An old woman came to see Frigg who was in her palace, Fensalir. Frigg does not appear to have wondered who she was or where she came from. She was just an old woman like any other old woman, indeed an archetypal old woman. If you looked hard at her she was almost too perfect, the web of wrinkles over her face and neck, the intricate folds of her long cloak over her dark dress, a kind of icon of old-womanhood. If she looked at you – even if you were the queen of the Ases – you could not hold her cold grey gaze, but you knew you needed to speak to her, she shimmered with your need to speak to her, almost as though only your need held her shape together. She was Loki the shapeshifter of course, putting out waves of glamour. So Frigg asked, as he needed her to do, what they were all doing in the fields of Asgard, crying out and whooping?
The old woman said they were hurling weapons at Baldur, and that nothing could harm him. She remarked humbly that someone of great power must have persuaded everything not to harm Baldur.
And Frigg said, as she must, as the tale required, that it was she, his mother, who had called everything not to harm him, and had been heard by everything.
‘Everything?’ said the old woman.
‘Well, I noticed a young shoot on a tree to the west of Valhall. It is a thing called mistletoe. I was past it before I saw it, and it was barely alive, with no strength, too young to make a promise.’
And yet, the thin child thought, she must have been worried at some level, or how would she have remembered this insignificant plant at all?
And then, the old woman was simply not there at all. Maybe she never had been. Frigg’s huge effort had tired her. Her eyes were dazzled. She listened to the wild shrieking of the happy gods.
Loki went for the mistletoe. Mistletoe is a feeble killer. It attaches itself to the boughs and branches of trees and sends fine threads like blind hair-worms into the rising columns of water which the leaves on the tree suck up and breathe into the air. The mistletoe has no branches and no true leaves: it is a tangle of waxy stems, with strange key-shaped protrusions and whitish gluey berries with black seeds visible through the translucent flesh, like frogspawn, the thin child always thought, seeing the lumpish globes of the mistletoe dense on bare branches in winter. Little twigs of it were pinned to lampholders and over doorways at the turn of the winter, and you kissed one another under it because it was evergreen and clinging, it represented constancy and perpetual liveliness. Next to the holly in which it was sometimes wound, it seemed ghostly, almost absent. The holly was shiny and scarlet and prickly and strong. The mistletoe was soft, floppy, a yellowish colour that was like dying leaves. The thin child had been told about it in Nature Study. She had been warned against eating it: it was poisonous, she was told, though she was also told that birds fed on it and scattered it about by cleaning its glue from their beaks on the bark of branches, and leaving the seeds with the glue.
It could spread over a tree like an overcoat and suck the lifewater from the wood, so that the remaining corpse was a dry prop for the grey-gold fronds.
It was mystical to the druids, she was told, but she could not find out what they did with it. It was associated with sacrifice, including human sacrifice.
Loki tore it gently from its foothold in an ash tree. It squirmed a little in his facile fingers. He stroked it. It made its hosts put out thickets of fine, sickly twig-masses, witches’ brooms they were called, and Loki stroked and stroked his fleshy bundle, and pulled, and made hard, and spoke sharp words to it, until he had not a clump but a fine grey pole, still a little luminous, like the round pale fruit, still a curious colour like snakeskin or sharkskin rather than bark, but a pole, which he twirled in his clever hands until it balanced like a javelin and had a fine, fine point like a flint arrow.
Loki, now again in his own bright form, stepped soundlessly into the hurling and howling throng of the gods, avoiding the missiles, aimed or returning. He turned the mistletoe spear in his hand, telling it to keep its shape. He found the one he was looking for, standing apart at the edge of the crowd, his hood pulled over his dark face. This was Hödur, Frigg’s other son, as swarthy as Baldur was golden. He had slipped second out of the womb, his eyelids sealed, like a blind kitten. They remained sealed. He was dark to Baldur’s day, night to his sunlight. They needed each other. Because he had never seen, he had his own ways of moving around Asgard, feeling for pillars, measuring steps, holding his shadowy head sideways and listening to space. If Baldur asked him what it was like not to see, he would answer, how do I know, since I have never seen. Loki, seeing him now, saw that his head was down, slightly slanted, listening to the uproar of which he was not part. What was it like, inside that skull? Caverns of blackness, or grey thick cloud, or enclosed shining lights? Loki always wanted to know everything, and might have asked, but now he was bent on mischief. For its own sake, because he alone knew how to stop the singing.
‘Why do you not join in the games?’ he asked Hödur. ‘It is a wonder to see Baldur, calm and smiling, in a hail of sharp stones and pointed arrows that turn away from him, and fail. You should play your part.’
‘I have no weapon,’ said Hödur. ‘And, as you well know, I cannot see to take aim.’
‘I have here a sleek and princely spear,’ said smiling Loki. ‘And I can put my hand over yours, to guide your aim. And then, you will have played your part.’
So he took the blind god by the hand, and led him to the front of the crowd. He put the lance in his hand, and closed his own quick fingers over those dark ones.
‘Baldur is over there,’ said Loki, pointing with the spear itself. ‘His breast is bare, he is smiling, he is waiting for your stroke.’
And he raised the other’s arm to shoulder height, and drew it back, and loosed his own grip, and said ‘So, now. Throw now.’
And Hödur let the hood slip from his dark head, and threw it back, and hurled.
The mistletoe spear hit Baldur’s breast and ran through him.
Baldur fell. Blood blossomed and he choked.
Hödur cast about in the sudden silence for Loki. A gnat buzzed by his ear. The shapeshifter was off.
The grief of the gods was appalling. They broke down. They could not speak for weeping. Most affected of all was Odin: gods did not fall dead, and when the loveliest and gentlest god could be killed in a game, worse still was on the way. For a long time the assembled gods stood stupidly, unable to touch the body, or to move it. The bright hair ruffled in the light wind. Dark Hödur stood alone, listening to the sobbing. The thin child closed her eyes and tried to imagine the inside of his head and failed.
Frigg was a mother and also a power. She had set her will to making her son invulnerable, and what had been waiting for him had mocked her. Terrible in grief and rage she refused to be mocked, to be defeated, to accept this end. If he had gone down to the underworld there were powers there who could be bargained with, pleaded with. Even cold Hel would be moved by the fury of Frigg’s grief, greater, Frigg knew, than that of any other mother for any other son. This could not be done to her, as it should not have been done to him. The story ran one way, but she would twist it, turn it back on itself, shape its end to her will.