“A bad one,” one of the men said severely. “God or not, I think that perhaps Odin was a very bad father.” Alea was astonished to find that she agreed with him.
Another woman asked, “Didn’t Thor’s mother have anything to say about this trip?”
Lamely, Alea had to admit, “She didn’t have much to do with Thor after he became a teenager.”
All the people shook their heads, adults and children alike exclaiming at the scandal. One childish treble rose clearly above alclass="underline" “Poor man!”
“Poor indeed!” the older woman said, seeming shaken. “What an undutiful son, what a neglectful mother!”
“The one follows from the other, I suppose, Aunt,” one of the younger women said. “If she neglected him so, it’s no wonder he didn’t pay any attention to her when he was grown.”
The parents nodded, agreeing with her in many different words but one common opinion.
“Well, Thor was eager for more traveling, anyway,” Alea said quickly: Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gar sitting with his head bowed, lips pressed tight and shoulders shaking.
“Wasn’t one wanderjahr enough for him?” the younger woman said, frowning.
“No, he was like us peddlers,” Alea said, “one of the ones who has a great deal of trouble settling down.”
“Well, he was the thunder god, she said, and storms do travel,” a man said thoughtfully. “If they didn’t, one village would be drowned while another was parched. I suppose a thunder god would have to be a wanderer, yes.”
“That was it!” Alea said, relieved. “So he and Loki harnessed Thor’s two giant goats to his chariot and drove away down the road toward Jotunheim.”
“Giant goats?” one of the children asked, eyes wide.
“Oh yes, taller than a man at the shoulders,” Alea said, warming to her audience, “with long twisted horns and shaggy black-and-white coats. Thor’s chariot stood on wheels as tall as my shoulder and rose as high as the goats’ horns. What was more, those goats could fly and pull the chariot through the air faster than any bird.”
“Magic indeed,” one of the parents said above the children’s excited murmurs.
“Well, he had to be able to fly, to bring the storms,” Alea explained, then looked down at the children. “Do you know, when the lightning flashes, how there’s a big boom, then a rumble dying away? That boom is the sound of Mjollnir hitting a cloud, striking the gigantic sparks that we call lightning. The rumble is Thor’s chariot wheels rolling away across the sky.”
The children chorused wonder, and the parents smiled, recognizing a fairy story when they heard one. Encouraged, Alea went on to tell her audience how Thor and Loki had decided they would have to camp at the end of the day and came down to earth to find a cave taller than Thor’s head, which wasn’t exactly a cavern but was warm and dry inside. There were five smaller caves arranged around the outside, but they were too narrow to be interesting, so Thor and Loki ignored them. The children shivered with delicious apprehension, wondering what would come out of such horrid places, and were rather disappointed when nothing happened all that night. But when a giant came the next morning to invite Thor and Loki to his hall, then picked up the “cave” and slipped it on his hand, the children laughed and clapped, delighted that the giant’s glove could be so huge that the gods would have been able to spend the night in it.
“What happened when they came to the giant’s hall?” one of the boys asked, eyes shining.
But Alea had been smelling dinner cooking for some time and the parents were glancing at the cottages and beginning to look impatient. “Perhaps I’ll tell you that after dinner,” she said, “but I’m rather tired of talking now.”
The children complained, a disappointed chorus, but the older woman stepped forward to clasp Alea’s shoulder with a friendly touch, saying, “You’re rather hungry, too, I should think, lass, and if you’re not, your brother must be, with a great frame like that to fill! No, children, she has the right of it—we’ll come out to the common after dinner, if she is willing, but for now, it’s time for supper.”
Disappointed but hopeful, several children went home with each adult. Alea was interested to see that every man or woman went to a different cottage; apparently there had been no adult couples here, which meant that men as well as women did the cooking, just as women worked alongside the men in the fields. She marveled at the notion, delighted, but wondered how they decided who did which chore.
Over dinner, the parents with whom they were staying let her know, very gently, their concerns about the moral values in the tale she’d been telling. Alea assured them the rest of the story was nothing to distress them, and sure enough, after dinner, she presented the tale of the giants’ challenge as a friendly invitation to a contest, and the theft of Mjollnir had been only a practical joke designed to bring the strongest god and the shrewdest god to match strength, speed, and wits with the giants, simply to while away a dull winter’s day. In that context, everybody could relax and enjoy the eating bout and the race and the feats of strength—and, rather than recapturing Mjollnir and using it to ay waste the giants’ hall, Thor was awarded his hammer as a prize and sent on his way back to Asgard with good wishes. The tale ended with giant and god in happy accord, and the audience loved the tale. Alea was rather impressed with it herself, in spite of the fact that Gar refused to meet her eyes and kept his thoughts shielded.
The children pestered Alea for another story, of course, but the parents firmly sent them off to bed, claiming the peddlers must be exhausted with so much talking, then turning to Alea with avid interest as the children scampered away, asking, “What news have you of the wide world?”
“Nothing terribly much.” Alea’s thoughts raced. “Someone claimed to have seen a great golden disk in the sky some days ago.”
The people laughed and one man asked, “How much had he been drinking? I wonder.”
“Oh, I saw a disk in the sky myself,” one of the women said. “I call it ‘the sun.’ ”
They laughed anew at that, then quieted, looking hungrily to Alea.
“There is General Malachi,” she said tentatively. The people’s faces darkened. “General, is it?” said an older man. “It was ‘major’ when last we’d heard, and that just means ‘bigger.’ What does ‘general’ mean, I wonder?”
“Including everything,” Alea said, “which I gather is what Malachi means to do. He has conquered all the outlaw bands in his forest and seized three villages around the woods.”
The people were startled and unnerved. “Seized them? What did he do with them?” one woman cried. “Plundered and bullied, I don’t doubt,” the oldest man said, his bushy white brows drawn down so far as to hide his eyes in shadow. “I’ve seen the like of him come, and I’ve seen them all go, or heard of it. But they cause a deal of grief while they last.”
“Bandits always do,” a woman agreed. “I suppose we’ll have to band together with the other villages soon to go and talk sense into them again.”
“The only talk they’ll listen to is the sound of scythes and flails.” The old man sighed. “Still, we must see the roads safe for the bands of young folk in their wanderjahrs.”
“You had best do it quickly, then,” Alea said, “before General Malachi becomes too strong. He’s making the people of the captured villages fight for him.”
That upset the villagers mightily. They burst into talk, but not arguing about the best way to counter General Malachi—only deploring what he was doing, and wondering how a decent human being could do such things. The consensus, of course, was that he wasn’t decent at all—but someone said sagely, “Well, the Scarlet Company will do for him,” and everyone else agreed, their faces clearing, as they nodded and said in many words how they could leave General Malachi to the Scarlet Company.