Odds and Gods (25 page)

Hotduyrtdx nodded. ‘And you know what for?’ he went on. ‘You know what it was I’d done that was so terrible I wasn’t allowed to be a god any more? Go on, guess.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I hadn’t been filling out my green sheets in duplicate, like I was supposed to. Instead I was just filling out the top copy and taking a photocopy for the file. That was it. Heinous stuff, yes?’

Lundqvist cast his mind back. Green sheets - god, yes, them. He remembered now. Back then, all gods were supposed to fill out these idiotic forms each time they did a miracle. It was something to do with input tax, and the whole scheme was abandoned a short while afterwards.

‘They struck you off for that?’

‘Conduct unbecoming, they said.’ Hotduyrtdx smiled grimly. ‘The way they saw it, it was just an administrative error, and to err is human. If it’d been something really heavy, like bringing the dead back to life or wiping out a century’s worth of history, I’d have got away with a reprimand, because to forgive is divine. Marvellous system, huh?’

Lundqvist nodded. He couldn’t think of very much to say.

‘The business had to close down, of course,’ Hotduyrtdx continued remorselessly. ‘All my customers were gods, see, and so I wasn’t allowed to trade with them. As a result the whole population were put out of a job, they drifted back into subsistence agriculture and died out. I’ve been here ever since. Thanks to you.’

‘I never meant . . .’

Hotduyrtdx scowled, and wisps of strange brown vapour drifted from his nostrils. ‘I don’t imagine you did. Your sort never do. Ever since, I’ve been holed up here, brewing up moonshine magic out of anything I could lay my hands on, ready for the day when I could get even with you, you scumbag. It’s been a long time.’

He advanced another two paces, until his shadow engulfed Lundqvist completely. It was hard not to notice the claws on the end of his feet.

‘Would it help,’ Lundqvist said tentatively, ‘if I told you I was in a position to put a good word in for you with some very high-ranking gods indeed? I mean, like really top-flight . . .’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘In that case,’ he went on, ‘you leave me no alternative.’

Hotduyrtdx blinked. ‘What d’you mean,
I
leave
you
no alter . . .’

Lundqvist braced himself for the desperate expenditure of energy that was to come. Good old pineal gland, always been there for me when I needed you most, come through for Daddy just one more time, we all know you’ve got it in you. ‘I just want you to know,’ he said solemnly, looking for the right spot, ‘that I really hate doing this. If there was any other way at all . . .’

‘Doing what, for pity’s sake?’

With a violent explosion of muscular effort, possible only because of countless years of specialist training, Lundqvist jumped between Hotduyrtdx’s legs, hit the ground, rolled, regained his feet and used them.

‘Running away,’ he shouted back over his shoulder. ‘I’ll get you for this, you sucker!’

‘Now just a flaming minute . . .’

But Lundqvist wasn’t there any more. He had always been a good runner, although in different circumstances (he had always specialised in
after
rather than
away from
) and the thought of the claws and the quite staggering size of the horrible thing somehow made him able to set a pace that would have had Carl Lewis tripping over his feet in about twelve seconds. As tactical withdrawals went, it was pretty slick.

There is only so much percentage, however, in running away from someone when you’re on an island; and running, as the man said, is one thing, hiding is quite another. As he ran, Lundqvist’s mind kept itself occupied with figuring out how many of Hotduyrtdx’s strides it would take to traverse the island from one side to the other. Not many, he decided. Not nearly many enough.

‘I told you,’ Lundqvist panted, ‘bugger off. I’ve got enough problems of my own without you to contend with.’

The Dragon King of the South-East shrugged his shoulders.
‘Blimey, mate,’
he said,
‘you’re a hard bloke to help, no worries. Just say the word and I’ll have you out of there in two shakes of a possum’s—’

‘Go away! Piss off! Get the hell outa here!’ Lundqvist yelled. ‘This is your last warning, okay?’

‘
Be like that
,’ said the Dragon King huffily, and vanished.

Five minutes of flat-out running later, Lundqvist was so demoralised that he was beginning to wonder whether the Dragon King mightn’t have been such a bad idea after all when he came to an unscheduled and quite involuntary stop. Some idiot, it seemed, had built a damn great wall right across the road. To make matters worse, they’d painted it invisible.

‘Are you hurt?’ said a disembodied voice.

Kurt tried to move; but the parts of his brain responsible for motor functions told him to forget it. He groaned.

‘Because if you are,’ the voice went on, ‘we might be able to help. We’re doctors, you see.’

At which point, the two doctors stepped out from behind the invisible wall.They were carrying the inevitable black bags, together with assorted firearms, hand grenades, surface-to-air missile launchers and extremely hi-tech edged weapons; in other words, almost exactly the way the young Kurt Lundqvist had imagined Santa Claus looked, except that they didn’t have red robes, long white beards and flak jackets.

‘Mind you,’ said one of the doctors, ‘it’s partly your own fault for not looking at the signs.’

Lundqvist spat out a tooth. ‘Signs?’ he croaked.

A doctor nodded. ‘Back there,’ he replied, pointing. ‘Big signs saying,
Caution, invisible wall
. Of course they’re invisible too, but . . .’

Numb, Lundqvist lay still while they examined him and, eventually, prescribed two aspirin and a good lie down. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked.

A doctor looked at him. ‘You are Kurt Lundqvist, aren’t you?’ he asked.

Lundqvist nodded. ‘Why?’

‘Good.’The doctor took out his stethoscope, blew down one earpiece and listened to Lundqvist’s chest. ‘Your friends are coming to rescue you,’ he said. ‘That’s why we’re setting up these invisible road-blocks. Clever, yes?’

‘How did they know I was here?’

‘I told ’em, of course,’
replied the Dragon King of the South-East, materialising in a deck chair in mid-air about four feet over Lundqvist’s head.
‘The way I saw it, if you’re such a galah you won’t ask me to help you, it’s up to me to use a bit of initiative.’

Lundqvist groaned and lay back on the ground. ‘I shall count to ten,’ he said. ‘If you’re still here . . .’

‘I wish you’d disappear up your own arse, you fucking stupid goldfish.’

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’
said the King cheerfully, and vanished.

Kurt propped himself up, painfully on one elbow, and turned to the two doctors, who were planting invisible landmines. ‘You heard that,’ he said, ‘you’re witnesses. I made a perfectly valid wish. I asked him to vanish, he vanished. Okay?’

A doctor looked at him. ‘Who vanished?’ he asked.

‘Concussion,’ said his colleague.

‘Oh yes, of course. Silly me. Here, Mr Lundqvist, you’d better make that three aspirins.’

Why bother? Lundqvist said to himself. He whimpered, got slowly to his hands and knees, and crawled away behind the wall.

Fortuitously, it turned out; because no sooner had he vanished from sight than Hotduyrtdx suddenly hove into view, making the ground shake with his footsteps.

‘Oy, you,’ yelled a doctor. ‘Not this way, there’s a minefield, you could get—’

Bang.

There was a short pause, during which large chunks of uprooted turf plopped back down to earth.

‘Excuse me, but are you injured at all?’

Hotduyrtdx snarled; difficult, because his body was now in more pieces than one of those incredibly complex jigsaw puzzles you were given by aunts for Christmas in your formative years, and which went straight up into the loft first thing on Boxing Day morning.

‘I got blown up,’ he grunted. ‘I’d leave me well alone if I were you.’

The two doctors exchanged glances.

‘Ah well,’ one of them said at last. ‘Now at least we know they still work.’

 

To the gods all things are possible. Well, virtually all.

‘Marvellous,’ Thor growled. ‘Absolutely bloody wonderful. Now what do we do?’

Frey pointed. ‘There’s a little sticker,’ he said, ‘look, there on the windshield.That probably tells you the procedure. ’ He leant forward and read aloud: “This vehicle has been immobilished; do not attempt to move it . . .”’

‘Yes, thank you, I can read,’ Odin said. ‘The question is, how do we get rid of the confounded thing?’

One of the things - the very, very few things - not possible to gods is removing wheel clamps from illegally parked traction engines, using only the rudimentary tools usually carried in the glove box. ‘We could pay the fine,’ Frey suggested. ‘I gather that usually does the trick.’

Thor snarled. Not for nothing had he been the god of thunder for countless centuries; it started to drizzle with rain.

‘Over my dead body,’ he said. ‘Nobody wheelclamps a god and gets away with it.’

‘Fine. So you do know how to get it off, then?’

‘Yes. I’ll, um, remember in a minute.’

Always the way, isn’t it? A quick pitstop in the suburbs of Mexico City, to buy gasket sealant and gear-box oil; Odin’s cheerful assurance that they could park in the No Parking zone with impunity since they were only going to be three minutes, and there were no traffic wardens in sight of his all-seeing eye. And here they were. Stuck.

Thor pulled himself out from under the chassis, oily-faced but grinning. ‘I think I see how to go about it,’ he said. ‘Odin, I’ll need the tin of grease and a cold chisel. Frey, my hammer.’

A quarter of an hour passed noisily, at the end of which time Thor had hit everything he could reach (including, on a regular basis, his own fingers) and the clamp was still there.

‘All we have to do is give them some money and they come and do it for us,’ Frey insisted. ‘Come on, it’s easy. Mortals can do it, even.’

‘Shut up, I’m thinking. Odin, go and buy a hacksaw.’

Twenty minutes later; the hacksaw blade had eventually snapped, taking a lump out of Thor’s thumb as it did so. Otherwise the situation was pretty well unchanged.

‘On the other hand,’ Frey said, ‘we could stay here for ever and ever. You know, find jobs, settle down, get married, that sort of thing.’

‘I said shut up.’

‘Leave Frey alone, Thor. It’s not his fault.’

‘Yes, but he’s being aggravating, and if he carries on like that I shall knock his block off with my hammer.’

‘He’s always aggravating. I don’t notice it any more.’

‘. . . Ready-made start in the scrap iron business . . .’

‘You see? How am I supposed to concentrate with him mithering on all the time?’

‘You’ve just dropped the three-eighths spanner down that grating.’

Thor sighed. ‘I seem to remember,’ he said dismally, ‘we had a damn sight fewer problems when we were creating the Earth.’

Odin nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, it’s one thing making something from scratch, but mending it once it’s bust is another matter entirely. Besides,’ he added wistfully, ‘we had the proper tools then.’

‘God, yes.’ Thor sighed in nostalgic reverie. ‘Remember that seven-mill Bergsen cutter with the adjustable three-way head? Went through igneous rock like a knife through butter.’

‘And what about the old rotary magma plane?’ Odin smiled involuntarily. ‘Whatever became of that, by the way? It must still be about the place somewhere.’

Thor shook his head. ‘Swopped it with the Celtic mob for a set of river-bed props and a beach grinder. Load of old tat that was, too. Worst deal I ever did.’

‘Bet you they let it get all rusty.’

‘Never cleaned anything in their lives.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Frey, ‘but are we going to do something about this wheel thing or are we just going to stand here chattering on until they pull the city down and build a new one?’

His two colleagues looked at him.

‘Oh, shut up,’ they said.

‘Whose damnfool idea was this, anyway?’ Osiris demanded, scratching his ear and wriggling uncomfortably in his wheelchair. ‘It certainly wasn’t mine.’

It was a hot day and the hill was steep. Pan therefore had to save up his breath, like a child with a piggy bank, in order to have enough to answer.

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said.

Neither of the mortals said anything, mainly because neither of them had a very clear idea of where they were or what they were meant to be doing. One moment they’d been escaping from an anthropomorphic oral hygiene accessory, the next they were on a Lear jet flying south-east.