The builder watched his horse head toward him, and he felt satisfied. The hoofbeats pounded across the meadow, doubling and redoubling with the echoes that bounced from the high gray granite wall, so for one moment the builder imagined that a whole herd of horses was coming toward him.
No, thought the builder, just one horse.
He shook his head and realized his mistake. Not one horse. Not one set of hoofbeats. Two . . .
The other horse was a chestnut mare. The builder knew she was a mare immediately—he did not have to look between her legs. Every line of her, every inch of her, everything about the chestnut was female. Svadilfari wheeled as he ran across the meadow, then he slowed, and reared, and neighed loudly.
The chestnut mare ignored him. She stopped running, as if he were not there, and she put her head down and seemed to be cropping the grass as Svadilfari approached her, but when he was within a dozen yards she began to run from him, a canter that became a gallop, and the gray stallion ran behind her, trying to catch her, always a length or two behind, nipping at her rump and tail with his teeth, yet always missing.
They ran across the meadow together in the creamy golden light of the end of the day, the gray horse and the brown, sweat glistening on their flanks. It was almost a dance.
The builder clapped his hands loudly, and whistled, and called Svadilfari’s name, but the stallion ignored him.
The builder ran out, intending to catch the horse and bring him back to his senses, but the chestnut mare seemed almost to know what he intended, for she slowed and rubbed her ears and mane against the side of the stallion’s head, and then ran, as if wolves were after her, toward the edge of the forest. Svadilfari ran after her, and in moments they both vanished into the shadows of the wood.
The builder cursed, and spat, and waited for his horse to reappear.
The shadows lengthened, and Svadilfari did not return.
The builder returned to his stone-boat. He looked into the woods. Then he spat on his hands, took hold of the ropes, and began to haul the stone-boat across the meadow of grasses and spring flowers, toward the mountain quarry.
He did not return at dawn. The sun was already high in the sky by the time the builder returned to Asgard, hauling the stone-boat behind him.
He had ten stone blocks on the stone-boat, all he could manage, and he was hauling and heaving the stone-boat and cursing the stones, but with each heave he got closer to the wall.
Beautiful Freya stood at the gateway, watching him.
“You have only ten stone blocks with you,” she told him. “You will need twice that many bricks to finish our wall.”
The builder said nothing. He carried on hauling his blocks toward the unfinished gateway, his face a mask. There were no smiles, no winks—not any longer.
“Thor is returning from the east,” Freya told him. “He will be with us soon.”
The gods of Asgard came out to watch the builder as he hauled the rocks toward the wall. They joined Freya, stood about her protectively.
They watched, silently at first, and then they began to smile and to chuckle, and to call out questions.
“Hey!” shouted Balder. “You only get the sun if you finish that wall. Do you think you will be taking the sun home with you?”
“And the moon,” said Bragi. “Such a pity you do not have your horse with you. He could have carried all the rocks you need.”
And the gods laughed.
The builder let go of the stone-boat then. He faced the gods. “You cheated!” he said, and his face was scarlet with exertion and with anger.
“We have not cheated,” said Odin. “No more than you have cheated. Do you think we would have let you build our wall if we had known you were a giant?”
The builder picked up a rock one-handed and smashed it against another, breaking the granite block into two. He turned to the gods, half of the rock in each hand, and now he was twenty, thirty, fifty feet tall. His face twisted; he no longer looked like the stranger who had arrived in Asgard a season before, placid and even-tempered. Now his face looked like the granite face of a cliff, twisted and sculpted by anger and hatred.
“I am a mountain giant,” he said. “And you gods are nothing but cheats and vile oath-breakers. If I still had my horse, I would be finishing your wall now. I would be taking the lovely Freya and the sun and the moon for my wages. And I would be leaving you here in the darkness and the cold, without even beauty to cheer you.”
“No oath was broken,” said Odin. “But no oath can protect you from us now.”
The mountain giant roared with anger and ran toward the gods, a huge lump of granite in each hand as a club.
The gods stood aside, and only now the giant saw who was standing behind them. A huge god, red-bearded and muscular, wearing iron gauntlets and holding an iron hammer, which he swung, once. He let go of the hammer when it was pointing at the giant.
There was a flash of lightning from the clear skies, followed by the dull boom of thunder as the hammer left Thor’s hand.
The mountain giant saw the hammer getting rapidly bigger as it came hurtling toward him, and then he saw nothing else, not ever again.
The gods finished building the wall themselves, although it took them many more weeks to cut and haul the last ten blocks from the quarries high in the mountains and drag them all the way back to Asgard and place them in position at the top of the gateway. They were not as well shaped or as well fitted as the blocks the master builder had shaped and placed himself.
There were those of the gods who felt that they should have let the giant get even closer to finishing the wall before Thor killed him. Thor said that he appreciated the gods having some fun ready for him, when he got home from the east.
Strangely, for it was most unlike him, Loki was not around to be praised for his part in luring away the horse Svadilfari. Nobody knew where he was, although there were those who spoke of a magnificent chestnut mare seen on the meadows beneath Asgard. Loki stayed away for the best part of a year, and when he showed up again, he was accompanied by a gray foal.
It was a beautiful foal, although it had eight legs instead of the usual four, and it followed Loki wherever he went, and nuzzled him, and treated Loki as if he were its mother. Which, of course, was the case.
The foal grew into a horse called Sleipnir, a huge gray stallion, the fastest and the strongest horse that ever there had been or ever there would be, a horse that could outrun the wind.
Loki presented Sleipnir to Odin as a gift, the best horse among gods and men.
Many people would admire Odin’s horse, but only a brave man would ever mention its parentage in Loki’s presence, and nobody ever dared to allude to it twice. Loki would go out of his way to make your life unpleasant if he heard you talking about how he lured Svadilfari away from its master and how he rescued the gods from his own bad idea. Loki nursed his resentments.