Running Ahead
The floor of the chariot shook under Thjalfi's knees, and they had not touched the ground yet.
He held the side rail with both hands. Below them the hills had begun to move. Stones were running down every slope at once in long grey trickles, and the snow in the hollows cracked and slid while he watched. Each time the goats' hooves struck the empty air, the land underneath shuddered as though it had felt them.
Behind the chariot the sky was burning. The clouds they had come through had caught along their bellies, and the red spread out across them, wider every moment. Thjalfi did not look at it long. It hurt his eyes, and Thor was not looking at it at all.
Thor stood with his feet apart and the reins in one fist. His brows had come down so far that his eyes were two shadows under them. He had stopped eating somewhere over the last ridge, and Thjalfi had never seen him stop before there was nothing left.
They came down on a hill Thjalfi knew. He knew it by the boulders along its top, where he had lain on his stomach twelve nights ago with his chin over the edge. The wheels hit the stones and bounced and hit again, and the goats ran on a few strides with their heads low before Thor pulled them in. Tanngrisnir stood with its stiff leg out behind it and its sides going in and out. It did not try to bite anyone.
Thjalfi looked over the edge. Grjottungard lay below, grey from end to end. The scree ran down from the hilltop in one long slope, loose and shining wet, and at the bottom, where the ground went flat among boulders, stood the man of clay.
He was as tall as before. The builders' frames had been taken away, and without them he looked thinner, a grey-brown pillar with arms. The steam had stopped. Frost had got into his shoulders in the night and turned them pale. Far off on the eastern hills a row of small dark shapes stood watching, and none of them came any nearer.
Beside the clay man's knee stood Hrungnir. He held his shield out before him in both arms. It was a slab of grey stone wider than the giant himself, turned toward the west, toward this hill, so that all Thjalfi could see of him behind it was his head and shoulders.
Something long and grey stood up over one shoulder like the end of a roof beam. That would be the stone for sharpening blades. Roskva had been right. It would not fit in a pocket.
Then the red came over the hilltop behind them and lit the whole slope.
Mokkurkalfi saw it. His head did not turn, because it could not, but behind the crack in his chest the dark red heart jumped and began to race. Water came running down the insides of both his clay legs and steamed on the stones round his feet.
The giants' man of clay had wet himself.
Thjalfi did not laugh. He had seen young goats do that on the scree when a dog came too close, and it was nothing to laugh at in a goat.
Behind him the chariot creaked. Thor had let go of the reins and was pulling on his iron gloves. He did it slowly, the way a man does in the cold, working each finger down into its place, and the small plates clinked. He was watching the giant the whole time. He had not said a word to Thjalfi since the yard.
The ground shook again. A stone the size of a loaf turned over by Thjalfi's shoe, rolled, and went bounding away down the scree, and a whole sheet of smaller stones went after it with a long dry hiss. He watched them all the way to the bottom.
His stomach had gone small and tight. His hand went to the hoof knife at his belt, for no reason, and came away again.
Then he jumped down off the chariot and ran.
He did not ask. Behind him he heard Thor's head come up, and nothing else, and then the second glove clinking on.
The scree took him at the first step. It went out from under his shoes and carried him, and he let it, and ran across it instead of down, slanting, as he went across the high screes at home after a stray.
Every step slid. Every stone he put his weight on went somewhere else, and the slope ran with him, rattling, a whole hillside going down at a walk while he crossed it at a run. Once his foot went into a hole of loose grit up to the ankle and he pulled it out without stopping. His legs knew what to do. He let them get on with it.
He had Roskva's words in his head, set down one at a time, as she had said them. I'll not be caught without them again. Not ever.
The giant had his shield. He had it out in front, toward the hill and the burning sky. Behind him stood the clay man. On either side were the boulders. There was nowhere else for Thor to come from.
Then the ground jumped under his feet. It came up through his shoes and the soles of his feet and into his knees, and it was not coming from the sky, or from the chariot on the hill. It was coming from underneath. Every stone on Grjottungard was shaking with it, and the shaking came from below.
He knew then. He did not have to work it out. He only had to say it loud enough.
The bottom of the slope came up at him. He came off the last of the scree onto the flat in three long jumps and stopped, because there was nowhere left to go. In front of him stood the shield.
Close to, it was not grey all over. There were seams of white quartz in it and one chipped corner, and the giant's stone fingers lay over its top edge, each as thick as Thjalfi's leg. Above the edge was Hrungnir's head.
Thjalfi could have touched it, if he had been taller. Frost had got into the pits of the stone and lay there in white grains. A crust of grey-green lichen grew along one cheek, on the side the weather came from, as it grew on the old stones of a field wall. There was a long crack down the jaw with grit packed in it.
Deep inside the stone, two eyes moved. They were small and dark and wet, and they found him.
"You," said Hrungnir. The voice came down from above the shield. "The gate boy."
Thjalfi's chest was going so hard he could not answer. Steam rose from the giant's mouth into the cold. It still smelled of ale.
"Come to watch, have you?" said Hrungnir. "Watch, then. You'll have something to tell. Nobody ever called him out before me. Not once, in all the years he's gone about knocking our heads in. I was the first, and they'll be singing it at every hearth in Jotunheim by spring."
Thjalfi got his breath. "You're standing wrong," he said.
It came out too small. He said it again, as loud as he had ever shouted down the valley to his father.
"You're standing wrong! You've got it all out in front. He's seen you. He's been looking at you from up there all morning." He pointed at the shield, and then at the stones under the giant's feet. "He's not coming over the hill. He's coming up under you. Through the ground."
The stone eyes narrowed. "And why would his boy tell me that?"
"I'm not telling you anything. I want you to know it before he gets you." Thjalfi's voice cracked and he did not care. "You stand there guarding the sky."
Hrungnir laughed. It started big, and then the ground shook again, hard, and the laugh stopped.
The stones round the giant's feet rattled and danced. Grit ran off the top of the shield in a thin stream. High above them the clay man's chest shivered and let fall a shower of flakes, and behind the crack the mare's heart went so fast that Thjalfi could not have counted it.
"Feel that," said Thjalfi. "That's him."
The eyes went down. They went to the ground and stayed there.
Thjalfi saw the stone fingers tighten on the shield's edge. Then the whole of him turned toward the danger he had been told about.
Hrungnir brought the shield down.
It hit the scree flat with a crack Thjalfi felt in his teeth, and stones spurted out from under its edges. The giant stepped up onto it, one foot and then the other. The slab rocked and settled under his weight.
He reached up and took the whetstone down off his shoulder. Close to, it was as long as the roof beam it looked like, grey and rough, with a worn groove along one side where something had once been sharpened on it. He took it in both hands. His whole front stood open to the west now, from the stone chin to the knees.
Thjalfi backed away, one step and then another onto the shifting stones, keeping his eyes on the giant. Up on the hill behind him the chariot had gone quiet. He did not turn round to see why.
Hrungnir did not look at him again. He stood on his shield with the whetstone held across his chest and his stone head bent, looking down at the ground between his feet.
"Come up, then," he said to it, low. "I'll hear you."