The Boy Who Raced Thought

The mud let go of his shoes with a wet suck, and then there was hard ground under him and he was away.

Thjalfi had been started by a word all his life. His father said "Go" at the byre door in the mornings, and the goats went, and Thjalfi went after them. This word was no different. His legs heard it before he did.

The first strides were the bad ones. They always were. He kept low and short and let his arms work, and the pale plain came up hard to meet each foot. Then his legs found their length. The cold went into him like a blade and came out of him in a cloud, and the giants began to go by.

They went by as boots. Two long rows of boots, grey with frost to the ankle, slid past on either side of him.

Far above them was the noise. The giants were shouting, but it came down from so high that it reached him late and thin, like voices from the top of a scree. He did not look up. Looking up was how you fell.

Hugi was beside him.

Thjalfi had not seen him start. He had simply been there at the edge of his eye since the first stride, tall and pale and running easy.

That was all right. Plenty of the valley boys started level with him. The scree sorted them out by the second bend. He put his head down and ran harder.

This was the flat, and the flat was nothing. Five summers he had gone up the high scree behind the goats, where every stone moved under your foot and the old nanny looked back from the top as though you were a fool. Here nothing moved.

The ground went straight on, and his feet slapped it, and the stick stood up at the end of it and got bigger. He could see it was a stick now and not a pin. He could see a knot on it.

He was running better than he had ever run in his life. He knew it in his legs and in his chest at once.

His shoes were wrong, though. The worn toes caught at the ground, and every few strides he felt the right one slip on his heel. He ran through that. He ran through the stitch that came in his side and the burn that came up his throat from the cold. He thought of nothing except the knot on the stick.

Hugi was not beside him any more.

Thjalfi had not felt him go. Somewhere among the boots the pale edge of his eye had emptied, and he had been too busy to notice. Now he looked ahead, and there was Hugi, far out in front. There was his back, and his pale hair, and his long legs going without any hurry at all. He was nearly at the stick.

That was all right too, Thjalfi told himself. On the scree the young billies always went off too fast. You caught them near the top, standing with their sides going in and out, too blown to take another step. He ran for the place where Hugi would tire.

Thjalfi's mouth came open. He did not have the breath to shut it. He made his legs go faster, and they went, a little. The stick grew. Hugi reached it.

He went round it as smooth as water round a stone, and came back.

He came back down the course toward Thjalfi, running exactly as he had run out, loose and easy, with his hands open. Overhead the giants' noise went up and broke into laughing. Thjalfi was still running out. The stick was still in front of him, no nearer than it had been a moment ago. And Hugi was coming the other way on the same hard ground, bigger with every stride, his hair streaming back off his face, until he was there.

They passed close. Thjalfi could have touched him. He felt the wind of him go by on his cheek, and it was cold, colder than the plain. He heard his own breath, loud in his ears, a sob in it on every stride.

From Hugi he heard nothing. Hugi's mouth was shut. His chest was not heaving. He glanced down at Thjalfi as he went past, pleasantly, as one man nods to another in a lane.

Then the wind was gone, and there was only the stick. Thjalfi ran on to it. There was nobody to race to it now. All down both rows the giants had turned to watch Hugi come home, and their laughter rolled away over Thjalfi's head toward the gate.

But the course was out to the stick and round it and back, and he had not been round it yet. So he ran to it. It was an ash stick, peeled white, with the knot on it he had been looking at all this way. He put his hand on it as he went round, because he wanted to have touched it. His shoe skidded on the turn and he nearly went down, and didn't.

Out here at the far end the rows had thinned to a few giants standing apart, and the ground round the stick was untrodden. The frost there lay white. His feet broke it going round, and he saw the dark marks they left, and then he had come round and was facing the gate.

The course ran back the whole long way between the rows of boots. At the end of it was the wall of Utgard, grey and enormous, and under the wall a small dark knot of people at the line. Hugi was standing among them already. Thjalfi could see his pale head from here.

Going back was worse. The laughing came down to meet him now, out of the rows on both sides, and it went along with him all the way. A giant leaned down and said something to the one beside him, and they both laughed. Another clapped, slowly, two great slaps that Thjalfi felt in his ribs.

His right shoe had come half off. He held it on with his toes and ran with his head down.

Somewhere near halfway he passed the place where Hugi had met him. He only knew it because it was halfway. It looked like the rest of the plain. Then the ground went soft under him, and dark, and the line was there.

He crossed the line and ran on a few steps because he could not stop. Then he stopped. He bent over with his hands on his knees and breathed.

For a while that was all there was.

The ground swung under him. His breath went up past his face in great white clouds. His legs shook, and his throat felt scraped raw. Somewhere far above him the giants were still laughing. He looked at his hands on his knees, brown and scratched, and waited for them to be still.

Beside him there was a pair of shoes. They stood on white frost.

He did not look at the frost. He looked up instead, past the long legs, to Hugi's face.

Hugi stood with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes on the course. He was not bent over. His chest went quietly up and down as though he had strolled out from the hall to see the weather. Nothing came out of his mouth into the cold air.

Thjalfi looked away. He's thin, he thought. Some people don't puff. He looked hard at the mud between his own feet and did not think about his sister at all.

"Well," said Utgard-Loki.

He had come over from the line. He stood above Thjalfi with his ringed hands folded in front of him, and he bent down a long way to look.

"That was a run," he said pleasantly. "I'll give it that. But you'll have to lay yourself out a good deal more than that if you mean to win." He straightened, and went on straightening for some time, and spoke over Thjalfi's head to the rows. "And yet I'll say this for him. Nobody has ever come through my gate quicker on his feet than this one. In all the years I've kept it."

The rows laughed at that too. Thjalfi could not tell which part they were laughing at.

He stood up slowly. Nobody quicker. It went into him and sat there, warm, under the ache in his chest.

He had always known he was fast. Nobody had ever said it like that, in front of so many, as if it were a plain fact like the height of the wall. And Hugi had been round the stick and halfway home while he was still running out.

Both things were true. He could not make them fit together.

"Quickest of all the visitors," said Loki behind him. "That's a comfort, isn't it? Pity about the ones who live here."

Thjalfi did not turn round. He looked for Thor instead.

Thor stood near the line with Roskva at his leg. He was not laughing. He was looking at Thjalfi, or at the mud round Thjalfi's feet, and his brows were drawn together.

Roskva was looking at Thjalfi too. Her mouth was shut, and her grey eyes went down to Hugi's feet and came back up to his face, and stayed there. He found he did not want to know what was in her face. He looked at his shoe.

"Three heats, I said," Utgard-Loki went on. "But perhaps you'd rather sit down. There's no shame in sitting down." He smiled round at the giants. "And there's a great deal of floor."

The laughter came down again, closer this time, as the near rows leaned in. Thjalfi bent and pulled his shoe back up over his heel. His fingers were still shaking. He tied the thong twice, hard, and stood.

"Again," he said.

He walked back to the line through the trodden mud. His own two prints were still there, dark and deep, just where he had left them. He set his feet down into them and waited for the word.