When Golden Mane was low enough that his hoofs were splashing up water, Heimdall leaned sideways out of the saddle and held the Gjallarhorn beneath the surface. He scooped up enough water to fill the vessel nearly to the brim, then righted himself and sent the black horse climbing upward. They landed back in front of Mimir’s hermitage, and, with a final flutter of ruddy pinions, Sif set Bloodspiller down beside them.
Heimdall smiled at her. “No serpents.”
She didn’t smile back. “Serpents were never the truest danger. The water is, and you haven’t drunk it yet.”
Perhaps it was the dour warning that gave him a pang of uncertainty. Pushing the feeling away, he tilted back his head and drank deeply from the horn. The water was cold and tasted of nothing in particular. Drinking it was like quaffing water from any mundane well, spring, or river.
Still, he thought, surely it would grant him some profound understanding of which he’d been incapable before. He spent the next several seconds contemplating the course of his thoughts, the inner workings of his mind, only to find that no matter how intently he scrutinized them, nothing had changed. The realization arrived with a crushing feeling of anticlimax. He told himself that at least nothing terrible had happened as a result of drinking the water, but the reflection did little to ease his disappointment.
“Anything?” asked Sif.
He sighed. “Nothing at all. Maybe you have to make a sacrifice to activate the magic.”
Sif glowered. “You are not going to pluck out an eye like Odin did. I’ll beat you senseless, throw you over Golden Mane’s back and haul you away from here if that’s what it takes to stop you.”
Her truculence made him smile and feel a little better. “You won’t have to. I’m not that eager to sharpen my wits. But there’s still some water left. Maybe the magic will work for you.” He proffered the Gjallarhorn.
“No,” she said. “I already have enough wisdom to swing a sword and loose an arrow. How much more do I need? Why would I risk changing the insides of my head and maybe not being the same person any more?”
Heimdall studied her. “Is that the real reason you didn’t want me to drink? You were worried I wouldn’t still be the same person?”
Sif shrugged. “Maybe. A little.”
He felt a surge of affection. “There’s nothing that could ever stop me being your brother.”
She smiled. “Yes, that’s my burden to bear. Come on. Jotunheim awaits.”
He tossed out what was left of the water and hung the drinking horn back over his shoulder. The vessel hadn’t helped him, but he hadn’t given up hope that Frigga or some Asgardian sorcerer could still put it to good use. He and Sif then flew back to the secondary root that was supposedly the way to the world of the frost giants.
The root twisted and narrowed as they flew along it. Eventually it was no wider than the battlements atop the wall of Asgard, and not long after that, it tapered to a rounded terminus no bigger than a person’s finger sticking out into empty space. Heimdall and Sif flew past the end of it, and nothing changed. They were still soaring over Yggdrasil’s root system.
Sif cursed obscenely. “The story lied! Or Nidhogg lied when he drew his map!”
Heimdall feared she was right, but wasn’t ready to accept that conclusion yet. He pondered, and after a moment a thought came to him. “I never heard that Mimir had a winged steed or any other means of flying. Is it possible the secret path only works if you walk it?”
“Who knows what’s possible in this place?” Sif replied. “Let’s give it a try.”
They wheeled their mounts and set them down near the end of the root, Heimdall in the lead and Sif behind. Then they walked the horses forward.
Heimdall could see nothing ahead that hadn’t been there before, and Golden Mane tossed his head in displeasure. If the black steed was going to venture out into the void, he plainly wanted to do it flying, not falling off the end of a root. The Asgardian kept him walking, though, and after another moment, cold air gusted at them from somewhere they couldn’t see. Golden Mane stepped out into empty space and suddenly they were on a snowy peak with dark gray storm clouds overhead. A howling wind chilled Heimdall’s face, and, excited and wary in equal measure at the sudden arrival, he made haste to wrap his scarf around his mouth and nose. As he fumbled with it, Sif and Bloodspiller appeared beside him.
“Welcome to Jotunheim,” he said. “At last.”
Sif tugged her cloak tighter around her body. “Suddenly Yggdrasil doesn’t seem so bad.”
Twenty-One
Asgardian warriors were hardy, Valkyrie steeds were more than a match for them in that regard, and the snow provided water. Still, after two days of traveling across the country of the frost giants, Heimdall’s belly was growling – he actually felt faint at moments – and though Golden Mane and Bloodspiller were still willing, it was plain their strength was dwindling as they fought Jotunheim’s frequent gales.
Heimdall pushed away the dispiriting thought that if things continued as they were, he and Sif might never reach Utgard, the Jotun capital, where they were guessing Mimir’s head resided in the citadel of King Skrymir. He told himself firmly that hunger, both that of the horses and of their riders, was simply another problem to be solved as he and Sif had already solved others.
She called across the space separating the two horses. “How much farther?”
“A ways, I think,” Heimdall answered. Jotunheim was the largest of the Nine Worlds, and as best he could judge from the recognizable landmarks in this frozen landscape, Mimir’s path hadn’t opened particularly close to the stronghold of the frost giant king.
“The horses need food!” Sif called.
“I know. We’ll just have to keep looking for it.”
Inhospitable as the mountains and valleys of Jotunheim seemed, they harbored animal life, much of it on a scale with the frost giants and their ilk. The huge wolves, bears, and saber-toothed tigers hunted the deer, elk, and wooly mammoths that, Heimdall assumed, must eat something in their turn.
Heimdall kept an eye out and eventually spied a herd of elk heading down a pass. Elk, he thought, ate plants, and in all likelihood what they ate the winged stallions could eat too. He and Sif followed the herd from on high until they came to a place where long blades of grass poked up out of the snowfall. There, the animals began to graze.
Heimdall cautiously set Golden Mane down at some distance from the herd but at a point where the grass still grew. Sif followed him to the ground. The towering animals turned their antlered heads to regard the newcomers, then, apparently deciding the small, unfamiliar creatures posed no threat, returned to their feeding.
But Golden Mane and Bloodspiller had scarcely begun to munch the lengths of grass, broad as sword blades to Heimdall’s eyes, when the elk abruptly raised their heads and all peered in the same direction. They then bounded in the opposite direction, which by ill fortune was straight at the Asgardians.
Heimdall felt a jolt of alarm. With no time to mount their steeds and fly or to seek any sort of cover, he and Sif could only crouch and hope not to be trampled. The enormous animals thundered by them, over them, casting up showers of snow, and then they were gone, leaving both riders and steeds unscathed. Unfortunately, he barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief before a far greater danger arrived.
Amber eyes burning, white gray-striped fur making it hard to see despite its size, one of the gigantic saber-toothed tigers charged down the pass. Arriving too late to kill an elk, it turned its gaze on the little creatures still within its reach.
Sif dashed to Bloodspiller and swung herself into the saddle. Heimdall ran to Golden Mane. As he leaped onto the black stallion, the saber-toothed tiger charged. Galloping away from the cat and lashing their feathery wings, the Valkyrie horses ascended into the air and put themselves and their riders above the saber-tooth’s reach. Thwarted, the huge tiger
glared up after them.
“Curse it!” said Sif, sounding as frustrated as the cat. “The horses didn’t have time to eat enough!”
“They still might get their chance,” Heimdall replied. “The elk are gone. The tiger can’t get us while we’re this high. Maybe it will just go away.”
That didn’t happen, though. Heimdall and Sif circled the spot where the grass grew out of the snow, and perhaps deciding they were unwilling to abandon the place, the saber-tooth didn’t either. Rather, the cat stalked back and forth beneath them.
As Heimdall looked down, studying the beast as it was glaring up at Sif and him, he realized something that surprised him. He wasn’t especially afraid of it. Wary of it, certainly, respectful of its strength and ferocity, but not truly afraid.
He could attribute part of that to presently being where the saber-tooth couldn’t get at him, but that wasn’t the whole of it. After successfully battling frost giants and trolls, he’d come to feel more confident in his ability to contend with even enormous foes and in his fighting prowess in general. As a result, he could contemplate a threat like the tiger with a cooler head.
“The cat’s not going away!” Sif shouted.
“You’re right,” Heimdall answered.
“I don’t want to go away, either. Who knows long it would take to find other forage for the horses? I’d rather fight. Kill the cat or chase it off.”
“I agree. That’s the better option.” Heimdall had never expected to fight a battle over blades of grass, but so be it. He took a deep, steadying breath and drew his two-handed sword from its scabbard.
Sif swooped downward. The saber-tooth reared and clawed at her, and Heimdall felt an instant of dread on her behalf. Bloodspiller, however, lashed his pinions and dipped below the attack. Cloak streaming out behind her, shouting “Vanaheim,” Sif slashed at the dark pads on the underside of the tiger’s paw. The broadsword came away bloody, and the cat snarled.
While she had the saber-tooth distracted, Heimdall urged Golden Mane into a dive. The winged stallion hurtled along above the saber-tooth’s back. Heimdall leaned sideways out of the saddle and stabbed down repeatedly.
Snarling, the tiger whirled in a blur of white and gray. The beast’s jaws gaped, and Golden Mane veered in flight to avoid the bite. A long tooth flashed down just shy of his wing.
Heart thumping, Heimdall sent Golden Mane climbing and then he and Sif hurtled down again. The saber-tooth pivoted toward his sister, and he thought he had an opening. Then the cat spun back toward him, reared, and bashed him and his steed.
Time skipped. When Heimdall came to his senses, his head was ringing and he was lying half buried in a snowdrift. For an instant he was dazed, and then a jolt of alarm cut through the fog. Yellow eyes blazing, the tiger was gathering itself to pounce at him. Wheeling above the cat, not yet in position for another attack, Sif shouted taunts and obscenities at the top of her lungs in a vain effort to distract the animal.
Heimdall cast frantically about. To his relief, the two-handed sword had fallen within easy reach. He grabbed it and scrambled to his feet just as the tiger lunged.
He dodged a raking paw, and then the fanged jaws were opening right in front of him. He dived under the tiger’s head, rolled onto his back, and slashed at its throat with all his strength.
Red blood gushed to spatter his face, arms, and chest. The saber-tooth shuddered and collapsed. He scuttled out from under just in time to keep the beast from thudding down on top of him.
Breathing heavily, his body trembling in reaction to what had just happened, he warily watched the saber-tooth to make sure it was truly dead. Meanwhile, Bloodspiller and Golden Mane descended to earth. “Are you all right?” asked Sif.
Only then did he realize with a pang of alarm that he might not be, because the paw had struck him and Golden Mane. He hastily checked himself and the stallion too, now standing in the snow and shaking out his wings. Neither of them bore any grievous wounds. He surmised that while the saber-tooth’s paw had struck them, the claws hadn’t.
Relieved, he rubbed the horse’s shoulder. “I hope you appreciate all the trouble I went to just to get you something to eat.”
Golden Mane tossed his head as if to say that so far as he was concerned, he was owed that service and more.
“The horses can eat,” said Sif. “That leaves the two of us.”
“We shouldn’t overlook the obvious.” Heimdall returned to the saber-tooth’s carcass and hacked into it with his sword. He cut loose a scrap of flesh. “We should be able to make some excuse for a fire by burning blades of this grass. Then we can eat the meat.”
His sister grimaced. “I imagine it will be awful.”
“Almost certainly,” he replied. “But it is meat, and we can eat it. I think we’re all going to make it to Utgard alive, us and the horses both.”
“And afterwards,” Sif said with a wry smile, “we’ll only have surviving the citadel of the frost giant king to worry about. You’re covered in cat blood, by the way.”
“At least for a moment I was warm.” Heimdall picked up a handful of frigid snow and used it to scour his face.
Twenty-Two
Shortly after the encounter with the saber-tooth, Heimdall spied three towering volcanos in the distance, each putting forth a plume of smoke in seeming defiance of Jotunheim’s generally frigid aspect. The smoking peaks were one of this world’s most prominent and unmistakable landmarks, and, along with his memory of the maps he’d seen, they enabled him to take his bearings. After two more days of travel, he and Sif reached Utgard, the capital city of the frost giants.
He and his sister landed on a mountain ledge at what they hoped was a safe distance to view the city and the royal citadel rising in the center of it. Utgard was of a piece with the desolate landscape on which it sat, a jumble of gray stone spikes, the conical roofs of the towers encrusted with snow. Like Asgard, it was a walled city, with blue-skinned frost giant warriors patrolling the lofty battlements.
“Do you think we can fly in unnoticed?” asked Sif.
“In time of war?” Heimdall replied. “I wouldn’t count on it even if we wait until after dark. Nor could we be certain of finding a safe place to leave Golden Mane and Bloodspiller while we searched the citadel.”
“That’s what I think too.” Sif frowned. “How, then, do we get inside?”
“That way, perhaps.” He pointed.
Beyond the city, the mountains sloped down to a sea with icebergs floating in the distance and a strip of harbor running alongside it. Sailors had moored ships at the docks, some of the vessels seemingly carved from icebergs. A bit inland were wrecked ships and fishing boats made of wood, some small enough that they appeared to have been plundered from other peoples inhabiting other worlds. Such shanties, Heimdall had heard, were the common habitations of the brine giants who apparently worked the docks.
Sif grunted. “The harbor is outside the city walls.”
“But that works to our advantage,” he said. “We can get to it without having to scale a wall or slip through a gate, and then, as there’s trade, there must be cartloads of goods going up into the city and probably even the citadel itself. We can sneak onto one of those.”
“All right, that might work.” It was Sif’s turn to point. “Let’s come in from that direction. It doesn’t look like there’s much of anything or anyone atop those crags. We can hide the horses there where nobody will find them, and they’ll be close – well, relatively speaking – if we need to leave Utgard in a hurry.”
It pleased Heimdall to discover there was more of the long, coarse grass growing on one of the peaks. There was also an overhang of rock that might provide at least a modicum of shelter when Jotunheim’s blizzards were blowing, so they flew to that.
Heimdall and Sif removed the horses’ tack and stowed it under the overhang. He then stroked Golden Mane’s fac
e. “Wait for us,” he said, feeling an upwelling of fondness for the steed that had borne him valiantly thus far, “and don’t let anybody see you.”
Sif grinned. “I wonder how much of what we say the horses truly understand.”
“Well, they are Valkyrie horses.”
“That’s true.” She rubbed Bloodspiller’s flank. “You heard what my brother said. Take care of yourselves, and we’ll be back soon.”
The roan steed nickered.
Sif turned back to Heimdall. “All right,” she said, “how do we get through the harbor?”
He realized it was an excellent question. They had cloaks and hoods in which to muffle themselves, and as he’d observed in his various encounters with them, some frost giants were bigger than others. But all those in view were at least three times as tall as an Asgardian. That suggested this wasn’t like back in the troll tunnel. Disguises wouldn’t serve. But perhaps the intruders could exploit their relative smallness to their advantage.
“Maybe,” he said, “we just sneak. We’re small as mice to the giants. For the most part, they won’t be looking down. If we’re careful, they might not notice us.”
Sif grinned. “That’s just mad enough to work.”
With that, brother and sister began the clamber down the escarpment. It was grueling work made harder by cold gusts of wind and slick ice, and when they finally happened upon a steep switchback trail, the two Asgardians exchanged glances, saw they were in agreement, and descended it thereafter. In the unlikely event that a frost giant came along, they’d conceal themselves somehow.
In fact, there was no need. They met no one on the trail, and in due course the harbor stretched out not far below. Looking down from above, where the differences in scale were less glaring, it was a strange mix of familiar and odd. Cranes creaked as they swung back and forth loading or unloading nets full of cargo or fish. Wagons rumbled, the shaggy oxen drawing them grunted and lowed, and sailors and stevedores shouted and cursed to one another. The cold air smelled of salt water. All of that was much like ports Heimdall had visited in Vanaheim and Asgard.
The Head of Mimir Page 18