by Tom Holt
A few helicopters wouldn’t come amiss, either.
And so the day went on. The sun shone, bullets flew, plastic explosive detonated, and for once someone somewhere in the world was, for a while at least, completely well-adjusted and happy with his lot. There were, admittedly, only three helicopters; but one of them had an Oerlikon 20mm cannon, which made up for quite a lot, particularly when it crashed.
And finally, to round off a beautifully mellow afternoon, he found a tub of Semtex, blew the lid off the tank, and threw down a rope.
‘The sun has got his hat on . . . Come on, you guys, it’s time to split,’ he yelled. ‘Grab the rope and let’s get our butts outa here . . . The sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today . . . Come on, let’s move!’
In the gloom inside the tank, Osiris stirred and looked up. Someone had just dropped a rope on his head.
‘Good grief,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s that maniac friend of yours. The one who got us all in this mess in the first place.’
Lundqvist froze. He could feel the confidence and joie de vivre ebbing away. God, he hated being around gods. They did something to him.
‘Took your bloody time, didn’t you?’ Pan said, yawning and massaging his leg, which had gone to sleep. ‘Next time, a bit less of the prancing about shooting at people and more attention to the job in hand, all right?’
‘Yeah, okay,’ Lundqvist mumbled. ‘Look, could you kinda get it moving, because they outnumber us fifteen to one and—’
‘Is that all? I thought you did this sort of thing for a living.’
‘I do.’ Lundqvist ducked as a bullet skimmed off the side of the tank a mere inch from his head. ‘I’m doing pretty damn good, if you must know. Now can we—?’
‘The shooting bothering you, is it?’ asked Osiris ironically. ‘Well, we’ll see what we can do, shall we? Just a moment. There.’
The shooting stopped.
‘Hey,’ Lundqvist demanded, ‘what happened?’
Osiris smiled. ‘I turned them all into frogs,’ he replied. ‘Now, will somebody please give me a hand with this rope thing?’
‘You turned them all into frogs.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Piece of cake.’
Lundqvist bit his lip. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Fine.’
‘I mean,’ Osiris went on, ‘if I’d had to wait for you to finish fiddling about we’d be here all night.’
‘Yeah. Right. Thanks.’
‘And another thing,’ Osiris added, pushing the rope aside and levitating smoothly out of the tank. ‘Next time you need rescuing, get somebody else. Take out insurance or something. We’re busy people, you know.’
Lundqvist looked down at his rifle, sighed, and threw it away. Never wanted to see another silly old rifle as long as he lived.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
In the introductory booklet that accompanies his best-selling video, Kurt Lundqvist’s Paranormal Assassination Techniques Workout, Lundqvist was later to write that ‘in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, actually doing the job on some vampire or ghoul is the piss-easy part; getting there is where the real hassle comes in’. He wrote, obviously, from bitter experience; and some of his biographers pinpoint the journey from Easter Island to the Sinai desert as the crucial catalyst that led him to formulate this justly famous aphorism.
Hijacking a passing destroyer and hitching a forced lift as far as the Solomon Islands was, comparatively speaking, a walkover; it was the scheduled flight to Tel Aviv, followed by the train journey, followed by the taxi ride that nearly brought him to his knees. The combination of Pan’s extreme fear of air travel (‘If we’d intended ourselves to fly we’d have given ourselves wings.’) and Osiris’ undisguised contempt for all forms of technology not directly based on magic and superstition, plus such minor details as their complete lack of either money or passports, made for a trip that was memorable in the same way that death is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
‘Well,’ Pan remarked, as they paid off the taxi and lifted out their luggage, ‘here we are. Changed a bit since I was last—’
‘Follows,’ Osiris replied. ‘Changed a hell of a lot since I was last here. It’s fallen down, for a start. Now, who’s got the rams’ horns?’
There are few more evocative place names in the world than Jericho, and it’s hard to know what to expect. The modern town, snuggled under the mountains, is just a town - ‘the sort of place,’ as Sandra observed, ‘where you could probably get a bath and something to eat’. A few miles beyond, you come to the remains of the massive stone walls of the ancient city which, so archaeology tells us, were shaken down by an earthquake some time around 1200 BC.
‘It’s around here somewhere,’ Osiris said, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sand. ‘Exactly where, though, escapes me for the moment. I always used to get my bearings from Ameneshke’s kebab stall, and I think he went bust about three thousand—’
‘Me too,’ Pan replied. ‘Dunno why, because the old sod did a mean camel kebab. Besides,’ he added, ‘the old place does seem to have fallen down rather, which I find has a somewhat disorientating effect.’ He prodded a pile of fallen masonry with one toe. ‘Hence the expression “Jerry-built”, I guess,’ he said. ‘Well, you have a poke about, I’m just going to see if I can’t get forty winks under this bit of shade here.’
He selected a pile of millennia-old rubble, brushed away some of the dust, and lay down, his head leaning against a fragment of pillar. It moved.
The scene changed.The landscape changed. For a start, Pan was now lying on a broken column forty foot up in the air.
‘Ah,’ Osiris said, ‘you’ve found it. Good lad.’
The city of Jericho, as observed above, was destroyed by an earthquake.
This snippet of misinformation emanates from the same source as the reassurance that flying saucer sightings are all hoaxes, crop circles are caused by modern fertilizers or unscheduled helicopter landings, ghosts are all done with mirrors by unscrupulous mediums and the crew of the Marie Celeste abandoned ship as they did because of a surprise visit from the excise men.
The city of Jericho is still, of course, there; and the piles of untidy rubble shown to visiting coach parties are mere camouflage, surreptitiously inserted by a League of Nations task force under pretence of excavating the site, shortly after the First World War.
Despite this universal conspiracy of silence (unmasked in all its Machiavellian deviousness by the late Danny Bennett in his seminal but hitherto unpublished masterpiece, The Holy Grail and the Holy Graft), getting into Jericho is in fact child’s play. All you have to do is . . .
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ Osiris called out, ‘you can come down here and do something useful for once.’
Pan, suffering from quasi-terminal agrophobia on a narrow chunk of rock which would have done St Simeon Stylites very nicely as a shooting-stick, racked his brain for an appropriately scintillating jewel of repartee.
‘Help!’ he said.
Lundqvist eventually got him down with the help of a long piece of rope and a few rocks; and the fun began.
To get into Jericho . . . The phrase is misleading. It’s more a case of getting Jericho back.
‘Because,’ Osiris explained to Sandra, as he gave his ram’s horn an experimental puff, ‘the old place wasn’t so much destroyed - how you’re supposed to play one of these things I have absolutely no idea - as put away in a safe place so that it wouldn’t get lost.’
Sandra squinted. ‘How can you lose a city?’ she replied. Osiris grinned. ‘Well, the best way is to put it in a safe place and then forget where. In fact, it’s about the only way.’
‘Ah.’
At the next attempt the ram’s horn did indeed make a noise. It was very faint and extremely vulgar, and it made Osiris realise that there was more to this than met the eye. He wondered whether a saxophone would do instead, at a pinch.
‘Now I bet
you’re wondering,’ he went on, jabbing about inside the horn with a piece of wire to see if there was anything inside, ‘why anyone should want to lose a city. Yes?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Easy. It’s a sort of prison.’
‘Right.’
Osiris frowned. ‘Well, when I say prison, more a sort of remand centre. For gods.’
Sandra looked up. ‘Gods?’ she repeated.
Osiris nodded. ‘It’s all rather sad, actually,’ he said. ‘Long time ago now, this area was absolutely crawling with gods. Elamite gods, Hittite gods, Phoenician gods, Philistine gods, Moabite gods, Edomite gods—’
‘I thought Edom was a sort of cheese.’
‘—Jebusite gods, Hivite gods, Amorite gods, Canaanite gods . . .’ Osiris paused, having run out of fingers, ‘. . . hundreds of the little tinkers, all squabbling and bickering over who could have what and whose drains went under whose driveway and whose hedge was eighteen inches too far to the left, all that sort of thing. Well, it had to stop.’
Sandra, who had learnt a thing or two about gods during her time at Sunnyvoyde, raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Sounds perfectly normal behaviour for gods, if you ask me.’
‘It was letting the side down,’ Osiris replied stiffly. ‘Mortals were getting involved. Anyway, all the other gods got together and give them an ultimatum: pack it in, or else.’
‘And?’
‘Else,’ Osiris replied grimly. ‘They refused to take a blind bit of notice, and so we had to take steps. We locked ’em up.’
Sandra stared at him. ‘Put them in jail, you mean?’
Osiris nodded. ‘We had no choice, really. They were making a laughing stock—’
‘Your own kind? You locked them away, just like that?’
‘If there had been any other way . . .’
‘Huh!’
Osiris frowned and fidgeted with his ram’s horn, in which he had just discovered a mouse nest. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘here’s where we put them, in Jericho. Then we sort of vanished it.’
‘Sort of vanished it.’
‘That’s right.’ Osiris rubbed his eyes. Put this way, it did seem a bit extreme. At the time, though . . . ‘Jericho lies on this huge geological fault, you see,’ he continued, ‘and we just opened it up, dropped the city in and closed it up again. It was only a temporary measure,’ he added, catching Sandra’s eye, ‘just to give the ringleaders, Ashtoreth and Melkart and Mammon and the rest of them, time to patch up their differences and learn to get along with each other like civilised adults.’
‘Really.’
‘After which,’ Osiris continued, red in the face, ‘they’d be sort of paroled . . .’
‘Let out on Ba’al,’ Pan interrupted, strolling up and rubbing Germoline into the rope burns on his hands. ‘Never got around to it, though, did you?’
‘The time never seemed exactly right, somehow.’
Pan nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘The fact that you lot divided up their territories between you was neither here nor there. And neither, of course, were they.’
‘I see,’ Sandra said. ‘And now you’re going to let them out again.’
‘Strictly on a trial basis.’
Pan grinned. ‘He needs a favour,’ he explained.
‘Does he?’ Sandra looked puzzled. ‘From a load of gods who’ve been locked up in a cave for thousands of years? What on earth—?’
‘Money.’ Pan shrugged. ‘What else?’
‘They’re going to pay him money?’ Sandra hazarded. Pan shook his head.
‘Not pay money,’ he replied, grinning. ‘Launder it.’
Once again, Sandra looked surprised; shocked, even. ‘Launder it?’ she said. ‘But isn’t that what criminals do? Thieves, and so on?’
‘And gods, too,’ Pan replied. ‘Perfectly ordinary, reputable, divine behaviour. Hence such well-known phrases as “Honour among gods” and “Gods’ kitchen” and “Like a god in the night”. So—’
‘What Pan is trying to say,’ Osiris interrupted, ‘is that this is an opportunity for these hitherto troublesome and disruptive members of the divine community to redeem their previous antisocial behaviour by . . .’
Like most superstitions, the concept of widdershins has its origins in very pertinent fact.
As witness . . .
Two gods, one contract killer, one lorry driver and one state registered nurse, all clutching ram’s horns, all clumping very self-consciously round and round (widdershins, of course) a frost-damaged basalt pillar in the middle of the desert.
‘When I say blow,’ Osiris called out, ‘blow your horns.’
Pan scowled. ‘Who does he think he is?’ he muttered, ‘Count Basie?’
‘Is something going to happen?’
‘Wait and see, Carl my old mate,’ Pan replied, lifting his horn to his lips and making a noise rather like prrrp.
Tramp, tramp, tramp they went, seven times round the pillar; and to mark the end of each circuit, a fanfare on the horns. There have been louder fanfares, it’s true, and more melodious and impressive ones too. But a crummy fanfare is still a fanfare.
‘We must be complete idiots, letting ourselves get talked into—’
‘Shut up, Pan. Now then,’ Osiris said, quickly checking the tally he’d made on his fingers, ‘that’s seven, so all we have to do now is shout.’
Pan raised an eyebrow. ‘Shout what, pray?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, do I? Anything so long as it’s loud.’
‘Sorry, for instance?’
‘If you must, yes.’
‘Thanks,’ Pan replied. ‘Sort of two birds with one stone, really.’
And so the party halted and, feeling right clowns, shouted. Nothing happened. The echo died away in the desert.
And then the ground shook, and cracks began to form in the sand, giving one the impression that this was a bit of the Earth’s crust the creation of which God subcontracted out to a couple of lads He’d met in a pub somewhere. There was dust, and noise and . . . movement.
And the walls of Jericho came tumbling up.
There are gods of every conceivable sort and description in the universe, all of them created, in some way or another, by Mankind in his own image. Most nations subconsciously customise their pantheon to suit their world view and basic needs, and it’s largely true that humanity generally gets the gods it deserves.
Thus the Greeks created their gods in order to give names, faces and addresses to various oversize notions banging away inside their brains. The Hindus shaped their gods in order to ensure that in times of trouble there’d always be Someone standing by to lend a helping hand (or, indeed, hands; in extreme cases arms, in large quantities) whereas the various Middle Eastern ethnic groups responsible for the gaggle of divine beings locked up in Jericho (if the theory is correct) fleshed out their immortal beliefs purely and simply to tie in with some urgent need of the tribe; quite likely the need to believe, with good reason, that however daft they may look, however nastily they behave, they’re still a bunch of choirboys compared with the everlasting gods.
This is probably the most useful thing a god can do for his people; but, job satisfaction aside, it doesn’t have very much to recommend it. Not if you have to live, for ever and ever, with the consequences.
‘And that,’ said Osiris, ‘is Jericho.’
‘Um,’ Sandra replied. She wasn’t sure that she liked the look of it much. Certainly it wasn’t anything like the picture in the Illustrated Children’s Bible she’d doodled all over in Sunday school; for one thing the version depicted by the artist hadn’t had so many searchlights, barbed wire entanglements and machine-gun emplacements. Nor had there been a big signpost with a skull and crossbones on it reading MINEFIELD - DO NOT ENTER right in front of the main gate.
‘I gather,’ Pan remarked in a conversational tone, ‘that they’ve been digging an escape tunnel for the last three thousand years. Hasn’t got very far, though.’
‘
No?’
Pan shook his head. ‘Dimensions inside a geological fault get a bit muddled,’ he explained. ‘Damn thing kept on coming out slap bang in the middle of the same tunnel a week after they started digging. The diggers from the future were able to tell the diggers from the past not to bother after all. This,’ he added with a grin, ‘led to all sorts of problems, as you can imagine.’
Sandra preferred not to. ‘Sorry if I’ve missed something, ’ she said, ‘but aren’t they going to be a bit - well, fed up after all this time? I mean, when we open the gates and go in and . . .’
Pan shuddered. ‘Not bloody likely,’ he said. ‘No way we’re going to let any of them out until . . . Oh for crying out loud, what’s the stupid old fool think he’s doing now?’
Osiris, pushed by Carl, was speeding towards the main gate, weaving an apparently perfectly remembered course through the minefield. In his hand he held a big bronze key.
‘Can’t you stop him?’ Sandra hissed.
Pan smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What a pity.’
Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Osiris.’
‘Osiris who?’
‘Stop pissing about, you pea-brain, and let me in.’
A panel in the gate shot back and a hideous face was glimpsable for about half a second. Half a second would be approximately four hundred and ninety-six milliseconds too long.
‘No, that’s not it,’ said a voice from the face. ‘That doesn’t sound right at all.’
‘I said open this door, you—’
‘I think,’ continued the voice, ‘you mean Osiris walkin’ down the lane, All in the month of May—’
‘Sabre-toothed ponce, or I’ll make you wish . . .’
‘Or maybe it was Osiris eyes are smiling,’ continued the voice. ‘It was something like that. Not a very good one, anyway.’
Osiris closed his eyes and counted up to ten.This wasn’t to help him calm down and keep his temper. Quite the opposite.