"Yes, but not your oldest and most potent honey mead. This is where your best knowledge lies hidden. All that you have given mankind until now has been merely the stuff of survival. We have come to you seeking to become great, and you have sent us away with simple skills, and we considered them marvelous because we had not seen them before. Brewing, cheesemaking, forging of metals, all this has become ordinary to us now. I have learned, jotun, that humankind can be as great as the Elder Race-maybe greater, since we are destined to rule the world. You have held something back from us. We are entitled to all your knowledge, not just trivial scraps."
"What would this knowledge accomplish in human hands? Would all men have it, or just a chosen few?"
"These powers are not suitable for all men. I have seen you form living creatures from a pinch of dust. I have seen you summon life into them. You can heal the dying, call the life back to the dead, and you are invulnerable to wounds or death. All this is done with the powers of the mind, not of sword or formulae written down in a book. You have pretended to enlighten us, Skrymir, but we are as much in the dark as animals when it comes to real knowledge."
"Mankind is not done with warfaring yet. When he is tired of the sword and the fetter, he will come naturally into the hidden powers of his mind. Be assured, Airic, they are waiting for the right time to blossom."
"This is the right time," said Airic. "We need those powers now to subdue our enemies, to know when they are plotting to attack, to see and hear them from afar for our own protection. Give me the honey mead and I will keep it safe for mankind."
"What are you prepared to give?" asked Skrymir. "Great gifts have high prices. Sometimes they take a great deal of time. Human possessions for the most part are nothing but trash and trouble. And I have no use for any more firstborn children."
"Time to a mortal is the only thing of true value. Let us make a wager, my life against your wisdom. I shall prove my worthiness."
A wager. Isolf sighed and rolled her eyes. For a moment, she had almost believed Airic more clever than the rest who had come swaggering and wagering to Skrymir's mountain. Usually Skrymir feigned defeat, letting them carry away a bellyful of honey mead and some trifling enchanted cup or sword in heroic self-congratulatory zeal. Once the cup or sword was taken out of Skrymir's enchanted presence, it would soon lose its powers and become as uncooperative as any other cup or sword. The mead itself would be pissed against some wall somewhere, but with luck, the pinch of wisdom contained in it might lodge within the bearer's mind and become useful.
"A wager. Very well," said Skrymir. "What do you wish? Three questions? A quest? A challenge to combat?"
Isolf heaved a short impatient sigh and made a disdainful clucking sound. The warriors who challenged Skrymir were perhaps the most pathetic of all, swaggering into the hall, sleek and bulging with muscle, exuding all the confidence and intelligence of an ox being led to the butcher's stall. Tiresome indeed for Skrymir, who tried to meet their furious attacks as creatively as possible, after thousands of years of the same glinty-eyed heroes seeking aggrandizement by killing a being they did not understand. Skrymir obligingly conjured a monster for such characters to fight, and then sent them packing with a trunkful of gold or jewels.
"A quest," said Airic. "Send me in search of treasure and power, and if I return successful, all the honey mead will be mine. I shall supplant you in wisdom. Men shall come to me for a sip of mead."
"And if you fail?"
"Then you get to keep everything you've got, and I shall probably be too dead to trouble you further."
"Well enough. As a jotun, I never lose a serious wager with a mortal, unless it's a mere trifle, or something your race needs anyway. I warn you, mortal, I shall not let you win this time. The gifts you desire are the greatest knowledge I possess."
"You won't need to allow me to win," said Airic. "I shall succeed on the merit of my own skill and wisdom, and I shall have the mead."
"Very well. I shall send you on a journey. Return to me with three magical objects, and you shall have what you wish. Bring to me the diamonds of Borkdukur, the captive princess of Fluga, and the sacred Orb of Ekkert, and then the last secrets of the Elder Race shall be yours."
"Then I shall be off upon my expedition. Would you mind pointing me in the proper direction for Borkdukur?"
"Certainly not. Anything to be of service. You simply go south until you reach the land of giant trees. You must climb up one of them until you reach the land of clouds. You'll know you are there when the landscape turns white, and scarcely anything grows upon the ground,"
"Thank you. I shall return quite soon, I'm certain."
"Good day to you, sir."
Airic bowed mockingly low, chuckling in a very superior way. In the midst of his bowing, Skrymir flicked one hand and Airic suddenly vanished with an unsavory-smelling puff of murky smoke. It smelled like hog-rendering days back in Holm. Isolf wrinkled her nose and looked for the greasy spot that must have been Airic. Instead, what she saw was a little creature about the size of a dung beetle tumbling around in a violent tussle with a linty length of worsted thread that must have come unraveled from the hem of Isolf s gown, trailing as it did across the rough flagstones of Skrymir's cave.
A closer look revealed that the beetle-creature was Airic, shrunken down to a less troublesome size.
"Hah, now all that remains is to step upon him and our troubles are over," said Isolf cheerfully.
"No, no, we must allow him his chance to prove himself," said Skrymir tolerantly. "Besides, he's going to have a great adventure, which will be handed down from generation to generation, gathering embellishments each time it's told, until Airic will be quite a hero. Who are we to deny him his moment of fame?"
"Compared to him, we are gods," said Isolf. "We can do anything we please to him. See, now it is nighttime."
She inverted a bowl over him, putting an end to his manful battle with the string. "You shall win, of course," said Isolf.
"There's no way out of it, I fear."
"Why would you wish to lose? Why didn't you just give Airic the mead and the wisdom?"
"Mortals learn best by opposition at every turn and obfuscation of their simplest desires. He would be suspicious and unappreciative of an unearned gift."
Skrymir rose to his feet and stepped over the bowl, treading as carefully as he could. "I've become so weary of my burden, child. Mortalkind is almost ready to carry itself, instead of riding upon my shoulders. I shall welcome the day when no one believes in jotuns. Then I shall take my walking stick and disappear into the mountains. Watch out for him awhile, won't you? Do what you wish to make his journey as uncomfortable as possible, short of killing him outright."
Isolf considered the bowl a moment, then removed it from over Airic. She was amused to discover that he had hacked the string into a hundred pieces, then he had curled up and gone to sleep in a fissure in the floor, with a tiny spark of a fire glinting like a jewel.
For the fun of it, Isolf blew on him, buffeting him around awhile like a grain of wheat on a skillet.
"Wake up and get along your journey, you lazy dolt," she said.
For an hour or more he scuttled around among various obstructions, sticks of firewood, ashes, dead coals. Once he blundered into a dropped glove, and Isolf turned it around to face another direction when he came out, in case he had begun to get his bearings somewhat. True to her suspicions, he wandered out and became lost in a forest of chairs and stool legs. Isolf became tired of him after watching him laboriously climb several chair legs, so she put the bowl over him and went on her way.