He nodded. It was noteworthy that neither he nor anyone else sniggered at the phrase "taking the rear." Nothing, right now, was very funny.
"So you'd have been following Chops. Was it him? Did he open fire?"
"I don't know, Gid. I really don't. I wasn't looking his way when it all kicked off. First I knew about it was a couple of frosties were on the deck and so was Chops. It happened that fast. At a push, my guess would be a frostie made a move on Chops and he retaliated."
"Why would one of them do that, though?" I said. "They had specific instructions to leave us alone and not hurt us."
"Yeah, but you know how they was on the way in," said Cy. "All nudging us and giving it attitude and everything. Maybe one of them forgot what Bergelmir said and went back to how they was behaving beforehand, only he took the aggro too far and Chopsticks hit back. We was all on edge, bruv. I mean, Bergelmir, he'd been talking about executing the lot of us not ten minutes earlier."
The others echoed this with a round of disgruntled grunts. I'd not earned myself any Brownie points with the way things had gone in the citadel. Although I'd been able to pull our fat from the fire, the lads weren't happy that our fat had been anywhere near a fire in the first place. I couldn't blame them for that.
"No question, I take full responsibility for this mess," I told them. "My plan, my fuck-up. I just want to find out why things went south, so we can avoid a repeat in future."
"Maybe Chopsticks got careless," Baz offered. "Maybe his safety was off and he stumbled and pulled the trigger by mistake."
I shook my head. "I didn't know him as well as any of you did, but that doesn't strike me as like him. Chops was always measured and cautious. What's more, he'd know better than to march with his finger inside the trigger guard."
"Would he? He were only Territorial, after all. Saturday night soldier."
"Still."
"And accidents happen."
"And if guns are involved they're usually tragic accidents. Somehow, though, I just can't buy this as one of those."
"Maybe," said Paddy in a conciliatory tone, "we should chalk it up to experience and move on. What's done is done. Rehashing it isn't going to change anything and certainly won't bring Chopsticks back. I'll miss the lad because he was just about the only one around here with a bit of culture, unlike the rest of you philistine, pig-ignorant shites. But he's gone, and we should start coming to terms with that."
"And our chances of bringing the frosties onside have been scuppered too," I said bitterly. "We lost a man and screwed the mission, so you'll forgive me if I can't put it behind me quite yet, Pads."
"That's your prerogative. All I'm saying is, we're alive at least, even though it was touch-and-go back there for a while. That's worth remembering. It wasn't a total disaster."
"Irish eyes keep smiling, eh? Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and all that."
"Those are meaningless insults, Gid, and with respect, fuck you."
"Fuck you too, Paddy."
That was the end of that conversation, and Sleipnir carried on to Asgard with some very surly and irritable passengers in its hold.
The thing was, an idea had started flitting around in my mind. It was a moth in the dark, flapping against me with its wings, and I kept batting it away but it kept blundering back, and I didn't like it. I didn't like the fact that it was even there, that some crack or chink that shouldn't have existed had allowed it to enter my headspace.
A single word, faintly whispering, bristling with unease.
Sabotage.
Forty-Six
I dreamed I was in the car again. Back in that fucking Vauxhall Astra. Alone. Upside down. Cold. Numb. So numb, I felt I was floating. I didn't have a body any more, I'd slipped free of it and was just this shapeless entity called Gideon Coxall, an insubstantial thing in the darkness.
Then there was light.
It filled the tunnel Abortion had dug in the snow, highlighting every scoop and groove his hands had left. Bluish, coming from outside, it wavered, now bright, now less so.
A torch?
No. A mobile. The glow from a phone screen. Held in someone's hand. Someone who was approaching. Abortion. Had to be.
Maybe he'd found help. Maybe he'd got a phone signal and was coming to tell me the ambulance was on its way. Better yet, a search and rescue helicopter to airlift us the fuck out of here.
I tried to say his name but I didn't have a throat that worked properly. Didn't have a throat at all, it felt like.
The blue light brightened, whitened, rapidly. The end of the tunnel became a flaring dazzle that I couldn't look at any more.
I shut my eyes and opened them and I was in my bunk bed in Asgard. Around me were a couple of dozen men, snoring, snorting, turning over on creaky springs, mumbling in their sleep. A cabin full of slumbering bodies, restless and writhing.
Soldiers — a breed who seldom slept soundly. Always unconsciously keeping an ear out for the enemy… or else grappling with nightmares.
Forty-Seven
We were now on a countdown to a deadline, it seemed. Mrs Keener's visit to the UK drew nearer day by day. Huginn and Muninn flew out over Midgard and sent Odin images of the preparations for her arrival. Odin spoke of city streets being cordoned off for security purposes, the Stars and Stripes being hung out on public buildings, and strenuous debate in the House of Commons over the wisdom and validity of asking her to come at all.
Prime Minister Clasen defended his decision on the grounds that Britain's business ties with the US remained strong, even if politically there were disagreements between the two countries. Besides, wouldn't it be better and more meaningful if he was able to challenge Mrs Keener on diplomatic issues face to face rather than via webcam?
Privately, in Cabinet — the ravens eavesdropped on a window ledge outside Number 10 — Clasen expressed misgivings about the visit, seeming to imply that rather than being invited, the President had more or less invited herself and he had been too intimidated to refuse. Mrs Keener was about to gatecrash, and she probably wasn't even bringing a decent bottle of plonk.
Protestors against American foreign policy were organising mass rallies, although the cops were going to see to it that they didn't get within a placard's throw of Whitehall or any of the other destinations on the presidential itinerary. Hence the street closures. Meanwhile, the TV channels were lobbying for interviews, although so far Mrs Keener's aides had turned down all the journalistic hard cases like Paxman and Dimbleby and approved on-air face time with only Alan Titchmarsh and Adrian Chiles. Real heavyweights who didn't flinch from asking the tough questions like, "What's your favourite colour?"
Our own preparations consisted of drilling like bastards, then drilling again, and then, when we'd had enough of drilling, drilling some more. In my spare time, such as it was, I went out in Sleipnir with the drawling RAFfer pilots and we scouted Asgard's borders looking for likely ingress points. Odin put the trolls on subsistence rations to make them less dopey and more aggressive, and it worked, although two of them became so hungry they had a fight and tore off and ate parts of each other, and had to be put down. The Valkyries, for their part, went about on their snowmobiles caching supplies and ammunition in various strategically useful places, mostly near the intersections between Asgard and the other worlds.
Either an attack was coming or it wasn't. Either Loki was going to make his move or he wasn't. That choice was his. Ours was whether to be caught with our knickers around our ankles or not, and we definitely wanted to avoid the "not" option.
I was still pissed off about the frost giants and losing Chopsticks, and I might have betrayed these feelings once or twice. For instance, when Bragi proposed reciting a poem about our recent trip to Jotunheim, and I told him he could stick his poem up his arse and shove that stupid beard of his up there too while he was at it. And another time, when Thor made some joke about being excluded from the mission to Utgard, saying it couldn't surely have gone any worse if he had accompanied us and had just s
tarted killing jotuns indiscriminately as soon as he arrived.
I suggested where he should shove his hammer — a similar place, funnily enough, to where I felt Bragi's poem and beard belonged — and Thor looked all set to deck me, and would have if Paddy hadn't played United Nations and got between us and told Thor to go easy on me because I was taking Chopsticks's death very personally. Thor backed down, grumbling, and said that at least his visit to the gnomes had been a success and he'd brought back something of value rather than leaving a corpse behind. At which point I tried to deck him, and it took a combined Herculean effort from Paddy, Cy and Baz to keep me from doing so.
The last person I'd have expected to take me aside for a friendly "what's the matter?" chat was Freya Njorthasdottir. But that was exactly who did, on the eve of Mrs Keener's arrival.
Of course she didn't put a gentle arm round my shoulder and suggest we go for a drink. That wouldn't have been very Freya-like. Instead she came at me out of nowhere, thrust a hunting rifle into my hands — a bolt-action Lee-Enfield with fibreglass stock and thick rubber recoil pad — and loped off into the woods without a backward glance. It took me a moment to realise that, since she was carrying a hunting rifle as well, this meant she wanted me to go with her. At first I thought she was simply dropping a not too subtle hint. Here's a loaded firearm. Go do the decent thing.
I set off after her. I'd been out admiring a spectacular, rather ominous, blood-red sunset, and now dusk was falling, the trees slatting the purple sky. Shadows gathered, smudging the air beneath the pines. Freya set a formidable pace and I had to run full pelt to keep her pale silhouette in sight. Several times I lost her in the gloom and had to resort to following her footprints. They were shallow, often so faint as to be virtually undetectable; she must weigh next to nothing. I recalled Chopsticks informing me, not long before he died, that the Vanir were airy, spirit-like beings. Unlike their junior cousins the Aesir, who were all too physical and fleshy, the Vanir belonged to a loftier order of existence. The word he used for them was "evanescent." Freya's barely-there footprints proved it. That and the way she could move across snow with scarcely a whisper of sound. That time she sneaked up on me at Yggdrasil, I hadn't heard a thing. No wonder she was such a good huntress. Her prey never had a clue she was coming.
Finally — and I'd sort of begun to accept that this would happen — I lost her. Or she lost me. One or the other. Her tracks faded to invisibility, she herself had long ago sprinted out of view, and I was left panting in the depths of the woods, alone.
I leaned against a tree while I caught my breath. Silence descended around me — the utter silence of a snowbound forest. Nothing else like it in the world. Every noise, even your own breathing, deadened. Nature's soundproofed booth.
Which meant the snap of a rifle bolt being racked right behind my head seemed as loud as if the rifle was actually being fired.
I groaned. She'd done it again.
"Nice one," I said without turning round. "You got me. Don't I just feel like a clumsy mortal oaf."
"It was too easy," said Freya. "I couldn't resist."
"So are we going hunting or what?"
"It depends."
"On?"
"Your definition of hunting. And of prey. Look at me."
I did as I was told.
And gaped.
She was stark naked, apart from an amazing, intricate golden necklace. It had to be the one Odin told me about, the one Loki had tried to nick off her. Complicatedly braided.
Not that I was paying the necklace much attention, mind. Stark naked, remember?
"Ah," was all I said. Power of speech all but gone. A babe in the nuddy with a rifle pointed at your head could do that to you.
She was perfect. Not all inflated and plucked like a porn actress. Lean, curvy where it counted, everything in proper proportion, real. The cold air had done to her nipples what her nipples, in turn, were starting to do to my dick. And her skin was smooth and pale, like the snow her feet left hardly any impression in.
She lowered the rifle.
"Well?" she said.
There was heat. Burning breath. Skin flushed pink. Rough bark against my back, then against hers. A handful of hair, gripped so hard it hurt. Tongue thrust into wetness. The pressure of thighs around hips. Gasps rising to screams — cries to startle every animal within a three-mile radius and put it to flight.
She did weigh next to nothing.
Afterwards we meandered back to the castle, rifles slung over our shoulders by their straps, and we talked. I wasn't normally a fan of postcoital chitchat. More the roll-over-and-start-snoring type. But we weren't in bed, and we had distance to cover, and not saying anything would have been awkward. More awkward than talking.
Freya revealed that she wasn't just a hunting goddess, she was a war goddess, a fertility goddess, a goddess of lust…
"In charge of nearly all life's essentials, then," I said. "Unless you're a goddess of pizza as well."
"My attributes haven't always made me popular among my own kind," she said. "I am frank about my needs and appetites."
"So I noticed."
"To earn my necklace" — she patted the front of her anorak, where the golden necklace lay beneath — "I slept with the Brisings, the four gnome brothers who owned it."
"All four at once, or one after another?"
"Does it matter?"
"Kind of. Not necessarily."
"They weren't terribly prepossessing individuals but they made up for it in other ways."
"How?"
"Do I need to spell it out? Let's just say attentive. And generously endowed."
"Gnomes are well hung?"
"Creatures of such poor physical grace and stature must have some redeeming features. It was… a memorable experience."
"Sounds like it."
"Odin was peeved at me, of course. He felt I'd debased myself. Which I had, I suppose." The corners of her mouth turned up as she said this. Here was a girl who didn't mind getting down and dirty every once in a while. As I myself was now well aware. "But if I see something I want, I go for it."
"Including me?"
"Don't think I haven't noticed how you've been staring at me ever since you got here. Particularly at my behind."
"Just appreciating a work of art."
"On the strength of that, I didn't think you'd be in any way unwilling."
"Bang-on there."
"And, in so far as I have a type I prefer, you're it. A warrior. A man of passion. Someone who seldom thinks before he acts. Callous at times. Rugged in manner as well as looks."
"I'll take all that as a compliment."
"It's meant that way. I had a husband once — a roamer, a faraway-eyed dreamer, poetically inclined. His name was Od."
"What was odd about it?"
"No. That was his name. Od. He disappeared one day. Just… wandered off, never to be seen again. I was sad that he went but it taught me that I wasn't suited to be with a man of that sort. My kind of man does not live too much inside his own head. He gets out there. He engages with life. He does."
"Like me. I do."
"I've seen it. We all have. Odin is especially impressed with your quick-wittedness, your decisiveness under pressure. He believes you might just make all the difference in the coming days. You might just tip the scales in our favour."
"Well, I'll try."
"And that's why he's concerned about this state of despondency you've fallen into since coming back from Jotunheim. You're still doing whatever's asked of you, but your heart doesn't seem to be in it any more."
"Hold it," I said, halting. "Before you go on, tell me — did he put you up to this?"
"What? Odin?"
"Did he ask you to get me out here and, you know, jump my bones? Has this just been some kind of sympathy shag to cheer me up? Because if so…"
She raised an eyebrow at me.
"If so…" I repeated, then said, "I don't really mind. It was great either way."
&nb
sp; "Right attitude. And no, this was not the All-Father's idea. It was mine alone. And sympathy does not come into it. My own selfish desires aside, I simply wanted to bring you to your senses, remind you who you are, pull you out of yourself."
I leered. "That, you definitely did."
"Because, Gid, your comrade may have died, but you are still here. And we need you here. We need you fully with us when Ragnarok comes."
"Chops was a good man, though. When I think that Hel's got him now…"
"Has she?" Freya said, arching an eyebrow.
"She hasn't? But isn't that what happens when you die? Hel comes to collect you and drags you off to Niflheim?"
"Did you see her appear over his body?"
"No. I was kind of busy trying not to get killed myself."
"There is another world where the souls of the dead may go."
"What! No one told me that."
"Gimle. High Heaven. The outermost of the Nine Worlds. Hel can claim sinners, those who have acted dishonourably or shamefully in life or have committed heinous crimes."
"I imagine that would include those American black ops guys."
"Yes. But a virtuous man, a blameless man, anyone who has been without taint, even a god, goes to Gimle after death, there to spend eternity in oneness with the glorious light and majesty that lies at the heart of all creation. Was your comrade that sort of man?"
"Dunno. I'd say probably."
"Then there's every chance that that's where he is now — Gimle."
It was a load off my mind, seriously it was, to think that Chopsticks hadn't gone to Niflheim and wasn't suffering a long drawn out erosion of the soul under Hel's cackling gaze. I felt suddenly about ten pounds lighter.
"So how come she got Balder, then?" I said. "Wasn't he, like, the ultimate Aesir? Asgard's answer to Gandhi?"
"It is the greatest of injustices," Freya replied. "She should never have had him. In the wake of Balder's death Odin despatched son after son to Niflheim, to remonstrate with Hel and get her to agree to send Balder on to Gimle. She refused at first, but finally relented. She said she would do as Odin asked."
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