Anything but Ordinary (24 page)

‘Thor?’ echoed Odin.  ‘He’s upstairs, polishing his hammer, ready for battle you know.’

‘Get him,’ she ordered. She did not really want to see Thor, who was uncomfortably like Hogswill the Hairy backed – a drunken Viking that she had been enslaved to and whom she had no desire to be reminded of.  But she needed time to think.

‘I shall send for …’ Odin raised his head, listening.  ‘They’re here!’ he ran to the window in a panic. 

There was a thunderous sound outside, getting closer.  Bloodcurdling shouts filled the air. ‘Ah, it’s only the Valkyries,’ said Odin in a relieved tone.  ‘What on Asgard is that they are singing?’

Tamar shoved him aside and looked. A broad smile spread over her face. ‘It’s Denny,’ she said. 

‘What?’ said Slick beside her now and straining his eyes to see. ‘Even
you
can’t possibly see that from this distance,’

‘No,’ Tamar grinned in delight. ‘But I can hear. Only Denny could get the Valkyries singing “Stairway to Heaven”.’

~ Chapter Sixteen ~

‘
T
amar!’ Denny ran toward her and crushed her in his arms. ‘Thank God!’

Tamar returned the embrace laughing as she did so.  ‘When are you going to learn,’ she said into his hair, ‘that you don’t need to worry about me?’

He held her away from him and gave her a baffled look. ‘Never,’ he said.

And Tamar felt suddenly as if she were being drowned in golden sunshine. 

Slick nudged Ray and pointed to the look on her face. ‘Looks like a bad case of the warm and fuzzies,’ he said.

The hall was now fairly full. There were the Valkyries of course, standing in formation like rock n’ roll cheerleaders.  Vidar had gone to kneel before Odin, leaving Ray and Dawber wondering if they should be doing the same. 

Slick had no such qualms. Watching Tamar bossing Odin about like a naughty schoolboy had greatly diminished the awe of his presence, and such a thought never even occurred to Stiles.  Hecaté considered herself at least his equal, and Denny, as yet, had not even noticed him.

‘You have done well,’ Odin was heard to say to Vidar, drawing a derisive snort from Denny. 

‘And you must be the husband?’ said Odin, looking up in surprise at this noise. 

‘Introductions later,’ said Denny, ‘
if
we’re all still alive.  Loki’s right behind us.’ he looked questioningly at Tamar who nodded to indicate that she knew all about it. 

‘Right,’ he said, apparently
apropos
of nothing.  ‘Got any ideas?’ he asked her. 

‘Fight,’ said Tamar succinctly.

‘WE
WILL
FIGHT!’ came a thunderous voice that shook the room. Everyone turned to see a massive figure standing in the doorway swinging a massive hammer. 

‘Hello Thor,’ said Tamar without enthusiasm.

‘Djinn,’ he acknowledged her with a dismissive grunt.  Denny went red with fury at this, but Tamar restrained him. ‘He doesn’t know any better,’ she said placatingly.

‘Father,’ he nodded brusquely at Odin

‘See?’ said Tamar. ‘The same to everyone. He doesn’t mean anything by it.’

Now the other gods were filing into the hall in a silent procession. One by one, as the visitors watched in fascination, they stood before Odin, bowed and moved on to stand together on the other side of the throne. 

When this was over, Thor addressed them. ‘BATTLE!’ he bellowed.

And the reply came back. ‘BATTLE!’

‘BATTLE!’ repeated Thor even louder than before, brandishing his hammer wildly. 

‘BATTLE’ returned the assembled gods banging their weapons on the floor. ‘BATTLE, BATTLE, BATTLE, BATTLE …’ they chanted in rhythm with the banging.  

‘Oh brother!’ said Denny, as the noise rose to a crescendo. 

Then the skies over Asgard flickered as if a bird had flown across the sun, and then went dark. The noise ceased abruptly as if all sound, as well as light, had been sucked from the world, and Valhalla stood in a vacuum of silence and darkness.  No one moved, even the pennants on the battlements stopped fluttering. The whole world was frozen in a moment of time that simultaneously lasted forever and went by in instant. 

‘Oh, no,’ breathed Tamar. She alone had seen this before – long ago. She alone knew what it meant. And she thought of the collective power of the Tuatha and their magical hosts, gathered outside the doors of Valhalla.

The light over Asgard would never shine again. It was over. 

There was more than Loki behind this; he was only the instrument. This was destiny, unstoppable and inexorable. The time of the Norse gods had finally come. They had cheated their fate long enough.

So, it had been for the Greek gods. Long ago, she had seen this darkness fall over Mount Olympus. The file was being erased, and they were all stuck inside.

She became aware of the sounds of battle going on all around her, overlaying the stillness and silence. She saw herself fighting desperately for her life, while she stood calmly by and watched in a detached way

‘Of
course
,’ she realised, both were true. That this battle would go on forever for the participants, but also, that nothing would ever happen here again.  With a kind of cold horror, she understood that she was watching, from the inside, a file of mythology becoming a disused file. A file containing a thing that had never happened. In a distant kind of way, she remembered explaining this phenomenon to Denny shortly after they had first met. It had not seemed so bad then. But then she had not been the one being erased forever. 

How had she escaped before? She did not know, could not remember, but she dimly understood that in those days, as a Djinn, she had been a file all by herself. That was no longer true; she had joined the world – because of Denny.  There would be no escape this time. 

‘So, how it that she could see what was happening, as an observer as well as a participant?  She was not supposed to
be
here. But then, neither were Denny and her friends. 

That was a point, why
were
they here?  Superficially, they were here because Loki had manipulated things, through Fenrir, in order to draw them into Ragnoroc. Odin might have also been behind some of it. They undoubtedly had their reasons, or
thought
they did.  Loki had certainly never liked Tamar much. Dragging her into the Twilight of the gods might have only been his idea of a joke. He had had a twisted sense of humour at the best of times, and several thousand years of torture had probably twisted it even further. 

The truth was, though, that the file clerks in mainframe were behind this.

The Norse Gods had escaped their fate the first time around. While the Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans etc were all discarding their old belief systems, and their gods were relegated to the ignominy of the deleted files of fiction, the Norse gods had managed to hang on somehow. Ragnoroc had been averted the first time around, and the gods of Asgard had been a thorn in the side of the tidy minded clerks ever since. Much like the Djinn had once been.

So, had the clerks finally had enough of Tamar and Denny messing around with things that did not concern them and decided to finish them off once and for all?  The idea had a certain poetic justice about it, she had to admit. Their own predilection for intervening in things that were not their business, used against them.  And the clerks would know that they would not be able to resist interfering in this one. 

But while she could admire, in the abstract, the genius of the plot against them, it did not mean she was going to put up with it. 

But what could she do? 

She was part of the file now; she had no control over events from the outside. Asgard was no longer real, the events taking place before her very eyes had no relevance, no meaning, they were no longer real. Fenrir could eat the sun if he liked, there was no point in stopping it. It was not the real sun anyway. Outside, the world was going on as normal.

But what if she
did
stop it?

Tamar stood in the empty file looking at on at the battle taking place within, as if she were watching an old newsreel of something that had happened long ago, and could no longer be changed.  She was there, and also here, watching herself. She wondered idly what that other self was thinking. She felt as if she ought to be able to remember, as if she were watching events that she had taken part in long ago from a distance of many years. But that other self was not real now, any more than any of this was real. It had never happened. That was the point. 

If she closed her eyes, she would find herself in an empty file, alone?  And then she could leave, because she was real; she could close the file and return to mainframe, leaving her unreal self behind. Or she could remain, wandering through the battle like a ghost for the rest of eternity.  Some choice!’

She saw Stiles and Denny fighting back to back, they looked grimly happy – the joy of battle. Were they still real? Or were they a part of the unreal world now? Could she get them back?  Or were they, like her, watching the battle from some unknown vantage point, as well as participating? Was this happening to all of them? For the first time in her long life, Tamar was tormented by an agony of indecision. Tears of frustration formed in her eyes.

She did not know what to
do
!

‘
If you want to, I can save you,
’ Denny had sung that to her. Startled by the clarity of the memory, she blinked the tears from her eyes. ‘
I can take you away from here,
’ 

‘Denny?’ she whispered.

Denny
was
real. They were
all
real, of course they were, how stupid! ‘It’s not over yet!’ she told herself.  At least, she counted on her fingers, six people – seven if she included herself, were still real, and the others … well, it was not too late for them either. Ragnoroc was about to be cancelled all over again.

‘Sorry guys,’ she said silently to the clerks in mainframe. ‘I’m the fly in your ointment – again.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Close file,’ she said firmly. 

~ Chapter Seventeen ~

T
he noise was incredible. Thor’s hammer crashed with a thunder that shook the surrounding mountains causing great tracts of ice to shatter and slide down the mountainsides, the sound of their falling lost in the tumult. The darkened skies were filled with flashes of lightning, so bright they seemed more like exploding suns. 

Battle cries and the screams of the dying, the clash of sword, spear and battle axe fused together in a single deafening wall of sound. 

It was like being in the middle of an earthquake in a thunderstorm after a meteor strike during a nuclear war.  And that was just the background noise – the special effects so to speak going on behind the action. 

It was impossible to stand. The ground was continually moving under the feet, splitting and tilting the unwary into great crevasses that opened as the ground fell away from under them. 

Denny, although fighting like a maniac, yet felt strangely detached. His presence here, he knew, was totally irrelevant.  He would fight, but he could not win, could not change the outcome. One lonely warrior, however valiant, however good, could not single-handedly win a war between hundreds of opposing combatants. Nor could seven, he added to himself, acknowledging the others, they were simply too few. And even had they been a hundred – or a thousand, there was an inevitability about the conclusion that could not be avoided. The time for Ragnoroc had come, had been decided upon elsewhere and there was no stopping it.  They would die here, victims of their own hubris, lost in a mythology that they had no part in, and Ragnoroc would be an established fact. Something that had happened, that could not be changed.  It felt as if it already was.  

‘The only way to win a war is not to hold it.’ these words dropped into Denny’s head from a place of silence, sharp and clear against the tremendous clamour all around him.  And yet he heard them through his ears in the ordinary way, which should have been impossible given the decibel level assaulting his senses. 

‘Finally losing my mind,’ he muttered, deftly decapitating a giant that had incautiously come too close to his swinging broadsword, which was actually the Athame wearing a cunning disguise.  ‘Bloody hearing things now.’

Stiles was in trouble, and despite his conviction that they were all going to die anyway, Denny’s instincts took over, and he leapt into the fray to help him out.  They were fighting back to back when Denny felt a sudden vacuum close to him an empty space that had been filled with noise, blood and confusion. Then the whole world went dark.

 ‘Funny, I don’t
feel
dead,’ he told the empty space. ‘Christ, now I’m
talking
to myself,’ he added.  

‘The only way to win a war is not to hold it. Go back.’

‘Who
said
that?’ snapped Denny.  ‘I know that voice.’

‘Damn,’ came the voice. There was a crackling sound and, ‘is this thing on?’ Then dead silence. 

‘Hello?’ said Denny uncertainly. ‘Is anybody there?’ He felt a fool. Like a man at the wrong end of a séance. Surely, it was the living who said things like that to the dead, not the other way around. 

But now he was certain that he was not dead, but somehow in a file in mainframe, and somebody was trying to contact him.

‘Hello?’ he tried again. 

‘Crackle crackle hiss … ‘ve to go back.’

‘What?’

‘… go back, damn! Wait … min…te … tryi… fix… blast… thing… stan… by…
hell
.’

‘
Clive
?’ asked Denny suddenly recognising the broken voice. 

‘Of course … stupi… boy,’ came the voice. ‘Other… tried to fit you up. Felt oblig… help. Owe you one … can … hear me?’

‘Sort of,’ said Denny.  ‘You’re breaking up terribly.’

‘Unauthoris… tra…mission… bad quality… sorry crackle, crackle beeeeep! Is that better?’

‘Yes, where are you?’ 

‘Better you don’t know. Now, I haven’t got long before they find me, so listen carefully…’