Odds and Gods (22 page)

Odin was still wrestling with the joystick. ‘What irresponsible fool put those mountains there?’ he growled. ‘Some people just don’t think, that’s their trouble.’

He jerked the joystick again, snapping it off. He stared at it for a moment and then put it carefully away under the seat. Probably get it back together again with a spot of weld, he reflected.

Thor leant out over the side. Up to a point his former view - the back of Odin’s neck - had suited him fine, since it blocked out a lot of rather disturbing things, like the ground rushing up to meet them. On the other hand, he was so sick of the sight of his colleague that right now, anything would be preferable.

‘Oh shit,’ he groaned. ‘More mountains.’

‘Volcanoes,’ Odin corrected. ‘Active ones, by the looks of things. That’s odd, you know.’

‘Odd!’

Odin nodded. ‘I think we may have wandered off course a bit,’ he shouted. ‘I don’t recall there being any active volcanoes in Staffordshire.’

All this while, of course, they had been gaining rather than dissipating speed. It should therefore have been some comfort to them to reflect that even if the joystick hadn’t snapped and even if the rudder had been working, there still wouldn’t have been time to avoid the huge crater they now flew into . . .

But not out of.

 

‘
Si, senor
.’ The old peasant nodded and pointed. With a wave, the driver of the leading armoured personnel carrier waved and let in his clutch. The column moved off.

‘
Medicos Yanquis
,’ the peasant explained to his wife as they glumly contemplated next season’s cabbage crop, over which the column had driven.

The peasant’s wife scratched her brown nose, and smiled. On the other hand, she said, there was the compensation.

Compensation?

Compensation, she confirmed. When the Yankee drug police burnt down old Miguel’s tomato plot last year thinking it was drugs, they paid him twice its value. And when they napalmed Salvador’s beans and shot up his turnips with the helicopter gunships, he ended up with a profit of something like three hundred per cent. This year he was seriously considering hanging paper cut-out flowers on his onion sets to make them look like opium poppies, just in case they came back this way.

The peasant shook his head. Not drug people, he explained. Doctors.

Gringo
doctors, his wife corrected him.

True . . .

T
he Guardian of the Golden Teeth stirred in his sleep.

It had been a long time since anybody had come - even mortals learn eventually, and twenty acres scattered with wind-bleached bones help to concentrate the mind. In actual fact, the bones were a job lot from a bankrupt ossuary, but the Guardian liked them. He felt they added tone.

Under him, the ground trembled, troubling his sleep with dreams of water-beds and passing trains. His subconscious mind reassured him that it was just the volcano playing up, and the dreams returned to their previous even tenor: a green baize cloth, coloured balls, a man in a waistcoat leaning pensively on a wooden shaft. The Guardian hadn’t the faintest idea what the dream was supposed to be about, but so what. After the first ten years it was strangely hypnotic.

The fact of the matter was that, many years ago, a group of cunning and unscrupulous Australian television magnates, unwilling to meet the cost of launching a satellite, had found a way of using the Guardian’s slumbering brain as a relay station, with the result that his primordial sleep was populated with soap operas, American films and round-the-clock sports coverage, all rattling around in his frontal lobes and frequently seeping through into the parts that processed the dreams. At one time, when the Melbourne Olympics coincided with the birth of Linda’s baby and the TV premiere of
LethalWeapon 9
, the Guardian’s dreams were probably the most bizarre mental images ever generated since the death of Hieronymus Bosch.

Mortals. He could smell mortals, not too far away. And, he realised, another smell; a strange one, this, something that he could just faintly remember from a very long time ago. A worrying smell, presaging trouble.

Not mortals, the other things. Immortals. Gods. There were gods on his mountain. Dammit, when would they learn they weren’t welcome here?

 

‘Fine,’ Pan said, sitting down on a rock and sinking his chin in his hands. ‘Now all we have to do is find some way of moving them. Anyone think to bring a wheel-barrow? ’

Below them lay the Teeth. The clear, tranquil, still slightly effervescent pink liquid that filled the crater served to distort the outline of the huge yellow objects that lay - how deep? A few metres? Fifty? A hundred? - below the surface, but in spite of that, and despite the distance from the lip of the crater to the bottom, the sight was little short of staggering.

Interesting to compare the reactions of the members of the party. Osiris had jammed the brake on his wheelchair and was gazing with one of the wildest surmises ever seen in those parts, silent on an extinct volcano in Nezahuancoyotl. Pan, as stated above, was wretchedly speculating as to who, in accordance with his usual rotten bloody luck, was going to be called upon to do the heavy lifting. Sandra was thinking, Right now, what wouldn’t I give for a whacking great big cheese-burger. As far as we can tell, Carl wasn’t thinking anything at all.

‘Amazing,’ Osiris said at last. ‘All that wealth, all that ingenuity, all that manpower, and all the silly sods needed to do was invent the toothbrush.’ He sighed. The older he got, the more firmly he was convinced that all gods were, basically, pillocks.

‘Excuse me,’ Pan interrupted, ‘but if you’ve got some subtle scheme for shifting that lot, now would be a very good time to mention it.’

Osiris brought his mind back from its reverie with an almost audible click. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘We cheat.’

‘We can do that, can we?’

‘’Course we can. We’re gods, aren’t we? Where’s the point in being a god if you can’t bend the rules now and again?’

‘There’s bending rules,’ Pan muttered, ‘and there’s the law of conservation of matter. And before you ask,’ he added, ‘yes, if they catch you breaking it they do come down on you like a ton of bricks. Even for a first offence I believe the minimum penalty is four thousand years’ community service.’

‘Relax,’ Osiris replied. ‘To the gods all things are possible, remember?’

‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

‘Don’t be so damned negative about everything,’ Osiris said irritably. ‘That’s the trouble with you. At the first little sign of difficulty you start to panic, and—’

‘Well I would, wouldn’t I?’

Osiris sighed. ‘We cheat,’ he said decisively. ‘And this is how we do it.’

Because, after all, the laws of physics are like all other laws everywhere: designed to make life difficult and unpleasant for the small fry like you and me, while the rich and powerful take no notice of them whatsoever.

The basic, back-of-an-envelope logic behind it all was as follows:

Fine; but that wasn’t getting an extremely heavy set of false teeth shifted from the bottom of a very big crater. In order to achieve that objective, a degree more detail was required. Thus:

‘Here we are,’ Osiris said. He put the teeth carefully away in a jiffy bag, and stowed the parcel in his inside pocket. He turned his head towards Pan, and grinned. ‘You see what you can achieve by thinking things through,’ he added. ‘Saves no end of mucking about.’

‘Well done,’ Pan replied, while his inner thoughts added
Bloody show-off
. ‘And now I think we’d better be getting along, because I have this funny feeling that . . .’

In the crater, the lake was beginning to froth.

‘You’re paranoid, you are.’

‘Am I?’

‘Believe me.’

‘Maybe,’ Pan answered. He was looking down into the crater, where the froth was clearing on the meniscus of the lake, which was now starting to boil. ‘Have you ever asked yourself what made me paranoid in the first place?’

Osiris followed his line of sight. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘standing round here chattering isn’t achieving anything, and we’ve got a lot to do, so maybe we should . . .’

And then the volcano shook, and from the bottom of the now empty crater a waterspout leapt up, whirling and spinning. As it spun faster it seemed to take on a shape, a form branded on to the divine subconscious and signifying hassle. A few spins later, and it was solid.

‘Strewth,’ Carl muttered under his breath. ‘It’s a bloody great big snake.’

Out of the mouths of babes and morons. It was no longer even translucent; it was depressingly material, a monstrous serpent, towering above them, making a giant Redwood look like a dwarf geranium. At the top of the metallic scaled neck perched not one but very many small, diamond-shaped heads, each with its own fangs and flickering forked tongue. For the record, the Guardian had seventy-three heads, each one capable of independent action. Through his still sleeping brain, meanwhile, weird and incomprehensible messages flashed and were gone, leaving behind a sort of glow, like the flash of floundering colour you can still see with your eyes closed after looking at the sun.

Marvellous stuff, Steradent. Not only does it preserve dentures from decay and kill the lurking germs that find their way into the recesses of even the best false teeth; when the need arises, and some deadly peril threatens the teeth placed in its charge, it can (if infused with enough magic to poison a convention of wizards) turn itself into a hundred-foot-tall mythical serpent and devour all known intruders.

‘Funny the way it’s still bright pink,’ Sandra observed. ‘I wonder if it still tastes minty.’

One of the advantages of having the god Pan in your party is that you can get all the blind, unreasoning terror you could ever possibly need, the finest quality, trade. As the hydra uncoiled its grotesquely long neck and lunged, hissing (not exactly hissing; more a sort of bubbling fizz) and darting out countless pink tongues, the denture-thieves scattered and fled, leaving Osiris stranded directly in its path.

‘Pan, you sodding coward!’ they heard him shout. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re . . . ?’

Oh no you don’t, Pan reflected as he hurled himself into a narrow crevice between two split rocks and covered his head with his arms. I
know
what I’m doing, and I prefer it this way. I may be immortal, but I’d really rather not spend the rest of eternity inside the digestive organs of a fucking great snake, thank you all the same. And being a god means never having to say . . .