I looked up at the mixing bowl, the snake’s jaws horribly magnified through the thickness of the glass.

Snakey looked right back at me with maniac intensity.

I could tell he was only biding his time, waiting for Sigyn to lower the bowl, which was already a quarter-full of collected venom.

How many minutes, I asked myself, before she would need to empty the bowl? How many minutes before the snake, seeing its chance, would strike? How many minutes, how many hours before I was screaming in torment again?

Punishment is futile, of course. It doesn’t stop crime, or undo the past, or make the culprit sorry. In fact, all it does is waste time and cause unnecessary suffering. Perhaps that’s why it’s the basis of so many world religions. I thought of the Oracle’s prophecy.

The wretch looks like Loki. His wife

Alone stands by him as he suffers.

Oh, gods. And I’d thought the snake was bad. But to wait until the End of the Worlds listening to Sigyn’s chatter, eating her fruitcake and watching the snake through the fish-eye lens of that mixing bowl . . .

I tried a last, miserable tactic. ‘Please. I love you, Sig,’ I said.

That’s how pitiful I was. That’s how sorry I was for myself. That’s how wretchedly low I’d sunk – using the L-word to my wife . . .

She smiled again. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said, and I knew that my last gambit had failed. In fact, my words had sealed my fate: she had me just where she wanted me. Needy, and helpless, and desperate, and hurt, and wholly in her power.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and her voice was tender as she said: ‘Oh, Loki, sweetheart, I love you too. And I’m going to take such good care of you.’

Lesson 11 Escape

LESSON 11

Escape

Never neglect the small print.

Lokabrenna

THERE FOLLOWED a long, strange, terrible time. Half in, half out of the waking world, it’s hard to say how long it was, but to me it was an eternity of boredom, boredom interrupted by intervals of brief, but unspeakable suffering.

To do her credit, Sigyn tried her best. Mad as she undoubtedly was, and as impervious to my pleas as she was to my cajolery, she did what she could to help me.

Most of the time that consisted of collecting Snakey’s venom. At intervals she emptied the bowl, at which times the evil creature struck. It also struck when she made me drink, which I had to do occasionally, or when she tried to feed me, or when she went to powder her nose. The result of this was that I was perpetually hungry, thirsty, in pain, or all three.