The Age Of Odin

Thirty-Eight

Shagged out.

Done in.

Cream-crackered.

A fortnight we'd been doing our "bring 'em back alive" bit with the trolls. Day after day in-country, exploring their known haunts, with Freya using her tracking skills to find their lairs or stalk them on the move. Night after night under canvas listening to the lament of the wind, and occasionally the baying of distant wolves.

Alfheim: where the air was thin and the aurora borealis snaked greenly among the stars, and where I never saw a single elf despite Freya's insistence that they were watching our every move.

Svartalfheim: barren and grim, a lifeless lunar landscape of black volcanic rock and ancient lava flows, dotted with billowing geysers and patches of glassy obsidian.

Jotunheim: along the borderlands, the regions of intersection where it cold-shouldered Asgard.

The trolls were everywhere, but never in bands of more than two or three and more often than not solitary. Invariably they blundered straight into the traps we laid. They didn't always get to feed on the tethered goats we put there to sucker them in, either. Often Thor would leap out from hiding and cosh them on the head while they were still rubbing their tummies and smacking their lips in anticipation. It never once occurred to any of them to question why an animal was standing tied to a peg at the end of a blind canyon or next to an outcrop of rock large enough to conceal several soldiers. The prospect of a free, easy meal made the creatures even dumber than normal.

Winkling them out of caves was a mite more problematic. But again the nickering of a frightened goat usually did the trick, drawing them up from the depths as efficiently as a dinner bell.

Mostly we had to subdue them with gunfire, if Thor didn't get the chance to knock them out cold. We'd use tear gas as well, stun grenades, magnesium flares. Once, swear to God, a female troll got so disorientated and stressed out by all the noise and smoke, she wet herself. I felt strangely guilty about that.

Odin's ravens were with us the whole time. Radio didn't work across the frontiers between worlds, so Huginn and Muninn kept their boss updated on our progress. They also enabled him to guide Sleipnir's pilots to our location when a troll was ready for retrieval.

By the end of it, when Odin decided we'd caught as many trolls as Asgard could handle, I could have done with a break. We all could have. But there was no time to rest. Mrs Keener's state visit to the UK was only a few days away, and we didn't know if this would coincide with another — maybe larger-scale — attack on us, but it seemed a fair bet. So on we pressed.

Thor was despatched on an errand to Svartalfheim, to request a favour off the gnomes. He took with him some sketches I'd drawn — "blueprints" would be overstating it, given the crapness of my drawing skills — and his wife Sif went along too, ostensibly as moral support but really because Thor wasn't big on tact and, according to Odin, dealing with grouchy gnomes required finesse.

I'd remembered Bergelmir saying how good the gnomes were at making tools. Odin had confirmed it, talking up their blacksmithing ability. "Masters of moulding metal," he'd told me. "They make it dance in their hands." He'd gone on to describe at length their underground forges, their furnaces that were heated by nothing less than the magma beneath the earth's crust, their vast cavern workshops that resounded deafeningly with the sound of hammered iron and hissing water.

If gnomes couldn't manufacture what I'd designed, no one could.

Not that it mattered much either way. That plan was something of a long shot, and the main purpose of it was to get Thor temporarily out of our hair. He couldn't come with the rest of us where we were going. We couldn't bring him along because we couldn't count on him to play nice and behave.

Not in Utgard, capital of Jotunheim and main hangout of the frost giants.