Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection Page 4

  The frost giant raised himself from the huge boulder. Then he jerked a thumb behind him. “See that wall?” he said.

  You couldn’t avoid seeing it. It filled the world. Every stone in the wall was bigger than the houses in Odd’s village.

  “My brother built that wall. He made a deal with the Gods—to build them a wall inside six months, or he would take no payment. And on the last day, as he was just about to complete it . . . on the last hour of the last day, they cheated him.”

  “How?”

  “A mare, the most beautiful animal anyone had ever seen, ran across the plain and lured away the stallion who was hauling the stones for my brother. It used womanish wiles. The stallion broke its bonds, and the horses ran off into the woods together and were gone. And then, just when my poor brother had nerved himself up to complain about how he was being treated, Thor returned from his travels and killed him with his damnable hammer. That’s how every tale of the Gods and the Frost Giants ends—with Thor killing Giants. Well, not this time.”

  “Obviously not,” said Odd, who was beginning to have his suspicions about who the mare had been. “So, what did your brother want for payment?”

  “Nothing really,” said the giant, shifting from foot to foot. “Just stuff.”

  He sat down again on the boulder. Where the air touched the Frost Giant, it seemed to steam. Odd had seen the water in the fjord steam in winter, when the air was colder than the water. He wondered how cold the Frost Giant was.

  “He wanted the Sun,” said the giant, “the Moon. And Freya. All things that I now control, for Asgard is mine!”

  “Yes. You said that.”

  There was a pause. The Frost Giant looked tired, Odd thought. Then Odd said, again, “Why? Why did he want those things?”

  The Frost Giant took a deep breath. “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME!” he roared, and Odd felt the earth shake beneath him. He leaned on his crutch to keep his balance as icy winds blew past him. Odd didn’t say anything. He just smiled some more.

  The giant said, “Would you mind if I picked you up? It would make it easier to talk if we were face-to-face.”

  “So long as you’re careful,” said Odd.

  The giant reached down and laid his hand flat on the ground, palm up, and Odd clambered awkwardly onto it. Then the giant cupped his hand and lifted Odd up, so the boy was on a level with his mouth, and the giant whispered, in a voice like the howl of a winter wind, “Beauty.”

  Then the giant cupped his hand and lifted Odd up, so the boy was on a level with his mouth.

  “Beauty?”

  “The three most beautiful things there are. The Sun, the Moon and Freya the lovely. It’s not beautiful, really, in Jotunheim. There’s just rocks and crags and . . . Well, they can be beautiful too, if you take them the right way. And we can see the Sun there, and the Moon. No Freya—nothing that beautiful. She’s beautiful. But she does have a tongue on her.”

  “So you came here for beauty?”

  “Beauty, and revenge for my brother. I told the other Frost Giants I’d do it, and they all laughed at me. But they aren’t laughing now, are they?”

  “What about spring?”

  “Spring?”

  “Spring. In Midgard. Where I come from. It isn’t happening this year. And if the winter continues, then everyone will die. People. Animals. Plants.”

  Frosty blue eyes bigger than windows stared at Odd. “Why should I care about that?” The Frost Giant put Odd down on the top of the wall around Asgard, the wall his brother had built. It was windy up there, and Odd leaned into his crutch, scared that a gust of wind would blow him away and down to his death. He glanced behind him, and was not surprised to see that the home of the Gods looked almost exactly like the village on the fjord from which he had come. Bigger, of course, but of the same pattern—a feasting hall and smaller buildings all around it.

  Odd said, “You should care because you care about beauty. And there won’t be any. There will just be dead things.”

  “Dead things can be beautiful,” said the Frost Giant. “Anyway, I won it. I beat them. I fooled them and I tricked them. I banished Thor and Odin and that miniature turncoat Loki.” And then he sighed.

  Odd remembered what he had seen in the pool, the previous night. He said, “Do you really think your brothers are on the way?”

  “Ah,” said the Frost Giant. “Um. They may be. I mean, they all said they would . . . if I did . . . It’s just that I don’t think that any of them actually expected me to conquer this place, and they all have things to do, farms and houses and children and wives. I don’t think that they really want to come down to the hot lands and play soldiers guarding a bunch of grumpy Gods.”

  “And I suppose they can’t all be betrothed to lovely Freya.”

  “Lucky them,” said the Frost Giant, darkly. “She’s beautiful. Oh yes. She’s beautiful. I’ll give you that.” He shook his head. Icicles fell from his hair and crashed, tinkling, on the rocks beneath. “She’s got a carriage pulled by cats, you know. I tried stroking them.” He held up the index finger of his right hand. It was covered in scratches and cuts. “She said it was my own fault. That I’d got them overexcited.

  “She is beautiful,” he said, and sighed. “But she only comes up to the top of my foot. She shouts louder than a giantess when she’s angry. And she’s always angry.”

  “But you can’t go home when you’ve won,” said Odd.

  “Exactly. You wait here, in this hot, horrible place, for reinforcements who don’t want to come, while the locals hate you . . .”

  “So go home,” said Odd. “Tell them that I beat you.” He wasn’t smiling now.

  The Frost Giant looked at Odd, and Odd looked at the Frost Giant.

  The Frost Giant said, “You’re too small to fight. You would have to have outwitted me.”

  Odd nodded. “My mother used to tell me stories about boys who tricked giants. In one of them, they had a stone-throwing contest, but the boy had a bird, not a stone, and it went up into the air and just kept going.”

  “I’d never fall for that one,” said the giant. “Anyway, birds, they just head for the nearest tree.”

  “I am trying,” said Odd, “to allow you to go home with your honor intact and a whole skin. You aren’t making it any easier for me.”

  The giant said, “A whole skin?”

  “You banished Thor to Midgard,” said Odd, “yet he’s back now. It’s only a matter of time until he gets here.”

  The giant blinked. “But I have his hammer,” he said. “I turned it into this boulder I sit on.”

  “Go home.”

  “But if I take Freya back to Jotunheim, she’ll just shout at me and make everything worse. And if I take Thor’s hammer, he’ll just come after it, and one day he’ll get it, and then he’ll kill me.”

  Odd nodded in agreement. It was true. He knew it was.

  When, in the years that followed, the Gods told this tale, late at night, in their great hall, they always hesitated at this point, because in a moment Odd will reach into his jerkin and pull out something carved of wood, and none of them, try how they might, was certain what it was.

  Some of the Gods claimed that it was a wooden key, and some said it was a heart. There was a school of thought that maintained that what Odd had presented the giant with was a realistic carving of Thor’s hammer, and that the giant had been unable to tell the real from the false, and had fled, in terror.

  It was none of these things.

  Before he took it out, Odd said, “My father met my mother when our village was raiding somewhere in Scotland. That’s far to the south of us. He discovered her trying to hide her father’s sheep in a cave, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. So he brought her, and the sheep, home. He would not even touch her until he had taught her enough of the way we speak to be able to tell her he wanted her for his wife. But he said that on the voyage home, she was so beautiful she lit up the world. And she did. She lit up his world,
like the summer sun.”

  “This was before you were born,” said the Frost Giant.

  “True,” said Odd, “but I saw it.”

  “How?”

  Odd knew, without being told, that it would be very, very wrong to mention the pool in the forest to the Frost Giant, let alone the shapes that he had seen moving in the pool the night before. He lied, but it was the truth also. He said, “I saw it in my father’s eyes. He loved her, and a few years ago he started to make something for her, but he left it unfinished, and then he didn’t come back to finish it. So last night, I finished it for him. At first I didn’t know how it was meant to look, and then I saw her . . . I mean, it’s as I imagine her, my mother, when they had just met. Stolen from her people and her land, but brave and determined, and not ever going to give in to fear or grief or loneliness.”

  The giant said nothing.

  Odd said, “You came here for beauty, didn’t you? And you can’t go back empty-handed.”

  He reached into his jerkin and he took out the thing that he had carved. His father’s carving, which he had finished. It was his mother, as she had looked before he was born. It was the finest thing that Odd had ever made, and it was beautiful.

  The Frost Giant squinted at it, and then, just for a moment, smiled. He put the carved head into his pouch, and he said, “It is . . . remarkable. And lovely. Yes. I will take it back with me to Jotunheim, and it will brighten my hall.” The Frost Giant hesitated, then he said, a little wistfully, “Do you think I should say good-bye to Lady Freya?”

  Odd said, “If you do, she’ll probably shout at you some more.”

  “Or beg me to take her with me,” said the Frost Giant. Odd could have sworn that the Frost Giant shivered at that.

  The Frost Giant took a step away from Odd, and as he moved away, he grew. He went from being the size of a high hill to being the size of a mountain. Then he reached an arm up into the grey of the winter sky. His hand vanished in the cloud . . .

  “I think I need good weather to leave in,” said the giant. “Something to hide my tracks and to make me hard to follow.”

  Odd could not see quite what the Frost Giant did, but when he lowered his hand, snow began to fall in huge white flakes that spun and tumbled and obscured the world. The giant began to lumber away into the blizzard.

  “Hey!” called Odd. “I don’t know your name!”

  But the figure did not hear him, or if it did, it did not answer, and in moments it was lost to sight.

  CHAPTER 7

  FOUR TRANSFORMATIONS AND A MEAL

  THE EAGLE FOUND HIM, as he sat on the wall, in an area that he had kept as free of snow as he could. The great bird landed beside the boy.

  The great bird landed beside the boy.

  “Good?” it said. It was twilight, and the snow was falling more gently now.

  “I’m cold,” said Odd. “I nearly got blown off there a couple of times. I was getting worried I’d have to spend the rest of my life up on this wall. But, yes, I’m good.”

  The eagle simply looked at him.

  “The Frost Giant’s gone,” said Odd. “I made him go away.”

  “How?” asked the eagle.

  “Magic,” said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, If magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be . . .

  “Down,” said the eagle.

  Odd eyed the snowy rocks that made the wall. “I can’t climb down that,” he said. “I’ll die.”

  The eagle launched itself from the edge of the wall, circled downward. It soon returned, flapping heavily, carrying a worn-looking soft leather shoe, which it dropped on the wall beside Odd. Off again it went, into the snowy dusk, and came back with a shoe that was a twin to the first.

  “They’re too big for me,” said Odd.

  “Loki’s,” said the eagle.

  “Oh,” said Odd, remembering the shoes from Loki’s story, the ones that walked in the sky. He pulled them on. Then, warily, heart pounding, Odd limped to the edge of the wall, and when he got to the edge, he stopped.

  He tried to jump, and nothing happened. He didn’t move a muscle.

  Oh come on, he told his feet, his good one and the one that was broken and twisted, the one that hurt all the time. You’ve got magical flying shoes on. Just walk out into the air, and you’ll be fine.

  But his feet and his legs ignored him, and he stood where he was. He turned to the eagle, who was wheeling above Odd’s head impatiently. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’ve tried and I can’t.”

  The eagle gave a screech, flapped its wings hard, and rose into the snowy air.

  Another screech. Odd looked around. The eagle was heading straight for him, wings outstretched, hooked beak open wide, talons out, single eye aflame . . .

  Odd took an involuntary step backwards, and the eagle’s claws missed him by less than the width of a feather . . .

  “What was that for?” he shouted after the bird.

  Then he looked down and saw the ground that wasn’t under his feet. He was a very long way up, standing unsupported on the air.

  “Oh,” said Odd. Then he smiled, and he slid down the sky like a boy going down a hill, shouting as he did so something that sounded remarkably like “Whee!” and he landed as lightly as a snowflake.

  Odd pushed himself back up into the air and began to jump, ten, twenty, thirty feet at a time . . .

  He moved towards the cluster of wooden buildings that were Asgard, and did not stop until he heard the sound of cats, mewing and mrowling . . .

  The Goddess Freya was nowhere near as scary as Odd had imagined from the Frost Giant’s description. True, she was beautiful, and her hair was golden, and her eyes were the blue of the summer sky, but it was her smile that Odd warmed to—amused, and gentle, and forgiving. It was safe, that smile, and he told her everything, or almost.

  When she understood who the three animals really were, her smile became wider.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. And then she said, “Boys!” They were in the great mead hall now. It was empty and no fire burned in the hearth. The Goddess reached out her right arm.

  The eagle, which had been sitting on the ornately carved back of the highest chair, flapped over and landed awkwardly on her wrist. Its talons gripped her pale flesh so hard that crimson beads of blood welled up, yet she did not appear to notice this, or to be in any visible discomfort.

  She scratched the back of the bird’s neck with her fingernail, and it preened against her.

  “Odin All-father,” she said. “Wisest of the Aesir. One-eyed Battle God. You who drank the water of wisdom from Mimir’s Well . . . return to us.” And then, with her left hand, she began to reshape the bird, to push at it, to change it . . .

  A tall, grey-bearded man, with a cruel, wise face stood before them. He was naked, something he seemed scarcely to notice. He walked over to the tall chair, picked up a large grey cloak, and an ancient floppy-brimmed hat—which Odd could have sworn had not been there the last time he looked—and he put them on.

  “I was far away,” he told Freya absently. “And getting farther away with every moment that passed. Good job.”

  But Freya had already put her attention on the bear, and was kneading at it with both hands, pushing and shaping, like a mother bear licking her cubs into shape. Beneath her fair hands the bear changed. He was red-bearded and covered in hair, and his upper arms looked as knotted and as powerful as ancient trees. He was the biggest man, who was not a giant, that Odd had ever seen. He looked friendly, and he winked at Odd, which made the boy feel strangely proud.

  Odin tossed Thor a tunic, and he walked into the shadows to get dressed. Then he paused, and turned back.

  “I need my hammer,” Thor said. “I need Mjollnir.”

  “I know where it is,” said Odd. “It was hidden as a boulder. I can show you, if you like.”

  “When we’ve finished the important business at hand, perhaps?” said the fox. “Me next.”

>   Freya looked at the animal, amused. “You know,” she said, “many people will find you much easier to cope with in that shape. Are you sure you don’t want me to leave you?”

  The fox growled, then the growl became a choked cough, and the fox said, “Fair Freya, you joke with me. But do not the bards sing:

  “‘A woman both fair and just and compassionate

  “‘Only she can be compared to glorious Freya’?”

  “Loki, you caused all this,” she said. “All of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I admit it. But I found the boy as well. You can’t just focus on the bad stuff.”

  “One day,” said Freya softly, “I will regret this.” But she smiled to herself, and she reached a hand out and touched the black tip of the fox’s muzzle, then ran her finger up between its ears and along its spine and all the way up to the very tip of its tail.

  A shimmer—then a man stood in front of them, beardless, flame-haired, as pale of skin as Freya herself. Eyes like green chips of ice. Odd wondered if Loki had a fox’s eyes still, or if the fox had always had Loki’s eyes.

  Thor threw Loki some clothes. “Cover yourself,” he said bluntly.

  Now Freya turned her attention to Odd. Her gentle smile filled his world. “Your turn,” she said.

  “I look like this anyway,” said Odd.

  “I know,” said Freya. She knelt down beside him, reached out a hand towards his injured leg. “May I?”

  “Um. If you want to.”

  She picked him up as if he was light as a leaf, and put him down on the great feasting table of the Gods. She reached down to his right foot and deftly unhooked it at the knee. She ran a nail across the shin and the flesh parted. Freya looked at the bone, and her face fell. “It was crushed,” she said, “so much that not even I can repair it.” And then she said, “But I can help.”

  She pushed her hand into the inside of Odd’s leg, kneading the smashed bones, pulling together the fragments from inside the leg, smoothing them together. Then she opened the flesh of the foot and repeated the same operation, putting the pieces of foot bone and toe bone back where they were meant to be. And then she encased the skeletal leg and foot in flesh once more, sealed it up, and the Goddess Freya reattached Odd’s leg to Odd, and it was as if it had always been there.