Luke J. Morris
To Bind a Wolf
The shot glass went up full and came down empty; the match brushed sandpaper and hissed alight; the black cigar glowed and crackled at the tip; the eyes sparkled blue in reflection; the hair rustled in the breeze from the door; the dark man turned his glance and said, “Have you ever heard of Tyr?”
The bartender shook his head and blinked.
Smoke writhed like a snake around the man’s head, and swirled away to reveal the hardness of his features, his sharp jaw, the crease in his forehead, the deep lines at the corners of his eyes. He grinned. “I’ll tell you, then,” he said. Behind the words lay the meaning, “because you should know.”
“Tyr was a god,” he began, “a Viking god, of the Aesir, the Norse pantheon. The god of War, some call him, though with the Vikings that’s pretty redundant – all they had were gods of war, in some form or another. Anyway, he wasn’t the All-Father, the Thunderer, or the Mischief-Maker; he wasn’t all-knowing, he wasn’t impossibly strong, he wasn’t maliciously cunning. Those roles were taken. But he had something that the rest of them didn’t.”
“What?” asked the barman.
The man paused, slid smoothly onto a stool, leaned over the bar, and extended his glass, his hand unwavering, his body still as a statue of Dionysus. The bartender poured the whiskey, returned it to the shelf, and leaned on the bar, waiting. The customer puffed his cigar a moment, narrowed his eyes, and continued.
“The Father of Lies fathered children on the giantess Angrboda, and they were one ugly match. They named their daughter Hel – that says something, doesn’t it? Well, you can guess where she ended up. Another kid turned out to be a snake – Jormungand, they called him. Odin tossed that one to the sea, and he’s down there now, encircling the world and biting his own tail, having a great time of it. Then there was Fenrir, the wolf, who they kept in Asgard so they could keep an eye on him. That’s where Tyr comes in.
“You see, none of the gods wanted anything to do with Fenrir – he was as big as a dragon and twice as mean, with teeth longer and sharper than broadswords. Only Odin’s son Tyr was brave enough to face him alone. Tyr fed the wolf pieces of meat and bone and gristle to sate its hunger, but it kept getting hungrier, and no doubt Tyr himself was starting to look like a tasty morsel in its eyes. So the gods decided to chain him – the wolf, that is. They made a great chain, Laeding. No, I don’t know why they named their chains,” the man replied to the barman’s questioning look, “they named everything, it was personal. Anyway, they knew they’d never be able to take Fenrir by force, so they appealed to his feral vanity and dared him to test his strength against the chain. It worked. They bound him with Laeding. And he snapped it like a string. So they made a chain twice as strong, Dromi, stronger than the strongest anchor chain, and played the same game. Again the wolf took their dare, and this time, with a little more effort, he shattered the chain into shrapnel. So it became pretty obvious that chain wasn’t the way to go.”
“So what did they do?” the bartender asked, still drying glasses in a brusque, businesslike manner.
“They thought they’d try it one more time,” the man continued, “but this time they went to the dwarfs, the dark elves, for help - and they brought gold, of course, because the dwarfs won’t work for free. The little folk schemed together and fashioned a string of silk, called Gleipnir, from the sound of a cat moving, a woman’s beard, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and a bird’s spit.”
The barman stopped cleaning. “From a what?” he sputtered.
The man at the bar chuckled and extended his glass for drink. “Think about it!” he said. “Why do you think a cat doesn’t make a sound, why women don’t have beards, mountains don’t have roots, fish don’t breathe and birds don’t spit?”
The bartender smiled. “I guess the dwarfs keep all those things safe,” he said.
“You’re damn right they do!” the man beamed, draining his glass in one long gulp. Then he place it back on the table, carefully precise as ever, and said, “So, the gods go to Fenrir with this ribbon, and say, ‘it’s a little stronger than it looks, but it’s really nothing, you’ll be able to break it, give it a try.’ And they add, just for confidence’ sake, ‘if you can’t break it, we’ll set you free.’ But just because a wolf is proud doesn’t mean he’s stupid. He suspected that they’d made the rope with magic, and he knew they would never free him if they managed to bind him once. Still, his vanity won out in the end, he didn’t want to be called a coward, though he was still cautious: he ordered that one of the gods must put a hand in his mouth as a token of good faith, until the deed was done.
“You can imagine how eager all the gods were to take up that offer. They backed away, they hid behind each other, each of the godlings with his great power and honor, glorying in his immortality as a member of a pantheon, a lord of Asgard, a supreme guardian of the nine worlds, each shirking, then accepting his personal cowardice when it finally confronts him. And there was Tyr. Tyr, looking at the gods, his equals and superiors, one by one, trying to smother his own contempt for them, for their smallness, their weakness, their less-than-human frailty. He alone knew how fearsome the wolf really was. If they didn’t bind it, it would tear Asgard apart and devour the gods to sate its hunger and show its power. He had a choice – to save the world, or let it suffer the death of its insipid, disintegrating commonality. He chose; he approached the wolf, he looked it in the eye, he held his warlike right hand beneath the wolf’s muzzle.
“‘You are confident, little godling?’ Fenrir growled. ‘I am,’ Tyr answered. The wolf clamped down tight on the hand, as the lesser gods speedily entwined him with Gleipnir. Tyr could feel the razor teeth biting into his wrist, holding his arm fast; he gritted his own teeth and stood firm. Then the wolf began to struggle. He flexed his muscles, he jerked and kicked and whipped about, his whole body shuddered with the force of an earthquake, knocking gods off their feet a mile away. The more he fought the fetter, the tighter it bound him. Finally, despairing, he chomped down hard on Tyr’s hand, teeth tearing through skin and muscle and bone, ripping the hand from its powerful arm, leaving shreds of flesh hanging from a bloody shard. Tyr howled in agony, but stood his ground, unable and able to bear the pain. The wolf was bound, and the gods laughed. They laughed! There was Tyr, the bravest, the strongest of spirit, the most virtuous, the greatest ever spawned by the roots of Valhalla, mutilated for the sake of lesser and more craven things, and they laughed!”
The last word rang as a condemnation through the empty bar. The bartender stared, wide-eyed, at the storyteller. The man had stood for the last part of the story and enacted the gruesome scene for him, the wolf, the hand, the laughing gods, and the bravest of heroes standing stoically alone. The man now took a deep breath, the flame in his eyes subdued, and he walked back to the bar to stamp the butt of his cigar in the ashtray. The bartender handed him another drink, and he gulped it straight down, his eyes still gazing as though they watched something far away. He returned to the present, and turned his gaze to the barman. A young man, mid-twenties, tall, smart, competent. The storyteller smiled; the creases in his face looked youthful, his jaw was purposefully set, his eyes flashed with merriment. The bartender smiled back.
“So now you know,” the man said.
“Yes,” said the barman.
The man stood tall, donned his coat, and walked to the door, then turned again. “Ask yourself,” he said, “did Tyr do the right thing?”
The bartender looked puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, should great gods sacrifice themselves to keep a mass of mediocrities alive? Should brave men serve cowards?” The man turned away and opened the door. “Think about it,” he said over his shoulder, and walked out into the snow.
The evening
customers started to trickle in an hour later.
One man sat by himself at the end of the bar – a businessman, straight
back, proud shoulders, a sharp, questioning gaze. “So,” the bartender asked him, “have you ever
heard of Tyr?”