A fresh set of clothes was found for me — snow-pattern gear like everyone else was wearing. Turned out my own kit was more or less in tatters, which in all the excitement I hadn't realised. Torn to shreds by frost giant claws and general abuse and wear and tear over the past day.
Dressed like the rest, I joined them on the yomp back to Asgard Hall. We hiked with the sunset at our backs, on through the dark, until around midnight Freya called a halt and proposed we bed down until daybreak. Sentries were posted on two-hour watches, bedrolls were produced, and rations of bread, beef jerky, salted cod, power bars and drinking water were doled out. Under the stars, I tried to sleep, but for once in my life couldn't. My mutant super power — the ability to nod off at the drop of a hat, any time, anywhere — had deserted me. My mind was full of racing thoughts, too many to process easily. Foremost among them was the knowledge that everything I'd agreed to myself must be absolute bollocks was, in fact, true. I'd been held captive by frost giants. Creatures from fantasy, from medieval myth, and they were fucking real. I'd seen them with my own eyes. Conversed with them. Had the shit kicked out of me by them. Smelled them, for Christ's sake. They couldn't have been more real if they'd had a factory stamp on their backs stating that they were a real product of Realness Incorporated, makers of real things that are, in reality, real.
In which case, how much else here was actual-factual? Were there truly trolls as well? Gnomes? Was that big fat oaf Thor over there, on his back snoring like a chainsaw, genuinely the Norse god of thunder? Was Freya a goddess? She sure as hell had the looks for it. Was Odin, all said and done, everything he claimed to be? The Odin? Was Asgard Hall the Asgard?
I still clung to the notion that there was, to coin a phrase, a rational explanation for all this. That, like in an episode of Scooby-Doo, the supernatural-seeming stuff could be accounted for by people wearing clever costumes or using trapdoors and mirrors and suchlike. But I knew this wasn't much more than a vain hope. I was thrashing around for a lifebelt to keep me afloat and all I could lay my hands on was a set of child's inflatable armbands.
"I see that look in your eyes, Gid," said Cy from next to me, in a whisper. "That stare. It's like that for all of us, the first time, when you finally twig what's what. Takes a while to get a fix on, know what I mean? Just try not to think about it too hard. Try to accept it. Simpler that way. It's not worth losing sleep over. This is just how things are from now on. This is the world we're in."
I lay looking up at a bunch of constellations I didn't recognise, and I waited to feel comforted by the advice.
Twenty
Eventually I did fall asleep, and I dreamed I was back in the Astra.
I was back in the Astra, trapped upside down, and Abortion had burrowed his way out and was somewhere in the field outside, but he'd been gone a long time. Minutes, though it felt like hours. It didn't take that long to phone the emergency services, did it? What was he doing, giving them his life story?
"Abortion?"
Nothing. No answer.
"Abortion? Mate?"
Still no answer.
I tried it louder, almost a scream.
"Abortion!"
Don't flap, Gid, I told myself. Bugger's strayed out of earshot, that's all. Trying to get to high ground to get a signal. Yeah, that's it.
But it wasn't impossible that he'd wandered off. Abortion's brain had holes in it, which his train of thought often fell into and seldom chuffed itself quickly out of. Dazed and confused from the crash, he could easily have forgotten about me and trundled off back up to the road, maybe planning on heading back to the petrol station. By the time he got there, if he ever did, he might not even recall how he came to be out on a night like this in the first place. Meaning I was well and truly snookered.
I wriggled, struggled, but couldn't free myself. The cold was seeping into my muscles, my bones. I was constricted. Paralysed. Dying.
I woke up then, in Jotunheim, with my bedroll all twisted round me like a sweet wrapper. I got untangled, huddled tightly up and rubbed myself for warmth, and soon was dozing once more.
The claustrophobic car dream, I suspected, was destined to become a recurring nightmare.
Another one to add to the collection.
My tours in former Yugoslavia, then Iraq, then Afghanistan, had left me with a whole host of images that I could push to the rear of my mind and ignore while I was awake, but not in my sleep, when my brain was its own boss and did whatever it felt like.
The aftermath of a Sunni suicide bombing on a bus carrying Shiite militiamen in Basra.
An Afghan woman in the field hospital at Bastion, her face melted off by white phosphorus.
The charred corpses of British soldiers in a Snatch Land Rover whose armour hadn't protected them from an RPG attack near Kandahar.
Naked bodies piled high in the cellar of a house in Srebrenica, all males, the youngest of them a boy of no more than fifteen — Bosnian Muslim refugees slaughtered by a particularly vicious Serbian para-military death squad known as the Scorpions.
A British infantry platoon limping home to forward command, lugging several of their comrades behind them on improvised drag litters after a "friendly fire" incident when the joystick jockey operating a Predator drone a couple of hundred miles across the border in Uzbekistan opened up on them with Hellfire missiles, misreading his camera image and mistaking them for armed locals.
They came to me at night, these scenes and others. I lived them over and over, never able to escape them. Mental wounds, the kind that never heal. Bringers of night sweats and small-hours vigils that lasted until dawn.
The price we paid for being soldiers. The price of surviving warfare.
Twenty-One
Before dawn we were on the march again. My body had stiffened up during the night, a hundred separate bruises congealing, and I walked with all the grace of a horror-movie mummy, but I did my best to keep pace with the others. They'd come for me, risked their necks. Damned if I was going to slow them down or be any more of a pain in the arse than I'd already been.
Freya saw the ravens first, long before anyone else did. She made us halt without explaining why, until the two birds were visible to all, winging towards us from out of the sunrise.
"Oy-oy," said Cy. "Message from HQ."
"You mean those are Odin's?" I said, recalling the ravens that had been perched on his shoulders at the banquet.
"Huginn and Muninn," said Paddy. "And don't go asking which is which, because all ravens look the bloody same to me."
"And they're, like, carrier ravens? They'll have little slips of paper attached to their legs with Odin's orders on?"
"Not exactly," said Cy. "Wait and see."
The ravens circled above us for a while before descending. One landed on each of Freya's outstretched arms, and bugger me if she didn't greet them with a bow and a "good morning," just as if they were people.
"Huginn, Muninn," she said. "You have flown long and far, and I humbly thank you for your efforts."
The birds went "cawww" and "arrrkk" in turn, and flapped their wings and waggled their beaks, as though acknowledging and returning her courtesy.