The Age Of Odin

'Gid.'

'Your mother always preferred Gideon. Your father was the one who shortened it. It was a bone of contention between them — one of the few, all minor, until his infidelity. Afterwards, she wouldn't even let your friends call you Gid while they were in the house. 'Gideon,' she would insist. 'As in the Bible.''

Me: eyes on stalks, jaw open to the neck.

But I recovered well, I thought.

'Okay, that trick isn't creepy much. What have you got back there, The Big Book Of Gideon Coxall, complete with illustrations?'

'Something of that ilk,' said Urd. 'I shall use Gideon too, because it was your mother's choice, and she is a significant factor in your past. What my sisters call you is their own business.'

'Will you invite us in?' said Odin, having to force the request out. 'I can't believe our visit was not expected.'

'Nothing is unexpected to the Norns,' Urd said, 'and indeed we already know your motives for being here and have prepared accordingly. Come in, both.'

She let us in, shut the door behind, and showed us along the hallway through to a lounge. The cottage's interior matched its exterior. Ripped and peeling wallpaper. Threadbare rugs and throws. Chairs well ventilated with holes. Moth-eaten, mildewed, mouldering curtains with hems so rotted away they barely touched the sills. The smell of dust, dense and peppery in the air. If the Norns were deliberately going for the shabby-chic look, they'd nailed it. Nailed it to the point of overkill.

In the lounge, two women rose to greet us. Both had a similar look about them to Urd. Same posture, same mannerisms, same colouring. In point of fact, they were exact replicas of her, just older. One by maybe twenty years, the other by a lot. One was Urd as she might be after childbirth, broader in the hips, plumper around the jowls. Matronly was the word that sprang to mind. The other was Urd as she'd become once menopause, osteoporosis, and the general withering of age had taken their toll: stooped, hair streaked with silver, lips shrivelled to a dog's bumhole with a sketching of moustache across the top.

'Verdande,' Odin said to the mother version of Urd, and 'Skuld' to the ancient version. There was a definite tremor in his voice. Oh how he did not want to be in a room with these three.

'All-Father,' Verdande and Skuld replied. Usually a term of respect round these parts, but from their lips the title sounded sarcastic, even contemptuous. They were scornful of it, and of Odin.

The Norns gathered together in the centre of the room, and it was like a snapshot of three generations. Grandmother, mother, daughter. Which would have been charming if they weren't so eerily alike in every way. Triplets born across a span of several decades.

'We are busy,' said Urd. 'There is much work to be done.'

'The tides in the affairs of gods and men are in full spate and reaching flood,' said Verdande. 'We must weave and divine as never before.'

'Yet we have made time for your visit,' said Skuld. 'How could we fail to? We are the Norns. It was foretold.'

'We are grateful,' said Odin.

But they didn't much seem to care for further niceties. 'Be seated,' Urd instructed, and Odin and I did as told, finding places for ourselves on a settee between the sticking-up springs and the outbursts of horsehair stuffing. A one-bar electric fire buzzed hear our feet, shedding some warmth but no further up our legs than our ankles. Funnily enough, I couldn't see where the fire was plugged into. It didn't even appear to have a flex.

'What has Odin told you about us?' Urd asked me. 'About how we work?'

'Little, I'd imagine,' said Verdande.

'The All-Father is loath to acknowledge that we exist at all,' said Skuld. 'Or that, as we prove, there are things beyond his control.'

'We see all.'

'While he sees not nearly so much.'

'Nor nearly so far ahead.'

'One eye only.'

'The other sacrificed in return for a drink from the Wellspring of Wisdom in Jotunheim.'

'Plucked out and given to Mimir, the only wise jotun that ever lived. A poor exchange.'

They were ripping the piss out of Odin, and he just stared at the middle distance and took it. I felt a bit sorry for him.

'For wisdom by itself is never quite enough,' said Urd.

'Not when unaccompanied by foresight,' said Verdande.

'Oh what it must be to understand all, but be able to predict the outcome of naught,' said Skuld.

'How sad.'

'How limiting.'

'How short-sighted.'

'Come on, girls, leave it out,' I said. Someone had to stand up for the old bugger. He obviously wasn't going to himself. 'So Odin's missing an eye. Never stopped Columbo, did it? Means he can't enjoy a 3D movie, but that's about the only drawback I can think of.'

'Don't defend me, Gid,' Odin said. 'This… teasing is just their way. The Norns must be endured and never — I repeat — never antagonised.'

'What's the worst they can do? Slag me off to death?'

The three women laughed in unison, a horrible sound, jarring and jangling like a bad guitar chord.

'Gideon has spirit,' said Urd.

'Gid does,' said Verdande.

'A hero born,' said Skuld.

'No, whoa, what?' I said. 'Hero? Oh no. That's enough of that.'

'Modest?'

'Or ignorant.'

'Or in denial.'

'Denial of his future path.'

'Shall we show him, sisters?'

'Show him the course we have set for him?'

'The thread we have selected?'

'Ought we?'

'He has come. We ought.'

'He wants truth.'

'We shall give him truth.'

They were talking so fast now, I was having trouble keeping up with which of them was saying what. The three-way rota of Urd then Verdande then Skuld had been abandoned. They were all speaking at once, or finishing one another's sentences, or doing alternate words, I wasn't sure which.

'It is the price.'

'The price of truth.'

'To be shown the truth of himself.'

'A truth for a truth.'

'Does he wish to see what is to be?'

'As if he has a choice.'

'In our house.'

'On our terms.'

'He cannot refuse.'

Then, like that, they were gone, whisking out of the room in a flourish of skirts. I looked at Odin.

'What the hell was all that — '

And suddenly they were back, wheeling a TV set. It was sitting on a rickety hostess trolley, with a VCR on the shelf beneath. The telly was vintage; fake wood veneer, bulbous screen, loads of knobs and buttons. Mid 'eighties at the latest. The VCR was much the same. A top-loader the size of a kitchen sink, with clunky lever