Thjálfi's Steps

Thjálfi had never asked to come along. That was the first thing you needed to understand. You did not ask gods for things. Gods did not ask either. They took.

Thor took him one evening at a table in his father's house. Thjálfi had cracked the goat's thighbone for the marrow, because marrow tastes like butter and fat and everything good, and he was thirteen and thirteen-year-olds do not think further ahead than the taste of the next bite. Next morning the goat was lame. Thor slammed his fist on the table. The table cracked. His father wept. His sister Röskva hid behind the door. And Thjálfi stood still, because he was too afraid to run and too proud to cry, and those two qualities saved his life and destroyed his childhood in the same moment.

"You are coming with me," said Thor. It was not a question.

After that Thjálfi walked behind Thor. Always behind. Thor's strides were long as a horse's leap and heavy as timber against earth, and the ground complained beneath his feet, and Thjálfi took three steps for every step Thor took, and sometimes four, and uphill five, and his calves ached every evening and no one ever asked.

No one asked him anything. Not the gods, who looked through him as through a windowpane. Not the giants, who could not tell one human from another. Not Loki, who talked to everyone but never listened. Thor spoke sometimes. Short sentences. "We go there." "Carry this." "Eat." Language was a tool, and Thor used his tools without unnecessary effort.

Thjálfi carried things. Thor's spare gloves. Food when there was any. A replacement strap for the hammer's cord that never broke but which Thor insisted on bringing anyway, and that was the closest Thor came to expressing concern, that spare strap.

The thing nobody told you about gods was the smell. Thor smelled of metal and lightning and goat. It was not bad, but it was a lot. All of Thor was a lot. His laughter was too loud. His anger too large. His hunger too deep. Everything was too, and Thjálfi lived in the shadow of that too, and the shadow was wide enough to hold an entire human without anyone noticing.

But Thjálfi noticed things. It was the only thing he had. He noticed that the soil changed colour half a day before it rained. He noticed that birds went quiet when giants approached. He noticed that Thor rubbed his right palm against his thigh when he was worried, and that Thor was only worried when the danger was real, not the kind of danger he could hit.

Once, in Jötunheimr, Thjálfi said: "There is smoke beyond the ridge." Thor stopped. Sniffed. "I smell nothing." "No," said Thjálfi. "It smells like hearths. Twenty, maybe thirty." Thor looked at him. It was the first time the god looked at him properly, with both eyes, not through him but at him. "How do you know that?" said Thor. Thjálfi shrugged. "It is just smoke."

But it was not just smoke. Beyond the ridge lay a giant village, and Thor's hammer was good against one giant or five but not against thirty, and they took a different path, and Thor said nothing more about it, but from that evening Thjálfi no longer walked behind. He walked beside.

Beside was not better physically. The stride was just as long. But the position was different. Behind, you see a back. Beside, you see a face. And Thor's face was not the face you expected. Not angry. Not hard. Tired. Gods get tired. No one knows that, because gods do not show it, but Thor had wrinkles around his eyes from squinting at the horizon for ten thousand years, and his beard had grey strands he never mentioned, and sometimes, when they sat by a fire late at night, he yawned like a child, with his whole mouth, without shame.

Thjálfi never learned why Thor had kept him. He never asked. There was a possibility the answer was "because you broke the goat's bone and it was your punishment," and he did not want to hear that answer aloud, because after enough years it had stopped feeling like punishment and started feeling like something else, and the something else had no name, and Thjálfi did not want to give it a name, because names make things real, and what was real could be taken from him.

He walked beside Thor. Three steps for every step. Sometimes four. He carried the spare strap and noticed things. It was enough.