Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

  The fox and the bear stood nearby watching. The eagle descended to see what was going on, landed in the leafless branches of a tree and was still as a statue.

  Odd took his ice triangle and placed it so that the sunlight shone through it onto the white snow that drifted on the frozen pool. Nothing happened. He twisted it, tilted it, moved it around and . . .

  A puddle of light appeared on the snow, all the colors of the rainbow . . .

  “How is that?” asked Odd.

  “But it’s on the ground,” said the bear doubtfully. “It should be in the air. I mean, how can that be a bridge?”

  The eagle took off from the tree with a clap of wings, and began to fly upwards.

  “I don’t think he’s very impressed,” said the fox. “Nice try.”

  Odd shrugged. He could feel his mouth pulling up into a smile even as his heart sank. He had been so proud of himself, making a rainbow. His hands were numb. He hefted the stone axe, was about to throw it, hard, away from him and then simply dropped it.

  A screech. Odd looked up to see the eagle plummeting towards them. He began to step back, marvelling at the eagle’s speed, wondering how the bird could pull out in time . . .

  It didn’t pull out.

  The eagle hit the patch of colored light on the white snow without slowing, as if it was diving into a pool of liquid water.

  The puddle of color splashed . . . and opened.

  Scarlet fell softly about them and everything was outlined in greens and blues and the world was raspberry-colored and leaf-colored and golden-colored and fire-colored and blueberry-colored and wine-colored. Odd’s world was colors, and, despite his crutch, he could feel himself falling forward, tumbling into the rainbow . . .

  Everything went dark. Odd’s eyes took moments to adjust, and when they did, above him was a velvet night sky, hung with a billion stars. A rainbow arced across it, and Odd was walking on the rainbow—no, not walking: his feet did not move. It felt as if he was being carried up the arch, going upwards, forwards, uncertain how fast he was travelling, only certain that he was somehow swept up in the colors and that it was the colors of the rainbow that were carrying him along.

  He looked behind him, wondering if he would see the snowy world he had left, but he saw nothing but blackness, empty even of stars.

  Odd’s stomach gave a sort of a lurch. He could feel himself dropping, and he turned his head to see the rainbow fading. Through the prism of colors he saw huge fir trees, foggy and purple and blue and red, and then the trees came into focus and found their own color—a cool bluish green—as Odd tumbled off the side of a fir tree and down into a drift of snow. The scent of bruised fir tree surrounded him.

  It was daylight. He was wet, and cold, but unhurt.

  He glanced up, but there was no sign of the Rainbow Bridge. Silently, across the thick snow, the fox and the bear were walking towards him. And then, with a rattle and a clatter, the eagle landed on a branch beside him, making the snow on the branch fall flump to the ground. The eagle looked less crazy now, thought Odd. And then, it looks bigger.

  “Where is this place?” asked Odd, but he knew the answer, knew it even before the eagle threw back its head and screamed, with delight and with relish and with keen, dark joy, “Asgard!”

  CHAPTER 5

  AT MIMIR’S WELL

  REALLY, TRULY, WITH ALL of his heart, Odd found that he wanted to believe that he was still in the world he had known all his life. That he was still in the country of the Norse folk, that he was in Midgard. Only he wasn’t, and he knew it. The world smelled different, for a start. It smelled alive. Everything he looked at looked sharper, more real, more there.

  And if there was any doubt, then he only had to look at the animals.

  “You got bigger,” he told them. “You’ve grown.”

  And they had. The fox’s ears were now level with Odd’s chest. The eagle’s wingspan, when the bird preened in the sunshine, was as wide as a longship. The bear, which had not been small to begin with, was now the size of Odd’s father’s hut, enormous in its bulk and in its bearishness.

  “We didn’t grow,” said the fox, its fur the vivid orange color of a blazing fire. “This is how big we are here. We’re normal-sized.”

  Odd nodded. Then he said, “So this whole place is called Asgard, and the town we have to go to is also called Asgard, yes?”

  “We named it after ourselves,” said the bear. “After the Aesir.”

  “How far is it to your place?”

  The fox sniffed the air, then it looked around. There were mountains behind them, and a forest all about them. “A day’s travel. Maybe a little more. Once we get through this forest we reach the plain, and the town is in the center of the plain.”

  Odd nodded. “I suppose we should get on with it, then.”

  “There will be time,” said the bear. “Asgard is not going anywhere. And right now, I am hungry. I am going fishing. Why don’t you two build us a fire?” And without waiting to see what would happen, the great beast lumbered off into the darkness of the forest. The eagle flapped its wings, loud as a small thunderclap, and it took off, circling higher and higher, and then followed the bear.

  Odd and the fox gathered wood, finding dry twigs and dead branches, then Odd heaped them high. He took out his knife and sliced a point on a hard stick, put the point against a piece of dry, soft wood, preparing to rotate the stick between his hands, to use the friction to make a fire.

  The fox eyed him, unimpressed. “Why bother?” it said. “This is easier.” It put its muzzle against the heap of wood, breathed on the twigs. The air above the twigs wavered and shimmered, then, with a crackle, the sticks caught fire.

  “How did you do that?”

  “This is Asgard,” said the fox. “It’s less . . . solid . . . than the place you come from. The Gods—even transformed Gods—well, there is power in this place . . . you understand?”

  “Not really. But not to worry.”

  Odd sat beside the fire and he waited for the bear and the eagle to return. While he waited, he took out the piece of wood his father had started to carve. He inspected it, puzzling over the shape, familiar yet strange, wondering what it had been intended to be, and why it should bother him so. He ran his thumb over it, and it comforted him.

  It was twilight by the time the bear brought back the largest trout Odd had ever seen. The boy gutted it with his knife (the fox devoured the raw guts enthusiastically), then he speared it through with a long stick, cut two forked sticks to make an improvised spit and he roasted it over the fire, turning it every few minutes to ensure it did not burn.

  When the fish was cooked, the eagle took the head, and the other three divided the meat between them, the bear eating more than the other two put together.

  The twilight edged imperceptibly into night, and a huge, dark-yellow moon began to rise on the horizon, achingly slowly.

  When they had finished eating, the fox went to sleep beside the fire, and the eagle flapped heavily off into a dead pine to sleep. Odd took the leftover fish and pushed it into a drift of snow, to keep it fresh, as his mother had taught him.

  The bear looked at Odd. Then it said casually, “You must be thirsty. Come on. Let’s look for some water.”

  Odd climbed onto the bear’s broad back, and held tight as it lumbered off into the darkness of the forest.

  It didn’t feel like they were looking for anything, though. It felt like the bear knew exactly where he was going, that he was heading somewhere. Up a ridge and down into a small gorge and through a copse of trees, magical in its stillness, and then they were pushing through scratchy gorse, and now they were in a small clearing, in the center of which was a pool of liquid water.

  “Careful,” said the bear, quietly. “It goes down a long way.”

  Odd stared. The yellow moonlight was deceptive, but still . . .

  “There are shapes moving in the water,” he said.

  “Nothing in there that will hurt you,” sai
d the bear. “They’re just reflections, really. It’s safe to drink. I give you my word.”

  Odd untied his wooden cup from his belt. He dipped it into the water, and he drank. The water was refreshing and strangely sweet. He had not realized how thirsty he had been, and he filled and emptied his wooden cup four times.

  And then he yawned. “Feel so sleepy.”

  “It’s all the travelling,” said the bear. “Here. Let me.” It pulled over several fallen fir branches at the edge of the clearing with its teeth. “Curl up on these.”

  “But the others . . .” said Odd.

  “I’ll tell them you fell asleep in the woods,” said the bear. “Just don’t go wandering off. For now, just rest.”

  And the bear lay down on the branches, crushing them under its bulk. The boy lay beside the animal, smelling the deep bearish scent of it, pushing against the fur and feeling the softness and the warmth.

  The world was comfortable and quiet and warm. He was safe, and everything was enclosed by the dark . . .

  When he opened his eyes once more, he was cold, and he was alone, and the moon was huge and white and high in the sky. More than twice as big as the moon in Midgard, thought Odd, and he wondered if that was because Asgard was closer to the moon, or whether it had its own moon . . .

  The bear was gone.

  In the pale moonlight Odd could see shapes moving in the water of the pool, and he pulled himself to his feet and limped over to look more closely.

  At the water’s edge he crouched down, made a cup from his hand, scooped up water, and drank. The water was icy cold, but as he drank he felt warmed and safe and comfortable.

  The figures in the water dissolved and re-formed.

  “What do you need to see?” asked a voice from behind Odd.

  Odd said nothing.

  “You have drunk from my spring,” said the voice.

  “Did I do something wrong?” asked Odd.

  There was silence. Then, “No,” said the voice. It sounded very old, so ancient Odd could not tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. Then the voice said, “Look.”

  On the water’s surface he saw reflections. His father, in the winter, playing with him and his mother—a silly game of blindman’s buff that left them all giggling and helpless on the ground . . .

  He saw a huge creature, with icicles in its beard and hair like the pattern the frost makes on the leaves and on the ice early in the morning, sitting beside a huge wall, scanning the horizon restlessly.

  He saw his mother sitting in a corner of the great hall, sewing up Fat Elfred’s worn jerkin, and her eyes were red with tears.

  He saw his mother sitting in a corner of the great hall . . . and her eyes were red with tears.

  He saw the cold plains where the Frost Giants live, saw Frost Giants hauling rocks, and feasting on great horned elk, and dancing beneath the moon.

  He saw his father, sitting in the woodcutter’s hut he had so recently left himself. His father had a knife in one hand, a lump of wood in the other. He began to carve, a strange, distant smile on his face. Odd knew that smile . . .

  He saw his father as a young man, leaping from the longship into the sea and running up a craggy beach. Odd knew that this was Scotland, that soon his father would meet his mother . . .

  He kept watching.

  The moonlight was so bright in that place. Odd could see what he needed to. After some time, he pulled out the lump of wood he had found in his father’s hut and his knife, and he began to carve, in smooth, confident strokes, removing everything that wasn’t part of the carving.

  He carved until daybreak, when the bear crunched through the trees into the clearing.

  It did not ask what Odd had seen in the pool, and Odd did not volunteer anything.

  Odd climbed onto the bear’s back. “You’re getting smaller again,” said Odd. This was no longer the huge bear of the previous evening. Now it seemed only slightly bigger than it had been the first time Odd had ridden it. “You’ve shrunk.”

  “If you say so,” said the bear.

  “Where do the Frost Giants come from?” asked Odd, as they bounded through the forest.

  “Jotunheim,” said the bear. “It means giants’ home. It’s across the great river. Mostly they stay on their own side. But they’ve crossed before. One time, one of them wanted the Sun, the Moon and Lady Freya. The time before that, they wanted my hammer, Mjollnir, and the hand of Lady Freya. There was one time they wanted all the treasures of Asgard and Lady Freya . . .”

  “They must like Lady Freya a lot,” said Odd.

  “They do. She’s very pretty.”

  “What’s it like in Jotunheim?” asked Odd.

  “Bleak. Treeless. Cold. Desolate. Nothing like it is here. You should ask Loki.”

  “Why?”

  “He wasn’t always one of the Aesir. He was born a Frost Giant. He was the smallest Frost Giant ever. They used to laugh at him. So he left. Saved Odin’s life, on his travels. And he . . .” The bear hesitated and seemed to think twice about whatever he had been going to say, then finished, “. . . he keeps things interesting.” And then the bear said, “Anything that you did last night, anything you saw . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.”

  The fox and the eagle were waiting beside the remains of the fire. Odd finished what was left of the fish. Then the bear said, “Well? What do we do now?”

  Odd said, “Take me to the edge of the forest. You wait for me. I’ll walk alone from there to the gates of Asgard.”

  “Why?” asked the fox.

  “Because I don’t want the Frost Giants knowing you three are back,” said Odd. “Not yet.”

  They set off.

  “I could get very used to travelling by bear,” Odd said. But the bear only grunted.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GATES OF ASGARD

  WHERE 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.
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  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?”