The Age Of Odin

Seventy-Three

So there I was, in hospital, in a corner bay in a six-bed ward, woozy with super-strength painkillers but too wired to sleep, waiting for the dawn to come and with it, hopefully, some enlightenment, some certainty.

All I had to keep me company through the dark was the mumbling and snuffling of the other patients in the ward, and my own confusion. Questions swirled, and questions within questions, and I struggled to make sense of them.

I was prepared to accept that everything I believed had happened, hadn't. I could live with the idea of it all being just a delusion. Asgard, Odin, Thor, Loki, frost giants, trolls, the battles, the lot — just events conjured up in my brain during the time it took for Abortion to leave the crumpled car, climb the slope, make the 999 call and come back down. What had seemed to be weeks of my life had taken place in a few minutes, a full-length narrative unfurling at lightning speed in my head while I'd been suspended upside down inside the Astra. I'd been hovering in and out of consciousness, perhaps even on the verge of slipping into a coma, and my mind, prompted by various cues, had chosen to play out a complex fantasy of war and death amid the snow and ice of other worlds.

A dream, in other words. A vivid hallucination I'd lapsed into, somewhere in the depths of myself, somewhere where I no longer had control over what I was thinking. I'd created an action movie featuring the Norse gods, with myself as the star and a major supporting role for one very famous real-world personality. It had been exhilarating, scary, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes illogical, like any good action movie. There'd even been a romantic subplot, the leading man winning over the gorgeous love interest in spite of her initial frostiness towards him. All the elements that made for an entertaining couple of hours down at the local multiplex, or perhaps an evening in with a rental DVD.

I could happily go along with writing it off as nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Except…

How come it had felt so real?

There had been pain. Lots of it. There had been danger that had had me sincerely fearing for my life. And that wasn't all. The biting cold. The trolls and their noxious smells. The angst of watching people I liked getting brutally killed. All experiences that were too harsh, too diamond-sharp, to be purely imaginary. I could recall, without any difficulty, the sensation of the wolf's teeth sinking into my wrist, the way the issgeisl shivered in my hands when Hval the Bald struck it with his, the feel of my skin tearing off on the handle of Bergelmir's ice knife… How was it possible I knew exactly what it was like to undergo such things, in the finest detail, unless I really had?

So, what if it hadn't been a dream? What then?

Suppose I'd died in that car, just for a few moments, and my soul, spirit, essence, call it what you will, had travelled elsewhere?

It wasn't the least bit plausible. But just suppose.

There were a few clues to support this theory. Bergelmir had mentioned the Einherjar, Odin's army of "heroic dead." Say I'd been one of them, if only briefly. Say I'd transmigrated — fancy word I remembered from RI lessons at school — and found myself caught up in an escalating battle between good and evil. It made a kind of sense, if you believed in that sort of stuff.

Another possibility was that, while out cold, I'd tapped into some hidden motherlode of mythology. Bragi had talked about the Norse gods being embedded in all human psyches, implying that their adventures were a part of our core programming, hardwired into us whether we realised it or not. More than merely dreaming, I'd accessed some inner database and discovered a whole bunch of stories there, which I'd then interacted with, writing myself into the narrative and even giving myself a pivotal role because, well, because why not? Like David Copperfield, we all wanted to be the heroes of our own lives, didn't we?

Or — how about this? — what if it had been a combination of the two? On some level I'd been aware that I was dying, or near death at any rate, and come up with a lucid, fictional way of visualising my struggle not to give in, my fight to live. It would explain why the Norns' videotape of my life stopped at the car crash. It also would account for Odin's comment about every death being "an apocalypse on a personal scale," for each of us our "very own Ragnarok." My characters making subtle, sidelong hints at my true predicament.

The bloke in the bed next to me moaned in his sleep and asked someone called Sonia if she'd remembered to put the cat out.

The night wore on. I longed for some kind of definitive answer to my musings. I wished I could know for sure, one way or the other, whether I'd genuinely fought alongside gods at the Viking end-of-all-that-is or simply been an accident victim having a bit of a funny turn.

Whichever way I looked at it, I did have one major regret. I hadn't had the chance to say a proper goodbye to Freya. I'd met my ideal woman, had had to abandon her, and had no way of getting back in touch with her. It was a terrific shame. If I thought about it too hard, I began to feel an ache inside, a yawning sorrow. So I tried to put it out of my mind.

If anything good was to come from the whole episode, it was the realisation that I should try harder with Cody. Face it, who had I been thinking of — the only person I'd been thinking of — when I was about to be blood eagled? He and I were estranged, but we needn't be strangers. I resolved to make an effort, try and see him more often, not just leave the raising of him to Gen and Roz. It wasn't too late to re-establish myself in his life. I'd have to be patient, take it one step at a time, but if he was willing, I'd gladly meet him more than halfway. I wasn't the All-Father but I could still be a father.

Next Bed Man was now muttering about whose turn it was to do the dishes. Such prosaic dreams the man was having. I should be so lucky.

In the crack in the curtains the night sky began to lighten, turning oyster grey. I could hear the hospital stirring and waking up — hushed voices, squeaky footfalls in corridors, things being placed clatteringly on trays. Soon, daylight was silvering the snow-laced branches of the tree immediately outside the ward window — some species of evergreen. The zigzag redbrick horizons of a northern city stretched beyond.

At about half past seven, as breakfast was being brought round, Abortion came skidding into the ward, all flushed and excited.

"Gid! Gid! You're awake. Good. You've got to see this."

"'How are you doing, Gid?' 'Oh, fine, mate, thanks for asking. Not too badly injured in the crash you caused.' 'Yeah, sorry about that. A thousand pardons.' 'That's all right. You came out of it unscathed, that's all that matters.' 'Yeah, that was pretty lucky, I thought.'"

"Later," Abortion said blithely. "You can have a go at me later, any time. Right now, you have to see the news. I was watching in the waiting lounge, where I've been all night, incidentally, sitting up while you've been all cosy in bed."

"You can't guilt me, so don't even try."

He grabbed the bedside TV set, swung it round on its arm, and switched it on.

"Whoa, steady," I said. "They charge a fortune for that."

"I know, but this is big."

And it was big. Every channel was carrying the story. All other programming had been suspended.

"…and once again, our breaking news this morning," said a sombre newscaster. "Lois Keener, President of the United States of America, has suddenly and unexpectedly died. Mrs Keener was at work in the Oval Office when she suffered what appears to have been a massive stroke. In a statement, Vice-President Bennewitz — now acting president — has confirmed that this was the probable cause of death, pending an official autopsy report. Beyond that, few details are known."

I watched with widening eyes… and a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach.

"Mrs Keener, a colourful and controversial figure on the world stage, had shown no previous signs of ill health. In fact, at the age of forty-two, she appeared to be in the prime of life, making her death all the more surprising. We can cross over now to our Washington correspondent for the latest."

"America is in shock and mourning," said the Washington correspondent. "It's the early hours of the morning here, but nobody has gone to bed. People are up and about. Many are glued to their TV sets. Nobody can quite believe it. I've seen strangers hugging one another in the street. Grown men weeping. There's a sense of… numbness, I suppose you could say. It's surreal. Comparisons could be drawn with the shooting of John F. Kennedy."

"What do we know about the circumstances of Mrs Keener's death?"

"Very little so far, beyond what the vice-president revealed in his statement earlier. Yesterday afternoon, at approximately three p.m., Mrs Keener was in discussions with military advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff when all of a sudden she slumped in her chair and collapsed to the floor. Paramedics were on the scene within minutes and applied emergency resuscitation methods, but without success. She was pronounced dead on arrival at George Washington University Hospital thirty-five minutes later. The cause of death is reported as 'catastrophic intracranial haemorrhage': in effect, a blood vessel in her brain ruptured, resulting in a build-up of fluid that ravaged vital brain tissue. Messages of support and sympathy for her family have been coming in from other world leaders, including our own Prime Minister Clasen. However, there have also been jubilant public celebrations in certain countries, people taking to the streets to express their joy that someone they regard as a national enemy, an oppressor, is no more."

"Fuck," I breathed.

"I know!" said Abortion. "Who saw that coming?"

"Not her, that's for sure," I said.

And a thought flashed into my head.

Heimdall's bullet.

Could it have been…? Was it conceivable…?

The newscaster droned on — a moment in history, a terrible tragedy for Mrs Keener's husband, son and daughter, an abrupt end to the remarkable rise to power of the self-professed "soccer mom from Wonder Springs," blah blah blah. Abortion plumped himself down on the end of my bed and helped himself to my breakfast, starting with the carton of orange juice. I turned away from the TV and stared out of the window.

She'd died at almost the exact same time I was tangled up in the car.

Coincidence, surely. That was all. A case of life imitating "art." To read anything more into it than that would be a great mistake. That way madness lay.

The tree outside, I noticed, had honeycomb-like bark. An ash.

Coincidence too, of course.

I was about to turn back to the TV and rescue my breakfast from Abortion's clutches when, all at once, a grey squirrel popped out from amongst the tree's foliage. It scampered to the very tip of a branch, until it was level with the window ledge. It stopped there, peeping around inquisitively, then swivelled its head and looked straight at me through the glass. Beady black little rodent eyes met my gaze, held it for several heartbeats. A brush of a tail twitched and fluffed. A nose quivered.

And then — swear to God — the squirrel raised one ratty-clawed forepaw in the air, level with its ear.

The fucking thing saluted me.

And then it was gone, dashing back into the snowy darkness of the tree's heart.

In that moment, I knew.

Not a sliver of doubt in my mind any more.

I knew.

And, knowing, wise at last, I smiled.