Valhalla, p.4
Valhalla, page 4
Attila the Hun closed his eyes, just for a moment. He didn’t want to; the last time he’d let his attention wander, somewhere in the seventeen-eighties, he’d missed the event of the century: a gnat landing on the Wall and getting its feet stuck. But his neighbour’s voice was so amazingly dull, so entrancingly soporific, it’d have taken reinforced steel joists to keep his eyelids from closing . . .
It wasn’t always like this.
‘—was always my favourite bit, just about when it wasn’t dry; you couldn’t in all honesty say dry exactly, more sort of squidgy-tacky so if you prod it with your finger you can feel the wet stuff deep down moving under the dry skin—’
Once there had been the open steppes, the thudding of hooves, the whistle of arrows descending, the screech of the sword against the steel chape of the scabbard. But no paint. Must’ve been pretty damn boring with no paint.
‘—and when you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll get to the stage where you can actually see when it reaches that precise point where if you were to press into it with your thumbnail it’d be hard, not soft, though of course it depends on how thick the coat was to begin with; I mean, if they put on a decent undercoat to start with it changes everything—’
Behind his eyes he could see it now: the moment when the line had faltered at Chalons, when Aetius’s Gothic infantry had held up, in spite of their catastrophic losses, and refused to give ground any further; that point where his wave had broken, and gradually started to recede. Funny, he thought, on that whole vast, gaudy battlefield there hadn’t been a single newly painted surface, not so much as a skirting board or a windowsill; but at the time he’d actually thought it was mildly interesting, almost as if something important had been happening. Of course, he knew better now, but at the time—
He sat up and opened his eyes. ‘How long have I been here?’ he asked.
‘—plastic emulsion, which I wouldn’t give you the pickings of my teeth for. What did you just say?’
Attila blinked. ‘I asked you if you knew how long I’d been here.’
His neighbour nodded, his eyes still fixed on the distant white glow. ‘I thought that’s what you said. Aren’t you feeling well, then?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Why do you ask?’
‘Because of what you said just now,’ his neighbour replied. ‘Some crazy nonsense or other, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Hello, it’s off again. Here, can you see? About fifteen feet west of the centre; if you look really closely you can just make out that tiny pucker where a drip will some day form. Now if you really concentrate, and I mean really concentrate, then in about sixty years’ time—’
‘Bloody hell,’ Attila said, standing up. ‘My army. My kingdom. Dammit, my whole empire—’
His neighbour’s eyes were still fixed on the wall; he was watching Attila’s extraordinary behaviour with the trailing edge of his peripheral vision only. But his peripheral vision was giving Attila one hell of a funny look.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ his neighbour hissed.
‘I can’t stay here,’ Attila protested. ‘This is wrong. Out there, the world—’
A hand descended on his shoulder, pushing him back into his seat. He tried to struggle, but all his strength, those exceptional resources of muscle and sinew that had allowed him to draw a hundred-and-twenty-pound composite horn bow with no more effort than if he’d been wiping a runny nose, had somehow evaporated. His knees buckled, and his backside and the base of his spine jarred as they made contact with the hard, cold stone.
‘Let me out!’ he tried to yell, but the words came out in a little quavery whisper.
‘Sit still,’ said a low, deep voice behind his ear. ‘Watch the nice paint.’
‘But I don’t want to watch the frigging paint,’ he twittered. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you? Then I’ll tell you. I’m A—’
‘Well?’
Attila made a funny queeping noise at the back of his throat. ‘I can’t remember,’ he croaked.
‘That’s the spirit, son. Keep it up. Watch the nice paint.’
‘But—’ He got no further. Suddenly he needed all his strength and determination just to breathe in. That was something a person could easily forget to do, breathing. And then where would a person be?
‘My name.’ The sound of his voice was as faint as the wind rustling in a single blade of short grass. ‘Somebody tell me. I’ve forgotten.’
‘Don’t need a name to watch the nice paint. Go on, look. Otherwise you might miss something.’
‘Wouldn’t want that,’ Attila murmured drowsily. ‘Doanwannamissnuvvernat.’
‘You’re getting it. Sit tight, now. Remember, watch the nice paint.’
The grip on his shoulder relaxed, but Attila didn’t move or speak. Instead he yawned, and his eyelids slid shut like a pair of those automatic doors you get in supermarkets. Then he stayed absolutely still and quiet for a week, just to make sure the nasty man with the big heavy hand had really gone.
‘I’m Attila,’ he said softly. ‘Attila the Scourge of God, king of the Hun nation, and bugger me, did you see that, the drip’s fallen off. Bloody hell, I’ve been tracking that drip since the Kaiser was a lad, and now I’ve missed it.’
‘Serves you right,’ said his neighbour unsympathetically. ‘That’s the trouble with you young people today, you just won’t sit still.’
Attila stared at the Wall. But it was somehow different now; it was as if someone had rigged up an old Super-8 home-movie outfit and was projecting a film on it. There he was - Bloody hell, look at me, I’m on the Wall - galloping full tilt across a corpse-strewn plain on a small, wiry black pony, while behind him a hundred thousand warriors whooped and yelled and hollered and somehow didn’t leave dirty hoofmarks in the paint . . .
He stood up again. His knees were still weak; but the rug had slipped off them, and as soon as he was free of its unspeakably oppressive weight he immediately felt stronger, fitter.
‘Oww,’ he wailed, and sat down.
‘Now what?’
‘Pins and needles,’ Attila whimpered. ‘In both feet. Ow.’
‘Huh. What do you expect, standing up suddenly when you’ve been sat there for fifteen hundred years.’
On the wall he saw himself again; a dirty bloody mess, four arrows sticking in his back as he crawled painfully through the mud, dragging himself by the elbows. That looked like it was even more painful than pins and needles. But the Attila on the screen didn’t seem particularly bothered; he was elbowing along at one hell of a lick, swift as a thoroughbred tortoise, faster than a speeding glacier. Oh, if only he could have been that Attila, instead of this one.
You were, once. Now pull yourself together and start walking.
‘But the paint,’ he said aloud. ‘I can’t leave now, it’s nearly dry. Come on, what’s the rush? A few more hundred years won’t hurt, and I’d hate to miss the end.’
Now.
‘But suppose that Attila wasn’t a nice person?’ he objected. ‘Why, I don’t know the first thing about him. For all I know, he might have been dishonest. Maybe even violent,’ he added, with a refined shudder. ‘I can’t actually remember anything at all, but I’m prepared to wager that my mother told me never to be reincarnated into the bodies of strange men.’
Wimp.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names . . .’ Attila hesitated in mid-quote. ‘Where am I?’ he asked his neighbour; but the man had his hands clamped over his ears and his eye rammed up so close to the eyepiece of his telescope that the flabby skin of his brows and cheeks actually enclosed the metal. ‘Be like that,’ he said, trying not to let the hurt show in his voice.
‘I thought I told you to sit still.’ It was Him again, the nasty man; and there was his heavy hand, pushing him down. ‘Why can’t you just stay put and watch the nice paint like everybody else?’
‘I don’t want to watch the nice paint,’ Attila screamed. ‘I think the nice paint is boring.’
The hand on his shoulder was tightening, the thumb digging into the hollow between the muscle and the collarbone. It hurt. Attila couldn’t remember having felt pain before. It wasn’t nice. ‘Don’t start,’ said the nasty man. ‘And don’t talk like that about the nice paint.’
‘It’s not nice paint. It’s boring. Boring, boring, boring.’
Thwack! The nasty man slapped him across the cheek. Attila felt his eyes become hot and wet, and his throat was convulsing. The detached part of his mind that dealt with cataloguing and analysing new experiences made a log entry tentatively attributing these symptoms to fear, distress and unhappiness. ‘Boring, boring, boring!’ he squealed. ‘I don’t want to watch the boring paint. I want to go—’
Home.
Home. Where’s that?
What a particularly fatuous question, coming from the leader of a tribe of nomadic raiders. Home is where the heart is; usually still quivering and nailed to a tree.
‘I won’t tell you again,’ warned the nasty man. ‘Calm down, or you’ll end up where the bad boys go.’
I am Attila, the Scourge of God— A little fragment of a forgotten reflex surfaced in his unconscious mind, and he grabbed the nasty man’s wrist, flipped him neatly over his shoulder and threw him six rows forward. There was a grisly sounding crunch as the nasty man landed. ‘Yes!’ Attila exclaimed. ‘Ouch,’ he added, as his muscles filed a formal complaint about the unexpected violent exertion. ‘Where on earth did I learn to do that?’
Nobody answered. His neighbours on both sides had edged away from him; they were still concentrating like crazy on the paint, as if he didn’t exist. He half-rose from his seat, completely undecided about what to do next. More scraps of half-digested memory were floating into his mind; bizarre, horrid stuff about burning churches and savage hand-to-hand fighting. (Gee, those big sharp knives! A person could cut himself on one of those.) But somehow, by some incredible effort of will, he wasn’t looking at the paint.
‘Run!’
He swivelled round to see who’d spoken, and saw a man standing in the ninth row up; a funny-looking man with long, droopy moustaches and a peculiar round fur hat with a steel peak. ‘Run,’ the man repeated. ‘Go on, get out of here before they come and get you. Run, Attila, run!’
Attila stared at him. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Where is this?’
‘Valhalla,’ the man replied. ‘But for pity’s sake don’t tell them I told you. I’ll get a thousand years in the blindfold just for talking to you.’
The blindfold - he remembered. Here, in Valhalla, if you were naughty they blindfolded you so you couldn’t see the paint; instead you had to listen to the radio commentary over itchy earphones, a millennium of ‘Looks like it’s still wet; yup, not dry yet, what do you think, Bob?’ ‘Well, David, I’d say it’s definitely still on the wet side.’ It wasn’t an experience you’d ever choose to repeat.
‘Don’t listen to him.’ There was another nasty man behind him, another cruel, harsh hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s just making trouble, and he’ll be punished. Besides, where could you possibly go? You’re dead.’
Attila sagged; he could feel all the vitality ebbing out of him, like air leaking from a punctured rubber ring. ‘Am I?’
‘Of course. You died and were sent to Valhalla. That’s why you can’t remember who you were. We take all that stuff away. Believe me, it’s for your own good.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course. If you had even the slightest notion of who you used to be, it’d burn you up. It’d be a far worse punishment than any blindfold.’ The voice laughed harshly. ‘In your case especially. For God’s sake, you used to be Attila the Hun!’
Attila closed his eyes. For a while, all he could see was the Wall, white paint slowly drying on the insides of his eyes. He decided to ignore it, and found that he could.
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Whoever I was - am, dammit - I have to find out. And no big bully,’ he added, repeating his earlier over-the-shoulder manoeuvre with just enough power to bring the other nasty man sprawling across his knees, ‘is going to tell me I’m not allowed to know. So,’ he went on, gripping the nasty man’s throat in both hands, ‘I suggest you tell me.’
Then Attila noticed; or at least, he remembered. The nasty man’s face was achingly familiar. Didn’t he once have a face that looked like that?
‘Correct,’ whispered the nasty man hoarsely, through a painfully constricted windpipe. ‘What keeps you here is you. It’s the most efficient system and brilliantly cost-effective.’
His neighbour on his left took one hand away from his ear to adjust the focus on his Stargazer Magnum 3 astronomer’s telescope, then hurriedly clamped it back. ‘That’s Hirohito,’ the nasty man said, ‘former Emperor of Japan. He’s got enough sense to realise that the last thing in the universe he’d ever want to know is who he was. And compared to you,’ the nasty man added nastily, ‘he was a sweetie.’
‘If I strangle you, will it be suicide? Let’s find out.’
‘You can’t leave,’ said the nasty man. ‘And you can’t kill me. Because you’re dead. Dead people don’t go anywhere when they die, not even if they do it bravely in battle. The story that they end up in Pittsburgh,’ he added, ‘is just a silly rumour.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Attila replied, increasing the pressure. ‘And even if you’re right, what have I got to lose?’
The nasty man’s face was starting to turn blue. ‘There’s always the risk you’ll find yourself in Pittsburgh,’ he croaked. ‘Six weeks there, you’ll be really sorry you left. At least here, there’s paint.’
Attila scowled. ‘Shut up and die,’ he growled.
‘How can I, I’m dead alre—’
The nasty man wriggled convulsively, then stopped moving. Attila stared at him for a moment, then let go and stood up, looked round. Nobody was looking at him. The paint, he noticed, was still wet.
He remembered who he was.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Way to go.’ At the back of the auditorium, no more than a mile from where he was standing, he could see a little door. Something told him that if he went through that door, he would find himself in Somewhere Else.
‘Hey.’ He nudged his neighbour in the ribs with his toe. ‘Save my seat for me, will you? I’m just popping out for a while.’ He grinned. ‘I may be gone for some time.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘Conflict of interests? said Lin Kortright, casually. ‘What a strange idea.’
They looked at him and said nothing. A little dribble of sweat ran discreetly down past Kortright’s ear and drained away into the gap between his neck and his collar. One of the distinguishing marks of a really first-class agent is never sweating where it shows.
‘On the contrary,’ he went on. ‘I want you to look on this as a really unique opportunity. For both of us.’
‘You already said that once,’ said the small, frail Japanese man. ‘You didn’t say why.’
Kortright spread his hands wide. ‘Sorry,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t want to insult your intelligence explaining something so goddamn obvious. Okay; you guys want to open an afterlife service that’s gonna appeal to the consumer. You think this is a new idea? Come on, will you? This concept’s been around since Adam complained about the first shooting pains in his chest. It’s never gotten off the ground because nobody knows what the consumer actually wants; because nobody ever got to ask one. Now, out of the blue, we got that opportunity. If I were you, Mr Kawaguchi, I’d start measuring Europe for new curtains, because when this deal goes through you’re gonna be able to buy it out of petty cash.’
Mr Kawaguchi shook his head; a tiny, precise movement. ‘I still don’t follow, Mr Kortright,’ he said. ‘I fail to see how your unfortunate bereavement is going to make it possible for you to contact the dead. Sad to say, you can no longer ask your daughter anything. She’s dead.’
Lin Kortright put on a smile that could have bridged the Grand Canyon. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘you’re going to help me bring her back to life. Soon as she’s back, we can start doing some really detailed market research; you know, did you find the service in the underworld (a) excellent (b) satisfactory (c) poor? Did the staff do everything they could to make you welcome? Were the towels clean? Mr Kawaguchi, Carol’s my daughter; commercial-opportunity awareness runs through her DNA the way the Mississippi runs through Dixie. I’ll bet you that right now she’s negotiating with King Pluto for a topside franchise for a chain of Hades Fried Asphodel restaurants. ’
Mr Kawaguchi stared at him again; then he pulled the immaculately folded handkerchief from his top pocket and handed it to Kortright without a word. Kortright slumped a little, took it and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
‘Distressing though your sad loss must be, Mr Kortright,’ said Mr Kawaguchi, ‘I must ask you not to allow it to cloud your professional judgement. I should regret having to cancel our agreement.’
‘But . . .’
Lin Kortright stopped there. Until he’d met Mr Kawaguchi, he’d firmly believed there wasn’t a person or a thing this side of Andromeda he couldn’t negotiate with to the point where he could not only sell them the Golden Gate bridge, he could make them pay extra for postage and packing. Mr Kawaguchi was different. Compared to him, a brick wall was an elderly widow from out of town holding a shopping bag full of banknotes and stopping drunks and street crazies to ask them for investment advice.
Still. Desperate situations and all that.
‘You want to cancel, Toshi-san, you go right ahead.’ When it came to saying the lines like he meant them, Lin Kortright was a legend in his own breakfast meeting, a man who not only called bluffs but had a whole string of them chasing after him Pied Piper fashion with their tails wagging. So; though both of them knew he was bluffing, Mr Kawaguchi’s stone face wobbled just a little and, in the split second before Kortright threw himself to the ground and started blubbering, he shook his head a second time and said, ‘I believe cancellation would suit neither of our interests.’ It was as if God had suddenly winked at Adam and said, ‘Gee, why didn’t you tell me you liked apples?’
