Valhalla, p.13
Valhalla, page 13
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So what’re you gonna do about it?’
None of them had an answer to that one. Carol counted to five under her breath, then smiled encouragingly.
‘Here’s what you want to do,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’
Blank faces. ‘Excuse?’
‘Nothing,’ Carol repeated. ‘Don’t fight. Don’t carouse. Don’t do anything. Just sit around all day, or stay in bed. Hell, if everybody joins in, we could bring this place to its knees in a day or so.’
A particularly bewildered-looking Viking on the far left stood up. ‘To be explaining,’ he said. ‘In order to be more fighting, not to be fighting at all?’
‘You got the idea,’ Carol said firmly. ‘You just wait and see, you’ll have Odin crawling to you, begging you to get out there and beat the shit out of each other. And you’ll just sit there like big dumb blocks of wood and do nothing. It’ll drive him nuts.’
‘Us similarly,’ sighed a Viking doubtfully. ‘Not to be fighting at all; in Valholl?’
Carol shook her head. ‘I ain’t saying it’s gonna be easy,’ she said. ‘No way. It’ll hurt like hell. It’ll be—’ (inspiration again) ‘it’ll be a real battle. Because this is the only way you guys can really fight for what’s due to you.’
‘By not fighting, to fight?’ the doubtful Viking queried. ‘Like mud the clarity.’
‘To be silent, Thorgrim,’ the big hairy Viking snapped. ‘Of the wench the wisdom to be heeding. To be fighting,’ he said solemnly, ‘is without a fight to be giving in.’
‘Thou dog!’
‘Ruffian!’
‘Guys,’ Carol interrupted, as the two Vikings leapt up and drew their swords, ‘guys. Cool it, will you? Can’t you see you’re playing right into their hands? This is exactly the way they want you to react.’
‘It is?’ The two Vikings looked at each other. ‘Of us the gullibility!’
‘You bet.’ Carol grinned. ‘If you start fighting, it’ll mean you’ve given up the fight. Whereas, by not fighting, you’ll be fighting them, and fighting’s what you’re here for. So,’ she added, taking a deep breath, ‘if you want to fight for the right to fight, then don’t fight, right?’
That one worried a lot of them. ‘Excuse?’ said one. ‘Past me once more to be running?’
The big hairy Viking turned round in his seat. ‘To be explaining,’ he said. ‘Of to be fighting the right to fight for, by not fighting is best to accomplish. Better?’
‘Ja,’ replied the other, relieved. ‘But that in the first place, why could she not be saying?’
‘Herself clearly to express, trouble is she having,’ the big hairy one whispered. ‘In life our advantages maybe not having had. The form, to be mocking, is bad.’
Carol clambered up on to the table and stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Okay, guys,’ she said. ‘Are you with me?’
Beards waggled right across the rows.
‘Then let’s go to it,’ she shouted. ‘And remember, Vikings sedated can never be placated. You have nothing to fight except fighting itself.’
‘Excuse?’
She left them, grimly sitting, sitting with every fibre of their being, and wandered through into the kitchen; where she found Odin, tossing a salad.
‘Didn’t you know?’ he said, looking up. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’
Carol ignored him. ‘I guess you heard all that?’ she said.
Odin nodded. ‘You realise this is war,’ he said.
‘You started it,’ Carol said. ‘Hell, you even dropped the hint.’
‘I know.’ Odin smiled at her fondly. ‘I wanted to start a war - after all, this is Valhalla, picking fights is what we’re here for. And it was all getting so darn cosy.’ He reached up for the dried basil. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m really pleased to see how quickly you’ve got into the spirit of things. We’ll make a Valkyrie of you yet.’
It came to him, just as he was being crushed to death under the tracks of a Challenger tank—
(Something of a collector’s item, as ways to die go. So far, from memory, he’d been:
- shot: 37 times
- blown up: by
(a) artillery fire: 21 times
(b) landmines: 14 times
(c) booby-traps: 7 times
(d) grenades: 2 times
- stabbed: 18 times
- gassed: 14 times
- hit by shrapnel: 11 times
- crushed under falling masonry: 9 times
- strangled: 7 times
- burnt to death: 6 times
- hurled off ledges: 6 times
- impaled on railings: 5 times
—but this was only the second time he’d been run over by a tank; and on the previous occasion it had been a mouldy old T-34, not a shiny new Challenger. It reminded him of collecting bubblegum cards as a boy. After three years of assiduous collecting, he’d ended up with forty-nine spare Bobby Charltons and never did manage to find a George Best. Would it be possible, he wondered, to swap deaths with his fellow inmates to make up the set?)
—that there was one obvious way to break the cycle and get home free. All he had to do was not die.
It stood to reason, he assured himself, as his life’s blood drained away into the dust. At the end of the day there had to be at least one man left standing, otherwise who killed the last-but-one? And when there was only one left, what happened to him? If he was allowed to go, at last there’d be some sort of sense to the whole ghastly business; something to fight for, an objective to strive towards, even if it wasn’t terribly realistic to expect to be able to attain it any time soon. First he’d have to study advanced fighting techniques (he hadn’t noticed many signs saying GROSVENOR ACADEMY OF FIGHTING around the place, but opportunities for picking it up as one went along were all around him), then he’d have to keep persevering until finally the day came and he made it. It could take a year, or five, or a thousand; but eventually he’d have served his time, learned whatever lesson it was he was supposed to learn here, and it’d be over.
Piece of cake, really. And with any luck, the hard crunchy bit in the middle of this piece of cake would turn out to be a file.
At one minute past dawn the trumpets sounded and the dead were raised; and Howard came roaring out of the traps like a greyhound who’d been promised forty per cent of the gross, paid in dog biscuits. Instead of trudging wearily down the street trailing his rifle after him, he bounded diligently from shell-hole to bombed-out shop frontage to abandoned jeep, shooting on sight anything not substantial enough to take cover behind, watching, listening, paying the strictest attention. If he got wasted again this time, it surely wouldn’t be for want of trying.
It settled down into a long, hard day. To begin with, it was all ambushes and street-fighting, and for some reason he handled it all extremely well. Howard made every shot count, and he fired plenty of them - unusually good marksmanship for a man who’d earned the nickname Vlad the Impaler when he’d played for a pub darts team, thanks to his unfortunate habit of missing the board completely every third shot or so and dropping the errant dart neatly among the customers standing at the bar. In fact it was downright bizarre. His hand-eye coordination was usually so poor that it was rumoured to have been studied by a Civil Service research team; yet here he was, swatting down the opposition like flies all around him. My turn? he speculated as he swung the .50-calibre Browning machine-gun up to waist height and opened fire, mincing an ambush up fine. Maybe each one of us here gets to have a good day like this, once every thousand centuries. That would certainly fit in (he mused, as he sidestepped a Rapier missile and ducked under a strand of virtually invisible monofilament wire stretched throat-high between two posts) with my last-one-gets-to-leave theory. It’s even possible that they’re deliberately making this easy for me.
By just after teatime, Howard had wiped out every sentient being between Rabone Lane and Beechfield Road, survived a tactical nuclear strike on the Harry Mitchell recreation centre and single-handedly sunk a Trident submarine on the Victoria Park boating lake, armed with nothing but his bare hands, a set of Chinese spanners and a long piece of string. After he’d paused for a breather and eaten a Penguin biscuit he’d found miraculously unharmed among the glowing cinders and melted paving stones of the Hales Lane cricket pavilion, he looked around for new opponents, but there didn’t seem to be any. The nuke had something to do with that, he was sure; and now he came to think of it, before he’d taken out the sub, it had been shelling the surrounding area for several hours with phosphor bombs, which in context was a very helpful act on its part. It was possible that he was already the last living creature in the war zone (assuming that the zone was basically confined to central Smethwick; if it continued up into Sandwell, he had a busy afternoon ahead of him). In any event, he was well on his way.
Five hours of fruitless wandering later (he hadn’t seen the streets this empty since last Cup Final day) Howard found himself standing in front of the blackened shell of a building he recognised as the Constance Avenue post office in West Bromwich, just as the sun began to dip below the horizon like a huge fiery orange digestive biscuit dunked in an infinity of inky black tea. The last recognisable life form he’d encountered had been a small rat, which he’d surprised as it tried to cross the B4169 opposite Smethwick West railway station. He’d nailed it stone cold dead with the fourth shot from his M-16, just in case. He’d walked all the way from Smethwick to West Brom and nobody had tried to do him any injury whatsoever (further evidence to fuel his growing conviction that this couldn’t be the real Smethwick). Surely, he told himself, I’ve done enough. I’ve survived a whole day without getting killed in the slightest. Can I go now, please?
‘Sorry.’
He swung round and, on instinct, squeezed the trigger; but the pin clicked on an empty chamber. He dropped the rifle and dropped his hand to his belt, groping for the machete that had been there ten minutes ago but wasn’t now.
‘It’s all right,’ Odin said, raising above his head the hand that wasn’t holding the bag of chips he’d been scoffing. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Now all you’ve got to do is kill me, remember, and you’re out of here. Till then, though, you’re mine.’
Howard remembered, all right: bullets, cold steel, wooden stakes had all bounced off the bastard like a bankrupt’s cheques. ‘We’ve been through all that,’ he said. ‘And what you said then,’ he added, ‘was that I had to keep trying till I killed you or the sun sets. Nothing about succeeding. After all, how can I kill you? If you’re really Odin, aren’t you some kind of god?’
‘My, what a sharp memory you’ve got,’ Odin answered with his mouth full. ‘Chapter and verse, all off pat; quite the shop steward, aren’t we?’ He glanced up at the sky, where the last slice of sunset was boiling away into the night. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course,’ he said. ‘All you’ve got to do is make a reasonable attempt at knocking me off within the next, let’s see, forty seconds, and you’re free to go, back to your drab, mundane little life in peace-torn Smethwick. So? What’re you waiting for?’
With a deep growl that frothed up from the bottom of his throat, Howard stooped to pick up a heavy spar of roof timber to use as a club. As he did so, however, the pile of fallen masonry that the spar had been supporting fell on him. He almost managed to jump clear, but a steel girder fell across his leg, pinning him to the ground and making it impossible for him to move.
‘Well?’ Odin asked politely, studying his watch. ‘Here I am. You’ve still just about got time for one savage, albeit inaccurate swipe - no, sorry, I tell a lie. Time’s up. What happened? You had a change of heart or something? Sudden change of role models, delete Rambo and replace with Gandhi? Charming sentiment, but the timing could have been better.’
‘Bastard,’ Howard said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said “bastard”,’ Howard repeated, tugging helplessly at the girder. ‘You knew that was going to happen. Probably you made it happen. This whole thing was a rotten cheat.’
Odin raised both eyebrows. ‘I’m wounded,’ he replied. ‘Actually, if only you’d said that a few seconds earlier you’d be home in front of the telly right now, watching EastEnders, because a verbal wound’s quite valid after seven p.m. on a Wednesday. So you see, I wasn’t cheating, because you still could have won. Ah well,’ he added, as the rest of the wall fell on Howard’s head, spreading it like marmalade, ‘better luck next time.’
‘Mrghrmph.’
‘Didn’t quite catch that,’ Odin said, walking away. ‘Actually, I’m very pleased with the progress you’re making. The way you massacred the crew of that submarine - vintage stuff. I might even consider nominating you for an Arnie. Anyway,’ he added, waving without turning round, ‘ten out of ten for persistence. You remind me of Robert the Bruce’s spider.’
In spite of everything, Howard couldn’t help feeling just the slightest little surge of pride. ‘What, you mean I’m indomitable?’
‘Hm.’
‘Whatever the odds,’ Howard went on, ‘you know I’ll never give up trying; every time I fall down I’ll just pick myself up and give it another go, over and over again until the job’s done? That sort of thing?’
Odin shook his head. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I mean you’re a nasty little crawling thing who’s going to spend the rest of his life not getting anywhere. Have a nice day.’
The inner barbarian; that, as far as his six-year-old cognitive skills had been able to make sense of it, was what Odin had been hinting at.
The bell rang for playtime, and all the other little boys and girls in Attila’s class jumped up from their desks and hurtled out into the playground. Attila didn’t join them immediately. He suspected it was something to do with being new to this body; he didn’t seem to have mastered the fine points of controlling it, which made him perceptibly slower and clumsier than the rest of them. He was also, he’d noticed with annoyance, a good inch shorter than average, but that wasn’t a new problem. Back in the good old days when he’d been a Hun, he’d quickly got used to all the Westerners - Romans, Goths, Vandals, Franks and the like - towering over his short, compact Central Asian nomad’s frame, but when it came to the crunch (or the slash, or the tchunk! or the chokkthud-aaaargh! ) it hadn’t proved to be an insurmountable handicap. Also, as if to compensate, what he lacked in height he made up for in weight. Few if any nomads of the steppes ever managed to hack and slash their way to a sufficient level of prosperity to acquire more than an ounce or two of surplus fat, whereas he had the sort of tummy on him that he’d only ever seen on the children of great khans.
As he got up, he noticed the teacher was looking at him oddly. Attila was thoroughly used to furtive sideways glances from women, signifying either lust or abject terror, but this didn’t seem like either of those. It was—damn it, he knew this one, that strange, abstruse Roman emotion that his people had never quite managed to get the hang of. P-something. Ah yes, that was it. Pity. The woman teacher looked at him as if she was sorry for him. Now why on earth would that be?
‘Brad,’ she said, and even now it took him a moment to associate that peculiar name with himself. ‘Aren’t you going outside to play with the other children? It’s a beautiful day.’
He glanced out of the window; couldn’t see for the life of him what was so all-fire wonderful about it. Hot sun, cloudless sky, the sort of weather that turns the meat rancid and encourages the horseflies. ‘Yes, miss,’ he said meekly.
‘Off you go, then,’ the teacher said, patting him on the head. ‘Play nicely.’
The barbarian within, he reflected, as he walked slowly down the corridor. It was an intriguing concept, at once contradictory and maddeningly seductive; the idea that one should strive to be the best barbarian one can in the circumstances in which one happens to find oneself - because we can’t all lead hordes or sack cities, there aren’t enough of either to go round, but we can do our very best to cherish and preserve the guiding principles of barbarism in our hearts, even if it’s just in trivial everyday things, like making time each day to pull a cat’s tail or drop some litter.
Or, Attila said to himself brightly, pick on someone smaller and weaker than ourselves. No shortage of raw materials here, he noticed, looking round the playground; the problem would be deciding where to start. So many pigtails, so little time.
While he was standing in the doorway, trying to decide between stealing the little blonde girl’s pink bunny pencil case or pulling the extravagantly long hair of the little girl with the Barbie™ lunch box, he noticed that the bright sunlight he’d been deploring earlier no longer seemed to be such a problem. He looked up and saw that standing between him and the sun were two boys; late sixes, possibly early sevens. They were staring at him and grinning.
‘Hey, you,’ said one of them. ‘Fat boy.’
Attila’s eyebrows narrowed. ‘You talking to me?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
Oh joy, Attila thought. I haven’t smashed a skull or prised open a ribcage in—oh, I don’t know how long. This is going to be such fun. ‘Are you calling me fat?’ he asked, assuming the hapless infant had intended the term as an insult, though where he came from it was what you called your clan chief to his face if you were a brown-noser.
‘Yeah,’ said the boy. ‘’Cos you are.’
‘Fat as a pig,’ added his companion, much to Attila’s delight. In his previous life, his record had been four suckling babes spitted on one lance, but he was out of practice and he knew it. Start with two and then work your way up slowly.
‘Come over here and say that,’ he replied.
After that, things didn’t quite go as he’d anticipated. He was just winding himself up for a really bloodcurdling yell when he realised he was lying on his back, with one boy sitting on his chest, pinning down his arms, and the other one banging his head against the playground tarmac. No matter, he said to himself, been in worse situations before, like that time in Kamchatka when the Uzgars nearly trapped us in that narrow pass. Nearly but not quite, which was why nobody since had ever heard of the Uzgars. He tried to do that really rather neat wriggle-and-jump manoeuvre he’d learned from the Frankish hostages, but somehow it didn’t work. A rapid diagnostic scan revealed that the source of the malfunction was an acute lack of physical strength. The boys were bigger than he was, and all his skill and experience couldn’t make up for that. He was helpless.
