Norse Mythology(33)

“The giant? Of course.”

“That was me. I used illusion to make myself so large and to change my appearance. The laces of my provision bags were tied with unbreakable iron wire and could be undone only by magic. When you hit me with your hammer, Thor, while I pretended to sleep, I knew that even the lightest of your blows would have meant my death, so I used my magic to take a mountain and put it invisibly between the hammer and my head. Look over there.”

Far away was a mountain in the shape of a saddle, with valleys plunging into it: three square-shaped valleys, the last one going deepest of all.

“That was the mountain I used,” said Utgardaloki. “Those valleys are your blows.”

Thor said nothing, but his lips grew thin, and his nostrils flared, and his red beard prickled.

Loki said, “Tell me about last night, in the castle. Was that illusion too?”

“Of course it was. Have you ever seen wildfire come down a valley, burning everything in its path? You think you can eat fast? You will never eat as fast as Logi, for Logi is fire incarnate, and he devoured the food and the wooden trough it was in as well by burning it. I have never seen anyone eat as quickly as you.”

Loki’s green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled.

Utgardaloki turned to Thialfi. “How fast can you think, boy?” he asked. “Can you think faster than you can run?”

“Of course,” said Thialfi. “I can think faster than anything.”

“Which is why I had you run against Hugi, who is thought. It does not matter how fast you ran—and none of us have ever seen anyone run like you, Thialfi—even you cannot run faster than thought.”

Thialfi said nothing. He wanted to say something, to protest or to ask more questions, when Thor said, in a low rumble, like thunder echoing on a distant mountaintop, “And me? What did I actually do last night?”

Utgardaloki was no longer smiling. “A miracle,” he said. “You did the impossible. You could not perceive it, but the end of the drinking horn was in the deepest part of the sea. You drank enough to take the ocean level down, to make tides. Because of you, Thor, the seawater will rise and ebb forevermore. I was relieved that you did not take a fourth drink: you might have drunk the ocean dry.

“The cat whom you tried to lift was no cat. That was Jormungundr, the Midgard serpent, the snake who goes around the center of the world. It is impossible to lift the Midgard serpent, and yet you did, and you even loosened a coil of it when you lifted its paw from the ground. Do you remember the noise you heard? That was the sound of the earth moving.”

“And the old woman?” asked Thor. “Your old nurse? What was she?” His voice was very mild, but he had hold of the shaft of his hammer, and he was holding it comfortably.

“That was Elli, old age. No one can beat old age, because in the end she takes each of us, makes us weaker and weaker until she closes our eyes for good. All of us except you, Thor. You wrestled old age, and we marveled that you stayed standing, that even when she took power over you, you fell down only onto one knee. We have never seen anything like last night, Thor. Never.

“And now that we have seen your power, we know how foolish we were to let you reach Utgard. I plan to defend my fortress in the future, and the way that I plan to defend it best to is to ensure that none of you ever find Utgard, or see it again, and to be quite certain that whatever happens in the days to come, none of you will ever return.”

Thor raised his hammer high above his head, but before he could strike, Utgardaloki was gone.

“Look,” said Thialfi.

The fortress was gone. There was no trace of Utgardaloki’s stronghold or the grounds it was in. Now the three travelers were standing on a desolate plain, with no signs of any kind of life whatsoever.

“Let’s go home,” said Loki. And then he said, “That was well done. Brilliantly deployed illusions. I think we’ve all learned something today.”

“I will tell my sister that I raced thought,” said Thialfi. “I will tell Roskva I ran well.”

But Thor said nothing. He was thinking about the night before, and wrestling old age, of drinking the sea. He was thinking about the Midgard serpent.





THE APPLES OF IMMORTALITY





I


This was another time that there were three of them, exploring in the mountain wastes on the edge of Jotunheim, the home of the giants. This time the three of them were Thor and Loki and Hoenir. (Hoenir was an old god. He had given the gift of reason to humans.)

Food was hard to find in those mountains, and the three gods were hungry, and getting hungrier.

They heard a noise—the lowing of distant cattle—and they looked at each other and grinned the grins of hungry men who would eat that night. They came down into a green valley, a place of life, where huge oak trees and high pine trees bordered meadows and streams, and there they saw a herd of cattle, huge and fat on the valley’s grass.

They dug a pit and built a fire of wood in the pit, and they slaughtered an ox and buried it in the bed of hot coals, and they waited for the food to be done.

They opened the pit, but the meat was still raw and bloody.

Again they lit a fire. Again they waited. Again the meat had not even been warmed by the heat of the fire.