The Complete Compleat Enchanter (10 page)

How had he seen through the illusion of the eating contest? Shea asked himself. A teardrop in the eye. Would he have to bang his head again to get another one? He closed his eyes and then opened them again, looking at Thor as he put an arm around the big cat’s belly and heaved. No teardrop. The cat’s belly came up, but its four big paws remained firmly planted.

How to induce a teardrop? A mug of mead stood on the table. Shea dipped a finger into the liquid and shook a drop into his eye. The alcohol burned and stung, and he could hear Thor’s grunt and the whooping of the giants. He shook his head and opened the eye again. Through a film of tears, as he repeated “Sudri—Nordri—Nidi—Nyi—” It was not a cat Thor was lifting, but the middle part of a snake as big around as a barrel. There was no sign of head or tail; the visible section was of uniform thickness, going in one door of the hall and out the other.

“Loki!” he said. “That’s not a cat. It’s a giant snake that Thor’s trying to lift!”

“With a strange shimmering blackish cast over its scales?”

“Yes; and no head or tail in sight.”

“Now, right good are your eyes, eater of turnips! That will be nothing less than the Midgard Serpent that curls round the earth! Surely we are surrounded by evil things. Hurry with the finding of the hammer, for this is now our only hope.”

Shea turned from the contest, making a desperate effort to concentrate. He looked at the nearest object, an aurochs skull on a pillar, tried another drop of mead in his eye and repeated the spell, forward, backward, and forward. No result. The skull was a skull. Thor was still grunting and heaving. Shea tried once more on a knife hanging at a giant’s belt. No result.

He looked at a quiver of arrows on the opposite wall and tried again. The sweet mead was sticking his eyelashes together and he felt sure he would have a headache after this. The quiver blurred as he pronounced the words. He found himself looking at a short-handled sledge hammer hanging by a rawhide loop.

Thor had given up the effort to lift the cat and came over to them, panting. Utgardaloki grinned down at him with the indulgence one might show a child. All around the giants were breaking up into little groups and calling for more drink.

“Want anymore, sonny boy?” the giant chieftain sneered. “Guess you ain’t so damn good as you thought you was, huh?”

Shea plucked at Thor’s sleeve as the latter flushed and started to retort. “Can you call your hammer to you?” he whispered.

The giant’s ears caught the words. “Beat it, thrall,” he said belligerently. “We got business to settle and I won’t have no snotty little mortals butting in. Now, Asa-Thor, do you want any more contests?”

“I—” began Thor again.

Shea clung to his arm.
“Can
you?” he demanded.

“Aye, if it be in view.”

“I said get outta here, punk!” bellowed Utgardaloki, the rough good nature vanishing from his face. He raised an arm like a tree trunk.

“Point at that quiver of arrows and call!” shouted Shea. He dodged behind Thor as the giant’s arm descended. The blow missed. He scuttled among the crowding monsters, hitting his head against the pommel of a giant’s sword. Utgardaloki was roaring behind him. He ducked under a table and past some foul-smelling fire giants. He heard a clang of metal as Thor pulled on the iron gloves he carried at his belt. Then over all other sounds rose the voice of the red-bearded god, making even Utgardaloki’s voice sound like a whisper:

“Mjöllnir the mighty, slayer of miscreants, come to your master, Thor Odinnsson!”

For a few breathless seconds the hall hung in suspended animation. Shea could see a giant just in front of him with mouth wide open, Adam’s apple rising and falling. Then there was a rending snap. With a deep humming, the hammer that had seemed a quiver of arrows flew straight through the air into Thor’s hands.

There was a deafening yell from the swarms of giants. They swayed back, then forward, squeezing Shea so tightly he could hardly breathe. High over the tumult rose the voice of Thor:

“I am Thor! I am the Thunderer! Ho, ho, hohoho, yoyoho!” The hammer was whirling round his head in a blur, sparks dancing round it. Level flashes of lightning cracked across the hall followed by deafening peals of thunder. There was a shriek from the giants and a rush toward the doors.

Shea shot one glimpse as the hammer flew at Utgardaloki and spattered his brains into pink oatmeal, rebounding back into Thor’s gloves. Then he was caught completely in the panic rush and almost squeezed to death. Fortunately for him, the giants on either side wedged him so tightly he couldn’t fall to be trampled.

The pressure suddenly gave way in front. Shea caught the giant ahead of him around the waist and hung on. Behind came Thor’s battle howl, mingled with constant thunder and the sound of the hammer shattering giant skulls—a noise that in a calmer moment Shea might have compared to that made by dropping a watermelon ten stories. The Wielder of Mjöllnir was thoroughly enjoying himself; his shouts were like the noise of a happy express train.

Shea found himself outside and running across damp moss in the middle of hundreds of galloping giants and thralls. He dared not stop lest he be stepped on. An outcrop of rock made him swerve. As he did so he caught sight of Utgard. There was already a yawning gap at one end of the roof. The central beam split; a spear of blue-green lightning shot skyward, and the place began to burn brightly around the edges of the rent.

A clump of trees cut off the view. Shea ran downhill with giants still all around him. One of the group just ahead missed his footing and went rolling. Before Shea could stop, he had tripped across the fellow’s legs, his face plowing up cold dirt and pine needles. A giant’s voice shouted: “Hey, gang! Look at this!”

“Now they’ve got me,” he thought. He rolled over, his head swimming from the jar. But it was not he they were interested in. The giant over whose legs he had fallen was Heimdall, his wig knocked askew to reveal a patch of golden hair. The straw with which he had stuffed his jacket was dribbling out. He was struggling to get up; around him a group of fire giants were gripping his arms and legs, kicking and cuffing at him. There was a babble of rough voices:

“He’s one of the Æsir, all right.” “Sock him!” “Let’s get out of here!” “Which one is he?” “Get the horses!”

If he could get away, Shea thought, he could at least take news of Heimdall’s plight to Thor. He started to crawl behind the projecting root of a tree, but the movement was fatal. One of the fire giants hallooed: “There’s another one!”

Shea was caught, jerked upright, and inspected by half a dozen of the filthy gorillalike beings. They took particular delight in pulling his hair and ears.

“Aw,” said one of them, “he’s no As. Bump him off and let’s get t’ hell out of here.”

One of them loosened a knife at his belt. Shea felt a deadly constriction of fear around the heart. But the largest of the lot—leadership seemed to go with size in giantland—roared: “Lay off! He was with that yellow-headed stumper. Maybe he’s one of the Vanes and we can get something for him. Anyway, it’s up to Lord Surt. Where the hell are those horses?”

At that moment more fire giants appeared, leading a group of horses. They were glossy black and bigger than the largest Percherons Shea had ever seen. Three hoofs were on each foot, as with the ancestral Miocene horse; their eyes glowed red like live coals and their breath made Shea cough. He remembered the phrase he had heard Heimdall whispering to Odinn in Sverre’s house—“fire horses.”

One of the giants produced leather cords from a pouch. Shea and Heimdall were bound with brutal efficiency and tossed on the back of one of the horses, one hanging down on either side. The giants clucked to their mounts, which started off at a trot through the gathering dusk among the trees.

Far behind them the thunders of Thor still rolled. From time to time his distant lightnings cast sudden shadows along their path. The red beard was certainly having fun.

Seven

The agonizing hours that followed left little detailed impression on Harold Shea’s mind. They would not, he told himself even while experiencing them. The impression was certainly painful while being undergone. There was nothing to see but misty darkness; nothing to feel but breakneck speed and the torment of his bonds. He could twist his head a little, but of their path could obtain no impression but now and then the ghost of a boulder or a clump of trees momentarily lit by the fiery eyes of the horses. Every time he thought of the speed they were making along the rough and winding route his stomach crawled and the muscles of his right leg tensed as he tried to apply an imaginary automobile brake.

When the sky finally turned to its wearisome blotting-paper gray the air was a little warmer, though still raw. A light drizzle was sifting down. They were in a countryside of a type totally unfamiliar to Shea. A boundless plain of tumbled black rock rose here and there to cones of varying size. Some of the cones smoked, and little pennons of steam wafted from cracks in the basalt. The vegetation consisted mostly of clumps of small palmlike tree ferns in the depressions.

They had slowed down to a fast trot, the horses picking their way over the ropy bands of old lava flows. Now and again one or more fire giants would detach themselves from the party and set off on a tangent to the main course.

Finally, a score of the giants clustered around the horse that bore the prisoners, making toward a particularly large cone from whose flanks a number of smoke plumes rose through the drizzle. To Shea the fire giants still looked pretty much alike, but he had no difficulty in picking out the big authoritative one who had directed his capture.

They halted in front of a gash in the rock. The giants dismounted, and one by one led their steeds through the opening. The animals’ hooves rang echoing on the rock floor of the passage, which sprang above their heads in a lofty vault till it suddenly ended with a right-angled turn. The cavalcade halted; Shea heard a banging of metal on metal, the creak of a rusty hinge, and a giant voice that cried: “Whatcha want?”

“It’s the gang, back from Jötunheim. We got one of the Æsir and a Vane. Tell Lord Surt.”

“Howdja make out at Utgard?”

“Lousy. Thor showed up. He spotted the hammer somehow, the scum, and called it to him and busted things wide open. It was that smart-aleck Loki, I think.”

“What was the matter with the Sons of the Wolf? They know what to do about old Red Whiskers.”

“Didn’t show. I suppose we gotta wait for the
Time
for them to come around.”

The horses tramped on. As they passed the gatekeeper, Shea noticed that he held a sword along which flickered a yellow flame with thick, curling smoke rising from it, as though burning oil were running down the blade. Ahead and slanting downward, the place they had entered seemed an underground hall of vaguely huge proportions, full of great pillars. Flares of yellow light threw changing shadows as they moved. There was a stench of sulphur and a dull, machinelike banging. As the horses halted behind some pillars that grew together to make another passage, a thin shriek ululated in the distance: “Eee-e-e.”

“Bring the prisoners along,” said a voice. “Lord Surt wants to judge ’em.”

Shea felt himself removed and tucked under a giant’s arm like a bundle. It was a method of progress that woke all the agonies in his body. The giant was carrying him face down, so that he could see nothing but the stone floor with its flickering shadows. The place stank.

A door opened and there was a babble of giant voices. Shea was flung upright. He would have fallen if the giant who had been carrying him had not propped him up. He was in a torchlit hall, very hot, with fire giants standing all around, grinning, pointing, and talking, some of them drinking.

But he had no more than a glance for them. Right in front, facing him, flanked by two guards who carried the curious burning swords, sat the biggest giant of all—a giant dwarf. That is, he was a full giant in size, at least eleven feet tall, but with the squat bandy legs, the short arms and huge neckless head of a dwarf. His hair hung lank around the nastiest grin Shea had ever seen. When he spoke, the voice had not the rumble of the other giants, but a reedy, mocking falsetto:

“Welcome, Lord Heimdall, to Muspellheim! We are delighted to have you here.” He snickered. “I fear gods and men will be somewhat late in assembling for the battle without their horn blower. Hee, hee, hee. But, at least, we can give you the comforts of one of our best dungeons. If you must have music, we will provide a willow whistle. Hee, hee, hee. Surely so skilled a musician as yourself could make it heard throughout the nine worlds.” He ended with another titter at his own humor.

Heimdall kept his air of dignity. “Bold are your words, Surt,” he replied, “but it is yet to be seen whether your deeds match them when you stand on Vigrid Plain. It may be that I have small power against you of the Muspellheim blood. Yet I have a brother named Frey, and it is said that if you two come face to face, he will be your master.”

Surt sucked two fingers to indicate his contempt. “Hee, hee, hee. It is also said, most stupid of godlings, that Frey is powerless without his sword. Would you like to know where the enchanted blade, Hundingsbana, is? Look behind you, Lord Heimdall!”

Shea followed the direction of Heimdall’s eyes. Sure enough, on the wall there hung a great two-handed sword, its blade gleaming brightly in that place of glooms, its hilt all worked with gold up to the jeweled pommel.

“While it hangs there, most stupid of Æsir, I am safe. Hee, hee, hee. Have you been wondering why that famous eyesight of yours did not light on it before? Now you know, most easily deceived. In Muspellheim, we have found the spells that make Heimdall powerless.”

Heimdall was unimpressed. “Thor has his hammer back,” he remarked easily. “Not a few of your fire giants’ heads will bear witness—if you can find them.”

Surt scowled and thrust his jaw forward, but his piping voice was as serene and mocking as before. “Now, that,” he said, “really gives me an idea. I thank you, Lord Heimdall. Who would have thought it possible to learn anything from one of the Æsir?
Hee, hee, hee. Skoa!”