Free Odds and Gods by Tom Holt Page B

world countries whose economies depend in whole or in part on the cultivation of sugar cane are likely to fall on hard times.
    ‘Have another biscuit,’ said Pan with his mouth full. Osiris shook his head.
    ‘Too full of cake,’ he explained. ‘Couldn’t eat another thing.’
    ‘To the gods,’ Pan replied, helping himself, ‘all things are possible.’
    ‘All right, then. I like these little ones with the coconut on top.’
    All living things yearn for their own kind; and it had been a long time since Pan had spent any time with a fellow god. As far as Osiris was concerned, he had several thousand years’ unhealthy eating to catch up on. So many doughnuts, so little time.
    ‘Well, then.’ Pan leaned back in his chair and nibbled the chocolate off a mini swiss roll. ‘So what have you been up to all this time?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Nothing at all?’
    Osiris nodded. ‘The first six hundred years after I retired, I just had a bloody good rest. After that, I found I’d got out of the habit of doing things. My own fault, really.’
    ‘Institutionalised.’
    Osiris let his eye wander around the room. His reactions were mixed. On the one hand, he thought, the very idea of an immortal god, one of us , being afforded so little respect by mortals that he could only afford a bed-sitting room over a chemist’s shop in a suburban high street was so infamous that it made his palms itch for a thunderbolt. On the other hand, it was a damn sight bigger than his gloomy little kennel at Sunnyvoyde (and he owned the horrible place, remember), and it was quite plain from the most cursory inspection that Pan didn’t have little chits of teenage girls in white pinnies barging in whenever they felt like it, moving his possessions about and confiscating his digestive biscuits. True, there was about a thousand years’ arrears of washing up in the sink, but the price of liberty is eternal housekeeping. He wrenched his mind back to the subject under discussion.
    ‘I suppose so, yes,’ he said wistfully. ‘To begin with you think, Hey, this is the life, five meals a day brought to your room by beautiful young girls. Then you realise that for the last thousand years you’ve noticed the food but not the girls. Then you start to wonder what’s happening to you.’
    ‘Yeah.’ Pan nodded, but in his mind’s eye he could picture his compact, thoroughly modern, utterly squalid kitchen. He had a perfectly good dishwasher, but it was a while since he’d actually seen it, because of all the dirty plates piled up on every available surface. ‘Mind you, five meals you haven’t had to cook for yourself. It’s definitely got something going for it.’
    ‘Not much, though.’ Osiris shifted slightly in his wheelchair, which seemed to have shrunk. ‘How come you never retired?’
    ‘Couldn’t afford to,’ Pan replied. ‘Purely and simply a question of money.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really. I look back now and I say to myself, If only I’d had the good sense to take out a personal pension plan back in the third century BC, I wouldn’t still be having to get out of bed at six-thirty every morning to go to work. Mind you, it’s always the way. When you’re that age, you think you’re going to live forever. Or, more to the point, you think you aren’t going to live forever, so why bother? Were you, um, planning to stay long?’
    Osiris nodded. ‘Depends on how long it takes.’
    ‘How long what takes?’
    ‘For me to outlive my godson,’ Osiris replied. ‘The way I see it, all I’ve got to do is stay out of the way of him and his precious doctors until they kick the bucket. And in our timescale, that just gives us time for a quick game of poker before I’ve got to be getting back.’
    ‘Poker?’
    ‘It was only a suggestion. If you’d rather play snakes and ladders or . . .’
    Inside his soul, Pan grinned. The ability to cause sudden panic isn’t the world’s most useful skill; it’s not like plumbing or