Bracelet of Bones by Kevin Crossley-Holland Page B

boat.
    “Our skipper’s a slave driver,” he told Oleg with a wink at Solveig and Vigot. “Anyhow, Solveig wouldn’t want to be out with men like us after dark.”
    “She wouldn’t want to be out without you,” Oleg said. “That’s for sure.”
    “I can look after myself,” Solveig protested. “I’m rising fifteen.”
    “Exactly,” said Oleg with a rueful smile.
    Then Oleg pressed something into the palm of Solveig’s injured hand and closed her fingers around it.
    “You have a maker’s eyes,” he told her. He stretched his thumb and forefinger. “Two colors. Wide and dreaming.”
    Solveig opened her left hand. A violet-gray glass bead nestled in it, shining with a quiet inner light.
    “Oh!” she exclaimed, holding it up to what little light there was. “It’s beautiful!”
    “Your third eye,” murmured Oleg.
    “Subtle as a fish scale,” Vigot observed.
    Swiftly Solveig stepped toward the craftsman and embraced him.
    “Not much of a man,” said Vigot disparagingly as the three of them strode side by side out of Earth Town. “An overgrown dwarf or something.”
    “The best smith and carver I’ve ever met,” said Bruni.
    “More skilled than you will ever be,” Solveig told Vigot.
    “All he wanted to do was talk about his . . . stuff.”
    “What did you expect? We didn’t go to see him to talk about the weather.”
    “He made it all sound . . . well, as if it matters more than anything else in the world.”
    “It does,” said Solveig. “To him it does.”
    “Makers like nothing more than to talk about their work,” observed Bruni. “It’s what’s most alive for them.”
    “Mmm!” agreed Solveig, smiling. “I can’t explain it exactly. But for me, well, meeting him was like taking a step onto the rainbow bridge.”
    “Heh?” inquired Vigot.
    “That little workshop. It’s like the bridge between middle-earth and Asgard. Between humans and gods. For me it is.”
    “You mean,” said Bruni, “that when men make something fine . . .”
    “Yes,” said Solveig. “Somehow, the gods strike a spark in them.”
    “With strike-a-lights!” said Vigot.
    “No, you don’t understand.”
    “There’s a story,” Bruni told them, “about how Odin won the goblet brimming with the mead of poetry. He shared it out between all the gods, but now and then he offers a drop or two to some human.”
    “That’s what I mean,” said Solveig eagerly. “It’s like that.”
    “He didn’t ask us anything about our journey,” Vigot said. “The crew . . . the cargo . . . where we’re going.”
    “He asked you what kind of fish you want to catch,” Solveig reminded him.
    “All kinds,” Vigot replied, and he flashed her a handsome smile. “Big ones, small ones, they can’t escape me.”
    Bruni grunted. “Thinking about girls again, are you, Vigot?”
    “And fish,” said Vigot.
    “You’ve got a mind like a cesspit.”
    “And you’re my teacher,” Vigot retorted.
    Bruni gave Vigot a scornful look, and his thick lips parted. “So says the pot,” he sneered. Then he glanced at Solveig. “Ignore him,” he told her. “Vigot and his fish, they’ve reminded me of something.”
    “What?” asked Solveig.
    “Hooked, are you?” said Bruni, and his mouth fell open again. “Listen to this! Thor went out fishing, and do you know what he used for bait?”
    “A turd,” said Vigot.
    “No,” said Bruni. “He baited his hook—his very big hook, Vigot—with the head of an ox.
    “In the depths of the sea the monster was waiting, the Midgard Serpent coiled around our middle-earth. He let go of his tail and snapped at the bait, and the sea frothed like ale. It fizzed. But Thor hauled up the monster. Then he reached for his hammer and whacked the serpent’s head. The Midgard Serpent tugged, and the huge barb tore at the roof of his mouth. He jerked his head from side to side, he wrenched . . .”
    Bruni grunted, he spluttered and spit like the Midgard