Frigga.
I mean — Frigga!
How could I be expected
She took it well. Wasn't the first time, clearly. She just smiled at me, fondly, like you would a child who'd just fathomed how hilarious the word 'bottom' is.
'You'll get over it,' she said.
And surprise surprise, she was right. I sniggered the next couple of occasions I used it, and then that was that.
I slept a lot. At odd hours, for odd lengths of time. I ate whenever someone brought me food. I relieved myself in the chamberpot provided, which would invariably be emptied and rinsed out when I next needed it. I let Frigga put poultices and bandages on my various injured parts and I drank the medicine she gave me, even though it tasted like boiled sweatsocks, because it took away the pain better than any pharmaceutical I'd ever known and because I could almost feel it and the poultices fixing things inside me, knitting bones, calming contusions, patching torn flesh back into place. I tried to piece it all together, where I was, how I'd got here, and gradually random thoughts surfaced, memories returned in snippets, and it was maybe my fourth day of recuperation when I finally got everything straight. Of course this wasn't a hospital. The snow storm, the car crash, the forest, the wolves, the women on snowmobiles… Asgard Hall.
And Abortion. Poor old Abortion.
Made me quite sad, remembering him and what he'd done, saving me from that wolf at the cost of his own life. I blubbed. Proper crying, tears and all. He was a useless tit but still, he'd been a mate, and I didn't have many of those. Arguably, I didn't have any now.
That time when he spent half an hour chatting up this German girl in a nightclub just off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, and came back to us boasting about how he'd pulled, and he couldn't understand why we were all pissing ourselves laughing until eventually someone explained that his ladyfriend wasn't as much of a she as she looked like, and he went back to check, and then spent the whole taxi journey back to barracks muttering about a shim, a fucking shim, you all knew and you never told me…
That time in Belize when he went into a seedy bodega in Cayo West to score some dope off a man there, and we'd told him beforehand that the phrase '
That time on base when he crashed out drunk and we got a black marker pen and wrote 'Sergeant Major Phillips' on his forehead, 'is a' on his right cheek, and 'cunt' on his left cheek, and he spent half the next morning frantically trying to scrub it off before parade at noon…
God, we were mean to him.
Abortion.
Carl.
Mate.
Six
Fifth day, I had a visitor. I woke up from a snooze to find this bloke had pulled up a chair beside my bed and was sitting there, hands laced together on his lap, studying me.
He was old, like Frigga, but wore his age less well. It seemed to hang heavily on him, the weight of years, bending his neck, stooping his shoulders. The lines on his face turned the flesh into little separate pouches. He had long white hair and a bushy white beard, like Santa Claus, but a Santa with manic depressive tendencies.
I could only see his right eye. The left, if it was there, was hidden beneath the brim of a big battered leather hat. The hat was cocked and the wide brim bent so that most of that side of his face lay in shadow.
The other eye shone brightly enough for two, however. It was grey like the North Sea, and there was intelligence in it. The deep, sad kind. Wisdom. I had the feeling that eye had been looking at me a long while, and I imagine that that was how it looked at everything. Steadily, for a long while. With care.
'Good evening,' the old man said.
'Yeah, is it? I try to keep track, but…' Outside the window it was dark and snowy. For a change.
'You are on the mend?'
'Getting there. Things are sore, but I feel like I've been fixed up well.'
'You have. My wife is an excellent nursemaid and a gifted healer.'
'Frigga.' The corners of my mouth twitched, but that was all.
He nodded. 'She tells me you came in with quite a litany of woes. Three cracked ribs. A dislocated shoulder. A cut to the head. A torn Achilles tendon. And of course that chewed and broken wrist.'
'I was going for the record. World's most beaten-up man.'
'You're lucky to be alive.'
'I know.'
'Had the Valkyries not found you when they did…'
'The who?'
'Valkyries.'
'The three snowmobile birds? That's their name? What, are they in some kind of band or something?'
'You're surely familiar with the term Valkyrie.'
I racked my brains. 'There's that boring Tom Cruise movie. Oh, and a piece of music, isn't there? The one in
'Indeed.'
'They took their name from that?'
He didn't answer, only grinned. There was something about it, that grin. Something I didn't entirely warm to. Reminded me of the wolves. Yeah, that was it. Definitely a wolfish look about it.
'Tell me,' he said, 'you were searching for us, were you not? You and your companion.'
'If this is Asgard Hall…'
'It is.'
'And the Valhalla Mission…'
'It is.'
'Then yes, we were.'
'It was an effort to get here.'
I flashed him a stating-the-bleeding-obvious smile.
'I'm sorry that it was,' he went on. 'It does seem that many of you have to suffer in order to fetch up on our doorstep, and a few don't make it at all. Wolves in the forest are a perennial problem, of course, but there
'Really? Such as?'
'You'd laugh if I told you, so I won't.'
'No, go on.'
'I could mention the word trolls.'
I laughed.
'See?' he said with a shrug. 'I'd have been better off keeping my mouth shut. My name's Odin, by the way. Odin Borrson.'
'Gideon Coxall.'
'Pleasure to meet you, Gideon.'
'I prefer Gid. Less of a mouthful.'
'Gid,' he said, musingly. 'Almost 'God' but not quite. Missed it by a vowel.'
'Never thought of it that way.'
'Whereas I am forever prone to spotting such things. Perhaps over-prone. Looking for patterns and
