The Boy Who Raced Thought

The first thing Roskva heard from the passage was the cups stopping.

All afternoon the hall had been full of small noises: cups knocked down on boards, a bench dragged, the boy on the table top whistling until someone told him not to. Now there was only the fire, and one set of feet coming slowly up the floor. Each step went through the planks and into the jug she held against her ribs.

"Out," said the hall-keeper at the low door. "Everybody with a jug. Pour when you're told, don't spill, and don't stare."

"Where's my brother?" said Roskva.

"By the door, where I put him, if he's got any sense." The old woman looked at the jug. "You've the biggest. Keep out from under his feet."

The passage emptied ahead of her. Roskva went last, because her jug was the biggest and would only go through the door slowly, and then she was in the hall and she stared.

It had filled while she was in the passage. Torches burned in iron rings down both walls, and the long fires in the middle had been built up until the air above them shook. The people of Asgard sat along the benches, big men and tall women with their sleeves pushed up for eating, more of them than lived in all of Steinsdal.

The boards in front of them were heaped with sides of pork, the crackling split and shining, and with salmon laid out whole on planks. There were cheeses as big as millstones and bread torn open and still smoking. Somebody had thrown a rib to the dogs under the table, and the dogs had left it lying. Every face on the benches was turned toward the floor between the fires.

Hrungnir stood there, and indoors he was bigger. The torchlight went into the pits of his stone face and stayed there, and his eyes, deep in it, moved from bench to bench. Snow was melting off his shoulders and dripping onto the straw.

"Well?" he said. "I was promised a drink. Is this how you keep promises here, all of you sitting and looking?"

At the far end, Odin had come in by some door Roskva had not seen. He sat in the high seat with his grey cloak still on and his chin on his fist. He lifted one finger, and two of the hall's men went to the board beside him and took up Thor's bowls.

Roskva knew those bowls. She had carried one of them since first light on a rope sling, and the rope had left a line across her shoulder that she could still feel. The men brought them down the hall between them, set them in front of the giant, and stepped back quickly.

Hrungnir bent over them until his stone face hung above the bronze rims.

"These are Thor's," he said. "Everyone in Jotunheim knows Thor's bowls. They say he can drink them dry." He laughed, and the dogs came out from under the nearest table and went out of the door with their tails down. "Fill them. Both of them. I'll show you what dry is."

The servers stood along the wall with their jugs. The girl beside Roskva was shaking, and the ale in her jug shook with her.

"He'll want us next," the girl whispered. "After the ale. They eat people."

"He hasn't finished the pork," said Roskva.

"Is that meant to help?"

"It's true, though."

The girl looked at her as though she were mad. Down the benches the gods looked at their own boards, or at Odin, and the giant waited with his empty hands spread on the wood. Then a woman stood up from the bench nearest the high seat.

She was taller than the men on either side of her, with hair so fair it was nearly white in the torchlight. A necklace of gold lay heavy at her throat and moved when she breathed. She came down the hall without hurrying, stopped in front of Roskva, and held out her hand.

Roskva gave her the jug. The woman's hands closed on it, and they were steady.

"Stay behind me," she said. "Keep them coming." Then she walked out across the floor to the giant, tipped the jug over the first bowl, and began to pour.

So Roskva went back and forth. In the passage the hall-keeper's people were knocking the bungs out of barrels and filling jugs as fast as they could be handed over. Roskva carried each one out into the tall woman's hands and took the empty one back.

It took eleven jugs to fill one of Thor's bowls. She knew what that bowl weighed with nothing in it, and full, she did not think the two men who had carried it could have lifted it between them.

Hrungnir lifted it in his two hands like a cup. He tipped it, and the ale went into the stone of his mouth with a long hollow sound, like water poured down a well. It ran out of the corners and down his face, darkening the grey in streaks that dried pale again in the heat of the fire. His throat moved, and the bowl went up and up, and when he set it down it was empty.

"Again," he said. "It's thin, this ale. Is it all as thin as this in Asgard?"

"There's plenty of it," said the woman, and poured. "Drink, then. That's what you came for."

Hrungnir looked down at her over the rim. "You're not frightened of me."

"You're a guest," she said. "Guests get poured for."

"Is this all Thor holds?" Hrungnir held the bowl up to the torches and squinted into it. "At home they tell it as if he drank the sea. Where is he, anyway? Off hitting something small?"

Nobody on the benches answered him.

He emptied the second bowl, and then the first again, and Roskva lost track of how many times after that. Each time his voice was bigger, and each time she came out of the passage there were fewer jugs along the wall.

The girl who had been shaking was gone. The boy from the table top had slid down under it and crawled to the passage door on his hands and knees. Two men who had been pouring for the benches set their jugs by the wall and walked away without looking back.

The hall-keeper stopped Roskva at the low door with a hand on her arm. "Leave that by the post," she said quietly. "Go and sit in the kitchen. Nobody'll blame you."

Roskva looked past her at the tall woman, alone on the floor with an empty jug and a giant in front of her. In the kitchen she would hear it all through a wall, and some of it she would hear wrong.

"She said to keep them coming," Roskva said.

"She'll say it to the next girl."

"There isn't a next girl. They've all gone."

The old woman looked at her for a moment, and then she took her hand away. "Then don't spill."

When she came out with the next jug, Hrungnir saw her. He pointed at her with the bowl, and ale ran down his wrist.

"That one," he said. "Look at her. All your servants have run off but that one. She's the only one left who'll come near me. What are you, girl, a giant's daughter?"

"No," said Roskva. "I'm from Steinsdal."

"Never heard of it."

"It's small," said Roskva, and gave the jug into the tall woman's hands.

She was frightened of him. She just had not put the jug down.

By the time that jug was empty, Hrungnir was getting up. He came off the bench in one heave, and his stone head struck a roof beam with a crack that made everyone look up. Soot came down in a black shower. Some of it fell into the bowl in his hand, and he did not notice. He stood under the beam with his head bent sideways and the bowl held out over the boards, slopping.

"This hall," he said. "What do you call it? Valhalla?"

The woman with the jug said, "We call it that."

"Valhalla. I'll pick it up. I'll put it on my back and carry it home to Jotunheim, roof and benches and all." He swung round, and ale slapped out of the bowl onto the straw. "And Asgard I'll sink. I'll kill every god in it, every one of you sitting there looking at me. And all your ale I'll drink myself. Every last barrel, till there's none." He drank, to show them.

Roskva stood behind the tall woman with a full jug in both arms. Her mouth was dry. She said the words over under her breath, so that she would keep them.

Valhalla on his back, all the way to Jotunheim. Asgard sunk. The gods killed. All the ale.

She had every one, in the order he had said it.

Along the benches the gods had stopped eating. "He'll have the roof off next," a woman said under her breath.

"He's had those bowls dry six times," said the man beside her. "Seven."

Further along, a broad man near the fire put down his knife and wiped his hands, and he did not look at the giant. He looked at the door.

"Thor," he said. He did not say it loudly.

The woman next to him said it too. Then a man across the hall said it, and two more further down, and the name went along the benches from mouth to mouth, low and tired, every one of them saying it toward the door.

Roskva looked for her brother. He was against the wall beside the door, where the hall-keeper had put him, and he had turned to look out into the dark. Then he jumped back from the doorway, and the doorway was full.

Thor stood in it with snow up to his knees and frost white in his red-brown beard. He had come a long way, fast, from somewhere east. His brows were down and his face under them was dark red, and he had the hammer up by his shoulder, his fist round the short handle, ready to throw.

He looked at the giant, and at his bowls on the board, and then at the tall woman with the jug.

"Who let him in?" said Thor. "Who let a giant sit and drink in this hall? And why is Freyja pouring for him?"

Freyja set the jug down on the board. Her hands were still steady. Roskva held her own jug tighter and stayed where she was, behind her.

For a breath Hrungnir only stood there under the beam, with the bowl in his hand and soot on his stone head. Then he put the bowl down.

"You came quick," he said. "For a man who was off in the east."

"I was called."

"By this lot?" Hrungnir looked round the benches. "They can't even pour for themselves. Odin asked me in. He said, come and drink. Ask him."

Every face went to the high seat. Odin had not moved, and his chin was still on his fist.

"I did," he said. "He came through my gate on my heels. His horse is quick."

"Quicker than yours," said Hrungnir.

"It isn't." Odin looked at Thor with his one eye. "But I asked him, and he's drunk my ale."

"You asked a giant to drink out of my bowls," said Thor.

"They were the only ones big enough," said Odin.

"There." Hrungnir spread his empty hands. "I'm his guest. Anyone asked into a hall to drink is under his host's hand till he's out of the door again. Everybody knows that. Even here."

The hammer stayed where it was. Thor's arm did not come down, and it did not go back to throw.

"You'll be sorry you were ever asked," said Thor, "before you're out of it."

"Will I?" The giant's voice dropped, and that was worse than the shouting. "Look at me. There's nothing in my hands. I left my shield at home, and my whetstone with it. If I'd brought them, we'd try each other here and now, you and I." He leaned forward. "Kill me like this, and every giant in Jotunheim will say Thor kills men with empty hands. There's no honor in that for you."

His stone fingers closed on nothing, and opened again.

"So come and fight me properly. Grjottungard, on the border of my land. I'll have my shield there, and my stone. I'll not be caught without them again, not ever." He looked round the benches, at the dropped knives and the cold meat. "Nobody's ever asked you that, have they, Thor? Nobody ever dared. I'm asking."

The hall was so quiet that Roskva could hear the soot settling on the boards. She could hear the fire, and her brother breathing by the door.

She said it over under her breath. Shield at home. Whetstone with it. Never caught without them again.

Thor looked at the giant for a long time. Then he brought the hammer down from his shoulder, slowly, until it hung at his side.

"Grjottungard, then."