from
Expecting Someone Taller
by
Tom Holt

“Since you are totally ignorant of even basic theogony,” he said, “I will explain. My name is Ingolf, and I am the last of the Frost-Giants of the Elder Age.”

“Please to meet you,” said Malcolm instinctively.

“Are you hell as like. I am the youngest brother of Fasolt and Fafner the castle-builders. Does that ring a bell? No?”

“No.”

“You didn’t even see the opera?” said Ingolf, despairingly.

“I’m afraid I’m not a great fan of opera,” said Malcolm, “so it’s unlikely.”

“I don’t believe it. Well, let’s not go into all that now. I’ll be dead in about three minutes. When you get home, look up the Ring Cycle in your Boy’s Book of Knowledge.”

“Whoever owns the Ring is the master of the world,” said Ingolf, gravely.

“Oh,” said Malcolm. “So you’re . . .”

“And a fat lot of good it’s done me, you might very well say. Who did you think ruled the world, anyway, the United bloody Nations?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought, to be honest with you. But if you’re the ruler of the world . . .”

“I know what you’re thinkiong. If I’m master of the world, why should I have to hide in a copse in Somerset disguised as a badger?”

“More or less,” said Malcolm.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” said the Giant sagely.

Combe Hall was undoubtedly very beautiful, but it was also very big. It had been built in the days when a house-holder tended to feel claustrophobic if he could not accomodate at least one infantry regiment, including the band, in his country house. Its front pediment was world famous. Its windows had been praised and reviled in countless television series. Its kitchens were enormous and capable of being put to any use except the convenient preparation of food. It was very grand, very magnificent, and very empty.

Malcolm had always fancied living at Combe Hall on the strict understanding that his wish was never to come true. Now that he was its owner and (apart from the legion of staff) its only resident, he felt rather like a bewildered traveller at an international airport.

Flosshilde smiled sweetly at him, with the result that the milk in his coffee turned to cream. “Hello, Alberich,” she said. “How’s the digestion?”

“Awful. What are you doing here?”

“Drinking coffee. What about you?”

“Don’t be flippant.”

“But that’s what we do best,” said Woglinde, also smiling. There was little point in this, except pure malice, for Alberich had forsworn Love and was therefore immune to all smiles, even those of Rhinedaughters. But Woglinde smiled anyway, as a sportsman who can find no pheasants will sometimes take a shot at a passing crow.

Malcolm had always been of the opinion that pretty girls should not be allowed to smile at people unless they meant something by it, for it gives them an unfair advantage. He now felt under an obligation to buy something. That presumably was why the owner had installed a pretty girl in the shop in the first place, and Malcolm did not approve. It was exploitation of the worst sort.

Flosshilde was always beautifully dressed. She had been following fashion since the dawn of time, and her wardrobe occupied the space on the bed of the Rhine between Andernach and Koblenz. Not only did she follow fashion, she led it; she had been wearing figure-of-eight brooches when the Iron Age was still in its infancy, and it was her pioneering work that had given the ladies of sixteenth-century Europe the surcingle. In comparison, she thought, the twentieth century was drab, to say the least. Nevertheless, she had looked out a rather clever lemon-coloured pullover and a pair of black and white striped trousers which had, oddly enough, been in vogue at the height of the Hallstadt Culture. If you keep things long enough, she had learnt by experience, they eventually come back into fashion.

To add the finishing touches, she decorated her ears with Snoopy earrings and slipped over her slim wrist a bracelet of amber which had been given to her by the first King of the Langobards and which looked reasonably like tortoiseshell plastic. She would, she concluded, do.

“I’m not human, I’m delighted to say, but even so, the first thing I had to do before I was able to make the Ring in the first place was to forswear Love and all its tedious works. Whoever thought up that particular requirement knew what he was about, believe you me. Not that I was ever romantically inclined myself; my heart has often been burnt but never broken. Anyway, this made me immune from the one single greatest cause of idiocy in the world.”

“And he’s a god?”

“Only a very minor one. Many people are, you know; about one person in two thousand is a god or a spirit of some sort. Of course, most of these are mortal and wholly oblivious of their divine status. We prefer to keep it that way. It’s like your English system of appointing laymen as Justices of the Peace.”

Admittedly, the concept of love took on some strange forms (especially in California), but by and large the human race was horribly consistent in its belief in its value.

No matter how confused, oppressed, famished or embattled they were, the inhabitants of the planet tended to regard it as being the most important thing they could think of, and even the most cynical of mortals preferred it to a visit to the dentist. [...] Furthermore, with very few exceptions, the human race seemed to find its favourite obsession infuriatingly and inexplicably difficult, and considered it to be the greatest single source of misery in existence.

Wotan raised his right hand, and the Valkyrie Waltraute, who closes the eyes of men slain in battle, led forward his eight-legged horse, the cloud-trampling Sleipnir. Above his head hovered two black ravens.

“If you get mud on that saddle,” said Waltraute, “you can clean it off yourself.”