Age of Odin

by James Lovegrove

  The reaction from the Norse gods was not at all what I was expecting. I'd thought they'd be pleased. I'd done their dirty work for them. Loki was gone. Ragnarök, therefore, would have to be called off. Hooray, surely? Happy finish. No more bloodshed. Yes?

  Apparently not.

  "Gid," said Odin. Kind of sighing.

  "What?"

  He looked resigned. Pitying. So did everybody else. "There are certain... protocols at work here. Formalities to be observed."

  "But I just shot Loki. I mean, he's toast." I gesticulated at the corpse on the bridge. "He's out of the picture. That's a good thing, right? The bad guy's down and out. It's Bond killing Blofeld halfway through the film. There'll be no big confrontation now. The henchmen will all surrender. We won't have to blow up the volcano headquarters."

  "Would that it were that straightforward."

  I was finding this hard to believe. "He came - she came - and started nancying about in front of us. I had a gun. What else was I to do? Seemed a no-brainer to me. Still does. Would've been literally, if I'd gone for a head shot. And now it's all over. Isn't it? Ragnarök's off. Yes? No? It's off and we can all go home and eat choccy biccies and watch Loose Women in our pyjamas."

  "We, Gid," said Odin, "are gods, but we are also creatures of myth. Of saga. Of story. How can I best explain it? Some things are just meant to be. Ragnarök has long been foretold. Its arrival is assured. From the moment of Balder's murder, events have unfolded more or less along a foreordained path. There have been detours, divergences, but always the basic course has remained the same, and cannot be altered. Believe me, if I'd thought killing Loki would change anything, I'd have done it ages ago. But I could not. It would not have been in accordance with the destiny that the Norns have laid out for us, the sequence of events that we are all part of."

  "So you're saying -"

  "What he's saying," said a loud, unfamiliar voice from the bridge, "is close, but no cigar."

  It was Mrs Keener, and she was up on her feet, alive and well and looking, as might be imagined, somewhat narked.

  "This coat is Barguzin sable and cost a fucking fortune," she snarled, and she wasn't speaking like a good ol' Georgia gal any more, she was speaking in waspish masculine tones. "And you've put a hole in it and the blood won't come out easily. It's ruined! Who are you anyway?"

  "I'm..." was all I managed. Mrs Keener's on-the-spot resurrection had, unusually but understandably, left me at a loss for words.

  "No, wait," she said. "I recall Hel telling me that one of Odin's tame monkeys was a bit smarter and feistier than the rest, and I'm guessing you're him. It's Gordon, is it? Gudgeon? Something like that. Well, I suppose I should applaud your initiative, but as Odin's trying so dismally to put into plain English, you can't fight fate. There's a time and a place for me to die, as there is for everyone. It just doesn't happen to be now and here, with me getting shot in the chest between my slightly sagging yet still remarkable breasts. Otherwise do you think I'd be so crass as to turn up at Asgard all on my own, without even so much as a CIA bodyguard to leap into the path of a bullet? Or arrow, or hammer, as the case may be? Typical human thinking. Du-u-umb. Just not realising the scale and scope of what you've stepped into."

  I raised the rifle and sighted along the barrel. "I can always stick another one in you if you'd like. You might not die but I'm sure it'll hurt."

  "Fire away." Mrs Keener spread her arms, making herself an even easier target. "I can take it. All it'll do is ensure your death will be even more truly horrible. I've marked you out now, mortal, you see. You've just earned yourself a position high up on my shit list, right near the top. You'll live to rue the day you ever laid eyes on me."

  "I'm already rueing it, shemale," I retorted. "Now you're using your real voice, you're pretty creepy. Makes my skin crawl even looking at you."

  "Whereas when I spoke like this" - she'd resumed her breathy, high-pitched Southern lilt - "you found me kinda attractive, huh? Well, ain't you just the predictable male lunkhead, thinking with those there gonads of yours. They'll be the first things to go when the time comes, by the way. I'm looking forward to having you in my clutches and separating you from them slowly using just my little old fingernails. Wouldn't that be just dandy?"

  "It'll be a bigger job than you think."

  "You are just the cutest! Takes some kinda guy to boast about the size of his parts when he's being threatened with emasculation." Her smile, false as it was, tightened into a purse-lipped sneer. "I ain't just whistling Dixie here, mister. You shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that. What I say I'm gonna do, I do."

  "Still got this rifle, sunshine," I said. "Smack dab between the eyes, and you'll have the mother of all headaches to deal with."

  She glared at me through those footballer's wife sunglasses. You couldn't see her eyes but you could sense the fury in them. I'd goaded her good and proper. How to win friends and influence people, the Gid Coxall way.

  "Well. That's plenty enough of that," she said. One of the limo's rear doors sprang open, seemingly of its own accord. Mrs Keener bent to climb in. "It's war from here on in. Y'all are gonna suffer and die for what you did to me. The centuries I spent in that cavern, my eyes sizzling and burning and growing back only to sizzle and burn some more. The torture and humiliation you put me through. Payback's a bitch, and that bitch is me. Asgard's end is coming. We've had the Fimbulwinter. Now it's Ragnarök's turn to step out onto the pitcher's mound. Three strikes and you'll be out, all of you. Bottom of the ninth, and there ain't no way you're saving the game by stealing a home run."

  The door slammed. The limo revved and reversed rumblingly along Bifrost. At the far end of the bridge it U-turned and tore off down the road, snow spewing from its tyres. We watched its taillights fishtail into the dark, two red eyes shrinking 'til they were gone.

  "Baseball metaphor," I said, as the echoes of its engine noise faded. "Anybody here speak baseball? Because I'm drawing a total blank."

  The Aesir and Vanir, however, weren't up for a laugh. They turned and wandered away in dribs and drabs. Freya was one of the first to go. As she passed me, she said in a conspiratorial murmur, "Pity. It would have been a good, clean kill."

  I winked, but she pretended not to notice.

  Forty-Nine

  Soon there was just me left, and Heimdall. I went and checked on him. He was sitting in the doorway of his guardhouse and looked better than he had a few minutes earlier. Starting to recover from the effort of blowing the Gjallarhorn, which was now back hanging on the wall.

  "All right?"

  Heimdall gave a weary nod. "In a way, I'm relieved," he said. "Ragnarök has begun. Finally it's begun. The onus of knowing that it was coming, knowing that one day it would fall to me to announce it - this sat heavily upon my shoulders. But now the moment has come and gone, and I feel... uplifted. How strange."

  "It's not so strange. Nothing worse than the wait before an action. You're dreading what's ahead and you're glad when it all finally goes off."

  "True."

  "So what happens next? What's the order of play? When do the actual hostilities commence? Any idea?"

  Heimdall shrugged. "Loki will marshal his forces and attack at some point in the near future. I'm listening out for it even now. As soon as I detect enemy activity, however faint and remote it is, I will raise the alarm. As yet, I've heard nothing untoward."

  "Well, he's only just left, hasn't he? Let's give the bloke a chance to get his act together. You're sure you're going to be okay?"

  "I think so."

  I said goodnight and made my way back along the drive towards the castle and the cabins beyond. Bed beckoned. Some kip was definitely in order. There wouldn't be much of it in the days ahead, I imagined.

  Along the way I caught up with Bragi, who was straggling behind the rest of the Aesir. He was a slow walker, the head-down, trudging type. I fell in step.

  "Few days back, that thing about the poem..." I said to him. "Sorry about that.
I shouldn't have slagged you off."

  He gave a not-to-worry shrug. "I have a thick skin, Gid, as a poet must. How else can he survive the jeers and insults that sometimes greet his work? If there's anyone whose feelings you should be concerned about, it's Loki. You were unwise to antagonise him, you know. He is not one to be trifled with."

  "Who was trifling? I meant to kill the fucker stone dead. How was I supposed to know a bullet in the chest would only piss him off?"

  "Perhaps no one anticipated you would take such precipitous action."

  "Even so, it's like there's a bunch of rules here I don't understand, probably because nobody's seen fit to tell me what they are. I mean, you're gods, but you're not immortal, but you can't die 'til the time comes for you to die. Have I got that right?"

  "More or less."

  "Well, how does that make sense?"

  "It makes sense if you stop thinking of us as deities as such."

  "And what do I think of you as instead?"

  Bragi frowned deeply, looking inward. "Odin would explain this far better than I."

  "Have a go."

  "We are... myths. Do you understand what I mean by that?"

  "Stories."

  "If you like. Bigger than that, but yes, basically stories. We are created things, fabrications, and we're aware of it. We know full well where and how we originated. We are incarnations of the tales that the Norsemen told around fires on long, cold nights, the sagas that entertained them and enlightened them and helped keep the dark at bay. We were given form and substance by oral tradition, licked into shape by it just as the first Aesir were themselves licked into shape by the cow Audhumla from the salty rim of the Ginnungagap. The storytellers assigned us our personalities and patterns of behaviour in order to help their people understand the universe and their own environment. Vikings were all about fighting with their neighbours or trading with them. No wonder, then, that the storytellers dreamed up a cosmos in which gods are engaged in constant border disputes with their enemies and rely on certain allied races to supply goods they can't manufacture themselves. Through us, our tales, our deeds and feuds, the Norsemen affirmed and justified their place in the grand scheme of things."

  "This is nuts," I said. "You're saying you know you're not real?"

  "Not at all," he replied. "We're real. The storytellers' imaginations made us real - as real to every member of their audience as the person sitting beside them. Granted, they bestowed us with power, made us capable of superhuman feats. A bit of exaggeration there. Poetic licence. But real all the same. Our squabbles, our rivalries, our passions - nothing about us, deep down, was unintelligible or 'godlike' to the Norsemen. To them we were ordinary people with a few added extras. Gods made in mankind's image. I expect this is hard for a modern, rationalist mortal like you to comprehend."

  "Yes. No. Maybe a little. Not being funny, but TV soap operas - you know what those are?"

  Bragi smiled lopsidedly through his lush beard. "I've heard of them."

  "Not a fan myself, but my ex is. She follows a couple of them religiously. To her, the characters are like people she knows. I mean, she's not retarded. She knows it's just actors working from a script. But on some level I think she believes the characters exist. While they're onscreen, at any rate. That's why viewers, millions of them, get so absorbed in the shows and watch them week in, week out. Waste of time if you ask me, but if it makes them happy..."

  "It's life, but a heightened version of it."

  "Yeah."

  He waved an index finger in the air. "And so are we. And we, too, have certain plotlines we must follow. Our lives, and deaths, have already been dictated and mapped out by the storytellers long ago, and preserved for posterity in the Eddas. We know how things are going to turn out for us. We all have predetermined roles to play and destinies to fulfil."

  "But that's..." I groped for the right phrasing. "Isn't that, well, a bit depressing? You're called gods but you're actually - no offence - puppets."

  "'Puppets' is putting it too strongly. It makes us sound as though we lack free will. We have free will. We merely choose to act in the manner that's been established for us beforehand. Take Thor. He couldn't bring himself to befriend a jotun if he tried. But that's fine, because he has no great desire to befriend a jotun. He's happy to want to bash in the brains of every one of them he meets. So there's no inner conflict there, no angst. We all accept who we are and what is expected of us."

  "Hell of a way to live."

  "But what's the alternative? Not to live?"

  "When you put it like that..."

  "It's difficult to grasp, I appreciate," Bragi said, "but we Aesir have these existences that have been bestowed upon us, full of extraordinary events and lasting longer, far longer, than any mortal's - so why not make the most of them? Enjoy them, rather than moan about the few modest limitations that have been imposed on them? For most of us, it's not something we allow ourselves to be troubled by. Only Odin seems to take it hard. He alone feels woe over our lot and frets about it. Thinks too much, that's his problem. Wisdom takes its toll. But the rest of us, we're content to cherish and relish what we have."

  "And now it's all coming to an end."

  "Without wishing to sound too fatalistic, what must be, must be. All tales reach a climax. At some point the bard must tire and say 'enough.' What good is a story without a finish?"

  "Soaps never bloody finish," I said. "They just grind on and on. But that's the nature of them."

  "Indeed. They give the illusion of progress without offering any form of resolution. Somewhat like a mortal life."

  "Except mortal lives do have a resolution, if you can call it that. They all end eventually."

  "And maybe that's the crucial difference between a mortal and a god - between you, Gid, and me. I am a living story, an element of a larger overarching narrative. My tale has been told over and over in the past. Doubtless it will continue to be told over and over in the future. Maybe that is immortality: to recur and recur. Even now, perhaps someone is writing or speaking about me, putting words into my mouth, generating afresh the essence that is Bragi, bard of Asgard and enshriner of the doings of the Einherjar. I am embedded deep in the Midgardian psyche, below the surface but ever present. All the Aesir and Vanir are. We survive within you from age to age, as ideas, stories, archetypes. And every time we are remembered, every time our saga is retold, we are re-created whole and live out a brand new lifespan."

  "You reckon?"

  "Why not? If gods are fictions, then we are brought to life wherever there is a bard by a hearthside or, if you prefer, a writer at a desk. They think of us, therefore we are."

  "Shit..." My head was starting to throb. It was a lot to take in. Who'd have thought school dropout Gid Coxall would be standing discussing this kind of metaphysical bobbins with Asgard's very own poet in residence, while waiting for the end of the world to start?

  We'd arrived at the castle.

  "Well, here's where our paths divide," Bragi said. "Goodnight, Gid."

  He walked off one way. I walked off the other, only to stop after a few paces and turn and call out: "This does work out okay, doesn't it? Ragnarök? There's a happy ending?"

  "For some, yes. For others, no."

  "But ultimately the good guys win, the bad guys lose. Yeah?"

  "It's a work in progress," Bragi said after a moment, then added slyly: "Aren't we all?"

  And that was as much as I could get out of him on that subject.

  Bloody creative types.

  Fifty

  The first incursion came the next morning. A hit-and-run. No contact, no casualties. They took out one of our ammo dumps, situated near an intersection with Svartalfheim.

  We inspected the damage - Thor's team, with Huginn and Muninn monitoring for Odin. Nothing much to see, just a smoking crater and a few strewn, charred trees that had once been a copse.

  "C-Four plastic explosive," Backdoor opined. "About twenty pounds of it."

  "
No shit, Sherlock," I said. "And here was I thinking those trees fell over all by themselves."

  "They must have been conducting surveillance from across the way," said Paddy, gazing towards Svartalfheim. "Saw the Valkyries stash the ammo. Marked the spot for future reference."

  "Is this state-the-fucking-obvious week or what?" I snapped. I turned and eyed the undulating barren badlands of Svartalfheim, wondering if Loki's commandos were still out there somewhere. Bedded down in black camo gear and watching us through binoculars. And chortling.

  "The gnomes," I said to Thor. "I thought they were on our side. Friends of Asgard."

  "The gnomes are nobody's friend," he replied. "They do business with whomever wishes to do business with them but they owe allegiance to none but themselves."

  "So how come they've given safe passage to Loki's troops?"

  "They haven't," said Huginn and Muninn in tandem, speaking in Odin's voice from their perch on Thor's shoulders. "What you must understand is that the gnomes dwell perpetually underground. Sunlight turns them to stone, so they daren't venture up onto the surface. Even starlight makes them unwell. Their home is their caverns."

  "Meaning anyone can wander across their world if they want to."

  The ravens gave a synchronised nod. "The terrain above is no man's land, yes. The gnomes have no use for it, and care little who crosses it. Enter their caverns unannounced and unbidden - that is a different story. Then you'll find yourself facing red-hot pokers and tongs, wielded by some very irate little beings."

  "Who have no respect for one's dignity," Thor said, rubbing his buttock in memory of some wound inflicted once upon a time.

  "Then we need to patrol this crossing-point," I said. "We site a round-the-clock watch here."

  "You think they'll come over again?" said Cy.

  "Maybe not. It was a precision strike, a one-off. If I were them I wouldn't hit the same place a second time. But they're not me. They're probably a lot swankier and cockier than me, and they might think if they've got away with it once they can get away with it again, and come in deeper this time. Let's play on that. Let's give them an incentive. Commit a dozen men, and one of Odin's sons - Vali, say - with one of the special pieces of kit the gnomes made for us. Let's see how that pans out."