Every Bone
Thjalfi had not slept at all, and by the time the smoke hole turned grey he had decided the split did not show.
He had lain on his side all night, looking. From the platform the thigh bone was a pale shape near the edge of the nearer skin, a little apart from the rest. It looked like every other bone there. He pushed his tongue into the gap in his front teeth, where one had chipped on a rock two summers ago, and told himself so again.
Across the hearth, Roskva lay with her back to him. She had not moved since she spoke. He could not tell whether she was asleep, and he was not going to ask.
The big man woke all at once. One moment he was snoring at the roof beams. The next he was sitting up with his feet on the floor and the bench groaning under him. He scratched his beard with both hands. Then he picked up the hammer and went and stood over the skins.
Thjalfi pulled his knees up under the blanket. The scabs on his shins cracked.
The slim man was already sitting on the edge of the guest platform with his boots on. He looked at the skins, and then, for a moment, at Thjalfi, and then he smiled at nothing.
Geir woke and sat up, rubbing his face. Bera woke. Roskva turned over and looked straight across the embers at her brother, and said nothing at all.
The big man knelt by the skins. He said two words under his breath, low and short, the way a man calls his own animals in off a hill. Thjalfi could not make them out. Then the big man lifted the hammer by its short handle and held it out over the bones, and kept it there.
"What's he doing?" Geir whispered.
"Hush," said Bera.
Thjalfi looked at the thigh bone by the edge of the skin. He could still get down. He could cross the floor before anyone stopped him and pick up the two halves. Then he would be standing in front of everyone, holding them, and he did not know what he would do next. He stayed where he was.
For a long moment nothing happened. Thjalfi let his breath go.
Then the nearer skin twitched at one edge, like a dog's flank when a fly lands on it.
The bones on it began to sink. They went down into the hide slowly and steadily, like stones dropped into deep snow, until there was nothing left on top. The skin humped up off the floor. It grew rounder, filling from the inside like a sack when the grain is poured in. A leg kicked out from under it, then another, and the whole thing rolled over, hair side up, grey-brown and shaggy.
A goat got to its feet in the middle of the longhouse floor. It shook itself from its horns to its tail. Then it sneezed.
Beside it the second skin was already filling. Its goat came up faster, as if it had somewhere to be, and stood blinking at the fire with straw caught in its beard. It had a split ear.
Every winter, when the dark came early, Geir told the old tales by the hearth. One man walked through more of them than anyone else. He drove a chariot pulled by two goats, he ate more than any ten men, and he carried a hammer with a handle too short for its head.
Thjalfi had heard about him on every winter night he could remember. He had never once thought of that man eating supper in their house. He had never pictured him snoring at their roof, or throwing bones over his shoulder onto a goatskin without looking.
Thjalfi sat with both hands flat on his blanket. Last night he had eaten that goat. He could still taste it. Now it was standing by the hearth, and it was looking at him.
The split-eared goat took a step toward its twin. Its left hind leg came down and folded under it. It caught itself on three legs and stood there with the fourth held up off the floor, the hoof just touching the earth.
The big man lowered the hammer.
He looked at the leg. Then he put out one hand and ran it down the goat's side, from the hip to the hock, and the goat stood for him, trembling. His thumb stopped halfway down the thigh and pressed.
"This leg's been broken," he said. "Right through." He looked up, along the platforms, at each of them in turn. "Somebody in this house didn't keep to what I said."
His brows came down.
They came down slowly, heavy and red-brown, until his eyes were in shadow under them. His fist closed on the hammer's handle. Thjalfi watched the knuckles go white along it, one after another, and the handle was so short that his fist covered all of it.
Geir made a small sound in his throat. He was staring at the hammer.
"Mjolnir," he whispered. "That's Mjolnir. Then you're..."
He did not finish. He went down off the bench onto his knees on the earth floor, as if his legs had been cut from under him, and he stayed there.
Thjalfi knew the rest of the name. Everyone in Steinsdal knew it. Thor.
Then everybody was talking at once. Bera was on her knees beside Geir, and she had pulled Roskva down with her. Geir was holding out both his hands, empty. Thjalfi had never seen his father kneel to anyone.
"Take anything," he said. "The cows. The goats, all eleven of them, and the ox. Take the house. We didn't know. We didn't know who you were. Only, please."
"Please," said Bera.
Thor said nothing. He knelt by his goats with the hammer in his fist, and the look on his face was a thing Thjalfi felt in his stomach. Geir's voice went thin and stopped. He could not look at that face, and he could not look away from it either.
"He usually lets go of it in the end," the slim man remarked, to nobody. "Usually."
Thjalfi was on his feet. He did not remember deciding to stand. His blanket had fallen off and the floor was cold, and he was already speaking.
"It was me."
Every face in the house turned. Even the goats looked.
"I split it," he said. "Last night, with my knife. For the marrow." His voice came out wrong, too high, and he pushed it down. "Then I put it back. Both halves, right where it was. You said every bone on the skins, and they were all on the skins. You never said they had to be..."
He heard it as he said it. Last night, in the dark, it had seemed so clever. Now, in the grey light, with the goat standing on three legs, it sounded like the last bowl, and the spoon, and every other way round that he had ever found.
He stopped.
"It was me," he said again.
Roskva was on her knees beside their mother. She was looking up at him, and her mouth was shut very tight.
"Why?" said Thor.
Thjalfi's hands found the hem of his tunic and held on to it. "I was hungry."
"You'd had a bowl. You'd had four bones. I watched you suck them."
"I'm always hungry," Thjalfi said. It was true, and it did not help, and he knew it.
Thor looked at him for a long while. Then he looked at Geir on the floor, and at Bera's shaking hands. He looked at the row of empty bowls on the hearthstone where the guest's bowl stood first.
His brows lifted again. It happened slowly, and the anger went out of his hands last of all. His fingers opened on the handle one at a time. The white left his knuckles. He set the hammer down across his knees and breathed out through his nose, a long breath, like a bull's in a cold byre.
"Get up," he told Geir. "I don't want your cows."
Geir did not get up. "Then what? What will you have?"
Thor scratched his beard and looked at the lame goat. It had put its nose against its twin's neck and was standing very still.
"Somebody has to put it right," he said. "You can't put this right with a cow." He jerked his chin at Thjalfi. "The boy comes with me. He serves me. And the girl goes with him."
"Not her," Thjalfi said. It came out fast, before he could stop it. "She didn't do anything. She only saw."
Thor's eyes went to Roskva. "She saw?"
Roskva said nothing. She did not look away from him either.
"Saw, and kept it to herself," said Thor. "Both of them, then."
"Honest," said the slim man, as though he had found a coin in the road. "Well. The boy's honest. You don't often see that in a thief."
Nobody laughed. Bera's hand closed on Roskva's shoulder and stayed there. Geir looked at his wife, and then at the hearth, and at the bowls, and at the door to the byre, where the eleven goats were stamping for their hay. He looked at everything in the house except his son. Then he bent his head, and said two words to the floor.
"Take them."
The split-eared goat stood by the hearth on three legs. Thjalfi put his hand out to it, because his hand always went to goats. It laid its ears flat, and hitched backward across the earth floor, away from him, until its rump met the wall.