The Age Of Odin

been left stranded a couple of hundred metres from its parent, the three of us watched the battle go down.

It was brief, as contacts with the enemy normally were in my experience. Once all of the troops were out in the open, they formed lines and waited for the frost giants to appear. They moment they did, the big bastards got raked with enfilading fire. They retreated quick-smart back into the entrance to the caves, where bullets kept them pinned in place. A few hatchets hurled out at the troops, but the throws fell short. It was more a gesture of defiance than a concerted offensive action.

Eventually the frost giants seemed to realise that, with their close-quarter weapons, they hadn't a hope of overcoming the long-range firepower arrayed against them, and they pulled back further into the caves, out of sight. Thor commanded a ceasefire and went galloping off into the glacier after them, hammer held high. This wasn't unexpected. As Paddy put it, 'He hates the frosties with a vengeance. Can't think straight when they're around. If he didn't get a chance to give them a good pasting, we'd never hear the end of it. He'd be moaning and sulking the whole way home.'

Ten minutes later Thor was back, with an air of satisfaction about him. His hammer was coated with blood- clotted fur. His right arm was splashed red up to the elbow.

As the punchline to the whole joke, grenades were tossed into the cavemouth. Whump, crump, kerr-asshh, the roof came down, a section of the glacier collapsed in on itself, and the frost giants were sealed inside.

Or maybe not.

'Ah, they'll dig their way out in a day or two,' Paddy told me. 'That's if they don't have an emergency back- route escape tunnel somewhere further up the glacier, which they probably do. They're not dumb, those big fellas, appearances to the contrary. Bit like Cyrus here. To look at him you'd think there wasn't a single thought going on in that head of his, but I know there's a brain buried somewhere deep within. Or at least, I'd like to think so.'

'In't it Irishmen who are supposed to be thick?' Cy retorted. 'Did you hear the one about the Irish pilot who crashed his helicopter? He got so cold he turned off the fan.'

'Our reputation for stupidity is a terrible calumny against the nation that gave the world Yeats, Joyce and Wilde.'

'And Riverdance,' I said. 'Don't forget Riverdance.'

Paddy gave a sorrowful shake of the head. 'There, I admit, we have much to atone for.'

We reconvened with the rest of the troops, and a quick head-count confirmed that no human lives had been lost in the course of Operation: Get Gid The Fuck Out. I was relieved and delighted. I'd have felt like shit if someone had made the ultimate sacrifice just to save my wretched skin. It was bad enough that a few of the guys had received injuries during the fighting, although luckily nothing more severe than cuts and scrapes, sustained mostly due to grazing themselves on rough ice.

A fresh set of clothes was found for me — snow-pattern gear like everyone else was wearing. Turned out my own kit was more or less in tatters, which in all the excitement I hadn't realised. Torn to shreds by frost giant claws and general abuse and wear and tear over the past day.

Dressed like the rest, I joined them on the yomp back to Asgard Hall. We hiked with the sunset at our backs, on through the dark, until around midnight Freya called a halt and proposed we bed down until daybreak. Sentries were posted on two-hour watches, bedrolls were produced, and rations of bread, beef jerky, salted cod, power bars and drinking water were doled out. Under the stars, I tried to sleep, but for once in my life couldn't. My mutant super power — the ability to nod off at the drop of a hat, any time, anywhere — had deserted me. My mind was full of racing thoughts, too many to process easily. Foremost among them was the knowledge that everything I'd agreed to myself must be absolute bollocks was, in fact, true. I'd been held captive by frost giants. Creatures from fantasy, from medieval myth, and they were fucking real. I'd seen them with my own eyes. Conversed with them. Had the shit kicked out of me by them. Smelled them, for Christ's sake. They couldn't have been more real if they'd had a factory stamp on their backs stating that they were a real product of Realness Incorporated, makers of real things that are, in reality, real.

In which case, how much else here was actual-factual? Were there truly trolls as well? Gnomes? Was that big fat oaf Thor over there, on his back snoring like a chainsaw, genuinely the Norse god of thunder? Was Freya a goddess? She sure as hell had the looks for it. Was Odin, all said and done, everything he claimed to be? The Odin? Was Asgard Hall the Asgard?

I still clung to the notion that there was, to coin a phrase, a rational explanation for all this. That, like in an episode of Scooby-Doo, the supernatural-seeming stuff could be accounted for by people wearing clever costumes or using trapdoors and mirrors and suchlike. But I knew this wasn't much more than a vain hope. I was thrashing around for a lifebelt to keep me afloat and all I could lay my hands on was a set of child's inflatable armbands.

'I see that look in your eyes, Gid,' said Cy from next to me, in a whisper. 'That stare. It's like that for all of us, the first time, when you finally twig what's what. Takes a while to get a fix on, know what I mean? Just try not to think about it too hard. Try to accept it. Simpler that way. It's not worth losing sleep over. This is just how things are from now on. This is the world we're in.'

I lay looking up at a bunch of constellations I didn't recognise, and I waited to feel comforted by the advice.

Twenty

Eventually I did fall asleep, and I dreamed I was back in the Astra.

I was back in the Astra, trapped upside down, and Abortion had burrowed his way out and was somewhere in the field outside, but he'd been gone a long time. Minutes, though it felt like hours. It didn't take that long to phone the emergency services, did it? What was he doing, giving them his life story?

'Abortion?'

Nothing. No answer.

'Abortion? Mate?'

Still no answer.

I tried it louder, almost a scream.

'Abortion!'

Don't flap, Gid, I told myself. Bugger's strayed out of earshot, that's all. Trying to get to high ground to get a signal. Yeah, that's it.

But it wasn't impossible that he'd wandered off. Abortion's brain had holes in it, which his train of thought often fell into and seldom chuffed itself quickly out of. Dazed and confused from the crash, he could easily have forgotten about me and trundled off back up to the road, maybe planning on heading back to the petrol station. By the time he got there, if he ever did, he might not even recall how he came to be out on a night like this in the first place. Meaning I was well and truly snookered.

I wriggled, struggled, but couldn't free myself. The cold was seeping into my muscles, my bones. I was constricted. Paralysed. Dying.

I woke up then, in Jotunheim, with my bedroll all twisted round me like a sweet wrapper. I got untangled, huddled tightly up and rubbed myself for warmth, and soon was dozing once more.

The claustrophobic car dream, I suspected, was destined to become a recurring nightmare.

Another one to add to the collection.

My tours in former Yugoslavia, then Iraq, then Afghanistan, had left me with a whole host of images that I could push to the rear of my mind and ignore while I was awake, but not in my sleep, when my brain was its own boss and did whatever it felt like.

The aftermath of a Sunni suicide bombing on a bus carrying Shiite militiamen in Basra.

An Afghan woman in the field hospital at Bastion, her face melted off by white phosphorus.

The charred corpses of British soldiers in a Snatch Land Rover whose armour hadn't protected