Valhalla (1987) by Tom Holt

Author:Tom Holt
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

“To be kidding?” replied the fat, red-haired Viking mournfully. “In a war to be getting frequently killed, off a duck’s back the water. This…” He sighed, and shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Peace is hell,” he said.

The Valhalla strike (more properly it was a fight-to-rule; however, when Carol had tried to explain the idea, the Vikings had so much trouble with a sentence in which the concepts fighting and rules were juxtaposed that she gave it up) was still holding, though only just. This was impressive, to say the least, considering the tactics Odin and the rest of the Valkyries had stooped to in their attempts to breach the picket line that divided the kitchens and Odin’s office from the rest of the hall.

“Still,” Carol ventured, “it could be worse.”

The Viking looked at her. “To specify,” he replied. “Please.”

“Well…” Actually, if you were the ghost (or whatever these people were; she still had no idea) of a long-dead hero who’d spent thousands of years joyously indulging himself in blood, booze and broads, it’d be hard to imagine how it could be worse, since the essentials of the strike were no blood, no booze and no broads; added to which there were the dastardly Management strike-breaking ploys. Some of them she’d anticipated: scantily-clad Valkyries prancing up and down the line waggling jugs of mead, double-headed battleaxes and untold square metres of cleavage, for example, and she’d warned them to expect it and they were being thoroughly – well, astonishingly enough, the word mature wasn’t entirely inappropriate in this context, though it helped her to understand this sudden outbreak of restraint when one of the Vikings explained that like of horses the wee the mead, of one Valkyrie the bouncy bits to have seen all of the same likewise, and for toffee even to be fighting all girls were unable. Nevertheless – “Hail, mariner!” It was Big Olga, most dogged and devoted of the Valkyries, back again with more mead, a bigger axe and – God alone knew where she got it from – more cleavage. All the other shield-maidens had packed it in for the night; fair enough, after a fourteen-hour shift of mead-proffering and hip-wiggling, but Olga was apparently back for another stint, grimly determined as an asbestos moth. You had to admire her steely tenacity, although the fact that she spoke her lines as if reciting some of the gloomier bits out of Ibsen made it easier to understand how the boys managed to resist her. “Ho! But you are a strapping fellow,” she boomed, reminding Carol strongly of a Marine Corps drill sergeant bawling out a crummier-than-usual bunch of recruits. “For a good time might you be seeking?” She swung the pitcher of mead at the Viking’s head so fast that only his combat-honed reflexes made it possible for him to get his jaw out of the way in time. The swipe was, however, only a feint; as the Viking was swaying backwards, she brought her knee up into his groin with a crunch that was probably audible in Minneapolis.

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