The Boy Who Raced Thought

"Is he your kin?" said Thjalfi.

He had been carrying the question since the oak, and it weighed more than the bag did. They were walking east over country that had flattened out under them. The heather had given up first, and then the boulders. Now the ground was pale and hard and bare, and nothing grew on it taller than a thumb.

Loki looked round at him pleasantly. "Who?"

"Utgard-Loki. The giant said his name."

"I heard him." Loki walked on a few steps. His smile stayed where it was, but the rest of his face went thin. "No. He's a giant, and from the sound of it a king of giants, with a hall full of them. A name isn't a family. Plenty of people carry a name they never got from me."

"Then why's he called that?"

"Ask him," said Loki. "I'm sure he'd enjoy it."

Thor, ahead of them, said nothing. He had not spoken since the third blow. The iron gloves were still on his hands, and every so often he opened one and shut it again, and the small plates clinked.

Thjalfi's stomach had stopped complaining some time in the night. Now it sat inside him small and hard, like a stone in a shoe.

Twice he tried to run on ahead to the next rise, out of habit, and there was no next rise, only more of the flat. His legs had nothing in them. He walked. Roskva walked beside him with one hand on her spindle and her eyes on the ground.

The sun climbed. Their shadows got shorter and crept in under their feet.

At first he took the grey line on the edge of the plain for a bank of cloud. It lay low and flat-topped, and it stayed the same size all morning while they walked toward it. Then, a little before noon, it came near all at once. It stood across their road from one side of his sight to the other, and the road ran straight into it.

Thjalfi put his head back to see the top. He put it further back. The back of his skull came down onto his collar and his mouth fell open by itself, and still the wall went up, grey block on grey block.

The joins between the blocks were wide enough to put his arm in. Far up, where his eyes began to water, there was an edge, and pale sky over it. A cord in the side of his neck began to ache.

Roskva had her head back too. She swayed, and caught his sleeve to keep from going over.

He had been small all his life. He had never once been this small.

Loki rubbed the back of his neck. "Well," he said. "They'll have a great many stairs."

The road ended at a gate. It was made of iron bars, each as thick as a fence post, set upright in a frame of black timber, and it was shut. The wall above it was blank to the top, and nothing hung beside the gate to blow or to pull.

Thor walked up to it and took hold of two bars, one in each iron fist. He set his feet. He pulled, and then he pushed, and then he pulled again, and the gloves ground on the iron with a sound that set Thjalfi's teeth on edge. Thor's heels dug two short furrows in the hard ground. The gate did not so much as rattle.

He let go. He looked at his gloves, and then at the gate, and his brows came down.

"You could knock," said Loki.

Thor turned his head and looked at him. Loki found something of interest at the top of the wall.

Thjalfi was looking at the gaps. He had been looking at them the whole time Thor pulled. Between each bar and the next there was a space of shadow, and the shadow was wider than his shoulders. He had gone through tighter places in the byre wall at home, after goats who thought they were clever.

Nobody told him to. He turned sideways, put his right foot through, and went after it.

The iron was cold on his chest and cold on his back at the same moment. It smelled of rust and frost. For a breath he was inside the gate, with the plain behind him and the giants' yard in front, and the bag strap caught on the bar at his back and held him. He tugged. It came free, and he was through.

The yard was paved with flat stones, each one wider than the floor of the longhouse at home. Smoke hung low over it. He smelled roast meat, so strongly that his knees went loose, and somewhere ahead and high up, someone laughed. There was nobody else in the yard. He was on the giants' side, and he was alone on it.

He turned round. Three faces looked at him through the bars.

"It's wide enough," he said. It came out smaller than he meant.

Roskva came next, quick and neat, without touching either side. Loki slid through after her, like a weasel through a hedge.

Thor came last. He had to turn sideways and breathe out, and Megingjord scraped along one bar while the hammer's head knocked on the other, and for a moment he was stuck fast. Then he heaved, and came through, and stood in the yard brushing rust off his front. He did not look at any of them.

The doors of the hall stood open. They went in.

The heat met Thjalfi first, then the smoke. Fires burned down the middle of the hall in long pits, and he could not see across them, only light moving in the smoke and shapes beyond it. He could not see the far end either. The hall simply went on into the haze.

On either side ran a bench, and the benches were full of men.

He saw the nearest one's knee first, because it was level with his face. It was a knee in brown wool. Above it the man went on up, a belt, a chest, a beard spread down the front of it, and his head sat up in the smoke among the roof beams. Each of them, sitting down, was as tall as the gable end of a house. The benches ran away into the smoke on both sides, and there were more men on them than Thjalfi could have counted with a whole day to do it.

They were eating. Whole joints went from hand to hand. Fat dripped into the rushes on the floor, and cups went up and came down again. When one of them laughed, the sound came from so far overhead that Thjalfi looked up for it and found only beard.

His mouth filled with water. He swallowed it and shut his mouth tight, teeth together. Keep your mouths small. He kept his very small indeed.

They walked up the middle, between the fire pits and the benches. A few of the giants looked down at them as they passed. One shifted his boot out of their road without looking, the way a man moves his foot for a dog. Thjalfi was ahead of Thor without meaning to be. He had been first through the gate, and his feet had not noticed that it was over.

Past the last fire a high seat stood on its own, and in it sat the master of Utgard.

He was taller than any man on the benches, though he lounged lower in his seat than they did, with his long legs stretched out. His face was long too, long and pale, and his beard was trimmed short and neat. Rings sat on his fingers, gold ones and dark ones, more than one to a finger. He was talking to the man on his right and turning a cup in his hand, and he did not stop.

Thor stopped at the foot of the seat. Thjalfi stopped a step in front of him, and Roskva took hold of the back of his tunic.

The talking went on. Thjalfi felt the hall go quiet behind him, a bench at a time, as the men nearest the fire noticed and nudged the next ones down. Utgard-Loki finished what he was saying. He drank. Then he lowered the cup and looked down, slowly, and the first thing he looked at was Thjalfi.

He smiled. It showed his teeth, all of them, white and even.

"Visitors," he said. His voice was light for so large a man, dry and pleasant, and it reached the far end of the hall without his raising it. "Small ones. You'll forgive me if I don't get up." Laughter ran down the benches. "We heard Thor was on his way to us. Which of you is Thor? Not this one, surely."

His eyes stayed on Thjalfi a moment longer. Thjalfi's face went hot to the ears.

Then the eyes moved on, past him, up the red-brown beard and down to the iron gloves and the hammer on the belt. They took their time about it.

"Ah," said Utgard-Loki. "The beard. So this lad is Thor." He leaned back. "Well. People do talk a thing up. There may be more in you than shows, lad. There would need to be."

The laughter came again, from higher up this time, and went on longer. Thor's brows sank until there was nothing under them but shadow. One iron hand went to the hammer's short handle and stayed there. It did not lift.

"Here's how it is in my hall," said Utgard-Loki, turning his cup. "Nobody stays in it who can't do something better than other people can. Some skill. Some trick worth seeing. Do that, and you'll sit on my benches and eat my meat. If you can't, the gate is where you left it." He looked down at the four of them, one after another. "So. What can you do?"

I can run. The words were right there behind Thjalfi's teeth. He could run faster than anyone in Steinsdal, faster than any goat on the high scree. He opened his mouth.

Then he heard Skrymir's slow voice in his head, under the oak at dawn, and he shut it again so hard that his chipped tooth clicked.

Thor said nothing. A muscle moved in his jaw, and that was all.

Loki had come in last and stood at the back. Now he stepped forward, past Roskva, past Thor's elbow, until he was in front of all of them, smiling up at the high seat with his hands open.

"I can," said Loki. "Have them bring in the meat. I'll eat faster than any man in this hall."