Odds and Gods (14 page)

‘I spy with my little eye’ - they have no names, but let them be labelled One, Two and Three - ‘something beginning with O.’

For a time they were called Graeae, and it was held that between the three of them they had one eye, one ear and one tooth, which they passed from hand to hand. This is almost certainly untrue.

‘Outcrop.’

‘Correct. Your go.’

‘I spy with my, sorry
our
little eye something beginning with . . .’

‘Hang on, I’ve still got the ear,’ said Two. ‘Here, Elsie, catch.’

‘She’s dropped it.’

‘She couldn’t see, because you’ve got the eye.’

‘That’s right, it’s all my fault, as usual.’

‘Where is it?’ asked Three, scrabbling in the short, wiry grass with her gnarled fingers.

‘Left hand down a bit, steady as you go, getting warmer.’

‘She can’t hear you.’

‘Oh for crying out loud.’

Their sleep is dreaming, their dreaming is contemplation, their contemplation is eternal bitter resentment about who forgot to pack the spare organs. ‘Got it,’ said Three, ‘no thanks to you two.’ It is perhaps unfortunate that the only organ they have in triplicate is tongues.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘I spy with our little eye something beginning with R.’

‘Ravine.’

‘Correct. Give Betty the ear, Elsie, and do please try not to drop it.’

‘I like that coming from you.’

One of the drawbacks that comes with playing I Spy for at least five hours each day in the same place ever since the beginning of Time is that you reach a point where you know all the answers.

‘Mountainside,’ said Two.

Three scowled. ‘You might wait till I actually ask the question.’

‘It’s the right answer, isn’t it?’

‘That’s beside the point.’

‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ said One, ‘let’s play something else.’

‘All right.’

What is undoubtedly true is that they are wise. All the wisdom in the Universe has at one time or another made the circuit of that little ring before drifting out into other, more prosaic dimensions. This means that the Three are very powerful, very wise and . . .

‘Name me three rivers whose names begin with Y.’

‘Yangtze-kiang, Yarra and Yellow.’

... Very, very bored.

‘Let’s play something else instead,’ sighed Two. ‘What about consequences?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ replied Three, ‘you cheat.’

The ear flashed from hand to hand, until it became a blur. The eye, meanwhile, lipread.

‘I do not.’

‘You do.’

‘It’s impossible to cheat at Consequences.’

‘You seem to manage.’

‘You two,’ growled One. ‘Just shut up and spin, all right?’

They sat, and they span, and Time ran round the circle. Time running in an enclosed circuit generates Truth. Truth sparking across the points of Knowledge becomes Wisdom.

‘We could,’ suggested Two, ‘play Twenty Questions.’

‘Are you out of your mind? After last time?’

‘What?’

‘I said, are you out of your mind, after last time.’

‘What?’

‘She’s gone and dropped the ear again.’

‘We ought,’ opined One, ‘to tie a bit of string to it, and then we wouldn’t have any of this—’

‘What?’

‘Oh forget it.’

On the skyline, about seven hundred yards away, a tatty yellow van materialised and crawled painfully over the rocky ground. There was the occasional scrunge as some component or other hit a stone.

‘There they are,’ said Osiris, pointing. ‘You see them, Carl? Just under that funny-shaped tree.’

‘I got that, Mr Osiris. I think we just lost the exhaust.’

Pan closed his eyes. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure about this, because those three old boilers really get up my nose.’

‘Absolutely essential,’ Osiris replied. ‘Here, Carl, watch out for that—’

‘Sorry, Mr Osiris.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Pan winced. ‘You sure,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t just look him up in the phone book or something? I mean, we haven’t actually tried that, have we?’

‘Shut up, Pan, there’s a good lad. Right, park here and we’ll walk the rest of the way.’

Under the tree, the three sisters stiffened, the web suddenly still in their hands.

‘Visitors,’ observed Two with disgust.

‘Not again,’ One sighed. ‘That makes three times this century. What does it take to get a little peace and quiet around here?’

‘What’s she saying?’

‘I said—’

‘She’s dropped it
again
.’

‘One of these days,’ remarked Two, after a short scrabble, ‘it’s going to go in the cauldron and get cooked, and then where’ll we be, I should like to know.’

Folklore abounds with different versions of how to approach the sisters and implore their assistance. All known versions are completely incompatible with each other, except that all agree that the sisters must be treated with the very greatest respect. Failure to observe this simple precaution will inevitably mean that any request for information will fall on deaf ear (even if the ear hasn’t rolled away under a stone or taken refuge in the lid of the sewing box), and there are rumoured to be even worse consequences as well.

‘Wotcher,’ Osiris called out. ‘Hands up which of you’s got the ear.’

‘Who wants to know, shortarse?’

Osiris cleared his throat. The next bit always made him feel terribly self-conscious.

‘Look,’ he said, I conjure you by the dread waters of Styx, you who know all that is, all that was and all that will be. Tell me now—’

‘I can’t hear you,’ said One, putting on her irascible crone voice. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’

Pan leaned forward, grabbed the ear from One’s withered hand and held it to his lips like a microphone.

‘He said,’ he shouted, ‘he conjures you, lots of stuff about how clever you are, and he wants to ask you something. Got that?’

The three sisters sat for a while, waiting for the ringing inside their skulls to stop.

‘There is no need,’ said One frostily, ‘to shout.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I said, there’s no need to—’

‘Sorry?’

‘What did she say?’

Pan grinned. ‘SHE SAID THERE’S NO NEED TO SHOUT,’ he said, and tossed the ear towards Three, who fumbled the catch. There was a plop as the ear went in the big black pot that stood in the middle of the circle. The sisters shrieked in chorus.

‘Butterfingers,’ said Pan. ‘Now then . . .’

Sandra darted forward, plucked the ear out of the soup, picked a few lentils and split peas out of the funnel-shaped bit and handed it carefully to One.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘All right, fire away.’

 

Somewhere near the French-Belgian border, a giant Mercedes lorry thundered south-westwards through the night. Swiftly it went on its sixteen wheels, and its iron belly safeguarded a consignment of two thousand cases of tinned prunes.

The driver, a Breton, stared with weary eyes into the cone of white light his headlamps projected and whistled a tune to keep himself awake. It had been a long day and he had many miles to go, but the magnitude of his enterprise stirred in him a sense of adventure he hadn’t felt since he was a lad. For there was a serious shortage of prunes in France, so the rumours said, and it was mildly flattering to be chosen to be the man who brought the canned fruit from Ghent to Aix.

As he approached the border, he braced himself for a potentially tiresome passage through customs. You didn’t need too exceptional an imagination to forecast the reaction of a bored excise official to the information that the cargo aboard the truck consisted of half a million prunes. There would be funny remarks, and witticisms, doubtless at his expense; and at three in the morning after a long drive, he could do without that sort of thing, thank you very much.

So preoccupied was he with these and other similar thoughts that he didn’t notice the fact that he seemed to have acquired a shadow, in the form of a big, black, four-wheel drive with tinted windows.

The first he knew about this vehicle, in fact, was when he came round a sharp bend to find the road blocked by a tractor. He slammed on his brakes and slithered to a halt; whereupon three shadowy figures jumped out of the four-wheel drive, ran up to the driver’s door and pulled it open. Something metallic sparkled in the pale light of the stars.

‘Just climb out slowly,’ said a shadowy figure in abysmally accented French, ‘and you won’t get hurt. Okay?’

The driver nodded quickly. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You do know what I’m carrying, don’t you?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Okay.’

(By pure coincidence, another identical lorry owned by the same road freight company was carrying a load of twelve million cigarettes along the same route, only about three quarters of an hour behind. Because of the prune famine, the schedules had been rearranged somewhat.)

Shortly afterwards, the lorry continued its journey, with a different driver, and headed for a different destination; namely a deserted hockey field on the outskirts of Cambrai. On arrival, it was driven into a big shed, and the doors closed behind it. Lights came on, and men hurried to the tailgate to start unloading.

The gate opened.

‘Hang on,’ said a voice from inside the container body. ‘This isn’t right, surely.’

The speaker, when fixed in a spotlight, turned out to be a white-haired old gentleman in a wheelchair. He was flanked by a plump girl, a large, stocky man with an expression like bad amateur taxidermy, a tall, thin man in camouflage gear holding a very large handgun and an even taller, thinner character with goat’s feet.

Slowly, the hijackers backed away. Even those of them who could stomach the sight of Lundqvist’s Desert Eagle felt distinct bad vibes from the expression in the old man’s eyes and the curious terminals of Pan’s legs. In the version they’d heard, it had been an old lady with an axe in her shopping-basket, but this was clearly an updated rescension of the same basic urban folkmyth.

‘Sorry about this,’ Pan called out. ‘Only, we needed a lift, you see, and there was your lorry, and we thought . . .’

There was a shot. Maybe it was fear, or perhaps just a nervous finger tightening reflexively on a trigger. The bullet hit Pan in the forehead, passed out the back of his head as if through thin air and buried itself in the mountain of boxes behind. Brown juice started to seep through the cardboard.

Then there were more shots - Lundqvist giving area fire with the .50 calibre, which made a noise like a portable indoor volcano and took out most of the lights. The hijackers responded in kind. There were suddenly prunes everywhere.

‘Stop it,’ said Osiris briskly, ‘at once.’

Simultaneously, every firing pin in the building jammed solid, and the lights came back on. This time, however, they were supported by unpleasantly-shaped figures with the heads of jackals; and for all their brilliance they seemed to produce more shadows than light. The hijackers came forward.

‘Now then,’ Osiris said. ‘Someone tell me where we are.’

The gang leader, nudged forward by his colleagues, unravelled six inches of tongue from round his Adam’s apple and explained. He also apologised profusely, expressed extreme regret for having inconvenienced such obviously distinguished supernatural persons, and asked if they would very kindly care to turn the prunes back into Marlboro Hundreds, as he had a customer waiting.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ Osiris replied. ‘We’ve got to get to Aix by morning, and you’re going to take us there. Otherwise, ’ he added with a pleasant smile, ‘something around here’s going to get turned into cigarettes, but it sure ain’t going to be the prunes. Kapisch?’

The journey was resumed. This time, however, the chief hijacker travelled inside the container, with the muzzle of Lundqvist’s gun nestling in his ear and Carl standing behind him with a tyre iron.

‘Going far?’ the hijacker asked.

Osiris grinned. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think you’d want to know where we’re headed, really I don’t.’

‘That’s fine,’ the hijacker replied quickly. ‘Only making conversation.’

‘But I’m going to tell you anyway,’ Osiris replied maliciously. ‘That way, either you’ll tell someone else, and they’ll lock you up in a loony bin for the rest of your life, or else you’ll keep it to yourself and probably go stark staring mad anyway. Serve you right. We’re gods.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘And,’ Osiris went on, ‘we’re headed for the Kingdom of Death, if it’s still there. Last time I heard, they were trying to turn it into some sort of ghastly drive-in theme park, but I don’t suppose they ever got the planning permission. I mean, imagine the problems you’d have with off-street parking.’

‘Indeed.’ To those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give pins and needles in the left foot. The hijacker rubbed his leg against the side of the van, but it didn’t help much.

‘We need to go there,’ Osiris went on, ‘because the Three Wise Women told us that in order to locate the last hiding place of the Golden Teeth of El Dorado (which, as you know, lie at the world’s end and are guarded by an enormous fire-breathing, hundred-headed answering machine) we have to find and read the Runes of Power chalked on the wall in the little boy’s room immediately adjacent.That’s what they said, anyway,’ Osiris concluded. ‘It’s not April the First today, by any chance?’

‘You certainly have an unusual job,’ said the hijacker. ‘Did you always want to be a god or did you just sort of drift into it?’

‘We need the Golden Teeth,’ Osiris went on, ‘in order to pay our lawyer. That’s just something on account, by the way, to cover initial expenses, setting up the file on the computer, routine administrative work, that sort of thing. He’s very expensive, even for a lawyer.’