Valhalla, p.17
Valhalla, page 17
Carol decided to take her chance. She put her head down and dashed for the door; would have made it nicely, too, if she hadn’t tripped over Deathgrip the rabbit and gone sprawling on the floor, ending up heaped round Odin’s feet like presents round a Christmas tree.
‘A word of advice,’ Odin said, reaching out a hand and helping her up. ‘Always look a gift horse in the mouth. That way, you can tell when they’re about to reach out and bite off your ear. I’ll let you know when your dad’s cleared immigration.’
Carol gave him a long, cold look; in comparison, the ice ages were the one hot day in July that constitutes the average British summer. ‘You wait and see,’ she said. ‘Once Dad gets here, you’ll really have a strike on your hands. You ain’t seen nothing.’
‘You’re very hostile,’ Odin said. ‘That’s a pity, after all these years. Really, you make me wonder if I failed in my duty.’
Carol looked mystified. ‘What duty?’ she said. ‘What’re you talking about?’
‘Didn’t I mention that?’ Odin smiled affectionately. ‘I’m your godfather.’
Attila the Hun peered round the corner of the bicycle shed, then ducked back into cover. ‘Get ready,’ he hissed. ‘They’re coming.’
How long he’d been here, he had no idea. Time was passing in lumps and clots, like the crap coming free from a blocked drain. Some mornings he woke up and found the sleeves of his pyjamas up around his elbows, the result of a sudden growing spurt. Nobody would tell him anything, but he had an idea he was now about eleven or twelve years old; nearer twelve than eleven, probably, but small and puny for his age. That figured, though; the Huns had always been shorter and wirier than the races they’d fought and annihilated, that was part of the thrill of the thing, the joyful triumph of the sensibly sized over a whole world of Tall Bastards.
‘You all know what to do,’ he said. It was a statement, not a request. Attila had hand-picked his gang, trained them, imbued them with his philosophies of life and waging war, to the point where he could almost rely on them. He looked at them now; seven grim, taciturn, determined freckled faces, his men, his magnificent seven samurai, and not one of them so much as a hair’s breadth over four feet tall.
Alas, regardless of their fate, Terry Barrett’s gang were walking confidently into the zone between the bike shed and the science block that Attila had mentally designated the Valley of Death. When he gave the signal, his advance party would dart out, hurl their missiles (carefully and painfully selected from the abundant raw material to be found every morning in the park just after dog-walking time) and take flight in the direction of the main school building. The Barrett gang would pursue, whereupon Attila would lead out the main body of his force to take them in flank and rear. It had worked against the Goths, it had worked against the Avars, it had worked against the Romans, and all those had been little more than dress rehearsals. When the bell finally rang for the end of dinner time, the balance of power in this sector of the playground would be changed irrevocably, for ever.
Like lambs to the slaughter; except that lambs are born with some vestigial trace of a survival instinct, which put them a long way ahead of Terry Barrett and his gang in the hierarchy of evolution. It was almost disappointing, in a way. As the trap closed, Attila couldn’t help feeling that the clockwork precision with which his advance party wheeled and joined the mêlée as soon as the enemy had turned to face the ambush was wasted on these deadheads. A bunch of first-years could have taken them, maybe even girls . . .
‘You! Pack it in.’
The magnificent seven froze, like mammoths in the Siberian ice. ‘No!’ Attila wanted to scream. ‘Go on, what are you waiting for?’ But no words came; those damned little-boy instincts had cut in again, triggered by the irrelevant sound of a teacher’s voice. The hell with teachers, roared the inner Attila, they’re just more Tall Bastards, that’s all; give me a baseball bat or a cricket stump and a kneecap to swing at, we’ll soon see how tough they are. The bigger they are, the further they have to travel when they suddenly double up in unspeakable agony. But . . .
‘You,’ said Mr Garrod. ‘Wilson. I might have known. All right, the rest of you, detention.’ (Not a cry of protest, not a howl of defiance, not even a whined ‘But, sir!’ from the lot of ’em, friend and foe alike. Cowards!) ‘You, on the other hand,’ Mr Garrod continued, ‘are coming with me to see Mr Thompson.’
It’s all right, urged the inner Attila, Nature has condemned him to death, as She condemns us all. He’ll get what’s coming to him, sooner or later. But the physical Attila felt a twinge in his bowels and bladder - it had taken him a long time to figure out what that was; he’d narrowed it down to a stomach upset or fear, and he hoped like hell it was a stomach upset - and somehow he couldn’t lift his head and stare his tormentor in the eyes.
‘Wait there,’ he’d been ordered, and he duly took his seat on the bench outside Mr Thompson’s office. Mr Garrod walked away and there was nothing to keep him there; no chains, no ropes, Mr Garrod hadn’t even bothered with the elementary precaution of running a sharp knife across his Achilles tendon. Mr Garrod, it hardly needed to be said, wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the Steppes; unless, of course, Attila had had anything to do with it, in which case the poor bastard would probably have lasted five or six extremely uncomfortable days.
The door opened.
‘You again.’ He’d heard those words in this context so often he’d be forgiven for thinking it was his name (in which case, what would the ‘U’ stand for? Umberto?) But there was something unaccountably different about Mr Thompson today. Oh, for sure, he looked the same (another Tall Bastard; enough said); but there was somebody else looking down at him out of Mr Thompson’s eyes, in the same way as somebody else peered at him whenever he looked in a mirror. ‘Get in here,’ said Mr Thompson’s voice, ‘and shut the door.’
As the door clicked shut behind him, he recognised the voice.
‘You,’ he said.
‘Me.’ Mr Thompson opened a drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle. ‘Kvass?’ he offered. ‘Pretty mild stuff, compared to what you’re used to, but it’s better than nothing.’
Attila nodded, and Mr Thompson filled a couple of tumblers. ‘Never could get used to drinking it out of a glass,’ Mr Thompson went on. ‘In anything other than the skull of a defeated foe, it just doesn’t taste the same.’
‘You’re Odin,’ Attila said, pushing his glass across the desk for a refill. Mr Thompson emptied the bottle into it and pushed it back.
‘Just for now,’ he replied. ‘Talking of which, remind me to drain all the alcohol out of this wimp’s system before I go. He doesn’t drink, you see, except for a half of shandy at Christmas, and the number one rule is, please leave your host’s body as he’ll expect to find it. Well, how are you enjoying Valhalla? Settling in all right, I hope.’
Attila stood up, intending to lean forward over the desk, but he could only just see over the edge. ‘Odin, it sucks. You’ve got to get me out of here. All right, I was out of line running out on the paint-drying thing, I admit that, but enough’s enough and I don’t deserve this. Just take me back to my seat in the auditorium and we’ll call it quits, okay?’
Odin looked at him for a moment and then laughed. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you can do better than that. Where’re the threats and bluster, diminishing into pitiful grovelling? I was expecting theatre, rhetoric, sawing the air, great impassioned speeches, not Odin, it sucks, can I go home now? Don’t say you’re going native on me, please.’
Attila scowled at him, but the stapler was in the way. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If I give you the full English breakfast, will it do me any good?’
‘No,’ Odin replied, ‘but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of having given it your best shot. Face it,’ he went on, his patronising smile melting like snow on a hot exhaust, ‘you’re here for the duration now, and how you make out depends on what you do and who you turn yourself into. You aren’t Attila the Hun any more; you’re a short, fat, sensitive kid who gets his bum kicked in the playground and grows up to be a computer nerd or a Star Trek fan. Deal with it. All this preemptive bullying and beating the shit out of boys twice your size has got to stop, understood?’
Attila glowered at him, as if trying to barbecue him on the hoof. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘It works. I can do it. And nobody pushes me around any more. What are you going to do about it, expel me from the school?’
Odin laughed; it was the sort of noise Attila had been able to make once upon a time, and it had nothing whatever to do with people telling jokes. ‘So you reckon you can beat up on people who are bigger than you, do you? I’m warning you, Attila, things are different now. These days, there’s always someone bigger than you, and the smaller you are, the harder you fall. Give it up, now, while you’ve got the chance. Get it into your thick nomadic skull, will you? The Romans won.’
Attila shook his head. ‘Things change,’ he said. ‘People don’t. I’m still me, you - you tall bastard. You can’t take that—’
But Odin had gone, suddenly, like switching out a light. ‘What did you just call me?’ said Mr Thompson, in a voice of such utter incredulity that Attila wanted to giggle.
‘Nothing, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘Yes, you did. Right, that’s triple detention, and if I see you in here again before the end of term, I’m going to recommend suspension. Do you understand what that means?’
Oh, piss off, you fatuous git. ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’ Dammit, why am I staring at my shoes? Why do I always stare at my shoes, like I’ve done something wrong? I haven’t done anything wrong; because for men like me, like Attila the Scourge of God, words like Right and Wrong are utterly meaningless.
‘And do you understand,’ Mr Thompson went on, ‘why it’s wrong to behave like that? Because if you don’t understand—’
‘I understand, sir. And I’m sorry, sir. Won’t do it again.’
Mr Thompson looked at him for a long time; and because he was staring at his shoes, he couldn’t look up and see who was looking at him from behind Mr Thompson’s eyes this time. ‘That’s better,’ he said, in a voice that made Attila want to be sick. ‘This time, I really think you mean it.’
CHAPTER TEN
Gandhi, thought Howard suddenly, as another smart missile belied its name by crashing into the ground and blowing itself up. Bloody Gandhi.
Ever since Odin had mentioned the name in passing, a few hundred deaths ago, it had been rattling around in the back of his mind like the loose jack handle in the boot of your car that you mistakenly believe is the big end going. Gandhi wasn’t a subject he could claim to know a lot about; the last time the film had been on, it had clashed with Xena: Warrior Princess, and though his friend Dave had seen it, the only comment he’d had to make was that they’d got the number of buttons down the front of a Coldstream Guards second lieutenant’s tropical dress uniform wrong, that being the sort of thing Dave took very seriously indeed. The bare facts, however, were buried somewhere in the cardboard box of useless data he’d been storing in the back of his mind since school, when to his disgust they’d had to do the twentieth century in History for A level, something that struck Howard (who regarded anything later than 1820 as out-of-date news rather than history) as a terrible waste of time.
Gandhi; wasn’t he the bloke who overthrew British rule in India by entirely non-violent resistance? A curious notion, he’d always thought, akin to trying to put out a fire by hosing it down with petrol, but at the moment it had the overwhelming merit of being the one thing he hadn’t tried yet.
The logic was simple. In Valhalla, people fight all day and come back to life in the morning, over and over again. Didn’t it stand to reason, therefore, that if you didn’t join in the fighting, they’d have to let you go? Would Valhalla tolerate a pacifist, or would it reject them, like a Lloyds Bank card in a NatWest ATM? It would be interesting to find out.
And so he did, twenty-seven seconds later, when a shell from a seven-inch naval gun (Naval gun? But we’re miles and miles from the sea) left him very widely distributed and about a hundredth of a millimetre thick. When he next opened his eyes, he saw the same old landscape: barbed wire, burnt-out houses and shops, bodies slumped in doorways, the characteristic glossy brown-black of dried blood marking the pavement he was standing on. Either his next afterlife was set in Liverpool, or he was back where he’d started.
The Liverpool hypothesis was knocked on the head when he saw a tank lurch past, stop and move on (if this was Liverpool, someone would’ve stolen the tank’s caterpillar tracks while it was standing still) and he was just about to file the Gandhi initiative under F for Failure when a thought occurred to him.
One non-violent man sitting in the middle of the road is an idiot. A thousand of them constitutes a Movement. All he had to do was persuade his fellow inmates to join him, and then maybe the scheme might work.
First, catch your Movement.
‘Don’t shoot!’
A stream of bullets passed overhead, so close he could feel the blast of the shock wave. Tucking himself a little more tightly into the lee of the fallen-down wall he was hiding behind, he tried again. ‘Don’t shoot! I only want to talk to you.’
Once again, the bullets whizzed past, so close and so many that all he’d have needed to do to create the perfect colander was to hold his helmet a foot above his head. This was frustrating.
‘Pack it in, will you?’ he shouted. ‘All I want to do is talk to you. I have this brilliant idea about stopping the fighting so we can all go home.’
His words must have touched a chord in the heart of his unseen assailant because, sure enough, he stopped shooting. Instead, he threw a grenade. Howard had just enough time to grab it and throw it back before it went off. There was a loud bang, and a moment later it started raining that warm, sticky red stuff. Hell, Howard thought. So much for non-violence.
So what? Gandhi wouldn’t have given up so easily. A minor setback, such as blowing someone into taramasalata with a hand grenade, would have struck the great man as an interesting challenge, not the cue for total surrender. Beyond doubt, his first words of advice would have been something along the lines of If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, combined with a picturesque metaphor about omelettes and eggs.
He didn’t have far to go before he came across another unseen sniper. This one was embedded in the ruins of a public lavatory that had at some previous stage in the day’s programme taken a direct hit from a three-inch mortar, and the smell was quite repulsive. It didn’t seem to be doing much for the sniper’s mood, or his aim.
‘Please,’ Howard found himself saying, ‘it won’t take a minute, really. And then,’ he added with a sigh, ‘if I haven’t convinced you that my idea’s a good one, I’ll hold still while you kill me. Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’
The sniper held his fire, a very encouraging sign. Of course, it could just mean that he was swapping over rifle clips.
‘Are you kidding?’ said a faint, reedy voice from behind the evil-smelling rubble. ‘What kind of moron do you take me for?’
Howard took a deep breath. ‘It isn’t like that at all,’ he said. ‘I mean it, really. Look, I’m going to get up from behind this rock and you aren’t going to kill me; I’ll have both hands up in the air where you can see them, and I’ll throw out my weapons before I even start to move. Then I’ll come on, really slow and easy. Simple as that.’
The sniper didn’t say anything. Gradually, Howard eased forward, waiting for the rifle to start up again, until he was out in the open, too far to have any chance of getting out of the way if the enemy resumed hostilities. Still no response. He decided to push the risk all the way, and stood up.
‘Hi there,’ he said.
The other guy froze. He was in the middle of trying to unjam the mechanism of his weapon; there was an empty cartridge case stuck solid in the breech, refusing to budge. So much for the idea that the enemy had been listening to what Howard had to say. Still, as an exercise in creative serendipity it was worth seeing through to the end.
‘It’s all right,’ he called out, as the other man scrabbled like clumsy lightning for a big axe that was lying half-submerged in the mud. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Look, no weapons of any kind. No sudden movements, I swear to God. Now then, I’m coming toward you.’
The other man, a long, thin, straggly type with a lantern jaw and a parsnip nose, stared at him and left the axe lying. ‘Are you for real?’ he said. ‘You really aren’t going to attack?’
Howard nodded. ‘You got it,’ he said. ‘Non-violence. Peace on earth, goodwill towards men. Gandhi. I just want to talk, that’s all.’
‘Gandhi?’
‘Gandhi.’
The other man’s brow furrowed. ‘Isn’t that the name of a river in Northern India?’ he asked.
‘You’re thinking of the Ganges,’ Howard replied. ‘Gandhi’s the man who won his country’s freedom by forswearing violence and relying on quiet persuasion and the power of example. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
‘Not fighting?’ The man looked at him as if he’d just suggested not breathing. ‘Man, I don’t think that’s even possible.’
Howard made himself smile. ‘It’s worked so far, hasn’t it? I persuaded you, and you haven’t attacked me as a result. Now just think what’d happen if we each persuade two other guys, and they each persuade two guys, and they each persuade two guys—You get the idea? It’s evolution in action, if you ask me.’
‘Sounds more like pyramid selling to me.’
