The Age Of Odin

time, when Thor made some joke about being excluded from the mission to Utgard, saying it couldn't surely have gone any worse if he had accompanied us and had just started killing jotuns indiscriminately as soon as he arrived.

I suggested where he should shove his hammer — a similar place, funnily enough, to where I felt Bragi's poem and beard belonged — and Thor looked all set to deck me, and would have if Paddy hadn't played United Nations and got between us and told Thor to go easy on me because I was taking Chopsticks's death very personally. Thor backed down, grumbling, and said that at least his visit to the gnomes had been a success and he'd brought back something of value rather than leaving a corpse behind. At which point I tried to deck him, and it took a combined Herculean effort from Paddy, Cy and Baz to keep me from doing so.

The last person I'd have expected to take me aside for a friendly 'what's the matter?' chat was Freya Njorthasdottir. But that was exactly who did, on the eve of Mrs Keener's arrival.

Of course she didn't put a gentle arm round my shoulder and suggest we go for a drink. That wouldn't have been very Freya-like. Instead she came at me out of nowhere, thrust a hunting rifle into my hands — a bolt-action Lee-Enfield with fibreglass stock and thick rubber recoil pad — and loped off into the woods without a backward glance. It took me a moment to realise that, since she was carrying a hunting rifle as well, this meant she wanted me to go with her. At first I thought she was simply dropping a not too subtle hint. Here's a loaded firearm. Go do the decent thing.

I set off after her. I'd been out admiring a spectacular, rather ominous, blood-red sunset, and now dusk was falling, the trees slatting the purple sky. Shadows gathered, smudging the air beneath the pines. Freya set a formidable pace and I had to run full pelt to keep her pale silhouette in sight. Several times I lost her in the gloom and had to resort to following her footprints. They were shallow, often so faint as to be virtually undetectable; she must weigh next to nothing. I recalled Chopsticks informing me, not long before he died, that the Vanir were airy, spirit-like beings. Unlike their junior cousins the Aesir, who were all too physical and fleshy, the Vanir belonged to a loftier order of existence. The word he used for them was 'evanescent.' Freya's barely-there footprints proved it. That and the way she could move across snow with scarcely a whisper of sound. That time she sneaked up on me at Yggdrasil, I hadn't heard a thing. No wonder she was such a good huntress. Her prey never had a clue she was coming.

Finally — and I'd sort of begun to accept that this would happen — I lost her. Or she lost me. One or the other. Her tracks faded to invisibility, she herself had long ago sprinted out of view, and I was left panting in the depths of the woods, alone.

I leaned against a tree while I caught my breath. Silence descended around me — the utter silence of a snowbound forest. Nothing else like it in the world. Every noise, even your own breathing, deadened. Nature's soundproofed booth.

Which meant the snap of a rifle bolt being racked right behind my head seemed as loud as if the rifle was actually being fired.

I groaned. She'd done it again.

'Nice one,' I said without turning round. 'You got me. Don't I just feel like a clumsy mortal oaf.'

'It was too easy,' said Freya. 'I couldn't resist.'

'So are we going hunting or what?'

'It depends.'

'On?'

'Your definition of hunting. And of prey. Look at me.'

I did as I was told.

And gaped.

She was stark naked, apart from an amazing, intricate golden necklace. It had to be the one Odin told me about, the one Loki had tried to nick off her. Complicatedly braided.

Not that I was paying the necklace much attention, mind. Stark naked, remember?

'Ah,' was all I said. Power of speech all but gone. A babe in the nuddy with a rifle pointed at your head could do that to you.

She was perfect. Not all inflated and plucked like a porn actress. Lean, curvy where it counted, everything in proper proportion, real. The cold air had done to her nipples what her nipples, in turn, were starting to do to my dick. And her skin was smooth and pale, like the snow her feet left hardly any impression in.

She lowered the rifle.

'Well?' she said.

There was heat. Burning breath. Skin flushed pink. Rough bark against my back, then against hers. A handful of hair, gripped so hard it hurt. Tongue thrust into wetness. The pressure of thighs around hips. Gasps rising to screams — cries to startle every animal within a three-mile radius and put it to flight.

She did weigh next to nothing.

Afterwards we meandered back to the castle, rifles slung over our shoulders by their straps, and we talked. I wasn't normally a fan of postcoital chitchat. More the roll-over-and-start-snoring type. But we weren't in bed, and we had distance to cover, and not saying anything would have been awkward. More awkward than talking.

Freya revealed that she wasn't just a hunting goddess, she was a war goddess, a fertility goddess, a goddess of lust…

'In charge of nearly all life's essentials, then,' I said. 'Unless you're a goddess of pizza as well.'

'My attributes haven't always made me popular among my own kind,' she said. 'I am frank about my needs and appetites.'

'So I noticed.'

'To earn my necklace' — she patted the front of her anorak, where the golden necklace lay beneath — 'I slept with the Brisings, the four gnome brothers who owned it.'

'All four at once, or one after another?'

'Does it matter?'

'Kind of. Not necessarily.'

'They weren't terribly prepossessing individuals but they made up for it in other ways.'

'How?'

'Do I need to spell it out? Let's just say attentive. And generously endowed.'

'Gnomes are well hung?'

'Creatures of such poor physical grace and stature must have some redeeming features. It was… a memorable experience.'

'Sounds like it.'

'Odin was peeved at me, of course. He felt I'd debased myself. Which I had, I suppose.' The corners of her mouth turned up as she said this. Here was a girl who didn't mind getting down and dirty every once in a while. As I myself was now well aware. 'But if I see something I want, I go for it.'

'Including me?'

'Don't think I haven't noticed how you've been staring at me ever since you got here. Particularly at my behind.'

'Just appreciating a work of art.'

'On the strength of that, I didn't think you'd be in any way unwilling.'

'Bang-on there.'

'And, in so far as I have a type I prefer, you're it. A warrior. A man of passion. Someone who seldom thinks before he acts. Callous at times. Rugged in manner as well as looks.'

'I'll take all that as a compliment.'

'It's meant that way. I had a husband once — a roamer, a faraway-eyed dreamer, poetically inclined. His name was Od.'

'What was odd about it?'