James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin Read Online Free PDF

be sure of anything. How long had we been walking? How fast? How far? No idea, no idea, no idea. The snow baffled your senses and your instincts. It seemed to leech all certainty out of you and replace it with cold emptiness. It made you as blank as it made the landscape. There was so much of it coming down that the night sky scarcely seemed black any more; it was just one huge tumbling curtain of snow. Snow everywhere. White everywhere. Inside and out.
    "Can't be much further," Abortion kept saying, over and over, like some Buddhist chant. "Can't be much further. Surely can't be."
    But maybe we had passed it, I thought. The landmark. The giant-alike rocks. Maybe we'd blundered straight by, missing it in the storm, and Asgard Hall was behind us now, and we were staggering onward into nothingness, with the pure resolve of idiots. They'd find us tomorrow frozen stiff beside the road, buried to the waist in snow, conjoined statues of men, a work of sculpture with the title The Triumph Of Desperation Over Logic .
    And then, lo and behold, there it was.
    At first neither of us could quite believe our snow-stung eyes. It loomed before us, and it was almost too perfect, too obvious. Hulking great rocks protruding up, so sheer-sided and sharp that the snow could not easily settle on them. Huge, too, some of them, black spires and hillocks dotted across a shallow valley. A natural formation, had to be, but together they described a distinct shape. There the brow, there the nose, there the hands, there the knees. A supine, slumbering giant. The valley was his bed, and he filled it from end to end, and the snow, which according to cliché was always a blanket, was a blanket. It draped him smoothly, covering all but the bits that poked out.
    It was a remarkable sight, and Abortion let out a whoop of joy, of vindication, while I grimaced a smile and felt, if nothing else, we were going to survive this ordeal after all, even though we didn't really deserve to.
    Shortly after we spotted the giant we came across a turnoff, a track that ran perpendicular from the road, down into the valley. We took it, and crossed the sleeping giant's midriff, and climbed the slope on the other side, and found ourselves entering dense pine forest.
    The track bored straight through the trees, and was broad and clear to see, for a while.
    Then it narrowed and became winding. Either that or in the darkness we mislaid it. The tree trunks seemed to close in on us. We threaded between them, convinced we were still going the right way, or convinced enough at any rate, but in our heart of hearts far from sure. The grinding pain inside me was beginning to wear me down. My brain said I could carry on but my body was arguing otherwise. Each step was becoming a supreme effort, an act of teeth-gritting willpower.
    Finally Abortion halted. "I hate to say this," he said, "but I think we're going to have to retrace our steps. Find the track again."
    "I hate to say this," I said, "but I don't know if I can."
    "We can't just keep going forward if it's only going to get us more lost."
    "Mentally, I can't go back. It would be too much to take."
    "Corporal Coxall..."
    "Don't try that."
    "Corp, we are turning back. That's an order."
    "You can't pull it off, Abortion. Natural authority - it's just not you."
    "No?"
    "No."
    "Okay," he said, "so where does that leave us? What should we do?"
    As if in response, there came the eeriest sound I'd ever heard.
    It rose, rose a bit more, then fell.
    I stared at Abortion. He stared at me.
    Seconds later, the sound came again.
    And, from somewhere else, was answered.
    A howl.
    The howl of a wolf.

Three
     
    "No fucking way," said Abortion. "That isn't... That's just not..."
    But we both knew it was.
    I dimly recollected that there'd been a program a few years back to reintroduce wolves into the wild in the Highlands of Scotland. It had seemed a pretty daft idea to me - let's let some dangerous predators loose in the countryside and see what