I turned around. My body lay behind me in the dirt. It had not landed gracefully. My cheek was pressed against the cold stone floor, loose hair splaying across my eyes. One arm had folded behind me in an unnatural angle as I fell. I felt sick and numb.
“This way,” said Charon.
I removed the leather pouch from my mouth as I followed the ferryman down the path, away from my lifeless corpse. My eyes were adjusting to the gloom, but there wasn’t much except more gloom to see. The inside of a tree, it turns out, looks a lot like the outside of a tree, only darker. The cavern went much farther, deep into the earth. I could hear water flowing somewhere nearby as I followed Charon downward. The trickling little stream snaked into the cave, dribbling down a series of uneven tiers until it drained at last into a wide underground river. Mist swirled above the dark waters.
We descended the steps until we reached the river’s edge, and Charon held out a bony hand. I retrieved two coins from the pouch, offering them up. Charon plucked them out of my hand, rubbing them together with a satisfied tinkling.
“Obols. It has been a long time since I was paid in obols.” He sounded pleased, but his bony face showed no emotion. One of the coins glowed ruby red and then abruptly crumbled to ash between his fingers. He held the other up in the light from the opening above us, rubbing its weathered face with his thumb. “Eight chalkoi to the obol, six obols to the drachma, and one obol”—he handed the coin back to me—“to ride the ferry. I do not overcharge.”
I took the coin and thanked him as I tucked it back into the leather purse.
He stepped out onto an ancient dock and picked up a long pole from where it rested against decrepit ropes. At the top of the pole hung three small rods from a short chain, like a sort of flail. Charon shook the stick as if he were trying to shoo away a fly. The rods vanished and for a fraction of a second it seemed as though a long, crescent scythe blade had taken their place, but then the pole was just a pole. It was a little wider toward the top, but otherwise just a straight staff hewn of ordinary wood.
He unwound a length of rope from the mooring and pulled firmly until an old wooden ship slowly cut through the veil of mist and came to bump against the dock. It was a long, shallow vessel, lined with weather-bleached crossbeams that stuck out like human ribs within a coal-black chest. It had a thin mast, but the sail, if ever it had flown one, had long since rotted away. The fore and aft of the ship curved upward, and the figurehead was a snarling dragon.
“That’s your boat?” I said.
“Is there a problem?”
“No, of course not. It’s just not exactly what I expected. In the paintings it’s more of a simple gondola. Isn’t that a bit large for one person to steer?”
“Vikings,” he said. “They are stubborn, but they do make beautiful boats. This one is special. It handles rivers like a fish. You are correct, though. This is more than necessary. I had more souls to carry on my last trip. Please stand back.”
He took hold of the ship with both pale hands and heaved upward. It tipped until it looked like it was about to capsize, and then folded impossibly into itself. Heavy timbers slid together like a collapsible jewelry box, each section slotting perfectly into place with a satisfying wooden clatter until it settled back into shape, bobbing gently on the water as a skiff half the size of the original. The boatman stood with his hands behind his back, rocking on his feet ever so slightly. “Yes,” he said. “That is better.”
“That’s incredible!” I said. “How does it work?”
“Magic. Or science, or whatever they’re calling it now. The smiths of Nidavellir constructed it. It was a gift from an old king. They used to call him the Father of the Slain. He was very popular. Do you still do Wednesdays up there?”
“Wednesdays?” I said. He had climbed into the fore of the boat, and I slid onto a wooden seat at the aft. The boat smelled of salt and firewood. “Erm. Yes, we still do Wednesdays.”
Charon nodded. “That one’s his. There is a channel in these roots that leads to his hall.” Charon plunged his pole into the water and pushed off, punting the boat into the mist. “His men used to make a sport of skipping past me. There were days when this river was thick with their longships. They brought their own boats with them when they died.”
“That all sounds like the Vikings,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“I thought you were Greek.”
“I don’t bother much with politics. I am the ferryman.”
“But you’re real,” I said. “And this place is real.”
“Yes.”
“So who had it right, then?”
“I do not understand the question.”
“The afterlife. There are lots of different versions, and they can’t all be true. Heaven, Hell, the Happy Hunting Ground—which is it? You’re here, so does that mean there’s a Hades with an Elysium and a Tartarus and everything?”
“Why would there not be?”
“Well, because a moment ago you were talking about Valhalla.”
Charon pressed forward. The mist split around the masthead, curling into eddies that spun ghostly pirouettes over the surface of the river, the whole dance reflected below in the wine dark waters. “Do you know the fable of the blind men and the elephant?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t heard that one,” I said.
“A woman from the Hunan Province told it to me,” said Charon. “Once upon a time a stranger came to a remote village with an elephant. Everyone got excited, including three blind men who didn’t know what an elephant was. They decided to find out for themselves.
“The first man approached the elephant near its head. He reached his hand out and felt the leathery ear. The second man approached from behind and brushed the elephant’s bristly tail. The third came at it from the side and stroked its wide midsection.
“ ‘What a strange creature an elephant is,’ the first man said. ‘So flat and thin, like wash hung from the line.’
“ ‘What are you talking about?’ said the second man. ‘That animal was hairy and coarse, like the bristles on a stiff broom.’
“ ‘You are both wrong!’ said the third. ‘The beast was as broad and sturdy as a wall.’ They three men argued and argued, but they never could come to an agreement.”
Charon let the river drift past for another moment. “So,” he said finally. “Who had it right?”
“They all did,” I said. “Just not the whole of it.”
“Good answer.”
Charon guided the boat along, and I began to see things moving in the mist, shapes shifting along the shoreline, though I could not make out what I was seeing at first. We drew nearer, and I gasped. The silhouette of an enormous beast with a long snout lumbered along the bank across from us.
“Is that,” I whispered, “a hellhound?”
“That is Ammit.”