Chicks in Chainmail (7 page)

Give her a couple weeks, and she'd present Wotan with a plan for task forces on the Fimbulwinter.

Weather mapping might give NASA something to do, and Asgard clearly had enough gold to pay for some satellites. That looked hopeful: NASA would drive a hard bargain, but if Wotan sent
her
, she would use what influence she had…

Medicine didn't look hopeful at all as a grounds for getting home. The Swedes had superb socialized medicine, and Hillary rather thought Wotan was a skilled healer himself Damn.

She anticipated a little more success as the Valkyries grew more and more assertive. Egil, in the apron they insisted he wear to protect his cnainmail, made her choke on her ale. To. her horror, she realized she was beginning to enjoy its taste. By contrast, Rutger—the hero with the gray eyes, the cheekbones, and the buns she had covertly admired—had taken a certain amount of pride in cooking the stag he had slain, then carving it. She rather thought Rossweise had brought him in. Now, the two of them spent a lot of time nudging each other and whispering; and Hillary kept her eyes on both of them. If this went on, she'd have to get the Surgeon General to talk with them. Must be the Asgard air. Exercise had never made Bill look that good.

She had her elbows on the table, leaning over a draft of a plan on how to postpone Ragnarok by means of shuttle diplomacy, reviewing the plan with Wotan, when thunder pealed.

"After all," she told Wotan, "there is simply no reason for Sleipnir just to lounge around on his eight less eating his fool head off when someone like Heimdall could ride him across Bifrost and talk with the Frost Giants. It's not as if he requires an inordinate amount of fuel, not like Air Force One." (If only she had waited for a flight, rather than taken Amtrak! She wouldn't be here. She'd be home and alive. Better not think of that.)

"Now, I'd suggest," she said, "Heimdall to go speak to the Frost Giants. I take it that Loki…"

"He's likelier to betray me, if he hasn't already," said Wotan.

"For Niflheim," she went on, "I'd suggest sending me. I think I could work very effectively with Hela. I rather that she represents a sovereign state?"

In the next moment, Hillary realized how stupid she had been. Hela probably ran a theocracy. Religious zealots: oh joy.

Wotan rubbed beneath his eye patch as if his scar hurt. Then he turned and looked up. His gaze traveled to his daughters, then to Hillary.

At that moment, Heimdall blasted his great horn. At least it wasn't a saxophone. The warriors feasting in the hall set down horns, knives, and flagons, then looked up at Wotan. Was this the summons to mortal combat they had been brought here to await? Where were the
Geneva observers? That was what Hillary wanted to know. She had no desire to participate in a Dark Age Bosnia (which, come to think of it, was redundant; and she was damned if she'd let Wotan's daughters fight either. After all, she was pretty sure that the Army still didn't allow women in infantry or cavalry positions, and she didn't think the Valkyries' horses qualified as fighter planes.

A rapid pounding made the doors of the halls shake. Thunder pealed out again, then subsided. As Hillary grew more apprehensive, the warriors grinned. Even Wotan's face brightened, which took considerable doing when you realized that he considered himself and his whole cosmology to be living on borrowed time.

The doors burst open. Wotan's ravens cawed in welcome, and the god himself jumped up, knocking over a bench that a serving woman was entirely too quick to replace. In walked a one-man parade of a man, bigger and blonder than any opera heldentenor would even dream of becoming. The newcomer wore a red silk tunic that would have drawn wolf whistles on
Christopher Street
, until the whistlers had seen the cold gray eyes above his jolly, just-one-of-the-guys grin. Even as he marched in, he flexed his muscles unconsciously, making Rutger look like a wimp. A huge, phallic-looking hammer hung at his side. Carrying a thing like that on a belt would have pulled anyone else sideways. Thor wore it as easily as Chelsea would have hung a Swiss army knife at her belt, assuming Hillary and Bill would have let her have one, which they wouldn't.

"Thor!" bellowed Wotan. "My son!" Hillary narrowed her eyes at the disgusting display of family favoritism as father and son tried to crack each other's ribs in the most macho hug she'd ever seen, and Thor's sisters scurried to bring him enough food and drink to have fed an entire homeless family for a week. It was positively archaic, especially after she'd shown them better.

To her annoyance, she found that she too had gotten to her feet, drawn, she told herself, by the desire to examine the torque, wristlets, and belt buckle that Thor wore and that were obviously not museum replicas.

He detached his hammer from his belt and laid it on the table.

"I thought they were supposed to stack all weapons except eating knives outside," Hillary allowed herself to be heard to remark.

Thor glared at her.
Oho
. She had seen that before, on the Marine recruiter who had preferred not to answer her questions on the judge advocacy program in the Marine Corps in favor of giving her the bozo treatment, letting his eyes scan her from glasses to heels, then fill with contempt. What? Do you think I'd actually let a
girl
into the Corps? Do you think I'd even be civil?

She'd told the story at a
Wellesley reunion, and a classics professor had snickered and said something rude about the Sacred Band of Thebes. As homophobic as the remark was, Hillary's own ox had been gored (oops—better not say that around Tipper, assuming Hillary got lucky enough ever to get back to D.C.) sufficiently that she had snickered rack.

Hillary allowed herself to examine Thor the way the Marine Corps recruiter had eyed her. Obviously, she decided, he was a parody of a hero, overcompensating for a lost or distant mother by deeds of heroism and hostility to women.

As Wotan watched him fondly, Thor drained his drinking horn, saw it refilled, then leaned massive elbows on the table.

"What in Niflheim is going on here?" he demanded politely of his father. "I'd been practicing throwing my hammer at the Midgard Serpent when I ran into Loki, who looked as cheerful as if he'd gotten soused on my grave-ale. He laughed and said he didn't
need
to go to Jotunheim to start trouble; you already had more of it here than you could get out of, this side of Ragnarok."

The earth shook at mention of the fatal word. Thor brandished his fist at the offending Middle Earthquake. "Stop that!" he yelled. "It's not Ragnarok until we say it is."

He glared at his father. "I have a mind to try pest control on that Nidhogg. If it keeps on gnawing the World-Ash, that tree's going to die."

"That's the point," Wotan said.

Hillary pursed her lips. As she recollected, wasn't there just
one
Midgard Serpent? Then this overage, hypermasculine juvenile delinquent was persecuting the last member of an endangered species.

Allfather passed a hand over his bearded lips, forestalling her next protest. "Fru Clinton here is attending," he said with suspicious mildness, "to your sisters' education."

"You got those brats a
nanny
?" Thor sounded as if he wanted to spit up all the ale he had already drunk. Hillary braced herself. Alcohol abusers frequently turned to family violence, and this one didn't look as if he needed much encouragement.

"They already know how to ride and choose and fight, if they have to, and to serve at table. What do Valkyries need with more knowledge, unless you give 'em a good hiding so they know how to obey? Look at Brunnhilde. You actually talked to her and taught her to read, and what happened? She started trying to use her judgment—that's a laugh, and wound up asleep on a mountaintop surrounded by fire and waiting for the first hero with the balls to come and claim her."

Hillary suppressed a hiss of pure rage (after listening to Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, and the other Neanderthals, you got good at that) because of an exultation that suddenly washed through her, making her feel taller and stronger than Thor.

Buddy boy
, she thought,
I think you just gave me my ticket home
.

"You just pass me that gavel, mister," she demanded suddenly. "You're not chairing this meeting. Your father delegated it to me."

She pointed assertively at Thor's hammer. The girls watched, eyes round, appalled, but somehow hopeful.

"Now!"

He passed it over, so reluctant to have her touch it that you'd have thought it was Lorena Bobbitt's knife—or what it cut.

Wotan shrugged his shoulders. "She's good with the girls," he admitted. "They like her."

Hillary leaned forward, planting small fists on either side of Thor's hammer. "You bet they like me. I'm the only one around here who listens to them. Maybe you can tell me what happened to their oldest sister.
They
just cry. You didn't even let them grieve."

Thor glared at Hillary. "Gods don't grieve," he said.

Hillary glared back. "Tell it to the Marines," she suggested.

"Ask
him
," he grunted.

"
Him
is hardly a polite way to refer to your father and Allfather, I believe he's called," she informed him. "The girls… I mean, your sisters… told me that Brunnhilde was your lather's favorite. Never quite forgiven her for that, have you? And that she disobeyed him and brought a woman into
Valhalla. So what?
I'm
here, aren't I?"
And I wish I were home
! Dammit, if she kept that lament up, she was going to sound like E.T.

"It wasn't just any woman, woman," Thor snarled. "It was
Sieglinde
."

Hillary waited him out. "I wouldn't know Sieglinde from Jessye Norman," she told him. Since she Knew very little about Jessye Norman and Thor knew nothing at all, the score in this particular game of one-upmanship was tied.

"She ran away from her husband Hunding. Honestly, I don't know what Middle Earth's coming to," Thor grumbled.

"Did Hunding abuse her? If he did, I think your sisters did a very brave thing in giving her refuge." Hillary might not know how to embroider, but she certainly knew how to needle.

"You just don't get it, do you, woman? She ran off with her own brother Siegmund Walse's son, whom she hadn't seen for years. Hunding followed them and killed him. Very properly."

"That poor woman. And you stood for this?" She flashed a Look at Wotan with both eyes, and he deflected it with his one. Then, to her astonishment, he looked down, ashamed and saddened.

"My wife insisted. Uh…"

Hillary hadn't led her class at
Wellesley for nothing. "Ah," she said. "You go in for a spot of wandering around among mortals from time to time, do your And maybe under an assumed name like Walse? In the name of god, Wotan, how could you allow your children to suffer like that?"

"It gets worse," Rossweise put in from the dubious shelter of Rutger's arm. "Sieglinde was going to have a baby."

"You get away from him!" Thor bellowed. "Just because your sister's tying out on the hill for the first comer—" Hillary managed not to laugh in a way that might have distracted him "—doesn't mean you're not stiff a virgin goddess. Does it, missy?" He
strode
over to the Valkyrie and her chosen hero. The two of them, standing together, were enough to face up to him. Barely.

Adultery, two generations of it. Incest. Murder. This wasn't an afterlife, Hillary decided, it was a Scandinavian soap opera! And it had just gotten Worse: Brunnhilde abandoned on a hill until some rapist in chainmail decided to step through a fire and grab her; Rossweise and all the others forbidden education, autonomy, control even of their own bodies, just because some
men
decided for them what they should do about them.

"This didn't have to happen," she said with a tone that even to herself sounded nauseatingly self-righteous, "if you had decent birth-control centers for women to go to."

"
You
!" she flared up at Wotan. "You stuck your eldest daughter on a rock because she disobeyed you to protect her own half-sister. You're keeping these poor girls ignorant, violent, and noisy. You encouraged your son to become an arrogant, bullying brute, and you even feast with a man you know is going to betray you. Call yourself a god, let alone the father of the gods here. You're a poor excuse for it. I've got a good mind to start Ragnarok just to give this place a good cleaning."

Where, oh where, was Newt Gingrich when she needed him? Let him get his teeth into a scandal like this, and he'd never have time for the White House.

"Woman, you go too for!" Thor bellowed.

"I haven't gone far enough!" Hillary shouted back. "Now, you're out of order."

Whereupon she picked up the hammer and brought it down sharply on the table for order. That is, she would have brought it down sharply on the table if the thing hadn't been so heavy it weighed her shoulder down and she dropped it.

Boom
! The earthquakes that accompanied each mention of Ragnarok were nothing to the crashes that followed as the hammer broke the table, broke through the floor, and probably the sound barrier, as it emerged outside the hall. Thunder pealed again, and from the rain and lightning that lashed down outside, you'd have thought Hurricane Andrew had come again. Most likely, a couple branches broke loose from the World-Ash.