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almost of their own accord. The northern winds of his childhood sweep through his memory. He sees the frost-locked boreal landscape gleaming as though ablaze, even in the parsimonious winter light.
    “ The Twilight of the Gods, yes,” Elizabeth sa ys, and gives him a melting smile of unconcealed love, which the year-captain, lost in polar memories, does not see.
    Faces turn toward him. They want to hear more. The year-captain says, reaching deep for the ancestral lore, “ A time comes when the sun turn s black. It gives no light, it gives no warmth, winter comes three times in succession with no summer between. This is the Fimbulwinter, the great winter that heralds the world ’ s end. There is battle everywhere in the darkness, and brother slays brother f o r the sake of greed, and f a ther lies with daughter, sister with brother, many a whoredom.”
    Elizabeth is nodding. She knows these ancient skaldic poems too. Half to herself she murmurs, rocking back and forth rhythmically, “   ‘ An axe-age, a sword-age, shield s shall be cloven. A wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters. ’   ”
    “ Yes,” says the year-captain, shivering now, his mind swirling with the powerful ancient images. “ A great wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf the moon. The stars vanish from the h eavens. Trees are torn up, and mountains fall, and all fetters and bonds are broken and rent. The sea bursts its bounds, and the Midgard Serpent stirs and comes up on the land and sprinkles all the air and water with his venom, and the Fenris-Wolf breaks f ree and advances with his mouth agape, his lower jaw against the earth and the upper against heaven. Nothing is without fear anywhere in the world. For this is the day on which the gods will meet their doom.”
    He falls silent, playing out the final titanic battle in his mind, Thor putting the Serpent to death but dying himself of its venom, and the Wolf devouring Father Odin, only to have his gullet torn asunder by Vidar, and the demonic Surtr riding out of Muspelheim and casting fire over the Earth that bu r ns all the world. But of these things the year-captain says nothing aloud. He feels he has had the center of the stage long enough just now. And an Arctic gloom has begun to seize his spirit. The ice, the darkness, the ravening wolves rising above the bla z ing world. And the Earth of his Viking forefathers is so far away, floa t ing through the emptiness of the night, spinning eternally on its axis somewhere back behind him — a dot, a grain of sand. Nothing. Ever y thing.
    After a moment Elizabeth ’ s voice continues the tale:
    “   ‘ Smoke-reek rages, and reddening fire. The high heat licks against heaven itself. ’   ” Her mind is a crowded storehouse of poetry. But even she is unable to remember the next line.
    “ And then?” Paco asks. He throws his hands upward and outward, p alms raised. Paco is a small compact-bodied man of great strength and personal force, and any gesture he makes is always more emphatic than it needs to be, just as his shoulders seem twice as wide as those of a man his height should be. “ That ’ s it? The En d ? Everybody ’ s dead and there ’ s nothing more? The curtain comes down and there ’ s not going to be any next act, and we look around and see that the theater is empty?”
    “ Redemption, then,” says the year-captain distantly. “ Rebirth. The new world rising on the ashes of the old.”
    He isn ’ t sure. Some details of his grandmother ’ s stories have faded in his mind, after all these many years. But it must be so, the rebirth. It is that way in every myth, no matter what land it may come from: the world is destroyed so th at it may be brought forth new and fresh. There would be no point to these tales, otherwise. Not if the Twilight of the Gods is followed simply by unending empty night. That way all of life would be reduced to the experience of any one mortal individual: w e are each of us born into