‘What are we going to do about him?’
Denny shrugged and the robe slipped off his shoulders revealing the angry welts on his back and shoulders.
Tamar gasped. ‘Oh my God! Denny, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Oh, I’m okay,’ said Denny, hastily covering up again. ‘The Athame doesn’t heal, you know. But it’s not so bad now.’
‘But I can heal you, even if the Athame can’t. You really should have told me you were still hurt.’
‘Don’t fuss.’
She gave him a look.
‘Okay, okay,’ he gave in and bared his back. ‘Leave the black eye for now,’ he said. ‘We don’t want Mark Whatisname wondering.’
‘Which brings us back to my original question,’ said Tamar. ‘What are we going to do about him? How are we going to get him home?’
‘Would …? No never mind.’
‘What?’
‘Would leaving him in his bed, and letting him think it was all a nightmare, work? Silly I know, but …’
‘And the fact that he’s been missing from home for a fortnight? You don’t think that somebody might bring it up? His mum, for instance.’
‘Are you saying you
can
do it? Alter his memory I mean?’
‘Technically, no. But I can wipe away the pain of the last weeks, and without that, the memories would fade on their own. It’s our emotions that keep our experiences alive in our memory’
‘So, he
could
believe it was all a dream?’
‘But, Denny. What about the time?’
‘I know, I know,’ Denny shook his head sagely. ‘What a pity we can’t go back in time.’*
*[
Mark– somebody was deposited back in his own bed thirteen days before this conversation was to take place, by person or persons unknown. And aside from a severe telling off for staying out all night, suffered no ill effects from his adventure. Tamar and Denny never did find out his full name The file, once closed, naturally, re-opened at the same entry point as before. Thus proving Tamar’s theory of how the files worked to be the correct one]
~ Chapter Seven ~
‘
V
ikings
?’ snorted Denny in disgust. ‘What is this, a school trip?’
‘Shhh, they’ll hear you,’ Tamar pulled him behind a bush. ‘We don’t want to get tangled up with these bozos, believe me.’
‘Dangerous are they?’
‘Well, I suppose so, not to us though. No, what I mean is they’re idiots. Imagine Bart Simpson, grown up and crossed with a Mill-Wall supporter and you’re getting close.’
‘Oh.’
‘And talk about sexist! They make Australians look PC.’
‘Ah,’ Denny nodded, sagely. ‘Gave you a hard time, did they?’
Vikings they were – about 30 of them, give or take, but making enough noise for 100 at least. Most of them were drunk, and all of them were fighting. Even Denny was unnerved at the casual way they were knocking seven kinds of shit out of each other. The fact that they were doing this with broadswords instead of their fists just made it bloodier, and not any less like a drunken brawl, which it clearly was. They did not even seem particularly angry. Apparently this was just a typical Saturday night.
‘Did they always act like this?’ asked Denny, watching in fascinated horror as a bloody head rolled within two feet of him.
‘Oh no, only when they’d been drinking, they stopped when they went to sleep.’
‘You know, I read that the Vikings were like this, but I always thought it was, you know, popular prejudice, exaggeration, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh they’re not so bad when they’re sober. I mean you’re right in a way, all the accounts you’ve ever read were written by the people they plundered. Naturally they were prejudiced. They usually only get drunk
after
a raid, not during it. Add to that, the fact that the only people who could write in these times were the clergy and what you get are grossly inflated accounts of their vicious barbarism.’
‘Grossly inflated?
Look
at them! That one’s just chopped off that guy’s arm!’
‘Like I said, they’re drunk. Besides, they didn’t do that to villagers, there’s no sport in it, if they’re not fighting back.’
‘C’mon, let’s get out of here,’ she added.
‘I’m glad you said that, I had a horrible feeling you were going to suggest we try to break it up.’
Tamar shuddered. ‘Not this time. I hate these guys. I hope they all kill each oth …’
Denny and Tamar looked at each other in shock. What had interrupted her was the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.
Or it could have been a car backfiring, but in either case …
‘Isn’t it a bit too early for firearms?’ asked Denny, king of the obvious.
‘Oh, only about four hundred years or so, nothing really.’
‘Tamar, is this the time for sarcasm?’ What the hell does it
mean
?’ is Askphrit here?’
‘I can’t sense him, but he may have been here. Have you got any Nordic ancestors that you know of? You are very blond.’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It probably doesn’t matter. He’s not here now anyway, and maybe he never was. This anachronism is just an example of what can happen when you get unauthorised people running around in history, changing God knows what. We’ll probably get back to discover that the flintlock was invented in the Stone Age.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘Not when we left,’ she agreed. ‘But now – who knows? We’re going to have to expect to see this kind of thing, and sometimes it’ll probably be our fault. No matter how careful we try to be.’
‘But we haven’t been to the Stone Age,’ Denny pointed out.
‘Not yet,’ said Tamar darkly.
Denny tried to figure this one out and gave up. ‘So what do we do?’ he said.
‘There’s nothing we
can
do, not here. We just have to keep looking for Askphrit. That’s what we’re here for.’
A horrible thought struck Denny. ‘What if we’re too late?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what if he’s already … I mean, what if we get back, after we catch him, and I’m, you know, erased. You can’t keep the world frozen forever, just in case.’
‘Hmmm.’ Tamar frowned as she tried to work out this temporal conundrum. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know, let me work on it.’
‘And what are you planning on doing when we catch him anyway?’
‘Got to catch him first.’
Without warning, at least without specific warning – after all, with their luck, they were always only a step away from disaster at any given time. As Denny said later, ‘we
should
have expected it.’ A drunken Viking came hurtling toward them sword upraised making a noise like, according to Tamar, “a constipated dinosaur.”
‘How would
you
know?’ Denny actually found time to ask. ‘That was before even your time.’ Tamar shook her head sadly. ‘So innocent,’ she said enigmatically. ‘Mind his head,’ she added absently as Denny stepped aside lightly allowing the Viking to crash headfirst into a tree.
Apparently unhurt, he resumed his attack; Denny rolled his eyes in a manner very reminiscent of Tamar’s usual fashion.
‘You’d better fight him,’ Tamar told him, ‘if you don’t he’ll just keep coming. Believe me, I know these idiots.’
‘I don’t want to hurt him.’
‘You won’t, just stick to hitting him on the head.’
Denny shrugged and squared up to the enraged Viking, who did not know it, but who was about to get the pummelling of a lifetime …
Or not.
Denny raised his hands gingerly and clasped them behind his head. From behind him, he heard the soft click of the safety catch. He turned around slowly.
* * *
‘From this to Abba,’ said Denny. ‘I don’t know which was worse. Hey Bjorn,’ he yelled. ‘Where are the rest of the “Masters of the Universe”?’
Tamar gave him a questioning look. She was tied to the mast, and most of her other looks had been considerably more eloquent – and vicious. Denny was trying to make her smile, and not so far succeeding. She blamed him for all this, he knew, but being shot in the head would have been an inconvenient development, he felt. Particularly trying to explain why he had not actually died from it.
‘Well, doesn’t he look like “He Man”, to you?’ he explained.
Tamar grinned. ‘By the power of Greyskull,’ she giggled.
Denny relaxed; Tamar did not often sulk, preferring to deal out mayhem on a democratic basis when she was crossed. But when she did, she was unbearable.
The Conan look-alike strode over to Denny. ‘How do you know my name?’ he demanded. Tamar stifled a laugh.
Denny shrugged. ‘Wild guess,’ he suggested.
Tamar snorted.
Bjorn gave him a sideways glance full of suspicion, ‘Hmm,’ he said, and added ‘The Masters, by which I assume you mean the gods, are in Valhalla as ever. And, if you do not wish to go and meet them soon, you will keep your tongue behind your teeth – understand?’
Denny pulled a face to indicate that he did.
* * *
‘Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol – Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol.’
The Vikings were enjoying the new song that the skinny man had taught them, although Herger kept on forgetting the words, and Rethel kept on interrupting the second verse – ‘Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol’ – to belch loudly and disembowel the man next to him. But nobody really minded.
‘He’s big, he’s pissed, when he shot he never missed, Beowulf, Beowulf’
‘He killed, he died, his boots were all untied, his boots were all untied. All together now – ‘Beowulf, Beowulf, Beowulf - Beowulf, Beowulf, Beo wu-ulf.’
Some old philosopher once said that mankind is only one meal away from the loss of civilisation – this is bollocks. Mankind, as personified here by Denny, is actually only a skin-f (of mead in this case) away from it, and he had not put up much of a fight either.
Womankind, on the other hand, is only one sexist pig away from the end of her tether – civilisation had nothing to do with it, she left that behind the first time he left the toilet seat up, and was now heading toward total meltdown – accelerating fast.
She was not sure how it had happened, one minute Denny had been acting perfectly normally – for him – and the next …
Not that she had never seen him drunk before, but nothing on this scale. She had, she realised, underestimated the effects of mead on the uninitiated.
For an intelligent woman, Tamar could be surprisingly dense at times. Even now, she failed to take into account the effects of a large group of men, doing their man thing and letting off steam, on a young man who had been spending too much time in recent years in the sole company of a woman. Denny was drunk and rowdy because he
wanted
to be.
Also, he had never before experienced the feeling of being popular among other men; he was enjoying the experience immensely. These guys
liked
him.
Tamar was forgotten. She was, after all, in this context a mere woman. How could she understand the need to bond with his peers, get drunk and rowdy and generally act like a prat in order to prove and validate his role as a man? He was, for the first time in his life, “one of the lads”, and it was great.
Of course, Tamar was not just
any
mere woman; neither did she appreciate being forgotten about. Perhaps Denny should have taken these facts into account.
There is nothing quite like seeing the man you love passed out on top of a heap of drunken Vikings with his pants on his head and drool encrusted on his chin, to cool the fires of passion – sometimes permanently.
‘Odin!’ she muttered crossly in reference to some earlier songs by the “boys” not all of which had been entirely reverential (downright dirty some of them had been.)
‘I’ll give them Odin.’ She raised an eyebrow
a la
evil plotter. ‘Hmm, not a bad idea …’
The fact that she had now moved into talking to herself mode shows just how bad the night had been. She was, in fact, in that state of mind people get into after the boys next door have been playing heavy rock all night long at a decibel level better suited to the alarm system of a nuclear power station. Dawn is breaking, silence has descended, you have to be at work in an hour and your brain has been reduced to a kind of irradiated porridge. So naturally, it seems like a good idea to turn up your own stereo to maximum with a plentiful selection of CD’s programmed to play for at least six hours, open all the windows but not enough to allow entry (some people have been known to take the speakers outside, but this allows tampering) and leave the house. (It is at this stage that many people start to refer to themselves in the third person – evil laughter has been known)
It was a variation on the “stereo at dawn” plan that Tamar had in mind.
‘Oh I’ll give them Odin all right, serve the bastards right. Tamar Black doesn’t put up with this shit lying down.’ (What did I tell you?)
‘Tamar is nobody’s doormat. Slave girl am I? Huh!’
Denny, unfortunately, had not corrected this assumption on the part of his new friends and would pay for it later – and for the rest of his life, probably.
She cracked her knuckles and settled down to summon Odin in her own inimitable style.
‘Odin, you drunken scuzz -bucket get your omnipotent arse down here and deal out some retribution.’
She waited.
‘Come ON! I know you can hear me, did you hear those songs? Are you just going to let them get away with that?’
‘I’ll tell Freya about your Valkyrie Acceleration Programme,’ she added slyly.
‘All right, all right, I heard you, and there’s not a word of truth in those allegations, by the way.’
Tamar grinned. ‘Does it matter?’ she said. ‘Mud sticks, I don’t think you want that particular story in the Sagas, or do you?’
Odin’s beard twitched. ‘Damned reporters,’ he snarled. ‘They’ll write anything. All that bollocks about Thor’s appointment. Nepotism they said, they accused me –
me
! And all that guff about the Rheingold, never heard such a load of …’
‘Well, they don’t know any better do they?’ Tamar said soothingly. ‘Just look at it this way, in a hundred years, who’s going to care?’