LotS/The Story/The Saga of Drunken Ragnar/Brainteaser

Brainteaser

The weaver of tales stepped from the void-voyager's belly, into the summer sun. A cool wind blew across her face. Her braids danced to its caress like ears of golden corn. She closed her eyes and breathed deep of the air. Her lungs swelled with the greatness of the story which would soon be born on that world.

Beneath her arm, nestled there like a bard's songful harp, was the tool of her craft -- the word-axe that cleaved chronicles of mighty deeds into being. The weaver stroked its smooth surface. She felt purpose crackle along her fingertips, and knew that its edge would soon bite deep into the flesh and blood of fantastic happenings.

"Out of the way, bitch! The rest of us want to get off this ship today!"

The man pushed her from behind, and the weaver's brow grew dark. She grasped her word-axe tight in a warrior's grasp. Within her thoughts she screamed a cry that tore the heavens near in two. A single blow shattered the wretched fool's nose. Another smashed his chin. A third tore the face from his skull and left bloody ruin as an eternal mark of his folly...

But in the flesh she said, "Sorry!" instead. Then she walked down the metal steps.

There was a man she'd come to see. His name was Ragnar, son of Ragnar, grandson of Ragnar, great-grandson of Ragnar (and of a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother whose names were not Ragnar). He was known on a hundred worlds. And if the dead can be said to possess knowledge, he was known among them too -- for his doom-scribbler and foe-hewer had sent thousands into hell to bolster their number. Ragnar was a fearsome warrior, a great champion, an omnicidal ravager, a bastion to his friends and a terror to their enemies. He was many things. But he was not there.

Other people had gathered to meet the passengers who poured from the void-voyager's belly like gore from a wounded beast. To the left a little girl ran to her father, wrapped her arms around his leg, and squealed in delight. To the right a young man was arguing with a woman, a bouquet of forlorn flowers drooping from his hand. There was lipstick smeared across his cheek, and its shade wasn't hers. Nearby two men in blood-red suits seized the passenger who'd pushed the weaver, and threw him to the ground. They pummeled him with fists and boots, screaming about the money he owed. These and other meetings and reunions took place, chronicling the ever-moving cycle of life, but of the great warrior there was no sign.

"My father said Ragnar would be here," Svana thought. "Maybe he was waylaid by another great adventure."

This seemed possible. Perhaps he would soon arrive, clad in the hides of the monsters he'd slain, laden with weapons plundered from foes who'd chosen to try their strength against his and been destroyed for their reckless ambition. Valkyries might flank his steps and sing with beautiful voices of the carnage he'd wrought. Maybe he would hurl a fierce beast's corpse at her feet and recount the ferocious battle that had made him late...

Or perhaps he'd forgotten about her. So Svana called him, using her word-axe -- which was also a voice-hurler.

The word-axe rang, and threw her call into the heavens to find bold Ragnar. Again it rang, like the battering rams of warrior hordes beating at a feast-hall's doors -- demanding entrance with their thews. On the third ring the weaver gazed around, for she heard its echoes near at hand. But then its cry fell silent and gave way to the hero's voice.

"This is Ragnar. I'm not here. Or if I am here, I can't answer. Probably because I'm killing something. Leave a message. If you're a friend, or you have a bounty for me to go collect, I'll get back to you. If you're about to make a telemarketing call, ask yourself if you want my axe in your head."

Svana left no message. Instead she called again, and this time listened hard. Great piles of crates stood across the landing pad. These were fodder for void-voyagers, to be carried away and torn from their guts on distant worlds. The ringing was surely within their midst.

The weaver moved among the crates. And there she found Ragnar Ragnarsson, the mighty warrior, terror of his enemies, slaughterer of hundreds, breaker of bones, shatterer of skulls -- the one whose great story she had come to hack into the sneering face of literature. He was lying on the ground, asleep. His huge chest trembled with the strength of his snoring. Drool trickled from his maw.

"Hey! Wake up!"

But the warrior slept unheeding. So Svana poked his flank with the toe of her boot. Still he did not stir. Thus she kicked him hard. And screamed in pain.

"Damn it! What the hell are you made of? Metal?"

She shrieked and hopped. Then she shrieked again. The pain refused to leave her throbbing toes. It was deaf to her screams of outrage and agony. But though the pain was deaf, Ragnar was not. His foe-finders opened. He gave a mournful groan.

"Urgh. Can't a man sleep in peace? If you're dying, die quietly!"

But great was the pain in the weaver's toes. She screamed till the spaceport trembled beneath sinful profanities and parents fled with their children -- lest young minds fall prey to adult words and be plunged into depravity. The son of Ragnar (who was also Ragnar) growled as he stood. He glared at the teller of tales and bellower of blasphemies from foe-finders shot red with blood. His powerful body tottered. It swayed one way, then the other. It seemed that it would surely crash to the ground like a majestic fastness ruined by bomb and blast. But he placed his hand on the crates and steadied his hulking frame.

The weaver lowered her wounded foot and glared.

"You're drunk! I know you warriors love your ale... I'm pretty sure that's why I was born... But can't you damn well stay sober when you're meant to meet someone?"

Ragnar snarled.

"Don't be stupid! I could drink a sea of scotch! A valley of vodka! A river of rum! A mountain of mead! And after all that, I'd want something stronger to chase it! I-"

The warrior's words ceased to flow. His mouth clamped shut. His great muscles shuddered like a mountain peak racked by avalanches. His cheeks filled and bulged.

"Oh, knock it off! Save your bragging for when you're picking up girls! You're just like those little bastards I had to teach. Full of big talk... Then they had a couple of ales in morning break and-"

Ragnar's mouth opened wide, like the maw of a fearsome beast that roars its challenge and its fury at those it will soon devour. But neither challenge nor fury poured forth. Or if in truth they did, they were lost amidst the vomit. A torrent flew from the warrior's mighty innards. It was as though a million men had drunk their fill and in turn filled a river with their sick, and that river had broken its banks to flood the homes of the poor souls who dwelled nearby. Such was the vomit of Ragnar, son of Ragnar.

The weaver screamed anew. Vomit gushed across her face and hid its prettiness. Vomit spilled into her hair and became entangled amid the golden braids. Vomit splashed over her chest and flowed down her top. Vomit splattered across her word-axe and gave unwelcome metaphor. Vomit flowed over the toes of her favorite boots.

For a moment there was silence. The universe -- all its gods and monsters, its denizens from the lowliest thrall to the mightiest thane -- watched while Svana lived, moved, and had her being in vomit. Then the woman screamed, and it was the cry of a billion banshees.

"Bastard! You bastard! You stupid drunken bastard! Rivers of rum? Mountains of mead? Seas of goddamn scotch!?! What kind of Niflung warrior can't handle his drink? Screw you! If I wanted to be vomited on, I'd have taught kindergarten! I'm going home! If you can't hold your ale, you don't deserve to be in my saga!"

Ragnar's foe-finders flashed with the fury of a thousand berserkers -- the same dread stare that had watched myriad deaths wrought by the murderous hero's hand. His thews trembled with all the violence of a galaxy. But Svana wasn't cowed. From her youngest days she'd seen Niflung warrior wrath written on the face of her father, himself a mighty man of war and weapons. So she gave Ragnar one last look of scorn and began to turn away.

The rage drained from his face. His bulging muscles slumped. For the weaver's jibes had cut him deep, piercing flesh that would have withstood blade or bullet. He was clothed in shame as though it were a shirt of the thickest space mail. A great sigh shuddered through his body.

"Wait! Please..."

Roars and thunder, a tirade of profanity or murderous threats, wouldn't have stopped Svana. But the urging in Ragnar's voice did. She paused and stood there, vomit dripping from her skin, hair, clothes, and word-axe.

"Something's wrong!" the warrior said. "I've got more gear inside me than a warship. My guts are cybernetic. I can get drunk, but not like this!"

The weaver nodded her head.

"That explains why I nearly broke my foot when I kicked you. Maybe your systems are malfunctioning?"

"Then I'll find those tech-nerds and surgeons who put them in, and rip their damn heads off! They said my cybernetics would last a lifetime. So if I'm alive they should be working!"

The warrior stopped. He lowered his gaze. The woman rolled her eyes.

"My breasts are covered with beer-basted vomit, and you're still leering at them?"

"Bah! I'll leer later. Look down."

Amidst the vomit that smothered her chest, yellow-pink liquid and slithering chunks, something glinted. She plucked it from her bosom with finger and thumb, and held it up to her eyes.

"It's a little metal spider!" Svana exclaimed.

Its legs were unmoving now, but she could see the tiny joints and actuators which must once have given it life, along with other inert mechanisms.

The weaver ran her hands through vomit-streaked hair and over vomit-smeared garb. More miniature machines soon lay in her palm.

"What did you eat last night? A robot?"

A prodigious frown overtook the warrior's broad brow.

"I don't know... Damn cybernetics! I've never blacked out before! It shouldn't be possible!"

"What's the last thing you recall?"

His foe-finders narrowed in contemplation. A look of barbaric pondering shadowed his face.

"I collected a bounty. And after I got my credits, I went out for a drink..."

"Where?"

"I don't remember!"

Ragnar growled and smote a crate. Its thick metal buckled and groaned, and was left stamped with the shape of his head-smasher. Another punch launched a crate through the air. It span end over end, before crashing against a void-voyager like a mighty war god's hammer and leaving a long wound upon its paint. Still the son of Ragnar's wrath was not satisfied, so he raised his leg to wreak yet more carnage on the crates which had the audacity to be stacked in his warlike presence.

The weaver gasped.

"Ragnar -- there's something on your boot!"

The warrior's leg froze in the air.

"Can't people clean up after their damn pets?" he roared.

"I don't think it's dog crap..."

Perhaps the Niflung heard the horror in her voice or saw it on her pretty, vomit-covered visage. For he forestalled the kick that would have scattered the crates. Then he pulled the boot from his foot so that he might gaze upon its sole.

"It looks like..." Svana began.

"Blood and brains," Ragnar said -- for such things were not new to the omnicidal Niflung.

He placed his other hand to the side of his head. Then the back. Then the forehead. Then the other side. Then the crown.

"They aren't mine," he said. "My brains are still where they belong. I must have stomped them out of someone!"

"And you don't remember who? Ragnar, what if it was an innocent person!"

He snorted. His mouth opened to spew mockery over her as it had spewed vomit only a moment before. But this time neither mockery nor vomit spewed forth. His foe-finders held a faraway look. Ragnar had slain more men than he could count. Perhaps more than even a mathematician could count. If his tally had been set down upon a page, the numbers would have been festooned with strange Hellenic symbols designed to encapsulate their true magnitude. And yet he was troubled. He liked to know whom he killed...

Svana understood the hero's troubled gaze. And she knew too that she had found the beginnings of a saga. What triumph or tragedy lay in the story of the brains caked onto Ragnar's boot? She would find out -- and her word-axe would cleave it into eternity!

"We need to find out where you were last night," she said. "Maybe there are more clues in your vomit..."

And like two soothsayers parsing the bowels of a beast, trying to divine the future in the slaughtered creature's entrails, they pored over the vomit to see what it held.

"These pieces of meat!" Ragnar, son of Ragnar, pointed to brown scraps that lay like islands amid the stinking liquid. The indiscernible cooked flesh, still glistening with thick grease despite its time in the warrior's stomach, could only have meant one thing... "I ate a donner kebab! Maybe it was a trap, and had those machines in it..."

"Let me see those..."

Svana's word-axe, which also a voice-hurler, was other things besides. For the salesman had been handsome and charming... Thus she had allowed optional upgrades to rain down upon her like a volley of arrows thick enough to darken the skies above an ancient battle, and her bill to expand like the stomach of a voracious monster feasting upon its prey. Time and again she had chided herself for the moment of weakness, but now she was pleased.

The handsome trickster, who hadn't asked her out even though she'd bought all the optional upgrades and giggled at every one of his terrible jokes, had told her that a beautiful woman should watch what she ate. And so her word-axe had such powers. Slender beams of green light shot from its sensor and danced across the piece of meat. Svana read the screen.

"It's mostly giraffe," she said. "With a bit of walrus. And vomit. But I think that bit was added later..."

"Giraffe and walrus? There can't be many places that serve that..."

The weaver pressed buttons upon the word-axe's screen.

"Just one in this city. Kebab Chaos. Huh... And there are three places which serve human vomit..."

"I'll go to Kebab Chaos. And if I find out they stuck those metal spiders in my kebab..."

His foe-finders blazed. He reached to his belt. Then he froze. The warrior gazed at the ground, as though reading his vomit anew. He turned his head this way and that. His hulking frame span on the spot.

"My axe!" he roared. "Where's my axe?"