Hammer's Hearth: An Hour With Andvari
by Raven Kaldera
I knew that Andvari wanted to talk to me the day that we
unearthed the hammer.
We were working in the vegetable garden, doing the usual springtime shell game of dirt, moving the two-year-old compost to where the beans were going to be, and the year-old to the root crops bed, and last fall’s to the tomato plot. Somewhere in the bed that would soon hold the roots—beets and carrots and parsnips—we ran into something hard about four feet down. I thought that it was a root, or a stick, but when I got hold of it and wrenched it out, it turned out to be the great hammer that my housemate had lost last year. Covered in dirt and mold, it did resemble a tree root. As I knocked the earth off of it, I heard a gravelly voice: You’ll come down tonight.
I’d heard about Andvari from my friends Galina and Fuensanta, and allowed Galina to build a small altar to him on my land, but I’d been wary, because I wasn’t sure where He would fit into my life. I’m Hel’s Own, a god-slave in the most thorough sense, and She sets my priorities. I work for the Goddess of Death and Poverty, and She has no respect for money. (After all, you can’t take it with you.) She doesn’t allow me to take money for my shamanic work, She doesn’t let me work a job with a paycheck, and She does everything in Her power to encourage me to live a life from the era of barter. My relationship with money was, to say the least, ambivalent. It had been suggested that Andvari could help me with that, but the more I thought about it, the more I had the suspicion that He wanted to talk to me about something entirely different.
So later that evening I went down to where the little altar had been set up in the woods, by the bridge over the dark stream. It held a small metal anvil. I brought a bit of gold, tied up in golden cloth, and set my tiny offering down on the anvil. I sat down, and it was as if a door opened into a room somewhere. There was a warm hearth, and a comfortable chair, and a bearded dwarf-man smoking a pipe and looking at me with keen eyes.
“Greetings, scavenger bird,” He said. “You’ll notice that my altar lacks a hammer.”
“I suppose it does, sir,” I said. “I could ask Galina—”
“No.” He cut me off. “She gave up the anvil, and a fine thing that was. Some people are anvils—the world chooses their lives to play out the beating and the pain, but they are the solid ground under everything. They change context, they change ground. What do you think the Old Man’s got her doing? That’s anvil work.” I listened, fascinated. “And some people are tongs—they hold things at a distance, they break them down and make the dangerous safe. They do the delicate, careful work. And some people are the water that quenches, the fountain that speaks truth from the heart, that casts the final vote as to what the forged thing will be. If it’s well done, the water knows instinctively—it cools it and hardens it. But if it’s poorly done, the water cracks it and blows steam up in your face to boot.”
“And the forged thing?” I asked.
He blew out a smoke ring. “That’s Life,” He said between clenched teeth, around the pipe. I got the feeling that the word had some deeper connotation in His tongue, but it escaped me.
“And me?”
“You,” he said, gesturing at me with the pipe, “are a hammer. Dvalin would never have given you the Hammer’s Blessing otherwise.” The reference was to my single short-lived trip to Nidavellir, years before.
“That’s … rather crude,” I said, thinking of the various cultural references to hammers that associate them with brute force.
He looked at me. “I have hammers the size of your little finger that could wrap gold leaf around a blown egg without cracking it,” He said. “So get me a hammer, scavenger bird.”
“Right,” I said. “So … I think I’m supposed to ask you something, but I don’t know what it is. I thought that it was about money, but…”
“Do you know why I like you?” He asked, cutting me off. Before I could answer, He went on: “Because of all the many people I’ve ever met, you’re one of the very few who knows exactly what you’re worth. You neither sell yourself short nor think too highly of yourself. You’re realistic about your own value.” He filled his pipe again and lit it, making a puff of smoke that vanished before it reached me. “It’s everything and everybody else that you’re a bit skewed on, isn’t it?” He said, His eyes meeting mine so keenly that I had to look away.
“You see with Hel’s eyes, hear with Hel’s ears.” As he said this, the name of my patron goddess automatically translated in my head to Hel, because I have the bard’s gift of otherworldly languages, and that’s how it works. But I could hear a shadow of the Duergar word for Her behind it—something along the lines of Shkeksa—the middle syllable very like the sound that people make when they run their finger across their necks and mime a throat-slitting. “You see the darknesses and the flaws in people first.”
“Yes.” There was no denying that. “But I don’t necessarily see darknesses and flaws as evil, or as making people worthless. I’m Hel’s Own, I know better than that.”
“True. But if you can’t get beyond that, carrion-eater, you can’t see people’s potential. And if you can’t see their potential, you can’t inspire them to reach it. That’s the King’s Gold, you know. You don’t trust them, and so you expect too little of them.”
“I know,” I sighed.
“Let’s start from square one,” He said. “What do you own by right?”
I was silent for a moment, but not because I didn’t know the answer. It was just hard to choke out. Things flicked through my head—my land, my title, my power, my lovers, my talents, my body, my bed, my spoon, my fork, my knife … “Nothing,” I grated out. “It’s all Hers. I own nothing.” That had been a lesson that had been driven very firmly home some time ago. “I just take care of it for Her between orders.”
He nodded. “Exactly. And when you give things of value away to people, She gets paid. Believe me, She extracts a price, even if they don’t know it. Whether She kicks any of it back to you, that’s between you and Her. But just because the thrall does not see the master’s bargaining doesn’t mean that a fair exchange didn’t take place. You’re older than money. Let it go. It’s irrelevant. That’s not where you start. You start with Craft.”
“Craft,” I echoed, and suddenly I had a chill down my spine and had to look away again.
He blew out another smoke ring. “Your crafts are not what they could be. Oh, they’re good enough, there’s no lack of talent, but you’re still too shoddy in most things. You cut corners, you use lousy materials, you don’t polish every detail. You’ve been able to skate by thus far, but soon it’s going to catch up and you won’t be able to do that any more.”
Well, that was blunt. “I suppose I’m used to being poor,” I said. “All my life, it’s been make do with what you can.”
“I know,” he said. “Scavenger bird.” His tone did not excuse me. “So when you can’t afford fine materials, you make up for that with better craftsmanship. Yes, yes, I know, don’t even bother to talk about your Lady’s yen for recycling garbage. But if it’s given to you to make silk purses out of sow’s ears, you’re going to have to fall in love with the sow’s ear, and its potential. Then you can do it justice. When you’re slipshod, it means that you don’t value your own work. I know that’s because it hurts too much to value it, when She could take it away and give it to another at any moment, and you get nothing back directly. But if you don’t value it, you can’t fall in love with it. You can’t achieve Making from there.”
The imagery came in on me in a rush—for the moment, Andvari had stopped using words, because there were no words for the Making. The falling in love with the thing that you were creating, the devouring fascination that makes you forget food, sunlight, the people that you care about, that makes you think of nothing but the Beloved. The Beloved—the song, the sword, the story, the sculpture, the tapestry, the perfect cup. You have eyes for nothing but that, and those who come to drag you away from your Beloved receive nothing but irritated growls. You hold it up to the light to see each improvement and you tremble with joy, your body shaking with the emotion. Each setback casts you into near-despair, from which you bravely extract yourself and reach again for the light. It is possessive, it is passionate, it is worthy of all the hours you slave for it … and then, when it is done, there is the chance that you will have to let it go into some strange hand, someone who may never know the intense relationship this thing had with you, and you with it.
“Yes,” I said to the onrush of feeling. Yes, I understand this, I know it, I have been there again and again. Perhaps not with the passion of the Duergar—I am only a mortal—but I’ve had more than a taste of that drug. It always frightened me with its intensity.
“They can tell, you know,” He said. “Even the densest of them, they can tell when what you’ve made is a True Love, or a friendly dalliance, or a dutiful marital gift, or a cold, calculated joining. Look, you’re not my apprentice.” His tone was sardonic. “I’m not going to tell you what to make. I’m just saying that it’s not good for someone who has that Making close to the heart to whore it out like that. Bad for the soul. Bad for the belly. Gives one stomachaches. Makes one hate the Work, and not value it. You’ve said yourself that you’d make a lousy whore. So when it comes to Craft, hold out for Love whenever you’re allowed.” He settled back in his chair.
“That’s all?” I said. I thought it would be something hard. I thought that I would be slapped with some discipline, some new struggle, something I’d have to bludgeon myself with to achieve, like so many of the orders in my life. “All you’re giving me is—” …permission? I couldn’t say the word out loud.
His eyes were shadowed under bushy eyebrows; I wondered if there was pity in them. “Whenever you’re allowed,” He repeated. “And I think that you’re allowed that more often than you think you are. This sort of thing may not be your Lady’s game, but I can’t imagine She’d be opposed to further excellence for Her to exploit. Take it when you can. It’s good for you.” He said this as if delivering a prescription, and then gestured at me with His pipe. “Be off with you,” he said gruffly. “You’re letting in a cold draft.” And then the moon slid out from behind a tree, and illuminated the leaf-strewn ground, and the window had vanished into silvery moonlight.
Afterword: Within a couple of weeks, a total of five tiny hammers ranging from one to six inches came into my hands from various sources, including one handed to me by my wife (who had picked it up years ago and tucked it away) along with a tiny pair of tongs and a little vise grip. They are now tucked away in a box next to his anvil in the little stone cave that was built to be his altar.
Artwork by David Pollitz.