The Gospel of Loki by Joanne M. Harris Page A

fair! You can’t let him get away with this!’
    ‘I’m sorry, Brokk,’ Odin said. ‘You made the bet. It’s out of my hands.’ His face was stern as granite, but I knew that inside he was smiling.
    For a moment longer, Brokk tried to find words to express himself. His fists clenched. His body shook. His dark face darkened still more with rage. Then he turned on me, eyes smouldering like the coals from his forge.
    ‘You think you’ve outwitted me, Trickster,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe I can’t claim your head. But since it now belongs to me, I can at least make some improvements.’
    ‘What? Are you going to cut my hair into a more flatteringstyle?’
    Brokk shook his head. ‘No. But that smart mouth of yours can be taught a lesson. I can do that, if nothing else.’
    And from his pocket he pulled out a leatherworker’s awl and a long, thin leather thong.
    I said: ‘You can’t be serious.’
    ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Brokk, with a grin. ‘We Tunnel Folk aren’t such humorists as you seem to believe. Hold his head, someone.’
    And so, while Heimdall held me down (of course, it had to be Goldie, and I could tell he was enjoying himself), Brokk sewed my lips together. It took nine stitches, each of them like being punched in the mouth by a fistful of wasps.
    But much as it hurt, it didn’t hurt as much as did their laughter. Yes, they laughed , my so-called friends; they laughed as I struggled and whimpered, and no one moved a finger to help, not even Odin, who had sworn to treat me like a brother – but we all know what happened to them , don’t we? Bragi, Njörd, Frey, Honir, Thor – even goody-two-shoes Balder joined in the laughter, succumbing to peer-group pressure like the weakling he secretly was.
    And it was the sound of their laughter that followed me back to my bolt hole, where I pulled out the stitches and howled in rage and swore that one day I would pay them back – all of them, and especially my loving brother – in full. In blood.
    The stitches healed quickly. The pain went away. But Brokk’s awl was a magical tool. It left a permanent mark on me. Nine neat little cross-stitch scars that faded silvery with time, but never vanished. After that, my smile was never quite as true, and there was something in my heart, a barbed thing, like a roll of wire, that never ceased to trouble me. The gods never suspected it. Except perhaps for Odin, whose eye I often felt on me, and whose morality, I knew, was almost as dubious as my own.
    As for the rest of them, they thought I’d forgotten. I never did. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, or so goes the saying amongthe Folk. Well, I could have saved the Nine Worlds. I could have halted Ragnarók. But the gods, in their arrogance and greed, had clarified my position. I would never be one of them. I knew that now. I was alone. I would always be alone. I’d learnt my lesson for good, this time.
    Basically, never trust anyone .
    ‘Every dog has his day’, as the old Middle-Worlds saying goes. Every dog and every god, and now I began to long for the day when our roles would be reversed, and I would be the one looking down on all of them as they pleaded and cried. That day would come, we all knew that. Change is the wheel on which the Worlds turn, and the time would come when gods would be dogs, howling as everything they had built came down in ruins around them. Power always comes at a price, and the higher they climb, the further they fall. I meant to engineer that fall, and to laugh as they came tumbling down.
    Till then, I bided my time, and smiled as sweetly as my scarred lips would allow, until the day I would take my revenge and bring the gods down, one by one.

LESSON 1
    Gold
    All men are one-eyed when a woman’s involved.
    Lokabrenna
    A ND SO I BECAME THE T RICKSTER , despised and yet invaluable, hiding my contempt for them all behind my scarred and twisted smile. I found my appeal undiminished among the ladies, who seemed to find that