The Boy Who Raced Thought

"You're late," said the woman in the doorway, "and you've brought children."

The chariot had come down out of the dusk into a yard of trodden snow, and the goats were still blowing. Thjalfi's legs had gone stiff from sitting. He climbed down over the wheel and stood holding the side, because the ground still seemed to tip.

Behind the woman a hall ran away into the dark. It did not end where a hall should. Roof after roof went back from the doorway, high ones and low ones, ridge behind ridge. Smoke went up from more holes than he could count before the light failed. It looked like a whole valley of farms that someone had pushed together and roofed over.

"Is this Asgard?" he asked.

Thor was stretching his back. "Thrudheim," he said. "Mine."

The woman came down the step. She was tall and quick, with a ring of keys at her belt that clinked when she moved. Her hair was the yellow of barley on the last day before cutting, and she wore it in one thick braid wound round and round her head. She looked at Thjalfi, and at Roskva, and at the lame goat standing hip-shot in the traces.

"Sif," Thor said to his wife, "these are the farm's. For the goat."

Thjalfi had heard her name in his father's winter tales, but in the tales she had only been beautiful. Nobody had said she carried keys.

"What happened to the goat?" said Sif.

"It was supper."

"And you've brought me the supper's children." She said it to Thor, but she was still looking at Roskva. "Can you spin?"

Roskva took the spindle out of her belt and held it up.

"Kitchens, then. We're short-handed at Winter Nights, and there are three hearths in there that never go out." Sif turned to Thjalfi. "And you?"

"I'm quick," said Thjalfi.

"Good. Wood and water for the kitchens. Somebody has to keep three fires fed, and I'm tired of it being me."

Loki came round the back of the chariot, brushing snow off his knees. "I'll find my own bed," he said pleasantly to nobody, and went in past Sif, and was gone into the house as if he had always lived there.

Thjalfi did not move. The lame goat had turned its head in the traces. It was watching him with its yellow eyes.

"I asked for the goats," he said.

Sif's brows went up. She looked at Thor.

A man had come out of the house with a loaf, and Thor had already torn the end off it. He chewed, and swallowed, and looked down at Thjalfi.

"He asked," said Thor. "It bit him."

Sif looked at the wet marks on both of Thjalfi's trouser legs. Something moved at the corner of her mouth and was put away again.

"Then he can have the stall," she said. "East end. Bring them through. The yard way's drifted shut since you left, and I'm not having it dug for two goats. Don't get lost. I don't send anyone looking."

Thjalfi unbuckled the traces himself. His fingers were stupid with cold, and the straps were made for Thor's hands, but he managed. When the lame goat stepped clear of the pole he saw why it had been swinging its leg so wide on the last of the run. The strap had rubbed the stiff hind leg above the hock, all the way down the sky. The hair there was worn off in a patch the size of his palm, and the skin underneath was red and raw.

He took Tanngnjost by the halter. The lame one would not be led, but it would follow its twin, and it did, hitching along behind with its head low.

Sif went in through the doorway without waiting, and her keys went with her.

The house swallowed them. First came a long passage floored with flat stones, so low that Thor would have had to stoop in it. Then the roof leaped away overhead, and they were in a room whose beams were lost in smoke. A fire burned in it on a long hearth, and nobody was sitting at it.

Beyond that came a door, and another passage, this one of planks that boomed under the goats' hooves. Doors opened off it on both sides. Through one he saw cloaks hanging on pegs, each cloak big enough to roof a byre. Through another, nothing at all, only a dark room that gave back the sound of their feet a moment late.

Roskva walked beside him with her mouth moving. He knew what she was doing. She was counting.

The passage turned, and the roof dropped, and rose again. They crossed a room where two women were folding linen on a bench as long as Orm's boat. They did not look up. A dog asleep by a hearth lifted its head, saw the goats, and thought better of it.

At the second turning Sif put a hand on Roskva's shoulder and steered her through a doorway full of heat and noise. Thjalfi had a glimpse of three fires in a row, pots hanging over every one, and somebody shouting about onions. Then Roskva was gone into it, spindle and braid and all, and Sif was walking on.

He hurried after. At the next turning he lost the jingle of the keys. For a moment there were three doorways and no Sif in any of them. He stood in the passage holding a god's goat by the halter, in a god's house, and the cold of the stones came up through his shoes.

Then Tanngnjost pulled. It put its head down and walked through the left-hand doorway as if it had been waiting all journey to do it. The lame one hitched after it, and Thjalfi went where he was taken.

Warm air met him, thick with goat and the dusty sweetness of a full rack. He came out of the passage into the hall's east end, and the house simply turned into a byre.

The stall was built right into the wall of Bilskirnir. The floor was flagged and deep in straw. A long hay rack ran along one side, and a stone trough stood under a spout where water came in, so cold it smoked.

The back wall was warm to the touch. On the other side of it, he found later, stood the bread oven, and the goats slept against it all winter. A peg was driven into the doorpost at the height of his head. A lamp burned on a shelf above it.

Sif was standing in the straw with her arms folded.

"Thor's goats sleep warm," she said. "He likes them fat. The rack's filled from the loft above you. There's a ladder. Water comes on its own." She looked at the lame goat, already backing itself into the far corner. "That one doesn't like anybody but him."

Then she was gone, and the keys went away down the passage, and he was alone with them.

Tanngnjost went straight to the rack and began to eat. The lame one stayed in its corner. It stood with its stiff leg cocked off the ground and watched him over its shoulder.

Thjalfi pulled a handful of clean straw from the bedding and soaked it in the trough. The water bit his fingers. He went slowly across the stall, the way he would go up to a nanny who had just kidded on the scree, not looking at her, talking about nothing.

"It's warm," he told the goat. "Feel that wall. You never had a wall like that at our place."

The goat turned its horns toward him. He stopped. After a while it turned them away again, and he crouched and wiped the mud off the stiff leg, below the raw place, with the wet straw. The leg trembled. The goat let him do it.

He sat back on his heels. His hands were shaking, and he felt pleased with himself all the way down to his shoes.

Roskva came at full dark. She had flour on her face and bread in her apron, and in both hands a little clay crock with a wooden lid.

"Cook sent this," she said. "It's sheep fat with something green in it. They put it on the horses' harness rubs." She held out the bread first. "Two hundred and some."

"Rooms?"

"Then a woman told me to stop counting and peel onions. I lost it somewhere past two hundred." She looked round the stall, at the warm wall and the lamp. "This is the best room so far."

He took the crock and the bread. He ate the bread at once, standing up.

Roskva looked at the lame goat in its corner. It had come a step toward her when she came in. It was looking at her apron.

"It'll stand for me," she said. "If you want. I could hold its head."

He knew it would. It had taken food from her hand since the first morning. It had never taken anything from his but a mouthful of trouser.

"No," he said. "Go on back. They'll be shouting for you."

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she went, and he heard her small quick steps going away down the passage, counting again under her breath.

He took the lid off the crock. The salve was grey and soft and smelled of mutton and crushed leaves. He scooped some onto two fingers and went across the straw, slowly, talking.

The goat let him crouch. It let him lean in. It stood still while he reached past the hock toward the red patch. The moment his fingers touched it, the stiff leg came back like a gate swinging shut in a wind.

It caught him across the shin. He went over backwards into the straw. The crock flew out of his other hand and hit the flags and rolled. The salve went out of it in a long grey smear through the bedding.

For a while he lay where he was. His shin hurt with a deep, sick ache that would be a bruise by morning, the size of a hen's egg and then bigger. Above him the lamp burned steadily on its shelf. Tanngnjost went on eating.

When he sat up, the lame goat was back in its corner, chewing nothing, looking at him.

"It'll bite you," Thor had said. Nobody had said anything about kicking.

He got onto his knees. He found the crock under the hay rack, uncracked. With the flat of his hoof knife he scraped the salve back into it, off the flags and out of the bedding, straw and all. It came to less than half. He pressed the lid down and hung the crock by its cord on the peg by the door, where he would find it.

Then he sat down in the straw by the doorway, just out of reach, with his sore leg out in front of him.

He stayed there until the goat lay down. It took a long time. It went down slowly, front first, then folded the good hind leg under it and left the stiff one sticking straight out into the straw, the raw side up. Thjalfi watched how it lay. He watched which side it kept toward the wall, and how its ear flicked when he moved.

The lamp was getting low. Somewhere far off in the house a door banged, and then it was quiet.

Thjalfi got up, and rubbed his shin, and looked at the goat. It looked back.

"Tomorrow," he told it. "And the day after that."