Expecting Someone Taller

by Tom Holt

‘I’d better be careful, then,’ said Malcolm. ‘I’ve become very stuffy since . . .’

  ‘That’s not your fault,’ said the Rhinedaughter.

  ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ said Malcolm. ‘Fraternising with the enemy.’

  ‘I’m not really the enemy, am I?’ Flosshilde smiled, but it wasn’t a serious smile, just a movement of the lips intended to convey friendliness. Malcolm was intrigued.

  ‘I mean, you’re not going to give me the Ring, and why should you? That doesn’t mean I hate you.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Woglinde burst out crying.’

  ‘She does that,’ said Flosshilde. ‘She’s very bad-tempered. I’ll tell her to leave you alone.’

  ‘Would you?’ Malcolm felt a strange sensation at the back of his head, a sort of numbness. He hadn’t chatted like this to anyone for a long time.

  ‘Are you staying in England long?’ he asked, trying to sound uninterested.

  Flosshilde grinned. ‘If you like. It’s the same for us, you know. We’re all in the same boat. Of course, I’ve got the other two for company, but you know what it’s like with sisters. They get on your nerves.’

  ‘I know, I’ve got a sister.’

  ‘Then we’ll be company for each other,’ Flosshilde said. ‘I mean, we can go for drives in the country, or maybe take a boat up the river.’

  Malcolm remembered Hagen, and said he didn’t like boats.

  ‘Won’t your sisters mind?’ he added nervously.

  ‘Oh bother them,’ said Flosshilde. ‘Besides, I can tell them I’m working on you.’

  ‘Will you be?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ said Flosshilde, carefully not smiling. ‘Now, why don’t you buy me lunch? I’m starving.’

  Malcolm drove back to Combe Hall in a rather bewildered frame of mind, and nearly rammed a flock of sheep outside Bagborough. Over lunch, Flosshilde hadn’t mentioned the Ring once, except in passing (she knew some very funny stories about the Gods, especially Wotan) and seemed to be making no effort at all to lead him to his doom. That, of course, might simply mean that she was being subtle; but Malcolm had taken the precaution of reading her thoughts, and although he knew that one shouldn’t believe everything you read in people’s minds, he had been rather taken aback by what he had found. Of course, it was possible that she had deliberately planted those thoughts there for him to read, but somehow he didn’t think so.

  It seemed that Flosshilde had reconciled herself to the fact that the Ring wasn’t going to be given to her, and she didn’t really mind. Instead, she rather liked the Ring-Bearer. Nothing more than that, but never mind. Nor was it simply his assumed shape that she liked; she had seen that shape before when it had had the original Siegfried inside it, and besides, she didn’t judge by appearances. That, it seemed, was not the way these curious other-worldly types went about things, for in the world they inhabited, so many people could change shape as easily as human beings changed clothes, and so you could never be sure whether a person was really handsome or simply smartly dressed. Flosshilde, however, thought that she and the Ring-Bearer might have something in common, and she wanted someone nice to talk to and go out with. There had been more than this, but Malcolm hadn’t read it. He was saving it up, to read over lunch tomorrow . . .

  ‘Well?’ said Woglinde. ‘And where have you been?’

  ‘Having lunch,’ said Flosshilde, ‘at Carey’s.’

  ‘But you haven’t got it?’ said Wellgunde abruptly.

  ‘True.’ Flosshilde lay back on the bed of the Tone and blew bubbles. ‘But who cares?’

  Wellgunde stared at her sister, who closed her eyes and let out a rather exaggerated sigh. ‘I think I’m in love,’ said Flosshilde.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Wellgunde. ‘You can’t be. You aren’t allowed to be.’

  ‘Oh, all right then, I’m not. But the next best thing. Or the next best thing to that. He’s nice, in a quiet sort of way.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ said Woglinde, fiercely; but Wellgunde smiled, confusing a shoal of minnows who happened to get in the way. ‘If it makes it easier for you to get the Ring,’ she said softly, ‘then you go ahead.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the silly old Ring,’ yawned Flosshilde. ‘It’s supremely unimportant.’

  Wellgunde nodded. ‘Of course. But it would be nicer to have it than not to have it, now wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And there’s no point in your liking him if he doesn’t like you.’

  Flosshilde made a vague grab at a passing roach, which scuttled away. ‘I don’t know. Is there?’

  ‘And if he likes you, he’ll be pleased to give you the Ring, now won’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ replied Flosshilde. ‘We’re just good friends.’

  ‘You’ve only met him once,’ said Woglinde. ‘There’s no need to get soppy.’

  ‘There’s every need to get soppy. I like being soppy. What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Trout with almonds,’ said Wellgunde.

  ‘Not fish again.’

  Wellgunde perched on the edge of a broken wardrobe, one of many that furnished the riverbed. ‘Nobody says you shouldn’t make friends,’ she said gently. ‘But what about us? We want our Ring back.’

  ‘Once you’ve got it back, you can be friends with who you like,’ said Woglinde, inspecting her toenails, ‘though personally . . . They need doing again,’ she added. ‘There’s something nasty in this river that dissolves coral pink.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, both of you,’ said Flosshilde angrily. ‘I’m sorry I told you now.’

  There was silence at the bottom of the Tone for a while with both Flosshilde and Woglinde sulking. Finally Woglinde requested Wellgunde to ask her sister Flosshilde if she could borrow her coral pink nail varnish, and Flosshilde asked Wellgunde to tell her sister Woglinde that she couldn’t.

  ‘Be like that,’ said Woglinde. ‘See if I care.’

  Flosshilde jumped up and floated to the surface.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ hissed Wellgunde. ‘You’ve offended her.’

  ‘She isn’t really in love, is she?’ asked Woglinde nervously. ‘That would be terrible.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s just in one of her moods.’

  ‘What’ll we do?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Wellgunde calmly. ‘Leave her to me.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said Wotan, putting down his fork with a bang, ‘what do you want now?’

  ‘Sorry,’ panted Loge, breathless and sopping wet. ‘I didn’t realise you were still having breakfast.’

  Wotan smiled wanly. ‘Raining outside, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Loge. ‘Very heavily.’

  ‘So what was so important it couldn’t wait?’

  ‘I think I’m on to something,’ said Loge, sinking into a chair. The dining-room of Valhalla, the castle built by Fasolt and Fafner for the King of the Gods, was furnished in spartan but functional style. It had that air of grim and relentless spotlessness that is described as a woman’s touch.

  The Lord of Tempests looked at him suspiciously. ‘If this turns out to be another wild goose chase,’ he said, ‘I’ll turn you into a reservoir and stock you with rainbow trout.’

  Loge shuddered. ‘I’m sure there’s something in this,’ he managed to say. ‘The ravens have sighted Alberich, and . . .’

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer your guest a cup of coffee?’ Schwertleite the Valkyrie had come in with a crumb-brush and was ostentatiously brushing the table. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t bring work home with you.’

  Wotan turned and glowered at his daughter, who took no notice. ‘And ask him not to put his briefcase on the table.’

  The Valkyrie swept out, and Wotan turned the full force of his glare on Loge. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘You’ve sta
rted her off.’

  ‘But the ravens have seen Alberich and the Rhinedaughters, and they’re in this village in England called . . .’

  Schwertleite came back into the room with a bundle of newspapers in her arms. ‘Ask your friend to sit on these,’ she said sharply. ‘I’ve just had those covers cleaned, although why I bother, I don’t know.’

  ‘Now you see what I have to put up with,’ whispered Wotan. ‘What’s this about Alberich and the Rhinedaughters?’

  Loge, perched uncomfortably on a pile of back numbers of Die Zeit, started to explain, but before he could get very far, the Valkyrie Grimgerde stalked into the room with a pot of coffee. She had resented making it and it would just be left to get cold, but she had made it all the same. ‘I’m doing you some scrambled eggs,’ she said accusingly to Loge.

  ‘Please, don’t bother.’

  ‘I’ve started now,’ replied Grimgerde impatiently.

  Loge was about to say thank you, but the Valkyrie had gone back into the kitchen. Almost at once, Schwertleite reappeared, with her arms folded.

  ‘There are footmarks all over the kitchen floor,’ she said icily. ‘Have you been tracking in and out?’

  Before Wotan could reply, she too had gone. Wotan’s daughters had a habit of asking leading questions and disappearing before anyone could answer them. They had been doing it for over a thousand years, but it was still profoundly irritating.

  ‘. . . in a little village called Combe,’ said Loge, ‘which is in Somerset. Now why else . . . ?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Wotan hadn’t been listening.

  Loge took a deep breath, but could get no further. The Valkyrie Waltraute had come in with a plate of scrambled eggs. ‘As if I didn’t have enough to do,’ she said, slamming the plate down. ‘And mind the tablecloth.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Loge.

  ‘I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,’ Wotan muttered when she had gone. ‘None of my daughters can cook, although God knows it doesn’t stop them. I can cook but I’m not allowed in the kitchen.’

  Desperately, Loge wondered what to do so as to offend neither the Thunderer nor his daughters. He picked some scrambled egg up on his fork, but did not put it in his mouth.

  ‘I’ve been putting up with this for eleven centuries,’ continued Wotan. ‘Much more of it and I shall go quite mad.’

  ‘The ravens,’ said Loge for the fourth time, ‘have found Alberich and the Rhinedaughters, hanging around in a little village in . . .’

  ‘It all started when their mother left me,’ continued Wotan, ‘and was I glad to see the back of her. But my dear daughters, all nine of them, decided that I needed looking after. They didn’t want to, of course. They all wanted to have careers and lives of their own. I wanted them to have careers and lives of their own, preferably in another hemisphere. ’

  As if to prove his point, the Valkyrie Waltraute came storming in. ‘You’ve been eating the bread again, haven’t you?’ she said bitterly.

  ‘That’s what it’s there for.’

  ‘You’ve started a new loaf when there was half a loaf left in the breadbin. Now I suppose I’ll have to throw it out for the ravens.’

  ‘Half a loaf is better than no bread,’ Wotan roared after her as she stalked out again. A futile gesture. The Father of Battles banged his fist on the table, upsetting a coffee cup. A deep brown patch appeared on the tablecloth and Wotan turned white.

  ‘You did that,’ he said to Loge. ‘If they ask, you did that. I’ve got to live in this house.’

  Loge, whose titles include the Father of Lies, was not too keen on this particular falsehood, but the alternative was probably metamorphosis into a disused canal. He nodded meekly.

  ‘So we’ve all been stuck in this wretched great bam of a place, miles from anywhere, driving each other mad for a thousand years,’ said the King of the Gods. ‘They hate it as much as I do, but they’ll never move.’

  ‘At least there are only eight of them now,’ said Loge. ‘It must have been far worse when Brunnhilde was . . .’

  Loge fell silent, terrified lest his lack of tact should arouse Wotan’s anger. But Wotan only laughed. ‘You must be joking,’ he said. Imagine my delight when I’d finally managed to get one of them off my hands - and no question, Brunnhilde was the worst - and I thought that perhaps they’d all go away and at last I’d be allowed to wear my comfortable shoes in the dining-room. I fixed that miserable child up with Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer, the most marvellous man who ever lived. And look what she did to him.’

  Loge nodded sympathetically; tact was all that stood between him and a future in fish-farming.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Wotan, ‘he was lucky. Imagine what it would have been like being married to her. Give me a spear in the small of the back any day.’ The Lord of the Ravens shook his head sadly. ‘They blame me, of course. They blame me for everything. The only people in the world who aren’t entitled to.’

  ‘About the Rhinedaughters,’ suggested Loge.

  ‘Ask them to do anything useful, of course, and you get bad temper all day long. No, my family is a great trial to me, and I am a great trial to my family. If I had my time over again . . .’

  ‘The Hoover’s broken,’ said Waltraute, appearing in the doorway. ‘I suppose I’ll have to do the stairs with a dustpan and brush.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you will.’ Wotan stood up, his one eye flashing. ‘You’ll enjoy doing that.’

  He strode through the long corridors of Valhalla with Loge trotting at his heels like a terrified whippet, while all around him there came the calls of the Valkyries, informing him of further domestic disasters, until the vaulted ceiling that the Giants had built re-echoed with the sound.

  ‘England, did you say?’ whispered Wotan.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Wotan. ‘Let’s go there straight away.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Wotan, ‘I don’t quite know how we’re going to tackle this one.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just rush him?’ Loge suggested. ‘I’ll hold his arms while you get the Ring off him.’

  They stood and looked up at the electrically-operated gates of the Hall. A gardener in a smart new boiler suit walked up to them, holding a rake.

  ‘You can’t park there,’ he said.

  The long, sleek Mercedes limousine was blocking the driveway. Wotan stared at the gardener, who took no notice.

  ‘Move it, or I’ll call the police,’ said the gardener. ‘I’ve told you once.’

  ‘Certainly, right away,’ muttered Loge. There was no point in causing unnecessary trouble. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ said Wotan, as they walked up from the village green, where they had parked the car. ‘I tried closing up his lungs to make it hard for him to breathe, but it didn’t work. We’re too near the Ring-Bearer’s seat of power to be able to achieve anything by force. I imagine that idiot was under his protection.’

  Wotan stopped and studied the gates.

  ‘There’s no way through there by violence,’ he said. ‘We must be clever.’

  For some reason or other, Loge had a horrible feeling that by We, Wotan meant him. ‘What do you have in mind?’ he asked.

  ‘There are many things in the world that mortal men fear more than the Gods,’ said Wotan, airily. ‘I think it’s about time that the Ring-Bearer was brought down to earth. He’s a human being, not a God, and he’s a citizen of a twentieth-century democracy.’ Wotan chuckled. ‘The poor bastard.’

  Malcolm was feeling happier than he had for some considerable time. He had just had lunch with a remarkably pretty girl, he was going to have lunch with her tomorrow, and, best of all, his secretary had just told him that she was going to take her annual holiday in a week’s time. She was, needless to say, going to the Cotswolds. Malcolm thought that they would probably make her an honorary member.

  So, when the English Rose came knocking on his door at four o’clock, he expected nothing worse than a recital of her holiday plans. He
draped a smile over his face and asked her what he could do for her.

  ‘There’s a man downstairs,’ she said, ‘from the Government.’

  Given what he had been doing since he acquired the Ring, it was understandable that Malcolm misunderstood this statement. He expected to find a humble messenger imploring him to take over the reins of State, or at least to accept a peerage. What he found was a sharp-faced individual in a dark grey suit with a briefcase.

  ‘Herr Finger,’ said the intruder, ‘I’m from Customs and Excise. We’re making inquiries about illicit gold dealing.’

  For a moment, Malcolm forgot who he had become, and his blood froze. Like all respectable people, he knew that he was guilty of something, although what it was he could not say; and the arrival of a representative of the Main Cop only confirmed his suspicions.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he stammered.

  ‘About a month ago, a considerable sum of money in used currency notes was removed from the vaults of the Bank of England. Similar - withdrawals, shall we say? - were made from state banks all over the world. At the same time, large quantities of gold made an inexplicable appearance in the same vaults. Have you any comment, Herr Finger?’

  Malcolm was too frightened to speak, and simply shook his head.

  ‘On close examination, the gold was found to be part of a consignment supplied by a certain . . .’ the man paused, as if choosing the right word ‘. . . a certain underground movement,’ he continued, ‘to a subversive organisation, based in this country but with international links. This organisation has been secretly undermining the fabric of society for some time, Herr Finger.’

  ‘Has it?’ Malcolm’s throat was dry.

  ‘It most certainly has. And our investigations have led us to the conclusion . . .’

  Malcolm, who for the last twenty-five years had done little in the evenings except watch the television, knew what was coming next. There was no point in running. Faceless men in lounge suits were probably aiming rifles at him at this very moment.

  ‘. . . that you have some connection with this - this subversive ring.’