‘I’d be cutting my own throat,’ he said. ‘But gods, for a prize like that . . . I’ll take your offer.’ He spat in his hand, ready to shake with the Old Man.

‘Let’s make sure we’ve got this straight,’ I said. ‘Six months. Not a day more. And no sneaky sub-contracting, either. You do the job yourself, right? Alone and single-handed.’

The labourer nodded. ‘Just me and my horse. Good old Svadilfari.’ He patted the flank of the big black horse that had carried him over Bif-rost. Quite a nice-looking horse, I thought, but nothing out of the ordinary.

‘It’s a deal,’ I told him.

We shook. The race against time had begun.

Lesson 6 Pony and Trap

LESSON 6

Pony and Trap

Never trust a quadruped.

Lokabrenna

THE NEXT DAY AT DAWN, the job began. First, the dragging of fallen masonry; then the quarrying of new stone. The horse, Svadilfari, was exceptionally strong, and by the end of the first month he and his master had accumulated more than enough to begin.

Then came the placing of stone blocks; once more aided by his horse, the mason was able to hoist them to a great height. One by one, the wooden halls of Asgard were remade in stone, with strong, round arches, massive lintels, walls of granite so full of mica that they shone like steel in the sun. There were courtyards paved in stone, turrets, parapets, stairways. The work progressed with an eerie speed that the gods viewed at first with amazement, then, as winter deepened, with dread. Even I began to feel a little nervous as the walls of Asgard grew; most builders underestimate the time it takes to finish a job; in this case it looked as if six months might have been over-generous.

But the long winter was on our side; snow began to fall in drifts. Still the mason and his horse went on dragging stone up from the plain. Gales and snowstorms and biting cold seemed to have no effect on them; too late, we started to suspect that the mason and his horse were not everything they seemed to be.

Months passed with dizzying speed. The plain of Ida began to thaw. In Idun’s garden, snowdrops bloomed. Birds sang with sickening regularity. And day by day, Asgard’s walls grew bigger and more impressive.

Spring approached and, unfairly, all the gods blamed me for the fact that the work was getting on so fast. Freyja was especially scathing, pointing out to all her friends that this was why you should never trust a demon, and even suggesting that I might be in league with the stonemason, as part of a treacherous plan by Surt to take back the fire of the Sun and the Moon and to plunge the Worlds into darkness.