Free The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon

grumbling, milled about the ghastly hall seeking their place.
    ‘Sit anywhere,’ I said. (Except next to me, of course.) ‘There is no rank here.’ Oh, how they wailed and gnashed at that.
    I eyed the dead for likely servant material.
    What are my requirements?
     
    1. Ugly.
    2. Quiet.
    3. No one decomposing.
     
    Like I said, I’m not Miss Fussy.
    Number one was easy. Two and three seemed impossible.
    I saw wraiths and cadavers, decaying and freshly buried; fretful spirits fluttering about like greasy shadows; and corpses with peeling skin and maggots dripping from their heads.
    Every body was worse than the next. Most were old. And bony. And putrefying. All talking at me. I thought the dead would come in quietly. Sit down. Be still. Act dead.
    But oh no. The din was horrendous. Jabbering, querulous voices. Moaning. Yelling. Gathering around my High Seat, shrieking and screaming like stuck pigs.
    The shrieks of those fathers whose sons were too mean to bury them with gold and who discovered they’d arrived here with a wooden bowl and a dented axe.
    The stupid slave girls who’d volunteered to be sacrificed, thinking that if they follow their chieftain in death they’ll be his wife here in Hel. Where do they get these ideas? Ladies, it isn’t going to happen. Save yourselves. Don’t volunteer for any funeral pyres. Everyone journeys to me alone.
    ‘Have I been chosen by Freyja instead of Odin to live in her hall?’ asked one pudgy, bloodstained warrior, looking around in amazement. He gazed at me uneasily, seated on my throne, my silver hair exploding around my lead face, a blanket covering my legs.
    ‘Is this Asgard?’
    ‘Does this look like Asgard to you?’ I asked.
    His eyes widened.
    ‘I thought every warrior who fell in battle went to Valhall!’ he howled.
    ‘Well, you thought wrong,’ I said. ‘Only the best and greatest warriors go to Valhall. Which obviously excludes you .’
    His fellow warriors shuffled unhappily.
    I braced myself.
    ‘Where’s the banquet? Where’s the never-ending ale in the curved horns?’ they screamed. ‘Where’s the roast pork and the maidens serving?’
    The disappointment and fury of the first-class arrivals, the kings with their servants and animals aboard theiriron-shielded ships, when they end up here. Just as stinky as the grimiest thrall, the filthiest troll. I wanted to laugh.
    One stormed up to me, haughty and full of majesty in his silken tunic with gold buttons and fur hat, his slaves dragging in carts and wagons and jewels and bright swords.
    ‘I demand you receive me as a great lord,’ he boomed.
    ‘Or what?’ I said. All the timber and amber and rings didn’t alter the fact that he was – er – dead.
    ‘There’s some mistake,’ others protested.
    Nope.
    I covered my ears, ignoring them all. The corpses buzzed and whined around me like angry wasps.
    ‘Where’s my throne?’
    ‘I’m not sitting with him!’
    ‘Don’t touch that jug – it’s mine.’
    ‘You stink!’
    ‘Give me that –’
    ‘I want to go home …’
    ‘What am I doing here?’
    ‘My sister, the greedy cow, she kept my ivory comb!’
    ‘It’s not fair –’
    Then out of the gloom I saw an old crone, carrying an empty gold plate, coming towards me.
    An ancient man shuffled beside her, holding a knife and a cup.
    I watched them approach. I am not sure that approach is the right word. Were they actually moving? It was hard to say. Time slips away here. Time is of no importance. I was having to learn this.
    But one thing became clear as inch by inch they came closer to my throne. Both of these grey-haired, filthy thralls were alive.
    The hordes of the dead parted to let them through.
    ‘We’ve been waiting for you, mistress,’ said the crone. Her thin, grey plaits twisted beneath a dirty cap the colour of dung. Her words fell out of her mouth in long, slow syllables, like pus oozing from a wound.
    ‘We’ve been waiting forever,’ said the old hag spawn.His matted