Orm's Boat
Thor wanted his goats in the byre, and the goats wanted to stay by the fire.
He drove them out with the flat of his hand, the sound one first and the lame one after. Thjalfi held the byre door. It had always been his job, and nobody had told him it wasn't his any more.
The sound goat went past him and shouldered straight into the hay. The lame one came slowly, swinging its stiff leg. As it drew level with him it turned its head and bit him on the thigh, hard, through his tunic. It held on for a moment. Then it let go and limped off into the dark of the byre.
Thjalfi did not make a sound. He rubbed his leg and kept holding the door.
"Fair," said the slim man. He was leaning on the wall outside with his arms folded. "I'd bite you too."
Inside, Geir was forking hay. He had gone out to the byre as soon as the goats were standing, and he had not come back in. He kept his back to the door. The fork went in and out, in and out, and he threw down more hay than thirteen goats could eat.
"They stay here till I come back for them," Thor told him. "Feed them. Nobody yokes them."
Geir nodded at the hay.
Back in the house, a leather bag lay on the bench. It was Thor's, from under the chariot seat, long and flat and worn dark at the neck where a hand had carried it a long way. Bera stood over it with the last cheese in the house. She looked at the cheese, and then at her children, and pushed it in, and pulled the drawstring tight.
The slim man reached for the bag. Thjalfi got there first.
He had not planned to. His hand was on the strap before the slim man's was halfway, and then the bag was on his shoulder. It was heavier than it looked.
"I'll carry it," he said.
The slim man raised his eyebrows. "I'm sure you will."
"I'll carry it," Thjalfi said again, to Thor this time.
Thor was pulling on his boots. He looked at the boy, and at the bag, and at the boy's hand holding the strap with all four fingers.
"Then don't drop it," he said.
At the door, Bera stopped Roskva with a hand on her shoulder. Roskva's dress had a brooch on one strap and a bare loop on the other, where the second brooch had come off in the stream last summer and never been found. Bera unpinned her own oval brooch and fastened it there. Her fingers were slow about it, slower than they ever were at the loom.
Then she took a twist of rag from her apron and pushed it quickly down the front of Roskva's dress, under the strap. Thjalfi smelled dried fish. Nobody else saw. Bera looked at him over Roskva's head, and he looked down at the bag.
She put her palm against Roskva's cheek and held it there. Then she turned to her son.
"Eat last," she said.
He opened his mouth and found nothing in it. Behind him, in the byre, the fork stopped. Geir did not turn round. After a moment the fork went in again.
They went down the valley in the frost. Thor walked in front with the hammer at his belt, taking one stride for every two of Thjalfi's. The slim man walked beside him and talked about the weather, the path, the price of boats, and a woman he had once met who could whistle in two notes at the same time. Thor did not answer any of it.
Thjalfi came next with the bag. The strap cut into his shoulder, and after a while the shoulder burned. He did not shift it to the other side. If he put it down even once, somebody would offer to take it.
Roskva walked behind him. Her spindle was through her belt, and for once her hands were not on it. They were folded over the place where the fish was hidden.
Halfway down, where the path crossed the stream, he let her catch up.
"It was stupid," he said. "Saying you saw. I was trying to keep you out of it."
She stepped from stone to stone across the stream without looking at him.
"I was trying," he said.
On the far bank she stopped and looked at him for a long moment, with her grey eyes that looked at a thing until it gave up. Then she walked on past him, and he had to run three steps to get in front again.
Orm's landing lay at the valley mouth, a curve of grey shingle between two arms of rock. A boat was drawn up on rollers above the tide line, with its oars laid along the thwarts. The smell of tar came off it from a long way off.
Old Orm, who was deaf in one ear and owned the only boat in the valley worth the name, sat on an upturned bucket beside it with a pot of tar and a stick.
"I need your boat," said Thor.
Orm turned his good ear toward him. "What?"
"Your boat."
"What about my boat?"
Thor unhooked the hammer from his belt and held it up, not high, about where a man holds a lantern.
Orm looked at it. He looked at the red-brown beard above it, and at the goatless strangers, and at the hammer again, at the short handle with a fist wrapped all the way round it. He put the stick back in the tar pot very carefully, as if it might break.
"She leaks at the bow," he said. "Somebody'll have to bail."
Then he looked past Thor at the two children. "Geir's?"
Thjalfi nodded.
Orm said nothing else. He picked up his tar pot and went off up the shingle, and he did not look back to see them go.
Thor set his shoulder to the stern. The boat ran down the rollers by itself, the rollers spinning out behind it, and hit the water with a slap. When Thor stepped in, it sank until the sea was a hand's width from the rail. The slim man took the stern. The children climbed into the bow, Thjalfi with the bag in his lap. Thor took both oars.
On the first stroke the oars bent, the way green hazel bends when you weave it into a hurdle, and the boat jumped. On the second the bow lifted clean out of the water, and Thjalfi, sitting in it, found himself looking at the sky. Then the bow came down with a smack, and spray came back over them in a sheet.
The oars creaked against the pins. Thor rowed without hurry and without a word, and at every stroke the boat rose and fell and rose. The landing went small behind them. The two arms of rock closed together until they were one dark notch in the cliffs.
Thjalfi had been in a boat before, in Geir's little one, close in under the rocks, where you could see the bottom. This was different. Out here the sea had no bottom, only green going down into black, and the waves were long and slow and taller than the boat.
At dusk he turned and looked back. Far up the notch in the cliffs, he thought there was a thread of smoke. It might have been theirs. The light went while he was still deciding.
The cold came after that. It came up through the planks, and in on the wind, and down with the spray. His wool tunic soaked through and stayed soaked. He got the bag inside the front of his cloak and held it against his chest to keep it dry, and his arms went stiff around it.
"Where are we going?" he said at last.
The slim man was lying back in the stern with his hands behind his head. "East."
"What's east?"
"More of this." The slim man waved at the sea. "A great deal more. Then the other side, and that's the giants' country. Jotunheim. Nobody farms there. Nothing over there is the size you'd want it to be."
Thjalfi held the bag tighter.
"Loki," said Thor, without missing a stroke. "If you're not rowing, bail."
Loki. Thjalfi knew that name too. In Geir's winter tales, a slim, quick man walked beside the hammer man. He talked him into trouble and sometimes out of it again, and nobody in the tales ever trusted him for long. Knowing the name did not make the boat any warmer.
Loki sighed, found a wooden scoop under the thwart, and began to bail, humming. Water was coming in at the bow, just as Orm had said, a little at every wave.
Later, in the full dark, Thjalfi heard his sister's voice beside him. It was so low it was almost part of the sea. She was saying the day's words over, as she did every night at home.
"I'd bite you too. Then don't drop it. Eat last." She stopped there for a breath, and went on. "She leaks at the bow. Jotunheim."
He waited for her to say something of his. She didn't.
He did not mean to sleep. When he woke, the bag was still in his arms and his arms were still around it. Loki was asleep with the scoop in his lap. The oars had not stopped once.
The sky in front of them was going grey. Under the grey lay a black line, and the line grew as he watched it into a shore: dark rock, with no beach, no boats and no smoke.
Behind the rock stood trees. They were pines, close and black, and they climbed up from the water and went back and back. He looked left and right along the shore for the end of them, and there wasn't one. No bird called anywhere.
The boat ground onto stones. Thor shipped the oars, stepped out into the sea up to his knees, and hauled the boat up with one hand. He stood looking at the forest for a while. Then he looked at Thjalfi, and at the bag.
"Bring the bag," he said.