The Truth Spinner. Rhys Hughes

have players of that calibre. We were going to be slaughtered, and in my case I was going to be sacrificed in a particularly nasty way.

      “The week was already over and Ullr sent a bus to pick us up. I said nothing to my players about my fears. They were in good spirits and I didn’t want to lose the only strength at our disposal – mighty ignorance. The bus took us towards the Well of Urd and the new stadium and we pushed through the crowds on their way to the same place. In the changing room I gave a last inspirational speech and then I went to take some air. The atmosphere inside the stadium was incredible, overpowering, apocalyptic. To settle my nerves I smoked a cigarette and this seemed to attract the rage of a certain section of the crowd who made insulting dragon faces at me until I stubbed it out with a twist of my heel.

      “To my amazement I recognized the referee, a fellow who called himself the Postmodern Mariner. We had met shortly after my career as a pirate with Captain Ribs and my island idyll with Charlotte Gallon. He was a reporter who wandered around looking for strange stories connected to the sea. I managed to get close to him and ask what he was doing up here. He shrugged and said he originally came looking for information on Jörmungandr, the serpent that circles the world at the bottom of the sea, but somehow he’d ended up as a forced volunteer in this match. Nobody ever wanted to referee an Asgård game. The abuse from the dead Vikings in the crowd was just too much.

      “We didn’t have time for a longer conversation than that. The match was about to start. I paced the touchline as my players walked out of the tunnel to a chorus of insults and threats from the rows of the packed stadium. Every voice in the place was raised against us. The sweat on my skin, already cool, turned to ice when the home side emerged. Fifteen Norse gods in full armour, Thor in the lead, swinging his hammer and shouting with the force of a small volcano. I glanced up at the red sky expecting rain, but it was just Thor’s mocking laughter sounding like thunder. Then the coin was tossed, a coin with only one side – Odin’s mythical disc – and the game began. I covered my eyes.

      “The referee used a miniature ram’s horn instead of a whistle to blow off. The stampede of feet was like a landslide. I heard the pitiful shrieks of Arthur Gould, captain of Wales no fewer than eighteen times between 1885 and 1897, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look. Then there was a roar and I knew that Asgård had scored their first try. Finally I had to peer between my fingers. I watched the god Hœnir convert easily for another two points. He celebrated in modest fashion, for he was the silent god and considered something of a ditherer by Odin. I groped for another cigarette, thought better of it and ran my fingers over my ribs. The Rite of the Blood Eagle awaited me…

      “Many tries followed in quick succession. All the gods scored at least one, and some of them – including Dagr, Höðr, Njörðr, Váli and Kvasir scored a thousand or more. I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t recognize all the players on the Asgård side. One of their flankers looked like Tommy David, the Welshman who defected to Rugby League in 1974, but that couldn’t be so; my Norse mythology was probably just rusty. I didn’t know whether I wanted half time to come quickly or not, it might be a relief to have a pause in the carnage but it would also mean the moment of my doom was closer. I was in no mood to encourage my players for the second half but I did my best.

“I considered various methods of cheating. I wondered if I might hide myself in the ball and control its movements from within, a trick I had learned from a dwarf surrealist boxer named Engelbrecht5, but I was too bulky, plus there wasn’t a ball in play, just a severed head, and I didn’t fancy hiding inside that even if I fitted. I wondered if I might cause a diversion of some kind, maybe give the gods the idea that Ragnarok had started, and that they needed to be off to fight Surtr and the fire giants, while the universe collapsed around them. This way the match would have to be abandoned. It seemed a good plan and I briefly considered what I needed to do to create the right impression.

      “It has been told that certain events will signify the imminence of Ragnarok. If I could duplicate these convincingly everything would be fine. One of these events was the death of the god Baldr by the trickery of the villainous Loki, who slew him with a spear made of mistletoe. Another was the onset of the Fimbulwinter, three successive winters without a summer between them, a time of chaos and fratricide. Yet another was the eating of sun and moon by the wolf brothers, Skoll and Hati. There would also be a series of earthquakes that would snap every bond and fetter in existence, allowing the monstrous Fenrir to escape and wreak havoc, plus the rainbow would crack and fall.

      “After a few moments of careful thought, I decided I couldn’t replicate any of these events except in a most amateurish fashion. So I hastily devised a substitute plan, clutching my groin as if I needed to relieve myself, leaving the stadium and looking left and right as if for a place to answer this call of nature. Nobody noticed my departure. They were too intent on enjoying the scrum and the tearing apart of Wilfred Wooller, who helped Wales defeat the All Blacks in 1935 and was a fine cricketer too. His head was ripped clean off and booted into touch. I believe it was Odin himself who did the deed. I looked back and saw a one-eyed man with a long white beard and wide brimmed hat.

      “I never discovered what the final score was. It was 3,765,987 to nil when I left, with twenty minutes still to go, so four million to nothing is a reasonable guess. I found the bus made of fingernails in the car park and climbed into the driver’s seat, then I started the engine and off I went with a squeal of tyres. I put my foot down and got back to Bridgend in record time. I didn’t have to wait long for a connecting bus to Porthcawl. I came straight here to the pub where I was mighty pleased to see my friends, Frothing Harris and Paddy Deluxe, sitting at the same table as always, without a care in the world, and I looked so shaken and pale they bought me a few drinks to calm my fraught nerves.

      “I’ll never complain about the Welsh squad ever again, even if they lose to the All Blacks on a regular basis. I’ve seen a Welsh side get hammered for real and it wasn’t pleasant. I don’t go out in thunderstorms anymore, and I avoid all the props of Norse mythology as much as possible – horned helmets, trolls, runes, longships, the board game called hnefatafl, – with the exception of mead. They don’t serve mead in this pub, but I’ll have an ordinary lager if you’re buying. Did I tell you about the time I fell through a hole in the fabric of spacetime and ended up back in the Iron Age? It was called the Iron Age because people there ate a lot of spinach. Yes, that’s right, a lager please.”

5 Consult The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, recently reprinted by Savoy Books.