As the day wore on, the arc in the sky would creep around the rim of the valley. One could almost see it move; Thorinn had lain many an hour on the windswept hill, watching it, until he fell fast asleep, and the horses roamed where they would.
Tits and fieldfares were busy in the cropped grass around the spring, quarreling and chirruping over the bits of grain they found in the horse droppings. Hawks were awheel over the high rim; but in the dark side, Thorinn knew, owls and nightjars were stirring. Northward from Hovenskar, it was said, there were night creatures that never ventured into daylight, but followed the darkness eternally, around and around. Someday Thorinn would go and hunt them; Gory at would give him leave when he was a man. The world was good, though Snorri rumbled.
Above him near the outcrop and the spring, the eleven giant horses turned their heads alertly. Thorinn filled his lungs and shouted. "Ho, Biter! Ho, Stonehead!" The horses snorted, tossed their manes; Stonehead, the old stallion, showed his wicked teeth. Thorinn bent his knee, leaped over the grasstops, alighted two ells higher on the slope, leaped again. The horses, pretending fright, wheeled and lumbered away. Thorinn's leg pumped furiously; he bounded, leaped like a grasshopper after the soaring horses. He passed two stragglers, nervous young colts. The earth trembled, bouncing him higher. Blood burned in his veins; the wind whipped his cheeks, made his eyes smart with tears. Head down, his massive hindquarters bunching like fists, old Stonehead flew before. Stones and clots of turf spattered Thorinn like hail. He was flying, lungs afire. Into—the yellow—sea—and out. Ahead, the stallion's round eye glinted; the old horse turned, laboring upslope. In two breaths Thorinn was beside him; a final leap, and the rough mane was against his face, his arms and thighs gripping the shaggy neck, while the world wheeled.
Winded and utterly happy, Thorinn clung to the stallion's neck. After a plunge or two, earth and sky steadied around him; obedient to his will, the old stallion, who could have flung him five ells if he chose, stood snorting and trembling. Thorinn reached up, grasped a thick hairy ear at the root, pulled gently. The stallion dipped his huge head, turned and sprang.
The other horses, standing at gaze a few hundred ells away, fell upward into distance. The steep yellow bowl of the valley came plunging up, the wind whined in his ears—down, with a bone-breaking jolt, another leap—down, another. Bounding below, the tiny shapes of the houses grew larger with each dizzy arc. The stallion's neck strained against Thorinn's cheek; they were flying like the wind, they would leap and never come down!
The descent grew shallow, the hillside was behind them; now they were bounding across the level earth toward the stone-roofed house, and the gray figure beside it. Thorinn recognized Withinga, tall as the house-eaves, in his stained leather jerkin and his belt studded with metal bosses. Obedient to Thorinn's touch, Stonehead planted his hooves, slid to a bone-jarring halt. While Withinga watched sourly, Thorinn vaulted to the ground, slapped the old stallion's rump. Stonehead snorted, wheeled and bounded away toward the distant shapes of the other horses high on the hill.
"Do you want to break your neck, Flea?" Withinga asked, taking a stride forward.
"When Snorri calls, man must answer," said Thorinn. He hopped back, expecting a blow, but Withinga only stared at him for a moment, then said: "So it is. Come, the Old Man has a task for you." Thorinn followed him around the moss-grown sods of the house. Under the weight of the roof, the sod walls had bulged year by year until the house had lost all its squareness and was shaped like a cheese. Beyond in the dooryard, Untha and old Goryat squatted at the well-curb, beside the empty leather horse trough. They looked up as Withinga and Thorinn approached; Untha, who had been scratching the bare earth idly with his dagger, gaped witlessly, showing tusks as long as Thorinn's thumb. His yellow eyes, slitted like a goat's, stared at Thorinn as if he were a stranger.
Without speaking, Withinga sank down beside the other two. Squatting in a row, the three stared at Thorinn. Their massive, yellow-maned heads were on a level with his. Beyond them, the split sky arched over the rim of Hovenskar. At last Goryat spoke. "The well is broken."
"Did you call me down here to tell me that?" asked Thorinn in honest surprise.
"Hold your tongue and listen," said Goryat. "It is in my mind that the well may be mended. Therefore, jump into it and see."
Thorinn hopped to the well-curb and looked down. The deep shaft receded into darkness, past the leather thong and the dim round shape of the bucket; he could not see the bottom.
"How shall we mend it?" he asked.
"With stones," grunted Withinga. "The fool asks, wise men must answer. Go down, Flea." Thorinn bent toward the dark receding shaft, from which a faint cool breath arose; then a new thought struck him. "If this should be long in the doing," he said, "who will cook the dinner?" The two brothers glanced at each other again, and Withinga stroked his chin with a taloned gray hand.
"Well asked," he said grudgingly. "Also, who will fetch peat for the fire, and tend the horses?"
"And milk the mares, supposing they turn fresh again, and make cheese?" put in Untha, scowling and toying with his dagger. "That is no work for a man."
Thorinn stared from one to another, for their words made little sense; but Goryat said, "Peace," and gave them a hard look under his frosty brows. "Witlings have I for sons. The thing is decided." In his hands was a little framework of yellowed ivory carved with runes, a magical implement which Thorinn had seen only twice before. "Go down."
Thorinn hesitated, but he felt a pressure as if an invisible hand had been laid along his back, and he realized that the old man had put a spell on him, a geas: go down he must. He bent and picked up the bucket thong. He tugged at the end of it, where it was knotted around one of the stones of the curb, found it secure, and backed over the rim of the well-mouth, lowering himself hand under hand. The three white-and-yellow-maned heads turned to watch him. They disappeared over the rim of the well, but a moment later, as he descended, they came back into view, peering down. The three silhouetted figures seemed to rise and become foreshortened, the horizon sank, the ground bulged upward like water closing over his head. Clods and an occasional pebble, scraped loose by his feet, rebounded below. After a moment or two he heard something strike the bottom. Cold air breathed up past him. The edge of the leather bucket touched his thighs. Holding the thong with one hand, he pulled the bucket up free of his legs, hung a moment, and dropped.
The bottom drifted nearer. Dimly he saw it, bent his knees, took the shock. But the bottom of the well was tipped beyond his expectation, and it threw him against the side, making his head ring. He straightened himself and breathed deep. How cold it was down here! and no wonder, for the water they got from the well, before it went dry, had been cold as ice. That was natural, for the deeper you went, the farther from the warmth-giving sky. Thus it was colder here on the floor of the ancient ocean than it was in the Highlands; colder again at the bottom of the well; and if you could dig deeper still into the earth, eventually you would come to the land of eternal ice, the Underworld, where Snorri ruled. Go down.
Thorinn crouched and felt for the source of the steady slow current that breathed up around his legs. Oddly, although the air was cool, it seemed warmer than the earth and stones around him. His hands found an opening, half choked with mud. So far as he could tell, the rock table under the well had broken, and he was now crouching on a tilted slab of it that had fallen and stuck. He heard a sound, twisted to look up. The mouth of the well was a disk of brightness, surrounded by concentric half-circles of gray reflected light. The sound was repeated, and Thorinn saw a tiny black dot rise to the well-mouth, bob and disappear.