I've heard a lot from the carpers, the naysayers, the critics, the commentators, all the heathen so-called intelligentsia who talk down my policies time and again. They say my pro-life and anti-gay-marriage bills — passed through both Senate and House of Representatives with scarcely a murmur of dissent, I'd like to remind you — are an affront to human rights. They say my giving increased powers to the police to stop, search, arrest and robustly interrogate whomsoever they like, as a means of preventing Terror, infringes civil liberties. They say my proactive approach to overseas military intervention is hawkish, anti-UN, inflammatory, and possibly illegal under international law, and that my doubling our annual defense spending budget to two trillion dollars is unsustainable and threatens to derail the economy.
I have a number of counterarguments which I will set out below. But mainly, in response to the people who make these accusations, I have three words.
Get. A. Life.
Was it wrong of me to send US troops to Venezuela to root out political corruption there? Was I mistaken to invade Iran in order to put a stop to their uranium enrichment program and head off the prospect of nuclear conflict in the Middle East? Was the bombing of North Korea an act of warmongering?
As far as I'm concerned, these aren't even questions. They don't merit addressing. The answers are obvious.
Growing up in Wonder Springs, I used to hear this saying a lot: Good fences make good neighbors.
I would add to that.
If your neighbors misbehave, sometimes you gotta aim the garden hose over the fence and give 'em a darned good soaking!
I'm just an ordinary girl still, even after all that's happened to me. Come the evening, when the workday's done, all the paperwork's been gone over and signed, the staff have been dismissed for the night, I check on the kids, make sure they're keeping up on their homework and not just goofing around on Facebook, and then Ted and I curl up on the sofa together with a glass of Chardonnay and catch up on TiVo'ed Judge Judy and watch Fox News (which always gets it right, unlike the biased left-wing liberals at CNN and CBS). We devour DVD box sets of our favorite series. Leno is the late-night chatshow we like to round off our evening's viewing with — I adore Jay's jokes, and he's been kinda sweet on me ever since I went on the show and launched the old Lois charm missiles at him.
I'm usually worn out by bedtime, but never so much that I'm not up for a little cuddling and canoodling. Ted and I are still very much active in that respect, thank you very much, even after nearly twenty years together. In fact, since I got sworn in Ted's been even more of a tiger in the boudoir than before. They say power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and boy, are they right! Ladies, if your husband's letting you down in the divan department, let me tell you — just get yourself elected to high office and those he-turns-out-the-lights-rolls-over-and-starts-snoring nights will be a thing of the past!
I still feel I have much to offer, and if it is God's will that I get a second term — and I know it is — then I'll gladly show the American people that their First Lady has plenty of fresh schemes bubbling away on the back burners of her stove, plenty of fresh ideas keeping cool in the pantry. Some of them'll surprise you, some of them might give you pause for thought, but I guarantee, none of them'll bore you or make you regret re-electing me.
But this book isn't a manifesto. I'll leave the promises and the pledges for the actual election campaign. The one pledge I'll give you now is that if you thought my first term was a wild ride, well heck, mister, you ain't seen nothin' yet!
Eight
A couple of days later Odin returned. And he brought a walking stick with him. Nice-looking chestnut one with a crook handle.
"For you, Gid. Time you got up and stretched those legs. Don't dither. This is the grand tour."
The castle was well lit, airy, with bare beams, white plastered walls, and little in the way of decoration apart from tapestries, usually showing a forest or a hunting scene. All the furniture was solid oak, the chairs richly carved and adorned with images of animals and helmeted warriors. Spiral staircases wound everywhere, and Odin took me on such a twisty turny route through the building that within about five minutes I'd completely lost my bearings. I couldn't have found my way back to my room if you'd paid me to.
There was a huge kitchen, and next to it a splendid banqueting hall with a high vaulted ceiling and tables and benches to seat a couple of hundred. These were arranged in long rows leading to a top table dominated by a single massive chair, a kind of wooden throne, backed up next to a large open hearth.
"Yours, I take it," I said, with a gesture at the throne.
Odin twisted his mouth. "I preside at mealtimes, yes. Someone has to. Things can get rowdy. Someone must very evidently be in charge, to maintain order."
We went outside. It was a crisp, clear day, the sky bluer and the sunshine brighter than I could remember them being in a long time. Snow lay knee-deep all around, but a series of paths had been cut through, tidily spaded out.
We followed one of them towards a vast tree which stood a couple of hundred metres from the castle. It was, honestly, the biggest fucking tree I'd ever clapped eyes on, and — surely an optical illusion, this — it seemed to expand as we approached, the squat, gnarly trunk thickening, the branches increasing in number and spreading, the leaves multiplying into infinity, the whole of it rising higher and higher from the ground, arching up further and further into the sky. I didn't think I was imagining this, but probably I was. The tree was growing, swelling, right before me. From a distance it had looked as though it would have given a Californian redwood a run for its money, but up close, absolutely no contest. It was the daddy. The mother of all evergreens. The three roots anchoring it in place were the size of buses, and you could have built a house inside that trunk — not just a house, a ruddy great mansion — and still had room to spare.
"That," I said, gazing up, "is reasonably large. What is it, a cedar?"
"An ash," said Odin.
"That was going to be my next guess." I shivered. It was chilly in the tree's shadow, chillier than elsewhere. Barely a chink of sunlight penetrated its maze of bare branches. But that wasn't the only reason I shivered. No form of plant life had any right being so enormous. It was wrong. Unnatural.
"It has a name," Odin said.
"Thing that size, it bloody well ought to. What's it called, then? Treezilla? Humong-ash? King Conifer?" I was quite pleased with that last one.
"Yggdrasil."
"Come again?"
"Yggdrasil."
"Bless you."
"I suspect however many times I repeat the name, you'll keep pretending to mishear."
"Try me."
"Yggdrasil."
"About a quarter to eleven."
That wolfish grin. "You have quite an… insistent sense of humour, Gid."
"Keeps me sane," I said. "Just about. Yggdrasil, eh? Well, it's better than Bert or John, I suppose. Tree like this, an ordinary name just wouldn't cut it. How old?"
"As old as the world."
"No, but really."
"Really." Odin winked — or maybe blinked. With that left eye of his hidden, it was hard to tell. "Yggdrasil sprang up at the moment of creation, when the Nine Worlds were formed."
"The Nine Worlds? You mean the nine planets of the solar system?"
"No, the Nine Worlds. Earth, also known as Midgard, is one. The others are Muspelheim, the world of fire, Alfheim, the world of the elves, Svartalfheim, the world of the gnomes, Niflheim, the world of — "
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." I tapped the fingertips of one hand against the palm of the other to form a T. "That's it, Odin. Time out. Let's stop right there. I don't mean to be rude, but this is starting to get ridiculous."