The Boy Who Raced Thought

Roskva's spindle was turning again. She had pulled a tuft of grey wool off a thornbush at the edge of the plain. Now she walked with the spindle dropping and spinning at her knee, drawing the wool out thin between finger and thumb.

Thjalfi had not seen her use it since home. He watched it for most of the morning. It was easier to watch than the road, which ran west, flat and pale, with nothing standing at the end of it.

Nobody said much. Thor walked in front with his thumbs hooked in his belts. Loki had run out of things to say somewhere around sunrise, and Thjalfi had never known that to happen before.

Near noon a mountain came up out of the land ahead.

It was grey and bare and wide at the foot, and it took the whole afternoon to get near. Something was wrong with its top. Square gaps had been cut out of the ridge, one after another, with straight sides and flat floors. They looked like the notches Geir cut in the doorpost to count the lambs.

The nearest gap could have held the whole end farm, house and byre and home field, with room left over for the goats to run. The next was deeper. The last went down so far into the mountain that its floor lay in shadow at midday. Old snow sat in the bottom of it, grey as ash.

Thjalfi counted them. He counted again, though there were only three, and something cold went down through him from the top of his head. Under the oak, three times in the dark, he had felt the ground jump against his back.

Thor had stopped in the road. He stood with his head tipped back and looked up at the mountain for a long time.

"That's mine," he said. "All three."

Loki shaded his eyes with one hand. "Well. Nobody can say you didn't hit something."

Thor's brows moved, but they stayed where they were. He lifted one arm and pointed a thick finger at the deepest gap, the one full of shadow. "That's the last one," he said. "I meant that one."

He walked on. After a while Thjalfi saw him rub his right knuckles with his left thumb. He did it slowly, the way a man rubs a sore place he is rather pleased with.

They slept that night against a boulder with nothing in their stomachs, and late the next day they came down to the sea.

The sea had gone out. Black rock ran down from where they stood, wet and shining and hung with weed, much further than Thjalfi remembered. Orm's boat lay where they had dragged it, on a shelf above the tide line. The water was a long walk below it now.

Loki looked at the water, and then at Thor. "Thirsty work," he said.

Thor said nothing.

The bared rock was crusted with mussels, blue-black and cold. Thjalfi had his hoof knife out before anyone told him to. He pried them off in handfuls and filled the bag, and it was the first thing to go into it since his mother's cheese.

They ate them raw on the rocks as the light went. Thor cracked the shells two at a time in his fist. Thjalfi ate his share and stopped, and noticed that he had stopped.

It took a night and a day to cross. Thor rowed, and the oars bent, and Thjalfi bailed at the bow, where Orm had said she leaked. She did. When the shingle of Orm's landing grated under them at last, old Orm was on his bucket beside the rollers. He looked as if he had not got up since they left.

"Did she leak?" he said.

"Yes," said Thjalfi.

Orm nodded, satisfied, and went back to his tar.

They walked up the valley through the short afternoon. Snow had come to the high screes while they were away, a thin white skin over the stones. The wind off it smelled of iron.

Halfway up, Thjalfi heard a bell. He knew it before he knew he was listening: the black nanny's bell, flat on one side where she had knocked it on a rock. His legs wanted to run. He kept them walking, behind Thor.

The byre door had its warped bottom board, and the last light lay along it. Geir stood in the doorway with a bucket in each hand.

He saw Thor first, and set the buckets down with great care. He looked at Thor, and past him at Loki, and at Roskva. Then he looked at the ground in front of Thjalfi's shoes, and stayed there.

"I've come for my goats," said Thor.

"They're fed," said Geir.

Thor stooped and looked into the byre. Two big shapes stood among the farm goats, fatter than when he had left them. At the back, one of them turned its head, and Thjalfi saw the split ear.

"So they are," said Thor.

Then Bera came out of the house with her sleeves pushed up and flour to the elbow. She went down on her knees in the mud in front of Roskva and held her by both shoulders, looking at her. Over Roskva's head she looked at Thjalfi, the same look as on the morning they left. Then she looked up at Thor.

"You've let them get thin," she said.

Geir made a sound in his throat. Thjalfi waited for the brows.

"There wasn't much," said Thor.

"There was plenty," said Loki. "We just didn't get any of it."

Bera's mouth went tight. She got up, wiped her hands on her apron, and went in to the fire.

She had been keeping back butter for Winter Nights. Thjalfi watched it go into the pot, all of it, and the porridge came out yellow and thick for once. The guest's bowl went to Thor and the second to Geir. The third went to Loki, because he was a guest too, though Bera gave it to him without looking at him. Then she held a bowl out toward Thjalfi.

He did not take it. He looked at Roskva.

Bera's hand stayed out a moment. Then she gave the bowl to Roskva, and filled one for herself, and only then the last, and held it out again. He took it.

"I told you that," she said quietly.

"You did."

It was the best thing he had ever eaten. He ate it slowly. Across the hearth Geir ate his without lifting his eyes from the bowl.

Roskva put her bowl down on the bench.

"Father," she said.

Geir looked up. Roskva did not often start things, and everyone at the hearth knew it. Even Thor stopped eating.

"There was a race," she said. "At the giants' castle, in front of all of them. Thjalfi ran it three times against the king's runner, and he lost every time."

Thjalfi's spoon stopped. His face went hot from the neck up.

"After the first one, the king said this." Roskva shut her eyes. "'Nobody has ever come through my gate quicker on his feet than this one. In all the years I've kept it.'"

It was the king's voice, light and dry, coming out of her small mouth in the middle of their own house. Bera's hand went to her throat.

"Roskva," said Thjalfi.

She kept her eyes shut. "And next morning, when he told us all his tricks, he said: 'I said nobody quicker had ever come through my gate. That was true as well. I don't spend true things carelessly.'" She opened them. "The runner was his thought. Nothing goes as fast as a thought. And it cost the king something to keep ahead of Thjalfi. He said that too. 'Not much. Something.'"

The fire ticked. Somewhere in the byre a goat shifted and its bell spoke once.

Geir was looking at his son. He looked for a long time, at his face and his hacked hair and the chipped tooth, and at the hands round the bowl.

"You always were," Geir said at last. His voice came out rough. "Quickest in the valley. I used to tell Orm so."

"Orm's deaf," said Bera.

"He heard that," said Geir.

He reached across the hearth and put his hand on the back of Thjalfi's neck. It was where he had put it at the byre door every summer morning, before he said go. He left it there. Thjalfi sat still under it and did not finish his porridge, and for once nobody minded.

Thor held his bowl out to Bera. She filled it.

The goats came out of the byre in the grey before sunrise, stamping in the frost. The chariot had waited in the yard all this time under a cover of hides. Thor pulled the hides off and harnessed the goats himself.

Thjalfi held the byre door. Nobody had told him to.

Tanngnjost came first and went straight to its place on the right of the pole. The lame one came after, swinging its stiff hind leg. As it drew level it turned its head and bit him, on the other thigh this time, and held on.

Thjalfi did not make a sound. When it let go he rubbed the place. Then he followed it across the yard to where Thor was buckling the straps.

"Can I have the care of that one?" he said.

Thor looked at him. He looked at the goat, which was watching Thjalfi with its yellow eyes and chewing on nothing, and at the wet mark on Thjalfi's trousers.

"It'll bite you," said Thor.

"Yes, all right."

Thor grunted. He finished the buckle and stood back. "Get in," he said. "You sit that side."

He meant the left, above the lame goat. Thjalfi climbed in and sat there, and Roskva climbed in after him.

Bera had put a cheese in the bag. Thjalfi did not ask where she had found it. She held Roskva once more, hard, with one finger on the brooch, and then she stepped back beside Geir. Her face was dry and white.

Geir stood in the byre door. He did not turn round this time. He stood facing them with his arms at his sides while Thor took up the reins. When Thjalfi looked back, his father was still looking at him.

Thor shook the reins. The goats leaned into the traces. The chariot went out of the yard and up the valley instead of down it, past the home field and the foot of the high scree.

Thjalfi had climbed that scree every morning for five summers. The goats took it at a run. The lame one ran on the slow side with its hitching stride, and somehow kept level.

At the top the valley ended in a lip of grey rock with nothing but sky beyond it.

The goats did not slow. The wheels went over the lip, and the ground fell away under them. The lame goat's stiff hind leg reached down for stone that was not there. It found the air instead, and pushed off it.

Far below, the end farm sat at the head of its valley, small as a thumbnail. A thread of smoke went up from the roof, and one dark shape stood in the byre door and did not move.