The Boy Who Raced Thought

The gate of Utgard stood wide open in the first grey light, and the king of Utgard walked them out through it himself.

He had fed them first. There had been porridge with honey stirred into it, in bowls as deep as water buckets, and new bread, and cold meat from the night before. Thjalfi ate this time. He tasted none of it. He ate until Roskva stopped watching him, and that took a long while.

Now his stomach was full and heavy, his shoes were tied, and the empty bag hung from his shoulder. The yard behind them was silent. Nobody had come to the hall door to see the guests off. The benches had been empty when they woke, and the fire pits swept cold.

Utgard-Loki walked beside Thor with his hands clasped behind his back. He had shortened his stride to theirs, and it seemed to cost him nothing. His rings caught the light whenever his fingers moved. He talked about the road: how it ran west across the plain, how flat it stayed, how far a man could see on it in fine weather. Thor said nothing at all.

The racecourse lay off to their right. Thjalfi kept his eyes on the road. He felt the course there all the same, along his whole right side, like the heat of a hearth on one cheek.

They walked until the wall behind them was a grey edge low on the sky, and still higher than any hill at home. There the king stopped, where a track turned off west through the stubby grass.

"Here's your road," he said. "Before you go, tell me something, Thor. How did you find your visit? Did you meet any man stronger than yourself?"

Thor looked at him for a long time. "I've been shamed," he said. "I won't pretend I haven't. And you'll call me small when I'm gone, and I don't like that."

"Then I'll tell you the truth," said Utgard-Loki. "Now that you're outside my walls, I can. And while I live and rule there, you'll never come inside them again." He smiled with all his teeth. "You'd never have come in at all if I'd known how strong you were. You came very near to ruining us."

Thjalfi looked up. Thor had said it on the course, under the stars. He's frightened of something, that king.

"I was the one you met in the forest," said Utgard-Loki.

Then his voice changed. It slowed and sank and grew comfortable, the voice of something very large lying down in the wood.

"'Did a leaf fall on me?'"

Roskva's hand found Thjalfi's sleeve. The voice was Skrymir's, every bit of it, and it had come out of the king's narrow mouth.

"I tied the sack with iron wire," the king went on, light and dry again. "You couldn't have found the end of it if you'd picked till spring."

Thjalfi rubbed the knuckle that had healed. He remembered the knot, colder than any rope ought to be, and his knife skating off it without a mark.

"As for your hammer," said Utgard-Loki to Thor, "I saw it coming every time. So I set a mountain between my head and the blow. You'll pass that mountain on your road west. Look at it when you do."

Thor's fist had closed on the short handle at his belt. He said nothing.

"Then your friend and his supper." The king turned his head politely toward Loki. "He eats well. I've never seen a man eat better. But Logi was wildfire, and fire eats the trough as soon as the meat."

Loki had gone very still. "Wildfire," he said.

"Wildfire."

"Then I'd like that told properly, at home." Loki's smile came back, though it was thin. "Loki ate level with a fire, all the way to the middle of the trough. There aren't many who could say as much."

Nobody answered him. Roskva's lips moved, and Thjalfi knew she was keeping it.

Utgard-Loki looked down at Thjalfi then, for the first time that morning. "And Hugi," he said, "was my thought."

Thjalfi heard the word. For a moment he could hear nothing after it.

"Nothing in any world runs as fast as thought," said the king. "You were racing it from the line."

Hugi's quiet chest. The frost lying whole under his shoes. The cold wind of him going past, and no breath in it at all. He's thin, Thjalfi had told his sister. Some people don't puff.

"I said nobody quicker had ever come through my gate," Utgard-Loki went on. "That was true as well. I don't spend true things carelessly. It's why I sent my thought against you, and not some fellow off the bench."

He tipped his head. "It cost me something, keeping ahead of you. Not much. Something."

Thjalfi's face went hot. He did not know which part had done it.

"The horn," said the king to Thor. "Its narrow end lay out in the sea. You couldn't see that, of course."

"When you come down to the shore, look how far the water has gone out. That was your drinking. Men will call it the ebb, after this."

"I saw the end of the horn."

It was Roskva. Her voice came out small and rough, as it had at the start line before the first heat.

Everyone looked at her. Thjalfi had not known she was going to speak, and from her face, neither had she.

"It never came up," she said. "However high he tipped it."

The king's eyes rested on her a moment. "It couldn't," he said.

Then he turned back to Thor, and his voice went lower. "The cat was the worst of it, for us. That was the Midgard Serpent, Thor."

"It lies in the sea round all the lands. When you lifted that one paw, its head and its tail scarcely touched the ground. You had raised it nearly to the sky." He stopped, and for once he did not smile. "Every man in my hall was frightened."

Under the sleeve, Roskva's fingers had gone hard as twigs.

"And Elli," said Utgard-Loki. "Elli is old age. There has never been anyone, and there never will be, whom old age doesn't bring down in the end, if he lives long enough to meet her. You stood a long while against her. She took you to one knee and no further."

Thor's jaw moved under his beard. "So," said the king. "Go home, and don't come back. If you do, I'll guard myself with the same tricks, or with others, and you'll find nothing here to strike."

Thor's brows came down.

They came all the way down, as they had over the goatskins on the farm floor, and Thjalfi's body remembered that morning before he did. Thor pulled the hammer from his belt. He swung it up and back over his shoulder, and his arm was already coming forward.

There was no one in front of him.

The road was there, and the grass, and Thor's own long shadow lying across both. The king was not. Thjalfi turned, because the light had changed on the back of his neck, and the wall was gone.

Where Utgard had stood there was only the plain. It ran away east, pale and flat, under a sky that came down to the ground on every side. The sun had been behind the wall all morning. Now it stood just clear of the land's rim and shone straight into their faces, low and cold and yellow.

No gate stood anywhere. No tower, no smoke, no stone. Frost lay white to the edge of the world, and the sun lay on the frost.

Thor stood with the hammer lifted. Slowly he brought it down to his side. There was nothing to hit, and he stood there a while longer, as though something might still come.

"Well," said Loki at last, quietly. "He's tidy. I'll give him that."

Thjalfi was already walking. He went off the road and out across the plain toward the place where the gate had been. Nobody called him back. The frost crunched under his shoes and his breath went ahead of him in clouds.

After a while he found the start line, scratched into the pale ground, the mud still frozen in its ridges. The castle had taken its giants with it. It had left their boot holes.

Past the scratch were his prints. They ran out east, dark in the white, the shoe marks of the first heat and the long bare strides of the others. The stick was gone. He looked for it at the far end, and the plain lay flat to the sky.

He walked beside his own marks until the long strides ended and the short ones turned back. Then he stood in the place where he had stopped.

It was a long way out. The road, and the two figures waiting on it, looked small from here. Short of halfway, he thought. Well short.

He thought of the byre door at home, with its warped bottom board and the old nanny's bell beyond it. At once he was there. He could see the light lying along the board. He had not taken a step.

He thought of the top of the high scree, where he beat the goats every morning. He was there too, before he had finished thinking it.

Thjalfi stood still on the plain with his hands at his sides.

Behind him the frost crunched in short quick steps. Roskva came up level and stood beside him in his marks. She was out of breath, and her braid had swung over her shoulder.

"You were right," he said. "About his feet."

"I know."

"I went out in the night. There's only mine. I stepped where he ran, and it broke." He kicked at the frost, and it broke now too. "You said so at the start, and I told you to go back to Thor."

"You did." She pushed the braid back. Then she shut her eyes to find the words, as she had on the floor of the hall.

"'Hugi was my thought,'" she said, in the king's light, dry voice. "'Nothing in any world runs as fast as thought. You were racing it from the line.'" She opened her eyes. "That's what he said. Exactly."

"I heard him."

"You heard the first bit. You didn't hear the rest. Your face went away."

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

"He turned before the stick," said Roskva. "I told you. I watched him do it." She looked down the white plain to where the stick had been. "A thought doesn't need to go all the way round a stick. It's there already."

Thjalfi looked at the empty place too. Then, without meaning to, he laughed. It came out short and cracked, and it hurt his chest.

"I raced a thought," he said.

"Three times."

"Three times." He wiped his nose on his wrist. "I'd have run a fourth."

"I know you would," said Roskva.

She took hold of his sleeve, not hard. They stood together where he had stopped. The sun climbed off the rim of the plain, and their two shadows ran back across the frost toward the start line.

When they came to the road again, Thor had put the hammer back on his belt. He stood with the whole empty east behind him and looked west for a long time, toward the sea and whatever lay in it. Loki waited a little way off, picking frost from his sleeve. Then Thor turned his head and saw them.

"Come on," he said. "We go back for my goats."