The convoy of three minibus taxis trundles down the road, their brows low to the brown cloud of kicked-up mud and clay. They drive along a ridge line, the endless rolling green creases of the Valley of a Thousand Hills sloping down around them. In the distance, the shining surface of the Inanda Dam peeks from between the nooks of the steep hillsides. The day is dry, and hot enough to paste the grey summer haze low to the hillsides.
Erich swivels his head to take in the bright view peering in through all of the windows of his taxi, last in the convoy. The seats behind him are crammed with 15 African men, dozing indifferently in the heat.
Immediately behind him, Sergeant Van Wyk explains the workings of the uzi with which he is gesturing. The African man listens, his blank eyes fixed upon the policeman but his thin fingers skittering over the gun, touching and jerking back as if scalded.
In the far back corner, squeezed between the window and the shoulder of the man beside him, wearing a startling gold Kaizer Chiefs jersey and a beadwork neck-choker woven in horizontal stripes of red, white, black, green, gold, white and red, sits Loki, the Mischief-Maker.
His complacent gaze is fixed upon a distant spot somewhere on the taxi's roof, but he notices Erich, and his eyes drop down. He smiles, a thin blue compression of the lips. Erich turns around again in discomfort. It is a friendly, disaffected look he has been given, but coming from Loki, Erich presumes it to be pure evil.
"Now look, see? One last time," Van Wyk slaps the magazine into the butt, his finger firmly on the safety. "Just trigger this, and you're golden." The African man nods. The sergeant hands him the gun, which he places in his lap, fingers resting in eagerness on the black metal.
The people walking on the side of the road nervously step down the slope as the vehicles pass, their faces purposefully innocuous and wary. They know what this sight means, this odd procession of combi "taxis" driven by stern white men, packed with young Africans, an odd AK-47 towering from a seat back or a knobkerrie tapping absently against a window.
Some of the people watch the taxis' passage for a few seconds, then begin to hurry down the footpaths out of sight. None dare bolt in sight of the policemen. If the police thought there was advance warning of their approach fleeing ahead of them on dusty bare feet, they would shoot without hesitation.
Erich does not know why Loki chose to come along this day. He never can predict when the god would be a part of their team. Everyone treats Loki like any other Special Branch agent, this odd thin pale man with the immense hook nose.
The taxi jolts through a ditch filled with water the color of tea. The man beside Loki falls against him, and gives a broad apologetic I-don't-speak-English-or-Afrikaans-bra grin. The god treats him to a brief, icy, bemused glance.
Erich's parents emigrated to South Africa from Denmark before he was born. He was raised on the generous hectares of the farm his parents bought in Northern Zululand. The staid luxury of their farmhouse took on a smoky ancient mystery through the presence of dark wood antiques brought over from the old country, alien northern wood that sweated heavily in the tropic humidity. The antiques were as black as darkest Africa, and sweated like the hordes of workers his parents employed to burn and harvest the sugarcane they grew.
His father just has sold his operation to the Hulett sugar company. The financial arrangement is extraordinarily generous. Erich's expected retirement now is such a golden prospect that all of his remaining desire for police work has evaporated. He will be taking the government's retrenchment package and moving out to the farmhouse next month. This taxi excursion probably is his last such expedition.
The taxi excursion is part of the ongoing destabilization strategy formulated by the old apartheid state. They are bringing Inkatha Freedom Party members to attack an African National Congress-affiliated community in the valley, giving the assault the appearance of "black-on-black" or "tribal" violence.
Erich was recruited into the Third Force, the special unit of the police and military that worked with organizations like the IFP on "destabilization" measures, by an old schooling friend soon after he received his commission. He never knew precisely why he joined. It just seemed glamorous and exciting, he supposed, as if he were James Bond afield in Natal.
He was at the Elandskop farm early during his tour of duty. They shot four soldiers of Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC's liberation struggle, there. The soldiers refused to reveal the names of the Operation Vula activists who had brought them into Durban from the Swaziland border.
It was crowded that day. During the late 1980s, there was a great deal of traffic as independent police units came in and out of the various farms that the larger Third Force units established as their bases.
Erich's unit-mostly younger officers like him who were relatively new to the Third Force and of non-Afrikaans or mixed descent-captured, tortured and executed the soldiers by themselves. But they milled around at the edge of the field by the big trees as a few of the African policemen from another unit dug the graves.
A number of thin, sullen white men slouched around the scene: SBs. Special Branch were always around, but no officer could usually say why they were there. When they made their presence known, it was like the tinny whine of the mosquito by your ear. If you were not careful, they would draw blood.
An SB strolled over to Erich, smoking a cigarette away from the others. The agent had a sallow face and hook nose, but his eyes shone like glaciers in the midnight sun. He began speaking to Erich in Danish.
"Well, it's nice to see a friendly face," he said.
Erich looked up into his face and recoiled. "Eh... hello."
Loki's eyes crinkled in amusement. "Surprised to see me?"
Erich never had imagined encountering a Norse god in South Africa. He said finally, "Yes... what are you doing here?"
"I came down here, eh?" He passed his hand over his forehead. He was sweating, a curtain of water streaming down his face. "Damn hot, this Africa. I didn't think Yggdrasil's roots came down this far."
"Hmm... oww!" Erich had been staring dumb, and the cigarette dangling in his hand burned down to his fingers.
"It's nice to speak a proper language again. This Afrikaans, and this English; they're such mongrel tongues."
Erich nodded.
Loki's smile flickered across his face. "Okay, well it was nice talking to you. See you around, then?"
Erich muttered, "Yes... yes," as he walked away.
Loki is the God of Mischief, the bastard son of Odin, the All-Father of the Norse gods. As a child, Erich learned from his parents all about Asgard and the ancient beings who dwelled there. His parents were church-going, but they had a keen awareness of the gods. Erich's friends often made fun of the lovely carved runic totems scattered throughout his farmhouse. The dark wood furniture his father had imported at great cost, in fact, was specially-carved to pay homage to various deities and to the Norns, the fates.
Once, as a teenager, Erich had glimpsed Thor, the God of Thunder. He was in Denmark visiting for the summer before he began high school. He went out to an island near his uncle's house with a girl he was trying to get at, a lovely North Sea beauty with long blonde hair that tossed in great curls in the crackling, briny sea wind.
The island he rowed out to was nothing more than an asymmetrical slab of old granite placed on end in the icy waters. They were making love on the narrow strip of pebbles that was the beach they'd put ashore on as a thunderstorm raged nearby, battering the leeward slope.
Erich looked up and saw a figure perched upon the edge of the highest cliff above them, a bulky man with long red hair and a beard like a bramble hedge guarding his face. He was sitting on a rock, gazing glumly at the thunderheads receding over the water. He held a sledgehammer with a shortened handle.
Erich gasped, and the girl smiled and wrapped her arms tighter around him. He whispered, "No, no, look!" She tilted her head back and stared, open-mouthed, as a bolt of lightning shattered the rock, and Thor vanished. They gaped at the empty spot, sparkling with orange St. Elmo's fire, for a succession of minutes, and, then, in their thrill, began lovemaking with furious intensity again. Erich enjoyed that summer a great deal.
After the encounter at Elandskop farm, Erich began seeing Loki on various occasions during the years. He appeared no more frequently than any other particular SB, wandering along on convoys ferrying "Zulu warriors" to eliminate activists, sitting in upon strategy meetings with IFP warlords. He even saw Loki once in an armored Hippo, riding herd on a late-night township "patrol" of officers in camo-fatigues, on bulging dirt bikes, machine guns slung over their chests.
Once, Loki helped torture a former UDF activist, who was agitating about the causes of the "political violence" in his home community in the run-up to the 1994 democratic elections. Loki followed the lead of the other officers and struck the prisoner a few times, mincingly, with a sjambok.
He then straddled a chair in front of the prisoner, peering past the man's bloody, half-lowered eyelids. Erich and the rest of the officers glimpsed the fiery blue of Loki's eyes and turned away. The Afrikaners didn't understand why they did so, but the activist began screaming, and soon after slumped over dead.
That was how Erich could tell when Loki was around-by his eyes. He could feel them singeing him as the god's gaze drifted past, and when he turned to locate Loki, they speared out at him lasers of ice, flecks of blue glaciers housed in a sunken face.
The minibuses pull off the road, onto a plot of dead grass before the top o
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