Valhalla, page 8
He opened the door—
(‘Hey!’ exclaimed Shaka, former King of the Zulus, responsible for the death of a million human beings at a time when the cutting edge, no pun intended, of killing technology was a long wooden stick with a knob on the end. ‘Look, everyone, there’s a brush mark in the top left corner that’s just starting to smooth out!’) —slipped through and closed the door behind him, quiet as a little mouse.
It was dark, and he couldn’t see the paint. His first reaction was blind, paralysing fear; he froze, like a rabbit caught in oncoming headlights. Memories were edging back, sure enough - battles mostly, and the bloody sack of towns and villages, the sweetly disgusting smell of blood soaking into dust, the orange light of burning thatch visible five miles away against a starless night sky. But one of them concerned a little skinny boy lying in a carved wooden cot in a dark tent, awake when everyone else was asleep, staring in fascinated terror at the black silhouette of an edge of the tent-flap that (he was convinced) moved every time he took his eyes off it, a tiny twitch visible only on the furthest edge of his peripheral vision, jerky and extremely fast like the movements of a spider . . . You aren’t afraid of the dark, his father used to say, don’t be such a girl; and his brother, cruel and spiteful Bleda, made fun of his fears and played horrid tricks on him, creeping up behind him and pretending to be monsters—
‘Help,’ Attila whispered. ‘Mummy.’ —But that wasn’t even his memory, because Mummy had died or gone away or been left behind when he was still only a tiny baby, and the King’s son had been nursemaided by scarred and calloused warriors, weaned from mare’s milk on to yoghurt and kvass when other children his age still hung from their mothers’ breasts; it was inviolable tradition that the King’s son should be reared from the very first as a warrior, untainted by any feminine contact, kept out of the way of anything that might weaken or dilute a warrior’s devotion to his craft. Which raised the question: if not my Mummy, then whose?
‘Mummy,’ he repeated nevertheless. ‘Mum-meee!’
Suddenly there was light, an explosion, a great flood of searingly white illumination, apparently radiating from a curious glass knob hanging from the ceiling by a string. In all the places he’d been, from the snow-blinding steppes to the brilliant midsummer sun of the Mediterranean, he’d never seen pure white light before.
‘Shut up,’ said a voice.
Attila lifted his head. He was in a solid structure, a bricks-and-stones house like the ones the Romans used; he recognised walls, floor, ceiling, door frame. In the door frame was a huge woman, the size of one of the mountain ogres in the campfire tales of his childhood. She was wearing a long white gown that reached down to her bare feet, and her hair cascaded about her shoulders like a golden waterfall.
‘Shut up, you miserable little snot,’ she growled. ‘It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning.’
Another thing about the room that caught Attila’s attention was the decorations. Someone had gone to the trouble of pasting some kind of parchment or (what did they call that stuff that burnt so well? Papyrus? Paper?) paper all over the walls, from top to bottom, covered with a profusion of little paintings of what looked like animals. Yes, they were definitely supposed to be animals: that was meant to be a bear, and that was a donkey, that was an Indian tiger (he’d seen one in a cage once, in the amphitheatre at Ravenna) and that was a small pig standing on its hind legs. But the paintings were all in a most peculiar style, and furthermore the animals were wearing human clothes; the bear had a red jacket, the pig wore a stripy tunic, the old grey donkey had its tail attached to its body with a nail. It was all quite bizarre and disturbing, like the weird animal spirits who were supposed to guide the tribe’s shamans on their wandering between the worlds. Was this a shaman’s tent, perhaps? Who was the giant woman?
Whoever she was, she was standing over him, her hands on her hips, glowering down at him with furious hatred in her eyes. He tried to shrink away, but the pillows (Pillows? He was in a bed; a ludicrously wide, soft bed, with flowery sheets and a padded quilt. Even Honorius, the mighty Roman Emperor of the West, never swaddled himself in such ridiculous luxury as this) got in the way.
‘Well?’ snarled the woman. ‘What’s the matter this time?’
‘I was frightened,’ Attila said, in a little tiny voice. ‘I thought I saw something moving.’
The woman sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said, her voice softening just a little. ‘You’re a big boy now; big boys aren’t afraid of the dark.’ She reached out and grabbed something—Eeek! It was a wolf, grey and cruel, with huge round glassy eyes; no, it wasn’t, it was furry cloth stuffed with wool and made to look like a wolf. What kind of sick mind would come up with an idea like that? ‘Here,’ the woman said, ‘you cuddle up with Mister Dog and go to sleep, and I don’t want to hear another sound out of you till morning. Understood?’
Dear God, Attila realised with a feeling of sick horror, I’m a child. How in Hell’s name did that happen? This is—
‘Mummy?’ he asked tentatively.
‘Well?’
‘You’re my mummy?’
The woman’s face hardened again; Attila observed that she had the yellow hair and pale white skin of the Goths. ‘Oh for crying out loud, don’t start. I’ve got to be up at half-six to get your father’s breakfast; I haven’t got time to play silly games. Go to sleep now or you’ll be sorry.’
The woman stretched out her hand towards the wall beside the door, and suddenly the white light was completely gone; no sunset afterglow, no red gleam of dying embers in the hearth - white light that appeared and vanished as quickly and completely as opening or shutting one’s eyes. What kind of devilish sorcerers had he fallen among this time?
‘Sweet dreams,’ the woman said; and he heard a click, some sort of mechanism, like the sprung latches of the Romans’ siege engines, one of the most ominous sounds he could ever remember having heard. Maybe the terrible woman had set up such a device, one of those giant mechanical crossbows that hurled three-foot arrows, rigged to shoot if he tried to get out of the bed. It was just the sort of diabolical cruelty you’d expect from a Goth and, since the last time he’d heard of them they’d just struck an alliance against him with the Roman Aetius, that would account for where they’d got the siege engine. And they were so clever, those Roman engineers; it would only take the slightest movement, a sneeze, a cough, to trip the gossamer-fine wires and release the locking catch; and the next thing he’d feel would be an arrow the size of a young pine tree pinning him to the wall.
Attila kept perfectly still.
The important thing, he told himself, was to keep his mind from dwelling on the mortal danger that was probably less than a hair’s breadth away from him. Instead, think of something else; anything. So he made himself think back to the great and glorious deeds of his youth and manhood, which were just starting to flood back into his memory in full, sharp detail, like soldiers reporting for duty after a long and riotous spell of leave. He pictured himself standing before the smashed gates of Aquileia, watching as his grinning troopers dragged away the Roman women by their hair. In his mind’s eye he savoured once again the abject terror of Leo, the Pope of Rome, as he grovelled before the conqueror’s sandalwood throne in his lurid silk robes of office, now stained and spattered with mud. His imagination swept him up on the wings of eagles and let him soar over the battlefield of Chalons, where his horse-archers shot down the great lumbering Gothic knights by the score on every pass, then wheeled away on their swift Steppes ponies, and Oh no, I need to go wee-wee, I need to go wee-wee NOW!
He thought of the monstrous engine of death, lurking in the shadows like a giant spider, surrounded by the lethal threads of its web. Sure enough, he desperately wanted to go wee-wee, wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything in his whole life. But with that hateful contraption out there waiting to pounce, he was just going to have to cross his legs and—
Can’t. Must go wee-wee. Oh well.
He squirmed. Somehow, he couldn’t seem to find his way back to those memories any more; great conquerors, a voice inside his head seemed to be saying, don’t wet their beds in the night, so it stands to reason that you aren’t a great conqueror and these aren’t your memories. Access denied; go away. He shivered, wondering what sort of ghastly mess he’d got himself into. Lying in the dark wasn’t much better than sitting watching the nice paint; in fact, it was considerably worse, because he’d been clean and dry watching the nice paint, and he hadn’t had a Roman arcuballista aimed at his heart the whole time. At least he’d had a few shreds of dignity left, watching the nice paint. This, on the other hand, wasn’t nice at all.
I can’t stay here for ever, he told himself. Sooner or later I’ve got to move. Maybe if I was to start to sit up, and then quickly hurl myself sideways, perhaps then I’d fool the machine and the arrow would miss. Unless they anticipated that, of course. Sounds far-fetched, but a lot of good men ended up dead through underestimating Roman artillery engineers.
True enough. On the other hand, it was worth bearing in mind exactly who won that particular war, who burnt whose cities to the ground, and so forth. If he’d had a defeatist attitude like that back in the fifth century, chances were the Hunnish nation would still be trudging through the high passes of the Caucasus, eating stale yoghurt round a fire of dried horse-turds. Stands to reason: a man who can conquer half the known world can probably figure out a way of getting out of a piddle-soaked bed without getting shot.
All right, then. If V is the vector in flight of the arrow, and T is the time elapsed between release and impact, find the coefficient of X where X equals the angle relative to V through which the target Y must fall during the time T so that Y is greater than E, the margin of aiming error expressed as an angle relative to the vertical . . .
Piece of cake. Odd, he reflected, how things work out. Little had he suspected when he decided on pure impulse to spare the life of that Greek mathematician from Aquileia that, years later, all that gibberish he’d taught him would finally come in useful. He double-checked the calculations, knocked off a couple of decimal points in the interests of practicality, braced for impact and launched himself shoulder first at the floor.
He hit something that wasn’t the ground, and there was a deafening crunch. At first he assumed it was the arcuballista bolt smashing through the headboard and burying itself deep in the wall; on reflection, however, he realised that it hadn’t been that kind of noise at all. This was more a sort of brittle grinding noise, like the sound of someone trampling on shards of thin pottery. The point, in any event, was of academic interest only; the priority was to get clear of the bedroom before—
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
If anything, the light seemed whiter and harsher than before; and she was back, the fierce Gothic warrior princess, with an even more blood-curdling look on her milk-white face. He wanted to shout defiance, death to the whole treacherous Gothic nation and victory to the feathered-skull banners of the Huns; what actually came out was, ‘Sorry.’
‘Look at you,’ the woman thundered, ‘falling out of bed at your age.’ She stepped closer, touched the mattress with a fingertip and said ‘Oh God.’ Interestingly, there wasn’t so much as a trace of a siege engine to be seen anywhere in the room.
She reached out, took hold of the lobe of his ear between thumb and forefinger and applied force, lifting him clear of the wreckage of an MFI flat-pack bedside table and a shattered table lamp. ‘Just look what you’ve done, you bloody little brat,’ she said. ‘You wait till your father hears about this.’
Having no choice in the matter, Attila followed his captive ear. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘You can call me God if it helps you relate to me better,’ said the god, carefully fastening his seat belt. ‘But most people call me Willard.’
‘Willard,’ Kortright repeated. ‘Don’t like it.’
‘Oh.’ The god peered at him anxiously through his thick spectacles. ‘You think it’s wrong for me?’
Kortright sighed. ‘It’s dead right for you,’ he replied, ‘just all wrong for a god. Trust me, I know these things. I been around gods since—gee, I don’t know when.’ A thought struck him. ‘You know, I really don’t have a clue how long I’ve been in this business. Do you?’
Willard shook his head.
‘You should know, dammit, you’re supposed to be a god. I mean,’ Kortright added, spotting a gap in the traffic and aiming the car at it, ‘look at you.’
‘I’m the way you see me,’ Willard said, slightly hurt. ‘Made me in your own image and all.’
‘Sure.’ Kortright gestured expansively, taking both hands off the wheel to do so. Willard winced and gripped his seat belt tightly. ‘You know and I know what you’re like. But a god - well, gods are meant to look and act a certain way. And you don’t.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Bad,’ Kortright said firmly, as he whisked the car past a carnivorous Yellow Cab with at least one hundredth of an inch to spare. ‘In the looks department, you’re a definite non-starter. Small and weedy simply isn’t acceptable; you should be tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, the whole matinéeidol thing. Like Kirk Douglas. A strong chin is very god. You aren’t god at all, chinwise; like, you make up in quantity what you lack in quality. Basically, it’s all a matter of image. I mean, there’s latitude, don’t get me wrong, none of it’s what you might call graven in tablets of stone. A new look is good, it helps build up that all-important brand loyalty. But it’s got to be god. If it ain’t god it ain’t good, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘I see,’ Willard said thoughtfully. ‘So we’ve established I’m not an idol or a graven image. I’d have thought that came under the heading of making progress, wouldn’t you?’
Kortright stood on the brakes and swung the wheel hard to avoid a pedestrian. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘all I’m doing here is giving you the benefit of all my years in the business. Save your goddamn wit for the customers.’
‘Sorry,’ the god said remorsefully. ‘But picking on me because I’m not cute-looking in tights isn’t fair. Really it isn’t.’
Kortright shrugged. ‘All’s fair in love and theology,’ he said, ‘it’s one of the rules of this business. But I guess it’s not so important in your case - the appearance thing, I mean. After all, you’re here to help me, not so I can find you work. Just as well, really, because I hate failures.’
‘Excuse me.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Would you mind keeping your eyes on the road, please?’ Willard said nervously. ‘I don’t like to sound critical at all, but we nearly had an accident back there.’
‘So what’s that to you?’ Kortright said. ‘You’re a god. Talking of which, can’t you do anything about this traffic? I’ll miss my flight if this goes on much longer.’
‘Do what?’ Willard asked.
Kortright waved his hands impatiently. ‘I don’t know, do I? You’re the god, supposedly. Whatever happened to all-knowing and omnipotent?’
‘With all due respect, I never said I was all-knowing or omnipotent,’ Willard replied meekly. ‘That’s just your assumptions. I’m the god of Lin Kortright, remember.’
‘Yeah, but still. If you can’t do normal god stuff, then how in hell are you going to help me get my daughter back?’
‘I don’t know,’ Willard answered. ‘I was hoping you were going to think of something.’
Kortright made a rude noise. ‘Not omniscient, not all-powerful, looks like Woody Allen on a bad hair day; man, what kind of god are you?’
‘The kind of god you deserve,’ Willard said quietly. ‘That’s what you get. Didn’t you know? I’d have thought you’d have realised that years ago, you being a big theological agent and all.’
Kortright looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I never thought of it that way,’ he said. ‘But who knows, you may well be right. Makes a lot of sense.’
‘You don’t really need a god, you see,’ Willard went on. ‘Not the way most people do. I mean, if I was what you’d call a proper god - thunderbolts and fiery thrones and stuff - you’d know it was all basically fake, because you know how it’s all really done. No point trying to impress you.’
‘Okay, okay. You made your point. If that’s how it works, that’s how it works. Is there anything you can do? Type? Keep the books? Hey, maybe you can make sense of Windows 95.’
Willard shook his head. ‘I don’t think any of us can do that,’ he said. ‘But, honest, there’s tons of really cool stuff I can do. Real god stuff, too.’
‘Such as?’
Willard thought for a moment. ‘I can forgive,’ he said. ‘To forgive’s divine, isn’t it? I read that somewhere, I’m sure. For a start, I can forgive you for the way you drive.’
Kortright gave him a sour look. ‘You think you can do any better, pal, you just slide across into the driver’s seat and carry on.’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t even know how to drive a car.’
‘Enough of this telling me what you can’t do,’ Kortright growled. ‘Come on, show me something you can. One thing’s all it’ll take.’
‘All right.’ Willard took a deep breath. ‘For a start, I can do this.’
Suddenly and without any preliminary manoeuvres, Kortright began to cry. It started with deep, convulsive sniffles, followed by streams of tears that rolled down his cheeks like herds of migrating lemmings cascading off a cliff, followed by resonant, deep-throated bawling. ‘Please,’ Kortright blubbed, ‘stop it. Stop it now. Oh, it’s so sad.’
‘Or this,’ Willard said.
Now Kortright started to laugh, building from a snigger to a chuckle to a giggle to a full-bodied, filmed-before-a-live-audience roar. ‘Hey,’ Kortright guffawed, ‘for Chrissakes, this is killing me. You want that I should have a stroke and die?’
