again. We have held the task for the longest time. Often we have failed. It is worthy.
In this small corner of the realms, I’m the one who grabs one handle of the wheel of the World and spins a season to the next, but there are others. Holle and Beira In the West and Itztlacoliuhqui farther still, Skaði in the North, Tengliu in the East and Morozko the General, of course, always just behind the corner. Even in the South, mother Sarma dutifully does her part and mortals and immortals alike let her. Pines thicken their bark and pears drop their leaves. Some apes grow fur and some learn to skin the fur of others, breams take to deepwater warmth and swans fly against the spinning of the Wheel. But not here.
Here everyone wants to grab the Wheel and do as they please with it. Mortals mostly drown dolls and idols to make me a bit drowsy, but they can’t hunt me down. They aren’t fighters.
But Mycenae are ruthless. They are immense and old and immortal, a blasphemous mass that is both one and infinitely many. To them, to it, I am as insignificant as the ants whose bodies they sometimes capture. They drown them too, for both breeding and fun.
I like to think of myself as at least a special kind of prey. A rare catch.
The immortal with the name of Morena snores. A spider climbs in the damp dark warmth of an open mouth and makes her nest there. She rejoices for two nights, finally laying her heavy eggs, until the immortal turns her head, licks her lips and crunches down on both the mother and the unborn children. This is a matter of no consequence.
As she twists in nightmares of a sun that never sets, a path of ants forms itself under the black-and-grey hair growing out of her scalp. They reach her ear and burrow through the channel, burn through the drum with venom spray and trek on to touch soft grey meadows with their antlers. This is a matter of some consequence.
Her head falls against the bark and our exterior and the ant path is cut off. We draw water from our mycelia, the water from the cambium of this birch and the water of rains a thousand colonies north, and make our exterior swell. It reaches the black-and-grey tangles on a fortunate twig. Our mycelium bores down once more, and when the immortal rises with the moon that comes after three suns, we are torn off the family. Our exterior is no longer our exterior but Us, an Us so much smaller than the We that Us used to partake in. Us is a smallness with a great task.
The ants in her skull make her sway here and there, felling trees and freezing foxberries before their time. We make our way through the grey softness, settling mycelium in its folds and wrinkles and ridges. We suffocate the ants as an afterthought, we make the flailing our exterior and now the immortal with the name of Morena is Us too.
Us has legs – an odd sensation. Us moves detached from the ground yet attached to itself, so very unlike the We Us used to be. It isn’t unpleasant being an individual with borders and frames, though it is lonely. Us takes a step and another one, Us walks and runs and leaps over a melting trunk that gives home to thousand external parts of We. Us does not feel the tremors it sends through the undergrowth, but it sees a pond behind a grove of elms and birch. Water that makes so many lives and will help Us save We and all else.
A shore of moss and stones, water still and black and deep and cold-looking. Us grabs a large rock in its arms, as large as it can, steps in and gasps, though us don’t tell Us to gasp.
For the most part, drowning is like sleeping. Only the beginning is like waking up when you should already be somewhere else.
I’m cold, sleepwalking and sleep paralyzed. I feel my body wading through water, I tell it to stop, it takes a step deeper. Thinnest slivers of rime spread wide as I shake off my cloak, plunge and swim and kick free of my breeches. I swim like a frog, and as the centre gets closer, I feel fear I haven’t felt in epochs.
Then my body stops kicking. Air escapes its lungs and it starts to sink. I try to close my eyes and don’t. I do nothing.
When does drowning even begin? When I empty my lungs of air or when I fill them with water?
Submerging is so slow.
The pressure starts stabbing and slashing inside my ears, a piercing pain that grows like a scream. It would take no more than a swallow and blowing some air out of my nose to make it stop. The deeper I fall the more the pain grows, like my head was pumped full of air but someone kept going past the safety limit. I want to burst or swim or at least shout.
My body hits the maze of deadhead logs on the bottom.
The bastards make me pull myself under, to trap myself in the crisscross of trunks and twigs and duckweeds, to struggle until I cannot move. My ears keep telling me I’m alive, and I keep telling them to shut up.
I am turned to face the surface I cannot reach. I make rime grow to frost and frost to ice. Sunlight diffracts. It becomes faint and dark and blue, and the skin of the pond grows thick. A trap of water and ice and my own making.
I wish they would choose something else for once. What’s wrong with a good old burning pyre?
Our caps and legs begin to freeze as water sweeps in through the ant-sized hole in Our eardrum. Us is ready to submit. Its task is complete.
Then Us thinks a most important thought.
This gets them nowhere. The others will push a little harder, and winter will come all the same, though I would like to think it weaker than if I were there to help. Either way, the Spring deities will wake up in a few moons to take the handles. Yarilo will sweep me out of his realm, make a few quips, and be merrily on with his spring cleaning. When I return to my colleagues, Skaði will be dismissive and the General will be angry. Sarma might say a kind word or two. By the time we grab the handles of the Wheel again, all will be forgotten.
As Us die, us burst out spores for the water to take, spores carrying a single message to deliver if they ever reach the mycelium and grow, so that We might one day know.
There are many more still, and these are their names.