The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [114]
Protestors against American foreign policy were organising mass rallies, although the cops were going to see to it that they didn't get within a placard's throw of Whitehall or any of the other destinations on the presidential itinerary. Hence the street closures. Meanwhile, the TV channels were lobbying for interviews, although so far Mrs Keener's aides had turned down all the journalistic hard cases like Paxman and Dimbleby and approved on-air face time with only Alan Titchmarsh and Adrian Chiles. Real heavyweights who didn't flinch from asking the tough questions like, "What's your favourite colour?"
Our own preparations consisted of drilling like bastards, then drilling again, and then, when we'd had enough of drilling, drilling some more. In my spare time, such as it was, I went out in Sleipnir with the drawling RAFfer pilots and we scouted Asgard's borders looking for likely ingress points. Odin put the trolls on subsistence rations to make them less dopey and more aggressive, and it worked, although two of them became so hungry they had a fight and tore off and ate parts of each other, and had to be put down. The Valkyries, for their part, went about on their snowmobiles caching supplies and ammunition in various strategically useful places, mostly near the intersections between Asgard and the other worlds.
Either an attack was coming or it wasn't. Either Loki was going to make his move or he wasn't. That choice was his. Ours was whether to be caught with our knickers around our ankles or not, and we definitely wanted to avoid the "not" option.
I was still pissed off about the frost giants and losing Chopsticks, and I might have betrayed these feelings once or twice. For instance, when Bragi proposed reciting a poem about our recent trip to Jotunheim, and I told him he could stick his poem up his arse and shove that stupid beard of his up there too while he was at it. And another 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