“Who?” Loki said, quirking an eyebrow.

“New boy,” the All-Father said. “Roman, I think… looks a bit Jewish.” He shrugged. “I like to keep up with the times. You know that.”

“A new Jewish god?” Loki said, shaking his head and clucking. “I know someone who’s not going to like that.”

“I didn’t actually bring you over here to gossip about the neighbors,” Odin said. He turned his baleful eye back towards the fast-cooling corpse, a tiny sharpened sprig of mistletoe protruding from the neck. “This is a bad business, Loki.”

“Is it?” Loki asked. “I thought it was the family trade.”

“What?”

“Death, oh Gallows-God. Is that not what of you spoke?”

“I don’t mean death,” Odin said. “I mean this death. Baldur was the best of us.”

“Best-loved, surely,” Loki seemed to agree.

“The others are in a kind of shock-trance right now. They’re overcome with grief,” Odin said. “When they come to their senses, I fear grief will turn to anger, and the anger of a god is a fearful thing. Especially when it lacks direction. I’ve already removed his poor brother to a safe location.”

“Is that wise, if you fear undirected anger?” Loki said. “It seems the simplest course would be to allow the mob’s fury to be vented against the killer.”

“I fear this is no simple matter.”

“Meaning?”

“Hodur was the spear; he was not the hunter. Some hand, unseen by us, guided his shot.”

“Why are you telling me this, All-Father?” Loki asked.

“Because I must ask something of you,” Odin said. “Something new. Something that has never been done.”

“I have been known to do that, once or twice,” Loki said.

“I’ve often warned you to guard your cleverness, lest it get the best of you,” Odin said. “Remember that business with the dwarves? But now I would have you unleash it.” He gestured to the grisly scene beneath the tree. “Look. Seek. Find. Learn. Do whatever you must, but find for me these three things: who killed Baldur? Wherefore did he die? And how may his death be revenged?”

“You ask much.”

“You have done harder things for me before.”

“Yes,” Loki said, turning away and surveying the corpse himself. “I have.”

“He was beautiful,” Odin said. “Even among gods. He still is. Even empty as a mead-hall on Ragnarok, is not his body perfect?”

“Yeah,” Loki said. He shaded his eyes against the sun with his hand. “Shame about the little prick.”

It seemed the other side was having problems, too. He’d watched as their nerve and manpower dwindled, and the massed charges had given way to smaller and smaller groups. They didn’t charge, they peeked their heads cautiously over the embankment or rose with distressing casualness into his line of sight. He’d just kept plugging away with his rifle, though, and now it seemed like the enemy couldn’t muster more than one man at a time.

Every once in a while there were two or even three, sometimes with fresh recruits who didn’t even have a uniform. This had taken Jerry by surprise the first time it happened, but not long enough to stay his hand. It had been a long war, after all. Terror can have a monotony all its own, and Jerry welcomed the break. That had almost got him killed once or twice, he was sure. Once the bastards had sent a man over the top with a white flag of truce. Jerry hadn’t lowered his rifle. There was only one of him. Relief was coming, he knew, but until it got there he was alone. They wouldn’t be surrendering to him.

Maybe they wanted his surrender? Not likely. He’d seen the eagerness in the bastard’s face, the elation when he got close. He was way too happy for a man in a war zone.

Probably gone right round the bend, Jerry had thought. Probably hiding a pistol or a grenade. He just can’t wait to blow me away and he doesn’t care what happens to him.

Also, there was something disconcertingly familiar about his face. After he’d been at it for so long, the faces of the enemy had sort of blurred out. He didn’t see them as individuals any more. You couldn’t, or you’d go round the bend yourself. But this one had got in close and something about his face had almost stopped Jerry cold. He knew he couldn’t let anything slow him down or he’d be stopped for good, so Jerry had blown him away, and the bastards hadn’t tried that again.

But they hadn’t given up. Like a drippy faucet, the enemy came over the top reliably but irregularly. Sometimes it was almost continuous, sometimes there’d be a maddening delay when it seemed like they’d finally stopped right up until the moment a head popped up again.

There was one now. Jerry hardly needed to take aim. He’d become a machine; mechanized warfare, incarnate in a man. He squeezed the trigger. There was a report. The man fell back. This had become Jerry’s life, since the rest of the machine gun crew had gone crazy. One by one they’d given up and ran right across no man’s land, right over the embankment and into the arms of the enemy.

Shell shock. It had to be. They’d all had some close calls with artillery bursts, especially that last one just after they’d fed the last belt through.

Jerry had watched in horror as each of his mates scrambled out of the hole. He’d waited for the inevitable, for the shots to ring out and shatter their skulls or the machine guns to tear them pieces. They had never come. The enemy wasn’t going to waste the ammo. Instead the bastards had taken them alive and then sent them back after Jerry.

Their poor broken brains had been so receptive to the enemy’s lies that they’d believe anything, and spout it back out.

The war’s over. The fighting’s over. You can put down your gun and join us. You have to see it, Jerry… on the other side of the trench. It’s beautiful, Jerry. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Jerry knew if he let the stress get to him, he’d be next, but he also knew that relief was coming, reinforcements were coming. He couldn’t last forever, but he just had to hold out five more minutes. He couldn’t lose his nerve. He couldn’t let anything slow him down. He had to keep fighting.

And so he’d done the only thing for his comrades he could do: he’d put them out of their misery. Eventually the bastards stopped sending them, and now it was down to just one man. Not one man, Jerry thought to himself. Can’t kill the same man more than once. One man at a time.

It was coming up near midnight in the foxhole. Jerry spared a glance down at the last cigarette, but only a glance.

“Ain’t no shame in losing honestly,” Johnny said. “Even if it’s the only honest thing you ever do.”

“Yeah, well, there’s the rub,” the devil said. “See, I wasn’t completely honest.”

“You don’t… you don’t actually have a gold fiddle, do you?”

“Not solid gold,” the devil said. He waved his hand, and a shiny if somewhat crinkly looking instrument appeared. “The foil is real gold leaf, but underneath, it’s… well… chocolate.”

Johnny stared at the devil for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“At least you have a sense of humor about it,” the devil said, handing over the gold-wrapped fiddle.

“I guess you don’t recognize me,” Johnny said.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve met before,” Johnny said. “When I was ’bout twelve, thirteen… I ran into you at a crossroads and you made me a deal. I gave you my soul then and there, and in exchange you made me…”

“…the best damned fiddle player the world had ever seen,” the devil said, realization washing over him.

“That’s right,” Johnny said, shaking his head with a big, goofy grin on his face. “The best damned fiddle player… heck, I tried to throw the match, since if you beat me it would prove that I wasn’t the best and I could get out of our deal, but… I guess it doesn’t work that way? Because no matter what I tried, I played to beat the devil anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s how it works,” the devil said.

“So, you never had a gold fiddle…” Johnny said.

“…and you didn’t have your soul,” the devil said.

“Chocolate?” Johnny said, breaking the fiddle’s neck and proffering a piece.

“Sure,” the devil said. “Though it’s not actually very good chocolate.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t be.”

“Nope.”

Topiary animals craned their necks at the sound of her feet on the cobblestoned path. Green shoots shot up from the rich soil on either side of her, delicate flowers budding and blooming into existence just for her. Up a gentle slope there was an orchard of trees, their low-hanging boughs laden with brightly-wrapped presents and cakes. A silver stream that sparkled like diamonds wound its way up the hill and among the trees. Fluttering faeries sang, giggled, and danced in air was full of delicate floral scents carried on a cool, soft breeze.

Just ahead, the path split and circled around a tall white statue of a winged angel, its arms spread out in a gesture of welcome. As the young girl’s face lifted up to see its own, it looked down at her.

“Welcome,” the angel said to the girl. “Welcome, to the Garden of Earthly Delights. All that you see here is yours to enjoy.”

“Why would there be an angel in a garden of earthly delights?” the girl asked.

“Um, er…” the angel said.

“You’re Satan, aren’t you?” she asked. It stared down at her impassively, saying nothing. “Come on, you might as well admit it… it’s pretty obvious.”

“…I might not be,” it said.

“Yes, you are,” she said. “Look, your horns are even showing.”

“What?” it said, slapping at its head to try to feel.

“Yeah, and they look like this,” the girl said, putting her thumb and forefinger up to her own forehead in the shape of an “L”.

“I am not a loser!” the angel said.

“Whatever,” she said, turning and walking back towards the gates. “It’s like you’re not even trying anymore.”

We know He rested.

But did He sleep?

The original sleep of the righteous, we might say… and if He slept, did He, perchance, dream? With the act of creation still fresh in His mind, of what might He have dreamt, we wonder? Perhaps the same things that any of us, created in His image, might have dreamt: His work, naturally, and His children… His hopes and dreams for them.

He would have hoped for them to be fruitful. He might have hoped for them to be civilized. Perhaps he hoped that they would take the materials He had surrounded them with and create marvels of their own.

Maybe in His dream, he brought forth a new land from the ocean. An island, perhaps, teeming with people who exemplified the best of His hopes. We might imagine that they built graceful cities of impressive spires, that they studied the natural world and learned of its mechanics, that they constructed great ships and traveled across the face of the globe.

And perhaps His dream would be more substantial than yours or mine. Perhaps it would be more real.

Such an island, if it existed, would have been the envy and inspiration of ancient civilizations the world over… but being a dream, it would of have no hope of lasting. God might have slumbered, but He did not sleep forever. What was created on the seventh day could have been snuffed out just as quickly, the great island sinking beneath the waves in a single day and night of misfortune… if it had ever been there to begin with, of course.

Being a dream… even a dream of the divine… one suspects the record would be hazy.

He did not fly swiflty upon them. They were so crowded upon each other, many growing out of the backs of others, that they could not hope to bear him aloft. Indeed, he could hardly bear their weight himself. He had six hundred wings, and more were springing up all the time.

He took a flaming sword and sheared off all that he could reach, leaving the smell of burnt feather and flesh in the celestial air. He hacked and he cut and he slashed until his back was a mess of stumps, and from that smoldering mass a dozen more wings swiftly arose.

Sobbing in pain and frustration, Gabriel sank down to his knees in despair and uttered a prayer, his first ever of supplication rather than praise. Would his torments never cease?

Somewhere down far below, at the front desk of a hotel, a four-year-old was being ignored by her parents and the desk clerk while they argued over a service charge. Lacking any other amusement, she slammed her palm down on the desk bell, again and again. She giggled in delight at the noise it made.

Ring, ring, ring.

Six more wings.

“The zoo is closing,” he said.

“But where will we go?” the penguins asked.

“You don’t have to go home,” he said. “But you can’t stay here.”

The More Things Change

“…and so, over time, as animals that dealt better with confinement and artificial conditions passed on both their behaviors and their genes to their offspring, eventually things reached a point where the animals we bred in captivity were of an entirely different species than their cousins in the wild, back when any still lived,” the zookeeper explained to the school children. “At that point there was a serious debate about the purpose and nature of zoos. Before conservation efforts had included the re-introduction of animals back into their native habitats as a major goal. Now, our enclosures are full of animals whose native habitats are the enclosures. Releasing them into the wild would be as pointless and cruel as ‘re-introducing’ one of the old polar bears to the Amazon Desert.” The zookeeper noticed a child raising a hand at the back of the group. “Yes, do you have a question?”

“Yes. I don’t believe in evolution,” a child said.

“But we’ve seen it in action,” the zookeeper said. “We have records, we have proof.”

“The Bible says that it’s always been this way.”

“Even if it did, we still have a complete timeline of the speciation of…”

“If your ‘timeline’ says one thing and the word of God says another, then your timeline is wrong,” the child said.

“What do you think the Bible says about zoos?” the zookeeper asked.

“It says in Genesis that God created man to have dominion over the animals,” the child said.

“That could mean any number of things,” the zookeeper said. “Back before the age of zoos when animals were still wild, people believed…”

“If you read the Bible literally, there’s only one meaning… and there’s no mention of any ‘wild animals’ in Genesis,” the child said. “All the animals were with Adam and Eve in the garden. All of them were with Noah on the ark. We’re all descended from Noah, and our animals are all descended from his. It’s a clear description of an unbroken chain of stewardship, from the first days of creation until now.”

“I’m pretty sure there are a few mentions of wild animals in the Bible,” the zookeeper said. “In Leviticus, God threatens to send…”

“Now you’re going and putting your own liberal interpretation on things,” the child said. “You have to really study the Bible to understand what that passage means.”

“What does it mean?”

“You’d have to ask my pastor,” the child said. “But Genesis makes it clear that there are no wild animals, so a literal interpretation of any other passage can’t say otherwise.”

“I’m not sure we’d agree on what ‘literal’ means,” the zookeeper said.

“If you disagree with God’s unchanging word…”

“I’m not disagreeing with the Bible, I’m disagreeing with you,” the zookeeper said. “Now, unless you actually have a question, I think we’re going to be moving along to the dolphin embassy.”

“I’ll pray for you,” the child said.

“Okay, watch this,” one of them said to his less enthusiastic companion. He pointed down across the street, where a well-dressed but harried and tired looking woman was fumbling with a set of keys beside a dark-colored sedan. She set a laptop case down on the roof of the car. “She’s just come out of the coffeeshop where she waited over an hour for an interview with a man who never showed up. She’s been out of work since her bank shut down eight months ago. She needs a job, needs it badly, but even more than that she wanted this one. It was the perfect fit for her. It was her dream job. It was actually in her field, and the location would have been perfect.”

“How long have you been watching her?” the other one asked.

“The whole time,” he said. “Now take a look directly across the street from her. What do you see?”

“Another coffee shop.”

“Yes.”

“The same as the one she walked out of.”

“Yes!”

“They built two shops at the same street?”

“I know… crazy, isn’t it?” the first one said. “Now watch, because she’s going to look up and see it in about five seconds… three, two, and one.”

As they watched, the woman’s head tipped up in response to the flash of movement from a passing car and the expression on her face became one of surprise, then dawning realization and horror. Her car keys fell from her suddenly limp fingers, straight through the grating at her feet.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the first watcher said.

“If you saw that coming, you might have done something,” the other said. “Or you might have let her know that the man she was waiting for was across the street.”

“He actually wasn’t, though. He never showed up. He forgot about it. That’s what’s so beautiful about it. She’s going to be kicking herself forever, thinking that she fucked up, when actually it didn’t matter which of the cafes she went into. When he realizes that he blew off a prospective employee, he’s going to rationalize it away so it’s not his fault. He’ll decide he wouldn’t have hired her so he doesn’t have to call her to admit his mistake and reschedule. Nothing she could have done would have made this turn out differently.”

“Are you planning on letting her know that?”

“Are you? Of course not. We’re watchers. We watch.”

“We could let someone know.”

“That’s not my department. Anyway, it’s about to get better,” the first one said. “She’s blaming herself right now, but as long as she’s only blaming herself, there’s still the possibility in her heart that the universe is a kind and loving place. That just makes her kick herself all the harder, of course, because God was good enough to give her the chance to land her dream job and she blew it. What we’re about to see is the moment that she loses all faith.”

“That’s kind of morbid, isn’t it?”

“Morbid how?”

“We’re creatures of faith,” the other one said.

“Yeah, but we’re not like storybook pixies or anything. I don’t think we’re going to die just because someone doesn’t believe in us. We’d probably be long gone if that were the case.”

“Lots of people believe in angels,” his companion said.

“Yeah, but most of them don’t have a clue what Grigori are.” He pointed. “Okay, okay… watch this.”

The woman was looking around for something to fish her keys out. A young man who had just walked past the woman’s car suddenly doubled back and snatched the laptop, then took off running. The woman reacted as if in slow motion, turning, rising, and calling hoarsely for him to stop as he vanished around a corner.

“See, that’s it!” the watcher cried, slapping his knee. “Poof! All gone! Her heart’s breaking in two. She’s never going to believe in a higher power again… and the stupid thing is it’s more her fault than the missed interview is. It’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Not getting even a disgusted reply from his companion, he turned around and found that he was alone on the roof. The other angel had vanished.

“Probably just left,” he muttered to himself, unconvincingly.

He felt very cold, very small, and not at all sure of himself.

I wasn’t listening to the snake. I was listening to the tree.

The fruit called to me… it sang to me. God made man from dust and breath, but He didn’t put any music in us. He didn’t think to. When He put the tree in the garden, He didn’t realize how it would sing. God sees everything else, but He doesn’t see music, for the same reason fish don’t see water.

People have asked me about the fruit. They ask it all the time, actually, when they first get here. I understand… the way it’s written down, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It looks like the snake talked me into it way too easily.

That’s God again.

He was telling the story, of course. He didn’t know about the music, didn’t know what it did to me. Living in water, He didn’t realize how thirsty we could get.

Sometimes people are angry with me, even after I explain.

They think I ruined things for everyone. They think it’s my fault that they suffered. They’re not really mad, of course. The worst part’s over by the time they meet me. But they still want me to know that they blame me. There’s nowhere else to register a complaint, here, and not much to complain about.

It’s just a habit that some people carry with them.

Nobody ever thanks me. Nobody ever asks me if it was worth it.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I think I’d do the exact same thing. I like to say that I would have spent more time in the garden first, but I know that’s bullshit. I ate the fruit because I couldn’t help it, because it sang and because it offered relief for a thirst I didn’t know I had before I heard it. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

I was in the hospital, for a muscle biopsy. They put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The air inside was like nothing I’d ever known… heavy and sticky and sickly-sweet. Things got fuzzy right away. Vision, feeling, the sounds of the doctors’ voices…

Not all the sounds did, though. The “beep… beep… beep…” of some monitoring machine cut through the growing brain fog as clear as a searchlight, and it was the last thing I heard before I drifted off.

It wasn’t the last thing I heard before awakening, though.

That was The Song.

The Song was like nothing I’ve ever heard before, like nothing else I’ve heard since. It seemed to grow from the simple rhythmic pulse of the machine, but it was so much more. There were words and notes and colors and shapes seemed to flow naturally out of the music.

I awoke with the pure and certain knowledge of The Song in my heart, but without a single note of it in my ears. I couldn’t remember how it went, though I had the distinct impression that it was something I’d heard before… possibly years before.

I’ve heard it again twice since then. Once when I had another biopsy a year later, and once as an adult when I was put under after dislocating my arm. It’s been the same song each time. I recognize it. I remember recognizing it, though I don’t remember how it goes.

When I was younger, I was so sure that it was a real song… as in, one that existed out there in the world I knew… that I looked for it, listened for it, perked up my ears every time I thought I heard a snatch of something that might have been it.

I was forever disappointed, of course. The Song might be a real song, but it isn’t going to turn up on the radio some day.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on finding it one day. On the contrary, I’m sure that I will. Even if I manage to avoid the sorts of circumstances under which I heard it the first three times, I have every hope of hearing it again, perhaps more clearly than before. It is my sure and certain hope.

All things pass. The Song remains the same.