“And you with the men.” But Alea couldn’t help an anxious glance after him. He might be only a friend, but he was indeed a friend, and all she had.
Most of the women were as tall as Alea, three or four a little shorter. They had gathered around a stream fed pool ten yards from the cooking fire, watching older children turn the spit and chatting in low voices. The conversation gelled as Alea came up; she walked into silence. She decided to take the bull by the horns and looked down at the pool. Someone had widened the stream into a circular basin and paved it with rocks. “How pretty!” she exclaimed. “How clever of your men to make this for you!”
Some of the women stared at her as though she were insane, but others gave shouts of laughter, quickly smothered. One said, “Whatever possessed you to think the men did this, girl?”
Alea bridled at the term—she was clearly old enough to be an old maid, so calling her “girl” was showing contempt. But she kept her temper in check and said, “Those rocks must have been heavy to haul. Don’t tell me they left you to carry them yourselves!”
Several of the women lost their laughter and glared at her instead, but the one who had spoken only sneered. “Are you so weak you can’t lift a rock, girl?”
“I think I might.” Alea leaned on her staff to call their attention to it, though she doubted the men would have said anything about her using it on them. “But why should I, when I have a great hulk like Gar to haul them for me?”
“Oh, your man,” another woman sneered, “if you can call him that. How much man can he be, if he does a woman’s work?”
The men suddenly broke into angry shouting. The women looked up, eyes wide in fear. Alea felt it too, but forced herself to turn slowly, looking with curiosity only.
Two of the men were on their feet, the rest shaking their fists at Gar, but he only sat, watching them, and when the shouting died, he went on talking calmly. “Why are you so surprised? Dumi was a goddess, after all. Of course she was an excellent archer!”
“Not as good as the men,” Zimu said stubbornly.
Gar shrugged. “If you can hit the bull’s eye, how can you be better?”
Alea turned back to the women, looking as smug as a cream-fed cat. “He’s man enough to fight all your men to a standstill—and you know he did, or they wouldn’t have invited him to stay the night.”
They did know; their gazes were angry, but they slid away from hers.
For her part, Alea was surprised to realize she felt proud of Gar. “I’m as big as any of you, and bigger than any Midgarder.”
“Midgarders!” the oldest woman said with disgust. “Puling little things! The men are right—we’re much better than they are.”
The other women chorused agreement, and the oldest, a woman in her forties, said, “You’re right in that, Elsa—and as the men say, we’re even better than the giants, those great lumbering hulks!”
Anger kindled in Alea, partly at the thought of these semislaves ranking themselves better than Riara and Orla, partly at women being so ready to be cowed. “Oh, is that what the men say?”
Elsa frowned at the edge to her tone. “Aye, it is, and true! What Sigurd says is right—we’re a new breed come into being, better than any of the other three, and you should be glad of it, girl, for you’re one of us, too!”
Alea shuddered at the thought of being such a slave. “So you know what your men think. Do you know what you think?”
“We agree with the men.” Elsa glowered, then asked the older woman, “Don’t we, Helga?”
“Why not, if they’re right?” Helga answered, but her glare was on Alea. “We’re bigger than the Midgarders and stronger, and smarter and more nimble than the giants!”
“I’ve met the giants,” Alea told them, “and stayed the night with them. Believe me, they’re just as smart as we are, and gentle to boot!”
The women stared, scandalized. “The giants? Gentle?”
“To us, and to their women,” Alea replied. “The giant women do all that the men do, and the men do all the tasks that the women do. I didn’t hear any fighting—they talk things out until they agree. I never once heard a giant man give orders to a giant woman.”
“Well, of course, when you’re that big and strong…” Helga grumbled.
“The giant men are bigger and stronger,” Alea reminded them, “but women are precious to them. They need to win their favor—and keep winning it.”
Helga looked surprised, then calculating, but Sigurd said, “What if a man did give one of them an order, and she refused it? What then?”
“Aye!” said Elsa. “If the giant men are so much bigger than the women, how could she save herself?”
“None of their men would ever lift his hand against a woman,” Alea said positively, “but if he did, the other men would knock him flat—and if they didn’t, the other women would.”
All the women looked surprised, then excited—then crestfallen. “If the women banded together to defend one of their own,” Sigurd said, “wouldn’t the men come in a gang to thrash them all?”
“Here, perhaps,” Alea told them. “In Jotunheim, no.”
“But their women know how to fight!”
“A woman can learn.” Suddenly, Alea was aware of the pain from her bruises all over again, even the muted throbbing in her head—but with them, the fierce sense of exhilaration that came with knowing she had fought back and not lost, even if she hadn’t exactly won, either. “Believe me, a woman can learn.”
The men broke into another burst of shouting, half of them on their feet and shaking their fists. Gar only smiled up at them, interested, not amused, and gradually they quieted.
“The giants aren’t stupid,” Gar said. “I tested one of them, wrestling, and used some movements he didn’t know. By the end of the match, he used them on me. Oh, be sure, they’re intelligent enough.”
Dambri stared. “You wrestled with a giant?”
“Nothing could teach our men to honor us,” Helga said, with total assurance.
“Perhaps you should take your children and all go away long enough for them to learn how much they need you.”
“Perhaps they would come after us with sticks,” Elsa growled.
Alea sighed and searched her mind for a rebuttal—but when she didn’t find one, she remembered that she was supposed to be trying to bring these women peace, not war and possible death. “Tell them it’s religious, and make it so. Tell them you need time to meditate the new myth I’ve brought you.”
“What, that the giants are gentle toward their women?” Helga asked, with full sarcasm.
“That’s no myth—it’s news. The story I’ve brought you is the tale of Thummaz,” Alea said. “It isn’t told in Midgard, but I learned it from with the giants here in the North Country. It’s about a southern god who came to the gates of Valhalla, to visit…”
They listened at first with suspicion, but it evaporated under the spell of the tale. They listened intently, and when she was done, they relaxed with a sigh of pleasure.
“But what good does this tale do us?” Helga asked.
“It shows you that humanity can only become great if all its parts join together,” Alea answered.
Shouting erupted again, all of the men on their feet this time, and Zimu strode up to Gar, planting his fists on his hips, demanding, “How could you possibly put outcasts like us back with the Midgarders? Without our being slaves?”
“By cherishing your children who only grow as big as Midgarders,” Gar told him, “cherishing even the ones who grow no bigger than a dwarf, and the ones who grow as big as a giant!”
“None of our children will grow like that,” Zimu growled, but he sounded uncertain.
The women’s eyes all turned haunted at that.