Hrafspa: A Funeral Revelation

The crowd clapped, and the king made me tell a joke about Snorri Sturluson. Afterward I went to find Roberto. He was standing next to a big man in a blue tunic, a man with gray hair held back by a silver circlet around his forehead. He had a sheepskin thrown over his shoulder, and a drinking horn on his belt. Roberto smiled and pointed to him.

"Aldheim, I want to introduce you to Mikal the Ram."

"Or Mikal Hrafspa, if you prefer," said the shaggy man, and he smiled. "It means the same thing, but in the old language. And that was a pretty good poem you wrote, for a beginner."

"Thank you," I started to say, before I was cut off.

"Except that you only had Gangleri reveal seven secrets! He has to reveal nine! Nine's the magic number!"

I had not even been aware that Gangleri had been counting out the secrets he told at all, much less that anybody else would think to listen for that.

"And when you banged your stick on the ground . . . That was good, but you did it on this floor, and this floor is tile. Doesn't make a very good noise, especially with the acoustics. Here, let me see your stick for a minute."

I gave it to him and he walked over to the steps leading up to the stage and slammed the stick against the bottom one. The noise was loud and resonant -- it had exactly the effect I had been going for.

"And Odin always offers the first taste to Loki," said Mikal, handing back my staff. "Because he never knows if the old troublemaker poisoned it first, eh?"

"I -- Yeah, you're right, now that you mention it."

Mikal smiled. "That's all okay. The main thing is just that next time, you don't read off the paper. Worst thing in the world for a bard. You've got to let it come out of your head. The paper just gets in the way. Not period, either!"

Roberto slyly waved to us and slipped off into the crowd, still milling around after the performances, waiting for the lunch break to be over. Mikal the Ram didn't seem to notice, and he clapped his hand on my shoulder.

"But that was still very good. Not many people do that; not many go in for the Norse that way. I wrote a whole saga once in English in the Norse meter, and it about killed me. I'm glad to see others give it a try. I shouldn't be the only one who has to suffer."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small coin with a laurel branch on it, and put it into my hand. "I got a set of these coins when I became a laurel. This is the only one I have left. I'd like you to take it. And I'd like you to keep doing things like that."

I didn't speak much for the rest of that Queen's Prize, because Mikal the Ram was too busy talking -- telling stories, telling jokes, reminiscing about events and wars long gone. He was impossible not to like. And for me, it was impossible to think of anybody else in the society who I wanted to emulate more.

He was funny, and genuine, and he believed. I could tell. He believed in the stories; that's why he told them so well.

I realized, later, that I had lost that coin. It was like realizing I had never picked up a child from baseball practice, as though somewhere, this important thing I had been given custody of was sitting in the rain, cold and resentful.

***

After the funeral, Roberto, Helena, and I piled into their red Honda sedan for the drive home. I sat in the back and kept quiet. Truth be told, when Roberto spoke up, I was thinking about Jesus, as I often do. Salman Rushdie once said that atheists are obsessed with God; I think pagans tend to be obsessed with Christ in much the same way.

"I want to thank you for coming along today, bro," he said, glancing at me in his rearview mirror. Roberto thanks me every time he sees me, like I'm doing him a favor. He thanked me once for letting him buy me three meals and pay my way into an SCA event.

"Well. You know." I fumbled for words. "I wanted to pay my respects."

"He would have been glad you came. I know you always say you only met him once, but I think you understood Mikal a lot better than most people did."

I didn't say anything to that, mostly because I didn't think it was true. I hadn't even known Mikal's name before we got to the funeral -- his real name, I mean, the one that he used around everyone in the world but us. I hadn't known he was an art teacher, or that he had once flashed his BVDs at the church ladies.

I hadn't known that he was a Christian. I kept thinking of that bland modern church, and every time, I thought of "Loki's Song." I couldn't get my past how they could both belong to the same man.

Beneath all that, I felt something like betrayal -- nothing Mikal the Ram could have done on purpose, but betrayal nonetheless. I was coming to terms with my new outlook on faith at the moment I met Mikal. I wanted him to be the person who got it, someone who knew the old gods and believed in them like I wanted to believe in them. And he wasn't.