Charon Unguarded (Ferryman Saga Book 1) Page 16

  It took a few moments for Ra’s admission to sink in. Hermes and Loki had believed his lies because they wanted to go home. That desire could be forgiven. He could even sympathise a little. What he could not forgive was the fact they had both been willing to take innocent lives to get there. This was why the mortals had stopped believing and worshipping. Why the stories had faded, and their friends with them. The mortals had grown tired of them playing with their lives just to score points against each other, or even because they felt slighted or bored. Phaedra and Hippolytus were not the only victims of divine hubris. We deserve to be stuck here, living as they do. It is our penance for so many centuries of torment and bloodshed. We left the door open for someone like Yahweh to sneak in and take over, and we were all too busy squabbling to notice until it was too late.

  And here they were again. Repeating the same patterns which got them banished the first time. Dionysus was right. Trouble was, if they couldn’t beat back the united Titan and Giant threat, it wasn’t just banishment they had to worry about and it was more than just the gods who would suffer.

  It didn’t take long for Zeus and Odin to agree to a temporary truce, if only so they could wipe that smug grin off Ra’s face. They decided they would not sit and wait for their enemies to strike. A field of battle was agreed upon, and even Ares agreed to cooperate. He seemed to hold respect for warriors whose only care in battle was to die with a sword in their hand. Vigrid Plain, it was decided, was not a practical venue for the final battle, not least because it was on the wrong side of a barrier they couldn’t cross. The Rye Marsh, it was decided, was a sound spot as it had little in the way of high ground and the wet floodplain would be a tactical advantage. There was a fair amount of grumbling, on the part of Odin’s men, that Ragnarök should not be taking place on a flooded football pitch. Asclepius was charged with organising medics to help patch up any mortals that were stupid enough to be walking their dogs across a battlefield. It would be impossible to keep this one quiet and not alert the council, so Zeus and Odin decided they might as well do it out in the open and give a few mad poets a thing or two to write about.

  CHAPTER 26

  Ragnarök?

  It was the eve of battle. So far, Charon had managed to resist turning his phone back on. The pleading text messages from Zeus claiming all was forgiven were not holding sway with him. Zeus knew where he was. If he wanted to speak to him that badly, he could come down and half-apologise in person, thank you very much. In a way, he felt vindicated by what Ra had said, though he would never admit that self-satisfied twit was right about anything. He stopped himself. Was his animosity toward Ra because Ra was right, or was it because he was just a bit of a prat? He settled on the idea that it was probably a bit of both and decided to leave it at that.

  He looked at the clock. It said five pm. All was definitely not well. Erick had popped by over the last couple of days with some spare clothes, boots, an axe, a shield and an eyeglass helmet, so Charon would not be recognised by anyone. Zeus might be pleading for Charon to return to the fold, now a welcome hero but Odin had not said a word. Erick had reasoned that nobody would expect him to turn up at all, let alone looking like a Viking. Anyone that wanted to kill him would be looking out for a grumpy old Greek with bad posture and flat feet. He’d had to practice with the shield. He hadn’t realised how heavy they could be and if he was seen to be struggling with it he might as well be wearing a neon sign saying, ‘Does not belong!’ He rubbed his sore shoulder.

  One thing which seemed odd was that a few days after the war had been officially declared, Ra, Loki and Hermes had all vanished. What made this even odder was that no attempt had been made to find them. Charon had contemplated going to investigate but a handwritten message addressed to him arrived, expressly forbidding him from getting involved. That was weird too. It had been sealed with old-fashioned wax, as if out of time. If it had not been for the fact the wax was pink, the stamp would have looked even more official. Even so, he dared not argue with it, even though it was on forget-me-not scented paper which had small pink peonies printed in the corners. Nor was the letter signed. He’d racked his brains for days trying to think of what those flowers reminded him of. So much had happened in too little time and it was all just squashed into one bitter, leaden lump in the pit of his stomach.

  More orders from person or persons unknown. When were they going to stop playing games with him? He’d had enough. If he survived tomorrow he would move away. Somewhere they couldn’t find him. He got out his broom to start cleaning up but didn’t know why he was bothering. It would take a minor miracle to keep the foyer clean. The bin bag he’d taped over the broken window had helped to keep some of the dead leaves out but did nothing for the draft and the wind was making it rattle and rustle. As he swept up he thought about the last few weeks. Hermes’ betrayal. Having to hide from Zeus and Odin. He hadn’t asked for any of this and it all boiled down to him eavesdropping on one meeting. In a fit of temper, he spun around and hurled the broom at the back wall as hard as he could, hoping to hit the dreadful plastic plant and smash the pot. At the very least it would give him an excuse to sling the horrid thing out.

  ‘That is quite enough of that, Mr Charon.’ It was the nurse. She had caught it in one hand and stood with the other on her hip. ‘I take it that it wasn’t my note that has put you in such a foul mood.’

  ‘What? How?’ Charon spluttered. ‘The doors are locked. How did you get in?’

  ‘Oh, let’s just say I have an access all areas pass. You and I need a little chat.’

  ‘Your note?’

  ‘Well you’d turned off your phone.’

  ‘You sent the text messages?’

  ‘All bar the first. The Fae were worried you would get yourself killed or worse, foul up our investigation. You’d stumbled in at a very delicate point. It took a lot of persuasion to let me keep using you.’

  Realisation dawned. How else could she have known so much? It wasn’t Zeus who had called that ambulance, they had been watching him. ‘You’re with the Council.’

  ‘Well-reasoned, Mr Charon. I am one of their representatives.’

  ‘Don’t you lot normally come in threes?’

  ‘Who says I am not?’ She smiled. ‘Tea?’ A familiar tea tray appeared on the table he had been sweeping round. The nurse sat down and began heaping sugar into one of the cups. After six, she stirred what Charon suspected bore closer resemblance to syrup than tea and took a sip.

  ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘Sadly, that is not the case. If I had told you, what would you have done?’

  ‘Before he tried to kill me I would have told Hermes. But afterwards? I don’t know.’

  ‘It wasn’t safe for you to know. Especially after what happened to poor Robin.’

  ‘He was working for you? Loki was telling the truth.’

  ‘He does that. It really can be quite the annoyance. This investigation has been going on for a long time. Years in fact. The Fae loaned Robin to us. All that stuff about his exile was a cover story so he could get close to Loki without raising suspicion, but we needed to know who he was working with on your side. Loki couldn’t have released the Titans alone. You gave us a way to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘But Odin knew what was going on. He told me.’

  ‘And you told Hermes. Who went and told Loki that they were in danger of being found out. Did you not wonder why he disappeared?’

  ‘But that night at the paint factory, they knocked him out? Odin’s men held him hostage?’

  ‘Odin’s men found him out cold on the roof with his phone in camera mode. They thought he was with you. That meeting was called to flush out whoever released the Ice Giants. When you set off the wards it created a diversion for Loki and a few others to slip away. Which, in a way, achieved their goal. They were conspicuous by their absence. We suspect that one of Loki’s followers knocked him out to keep him from saying something … inconvenient.

  ‘Of course. But leav
ing a meeting isn’t proof of conspiracy. It only means they don’t want to be at the meeting.’

  ‘Exactly. And what did you do when he did suddenly make himself scarce?’

  ‘I carried on looking.’

  The nurse beamed. ‘Correct. You carried on looking. You’d made a promise to do something, at very great risk to yourself, and were determined to carry out that promise.’

  ‘I made a bit of a hash of it if I remember?’

  ‘You’ll learn. That prophecy of Zoë’s helped us persuade the Fae that their level of caution was dangerous. They have since left us alone to get on with it and we have progressed in leaps and bounds, thanks in part to you.’

  ‘But anyone could …’

  ‘No, anyone couldn’t. You could speak to Zoë on her level. That girl is extremely shrewd. She would have seen through me in an instant and sent me on my way with a flea in my ear. We needed someone who could get close to the situation without revealing that we knew what was going on, especially considering how hard they had tried to keep this all from us. But I have no real authority over her, or anyone else,’ she said.

  ‘And Robin?’

  ‘Robin will be missed but he knew the risks and he sacrificed his life so the investigation could carry on. Nobody has to work for us.’

  Charon went to pick up his cup but hesitated, ‘Why do I get the feeling that this is leading somewhere else?’ He wanted to know exactly what it would mean

  She sighed. ‘Very well. The Council would like to retain your services.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For as long as you feel comfortable. I told you, nobody has to work for us. You don’t have to answer now. Sleep on it and tell me tomorrow.’

  ‘You do remember what’s happening tomorrow, right?’

  The nurse just smiled and sipped her tea.

  * * *

  The next day was sunny and bright. It somehow felt wrong to have a battle on such a day, but even they couldn’t control the weather: At least, not anymore. Charon hadn’t slept well but figured that if he survived, he could sleep for a week. As he approached the battlefield he noticed that two trestle tables had been set up to one side and were laden with blue face and body paint. This was a less expensive, far less toxic, alternative to the traditional woad. Besides which, woad was out of season. One of them was bowing in the middle. He considered giving it a go but realised he might be recognised. He spotted Erick in the lines and went to join him.

  ‘Thought for a moment that you’d be late.’

  ‘What me? I couldn’t let my people face this lot alone. Has Zeus turned up?’

  ‘Yes. He’s over there being painted. Figured that if it works for us, it was worth a go. It’s a shame we couldn’t get any woad. This stuff feels like cheating. And it itches.’

  ‘What’s that over there?

  ‘Where?’

  Charon pointed toward the river and the woods, ‘There.’

  ‘Oh. That’s Ra’s barque.’

  Charon was impressed. It looked completely out of place on an English boating river but the golden vessel gleamed in the spring sun. He could see men, muscular and stripped to the waist, working on board, and heard the linen sails rippling and snapping in the wind. Perhaps the most impressive part of it being there was the fact that the only waterway to that part of the river was underground, and the only way off it was down a waterfall with a weir at the top and a sixteen-foot drop to an ankle-deep brook at the bottom. Never mind the canopy of trees overhanging that part of the river. Ra was showing off.

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Waiting.’ Erick yawned.

  ‘What? He started all this. This is what he wanted!’

  ‘Why do you think he brought the boat? He reckons we’re going to lose.’

  ‘We can’t let that happen.’ Charon was determined he wasn’t going back home. Even if Ra’s plan worked, and there was no guarantee it would, the idea of going back to life on the Styx was no more appealing now than it had been when he first heard Ra’s plan. But then, this plan was never meant for us, this has always been about Ra. Hermes had helped him. More than that, Hermes had lied to his face, tried to put him off getting involved, and then tried to kill him. Charon decided that if nothing else was achieved that day, he was going to kill Hermes. He wasn’t proud of it but he still felt it. He’d seen the carnage that a cycle of revenge could cause. During Troy, he’d had to consider taking on extra help just to cope with the traffic over the river. From Phaedra and Hippolytus, to Orestes avenging Agamemnon by killing his mother and her lover, revenge had done nothing but temporarily sate one person’s rage after another, after another.

  Orestes had not been quite so keen to avenge his poor sister, Iphigenia, against their father. She had been sacrificed to Artemis after her father had killed one of her sacred animals, and Agamemnon found his ships stuck in becalmed seas. Nor was he interested in the fact that after his father had used that wind to spend ten years besieging Troy because his brother’s wife had run off with someone with a bigger palace, leaving Clytemnestra behind to run the palace and bring up their surviving kids by herself. He then spent another ten years gallivanting around the Mediterranean with Odysseus. To add insult to injury, when he finally returned, he installed his new girlfriend in the palace and paraded her in front of his wife. Unsurprisingly, Clytemnestra decided she’d had quite enough of this nonsense, thank you very much. Too bad Cassandra didn’t see that poison coming. Then again, even if she had said anything nobody would have believed her. Notwithstanding, the Erinyes had a thing or two to say on the subject.

  ‘I don’t think it will, but even so, the coward has apparently been taking lessons from Lord Stanley’s Big Book of Battlefield Tactics[4].’

  ‘Must be.’

  Erick spat in disgust. ‘Loki!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the front lines. He still thinks they are going to send him home. Has he learned nothing about Giants?’

  Loki was on the front line with Fenrir by his side but Hel was not with him. He wondered if she was in Odin’s lines? He remembered that Ragnarök would only occur if certain conditions were in place. If she was not there, what would happen? The enemy lines stretched from one side of the field to the other and were at least twenty men deep. It was made up of gods, demons, ghouls, and all manner of other supernatural beings, lined up and ready to fight to go home or die in the attempt. Some had come from the other side of the world. The Greek-Norse side easily matched them in number and were taking it in turns to shout insults at the enemy.

  ‘Loki wouldn’t really be welcome here, would he?’

  ‘He would not. Odin wants him flayed alive, destiny be damned. Trying to manipulate fate is a big fat no-no. Oh, and the Council have told him that he is not to harm you. He’s now under a Council audit and been called to a private interview to explain himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zeus has too.’

  Charon said nothing. He hoped the Council did tear a few strips off Zeus. He had tried to throw Charon to the wolves just for knowing too much about what he wasn’t doing. He’d followed his orders and done as he’d promised but the only acknowledgement he’d got was from Ra, and only because it was an easy dig at Zeus. Maybe he should join the Council. It would be worth telling Zeus just to see the look on his face when he quit being a doorman in an empty building.

  Then came the call to attention. Zeus and Odin marched up and down giving the expected inspiring speeches. Nobody was impressed as most of the soldiers knew exactly what had been going on by now, and newcomers had no doubt been filled in. Odin and Zeus had tried to hide their parts in it, but by hiding they had exposed themselves. Not through deliberate action, but by ignoring the rot as it spread. All the suspicion and mistrust which had led them to be banished was still there, lurking under the surface. Charon looked at his watch. Since the call to muster, they’d been wittering on for at least ten minutes, and by the look of it even the giants were bored. Then came something nobody exp
ected, the pair shook hands.

  Ymir bellowed across the field, ‘Odin, have you finished talking false hope into your men yet? Time is marching and I have a world to make comfortable.’ His men laughed.

  Ymir was huge. He stood at about three times the height of Odin and Zeus, and they were not small men. The Titans matched the giants in both size and in number. Were it not for the fact that the Greeks and Vikings outnumbered them, they would not have stood a chance. The Titans had every right to be angry. They had been locked away just for existing. Mind you, Cronos had been so terrified of his successors that he ate five of his own children just to avoid them. Zeus had been warned that this would happen and now they would all pay the price. Numbers alone would not save them all.

  ‘Line commanders! Give your orders!’ Odin yelled.

  ‘Shield! Wall!’ The order went up from each end of the lines, and as one both sides stood with their shields raised and locked in row upon row of overlapping limewood. ‘Weapons!’ the crashing of weapons against shields echoed around the field. ‘Archers at the ready!’ Two ranks of archers nocked their arrows, drew their bows and aimed for the sky. One of the axemen began to mark time and was soon joined by the rest. ‘First rank! Fire!’

  At last Odin raised his sword and gave the call to advance. It happened slowly at first. The banging of axes and swords was deafening but it created a numbing rhythm. Charon could shut away the worries of tomorrow and do what must be done today. He kept his eye on the now advancing line of the enemy and kept marching. Gone was the rage of yesterday evening. Now, he was just determined to protect the world he had called home for so many centuries. He liked his life and he did not want to go back to the Underworld.