Odds and Gods

by Tom Holt

  Ilmater looked up from her plate. She had been forking through, picking out the pieces of boiled egg and depositing them carefully on her sideplate. ‘Sounds like he’s been terribly busy doing all those strenuous things,’ she said. ‘No wonder we haven’t seen him for a while.’

  ‘Died, you dozy old bat. I wonder whether Osiris has finally died.’

  Yama shook his head. ‘I doubt that very much,’ he said, ‘’cos I’d have been notified if he had. We get a circular every evening,’ he explained, ‘to avoid duplication and conflict of interests.’

  There was a flash, as Nkulunkulu’s pillar of salt turned itself into a miniature model of Lot’s wife, holding in her hands an LCD display reading I told you, no salt. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You work your fingers to the bone creating the world, making it nice for them, stocking it up with edible plants and gullible animals, and what do you get at the end of it all? Stone cold kedgeree and no bloody salt to go on it. It’s enough to turn you Methodist.’

  ‘Maybe he’s on holiday.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Osiris.’

  ‘Excuse me, young man, but are you a doctor?’

  ‘Last time I saw him,’ said Yama, ‘he was talking to that nurse, you know, the chubby one. Haven’t seen her in a while either, come to think of it.’

  ‘Pity,’ Nkulunkulu replied. ‘Had a bit of meat on her, that one did. Not like so many of these nurses you seem to get nowadays.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re actually supposed to eat them, Nk.’

  ‘I was speaking figuratively.’

  ‘Oh.’ Yama shrugged. ‘Maybe Osiris got fed up with kedgeree and booked out,’ he went on. ‘I wouldn’t be all that surprised, knowing him. Always did have balls - not in the right place, I’ll grant you, but . . .’

  Ilmater shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I rather believe booking out is against the Rules, otherwise we’d all have done it by . . . Nk, who is this strange old woman and why is she showing me her knee?’

  ‘That’s Minerva,’ the sky god replied. ‘Ignore her and she’ll go away. Tell you what, though, I’d like to see precisely where in the Rules it says you can’t book out. Worth looking into, that.’

  ‘Maybe he and the nurse eloped,’ Yama mused. ‘Difficult, of course, with the wheelchair and everything, but to the gods all things are - I don’t believe it, rhubarb again. Take it away, woman, take it away, I don’t want any.’

  ‘Custard?’ asked the waitress.

  ‘No.’

  The waitress looked over his head at Ilmater. ‘Would you ask him if he wants custard?’ she asked. ‘Only I haven’t got all day.’

  Ilmater smiled, what she hoped was her patronising reassuring-the-servants smile. ‘I don’t believe he does, thank you,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Nk, you were saying?’

  ‘About getting out of here,’ Nkulunkulu replied. ‘There probably is a way, you know, if only we could find out what it is. I’d be game, for one.’

  ‘Just look, will you, that stupid woman’s just poured custard all over my pudding. I really must insist on seeing the manageress.’

  After lunch, say the Rules, residents will enjoy the peace and quiet of the common room. Nobody knows what the penalties for not enjoying the peace and quiet of the common room are, but only because nobody has ever had enough foolhardy courage to find out. As Nkulunkulu sat and stared at the television set, however, his mind remained unwontedly clear. Something was buzzing around in it like a fly in a bottle, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Then he noticed the empty chairs.

  Three of them, over by the repulsive picture of a small child with a kitten. Frantic ransacking of his memory turned up three names: Odin, Thor, Frey.

  Stone me, muttered Nkulunkulu to himself, four of them AWOL. Four of them not enjoying the peace and quiet.

  How many does it take, he wondered, to make up a Precedent?

  ‘It was somewhere around here, I seem to remember,’ said Osiris, looking up from the map, ‘that they had the final shoot-out.’

  Pan, who was trying to stand on one hoof while extracting a stone from his shoe, quivered. ‘Who did?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Butch Cassidy,’ replied Osiris, ‘and the Sundance Kid.’

  Gravity is an evil bastard, Pan reflected as he wobbled, staggered and put his bare hoof down hard on a jagged flint. ‘that was Bolivia,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh.’ Osiris shrugged. ‘That’s just down the road that way, I think. We might stop and have a look on the way back, if we have time.’

  Pan silently vowed that they wouldn’t have time, not unless he could have a nice comfy wheelchair too. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘This volcano,’ he went on. ‘Shouldn’t we be able to see it from here?’

  ‘Look for yourself.’

  Pan took the map. ‘Oh hell,’ he said, ‘it’s one of these awful modern ones, I can’t read them. If it hasn’t got dragons and Jerusalem in the middle I can’t make head nor tail of it.’ He screwed up his eyes. Not that he needed glasses - to the gods, all things are visible - but another reason why modern maps were so useless was the minuscule nature of the print. ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ he said, and handed it back.

  Nevertheless, he continued to have reservations - not a particularly unusual state of affairs; on any given subject, Pan generally had more reservations than the entire Sioux and Blackfoot nations combined - and the complete lack of distant prospects of volcanoes did little to resolve them. Nuts, he said to himself, we’re lost. Again. And it’s not even my fault.

  ‘Where exactly,’ he was therefore moved to ask next time they stopped, ‘did you get that map from?’

  ‘The airport,’ Osiris replied. ‘And you know, I have to say I don’t think very much of it. That range of mountains over there, for example. Not a sign of it in here. Must be new, I suppose,’ he hazarded, narrowing his eyes. ‘Still, it’s a poor show selling out-of-date maps, if you ask me.’

  Pan nodded. ‘New mountains, I see.’ He took the map, looked at the cover and handed it back. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a street plan of Mexico City. According to which,’ he added, ‘that lot over there is the headquarters of the municipal fire service. How’d it be if we went back the way we came and tried to hire a taxi?’

  As he spoke, the earth shook. Gods ought to be used to such things, but Pan never quite managed it; he still felt terribly guilty when, in spring, at the time of the quickening of the soil and the reawakening of the life force, he walked across somebody’s nice new carpet without thinking and left behind him a trail of newly flowering primroses.

  ‘Look,’ Osiris said, and pointed.

  Three of the distant mountains appeared to be on fire. Sheets of red flame were rising hundreds of feet into the air, which was now full of soft grey ash and little hot cinders, some of which settled on the back of Pan’s neck.

  ‘Headquarters of the municipal fire service,’ Osiris repeated. ‘Yes, you could say that. Lads, I think we’re in business.’

  It was, apparently, a good day for pyrotechnic displays of all kinds; because they hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards towards the mountains when the sky was lit up by a dazzling flash, and some huge fiery object streaked across it, travelling at some bizarrely high speed, and vanished over the horizon, followed for a relatively long time after by a deafening sonic boom.

  ‘I told you,’ Thor screamed, as the controls writhed in Odin’s hands. ‘Those head coil gaskets, I said, they’re only sealed in with beeswax, go up too close to the sun and they’ll melt. And what does the stupid prawn go and do?’

  ‘Calm down,’ Odin bellowed, as the slipstream ripped off his white silk scarf and sent it fluttering away into the air. ‘Panicking won’t solve anything. Now, when I say the word, I want you both to lean as far as you can over to your left. Right?’

  The engine wobbled, jinked and turned a complete revolution around its central axis, but with no noticeable effect on its speed or trajectory. Frey
, however, lost his left glove, ripped from his hand by the wind.

  ‘I think we’ll have to try an emergency landing,’ Odin shouted. ‘I’m just going to look around for a suitable spot.’

  ‘Great.’ Thor tried to wriggle down further into his seat. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is without you crashing this poxy thing deliberately. Why not just sit back and let nature take its course?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Oh my god!’

  A fraction of a second ago, the mountains hadn’t been there; then, all of a sudden, there they were. Later, Thor swore blind that they missed the peak of the tallest and sharpest of them by no more than twelve thousandths of an inch.

  ‘That was interesting, what you just said,’ roared Frey, with his eyes shut.

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘You said Oh my god. Didn’t know you were religious, Thor.’

  ‘Just an expression.’

  ‘Ah.’ Frey’s knuckles whitened on the grab handle. ‘Pity. We could do with some divine assistance right now.’

  Odin was still wrestling with the joystick. ‘What irresponsible fool put those mountains there?’ he growled. ‘Some people just don’t think, that’s their trouble.’

  He jerked the joystick again, snapping it off. He stared at it for a moment and then put it carefully away under the seat. Probably get it back together again with a spot of weld, he reflected.

  Thor leant out over the side. Up to a point his former view - the back of Odin’s neck - had suited him fine, since it blocked out a lot of rather disturbing things, like the ground rushing up to meet them. On the other hand, he was so sick of the sight of his colleague that right now, anything would be preferable.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he groaned. ‘More mountains.’

  ‘Volcanoes,’ Odin corrected. ‘Active ones, by the looks of things. That’s odd, you know.’

  ‘Odd!’

  Odin nodded. ‘I think we may have wandered off course a bit,’ he shouted. ‘I don’t recall there being any active volcanoes in Staffordshire.’

  All this while, of course, they had been gaining rather than dissipating speed. It should therefore have been some comfort to them to reflect that even if the joystick hadn’t snapped and even if the rudder had been working, there still wouldn’t have been time to avoid the huge crater they now flew into . . .

  But not out of.

  ‘Si, senor.’ The old peasant nodded and pointed. With a wave, the driver of the leading armoured personnel carrier waved and let in his clutch. The column moved off.

  ‘Medicos Yanquis,’ the peasant explained to his wife as they glumly contemplated next season’s cabbage crop, over which the column had driven.

  The peasant’s wife scratched her brown nose, and smiled. On the other hand, she said, there was the compensation.

  Compensation?

  Compensation, she confirmed. When the Yankee drug police burnt down old Miguel’s tomato plot last year thinking it was drugs, they paid him twice its value. And when they napalmed Salvador’s beans and shot up his turnips with the helicopter gunships, he ended up with a profit of something like three hundred per cent. This year he was seriously considering hanging paper cut-out flowers on his onion sets to make them look like opium poppies, just in case they came back this way.

  The peasant shook his head. Not drug people, he explained. Doctors.

  Gringo doctors, his wife corrected him.

  True . . .

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Guardian of the Golden Teeth stirred in his sleep.

  It had been a long time since anybody had come - even mortals learn eventually, and twenty acres scattered with wind-bleached bones help to concentrate the mind. In actual fact, the bones were a job lot from a bankrupt ossuary, but the Guardian liked them. He felt they added tone.

  Under him, the ground trembled, troubling his sleep with dreams of water-beds and passing trains. His subconscious mind reassured him that it was just the volcano playing up, and the dreams returned to their previous even tenor: a green baize cloth, coloured balls, a man in a waistcoat leaning pensively on a wooden shaft. The Guardian hadn’t the faintest idea what the dream was supposed to be about, but so what. After the first ten years it was strangely hypnotic.

  The fact of the matter was that, many years ago, a group of cunning and unscrupulous Australian television magnates, unwilling to meet the cost of launching a satellite, had found a way of using the Guardian’s slumbering brain as a relay station, with the result that his primordial sleep was populated with soap operas, American films and round-the-clock sports coverage, all rattling around in his frontal lobes and frequently seeping through into the parts that processed the dreams. At one time, when the Melbourne Olympics coincided with the birth of Linda’s baby and the TV premiere of LethalWeapon 9, the Guardian’s dreams were probably the most bizarre mental images ever generated since the death of Hieronymus Bosch.

  Mortals. He could smell mortals, not too far away. And, he realised, another smell; a strange one, this, something that he could just faintly remember from a very long time ago. A worrying smell, presaging trouble.

  (‘And where’s one cue ball going to end up this time? Oh dear, that’s exactly where he didn’t want it to go. And how’s Steve going to get himself out of this one, I wonder?’)

  Not mortals, the other things. Immortals. Gods. There were gods on his mountain. Dammit, when would they learn they weren’t welcome here?

  ‘Fine,’ Pan said, sitting down on a rock and sinking his chin in his hands. ‘Now all we have to do is find some way of moving them. Anyone think to bring a wheel-barrow? ’

  Below them lay the Teeth. The clear, tranquil, still slightly effervescent pink liquid that filled the crater served to distort the outline of the huge yellow objects that lay - how deep? A few metres? Fifty? A hundred? - below the surface, but in spite of that, and despite the distance from the lip of the crater to the bottom, the sight was little short of staggering.

  Interesting to compare the reactions of the members of the party. Osiris had jammed the brake on his wheelchair and was gazing with one of the wildest surmises ever seen in those parts, silent on an extinct volcano in Nezahuancoyotl. Pan, as stated above, was wretchedly speculating as to who, in accordance with his usual rotten bloody luck, was going to be called upon to do the heavy lifting. Sandra was thinking, Right now, what wouldn’t I give for a whacking great big cheese-burger. As far as we can tell, Carl wasn’t thinking anything at all.

  ‘Amazing,’ Osiris said at last. ‘All that wealth, all that ingenuity, all that manpower, and all the silly sods needed to do was invent the toothbrush.’ He sighed. The older he got, the more firmly he was convinced that all gods were, basically, pillocks.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Pan interrupted, ‘but if you’ve got some subtle scheme for shifting that lot, now would be a very good time to mention it.’

  Osiris brought his mind back from its reverie with an almost audible click. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘We cheat.’

  ‘We can do that, can we?’

  ‘’Course we can. We’re gods, aren’t we? Where’s the point in being a god if you can’t bend the rules now and again?’

  ‘There’s bending rules,’ Pan muttered, ‘and there’s the law of conservation of matter. And before you ask,’ he added, ‘yes, if they catch you breaking it they do come down on you like a ton of bricks. Even for a first offence I believe the minimum penalty is four thousand years’ community service.’

  ‘Relax,’ Osiris replied. ‘To the gods all things are possible, remember?’

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned negative about everything,’ Osiris said irritably. ‘That’s the trouble with you. At the first little sign of difficulty you start to panic, and—’

  ‘Well I would, wouldn’t I?’

  Osiris sighed. ‘We cheat,’ he said decisively. ‘And this is how we do it.’

  Because, after all, the laws of physics are like
all other laws everywhere: designed to make life difficult and unpleasant for the small fry like you and me, while the rich and powerful take no notice of them whatsoever.

  The basic, back-of-an-envelope logic behind it all was as follows:(a) Only things that are possible may be done without violating the fundamental laws of the universe.

  (b) However, to the gods, all things are possible.

  (c) Therefore, ipso facto, anything a god chooses to do is by definition possible, and consequently entirely legal.

  Fine; but that wasn’t getting an extremely heavy set of false teeth shifted from the bottom of a very big crater. In order to achieve that objective, a degree more detail was required. Thus:(a) It is extremely difficult to move a set of dentures which is huge and made of solid gold.

  (b) On the other hand, it’s extremely simple to move a set of dentures which is standard size and made of the latest in lightweight hard plastics.

  (c) To the gods, who are eternal and enduring, all that is temporary and corruptible is pretty well the same; the atoms and molecules remain, but from time to time they make up an infinite variety of different shapes. To a god, the myriad shapes and forms that the atoms compose themselves into for a while before decay and entropy do their ineluctable stuff seem very like the individual frames that make up a length of cine film; each individual image is so transitory that the divine eye cannot perceive it, but the general theme remains behind once the image, and tens of thousands like it, have faded away into oblivion, and each single image goes towards building up the whole picture.

  (d) Therefore, to a god, everything is what he wants it to be. Including ginormous sets of gold bridgework.

  ‘Here we are,’ Osiris said. He put the teeth carefully away in a jiffy bag, and stowed the parcel in his inside pocket. He turned his head towards Pan, and grinned. ‘You see what you can achieve by thinking things through,’ he added. ‘Saves no end of mucking about.’