Holden Arquilevich

The People and Oslo

Oslo wakes in Spring, smelling like piss and stale sweat and he loves it.

He stretches his long hairy back and his spine crackles. Oslo’s haunches are boney and sticking sharp beneath his skin as he walks, padding along the floor of his cave. His walk is a triple-triple thump. This is because Oslo has six legs. Oslo is a god.

Oslo is not the sort of god who needs worship. Oslo only needs the calories. He needs the fat and the muscle and the marrow.

When Oslo th-th-thumps to the mouth of his cave, he goes blind from sun and snowmelt. He grimaces, bearing tusk and tooth. He is most vulnerable now, when Winter is newly departed and the fruit has not bloomed and become swollen, and his prey are all bones like him. More than Winter when Oslo sleeps–for Winter is simply a warm dream to Oslo–is fresh Spring the time when even Oslo may join his hairy, smelly, roaring, vicious, rutting, beautiful ancestors in God Heaven.

Oslo’s sharp eyes adjust. Oslo sniffs the air in great huffs. There is smoke. There are people at the river below. They are in their fur coats and they have survived Winter. Oslo saw them before he slept, only then their spears were dull and now they glitter. 

Before, he hunted the people. He hunted them until they gave up running and began giving themselves to Oslo piecemeal. Oslo preferred this to the hunting. He grew fat and content and took easy meals and waited for the deep sleep of Winter.

Awake, he sees the people have left nothing for him. It did not occur to them he would wake hungry. During his rest, the people had forgotten Oslo.

Oslo lumbers down the hill and the people see him coming. Oslo approaches the largest tent he can find–the shaman’s tent–and uproots it, hooking it on his tusks and shaking it vigorously. There is a single yelp from inside the tent as Oslo begins burrowing his snout into the hide walls, then silence. Like a boar digging for roots, he mashes the tent into the earth, twisting and snorting, the hide walls of the tent spiraling into a twisted mass of dirt and curled canvas. 

Oslo lifts his head to face the people.

The people brave enough to speak say, “You have killed our shaman, who spoke to the gods. You are clearly a god. What would you have us do now with no shaman?”

In answer, Oslo eats the brave people, and some of the cowardly people, until the only people left are the ones who wet themselves and lie down as though they are already dead.

Eating the people brings strength to Oslo, but not quickly enough. Weariness washes over him as the people sit heavy in his belly, and he finds himself collapsing from exhaustion on the pile where the shaman’s tent used to be, sinking into a sleep not as deep as the sleep of Winter, but very close.

Now the people who are left rise, shocked at this turn of fate, and they grow angry. The people who are left gather what spears were not shattered when Oslo devoured their warriors, and they take them to Oslo. They stab him in the throat and the eyes and all six of his legs, and his sleep is so deep that he does not wake. Even as all of his blood runs out and fills in the burrow-hole and covers the crumple of the shaman’s tent and submerges the shaman’s body lying curled up inside like a dead baby in an amniotic sac, Oslo does not wake.

Oslo only wakes in God Heaven, where he sees his ancestors. His brothers and sisters going back so many years and who befell so many fates like Oslo. He joins them in the fields of God Heaven where they scream and roar and hump and fuck and roll around in their own piss and make more gods, child-gods who will never see the world of the people–child-gods who will only know God Heaven, with tusks and many legs who gather around their father Oslo, who tells them stories of the people who forgot him, and of his taking revenge on that fuckhead shaman, and how the people who were lower than cowards took revenge on him. 

While Oslo enjoys fucking his brothers and sisters and siring children and telling them the same stories over and over, below, the people sleep uneasily near the pool of Oslo’s blood, praying those assholes never find a way out of God Heaven. Below, the people do not sire children quickly like Oslo. The people whisper in quick, breathless wonder. The people find berry-picking brave and hunting trips nonsensical. 

The people fear who their next god will be.

And they are right to, for the people’s next god rises from the pool of Oslo’s blood, wearing his tent like a great cloak, splashing blood all over the people’s tents and their faces with his emergence. The shaman rises and lumbers towards the people with a th-th-thump, his face the same as they remember, but also like Oslo’s face now. 

The people wait for the shaman to speak.

The shaman raises sharp fingers toward the sky. “I am returned,” he says, forming the words carefully around his new tusks, “and I am stronger than ever. And I will show you that I am not a little pussy who gets stomped on by cranky gods. I will show you the way to God Heaven, where we will hunt that asshole who crushed my tent and ate our warriors. Then we will return to the side of this river and not worry about such things any longer.”

The shaman turns and dives headfirst into the pool of blood and holds his breath as he swims to God Heaven, knowing that strong lungs and enough godsblood is what you need to get there.

There are still no brave people left, but those who are inspired by the sight of their shaman–his skin dyed deep red and appearing regal and terrible in his tent cloak and many legs and shiny new yellow tusks–those people grab their weapons and dive in after him.

Oslo sits with his family admiring the plains of God Heaven, considering what story he will tell next about those shitheads below, when his kin begin to howl and hoot in alarm all around him.

Out on the plains, the dirt begins to soak from below and bubble until it breaks and blood spouts up in a tall geyser, coating the little gold flowers of the plains of God Heaven in a thick film. The blood spatters Oslo, and when he tastes a drop, he tastes his own blood on his tongue, and he feels a pit form in his stomach.

The people emerge, and now they are now taller than Oslo. The people have six legs like him–the gift of his blood–and on top of that they have two human arms with sharp fingers. The spears the people carry drank the blood while they swam, and now they are longer and with shafts like serpents, the tips of the spears snapping their jaws and flicking their tongues in the direction of Oslo and his family. 

The shaman leads the war party in his great, blood-soaked cloak. He carries no spear. He does not need one.

Oslo roars and snorts and paws the ground before charging in blind rage at the shaman and the people, overturning the soil as he runs and crushing the little gold flowers of the plains. His brothers and sisters and children follow in a great mob, roaring and snorting, the th-th-th-th-th-th-thumping of hundreds of sixes of legs making the ground shake.

The people meet Oslo and the other gods. There are more gods than people, but the people have their terrible spears that whip and snap and bite, and the gods are mostly comprised of god children who have never known strife or toil, so those young gods die in droves to the people’s wicked spears and sharp claws.

But Oslo’s brothers and sisters are fiercer. They have known the struggle of the hunt and the cruelty of Winter, and they fare better against the people. When Oslo’s brothers and sisters see their young being eaten by the people, they lose all control and throw themselves at the people with no thought to how they land or what bones they break, so long as they break the bones of the people too. When one of Oslo’s brothers or sisters pins one of the people to the ground, the people swing their red claws and gouge out their eyes, but Oslo’s family do not let go until they are blind and the people are mashed into pulp.

And all the while, Oslo duels with the shaman. The shaman, whose magicks were once relegated to the occasional premonition and god-sponsored whiff of wisdom, now shoots fucking blood lightning out of his fucking fingertips, and his cloak whips around him like wings, lifting him into the air to glide above Oslo like a manta ray. 

Oslo hates this fucker, and he hates waiting for him to land and he hates running in circles to dodge the blood lightning that snaps at the ground and poisons the soil and murders the little gold flowers. So Oslo snatches up his children, whipping his jaw sideways towards the sky, pitching them squealing at the shaman. Those that miss land miles away on the plains of God Heaven, making huge craters when they land and breaking their skulls. 

When one of them finally flies true, the shaman twists and beats his cloak wings and pivots on the air, drawing a scythe of blood lightning with a gnarled finger, dividing the child in two.

Oslo’s brothers and sisters are faring well against the people, but his children are not. And even if they can kill all the people, the shaman will just keep flying around like an asshole and killing them while they stay stuck down on the plains of God Heaven.

So Oslo tries something stupid.

Oslo races towards the pool of blood, dodging blood lightning strikes, trampling his own children, and smashing past his brothers and sisters grappling with the people. When he arrives, he does not hesitate to dunk his head into the pool and drink deeply in long gulps that make his throat bulge and his eyeballs spin and whirl inside his skull. He drinks up all the godsblood in three gulps, and with each gulp after that, he begins to drink the world below. The people of the shaman’s village are the first to be sucked up screaming into Oslo’s mouth and consumed.

The shaman screeches like some kind of fucked up bird, and reigns down hell and blood from his fingertips and the flapping of his cloak in a massive barrage, but his strikes are useless against Oslo. Oslo has grown too strong in just four gulps, and as he sucks down a fifth–drinking down the animals and the rivers and the lakes of the world below–he grows so large that he suddenly feels the shaman’s cloak flapping against his massive shoulders.

Oslo rears up, two legs on the ground, four reeling in the air, and snaps up the shaman like an alligator catching a bat. The shaman yelps once, and then dies like a bitch.

Oslo lands back on all sixes like a natural disaster, shaking the plains of God Heaven so hard every one of his family fall over. 

His surviving brothers and sisters then rise, and the few of his children that also rise are the ones he is proud to call his own. 

Oslo shakes the shaman back and forth in his mouth and the shaman is scattered about into pieces. Oslo’s family swarm the pieces of the shaman’s body, screeching in joy, and they eat his liver and his cock and his face. 

While his family consumes the shaman’s body and they grow stronger and stranger from the effects of peoplemeat and godsblood and the little gold flowers that get mixed in, he rounds his now colossal body until he is towering over the pool to the world below, and with his great snout and his massive tusks he burrows into the pool, overturning the dirt until there is no passage left, and the way to God Heaven is shut.

And below, on the other side, Oslo’s snout appears jutting up from the earth where the village used to be like a mountain being born, and the rumbling of his excavating is like an earthquake at the dawn of time, and a great calamity ensues, and whatever life was left in the world below is burned off or buried under rubble or drowned in liquid metal.

When Oslo is done flailing, buried in the plains of God Heaven, he realizes that four of his six legs are wedged among the rocks and dirt, and that the pollen of the little gold flowers is stinging his eyes, and that he is trapped.

Oslo’s family notices too, and when they are finished eating the people and the shaman, they turn on the vulnerable Oslo, and his brothers and sisters start eating him and fucking him in the ass, and his children nibble on the parts of him that are exposed above the earth that they can reach like his triceps and his two legs that are not buried.

Oslo uses his free legs to squish a couple of the ungrateful runts, but there is nothing to be done about his brothers and sisters who continue to devour him, swarming like ants.

And soon enough there is nothing left of Oslo but a giant skeleton buried halfway between heaven and earth, and his family who tell stories of his legendary deeds and how he closed the way between the two.