The Boy Who Raced Thought

The benches creaked as the giants sat down again, one after another, all the way along both walls. It took a long time. Roskva stood in the rushes beside Thor's leg and listened to the hall fill back up. Her hand found the spindle in her belt and held on to it.

Thor stood before the high seat with his feet planted apart. Loki had drifted to the foot of it, beside his own half of the trough. He leaned there with his arms folded, as though the trough belonged to him.

Thjalfi went to neither of them. He walked to the clean end of the trough and sat down on the floor. He put his back against the planks and his shoes in his lap.

So he had taken the floor after all. Utgard-Loki had offered it to him twice. Roskva wished she had not thought of that.

The king did not get up this time. He settled deeper into the high seat and turned his cup once in his long fingers. Then he looked down the whole length of his own legs at Thor.

"You'll drink, you said. Good. My men drink from a horn in this hall." He lifted a finger. "Bring it."

A giant came out from behind the high seat with the horn held in both arms. It was longer than Roskva was tall, longer than Thjalfi, dark brown and polished smooth by hands. The wide end had a rim of pale metal. The narrow end curved back over the giant's shoulder and down into the shadow behind the high seat. She could not see where it finished.

"A good drinker empties it in one pull," said Utgard-Loki. "Some of my men take two. There's nobody here so poor at it that he can't finish in three."

"I'd have liked rules that clear for the eating," said Loki.

Thor took the horn by the rim. The ale inside was dark and smelled of honey and smoke, and it came right to the top. He set his mouth to it, tipped his head back, and drank.

Roskva watched his throat. At the farm she had seen him eat a whole goat and start on the second. His throat worked and worked, and his beard went dark and wet, and still he drank. At last he lowered the horn, breathing hard through his nose, and looked into it.

The ale had gone down by the width of a finger.

"Well drunk," said Utgard-Loki pleasantly. "Though if anyone had told me Thor could manage no more than that in one pull, I'd not have believed them. Still. You'll finish it in the second, I expect."

Thor said nothing. He took a breath and lifted the horn again.

This time Roskva did not watch his throat. Outside she had watched mouths, and then feet. Now she watched the narrow end of the horn.

Thor's head went back until his beard pointed at the roof, and the wide end rose with it. A horn went up at one end and down at the other; she had drunk whey from one every day of her life. This one did not. Its narrow end stayed exactly where it was, low in the dark behind the high seat, and did not lift at all.

When Thor lowered the horn, the ale had gone down far enough that a person could have carried it across the hall without spilling.

"Hm," said Utgard-Loki. "You're leaving yourself rather a lot for the third." Along the benches the giants laughed, high up and comfortable.

Thor drank the third time until his face went dark red above his beard. Roskva held her breath to see how long he could go, and had to let it out, and he was still drinking. When he brought the horn down, the ale was a hand's width below the rim. He looked at it for a moment. Then he pushed it back at the cupbearer and would not take it again.

"So," said Utgard-Loki. "It's plain you aren't the man we'd been told of."

Roskva said Loki's words over inside her mouth, without sound. Giants can show your eye what isn't there, and hide what is. She did not know what was hidden at the end of that horn. She only knew it had never come up.

She looked at Thjalfi. He was holding his shoes so tightly that the old leather had creased across the toes. He was watching Thor, and his face had gone pale under the dirt.

"Perhaps a smaller game," said Utgard-Loki. "Our boys here lift my cat off the floor. It's next to nothing. I'd never think of asking it of Thor, except that now I've seen what Thor can do."

"Bring it," said Thor.

Nobody brought it. The cat came out from under the high seat on its own. It was grey from nose to tail and big for a cat, the size of a yearling goat. It sat down in the rushes in front of Thor and blinked up at him.

Thor bent, put one hand under its belly, and lifted.

The cat's back rose with his hand. Its feet stayed where they were. He lifted higher, and the back went up and up with the grey fur drawn long over it. Soon the cat stood in an arch taller than Roskva, then taller than Thor's own belt. All four feet stayed in the rushes.

Thor straightened his arm as high as it would reach. He rose onto his toes. He stretched until his whole body shook.

One front paw left the floor. That was all.

Roskva watched the rushes under the other three. At home, when a cat that size slept on a heap of rushes, it left a soft hollow. Under this cat the rushes were crushed flat and split along their length. The earth showed through in three round marks, packed hard. Thor's boots, with all of Thor standing in them, had not pressed the floor like that.

Thor let go. The cat came down, shook itself, and walked back under the high seat with its tail up.

For a breath the hall was silent. Then the benches laughed, louder than they had laughed at the race.

Thor's brows came down. They came all the way down this time, as far as they had come over the skins on the farm floor. His eyes were only shadow. Roskva's hand tightened on her spindle.

"Call me small, then," Thor said. "Send someone to wrestle me. I'm angry now."

Utgard-Loki let his gaze travel slowly along one bench and back along the other. "I don't see a man in here who wouldn't think it beneath him." He turned his cup. "But there's Elli. Call Elli, my old foster-mother. She's put men on the floor who looked a good deal stronger to me than Thor does. Let him try her."

Roskva kept the words. Foster-mother. Farms did that sometimes: sent a baby to be brought up in another house, by a woman who was not its mother. So somebody had once held the king when he was small, and fed him, and wiped his face. It was very hard to picture.

Elli came in through a low door behind the benches. She was small for a giant, hardly taller than Thor, and her back was bent like a bough under snow. Her hair was thin and white. She walked slowly, and her hands hung at her sides, brown and knotted as old roots. The giants went quiet to let her pass.

Roskva looked at Thjalfi again. He had stopped watching Thor. He was looking at the rushes between his bare feet.

She left Thor's leg. Thor did not notice. She crossed the floor, stepped over a bone Loki had thrown there, and sat down beside her brother with her back against the trough. The planks were cold and greasy through her dress.

Thjalfi did not look up. "It's me," he said. "They think he's nothing because of me. I'm his, and I lost."

Out in the middle of the floor Thor and the old woman took hold of each other.

Roskva shut her eyes to find the words. Then she said them in the king's own light, dry voice, every word in its place.

"'Nobody has ever come through my gate quicker on his feet than this one. In all the years I've kept it.'"

Thjalfi's head came up.

"That's what he said," she told him. "After the first heat. Those words exactly."

"He was laughing at me."

"He wasn't. The giants laughed. He said it over your head to all of them, and he didn't laugh, and he doesn't like us." She heard her own voice going on and let it. "He wouldn't say it unless it was true. You're the quickest anyone's ever seen come here. Something's wrong with that runner. I don't know what. But you're the quickest."

Out on the floor the rushes hissed. Thor had flung his weight at the old woman, and she had not moved. He gripped harder, and she only stood steadier, her bent back bending no further. He heaved until the iron plates of his gloves ground together.

On the benches nobody laughed now. The giants leaned forward with their elbows on their knees and watched, the way men at home watched two rams with their horns locked, waiting to see which would give. Loki had come away from the trough. He stood with one hand at his mouth, and for once he had nothing to say.

Elli's feet had not shifted in the rushes. Thor's had. He was being turned, slowly, a little at a time, and the cords stood out in his neck. The old woman's face never changed. Then she let go with one knotted hand, hooked it behind his knee, and pulled.

Thjalfi stared at his sister. "That's the most you've said since home."

"Then listen to it," said Roskva.

Thor went down on one knee in the rushes. The thump of it came through the floor and into Roskva's back, and Thjalfi's hand closed round her wrist and stayed there.

"Enough," said Utgard-Loki. He raised one hand from the arm of the high seat, and Elli let go at once. "That'll do. You've wrestled my foster-mother, Thor, and there's no one left in this hall for you to try."

Thor got up slowly. He did not look at anyone. Elli patted his arm once, as a grandmother pats a boy who has done his best. Then she went back out through the low door, no faster than she had come in. She did not seem tired at all.

"Sit, all of you," said Utgard-Loki. "Room on the benches for the guests. There's meat coming, and you're under my roof tonight." He looked down at them over the rim of his cup and smiled with all his teeth. "And at first light, I'll walk you out to the road myself."