"Still got this rifle, sunshine," I said. "Smack dab between the eyes, and you'll have the mother of all headaches to deal with."
She glared at me through those footballer's wife sunglasses. You couldn't see her eyes but you could sense the fury in them. I'd goaded her good and proper. How to win friends and influence people, the Gid Coxall way.
"Well. That's plenty enough of that," she said. One of the limo's rear doors sprang open, seemingly of its own accord. Mrs Keener bent to climb in. "It's war from here on in. Y'all are gonna suffer and die for what you did to me. The centuries I spent in that cavern, my eyes sizzling and burning and growing back only to sizzle and burn some more. The torture and humiliation you put me through. Payback's a bitch, and that bitch is me. Asgard's end is coming. We've had the Fimbulwinter. Now it's Ragnarok's turn to step out onto the pitcher's mound. Three strikes and you'll be out, all of you. Bottom of the ninth, and there ain't no way you're saving the game by stealing a home run."
The door slammed. The limo revved and reversed rumblingly along Bifrost. At the far end of the bridge it U-turned and tore off down the road, snow spewing from its tyres. We watched its taillights fishtail into the dark, two red eyes shrinking 'til they were gone.
"Baseball metaphor," I said, as the echoes of its engine noise faded. "Anybody here speak baseball? Because I'm drawing a total blank."
The Aesir and Vanir, however, weren't up for a laugh. They turned and wandered away in dribs and drabs. Freya was one of the first to go. As she passed me, she said in a conspiratorial murmur, "Pity. It would have been a good, clean kill."
I winked, but she pretended not to notice.
Forty-Nine
Soon there was just me left, and Heimdall. I went and checked on him. He was sitting in the doorway of his guardhouse and looked better than he had a few minutes earlier. Starting to recover from the effort of blowing the Gjallarhorn, which was now back hanging on the wall.
"All right?"
Heimdall gave a weary nod. "In a way, I'm relieved," he said. "Ragnarok has begun. Finally it's begun. The onus of knowing that it was coming, knowing that one day it would fall to me to announce it — this sat heavily upon my shoulders. But now the moment has come and gone, and I feel… uplifted. How strange."
"It's not so strange. Nothing worse than the wait before an action. You're dreading what's ahead and you're glad when it all finally goes off."
"True."
"So what happens next? What's the order of play? When do the actual hostilities commence? Any idea?"
Heimdall shrugged. "Loki will marshal his forces and attack at some point in the near future. I'm listening out for it even now. As soon as I detect enemy activity, however faint and remote it is, I will raise the alarm. As yet, I've heard nothing untoward."
"Well, he's only just left, hasn't he? Let's give the bloke a chance to get his act together. You're sure you're going to be okay?"
"I think so."
I said goodnight and made my way back along the drive towards the castle and the cabins beyond. Bed beckoned. Some kip was definitely in order. There wouldn't be much of it in the days ahead, I imagined.
Along the way I caught up with Bragi, who was straggling behind the rest of the Aesir. He was a slow walker, the head-down, trudging type. I fell in step.
"Few days back, that thing about the poem…" I said to him. "Sorry about that. I shouldn't have slagged you off."
He gave a not-to-worry shrug. "I have a thick skin, Gid, as a poet must. How else can he survive the jeers and insults that sometimes greet his work? If there's anyone whose feelings you should be concerned about, it's Loki. You were unwise to antagonise him, you know. He is not one to be trifled with."
"Who was trifling? I meant to kill the fucker stone dead. How was I supposed to know a bullet in the chest would only piss him off?"
"Perhaps no one anticipated you would take such precipitous action."
"Even so, it's like there's a bunch of rules here I don't understand, probably because nobody's seen fit to tell me what they are. I mean, you're gods, but you're not immortal, but you can't die 'til the time comes for you to die. Have I got that right?"
"More or less."
"Well, how does that make sense?"
"It makes sense if you stop thinking of us as deities as such."
"And what do I think of you as instead?"
Bragi frowned deeply, looking inward. "Odin would explain this far better than I."
"Have a go."
"We are… myths. Do you understand what I mean by that?"
"Stories."
"If you like. Bigger than that, but yes, basically stories. We are created things, fabrications, and we're aware of it. We know full well where and how we originated. We are incarnations of the tales that the Norsemen told around fires on long, cold nights, the sagas that entertained them and enlightened them and helped keep the dark at bay. We were given form and substance by oral tradition, licked into shape by it just as the first Aesir were themselves licked into shape by the cow Audhumla from the salty rim of the Ginnungagap. The storytellers assigned us our personalities and patterns of behaviour in order to help their people understand the universe and their own environment. Vikings were all about fighting with their neighbours or trading with them. No wonder, then, that the storytellers dreamed up a cosmos in which gods are engaged in constant border disputes with their enemies and rely on certain allied races to supply goods they can't manufacture themselves. Through us, our tales, our deeds and feuds, the Norsemen affirmed and justified their place in the grand scheme of things."
"This is nuts," I said. "You're saying you know you're not real?"
"Not at all," he replied. "We're real. The storytellers' imaginations made us real — as real to every member of their audience as the person sitting beside them. Granted, they bestowed us with power, made us capable of superhuman feats. A bit of exaggeration there. Poetic licence. But real all the same. Our squabbles, our rivalries, our passions — nothing about us, deep down, was unintelligible or 'godlike' to the Norsemen. To them we were ordinary people with a few added extras. Gods made in mankind's image. I expect this is hard for a modern, rationalist mortal like you to comprehend."
"Yes. No. Maybe a little. Not being funny, but TV soap operas — you know what those are?"
Bragi smiled lopsidedly through his lush beard. "I've heard of them."
"Not a fan myself, but my ex is. She follows a couple of them religiously. To her, the characters are like people she knows. I mean, she's not retarded. She knows it's just actors working from a script. But on some level I think she believes the characters exist. While they're onscreen, at any rate. That's why viewers, millions of them, get so absorbed in the shows and watch them week in, week out. Waste of time if you ask me, but if it makes them happy…"
"It's life, but a heightened version of it."
"Yeah."
He waved an index finger in the air. "And so are we. And we, too, have certain plotlines we must follow. Our lives, and deaths, have already been dictated and mapped out by the storytellers long ago, and preserved for posterity in the Eddas. We know how things are going to turn out for us. We all have predetermined roles to play and destinies to fulfil."
"But that's…" I groped for the right phrasing. "Isn't that, well, a bit depressing? You're called gods but you're actually — no offence — puppets."
"'Puppets' is putting it too strongly. It makes us sound as though we lack free will. We have free will. We merely choose to act in the manner that's been established for us beforehand. Take Thor. He couldn't bring himself to befriend a jotun if he tried. But that's fine, because he has no great desire to befriend a jotun. He's happy to want to bash in the brains of every one of them he meets. So there's no inner conflict there, no angst. We all accept who we are and what is expected of us."