I tucked away and zipped up, chuckling at the squirrel, which only seemed to agitate it more.
"Calm down, you fluffy-tailed rat," I said. "You'll give yourself a stroke."
"Ratatosk is offended," said a voice in my ear.
I swung round, bringing a clenched fist up. Pure reflex.
Big mistake.
Next instant, I was flat on my back in the snow. I'd barely felt it. A hand grabbing my shoulder, a foot hooked behind my knee, and bam! Gid Coxall laid out like a frog on a dissecting slab.
To make matters worse, a sheath knife was being held at my throat, tip poised over my Adam's apple.
To make matters very slightly better, the person on the other end of the knife was Freya. The lovely Freya.
Only, the expression on her face was not lovely at all. Her features were fixed in a sneer of contempt. Not even a hint of friendliness there.
"No one raises a fist to me and gets away with it," she said. "Especially not a man."
I wasn't sure if she meant man as in male of the species or man as in mortal being, and I wasn't about to query the point. It could have been either and was probably both.
"Didn't mean to," I croaked. "You surprised me. I reacted. Overreacted. Don't slit my throat."
The sheath knife didn't move. Somewhere overhead I could hear the squirrel tittering scornfully. There was no other way to describe it. If squirrels could mock, this was exactly the sound they'd make.
"You were so easy to sneak up on," Freya said.
"Was I?" I had to admit the way she'd completely blindsided me was somewhat embarrassing, and I couldn't even blame my knackered ear. She'd come from the right. I should have heard her and hadn't. Talk about stealthy.
"Very easy. Were you a rabbit, or an enemy sentry, your blood would now be reddening the snow."
"Then I'm glad I'm neither of those. Look, will you put that thing away and let me get up?"
"I don't know. Ratatosk, what do you think?"
She was talking to the squirrel, and bugger me if it didn't pause from its tittering for a moment, as if considering, then delivered a stream of chirrups and chitters by way of a reply.
"He thinks," said Freya, "that you're ill-mannered and obnoxious but, after all, only a human and we should take that into account."
More squirrel chatter.
"And he says if you agree to apologise to the World Tree for besmirching it with your waste product, all will be forgiven."
"I say sorry to the tree, and everything's hunky dory again?"
"That's it."
"And you promise you'll put that knife away?"
"Certainly."
"Then you have yourself a deal." Granted, a cockeyed deal with a knife-wielding woman who talked to squirrels, but a deal nonetheless.
Freya got up, slipping the blade into the scabbard on her belt. I stood, brushed snow off me, then bowed my head, solemn as a churchgoer.
"Yggdrasil," I said, "I sincerely regret what I just did. I peed on you, and that was wrong and thoughtless of me. I should have known better. Maybe you could use the moisture and the ammonia to help you grow? Just a thought. But I'll never do it again. All right?"
The "All right?" was directed at Freya, but the tree seemed to think it was being addressed and ought to respond, so it shook its branches.
No, obviously it didn't. A stray wind came in out of nowhere, puffed against Yggdrasil and made all of the leaves shiver, releasing a fine dusting of snowflakes on our heads. That was what happened. The tree wasn't fucking answering me, like something out of an Enid Blyton book. That would have been absurd. It was a random coincidence, nothing else. A gust of wind. On a night as breeze-free and still as any I'd ever known. But still, just the wind.
Ratatosk the squirrel seemed satisfied, at any rate, and scampered off into the upper branches.
"So what brings you out here?" I said to Freya. "Why aren't you inside in the warm, partying with the others?"
"I could ask you the same."
"Not my thing, really." Not these days, not any more.
"Nor mine. I prefer not to gorge and guzzle. My pleasures are simpler, purer. The majesty of a night sky, for instance, and the knowledge that live prey awaits me out in the woods."
"You're going hunting?"
She nodded.
"For what?"
"Deer, rabbit, fox... Any wild game I can find. I'm not picky. The odd human occasionally."
"You're joking."
"Perhaps," she said in a way that implied she was. "I caught you, didn't I?"
"True." I was embarrassed enough by that to want to change the subject, so I jerked a thumb in the direction the squirrel had gone. "Anyway, what's up with Ratatouille there? It's dead of winter. Shouldn't he be hibernating and keeping his nuts warm?"
"Ratatosk is no ordinary squirrel," Freya said. "He keeps Yggdrasil free of worms and pests. Normally that's the Norns' job but they're exceptionally busy right now so Ratatosk has pitched in to help."
"Do I count as a pest? Was that why he was so peeved?"
"Very much so."
I was hoping for a flicker of amusement from her at the very least, but there was nothing.
"And who are these Norns?" I said. "Odin mentioned them earlier."
"Three women you really don't want to meet," Freya said. "The Three Sisters know our fates - our futures, our destinies - and it isn't always wise to learn where you're going in life before you get there."
"Oh. No, I suppose it isn't."
She looked at me sidelong. "May I say something, Gideon?"
"Please. Gid."
She shrugged. Made no difference to her. "I find you hard to fathom. You affect nonchalance about everything, yet clearly you are a man of passion."
Was this a come-on? Was Freya flirting with me? I didn't think so, but decided to take an approach as if she was. What did I have to lose?
"I am," I said, "beneath this unflappable exterior, a smouldering volcano. Tap into me and you'll see. Watch the lava flow out."
I added a wink. Few women could resist cheeky chappie Gid with his charm firing on all cylinders.
Freya, it turned out, was one of the few.
"Do you not see," she said, untouched by the waves of sheer sexual magnetism washing over her, "that we are engaged in a vital enterprise here? Nothing less than the fate of the Nine Worlds depends on us."
"Yeah, does it?"
"Of course. Yggdrasil is dying. Do you realise what that signifies?"
I glanced up at the intricate weave of branches. "Looks fine to me. In tree-mendous shape, in fact."
She snorted. Jokes, even the lamest ones, didn't work on her. Seriously hard to crack, this woman, and I was beginning to wonder why I was bothering. Other than she was just plain gorgeous, supermodel-standard, and oh, that arse of hers, and nobody ever said that Gideon Coxall didn't set his sights high. Aim high, and if you failed, you still failed better than if you aimed low and failed.
"Do not be deceived," Freya said. "Yggdrasil may look strong, but it is old, so old. The World Tree has been standing since the dawn of time, and its ancient boughs are tired and its aged trunk is hollow. Those ruptures on its bark, those patches that look as though it has exploded from the inside out? See? Those are cankers. Disease. And sometimes, in storms, battered by winds, you can hear it groaning horribly, in agony. When Yggdrasil falls..."
She shuddered. Faltered.
"But it must not fall," she said. "If it does, all is lost."
"What all?"
"Everything. The Nine Worlds. Destroyed. Utterly."
"Maybe a decent tree surgeon..."
"Oh, forget it!" she snapped, scowling. "You do not understand. You cannot hope to, with a mind as limited as yours. You are as blinkered as any mortal I have met, Gid Coxall. Here, you are being given the opportunity to take part in the most important conflict there has ever been - the only conflict that has mattered or will matter. You have come because fate has decreed it. You are one of the fe
w, the chosen. You are being offered honour and glory the likes of which most men would sell their own mothers for. Yet all you do is snipe and wisecrack and bluster. Ignoring self-evident truths proves nothing except that you are ignorant."
And with that, she stomped off towards the forest.
I didn't take too kindly to being barked at, even if the person doing the barking was, ahem, far from a dog. I raced after her and, abandoning all caution, grabbed her by the arm.
She froze, and out of the corner of her mouth hissed, "Unhand me. Unhand me, or I will unhand you."
"No, you just listen to me a moment, Freya..."
"I'm serious." Her palm was resting on the hilt of her sheathed knife. "If you do not remove your hand from my arm this instant, I will cut it off and leave you to bleed to death in the snow."
I yanked her around to face me.
There was a metallic scrape, and an inch of knife blade shone in the starlight.
"You clearly do not value your life," she said.
"No," I said, "what I value is straight talking, and ever since I arrived I've had none of that. It's all been 'Ooh, look at us, we're Norse gods, tra-la-la, we're immortal, we're going to war,' and I've had it up to here with that. I want the honest, unpolished truth. I want one of you, just one, to admit this is pure makebelieve. Poncing around with your myths and legends and your magic trees and your talking squirrels, when you all know deep down it's a load of bollocks. I don't believe in gods, and you people don't either, not really. You're playing a game. All of this, the medieval re-enactment banquets, the daft names, the props like Thor's hammer, it's all a game. Come on, admit it. I'm right, aren't I?"
Freya stared at me. Tight-lipped. Imperturbable.
"And what's more, you know what I think?" She wasn't interested, but I was going to tell her anyway. "I think you're not just lunatics, you're dangerous lunatics. That Odin, he's brainwashed everybody around him. He's got this, this personality cult thing going, and he's using it, using you, not to mention all those soldiers stuffing their faces back there in the castle, for some kind of sinister purpose, and if I had to hazard a guess what it was, I'd say it was overthrowing the government, or attempting to. Like those white supremacists in the States, the ones who live in compounds in the mountains and collect small arms and are waiting to rise up against the authorities - when they're not busy screwing their sisters and twiddling on banjos, that is. Far-right redneck fruitcakes who go on about racial purity and Aryanism, and they all want to be blonde and Nordic, don't they? That's the ideal. I think they're even into Norse mythology too, only they don't take it quite so far as imagining they actually are Norse gods. Even they're not quite that daft. But that's what I reckon you're up to, what the Valhalla Mission is. You've taken a leaf out of those inbred hillbillies' book, and you've got the prime minister and parliament in your sights because they're all part of some worldwide conspiracy, right? Some Jewish Zionist oppression bullshit which you're going to stand against, you're the last best hope against."
I paused to draw breath. It was a ramshackle theory with holes in it you could drive an HGV through, but it was best I'd been able to cobble together and was, I felt, fundamentally sound.
"Finished?" said Freya.
"Yes. No! So what needs to happen, what someone needs to do, is get the fuck out of this place and report you to the powers-that-be. I'm astonished, frankly, that someone hasn't done it already, but then I guess a hefty wage packet helps seal lips and secure loyalty, doesn't it? But you need to be investigated. Your secret needs to be got out so that the police can come and break this all up and put away the ringleaders, the chief whackos, starting with Odin. That's what needs to happen."
"And you're the man to do it, yes?"
I realised that, in my ranting infuriation, I'd given away too much. I'd announced my intentions, and now I was officially on these people's wrong side. Typical me. Leaping without looking.
No choice now but to brazen it out.
"Perhaps," I said. "Yes. Or maybe not. I don't know. The cops and I don't exactly have a sterling track record together. But somebody at least should blow your operation wide open, even if it's with, maybe, an anonymous phone call. Anonymous tip-off. Something along those lines."
"Well," Freya said, "go on then."
I blinked. "Huh?"
She removed my hand from her, easily, like plucking off a stray hair that had attached itself to her clothes. I'd forgotten I was still gripping her. Then, for the first time in my presence, she smiled. But it was a brittle, lofty smile.
"Go ahead. Leave. Report us to the authorities. No one's going to stop you. Give it a try. See how far you get."
I was taken aback.
"All right then. I will," I said.
"Do."
"Fine."
"Good."
"But don't blame me when it all comes crashing down around your ears," I warned.
"If that does happen, it won't be in the sense that you mean," Freya replied. "Nor will it be your doing."
"We'll see," I said.
For the life of me I didn't know whether I wanted to snog her just then or punch her. Although the latter wouldn't have been a good idea. Not only because It's Wrong To Hit Women, but because she could hit me back just as hard as if not harder than. And she was packing a big fuck-off knife and all. Come to think of it, snogging her mightn't have been such a good idea either - for much the same reasons.
And so we had ourselves a little standoff, Freya Njorthasdottir and I. I was six foot, and not many women could meet me eye to eye, especially without heels on, but she could. We gauged each other, there in the snow and the breath-stealing starlit cold, me and this maddeningly cool statuesque beauty, breaths mingling, until finally she looked set to say something, something that meant something, although I didn't have the chance to discover what because that same moment we heard the burp of a snowmobile engine sparking up, followed by two others in quick succession, then all three revving, and a few seconds later the Valkyries veered into view, scooting across the snow.
They were coming our way, and Freya called out "Ho!" and waved, and the three Valkyries returned the gesture as they passed by. Then off they went down the drive in the direction of Bifrost, hunched over the handlebars, weaving to and fro across one another's trails as they chased the cones of their headlight beams into the darkness.
"Huntresses too," Freya said, admiration in her voice. "The Choosers of the Slain. This is probably the last night they'll venture out in search of strays like you, to bring them in."
I wasn't really listening to her. All I was thinking was, I damn well hope they're back by dawn. One of those snowmobiles is my getaway vehicle.
Freya gave me a last, long, penetrating look. Then, without another word, she about-faced, loped off to the woods, and was soon lost among the trees.
I didn't follow or try to stop her this time. No point. I'd resigned myself to the fact that this was one woman I was never going to get to the bottom of.
No pun intended.
Fourteen
Next day, I was up, dressed, and raring to go before sunrise. I padded through the silent castle. Down in the banqueting hall I found sleeping bodies, revellers who'd not made it back to the cabins and instead conked out on the spot, surrounded by the debris of the meal. I had to step not only over them but over spillages of mead, the odd puddle of puke, even a spattering of dried blood. Things had got pretty rowdy later on, it seemed. Couldn't say I was sad to have missed it.
The sun was just peeking over the treetops as I reached the lean-to. Happily, all three snowmobiles were back home, parked in a row. I topped up the fuel tank of the nearest one, then strapped a jerry can of petrol to the back of it with a bungee cord I found. The machine was too heavy for me to push it away and start it up at a distance, out of earshot of the castle. I just had to hope that the thick stone walls would baffle the noise of the motor so that no one indoors would hear. If that didn't work and I did wake the household up ou
t of their collective hangover, with luck I'd be off and away and far out of sight before anyone got it together to stumble outdoors and see what was going on. The Valkyries wouldn't take too kindly to having one of their vehicles nicked, but if what Freya had said last night was true, they wouldn't be needing them in future, would they? I consoled myself with that thought as I slapped on a helmet and goggles, perched myself astride the snowmobile, and hit the ignition. My guilt wasn't huge but needed soothing all the same.
The snowmobile bucked into life beneath me. The roar of the 1000cc engine shattered the early-morning tranquillity like an atomic bomb. Quickly I engaged reverse and backed out of the lean-to. Then I gunned the throttle, swung the snowmobile round, and aimed for the drive.
I'd ridden one of these things in Canada, and they were pretty straightforward to drive, although rear-heavy and liable to fishtail if you didn't keep your wits about you and a tight rein on the controls. I sped off across powder snow that was streaked blue and pink with shadows and dawn sunlight. With a hundred and fifty horsepower beneath me and the speedo nudging thirty, the castle soon receded behind me. I kept glancing over my shoulder but no doors or windows opened and nobody came charging out looking all startled and irate. Then, all at once, the grey walls and stout turrets were gone, swallowed by a screen of trees.
That was the easy part. Halfway to Bifrost, I swerved off the drive and made for the woods. Heimdall had claimed he wasn't bothered about who or what left the grounds of Asgard Hall, only who or what entered. But if somebody from the castle radioed him in his guardhouse and told him to halt the miscreant on the snowmobile coming his way, by any means necessary, then I'd be heading straight into Kalashnikov fire, and I had no great urge to do that. The plan was I would track perpendicular to the drive for a mile or thereabouts, then resume course until I arrived at the gorge, which I'd follow to where it shallowed out. It must do at some point. After that, I would navigate by the sun, bearing south until I hit a proper road. The tricky bit would be maintaining a more or less straight trajectory through the woods. The rest: piece of piss.
Trees whooshed by on either side. I assumed "posting" position, crouching with knees bent to absorb the juddering from the bumpy, uneven terrain. Snow fanned out behind, kicked up by the caterpillar tread. Blissful heat oozed into my hands from the grip warmers. I felt a flood of exhilaration. I'd done it! I'd escaped! And no one had tried to stop me or anything. A clean getaway with no interference, no collateral damage. I could hardly believe it. Shortly I would be back in civilisation, or what passed for civilisation round these parts. Road signs, fences, dry-stone walls, barns, farmhouses, and not a single self-styled "god" in sight. Gid Coxall was a free man again. And a man with a hell of a tale to tell, if he could only persuade the right ears to listen to it.
James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin Page 10
