Odds and Gods (31 page)

‘I did.’

‘Yes, thank you, Carl, I’d rest on your laurels for a bit if I were you. Look, can anyone beside me smell a sort of deserty stable smell?’

‘I can.’

‘And which one of you said—?’

‘Me.’

‘Thanks. And who’s me?’

The lights went on . . .

‘Me,’ repeated the camel.

 

‘Our demands,’ said Teutates, his tone of voice belying his air of confidence, ‘are as follows. One, we want . . .’

The wind howled, bringing with it small, hard bullets of rain that bit into the back of his neck. It was also, he couldn’t help noticing, a long way to the ground, even for a god like himself. He tried to huddle down a few millimetres further into his dressing-gown.

‘I do wish you’d all stop being such sillies and come down from there,’ replied the voice of Mrs Henderson, blared metallically through a megaphone. ‘You’ll catch your deaths of cold in this weather.’

Teutates steeled his heart. About ninety-three per cent of him by volume (ninety-five per cent by weight) wanted to capitulate, scramble back down the ladder and wrap itself round a big bacon sandwich and a steaming mug of hot chocolate. The other seven (or five) per cent of him, however, being the parts of the brain i/c policy formation, held the casting vote.

‘We stay,’ Teutates shouted back. ‘You want us; come and get us.’

‘Please yourselves,’ Mrs Henderson megaphoned back. ‘As I always say to guests when they first arrive, so long as accounts are settled promptly and you don’t upset other residents, this is Liberty Hall. I’ll see you at dinner, I hope.’

‘Our demands,’Teutates yelled, ‘are, like I said, straightforward. First, we want a fast car, and a doctor, and two million gold zlotys, and . . .’

The great sit-in on the roof of Sunnyvoyde had started off with at least one bang and a wide selection of the very latest crashes, quality bespoke sound effects you can be proud of. Twenty-four hours later, there was just Teutates, Nkulunkulu, the Great Sky God of the Zulus, and a small, unidentified hairy deity of no apparent usefulness and incapable of saying anything other than ‘Uk!’. By the look of him he was probably a vegetation spirit from the Maldives, but it was just possible that he was a reporter or something in disguise. Most of the time he slept.

‘Our demands,’ shouted Teutates hopelessly. As the wind ate his words and the rain finally found a narrow accessway down the back of his collar, he found himself reflecting that rice pudding, in moderate quantities and with due notice, can make a pleasant change and is not unpalatable. ‘Are negotiable,’ he howled, just in case anyone was listening.

Back inside the comfort of her warm, dry sitting room, Mrs Henderson caught a faint echo of the last two words and smiled. Give them another three hours and then send the odd-job man out with a ladder.

Nevertheless, it was worrying; very worrying. Mercifully, the manifestation the dissident tendency had chosen on this occasion had been wildly inappropriate, given that she had confiscated the keys of the thunder from Thor when he first moved in, and could summon up wind and rain whenever she chose. Next time, they might use their common sense before selecting their course of action.

It was all the fault of
naughty
Mr Osiris, she reflected. They only dared behave like this because he was still on the loose, making them think things and giving them a precedent, and hope. The sooner he was dealt with, the better.

There was a spluttering noise from her desk, and she saw a fax worming its way through the rollers. When it had finally wiggled to a halt, she read it, and smiled again before scribbling an answer and sending it off. The number she dialled was unlisted and known to very few people, probably because the last thing the Judges of the Dead need is piles of junk faxes.

Oh
good
, Mrs Henderson thought.

 

It was a very odd-looking camel indeed. It was tall, with long spindly legs, and you didn’t need to look twice to see that it had all its ribs. In fact it was so thin that it was probably the only known life-form capable of wearing a Calvin Klein original without bursting the zip.

‘Hi,’ it said.

Osiris drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘the hell is going on here?’

‘Weighbridge,’ replied the camel, with its mouth full. ‘Sort of weighbridge, anyway. At your service, distinguished patrons.’

Pan, who had been looking around, saw what he’d been looking for, and grinned. ‘Clever,’ he said. ‘Strictly within the rules, helps keep the riff-raff out; yes, I like it. Your own idea?’

The camel shrugged, giving the impression of a conga of coathangers. ‘Alas, no,’ he said. ‘I am merely a loyal, hard-working employee dedicated to the ideal of old-fashioned personal service. Three hundred thousand zlotys to go through.’

Osiris was becoming impatient. ‘Somebody explain,’ he demanded. ‘To go through what, precisely?’

Pan pointed.

At first it looked like an ordinary archway, until you realised that archways aren’t usually made of chrome-plated steel. Once your eyes grew accustomed to the bewildering perspectives involved, you realised that it was . . .

‘The eye of a needle,’ Pan said. ‘You pay your money, the camel does his bit, you’re in, free and clear. I assume there’s a certificate or something to say you got to the other side?’

The camel nodded. ‘Duly witnessed and legalised by a notary public,’ it said. ‘I am, as it happens, a notary public.’ It lowered its voice. ‘I took the exams and everything. ’

‘I’ll bet you did,’ Pan replied. ‘Look, thanks for your time but we’re all of us poor as church mice, so I guess we’ll just carry on the way we were—’

‘Ah,’ said the camel. ‘You mean via the toll road?’

‘That’s not quite what I meant,’ Pan replied cautiously, ‘but do please go on. You will note, by the way, that my friend over there is carrying a very big rifle, which I believe has strong Freudian overtones in his case but is nevertheless loaded.’

The camel shuddered slightly, reminding Pan of a xylophone yawning. ‘There’s no need to get boisterous,’ it said, and pointed with a hoof towards a side tunnel. ‘Pedestrians are requested to keep to the footpaths at all times,’ it added. ‘Have a nice day, now.’

About twenty yards in, the side tunnel grew narrow and low, so that everyone except Osiris had to duck their heads. Underfoot the ground was spongy and soft without being damp, and the sides had the same sort of feel to them. It was unnervingly like being inside somebody’s intestines.

‘Painfully unimaginative use of imagery,’ Pan explained, wiping something sticky and yuk out of his eyes. ‘If that back there was the jaws of death, this must be its gullet or something.’

‘Talking of eating things,’ said Sandra.

‘I can hear water.’

Pan stopped. True, Osiris was a god, and gods can hear the turning of the earth, the graunching of the stars on their badly lubricated axles; but even gods can imagine things. Pan was a god too, and all he could hear was the rumbling of Sandra’s stomach.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but all I’ve got left is a couple of cough sweets and an aspirin. They may have a handful of calories between them if you want to try.’

‘Thanks,’ Sandra replied, ‘but I think I’ll wait. There must be a diner or a Little Chef or something around here somewhere.’

‘Over there, maybe,’ said Osiris. ‘By the river.’

There was indeed a river.

Tremendous efforts have been made in recent years to clean up the great waterways of the civilised world. Salmon now spawn in the Thames. The Loire sparkles through central Paris like Perrier on endless draught. The Tiber and the Ganges are now so pure that local inhabitants use it neat to top up their car batteries, and a company has been formed to bottle the Hudson and sell it in health food shops. But cast your mind back to the bad old days, when the smell of your average urban waterway was enough to bubble varnish, and a brick thrown from Waterloo Bridge would have bounced off the surface in a way that would have had Barnes Wallis dancing with joy.

‘Where’s this, then?’ Pan asked.

‘The Styx.’

‘Sure, it’s hardly downtown LA, but—’

Osiris spelt it for him. ‘All we have to do,’ he went on, ‘is cross over and we’re there. Home and dry. Well,’ he amended, ‘home. Now, somewhere around here there should be a ferry . . .’

And sure enough, there was a ferry. It was, Pan realised with horror, more or less exactly how he remembered it from his last visit here, back in the days when there wasn’t so much of this science nonsense about and you could have a really good blow-out, take in a show and still have change out of the burnt entrails of a ram. The auto-cauterising function of his memory had compiled a nice thick sheath of mental scar tissue over the whole business; it took just one look at the blunt, squat boat that nosed its way up to the bank to pick off that particular scab, leaving a big patch of raw reminiscence bare and unprotected.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘We’ll need tickets.’

Osiris raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you just paid the ferryman,’ he said.

‘Shows how much you know.’ Pan took out his wallet and extracted a selection of major credit cards, supplied to him by various leading banks who afterwards found themselves trying hard to remember what the very good reason at the time had been. Then he reached across and abstracted Lundqvist’s Sykes-Fairbairn knife from its scabbard on his hip.

‘’Scuse fingers,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ Lundqvist replied automatically, and then added, ‘Hey, that’s my knife you just . . .’

Pan ignored him. Taking great care not to lacerate the ball of his thumb, he was cutting circles approximately three quarters of an inch out of the cards, two from each one.

‘Origami?’ Sandra asked. Pan shook his head.

‘The trick is,’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the job in hand, ‘when crossing the Styx on that horrible contraption over there, not to get caught without a ticket when you’re half way across; because if you are, you get thrown off the boat. Into that,’ he particularised, pointing with the knife at the turgid crust of the river. ‘No joke,’ he added. ‘So if you’ll all just hold your water a moment.’

Osiris, meanwhile, had given his colleague up for nuts and commanded Carl to wheel him up the gangplank that the ferryman had laid down.

‘Five, please,’ he said. ‘Two gods and three adults. Return.’

‘You what?’

‘Return tickets, please. What’s so funny about . . . ?’

The ferryman, who seemd to consist entirely of a big black hood and two unnervingly bony hands, stopped sniggering as if he’d just been switched off at the mains. ‘Tickets,’ he said.

‘But I thought we pay you as we board,’ Osiris replied, confused. ‘Surely—’

‘Not enough money in the world,’ the ferryman said. ‘You wanna know why you can’t take it with you?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I takes it off you first. Show us yer ticket or sling yer hook.’

Before Osiris could remonstrate further, Pan finished sectioning the last card, gave Lundqvist his knife back and hurried up to the river bank. ‘Here we are,’ he said, handing out the little celluloid discs. ‘Tickets.’

‘Pan,’ Osiris said, ‘they’re just little round bits cut out of credit cards. What are we supposed to . . . ?’

He tailed off. Pan was now lying on his back, screwing the plastic circles into his eyes like oversize contact lenses. The ferryman leant over him, like the devil’s optician making a house call.

‘That’ll do nicely, sir,’ he grunted. ‘Hold on just a mo while I write down the number.’

‘It all started,’ Pan explained, some time later, as they lurched nauseatingly across the river in the little boat, ‘with the first big dose of inflation they had back along, just after the first sack of Rome. Apparently, Chummy here . . .’ He indicated the ferryman with a jerk of his thumb. ‘Chummy here got so sick of being paid in devalued Roman currency that he started to get funny about it. Started off demanding Swiss francs, even though they don’t fit properly and the milled edges cut your eyelids; then it was Deutschmarks, then US dollars for a while, and then it was yen, just for a short time. Now it’s plastic or nothing. And if your credit rating doesn’t match up, then it’s just hard luck.’

Osiris shook his head sadly, adding slightly to the already disturbing oscillation of the boat. Ever since - well, ever since he’d left Sunnyvoyde, he’d had this feeling that things were wrong. Not, of course, that they’d ever been right, not ever (as far as he could remember; and he could remember the universe when it had been in the interstellar equivalent of its very first Babygro); but never, surely, as wrong as this. True, the system had been unjust and unfair and stacked against the poor bloody mortal from the outset; but at least it had been efficient, and it had worked. Now, of course, it was all different. Gone were the days of arbitrary authority and the Divine Whim, and as a result it looked as if you needed private health insurance just to be allowed to die.

I leave them to their own devices for just five minutes, and look what they’ve done to it all.

He turned to the ferryman and tapped him on the shoulder. It was a bit like playing a very short piece by Stravinski on the xylophone.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do you own this boat?’

‘What, me?’

‘Yes, you.’

The cowl wobbled sardonically. ‘Get real, chum,’ said the ferryman. ‘I just work here, all right? You got anything to say, you say it to the bloody management.’

Osiris nodded. ‘I will,’ he replied, ‘you can count on that. Who would that be, incidentally? The management, I mean.’