by Terry Graves
Then, they changed their course and went to Álfheim, where it was always dawn and the light had the warm and soft quality of an inviting hearth. There, they heard chants of sorrow in a tongue Kai could not decipher. After listening for a while, he felt an incommensurable sadness. Sparrows could not cry, but he would have if it had been possible, and he very much wanted to let himself go, stop flapping his wings and plunge into the rocks below. But, as soon as they flew away, the feeling was also gone.
Then Kai saw the Bifröst Bridge, a bluish curve like a frozen rainbow, with clouds that were rivers — or rivers that were clouds — under it. He followed the arch until his eyes reached Himinbjörg, a dark shadow under the iced structure, no longer identifiable. It was said that in the past Heimdall had guarded the bridge and blew his horn every time the giants tried to get to the gods’ dwelling. The stronghold looked bleak, with dozens of towers in the shape of icicles, like teeth from a vicious beast. Kai had never seen it up close, because Solfrid had forbidden him to approach Himinbjörg, or even Ásgarð, during these travels. “That may call attention to you again,” she used to say. And she was probably right.
Still, the temptation was strong and, almost without noticing, he let his body slide with a cold air current and got close to the palace. For the first time, he noticed the details in the outward structure and discovered that the building’s architecture was much more intricate that he had thought. Ice seemed to have been carved in the same manner as rock would be, but with a delicacy and expertise that Kai had never seen before in his life. There were tall windows with thin polished sheets of ice as panes, arches with multiple moldings, cuspings that resembled snowflakes, columns with ornamented capitals and detached shafts, and sharp turrets.
The Snow Queen had done all that, Kai figured, and must have put a lot of thought onto it, even if she had used her magical powers. The craftsmanship was spotless, and he decided that someone capable of creating such beauty could not be all bad. Most of the walls were translucent and glinted in the sun. He flapped his wings and tried to get closer in an attempt to peek at the interior.
From a distance, Solfrid called to him with that strange noise herons made. Kai ignored her and glided over Ásgarð and saw snow all across, covering the great halls of the gods, the plains and the hills. Everything looked lifeless and still, as if the whole place had been detached from time.
He tried to get to the stronghold but a sudden gust of wind sent him away. Kai moved his wings frantically against it, but he was too small, too light. His sparrow body was all bones and feathers. Alarr would have laughed at him for only being capable of taking this powerless shape. Not a raven, not an eagle or a hawk, not even a black heron. Just a sparrow, fragile and powerless, as the true Kai was.
The sky was getting darker and clouds seemed to gather around Himinbjörg like a herd around a shepherd. Kai tried to fight, but he was a plaything in the hands of the whirlwind. Hail drove savagely against him, hit him and sent him in multiple directions, spiraling out of control.
She can see me, he thought. She found me.
Kai crashed into one of the walls, and when he opened his eyes it was morning and he was lying on the floor of his house again, with Solfrid next to him, snoring.
FOUR
“What do you know about giants?”
These were the first words Gerda’s father had addressed to her in the last two days, and they startled her. She turned around and watched him, seated on the chair beside the fire, scratching the stump on his leg.
“What do I know?” Gerda repeated. “Well, let me see…”
She rummaged through the kitchenware, looking for some bread for the breakfast. Surprisingly, her father hadn’t claimed he’d seen any giants during his travels, but they were material for stories, and if the elders of Veraheim excelled at something – with the exception of complaining about the fairness of the weather – it was telling stories.
“I know they are called Jötnar in the Old Tongue and they are supposed to live in Jötunheim, far up north, behind the mountain range,” Gerda said. She cut two slices of bread with her knife. The loaf had hardened and seemed inedible, but it was all they had. “I know that they can have different sizes, or perhaps they can change size. Some of them can easily pass as humans and others would be better concealed if they disguised themselves as mountains. And I know that there are male giants and female giants.”
“That is all?” Hallbjorn breathed heavily. There was urgency in his voice. The blush on his cheeks had faded and his hands did not tremble anymore. He did not seem drunk, but one could never be sure.
“And I know there is one trapped under the lake,” she said. “And I know you’re waiting for me to stop talking to give me a lesson, so I will shut up and let you carry on with it. That way, at least, we will finish sooner.”
Her father sent her a tired gaze. At night, if she had to go searching for him in the great hall, she would find him merry, chatting in a lively way, claiming feats too big for a man of his stature. At those times his dark blonde hair with strawberry highlights shone, and his eyes sparkled with a hidden fire, the same as Gerda’s. But daylight was not kind to him, and in the mornings he always seemed old, bloated and dazed.
“There is something else. Say it already.”
Gerda took a deep breath.
“And I know that, many years ago, the giants fought the gods of Ásgarð and won, and they would have claimed the place for themselves if it was not for the Snow Queen.”
“Giants are not to be trusted” Hallbjorn concluded.
“Neither gods, nor men or women.”
He nodded and shook his hand, as if all this was well known. Gerda left the two plates and the bread and took a seat beside him. There was some fat as well. She divided it equally and then proceeded to spread her share over her slice.
“I have never seen a Jötunn before, but someone told me a story once. This man had traveled so far into the north that he found Útgarð among the mountains, a city where many frost giants live. He disguised himself as one of their kind and stayed among them for seven days. And he found out that they were looking for something.”
Hallbjorn looked at his plate, but did not touch it.
“A wonderful story, father,” Gerda mocked him, “and a valuable lesson for me.”
“And whatever it was,” her father ignored her and kept talking, “he told me that when they find it, the Jötnar will go to war.”
Gerda nodded. She had the habit of not believing a word her father said. Hallbjorn claimed that he had headed up north to the icy wastelands, where the sun shone exhausted and light was thin and all heat seemed to have left the world. He had tried to convince everyone that he had been where no men could survive for long, where the air had teeth of icicles and bit your skin and made your blood freeze and form clusters in your veins. In those faraway lands he had claimed to outsmart a huldra in a forest with black-needle pines and witnessed the statues of an army of trolls, surprised by Thor’s lightning and turned to stone. He used to say that when the Snow Queen sends one of her howling gales down the slopes of the mountains, a man who gets in the way could die just by breathing once. His lungs would freeze and his heart would stop and the man would be gone in the middle of a step.
Gerda had loved his stories. When she was little, she had regarded her father as a hero. But once she had started to pay attention to what people said, she had discovered the ugly truth: that a swineherd could not travel so far for no discernible reason to witness all these beings of legend and only lose a leg in the process. We’re a joke to them, she thought. You and your tales; me and my miseries. But she would never say that to him, because it would break his heart.
And still, stories were all Gerda had, all that everybody had in Veraheim: the elder with his tales about the Great Cold and the missing gods, her father with his lies about his travels, Kai’s fantasies with the Snow Queen, and Alarr’s dreams about joining the army. Even Gerda had seen many a winter come an
d go already and was in desperate need of a story of her own. Runa was perhaps the only one who did not take any pleasure in fabling, but that was to be expected. She, after all, had lived a real adventure and had come out scathed.
“Weather is fair today,” she said to change the topic, and looked through the window at the sun that rose behind the roofs. There was smoke coming out from Kai’s house and a subtle smell of burning herbs. Perhaps he and Solfrid had been performing some sort of spell the night before, she thought, and that annoyed her. “I will tend to the pigs, let them root around outside.”
“Don’t go near the giant” Hallbjorn insisted. “Don’t exchange glances. Don’t knock on the ice above him. Don’t touch his skin. Don’t speak to him.”
“I won’t.” Gerda put her breakfast away. The bread was too hard and she had lost her appetite anyway. She got up and picked up her father’s plate, which he had not touched, and left it on the lid of the saucepan over the fire. “Keep it there for a while, until the fat has melted it. It will get better.”
Gerda thought that they would keep an eye on Fyrnir, but there was no one on the path or near the lake. If someone came and asked her, she would say that she had forgotten her cloak and her skates when she saw the giant. Which was true. When Gerda had looked at the creature’s face for the first time, their sights had crossed. That had been enough for her to scream, run across the polished ice, fall, and hurt her knees. It was then that she had forgotten her cloak and her skates, which she had left hastily on the shore. She had kept running without looking back and, when she had returned with Kai and the others, she had been too excited to pick them up again.
Gerda found the skates under a thin layer of snow. She shook the dark gray cloak – which was frozen and hard – in the air, grabbed the skates, and paced toward the center of the lake. The cloak had belonged to her mother, so it was very valuable to her.
She stopped when she reached the giant’s hand and followed the wrist with her eyes until it became a dark and blurry silhouette some feet below her. She could not even distinguish the joint at the elbow. Gerda still hesitated for a moment, then she raised her hand and touched the skin of the giant’s wrist. It was rough and cold, but it felt like flesh.
“Fyrnir,” she said, and waited.
The finger was still missing. In some stories it was stated that Jötnar could grow new limbs — a piece of lore she had heard but had not shared with her father, because she had thought it disrespectful — but this one had not grown back.
“Fyrnir,” she said, and waited again. A black-crowned night heron flew above her head, perhaps in the hope of finding better hunting grounds.
Disillusioned, Gerda stood up and walked a bit farther on onto the lake, where the white round stones with the runes stood in a circle around the giant’s head. She kicked one with her boot when she got inside, half-purposely. Then, she dropped her cloak and extended it over the ice before lying flat on it. She then leaned her head to examine the frozen mass of water underneath, the face of the giant with his opened eyes. His pupils were unfocused and he did not seem to notice her. Gerda knocked on the surface three times. And at last, Fyrnir talked back:
“Little girl,” he said. “You have come back. That was… unexpected.”
“Were you asleep?”
“Something like that. Asleep, and dreaming.”
“I came back to apologize. None of us wanted Sveinn to cut off one of your fingers. I’m sorry for that.”
Fyrnir pondered it, then said: “I suppose worse things will come to me soon enough, now that they know I’m here.”
Gerda would not deny it. Torgeir had departed and he would reach Heiðirsalr soon enough, setting things in motion. “You have to understand, though, why they are afraid of your race. The prophecy says that giants will conquer Valhalla, free Loki, and start Ragnarök. You attacked their dwelling already and sent the gods away. Or do you deny it?”
So went the story, at least in the manner in which it was told in the north. From that point on there had been no gods for mankind to pray to, for better or worse. Some would say they were all dead, and others that they had just left the ash tree and traveled elsewhere. And there were those who argued that the gods now lived hidden among humans, waiting for the moment they could come back to Ásgarð.
“I won’t,” Fyrnir said, speaking in the same monotonous voice. “It was a prophecy fulfilled. Quite appropriate if you ask me. The question is: if our treason was written in the stars the moment we were born, is it truly ours, the guilt? Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had never heard of the prophecies of the Æsir, if we had been free then to choose our fate, and if we had chosen differently. But we can only guess, I suppose.”
Life in Veraheim often felt like a fulfilled prophecy too. You would be born poor, grow weary and feebly on its soil, like carrots and turnips did, get married and have children, and die poor without making a single dent in history. That was the story the norns seemed to have chosen for her and everyone took it as unavoidable fate. So Gerda could understand quite well what Fyrnir was trying to say.
“My father told me about a place among the mountains. Útgarð, he called it.”
“Ah, yes.” To her surprise, Fyrnir recognized the name and his eyes opened wide. “The City of the White Nights, a true gem in the North. Its beauty has no equal, not even in Ásgarð. It seems you want to torture me as well, Gerda Hallbjornsdóttir, talking to me about places I will never see again.”
“I would help you if I could,” said Gerda, and she meant it. “But there is nothing I can do.”
“Mm, but there is. There is always something to do. That is, as long as you’re not trapped in the ice.”
“Tell me,” she asked him, and thought that there was no harm in knowing.
“Very well. I’m a frost giant, as you see; and so, I know a spell to break the ice above me. For this I would need two things. The first one is a certain flower, golden as Sif’s hair in the center and with white petals all around. On the surface, the flowers resemble the baldursbrá, but while these grow in the sand of the coasts, next to the salt water, the one that I seek only does it in the shade of the mountains.”
“Flowers, shade, mountain. Very well.” Gerda recognized the flowers described by Fyrnir. They sometimes sprouted between the rocks of Groennfell. The place was close enough, less than a day’s journey from Veraheim, and she had gone there with her friends plenty of times when she was younger. “What’s the other thing?”
“The sorceress,” said Fyrnir. “The one who created the circle of rocks that put me to sleep. The bear-woman.”
“Solfrid? What do you need her for?”
“She has something that is mine in the little bags that hang around her neck.”
“The mirrors?” Solfrid claimed to have two of the smallest pieces of the mirror in two leather bags that she always carried around her neck, shards no bigger than grains of salt. The fragments were mixed with a fistful of dark volcanic sand. She had done it to conceal them so, if someone wanted to steal the shards from her, she could open the bag and spread the sand into the wind. You could give credence to this or not, and most people didn’t.
“You call them mirrors, fine. But it is stone-heart that you’re talking about.”
“So it’s true. She can do magic.”
“Jötnar magic,” Fyrnir specified. “A little bit, but enough for me to break free.”
“It doesn’t take much to please Vöggr,” Gerda muttered, using an expression that her father said with irony when Gerda asked for too much. She had never wondered who Vöggr was or why he was so easy to please. “The flowers, I can get them soon enough if you give me some days to organize it. The mirror shards, or the stone-heart as you say, are a different thing.”
“It is the only way. But I don’t mind if you don’t do it. It is unfair to expect a little girl to solve all my problems, to make right what is wrong.” He paused. “Mm. I suppose I can also wait and die. Yes, dying is e
asy enough, I know how to do it. Simplest thing in the world.”
“I’m not a little girl,” said Gerda, “and I can do anything, so stop complaining. I’ll see to it.”
“You will?”
Gerda stood up and smiled. She felt a mindless joy, as if she was floating in air. “I will.”
At last, an adventure.
FIVE
Alarr pushed the crates back and buried his hands in the hay to find both swords, shrouded in old linen clothes. He unwrapped them with care, picked one up with each hand and held them in the air. They had no sheaths, and the sun was caught in the shine of the blades.
He had forged them himself. Not the best craftsmanship in the world, he had to admit. They were not like those swords from legend who could bend completely without breaking, light as an autumn leaf, sharp as the mind of a flyting master. These were simply iron, not even steel. He had been collecting scraps of metal for months — a bit from the ores after they were weighted, a couple of grams from each horseshoe — and saving them in the barn. Just iron, because steel was rare and expensive, and his father would have noticed.
Just iron, but iron would suffice.
One cannot be a warrior with a wooden sword and one cannot take part of a shield wall with a training weapon. His family were not fighters, they were not wealthy enough to afford a panoply, but they took part in the levy for the chieftain, so his father had a spear, a shield, and an axe. Alarr had never seen him go on a raid in his life. And, since war times, no enemy force had bothered to attack so far up north. So the spear had its head deformed and the shield had its paint peeled off. The axe, on the contrary, was in perfect condition, only very worn down after cutting so much wood for the hearth.
