Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [94]
The rotmistr towered two benches over, so we took our wine and migrated to sit next to him, disrupting his whispered and, by all appearances, emotional discussion with Petrovsky. If the rotmistr was indeed a messiah, he couldn’t have wished for more dedicated disciples than his cornets.
“Sit with us, you two,” he addressed us when we approached. “I was just telling the dolt here why I joined the military.”
“The Napoleonic war?” I guessed. “Lost your father in it?”
“This, my young poruchik, is all coincidental although not wrong,” he replied. “But the real reason is that unless you die with a weapon in your hand—and what is a better way to ensure such manner of death than joining the military?—you cannot reach Valhalla.”
“Valhalla,” I repeated. The rotmistr appeared to be one of those rare individuals who managed to combine a perfectly traditional upbringing with unexpected paganism of the school that greatly exaggerated the nobility and acumen of our Scandinavian neighbors, but I was at least willing to give the rotmistr a chance to talk about his unorthodoxies, since we had a few hours until arrival to Krasnoyarsk.
“Valhalla,” the rotmistr said and sobered up visibly. “Not because of what you think, Menshov—not just weapons or the flying wenches . . . whatever they are called.”
“Valkyrie,” Petrovsky offered in a reverential tone, his eyes glistening. I guessed that he harbored some ideas of his own as well.
“Right,” the Rotmistr said, nodding. He pulled a wine bottle from under the bench where it fit for easy storage, and topped off the mugs of both cornets. He handed the bottle with the leftovers to me, and I guessed that I was to drink directly from it. “But flying wenches or no, this is not why. You know that in the great hall, in Odin’s hall—and Odin is the one who takes the warriors fallen in battle—they drink and then they fight, and whoever falls in that battle wakes up whole again, so he can drink and fight and die again. In Valhalla, it’s not like heaven, where you get to stay alive forever and play some lute or harp . . . there, the world is destroyed every day, and then rebuilt anew, so nothing is ever old, ever stale.”
I took a cautious sip of the wine. “But everyone gets resurrected and they’re still the same.”
The rotmistr wagged his thick, calloused finger at me, dirt around his fingernail black as gunpowder, and I suspected that it had become incorporated into his skin and could never be washed out. “No one is the same after resurrection. Read the classics, Menshov. Cannot step twice in the same river, and everything changes even if you go away from home for a week. What do you think happens to everything, to the world, if you daily destroy and rebuild it? It changes, because nothing can ever be recreated perfectly.”
“So what do you want with it?” I asked, wine making me bolder. “You want to be killed and resurrected too?”
He shook his head, sly. “No no. I’d sit in the corner and watch and take notes, on how everything becomes different from day to day to day. I would keep track of all the small alterations, of all the tiny fault lines and cracks that appear from one resurrection to the next. And I will be there when everything finally crumbles to dust.”
“What will happen then?”
“Ragnarok,” he said. “When the new world will be made from scratch instead of rebuilding an old one again and again, from a broken mold that wasn’t that great to begin with.”
“You want an apocalypse?”
He shook his head vigorously. “Aren’t you even listening to me, lad? Apocalypse means that the world ends and we all go live in the clouds with harps, or in the eternal flames with pitchforks as the case may be. No, what I want is a new, better world, and the only way to make it happen is to go to Valhalla, and to go there I need to die with a weapon in my hand. Believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and Ragnarok seems like the only way to a new world rather than a mere destruction of the old one.”
I suppose I could think the rotmistr was simply