Day of the Giants Read online

  Day of the Giants

  Lester Del Rey

  The final war between the Norse gods and the Giants!

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  An Axe-age, a Sword-age, shields shall be cloven;

  A Wind-age, a Wolf-age, ere the world totters.

  —VÖLUSPA

  Chapter I

  Summer had ended before it began in June, and the first killing frost had come early in August. Now it was September, and winter was roaring across the fertile plains of the United States. Most of the crops had failed to ripen, and the only harvest on the farm lands was that of wood—there was a frantic race to cute wood for the stoves and furnaces that had to be kept full in the struggle against the cold.

  Leif Svenson threw the last split log against the saw, feeding it automatically by the whine at the blade. He was a big, lean man, whose economy of motion made him seem slower than the was. The steel-blue eyes, blond hair and sharp-planed handsomeness most have come from some Viking ancestor, but there was none of the traditional sea rover’s lust for living on his face. Only grim, dogged weariness showed now. He stacked the wood neatly and shut off the tractor motor beating his hands together to warm them. Now he could hear the rising drone the wind and the pinging of icy crystals on the metal roof above him. He scowled, not bothering to put on a smile as he turned toward the visitor who had been waiting for him to finish.

  “Any recent news, Summers?” he asked, but there was no expectation in his voice. It had become a purely routine question.

  “Radio says things are getting worse, that’s all. There’s a blizzard running from Dakota clear down to Kentucky. Guess we’re just getting the edge of it now. Helluva year. Old man Erickson claims it’s the end of the world.” Summers gnawed at the corner of a plug of tobacco. There was a shadow of dull fear on his face, overlaying his habitual attempt at an ingratiating smile. He waited for encouragement, then sighed reluctantly. “Reason I come by, Leif, was about your dog. You changed your mind yet?”

  “No,” wife answered flatly. “What I told the sheriff still goes. Rex has been chained up constantly for two weeks now, and I’m not letting anyone kill him for what some other animal does. Why should I?”

  Summers cleared his throat awkwardly. “Now look, I ain’t saying you should. I just figured I’d better warn you that the neighbors are holding an action meeting in the schoolhouse at five today. Al Storm says that two more of his pigs got killed last night by your dog or wolf–and nobody’s ever seen any wolves around here. He’s mighty put out, Leif. Losing food like that any funny now. So I thought I’d best tell you about it. Might be better you should go to the meeting, talk to them before they decide on something foolish. They’re pretty het up.”

  Leif’s scowl deepened. Summers was right, of course. With the loss of fodder and crops over the whole world, there was a growing crisis in food; vigilantes were coming back into style in many places, and there had already been lynchings for less than the loss of a pig.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll try to get there. Know anything else?” Summers’face brightened with sudden importance, but the fear was still there. “Seen an angel last night. On the level. Big blonde woman on a white horse, about a hundred feet up in the air, going hellbent east and singing loud enough to raise the dead. Just like the ones all the soldiers over there have been reporting. We were out hunting–four of us–long about sundown, if there’d been a sun, and we all seen her… Of course, there was supposed to be one over in Twin Forks last week, but…”

  Leif left him ramble on, not surprised by it, but trying to pretend interest. Every period of war has its mass hallucinations, and the bitter stalemate that had begun in Europe was loaded with hysteria of the weather and the fear of famine to come. Nobody had yet begun using atomic weapons, mercifully, but the tension of dread remained. It was small wonder that reports kept coming back of angels riding this guy on horseback over the battlefields—and lately, even here. The nonsense about flying saucers had just begun to quiet down after the first successful lunar probe revealed no aliens on the moon; now the crackpots were seeing changes instead. Summers’ sighting has probably been only a trick cloud, catching a strain ray of sunshine, but there was no use in robbing the man of his importance by suggesting that.

  Leif welcomed the sound of the phone from the house when his ears caught it during a lull in the wind. He started out at a run, throw in words rover’s shoulder to summers. No knowing how long it had been ringing.

  It was still ringing when he grabbed it up, though, and the voice of his twin brother came from receiver. “About time, Leif. How soon can you pick me up?”

  “What happened to your motorcycle?”

  “Skidded into the telephone pole at Five Corners. Not much left of the machine, but I jumped in time. Few scrapes and bruises, but it could be worse. A lot worse!” The phone carried the sound of a load chuckle if as he muttered something away from the mouthpiece.

  “I told you not to take that damned motorcycle, on these roads…” Leif began, but Lee cut him off, still chuckling.

  “So you did, son, so you did. Look, I’m at the Faulkner place, getting myself bandaged up. Know where it is? Good. Then come and collect your erring brother—but don’t hurry too much. You should see what I’ve found for a nurse!”

  The phone went dead, and Leif swore. Then he grinned wryly, with a mental picture of the bandaging that Lee would be enjoying. Lee was his twin’s mental opposite. The crazy fool had managed to get into the Second World War at fifteen, had followed that with a trick in Korea, down into some South American fracas, and over half the known world. His letters had come back now and then, filled with exploits, women, casual citations and disgraces, more women, and sometimes money that Leif regarded with suspicion but had used to develop their farm.

  Now Lee Svensen was back to recover from a chest wound he’d picked up two months before as a mercenary in the new French Interior Legion, and already he was bored with the farm and quiet. It was like him to go careening off on his motorcycle before his chest was fully healed, and to consider the almost certain accident as only a joke and a chance for other conquest.

  Summers was gone when Leif came out. He glanced at the shed, saw that Rex was still chained securely, and headed for the garage. It took time to put on skid chains and check the car against any possible trouble from the slippery road. But while he realized that Lee wouldn’t have bothered, his own habits of caution were too deeply ingrained. He’d stayed at home to run the farm and build up the greenhouses and orchard, planning each step and going slowly. Maybe the full cellar, silo, and fodder bins justified it, but there were times when letters came from Lee, or on Lee’s rare visits, when Leif wondered. Just about the only excitement he’d known was from vicarious adventures presented on his TV screen. And as for romance—well, maybe it was all to the good that nothing had ever come of his few affairs.

  He could no more dislike his brother than anyone else could, but Leif still felt a trace of resentment whenever he remembered having to give up his studies in science at college because Lee had gone off adventuring.

  Then Leif’s thoughts veered back the present, and he began worrying again. Now he wouldn’t be able to attend the action meeting, and t
here would be no one there to present his side of the affair. Summers would never walk the would-be vigilantes who were set to kill Rex. Lee would pick a time like this for trouble.

  The wind was increasing in strength, and the dull gray sky was hidden by heavier snow. It was crystalline and sharp, though, bouncing on the frozen mud of the road and whipping against the windshield, still too fine to stick. Leif hunched over the wheel, staring ahead. He turned the heater control to maximum, but the wind whipped out the warmth before he could feel it. Driving back would be rugged.

  To make it worse, there were still quite a few cars on the road, and many of them were obviously unused to winter driving on gravel. They were probably city fools, out trying to buy food in the country, and now scared back homeward by the storm. Hoarding and increasingly wild prices were making marketing tough in the cities, and there were still a few farmers–move by stupidity or cupidity–who were willing to sell what they themselves might need very soon.

  He came to a rough stretch of road, hardly more than a one-way lane, then jammed on his brakes as headlights broke around the corner and glared into his eyes. The car skidded and slewed around, but he fought it to the side, almost into the ditch. A big Cadillac swept by him, piled high with foodstuff that could never be kept in any city house. It bounced and skidded on the rutted road but dashed past without slowing.

  Leif muttered curses and shifted into low. His foot just easing up on the clutch when a rap sounded on the right front window. There had been no sight of any one near before the lights of the car blinded him. But as he hesitated, the rap can again.

  He swung his head, expecting to see only a broken branch from a nearby tree. His eyes stared into a red-bearded face and a pair of dark eyes, set too narrow and too deep. It was a handsome face, from what the beard revealed, but something and it made Leif draw back before he caught himself and unlocked the door. The feeling of shock increased as the man climbed in; then the feeling died abruptly.

  “Thanks. They call me Laufeyson,” the stranger announced coolly. There was a hint of chuckle in his voice, and his lips parted in a fleeting smile that held a clearly sardonic twist. “I’ll ride with you, Leif Svenson, since you’re going my way. I’m happier not too walk, with a Fimblewinter already upon us.”

  The word struck a familiar chord, and Leif groped for it, forgetting his fleeting puzzle over Laufeyson’s knowing his name and the man’s sudden appearance. Then the word came back, dredged from the stories he’d heard as a child from his grandmother. “The Fimblewinter—the dreadful winter. Wasn’t that supposed to come before the Twilight of the Gods, or some such?”

  “Twilight—or night?” For a moment, Laufeyson’s shadowed eyes were cold. Then the wrinkles around them deepened in a deliberate amusement as the stranger studied Leif. “The old blood runs strong in you, Leif Svenson, if you remember that the Fimblewinter comes before the Ragnarok. As I already knew by your looks. Eh, it darkens early. You’re lucky for the lights in this—this car.”

  Leif nodded, staring out of the weather. Fimblewinter! The name fitted. Tattered shreds of the old Norse legends came back to him from his grandmother’s tales. It was the winter before the gods were to fight their hopeless, fatal battle with the giants. The grimness of the legends had always depressed him, and how the setting was all too suitable in mood. He reached for the radio, to turn on a local FM station that would carry the weather reports and news. Beside him, the stranger jumped at the sound of the voice from the speaker, his red beard seemed to bristle suddenly. Then he chuckled and set back to listen.

  The news was hardly less grim than the tales of Ragnarok. Even the southern hemisphere was in the grip of savage storms, and the seemingly impossible war between Australia and New Zealand was settling into a long and savage affair. There were food riots in the east, crime everywhere, fanatic groups in California, a third war beginning in South America, and utter chaos in China and India. The Muslim faith was sweeping over Russia, and there was dark muttering of a new jehad. So far, the United States had kept out of all these petty wars, but insane pressures were building up.

  In nearby Brookville, the Olson brothers had quarreled and killed each other with kitchen knives over who should carry in the wood. Hate groups and vigilantes were meeting regularly, and city hoodlums were forming gangs to invade the surrounding country. Guns and ammunition were being advertised openly on the radio. And there were three more accounts of the angel riders in the sky, with some nonsense about their avoiding the air over churches. Finally, the announcer began on the weather, his voice taking on a forced optimism as he tried to make it sound like something besides a reading of doom.

  Laufeyson broke in on that. “Your Norns in the box make no sense,” he said. “Why talk of wind direction, when every fool knows that the winds blow from all quarters at Fimbuljahr? And who needs such a voice to know what must come? Unless I smell it wrong, there’ll be three days of blizzard, with snow above the head of the tall man.”

  Leif grunted disgustedly and cut off the radio; Laufeyson might be as accurate as the forecasts being given out now, at that. He slowed as he came to another side road.

  “Far as I go in this direction.”

  “I’ll go along with you, Leif, until you find your brother. I’m seeking a meeting and wolf—though not as the One-Eyed thought—and Faulkner’s steading is as near as any for me.”

  Leif stole a quick glance at him, but something about the expression of the hitchhiker held back his curiosity. He shrugged off a shiver that ran up his spine and concentrated on his driving over the pitted little road. Faulkner’s small, weatherbeaten house came into view. Lee’s motorcycle was in front, crumpled badly, and already been covered by snow. Only the luck of a fool could have saved the rider serious injury.

  Leif drove up the lane and parked to the lee of the house. “Coming in with me?”

  “I’ll wait here, now that the wind no longer blows through the car. And when I’m warmer, I’ll be on my way.”

  Leif let it go at that, and went up the crackling, snow-covered steps. He knocked, waited, and knocked more loudly, not surprised at the delay, even though his own efforts to date Gail Faulkner two years ago had been futile. When she finally opened the door, there was a flush of red on her face, and she avoided Leif’s look. Behind her, Leif Svenson seemed generally pleased with the world, though the knees were ripped from both legs of his pants, and one hand was bandaged.

  “Come in and shut the door, son,” he advised. “Hot coffee on the stove. You run and fix it, honey. Black, no sugar. Leif probably wants to bawl me out.”

  Leif grinned wryly, in spite of his irritation. Nobody had ever succeeded in staying mad at Lee, and he was still a sucker for his twin. The expression on their faces was the only dissimilarity in their looks, but it set them completely apart. The unconscious resentment of Lee’s too-ready success with girls was already fading as Leif dropped in a chair near the floor radiator, soaking up the heat greatfully.

  “Go out and tell Laufeyson—the man out in the car—to come in for some coffee, and we’ll forget the lecture, Lee, I’m used to your raising hell with my plans.”

  Lee groaned as he got to his feet, but his steps were lithe and normal as he went out. A moment later, he was back. “Nobody there. Unless you count the biggest hawk I ever saw flying over. “What’s the joke?”

  Leif got up reluctantly and moved outside. There was no trace of Laufeyson—nor were there any footprints to show how he’d left through the snow. Leif could see where his own footprints led to the house, but there were no others. He started to bend down for closer study, just as a shrill scream pierced the air. Lee was looking up, and Leif followed his gaze. Far above, something moved through the gloom and the thing snow; it might have been a huge hawk, but it was impossible to see clearly enough to be sure. However, several hunters had brought back rumors of such a bird near here recently. The scream came again as the bird streaked off toward the distant village and vanished in the distance. L
eif bent down for further inspection of the area around the car, dismissing the hawk from his thoughts.

  “Laufeyson must have had his tracks covered by a chance gust of snow,” he decided. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but…”

  “He probably sprouted wings and flew away as a hawk,” Lee said. “And even if he did, so what? Let’s get that coffee before we turn into snowmen and freeze solid here.”

  Leif went in reluctantly, still bothered by the effect Laufeyson had worked on him. Hell, in another month at this rate he’d be seeing whole companies of angels riding through the sky. The whole business wasn’t worth worrying about.

  He was still worrying it over an hour later, however, while Lee and Gail were laughing together at the other side of the room. Then he heard the sound of a car outside, and Gail’s laughter cut off suddenly. She got up quickly and moved toward the kitchen, just as the door there banged loudly. There as a mutter of voices, and then the older Faulkner’s voice rising in excitement: “…Never seen him before. Some new guy. He got there just when the meeting was breaking up with nothing resolved. You shoulda been there to hear him. Sure put some gumption into Summers and the rest of the weak-kneed bunch. After he got done talking, we all voted for action. Svenson either gets rid of that killer of his, by golly, or we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re going to get things straight around here…”

  Gail had obviously been trying to quiet him, but his words went on until he reached the living room and spotted Leif and Lee. For a second, a sullen embarrassment covered his grizzled face, to match the scarlet and miserable look of his daughter. Then his stooped shoulders squared belligerently.

  “You! Get out! Get out of my house, the both of you, before I throw you out. I won’t have a Svenson sneaking around here…”

  Lee had gotten to his feet and was buttoning his jacket leisurely. There was a thin, savage grin on his lips as he faced Faulkner, and the older man’s whipped-up rage seemed to drain as he faced it.