The Boy Who Raced Thought

The salve crock was empty. Thjalfi turned it over above his palm and knocked the bottom, and one grey crumb fell out with a stalk of straw stuck through it.

The lame goat watched him from the hay rack. It had a wisp hanging from its beard and no interest at all in the crock.

Three nights ago he had told it he would be back by dark. He had not been. Somebody from the kitchens had laid its hay on the flags instead, and it had eaten every stalk and never once looked at the door.

He had been at a different door that night, the tall one in Asgard's hall, with his back against the wall. He had watched Hrungnir duck out under it and climb onto his chestnut horse in the snow. Nobody had stopped him. The gods had stood in the dug paths with their cups and watched him ride out through the gate.

Thor would want the goats for Grjottungard. Thjalfi knew that much, if nothing else about it. The traces would rub the stiff leg raw again before the day was half done.

He took the crock to the kitchens.

They were full of steam and the smell of onions. At the middle hearth a man Thjalfi had never seen sat on an upturned tub with his boots almost in the fire. He wore a sheepskin coat with the wool turned inward, and ice was still melting out of his beard. Sif stood over him with her keys in her fist. Roskva was at the long trough with flour to her elbows, and she looked up when Thjalfi came in and then back at the stranger.

At the board by the wall sat Thor, with a loaf in one hand and a cold leg of mutton in the other. He had come home from Asgard the day after the feast and had not stopped eating since.

"Say it again," said Sif. "So he hears it this time."

"From my top pasture you can see over into their country," said the man. "Grjottungard, at the edge of it, where nothing grows. There's giants on it. Thirty, maybe. They've been digging three days. Carrying water up from somewhere in skins, and fires going all night."

He held his red hands out to the fire. "They're making something. It's taller every morning."

"Making what?" said Sif.

"I couldn't say. It's grey. It's the shape of a man, near enough."

Thor tore the loaf in half. "Then I'll see it when I get there."

"And when's that?"

"When he's ready. He went home for his shield." Thor chewed, and swallowed. "The boy comes with me. He knows the goats."

Every face in the kitchen turned to the door, where Thjalfi stood with the empty crock in both hands. Nobody had seen him come in.

"Yes, all right," he said.

The cook took the crock out of his hands without a word, filled it from the big jar by the oven and pushed it back at him. It was warm from standing near the bread. He carried it all the way back to the stall and only knew he was still holding it when his hands smelled of sheep fat.

That night he lay in the straw and kept seeing the herdsman's hands, held up to show how tall. Taller every morning. He was going to stand in front of it beside Thor, and he did not even know what it was.

Before light he went to the kitchens. Roskva slept there with the cook's girls, on the warm platform behind the ovens. He found her foot in the dark and shook it.

"I'm going east," he whispered. "To look at it."

She sat up. Her braid had come half undone in the night. "Does he know?"

"No."

She looked at him a long time in the red light from the oven door. He waited for her to tell him what she thought of it.

"The goat," was all she said.

"It takes hay from your hand," said Thjalfi. "It's never taken anything from mine." It came out easier than he had expected. "Will you?"

"Yes." She lay down again and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. "Be back."

The snow outside had a crust on it from the night's frost, and it held him if he kept moving. He went east across the fields toward the low blue hills Thor had walked into after Yule, with the dark going grey behind them. By sunrise he was climbing. His breath went up in front of him, his legs were warm, and nobody was watching. He ran the way he had run the screes at home, without deciding anything.

Beyond the first ridge there was another, lower and greyer. The snow thinned as he went. On the far side it lay only in the hollows, and the rest was stone, grey scree that slid and clicked under his shoes.

He saw it from the top of the second ridge, at midday. It stood among the far hills with its arms at its sides, and it was taller than they were.

After that he went carefully. He came up the back of the last hill on his hands and knees between the boulders, and at the top he lay down flat and put his chin over the edge.

He was looking at its chest.

It was close enough to throw a stone at. The clay was grey-brown, like the mud at the bottom of a cattle pond, and it had been smoothed on in long strokes as wide as ditches, where a giant's hand had dragged across it. At the elbows and in the creases under the arms it was still dark and wet. Frames of lashed tree trunks stood up its sides, and giants climbed them with steaming skins on their backs and poured warm water into the creases to keep the frost out. The steam went up past its face in long grey threads.

The face was hardly a face. Two thumb holes had been pushed in for eyes, high up, and below them somebody had drawn a line with a stick for a mouth and then given up.

In the middle of the chest there was a crack. It was longer than Thjalfi was tall, and its edges were soft and wet, and through it something dark red was moving.

It was beating. It went faster than his own heart, and his own had been running all morning.

He shifted his elbow to see better. A stone slid out from under it, rattled down the slope and went clicking away over the scree below.

The heart jumped. For a breath it stopped altogether, and then it went twice as fast, and the whole great chest of clay shivered around it. Flakes came off the shoulders and fell turning, like bark off a dead pine in a wind.

Thjalfi knew that. He had seen goats on the scree go like that when a rock came bounding down past them: all four legs locked and the whole body shaking, the eyes showing white. It was not the stone they were frightened of. It was everything.

Below, on the lowest frame, a builder had stopped with his skin of water and was looking up the hill. Thjalfi put his face down on the cold stone and lay still. He could hear his own breath going in and out against the rock.

"What's it jumping at now?" said the builder.

"Leave it," said another, further down. "It jumps at everything. It's the heart."

"I said we should have waited for a better one."

"There wasn't a better one. You saw. Nothing in all Jotunheim with a heart big enough, and that mare's was the biggest we found." The second voice laughed, short and sour. "Mokkurkalfi. Look at him. Shaking like a foal."

"He'll stand when it counts."

"He'd better. If Hrungnir falls, it's us next, and that one with the hammer won't stop at the border."

Water splashed. When Thjalfi lifted his head, the builder had gone back to his pouring, and the steam was going up again. Behind the crack the mare's heart went on, quick and quick, and it did not slow down all the time he lay there.

He came back across the fields long after dark, with the stars out over Bilskirnir's roofs and every smoke hole showing a little red. His legs had gone stiff on the last ridge and loosened again on the flat. He went in by the kitchens because they were warm, and Thor was there, eating.

Roskva sat on the bench by the bread trough with her spindle in her lap. She did not get up. Her hands stopped.

Thor looked at him over the board. "You went to look."

"Yes."

"Tell it, then."

So he told it, standing by the hearth with his shoes steaming. He told the ridges and the scree, the frames of tree trunks and the giants with their skins of warm water. Thor stopped chewing when he got to the size.

"How tall?"

"Taller than the hills at home. I was on top of the last hill and I was looking at his chest." Thjalfi held his hands apart, which was no use at all, and put them down. "There's a crack in it. You can see the heart through it. It's a mare's, they said so. They couldn't find one big enough. It jumps at stones."

Sif had come to the door with her keys. Nobody said anything for a while. The fire ticked.

Then Thor put down the mutton, leaned over to the edge of the hearth, and drew in the cold ash with one thick finger. Three strokes from the middle, each ending in a sharp point turned outward.

"Hrungnir's isn't a mare's," he said. "His heart's stone. Hard all through, with three horns to it, like that. There's a mark men cut in wood that's the same shape. They call it after him. Hrungnir's heart."

Thjalfi looked at the shape in the ash. Across the kitchen Roskva was looking at it too, and her lips moved once without a sound.

"Was that all?" said Thor.

There was one thing more. Thjalfi had kept it back without meaning to, because it was the one he liked least.

He told them how, as the sun went down behind him, a giant had come walking up out of the east across the scree. The builders had climbed down off their frames to let him by. He was bigger than any of them, and grey, and the low light had gone onto his head and found no hair there, only stone, pitted and rough.

He had walked to the clay man's knee and stopped, and turned, and stood looking west toward Thrudheim. He had been looking straight at Thjalfi's hill. He had not moved while Thjalfi crawled backward off the top of it on his stomach. When Thjalfi looked back from the next ridge, he was still standing there, with the man of clay above him and the steam going up.

Thor looked at the mark in the ash for a long time, and did not eat.

Later, in the stall, the lame goat was lying down with its stiff leg out straight. Thjalfi hung the crock on its peg. He laid an armful of hay on the flags and stepped back to the wall, and after a while the goat heaved itself up, front end first, and limped over to eat.

He watched its flank go in and out, quick at first and then slower, and thought about a heart that jumped at stones.