Hammer and Stone
The crash came from behind him, so loud that Thjalfi heard it with his whole back.
It rolled down off the hilltop and along the scree and into the stones under his shoes. Before it had died away a second one broke over it, louder. Hrungnir's head jerked up from the ground between his feet.
Light ran along the top of the hill. It was white and it forked, and it went on forking. It split the red sky into pieces that hung there a moment after they had gone. Thjalfi's shadow leapt out across the stones in front of him, long and black, and leapt back.
He turned round before he knew he had. Thor was coming down the hill.
He had left the chariot empty on the top. He came down the scree the way the scree itself came down, all at once and taking everything with it. Stones ran ahead of him in a grey wave. He did not slant and he did not slide.
Each foot struck, the hill gave under it, and he was already on the next. His beard stood out from his face in the wind of his own running. Both belts were buckled tight and the iron gloves were dark on his hands. In the right one, its short handle lost inside his fist, was the hammer.
At the farm, over the bone, Thor had only been angry. This was Thor in his whole strength, and Thjalfi had no word for it.
Behind him, stone grated on stone. Hrungnir had seen. The great head came round from the ground to the hill, and the small wet eyes found what was coming down it. For one moment they came back and found Thjalfi. The stone mouth opened on whatever it meant to say to him, and shut again on nothing.
Then the giant's feet shifted on the shield, the slab rocked under him, and there was nothing in front of him at all.
There was no time to pick the shield up. There was time for one thing, and he did it. He swung the whetstone back over his shoulder in both hands, and his whole stone body leaned into the swing.
Thor threw first. He was still far off, halfway down the slope and running, when his arm went back and the hammer left it.
Hrungnir threw the whetstone.
Thjalfi dropped. He went flat on the stones with his arms over his head. That was what you did when a rock came off the high scree, and his body had done it before he thought.
Above him the two met.
He saw it from underneath, with his cheek on the cold grit. The hammer was small in the sky, no bigger than a fist. The whetstone was as long as a roof beam and turning end over end. They came together right over his head. There was a flash as white as the lightning, and a crack so sharp it went through him and on into the ground.
The whetstone did not stop the hammer. It broke on it. It burst apart in the air, pieces flying out every way at once. The hammer went on through the middle of them as though nothing had been there.
For a while he could hear nothing at all. His ears were full of a high thin singing. He lay with his face in the grit and felt the stones shiver under him, and could not tell what made them. Then the singing thinned, and he heard the patter.
It was raining stone. Grit came down on his back and his hair and the backs of his hands. Something bigger struck the scree beside him and smashed. When he opened his eyes, grey dust lay all down the slope, fine as ground barley. Grey chips lay among the other stones as far as he could see.
One piece had not fallen. He saw it go. It flew on, low and fast, back the way the whetstone had been thrown, back toward the hill. Thor was still running. It met him in the forehead.
Thor's head went back. His legs went on a step without him. Then he fell forward, all of him at once, onto the flat at the foot of the scree, and lay there with his arms out.
The hammer did not miss. It struck Hrungnir's stone head and broke it, and the giant fell.
He went over slowly at first, like a tall pine when the last of the cut lets go, and then fast. He came off the shield twisting, half round. His body came down along the flat with a sound Thjalfi felt in his chest, and the ground jumped one last time and was still. One stone leg lay across Thor, and the foot at the end of it lay over Thor's neck.
Far off, the hammer was coming back. Thjalfi heard it pass above him, a low hum in the air. Thor's right glove moved on the stones and closed on the handle as it came down.
Nothing else on Grjottungard moved. The builders on the eastern hills stood where they were. Up behind Thjalfi the chariot waited on the hilltop with both goats in the traces, and the slope up to it was the way out. Tanngrisnir had its head up over the pole, ears forward, staring down at him. He looked at it once.
Then he got up, turned his back on it, and ran toward the giant.
The flat was strewn with grey. He ran along the whole length of Hrungnir, past the shield tipped up on its edge, and then the giant's arm was across his way. It lay over the stones higher than his head. The hand at the end of it lay open on the scree, bigger than his father's byre door.
He went over it as he went over field walls at home, a foot in a crack and then a swing from the top. The stone was cold through his palms and gritty with lichen. He landed badly, caught himself, and ran on. He kept his eyes off the head. The giant smelled of wet stone and old ale.
Thor lay on his face with his beard spread out over the grit. The giant's foot lay over the back of his neck and his shoulders, enormous, with dirt packed in its cracks. A piece of the whetstone stood fast in Thor's head, above his right brow, as grey as the rest of it. There was no blood. Thjalfi looked for some and found none, and did not know if that was good.
He went down on his knees by Thor's face. "Thor."
For a long moment there was nothing. Then a breath came out and blew the dust away from Thor's mouth, and another came after it.
"Thor. It's me."
Grit had settled in the red-brown brow and in the lashes of the one eye he could see. He brushed it away with two fingers, carefully, as he would clear chaff from a kid's eye. His hand was shaking. He made it stop.
The eye opened. It looked at the stones a hand's width from it for a long time, and then it slid sideways and found him.
"Boy," said Thor. His voice came out flat and short, squeezed small under the weight.
"Yes."
"Is he dead?"
"Yes."
Thor breathed. The grey dust lifted and settled. His shoulders pushed once against the stone, hard enough that the gloves creaked on the hammer. The foot did not move. He lay still again.
"That bit got me," he said. His eye went to the grit spread over the stones by his face. "The other bit came down there. That's whetstone now, all of it. Every whetstone anybody ever sharpens a blade on will come out of that."
Thjalfi looked at the dust on his own hands. At home, on a peg by the byre door, hung his father's scythe stone, worn hollow in the middle from summers of hay. It was this grey exactly. He closed his fingers on the grit without meaning to.
"Hurts," said Thor, into the stones. He said it as plainly as he said a thing was cold, or that he was hungry.
"I'll get it off you."
Thjalfi put both hands flat on the stones beside Thor's shoulder, as if that would help. He looked up the long stone leg to where it went into the rest of the giant. It was like looking up the side of the scout hill.
"You won't," said Thor. The eye closed and opened. "Where's the clay one?"
Thjalfi had forgotten him. Behind him, something cracked. It was a slow wet sound, like ice letting go on a pond, and it went on longer than any ice. He turned on his knees.
Mokkurkalfi stood where he had stood all day, beside the empty place where Hrungnir had been. Clay was falling off him in flakes. Behind the crack in his chest the mare's heart was going so fast it was only a red shaking in the dark. His great head had not turned, because it could not, but the whole of him was leaning toward the two of them on the flat.
Then the clay man pulled one foot up out of the wet stones, and set it down again, nearer.