A Long Bowshot
The shoes were the trouble.
He looked down at them while the giants settled back into their rows. They had been his father's shoes before they were his. The leather had gone thin and grey at the toes, and the right one would not stay on however he tied it.
On the scree he never ran the steep places shod. Nobody did. You kicked your shoes off at the bottom and picked them up on the way down, and your feet learned the stones.
He bent and untied the thong he had just tied twice. His fingers were slow with cold. He pulled both shoes off and stood up in his own two prints with nothing between him and the ground.
The mud bit. He curled his toes into it and let it.
"Oh, good," said Loki. "Lighter by two shoes. That should make all the difference."
Thjalfi held the shoes out behind him without turning round. Somebody took them. The hands were small and cold, and he knew whose they were.
Utgard-Loki had come to stand at the end of the line with his ringed hands folded. He looked down at Thjalfi's bare feet, and his eyebrows went up. "Barefoot," he said. "Well. A man must lay himself out somehow."
"Does your runner take his off too?" asked Loki. "To keep things fair."
Utgard-Loki smiled at him. "Hugi? I've never known him to need to."
"No," said Loki. "I don't suppose you have."
Lay yourself out. Thjalfi turned the words over. He thought of the young billies going up the scree in spring, heads low, all their weight thrown out ahead of them. They had to keep running or fall on their noses. You leaned until your legs had no choice.
He set his feet. He let his weight tip forward over his toes, further than he liked, until he was nearly falling.
Hugi came and stood beside him. Thjalfi did not look down at Hugi's feet. He looked at the stick.
Under his breath he counted the goats. The old nanny first, then the black one with the bell, then the brindled one, then the twins, on down the eleven. Then the two in his father's byre, the big one and the lame one. He did not know what to call those two. He got to the lame one and stopped.
Utgard-Loki lifted one finger.
That was all, this time. Thjalfi had been waiting for a word, and he was a breath late, and Hugi was already gone.
He fell forward after him. It was different at once. Without the shoes the ground came up into him, every frozen ridge of it, and the frost was sharp as broken pots. He did not care.
His feet gripped. They did not slip on the heel or catch at the toe. Each stride he fell forward, and his legs came through and caught him, and he fell forward again.
The boots went by faster than before. He could feel that he was faster. He could feel it in the wind on his face, which had an edge on it now, and in the way the stick grew.
Hugi was in front of him from the first. He did not drift away, as he had last time. He simply was away, a long pale back going down the middle of the course, with the gap opening behind him every stride like a seam pulled apart.
Thjalfi leaned harder. He laid himself out until his chest burned and the stitch came back and went in deep. He did not look up at the noise. He ran at Hugi's back, and Hugi's back got smaller.
Far ahead, Hugi came to the stick and turned.
Thjalfi saw it plainly. The pale shape reached the white stick and swung round and came back. And Thjalfi was nowhere near it.
He knew that distance. At home, old Orm liked to shoot a mark on the shore below his landing, from the boat sheds to a black rock at the water's edge, and Thjalfi had run after every arrow to fetch it back. A long bowshot. He had run it a hundred times. It lay in front of him now, all of it, flat and pale and empty, between him and the place where Hugi had turned.
There was nothing on it. Only frost between the boots, and his own breath going out ahead of him in a cloud and tearing apart.
High above, the giants were laughing. It started near the stick and came rolling back along both rows toward the gate, a long way up, over his head.
Hugi went by him somewhere in all that empty ground. Thjalfi kept his eyes on the stick and did not feel any wind this time.
He reached the stick at last. The frost round it was broken in a ring of dark marks, his own, from the first heat. He put his hand on the white wood and swung round and made some more.
Then there was the whole course back again, and the laughing all down it. His feet hurt now. He let them.
He leaned and fell and caught himself, and fell again, down the long lane of boots toward the wall. A giant called something down to him that he could not make out. Somebody else whistled. He kept his head low and did not give them his face.
The ground went soft and dark. He was over the line.
He did not double over this time. He made himself stand, with his hands on his hips and his chest going in and out, and he looked for Hugi.
Hugi stood off to one side on white frost, gazing back down the course. His hands hung loose. His mouth was closed. He did not seem to have noticed that the race was over.
"Better," said Utgard-Loki. He was smiling round at the rows. "Much better. You run well, there's no denying it." He bent toward Thjalfi, and his voice dropped, kindly. "But I don't think you'll win it. Still. That's what a third heat is for." He looked over at his runner. "Hugi doesn't trouble himself to breathe hard. Do you, Hugi?"
Hugi did not answer. He went on looking down the course, pleasant and quiet, his chest barely moving.
The rows laughed. Thjalfi stared at the mud. His feet had left it full of small dark toe marks, all round where he stood.
"Lean any further," said Loki, "and you'll have to grow a nose to land on."
Thor stood where he had stood before, with his arms folded over his two belts, and said nothing at all. His brows had come lower.
Roskva came across the mud with the shoes. She did not hand them over. She crouched and set them side by side in front of his feet, toes to the line, and stayed down there looking at his feet instead.
"They're cut," she said.
"They're fine."
"They're bleeding a bit, Thjalfi."
"They're fine. They're better than in the shoes." He heard himself, sharp, and did not like it. He crouched down too, so that their faces were level, and pulled the right shoe to him and did not put it on. "What?"
"You were counting," she said.
"I always count."
"I know. I watched your mouth." She picked a bit of frozen mud off the toe of his shoe. "You stopped before the end."
He looked at her. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the shoe, and her face had that shut look it got before she said a thing she had been keeping.
"I don't know what they're called," he said. "His two. He never said."
"He did. Once."
"When?"
"Over the skins. At home, before the hammer." Her voice was low and plain, and she said it to the shoe. "He knelt down and said two words. You were behind me. I was nearer."
He remembered it. The big man on his knees by the hearth, saying something low and short, and then lifting the hammer. He had not caught it. He had been watching the bones.
"Tanngnjost," said Roskva. "And Tanngrisnir."
She said them carefully, the way she said the day's words over at night, every bit of each name in its place.
"Tanngrisnir is the lame one," she said. "The one with the split ear."
"Which one's Tanngnjost, then?"
"The other one. The one that isn't lame."
"That's not much to go on."
"It's all he said."
Thjalfi said the name under his breath. Tanngrisnir. It was a mouthful, rough at the start and quick at the end. It was strange to have a name for the grey-brown goat that had backed against the wall from him and bitten him in the byre. It made the goat more there, standing in its stall a whole sea away with its stiff leg.
"You never said," he told her.
"You never asked."
"I'd have asked if I'd known there was anything to ask."
"Well," said Roskva. "Now you know."
He had nothing to say to that. He put the shoe down. Tanngnjost, he thought, and Tanngrisnir, and fitted them onto the end of the count where the gap had been. Eleven and two. It came out right now.
"Did he watch?" he asked. "Thor. While I was running."
Roskva thought about it before she answered. She always did. "Yes. All the way out and all the way back."
"Was he angry?"
"His brows came down."
"All the way?"
"Halfway."
Thjalfi knew what all the way looked like. He had seen it at home, by the hearth, with his father on his knees in the ashes. Halfway was bad enough.
"He's angry I lost," he said.
Roskva opened her mouth and shut it again. Her hand went to the spindle in her belt and turned it once.
"Maybe," she said.
"I was quicker," he said. "This time. I know I was quicker."
"You were." She said it at once, plainly. "You passed the giant with the patched boots sooner. Last time you passed him after Hugi turned. This time it was before. I counted."
"And Hugi?"
She did not answer that. She picked at the shoe again.
"So next time." He stood up. His feet stung on the mud and he ignored them. "Next time I'll lean more. I'll go off the finger. I won't wait for a word."
"Put your shoes on for it," said Roskva.
"No. They slow me. You saw."
"Thjalfi."
"I'm not wearing them."
She looked down at his feet in the mud, and then at his face, and did not argue. She had never once won an argument with him about his feet.
Roskva stood up too. She was looking past him now, down the long course, at the far white stick, so small again it might have been a pin.
Then she looked round. Utgard-Loki had his back to them, talking up at the rows. Hugi stood on his frost, looking at nothing.
Roskva took hold of Thjalfi's sleeve, as she had before the first heat, and pulled until his ear was by her mouth.
"Thjalfi," she said. "He turned before the stick. I watched."