Odds and Gods

by Tom Holt

  The next morning they overslept (the alarm clock radio didn’t work, because (a) Epimetheus had put the batteries in the wrong way, or (b) because Pandora had set it up all wrong, despite Epimetheus’ totally lucid explanation of how to do it). What finally woke them was the sound of the bailiffs breaking in to repossess the blender, the video recorder, the washing machine, the microwave, the power drill and the exercise bicycle.

  This led, inevitably, to a free and frank exchange of views on the subject of budget management, impulse buying and some people who were so mean that other people couldn’t be expected to live with them one minute longer; which was in turn interrupted by the arrival of the men from the electricity company to disconnect the supply for non-payment of the bill.

  By nightfall, the cave was empty. Pandora and Epimetheus had moved to smaller, damper caves at opposite ends of the mountain and were corresponding bitterly by carrier pigeon over who was to get the alarm clock radio.

  As the argument raged, and the air vibrated with the clatter of hurrying wings, something moved at the bottom of the original box, out of which the free gift had come. It stirred. It blinked. Feebly, it spread stunted wings and lifted itself into the air.

  In their excitement, Pandora and Epimetheus had overlooked the little creature; that slow, patient, long-suffering stowaway in the box of troubles. It didn’t mind. It suffered long. Painfully stiff after its long confinement, it fluttered away towards Pandora’s cave with its message of hope.

  As you will have guessed, the little creature’s name was Litigation, friend to all wretched mortals who have suffered wrongs and been oppressed. Next morning, when it perched on the rock outside Epimetheus’ hovel and handed him a writ, it had somehow grown slightly larger and maybe even a touch fatter; but it had deep, grey eyes that seemed to say, Trust me.

  By the time it arrived back at Pandora’s cave, bearing a counter-writ, it was the size of an ostrich and virtually spherical, and its soft velvety paws had been replaced by whacking great talons. By then, of course, it was ever so slightly too late.

  Lundqvist didn’t put it quite like that, of course; his account was rather more pithy. But that, more or less, was the basic outline.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Italy?’ Odin asked, smiling. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

  Below them, the traction engine ran smoothly, purring across the sky like an enormous flying cat. It had been Thor who’d fixed it eventually, and in doing so proved yet again the validity of his theory of simple mechanics; namely that, just because something’s inanimate and incapable of perception doesn’t mean to say it can’t be scared shitless by being threatened with a whacking big hammer.

  ‘Well, for a start,’ Frey replied, ‘the place is full of Italians.’

  Odin shook his head in gentle scorn. ‘It’s a well known fact,’ he said, ‘that there’s a substantial emigré Italian population in the north of England. More a Yorkshire phenomenon than Derbyshire, I’d always understood, but obviously you came across an enclave . . .’

  ‘A whole townful?’

  ‘They like to stick together.’

  ‘Escorting a statue of the Madonna through the streets to a Romanesque cathedral?’

  ‘Probably nineteenth-century Gothic.’

  ‘Past a town sign saying Bienvenuto in Bolzano?’

  ‘Twin town scheme. Very popular idea these days, twinning. Never had it in our day, of course. Nearest we ever got was, we burn your crops, you throw decaying corpses in our water supply.’

  Thor, propped on one elbow on the roof of the cabin, snarled irritably. ‘You’d better be right, sunshine,’ he said. ‘Because if this is Italy, then we’re a long way from home, and the further we are, the later it’ll be before we get back, and the likelier it is that She’ll have noticed we’ve gone. And you know what that means.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I’m frightened of Mrs Henderson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  Frey shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘If it helps at all,’ he murmured, ‘I’m absolutely terrified of Mrs Henderson.’

  ‘Huh.’ Odin sniffed. ‘I always reckoned you had a yellow streak in you.’

  Frey stiffened. True, he wasn’t the most warlike of the Norse gods; he was, after all, a god of peace and fruitfulness, of nature and the quickening earth; or, as his devotees had put it back in the good old days, a wimp. True, in the Last Days, when the Aesir had ridden forth for the last battle with the Frost-Trolls, it had been Frey who’d volunteered to stay inside Valhalla and man the switchboard and co-ordinate supply chains and monitor intelligence reports and all the other things one can find to do indoors in time of war. But these things are relative; and even a wimpish Norse god is on average rather more quick-tempered and volatile than a barful of marines at closing time on pay day. ‘What was that,’ he enquired, ‘you just said?’

  ‘I don’t know about you two,’ Thor interrupted, ‘but I’m scared of her. And so are both of you, if you get right down to it.’

  Odin shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘and so am I, but that’s beside the point. We’re on our way home, and she’ll never even know we’ve been gone, and that’s a promise.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

  ‘We’re exactly on course,’ Odin continued icily. ‘Another three minutes and we’ll be directly over Warrington.’

  A look of recollected pain crossed Frey’s face. ‘It’s the way she draws her eyebrows together just before she tells you off that gets me,’ he said. ‘As soon as you see those eyebrows move you say to yourself, Right, here it comes, but there’s like this sort of twenty-second gap, and it’s the waiting that gets you down. I’ll swear she practises in front of the mirror or something.’

  ‘And the tone of voice,’ Thor replied. ‘Don’t forget the tone of voice. The way she says, “What do you think you’re doing, exactly?” It makes you feel so . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will you two stop going on about Mrs blasted Henderson?’

  Thor shook his head, and looked down over the side at the ground below. It was at times like this, when he found himself gazing down from the heights upon the kingdoms of men, spread out beneath him like some enormous chessboard, that he felt an overpowering urge to drop something heavy over the side. He resisted it.

  ‘So what’s that lot down there, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Which lot where?’

  ‘The major city with all the suburbs and arterial roads and things.’

  So high up was the chariot that all a mortal would have seen was a splash of grey, flickering intermittently through the veil of thin cloud. But the gods can see things which we cannot; not with their eyes but with their minds, which thrill to the subtlest harmonies of the planet. With their minds they can see Time, smell light, hear the grinding of the Earth on its axis, feel the vibrations of the changing seasons. Thus, from this height, a god would have no trouble at all making out the Coliseum, the Forum, the Baths of Caracalla, Trajan’s Column, St Peter’s Square, all the crazy cross-hatched jumble of junk and jewels that make up the Eternal City.

  ‘Easy,’ said Odin, throttling back and gently feathering the airbrake. ‘That’s Droitwich.’

  Ever since the world began, there has been a windswept hillside under an iron-grey sky where three grey women sit beneath a bent tree and spin.

  What name you give them depends on who you are; but you can never be wrong, whatever name you choose, simply because what mortals call them is completely and utterly unimportant. Whether you refer to them as Parcae, Norns or Weird Sisters, nothing you can say or do will affect them in the slightest degree, because they were here first. More to the point, they will still be here long after you, and everyone else, have been entirely forgotten.

  They sit, and they spin. Some people will have you believe that they are asleep, and in their sleep they dream, and their dreams are thoughts
and their thoughts supply the world with wisdom. Others claim that what they spin is the web of life; its warp, its weft and the final little dismissive click of the scissors. The truth, insofar as such a concept has any validity in this context, is that they sit, and they spin, and occasionally speak softly to one another, just as they have always done, and what you may care to believe is your own affair entirely.

  ‘I spy with my little eye’ - they have no names, but let them be labelled One, Two and Three - ‘something beginning with O.’

  For a time they were called Graeae, and it was held that between the three of them they had one eye, one ear and one tooth, which they passed from hand to hand. This is almost certainly untrue.

  ‘Outcrop.’

  ‘Correct. Your go.’

  ‘I spy with my, sorry our little eye something beginning with . . .’

  ‘Hang on, I’ve still got the ear,’ said Two. ‘Here, Elsie, catch.’

  ‘She’s dropped it.’

  ‘She couldn’t see, because you’ve got the eye.’

  ‘That’s right, it’s all my fault, as usual.’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Three, scrabbling in the short, wiry grass with her gnarled fingers.

  ‘Left hand down a bit, steady as you go, getting warmer.’

  ‘She can’t hear you.’

  ‘Oh for crying out loud.’

  Their sleep is dreaming, their dreaming is contemplation, their contemplation is eternal bitter resentment about who forgot to pack the spare organs. ‘Got it,’ said Three, ‘no thanks to you two.’ It is perhaps unfortunate that the only organ they have in triplicate is tongues.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘I spy with our little eye something beginning with R.’

  ‘Ravine.’

  ‘Correct. Give Betty the ear, Elsie, and do please try not to drop it.’

  ‘I like that coming from you.’

  One of the drawbacks that comes with playing I Spy for at least five hours each day in the same place ever since the beginning of Time is that you reach a point where you know all the answers.

  ‘Mountainside,’ said Two.

  Three scowled. ‘You might wait till I actually ask the question.’

  ‘It’s the right answer, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s beside the point.’

  ‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ said One, ‘let’s play something else.’

  ‘All right.’

  What is undoubtedly true is that they are wise. All the wisdom in the Universe has at one time or another made the circuit of that little ring before drifting out into other, more prosaic dimensions. This means that the Three are very powerful, very wise and . . .

  ‘Name me three rivers whose names begin with Y.’

  ‘Yangtze-kiang, Yarra and Yellow.’

  ... Very, very bored.

  ‘Let’s play something else instead,’ sighed Two. ‘What about consequences?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ replied Three, ‘you cheat.’

  The ear flashed from hand to hand, until it became a blur. The eye, meanwhile, lipread.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘It’s impossible to cheat at Consequences.’

  ‘You seem to manage.’

  ‘You two,’ growled One. ‘Just shut up and spin, all right?’

  They sat, and they span, and Time ran round the circle. Time running in an enclosed circuit generates Truth. Truth sparking across the points of Knowledge becomes Wisdom.

  ‘We could,’ suggested Two, ‘play Twenty Questions.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind? After last time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, are you out of your mind, after last time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s gone and dropped the ear again.’

  ‘We ought,’ opined One, ‘to tie a bit of string to it, and then we wouldn’t have any of this—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh forget it.’

  On the skyline, about seven hundred yards away, a tatty yellow van materialised and crawled painfully over the rocky ground. There was the occasional scrunge as some component or other hit a stone.

  ‘There they are,’ said Osiris, pointing. ‘You see them, Carl? Just under that funny-shaped tree.’

  ‘I got that, Mr Osiris. I think we just lost the exhaust.’

  Pan closed his eyes. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure about this, because those three old boilers really get up my nose.’

  ‘Absolutely essential,’ Osiris replied. ‘Here, Carl, watch out for that—’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Osiris.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Pan winced. ‘You sure,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t just look him up in the phone book or something? I mean, we haven’t actually tried that, have we?’

  ‘Shut up, Pan, there’s a good lad. Right, park here and we’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  Under the tree, the three sisters stiffened, the web suddenly still in their hands.

  ‘Visitors,’ observed Two with disgust.

  ‘Not again,’ One sighed. ‘That makes three times this century. What does it take to get a little peace and quiet around here?’

  ‘What’s she saying?’

  ‘I said—’

  ‘She’s dropped it again.’

  ‘One of these days,’ remarked Two, after a short scrabble, ‘it’s going to go in the cauldron and get cooked, and then where’ll we be, I should like to know.’

  Folklore abounds with different versions of how to approach the sisters and implore their assistance. All known versions are completely incompatible with each other, except that all agree that the sisters must be treated with the very greatest respect. Failure to observe this simple precaution will inevitably mean that any request for information will fall on deaf ear (even if the ear hasn’t rolled away under a stone or taken refuge in the lid of the sewing box), and there are rumoured to be even worse consequences as well.

  ‘Wotcher,’ Osiris called out. ‘Hands up which of you’s got the ear.’

  ‘Who wants to know, shortarse?’

  Osiris cleared his throat. The next bit always made him feel terribly self-conscious.

  ‘Look,’ he said, I conjure you by the dread waters of Styx, you who know all that is, all that was and all that will be. Tell me now—’

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ said One, putting on her irascible crone voice. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’

  Pan leaned forward, grabbed the ear from One’s withered hand and held it to his lips like a microphone.

  ‘He said,’ he shouted, ‘he conjures you, lots of stuff about how clever you are, and he wants to ask you something. Got that?’

  The three sisters sat for a while, waiting for the ringing inside their skulls to stop.

  ‘There is no need,’ said One frostily, ‘to shout.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said, there’s no need to—’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What did she say?’

  Pan grinned. ‘SHE SAID THERE’S NO NEED TO SHOUT,’ he said, and tossed the ear towards Three, who fumbled the catch. There was a plop as the ear went in the big black pot that stood in the middle of the circle. The sisters shrieked in chorus.

  ‘Butterfingers,’ said Pan. ‘Now then . . .’

  Sandra darted forward, plucked the ear out of the soup, picked a few lentils and split peas out of the funnel-shaped bit and handed it carefully to One.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘All right, fire away.’

  Somewhere near the French-Belgian border, a giant Mercedes lorry thundered south-westwards through the night. Swiftly it went on its sixteen wheels, and its iron belly safeguarded a consignment of two thousand cases of tinned prunes.

  The driver, a Breton, stared with weary eyes into the cone of white light his headlamps projected and whistled a tune to keep himself awake. It had been a long
day and he had many miles to go, but the magnitude of his enterprise stirred in him a sense of adventure he hadn’t felt since he was a lad. For there was a serious shortage of prunes in France, so the rumours said, and it was mildly flattering to be chosen to be the man who brought the canned fruit from Ghent to Aix.

  As he approached the border, he braced himself for a potentially tiresome passage through customs. You didn’t need too exceptional an imagination to forecast the reaction of a bored excise official to the information that the cargo aboard the truck consisted of half a million prunes. There would be funny remarks, and witticisms, doubtless at his expense; and at three in the morning after a long drive, he could do without that sort of thing, thank you very much.

  So preoccupied was he with these and other similar thoughts that he didn’t notice the fact that he seemed to have acquired a shadow, in the form of a big, black, four-wheel drive with tinted windows.

  The first he knew about this vehicle, in fact, was when he came round a sharp bend to find the road blocked by a tractor. He slammed on his brakes and slithered to a halt; whereupon three shadowy figures jumped out of the four-wheel drive, ran up to the driver’s door and pulled it open. Something metallic sparkled in the pale light of the stars.

  ‘Just climb out slowly,’ said a shadowy figure in abysmally accented French, ‘and you won’t get hurt. Okay?’

  The driver nodded quickly. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You do know what I’m carrying, don’t you?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  (By pure coincidence, another identical lorry owned by the same road freight company was carrying a load of twelve million cigarettes along the same route, only about three quarters of an hour behind. Because of the prune famine, the schedules had been rearranged somewhat.)

  Shortly afterwards, the lorry continued its journey, with a different driver, and headed for a different destination; namely a deserted hockey field on the outskirts of Cambrai. On arrival, it was driven into a big shed, and the doors closed behind it. Lights came on, and men hurried to the tailgate to start unloading.