“We don’t talk about that,” said the fox.
“So is that why the winter isn’t ending?” said Odd.
“The Frost Giants like the winter. They are the winter,” said the bear.
“And if spring never comes? If summer doesn’t happen? If this winter just goes on forever?”
The bear said nothing. The fox swished its tail impatiently. They looked to the eagle. It tilted its head back, and with one fiery yellow eye it stared at Odd. Then it said, “Death!”
“Eventually,” added the fox. “Not immediately. In a year or so. And some creatures will go south. But most of the people and the animals will die. It’s happened before, back when we had wars with the Frost Giants at the dawn of time. When they won, huge ice sheets would cover this part of the world. When we won—and if it took us a hundred thousand years, we always did—the ice sheets would retreat and the spring would return. But we were Gods then, not animals.”
“And I had my hammer,” said the bear.
“Well then,” said Odd. “We’ll set off as soon as it gets light enough to travel.”
“Set off?” said the fox. “For where?”
“Asgard, of course,” said Odd, and he smiled his infuriating smile. Then he went back to his little bed, and he went back to sleep.
CHAPTER 4
MAKING RAINBOWS
“WHAT’S THAT YOU’VE GOT there?” asked the fox.
“It’s a lump of wood,” said Odd. “My father began to carve it into something years ago, and he left it here, but he never came back to finish it.”
“What was it going to be?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Odd. “My father used to say that the carving was in the wood already. You just had to find out what the wood wanted to be, and then take your knife and remove everything that wasn’t that.”
“Mm.” The fox seemed unimpressed.
Odd was riding on the bear’s back. The fox trotted along beside them. High above them, the eagle rode the winds. The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky, and it was colder than it had been when there was cloud cover. They were heading towards higher ground, along a rocky ridge, following a frozen river. The wind hurt Odd’s face and ears.
“This won’t work,” said the bear gloomily. “I mean, whatever it is, it won’t.”
Odd said nothing.
“You’re smiling, aren’t you,” said the bear. “I can tell.”
The thing was this: You got to Asgard, the place the Gods came from, by crossing the Rainbow Bridge, which was called Bifrost. If you were a God, you simply wiggled your fingers and a rainbow appeared, and you walked across it.
High above them, the eagle rode the winds.
Easy, or so the fox said, and the bear morosely agreed. Or at least, it was easy until you didn’t have fingers. Which they didn’t. Still, even if you didn’t have fingers, Loki pointed out, you could normally still find a rainbow and use it. Rainbows turned up after it rained, didn’t they?
Well, they didn’t in midwinter.
Odd thought about it. He thought about the way rainbows appeared on rainy days, when the sun came out.
“I think,” said the bear, “as a responsible adult, I should point a few things out.”
“Talk is free,” said Odd, “but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.” It was something his father used to say.
“I just thought I should point out that we are wasting our time. We don’t have any way of getting to the Rainbow Bridge. And if by some miracle we crossed it, look at us—we’re animals, and you can barely walk. We can’t defeat Frost Giants. This whole thing is hopeless.”
“He’s right,” said the fox.
“If it’s hopeless,” said Odd, “why are you coming with me?”
The animals said nothing. The morning sun sparkled up at them from the snow, dazzling Odd, making him squint.
“Nothing better to do,” said the bear after a while.
“Up here!” said Odd. He clung tightly to the bear’s fur as they clambered up the side of a steep hill. They could see the mountains beyond.
“Stop,” said Odd. The waterfall was one of his favorite places in the world. From spring until midwinter it ran high and fast before it crashed down almost a hundred feet into the valley beneath, where it had carved out a rocky basin. In high summer, when the sun barely set, the villagers would come out to the waterfall and splash around in the basin pool, letting the water tumble onto their heads.
Now, the waterfall was frozen and ice ran from the crags down to the basin in twisted ropes and great clear icicles.
“It’s a waterfall,” said Odd. “We used to come out here. And when the water came down and the sun was shining brightly, you could see a rainbow, like a huge circle, all around the waterfall.”
“No water,” said the fox. “No water, no rainbow.”
“There’s water,” said Odd. “But it’s ice.”
He took the axe from his belt, pushed his crutch beneath his arm as he got down from the bear’s back and walked over the ice until he stood before the frozen waterfall. He used the crutch to hold himself in position as best he could. Then he began to swing the axe. The noise of the blade hitting the thick icicle cracked off the hills around them, making echoes that sounded as if an entire army of men was hammering on the ice…
There was a crash, and an icicle as large as Odd smashed down to the surface of the frozen pool.
“Clever,” said the bear, in the kind of tone of voice that meant that it wasn’t clever at all. “You broke it.”
“Yes,” said Odd. He inspected the shards of ice on the ground, picked up the biggest, most cleanly broken piece he could find, then took it to the side of the frozen pool, and put it on a rock, and stared at it.
“It’s a lump of ice,” said the fox. “If you ask me.”
“Yes,” said Odd. “I think the rainbows are imprisoned in the ice when the water freezes.”
The boy took out his knife and began to trace outlines on the ice block with the blade, going back and forth with it, scoring it as best he could.
The eagle circled high above them, almost invisible in the midwinter sun.
“He’s been up there a long time,” said the bear. “Do you think he’s looking for something?”
The fox said, “I worry about him. It must be hard to be an eagle. He could get lost in there. When I was a horse…”
“A mare, you mean,” said the bear with a grunt.
The fox tossed its head and walked away. Odd put his knife down and took out his axe once more. “I’ve seen rainbows on the snow sometimes,” said Odd, loud enough for the fox to hear, “and on the side of buildings, when the sun shone through the icicles. And I thought, Ice is only water, so it must have rainbows in it too. When the water freezes, the rainbows are trapped in it, like fish in a shallow pool. And the sunlight sets them free.”
Odd knelt on the frozen pond. He hit the big lump of ice with his axe. This did nothing—the axe just glanced off the ice and nearly cut into his leg.
“Do that again and you’ll break the axe,” said the fox. “Hold on.”
He nosed along the bank of the frozen pool for several minutes. Then he began scrabbling at the snow. “Here,” he said. “This is what you need.” He put his paw on a grey rock he had revealed.
Odd pulled at the stone, which came up easily from the ground, and it proved to be a flint. Part of it was grey, but the other part, the translucent part of the flint, was a deep salmon-pink color, and it seemed to have been chipped.
“Don’t touch the edges,” said the fox. “It’ll be sharp. Really sharp. They didn’t mess about when they made those things, and they don’t blunt easily if you make them well.”
“What is it?”
“A hand axe. They used to do sacrifices here, on that big rock over there, and they used tools like this to slice up the animal and to part the flesh from the bones.”
“How do you know?” asked Odd.
There was satisfaction and pride in the fox’s voice as it said, “Who do you think they were making sacrifices to?”
Odd brought the tool over to the lump of ice. He ran his hands over the ice, slippery as a fish, then he began to attack the ice with the flint. The rock felt warm in his hands. Hot, even.
“It’s hot,” said Odd.
“Is it?” said the fox, sounding pleased with itself.
The ice fell away under the flint axe, just as Odd had wanted it to. He hacked it into a shape that was almost triangular, thicker on one side than on the other.
The fox and the bear stood nearby watching. The eagle descended to see what was going on, landed in the leafless branches of a tree and was still as a statue.
Odd took his ice triangle and placed it so that the sunlight shone through it onto the white snow that drifted on the frozen pool. Nothing happened. He twisted it, tilted it, moved it around and…
A puddle of light appeared on the snow, all the colors of the rainbow…
“How is that?” asked Odd.
“But it’s on the ground,” said the bear doubtfully. “It should be in the air. I mean, how can that be a bridge?”
The eagle took off from the tree with a clap of wings, and began to fly upwards.
“I don’t think he’s very impressed,” said the fox. “Nice try.”
Odd shrugged. He could feel his mouth pulling up into a smile even as his heart sank. He had been so proud of himself, making a rainbow. His hands were numb. He hefted the stone axe, was about to throw it, hard, away from him and then simply dropped it.
A screech. Odd looked up to see the eagle plummeting towards them. He began to step back, marvelling at the eagle’s speed, wondering how the bird could pull out in time…
It didn’t pull out.
The eagle hit the patch of colored light on the white snow without slowing, as if it was diving into a pool of liquid water.
The puddle of color splashed…and opened.
Scarlet fell softly about them and everything was outlined in greens and blues and the world was raspberry-colored and leaf-colored and golden-colored and fire-colored and blueberry-colored and wine-colored. Odd’s world was colors, and, despite his crutch, he could feel himself falling forward, tumbling into the rainbow…
Everything went dark. Odd’s eyes took moments to adjust, and when they did, above him was a velvet night sky, hung with a billion stars. A rainbow arced across it, and Odd was walking on the rainbow—no, not walking: his feet did not move. It felt as if he was being carried up the arch, going upwards, forwards, uncertain how fast he was travelling, only certain that he was somehow swept up in the colors and that it was the colors of the rainbow that were carrying him along.
He looked behind him, wondering if he would see the snowy world he had left, but he saw nothing but blackness, empty even of stars.
Odd’s stomach gave a sort of a lurch. He could feel himself dropping, and he turned his head to see the rainbow fading. Through the prism of colors he saw huge fir trees, foggy and purple and blue and red, and then the trees came into focus and found their own color—a cool bluish green—as Odd tumbled off the side of a fir tree and down into a drift of snow. The scent of bruised fir tree surrounded him.
It was daylight. He was wet, and cold, but unhurt.
He glanced up, but there was no sign of the Rainbow Bridge. Silently, across the thick snow, the fox and the bear were walking towards him. And then, with a rattle and a clatter, the eagle landed on a branch beside him, making the snow on the branch fall flump to the ground. The eagle looked less crazy now, thought Odd. And then, it looks bigger.
“Where is this place?” asked Odd, but he knew the answer, knew it even before the eagle threw back its head and screamed, with delight and with relish and with keen, dark joy, “Asgard!”
CHAPTER 5
AT MIMIR’S WELL
REALLY, TRULY, WITH ALL of his heart, Odd found that he wanted to believe that he was still in the world he had known all his life. That he was still in the country of the Norse folk, that he was in Midgard. Only he wasn’t, and he knew it. The world smelled different, for a start. It smelled alive. Everything he looked at looked sharper, more real, more there.
And if there was any doubt, then he only had to look at the animals.
“You got bigger,” he told them. “You’ve grown.”
And they had. The fox’s ears were now level with Odd’s chest. The eagle’s wingspan, when the bird preened in the sunshine, was as wide as a longship. The bear, which had not been small to begin with, was now the size of Odd’s father’s hut, enormous in its bulk and in its bearishness.
“We didn’t grow,” said the fox, its fur the vivid orange color of a blazing fire. “This is how big we are here. We’re normal-sized.”
Odd nodded. Then he said, “So this whole place is called Asgard, and the town we have to go to is also called Asgard, yes?”