XII) Surtr: The Work That Remained

The first letter burned before Surtr finished it.

He had managed the queen's name, and most of Lyradon, when the parchment browned beneath his thumb. He lifted his hand. Too late. A thin orange line ate the edge of the page, curled through the unfinished sentence, and left him holding an apology in the form of ash.

Surtr watched it fall.

On the other side of the stone table, Bruni waited.

“Another,” Surtr said.

Bruni placed a fresh sheet on the stone. Then he put a shallow dish of water beside it.

Surtr looked at the dish.

“For fingers,” Bruni said.

“I know what water is.”

“Didn't use it.”

The fire in Surtr's beard stirred. Once, whole companies had fallen silent at that small movement. Bruni reached for the discarded pen, examined the scorched nib, and set down another.

Surtr lowered his fingers into the water.

Steam obscured the table.

He waited until he could see the page again.

They were working in an abandoned quarry beyond Concordia, where his presence could ruin very little. There was no grass underfoot. No roof to catch. No child around a corner that he might turn too quickly. The old cutting floor held rain in its channels, and swallows nested high in the cliff, well above the heat.

Thor had suggested the place. Bruni had brought the table.

Neither had called it a beginning.

Surtr wrote the queen's name again.

Below it he wrote that he wished to help restore what had been destroyed.

He looked at the sentence for a long time.

Then he crossed out the last four words.

What I destroyed.

Bruni stood beside the table while he wrote the rest. The letter was short. Surtr had possessed speeches long enough to fill valleys, once. Now he discovered that most of them had consisted of finding impressive ways to avoid saying precisely what he meant.

He asked whether there was work Lyradon would permit him to do.

He said he would not enter the kingdom without an answer.

He signed his name.

“Read it,” he said.

Bruni did, slowly, moving one broad finger beneath the lines without touching the damp ink.

“She might say no.”

“I know.”

Bruni looked at him.

Surtr set the pen down.

“Then I will stay here.”

The swallows went on feeding their young.

***

The giants answered before Lyradon did.

They did not come as a delegation.

That had been made clear in the message Bruni carried. Hadrun would speak for Hadrun. Yrsa would speak for Yrsa. Others might come, or remain away, or send questions in another person's hands. No one had been appointed to make the scattered survivors into a single voice convenient for Surtr to hear.

He waited on the quarry floor while they assembled on the higher ledge.

Hadrun arrived first, leaning heavily on a staff. Anja walked with him to the path, then chose to remain above with Thor. Surtr saw the girl take the goddess's hand.

He remembered looking across fields at people running.

He had rarely troubled to distinguish one from another.

Yrsa came last. She used a stick too, though differently, keeping her injured leg stiff on the slope. Her mother stopped beside her. Behind them stood a giant whose left sleeve was folded and pinned at the shoulder, and a woman carrying something wrapped in a blanket.

Surtr had prepared no speech.

When they had found places, he said, “I burned your homes. I took your labor, and called it loyalty. People suffered under my command while I spoke of the strength of our kind.”

The woman with the bundle stared at him without blinking.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I have no right to ask you to come back. I will not ask.”

Hadrun's hand tightened around his staff.

“Come back where?”

Surtr felt the question strike harder than an accusation would have.

There were villages to which no one could return. He knew their roads. He could have walked them blind through the smoke. Some he had destroyed because they resisted him. Some because resistance might be found there later. At the time those distinctions had seemed worth making.

“There is no home there,” Hadrun said. “Not mine.”

“No.”

“I want the names.”

Surtr looked up.

“The yards. The camps. The places they sent people when they took them off the road. We have been asking each other. Some of us are still asking.”

He stopped to draw a breath. Surtr kept still, though it was difficult not to lean toward him and offer help that had not been wanted.

“You know places we don't,” Hadrun finished.

“Yes.”

“Then start there.”

Yrsa shifted her weight.

“And do not melt everything because you are ashamed of it.”

For the first time, Surtr looked directly at her.

“The collars,” she said. “The frames. The records. You don't get to turn them into plowshares before the people who wore them decide what they want done.”

He had considered precisely that. Not as an evasion, he had thought. As a useful act. A transformation he could understand: take something broken or vile, bring it into the fire, make something better of it.

There would have been witnesses. There would have been a moment when the old iron ran bright and clean.

Yrsa watched his face.

He lowered his gaze.

“I will leave them intact.”

“And tell us where.”

“And tell you where.”

The woman opened her blanket.

Inside was a great iron cooking hook, bent nearly double. Soot lay in the places a cloth could not reach. One end had been worked into the shape of a bird, crudely but with care.

“My husband made this,” she said.

Surtr looked at the bird.

“The house fell on it.”

She did not tell him what had happened to her husband.

After a moment she laid the hook on the ledge and stepped away.

“Can you straighten it?”

He could have made a hundred finer hooks before sunset.

“Yes.”

“Leave the bird alone.”

He bowed his head.

When they had gone, he worked on it until dark.

***

The search took most of the spring.

Surtr went ahead of the recovery parties only when they asked him to. Elsewhere he marked a route on stone and stayed behind while giants, soldiers, and clerks followed it. Some returned with people who had hidden so long that the end of the war sounded like another trick. Some returned with tools, letters, a child's cup, a door lintel bearing the heights of children who would never stand beneath it again.

Some brought nothing.

Those were the evenings when he most wanted to leave.

The urge disguised itself as usefulness. There was another storehouse to find. Another road to clear. He could be moving instead of standing in a quarry while someone read out names that had found no answers.

He stayed.

Hadrun sat at the stone table with a clerk from Concordia and worked through each list. He corrected names where Surtr remembered only the name of a valley. He refused to let three similar marks stand for three interchangeable men. When Surtr did not know, the clerk wrote that he did not know.

One afternoon they found a chamber Surtr remembered as a grain store.

It contained no grain.

The door had been secured from the outside.

He stopped several paces from it, looking at the fastening.

“Were you here?” Hadrun asked.

“Not at the end.”

“Before?”

Surtr remembered an officer giving a report. A shortage. An interruption in the work. His own impatience with both. He had ordered the difficulty dealt with and turned his attention elsewhere.

“Yes.”

Hadrun did not let him move the door. Two other giants took it down together while Surtr waited on the road.

That evening he corrected the account he had given the clerk.

He told her about the officer. About the shortage. About the order.

She asked him to repeat the words as closely as he could remember them. Her hand shook once as she wrote, and she rested it against the table before continuing.

He watched the nib move.

He did not ask whether telling the truth helped.

Later Bruni brought a length of chain from one of the cleared yards. It was ordinary iron, without any binding left in it. Surtr could feel that before the links touched the ground.

“They want this melted,” Bruni said.

“Who?”

Bruni gave him the names.

“What do they want made?”

“Hinges.”

Surtr looked at the heap.

“For a hall,” Bruni added. “Big doors. Open out.”

“I can make them.”

“Know.”

Bruni sat on a block of stone and waited while the iron warmed.

There was a time when Surtr would have despised the work for its smallness. He remembered that without liking it. Four hinges. Eight mounting plates. The weight of doors that would shelter people through a winter.

He made the pins removable from inside.

Then he asked Bruni to test them.

***

Jörmungandr and Fenrir met him at the river.

Surtr had sent word through Thor and waited for their answer. He had not asked her to bring them, or to stand beside him when he spoke. She remained up the bank with Bruni, far enough away to leave the meeting to the three of them.

Fenrir came through the reeds first.

His brother followed in the shallows, water running along the dark curve of his body. Jörmungandr stopped with his head above the bank. Fenrir settled beside him, his ears angled forward, every part of him attentive.

Surtr had faced armies with less difficulty than he faced those two quiet bodies.

“Jörmungandr,” he said. “Fenrir. I am sorry for the harm I did you, and for treating your lives as things that belonged in my war. Letting one of you escape did not undo that. Neither of you owed me obedience, or a place in any ending I chose.”

The river moved between the reeds.

Fenrir looked at his brother before he answered.

“We are finished being put into other people's endings.”

“Yes.”

Jörmungandr lowered his head a little.

“I remember that you told me to run.”

Surtr said nothing.

“I remember the rest too.”

“You should.”

Fenrir's tail moved once through the grass.

“He doesn't need your permission to remember.”

Surtr felt the familiar heat gather under his ribs. The reflex to answer. To turn a correction into a contest and win it.

He let the silence last until he could speak without that heat inside the words.

“No. He doesn't.”

For a while none of them spoke.

On the far bank a bird struggled with a twig too long for the nest it was building. It dragged the twig sideways, dropped it, picked it up again, and tried the same approach with extraordinary confidence.

Fenrir watched it.

“You will be at the giant settlements?” he asked.

“Only where I am invited.”

“Some of them will be frightened of you.”

“I know.”

“Knowing will not always make you notice. Watch their feet. People can say yes while their feet are trying to leave.”

Surtr looked at him then, properly.

Fenrir held his gaze.

“I will watch,” Surtr said.

Jörmungandr shifted in the water.

“That is enough for today.”

Surtr stepped back from the bank and left the path clear.

The brothers went upstream together. Neither looked behind him. Surtr watched until the reeds hid them, then turned toward the quarry.

He had spoken the apology once.

He would not pursue them with it until they gave him an answer he preferred.

***

Queen Mirelle's reply arrived in early summer.

The sheet was folded around a smaller drawing. Surtr recognized the valley before he recognized what had been placed across it.

A bridge.

The queen had written in a firm hand.

Lyradon needed a permanent crossing where the old bridge had stood. Davren was preparing the design. Julian was helping with the work. If Surtr wished to contribute, he could begin by meeting them at the northern quarry, outside the inhabited roads.

There were conditions.

He would come without followers. He would announce his approach. He would remain in the places agreed upon. Acceptance of his labor would confer no claim upon the kingdom or its people.

At the bottom, beneath her signature, she had added one sentence.

My husband's name was Roderic.

Surtr stood with the letter in both hands.

The parchment did not scorch.

***

Mirelle came to the quarry herself.

He had expected her engineer, perhaps Julian, perhaps an officer authorized to tell him where to stand. Instead a small company stopped at the edge of the cutting floor and the queen dismounted before anyone could offer a hand.

Julian came beside her. Davren carried a roll of drawings under one arm and kept readjusting his grip on it.

Adriana stood on Mirelle's other side.

Surtr lowered himself to one knee.

He had chosen a patch of bare stone and cooled it first. Even so, he heard one of the horses step sideways.

“Your Majesty.”

“Surtr.”

He looked at the face of the woman whose husband he had killed.

There was no gentleness in it for him. There was exhaustion that had settled deeply enough to become part of its shape, and a determination he recognized from another face on another day.

“I remember his name,” he said.

“So do a great many people who never met him.”

Surtr bowed his head.

“I killed Roderic. I burned the homes of people he stayed to protect. I drove you and your children onto the road. I am sorry for it.”

Mirelle's fingers tightened on her gloves.

He forced himself to stop there. No account of Varrick. No explanation of the voice in the dark. He had told that truth before, and it remained true, but it was not the truth she had traveled here to hear.

“There are women in Lyradon,” Mirelle said, “who are still using the blankets they carried away that morning.”

He waited.

“They have new beds. Some have new husbands. Some have children born after the war. They still keep the blankets.”

The wind touched the edge of a drawing under Davren's arm.

“I cannot give you an answer on their behalf,” she said. “Or my husband's.”

“I understand.”

“I am not certain you do. You have lived a very long time. You may outlive everyone who remembers being afraid of you.”

Surtr raised his head.

“That will not mean you were forgiven.”

“No,” he said.

Adriana had been watching him without moving.

“I am here because my brother asked me to come,” she said. “I wanted to see the conditions agreed. That is all.”

“Yes.”

“When this is built, I may cross it. That will mean I needed to cross the river.”

The words hurt. He was grateful she could not mistake his stillness for indifference; the light in the cracks of his hands had dimmed almost to black.

“I will not make it mean anything else.”

Julian looked at his sister. She touched his arm once.

Then Davren unrolled the drawings on a broad piece of stone and held the curling corners down with four pebbles.

His first attempt at explaining the foundations came out too quickly. He stopped, swallowed, and began again.

Surtr leaned forward to listen.

***

He disagreed with the design almost immediately.

Not the arch. The arch was excellent. The engineer had understood the valley and the rock beneath it, and had drawn a span of startling lightness for the load it would bear.

The handrails were wood.

“Oak,” Julian said.

“It burns.”

“So do houses.”

Surtr looked away from the drawing.

Julian's expression had not changed. He had not thrown the words. He had simply placed them on the table between them, where they could not be mistaken for anything else.

“People need houses,” he continued. “And they need rails they can touch in winter without leaving skin behind.”

“I could make the iron warm.”

“Every day?”

Surtr considered the question.

“No.”

“Then oak.”

Davren studied a pebble with great concentration.

“Oak,” Surtr agreed.

They moved on to the joints.

The work took a season.

Surtr forged beyond the inhabited valley, in a place chosen by the masons and approved by the people who grazed animals nearby. A ditch carried rainwater away from the casting beds. Screens protected the workers from the glare. Davren measured everything, including quantities Surtr could judge by feeling the iron change beneath his fingers.

He let Davren measure them.

Sometimes the young engineer found an error.

That was harder.

The first time, Surtr said the difference was insignificant.

Davren went pale. He looked toward Julian, then back at the great cooling rib laid across the supports.

“It is insignificant here,” he said. “It will not be insignificant at the other end.”

Surtr looked down.

Davren's feet had turned toward the path.

He remembered Fenrir.

“Show me.”

The engineer did.

Surtr remade the piece.

Word traveled. Not all of it kindly. One mason said the bridge would be cursed. A woman refused the offer of replacement gate fittings when she learned who had forged them. A carter came to the works and shouted at Surtr for the length of time it took the afternoon shadows to reach the first ditch.

Surtr listened until the man ran out of words.

Then he asked whether he should move farther from the road.

The carter stared at him, furious at having no useful answer, and went away.

He returned a week later with stone.

He still would not look at Surtr.

The stone was unloaded where he requested.

***

Hadrun came to see the work before autumn.

He stood beneath a completed rib and looked along its curve. Anja remained beside him this time. She had grown tall enough that the movement caught Surtr off guard; people could change while he was occupied elsewhere, and the change did not always mean they were dying.

“We need a crossing,” Hadrun said.

Surtr looked toward the valley.

“This one—”

“At the settlement. Across the stream. The small bridge carries people. It won't carry us.”

“I can make one.”

“You can make the parts. We want to build it.”

Surtr nodded.

Hadrun took a folded drawing from his coat. It had been handled often. The ink was uneven, but the measurements had been written clearly and checked by someone with a sharper pen.

“Yrsa says no decoration.”

“I had not proposed any.”

“She said you'd think of it.”

Anja looked at the enormous iron rib, then at Surtr.

“Can you make it without your name on it?”

He felt Hadrun stiffen.

“Yes,” Surtr said.

“Good.”

She reached for her father's hand.

Surtr took the drawing after they had set it down and moved away. Beneath the main span someone had drawn fish. One had legs. He could not decide whether the legs were intentional.

He left them on the paper.

The finished parts went north on six wagons. He did not accompany them. A fortnight later Bruni brought back a message that the crossing stood and that the measurements had been right.

There was no invitation enclosed.

Surtr put the message beside the queen's letter, in a stone box lined with cool clay.

***

The last fastening of Lyradon's bridge was driven on a morning of cold mist.

Surtr stood above the gorge while the workers completed the deck. He had carried the great pieces into position under Davren's direction. At one point he had held a rib motionless through an entire night while the men on the southern footing corrected a support.

His hands had ached.

He remembered the restrained giants, compelled to continue when their bodies could no longer bear the work. The memory did not make his own hands hurt less. It made him careful when Davren asked for another hour.

Now the bridge held itself.

Julian walked its length, inspecting the oak rails. He found a rough place halfway across, took a scrap of abrasive from his pocket, and worked at it while the others waited.

Nobody called to hurry him.

Mirelle crossed first.

She went slowly, with Cassia beside her, and stopped in the middle to look downstream. Surtr could not hear what they said. When they continued, the queen kept her hand on the rail.

Behind them came a farmer leading a mule, two children arguing over a basket, and an old woman who stopped to stamp on the deck as though she doubted its intentions.

The bridge answered with a low note.

She stamped again.

Davren looked wounded.

“It is supposed to do that,” he said.

“Good,” she told him, and crossed.

By noon there were cart wheels on the span.

Surtr had imagined, despite himself, that he would feel something immense when the work was finished. A burden lifting. Some change inside the place where pride had once lived so comfortably.

Instead he was tired.

The old bridge remained destroyed. Roderic remained dead. People were crossing a river because they had business on the other side, and most of them were not thinking about the being who had forged the iron beneath their feet.

He watched a child trail her fingers along Julian's rail.

For a little while, he was able to be glad without asking the gladness to do anything more.

Adriana came in the afternoon.

Uriah walked beside her. They paused at the northern end, speaking quietly, then she stepped onto the bridge alone.

Surtr remained well back from the road.

At the middle she stopped.

Her hands closed around the oak. She bowed her head, and he saw the movement of her shoulders. Uriah went to her then, without haste, and stood close enough for her to lean against him.

Surtr turned away.

There was a fitting left in the grass, a spare one. He picked it up and carried it to the tool cart. He checked that the remaining iron had been secured for the journey. He waited until someone told him the road was clear.

***

Julian found him before sunset.

Surtr was preparing to leave by the northern pass. He had extinguished the smallest scattered coals, checked the empty casting beds, and walked the perimeter twice to make certain nothing smoldered beneath the soil.

The prince stood at the edge of the work ground.

“You haven't crossed it.”

“I put it there.”

“That isn't crossing.”

Surtr looked down toward the river.

“I was not asked.”

Julian shifted his weight. There was sawdust caught in the fold of his cuff. Surtr remembered the boy standing with a helmet in both hands, and the impossible expectation that he might catch something instead of breaking it.

“I'm asking,” Julian said.

They went down together.

The bridge was nearly empty. A pair of laborers stepped aside to let them pass, and Surtr waited while they found space beyond the approach. He made himself as small as he could. Drew the heat inward. Watched the oak.

His first step rang through the span.

He stopped.

Davren, waiting at the far end with his arms folded, called, “It is supposed to do that.”

Julian smiled.

Surtr took another step.

At the center he stood with his hands carefully at his sides. The river ran beneath him. He remembered stone arches, smoke, the bright and useless edge of a mortal sword.

“He looked back here,” Julian said.

Surtr could not be certain of the exact place. Too much had fallen. The new span stood differently upon the banks.

“Near here.”

Julian nodded.

They remained quiet until the first lamps appeared among the houses downstream.

“I will come here next year,” Julian said. “This day.”

Surtr turned his head.

“You may come too.”

The invitation was small enough to fit inside an ordinary sentence. It did not mention the people who would refuse him. It did not promise that Julian would always feel as he felt now. It offered an afternoon, a year away, on a bridge that needed no army to cross it.

“I will come,” Surtr said.

“At a walk.”

“At a walk.”

Julian rubbed his thumb along the rail. He found another rough place and frowned at it.

Surtr almost offered to smooth it with heat.

Instead he waited while Julian took the little scrap from his pocket and attended to his own work.

***

The years gave Surtr no single day on which he became welcome.

At one settlement, he was asked to remain beyond the boundary while a broken pump was brought out to him. At another, Yrsa let him stand inside the unfinished hall and hold a roof beam while its braces were fitted. She corrected him twice and sent him away before supper.

The woman with the cooking hook sent a message through Bruni that it held a pot properly again.

He kept that message too.

There were names on Hadrun's lists that never found answers. Surtr returned to the old places when new memories troubled him, and sometimes what he remembered was useful, and sometimes it merely made another night difficult. He learned to record both without pretending they were the same.

In Lyradon the orchards grew.

He watched from the road as white blossom spread along terraces that had once been gray. The first time he saw children playing beneath the trees, he stopped so far away that none of them noticed him.

He went to the bridge each year.

Sometimes Julian talked. Sometimes he was quiet. Once he arrived furious about a leaking roof and spent most of the afternoon explaining why the leak could not possibly be where the builders said it was. Surtr listened with the solemnity he had once reserved for declarations of war.

Eventually there was Elowen beside him.

Later there was a child.

The first time Julian brought Roddick, Surtr stayed at the far end of the span while the boy regarded him from his father's arms. One small hand opened and closed against Julian's shoulder.

“Warm,” Roddick said.

“Yes,” Julian answered. “We stay here until he is ready.”

Surtr lowered himself carefully, feeling the bridge take his weight.

He had spent the morning practicing with a basin of water and an iron bar. He had asked the dwarves questions that once would have offended him. How long heat lingered in metal. How the surface could be warm while the heart still held enough to burn. How a small hand differed from his own.

Now he looked at Julian's son and discovered that he wished he had asked more.

“A little farther back,” he said.

Julian took a step.

Surtr waited.

The light beneath his skin dimmed. Air moved between them without shimmering. Roddick found something fascinating on his father's collar and forgot him for a moment.

That helped.

He did not have to make the moment remarkable. He only had to avoid hurting the child.

At last Julian came closer.

Roddick looked up again. He smiled, sudden and toothy, for reasons of his own.

Surtr had no gift with him that year.

He thought of the cooking hook, of hinges that opened out, of the little horse a child might hold at the foot of a winter bed. Four legs. A tail. Something small enough to belong to one person without frightening anyone else.

It would take practice.

Above them, evening gathered over the pass. Behind him lay the road he had burned and walked and would walk again. Below, the river carried the day's light through Lyradon.

“Next year?” Julian asked when it was time to leave.

Surtr rose carefully from his knees.

“Next year.”

He stepped off the bridge, waited for a cart to pass, and started up the mountain at a walk.