Odd and the Frost Giants (4 page)

W
HERE THE FOREST ENDED
, the bear stopped, and Odd climbed off. He put his crutch beneath his armpit, gripped it hard with his right hand.

“Right,” he said. “Wish me good luck. The blessing of the Gods must count for something.”

“What if you don’t come back?” said the fox.

“Then you’re no worse off now than you were before you met me,” said Odd cheerfully. “Anyway, why shouldn’t I come back?”

“They could eat you,” said the bear.

Odd blinked. “Ah…
do
Frost Giants eat people?”

There was a pause. The fox said, “Occasionally” at the same time as the bear said, “Almost never.”

The fox coughed. “I wouldn’t worry,” it said. “There’s barely any meat on you. You’d scarcely be worth the trouble of eating.” It grinned. This did nothing to make Odd feel any better. He hefted his crutch and began to walk, slowly, laboriously, towards the huge stone wall that surrounded the city of the Gods.

The snow had blown clear of the path, and although the ground was slippery in places,
he found the walk was not as hard as he had expected.

Days were longer here in Asgard. The sun was a silver coin that hung in the white sky. Odd pushed himself to keep walking, one step at a time, remembering back when he had walked with ease and never thought twice about the miracle of putting one foot in front of the other and pushing the world towards you.

At first, Odd thought that the wall of Asgard was as high as a tall man and that there was a pale statue of a man sitting on a boulder beside it—at least, he imagined it to be a statue. And then he moved slowly closer, and closer, and the wall grew, and the pale statue grew also, until, as the boy got closer still, he had to throw back his head to look at them.

Every step he took towards the gates, towards
the huge pale figure on the boulder, he felt the temperature drop.

And then the statue moved, and Odd knew.

“WHO ARE YOU?” The voice tumbled across the plain like an avalanche.

“I’m called Odd,” shouted Odd, and he smiled.

The Frost Giant peered down at him. There were icicles in its eyebrows, and its eyes were the color of lake ice just before it cracks and drops you into freezing water.

“WHAT ARE YOU? A GOD? A TROLL? SOME KIND OF WALKING CORPSE?”

“I’m a boy,” yelled Odd, and he smiled again.

“AND WHAT IN YMIR’S NAME ARE YOU DOING
HERE
?”

It is a strange sensation, talking to a being who could crush you like a man could crush a baby
mouse.
And
, thought Odd,
at least mice can run
.

“I’m here to drive the Frost Giants from Asgard,” explained Odd. Then he smiled at the giant, a big, happy, irritating smile.

It was the smile that did it. If Odd had not smiled, the giant would simply have picked him up and crushed the life from him, or squashed him against the boulder, or bitten his head off and kept him to snack on later. But that smile, a smile that said that Odd knew more than he was saying…

“No, you won’t,” said the Frost Giant. “You can’t.”

“’Fraid so,” said Odd.

“I outwitted Loki,” said the Frost Giant portentously. “I bested Thor. I banished Odin. All of Asgard is pacified and under my rule. Even now, my brothers march from Jotunheim, as
reinforcements.” He darted a look towards the horizon, to the north. “The Gods are my slaves. I am betrothed to the lovely Freya. And you honestly think you can go up against me?”

Odd just shrugged and continued to smile. It was his broadest, most irritating smile, and at home, it had always gotten him hit. Even the giant wanted to hurt him, to wipe that smile off his face. But nobody had smiled at the giant like that before, and it bothered him.

“I rule Asgard!” boomed the giant.

“Why?” asked Odd.

“WHY?”

“I can hear you fine without you shouting,” said Odd, when the reverberations had died away. And then he said, pitching his voice just a little quieter, so the giant had to lean in to listen, “Why do you want to rule Asgard? Why did you take it over?”

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.”

“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?”

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

“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.