Yet I kept it up. I kept it up even though it was hopeless, even though the whole notion of trying to beat Hval was futile, because supposing by some miracle I did beat him, I'd still have a roomful of his frost giant pals to contend with, and they'd easily overwhelm me, through sheer numbers alone, and then - unless Bergelmir was fibbing, and I didn't think he was - I'd be dinner, and I couldn't imagine a worse fate than ending up in the stomachs of these huge, hairy, smelly, ugly monsters. At least, from the sound of it, they'd have the courtesy to kill me first before serving me up with the gravy and the horseradish, but despite that it still wasn't much of a prospect to look forward to.
Obstinate. That was me. That was why I continued fighting instead of simply giving up. Obstinate, and also not willing to go down without securing some kind of victory for myself, recouping some measure of self-esteem, however pathetically small. Even if I just saved face by giving Hval a run for his money, proving I was no pushover, that would be something.
And then he got overconfident. Or rather, his overconfidence got the better of him. Somehow I got past his guard. A lucky shot. A freak statistic. Out of the hundred strikes I made with my issgeisl, one finally got through.
The issgeisl's spear blade sank into Hval's thigh. Not deep, but far enough in to inflict some damage and cause pain. Suddenly white fur was stained with a gush of crimson, and Hval let out an agonised roar that stopped the audience noise dead. Where there had been yells of support and chants of glee from the slightly biased spectators, now there was stunned silence. A moment later, boos and catcalls rushed in to fill the vacuum. It wasn't supposed to be like this. The human combatant wasn't supposed to hurt his opponent. That wasn't right!
"Second blood to me," I said to Hval, panting. It was witch's tit in that cavern but still the sweat was pouring down my face. I had to scrape some out of my eyes with my thumb. "How's that feel, slaphead? Not so cocky now, are you?"
Hval looked at me with murder in his jet-black eyes. "You - you dare!?" he exclaimed. "You dare stick your issgeisl into me?"
I held up the blood-smeared spear tip. "Rather looks like I do dare, doesn't it, chrome dome? By the way, doesn't your scalp get cold? Ever thought about headgear? I can just see you in a beanie, or maybe a woolly bobble hat. Or maybe you like the way it looks. How do you keep it so shiny? Mr Sheen?"
That pissed him off. Even though he probably didn't understand half of what I was rabbiting on about.
Which was fine - I wanted him pissed off.
Truth to tell, I was pretty pissed off myself. It was starting to get on my wick, this fight, the entire situation. The absurdity of it, the one-sidedness. It was starting to enrage me, deeply. This was an old feeling, a familiar feeling, one I hadn't experienced in a while. One I welcomed now like an old friend I hadn't seen in ages and forgotten how much I missed. Anger at the inequality of the situation, the unfairness of everything. A sense of having been robbed by life and wanting to get payback somehow, any old how. It gurgled up through me, hot and black as tar. It pulled my mouth into a ferocious grin. It drowned out all extraneous noise. It throbbed in time to my pulse rate. It put a dark frame around everything I was seeing, like the border on an obituary notice in the papers. It left nothing in my sensory field except Hval. Hval the Bald, who was growling like a dog, one hand pressed to the wound in his leg to stem the blood flow. Resentment radiating from his face. Ready to lance and skewer and disembowel and dismember. Ready to kill as savagely and messily as he knew how.
Or was that me?
Seventeen
There was this bloke. Martin Sellers, though I didn't find out his name until after. He had thickish spectacles and kept his hair slicked to the side and sharply parted. Wore a tank top over a checked shirt. Creases in his trousers, turn-ups at the bottom. Weak chin. Rubbery lips. Open-toed sandals with socks. Centre parting. He looked, really, like the living definition of a paedo. Honestly, if you'd searched "child molester" on Google Images, the first picture that came up, after Gary Glitter, would be this fella.
I was at the indoor soft play with Cody. Typical pissy summer-hols day, so I'd taken him off there so Gen could have a bit of a break. So that I could have a bit of a break too, actually, because the soft play was great for that. Let the kids hare off and run wild in the climbing apparatus while Dad sat in a comfy chair with a coffee and a bun reading the Daily Mail. Bingo, result for everyone. All I had to do was glance up every now and then, locate Cody inside that huge padded labyrinth affair, make sure he wasn't getting beaten up or beating someone up, and that was that, job done. Tenner well spent.
Cody was nine at the time, looking like a proper boy, all tousled hair and gangling legs. Heartbreakingly handsome lad. Just like his pa.
I'd just finished checking Jonathan Cainer for my horoscope. Apparently I had an unusual stroke of good fortune coming my way owing to a rare conjunction of Saturn and Venus in my House of Total Bollocks, and I'd find out more if I rang a hotline at a rate of £500 per second plus standard network charges. I happened to look round, and there was Martin Sellers snapping away at Cody with his phone camera.
Now, that was exactly how it appeared to me. Cody romping around in the ball pit on the soft play's lower storey, and Mr Couldn't-Be-More-Paedo-If-He-Tried carefully lining up his shots and clicking again and again. I watched him for a full minute, getting more and more convinced that it was Cody he was photographing. He was waiting until Cody dived into the balls so that he could take nice pics of Cody's bare legs and shorts-clad backside poking up. There was this stupid, sloppy smile on his face that told me he was getting off on this. He looked ready to drop his trousers and start whacking himself off right then and there.
The one thought which didn't occur to me, and which might have saved both him and me a lot of agony, was what was he doing here if he didn't have a kid of his own? They'd never have let in a lone adult male. He'd have to have been accompanying a child. Maybe I did think this but dismissed it as unimportant. Maybe I told myself he was a bachelor uncle who'd tagged along on a family outing. The whys and wherefores didn't matter, really. Logic was winging its way out of the window. What I saw, all I saw, was a pervert taking photos of my boy. The rest was just detail.
The black tide surged up. I wasn't aware of much after that. Eyewitnesses said I strode straight over and, without even saying a word to Sellers, started hitting him. Snatched his mobile and smashed him in the face with it a few times, then brought him low with a kind of judo throw and starting pounding on him as he lay on his back on the floor. He was screaming through bubbles of blood. Someone, an employee at the place, ran over and tried to pull me off. I decked him with a single punch. Someone else, a woman, pushed her way between Sellers and me, shrieking at me to stop, what was I doing, get off, that was her husband, he hadn't done anything. I shoved her aside, not listening, and carried on beating the shit out of the guy. The sicko. The perve. The fucking chickenhawk piece of scum.
Three of the burlier dads laid into me, yelling that was enough, leave him alone. They managed to haul me off Sellers, but I struggled free and launched myself at him again. It ended only as I was about to resume destroying this kiddie-fiddling dirtbag and, all at once, there was Cody standing in front of me, a look of absolute astonished horror on his face.
"Dad?" he said in a tiny, trembling voice. "What are you doing? That's Tamara's dad. Tamara from school. I was playing with her. He was taking pictures of us in the ball pit. She was being Hermione Granger and I was being Ben 10. We were fighting alien wizards."
Everybody on the premises was staring at me. Martin Sellers lay in a pool of his own blood, making little soft wailing noises like a distant cow mooing. Children were sobbing. I heard somebody on the phone to the police, talking hysterically about a man who'd gone berserk, maybe killed someone. None of it meant anything to me. The only thing that counted was Cody's expression - the fear in his eyes - the way he was looking at me as though I was a monster from a nightmare. His father, on the outside, b
ut inside, something else - a demon, perhaps, that had taken over my body and was still staring out from within, ablaze with fury and hate.
Arrest. Custody. Bail. Court.
The police officer who put the plasticuffs on me knew me. We'd had a couple of run-ins before, normally around pub closing time. He knew I was ex-military, knew about my record, my hospitalisation, my discharge. At the trial he told the judge that I had a history of ABH and public affray, infractions which he and his colleagues had gone easy on because of my "background circumstances." The judge suggested that perhaps if they hadn't been quite so lenient in the past, the distressing incident with Mr Sellers might have been averted. The cop took the rebuke on the chin.
This, after all, wasn't mere ABH, it was GBH. Sellers had needed extensive facial reconstruction surgery. He would never look the way he used to and many of the nerves in his face no longer worked, but fortunately he had suffered no brain damage. He glowered at me throughout every minute of the trial and that was hard to take - if looks could kill and all that - but it was Gen up in the viewing gallery whose gaze weighed the most heavily on me. The hurt and recrimination in her eyes. The set of her jaw, which said, This is it, Gid, I've put up with it so far, but this is the final straw...
I got the divorce papers while I was banged up. I signed them, sent them back. She never visited. Why should she? I'd disappointed her once too often. I wasn't the man she'd married. Hadn't been for a long time.
The stretch handed down was surprisingly short, which caused outrage in some quarters: Sellers and family shouting "Shame! Disgrace!" in court, and a handful of indignant letters in the local newspaper. The judge, for all that he'd ticked the cops off for being soft on me, was soft on me himself. An expert witness, a shrink who specialised in the psychology of people who'd suffered major head trauma, stood in the box and said there was every chance I'd not been in full control of my faculties. The injury to my brain could well have upset my mental equilibrium. It was possible I was still suffering the after-effects of the IED explosion, even two years on. "In light of such testimony," the judge said during his summing-up, "you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may wish to take the view that Mr Coxall is a man with diminished responsibility for his actions and thus cannot be held wholly accountable for them. You may also wish to take into account his role in Her Majesty's Armed Forces and his service to our country, in the performance of which he suffered most grievously." An eight-month custodial sentence was what I was given.
I'd have got away with serving only six of those eight months, too, if I hadn't had that altercation with the crackhead on B Wing. No time off for good behaviour.
Once out, I made a vow never to let the blackness rise again. If I ever felt it welling up inside, I would simply remove myself from whatever situation was triggering it. I would walk away. All the fights I'd been getting into, the blackness was behind them. It was to blame. I had to contain it, corral my blind rage. It would do me no good.
Except now. Facing Hval the Bald.
Now, the blackness was my great ally. My secret weapon. My ace. It came, and I let it fill me. Consume me. Overwhelm me.
Five minutes later, our duel was over. Hval was on his hands and knees on the arena floor, and I stood over him, issgeisl raised. His head was bowed. Blood - his blood - matted his fur and covered the ice in congealing smears, bright red against the glittering whiteness. His breath rattled in and out, thickly, stickily. Punctured lung. He was a goner. We both knew it. Everyone in the cavern did. The frost giants looked on in appalled silence. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bergelmir clasping his throat, aghast.
"Fancy that," I said, loud enough for all to hear. "The puny human won."
Then I brought the issgeisl down with all my might and lopped Hval's head clean off.
Eighteen
In the uproar that followed, two of the frost giants made the mistake of attacking me singly, bare-handed. While I was still armed with the issgeisl? When I'd already shown I was at least equal to one of them? Seriously? They learned their error the hard way.
After that, though, pretty much all of them bundled in on me in a huge mob, and I tried my best, but I was on a hiding to nothing. They disarmed me. Then they just started chucking me all over the shop, shoving me back and forth between them, roughing me up, punching, kicking. I pinballed around the cavern, and every way I went it was claws and teeth and flying furry fists and feet. Somehow I didn't blame them. I'd be pissed off too if some little pipsqueak came along and offed three of my relatives.
Bergelmir finally halted the fun with a loud roar. He ordered the frost giants to bring the human to him. I was dragged over and dumped in a heap at his feet.
"Remarkable," he said to me. "Hval is - was - one of our finest warriors. For him to fall to a mere human speaks highly of your prowess. Not in a long time have I seen such pure, perfect battle-frenzy as you have just shown. I am almost impressed. You didn't hesitate, either, when you had him at your mercy. Another man might have attempted to use Hval's life as a bargaining chip, to save his own."
"Wouldn't have worked," I managed to spit out, along with quite a lot of blood, and a molar. "Even if the idea had occurred to me, which it didn't."
"Odin did indeed find himself a valuable asset. Such a shame."
"I told you, I'm nothing to do with -"
"Yes, yes, I know," Bergelmir said with a dismissive wave. "You would have ended up fighting for him all the same. Odin has a way of winning everyone over to his cause sooner or later. An inspiring turn of phrase. An insidious charisma. All true warriors are drawn to him, even if it goes against their better judgement. Does his name not mean 'war fury'? Is it not his allotted role to preside over the Einherjar?"
"Come again?"
"The Einherjar. The Heroic Dead. The army he has been busy raising. Haven't heard the name before? The concept is strange to you? Oh human, how little you grasp of your situation!"
"I grasp that I'm not dead," I said. "I'm not a hero either."
"We could debate the latter. As to the former - well, perhaps you aren't, but it's a situation I'm about to remedy."
He held out a hand, and someone passed him an issgeisl.
"Get him into position," he instructed, and frost giants grabbed my arms and twisted them up behind my back, bending me over until my forehead was almost touching the floor.
"In recognition of your extraordinary defeat of Hval the Bald," Bergelmir said, "I shall make your execution as swift and painless as possible. You have won this leniency for the valour and brutality you have exhibited. Not only that, but you have won the honour of receiving the fatal blow from none other than myself. Few humans -"
"Look," I said, with feeling, "are you going to flap your lips all day or are you just going to get on with it? This is boring, and not very comfortable."
"You aren't even going to plead for your life? Beg like a dog?"
"What would be the point?"
"Truly, you are a credit to your species," Bergelmir said, and it sounded like he really meant it. "In other circumstances I might have been proud to know you. Very well..."
The issgeisl went up. I heard the swisshh it made as it rose through the air.
I'd been near to death in Afghanistan. A gnat's pube away from the Great Beyond. The medics told me it had been touch-and-go for a while when they'd got out to me and were patching me up in the field. Said they'd thought it was fifty-fifty I'd last the chopper ride back to Bastion. There'd been no tunnel of light then, no choirs of angels, no loved ones queuing up to usher me through the Pearly Gates. There'd been nothing except absolute nothingness.
So I wasn't anticipating any afterlife once that issgeisl fell. Just an end, that was all. A full stop rounding off the sentence of my life. I braced for the blade to descend.
That was when the shooting started.
Nineteen
Nothing quite like gunfire to bring instant chaos to any given situation. Within moments of the first salvo, everyone was cha
rging around like headless chickens. I'd been immediately forgotten about. Frost giants were yelling, screaming, and Bergelmir was giving orders, shouting to be heard above the hullabaloo: "To the armoury! Take arms! We're under attack!"
Like, duh. As Cody might have said.
Bullets thunked into ice, gouging holes, shattering stalactites, ruining the smooth rounded contours of the cavern. Frost giants blundered into one another. Some let out cries of pain. Some fell.
One landed right on top of me, squashing me flat. I wriggled out from under the corpse, mostly to avoid being suffocated by the sheer bulk of it, although the blood gushing out over me from several bullet wounds wasn't much fun. Crouching, using the body for cover, I took stock of what was going on.
It was more or less what I'd guessed. Odin's forces, attacking. I counted a dozen men spearheading the operation, a first wave of assault sowing death and discord through the cavern. Kalashnikovs and SA80s barked in their hands. Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistols stuttered.
Once this first lot had done their job, taking the frost giants by surprise, killing as many as they could and scattering the rest, a back-up squad of similar size stormed into the cavern. They fanned out into position, securing the site and checking that all the fallen enemy combatants were as dead as they appeared to be. Head shots accounted for the ones that weren't.
Among the second lot of soldiers I recognised Cy and Paddy. They spotted me at about the same time I spotted them.
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