James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin (19 page)

Freya saw the ravens first, long before anyone else did. She made us halt without explaining why, until the two birds were visible to all, winging towards us from out of the sunrise.

"Oy-oy," said Cy. "Message from HQ."

"You mean those are Odin's?" I said, recalling the ravens that had been perched on his shoulders at the banquet.

"Huginn and Muninn," said Paddy. "And don't go asking which is which, because all ravens look the bloody same to me."

"And they're, like, carrier ravens? They'll have little slips of paper attached to their legs with Odin's orders on?"

"Not exactly," said Cy. "Wait and see."

The ravens circled above us for a while before descending. One landed on each of Freya's outstretched arms, and bugger me if she didn't greet them with a bow and a "good morning," just as if they were people.

"Huginn, Muninn," she said. "You have flown long and far, and I humbly thank you for your efforts."

The birds went "
cawww"
and "
arrrkk"
in turn, and flapped their wings and waggled their beaks, as though acknowledging and returning her courtesy.

Neither of them, I noticed, appeared to have brought any message container with it. I looked at Cy and Paddy. "So what now? She Dr Dolittle or something?"

Paddy just raised his monobrow in a way that said
keep watching
.

"You who are the All-Father's eyes and ears abroad," Freya said to the ravens, "you who go where he cannot and witness what he cannot and bring back news to him of all that happens, speak to me now in his words. Tell me his wishes."

"
Arrkk
!" said either Huginn or Muninn, and I thought we were in for a long morning if we were going to stand there until one of those birds actually started talking.

Of course, I ought to have known better by then, because one of them actually did. Both, in fact. They opened their beaks simultaneously, and out came the voice of none other than Odin himself. Odin, in bizarre avian stereo.

"Freya Njorthasdottir," the ravens said, "I see that Gid is among your number. He looks as well as can be expected. You have discharged your duty with your customary diligence."

"I did not do it for praise. To serve the All-Father is its own reward."

"Aye," Thor agreed.

"Nevertheless," said the ravens, "praise is due. I now have another job for you and your men to perform."

"Name it, Odin."

"Originally I dispatched Huginn and Muninn with the sole purpose of making this rendezvous with you and establishing mission status. On their way, however, they observed a disquieting sight. Trolls. Not far from the Asgardian border."

"How many trolls?" Thor enquired eagerly.

"Three. If you turn a few degrees northward from your current bearing, you will encounter them in two, perhaps two and a half hours."

"You wish us to kill them, All-Father?" asked Freya. I could tell the idea appealed.

"In days of yore I would have said yes," said Odin via raven walkie-talkie. "Trolls straying beyond the bounds of Jotunheim is not permissible, and these three look set to do just that. However, times are changing. New strategies are required to meet the growing threat of the true enemy. New allegiances too."

Thor gaped. "You mean...?"

"Yes, my son. I want them taken alive, not destroyed."

"Trolls - captive?"

"Annexed. Press-ganged. Recruited."

"Those brainless, lumbering -"

"- immensely strong, highly suggestible creatures, yes." The ravens stalked sideways up and down Freya's arms, canting their heads. "We discussed this. Several times. Were you not paying attention? If we can control a significant number of trolls, think what a blunt-force defensive unit they could make."

"I remember you suggesting something of the kind, father. I simply didn't -"

"Cousin," said Freya to Thor, butting in, "Odin's wisdom is not to be questioned. If this is what he desires us to do, we do it, difficult as it may seem."

"I'm not scared of difficulty," said Thor. "It's the notion of letting a single troll live, let alone making
pets
of the things, that I have a problem with."

"Is this a challenge you shrink from, my son?" the ravens asked, with a sly glint in their beady little eyes.

"Never!" declared Thor, and he beat his breast. Actually thumped himself in the sternum with both fists. If there'd been trees around, I wouldn't have been surprised to see him start swinging from them. "You want three trolls trounced and trussed and brought to you, father? Then that is what you shall have."

"Huginn and Muninn will lead you to their location," the ravens said, "and when you have overcome the trolls, transport will be sent to ferry them hither. Good luck, all."

The birds took off from Freya's arms, wheeling up into the firmament.

She turned to us. "You heard the All-Father, men. Is there any among you who would shirk the task Odin has set?"

As one, the soldiers yelled, "No!"

Even me. No idea why. The word just rushed out from my throat. It was as though someone else was speaking through me, much as Odin had spoken through the ravens.

"No!" I said, swept up in the moment, full of inexplicable enthusiasm, and thinking,
Trolls - how bad can that be?

Twenty-Two

Very bad, as it turned out.

In my head I had a vision of dwarfish, shrivelled things. Bit like Yoda. Shuffling along all hunched and wizened. Odin had said something about them being immensely strong and useful in defence, but to me it had sounded like pure hype. After the frost giants, which were surely the biggest, meanest bastards in the land, trolls had to be a happy hobbity lot by comparison, right? I thought back to the fairytales I used to read Cody when he was little. There was that troll who lived under a bridge in the story about the three billy goats. Couldn't be much of a threat, could he, if a fucking goat could sort him out with a head butt. Trolls. I mean,
really
.

But I was aware of Cy and Paddy both getting tenser as we tramped north-east after the ravens, so I asked if either of them had had a run-in with a troll and what I should expect, and they said no but they'd heard trolls were something to be steered clear of, and then another bloke, a ginge who I was pretty sure was called Allinson, or maybe Ellison, overheard and mentioned that he'd seen one while out of patrol a few weeks back. It was as big as a Challenger tank, he said, with long arms and sickly greyish skin, and the patrol's leader, Odin's son Vidar, had told them all to take cover behind some rocks while the thing passed because there was nothing to be gained by tackling a troll if it could possibly be avoided. The troll had lolloped by on a mission of its own without noticing any of them hiding, but what Allinson-or-Ellison remembered most of all was how the ground trembled beneath its feet.

"You could actually feel it through your boots," he said. "The vibrations from each step it took, and it was a hundred metres off at least. Arms the size of tree trunks. Fists the size of wrecking balls. And these two ruddy great blunt teeth sticking up from its bottom jaw, like tusks."

"But slow," said Thor, joining in the conversation. "Slow of wit and of limb. There was never a troll that was fleeter of foot than a snail, nor capable of out-thinking a worm. With our brains and speed, not to mention our weaponry, we shall make short work of the moronic creatures and fetch them triumphantly home."

"If you say so," I said. "Speaking of weaponry, though... Any chance I could maybe have a gun? Everybody else is packing, and I'm feeling a bit left out."

"Of course, Gid," Thor replied with alarming jollity, and within moments he'd commandeered a Minimi light machine gun, the best thing to come out of Belgium since waffles, and a Glock 17, the best thing to come out of Austria since, well, ever. Plus a day's worth of ammo. It said something for how well equipped these guys were that they had guns going spare, enough that they could afford to share them around. I was revising my estimate of the Valhalla Mission upward. Its aims remained murky to me, but somehow that didn't matter so much any more, now that I'd accepted I'd entered some Other Realm where the laws of science and nature as I knew them no longer applied.

"You will not shoot to kill," Thor warned me. "That said, mere bullets won't bring a troll down anyway. Their hide is too thick."

"What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?" I said. An
Aliens
quote. Wasted on Thor. And pretty much everybody else. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn't too much of a sci-fi geek for this line of work.

"What we do is we use the guns to whittle down and weaken them," he said. "Whereupon I, with Mjolnir, rob them of their senses. That is how we will win."

Half an hour later, our raven scouts Huginn and Muninn swooped down to report that the targets had been sighted. They were making their way along a narrow, shallow valley ahead, which led directly onto Asgardian territory. The ravens recommended we proceed in parallel formation along both sides of the valley in order to catch the trolls in a pincer movement. Freya instantly divided us into two groups, her in charge of one, Thor the other. I was hardly astonished to find myself not in her group.

A dozen of us followed Thor's massive rolling shoulders upslope, onto the thin ridge that formed the valley's rim. The sky had greyed. An apologetic sleet was falling and one of those thin chilly winds had started up, the kind that drilled right into your sinuses like an ice cream headache. This was barren country, with little in the way of vegetation to afford cover or shelter. The valley's sides were a mix of shale and scree, interspersed with boulders and patches of coarse, long-lying snow. As scenic beauty spots went, it didn't. I couldn't think of a drearier, more miserable-looking place. Except perhaps my own flat. And Birmingham.

Thor called us to a halt with an upraised hand. He pointed down into the valley, and there they were. A trio of trolls.

The ginge had exaggerated, but only a little. Not a Challenger tank. Each was more the size of a Ford Transit laid on its end. Which, frankly, was big enough. They had loincloths on and leather caps with loops that fastened under the chin, plus furry boots on their feet, but the rest of them was bare naked, acres of skin showing, all of it the colour of the scum that sometimes collected on the surface of streams, white tinged browny-grey, and riddled with moles and liver spots and tufts of hair in odd locations. Massive muscles worked beneath as they hulked along, half hunched over, almost but not quite on all fours, their knuckles brushing the ground. Their brows beetled, shading tiny stupid eyes. Their jaws chomped, protruding tusk-like teeth all but poking into their nostrils. Every so often they'd grunt or croak to one another. It sound like language but not quite. Caveman-level, if not even more primitive. Mostly they just used gestures.

I felt nothing but disgust and revulsion as I watched them. Part of me advised leaving them well alone, shrinking out of sight. Another part wanted to stamp them out as you would a cockroach. They were intimidating and loathsome at the same time. I'd have taken the frost giants over them any day.

Thor signalled across to Freya on the valley's far side. She waved back, and began stationing her men along the ridge ahead of the trolls, downwind. Thor copied her. We crouched in wait. Guns were stealthily cocked, safety catches off.

Then the lead troll stopped, so sharply the other two almost bumped into him. He raised his head, sniffing the sleety air, then growled out a mangled syllable or two. He'd detected something... something he didn't like the smell of...

Thor cursed under his breath. "Son of a jotun whore! The wind has shifted. He scents us. Damn things have no intelligence to speak of, poor eyesight too, but fate has compensated by giving them extraordinarily sensitive noses."

"So?" I said.

"So," said Thor, "we take what little element of surprise we have left and we use it. Open fire!" he barked. "Fire at will!"

We did, strafing the trolls with bullets of every calibre. Freya's lot did likewise. The ground around the trolls erupted, becoming a frenzied dancing carpet of impacts. Most were stray shots, misses, but many were ricochets. Rounds bouncing off the trolls and spinning away in all directions.

Conventional bullets simply couldn't penetrate the trolls' skins. But they did sting, that much was obvious. Badly. The trolls flailed and thrashed about under the volley of gunfire, roaring and raving as though they were under siege from a swarm of angry hornets. Red welts appeared all over them, and the trolls hugged their heads and shielded their faces, and my Minimi and everyone else's guns joined forces in a tumultuous symphony of bangs and cracks and chatters that rippled along the valley like thunder.

Empty mag. Eject. Fresh mag. Reload. Empty, eject, fresh, reload. It was second nature. Like riding a bike. I barely had to think about it. The Minimi juddered, nice and lively in my hands. My ears rang. Cordite smoke filled my nose, singeing my nostril hairs. I had my range. Every shot was made to count.

And in time, we brought the creatures to their knees. They couldn't take any more. They were wailing, pleading for relief in some guttural language that was all growls and vowels. And I felt not a shred of pity. When Thor gave the command to cease firing, I was the last to do so. And when he hared off down the slope, Mjolnir drawn, for some reason I was hot on his heels.