Neil Gaiman - Odd and the Frost Giants

“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?”

The frost giant raised himself from the huge boulder. Then he jerked a thumb behind him. “See that wall?” he said.

You couldn’t avoid seeing it. It filled the world. Every stone in the wall was bigger than the houses in Odd’s village.

“My brother built that wall. He made a deal with the Gods—to build them a wall inside six months, or he would take no payment. And on the last day, as he was just about to complete it…on the last hour of the last day, they cheated him.”

“How?”

“A mare, the most beautiful animal anyone had ever seen, ran across the plain and lured away the stallion who was hauling the stones for my brother. It used womanish wiles. The stallion broke its bonds, and the horses ran off into the woods together and were gone. And then, just when my poor brother had nerved himself up to complain about how he was being treated, Thor returned from his travels and killed him with his damnable hammer. That’s how every tale of the Gods and the Frost Giants ends—with Thor killing Giants. Well, not this time.”

“Obviously not,” said Odd, who was beginning to have his suspicions about who the mare had been. “So, what did your brother want for payment?”

“Nothing really,” said the giant, shifting from foot to foot. “Just stuff.”

He sat down again on the boulder. Where the air touched the Frost Giant, it seemed to steam. Odd had seen the water in the fjord steam in winter, when the air was colder than the water. He wondered how cold the Frost Giant was.

“He wanted the Sun,” said the giant, “the Moon. And Freya. All things that I now control, for Asgard is mine!”

“Yes. You said that.”

There was a pause. The Frost Giant looked tired, Odd thought. Then Odd said, again, “Why? Why did he want those things?”

The Frost Giant took a deep breath. “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME!” he roared, and Odd felt the earth shake beneath him. He leaned on his crutch to keep his balance as icy winds blew past him. Odd didn’t say anything. He just smiled some more.

The giant said, “Would you mind if I picked you up? It would make it easier to talk if we were face-to-face.”

“So long as you’re careful,” said Odd.

The giant reached down and laid his hand flat on the ground, palm up, and Odd clambered awkwardly onto it. Then the giant cupped his hand and lifted Odd up, so the boy was on a level with his mouth, and the giant whispered, in a voice like the howl of a winter wind, “Beauty.”

“Beauty?”

“The three most beautiful things there are. The Sun, the Moon and Freya the lovely. It’s not beautiful, really, in Jotunheim. There’s just rocks and crags and…Well, they can be beautiful too, if you take them the right way. And we can see the Sun there, and the Moon. No Freya—nothing that beautiful. She’s beautiful. But she does have a tongue on her.”

“So you came here for beauty?”

“Beauty, and revenge for my brother. I told the other Frost Giants I’d do it, and they all laughed at me. But they aren’t laughing now, are they?”

“What about spring?”

“Spring?”

“Spring. In Midgard. Where I come from. It isn’t happening this year. And if the winter continues, then everyone will die. People. Animals. Plants.”

Frosty blue eyes bigger than windows stared at Odd. “Why should I care about that?” The Frost Giant put Odd down on the top of the wall around Asgard, the wall his brother had built. It was windy up there, and Odd leaned into his crutch, scared that a gust of wind would blow him away and down to his death. He glanced behind him, and was not surprised to see that the home of the Gods looked almost exactly like the village on the fjord from which he had come. Bigger, of course, but of the same pattern—a feasting hall and smaller buildings all around it.

Odd said, “You should care because you care about beauty. And there won’t be any. There will just be dead things.”

“Dead things can be beautiful,” said the Frost Giant. “Anyway, I won it. I beat them. I fooled them and I tricked them. I banished Thor and Odin and that miniature turncoat Loki.” And then he sighed.

Odd remembered what he had seen in the pool, the previous night. He said, “Do you really think your brothers are on the way?”

“Ah,” said the Frost Giant. “Um. They may be. I mean, they all said they would…if I did…It’s just that I don’t think that any of them actually expected me to conquer this place, and they all have things to do, farms and houses and children and wives. I don’t think that they really want to come down to the hot lands and play soldiers guarding a bunch of grumpy Gods.”

“And I suppose they can’t all be betrothed to lovely Freya.”

“Lucky them,” said the Frost Giant, darkly. “She’s beautiful. Oh yes. She’s beautiful. I’ll give you that.” He shook his head. Icicles fell from his hair and crashed, tinkling, on the rocks beneath. “She’s got a carriage pulled by cats, you know. I tried stroking them.” He held up the index finger of his right hand. It was covered in scratches and cuts. “She said it was my own fault. That I’d got them overexcited.

“She is beautiful,” he said, and sighed. “But she only comes up to the top of my foot. She shouts louder than a giantess when she’s angry. And she’s always angry.”

“But you can’t go home when you’ve won,” said Odd.

“Exactly. You wait here, in this hot, horrible place, for reinforcements who don’t want to come, while the locals hate you…”

“So go home,” said Odd. “Tell them that I beat you.” He wasn’t smiling now.

The Frost Giant looked at Odd, and Odd looked at the Frost Giant.

The Frost Giant said, “You’re too small to fight. You would have to have outwitted me.”

Odd nodded. “My mother used to tell me stories about boys who tricked giants. In one of them, they had a stone-throwing contest, but the boy had a bird, not a stone, and it went up into the air and just kept going.”

“I’d never fall for that one,” said the giant. “Anyway, birds, they just head for the nearest tree.”

“I am trying,” said Odd, “to allow you to go home with your honor intact and a whole skin. You aren’t making it any easier for me.”

The giant said, “A whole skin?”

“You banished Thor to Midgard,” said Odd, “yet he’s back now. It’s only a matter of time until he gets here.”

The giant blinked. “But I have his hammer,” he said. “I turned it into this boulder I sit on.”

“Go home.”

“But if I take Freya back to Jotunheim, she’ll just shout at me and make everything worse. And if I take Thor’s hammer, he’ll just come after it, and one day he’ll get it, and then he’ll kill me.”

Odd nodded in agreement. It was true. He knew it was.

When, in the years that followed, the Gods told this tale, late at night, in their great hall, they always hesitated at this point, because in a moment Odd will reach into his jerkin and pull out something carved of wood, and none of them, try how they might, was certain what it was.

Some of the Gods claimed that it was a wooden key, and some said it was a heart. There was a school of thought that maintained that what Odd had presented the giant with was a realistic carving of Thor’s hammer, and that the giant had been unable to tell the real from the false, and had fled, in terror.