Odds and Gods

by Tom Holt

  ‘Well done,’ Pan replied, while his inner thoughts added Bloody show-off. ‘And now I think we’d better be getting along, because I have this funny feeling that . . .’

  In the crater, the lake was beginning to froth.

  ‘You’re paranoid, you are.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Believe me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Pan answered. He was looking down into the crater, where the froth was clearing on the meniscus of the lake, which was now starting to boil. ‘Have you ever asked yourself what made me paranoid in the first place?’

  Osiris followed his line of sight. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘standing round here chattering isn’t achieving anything, and we’ve got a lot to do, so maybe we should . . .’

  And then the volcano shook, and from the bottom of the now empty crater a waterspout leapt up, whirling and spinning. As it spun faster it seemed to take on a shape, a form branded on to the divine subconscious and signifying hassle. A few spins later, and it was solid.

  ‘Strewth,’ Carl muttered under his breath. ‘It’s a bloody great big snake.’

  Out of the mouths of babes and morons. It was no longer even translucent; it was depressingly material, a monstrous serpent, towering above them, making a giant Redwood look like a dwarf geranium. At the top of the metallic scaled neck perched not one but very many small, diamond-shaped heads, each with its own fangs and flickering forked tongue. For the record, the Guardian had seventy-three heads, each one capable of independent action. Through his still sleeping brain, meanwhile, weird and incomprehensible messages flashed and were gone, leaving behind a sort of glow, like the flash of floundering colour you can still see with your eyes closed after looking at the sun.

  Marvellous stuff, Steradent. Not only does it preserve dentures from decay and kill the lurking germs that find their way into the recesses of even the best false teeth; when the need arises, and some deadly peril threatens the teeth placed in its charge, it can (if infused with enough magic to poison a convention of wizards) turn itself into a hundred-foot-tall mythical serpent and devour all known intruders.

  ‘Funny the way it’s still bright pink,’ Sandra observed. ‘I wonder if it still tastes minty.’

  One of the advantages of having the god Pan in your party is that you can get all the blind, unreasoning terror you could ever possibly need, the finest quality, trade. As the hydra uncoiled its grotesquely long neck and lunged, hissing (not exactly hissing; more a sort of bubbling fizz) and darting out countless pink tongues, the denture-thieves scattered and fled, leaving Osiris stranded directly in its path.

  ‘Pan, you sodding coward!’ they heard him shout. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re . . . ?’

  Oh no you don’t, Pan reflected as he hurled himself into a narrow crevice between two split rocks and covered his head with his arms. I know what I’m doing, and I prefer it this way. I may be immortal, but I’d really rather not spend the rest of eternity inside the digestive organs of a fucking great snake, thank you all the same. And being a god means never having to say . . .

  Oh balls!

  Painfully and with infinite regret, he levered himself back out of safety, banged his head on a jagged rock in doing so, and ran back towards where Osiris had been.

  The Guardian shuddered.

  He was, of course, still fast asleep; the unofficial tenants of his brain saw to that. If he were to wake up, even for a moment, television reception on three continents would be interrupted and millions of viewers switching on for that day’s episode of The Young Accountants would find themselves watching a rather slow and extremely esoteric documentary about the thought-processes of a pool of denture cleaner.

  Since he couldn’t wake up, he dreamed strange dreams. For example, his seventy-third head, through which passed live coverage of the Melbourne Open Golf Championship, was haunted by the image of one of the contestants suddenly grabbing the ball from the ninth green and making off with it. Head 34 (A Million Menus, with Yvonne Wilson) buzzed with a mouth-watering recipe for intruder fried in butter with fresh parsley and new potatoes. Head 41 (the popular game show Name Your Poison) cut out in the middle of the pushing-innocent-civilians-down-coal-shutes-and-pouring-hot-tar-on-their- heads round and started a new game entirely from scratch, the objective of which was to capture your opponent’s knight’s pawn and rip his lungs out with a meathook. One thing on which all the heads were decided was that as soon as there was a commercial break, they’d be out of there and hammering on the franchiser’s door in search of a refund.

  Burglars, whispered the night-watchman in his subconscious. Get on and eat the fuckers. Blearily, he turned his heads from side to side, scanning the surrounding area for someone to devour.

  What his seventy-three pairs of eyes saw was a little old man in a wheelchair, shaking a liver-spotted fist at him and shouting angrily in a high, reedy voice. Burglars, the heads cried in unison. Do us a favour. That old codger couldn’t burgle the Dogger Bank.

  The Guardian was just about to give the whole thing up as a bad job and go back to his nice muddy bed when a flurry of movement caught his eyes. He hesitated, and saw another human figure sprinting awkwardly over the jagged outcrops of rock towards the old guy in the wheelchair and yelling. Two of them; rather more like it.

  And a big hand, please, for our two brave contestants, who’re going to step forward tonight and play Hiding To Nothing.

  The wheelchair lurched forward, and it appeared that the older man was trying to move towards the younger. That, the Guardian reckoned, was thoughtful; one cyanide gas sneeze from Head 72 would do for both of them, and there was plenty of meat on the second one, even if the first was probably a trifle stringy.

  The Guardian frowned and, on the basis that if two heads are better than one, seventy-three must be pretty damn smart, he considered the position in some detail, quickly drawing up a number of alternative courses of action, each one nothing more than an alternative means to the common end of making these two clowns wish they’d never been born. By the time the heads had taken a vote and decided to go for straightforward violence and mayhem, the running burglar had grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and set off as quickly as he could towards a large heap of rocks.

  The hydra yawned. Oh well, he said to himself, here we go again. Another day, another mangled bag of crushed limbs.

  ‘I don’t know, Pan, there are times when I despair of you.’

  Pan paused for a moment, panting for breath. This gave Osiris further scope to develop his theme.

  ‘Call yourself a god,’ he went on, ‘I’ve seen beermats with more divinity than you.Your trouble is,’ he continued, with the air of someone who had long been minded to make the ensuing points, ‘you’ve got no sense of altruism. Can’t be a god unless you care. You’d only take away the sins of the world if you could be sure of getting money back on the empties.’

  ‘Osiris,’ Pan replied, ‘shut up.’

  ‘It’s all very well you saying—’ Osiris got as far as saying before Pan clamped his hand firmly over his divine colleague’s mouth. With the other hand he tried to push the wheelchair.

  And it’s Second Burglar on the inside, Second Burglar with Old Codger making a last-minute effort, is he going to make it or has he left it too late, Second Burglar coming up hard now on the inside, maybe finding the going a bit too hard for him . . .

  The Guardian swooped, his heads swaying on his neck like over-heavy buds on a broken stalk, and lunged at Pan, who made a desperate effort to jump clear without letting go of the wheelchair. If the traffic wardens of physics had been standing by, they’d have given him a ticket for a flagrant breach of gravity. As Heads 63 and 47 snapped vainly at his heels he landed awkwardly, turned his ankle and bolted, jolting Osiris so violently that he almost swallowed his teeth.

  ‘Mmm,’ shouted Osiris through Pan’s tightly gripping fingers. ‘Mm mmm mmm mm mmm mmmmmmmm mm m!’

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say that,’ Pan ga
sped in reply. ‘Hell’s bells, that was close!’

  The situation was deteriorating somewhat. He was tiring rapidly, he could feel the hot breath of Numbers 42-67 inclusive on the back of his neck and he had a sharp pebble in his shoe. It would be nice, he couldn’t help thinking, if someone did something to help. Fairly soon would be nicer still.

  There was a loud bang.

  When a man has been in the contract killing and supernatural pest control business as long as Kurt Lundqvist, he learns to adopt a robust attitude to false modesty.

  Just getting here, Lundqvist reflected, was enough to earn him a nomination for the Golden Uzi at this year’s Beirut Festival. He’d walked barefoot across scalding hot deserts, climbed snow-capped mountains, living off small birds and insects and drinking the foul juice of cacti. By sheer dead reckoning he’d found his way to the only airport in a thousand square miles, hijacked a plane with nothing more lethal about his person than five days growth of beard and a plausible manner, overpowered five members of a commando unit sent to dispose of him and armed himself for the job he now had to perform from their rather inadequate kit. He was a big man, and the commandos had been highly trained, deadly and ruthless but nonetheless a bit on the petite size when it came to footwear. The largest boots they’d had between them were two sizes too small.

  His seventh sense had warned him to expect to find trouble, and so he had approached the volcano circumspectly. Now, as he lifted his head and peeked out, he could see that he had been justified.

  Huge pink hydras no longer fazed him. There had been a time, a great many years ago, when a sight like the one now confronting him would have given him pause for thought, and quite possibly permanent psychological damage; but not any more. All that passed through his mind as he ducked down back out of sight was, Pink hydra, shit, how in God’s name am I supposed to take out a pink hydra with this garbage?

  The plane he had commandeered, it should be noted, was the flagship and one hundred per cent of the operational fleet of Air Easter Island, the recently formed national airline of that state; and although it wasn’t actually powered by a rubber band, that was about all you could say for it. The commando squad sent to eliminate him had therefore been the elite forces section of the Easter Island Defence Force, and their equipment, though perfectly adequate for their purposes, was a few points behind NATO standards in terms of propinquity to the state of the art. Surveying what he’d got, Lundqvist reckoned, he’d be prepared to go a bit further than that. The only art this lot was anything like state of was probably Surrealism.

  A quick mental inventory revealed:

  Item; a Daisy air rifle, circa 1952.

  Item; a surface-to-air rocket.

  Item; a launcher for the rocket, consisting of a stick and an empty milk bottle.

  Item; a Zambian Army Knife, all blades except the cork-screw broken.

  Item; a Sony Walkman, 1982 model, and a tape of the Band of the Coldstream Guards playing Souza marches.

  Item; a potato gun, with three rounds of Aran Piper.

  Item; an RPG-7 anti-tank missile and projector.

  The last item hadn’t in fact come from the Easter Islanders. He’d found it in the glove compartment of the plane, and the only conclusion he could logically draw was that it had been left behind by some absentminded member of a previous hijack squad. It wasn’t what he’d have chosen, but in context it was probably going to have to do.

  He shouldered the RPG-7 and glanced through the sight. What met his eye wasn’t the most encouraging of scenes. There was the hydra, huge great big thing with lots of heads, and directly underneath it, dodging about like a blindfolded hedgehog in the Los Angeles rush hour, was Pan, pushing Osiris’ wheelchair with one hand and making feeble shooing gestures with the other.

  Quickly he considered his options. In the circumstances, a head shot (his usual choice) was out of the question. That left the heart or the point of the shoulder; and since it was anybody’s guess where the heart was, he opted for the latter. A well-placed hit there ought to break the spine, provided that the projectile had sufficient oomph to achieve the desired result. Probably not, he had to concede, but there’s no harm in trying.

  He steadied his aim, took up the slack on the trigger, aligned the sights and slowly squeezed off the last pound and a half of the trigger pull. There was a loud bang.

  The Guardian froze, and all seventy-three heads turned slowly and in perfect unison towards the source of the noise . . .

  . . . Which proved to be a man sitting behind a rock, holding what was undoubtedly an anti-tank missile launcher. There was no rocket in the breach. You could use the laucher as an impromptu vase for flower arranging, if you filled it with water, but that was about it.

  By reflex the Guardian raised a paw and swatted at where the missile should have hit him, had it gone off. It hadn’t, or rather, it had done exactly what it had originally been designed to do; it had produced a loud noise and pushed out from the muzzle a small, tatty flag, embroidered with the word:

  BANG!

  Marvellous, Lundqvist muttered under his breath. Millions of these RPGs were scattered about the world, and I have to get the one converted into a joke novelty. He reflected, apropos of nothing much, on his boyhood, playing tag with his father in the orchard out back of the house. His competitive instinct had compelled him to win, and on the occasion he had in mind, his father had been in hospital for three days afterwards.

  The hydra, meanwhile, was turning towards him, looking with its seventy-three heads like nothing on earth so much as a very elderly mop of the sort that is made up of lots of batch ends of frayed string. It was coming this way.

  ‘What I need,’ Lundqvist said aloud, ‘is an act of goddamn God.’

  Which is precisely what he got.

  The act in question had been performed by Odin; and to be absolutely precise it wasn’t an act so much as an omission. It had been understood that when they were putting the traction engine back together again after picking it out of the side of the mountain they’d flown into, it was Odin’s turn to clear out the intake valves. If that wasn’t done, Thor had reminded him, the whole bloody contraption was liable to blow up.

  ‘Can’t be expected to work miracles,’ Odin replied. ‘All we can do is our best, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘Your best?’ Thor laughed harshly. ‘Are you sure you’ve got one? Or is it just one of your many worsts?’

  Frey stirred. ‘Actually,’ he murmured, ‘you can.’

  ‘I can what?’

  ‘Work miracles. It’s dead easy, actually. Turn water into wine, for instance . . .’

  The traction engine stalled. For a split second it hung in the air like a large, malformed cloud; then it began to fall to earth.

  ‘Or there’s loaves and fishes,’ Frey continued, his hands so firmly over his eyes that powerful hydraulic rams would have been needed to dislodge them. ‘I read a book about it when I was a kid. All you need is two loaves, five fishes, some sticky-backed plastic and a couple of old washing-up liquid bottles with the ends cut off . . .’

  ‘I’m getting sick of this,’ Thor growled. ‘After all, it’s my bloody engine, I’m a god and I’ve had it up to here. I’m going to do some magic.’

  Odin frowned. ‘We’re not allowed -’ he started to say. ‘Bugger that.’ Thor spread his arms and knotted his brows, trying to remember how you went about it. It had been quite a while and time tends to blur the sharp edges of the brain. All he could recall offhand was that in his particular method of disrupting the chain of causality, sticky-backed plastic and decapitated squeegee-bottles were conspicuous by their absence.

  It was probably, he decided, a bit like mending a broken machine. You shouted at it, and if that didn’t work you belted something with a bloody great big hammer.

  ‘Right,’ he yelled. ‘Airbrakes!’

  Nature, that much-abused personification, grinned.You want airbrakes, she whispered, you got them.

  And this t
ime it looks like the big fella’s going to be in luck, he’s bringing his number 42 head into position, and it looks very much like it’s the end of a very courageous fight-back by Burglar, a very sporting loser here at the . . .

  BANG!

  The Guardian blinked, seventy-three times, simultaneously, and then fell over.

  ‘What,’ screamed Thor, who had pushed Odin aside and was wrestling ferociously with the joystick, ‘the bloody hell was that?’

  The traction engine was vibrating horribly; but, in some peculiar way, the impact had steadied it - broken its fall, you might say. Also, the quite stupendous jolt had had the effect on it of being thumped, very hard indeed, with a two-hundred-pound lump hammer.

  It was a machine, and as such only understood one thing. Being clobbered with big hammers was something it could relate to. The motor, which had been simpering in a smug, self-satisfied way in preparation for total shutdown, coughed a few times, spluttered, caught and roared into life. They had lift-off.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Frey yelled back.

  ‘I said, what was that?’

  To the gods, all obscure things are clear, all hidden things are plainly visible. A god sees what is really there, disregarding the deception of form, the meretricious tricks of morphology.

  ‘I think,’ Frey therefore replied, ‘we just hit a lake.’

  We apologise for the temporary interference with reception, which is due to technical problems. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

  The Guardian stirred, winced, and felt the side of his head. It hurt. Vague flashbacks of memory crept back, like a film of drifting smoke played backwards. A bang, a sharp blow; the silhouette of a tiny figure against the rim of the crater, with some sort of gun in its shoulder. Some bastard had taken a shot at him.

  Right. We’ll see about that.