Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

  There was silence. Odd rolled over. There was a glow from the fire embers, enough to see the inside of the hut, enough to confirm to Odd that there were not another three people in there with him. It was just him and the fox and the bear and the eagle . . .

  Whatever they are, thought Odd, they don’t seem to eat people.

  He sat up, leaned against the wall. The bear and the eagle both ignored him. The fox darted him a green-eyed glance.

  “You were talking,” said Odd.

  The animals looked at Odd and at one another. If they did not actually say “Who? Us?” it was there in their expressions, in the way they held themselves.

  “Somebody was talking,” said Odd, “and it wasn’t me. There isn’t anyone else in here. That means it was you lot. And there’s no point in arguing.”

  “We weren’t arguing,” said the bear. “Because we can’t talk.” Then it said, “Oops.”

  The fox and the eagle glared at the bear, who put a paw over its eyes and looked ashamed of itself.

  Odd sighed. “Which one of you wants to explain what’s going on?” he said.

  “Nothing’s going on,” said the fox brightly. “Just a few talking animals. Nothing to worry about. Happens every day. We’ll be out of your hair first thing in the morning.”

  The eagle fixed Odd with its one good eye. Then it turned to the fox. “Tell!”

  The fox shifted uncomfortably. “Why me?”

  “Oh,” said the bear, “I don’t know. Possibly because it’s all your fault?”

  “That’s a bit much,” replied the fox. “Blaming the whole thing on a chap like that. It wasn’t like I set out to do this. It could have happened to any of us.”

  “What could?” asked Odd, exasperated. “And why can you talk?”

  The bear pushed itself up onto all fours. It made a rumbling noise, then it said, “We can talk because, O mortal child—do not be afraid—beneath these animal disguises we wear . . . well, not actual disguises, I mean we are actually a bear and a fox and a big bird, which is a rotten sort of thing to happen, but where was I . . . ?”

  “Gods!” screeched the eagle.

  “Gods?” said Odd.

  “Aye. Gods,” said the bear. “I was just getting to that. I am great Thor, Lord of the Thunders. The eagle is Lord Odin, All-father, greatest of the Gods. And this runt-eared meddling fox is—”

  “Loki,” said the fox smoothly. “Blood-brother to the Gods. Smartest, sharpest, most brilliant of all the inhabitants of Asgard, or so they say—”

  “Brilliant?” snorted the bear.

  “You would have fallen for it. Anyone would,” said the fox.

  “Fallen for what?” said Odd.

  A flash of green eyes, a sigh and the fox began. “I’ll tell you. And you’ll see. It could have happened to anyone. So, Asgard. Home of the mighty. In the middle of a plain, surrounded by an impregnable wall built for us by a Frost Giant. And it was due to me, I should add, that that wall did not cost us the Giant’s fee, which was unreasonably high.”

  “Freya,” said the bear. “The Giant wanted Freya. Most lovely of the Goddesses—with, obviously, the exception of Sif, my own little love. And it wanted the Sun and the Moon.”

  “If you interrupt me one more time,” said the fox, “one more time, I will not only stop talking, but I shall go off on my own and leave the two of you to fend for yourselves.”

  The bear said, “Yes, but—”

  “Not one word.”

  The bear was silent.

  The fox said, “In the great hall of Odin sat all the Gods, drinking mead, eating and telling stories. They drank and bragged and fought and boasted and drank, all through the night and well into the small hours. The women had gone to bed hours since, and now the fires in the hall burned low and most of the Gods slept where they sat, heads resting on the wooden tables. Even great Odin slept in his high chair, his single eye closed in sleep. And yet there was one among the Gods who had drunk and eaten more than any of the others and still was not sleepy. This was I, Loki, called Sky Walker, and I was neither sleepy nor yet drunk, not even a little . . .”

  The bear made a noise, a small grumpy harrumph of disbelief. The fox looked at him sharply.

  “I said one word . . .”

  “That wasn’t a word,” said the bear. “I just made a noise. So. You weren’t drunk.”

  “Right. I wasn’t. And not-drunkenly I wandered out from the hall, and I walked, with my shoes that step on air, up to the top of the wall around Asgard, and I looked out over the wall. In the moonlight, standing beneath the wall, staring up at me, I saw the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen. Her flesh was creamy, her hair was golden, her lips, her shoulders . . . perfection. And in a voice like the striking of a harp string, she called out to me. ‘Hail, brave warrior,’ she said.

  “‘Hail yourself,’ says I. ‘Hail, most beautiful of creatures,’ at which she laughed prettily and her eyes sparkled and I knew she liked me. ‘And what would a young lady of such loveliness be doing, a-wandering alone, and at night, with wolves and trolls and worse on the loose? Let me offer you hospitality—the hospitality of Loki, mightiest and wisest of all the lords of Asgard. I declare that I shall take you into my own house and care for you in every way that I can!’

  “‘I cannot accept your offer, O brave and extremely good-looking one,’ she said to me, eyes shining like twin sapphires in the moonlight. ‘For although you are obviously tall and powerful and extremely attractive, I have promised my father—a king who lives far from here—that I will not give my heart or my lips to any but he who possesses one thing.’

  “‘And that one thing is?’ says I, determined to bring her anything she named.

  “‘Mjollnir,’ says the maiden. ‘The Hammer of Thor.’

  “Hah! Pausing only to tell her not to go anywhere, my feet flew, and like the wind I rushed to the great hall. They were all asleep, or so drunk it made no never mind. There was Thor, sleeping in a drunken stupor, his face on the gravy-covered wooden trencher, and hanging from his side, his hammer. Only the nimble fingers of Loki, wiliest and cleverest, could have teased it from the belt without waking Thor—”

  At this, the bear made a deep noise in the back of its throat. After glaring at it for a moment, the fox said, “Heavy it was, that hammer. Heavier than people dream. It weighed as much as a small mountain. Too heavy to carry, if you are not Thor. And yet, not too much for my genius. I took off my shoes, which, as I said, can walk on the air, and I tied them, one to the handle and one to the head. Then I snapped my fingers and the hammer followed me.

  “This time I hurried to the gates of Asgard. I unbarred them and I walked through—followed, I do not need to tell you, by the hammer.

  “The maiden was there. She was sitting on a boulder and she was weeping.

  “‘Why the tears, O loveliness itself?’ I asked.

  “At that, she looked up at me with a tear-stained face. ‘I weep because once I saw you, great and noble lord, I knew I could never love another. And yet I am doomed to give my heart and my caress only to he who lets me touch the Hammer of Thor.’

  “I reached out a hand and touched her cold, wet cheek. ‘Dry your tears,’ I told her. ‘And behold . . . the Hammer of Thor!’

  “She stopped crying then, and reached out her delicate hands and held the hammer tightly. I had reckoned I could have my fun with the lady and still get the hammer back into the hall before Thor woke up. But we would need to get a move on.

  “‘Now,’ I said. ‘About that kiss.’

  “For a moment I thought she had begun to cry once again, and then I knew that she was laughing. But the noise she made was not a sweet, tinkling, maidenly laugh. It was a deep, crashing noise, like an ice sheet grinding against a mountainside.

  “The maiden pulled my shoes from the hammer and dropped them to the ground. She held the hammer as if it was a feather. A wave of cold engulfed me, and I found myself looking up at her, and to make matters worse she wasn�
�t even a she any longer.

  “She was a man. Well, not a man. Male, yes. Yet big as a high hill, icicles hanging from his beard. And she—he, rather—said, ‘After so long, all it took was one drunken, lust-ridden oaf, and Asgard is ours.’ Then the Frost Giant peered down at me, and he gestured with the Hammer of Thor. ‘And you,’ he said in a deep and extremely satisfied voice, ‘you need to be something else.’

  “I felt my back pushing up. I felt a tail pushing its way out from the base of my spine. My fingers shrank into paws and claws. It wasn’t the first time I had turned into animal form—I was a horse once, you know—but it was the first time it was imposed on me from the outside, and it wasn’t a nice feeling. Not a nice feeling at all.”

  “It was worse for us,” said the bear. “One moment you are fast asleep, dreaming about thunderstorms, and the next you’re being scrunched into a bear. They turned the All-father into an eagle.”

  The eagle screeched, startling Odd. “Rage!” it said.

  “The giant laughed at us, waving my hammer around the while, and then he forced Heimdall to summon the Rainbow Bridge and exiled the three of us here to Midgard. There’s no more to tell.”

  There was silence then in the tiny hut. Only the crackle and spit of a pine branch on the fire.

  “Well,” said Odd, “Gods or not, I can’t keep feeding you, if this winter keeps going. I don’t think I can keep feeding me.”

  “We won’t die,” said the bear, “because we can’t die here. But we’ll get hungry. And we’ll get more wild. More animal. It’s something that happens when you have taken on animal form. Stay in it too long and you become what you pretend to be. When Loki was a horse—”

  “We don’t talk about that,” said the fox.

  “So is that why the winter isn’t ending?” said Odd.

  “The Frost Giants like the winter. They are the winter,” said the bear.

  “And if spring never comes? If summer doesn’t happen? If this winter just goes on forever?”

  The bear said nothing. The fox swished its tail impatiently. They looked to the eagle. It tilted its head back, and with one fiery yellow eye it stared at Odd. Then it said, “Death!”

  “Eventually,” added the fox. “Not immediately. In a year or so. And some creatures will go south. But most of the people and the animals will die. It’s happened before, back when we had wars with the Frost Giants at the dawn of time. When they won, huge ice sheets would cover this part of the world. When we won—and if it took us a hundred thousand years, we always did—the ice sheets would retreat and the spring would return. But we were Gods then, not animals.”

  “And I had my hammer,” said the bear.

  “Well then,” said Odd. “We’ll set off as soon as it gets light enough to travel.”

  “Set off?” said the fox. “For where?”

  “Asgard, of course,” said Odd, and he smiled his infuriating smile. Then he went back to his little bed, and he went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  MAKING RAINBOWS

  “WHAT’S THAT YOU’VE GOT there?” asked the fox.

  “It’s a lump of wood,” said Odd. “My father began to carve it into something years ago, and he left it here, but he never came back to finish it.”

  “What was it going to be?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Odd. “My father used to say that the carving was in the wood already. You just had to find out what the wood wanted to be, and then take your knife and remove everything that wasn’t that.”

  “Mm.” The fox seemed unimpressed.

  Odd was riding on the bear’s back. The fox trotted along beside them. High above them, the eagle rode the winds. The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky, and it was colder than it had been when there was cloud cover. They were heading towards higher ground, along a rocky ridge, following a frozen river. The wind hurt Odd’s face and ears.

  High above them, the eagle rode the winds.

  “This won’t work,” said the bear gloomily. “I mean, whatever it is, it won’t.”

  Odd said nothing.

  “You’re smiling, aren’t you,” said the bear. “I can tell.”

  The thing was this: You got to Asgard, the place the Gods came from, by crossing the Rainbow Bridge, which was called Bifrost. If you were a God, you simply wiggled your fingers and a rainbow appeared, and you walked across it.

  Easy, or so the fox said, and the bear morosely agreed. Or at least, it was easy until you didn’t have fingers. Which they didn’t. Still, even if you didn’t have fingers, Loki pointed out, you could normally still find a rainbow and use it. Rainbows turned up after it rained, didn’t they?

  Well, they didn’t in midwinter.

  Odd thought about it. He thought about the way rainbows appeared on rainy days, when the sun came out.

  “I think,” said the bear, “as a responsible adult, I should point a few things out.”

  “Talk is free,” said Odd, “but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.” It was something his father used to say.

  “I just thought I should point out that we are wasting our time. We don’t have any way of getting to the Rainbow Bridge. And if by some miracle we crossed it, look at us—we’re animals, and you can barely walk. We can’t defeat Frost Giants. This whole thing is hopeless.”

  “He’s right,” said the fox.

  “If it’s hopeless,” said Odd, “why are you coming with me?”

  The animals said nothing. The morning sun sparkled up at them from the snow, dazzling Odd, making him squint.

  “Nothing better to do,” said the bear after a while.

  “Up here!” said Odd. He clung tightly to the bear’s fur as they clambered up the side of a steep hill. They could see the mountains beyond.

  “Stop,” said Odd. The waterfall was one of his favorite places in the world. From spring until midwinter it ran high and fast before it crashed down almost a hundred feet into the valley beneath, where it had carved out a rocky basin. In high summer, when the sun barely set, the villagers would come out to the waterfall and splash around in the basin pool, letting the water tumble onto their heads.

  Now, the waterfall was frozen and ice ran from the crags down to the basin in twisted ropes and great clear icicles.

  “It’s a waterfall,” said Odd. “We used to come out here. And when the water came down and the sun was shining brightly, you could see a rainbow, like a huge circle, all around the waterfall.”

  “No water,” said the fox. “No water, no rainbow.”

  “There’s water,” said Odd. “But it’s ice.”

  He took the axe from his belt, pushed his crutch beneath his arm as he got down from the bear’s back and walked over the ice until he stood before the frozen waterfall. He used the crutch to hold himself in position as best he could. Then he began to swing the axe. The noise of the blade hitting the thick icicle cracked off the hills around them, making echoes that sounded as if an entire army of men was hammering on the ice . . .

  There was a crash, and an icicle as large as Odd smashed down to the surface of the frozen pool.

  “Clever,” said the bear, in the kind of tone of voice that meant that it wasn’t clever at all. “You broke it.”

  “Yes,” said Odd. He inspected the shards of ice on the ground, picked up the biggest, most cleanly broken piece he could find, then took it to the side of the frozen pool, and put it on a rock, and stared at it.

  “It’s a lump of ice,” said the fox. “If you ask me.”

  “Yes,” said Odd. “I think the rainbows are imprisoned in the ice when the water freezes.”

  The boy took out his knife and began to trace outlines on the ice block with the blade, going back and forth with it, scoring it as best he could.

  The eagle circled high above them, almost invisible in the midwinter sun.

  “He’s been up there a long time,” said the bear. “Do you think he’s looking for something?”

  The fox said, “I worry about hi
m. It must be hard to be an eagle. He could get lost in there. When I was a horse . . .”

  “A mare, you mean,” said the bear with a grunt.

  The fox tossed its head and walked away. Odd put his knife down and took out his axe once more. “I’ve seen rainbows on the snow sometimes,” said Odd, loud enough for the fox to hear, “and on the side of buildings, when the sun shone through the icicles. And I thought, Ice is only water, so it must have rainbows in it too. When the water freezes, the rainbows are trapped in it, like fish in a shallow pool. And the sunlight sets them free.”

  Odd knelt on the frozen pond. He hit the big lump of ice with his axe. This did nothing—the axe just glanced off the ice and nearly cut into his leg.

  “Do that again and you’ll break the axe,” said the fox. “Hold on.”

  He nosed along the bank of the frozen pool for several minutes. Then he began scrabbling at the snow. “Here,” he said. “This is what you need.” He put his paw on a grey rock he had revealed.

  Odd pulled at the stone, which came up easily from the ground, and it proved to be a flint. Part of it was grey, but the other part, the translucent part of the flint, was a deep salmon-pink color, and it seemed to have been chipped.

  “Don’t touch the edges,” said the fox. “It’ll be sharp. Really sharp. They didn’t mess about when they made those things, and they don’t blunt easily if you make them well.”

  “What is it?”

  “A hand axe. They used to do sacrifices here, on that big rock over there, and they used tools like this to slice up the animal and to part the flesh from the bones.”

  “How do you know?” asked Odd.

  There was satisfaction and pride in the fox’s voice as it said, “Who do you think they were making sacrifices to?”

  Odd brought the tool over to the lump of ice. He ran his hands over the ice, slippery as a fish, then he began to attack the ice with the flint. The rock felt warm in his hands. Hot, even.

  “It’s hot,” said Odd.

  “Is it?” said the fox, sounding pleased with itself.

  The ice fell away under the flint axe, just as Odd had wanted it to. He hacked it into a shape that was almost triangular, thicker on one side than on the other.