The Boy Who Raced Thought

The first thing the forest took from them was the sound of the sea.

Twenty steps in, it was gone. After that there was only the hush of their feet on old needles, and Loki's voice, and now and then a creak high overhead where one trunk leaned against another. The pines grew so close that their lowest branches had died for want of light. They stuck out grey and bare at the height of Thjalfi's face, and he walked with one hand up.

Thor went in front. He did not look for a path. He went east, as straight as the trees allowed, and when a fallen trunk lay across the way he stepped over it, and the rest of them had to climb.

Thjalfi kept his eyes on the ground. At home, an autumn wood meant something in your hands by evening: hazelnuts, a late bunch of rowan berries, the pale caps of mushrooms that came up after rain. He knew which ones to pick and which ones turned your stomach inside out.

Here there were brown needles and grey stone and nothing else. He kicked over a rotten log. Under it was black earth and a smell of cold.

By midday he had found one mushroom. It was the wrong kind. He threw it away before anyone could see him holding it.

The bag rode on his shoulder. It was no lighter than it had been on the shore, because the cheese was still the only thing in it, and he could feel its round edge through the leather at every step. He thought about the cheese more than he wanted to.

The bite on his thigh had stiffened in the cold boat, and every fallen trunk woke it up again. He climbed them anyway, ahead of Roskva, and held a hand down to her from the top. She climbed past the hand as if it were a branch.

"Nice forest," Loki said to nobody. "Plenty of it. You'd never run short of trees here."

Nobody answered. He did not seem to need them to.

The light went early under the pines. It drained out from the bottom first, so that their feet were in the dark while the treetops were still grey.

Thjalfi's stomach had stopped complaining at noon and gone quiet, and the quiet was worse. His legs were all right. His legs could have walked another day. It was the rest of him that wanted to lie down in the needles and stay there.

Then Thor stopped so suddenly that Thjalfi nearly walked into his back.

A hall stood in front of them, in a clearing with no stumps in it. It was long and dark and higher than the pines, and its roof curved down to the ground on either side, smooth, with no turf on it and no smoke hole.

The near end had no wall at all. The whole end of the hall stood open, from one side to the other, so the doorway was exactly as wide as the hall. There was no door to shut it. There was no light inside, and no sound of animals.

"Somebody's," said Loki.

"Not tonight," said Thor, and walked in.

The floor was smooth under Thjalfi's shoes, smoother than any floor of beaten earth, and it gave a little when he put his weight on it, like turf over a bog. It smelled of leather, and under the leather of something older and sourer, like the inside of a boot. He put out his hand. The wall was cold and slightly soft, and it was not wood or turf or stone. He could not think what else a wall could be.

There was no hearth down the middle. There were no benches along the sides and no posts holding up the roof.

"Where's the fire?" he said.

"Some halls have fires," said Loki. "This one has a door."

Thor sat down just inside the opening with his back to the wall. In the last of the light he looked at the bag on Thjalfi's shoulder. Thjalfi looked at it too, and waited, and felt his whole body wait with him.

"Morning," said Thor.

That was all. He lay down on his side with one hand on the hammer, and soon he was asleep.

Thjalfi stood holding the strap. He had never in his life seen a hungry man leave food uneaten when it was right in front of him. He could not decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.

In the end he lay down a few steps further in, with the bag beside his head and his hand on it. Roskva lay down on his other side, not close. Loki lay down somewhere Thjalfi could not see.

At home there was always the hearth, red under its ash all night, so you could find the door. Here he held his hand in front of his face and saw nothing. He meant to stay awake and guard the bag. He was asleep before he had finished meaning it.

He woke because the floor threw him.

It heaved up under his hip and shoulder and rolled him half over, and then it dropped away, slowly, so that his stomach went on falling after the rest of him had stopped. A sound filled the dark. It began somewhere outside and very low, so low he felt it in his teeth before he heard it. It was a long grinding groan that climbed and broke off and began again.

The walls shivered with it. Somewhere near the roof a loose fold of something flapped twice and was still.

"Get away from the door," said Thor's voice out of the dark. "All of you."

Thjalfi was already gone. He did not decide to go. His feet were under him and his hand was on the wall, and he was running along it, fast, deeper into the hall, the way he ran the screes at night when a goat had strayed: by touch, by luck, never slowing down.

Halfway along, the wall stopped under his palm. There was an opening on the right. Cold air came out of it, and the leather smell, stronger.

"Here!" he shouted. "There's a room!"

He stood in the gap and kept shouting until they came. Roskva came first, so quietly that he knew she had gone past him only by the brush of her skirt. Loki came next, quick and light, and kept going until there was nowhere left to go. Thjalfi heard him bump the far end and stop. Then came the heavy feet of Thor.

Thor did not come in. He sat down across the mouth of the side room so that his body filled it. Thjalfi heard the iron head of the hammer knock once on the floor as Thor set it upright between his knees.

The room was narrow, and the floor sloped back and up, like the inside of a horn. Thjalfi felt his way along the wall and sat down. The floor lifted again, and the groan came, and the wall at his back trembled like a hide pegged out to dry in the wind.

He reached for the bag.

His hand closed on nothing. He felt round him in the dark, both hands, the floor and the wall and his own knees, and knew the whole time where it was. It was out in the hall, by the place where his head had been, with the last cheese from home inside it.

He had not dropped it. He had left it, and that was worse.

On his hands and knees he went back down the side room. Thor's back filled the doorway, broad and still, and smelled of sea salt and old smoke.

"Where are you going?" said Thor without turning round.

"The bag."

For a moment Thor said nothing. Then his knee moved, about the width of a hand, and that was the whole answer. Thjalfi squeezed through the gap with his face against Thor's wool sleeve and came out into the big hall.

Out here the floor was worse. It rose under his palms and knees, a long slow lift that held him up high in the dark, and then it let him down so far he lay flat and spread his fingers and waited.

When it was still he crawled. He kept his right shoulder against the wall and counted. He had run thirty strides to the side room. Crawling, it was more. He lost count once when the groan came, so loud and close that the soft wall pressed in against his shoulder and pushed him sideways, and he had to start again from a guess.

At last his fingers found leather. For a breath he thought it was only more floor. Then he felt the hard round edge of the cheese through it, and he pulled the strap over his head and lay on top of the bag with both arms around it while the hall went up and down beneath him.

He crawled back slower, with the bag under his chest. When he reached Thor, the knee moved again without a word.

In the side room he felt along the wall for his place. Where Roskva had been sitting there was a gap now, the width of a boy, and warm wool on one side of it. He sat down in it.

She did not speak. Neither did he. He held the bag on his knees, and after a while he stopped shaking enough to notice that she had not moved away.

"Whatever that is out there," said Loki from the far end, quite cheerfully, "it had better hope it's slow. He only has to throw once."

Thjalfi's mouth was dry. "Throw it?"

"The hammer. Throw it as far as you like, at anything you like, and it's back in his hand before you've finished watching it go. Every time. I've seen it." Loki's voice moved, as if he were settling more comfortably against the wall. "I'd never seen him go without his supper, though. That's new."

"Quiet," said Thor.

Loki was quiet. Before long Thjalfi heard him snoring, lightly, under the groans.

Nobody else slept. The floor rose and fell all night, and every time it rose, Thor leaned forward a little over the hammer, and every time it fell, he leaned back. Thjalfi watched the place where he thought Thor's head must be, though there was nothing to watch. His third night without proper sleep went past him like that, one groan at a time, with the cheese pressing round and hard against his ribs.

At last the dark in the doorway began to go grey around the edges of Thor. Past him, through the wide mouth of the hall, Thjalfi could make out the clearing, and the pines, and beyond the pines a long grey hill that he did not remember from the evening before. It lay along the edge of the wood with trees pressed against its side.

As he watched, the whole hill rose, slowly, and then slowly settled down again.