by Tom Holt
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘As a slogan,’ said Ahura Mazda, sun god of the ancient Persians, ‘it lacks a certain something, don’t you feel?’
Baldur, Norse god of fertility, looked up irritably, aerosol in hand. ‘You reckon?’ he said.
‘Well . . .’ Ahura Mazda took a step back and scrutinised the wall further. ‘You do want me to be honest, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Not neces . . .’
Great oaks from little acorns; very prudently, the Sunnyvoyde Residents Direct Action Committee had decided to try out its blitzkrieg graffiti campaign on the back wall of the coal bunker, down at the far end of the garden, behind the compost heap. That way, if it turned out not to be the stunningly effective medium of protest they confidently anticipated, nobody would ever know.
‘I mean,’ Ahura Mazda drawled on, ‘banality is all right in its way, but if we were going all out for the trite approach, we can still do better than that.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as, let me see, um, “Gods united can never be defeated”. Or “Rice pudding? No thanks”. Or “Together we can stop the courgettes”. Something like that.’
‘ “Gods of the cosmos unite”,’ suggested Nkulunkulu, the Great Sky Spirit of the Zulus. ‘ “You have nothing to lose but your . . . your . . .” Hell,’ he said, furrowing his brows into a single black hedgerow. ‘Nothing to lose but what, for pity’s sake?’
‘I like it,’ Baldur growled. ‘I think it has relevance.’
On the wall he had painted:MISIS HENDRESUNS A SILY OLD BAGE
in wobbly green letters. On the other hand, it was his aerosol.
‘I still think,’ muttered Vulcan, the Roman god of fire,
‘you should have said something about that tapioca last Thursday. It was really horrible, I thought, and lumpy, too. I can’t be doing with lumpy tapioca.’
‘The tapioca was fine,’ retorted Viracocha, the pre-Inca All-Father of Argentina, ‘compared to that yuk we had yesterday, whatever it was supposed to be.’
‘Pease pudding,’ said Vulcan.
‘Whatever,’ Viracocha snarled. ‘It was absolutely yetch, you know?’
‘Absolutely,’ Ahura Mazda agreed. ‘They make a dessert and they call it pease. I still don’t think we’ve quite taken the possibilities of this medium of expression to their absolute limits, do you?’
Ogun, the Nigerian god of war, shook his head. ‘I’m going in,’ he said, ‘before I catch my death of cold. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the television room.’
‘Scab,’ Baldur hissed, shaking the aerosol aggressively. ‘Blackleg.’
Ogun gave him a long stare. ‘I’ll take that as a statement of fact,’ he said frostily. ‘So long, losers.’
Baldur sighed. In his face was reflected the transcendent pain and sorrow of all organisers everywhere who come up against total unrelenting apathy. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘fine. From now on you can use your own bloody aerosol. I’m going to my room.’
The other members of the committee lingered a little longer, contemplating the despised graffiti. So nearly there, they thought, but not quite.
What we need, they realised, is a Leader.
‘I think there’s a spelling mistake in there,’ Viracocha observed. ‘Aren’t there two Gs in Bage?’
‘I wonder where Osiris has really got to?’ somebody asked.
Ahura Mazda nodded. ‘Good question,’ he replied. ‘Typical of him, that, making himself scarce as soon as he’s needed.’
‘He’d know what to do.’
‘Oh come on.’ Ahura Mazda yawned and polished his spectacles. ‘We all know what to do. It’s how to do it that’s got us a bit stumped just at the moment.’ He looked round. ‘Any suggestions, anyone?’
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘I suppose we could look it up in a dictionary,’ Viracocha suggested.
‘Look up what?’
‘Bage.’
Ahura Mazda sighed. Then, from the pocket of his raincoat, he produced his own aerosol (cobalt blue gloss, for touching up scratches on 1974 Cortinas). He shook the can, playing a merry if avant-garde tune with the little ball bearing in the neck.
‘Try this,’ he said, and started to spray.
What he sprayed was:HELP
Once, in the Great Night that preceded the First Day, a woman had stooped over the mangled corpse of her husband. Red to the elbows with his blood, she had gathered the torn scraps of his body in a basket and stolen them away. Under the dim light of the newly lit stars, she had put them back together, refusing to acknowledge the existence of Death, as if it had been some unstable totalitarian regime in some little dominion far away.
In her hand, cupped against the faint breezes of the first dawn, she had shielded the guttering flame of his life. Because she did not recognise Death, because she had refused to admit the possibility of something ending, her work was successful and the body, stitched together with papyrus thread and linen bandage, eventually twitched and stirred; and the mouth opened and said, ‘. . . -Handed cow, you’ve gone and bolted my trapezus slap bang in the middle of my pectoral major. Do you realise that from now on, whenever I want to scratch my ear I’m going to have to wiggle my toes?’
But that was a long time ago; and since then, Death has opened his embassies and consulates in every corner of the cosmos. Undoing Death’s work is no longer a matter of putting the bits back together and turning the starting handle. Or so they say.
‘Search me,’ said Pan, scratching his chin. ‘Try turning it round the other way and belting it a few times with the heel of your shoe.’
Sandra looked up at him. Her clothes were soaked in blood, there was blood on her face, in her hair, everywhere. In her hand she held seven inches of warm grey tubing and a bone.
‘You’re not really helping, you know,’ she said.
Pan shrugged. ‘I was beginning to wonder,’ he said glumly. ‘I think I’ll go and see if I can get hold of lots of hot water and some clean towels.’
With an effort, Sandra cleared her mind. On the one hand, it surely stood to reason; in the old days, he was always being dismantled and put together again, so there had to be a way of doing it, a simple way that a trained nurse like herself could work out, from first principles if necessary. On the other hand . . .
‘Thigh bone,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘The thigh bone connecka to the hip bone, the hip bone connecka to the—’
Find my head.
She looked up. The voice had sounded just like him, except that there had been no sound and no voice. She pulled herself together and picked a few bits of fluff out of what she believed was the left kidney.
Find my head and I can tell you what to do. Please.
‘Osiris?’ she asked faintly. ‘Osiris, is that you?’
No, it’s Maurice Chevalier. Of course it’s me. This is my soul speaking.
‘Where are you? I mean, where is it?’
You’re kneeling on it.
Sandra stood up hurriedly. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Gosh, so that’s what they look—’
Find my head. I’ll tell you what to do. But hurry. This really isn’t the most comfortable way to have a conversation, believe me.
There is something horribly comic, under all imaginable circumstances, about a head with no body attached to it. No matter how desperate the grief, how bewildering the shock, there is always the temptation, lurking in the blackness of the mind, to stick one’s fingers up the neck and try to say Bottle of beer without moving one’s lips.
When you’ve quite finished.
And, when the First Day dawned, the wicked prince Set looked out from his throne and saw the sun. And he turned to his two brothers and asked them what it might be.
And his brothers turned to each other in amazement (they had perfectly good names but somehow always ended up being called Game and Match) and confessed that they did not know. Something, they suspected, had gone wrong somewhere . . .
And Osiris had r
isen from the dead, made whole again by the love and faith of his wife, and had thrown Set and his treacherous brothers into the Pit. Thenceforth there had been day and summer, and there was no more Death except for those who did not truly understand . . .
Or so they say. It’s one thing to believe in the existence of a video recorder, and another thing entirely to build one from scratch out of a cardboard box full of knobs and bits of old wire.
Except that to the gods, all things are possible . . .
‘Yes, but where does this bit go?’
Osiris’ head blushed; quite some feat considering that his blood supply was some five yards away. ‘Stay at home a lot in the evenings, do you?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Sandra replied, frowning, ‘as a matter of fact I do. Why?’
The head sighed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t actually used that bit for so long that I’m not absolutely sure myself. Ask Pan, he’ll know.’
Kurt Lundqvist, meanwhile, had wandered off, quite unnoticed by his companions, on the pretext of finding the two doctors and pulling their lungs out, but really to go and have a nice sulk in the bushes, if he could find any. All this time, he reflected, he’d been tagging along like some accredited observer, pleased and grateful if anyone asked him to pass a spanner or lift a wheelchair. True, whenever he had had centre stage to himself he hadn’t exactly cut the most heroic of figures, but that wasn’t his fault, he felt sure. Perhaps he should just leave them a note and slip quietly away.
‘Hoy, you!’
He turned.
‘Whatsyername! Thingy!’
He was being addressed, he realised, by a disembodied head; and although this wasn’t in fact a novel experience for him (compare the Grendel contract of AD 792, for example; or the Medusa hit, right back when he was just starting out in the business) it was nonetheless a sufficiently rare occurrence to leave him standing there with his mouth open making a sort of Gark! noise.
‘I’ve got a job for you,’ said the head. In his already bewildered state it took Lundqvist several seconds to notice that the head was being supported by a column of ants, none of whom seemed to know particularly how they came to be doing this.
‘Pardon me,’ he eventually managed to say, ‘but shouldn’t you be, um, over there. With the rest of you?’
The head sighed. ‘They’re in conference,’ the head replied. ‘Trying to work out which order the toes go in, would you believe. I think they’ve got as far as the little piggy who had roast beef. Anyway, it’ll be ages before I’m needed. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you your orders.’
Lundqvist took a deep breath. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been thinking it over and I guess I’m not really achieving anything here, and I’ve got this pretty major practice of my own back home that needs my full attention, so maybe it’d be better if we just call it a day, huh? I won’t be sending in an invoice, naturally, because . . .’
And so on. That at least was what he intended to say, but in reality he only got as far as, ‘Tha.’ Academic, in any case, as to the gods all things are known and no secrets are hidden.
‘Easy little job,’ the head continued. ‘For someone with your qualifications and experience, that is. Spot of fighting, a touch of abseiling in through windows and throwing grenades, silent elimination of sentries, all that sort of carry-on. Right up your street, I reckon.’
Lundqvist nodded eagerly. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘No problem, glad to be of service. What exactly did you have in—’
‘Well.’ The head grinned. ‘What it boils down to is, I want you to liberate Sunnyvoyde.’
‘I beg your . . .’
The head ignored him, and a seldom-used part of his subconscious mind reflected on the humiliation of a six-foot-seven man being talked to by a severed organ positioned the height of an ant’s shoulders above the ground. ‘Go in there,’ he said, ‘take out all the guards, get the residents organised, lead them to death or glory. Well, glory anyway. You think you can manage that?’
‘I guess so,’
‘You’re sure you don’t want any backup? Helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, dog-headed fiends from the land of the Dead, that sort of thing?’
‘No, that’s fine,’ Lundqvist replied, mentally reviewing his various pre-departure checklists. ‘When do I start?’
‘Now,’ replied the head.
‘No time to lose, huh?’
The head nodded, and in doing so squashed flat about forty members of its escort. But that sort of thing is par for the course if you’re a tiny individual caught up in the ebbing and flowing of the tide of Destiny; just as you’re about to overthrow the forces of Darkness and bring back the old King or whatever, along comes some bastard and treads on you. Still, there it is.
‘If I were you,’ the head said, ‘I’d get on to it right away. Tell them,’ it added, ‘I sent you, okay?’
‘That’ll help, will it?’
The head considered. ‘I expect so. Still here?’
Lundqvist nodded; and then frowned, as a thought struck him. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Which way is Sunnyvoyde from here?’
The head grinned, and rolled its eyes directly upwards.
‘If you lie on your back,’ it said, ‘just follow your nose.’
Misha Potemkin, assistant distribution manager for the Novosibirsk Tractor Co-Operative, woke to find himself in the toilet of a standard-class carriage of the Trans-Siberia express. This was pretty much what he’d been expecting.
Painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and pulled up his trousers. Too much vodka on an empty stomach at the Jaroslavsk Tractor Industries Fair, combined with not getting all that much sleep over the last four days, had obviously caught up with him. Just his luck, he reflected bitterly, massaging his querulous temples with the palm of his hand, if he’d missed his station. If he had, it’d be another twelve hours before he’d be home again.
Cautiously, he rolled back the door, staggered out into the corridor, and looked out of the window. He observed three things which gave him cause for serious thought.
He saw no train.
He saw no track.
He saw no ground.
With a gurgling noise he collapsed back into the toilet and slammed the door, bolting it behind him. His senses told him that outside the window there was nothing at all. Not even a distant prospect of the ground, such as one might expect to see if the train had derailed on a hairpin bend in the mountains, leaving half the carriage hanging out over a ravine; or clouds, or sky.
A man who has spent twenty-seven years in the nationalised tractor business knows better than that. Obviously he was suffering from hallucinations, the result of cheap Georgian vodka (probably made from freeze-dried oven chips), and until they’d stopped he was likely to be better off where he was. The last time he’d had the DTs, immediately after the Miss All-Siberian Reaper and Binder awards ceremony the May before last, he’d hallucinated some pretty unsettling things, all of which had been far too large to fit inside a small, confined space like this. They’d be hard put to get just their heads in without banging their noses on the sink.
Half an hour later his head still felt like the contents of a turbocharged cement mixer, but he hadn’t had to contend with so much as a single sabre-toothed wolfhound coming through the wall at him holding a bunch of flowers. Probably, he decided, it’s better now. Just to make sure, however, he opened the door on the other side of the corridor and looked out.
Still no train.
Still no track.
But at least there was some ground; there was, in fact, a stereotypical Siberian landscape (snow, snow and more snow under an iron-grey sky that looked like a photograph taken with poor quality ASA 400 film). That, he reflected, was a material advance. He closed the window, crossed to the other door and looked out.
No train.
No track.
No ground!
The holding of high-level peace conferences in railway carriages
straddling the borders of the conflicting nations is an inoffensive, even picturesque tradition, and its very lack of originality gives it a degree of innate respectability, extremely useful when organising a last-ditch attempt to reach a negotiated settlement between two implacably hostile factions.
It had been Pan’s idea, of course, and a very good idea too. Since Osiris had refused to return to Earth, and Julian had declined categorically to visit the extended parallel dimension, at right angles to reality, in which Osiris had pitched his base camp, it was also pretty well the only option. It had, however, taken some setting up. Simply getting the dispensation from the Physics Board of Control had been bad enough.
But there the carriage was, half in and half out of the universe of space and time, and on board were the two teams of delegates: the hand-picked elite of the legal and accountancy professions at one end of the carriage, all briefcases and laptop computers and go-anywhere fax machines, and Pan, Carl, Sandra and an old Olivetti portable at the other. Whether by luck or by judgement, however, the divine delegation had scored one of the most telling victories of the conference before a single word was spoken; they’d got the end of the carriage with the toilet.
‘All right,’ said one of Julian’s team, a jet-propelled intellectual property lawyer from New York, attended by no less than three Principal Minions and seven Nodders First Class, ‘we’re prepared to back down on the watercress if, and this is a very big if, you guys can see your way to accommodating us on the pastrami. How about it?’
Five hours into the conference and they were still discussing what to have in the sandwiches.
All this had come about because Kurt Lundqvist had stormed Sunnyvoyde. Scroll back and edit; not so much stormed, perhaps, because he’d gained admittance by ringing the front door bell and asking to be let in, on the pretext that he’d come to mend the ballcock. Once inside, however, he had made inflammatory speeches, distributed subversive pamphlets, done all that could be expected of a front-line professional agent provocateur and diagnosed Minerva as having tonsillitis. His appearance had at first had the effect on the residents of a small Friesian calf in a ceramic pipe factory, but eventually . . . Mrs Henderson was now besieged in the linen cupboard, fifty thousand tins of tapioca pudding had been dumped in the swimming pool, and the gods had signed a hurriedly drafted Declaration that dealt in lofty terms with such concepts as life, liberty and the pursuit of Black Forest gateau.