"The Hammerer!" cried the Jotuns.
They bolted in frantic fear toward their horses. But they were too late. A terrible bull-roar of rage came from the bearded, bare-headed giant. His huge hammer smashed a Jotun's helmet and skull like cardboard. Without slackening his horse's stride, the gigantic Hammerer swung his awful weapon at another Jotun's head.
"It's the Jarl Thor and my kinsman Frey!" Freya stated coolly.
Thor, mightiest of the old gods of legend, strongest of Aesir? Frey, the mythical kinsman of Freya? I shrugged in defeated skepticism.
None of the fleeing Jotuns reached their horses. The lightninglike sword of Frey stabbed two as they ran, and the terrible hammer of bearded Thor smashed down the others. Then Thor and Frey wheeled their horses. The Hammerer uttered another roar of rage and spurred straight at me.
"Here's a Jotun dog we missed!"
Before I could move, his great hammer, bright-red with new blood, was already raised. I swayed drunkenly, exhausted, unable to defend myself from that terrible weapon.
"Wait!" Freya cried.
The hammer was checked in mid-air. No ordinary man could have halted its downward rush so effortlessly.
"Is he not one of the Jotun skrellings who attacked you?" rumbled Thor.
"He cannot be," Freya said. "For they tried even harder to kill him than me, and he fought valiantly against them."
Frey hurriedly dismounted. His handsome face was drawn with worry as he ran to the woman and caught her shoulders.
"You're not harmed, Freya?" he asked anxiously.
"No, by the help of this outlander," she said. "Jarl Keith is his name, and he says he came from beyond Niffleheim."
"It's true," I panted. "I came in that flying ship."
I pointed to the beach far below, where my rocket plane rested between boulders. They stared down at it.
"So you outlanders can build flying ships," Frey said wonderingly. "Your civilization must be far different from ours. Odin will wish to question this outlander. We'll take him to Asgard with us."
Odin, chief of the old Norse gods, king of the mythical Aesir? I shook my head and gave up the fight against disbelief.
"Very well," growled Thor reluctantly. "I still think he looks like a Jotun."
Frey brought me the horse of a dead Jotun. By now, the troop that had hurried after Frey and Thor reached us. They were all big, fair-haired men, armored in mail brynjas and helmets, obviously disappointed at missing the fight.
I mounted, unable to lose the dreamlike quality of the experiences. With the troop of horsemen following. I rode beside Freya, Thor and Frey. I heard the clatter of hoofs, the rumble of voices, felt the saddle beneath me, and the motion of the horse. But nothing seemed real. My body grasped the actuality, yet my tired, harried brain refused to accept it. My eyes were so puzzled and shot with blood that Freya looked at me sympathetically.
"You can rest in Asgard. Jarl Keith." she said. "And you have nothing to fear from my people."
"I do not fear," I answered thickly, "but my dazed mind makes me unhappy. Are you people really the old gods?"
"Gods," she repeated. "I do not understand you, Jarl Keith. There are no gods except the three Norns and their mother, Wyrd, the fates whom we worship."
I clenched my teeth and stared straight ahead. If they weren't the ancient Norse gods, why did they give themselves, their city, the lands around them, the names I had found in the legends? On the other hand, it couldn't be a fake, for they seemed genuinely bewildered by me and my questions. Naturally they might have been fairly recent immigrants to this weird blind spot, perhaps the tenth or fifteenth generation. In that case, they wouldn't be immortals, of course, and there would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for their names and those of their city and surroundings. But would recent colonists dare the vengeance of their gods by taking their names? I had to change that question when another thought struck me. Even if the colony were thousands of years old, there would still be some remembrance of the Aesir — the old gods! But these people worshiped the Norns and their mother, Wyrd, which meant they were not gods and did not regard the Aesir as supernatural beings!
Defeatedly I stopped thinking when we reached the rainbow bridge. Five hundred feet long, it consisted of brilliantly painted slabs of stone, laid across two huge arched beams of massive, silvery metal. Far beneath this giddy span, the green sea rolled between the promontory and the island, Asgard. My hair stood up in fright as we rode our horses up the arch. Their hoofs clattered on the stone, proving the solidity of the bridge. But I shrank from looking over either side, for there were no railings or low walls. But neither the Aesir nor their horses showed apprehension.
Bifrost Bridge hung in the sky like a rainbow frozen into stone. And I, Keith Masters, with Thor, Frey and Freya of the old Aesir, was riding across it into Asgard, the mythical city of the gods!
Chapter IV
Odin Speaks
The bridge ended in a massive guard-house of gray stone, built sheer on the precipitous edge of Asgard. The only entrance to the city beyond was by an arched way through the fort, which was, barred by metal gates. But as our horses clattered over the stupendous bridge, a guard blew a long, throbbing call on a great horn that hung in a sling.
Our horses paused. Warily I glanced down into the abyss and looked at the island more closely. I noted that in the eastern cliffs was a deep fiord with a narrow entrance, in which floated several dozen ships. Dragon-ships like those of the old Vikings, they were forty to eighty feet long, with brazen beaks on their bows and sails furled and oars stacked. From the fiord, a steep path led upward to the plateau.
In answer to the blast on the horn, a tall, lordly man in gleaming mail and helmet came out on the tower above.
"Open wide your gates, Heimdall!" boomed Thor impatiently. "Are we to be kept waiting here till we rot?"
"Softly, Thor," Frey said to the Hammerer. "It was Heimdall, remember, whose keen eyes saw Freya and the Jotuns and warned us."
Heimdall, the warder of the guardhouse, waved his hand to us. Winches groaned, and the barred gates swung inward. We spurred forward. I was glad to leave that unrailed bridge over the abyss. We rode right through the arched tunnel that pierced the guardhouse, and clattered onto a stone-paved plaza.
Asgard lay before me.
Involuntarily I slacked my bridle and stared at the great gray castles that were built in a ring around the sheer edge of the lofty island. All twenty had been built of gray stone hewn from the rock of the island itself, and all were tiled with thin stone slates. Each consisted of a big, rectangular, two-storied hall, with two branching lower wings and two guardtowers. They faced toward a far huger pile that rose from the center of the island.
The largest castle had four guardtowers, and its vast, stone-tiled roof loomed over the rest of Asgard like a man-made mountain. Between this great hall and the ring of smaller castles lay small fields and cobbled streets of stone houses and workshops.
Hundreds of the people of Asgard were in the streets and fields. All were fair-haired, blue-eyed and large-statured. Many of the men wore helmets and mailed brynjas, and were armed with sword, ax or bow. Other men wore metal rings around their necks, but they went about their tasks cheerfully enough. The women wore long blue or white gowis, with wimpled hoods. There were scarcely any children.
"Must be an unbelievably low birthrate here," I muttered. "That could be due to the hard radiation effect."
The faint, eldritch green glow pervaded this island, like the mainland. It was certainly exhilarating. It was restoring my vigor with amazing speed. But if it was actually gamma or a similar hard radiation, as I suspected, it would be bound to cause a partial sterility among people who were continually exposed to it.