Odds and Gods (17 page)

... And then there was a forest. All the prunestones were suddenly sprouting. Like the fingers of a martyr to rheumatism their roots clawed a couple of times at the flags, scratched a few times at the surface, and thrust a taproot down through the stones and into the bowels of the earth. The trees grew.

When they were all twenty feet high, Osiris tapped Carl on the shoulder . . .

(‘Farmer, painter and decorator, handyman. Um . . .’)

... pulled him to his feet and shouted in his ear. Carl nodded, grabbed Sandra by the hand and hauled her after him out of the lorry into . . .

Indeed. Into the forest.

Forest was, by now, the only apposite word for it. True, it was made up of nothing but plum trees (Victorias) and it didn’t actually cover very much ground, but it was quite definitely a forest. What it lacked in the horizontal axis was more than adequately compensated for by the sky-scraping height of the vertical.

‘It seems to be working,’ Osiris said. His face was green, and he kept swallowing hard. ‘That’s splendid. Now then, somebody give me a push and we’ll get out of here.’

The wood - to be precise, the sacred grove - was still going strong. A snatch squad of monks who had been trying to sneak into the lorry through the front passenger door were suddenly smothered in long, leathery twigs, shaken violently, and hurled backwards into the middle of the yard. No prizes for guessing whose side the timber was on.

‘That’s the trouble with this business sometimes,’ observed one of the two doctors to his companion, as they watched the plum forest below them explode into blossom. ‘Sometimes, you just can’t see the wood for the . . .’

The rest of the sentence was drowned out by the crash of falling masonry. A handful of prunestones had chanced to fly through an open window, and now there were large holes in the walls, with plum-laden branches sticking out through them. A task force of monks with strimmers and electric hedge-trimmers were fighting a desperate rearguard action to save the auxiliary paraffin store.

There was a crash, as of a sash being thrown up. Mgr O’Rourke froze in the act of lobbing a chasuble and glanced up, to see an open window and an all too familiar form silhouetted in the frame. It was wearing purple silk pyjamas.

‘You there,’ boomed a voice from the window, ‘keep the noise down. There’s people up here trying to sleep.’

 

‘Yes,’ muttered Osiris, ‘point taken. All I can say is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.’

‘Did it?’ Pan frowned at him. ‘There was a time, then, when you thought it’d be a really spiffing wheeze to hem us in with an impenetrable grove of supernatural plum trees. Fine. Any similar ideas about how we’re going to get out of here?’

‘Look, I said—’

‘And,’ Pan continued, making the most of what was for him a unique opportunity to tell someone so instead of being told so by somebody else, ‘any further brain-waves about how we’re going to slip past all those loony monks and priests and so on once we’ve managed to get out of here? Or didn’t you want to spoil the spontaneous excitement of it all?’

Osiris scowled at him. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘There’s no need to get all amusing about it. We’ll just have to apply our minds a bit, that’s all.’

‘Maybe,’ Sandra suggested, ‘they’ll get bored and go away.’

‘That’s what you reckon, is it?’ Pan demanded. ‘They’ll eventually wander off to watch the flying pigs, or something. Well, you never know, do you. Or perhaps the sky will fall on their heads. Perhaps,’ he went on, making the most of it while it lasted, ‘the gods will come and rescue us. You know,
deus ex machina
, all that sort of caper.’

‘Now calm down,’ Osiris interrupted sharply. ‘We’re in enough of a hole already without you indulging in flights of fancy.’

‘Flights of fancy what?’

Osiris was about to answer this with a homily on the childishness of low-grade irony when the sky darkened, the earth began to shake, and a loud crack of thunder made his teeth vibrate in his head. He looked up.

 

‘No, we are
not
going to crash,’ retorted Odin testily. ‘I fixed the locknuts myself, everything is entirely under . . .’

The engine crashed.

There was silence, apart from the death-rattle of the engine as it feebly spun a flywheel or so. A few of the riper plums fell from the tree and splatted on the rear mudguard.

‘. . . Control.’

‘We seem,’ Frey remarked, hauling himself out from under a fallen branch, ‘to have landed in some sort of a forest. Odd, that.’

‘Quite.’

‘A forest in the middle of Droitwich.’

Odin’s head popped up from inside the cab. He was covered in oil, and his spectacles lay at a crazy slant across the bridge of his nose. ‘Probably a park or a picnic area,’ he said. ‘Look, shin up that tree there and see if you can spot something like goalposts or a bandstand, something we can navigate by.’

‘Must I?’ Frey gave him a troubled look. ‘Come on, Odin, you know about me and heights, I get vertigo standing on tiptoe. Can’t someone else do it?’

‘Leave it to me,’Thor grumbled. He knelt down, tucked his socks inside his boots and laid a hand on the nearest treetrunk. ‘I’m going up now,’ he said. ‘I may be gone for some time. If I’m not back in half an hour, bloody well come and find me, okay?’

‘Okay. Oh, Thor . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Before you go . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Have one of these plums, they’re not at all bad.’

With a bad grace, Thor started to climb the tree. Odin, meanwhile, was studying the AA book of town centre plans. Frey had found a rather squashed, almost two-dimensional banana and was eating it.

After a less than flawless climb - the tree was designed more for aesthetic and horticultural purposes than ease of ascent-Thor reached the top. He rested for a moment, then shaded his eyes with his hand and looked out. And saw . . .

‘Hey, you two!’

‘Well?’

‘You’ll never guess what I can see.’

‘What?’

‘I said, you’ll never guess.’

‘I wasn’t,’ said Frey, through a mouthful of banana, ‘proposing to try. Are you going to tell us, or are we going to have to wait for your collected letters and diaries?’

‘I think,’ said Thor, ‘we’re actually inside the Vatican.’

Frey glanced up. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I read a book about it once, the decor’s all wrong. For a start, it’s not the right ceiling.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘The ceiling in the Vatican,’ Frey continued obliviously, ‘is sort of wide and covered in these paintings. I never heard anything about plain navy blue ceilings with tiny white dots.’

‘Listen . . .’

‘Very famous, the Vatican ceiling,’ Frey went on. ‘There’s this really famous picture of the two electricians wiring something up, only they’ve obviously not earthed it properly, because where one geezer is handing something to the other one - probably a screwdriver or a pair of tinsnips - there’s this big flash and sparks running up and down the guys’ arms. I think it’s one of those public information posters, something like Increasing Safety in the Home.’

‘I meant to say,’ said Thor patiently, ‘inside the Vatican grounds.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Divine intuition.’

‘Oh.’ Frey folded the banana skin neatly and threw it over his shoulder. ‘Any people about?’

‘Odd you should mention that,’ Thor replied. ‘Yes, there’s quite a few milling about down here. You know something? This place is crawling with priests.’

At the bottom of the tree there was a hurried conference.

‘Ask them,’ Frey called out, ‘if we can borrow a set of welding gear.’

 

One of the few remaining advantages of being a god, Pan said to himself, as he raced along behind Osiris’ wheelchair through the darkened streets of Rome, is that you don’t have any hang-ups about believing in miracles. For instance, there we all were, trapped, no way out. Next minute, something like an enormous traction engine materialises in the sky, swoops down, smashes a gap in the outer wall, ploughs through the plum trees and lands slap bang on top of the lorry, allowing us to make a smart getaway while the priests and monks are having severe hysterics and crises of faith. Not many mortals could handle something like that, but for a god it’s all in a day’s work.

‘Any idea where we are?’

‘No,’ Pan replied. ‘Years since I was in Rome. Last time I was here, in fact, I remember watching the Christians being thrown to the hamsters.’

‘You mean lions.’

‘No,’ said Pan, ‘hamsters. It was a Wednesday matinée. Are they following us, do you know?’

Osiris glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, ‘but let’s not take any chances. Go easy a minute, let the mortals catch up.’

‘Any idea what that big engine thing was?’

‘I reckon it must have been a
deus ex machina
.’

‘Fancy.’ said Pan. ‘I always wondered how those things worked. Bloody handy, the way it just turned up like that.’

‘Maybe it was fate, or something.’

‘I didn’t think we were supposed to get any of that,’ Pan said, ‘being gods.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t for us. Maybe it was for the mortals. Anyway, who cares? Let’s just accept it and be grateful, eh?’

‘Sort of a
fate accompli
, you mean?’

Osiris sighed. He was tired, frustrated, disorientated and very, very full of prunes. It was probably just as well that the Lady Isis had at some stage mislaid most of his pancreas, because otherwise he would probably be feeling a bit under the weather by now.

‘We lost Lundqvist, then,’ he observed.

Pan shrugged. ‘You can’t make omelettes,’ he said. ‘I expect he’ll be all right. After all, he is a professional assassin, and they’re a load of monks and things. Supposed to turn the other cheek and all that. Knowing Kurt Lundqvist, he’ll have no difficulty knowing what to do with a turned cheek.’

‘You know him from somewhere, I gather.’

Pan nodded. ‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘I was up around Thessaly someplace, on a job. He was there doing his thing. Not a very nice person to be around when he’s working, unless you know exactly who it is he’s there to see to. I was very relieved to find out it wasn’t me.’

‘It wasn’t, then?’

Pan shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he replied, ‘just some local fertility spirit they needed knocking off. You know, one of those matinée idol types who has to die each winter so that the crops may germinate and the corn ripen.’

‘And Lundqvist was there to assassinate him?’

Pan nodded. ‘At the time he specialised in that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘I believe he’s what they call a cereal killer.’

‘If I never see another prune as long as I live,’ Osiris remarked, ‘that’ll be absolutely fine by me. Ah, here they are. Come on, you two, we may be immortal but we haven’t got all day.’

Sandra and Carl came round the corner, red-faced and panting; the result, Pan presumed, of violent exertion on a full stomach.

‘Are you being followed?’ Osiris demanded.

‘I don’t,’ Sandra gasped, took a deep breath, and went on, ‘think so. Haven’t looked for a while. Haven’t heard anything.’

‘Prunes getting to you?’ asked Pan, sympathetically. Sandra nodded.

‘No custard,’ she explained.

For some reason the mention of custard made Osiris restless. ‘Right then,’ he said, ‘time we weren’t here. Lead on.’

Pan frowned. ‘Where?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, do I?’ Osiris replied. ‘You’re supposed to be a god, use your flaming initiative.’

He had hardly finished speaking when they all heard an ominous sound in the distance: the blowing of whistles, and the faint sussuration of many men singing the 23rd Psalm under their breath while running. ‘This way,’ said Pan, decisively, and he put his weight behind Osiris’ wheelchair and started to push strenuously. The two mortals found themselves struggling to keep up.

As observed previously, the art of leading the way down narrow alleys on the pretext of knowing a neat little shortcut is an essential part of the craft of spreading confusion, and accordingly Pan set a brisk pace through a maze of back-streets. By the time the mortals gave up the struggle and sagged in a shop doorway, announcing that they were incapable of one more step, it was nearly light, and several tradesmen were rolling up their shutters to catch the early customers on their way to work. Into one such shop Pan led the way.

It turned out to be a typical old-fashioned small back-street barber’s shop, with four well-worn chairs, a foxed mirror and a small bald man with a brown liver-spotted head and enormous eyebrows standing ready to greet them. On seeing him, Pan did an immediate double-take.

‘Buon giorno, signori, signorina,’ trilled the barber, indicating his chairs with a fine, practised flourish. ‘Per favore, si sedrai qui. Che bella giornata oh my gawd it’s you!’

Pan grinned sheepishly. ‘Hiya, Miffy,’ he said. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’

The barber drew his substantial eyebrows together like curtains. ‘Gitonoutavityabastard,’ he snarled. ‘How you’ve got the bloody cheek to come waltzing in here after all you—’

‘Excuse me.’

The barber turned on Osiris with an angry gesture, registered the wheelchair and moderated his tone with a visible effort. ‘Look here, chum,’ he said, ‘you tell your mate here to sling his hook, otherwise I’m bleedin’ well gonna sling it for him, okay? If he’s not out of here by the time I count to . . .’

Osiris raised an eyebrow. ‘You two know each other, then?’

The barber laughed savagely. Pan, who had stepped behind the wheelchair at the start of the exchange, nodded.

‘We go way back,’ he said. ‘This is Miffy - sorry, Mithras, God of the Morning. He’s a sun god.’

‘Was,’ said Miffy emphatically. ‘Was a sun god. Packed it in fifteen hundred years ago. And keep your bloody voice down, will you?’