Odds and Gods (28 page)

‘And that,’ said Osiris, ‘is Jericho.’

‘Um,’ Sandra replied. She wasn’t sure that she liked the look of it much. Certainly it wasn’t anything like the picture in the
Illustrated Children’s Bible
she’d doodled all over in Sunday school; for one thing the version depicted by the artist hadn’t had so many searchlights, barbed wire entanglements and machine-gun emplacements. Nor had there been a big signpost with a skull and crossbones on it reading MINEFIELD - DO NOT ENTER right in front of the main gate.

‘I gather,’ Pan remarked in a conversational tone, ‘that they’ve been digging an escape tunnel for the last three thousand years. Hasn’t got very far, though.’

‘No?’

Pan shook his head. ‘Dimensions inside a geological fault get a bit muddled,’ he explained. ‘Damn thing kept on coming out slap bang in the middle of the same tunnel a week after they started digging. The diggers from the future were able to tell the diggers from the past not to bother after all. This,’ he added with a grin, ‘led to all sorts of problems, as you can imagine.’

Sandra preferred not to. ‘Sorry if I’ve missed something, ’ she said, ‘but aren’t they going to be a bit - well, fed up after all this time? I mean, when we open the gates and go in and . . .’

Pan shuddered. ‘Not bloody likely,’ he said. ‘No way we’re going to let any of them out until . . . Oh for crying out loud, what’s the stupid old fool think he’s doing now?’

Osiris, pushed by Carl, was speeding towards the main gate, weaving an apparently perfectly remembered course through the minefield. In his hand he held a big bronze key.

‘Can’t you stop him?’ Sandra hissed.

Pan smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What a pity.’

Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Osiris.’

‘Osiris who?’

‘Stop pissing about, you pea-brain, and let me in.’

A panel in the gate shot back and a hideous face was glimpsable for about half a second. Half a second would be approximately four hundred and ninety-six milliseconds too long.

‘No, that’s not it,’ said a voice from the face. ‘That doesn’t sound right at all.’

‘I said open this door, you—’

‘I think,’ continued the voice, ‘you mean Osiris walkin’ down the lane, All in the month of May—’

‘Sabre-toothed ponce, or I’ll make you wish . . .’

‘Or maybe it was Osiris eyes are smiling,’ continued the voice. ‘It was something like that. Not a very good one, anyway.’

Osiris closed his eyes and counted up to ten.This wasn’t to help him calm down and keep his temper. Quite the opposite.

‘Hang on,’ said the voice, ‘isn’t it, A kiss is just a kiss, Osiris just a sigh, The fundamental thi—?’

‘
Right!
’

There was a flash of lightning, a peal of thunder, and a very loud crash; and the door came away from its hinges and fell. A second later, a small, weary voice was audible from somewhere underneath where it had landed.

‘Okay,’ it said. ‘Anybody spot my deliberate mistake?’

‘Ah.’ The doorfiend, now visible in all his biological improbability through the vacant doorway, scratched his head. ‘It was deliberate, was it? Because I thought to myself, when the hinges melted and then the door started to fall
outwards
, I thought—’

‘Shut up and get me out of here.’

The doorfiend swiftly obliged, lifting Osiris out of a god-sized hole he’d been hammered into by the sudden descent of several hundred tons of wrought bronze gate.

‘What was the name again?’ asked the fiend.

Osiris told him.

‘Coo!’ said the fiend, grinning. ‘I wouldn’t go letting them in here find out, ‘cos that’s the same name as the little shit who’s responsible for all this, and they might just think you were him.’

‘Might they?’

The fiend nodded. ‘And that’d be bad news,’ he went on, ‘’cos really the only thing they do to help them pass the time is planning what they’re gonna do to him, the real Osiris, I mean, when they get out.’

‘Let me guess. Buy him dinner?’

‘No.’

‘Flowers?’

‘Not unless you count sharpened bamboo poles as flowers, no.’

Osiris shrugged. ‘Never mind, he said. ‘Now then, which way to the Governor’s office?’

 

Knock. Knock. Knock.

‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me, Governor.’

‘No, I’m the Governor, who are you?’

Osiris, having made some passing comment about crying out loud, blew open the door (this time not repeating the deliberate mistake; with the result that the door fell heavily on the doorfiend, driving him fencepostlike eight inches into the ground).

‘Bloody hell fire. You!’

Osiris smiled pleasantly. ‘Ba’al, my old mate,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘Long time no see and all that. I see they made you a trusty, then.’

‘You?’

‘Nice office you’ve got here. Splendid view of the . . .’ Osiris craned his neck. ‘Of the exercise yard, well, that’s wonderful. You always were fond of sport, I seem to remember.’

‘You!’

‘It’s a funny thing,’ Osiris went on, wheeling himself in and taking a cigar from the box on the desk. ‘I was just thinking to myself the other day, I wonder how my old friend Ba’al’s getting along these days. And that set me thinking, of course, about the old times.You remember the old times? Of course you do.’

‘You . . .’

Osiris lit the cigar, inhaled, and coughed. ‘And I thought,’ he went on, ‘it’s never right, I thought, my dear old chum Ba’al locked up in there with a load of criminals and undesirables, there must be something I can do, see if we can’t get him out on parole or whatever, I mean, what’s the use of having power and influence if you can’t—?’

‘And so,’ Osiris said, ‘here I am. Got a little deal to put to you which might—’

‘—interest you.’

 

‘Right,’ said Ba’al, rubbing his hands together. ‘Any suggestions?’

The packed dining hall echoed with shouting voices. There were nine hundred and six gods jammed into a space designed to hold three hundred gods in modest discomfort. During their long imprisonment, the gods and goddesses of ancient Palestine hadn’t exactly been idle.

‘One at a time, now,’ Ba’al shouted, waving his arms. ‘Best of order, ladies and gentlemen, please. You at the back there, Mammon. I think you were first.’

Osiris, bound hand and foot in the middle of the throng, smiled serenely. This was better than he had dared hope.

‘Well,’ said the god at the back, ‘it’s got to be the oil, hasn’t it. Thirty years up to his neck in boiling oil, I mean, we did discuss this in committee . . .’

‘Tar.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The chair,’ yelled Ba’al forlornly, ‘recognises Tanith, Queen of Darkness.’

‘It was tar, you silly old fool,’ said Tanith irritably. ‘We put it to the vote, remember, and it was five hundred and thirteen for tar, three hundred and forty-three for oil, fifty abstaining.’

‘It was not, it was oil. I distinctly remember asking where we are going to get that much oil from.’

‘Pitch, you daft old cow. When we took the vote, tar hadn’t even been invented.’

‘Not to mention,’ Mammon continued, ‘fuel efficiency. To maintain tar at a constant one hundred degrees Celsius—’

‘Tar, pitch, does it really matter? The point is—’

‘The point is,’ shouted Melkart, a short, fat god with hairy ears, ‘twelve minutes in oil, the bugger’ll be fried to a crisp and that’ll be that, whereas with tar—’

‘Thank you,’ Ba’al bellowed, ‘but I think we had this debate before. Will someone just look up the minutes?’

‘What minutes?’

‘The minutes of the—’

‘I think you’ll find there aren’t any. I remember saying—’

‘Are you telling me there aren’t any minutes?’

‘The chair recognises—’

‘And you can shut your face and all, you daft old—’

Ba’al scowled. ‘Hoy,’ he growled, ‘this is a democratic—’

‘Since when? We’re gods, aren’t we?’

‘Excuse me.’

Dead silence, instantaneously. It must have been, Ba’al later reflected, the way he said it.

‘Thank you.’ Osiris cleared his throat. ‘I just wanted to say,’ he went on, ‘that if any of you want to get out of here - ever - then this is probably your last chance.’ He paused; still silence. ‘And if I were you, I’d hold the oil just for a while.’

‘Not oil. Pitch.’

‘Whatever.’ Osiris frowned in the general direction of the heckler, and then continued. ‘First,’ he said, ‘outside this building I have a crack team of commandos, led by someone whose name is, I feel sure, familiar to many of you . . .’

‘
Lundqvist
,’ someone whispered, at the back of the hall. ‘
He must mean Kurt Lundqvist
.’ Osiris was impressed.

‘Secondly,’ he went on, ‘the reason I’m here today is purely and simply to offer you imbeciles . . .’ He paused, letting the word hang in the air. Good, he reflected, as the silence persisted, I’ve got ’em. ‘. . . imbeciles the chance of a free pardon. If you do exactly what you’re told, of course. If not . . .’

The silence lingered; mellowed; ripened. And then was broken.

‘I still say it was oil. I mean, boiling tar, just think of the smell . . .’

‘
Sssssh!
’

It is a terrible thing to be shushed by nine hundred and five gods simultaneously. The nearest precedent is probably the piecemeal tearing of Orpheus by the Thracian Women; except that piecemeal tearing is, comparatively speaking, quick and painless. Torn piecemeal, you don’t find yourself still waking up years later at three in the morning, sweating and pink to the ears with embarrassment.

‘Hush, please!’ Ba’al banged with his gavel for silence and smiled weakly at Osiris, who nodded affably back. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said politely. ‘Please, do go on.’

 

‘The way we do it,’ said Ba’al, ‘is this.’

Osiris nodded politely. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ To the gods all things are possible, but some of them are still bloody difficult; for example, keeping your eyelids from foreclosing when someone is explaining to you how to operate a complex bond-washing deal on a five-dimensional stock exchange.

‘You’ve heard,’ Ba’al’s voice was saying, ‘of selling forward, like in exchange rate and commodity transactions? Well, that’s basically what we do here, except we sell back. It’s really pretty straightforward . . .’

Creak, creak, creak went the drawbridges of Osiris’ eyes, and the strain of keeping up so much weight unsupported is pretty extreme, particularly if you’re trying to stay awake at the same time. ‘Good Lord,’ Osiris heard himself say, ‘isn’t that clever.’ He hoped, vaguely, that the context was right.

‘. . . Whereupon the brokers
backwards
in time, who are of course selling their stocks of gold
forward
against early settlement in a bull market, buy
retrospectively
so as to get the advantage of the reverse exchange rate differential, which washes out the coupon, resulting in a very useful capital loss for tax purposes. And it’s at precisely this point that we step in and buy
forward
, on a
bear
market, thereby . . .’

‘Really.’ If Macbeth really did murder sleep, Osiris mumbled dreamily to himself, I can quite believe that he was provoked beyond endurance. ‘Now that you’ve explained it,’ he hazarded, ‘it all seems so very simple.’ He smiled.

‘It is,’ Ba’al replied, nodding. ‘And of course the effect is redoubled if you then sell back through a parallel universe, creating a Doppler effect on the commodities markets in this universe while still getting your settlement ex div
over there
.’ He paused; and an allegorically minded artist, requiring a model for Smugness, need have looked no further. ‘All my own idea,’ he said, ‘and completely legal and above board. Mind you,’ he added in a whisper, ‘it can have side-effects, like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but you can’t make omelettes, can you?’

‘Hmm?’ Osiris woke up suddenly from a short but vivid dream involving stuffed crocodiles. ‘Tricky,’ he answered. ‘I always find it helps stop them sticking if you whisk up the yolks in an egg-cup first.’

‘Quite. Well, I’d better be making a start, hadn’t I?’

‘Absolutely.’

Ba’al smiled. ‘Strictly speaking, of course,’ he said, ‘I already have. That’s the joy of it, so little paperwork.’Then he laughed, indicating that that had been a funny, albeit technical, joke.

‘Ha ha,’ Osiris therefore said. ‘Look, roughly how long will this take, because I have people waiting.’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Or seventy-three years, of course, depending on temporal refraction. We’ll probably get a slightly better rate if we wait for the upturn in the fiscal sinewave.’