The Ship of the Dead

  The giant turned and strode through the streets of York, pedestrians moving out of his way as if he were a veering bus.

  I turned to Alex. “Explain. What did you just agree to?”

  The contrast between her heterochromatic eyes seemed even greater than usual, as if the gold and the brown were separating, pooling to the left and right.

  “We need to find a pottery studio,” she said. “Fast.”

  YOU DON’T hear heroes say that a lot.

  Quick, Boy Wonder! To the pottery studio!

  But Alex’s tone left no doubt it was a matter of life and death. The nearest ceramics workshop—a place called the Earthery—turned out to be on my favorite street, the Shambles. I didn’t see that as a good omen. While T.J. and I waited outside, Alex spent a few minutes talking with the proprietor, who at last emerged, grinning and holding a large wad of multicolored money. “Have fun, lads!” he said as he hurried down the street. “Brilliant! Ta!”

  “Thank you!” T.J. waved. “And thanks for not getting involved in our Civil War!”

  We headed inside, where Alex was taking inventory—worktables, potter’s wheels, metal shelves lined with half-finished pots, tubs filled with tools, a cabinet stacked with slabs of wet clay in plastic bags. In the back of the studio, one door led to a small bathroom, another to what looked like a storage room.

  “This might work,” Alex muttered. “Maybe.”

  “Did you buy this place?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly. I just paid the owner for twenty-four hours’ exclusive use. But I paid well.”

  “In British pounds,” I noted. “Where’d you get so much local cash?”

  She shrugged, her attention on counting bags of clay. “It’s called preparation, Chase. I figured we’d be traveling through the UK and Scandinavia. I brought euros, kronor, kroner, and pounds. Compliments of my family. And by compliments, I mean I stole it.”

  I remembered my dream of Alex in front of her house, the way she’d snarled I don’t want your money. Maybe she’d meant she only wanted it on her terms. I could respect that. But how she’d gotten so many different currencies, I couldn’t guess.

  “Stop gawping and help me,” she ordered.

  “I’m not—I wasn’t gawping.”

  “We need to push these tables together,” she said. “T.J., go see if there’s more clay in the back. We need a lot more.”

  “On it!” T.J. dashed to the supply room.

  Alex and I moved four tables together, making a work surface big enough to play Ping-Pong on. T.J. hauled out extra bags of clay until I estimated we had an adequate amount to make a ceramic Volkswagen.

  Alex looked back and forth between the clay and the potter’s wheels. She tapped her thumbnail nervously against her teeth. “Not enough time,” she muttered. “Drying, glazing, firing—”

  “Alex,” I said. “If you want us to help you, you’re going to have to explain what we’re doing.”

  T.J. edged away from me, in case Alex brought out the garrote.

  She just glared at me. “You would know what I’m doing if you’d taken Pottery 101 in Valhalla with me like I asked you.”

  “I—I had a scheduling conflict.” In fact, I hadn’t liked the idea of pottery to the death, especially if it involved getting thrown in a fiery kiln.

  “Stone giants have a tradition called tveirvigi,” said Alex. “Double combat.”

  “It’s like Viking single combat, einvigi,” T.J. added. “Except with tveir instead of ein.”

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “I know! I read about it in—”

  “Please don’t say a travel guide.”

  T.J. looked at the floor.

  Alex picked up a box of assorted wooden tools. “Honestly, Chase, we don’t have time to bring you up to speed. T.J. fights Hrungnir. I make a ceramic warrior who fights the giant’s ceramic warrior. You play water boy, or heal, or whatever. It’s pretty straightforward.”

  I stared at the bags of clay. “A ceramic warrior. As in magic pottery?”

  “Pottery 101,” Alex repeated, like that was obvious. “T.J., would you start cutting those slabs? I need slices one inch thick, about sixty or seventy of them.”

  “Sure! Do I get to use your garrote?”

  Alex laughed long and hard. “Absolutely not. There should be a cutter in that gray tub.”

  T.J. sulked off to find a regular clay cutter.

  “And you,” Alex told me, “you’re going to be making coils.”

  “Coils.”

  “I know you can roll clay into coils. It’s just like making snakes out of Play-Doh.”

  I wondered how she knew my dark secret—that I had enjoyed Play-Doh as a kid. (And when I say kid, I mean up to, like, age eleven.) I grudgingly admitted that this was within my scope of talents. “And you?”

  “The hardest part is using the wheel,” she said. “The most important components have to be thrown.”

  By thrown, I knew she meant shaped on the wheel, not thrown across the room, though with Alex the two activities often went together.

  “All right, boys,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

  After a few hours spent rolling coils, my shoulders ached. My shirt stuck to my sweaty skin. When I closed my eyes, clay snakes flopped around on the backs of my eyelids.

  My only relief was getting up to change the station on the proprietor’s little radio whenever Alex or T.J. didn’t like a song. T.J. preferred martial music, but English radio had a shocking lack of marching-band tunes. Alex favored songs from Japanese anime—also in short supply on the AM/FM dial. Finally, they both settled on Duran Duran, for reasons I can’t explain.

  From time to time, I brought Alex soft drinks from the proprietor’s mini fridge. Her favorite was Tizer, a sort of cherry soda with extra twang. I didn’t like it, but Alex quickly got addicted. Her lips turned bright red like a vampire’s, which I found both disturbing and strangely fascinating.

  Meanwhile T.J. ran back and forth between his slab-cutting and the kiln, which he was heating up for an epic day of firing. He seemed to take special pleasure in poking pencil-stub-size dents in the slabs so they wouldn’t crack when baked. He did this while humming “Hungry Like the Wolf”—not my favorite song, given my personal history. T.J. seemed cheerful for a guy who had a duel scheduled with a twenty-foot-tall stone giant in the morning. I decided not to remind him that if he died here in England, he would stay dead, no matter how friendly the locals were.

  I had placed my worktable as close as I could to Alex’s wheel so I could talk to her. Usually I waited to ask her a question until she was centering a new lump of clay. With both her hands engaged, she was less likely to hit me.

  “Have you done this before?” I asked. “Made a pottery guy?”

  She glanced over, her face flecked with white porcelain. “Tried a few times. Nothing this big. But my family…” She bore down on the clay, molding it into a beehive-like cone. “Like Hrungnir said, we have the necessary skills.”

  “Your family.” I tried to imagine Loki sitting at a table, rolling clay snakes.

  “The Fierros.” Alex shot me a wary look. “You really don’t know? Never heard of Fierro Ceramics?”

  “Uh…should I have?”

  She smiled, as if she found my ignorance refreshing. “If you knew anything about cooking or home décor, maybe. It was a hot brand about ten years ago. But that’s fine. I’m not talking about the machine-made crap my dad sells, anyway. I’m talking about my grandfather’s art. He started the business when he emigrated from Tlatilco.”

  “Tlatilco.” I tried to place the name. “I’m guessing that’s outside I-95?”

  Alex laughed. “No reason you’d have heard of it. Tiny place in Mexico. These days it’s really just a subsection of Mexico City. According to my grandfather, our family has been making pottery there since before the Aztecs. Tlatilco used to be this super-ancient culture.” She pressed her thumbs into the center of her beehive, opening u
p the sides of the new pot.

  It still seemed like magic to me the way she did it, shaping such a delicate and perfectly symmetrical vase with nothing but strength and spin. The few times I’d tried to use a wheel, I’d nearly broken my fingers and managed to turn a lump of clay into a slightly uglier lump of clay.

  “Who knows what’s true?” Alex continued. “These are just family stories. Legends. But my abuelo took them seriously. When he moved to Boston, he kept doing things the old way. Even if he was just making a plate or a cup, he’d create every piece by hand, with lots of pride and attention to detail.”

  “Blitzen would like that.”

  Alex sat back, regarding her pot. “Yeah, my granddad would have made a good dwarf. Then my dad took over the business and decided to go commercial. He sold out. He mass-produced lines of ceramic dishware, entered into deals with home-furnishing-supply chains. He made millions before people started realizing the quality was going downhill.”

  I recalled her father’s bitter words in my dream: You had so much potential. You understood the craft almost as well as your grandfather.

  “He wanted you to carry on the family business.”

  She studied me, no doubt wondering how I’d guessed. I almost told her about the dream, but Alex really did not like having people inside her head, even unintentionally. And I didn’t like being yelled at.

  “My father is an idiot,” she said. “He didn’t understand how I could like pottery but not want to make money off it. He definitely didn’t appreciate me listening to my granddad’s crazy ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  Over at his worktable, T.J. kept poking holes in the clay slices with a dowel, creating different patterns, like stars and spirals. “This is kind of fun,” he admitted. “Therapeutic!”

  Alex’s Tizer-red lips curled up at the edges. “My abuelo made pottery for a living, but his real interest was in our ancestors’ sculptures. He wanted to understand the spirituality of them. That wasn’t easy. I mean…after so many centuries, trying to figure out your heritage when it’s been buried under so much else—Olmec, Aztec, Spanish, Mexican. How do you even know what’s true? How do you reclaim it?”

  I got the feeling her questions were rhetorical and didn’t require answers from me, which was just as well. I couldn’t think clearly with T.J. humming “Rio” and doweling smiley faces in his clay.

  “But your granddad managed,” I guessed.

  “He thought so.” Alex spun up the wheel again, sponging the sides of her pot. “So did I. My dad…” Her expression soured. “Well, he liked to blame…you know, the way I am…on Loki. He didn’t like it at all when I found validation on the Fierro side of the family.”

  My brain felt like my hands—as if a layer of clay was tightening over it, sucking out all the moisture. “Sorry, I don’t understand. What does this have to do with magic ceramic warriors?”

  “You’ll see. Fish the phone out of my pocket and call Sam, will you? Give her an update. Then shut up so I can concentrate.”

  Even under orders, pulling something out of Alex’s pants pocket while she was wearing said pants seemed like a good way to get myself killed.

  I managed, with only a couple of small panic attacks, and found that Alex’s phone had data service in the UK. She must have arranged that when she arranged her multicurrency theft.

  I texted Samirah and gave her the lowdown.

  A few minutes later, the phone buzzed with her reply. K. GL. Fighting. GTG.

  I wondered if GTG in this context meant got to go, Gunderson throttling girlfriend, or giants torturing Gunderson. I decided to think optimistically and went with the first option.

  As the afternoon wore on, the back tables filled up with fired porcelain squares that looked like armored plates. Alex taught me how, by combining my coils, to form cylinders that would serve as arms and legs. Her efforts at the pottery wheel produced feet, hands, and a head, all shaped like vases and meticulously decorated with Viking runes.

  She spent hours on the faces—two of them, side by side, like the piece of art that Alex’s father had shattered in my dream. The left face had heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes, a cartoon villain’s curly mustache, and a huge grimacing mouth. The right face was a grinning skull with hollow eyeholes and a lolling tongue. Looking at the two visages pressed together, I couldn’t help thinking about Alex’s own different-colored eyes.

  By evening, we’d laid out all the pieces of the ceramic warrior on our quadruple table, creating an eight-foot-long Frankenstein’s monster, some assembly required.

  “Well.” T.J. wiped his forehead. “That thing would scare me if I had to face it in battle.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And speaking of faces—?”

  “It’s a duality mask,” Alex explained. “My ancestors from Tlatilco—they made a lot of the figurines with two faces, or one face with two halves. Nobody’s sure why. My grandfather thought they represented two spirits in a single body.”

  “Like my old Lenape friend Mother William!” T.J. said. “So, I guess the native cultures down in Mexico had argr, too!” He corrected himself quickly. “I mean trans folks, gender-fluid folks.”

  Argr, the Viking word for someone of shifting gender, literally meant unmanly, which was not an Alex-approved term.

  I studied the mask. “No wonder the duality art spoke to you. Your granddad…he got who you were.”

  “He got it,” Alex agreed, “and he honored it. When he died, my dad did his best to discredit my abuelo’s ideas, destroy his art, and turn me into a good little businessperson. I wouldn’t let him.”

  She rubbed the nape of her neck, maybe subconsciously touching the tattooed symbol of the figure-eight serpents. She had embraced shape-shifting, refusing to let Loki ruin it for her. She had done the same with pottery, even though her father had turned the family business into something she despised.

  “Alex,” I said, “the more I find out about you, the more I admire you.”

  Her expression was a mix of amusement and exasperation, like I was a cute puppy that had just peed on the carpet. “Hold the admiration until I can bring this thing to life, Smooth Talker. That’s the real trick. In the meantime, we all need some fresh air.” She threw me another wad of money. “Let’s go get some dinner. You’re buying.”

  DINNER WAS fish and chips at a place called Mr. Chippy. T.J. found the name hilarious. While we ate, he kept saying “MR. CHIPPY!” in a loud, bubbly voice, which did not amuse the guy at the register.

  Afterward, we returned to the pottery studio to lay low for the night. T.J. suggested going back to the ship to be with the rest of the crew, but Alex insisted she needed to keep an eye on her ceramic warrior.

  She texted Sam an update.

  Sam’s response: NP. OK here. Fighting water horses.

  Fighting water horses was written in emojis: fist, wave, horse. I guessed Sam had fought so many of them today she’d decided to make a text shortcut.

  “You got her international coverage, too,” I noted.

  “Well, yeah,” Alex said. “Gotta keep in touch with my sister.”

  I wanted to ask why she hadn’t done the same for me. Then I remembered I didn’t have a phone. Most einherjar didn’t bother with them. For one thing, getting a number and paying the bill is hard when you’re officially dead. Also, no data plan covers the rest of the Nine Worlds. And the reception in Valhalla is horrible. I blame the roof of golden shields. Despite all that, Alex insisted on keeping a phone. How she managed, I didn’t know. Maybe Samirah had registered her in some kind of friends & family & also dead family program.

  As soon as we reached the studio, Alex checked on her ceramic project. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that it hadn’t assembled itself and come to life yet.

  “I’ll check it again in a few hours,” she said. “Gonna…”

  She staggered to the only comfy chair in the room—the proprietor’s clay-spattered Barcalounger—then passed out and began to sno
re. Yikes, she could snore. T.J. and I decided to bunk in the storage room, where we’d be better insulated from Alex’s impression of a dying lawn mower.

  We made some impromptu mattresses out of canvas tarps.

  T.J. cleaned his rifle and sharpened his bayonet—a nighttime ritual for him.

  I lay down and watched the rain patter against the skylights. The glass leaked, dripping on the metal shelves and filling the room with the smell of damp rust, but I didn’t mind. I was grateful for the steady drumming.

  “So, what happens tomorrow?” I asked T.J. “I mean exactly?”

  T.J. laughed. “Exactly? I fight a twenty-foot-tall giant until one of us dies or can’t fight anymore. Meanwhile, the giant’s clay warrior fights Alex’s clay warrior until one of them is rubble. Alex, I dunno, cheers on her creation, I guess. You heal me if you can.”

  “That’s allowed?”

  T.J. shrugged. “Far as I know, anything’s allowed for you and Alex as long as you don’t actually fight.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that your opponent is fifteen feet taller than you?”

  T.J. straightened his back. “Do you think I look that short? I’m almost six feet!”

  “How can you be so calm?”

  He inspected the edge of his bayonet, holding it up to his face so it seemed to cut him in half like a duality mask. “I’ve already beat the odds so many times, Magnus. On James Island, South Carolina? I was standing right next to a friend of mine, Joe Wilson, when a Reb sniper—” He made a finger gun and pulled the trigger. “Could have been me. Could have been any of us. I hit the dirt, rolled over and stared up at the sky, and this sense of calm washed over me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.”

  “Yeah, that’s called shock.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, I saw Valkyries, Magnus—ladies on horses, swirling in the skies above our regiment. I finally believed what my ma had always told me about my dad being Tyr. Those crazy stories about Norse gods in Boston. Right then I decided…okay. What happens happens. If my dad is the god of bravery, I’d better make him proud.”

  I wasn’t sure that would’ve been my reaction. I was glad I had a father who was proud of me for healing people, enjoying the outdoors, and tolerating his talking sword.

  “You’ve met your dad?” I asked. “He gave you that bayonet, right?”

  T.J. folded the blade in its chamois cloth like he was tucking it into bed. “The bayonet was waiting for me when I checked into Valhalla. I never met Tyr face-to-face.” He shrugged. “Still, every time I accept a challenge, I feel closer to him. The more dangerous, the better.”

  “You must feel super close to him right now,” I guessed.

  T.J. grinned. “Yep. Good times.”

  I wondered how a god could go a hundred and fifty years without acknowledging a son as brave as T.J., but my friend wasn’t alone. I knew a lot of einherjar who had never met their parents. Face time with the kids wasn’t a priority for Norse deities—maybe because they had hundreds or thousands of children. Or maybe because the gods were jerks.

  T.J. lay back on his tarp mattress. “Now I just gotta figure out how to kill that giant. I’m worried a direct frontal charge might not work.”

  For a Civil War soldier, this was creative thinking.

  “So what’s your plan?” I asked.

  “No idea!” He tipped his Union cap over his eyes. “Maybe something will come to me in my dreams. ’Night, Magnus.”

  He began to snore almost as loudly as Alex.

  I couldn’t win.

  I lay awake, wondering how Sam, Halfborn, and Mallory were doing on board the ship. I wondered why Blitzen and Hearthstone weren’t back yet, and why it would take them five days just to scout out the location of a whetstone. Njord had promised I’d see them again before the really dangerous stuff went down. I should’ve gotten him to swear an oath on his immaculately groomed feet.

  Mainly though, I worried about my own impending duel with Loki: a contest of insults with the most eloquent Norse deity. What had I been thinking? No matter how magical Kvasir’s Mead was, how could it possibly help me beat Loki at his own game?

  No pressure, of course. If I lost I’d just be reduced to a shadow of myself and imprisoned in Helheim while all my friends died and Ragnarok destroyed the Nine Worlds. Maybe I could buy a book of Viking insults at the Viking Centre gift shop.

  T.J. snored on. I admired his courage and positivity. I wondered if I’d have