The Valkyrie

by Charlotte Vassell

  “Great, thank you Dionysius.” Fortune said having seen him off “Next is Sigyn of Asgard here to talk about being one of Freya’s handmaidens.” Fortune announced. This was some of the best fun she’d had all week.

  An insipid doormat walked on to the stage. “Um hi all, I’m Sigyn. I’m married to Loki and I am also one of Freya’s handmaidens, so I have it all.” Sigyn laughed through her little speech as if convincing herself “Yeah, so, handmaidens basically plait hair and make sure that Freya’s shoes and dresses match. Oh and we go and buy nail varnish. Um, yeah, we don’t get involved in the war bit just the beauty side.”

  “Too tragic to heckle.” Glory said on a wispy breath. No one heard her nor did they need to. She looked at Sigyn blushing from the room’s attention and felt what she thought might be guilt. She’d read about how the mortals feel guilty when they’ve done something they know they shouldn’t have done, but she wasn’t sure that she was capable of feeling that way. Either way she knew she was ruining Sigyn’s marriage, if she hadn’t ruined it already. After a minute of awkward giggling and silly questions from the audience Sigyn toddled off stage. She looked proud of herself. Undoubtedly she’d been practising in her bathroom mirror for some time.

  Fortune walked back on stage “Fantastic. So our last speaker for this half of the morning is almost interesting, not many spots come up within the Valkyries. So without further ado here is Glory Britannica, commander of elite Valkyrie Unit 401. You may recognise her from World War Two or something else horrid.”

  At this point Glory should have looked lively but instead she sauntered slowly towards the stage. She barely clocked a tall god enter at the back of the hall, but boy did he notice her. Glory looked at the expectant crowd and started making a speech that she most definitely hadn’t Blue Petered and prepared earlier: “Konichiwa bitches. Now I’m not going to lie, most of you look too basic to be anywhere near me. We’re not even recruiting at the moment, Liberty told me to be here and I wanted this morning off to get over my hangover.” At this inopportune moment Glory’s phone went off and her Wagnerian ring tone echoed across the hall. “Hey Valour, why are you ringing me you’re supposed to be pissing about in Asia Minor? You’re still in bed? With who? Seriously. Why? No really why? Are you shitting me? With his tongue? Mate lock that shit down, he’s a unicorn. Does he have any brothers? That has to be an inherited trait? No aw, how cute is his dad? Alright I accept your resignation. You know you don’t have to leave just because you probably got impregnated by an elf last night. Can I be a bridesmaid? I’d look lovely in the photos. Ok sweetheart chat later.” She put her phone down and leaned across the lectern and glared “Right well, so actually I am now hiring. Does anyone have any questions?”

  With leaflet in hand the girl who had failed to befriend Bea stood up and asked “So, if I was a Valkyrie would I have an allowance for shoes like you do if you’re one of Freya’s handmaidens?”

  “Was that a serious question or are you just fucking with me?” Glory asked from on high.

  “Am I fucking with you? Or rather am I fucking you?” said the handsome god who had walked in on the careers seminar for female immortals and lesser goddesses. He was a bit thick, and he was most certainly not a teenaged nymph.

  “Are there any other questions?” Glory asked, ignoring him.

  “Are you wearing sunglasses indoors because you’re too cool or because you did a tonne of MDMA before coming on stage?” Bea asked.

  “Which do you think?” Glory asked.

  “MDMA” Bea asked.

  “Hullo? You still haven’t answered my question.” The handsome god interjected.

  “She clearly is fucking you mate.” Bea said.

  “You’re name?” Glory asked.

  He sighed and said “Thor, come on you know who I am.”

  “Not you, you dumb prick. I’m Bea.”

  “Bea, you’re hired. Thor, what’s wrong with you? There are a couple of your bastards in the third row. Decorum. The poor things probably have enough daddy issues as it is. Have you been watching Love Actually again? Big gestures count for fuck all.” Glory said dropping the mike. She left the stage and gestured at Bea to follow her.

  “Right well wasn’t that lovely. There’s also a feedback form for everyone to fill in with any comments on the seminar and today’s speakers. Please help yourselves to ambrosian biscuits over the break girls.” Fortune had had an amusing morning.

  Admin

  It was the early afternoon and Liberty had sent Honour back to their house in order to start planning for the Second Korean War, while she had carried on back to their office in Valhalla to complete the day’s admin tasks. She had organised inductions, found equipment and filled in nearly all of the requisite forms that any mortal soul needs to properly enter Valhalla. Having changed out of her standard issue uniform Liberty sat at her desk in a blue jersey dress. Now calling it an office was exaggerative, it was nothing more than a group of cubicles. Most mortals had never realised that Ikea made compartmentalised afterlife office furniture as well as Billy bookcases. Liberty looked down at her desk and saw the orange post-it notes, the telephone with a curly chord that every now and then Freya would ring by mistake, and the pot of highlighter pens and biros. She braced herself as she called the next one in to personally explain what the shit had happened to them. Very few mortals really understood what Valhalla was anymore and she usually had to explain it to them very slowly. They had all somehow managed to form these ideas of places with funny names like Purgatory which Liberty couldn’t quite fathom.

  “Is this Heaven?” said a man who had died that day.

  “No” Liberty was getting bored with that conversation.

  “Are you an angel then?”

  “Are you referring to the religious or the Victoria’s Secret sort?”

  “Er, well either I suppose?” he said trying it on. He had never seen any creature as singularly perfect and terrifyingly exquisite as Liberty. If he had have been alive he would have sworn that his heart was about to beat furiously out of his chest in abysmal love. Mercifully he wasn’t alive as that would have been messy and Liberty’s suede shoes were a pretty shade of light blue.

  “Right, well I’m neither. You’ve been barking up the wrong tree there with all that stuff.” Liberty was no longer amused by being hit on by dead squaddies. She had ceased to be amused by them after Napoleon. She was informed by her spread sheet that he used to be a married father of two called Bill.

  “So this is heaven right. If this isn’t heaven I’ll kick off I swear.”

  “Ha, no it’s not but I do understand that you thought that when you die you go to somewhere very different to this and yes I understand that you feel short changed. I get it, I really do. In fact there are multiple afterlives for humans it just depends on the luck of the draw. Spending eternity with Hades for example would be far more tedious than Valhalla. Even out of the Norse afterlife you’ve got it good. You could be stuck with Hel, from the waist down she’s a rotting corpse and she’s a massive Justin Bieber fan. Bizarrely most mortals assume that there is only one ‘God’ but actually there are loads of us. What you might call a pantheon is merely a dysfunctional family unit. If you go back far enough we’re all related the world over anyway.” Liberty said with little conviction.

  “I am not having that, you hear me.”

  “Well I’m afraid that you’re stuck with this aren’t you. Look once you’ve settled in you’ll probably really enjoy yourself. If you’d let me explain how things work here: so by day you train for the war.”

  “Which war?” he said with narrow eyes, interrupting the flow of Liberty’s spiel.

  “The Ragnarok... Oh come on you must know what the Ragnarok is? Well it’s the final war when one of Loki’s sons the savage wolf Fenrir kills Odin and another of his sons, the great serpent Jormungandr, kills Thor only to be finally defeated. Many of the gods will perish as will humanity alongside them, yada, yada, yada. Loki is in cahoots with a
fire giant called Surtr or something. Right? Do you understand? So you’re going to be a foot soldier for this battle.”

  “Oh Odin, Thor and Loki I’ve heard of them, they were in that film with Samuel L. Jackson yeah? Oh Loki was played by that bloke, oh Tom something. My missus loves him.”

  “You’ve slightly missed the mark, this is very real and not a Hollywood blockbuster I can assure you, but that’s close enough for rock ‘n’ roll.” Liberty acknowledged that Marvel’s film franchises had made her job a little bit easier over the last few years.

  “So basically I have to hunt down and kill this Loki bloke. Where can I find him? I may as well go and get it over and done with right?”

  “Well actually he lives next door. Valhalla is basically a sports centre for dead humans within Asgard, the city of the Norse gods. You’ve got Folkvangr in this complex too, which is basically an overspill car park for squaddie souls.”

  “Right so let me get this straight, the god that causes a war and kills most of you lives next door and you lend him cups of sugar when he runs out?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes I’ve pointed this out before to no avail. The Norse are fatalistic. I don’t know why they let Loki live here either. Zero logic. He’s actually quite a nice guy, we go down the pub with him every now and then, but it’s not really your business is it now?” Liberty said as Bill started to look as flustered as a dead man could. “Look, don’t you worry, as I’ve said we’ll train you up. There are added bonuses of course, train by day party by night.”

  “There’s a free bar?”

  “Yes as much mead as you can drink. Mead’s almost Heineken I suppose.”

  “And what about the other benefits?” Bill asked with a glint.

  “What other benefits?” Liberty asked before the coin dropped “Just take this leaflet and fuck off, yeah.” Bill dejectedly wandered out of the cubicle and followed the trail of actual arrows tacked to the walls towards the induction area.

  ***

  Liberty completed her day’s spread sheet before she got a tumbler and bottle of whiskey out of the filing cabinet under her desk where she kept an emergency stash. She looked over towards Honour’s cubicle which was behind hers; the desk was piled high with tomes on military history. She came out of her cubicle and crossed over to where Valour’s and Glory’s were. Valour’s contained very little bar a piece of a paper with something unintelligible scribbled on it anchored by a conch shell paperweight. Glory was the only one who could read Valour’s handwriting. Glory’s on the other hand was full to the brim of all sorts of weird curios, but the only thing of interest to Liberty was her not so secret coke stash. Liberty was getting a dull headache from trying to use her vision. Valour had dipped off her radar during the night and worryingly she couldn’t get a clear picture of her at all. All Liberty could see were some flowers. She picked up her desk phone to ring Val again and as she stood there listening to it ring out and go to voicemail the cool heat hit her. She then rooted around in her bag for five minutes, sifting through all the crap she carried with her, before she found her mobile. There were no calls, no texts and no snapchats from Valour, however there were six missed calls, seventeen texts and forty three snapchats waiting from Apollo. The snapchats ranged from innocuous pictures of the sonnet he had just read that reminded him of her to the less picturesque. Liberty knew she needed to resolve this situation soon without turning into a laurel tree out of desperation.

  Housekeeping

  Glory’s classic (battered) chariot-come-sports car pulled in to the disabled parking bay outside of Valkyrie Unit 401’s official headquarters: a four bedroom terraced house with pebble dashing and a lion shaped door knocker that the girls shared in Hackney. Having hurtled away from the village hall at the speed of light Glory felt the need to clarify a few things for her new protégé Bea who was sitting next to her in the front of the car. Glory was fascinated by Bea, which was highly uncharacteristic of her. The young Bea was both at once so very different and yet so enormously familiar to Glory that it unnerved but captivated her. Bea had the grace of an Olympian but something quicker, sharper and more agile to her. They were all in likelihood related.

  Glory turned the engine off and faced Bea “So I’ve just got a bit of housekeeping before I show you around our digs. Some of the facts I am about to tell you are not to be repeated. We don’t like everyone knowing exactly what we get up and how many strings we’ve been pulling. It’s a matter of safety if nothing else. Now in terms of your employment with us I am legally obliged to inform you of the following:

  1. We don’t really have set hours and are obliged to work whenever required – that isn’t much at the moment, what with mother’s forces done in and everyone else castrated by the UN. It’s so much harder to coax mortals into full on combat nowadays. We have to make do with small skirmishes, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Honour is mightily pissed off; she loves a good naval battle. Has a thing for sailors, she used to write sonnets to Nelson.”

  “Sorry but your mother’s forces?” asked Bea.

  “Oh yeah, my mother is Britannia, you know Last Night of the Proms, bunting and fifty pence pieces? Valkyries technically come under Odin or Freya, as she’s actually the Norse war goddess, but she really doesn’t give a flying fuck under whose name it’s done under as long as she gets her quota sorted and Odin leaves her alone to get her pedicures. So five hundred odd years ago Liberty and I made the executive decision that the most efficient way of hitting our targets would be the development of a few industrialised nation-states with a capitalist bent, Mother’s lot being the easiest to deal with and in close proximity. Mechanised warfare is an administrative godsend.”

  “Ok so the whole age of European Empires was a born out of a bureaucratic necessity?” Bea asked.

  “Yes, we practically ran the world. We coasted through the last century what with the World Wars. We didn’t have to make too much effort since we hit our quotas so early on, but we’re gearing up for another biggie soon.”

  “Doesn’t Odin care that you did all that in someone else’s name and not his?”

  “He brought it up once but then I let him touch my boobs and it’s never come up again.” Glory looked at her nails and thought she’d paint them orange next “Right where were we, ah:

  2. Any contract you enter into with us, once you pass probation, is short term and will last for only one hundred years after which you have the opportunity to renew or walk away.

  3. You don’t actually have a notice period, the contract is really easy to breach and I can’t be bothered with all the forms.

  4. As a junior we will fully train you up to be an expert member of Valkyrie Unit 401.”

  Interrupting Glory’s patter Bea asked “Fortune called you elite?”

  “You really haven’t heard of us? Even after I’ve put in all those years of hard work building a terrible reputation? Mothers tell their children tales of us at night to stop the blighters from misbehaving.” Glory said a little flustered. What was the point in being a badass if no one knew it? “You should know that Unit 401 is the only combative unit of the Valkyries there is. Everyone else just mopes around battlefields. We’re the strategy wing of all of Valhalla’s operations. Neither Odin nor Freya really can be arsed so Liberty does the planning, Honour does the logistics, Valour always dealt with the mortals and I deal with shit on the ground whilst overseeing everything else, with Liberty as second in command. Over the last millennium 64.3% of all conflicts came out of this unit globally, whether the world knows it or not.”

  “Ah cool so I get to blow stuff up?” Bea asked.

  “Oh sweetheart there are actually three blows: blowing shit up, blow jobs and blow coke. This, my young friend, is the life.” Glory was sincere.

  “So what about the other, erm, perks?”

  “Free digs with a mead tap in the kitchen; nice cars; decent armour we commission ourselves from Wayland; oh and you’ll come out the other end of this job with enough of a pro
blem with alcohol that you’re interesting at parties. Do you have any other questions?” Glory asked Bea who just shook her head “Nope, cool. You’ve been to Hackney before right? We like it here, it’s got nice pubs with pool tables but is dicey enough that you might get stabbed and/or raped. Honour says it reminds her of home. Fancy a line before I show you around?”

  As Glory and Bea got out of the car Glory couldn’t help but feel a little twinge of what she thought could be nostalgia. Valour moving out like that and in with her boyfriend felt like the end of an era, it also served to remind Glory of how omnishambolic she was. Not that she felt the need for a boyfriend. She just sometimes – very, very, very occasionally – thought it might be quite nice to have one again. She thought of Loki and considered calling him. She even thought of calling Thor. Calling either of them would achieve nothing. Loki had written his phone number on the top of her thigh as a joke because she never called him when he asked her to and he was adamant that she must have lost his number. Glory couldn’t quite bear to scrub it off just yet. She couldn’t bear to scrub the phone number of a married god that she was screwing off her thigh. That thought would have been sobering had Glory not been so tanked up. That being said the freedom of being a Valkyrie was like nothing else: over the centuries she had seen her cousins reduced to merely maternal consorts or whores. Glory had gotten to do exactly what she had wanted and if anyone objected unreasonably she could always just stab them. She very much liked it that way.

  The pair walked past the rubbish bins. The big green recycling bin was full of empties to the red door. There were cans of ready prepared gin and tonics, Pimm’s that had been drunk neat, and desolate bottles of port were overflowing – Honour demanded they recycle. Glory took out her keys, opened the door and they both walked in to the house and in to another era. On the small wooden table in the hallway were Valour’s old set which she handed over to Bea. They were accompanied by four piles of letters, one for each of the girls. Glory took up Valour’s with the intention of forwarding them on and her own. Of the seven letters in her hand addressed to her six were silly love letters and the other was a bloody invitation from her mother. Bea shut the door behind her with a thud.