Odds and Gods Read online

  He was going to have his work cut out this time, though. On the other hand, he was a god; and to the gods, all things are possible, at least in theory. Thus it was that when the emergency repair squad broke into the reactor cell three days later, wearing their lead suits and clinging like covetous limpets to their lucky rabbits’ feet, their Geiger counters showed up a radiation level several points below the normal ambient reading.

  What they did find was a toasting fork, an unopened pat of butter and five stone cold baked potatoes.

  There are some people who like lawyers.

  For example, Ashtoreth, the antediluvian moon goddess of southern Palestine, was thrilled to bits when her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-godson Hyman was made a partner in the leading New York firm of Kaplan and Hart, and drove the other occupants of Sunflower Annexe to the brink of violence by talking loudly and incessantly about Her Godson Hymie, The Lawyer.

  Other deities with whom lawyers are popular include: Ahriman, the Father of Darkness; Hermes, patron god of thieves; the Scandinavian Loki, god of lies and deceit; and Belenos, in whose honour the Druids burnt men alive in wicker cages. You can’t beat a lawyer, according to Belenos, for the generation of plenty of hot air.

  Osiris, for his part, had always reckoned that he could take them or leave them alone, with a marked preference for the latter option. Visits from his current godson were therefore as welcome as a rat in a morgue.

  And that, he felt, remembering where he was, is no bad analogy. I really shouldn’t be in this place. Hellfire, if only the dozy old bat hadn’t had the exploded diagram the wrong way up the last night we did the reassembly, I wouldn’t be. I’d be out there, bombarding snotty little tykes like Julian with meteorites.

  ‘How do, Julian,’ he said, as his godson entered the room. ‘Brought me some grapes, then.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Can’t stand grapes.’

  ‘No matter.’ There was a gonglike sound as the bag of grapes hit the bottom of the tin wastepaper basket. ‘Look, I’ve got to be quick, I’m due in a meeting in forty minutes. How’s life treating you, anyway?’

  Osiris paused, stroking his chin. ‘Life,’ he pronounced, ‘is a bit like mashed swede. A little bit’s nice for a change now and then, but you wouldn’t want to live on it.’

  ‘Yup.’ Julian stared at him for a few seconds and blinked twice. ‘The leg still playing you up, then?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to write it down?’

  ‘Write what down?’

  ‘What I just said,’ replied Osiris testily. ‘That was a Teaching, that was. You’re supposed to write down Teachings.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘And don’t give me that boiled cod look, because there’s been dafter things than that said out of burning bushes, take it from me. How’s Phyllida?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your wife.’

  ‘Oh.’ Julian glanced at his watch. ‘Fine. I’d have heard if she wasn’t. Look, I hate to rush off like this but it really is a very important meeting . . .’

  ‘And Ben? And little Julia?’

  ‘They’re fine too. Ask after you all the time. Anyway, it’s been great seeing you.’

  ‘Your children,’ said Osiris icily, ‘are in fact called Emma and Clinton. Keeping busy, are you?’

  ‘Yup, thanks. It’s been an uphill job, holistically speaking, with the recession bottoming out, but the medium- to long-term overview of our bedrock client base is definitely more positive than negative, and . . .’

  ‘Just remind me,’ said Osiris, ‘what it is you do.’

  Julian sighed. ‘I’m a lawyer, Oz,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh,’ said Osiris. ‘Oh well, never mind. You’ve just got to try not to give up hope, that’s all. I heard a good joke about lawyers the other day.’

  ‘I know them all, thanks, Oz. Look, I’ll call you. You look after yourself. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, okay?’

  ‘Son,’ replied Osiris with conviction, ‘I wouldn’t do anything you would. Shut the door on your way out.’

  Julian looked at him. ‘You feeling okay, Oz?’ he asked.

  Osiris looked up, startled by his tone of voice. ‘I believe so,’ he replied. ‘As well as can be expected for someone whose small intestine now runs slap bang through the middle of his bile duct. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Julian replied absently, as he picked at the handle of his briefcase. ‘You just seem kind of odd today, that’s all.’

  ‘Odd. Right.’

  ‘Not quite, you know, a hundred and ten per cent.’

  ‘Julian, my boy, if I was a hundred and ten per cent, there’d be a seven-and-a-quarter-inch-high replica of me standing beside me on the hearthrug. Go on, now, sling your hook.’

  ‘You haven’t been, for example, hearing strange voices or anything?’

  ‘Yes,’ Osiris snapped, ‘yours. Now piss off.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Same time next week, right?’

  ‘Right.’ Osiris sighed. ‘Unless, of course, I’m in a meeting. The doorknob is the round brass thing about three feet up from the floor. A half-turn to the right usually does the trick.’

  As Julian retreated down the corridor, he played back his mental tape of the interview, ignoring the crackles. Yes, the old fool had sounded strange; but on reflection, no stranger than usual.

  Hey!

  Julian stopped, standing on one foot; and suddenly grinned.

  He’d just had an idea.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Once, long ago and far away, a bard sang in the mead-hall of King Hrolf Kraki.

  There was dead silence from the King’s warriors, his carls and servants as the poet traced the intricate pathways of kenning and metaphor, trope and simile, in the still, tense circle of the tawny glow of the hearth. Nobody moved, and the dark yellow mead glistened untasted in the drinkhorns, as the words of the lay sparkled in the air like frozen dewdrops on a spider’s web. This moment, this splinter of time, caught like a fly in amber, mounted in a ring of golden firelight.

  It was an old song, so old that nobody knew where it had come from or when it had first been sung. It began at the beginning, when Ymir the Sky-Father had first opened his eyes and seen nothing, nothing but the cold and the wind and the loneliness of the first day. On it swept, gathering pace as the singer peopled the shadowy corners with ghosts: Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer; Arvarodd, who once strayed into the land of the Giants; Weyland the craftsman without equal, whose skill brought him only sorrow; Brynhild, who slept for a thousand years on the fire-girt mountain. And now it crawled on to its terrible end, this song without pity, under the control of no singer; the last days, the rising of the Frost-Trolls, the swallowing of the sun and moon by the Wolf, the last battle on the Glittering Plains, the going-down of the gods themselves. As the poet sang, the world seemed to grow tight and brittle, and King Hrolf nervously motioned for more logs to be heaped on the fire.

  And then the poet told of the new dawn of the gods; how they rise again from the ashes of the burnt Valhalla and build a new castle that will never be thrown down, a shimmering, sublime fortress of golden stone where Odin and Thor and Tyr the One-Handed and Frey, who is the friend of wretched mortals, will reign for ever, feasting and delighting in the song and restoring vintage traction engines. And there will be no more winters in this . . .

  ‘Doing what?’

  The poet shut his eyes. For one blessed moment he thought he’d actually got away with it.

  ‘Um,’ he said, ‘restoring vintage traction engines. And no more shall hoar-frost fasten on hawthorn . . .’

  ‘Vintage what?’

  Sod, fuck and bugger this stupid, lousy song, muttered the poet to himself. Because some bastard always stops me and asks What’s a traction engine? and I don’t sodding well know. And neither did my father nor his father before him, and does it really bloody well matter anyway?

  ‘Traction engines. I think they’re, um, things that gods sort o
f, well, restore.’

  King Hrolf leaned forward, gathering the cowl of the poet’s hood in his frying-pan-broad fist. ‘Are you,’ he growled, ‘taking the piss?’

  ‘No, honestly, that’s what it says in the song, and . . .’

  ‘The last one of you clowns,’ the King went on, knitting his brows into something like a long, scraggy thorn wind-brake, ‘who thought he could come here taking the piss . . .’ The King’s face melted into a savage grin. ‘Thorfinn, tell this ponce what happened to that other ponce, will you?’

  Thorfinn, whose eyebrows were slightly less bushy than his lord’s but would nevertheless have made ideal starter-homes for discerning partridges, obliged. Usually a man of few words, he seemed to strike a vein of eloquence that would have allowed the poet to jack in minstrelsy and open a nice little newsagent’s shop somewhere quiet.

  ‘. . . Right up his jacksy, and then set fire to it. Talk about a pong, we had to have the roof off in the end, and you still get a taste of it when the wind blows in from the fjord. Was that the one you meant, chief?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  The poet twitched. ‘Honest,’ he said, ‘it really and truly says traction engines. Do I look like the sort of bloke who could make up a thing like that?’

  There was a long, horrible silence; and then King Hrolf smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘right. Traction engines. That’s where you get two bits of rope and a winch and you tie one rope to the bloke’s ankles and the other round his neck, and you - yes, got you, fine. Just the sort of thing you’d want in Valhalla, for when it’s raining out. Sorry, you were saying?’

  Twelve hundred years later, it’s safe to point out that Hrolf had got it all wrong. By traction engines, the primeval bard had meant big steam-powered locomotives with lots of shiny brass handles and valves and tappets and bright green paint. Or rather, to be precise, one such machine.

  She was called Pride of Midgarth, and right now she had just emerged from under a layer of old dustbin liners and potato sacks in the big coalshed round the back of Sunnyvoyde. It had taken a millennium of painstaking effort to get her looking the way she did now; which was a right mess.

  ‘I told you,’ said Thor, taking a step backwards. ‘Wait till the first coat’s completely dry before you bung on the second, otherwise it’s going to smear. But no, someone had to know best.’

  Odin scratched his head. ‘The paint must have been no good,’ he said. ‘I told you, just because it’s cheap . . .’

  ‘Nothing wrong with army surplus paint,’ Thor replied. ‘Provided,’ he added irritably, ‘it’s allowed to dry properly. Provided some great jessie doesn’t go slapping a second coat on while the first’s still tacky.’

  ‘I think it looks rather nice,’ said Frey, absently chewing a peppermint. ‘Sort of dappled.’

  Thor ignored him. ‘It’ll have to come off,’ he said. ‘Strip it right down all over again, then go over it top to bottom with wire wool and Trike, and then back to square one. God, what a waste of bloody time!’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ replied Odin mildly. ‘We could always—’

  ‘Look, pillock,’ Thor interrupted, ‘it’s my bloody engine, we’ll do what I say just for once. Before you ruin it completely.’

  Odin shrugged. It was indeed Thor’s engine, and always had been. Two thousand years ago it had been the chariot of the thunder, on which the Lord of Tempests rode across the sky on his way to do battle with the Frost-Trolls. One thousand nine hundred and fifty years ago this Wednesday fortnight, however, it had popped a gasket in the upper inlet manifold, flooded the outer compression chamber and seized the main driveshaft bearing solid on the integral cam. After belting it around with his hammer and using a certain amount of intemperate language, Thor had dumped it in an outhouse and bought himself a replacement; a sort of twenty-thousand ton fire-spitting phosphorescent milk float with scythed wheels and a built-in rev inhibitor that limited the maximum speed to six miles an hour. It was pathetically slow but very cheap to insure, and it didn’t keep breaking down in the middle of the Glittering Plains, slap bang in the epicentre of enemy territory and miles from the nearest call box.

  Thirteen hundred and twenty years ago come Lammas Eve, Odin had idly remarked that they could have fun doing it up again once they retired. It would be a nice little hobby for them, he’d said. They could get it running and hire it out for flower shows and village fetes and gymkhanas.

  Nine hundred and ninety-six years ago, the gods of the Great Aesir had clocked off for the last time, received their signed testimonials and gold watches from the Scandinavian nations, and retired to New Valhall, a purpose-built specially-designed complex in the upmarket suburbs of Musspellheim. It was replete with every conceivable feature required by the discerning ex-god - ceaseless feasting, piped eddas, twenty-four-hour-duty Valkyrie service and so on - and the Aesir valiantly put up with it for three very long weeks before sloping off in the early hours of the morning, leaving a note propped up against the Test-Your-Wrath machine and no forwarding address. And taking with them the vintage traction engine.

  ‘Maybe,’ Odin suggested, ‘we could just rub it down with wet-and-dry and paint over it.’

  ‘Don’t be such a pillock,’ Thor replied.

  Four hundred and seventy-five years ago, Mrs Henderson had put her foot down. She had no objection, she had said, to her residents having little hobbies. Jigsaw puzzles, yes; also ships in bottles, even one-seventy-second scale models of the Temple of the Gods of Death and Destruction in Tlaxopetclan built out of matchsticks, provided always that the person concerned tidied away afterwards and didn’t get glue on the carpets. Great big oily traction engines in her newly decorated television suite, no. Either it went, or they did.

  So it went; as far as the coalshed, and for four hundred and seventy-five years (ever since Pizarro conquered Peru, and long before Sir James Watt was even thought of) Odin, Thor and Frey had snuck out after lunch on the pretext of taking a walk, and snuck back in several hours later to wash up and leave oily handprints all over the towels in the downstairs cloakroom.

  ‘Quick,’ Thor hissed, ‘someone’s coming.’ There was a frantic scrabble and a heaving of potato sacks, just before the door opened. But it was only Freya, come to ask her brother Frey if he wanted to make up four for bridge.

  ‘Not now, sis,’ Frey replied. He glanced downwards, subconsciously aware that something seemed to be wrong, and observed that he was standing in one of the tins of green paint. He sighed.

  ‘You’re not playing with that thing again, are you?’

  ‘What thing do you mean, sis?’

  ‘You know perfectly well.’ Freya tutted. ‘Like silly children, the lot of you. I think you’d better get cleaned up and come back inside before Mrs Henderson catches you.’

  ‘But sis . . .’

  ‘Come on.’

  Frey sighed. He’d had a sister ever since the earth was without form and void, but even now he sometimes caught himself thinking, Why me? What harm did I ever do anyone? ‘All right,’ he muttered. ‘But I’m not going to play bridge with a lot of old—’

  ‘Yes you are. And you two . . .’ She looked round. The other two gods had somehow managed to disappear. ‘Children,’ she repeated.

  As soon as the shed door had closed, Odin and Thor crawled out from under the sacking and dusted themselves off. They looked at each other.

  ‘Women,’ said Thor.

  ‘Quite.’

  Legend has it that the massive glass and chromium offices of Haifisch & Dieb, the greatest law firm in the world, have never been totally empty since the firm was established, on the second day of Creation, to cope with the anticipated flood of product liability claims.

  On this night, the lights were still bright on the top floor, home (to all intents and purposes) of Julian Magus, the firm’s managing partner. He was sitting at his desk, talking through an idea with a colleague from the Probate and Trusts Department.

  ‘Basically
,’ said the colleague, rubbing his lead-heavy eye-lids, ‘your options are somewhat restricted.’

  ‘Go on,’ replied Julian.

  ‘Well,’ the colleague continued, ‘on the inheritance front, expectations-wise, I feel I have to advise that we’re into a pretty narrow band in relation to the justifiable aspirations position. Like, prima facie and on the facts as presented to me, before there can be an inheritance, there has, strictly speaking, to be a death.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a problem, Leon,’ Julian replied slowly, ‘only an opportunity in fancy dress. You’d do well to remember that if you ever want to get on in this profession.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the colleague, his palate suddenly dry, ‘absolutely. I think we’re one hundred per cent ad idem on that viewpoint. Sounding a slight note of caution, however . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I mean,’ said the colleague, ‘obviously we’ve got to get the terminology up together before we can progress this. I mean, if we start with the actual definition of death, maybe we could do something there. Like, where in the book of words does it actually say you can’t be dead till you stop moving? There’s judicial authority to support a view that—’

  ‘No,’ said Julian, ‘you were right the first time, the death side is a complete washout. Hiding to nothing time. I was thinking,’ he went on, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers, ‘of approaching this from another angle entirely.’