The Age Of Odin aog-3

by James Lovegrove

  A few of the frost giants went for the better-part-of-valour option and fled the scene. When others saw this, they panicked and copied them. Soon it was a mass exodus, a thundering stampede for the forest. The frost giants were thoroughly routed. Those that remained — and there weren't many — stood their ground bravely, but our lot swarmed over them, Vidar, Skadi and Freya to the fore. Heimdall contributed from up on the castle turret, sniping until his ammo ran out. Before long, there wasn't a single living frostie to be seen from the castle.

  Our human enemies had observed which way the tide was turning and were beating a hasty retreat of their own. I saw them making for Nagelfar in an unruly herd. Among the bobbing heads was one with a set of peroxide cornrows.

  The blackness in me snarled.

  Cy.

  I sprinted for the scaffold steps, hurdling the near-headless remains of Mrs Keener. My own bullet hadn't been capable of killing her, but Heimdall's certainly had. It was a case of right time, right place, right assassin. The look on the Norns' faces immediately before he fired had said that this was how it was supposed to be. Loki's life was meant to be ended by Asgard's gatekeeper. No one else but Heimdall could close the book on the great trickster. Loki's fate was written that way.

  Freya hailed me as I ran past. I gestured towards Nagelfar, and it was then that I realised I was still holding Bergelmir's knife. My hand was clamped round it, and it dawned on me that I couldn't actually let go even if I wanted to. My skin was stuck fast to the handle.

  Nagelfar's fans started whirring and the ramps began to retract. Airborne dreadnought had just become refugee vessel. I leapt onto the nearest ramp as it rose and scurried up it like a rat up a drainpipe. The door ahead of me was closing, and I heard Freya shouting from the ground below, telling me to jump off, I wasn't going to make it. But I was. I fucking well was.

  I reached the door. It had very nearly slid to. Elongating my body, I daggered through the narrow gap. The door clanged shut.

  Nagelfar then gave a shudder and a lurch. Its entire frame shook mightily as it hoisted itself off from the permafrosted earth.

  There was me aboard, its crew, and a handful of American mercenaries.

  I wasn't bothered about any of them. They could live or die, I didn't give a shit.

  There was only one person on that ship I cared about.

  It was me and Cy now. I was going to find him and kill him, and God help any bastard who got in my way.

  Seventy-Two

  I headed forward to the bridge. It seemed the likeliest place to start looking.

  By the time I got there I'd already run into a few of the bad guys. I couldn't recall precisely what had happened during these encounters. All I knew was that the ice knife was even bloodier than it had been before.

  The bridge was a kind of gallery affair with a broad, curved windscreen overlooking Nagelfar's prow. The five-strong crew were busy arguing as I arrived. One man, clearly the captain, was demanding that a course be set for Svartalfheim. Two pilots, seated at computer-controlled flying stations, disagreed. They were in favour of attacking the people on the ground with Nagelfar's guns. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, they said. There'd never be a chance like this again.

  Voices rose. The captain wasn't managing to assert his authority. The chain of command had broken down, a sure sign of a retreat turning into a shambles.

  I slit the captain's throat in mid-sentence. He was so involved in the argument that he never heard me approach.

  A navigator went next. By that point the two pilots had realised they were in the shit, and decided to go on the offensive with Nagelfar while they still could. Maybe they thought they could hold me to ransom by turning the ship's guns on my comrades. Maybe they thought this would deter me somehow.

  When I was finished with them, I rounded on the fifth man. He was young, a subaltern or some such. Completely bricking it.

  "Can you fly this thing?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "N-no. I'm only a j-junior rating. You n-need two men anyway."

  "So I've effectively crashed us then?"

  He nodded. "Y-yes sir."

  The blackness in me wasn't bothered. The blackness didn't have much interest in self-preservation. That wasn't the way it worked.

  "Oops," I said.

  Thwunk!

  That was the sound of a punch coming out of nowhere, connecting with my skull. My head whiplashed sideways. Neck tendons cracked.

  Thwunk!

  A second punch, even harder than the first. The whole of my right cheek went numb, then suddenly seemed to expand like a piece of popcorn in the microwave, puffing out with pain. I said goodbye to another molar.

  "Whoof!"

  That was the breath being driven from my lungs by a fist ramming into my stomach with the force of a steam piston. The tooth was expelled along with it.

  "Cunt."

  That was Cy, looking down on me as I crawled on all fours at his feet. I was wheezing, and my head was a squall of sirens, my vision wavering as though I was underwater.

  He booted me in the midriff, spinning me over onto my back. I tried to lift the knife. He stamped on my wrist, crushing it to the floor.

  Alarms wailed on the bridge. Red lights whirled and flashed. The deck began tilting beneath us, and I could hear Nagelfar's engines churning asynchronously. The ship was fighting to keep itself in the air, and failing.

  If Cy was at all worried that Nagelfar was going down, he didn't show it.

  "I've been itching to give you a good going over," he said. "Just to prove I'm the better man."

  "Jury's still out on that," I managed to mumble through swelling lips.

  Cy leant down and belted me full in the nose. I felt the snap of bone breaking, an electric jolt all the way up into my sinuses.

  The alarms were getting louder and more strident. The deck was tilting ever more steeply. I could just see the windscreen, and filling it was the bulk of Yggdrasil, canted at a crazy angle. Nagelfar was heading for the World Tree. A computerised voice added itself to the cacophony of warning sounds. "Collision Imminent," it intoned, loud but calm. "Collision Imminent."

  Cy set about pummelling me methodically and relentlessly. In his eyes there was nothing. Only blackness. The same blackness that was in me, the berserker rage that could take you beyond reason, beyond sense, make you fight and want to fight and only ever want to fight.

  Then Nagelfar gave an abrupt lurch, and all at once the deck veered to almost vertical. Cy and I started sliding. We rolled helplessly, limbs tangled. I tried to latch onto something with my free hand on the way down but couldn't. We thumped up against a bulkhead, Cy taking more than his fair share of the impact. I wasn't sure but I thought I heard, above all the ruckus, one of his ribs crack.

  I still had the knife. Had no choice about that. Soon as I'd got my bearings, I stabbed down with it. Cy caught my forearm with both hands and held me off. The blade of the knife had become oddly distended, mottled. Hot blood had melted its surface and then become frozen to it, adhering in blobs and greasy swirls. As far as I could tell, though, the thing was still sharp enough to do what it was supposed to.

  I drove down with all my strength, spare hand pressing on the pommel. Cy continued to resist. The knife point quivered above his mouth, which was wide open in a rictus grimace of strain. I could see all of his teeth, his tongue, even that dangly bit of flesh at the back of his throat. Nagelfar was tipping over even further, not even on its side any more but starting to turn turtle. Yggdrasil's trunk filled the windscreen.

  "Collision Imminent. Collision Imminent."

  "You got Backdoor killed," I growled at Cy. "It wasn't me. You. But know what? Him getting executed bought Heimdall the time he needed. If Backdoor hadn't been blood eagled first, I wouldn't be here now to stick this down your fucking gizzard."

  The knife descended, slowly but surely. The tip was now framed by Cy's teeth. The blackness in his eyes began to be replaced by something else — bright terror.


  "Collision Imminent."

  I put a knee on his chest and dug in with it, managing to locate the fractured rib, or near enough. A noise came out of Cy's throat, a cross between a grunt and a shriek. His grip slackened, just for a split second, and I rammed the knife all the way home. I felt the soft pressure of the blade slicing meat, splitting his tongue down the middle. Then the firmer pressure of the top of the blade grinding against his palate.

  With the pain of his mouth being carved open came a sense of inevitability. Cy knew he couldn't win any more. He couldn't survive this.

  Resignation entered his gaze, and now the knife point was piercing the back of his throat, sinking in deep. Blood frothed up. His body started to go into convulsions. His eyes rolled up in their sockets.

  "Collision — "

  No longer imminent.

  Nagelfar, all but upside down, plunged prow first into Yggdrasil. The crash sent me somersaulting rearwards. My hand was torn from the ice knife, which was firmly embedded in Cy's jaws. Skin ripped free, but that was the least of my concerns. Huge branches punched through the windscreen, shattering it to smithereens. An immense hollow groan was either metal tearing or the World Tree crying out, I wasn't sure which. Nagelfar bore down on Yggdrasil, and there was a profound, resonant cre-e-e-eak like nothing I'd ever heard, the sound of timber splintering, magnified a thousandfold, as though an entire forest was being flattened in one fell swoop. All I could do was lie in a helpless heap against an inner wall as the inverted ship rode the breaking Yggdrasil, the two massive objects toppling together like exhausted wrestlers in a clinch.

  When they fell, all was darkness.

  After they fell, all was silence.

  In the darkness and silence, I was alone.

  There was nothing.

  Only me.

  Adrift.

  Isolated.

  Enclosed.

  And then…

  …light.

  A tiny glimmer of it. A twinkle, like a distant blue star.

  And someone saying my name.

  "Gid."

  Someone I knew.

  "Gid. Wake up."

  Someone who was dead.

  "Listen, you've got to wake up."

  Abortion.

  "They're on their way. I got a signal. Had to go all the way back up to the road to get it, but I got one. They said keep you conscious, don't let you nod off. They said they won't be long. I think it's a chopper that's coming."

  The light, a mobile phone screen.

  "That's it, keep those eyes open. We're going to be okay, Gid. They're coming. We're going to be okay."

  Seventy-Three

  So there I was, in hospital, in a corner bay in a six-bed ward, woozy with super-strength painkillers but too wired to sleep, waiting for the dawn to come and with it, hopefully, some enlightenment, some certainty.

  All I had to keep me company through the dark was the mumbling and snuffling of the other patients in the ward, and my own confusion. Questions swirled, and questions within questions, and I struggled to make sense of them.

  I was prepared to accept that everything I believed had happened, hadn't. I could live with the idea of it all being just a delusion. Asgard, Odin, Thor, Loki, frost giants, trolls, the battles, the lot — just events conjured up in my brain during the time it took for Abortion to leave the crumpled car, climb the slope, make the 999 call and come back down. What had seemed to be weeks of my life had taken place in a few minutes, a full-length narrative unfurling at lightning speed in my head while I'd been suspended upside down inside the Astra. I'd been hovering in and out of consciousness, perhaps even on the verge of slipping into a coma, and my mind, prompted by various cues, had chosen to play out a complex fantasy of war and death amid the snow and ice of other worlds.

  A dream, in other words. A vivid hallucination I'd lapsed into, somewhere in the depths of myself, somewhere where I no longer had control over what I was thinking. I'd created an action movie featuring the Norse gods, with myself as the star and a major supporting role for one very famous real-world personality. It had been exhilarating, scary, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes illogical, like any good action movie. There'd even been a romantic subplot, the leading man winning over the gorgeous love interest in spite of her initial frostiness towards him. All the elements that made for an entertaining couple of hours down at the local multiplex, or perhaps an evening in with a rental DVD.

  I could happily go along with writing it off as nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

  Except…

  How come it had felt so real?

  There had been pain. Lots of it. There had been danger that had had me sincerely fearing for my life. And that wasn't all. The biting cold. The trolls and their noxious smells. The angst of watching people I liked getting brutally killed. All experiences that were too harsh, too diamond-sharp, to be purely imaginary. I could recall, without any difficulty, the sensation of the wolf's teeth sinking into my wrist, the way the issgeisl shivered in my hands when Hval the Bald struck it with his, the feel of my skin tearing off on the handle of Bergelmir's ice knife… How was it possible I knew exactly what it was like to undergo such things, in the finest detail, unless I really had?

  So, what if it hadn't been a dream? What then?

  Suppose I'd died in that car, just for a few moments, and my soul, spirit, essence, call it what you will, had travelled elsewhere?

  It wasn't the least bit plausible. But just suppose.

  There were a few clues to support this theory. Bergelmir had mentioned the Einherjar, Odin's army of "heroic dead." Say I'd been one of them, if only briefly. Say I'd transmigrated — fancy word I remembered from RI lessons at school — and found myself caught up in an escalating battle between good and evil. It made a kind of sense, if you believed in that sort of stuff.

  Another possibility was that, while out cold, I'd tapped into some hidden motherlode of mythology. Bragi had talked about the Norse gods being embedded in all human psyches, implying that their adventures were a part of our core programming, hardwired into us whether we realised it or not. More than merely dreaming, I'd accessed some inner database and discovered a whole bunch of stories there, which I'd then interacted with, writing myself into the narrative and even giving myself a pivotal role because, well, because why not? Like David Copperfield, we all wanted to be the heroes of our own lives, didn't we?

  Or — how about this? — what if it had been a combination of the two? On some level I'd been aware that I was dying, or near death at any rate, and come up with a lucid, fictional way of visualising my struggle not to give in, my fight to live. It would explain why the Norns' videotape of my life stopped at the car crash. It also would account for Odin's comment about every death being "an apocalypse on a personal scale," for each of us our "very own Ragnarok." My characters making subtle, sidelong hints at my true predicament.

  The bloke in the bed next to me moaned in his sleep and asked someone called Sonia if she'd remembered to put the cat out.

  The night wore on. I longed for some kind of definitive answer to my musings. I wished I could know for sure, one way or the other, whether I'd genuinely fought alongside gods at the Viking end-of-all-that-is or simply been an accident victim having a bit of a funny turn.

  Whichever way I looked at it, I did have one major regret. I hadn't had the chance to say a proper goodbye to Freya. I'd met my ideal woman, had had to abandon her, and had no way of getting back in touch with her. It was a terrific shame. If I thought about it too hard, I began to feel an ache inside, a yawning sorrow. So I tried to put it out of my mind.

  If anything good was to come from the whole episode, it was the realisation that I should try harder with Cody. Face it, who had I been thinking of — the only person I'd been thinking of — when I was about to be blood eagled? He and I were estranged, but we needn't be strangers. I resolved to make an effort, try and see him more often, not just leave the raising of him to Gen and Roz. It wasn't too
late to re-establish myself in his life. I'd have to be patient, take it one step at a time, but if he was willing, I'd gladly meet him more than halfway. I wasn't the All-Father but I could still be a father.

  Next Bed Man was now muttering about whose turn it was to do the dishes. Such prosaic dreams the man was having. I should be so lucky.

  In the crack in the curtains the night sky began to lighten, turning oyster grey. I could hear the hospital stirring and waking up — hushed voices, squeaky footfalls in corridors, things being placed clatteringly on trays. Soon, daylight was silvering the snow-laced branches of the tree immediately outside the ward window — some species of evergreen. The zigzag redbrick horizons of a northern city stretched beyond.

  At about half past seven, as breakfast was being brought round, Abortion came skidding into the ward, all flushed and excited.

  "Gid! Gid! You're awake. Good. You've got to see this."

  "'How are you doing, Gid?' 'Oh, fine, mate, thanks for asking. Not too badly injured in the crash you caused.' 'Yeah, sorry about that. A thousand pardons.' 'That's all right. You came out of it unscathed, that's all that matters.' 'Yeah, that was pretty lucky, I thought.'"

  "Later," Abortion said blithely. "You can have a go at me later, any time. Right now, you have to see the news. I was watching in the waiting lounge, where I've been all night, incidentally, sitting up while you've been all cosy in bed."

  "You can't guilt me, so don't even try."

  He grabbed the bedside TV set, swung it round on its arm, and switched it on.

  "Whoa, steady," I said. "They charge a fortune for that."

  "I know, but this is big."

  And it was big. Every channel was carrying the story. All other programming had been suspended.

  "…and once again, our breaking news this morning," said a sombre newscaster. "Lois Keener, President of the United States of America, has suddenly and unexpectedly died. Mrs Keener was at work in the Oval Office when she suffered what appears to have been a massive stroke. In a statement, Vice-President Bennewitz — now acting president — has confirmed that this was the probable cause of death, pending an official autopsy report. Beyond that, few details are known."