Clovenhoof 03 Godsquad

  Godsquad

  Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Pigeon Park Press

  ‘Godsquad’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2015

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9930607-2-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9930607-3-1

  Cover artwork and design Copyright © Mike Watts 2015 (www.bigbeano.co.uk)

  Published by Pigeon Park Press

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  info@pigeonparkpress.com

  For Joan.

  Chapter 1 – The Celestial City

  Thwack!

  The laws of physics do not apply to the Celestial City. Nor do the laws of mathematics, logic, reason or common sense. The heavenly home of the blessed dead is a square city, with walls that are forty eight thousand stadia long and yet simultaneously of infinite length. In the physical world its total mass would make it fold in on itself but here in the realm of Heaven, it enjoys a pleasant Earth-like gravity and an endless succession of bright sunny days, even though there was no sun.

  Thwack!

  In such a place of impossible wonders and infinite variety, the blessed dead can find any scene, setting or arena to suit their tastes. An individual might discover the perfect spot in which to spend their personal eternity or, alternatively, take up an endless quest to find new and strange vistas. Whatever wholesome delights are sought, Heaven is certain to possess them.

  Thwack!

  Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, peasant girl turned armour-plated military leader turned religious martyr had explored much of the Celestial City. However, if she was said to have a favourite place it would be a certain small garden, where rose bushes thrived in the borders and classical statues of eye-watering beauty dotted the lawn. Enclosed and sheltered from the business of the city behind a tall stone wall and a battered little door so innocuous most people would hardly have registered it, it was possible that no one else even knew of this fragrant corner’s existence let alone ever entered it.

  That suited Joan’s needs perfectly. The last thing she wanted was someone disturbing her.

  Thwack!

  Joan removed a nymph’s pretty head with a backhanded swipe of her broadsword and then turned the blade’s motion inward and ran the marble statue through, shattering its torso. Breathing hard, she lowered her blade and looked upon her handiwork. The fragments of statuary on the floor were already rocking and rolling back together.

  In Heaven, even this low level desecration of beauty was only temporary. Elsewhere in the city every broken mirror was instantly mended, each spilled cup instantly refilled, each scraped knee instantly healed. The holy restorative powers of the statues in this garden formed part of a particularly vicious circle. The fact that the statues repaired themselves meant that Joan never ran out of targets to practise on. The fact that they refused to stay destroyed only fuelled the discontent and irritation that coursed through her.

  Some days, she ran riot around the lawn trying to cut down every statue before any of them were restored. Other days she focussed on just one and continually pounded it into dust, keeping it down for as long as possible. And yet on other days, she gave up the statues and turned her ire on the roses, hacking them apart only to see them grow anew in moments.

  Right now, the smug carefree nymph was whole once more. All signs of the damage Joan had wrought here were gone.

  “I hate you,” Joan told the nymph emphatically.

  There was a low, savage growl behind Joan. She turned.

  The door to the garden was open. A huge shaggy wolf with a patina of drool across its massive jaws glared at her hungrily.

  “Did you escape again?” she said.

  The Wolf of Gubbio advanced on her, fangs bared and lips quivering. Joan raised the tip of her sword until it was millimetres from the wolf’s nose.

  “Really?” she said, one eyebrow raised.

  The Wolf of Gubbio gave its position a rethink, sat back on its haunches and scratched itself.

  “Better,” said Joan.

  The Wolf of Gubbio whined.

  “No, I understand,” she said. “I really do.”

  Joan lashed out, decapitating a beautiful marble youth before sheathing her sword.

  “I think I’ve got anger management issues too.”

  The wolf went to have a sniff at the severed marble head.

  “I foolishly shared my sense of annoyance at the last committee meeting,” said Joan. “Do you know what that monstrous prig St Paul said to me?”

  The Wolf of Gubbio tried to take the head in his jaws and slobbered noisily as he failed to gain purchase on its smooth surfaces. Joan took that to be a beastly equivalent of, “No, do tell.”

  “He suggested that maybe it was my ‘time of the month.’ Which not only shows that he’s a retarded and insensitive chauvinist, but that he fails to grasp the whole point. Besides, if this were a less male-ordained Heaven, there would be no time of the month.”

  The Wolf of Gubbio gave up on biting the head and settled for licking it to death.

  “There’s no time in Heaven,” said Joan. “I don’t have a time of the month. There are no months. Look!” The plates of her gleaming armour rang against one another as she flung a hand out to point at the large sack deposited by the wall. “I’ve just come back from the annual Heaven/Hell Christmas gift exchange. It’s not even really Christmas, wolf. There is no Christmas here.”

  The marble head began to roll across the grass, back towards the base of its statue. The Wolf of Gubbio pounced on it at once and pinned it to the ground with his wide paws.

  “I’m nineteen years old,” said Joan. “I’ve been nineteen years old for centuries. Well, not centuries. There are no centuries. But I’ve been nineteen for flipping ages. Frozen. Neither one thing or another.”

  She gazed at the headless youth, the curved outlines of his legs, the smooth undulations of his torso.

  “I think I’m missing out on something,” she said.

  These words sparked a response from the wolf who sat bolt upright and stared at her.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

  Joan produced from beneath her steel plackart that most unlikely of items: a computer tablet.

  “You’ve seen The Breakfast Club, right?”

  The Wolf of Gubbio licked its own nose. Joan flicked through to her movie collection.

  “Pretty in Pink? Sixteen Candles?”

  She angled the screen for the wolf to see.

  “I mean, you must have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, right?”

  The wolf looked nonplussed but Joan was undeterred.

  “All these great films, all about teenagers. They’re going out and doing this ... stuff. They’re breaking rules, finding their place in the world, falling in love for the first time, leaving their mark and –“

  Joan stopped. On the tablet screen, above the image of Ferris Bueller dancing on top of a parade float, a little bell icon was flashing.

  She frowned.

  “Did Francis send you to fetch me, wolf?” she asked.

  The wolf whined. She tapped the icon and a calendar window opened up.

  “Oh, cheese and crackers!” she gasped, grabbed the sack of hellish Christmas presents and sprinted out of the garden.

  There might be no such thing as time in Heaven but Joan was late nonetheless.

  St Francis, formerly of Assisi, shuffled uneasily in his seat.

  “This pwoject is
the physical expwession of a most vital piece of scwipture.”

  “It’s insane,” said the Venerable Pope Pius XII. “Even more insane than your last attempt, wolves-living-with-lambs insane.”

  “I beg to differ,” said Francis. “We had sevewal successful twials.”

  “Not before your wolf ate twelve sheep, Francis! Twelve!”

  “’The wolf and the lamb will eat together,’” quoted St Paul solemnly from the end of the table.

  “See?” said Francis

  “Enlighten me,” said Pius. “In which verse did Isaiah say the wolf would swallow the lambs whole?”

  “Dear fwiend,” said Francis, “I understand your concerns. That is why we have moved onto the next phase of the pwoject.”

  “And how,” said the Italian pope, removing his spectacles to massage the bridge of his nose, “how will leopards lying down with goats fare any better?”

  “We don’t know until we twy, do we?” said Francis.

  “Oh, I think we do,” fumed Pius.

  “Gentlemen,” Archangel Gabriel raised his hands to call for calm, “I’m certain we can all see St Francis is attempting to do good work here.”

  “Are you joking?” said Pius. “He’s forcing animals to act against their nature in order to prove the literalness of divine scripture.”

  “Are you suggesting that the word of the Almighty is not literal truth?” St Paul tapped his fingers warningly.

  “I do know that Francis is on a fool’s mission,” said Pius. “He’s even trying to get the lions to eat straw and the serpents to eat dust. You wouldn’t think serpents could cry but I’ve seen them. Miserable things.”

  “I think we can all see the benefit of a vegetawian diet,” said Francis.

  “Carnivores eating straw and dust!” snapped Pius. “It’s an oxymoron.”

  On a low stool beside Gabriel’s seat, Mother Teresa of Calcutta stopped writing, her quill frozen on the parchment.

  Gabriel leaned over to her.

  “O – X – Y – M – “

  The door to the committee room slammed open and Joan of Arc staggered in, breathless, a bulky sack over her shoulder and the Wolf of Gubbio at her heels.

  “I am so sorry,” she panted, as she slung the sack under the table and fell into her seat with an audible clang of armour.

  “Joan,” said Gabriel sternly, “if you wish to maintain your place on Heaven’s administrative committee, may I suggest you take your duties a little more seriously.”

  “Perhaps the role isn’t suited to this woman,” said St Paul.

  “I said, I’m sorry,” she said, not at all sorry.

  “‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,’” said St Paul.

  “Only a complete narcissist quotes his own letters,” snarled Joan.

  Mother Teresa gave a little whimper.

  “If you can’t spell ‘narcissist’, Teresa,” said Joan, “you could just write selfish, arrogant cripple.”

  “Cripple?” said St Paul.

  “Keep talking, buddy,” said Joan, resting a meaningful hand on the pommel of her sword.

  “Please, please,” said Gabriel. “Stop your quarrels. We are now all here and we can return to the items on the agenda.”

  St Francis, glad that the focus of the committee’s scrutiny had moved away from him, regarded the agenda.

  “How went the Christmas gift exchange?” asked Gabriel.

  “As well as always,” said Joan. “We sent gifts of consolation and words of succour to Hell and they have sent us their…” She paused and looked down at the sack beside her. “…their response. I merely need to find members of the faithful to accept them.”

  St Paul clicked his fingers for Joan to pass him a parcel.

  “‘Let us not grow weary of doing good,’” he quoted.

  Pius shook his head.

  “I am uncomfortable with these deals with Hell.”

  “I’m trying to do something good here. Like Paul says.”

  “Heaven is goodness,” said Pius. “We sing our praises to the Almighty and bask in the glory of his boundless love.”

  “Yes, but I also want to do something,” said Joan.

  “I do think this restlessness is unbecoming,” said the archangel.

  “What is this thing?”

  St Paul had opened the package Joan had given him and now held up a plastic box covered in coloured squares.

  “It’s called a Rubik’s Cube,” said Joan.

  “And this is one of the tortures Hell has sent us?”

  Joan shrugged.

  “Apparently. It’s a puzzle. You’ve got to get the little squares to match up so that each side is just one colour.”

  “A child’s toy,” said St Paul and began disdainfully twisting the thing.

  “Point is,” said Joan to Gabriel, “if we’re not doing something we’re just… waiting. Killing time until Armageddon.”

  “Ooh,” said St Francis, trying to keep up with matters despite the fact that the Wolf of Gubbio had its nose planted firmly in his habit, trying to sniff out his stash of dog treats. “We’ve got an Armageddon dwill on the agenda. I do like Armageddon dwills.”

  He saw Joan roll her eyes.

  “What?”

  “Practising for something that’s never going to happen. I just…”

  “‘But about that day or hour no one knows,’” said St Paul, his attention now more on completing the red side of the cube.

  “Quite, do you know which wapture squad you are in, Joan? Do you know where your muster point is? Do you know what you’ll do when the end comes?”

  “Plant beans.” The words escaped before she could trap them in her mouth.

  “What?” said Francis, who had finally relented and given the wolf every biscuit in his pocket.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Now, what’s this on the agenda? NSPAU incident?”

  “Perhaps the main item for our discussion today,” said Gabriel. He waved his arm and the door opened. “Come in, gentlemen.”

  Both of the saints who entered the room had a little trouble with the door. St Christopher was a burly giant of a man, a full head higher than any normal man, with shoulders and arms so muscly it looked as if his tunic was stuffed with pillows. St Thomas Aquinas was a squat, tonsured monk who had clearly enjoyed too many monastic feasts in his lifetime. If Christopher had pillows up his sleeves then Thomas had a whole duvet wrapped around his waist.

  “Christopher is one of our operators in the NSPAU,” said Gabriel.

  “Enspow?” said Joan.

  “The Non-Specific Prayer Assessment Unit,” said Gabriel.

  Francis clicked his fingers in understanding.

  “The ‘ohgodohgodhelpme’ helpline,” he said.

  “We don’t call it that,” corrected Gabriel.

  “Yes, we do,” said St Christopher, sitting down on a chair that creaked under his bulk.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you around in a while, Chris,” said Joan.

  “Aye. That’ll be on account of me no longer existing,” said Christopher.

  “Weally?” said Francis.

  “Pope Paul VI – the bastard – declared there was no historical evidence for my existence.”

  “Pope Paul VI,” said Francis. “I’ve not seen him in a long time either.”

  “That may be on account of him being too frightened to leave his apartments these days,” said Pius.

  “Hey,” said Christopher. “I just want a quiet word with the feller. That’s all.”

  Gabriel made an unhappy noise.

  “You spend all your spare time standing in the street outside his house, crushing rocks with your hands.”

  “Man’s got to have a hobby,” Christopher grinned broadly. The former patron saint of traveller’s smile was like a wedge of sunshine in his brutish monolithic face.

  “As I’m sure you all know, NSPAU handles any prayers from Earth not directed at any particular intercessionary
figure,” said Gabriel. “Our team of operators, which includes many deleted saints like Christopher here, handles those prayers, responds appropriately according to our in-house scripts and either closes the call or passes it onto a higher authority.”

  “Sterling work,” said Francis.

  “Bloody boring,” said Christopher.

  “Anyway,” said Gabriel, “Christopher took a rather unsettling call recently.”

  “Aye,” said Christopher. “It came from this feller, Simon. Right panicky he was. Told me he was going to kill some people, kill lots of people.”

  “Trust me, we get a lot of those,” said Gabriel. “Killers with a conscience, the mentally deranged, the ‘I am the angel of vengeance’ crowd.”

  “I talked him through the script,” said Christopher.

  “So you actually speak to those who pway?” asked Francis.

  “They hear it in their subconscious mind, the voice of their conscience. I talked him through. He seemed to calm down and the call ended. Nothing unusual there. Only problem came when I went to sort Simon’s paperwork.”

  “What problem was that?” asked Joan.

  Christopher gave her an uncomfortable look.

  “Simon doesn’t exist, flower,” he said. “There’s no such person. We had a location for the prayer – Toulon in southern France, if I recall – but no actual person there.”

  There was a reflective silence, eventually broken by Pope Pius.

  “You are going to have to explain that to me again. You spoke to an individual who does not exist?”

  “To be specific,” said Gabriel, “Christopher engaged with a person who either does not exist or does not have a soul. Heaven trades in souls, not crude physical bodies. Our soul-tracker system is aware of every soul in creation. Whoever Christopher spoke to, this ‘Simon’ figure is not, or does not have, a soul.”

  “Is such a thing possible?” said Francis.

  “I believe this is where I come in,” announced St Thomas Aquinas sonorously. “I was invited here to offer my opinions on all things animated and pneumatic.”