"Kettlingur," said Skrymir. "I made them for Isolf."
"Do they multiply?" demanded Hrafnbogi, settling his disarrayed cloak and hood with a ruffled sputtering.
"I fear so," said Isolf. "Kisa, the striped one, has five little kettlingur."
"Then we'd better call the big ones kettir," said Skrymir. "Now there's eleven of the creatures."
"And more to follow, I'm afraid," said Isolf. "Silki and Silfur seem awfully fat."
"They multiply like trolls!" Hrafnbogi patted his forehead with a fluttering kerchief. "We're doomed! And they eat birds, don't they?"
"Now then, don't be alarmed," said Skrymir. "We'll give them to the New People to get rid of their rats."
"New People! I wouldn't do them any favors. Do you know what they call us? Giants. Giants, out of their own covetous fear and profound ignorance!" Hrafnbogi shivered his rusty shoulders, reminding Isolf more of an exasperated old rooster than an all-powerful jotun.
"I hardly think giving them kettir and kettlingur is a favor," said Skrymir.
"They have no respect for the old ways. We'll all be forgotten, derided, and turned out." Hrafnbogi snapped his mouth shut, like a beak, and commenced to sulk.
"At least we'll no longer have to answer their questions and settle their feuds," said Skrymir with a long and weary sigh. "They'll have to manage for themselves."
Indeed, Skrymir was tired. Isolf had plenty of occasions to spy upon him unwittingly, and usually saw nothing more portentous than Skrymir sketching runes, burning incense, or reiterating a phrase with the aid of a knotted string. Much of the time he simply sat in his great chair and pondered, his chin upon his fist, his eyes lost beneath craggy brows. His shoulders stooped when no one was about, sagging under the weight of his immense store of knowledge, beginning far back at the start of time itself. The last remnants of the Elder People must be fairly tottering with the burgeoning Past, with no foreseeable end in sight for beings who would never taste death. Oft-times Isolf thought herself of little more consequence than an ant that lives and toils one summer and dies, when she compared herself to Skrymir's antiquity and wisdom.
Nor did the wisdom go uncoveted among mortal men. Isolf came to dread and resent the visits of heroes from far-flung settlements, in search of wealth and adventure.
"What am I to feed these brutes?" Isolf asked of Skrymir, when the mountain hall was filled with twenty or thirty skin-clad power seekers. "I have only a few hens and geese and three sheep. This lot would eat that much and look around for the main course!"
Skrymir surveyed the reeking brood with a tolerant smile, which was easy from his towering vantage point.
"Feed them this. It is what they came from, and what they will return to, so it should nourish them well." With one great hand he sifted a handful of dust into Isolf's outstretched apron.
When she returned to the scullery, she poured the dust into a large cauldron and filled it with water. One did not question a jotun's wisdom with puny mortal objections. When she heated the kettle of dust and water, she discovered that the dust had reorganized itself into boiled fowls, fish, mutton, cabbage, spices, and other things to make a feast for their uninvited guests.
Isolf, from then on when company came, wordlessly accepted a handful of dust and took it to the scullery, where a pinch of it in the dough trough became bread, or ale in the ale barrel, or soup in the cauldron, meat on the hook, or whatsoever she desired to place on the guest table.
Try as she might to keep them locked up, the kettir always managed to misbehave when visitors arrived. Dogs they would not tolerate a moment, sending them howling back into the cold dark corridors. The kettir then took possession of the hearth in the main hall and the space beneath the table, where guests were always wont to throw bones and scraps when they were done with them, or liable to spill or drop something tasty. The guests laughed when the kettir fought with the dogs, laughed when their boorish laughter frightened the kettir, laughed when an impudent kettir stealthily snagged a toothsome tidbit off someone's plate. The feasting always attracted a horde of rats, and the ferocity of the kettir in killing them never failed to excite the admiration of the travelers. Thus stuffed with food, the kettir posted themselves on the hearthstones like furry, purring hummocks of assorted colors, or showed off their amiability by climbing into the nearest cooperative lap to be petted. Frequently after a feasting, a bristling warrior crept self-consciously into the scullery to inquire if Isolf could spare a couple of kettlingur for a faraway wife or mistress. Though Isolf grieved at parting with her pretty kettlingur, she was pleased to see them carried away to far places to win fame and the admiration of mankind.
There were some guests, however, who would as soon make a kettir into a pair of gloves as look at it. Their hatred of kettir dawned upon them at first glance, much the same as some people loathe snakes.
Raud Airic was one of these kettir-haters, and fancied himself quite the wizard besides.
"What horrid little beasties!" he declared furiously, after the fearless Fantur made off with a well-nigh empty bone from his plate, adroitly dodging a cup Airic threw after him. To show his disdain, Fantur stopped a moment in the middle of the table to sit down and extend one hind foot for a quick licking, as if a few deranged hairs might seriously impair his retreat to the hearth.
"It only shows," continued Airic slyly, as if he thought Isolf could not hear him from her lonely position on the dais at the end of the hall, "that the skill of the Ancient Ones is declining with the rise of the New People. Once they created mountains and oceans and huge beasts with rending tusks and claws. Now we get kettir, sly and slinking little thieves, able to kill nothing larger than a rat. The last gasp of a once-noble race-"
He might have gone on, but his speech was sundered by a series of explosive sneezes. This, too, Isolf had noticed before. Kettir possessed the amazing ability to make some people sneeze and weep at the mere sight of them.
Unfortunately, the sneezing and weeping occasioned by the kettir did nothing to discourage Airic's visits to the mountain hall. Each time he came with more questions and insolence, bringing his warriors and apprentices with him to devour piles of food and generate a mountain of garbage.
"I don't know how you tolerate him!" flared Isolf to Skrymir. "He comes and demands the answers to his questions and scarcely has the manners to thank you for them. And we know he doesn't put his answers to happy uses, Wise One. Yet last time you let him have the secret for predicting the eclipses of sun and moon, as well as the mysteries of the herbs, both good and deadly. Who knows what he wants now?"
Skrymir chuckled. "Airic doesn't even know what it is he ought to be asking for. Herbs and astrology ought to make him feel very important for awhile. We shan't worry about Airic until he learns the right questions."
To Isolf s dismay, it was not half a year before Airic returned, alone this time, and she instinctively knew that he had come with the right questions at last. His elegant wizard's robes were ragged now, his boisterous companions forgotten, and his eye gleamed with the light of dawning meaningfulness.
"What have you come for this time?" Skrymir's question hung in the air, like runes etched with fire, though his voice was soft and gentle. He had not bothered to alter his form to a more impressive one; he still looked like Isolf's grandfather, who had spent his early days as a renowned Viking and his latter days puttering about in the vegetable garden, growing useful plants that no one had ever seen before. He, too, had known the secrets of the jotun race.
"I have come for the honey mead," said Airic.
"I have never been loath to share it before," said Skrymir. "You yourself have tasted it already, many times."