‘And your father refuses to take you?’ he said. ‘Hilarious! Well, we’ll keep quiet about this for now, Wayland. Some day, we’ll take him by surprise.’

So the shame of not being taken on by my own father was to be turned back on him in days to come.

Let me tell you about work. There are things you can learn; how the grain of the stone works, how it is best held, best struck, into what it may be best made. You can look at a piece and see that is good or bad. You can see what it might become. You can see how it is that a tap here, a blow there, might give you the edge you want in the place that you want. These skills are all gone now. Long ago I used to go across Midgard to see the peoples that knew about the stone, but now you are all seduced by the new things I brought to you, to make the things you want.

But there are things you can’t learn. How to tap a stone just so, so that the chips fall off its side like the petals from a flower, revealing the tool that was hidden inside all the time. How to kiss the stone so sweetly and with such love that a misplaced chip may creep back in its place with no fault within or without. How to squeeze the stone very gently in the hand so that it changes texture - harder, softer, kinder, sharper. These kinds of tricks. These, where the trouble began.

It was a while before I showed them to Vinurd. I was suspicious - suspicious of myself, suspicious of him. I had already learned that no one else knew the things I knew, but I did not know what that meant. Were they a good thing or bad? Had I these gifts by grace or by a curse? I was scared, but each day I pulled my courage out of its bag, inch by inch, as I learned to trust Vinurd more.

‘Look, Vinurd, I have a new trick?’ I said at last. ‘Look, look. It needs a light touch. Just so,’ I said. I was gabbling. I knew this wasn’t right. My heart was galloping

‘Show me,’ he said.

I held the stone in my hand, cupped lightly. I took the hammer stone and I struck it in just the right place. The stone crinkled. The flakes fell away from the sides in perfect semi-circles. I shook them away. In my hand now lay a long spear head. Just so. Just right. As it always had to be.

Vinurd was sitting next to me. He frowned. ‘Wayland, what was that? Some trick …?’

‘No, not a trick,’ I said. My heart was beating hard. I felt that fate was knocking at my door - knocking at my heart.

‘Can you do it again?’ he asked.

‘I can,’ I replied, and I noticed there was sadness in my voice, although I didn’t understood why.

He picked up a stone from the pile by his foot, roughly shaped already. ‘Make me an axe this time. Can you?’

‘Yes, but not with that stone …. Look, this one. This one, this one has an axe inside.’

He looked at me sharply for my language - a tool is made, not found. So he thought. Well, it was like that for him. I held the stone loosely in my hand, and poised the hammer stone above it. I paused.

‘You must know what you want or stone will not perform.’

Again he frowned at my language. Then he nodded. I nodded; then I stuck the stone. The flakes fell. The axe emerged.

Vinurd smiled sourly. ‘The stone has performed,’ he said. ‘Or was it you?’

‘Don’t you know this?’ I said, lying, as I knew he could not. ‘Here - try. A light touch …’

‘A light touch,’ he said, smiling wryly.

‘Look, ….’ I gabbled. I think at that moment I wanted more than anything else for him to have this skill. I did not want to be special. I was a child of the tribe, a boy who wanted to be normal, like the others. ‘This stone, there’s an axe in here. Smaller I think. Here, Vinard, here …. you hold it like this …’ I said, shaping his hand around the stone … his rough fingers in mine. I remember that moment so vividly, because he lifted his eyes and we both paused a moment, looking at each other. He smiled. He knew. I knew. We knew.

‘You must strike it there. Just so. As if you are taking off less than a single chip or it doesn’t work.’

‘Wayland. You must know that no one else can do this but you.’

‘ No, no. Please, Vinurd. Try. Try, won’t you?’ I said. I begged. So he did as I asked, and heft the stone in his hand, glancing at me to see if it was held right. Then he stuck it with the hammer stone - my own hammer stone I had given him in case this was the magic, this was the thing that made it happen. He struck, neatly and sweetly as he knew how very well - he was after my father our best napper. And nothing happened.

‘Again. Try again. It must be learned. Everything must be learned,’ I lied.

He tried, bless him, a few more times, just to prove to me I think, before he put the stones down and took my face in his hands. I was gabbling, almost crying now.

‘This cannot be learned, Wayland. It cannot be learned.’

‘It is, it can, anyone can do it, you can do it,’ I gabbled. But he he took me in his arms and suddenly held me firmly to his chest.

‘It you, Wayland,’ he said again. ‘It’s just you. Only you.’ I began to cry then, big tears, big chest heaving sobs, because he had confirmed what I feared; that although I was of my people, I was not of my people. And all I ever really wanted was to be of my people.

‘There. Cry now. This is the time for tears … I know, I know. I know, Wayland.’

So he held me hard and stroked my head until my tears were all out of me. Then he held my shoulders at arms length and peered into my face.

‘What are you, Wayland? A witch, a magician, an elf?’

‘I am of the people,’ I said. This is how we answered all such questions. I spoke with no hesitation.

‘Then we are a very lucky people. Tell me - how do you do these things? Did you learn them? Off whom?’

‘I never learnt them. The stones ….’ I trailed off.

Vinurd nodded. ‘The stones taught you,’ he said. He thought a while, then he said the truth.

’The stones of the earth love you, Wayland’.

‘The bones of Ymir,’ I said.

‘Yes. Of course. The bones of Ymir,’ he said. ‘They love you.’ He shook his head. ‘What a wondrous thing,’ he said. He rubbed my hair and let me go. ‘Keep it quiet, boy,’ he told me. ‘You’ll scare people. It’s unnatural.’

‘It’s the most natural thing there is,’ I said. And so it was, to me.

‘When the time is ready, we shall show them what you can do. Perhaps Ymir will tell us when.’

And that was Vinurd, a man who was a father to me in a world where I already had a father, who refused to be a father to me.

Do you know of Ymir, in your age? He who was killed by Odin and his brothers long ago, when the only worlds that existed were the fire world, Muspelheim and the emptiness, Ginnungagap. Odin made the seven worlds with the slaughtered carcass of Ymir the Perfect, and all things of these worlds, living and dead, male or female, adult or child - all life, all decay, come from him. This is the story they tell, but surely that is not all of it. Why would the bones of a dead God love me? How? Back then, I was a human boy, born of mortal man and woman, mortal myself like all the creatures that live in Midgard. Now I am a god. I eat the apples that give us youth. If I am not killed, I will live until Ragnarok, when Surt comes and ends all our creations forever.

So the fire-giant Surt in Muspelkheim commands all, and destruction is the primary force in the universe. But after him - perhaps even his equal - is Ymir. All that is in all in these seven worlds goes back to him. Every day before I go to my forge, I sacrifice in blood to him. Blood to blood, flesh to flesh, decay to decay. The habit that I acquired when I was a child with my mother, of hearing Ymir’s name when I pray to Odin, I’ve kept to this day. Somehow, across the aeons since his death, his ghost reaches out to me. I have no idea if my sacrifice is noted, but I hope that Ymir, or his bones, or his shade, his spirit, his ghost, wherever that resides and remains, knows in some way that I am grateful. But I have no idea why I, who am ordinary in every other way, have deserved to be favoured in the way that I am.

After that day with Vinurd, I began to show the gifts the earth gave to me to him. I had been reunited with the flint I had found, but the gifts I received were not just flint. Obsidian appeared under my hands when I washed in a stream. Churt, other flints of clour and quality no one had seen before. And other stones I did not know or understand back then - strange, heavy, red coloured stones, yellowish stones, green stones - appeared in the grass, under my foot as I walked. It was to be many years before I understood the significance of those stones, and the secret metals that lay within. Like me, Vinurd had no idea. No one had bothered even to notice such stuff before. They were no use to nap, no use to grind, no apparent use at all. And others; crystals, some we knew, some we had never seen - small, bright, stones that shone and glittered when the light was on them; red, blue, yellow, white, green. Some were almost big enough to work, but when struck, they did not chip or shatter; it was the hammer stone that broke. So hard! Fire didn’t diminish them, age didn’t wear them or corrupt them. They seemed immortal, these stones. With care I found a way of setting them in flint - a shining white stone that shattered light onto the outward face; a deep blue stone that cast shafts of colour across the blueish greys of the flint.

These stones - these gems, let’s give them the name today they never had then - what could we do with them? Vinurd had the idea of setting them into wooden clubs. A blow from one would cut man or beast open, because nothing was harder. But we did not show them, even though we needed weapons of all kinds at that time. Vinurd was a cautious man. The flint wars that the first gift had begun had spread far beyond our valleys to distant clans. Some, it’s true, came only to see the my impossible find, but others claimed that they were the first clan of flint, and that therefore this find was theirs, that all flint was theirs, no matter how distant from their own hunting grounds. Others came simply with the force of arms to take it from us. As the years passed we had to fight harder for what was ours. How many deaths my first gift caused! How many bereft mothers and fathers, how many broken families. What kind of a blessing was wealth, when it took lives, when it made more work, more dangerous work, too. Guarding the flint grew harder with each year.

It wasn’t only humankind we feared. We feared the murky ones, the Dökkálfar, the dwarves, they who love the bones of Ymir so much that they live among them, underground, to be near them every day and every night, eschewing the sun and the upper air. They were known to be fierce and jealous. What if they found out that the Bones of Dead Ymir were giving me gifts? What if they learned of the skills I had without practise or knowledge? And the gods - they are known to be jealous, too. Tyr, I was certain, would want my weapons. Loki would lust after my skills. And Odin, the chief of all gods, he who wanted everything, to know all that could be known, to possess all that could be possessed. What if he decided that the treasure of myself was his, too?

We feared attack from the ground, from below it and from above it, from the sky. No wonder Vinurd was cautious; he did not want to make create even more wealth in case we attracted more attention. But the years went by and only people attacked our camp. They kept coming. We fought them off, but this was now our lives. Warfare. Parents buried their children; death become young. So far none of them had breached our stockade. We were kept … not safe. Not that. But alive, as a tribe, if not as always as individuals. As the fame of the flint grew - its perfection, its beauty, the tools that could be made from it, so the attacks got worse. Vinurd and others suggested making the flint available to all - a gift from the gods. But the people could not accept. This was on our land; therefore it was our stone. To them it was that simple.

In my fifteenth year, the crises arrived.

That year, we were attacked three times. On the third attack, we were almost overwhelmed. We prevailed, but how few youths we had left! Wealth was like a plague, it depleted our numbers, left us struggling to live, to work, to stay together.. If a tribe becomes too old and too young, how can it survive? Those who fight are also those who rear children. Soon, we would be too few to be viable.

A Thing was called to discuss the problem.

I spoke at that Thing - the first time I had a voice there. I wanted us to to leave our new life, to go back to the old. I missed the old ways - walking from place to place, gathering, hunting, taking what we needed, leaving what we didn’t. I was prepared to go hungry once in a while. I liked the seasons, the different places. When we lived in one place, the land got flattened by our trampling feet. The earth in the stockade was stained with blood. There were graves all around us, stinking heads on poles to warn off attackers. The crows and ravens visited us. Far better to move on while the air was still clean, while the green was still green. What was the point of wealth if it made your homeland foul?

Perhaps you think I was being unselfish. After all, I had found the flint, the source of our wealth. Why would I not love wealth? But there is more than one kind of wealth. It didn’t matter to me if there was a lot of stone, or just a little. Ymir gave it to me, wherever I was. I had no need to be greedy, to hoard, to hang on to what I had. Ymir gave me the best of everything wherever I was.

Let me tell you a story of the later times, where you may have a measure of Wayland. This is the story of a girl, a child, not yet in puberty who, I heard, had gifts laid in her bed, given into her hands, just as it was with me. By then I was the big man, living in Asgard with the gods - not high in status among the gods, but necessary, useful to them. one that humankind would gladly sacrifice to. Who among us has no use for tools? They may seem humble things beside the icons, the paintings, the beautiful objects so full of meaning. But none of these things come about unguided by my hand. And now, here there was a child, a mortal child, reminding me of my own humble lineage, receiving the same kind of gifts that I did.

I thought at first it must be a trick, some kind of game. Her parents were doing this to size up their family, or Loki was teasing me, or Tyr was testing me, or Odin was up to something. Who knows what his dreams and aspirations are? So I went secretly, without any of the others knowing, to see her, to judge her, to understand what was happening. She saw me, she knew me; she welcomed me as an equal. She showed me the gifts she had been given, that she discovered, as I say, in her bed, in her hand, sometimes, lying there in her grip when she awoke.

Minerals. Some of them I had never seen. She knew how to put them together to make other stuffs I had never seen. Yes - a miracle, like me, although her abilities were somewhat different. Greater, perhaps, for I was only able to find, not to create as she could.

Who knows what good it might have done her? Perhaps she would have replaced me. Perhaps she would have found her pantheon elsewhere. Perhaps, perhaps …. but whatever might have been cannot be known. I told her all about Ymir, how good he was, how old, how bold, how he was the foundation stone of this and - who knows! - perhaps of all the universes Odin knows. I shared everything I knew with her - what was there to loose? I took her for a walk by a lake, saying that we might find some new treasures in the water. She was happy, dancing by my side, delighted that someone had come who shared her knowledge. By the water she showed me how to press the earth between my palms and make a new mineral, but I was unable to do it. She, however, made a wonderful blue stone, something I have never seen before or since, by running her palms together in the mud, and with this wonderful stone she constructed a knife. I took it into my hand. It was a very beautiful thing, so lovely, so sharp, so impossibly blue. With it I slit her throat and let her blood pour into the lake. In the bloody mud I rubbed my own palms, wondering if some marvellous red stone would come, but all I got was muddy, bloody hands.

Back in Asgard I smuggled her body in under the nose of Heimdalr. I discarded her flesh to the dogs, but her bones I devoured myself. I hoped … I don’t know what I hoped. Perhaps to have the gift of rubbing new minerals out of dust and mud. Perhaps just to rid myself of a rival, for there can only ever be one god of each attribute - one Thor, one Loki, one Freya, one Hel; one Wayland.

And yes! The next day I too could rub my hands in the dust and make new compounds.

This is how it is with me. You see that human wealth means nothing to me, but there are other kinds of wealth which you would be wise never to touch.

Afterwards, I wondered if Ymir would be angry with me for murdering his new favourite and if favours would be withdrawn from me. But Ymir, murdered himself, does not judge and no gifts were withdrawn. More were only given. Only the wonderful knife made out of the wonderful blue stone remains to remind me of that child, long dead now, whose blood stained the water of the fjord. That stone alone is withheld from me - that, and perhaps others of which I do not know. Who knows what other gifts she may have received, that might have been passed on to you, mankind? We shall never know. That stone, that blue stone, has other properties - perhaps belonging the spirit of the dead girl, beloved of Ymir like me, whom I took out of this world and gave to death.

I saw her again, in Odin’s halls, feasting and fighting forever with the other warriors. There she remains, where she is beyond my power. Who knows what surprises she holds for me in years to come?

But to return to my story.

I was not alone when I made my plea for the old ways at that Thing long ago, when we debated what to do about our loss of young men and women in the guarding of the stockade. I was young, I was considered foolish, I think, for speaking up. Older voices carried more weight. It was always the older people who who had the most wealth, somehow. The power of the tribe had changed, moved on from the young who had meat to the old who had wealth. Wealth makes us foolish - have you noticed? We loose our vigour and their vision, we hold on to what we own, to things, to places, to people. Our lives narrow. We think that since we have so much, we deserve more. These people, they didn’t want to go walking, to have to make a new bed every day. Some of them suggested we take the war out of our own place, go abroad, fight our enemies in their own lands. Acquire more land, perhaps. Extend, expand, take slaves to do the work we did not care to do. That plan was not passed, either. Instead, younger people than usual were to put to guard the stockade.

‘And when my son is killed, who will replace him?’ asked my mother. ‘Shall we have boys and girls fighting men and women? Why not have the old people fight instead, since they’re the ones that want to hold tight to what we have?’

Yes! Send the old into battle. See how long war lasts then! - until the old are dead and the young must avenge them. No; war is always with us. So much of my work has always been with weapons.

We talked and talked. We voted. It was decided; the young must now guard the stockade, and put their lives at stake for the sake of stone. Perhaps it was right. Man and gods, dwarf and Jotun, they all love to own. Of all the races that we know, only the elves, the Ljósálfar don’t care for stuff. Only the upper air and the sunbeams and the moonbeams make them happy.

Then my master Vinurd spoke.

‘You think that the stone is the source of our wealth. Wayland and I can show you otherwise. Give us leave. We can show you that this wealth is fragile in a way you do not yet see.’

As he spoke, he laid his hand on my arm.

The tribes people told him that if had anything he needed to say, now was the time to say it, but Vinurd would not say, he would only show. I knew what he was going to show; me. I was the source of our all our wealth and all our slain. I always have been. I always will, for all Mankind, until Surtr comes and finishes both death and ownership forever.

After we had left the Thing, I went to my secret place and gathered together my secrets. Precious objects. The crystal hand axe I had made for my father. When I dipped it into water, the flakes had shed away. The ring I had made for my mother. The ivory mammoth I had carved for our best hunter to carry in his pocket, to call the beasts to him. Secretly I carried those secret things to our hut in the compound, and I laid them out. And I rejoiced. I knelt and prayed to Ymir and I sang. My heart leapt inside me because, because ...

Because I was to be made whole. My secret sat unhappily inside me. It separated me from my tribe, from my people. To share is to belong. To be known is to belong. I had not been known, I had not shared. It broke my heart. But now, I was to be made one.

Vinurd came and congratulated me. He was of the tribe, too. He knew what this meant. The sharing began at once. He called my mother to the hut to see my treasures for the first time

‘Look what your son has done,’ he said. When she saw the things I had made, she trembled like a leaf. I remember what a strange feeling it was to see my mother tremble and cry because of the things I had done. I felt … ashamed.

‘They are beautiful, so beautiful,’ she whispered.

‘No one before me has done these things.‘ I said, boasting.

‘Some great power loves him,’ said Vinurd. ‘One of the gods perhaps. These are not things any human hand could ever do.’

‘The dwarves? The Dark elves? Would they do it? They are the makers.’

‘When did the murky ones ever bother with human people? No.’ Vinurd looked at me. ‘The boy believes it is the shade of dead Ymir who does it. His bones, the bones that Odin, Villi and Vi made the stones and mountains with.’

My mother nodded. She caressed a crystal axe I had made with her hand.

‘This is for you,’ I told her. I took my gift out from my clothes - a ring, made from a single piece of stone, so green it made the forest pale - the green of the early beech leaves with the sun through them. I had drilled it with the point of a sharp stone and polished it, polished it, polished it, with grit, with dust, with skin until it was as smooth as skin itself.

She slipped it on her finger and looked down at it. It matched her eyes perfectly. I had had to change the colour slightly to make it work just so.

She took it quickly off.

‘This is for a goddess, not me,’ she said, which almost broke my heart. She frowned. ‘Does anyone else know about this?’ she asked.

‘No one.’

‘I knew he was finding things no one else could. But this …’ She gestured to the secret things, no longer to be secret. My treaty with myself, with my people, about to be made. Their beauty shone in anticipation of being seen. Of being owned. Of being loved.

‘Why have you kept it quiet?’ she asked.

‘Why did you?’ asked Vinurd. ‘Because, what will happen when it becomes known that a boy of fifteen years can do what no one else can do?’

‘The earth gives them to him,’ my mother said. ‘So the earth will protect him.’

That was what my mother said. She was a trusting person. She believed what she said, but it has not always been like that. It was a better warning, when she said that the ring was fit for a goddess, not for any mortal. Wise words. But wise words that cut me to the quick.

‘Wayland is the key to our lives,’ Vinurd said. ‘We don’t need to stay here, fighting for flint. He finds what he needs to find, wherever he is. He will find flint whether we are here or not. You want to go back to the old way; so do I. Now it’s time to show him to the tribe. We can be liberated from this warfare, from this place that we have become tied to. We can own all this and still be free.’

My mother picked up an axe I had made, set with precious jewels.

‘Even the gods don’t have tools like these,’ she said. ‘What are we turning into?’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Vinurd. ‘Maybe we were better off not owning anything but what we use for ourselves. But now there is Wayland in the world. He cannot be undone. He cannot be hidden forever. What would you do? Exile him? Send him away? Kill him for the good of us all?

My mother shook her head. Never for one moment did I believe that she would discuss my death.

‘When shall we show them, if not now?’ said Vinurd.

My mother thought long and hard. Eventually she said, ’No one but a fool makes the gods jealous.’

‘The gods have the Dökkálfar to make things for them,’ said Vinurd. ‘Surely even Wayland can’t make better than them.’

‘But they may think these things he makes are too good for us mortals. And maybe they will be right,’ my mother said.

‘You said the earth will protect him,’ said Vinurd.

‘We know what they did with Ymir,’ said my mother.

They looked at me, while I stood there fidgeting. Was I a blessing or a curse? Make up your mind, mortal. Perhaps I am both. I feed you, I clothe you, I kill you. In the end, I shall destroy you all. But then, we all have to die. All things.

Eventually Vinurd said, ‘It is wrong to make a secret of him to the tribe.’ To that, she had to agree. The tribe was us, we were the tribe. What I had was theirs.

The tribe could be won round. But the gods - that was a different matter. And you cannot keep secrets from the gods. Odin sees all. Even now in Asgard, his eye might be upon us, watching to see what we might do with my gifts. Judging.

I still remember them, every one. Mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins. And beyond them, the tribe. The tribe was everything. We were not high born - a common lot, my lot. But my family were craftsmen and women, every last one of us. My gift, in part, comes from them, but I arose from something before them, a deeper place that lies far beyond the middle earth, beyond even Asgard and Yggrastril.

Listen! I take you back to a time before there were gifts, into the long ages of mankind’s childhood. After that came a time of copper, of tin, of bronze and then iron, and on to all the things in the world that you know and use today. Back then our tools were stone and sinew, fibre, skin and wood, for eon after eon after eon after eon.

But the world was waiting. It was waiting for me.

I was four years old. Toys had not yet become tools and the world was full of magic - the ordinary magic, cast by a child’s eyes. Remember it. When everything was new and and unquestioned, when explanations were not needed. Magic days, when magic is every day. It was ordinary. I was ordinary. My family and my tribe were ordinary, but they were gods in my eyes.

We were travellers. We all were, back then. We followed the game around the landscape, travelling up and down our home valley and into the hills beyond. The stone in our valley was hard but dull and if we wanted good tools we had to trade for flints or chert from the south or north. My father was a toolmaker. He made very good tools. No one ever made better tools, save only one and that was me.

My father was a strange man. Dark skinned, darker than most folk hereabouts. He was an outcomeder, nobody knew from where. He was a tall man, with long, thin bones, whereas most of us were stubby, hard folk - tough nuts, we liked to think. He could not bear to be inside, but sat out all day and slept out when he could, even when it rained. For which reason the children teased him and called him frog. But they did not dare to get too close, because he was as famous for his temper as for his stonework, and also for his immense strength. He could throw a child over a small tree, I was told - and had done it once, before he was told that he ever tried such tricks again he would be cast out for the beasts to chew.

When I was born he was already old, his hunting days were past. He helped sometimes with fishing, with drying fish and meat, with foraging, but mainly he was a tool maker. He sat under his shelter all day, chip, chip, chipping away, until the frail and beautiful shapes emerged from the brittle flints. He would line them up on the fallen tree beside him, and people would come and inspect them and choose the ones they liked best. Our family never went short of meat, because my father - you understand this - my father was the best toolmaker anyone knew of, or remembered, or cared to imagine.

My mother wove. Blankets, cloth, ropes and string. Nets. She invented knots, some of which you use to this day. Unlike my father, whose skills are now extinct, her skills are still used, still held in regard. She cooked. She painted. She made images with clay and bone and ivory, objects so beautiful people worshipped them. I carried one in my pocket for years, an image of myself as as baby, snug in a wrap. In the end the cloth wore away all the features, and now all I have is a nub of ivory with the faintest of lines showing where a face and wraps once were; a memory of love in bone. She excelled at everything she did. My father was a proud man with a thousand miles of patience for things and none at all for people. He thought his work was perfection, never to be surpassed forever, but his work has been replaced. It is my mother’s skills that have survived.

Where are they now? - all dust. They and all my tribespeople live in my memory but there is no life in memory, after all. Buna, Bil, Eistla, Guðfinna, Gunnborga, beautiful Himinglæva, Jóríðr, Mergret, Oðin-Dísa, Þórhalla, Wīwijō. At night their faces parade in front of me. I am unable to forget them, the people of my tribe. How else could it be? I could as easily forget my arms and legs.

So it began for me as it began for you, with childhood. Mother, father, sisters, brothers, friends. Play. Learning. Being good, being bad. You know the story. Instead of all that, I shall tell you of the first gift. It was not recognised at first, not by any of us, including myself. How could any mortal child imagine such things as have happened to me? There was no skill involved. It was only later that my luck was recognised as something more, a clue to my future - and yours, perhaps.

I was on my own. I was often on my own. I had friends - what tribesman doesn’t? Many friends, and enemies too, all of my people, my tribe, my blood. Still, I was of that kind who would go off on my own. Not far - there were beasts in the woods and rivers that were to be feared back then. But I roamed away anyway where my mother and the women of the tribe had told me not to roam, even when other little ones had disappeared before me.

The gift occurred near the river below a bank of sandstone that reared from the bank, out below the willows and aspens. I was four years old and I was digging in the river bank. Digging, digging, I was always digging. Another clue there, if you care to follow it. Why would a child want to spend their time scraping in the earth? Here’s an answer, the same answer as always. It is love.

I found some soft clay by the river bank and scooped it out. I began to play with it, to make shapes like my mother did. A dog, a man, a woman, a fish. So I didn’t notice it at first, the flint. That’s what it was; the first gift; flint. A good flint, with no veins or other flaws, perfect in itself. It fitted into my hand like one of my own bones. It only needed a little working to sharpen its edge. So hard - and yet it flaked to a sharp edge so easily, as if the shape I wanted was waiting within. I was delighted, because although clay was there for the taking, flints were precious to us. I dug deeper, hoping to find more, and I found a vein of it, a fine thick vein nearly a meter wide of strong flint running along the bank and back away from it.

I wasn’t surprised, I was too young for surprise. When you’re so young, everything is new and new is normal. I knew perfectly well that there was no flint in our land, but now, look! Here was flint. So what? Everything was either the same or it was new or it changed. There was no difference in my eyes.

I thought I might tell my father about it, since he loved flint so much, but then I thought, better not. He kept his flint very close to him and only let us children play with the the chippings. He might disapprove of me having any. I thought I might tell my mother, but then I thought I better not tell her either. I don’t know why. Perhaps I felt even then that this was not good luck at all, but bad luck in disguise.

Sitting there in the sunshine of a spring day, I made my first hand axe – a little one, to fit my little hand. I was very proud of my achievement, and although I had decided to keep the stone a secret, I kept it with me. And of course within the day my father spotted me digging in the ground with it and came and snatched it out of hand.

‘Where did you get this?’ he demanded. It was a great puzzle for him, as no one spent their valuable time making tools to fit a child’s hand. We grew into our tools in those days.

‘I found it and I made it,’ I told him.

He turned it over carefully in his hand.

‘You didn’t make it and you didn’t find it.’ His face darkened. ‘You stole my flint!’ he hissed. His hand shot out and he struck me, hard. ‘Who made this? Who made this?’ he yelled, all the while lashing at me. No one went near my father’s store of flint. He kept it close.

The beating went on and on because my brain would not find a decent lie to make him stop. My father was a strong man, too - stronger than it seemed possible for him to be, with his long bones and sallow skin. He lost his temper and for a moment I feared that my own bones might be broken, or worse. But in the end the women came and made him stop. So that was my first reward for my gift – to be beaten. I carry scars from his beatings still, here on my side, two on my face, here and here, and another on my arm, here. No man should beat a child so hard, and for what? - a truth he was unable to believe.

My mother was scared I think, and I was told she upbraided him later for his violence. But she supported him to my face, even so.

’You shouldn’t have lied to him, and such a stupid lie,’ my mother said. ‘You know how he is for his stone.’

‘It wasn’t a stupid lie,’ I said. ‘It was a stupid truth.’ She laughed then, and let the matter go.

‘I’ll be watching you,’ she said. She looked at me with a frown. I was known not to lie, but how else could this be explained?

I have that axe still. It’s like a miracle even to me, so small, so perfect, made by a child of four, who had never chipped a stone before. I take it and hold it my hand often, and every time it fills me awe. What genius I had when I knew nothing! It makes me afraid that next time I try to make something it will come out bad, now that I know so much. It was perfect, that first thing. How can I ever reach perfection again? And yet, I do. Experience, it seems, doesn’t come into it.

My father took it away. I never saw it again in his lifetime. For a long time I believed he had destroyed it, but years later, during the searching years, I found it in another land. I was sitting on a bank, I looked into the water and there it was, just under the surface. I simply reached down and took it out, still perfect - more than perfect, because it had been lost and now was found.

Perhaps my father threw it away. Perhaps it was lost when our tribe was lost. I know I saw him often looking oddly at me after that. At the time I thought he was suspicious of me. Perhaps it was awe. I wish it was love, but he never showed me that. Perhaps he felt it in his heart, but what is not shown we can never know.

Questions! How did a vein of flint occur in our Yorkshire grit? How could a child so young make something so perfect? How did the axe come back to my hand after so many years, to be lying in a river so distant, in another land from where it was lost?

In the answer to these, you have the answer to me.

A few days later we moved on and the flint in the ground was left behind. No one knew about it but me, and all the time we travelled, I remembered it. I thought about it, I dreamt about it - I loved it. How I loved it! Already, although I had no idea how precisely and particularly mine it was, I knew it was special, and that it made me special … so special, in a strange way, that I was scared to share it. I am a tribesman. To be special is to be different and therefore hard to bear. I have found it so.

I knew I would tell, of course. I was a child, very young, but I already knew that what was mine was the tribe’s too. Back then, our people were a part of us. There was no difference between ourselves and them. We were all one. Alone, we could not survive. Alone we were lost, we faded and soon died, if not of starvation or hunted by beasts, then of a broken heart. Only our flesh was ours. Our soul and our mind were one.

And yet ... and yet I did not tell. Still! Perhaps it was my father’s fault, for beating me so hard for what I had found. He alone of all the tribe was somehow not of the tribe. He made it clear that his flint was his, not ours. He was strange among us for that. I don’t think we would have kept him among us if it were not for his great skill. Perhaps then, I am a little bit like him - just a little.

I was scared that if I told the tribe about the flint, that I would loose myself - what I was, what I was becoming. I did not know then that any amount of sharing cannot dilute a man. But this was the first gift! To this day I can recall the moment it came into my life. The feel of it, the warmth of it in my hand. Yes! The minerals of the earth are warm to my hand, like the flesh they once were. I swear I even loved the bruises and cuts that my father had left, because they had been caused by the flint. How strange am I! I was a child, all things were the same to me, but when I closed my eyes, I could literally see that vein of flint spreading under the ground. Ymir’s bones, secret bones, known only to me.

Yes. Another clue.

Time passed. The memory stayed with me. As time passed it did not diminish as memories usually do. It grew clearer, more vivid. Stronger. I bided my time. Weeks passed, months passed, and now I could remember every chip, every plane, every smear of clay on its perfect surface. Although I was just a child, and riven with desire, still I kept my silence. My obsession grew. Bt the time we came back, nearly a year later, I went to meet the flint again half expecting by then for it to have left - that had become disillusioned with me and had left to charm another boy, or that it had been an illusion, a dream, or perhaps that it had just got bored waiting for me. It was a summer’s day, bright with sunshine and dappled by the leaves on the trees above me. I went alone. I dug in the warm damp earth by the river and there it was, just a few inches below the surface, exactly where I remembered it, like a bone nestled in flesh. I leaned back, my arse in the water, and looked along its length hidden below ground, out of sight but still somehow there in my eye - snaking its way along the river bank and then moving inland for twenty or thirty meters. How I knew this, I did not know. But I knew it as clearly as if I could see it naked before my eyes, like a living thing under the ground.

Ymir is dead, but his bones live on. It seems that even Odin cannot kill the world stone dead.

When do the stones in the earth appear out of place for no reason? The answer; when Wayland is near. But I didn’t know that then. I only knew that there was a vein of flint in the ground under the sandstone cliff, and that I needed to be with it.

The years of a child are a time of learning. By the time I came back to the flint I knew much more than when I first found it.

‘Little ears are flapping,’ my mother used to say when we children waited for secrets. But no one hid how important flint was, and what a burden it was to us that it did not occur in our lands. We had to trade for it, carrying it on our backs in exchange for the good things we did have. By now I understood very well that what I had found was a great gift, a treasure, an asset to us all. Because of that, because of the tribe, because I was part of the tribe, I understood that now I had to tell.

But - not yet. Not yet. In this I was still a child, knowing the value of things but not the timing. Owning came to me before sharing; I am not a good person. Like a miser, I kept it hidden a while longer, a secret, lying quietly there inside the earth. Silent though it was, that stone was loud to me. Secret though it was, I knew everything about it. When we walked past it the river bank where it hid, I held my breath in fear that the others would see it, or hear it, or smell it, or feel it like I felt it, a sweet ache under their own skin.

I kept it to myself for a week. But how it weighed on me! I visited it when I could. I picked out stones of the right size, shape and quality and I made things … arrow heads, axes, awls. You have found such things in the deep layers where people once lived. I hid them in the grass by the river bank, but I knew it had to end. I had a treasure. What I did not know then was that the stone was not the treasure; I was. But even if I had known it, it wasn’t in me to hide it from my people. So one day I took my mother by the hand and led her to the spot where it was hidden. Although it was facing away from the current, the river covered it up each day and kept it hidden for me. I dug in the mud while she waited impatiently. Once again I was unsure that I was going to find it. What if it really was just for me? My father said I had lied; I knew I hadn’t. But had I dreamed? I was a child. What did I know of what is real and what is not real? What did I know of impossible and possible things?

But the flint was there. I cleared the dirt off it and a piece broke off into my hand, which I handed to her and showed her where it come from, the vein of it, a great wedge of it, bigger than anything any of us had seen.

My mother crouched down one knee to look at it better.

‘It’s a vein,’ she said, glancing back at me. I nodded. She paused awhile, a long while, so long I almost thought she had gone to sleep squatting there by the river bank, with the martins soaring past us and the river flowers nodding in the breeze. Then she knelt, both knees in the soft clay for a long while, before she looked down at me and said, ‘This should not be here, Wayland,’ she said. I nodded. Of course, to her the presence of this flint here, in the this clay, was unnatural. But for me, nothing could be more natural.

‘Lord Odin,’ she began, raising her face to the sky, and she began to pray to Odin, thanking him for what he had given us. But it was wrong.

‘Mother,’ I said. She looked down at me, shocked that I should interrupt such a prayer. But it was wrong. ‘’You should be looking down when you pray,’ I said.

‘To Hel? Why would she give us this gift?’

‘Not to Hel.’

‘To who?’

I shook my head. I didn’t know. ‘To the earth?’ I guessed. The stone after all came from the earth.

‘Jörð, our mother earth?’ She smiled at me - amused, I think, because I was a child. ‘This is not from her. Nothing grows in the hard stone, Wayland.’

I knew Odin was wrong but I had no answers as to why. I hazarded another guess. ‘Ymir,’ I said.

There was a long pause while she stared into my face.

‘Ymir’s bones,’ she said.

‘They come from the earth,’ I said.

‘Ymir is dead, Volund,’ she said.

‘But this flint is his bones. All stones are Ymir’s, aren’t they, mother?’

Again that long pause. My mother was troubled.

‘Not just the stones,’ she said. ‘If Ymir came back to life, the world would end. The sky is his skull, inverted over us. The earth we walk on is his flesh, the rocks beneath our feet are his bones, the mountains are his bones. No. Odin must have given this gift to us. It was him who killed Ymir and made his body into the seven worlds. He gifted the world to us. These stones, old Ymir’s bones, are his to give.’

So she went on with her prayer, with me beside her. I knelt next to her and lifted up my face and spread my arms to the sky, but my spirit was offended. Yes, I was offended that another god, even Odin, should get the credit for what for what I had found, when it was nothing to do with him. Every time she said his name, Odin, I whispered, ‘Ymir,’ to myself. That made me feel better about it.

Looking back now, I think she was scared. She thought Odin would be jealous. Perhaps she was right. Everyone fears Odin, the greatest of all living beings. But in my heart, I worship one greater even than him - even in death.

We walked back to our camp, where my father was sitting outside the round house as usual, chip, chipping away. My mother told him she had something to show him. She didn’t show him the flint that had fallen into my hand and at first, he didn’t want to come, but she was insistent, so he put down his stones and followed us. When we arrived his complaints at having to leave his work fell silent. He bent to examine the vein closely.

‘It goes underground for fifty steps or more,’ I told him. He turned to look at me, then back to the flint.

‘Wayland found it,’ my mother said. ‘It is a great asset for our tribe. He should not have been beaten for it.’

There was a silence. My father stood up and snorted. I held out my hand to give him the piece of flint that had been given to me, which he took and held close to his face.

‘It’s the best stone,’ he said. He began to nod his head rapidly. ‘This changes everything for us all. We must stay here, at this camp. No - we must make a new camp on this very spot. If others find out about it – when they do – there’ll be raids. Our peaceful days are over.’

He gave us both a curt nod walked back to our camp. My mother was furious. She called him back, but he waved his hand in the air at her as if he had better things to do, and so she berated him, which he hated. But he didn’t dare complain, because if he did she would do it again in public. Among us in those days, it was the women who made the plans, who organised, who led. My father was a man who never liked to do as he was told, but when it came to it, he accepted it - he had no choice. So he came and made his peace with me, looking not in my eyes but to the side of my face, as if he were the child, not me. I stood as tall as I could and looked him straight back - a boy of eight years to a man of his age and status. He told me he had been wrong, and that I had made a great new life for our people with my discovery. I looked him back in the eye and accepted it as my due.

‘And the flint that I made, that you took,’ I said when he was done, in my piping little voice. ‘I want it back.’

‘It’s gone, I don’t know where. I am sorry, but I will help you make new ones.’

There was a tone in his voice that told me then, right from the start, that he wasn’t happy to have me as his apprentice. But I had shown skill, he was my father. How else could it be?

I loved my father. Even now, after so many centuries, I can still find a place in my heart for him. But he was not a worthy father. For this reason, despite the love I held for him and that I still hold, I shall not pass on to you, my reader, his name. My mother, Egil. But my father, no. Let him, father of me, father of my gifts, remain in the shadows.

He looked at me a while, as if he had more to say, but never did. Instead he snorted again - a habit of his - and shook his head. His long ears, that stuck out from his thinning hair, shook slightly at the top. The other children used to tease him about his ears, which drooped slightly at the top in a way no other ears you ever saw on mortal man did. When I was very small I asked my mother about those ears and where they came from, but all she told me that when he was young, his ears were stood tall and stiff but now they were soft, and she put her hand to her mouth and laughed. As I say, my father came from away, an outcumden, as we called them then. No doubt he brought his ears from his past.

The flint, as my father said, changed everything. We had assets now, wealth; and wealth must be guarded. We became settled. We built our shelters to last. We took our flint to trade with other tribes, for meat and fish, for roots, and other things, including things we’d never owned before in our lives. Furs from beasts we’d never seen, skins, beads, coloured stones, clothing already made, leather, string, sinew pre-prepared, fruits dried. People began to decorate themselves more. Men, women and children walked around with painted faces.

That very first day, the day we showed my father the flint, the seam was guarded; and I was not allowed near it. I was a child, of course I was not allowed near something so valuable. Our elders set up their Things by the flint. There were shelters, armed men and women by it day and night. It was too important for a child.

I understood; and I was sick with rage. What did they think, that I would break it? That I would sell it, that which I did not own? Already there were hints in my mind of what was to become. I had found it, this impossible flint. Why was I not guarded, why was I not invited to the Things, why did no one see that my luck was not luck the way a man has luck, not a thing of chance or carelessness, but something with import and meaning. Not luck at all.

Of course, no one understood. They all thought my discovery was an accident - a child at play looking in places no one else looked in, for things no one expected to find. I knew better. I dreamt better. It was to be a long time, after I had received many other gifts, that I began to receive my due.

It began. I started to have visions of what lay beneath the earth, both close too and far away. I saw Ymir’s bones in seams, in layers stretching out across our lands, across and under rivers and mountains, down beneath the sea. In those unreachable seams I could see the flints sitting like birds perched inside the chalk and other rocks, and I knew exactly what tools they would best be. This with stones hidden half a mile below the surface and many miles away. I could see other stones as well - the dark granite, the shining marble, the soft sandstones. Yellow rocks, green rocks, red rocks, although I had no idea what they meant. And others - the shining rocks, white, red, yellow, green and blue. Yes, at such times of vision my eyes could see what was hidden, they would shine for me even though they were in darkness deep, deep down, far down, away from the sun, where they had never known the light.

In the night, through my dreams, I came to believe that what I had told my mother was true - that it was not Odin but Ymir, the slaughtered god, who had given me the flint. I saw how he had fallen in love with beasts no longer with us, how he had taken their bodies and made prints of them, as lovingly as any artist. Nothing so huge that was once alive can ever be entirely dead. I saw no image of him, heard no voice, but as the weeks and months went by I knew, as surely as if I had held his hand and looked into his face, that it was Ymir who loved me, Ymir who gave me the gifts. But I said nothing, I kept it all to myself. I had learned a wrong lesson - one of the first lessons I learned; that what I knew, what discoveries I might make, could be taken from me. This was not like the tribe as I knew it, for with the tribe, what one has, all have. But now, what one had, all had except he who had found it. I hated that, but I understood it. We were a tribe, we were together, a people bonded, a bond that could not be broken; but this was wealth. This was different to what we had ever had before. I knew I must submit to it, but I also knew that the tribe was wrong. This is why I kept quiet, not because I didn’t want to share, but because the sharing did not include me.

Sometimes I teased my mother.

‘Underfoot here there is the skull of a dragon. One day in a hundred or a million years, the wind and the rain will wear the rock away and the people will see, and they shall all be amazed.’

Of course my mother did not like these prophesies, not knowing that to me, they were simple truths. At first she thought it was games, a child’s play with his own pride. But one day I showed her the giant bones that I had predicted on the roof of a cave. She beat me then.

‘One day there will be a time for these visions,’ she told me, her voice shaking. ‘But until that day comes, you must keep them to yourself.’

And I was pleased because I had been told that my secrets were for myself alone.

We became rich. My father had a black axe made of obsidian, another made of crystal, traded from hand to hand from distant countries. Such things were magic, totemic, omens in themselves. He used them to sacrifice beasts to the gods. He became rich enough to buy himself a bigger crystal axe, which he then re-worked into a smaller one, a better one, a thing of great beauty. I do not know, I have not seen everything, but that axe may be the finest thing that was ever made by the hand of any mortal man. His work became known far and wide, passed from hand to hand among the people, far into Europe and beyond, even into Asia. To own a piece made by my father was a thing of pride. People travelled hundreds of miles to put a piece of stone they valued into his hand, for him to shape for them.

Meanwhile, my skills slept in my hands.

Wealth! Who can pass it by? But it buys more than you pay for. Envy, which we had not known before, began to plague us. Inside our compound, arguments began - who had what, who needed what, who wanted what, who should get what. Outside, threats multiplied. Our compound became a stockade. Our young men and women gave up the old life of hunting and gathering. They did nothing for themselves but everything for the tribe - they became warriors, soldiers. All day they played games - running, lifting, throwing, practising for the fight when it came. We fed them the best of what we had. When there was no one to fight we set them to work on the stockade, building it higher, stronger, better, all the while making themselves higher, stronger, better.

This is the price of wealth. And, mortal, know this; I am the source of wealth, all wealth. You will soon see how it comes about if you have not already learned. Already my story begins to tell its tale.

We learned all this, we had to. We held our assailants off. Heads appeared on spears around the encampment, to warn others that we would not hold back to protect what was ours - and we did not. Men and women were killed all along our walls. Those we captured were flayed, raped, killed slowly. Inside, the flint nappers, my father and others, worked steadily away, producing things to trade and to protect us.

And what of me? What of the source of all this wealth, this violence, this terror … this owning that suddenly overwhelmed us? I was not a part of it - not yet. In fact, I was not there at all. I was sent away. I went with my mother and the other young ones and their mothers on the old way, the travelling way, to fish, to hunt, to gather, while the men made their wealth as if it belonged only to them.

I was scared that people would blame me for this changes in our lives - for the deaths and cruelty that my discovery had caused. There were plenty of people who thought the flint should have remained buried in the earth, who preferred our old life to the new. When children and fathers and brothers and sisters died defending cold stone, there were tears, anger, threats. Where we had all lived together, now we were apart. Where we had been safe from other tribes, now we were in danger even from within. Where everything had been held in common, now you had to ask for a share for it to be given.
‘You call this a blessing? It’s a curse!’ one mother shouted at me when she heard her husband had died in an attack.

There have always been such complaints over the aeons as they pass - when the stone became metal, when the swords became guns, where the the guns became bombs. What is it to me? I make ploughs as well as guns. It’s not my business to say how tools must be used. I do as I am told, as the gods must answer all prayers. I make what I am asked to make, I accept what the earth gives me and do the best I can with it.

Today, I look back on those days after I received the flint, but before I was allowed to work with it, as the golden days of my life. Mother, innocence, play, learning. Sunny days, rainy days. Small creatures in the grass, flowers in the woods. The smell of rain and dust and mother. These things are the foundation of all our lives. They remain with us, sweet memories that seem to mean nothing but shape our earliest selves, like jewels inside us. It’s the same for you, surely? For every one of us, man, woman, god, Jotun, dwarf, elf. Who can withhold a smile when memories like these come to mind?

But it did not seem to me like that at the time. I cannot deny how angry I was that I was outlawed from my own discovery.

My mother said, ‘Make the most of this time with us, Wayland. In a few years, these times will be gone and you will doubtless be with your father, napping the stones all day, every day; but even tomorrow can cut our lives away. Who knows what will happen to any of us? We are your family. Enjoy being here with us. Don’t try to cut our time together short.’

Although I was at such a young age, although I loved the stones as the stones loved me, I knew her words were true. I was a small boy. What else matters so much to any of us as our people? But only the very young seem to truly understand this truth. I loved my mother, I loved my brothers and my sisters. Her words bit into me, and I resolved that whatever gifts came my way, I would never cease loving the people … my mother, my brothers, my tribe.

I would never, in short, become like my father.

But - the gifts. The gifts, having started, did not stop. They have never stopped. I searched among the grasses and shrubs and in the loose earth for flints that I knew should not be there; and I found them. Yes, you see? I was a miraculous child. At last I began to understand it. It was more than skill, it was more than prodigy. Consider; how did I find a vein of perfect flint, when there was none in our lands? Why did a flawless piece fall off it into my hands, of just the right size for my axe? Consider; why did such pieces continue to appear before me, of the right size, shape and consistency for whatever tool I wanted to make? Where did the flints that I sought come from, laid so easily in the long grass, among the heather, in the crook of a tree, wherever I choose to look? Why did no one else ever find them?

I was gifted. But by whom?

The gods have made that claim. Loki has said that he saw my fate and felt pity for me, knowing that I had talents but that my jealous father would never help me for the fear that I would very surpass him. It is true, my father was a jealous man. It is in Loki’s power to hide those flints, to whisper in my ear at night where to look, to guide my hands, my fingers and arms until my muscles knew skills that I had never been taught. But why would he? Loki, like all liars, talks about the truth all the time. I only say what I know and I only know what I see. It happened. That’s all.

Tyr, the god of war, has claimed that it was him. It is in his interest of course that someone is there to make armour and swords, guns, tanks, planes. He woos me, he flatters me, he favours me. But I don’t believe any of it.

It is none of them - no one living. No; it is dead Ymir who loves me, not Loki or Tyr or Odin. Ymir, first of all, a being so vast that Odin was able to make the universe out of his body parts. From beyond his death he guides my hands. In this sense, my gifts are not my own. I have no credit in it. It is given to me, all of it. And I have no idea, no idea at all, why that should be so.

My mother knew what was going on. I had shown her the dragon’s bones, remember? She watched many times as I parted the grass and lifted up a stone. She saw how it fitted my hand. There was never any struggle to make things work. She saw how the stones craved my touch, to be held, to be shaped by me, to feel the warmth of my blood against their ancient chill. But she never said a word, except to tell me to do my tricks out of sight, in case I was misunderstood.

So the years passed. I made stone tools and showed them to no one. I hid them in the long grass where I had found them. I knew I’d find them again when I looked. Who would steal them? The beasts? The birds? Of course not. Then my fellow tribesfolk, perhaps? Of course they would have - if they could. And yet they never found a single one. Even my mother. I saw her search where I had hidden, knowing exactly where I had dropped my work, and she found nothing. Then before her eyes, I retrieved it from the spot where she had searched and found nothing. She nodded to one side of me … to say that she knew, she had seen, but that she would not say she had seen, even to me.

` You see? Ymir made sure they were safe. He still does, despite all the ravages I have undergone. It is not the warm flesh of our mother earth who loves me. Deeper than that, under the flesh, in the stones and ores and crystals., where the ghost of dead Ymir dwells. That is where the love for Wayland is held.

I could say my skills increased - so they did. But perhaps it is better to say that I became a better vessel for Ymir to speak. I opened myself up to him, and he entered me. That, really, is all the skill I have. I learn better how to receive what is given to me. Sometimes, I feel that I myself barely exist at all.

All I am is a man who is strangely loved.

So the time passes. Three years I spent in the wilderness, away from the flint. Day and night I thought about the time when my apprenticeship would begin - when my gifts could at last become public - when I could give myself to my tribe, as is right. I thought of my father - my father who was a stranger to me. We would become father and son, like other fathers and sons. He would teach me. Perhaps, with pride and humility, I would teach him. He would learn to love me and he would learn to show that love. We would sit together and tap, tap, tap at the flints, showing each other our creations and complimenting each other on the skill, the craft, the luck, that led to some beautiful artefact. These were my childish dreams. But who does not dream of such things? Like a fool, I dream of them still, though he is long gone from all the worlds.

But when the time came, I was not apprenticed to my father. He did not want me. He was too busy, he said. He earned too much for the tribe, his skill was in making, not in teaching, he said. That last thing was true, I know that much. The young men and women who sat at his feet were not the lucky ones. In this respect, I was lucky, I suppose - lucky for my learning, if not in my father.

But it was all excuses. What he meant was, he was too important, too selfish, too caught up in his own story. He was not truly one of us. He was never a happy man, my father. Who can be happy if they do not give themselves to their people? Even when he sat napping the stones he looked fierce and anxious. How could anyone be happy, so wrapped up in themselves? He was beyond himself all the time.

My mother said, ‘You must learn how to love people all the more fiercely, because he cannot.’

I was a child, I loved and respected my mother. I tried to follow her words, but in the end I discovered what we all discover - that love is personal. It is between you and the loved one. None of us are able to love for others. So my father’s life was without love. There is some kind of justice in that.

Those of you familiar with my work will know of my two Norse novels Bloodtide and Bloodsong, and also perhaps of my adult novel Loki. The norse myths and legends are things I keep going back to, all the back way to the days when my dad brought me back a copy of Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes by Barbara Leone Picard from his work at ULP. How I loved that book! I loved the tales of the gods in particular, but wasn’t so keen on the heroes in general - with some exceptions. The Volsunga saga was one - that has to be the absolute classic of Norse mythology. And there’s one other I liked - the story of Volund the Smith.

Volund’s name is very little known in this country, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t know of him back in the pagan days - but under a different name. Wayland Smith is still recorded round and about the country in place names, or names for features in the landscape, such as Wayland’s Smithy, the Neolithic burial chamber near Uffington in Oxfordshire. He’s mentioned in Beowulf too under the name Weland, supposedly an earlier iteration of the same mythical figure. There’s little doubt that at one time in this country, everyone would have heard of his name, his exploits and above all, of his peerless skill as a smith. To own a sword made by Wayland was to own something of myth. You can think of him in some ways as the pagan patron saint of makers. Quite likely his story goes way, way back to early bronze age, when the new skill of smelting metal would have demanded its own hero. The Greeks had a god, Hephaestus, the god of all artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, metallurgy, metalworking, sculpture, and also of volcanoes - some smithy there, that last one! Hephaestus was cast out of Mount Olympus by his mother, Hera for being lame, but he did all right compared to poor old Wayland, who never quite made it to godhead.

Wayland’s actual parentage is difficult to put a finger on. He may have been a mortal man, or an elf, a demigod at best. Hephaestus was a true god. He married Aphrodite and made wonderful things, such as automatons to work for him, including some that looked like beautiful young women - what he wanted with them is not recorded. The only thing that poor old Wayland had in common with Hephaestus is that he, too, was lame.

Why should the mythical smith, deity or mortal man, be lame? Perhaps his ability to make such stuff as makes the human form seem lame is something to do with it? Certainly both Wayland and Hephaestus did make supernatural objects. A more scientific explanation is that Bronze Age smiths added arsenic to copper to harden it. Disabilities of one form or another were common right across the old world in the early days of smithing.

Wayland does have one thing that Hephaestus did not have though - a damn good story. I do like a good story, and I’ve wanted to look at his for some time. It’s both very romantic and very cruel. Although it’s a very different sort of tale, I originally planned to do it after Bloodtide and Bloodsong, but for some reason I put if off and never got round to it, until recently. The story is only known from the Norse sources, but it’s clear it was known in England as well, as we understand from various local images and texts, although no full version exists in Old English. The Norse version of Wayland, Volund, is in some ways a tragic figure. Although at heart it is a love story, it is also a story of broken love, in which Volund is separated from his love, captured and maimed, then forced to serve a cruel king. His revenge is bloody and heartless. He had a brief renaissance in Victorian times, but our fore-fathers found his story simply too cruel to be much celebrated.

Well, vengeance and bloodshed was something much more celebrated in a warrior culture such as the Viking had. Sadly, it’s something our own world seems to be turning to more and more.

A good friend of mine, some time ago, said to me that with the world as it is, with so much violence, chaos and destruction, with intolerance on every hand - why would you end a story on a miserable note? Most of my books end on a difficult note, some ambivalent but very few on a straightforward happy ending. For a long time I’ve felt that some things shouldn’t be painted rose coloured when in reality they are bloody red, but when I got round to the story of Wayland, I felt that my friend was right. I found myself thinking - how I can I be true to this wonderful story of love, dedication and vengeance without ending it on a note of violence?

You can find out what I did to that end in due course if you want to read it.

A quick note about putting the novel out here instead of getting it published. Like Sikes, it’s a difficult book to publish under the current climate. My agent, who is forever telling me that the publishers are all so risk adverse these days, thought Sikes would find a publisher, but maybe not a mainstream one - the reason being that although the story of Bill Sikes sounds interesting, my book, despite the title, ended up being quite a way removed from any actual Dickensian characters. This one, Wayland the Smith, was originally intended as a follow up to Loki, but the publisher didn’t want it - I suspect because Loki didn’t do well enough to risk any spend on a norse character almost no one has heard about. Fair enough. Personally, I’d have bought it as soon as I saw it - but who knows, maybe I’d be the only one. Actually I think it’s one of my better efforts. But then, you lot can be the judges of that.

While I’m on the subject, a note on publishing in this day and age. As my agent keeps telling me, publishers are very risk adverse at the moment. As a result, any book that is likely to have a small readership is unlikely to get very far. That makes things hard for anyone trying to establish a foothold in novel writing, let alone those of us who want to write stuff that’s not going to hit any kind of mainstream. I get a head start with writing adult novels because I had a very successful career writing for teenagers - but that was quite a few years ago now and although my name is still known here and there, it doesn’t mean that anyone out there automatically wants to read whatever I choose to write. I can’t complain - I had a very good run. I made a good living at it, which was not a common thing even back in the day. Now, I can take the time to write exactly what I want, exactly as I like. It’s a luxury - perhaps even an indulgence. Of course there’s a price to pay, which is that if you write what you want to write, it’s not always going to be what anyone else wants to read ....

The complete story, like my previous novel, Sikes, will be for paid subscribers only, although you can read a bit of each chapter for free, and there will be plenty of freebie chapters along the way - just to tickle the palate you understand. I will also certainly do my best to keep free stuff coming out regularly as I can.

Meanwhile - time rich as I once again am, I’m looking forward to starting on something new. How to publish that .... We shall see.

Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoy