Eric Flint - The Truth About The Gotterdammerung

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 73.04KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The TruthAbout the Gotterdammerung

Eric Flint

SinceLoki's alibi was airtight, suspicion fell on God.

"That Bum's always had in it for us," grumbled Frey. Thor roared and bellowed, splintering tables with

his hammer.

"Justice!Justice!"Valhallarang with his thunderous bassoprofundo . As always, the gigantic hall was

packed with heroes, who immediately took up the cry.

"JUSTICE!JUSTICE!"

Then:

"Death to the Christian God!"

At these words, the hall fell silent. Men and gods craned to see who had spoken. A huge and

extraordinarily inebriated warrior clambered onto a feasting table. Several times, actually, before he

finally managed the feat.

Swaying back and forth, spilling great quantities of mead from a tankard, this worthy spoke again.

"Hear me, gods and heroes! I amHunkredThorvaldsen , called the Cropped-Head, and I am accounted

the fiercest berserk in my district! It was I who slewGunnarHairybreeks with one thrust of my spear

through his liver after he took his sword and wounded my third cousin Ingmar, called the Reckless, after

Ingmar cut offGunnar's brotherHarald's arm at the fjord with his ax afterHarald killed my brother's wife's

uncle's grandson's dog after the dog pissed on his leg afterHarald stole a bone from the dog at the

midwinter festival after the dog had seized it fairly from the feasting table afterHarald's nephew Bjorn,

called the Ungenerous, refused the dog his fair portion."

Great applause resounded throughoutValhalla . Many toasts were drunk to the downfall of miserliness.

After falling off the table three more times,HunkredThorvaldsen resumed his wobbly stance and

continued his speech.

"Therefore do I,HunkredThorvaldsen , called the Cropped-Head, call upon the gods and heroes of

Valhalla to avenge the murder of our beloved deity"—here the berserk, sobbing tears, pointed to the

pallid corpse of the god Loki which was lying face down upon the floor of Valhalla, a knife sticking out of

its back—"and seek satisfaction upon the mangy body of God, called the Almighty."

As one man, the heroes ofValhalla leapt to their feet, tankards held high.

"DEATH TO GOD!"

The excitement of the moment was irresistible. Heroes seized their weapons and charged out of the hall,

led by the godsHeimdall and Thor. The former blew his greathorn, the latter swung his hammer gaily.

Taking his place at the head of the entire parade was Odin, riding his eight-legged horseSleipner .His two

great wolves,Freke andGere , paced by his side.

As the gods and heroes poured out of the great feasting hall, the goddesses andValkyries hastily donned

their breastplates and rushed out to bid them farewell.

Wincing, most of them.

"Breastplates and fond farewells are a lousy match," grumbled Odin's wifeFrigga , after the gods and

heroes were gone.

"You're telling me?" groused Thor's wifeSif , trying—gingerly—to pry her breastplate loose.

"Breastplates are a lousy match with anything civilized. At least your husband isn't a damned

weight-lifter."

* * *

As he led the procession across the heavens, Odin's expression was grim and stern, as befitted the

Allfather of gods and men. It grew grimmer and sterner at the words of the ravens perched on his

shoulder.Hugin andMunin , they were called.

"This is a bad idea," observedHugin .

"Areally bad idea," addedMunin .

"Shuddup," growled Odin. "What do you know, anyway? You're just a couple of stupid birds."

"They don't call God the Almighty for nothing," pointed outHugin .

"Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent," addedMunin .

"Not like you, Odin, who's just a—"

Odin's divine temper boiled over. His spear missed the ravens, although a few tail feathers went flying.

The birds cawed derisively and flew back towardValhalla .

"Don't say we didn't warn you!"

"And they call us bird-brains!"

But Odin had no more time for impudentavians . Even now was the mighty host drawing up before the

Pearly Gates of Heaven, so rapid is travel through the outer planes of creation.

High atop the Pearly Gates stood the resplendent figures of two angels. The one on the left held a great

trumpet.Gabriel, his name. No doubt in the hopes of abashing the lout,Heimdall blew a mighty blast with

his horn. But even before the sound ofHeimdall's horn faded, Gabriel was improvising upon the tune,

developing themes and variations which were not only dazzling in their divinity and awesome in their

cunning, but which also—especially the little riff which he added as a coda—exuded musical derision.

"O Heavens!" cried the other angel,Azrael . "We are besieged by a mighty host of flea-bitten

barbarians!"

"O, what shall we do?" sobbed Gabriel.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Eric Flint - The Truth About The Gotterdammerung.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Eric Flint - The Truth About The Gotterdammerung

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: