James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin (47 page)

"Well, that's good to know. I mean, at least I'm clear where I stand. So you're here to tell us any deal's off, yes? Is that all?"

"In a manner of speaking. This is us doing you the courtesy of informing you that there now exists a state of all-out war between Jotunheim and Asgard. Ragnarök is upon us, and it is beholden to us as jotuns to assist as energetically as we can in the complete and utter destruction of the Aesir and all their collaborators."

"So you're siding with Loki. That's it. Non-negotiable."

"Yes."

"And if at a later date he turns on you?"

"We will act accordingly," said Bergelmir. "But I doubt it will ever come to pass. Especially not if we prove ourselves to be diligent aides to him in this instance."

"Right now I'm looking at three frost giants," I said. "Forgive me if I'm not exactly quaking in my boots."

"Ah, but observe."

Bergelmir turned, put a hand to his mouth, and let out a long, loud, hooting call that echoed across the landscape.

And frost giants appeared. They came out from the woods, stomping into view, kitted out in a glittering array of ice armour and weaponry. There were hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. Everywhere I looked, frost giants.

"We have the castle fully surrounded," their leader said. "Every able-bodied jotun of fighting age, male and female, has taken up arms and come. We will grant you one hour in which to rally your forces and prepare. One hour and not a minute more. Think of it as a vestigial mark of the esteem in which I once held you. Then we attack. No mercy. No quarter. We will fight you until the very last of us is dead - or the very last of you. Good day, Gid. When we two next meet - and I'm sure we will, and soon - you will find me altogether less congenial."Bergelmir smiled, bowed, and left with his companions.

Sixty-One

He was as good as his word. One hour later, almost to the second, the frost giants moved on the castle.

I'd used the grace period to assess where the building's weak points were - and there were plenty of them - and make sure they were as well defended as they could possibly be.
Jormungand
had inflicted the most damage on the west-facing aspect. One major hole and several minor ones. Rubble formed convenient ramps, and I'd predicted the frosties would concentrate their efforts on using these to storm the breaches. That way they could establish a beachhead within the castle walls.

Which was exactly their plan, and we hit them with a withering crossfire as they came. We had to shoot from reasonably close range since we couldn't afford to waste too much ammo. Ice armour was effective at deflecting bullets at a distance, so we kept it down to fifty metres or less, which didn't leave much room for error. A few of the frosties got through and the combat turned dirty and hand-to-hand. The majority didn't make it past the slopes of rubble, however. The bodies began to pile up in the breaches, two, three, even four high.

The first wave of the attack lasted nearly forty minutes before a horn sounded the retreat. Bergelmir's troops withdrew to the trees, to retrench and steel themselves to start again.

By that point I'd had an idea. "A brilliant one, even if I do say so myself."

"Go on then," said Paddy, and when I'd outlined it he twisted his mouth up and said, "That could work. Maybe. Can't hurt to try, at any rate."

"Oh give over, it's genius!"

"No,
Finnegans Wake
is genius. You've come up with something that might make a difference and equally might not. Which is hardly the same."

"Sour grapes. You just wish it was
your
idea."

"If it makes you feel better, then to be sure, I do."

We got down to business preparing a - ho ho! - warm reception for the frost giants. No sooner were we done than they came at us once more, a fresh wave of them scrambling up the rubble, yowling and bellowing all the way.

"Fire!" I yelled into the walkie-talkie, but I wasn't referring to guns. All along the castle's western flank, men threw flash bombs onto the stacks of frostie corpses, which we'd laced with every kind of combustible liquid we could lay our hands on - fuel oil, lamp oil, diesel, petrol, even cooking fat. The bodies quickly became a great flaming barrier, a fiery screen with a dual function: it drove the attacking frost giants back, and the heat affected their weaponry and armour. Some of the ice-smiths' handiwork melted outright. Some of it held together, but was severely compromised - blades blunted, helmets and breastplates thinned.

Steaming, sodden, more vulnerable than before, the frost giants fled for the safety of the trees. Snipers on the battlements took them down as they ran. Freya was up there, leading the shooting, and her Lee-Enfield cracked rhythmically and repeatedly. I'd known she was a top-notch markswoman, but this was something else. No frostie she aimed at made it back to the forest. She would ratchet the rifle's bolt, sight, pull the trigger, and that was another of the big buggers flat on the deck. Reloading the five-round magazine took her next to no time, too.

The stench from the burning corpses was atrocious. All that fur and fatty flesh. And as the flames subsided and the acrid smoke cleared, out of the woods the frost giants came yet again. Now, though, they were closing in on the castle from all sides evenly, and I could tell they weren't going to converge on the breaches, not this time. Tried that twice and got nowhere. They went straight for the walls instead, and started to climb.

Boy, could they climb. The long talons on their hands and feet dug deep into the mortar and the cracks and crevices in the stonework, as effective as a mountaineer's ice picks and crampons. The frost giants swarmed up the walls like the biggest, ugliest, whitest spiders imaginable. We shot them down as they clambered, but there were masses of them and we weren't able to pick them off quickly enough. They began cresting the battlements, unslung their
issgeisl
s and other weapons, and engaged with us in earnest.

All along the castle's rim, men and gods grappled with towering, shaggy monsters. Odin's sons were at the forefront. Vali, Vidar and Tyr despatched frost giants in all directions, sending bodies tumbling to the ground. The Valkyries were in the thick of it too, whooping high-pitched battlecries as they gunned frosties down. Skadi was there.

Sif too. Thor's missus hadn't struck me as the Xena Warrior Princess type. I'd written her off as pleasant but mousy, and assumed she would stick with Frigga, helping to care for the injured, but not a bit of it. She was Aesir, and that meant getting down and mixing it with the enemy at a time of crisis. The death of her beloved gave her added impetus. She was a little hellcat, eyes bloodshot, taking out her very considerable anguish on her late husband's favourite punchbags. Any frost giant who strayed into her path didn't live long to regret it.

Freya, of course, performed sterling work, and I did my bit. Gave a pretty good account of myself, in fact. Just let my inner berserker have free rein and went along for the ride. Up on the battlements, I forgot everything. I didn't feel anger or hatred or fear or regret. I didn't have any petty problems any more. Nothing bothered me or distracted me. I was pure purpose. I existed to do one thing and that was kill frost giants. They appeared, I did away with them. Some I shot, some I stabbed, whatever suited. I had my Minimi in one hand and an appropriated
issgeisl
in the other, and ploughed through their ranks, cold, unfeeling, inexhaustible. I could have gone on for ever. Time had no meaning; I measured my progress through the world in terms of enemies exterminated. The only clock that counted was the one that registered the racking up of dead frost giants.

This was what I did best, what I was made for. I wasn't a good husband. I wasn't a good father. Nature hadn't designed me to hold down a McJob and be Mr Domestic and live the cosy life. It had designed me to fight and slay. I had no other function. This - wading headlong into the enemy and mowing them down - was me.

And the blackness at the core of my being exulted. It screamed with a joy that was beyond happiness, beyond ecstasy, inexpressibly sweet and mindless. You couldn't get a high like it from any other source. Drink, drugs, unbridled sex, they paled by comparison. Poor substitutes.
This
was the real deal. Uncut. Raw. Mainline. Heavenly. The utter, unutterable bliss of not having to think, not having to feel, having only to recognise, react, and move on. See enemy. Kill enemy. Find next enemy. Repeat ad infinitum, or until the supply of opponents runs out.

The sun set. The sky greyed. There was that greenish glow on the western horizon that signified the last of the light. And when it was gone, that was when Bergelmir decided his troops had had enough for the day. Once again, the retreat was sounded, and the frost giants pulled back. Any that were still scaling the castle walls leapt back down to the ground and scurried off; any that were still on top of the walls did their best to make a getaway, and many succeeded. White silhouettes, they ghosted across the snow to the dark sanctuary of the woods.

We watched them go, knowing we hadn't won, knowing they'd be back tomorrow, but knowing too that we'd done as well as we could have hoped and better than anyone might have expected. After all, we were still holding the castle, weren't we? And as long as we had that, we had something.

Sixty-Two

I was keeping lookout in the ruined hollow that had been one of the castle bedrooms. Nothing was happening outside. Campfires winked in the forest, but there'd been no sign of any overt hostile activity. Bitterly cold air whistled in through the caved-in outer wall. The stars were out in their millions, each a fleck of ice. The moon was as round and hard as a cannonball.

Freya brought me a mug of tea. She knocked on the frame of the shattered door first, before entering.

"Didn't want to startle you," she said. "I know how easy you are to catch unawares."

I murdered that drink. Hot, milky, delicious. "You're a godsend," I told her when the mug was drained.

"Soldiers love their tea. If I've learned anything these past months, it's that. They can't function without it."

"An army marches on its stomach, but only if its stomach's got a brew inside. So, what's the news? How's everyone holding up?"

"Reasonably well. Thwaite, however..."

"How is old Face Fungus?" I asked, although her tone of voice had already told me.

"He didn't make it. Frigga gave him all the attention she could, but she's been run ragged, her power is stretched thin... and he just didn't have the strength."

"Bugger. Anything else I should know about?"

"Nothing much. I did come across two of your teammates arguing."

"Backdoor and who?"

"Not him. Cy and the Irishman."

"Paddy? Arguing with Cy? What about?"

"That I don't know. I came in at the end of it. They were in the banqueting hall. Paddy called Cy a name and walked out fuming. That was all I saw."

"Huh. Well, they're both big boys. They can sort themselves out. It's a pressure situation. There's bound to be some friction. I'll maybe have a chat with them later, but it's probably just them getting on each other's nerves. Nothing to worry about."

Freya sat down beside me at my vantage point, near enough that our thighs were not quite touching. She stared out into the darkness. "Quiet out there."

"I'd say 'too quiet,' but that'd be a movie cliché. Frosties seem bedded down for the night. Doubt they'll attack before daybreak."

"Agreed. They're re-equipping themselves. Their ice-smiths will be busy repairing weapons and casting new ones. Normally it's a week's work to shape a decent blade, but they can put together something makeshift in under an hour."

"Let 'em. Makes no difference. Whatever they throw at us, we can handle it."

"From anybody else I would call that bravado. From you - you really believe it, don't you?"

"Why not? It's the only way to think. Otherwise, might as well just give up and go home."

"Why haven't you?"

"Why haven't I what?"

"Gone home."

"Don't understand the question."

She nestled in close to me. We were definitely touching now, her body firm and tight against mine. Knowing Freya, this was purely pragmatic. Compensating for the freezing temperatures, shared physical warmth, all that. And yet, it wasn't. It was more.

"This isn't your fight," she said. "You're a soldier of fortune. You're here only because money is involved. But still, you're going to see this through to the end. You're happy to."

"Loki has to be stopped."

"Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough? Nobody on Midgard seems able to stand up to him, but
we
can."

"Can we? We've taken such dreadful losses."

"Still here, though, aren't we? Still standing."

"I'm just saying I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to quit."

"I wouldn't forgive myself if I did."

"Asgard isn't your world."

"It isn't yours either, lady from Vanaheim."

"True, but I have a blood connection to it. The Aesir are family."