Thor's Bowls
Thor's bowl weighed about as much as a yearling kid, and it was harder to carry, because a kid at least holds on.
Thjalfi had it on his back in a rope sling a servant had knotted for him in the dark. The bowl's mouth lay against his spine, and its round bottom stuck out behind him like a second, larger back. Every time he turned, it turned a little later. He had already knocked it against the stall doorpost and against Roskva.
He had picked it up off the straw before she was awake enough to watch him do it. Neither of them had said anything about that.
The lame goat had its salve first, by lantern light. It stood for it with one ear back, and when he laid its hay on the flags and stepped away, it ate. He told it he would be back by dark. It did not seem to care.
Sif saw them out of the yard with her keys in her fist. "Follow the road to the wall," she said. "There's only the one road. Don't get lost."
"We don't," said Roskva.
"Everyone says that," said Sif, and went in.
The road ran out of Thrudheim between drifts higher than Thjalfi's head. Sledges had packed it hard, and in the cold of the morning it rang under their shoes. When the sun came up, their shadows lay out on the snow beside them: two small people with a great round hump each, like a pair of snails going visiting.
Roskva's braid had got caught under her rope. She kept trying to free it without stopping. Thjalfi watched her try twice, then reached over and pulled it out for her.
"I had it," she said.
"You didn't."
That was most of what they said for a while. He kept waiting for her to start again. Sulking, she had said, and water carried like an old man, and all the rest of it. She had every word, and he knew she would keep them until they were wanted. But she only walked, with her hands holding the rope at her shoulders, since there was no spindle for them to go to.
By the middle of the morning the drifts fell away and the land opened. The road climbed a long white rise. From the top of it Thjalfi could see the road going down the far side, straight and pale, for longer than the whole valley at home. At the bottom lay a line of dark across the snow. It might have been a forest, except that it was too even for one.
"That's the wall," said Roskva.
Thjalfi did not answer. He was looking at the slope.
Many sledges had packed it, and the wind had polished it until it shone. It went down and down without a bend or a stone in it. A goat would have gone down it at a run. He had gone down worse every summer evening of his life, with the whole herd bawling round his legs.
His legs went before he did.
He was three strides down before he knew it, and then there was no stopping, because the slope did not want him to stop. The bowl banged on his back.
Cold came into his mouth and into the backs of his eyes. His shoes skidded and found the snow again, and his arms went out on their own, and the road came up under him faster than he could think about it. He did not think about it. For two months he had done nothing without thinking first, and now he did not think at all.
No stick stood at the bottom. Nobody lined the sides, and nobody was going to win.
Where the slope flattened he ran out across the level on legs that were still going downhill, and went over in the snow with the bowl on top of him like a lid.
He lay there. Snow was in his collar and up both sleeves, and one shoe had come half off. The sky was high and pale.
Something was coming up out of his chest, and for a moment he did not know what it was. Then it was out, and he was laughing. He laughed until his ribs hurt and the bowl rocked on his stomach. When he could, he rolled out from under it and sat up.
Roskva was coming down the slope at a walk, carefully, her bowl on her back and her eyes on him the whole way. She stopped beside him and looked at the long dark streak he had made in the snow, and then at his face.
She said nothing at all. She held out a hand.
Her fingers were cold and strong. He let her pull him up and pushed his shoe back on, and they walked the rest of the way to the wall with snow melting down his neck. Once, without meaning to, he laughed again. Roskva kept her eyes on the road, but the corner of her mouth went in.
The wall of Asgard was built of grey stones fitted so close that the frost had nowhere to grip. It ran away on either side farther than he could see. After Utgard, he had been ready to bend his head back until his neck hurt. He only had to tip it up a little. A wall a person could see the top of was a great comfort.
The gate stood open. Its two leaves were timber banded with iron, each wide enough to drive a hay sledge through. The man leaning on one of them looked at the bowls before he looked at the children.
"Thor's?" he said.
"Thor's," said Thjalfi.
"Then you're late." He pointed with his chin.
Inside, paths had been dug through the snow between hall after hall, so deep that walking along them showed you nothing but walls of white and a strip of sky. The path the gatekeeper had pointed down ended at the biggest hall of all.
Its door was the first thing Thjalfi saw, and for a while it was the only thing. Thor could have walked through it with Thjalfi on his shoulders and Roskva on Thjalfi's, and not knocked anybody's head. Above it lay a single beam of black timber, worn pale along the middle where the weather had worked at it.
Then they were inside, and he forgot the door.
The hall went on. Benches ran down both sides of it as long as a hay field, with tables in front of them, and the far end was dim with the smoke of fires only just lit. Servants moved everywhere, spreading straw and laying boards, small at that distance as beetles on a floor. A boy about Thjalfi's size was walking along the top of one table, setting out cups. He was a long time getting anywhere.
Thjalfi stood with the bowl on his back and his mouth open. The cold of the doorway went past him into all that warmth.
"You," said a voice. "With Thor's bowls. Here."
The woman who said it was old and short and wide, with a bunch of wooden tally sticks hanging from her belt where Sif wore her keys. She looked at the bowls, and then at Thjalfi's wet collar. She did not seem to think much of any of them.
"Down," she said.
They set the bowls down. Inside one of them, the lame goat's snort had dried into a pale ring. The old woman saw it. She licked her thumb and rubbed it out, and her mouth went thin, but she let it go.
She led them up the whole length of the hall, and it took a long time. At the far end, where the benches stopped, a high seat stood empty against the wall. Near it on the board was a bare place, with nothing set in it at all.
"There," she said.
Thjalfi and Roskva lifted the first bowl between them and set it in the bare place, and then the second beside it. They fitted exactly, as though the board had been waiting for them all winter.
The old woman stood back and looked at them with her hands on her hips, the way Bera looked at a finished length of cloth.
"Thor's," she said again, and this time it was not a question. "Odin's son, and Jord's. And Jord is the Earth herself, if nobody's told you. That's who drinks out of these." She pointed a tally stick at Thjalfi. "And you carried them here on your back."
"Yes," said Thjalfi.
"Well. They got here."
He looked at the bowls in their place at the head of the gods' hall. That morning a goat had put its nose in one of them, and since then he had fallen down a hill under it. Neither thing seemed to have done it any harm. The Earth's son would drink from it and never know.
The old woman had already turned to Roskva. "Steady hands?"
Roskva held them out. They did not shake. The woman grunted and pushed a jug into them, so big that Roskva had to hug it to her chest.
"Servers' door's behind you," the woman said. "There's a passage runs the length of the hall behind the wall. You go where I send you, and you don't spill."
Roskva went. At the low door in the side wall she looked back once over the jug at Thjalfi. Then she ducked through it and was gone.
"And you," said the old woman. "What are you good for?"
He thought of saying fetching. He thought of saying goats.
"I can run," he said. It came out easily.
She looked at the snow dripping off his collar onto her clean straw. "So I see. Go up on the wall over the gate, then, and watch the road. The old one rode out this morning on his grey, and the feast waits till he's home. When you see him coming, you come and tell me. Run, if you like."
"How will I know him?"
She very nearly smiled. "You'll know."
Stone steps went up the inside of the wall beside the gate. At the top the walk was wide enough for a cart, with a low parapet on the outer side, and the wind came over it straight off the snow. Thjalfi stood with his hands under his arms and looked out.
The white land lay open to the edge of the sky. He could see the long rise he had come over and the slope below it. Down the slope ran a thin dark mark no bigger than a scratch on a board. It took him a moment to know it for his own.
He watched the road a long time. The sun went round behind him, and the shadow of the wall crept out across the snow. His feet went numb in his shoes, and he stamped them, and thought about the goat, and whether anyone would think to lay its hay down and step back.
Then, far out, where the road was only a guess, something moved.
Two dark specks were coming across the white land, and they were not on the road at all. Snow went up behind them in a long trailing smoke. The first had something on his head that caught the low sun and threw it back in a hard bright spark. The second was bigger, much bigger, and the horse under him had a mane the light lit up like straw on fire.
They grew while he watched. They were coming straight at the gate, and neither of them was slowing down.