The Valkyrie (3 page)

“The
Ragnarok... Oh come on you must know what the Ragnarok is? Well
it’s the final war when one of Loki’s sons the savage wolf Fenrir
kills Odin and another of his sons, the great serpent Jormungandr,
kills Thor only to be finally defeated. Many of the gods will
perish as will humanity alongside them, yada, yada, yada. Loki is
in cahoots with a fire giant called Surtr or something. Right? Do
you understand? So you’re going to be a foot soldier for this
battle.”

“Oh Odin, Thor
and Loki I’ve heard of them, they were in that film with Samuel L.
Jackson yeah? Oh Loki was played by that bloke, oh Tom something.
My missus loves him.”

“You’ve
slightly missed the mark, this is very real and not a Hollywood
blockbuster I can assure you, but that’s close enough for rock ‘n’
roll.” Liberty acknowledged that Marvel’s film franchises had made
her job a little bit easier over the last few years.

“So basically I
have to hunt down and kill this Loki bloke. Where can I find him? I
may as well go and get it over and done with right?”

“Well actually
he lives next door. Valhalla is basically a sports centre for dead
humans within Asgard, the city of the Norse gods. You’ve got
Folkvangr in this complex too, which is basically an overspill car
park for squaddie souls.”

“Right so let
me get this straight, the god that causes a war and kills most of
you lives next door and you lend him cups of sugar when he runs
out?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes I’ve
pointed this out before to no avail. The Norse are fatalistic. I
don’t know why they let Loki live here either. Zero logic. He’s
actually quite a nice guy, we go down the pub with him every now
and then, but it’s not really your business is it now?” Liberty
said as Bill started to look as flustered as a dead man could.
“Look, don’t you worry, as I’ve said we’ll train you up. There are
added bonuses of course, train by day party by night.”

“There’s a free
bar?”

“Yes as much
mead as you can drink. Mead’s almost Heineken I suppose.”

“And what about
the other benefits?” Bill asked with a glint.

“What other
benefits?” Liberty asked before the coin dropped “Just take this
leaflet and fuck off, yeah.” Bill dejectedly wandered out of the
cubicle and followed the trail of actual arrows tacked to the walls
towards the induction area.

***

Liberty
completed her day’s spread sheet before she got a tumbler and
bottle of whiskey out of the filing cabinet under her desk where
she kept an emergency stash. She looked over towards Honour’s
cubicle which was behind hers; the desk was piled high with tomes
on military history. She came out of her cubicle and crossed over
to where Valour’s and Glory’s were. Valour’s contained very little
bar a piece of a paper with something unintelligible scribbled on
it anchored by a conch shell paperweight. Glory was the only one
who could read Valour’s handwriting. Glory’s on the other hand was
full to the brim of all sorts of weird curios, but the only thing
of interest to Liberty was her not so secret coke stash. Liberty
was getting a dull headache from trying to use her vision. Valour
had dipped off her radar during the night and worryingly she
couldn’t get a clear picture of her at all. All Liberty could see
were some flowers. She picked up her desk phone to ring Val again
and as she stood there listening to it ring out and go to voicemail
the cool heat hit her. She then rooted around in her bag for five
minutes, sifting through all the crap she carried with her, before
she found her mobile. There were no calls, no texts and no
snapchats from Valour, however there were six missed calls,
seventeen texts and forty three snapchats waiting from Apollo. The
snapchats ranged from innocuous pictures of the sonnet he had just
read that reminded him of her to the less picturesque. Liberty knew
she needed to resolve this situation soon without turning into a
laurel tree out of desperation.

Housekeeping

Glory’s classic
(battered) chariot-come-sports car pulled in to the disabled
parking bay outside of Valkyrie Unit 401’s official headquarters: a
four bedroom terraced house with pebble dashing and a lion shaped
door knocker that the girls shared in Hackney. Having hurtled away
from the village hall at the speed of light Glory felt the need to
clarify a few things for her new protégé Bea who was sitting next
to her in the front of the car. Glory was fascinated by Bea, which
was highly uncharacteristic of her. The young Bea was both at once
so very different and yet so enormously familiar to Glory that it
unnerved but captivated her. Bea had the grace of an Olympian but
something quicker, sharper and more agile to her. They were all in
likelihood related.

Glory turned
the engine off and faced Bea “So I’ve just got a bit of
housekeeping before I show you around our digs. Some of the facts I
am about to tell you are not to be repeated. We don’t like everyone
knowing exactly what we get up and how many strings we’ve been
pulling. It’s a matter of safety if nothing else. Now in terms of
your employment with us I am legally obliged to inform you of the
following:

1. We don’t
really have set hours and are obliged to work whenever required –
that isn’t much at the moment, what with mother’s forces done in
and everyone else castrated by the UN. It’s so much harder to coax
mortals into full on combat nowadays. We have to make do with small
skirmishes, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Honour is mightily
pissed off; she loves a good naval battle. Has a thing for sailors,
she used to write sonnets to Nelson.”

“Sorry but your
mother’s forces?” asked Bea.

“Oh yeah, my
mother is Britannia, you know Last Night of the Proms, bunting and
fifty pence pieces? Valkyries technically come under Odin or Freya,
as she’s actually the Norse war goddess, but she really doesn’t
give a flying fuck under whose name it’s done under as long as she
gets her quota sorted and Odin leaves her alone to get her
pedicures. So five hundred odd years ago Liberty and I made the
executive decision that the most efficient way of hitting our
targets would be the development of a few industrialised
nation-states with a capitalist bent, Mother’s lot being the
easiest to deal with and in close proximity. Mechanised warfare is
an administrative godsend.”

“Ok so the
whole age of European Empires was a born out of a bureaucratic
necessity?” Bea asked.

“Yes, we
practically ran the world. We coasted through the last century what
with the World Wars. We didn’t have to make too much effort since
we hit our quotas so early on, but we’re gearing up for another
biggie soon.”

“Doesn’t Odin
care that you did all that in someone else’s name and not his?”

“He brought it
up once but then I let him touch my boobs and it’s never come up
again.” Glory looked at her nails and thought she’d paint them
orange next “Right where were we, ah:

2. Any contract
you enter into with us, once you pass probation, is short term and
will last for only one hundred years after which you have the
opportunity to renew or walk away.

3. You don’t
actually have a notice period, the contract is really easy to
breach and I can’t be bothered with all the forms.

4. As a junior
we will fully train you up to be an expert member of Valkyrie Unit
401.”

Interrupting
Glory’s patter Bea asked “Fortune called you elite?”

“You really
haven’t heard of us? Even after I’ve put in all those years of hard
work building a terrible reputation? Mothers tell their children
tales of us at night to stop the blighters from misbehaving.” Glory
said a little flustered. What was the point in being a badass if no
one knew it? “You should know that Unit 401 is the only combative
unit of the Valkyries there is. Everyone else just mopes around
battlefields. We’re the strategy wing of all of Valhalla’s
operations. Neither Odin nor Freya really can be arsed so Liberty
does the planning, Honour does the logistics, Valour always dealt
with the mortals and I deal with shit on the ground whilst
overseeing everything else, with Liberty as second in command. Over
the last millennium 64.3% of all conflicts came out of this unit
globally, whether the world knows it or not.”

“Ah cool so I
get to blow stuff up?” Bea asked.

“Oh sweetheart
there are actually three blows: blowing shit up, blow jobs and blow
coke. This, my young friend, is the life.” Glory was sincere.

“So what about
the other, erm, perks?”

“Free digs with
a mead tap in the kitchen; nice cars; decent armour we commission
ourselves from Wayland; oh and you’ll come out the other end of
this job with enough of a problem with alcohol that you’re
interesting at parties. Do you have any other questions?” Glory
asked Bea who just shook her head “Nope, cool. You’ve been to
Hackney before right? We like it here, it’s got nice pubs with pool
tables but is dicey enough that you might get stabbed and/or raped.
Honour says it reminds her of home. Fancy a line before I show you
around?”

As Glory and
Bea got out of the car Glory couldn’t help but feel a little twinge
of what she thought could be nostalgia. Valour moving out like that
and in with her boyfriend felt like the end of an era, it also
served to remind Glory of how omnishambolic she was. Not that she
felt the need for a boyfriend. She just sometimes – very, very,
very occasionally – thought it might be quite nice to have one
again. She thought of Loki and considered calling him. She even
thought of calling Thor. Calling either of them would achieve
nothing. Loki had written his phone number on the top of her thigh
as a joke because she never called him when he asked her to and he
was adamant that she must have lost his number. Glory couldn’t
quite bear to scrub it off just yet. She couldn’t bear to scrub the
phone number of a married god that she was screwing off her thigh.
That thought would have been sobering had Glory not been so tanked
up. That being said the freedom of being a Valkyrie was like
nothing else: over the centuries she had seen her cousins reduced
to merely maternal consorts or whores. Glory had gotten to do
exactly what she had wanted and if anyone objected unreasonably she
could always just stab them. She very much liked it that way.

The pair walked
past the rubbish bins. The big green recycling bin was full of
empties to the red door. There were cans of ready prepared gin and
tonics, Pimm’s that had been drunk neat, and desolate bottles of
port were overflowing – Honour demanded they recycle. Glory took
out her keys, opened the door and they both walked in to the house
and in to another era. On the small wooden table in the hallway
were Valour’s old set which she handed over to Bea. They were
accompanied by four piles of letters, one for each of the girls.
Glory took up Valour’s with the intention of forwarding them on and
her own. Of the seven letters in her hand addressed to her six were
silly love letters and the other was a bloody invitation from her
mother. Bea shut the door behind her with a thud.

Bea strode into
the kitchen as if she had been waiting for that moment for
eternity, leaving Glory to reread the spidery written invitation
with a stiff upper lip that barely contained her contempt. The room
was surprisingly clean, but as gods don’t eat anything bar ambrosia
in its varying forms, this should not surprise too much. The
cupboard doors were labelled curious things including but not
exclusively: skunk; ethanol; hand grenades; weapons-grade
plutonium, uranium and other nukes; condoms; and Coca-Cola (blood
stains). Honour was sitting at the table with three laptops and a
shit load of stationary covered in fluffy unicorns from Paperchase.
All around her were reams of charts and graphs, and beneath the
table were a few choice prototypes of military hardware that no one
outside of The Pentagon could even dream was possible let alone be
a reality. Honour was tapping her feet and wobbling her head along
to Beyoncé, wondering why no-one had deified her yet.

“I can’t read
my own blasted writing. NK Boom? What was Liberty on about? Ah yes.
Now how am I to mobilise bloody North Korea with such a rubbish
economy. The whole nation is geared towards it thanks to Valour but
has bugger all resources. Kim Jong-whatshisface may have wangled
some plutonium but he hasn’t tuppence to rub together to do
anything with it. I’m not a fucking miracle worker.” Honour said
aloud. She had yet to notice the arrival of Glory and Bea.

Glory entered
the kitchen, headed straight to a cupboard labelled ‘opiates’ and
began rifling through it until she appeared satisfied. She leaned
against a kitchen counter and took in the scene.

“Still working?
It’s 3pm on a Saturday why aren’t you prowling STI clinics in
Soho?” Glory asked Honour, she felt like causing some mischief. Bea
watched this little vignette with interest.

Out of the
corner of her eye Honour finally saw Bea and was taken aback that
she hadn’t noticed her before. “I only did that once.” Honour
pouted.

“Best orgasm
you ever had yeah?” Glory asked. This was an anecdote Honour always
told.

“Oh lordy where
to begin?” Honour said looking at Bea, trying to gauge whether she
was one of them, one of the good time girls “My logic is that only
girls who really, really know what they’re doing hang out there.
Her tits were marvellous.”

“Well I suppose
meeting at the clap club is cooler than online.” Bea said wondering
at the misogyny.

“Exactly, it
makes me interesting to talk to at parties. Who are you by the
way?” Honour asked.

“I’m Bea: new
recruit.”

“We’re hiring?
Oh Val’s not rocking up earlier. Was she KO’d by that elf?” Honour
asked Glory.

“Yup, the floor
fell as if from beneath her.” Glory said to Honour as the pair of
them took that thought in and wondered who would be the next
unfortunate soul to get married. “As your commanding officer I
think I should be obliged to enquire as to your workload?”