Odds and Gods (13 page)

It was the smell of cooking; to be precise, mushrooms and fried tomatoes.

The gods, it should be explained, ate their food raw and drank rainwater. After all, when you’re immortal the risk of catching some fatal disease from raw food is minimal; and since there’s no way a god can die of starvation, meals were in any case little more than a ritual observance designed to while away half an hour of endless, all-the-shops-are-shut-and-it’s-raining Eternity.

Nothing but salad for the rest of Time. Small wonder that the gods were all as miserable as sin; small wonder, too, that they regarded this as the proper state of affairs. Happiness wasn’t a concept they could easily get their heads around.

Athene uncrumpled her wings, adjusted a bent antenna and took off. Something would have to be done about this.

About a week later, Epimetheus and Pandora were just waking up from a nice lie-in and wondering whether to breakfast on plantain fried in honey or glazed eggplant with cinnamon when there was a knock at the cavemouth. They looked at each other.

‘Visitors,’ said Epimetheus.

‘Oh
goody
,’ replied his wife. ‘Just think, Ep, our first guests! Isn’t this wonderful?’

‘Rather,’ said our common ancestor, jumping up and running to the cavemouth. ‘Gosh, life’s fun.’

Outside the cave stood a tall figure in a blue uniform, with a peaked cap. There was, Epimetheus subconsciously noticed, a strange, almost unfinished look about him; almost as if he’d been called into being by someone who had a vague idea of what he should look like, but insufficient detailed knowledge to complete the job. Epimetheus couldn’t help feeling that, viewed from the back, he wouldn’t be visible.

‘Sign here,’ said the man.

‘Certainly. How do I do that, exactly?’

The man showed him, and Epimetheus followed suit enthusiastically, until the man took the pen and clipboard away from him. Then he handed him a parcel.

It was big, and chunky, and it rattled excitingly when you shook it. It also said
Do Not Open This Parcel
on the label in big red letters, and if Epimetheus hadn’t been so completely carried away with the delirious excitement of it all, he might have wondered how the hell he could read the writing, bearing in mind the fact that he was only sixteen days old and writing hadn’t been invented yet.

‘Hey, what are we supposed to do with this?’ he asked the man, except that the man wasn’t there any more. He shrugged, grinned with pleasure and took the parcel back into the cave.

Seven minutes later, of course, they’d opened the parcel.

‘What is it?’ Pandora asked.

Epimetheus shrugged again. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘there’s writing on the side here.’

‘What’s writing?’

‘This is.’

‘How absolutely wonderful.’

The writing said:

‘Gosh,’ said Pandora, after a long pause. ‘What’s a catalogue? ’

‘This is, I suppose,’ Epimetheus replied, lifting a thick glossy book out of the carton. He flicked a couple of pages and whistled. ‘Hey,’ he whispered, ‘you wait till you see what’s in here!’

The very next day, the order arrived: an electric blender (plug not supplied), a video recorder, a washing machine, a power drill, a microwave oven and an exercise bicycle. And, tucked in with the packaging, an invoice for three thousand, six hundred and thirty dollars, ninety-five cents (including delivery and packaging).

By the afternoon of that day, there was a certain coolness in the atmosphere at the cave. Epimetheus, if asked to account for it, would have explained by saying that Pandora had cracked the jug on the blender, jammed the washing machine and broken the exercise bicycle by over-vigorous use. Pandora’s version would have been that Epimetheus had made a complete mess of wiring up the plugs and plumbing in the washing machine, with the result that all the appliances had blown themselves up and the floor of the cave was an inch deep in suds and soapy water. In addition, there had been a degree of asperity in the discussion as to who was going to pay the bill.

It occurred to neither of them to ask where the electricity supply and the mains water had come from; partly because they were innocents living in the first dawn of the Golden Age, but mostly because they were too busy arguing over whose fault it was that Epimetheus had used the electric drill to drill slap bang through the middle of a power cable; after which, anything to do with the electricity supply was pretty well academic.

The next morning they overslept (the alarm clock radio didn’t work, because (a) Epimetheus had put the batteries in the wrong way, or (b) because Pandora had set it up all wrong, despite Epimetheus’ totally lucid explanation of how to do it). What finally woke them was the sound of the bailiffs breaking in to repossess the blender, the video recorder, the washing machine, the microwave, the power drill and the exercise bicycle.

This led, inevitably, to a free and frank exchange of views on the subject of budget management, impulse buying and some people who were so mean that other people couldn’t be expected to live with them one minute longer; which was in turn interrupted by the arrival of the men from the electricity company to disconnect the supply for non-payment of the bill.

By nightfall, the cave was empty. Pandora and Epimetheus had moved to smaller, damper caves at opposite ends of the mountain and were corresponding bitterly by carrier pigeon over who was to get the alarm clock radio.

As the argument raged, and the air vibrated with the clatter of hurrying wings, something moved at the bottom of the original box, out of which the free gift had come. It stirred. It blinked. Feebly, it spread stunted wings and lifted itself into the air.

In their excitement, Pandora and Epimetheus had overlooked the little creature; that slow, patient, long-suffering stowaway in the box of troubles. It didn’t mind. It suffered long. Painfully stiff after its long confinement, it fluttered away towards Pandora’s cave with its message of hope.

As you will have guessed, the little creature’s name was Litigation, friend to all wretched mortals who have suffered wrongs and been oppressed. Next morning, when it perched on the rock outside Epimetheus’ hovel and handed him a writ, it had somehow grown slightly larger and maybe even a touch fatter; but it had deep, grey eyes that seemed to say, Trust me.

By the time it arrived back at Pandora’s cave, bearing a counter-writ, it was the size of an ostrich and virtually spherical, and its soft velvety paws had been replaced by whacking great talons. By then, of course, it was ever so slightly too late.

Lundqvist didn’t put it quite like that, of course; his account was rather more pithy. But that, more or less, was the basic outline.

‘I
taly?’ Odin asked, smiling. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

Below them, the traction engine ran smoothly, purring across the sky like an enormous flying cat. It had been Thor who’d fixed it eventually, and in doing so proved yet again the validity of his theory of simple mechanics; namely that, just because something’s inanimate and incapable of perception doesn’t mean to say it can’t be scared shitless by being threatened with a whacking big hammer.

‘Well, for a start,’ Frey replied, ‘the place is full of Italians.’

Odin shook his head in gentle scorn. ‘It’s a well known fact,’ he said, ‘that there’s a substantial emigré Italian population in the north of England. More a Yorkshire phenomenon than Derbyshire, I’d always understood, but obviously you came across an enclave . . .’

‘A whole townful?’

‘They like to stick together.’

‘Escorting a statue of the Madonna through the streets to a Romanesque cathedral?’

‘Probably nineteenth-century Gothic.’

‘Past a town sign saying
Bienvenuto in Bolzano
?’

‘Twin town scheme. Very popular idea these days, twinning. Never had it in our day, of course. Nearest we ever got was, we burn your crops, you throw decaying corpses in our water supply.’

Thor, propped on one elbow on the roof of the cabin, snarled irritably. ‘You’d better be right, sunshine,’ he said. ‘Because if this is Italy, then we’re a long way from home, and the further we are, the later it’ll be before we get back, and the likelier it is that She’ll have noticed we’ve gone. And you know what that means.’

‘Are you suggesting that I’m frightened of Mrs Henderson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rubbish.’

Frey shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘If it helps at all,’ he murmured, ‘I’m absolutely terrified of Mrs Henderson.’

‘Huh.’ Odin sniffed. ‘I always reckoned you had a yellow streak in you.’

Frey stiffened. True, he wasn’t the most warlike of the Norse gods; he was, after all, a god of peace and fruitfulness, of nature and the quickening earth; or, as his devotees had put it back in the good old days, a wimp. True, in the Last Days, when the Aesir had ridden forth for the last battle with the Frost-Trolls, it had been Frey who’d volunteered to stay inside Valhalla and man the switchboard and co-ordinate supply chains and monitor intelligence reports and all the other things one can find to do indoors in time of war. But these things are relative; and even a wimpish Norse god is on average rather more quick-tempered and volatile than a barful of marines at closing time on pay day. ‘What was that,’ he enquired, ‘you just said?’

‘I don’t know about you two,’ Thor interrupted, ‘but I’m scared of her. And so are both of you, if you get right down to it.’

Odin shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘and so am I, but that’s beside the point. We’re on our way home, and she’ll never even know we’ve been gone, and that’s a promise.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

‘We’re exactly on course,’ Odin continued icily. ‘Another three minutes and we’ll be directly over Warrington.’

A look of recollected pain crossed Frey’s face. ‘It’s the way she draws her eyebrows together just before she tells you off that gets me,’ he said. ‘As soon as you see those eyebrows move you say to yourself, Right, here it comes, but there’s like this sort of twenty-second gap, and it’s the waiting that gets you down. I’ll swear she practises in front of the mirror or something.’

‘And the tone of voice,’ Thor replied. ‘Don’t forget the tone of voice. The way she says, “What
do
you think you’re doing, exactly?” It makes you feel so . . .’

‘I know.’

‘Will you two stop going on about Mrs blasted Henderson?’

Thor shook his head, and looked down over the side at the ground below. It was at times like this, when he found himself gazing down from the heights upon the kingdoms of men, spread out beneath him like some enormous chessboard, that he felt an overpowering urge to drop something heavy over the side. He resisted it.

‘So what’s that lot down there, then?’ he asked.

‘Which lot where?’

‘The major city with all the suburbs and arterial roads and things.’

So high up was the chariot that all a mortal would have seen was a splash of grey, flickering intermittently through the veil of thin cloud. But the gods can see things which we cannot; not with their eyes but with their minds, which thrill to the subtlest harmonies of the planet. With their minds they can see Time, smell light, hear the grinding of the Earth on its axis, feel the vibrations of the changing seasons. Thus, from this height, a god would have no trouble at all making out the Coliseum, the Forum, the Baths of Caracalla, Trajan’s Column, St Peter’s Square, all the crazy cross-hatched jumble of junk and jewels that make up the Eternal City.

‘Easy,’ said Odin, throttling back and gently feathering the airbrake. ‘That’s Droitwich.’

 

Ever since the world began, there has been a windswept hillside under an iron-grey sky where three grey women sit beneath a bent tree and spin.

What name you give them depends on who you are; but you can never be wrong, whatever name you choose, simply because what mortals call them is completely and utterly unimportant. Whether you refer to them as Parcae, Norns or Weird Sisters, nothing you can say or do will affect them in the slightest degree, because they were here first. More to the point, they will still be here long after you, and everyone else, have been entirely forgotten.

They sit, and they spin. Some people will have you believe that they are asleep, and in their sleep they dream, and their dreams are thoughts and their thoughts supply the world with wisdom. Others claim that what they spin is the web of life; its warp, its weft and the final little dismissive click of the scissors. The truth, insofar as such a concept has any validity in this context, is that they sit, and they spin, and occasionally speak softly to one another, just as they have always done, and what you may care to believe is your own affair entirely.