Odds and Gods (5 page)

‘Ready?’

‘Suppose so.’

Odin rolled up his sleeve, gripped the handle firmly, and turned it. There was a clatter, a dull thump and—

‘Gosh,’ Frey said, ‘it works. Well I never.’

‘There’s no need to sound quite so surprised,’ Odin replied. ‘I mean, it was really pretty straightforward when you think about it.’

‘Was it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Where did I get the idea that it was horrendously difficult from, then, I wonder.’

They stood for a while, staring. Ten seconds later, it was still working. And ten seconds after that. And ten seconds after that . . .

‘Okay,’ Thor said briskly. ‘Now we’ve got it going again, what are we actually going to do with it?’

To the gods all things are possible, all things are known. ‘Um,’ said Odin.

‘I mean,’ Thor went on after a longish pause, ‘there’s all sorts of things we
could
do with it.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘All sorts of things.’

‘The possibilities are endless.’

‘Only . . .’ Thor bit his lip. ‘Just now, like on the spur of the moment, I can’t quite remember, you know, offhand . . .’

Small, muffled bells rang in Frey’s memory. ‘Something to do with fun-fairs, I think,’ he said. ‘And church fêtes and that sort of thing.’

‘Really?’

‘I think so,’ Frey replied. ‘Of course, it’s been a long time.’

Odin came to a decision. ‘Why don’t we take it for a ride?’ he said. ‘You know, a test drive. Just to make sure it actually is working all right. Before we actually do, um, whatever it was we were going to . . .’

‘Good idea.’

‘Fine.’

In retrospect it was a pity that, in the excitement of the moment, they drove out through the shed door without remembering to open it first; but at least it proved that the old jalopy was still as robust as ever. The gods, however, didn’t let it worry them, once they’d brushed the bits of doorframe and hinge out of their eyes. Almost as soon as the engine started to move, a strange exhilaration seemed to sweep over them; a longing, almost, for some long-forgotten sensation that had something to do with speed, the open sky, the wind in one’s hair . . .

They were airborne.

‘Thor.’

‘Yes, Frey?’

‘Is it meant to be doing this?’

‘Doing what, precisely?’

Odin was poring over the map. In his left hand he had a magnifying glass, and in the right a compass.

‘Estimating our windspeed at thirty knots,’ he said, in a loud, clear voice, ‘that down there must be Budleigh Salterton.’

Frey turned and looked at him, vertigo temporarily pigeon-holed. ‘What did you say must be Budleigh Salterton?’

‘There,’ said Odin, pointing, ‘just below us now. I always was pretty clever at this dead reckoning stuff.’

‘You mean that there?’

‘Yes. Which means that, if we continue this course for another—’

‘That’s a cloud, Odin.’

‘No it’s not, don’t muck about. We’ve got a schedule to work to, remember?’

Thor and Frey suddenly remembered Odin’s thing about maps. It had slipped their memories until now precisely because, a very long time ago, they had induced Odin on pain of being gutted on his own altar never to so much as look at another map for as long as the world existed. For his part Odin knew for a certainty that he was an excellent map reader, but the landscapes mucked him about by moving around when he wasn’t looking. Other things that mucked Odin around included doors, piles of cans in supermarkets and all known electrical appliances.

‘If it’s not a cloud,’ Frey persisted, ‘how come it’s grey and wispy and you can see the ground straight through it?’

Odin sat still for a moment, staring at the map and chewing the end of a pencil. The pencil in question had once been part of a pen-and-pencil set presented by God the Father to God the Son on the occasion of his passing his Religious Education O-level. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Budleigh Salterton is somewhere over there.’ He waved an arm in a circle round his head. ‘So I make it that if we carry on the way we’re going, we should be in Papua by nightfall.’

‘Since when,’ Thor interrupted over the clatter of the turboprops, ‘did we want to go to Papua? Come to that, where is it exactly?’

‘Now you’re the one doing the kidding around.’

‘Straight up,’ said Thor. ‘I had this mate, you see, who was really into hang-gliding. He could read a course off a map sooner than you could say Jack Robinson.’

‘Who’s Jack Robinson?’

‘He’s a figure of speech.’

‘Oh,’ said Frey. ‘One of them.’

‘It’s in the middle of the Indian Ocean,’ said Odin, holding the map about an inch from the tip of his nose. ‘Principal exports include—’

‘Yes, but why do you want to go there?’

Odin looked up. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘All I said was, if we carry on this line till nightfall, that’s where we’ll fetch up.’

‘Oh I see,’ Frey said, ‘it wasn’t an announcement, it was a warning.’

‘Would you mind shutting up for a moment, please,’ Odin said. ‘Only I am trying to navigate here, and it’s never easy at the best of times.’

‘So don’t fly at the best of times,’ Frey replied. ‘In fact, not flying at all would be all right with me. Have either of you two noticed how far we are off the ground?’

‘For pity’s sake, Frey,’ Odin said, not looking up, ‘don’t be such a baby. Are you chicken or something?’

Frey scowled. ‘I am a god, remember. I can be anything I jolly well like. Only I’d prefer to do it down there, if it’s all the same to you.’

Thor sighed. ‘You know,’ he said, gazing out over the kingdoms of the earth, spread out before him like items of kit at an army inspection, ‘I used to be really good at this. Flying around and stuff. Only somehow,’ he went on, biting his lip, ‘somehow I’m not sure I can still—’

‘Don’t be so feeble,’ Odin replied. ‘It’s not something you forget; it’s like riding a bicycle.’

‘Sure,’ Frey muttered. ‘You wobble about for a while and then you hit the ground.’

‘That’s not what I meant at all.’

‘And anyway, when was the last time you ever rode a bicycle?’

‘Don’t change the—’

‘Come to that, have you ever ridden a bicycle at all? Ever?’

‘Loads of times.’

‘Name one.’

‘Look,’ Odin said, struggling to pull together the various strands of his thought processes, ‘this isn’t about riding bicycles, this is about flying. And here we are doing it. And we know
exactly
where we . . .’

For ever afterwards, the locals of that part of Cornwall referred to the rocky outcrop into which the Aesir now flew as Shooting Star Hill. The giant crater formed by the crash became a popular venue for outings and picnics, and attractive colour postcards are available at several local newsagents.

‘What,’ said Frey, struggling to his knees and spitting out earth, ‘happened?’

‘Easy mistake to make,’ replied a voice, conceivably Odin’s, emanating from the upper branches of a fir tree. ‘Could have happened to anybody.’

‘Will somebody please get this traction engine off me?’

‘Low cloud,’ Odin went on, ‘and a damn great pointy hill; you’re bound to have accidents sooner or later. Whoever created this region had absolutely no consideration whatsoever for the safety of air traffic. In fact I’ve a good mind—’

‘But you keep it for special occasions,’ interrupted Thor, from under the engine. ‘Look, stop fartarsing about, you two, and get me out of here.’

‘Yes,’ grumbled Frey, grabbing hold of the front fender and heaving, ‘but what happened?’ To the gods all things are possible, and their strength has nothing to do with muscle and sinew; rather, they draw power from the earth, the sky, the sea. ‘Don’t just stand there, you prune,’ he shouted at Odin, who had made it down from his tree and was scrabbling about for his map, ‘grab the other end of this before I drop it on my toe.’

‘Coming.’

‘Too late.’

‘When you’ve quite finished larking about,’ said Thor’s voice, from some way down, ‘perhaps you’d get on with the job in hand.’

‘All right, just give me a minute, will you?’

‘The sooner I get out, you see, the sooner I can kick Odin’s arse from here to Christmas.’

Between them, Odin and Frey manhandled the hundred-ton machine out of the way, rested it gently on the ground and rescued Thor, who had made a man-shaped hole of the kind usually only seen in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

‘Are you saying,’ Frey enquired, ‘that he managed to fly us straight into the side of this mountain?’

‘Actually,’ Odin said, ‘she’s not that badly damaged. Not badly damaged at all. Front wing’s a bit the worse for wear, but a few minutes with the lump hammer and you’d never know it was there.’

The reason why gods never fight among themselves is quite simply the futility of the exercise, combined with the prodigious danger to the environment. Two all-powerful, immortal, invulnerable beings going at it hammer and tongs are guaranteed to damage absolutely everything within a fifty-mile radius, with the sole exception of each other.

‘Lump hammer, did you say?’

‘That’s the ticket, Thor. Just pass it over, would you?’

‘On its way.’

Five minutes or so later, Frey (who had found the packed lunch and eaten the honey and raisin sandwiches and two of the chocolate mini-rolls) got up, wandered across the now considerably enlarged crater and stirred one of the two recumbent forms with his toe.

‘All right, chaps,’ he said. ‘Now you’ve got that out of your systems, shall we be cutting along?’

‘Good idea.’

‘Where to, exactly?’

‘Y
es,’ said the thug. ‘As a matter of fact, I am a doctor.

What’s it to you, prune-face?’

‘Oh.’ Minerva, former Roman goddess of Wisdom, blinked. Vague thought-shapes swirled in her brain, struggling to fight their way through the fog and the mist. ‘You don’t,’ she quavered, ‘look much like a doctor to me.’

‘Shows how much you know, you daft old bag,’ the doctor replied. ‘Now sod off, will you, there’s a love, because we’ve got things to do.’

Minerva hesitated. The next line was welling up in her mouth, the words that she always said to everybody; but somehow, for once, they didn’t seem appropriate, and she wasn’t even sure why she wanted to say them. Nevertheless, she did.

‘I shouldn’t be here, you know,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be here at all.’

The second thug, who was also a doctor, grinned. ‘Too bloody right,’ he said. ‘In a pine box ten feet under’s where you should be. Now sling your hook.’

‘I’m terribly ill, you know,’ Minerva said, or at least her lips shaped the words. Prompted by a massive sense of danger, her mind, what was left of it, was doing something it hadn’t done since Machiavelli was an adolescent. It was thinking. Little flashes of electricity were crawling along the overgrown, corroded synapses of her brain. ‘By rights,’ she went on saying in the meanwhile, ‘I should be in a hospital.’

‘Let go of my sleeve or you will be.’

Two intrepid electrical discharges met in a jungle of decaying silicone somewhere in Minerva’s cortex. It was like Livingstone and Stanley; and the one who might have been Livingstone might have said
Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into
, because the next words Minerva uttered were comparatively rational but factually incorrect.

‘You’re not a doctor,’ she said.

‘Get stuffed.’

The first thug, who really was a doctor, gave her a shove and she sat down heavily on an aged sofa, twisting her knee. Thirty centuries of outraged divinity suddenly woke up and screamed at her to turn this arrogant little mortal into a beetle. She tried it. She missed.

‘Come on, Vern,’ said the second doctor. ‘Let’s get it over with and get out of this dump.’ He strode forward, not aware that in doing so he’d stepped on Inanna, the great goddess of Uruk, who went
splat!

In the corridor that led from the day room to Lilac Wing, a nurse blocked their path.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but who are you and what are you doing?’

‘We’re doctors.’

‘Nobody told me anything about any doctors.’

‘So bloody what?’

The nurse, who was the same Sandra who had managed to make Osiris eat hot custard, moved her feet slightly, making it impossible for the two men to brush past her without actually knocking her over. ‘May I ask what you’re here for?’

The two doctors looked at each other. Because they really were doctors, and had therefore served their time as the lowest form of life in a busy hospital, they still had buried deep in their psyches the basic fear of nurses that all doctors carry with them to the grave. This fear springs from the subconscious belief that the nurse knows a damn sight more about what’s going on than they do, and for two pins will show them up in front of the patient.