The Age Of Zeus (28 page)

"Did he just say 'fiendish'?" said Sam.

"It's 'prodigies' I'm having difficulty with," said Landesman. "I daresay someone on his speechwriting team was handed a thesaurus and charged with finding the most euphemistic synonym for 'monster.'"

"These people, whoever they may be," Bartlett continued, "may think of themselves as agitators. Liberators. Freedom fighters. But let me tell you this." He thumped the despatch box with a statesmanlike fist. "They do not fight for
my
freedom, nor for the freedom of the Great British public."

This elicited plenty of "Hear! Hear!"-ing from his cabinet and backbenchers, and from across the floor as well.

"Great British public," Landesman echoed. "Words that always get a cheer in the Commons, regardless of what's actually being said. It's a political Pavlovian bell, and my, how it makes the dogs salivate!"

"No," said Bartlett, "what they are, Mr Speaker, what they so abundantly and incontrovertibly are, are terrorists."

Landesman heaved a theatrical sigh. "And there it is. The T-word. I knew it was coming. Didn't I say, Jolyon? Didn't I predict it?"

"You did, Mr Landesman."

"The minute we emerged into the limelight, some political stooge or other would get up on his hind legs and call us terrorists. I knew it would happen. And I'd have laid good money on it being Capitulating Catesby, too. We should have had a wager, Jolyon."

"I would have been foolish to take on that wager, sir, knowing I would surely lose. Rashly dispensing money is not something I'm too fond of."

"Yes, yes, no need to remind me. King of the purse strings. Master of the budget. We all know how diligent you are at your job."

"Or try to be. When I get the chance."

"It wasn't a complai- Oh, now hold on. What's this?" Landesman flipped to a different channel, an inset picture expanding to fill the entire screen. It was an American local news affiliate, and the words "Live From New York" were emblazoned across the top. Reasonably steady handheld camerawork showed a brawny, thickset figure staggering along a Manhattan street. The time was approaching noon, EST, and the person onscreen looked horribly drunk. He pinballed from lamppost to shopfront to parked car.

Which would have been unremarkable, perhaps, were it not for the fact that the figure was clad in a loincloth and a lion-skin cloak and that each time he collided with something it bent or broke. Behind him he had left a trail of damage - shattered plate-glass windows, tilted streetlights, splintered tree trunks, deeply dented car wings. Burglar alarms were whooping. Car alarms were wailing. Manhattanites could be seen peering out from office windows above or looking nervously on from the opposite side of the road.

"Hercules," Sam said, and sure enough, it
was
the ultra-strong Olympian, and the only conclusion to be drawn from his behaviour was that he'd just come from enjoying ample hospitality at some downtown bar, probably one of his favourite Chelsea or Greenwich Village hangouts.

A reporter, off-camera, was providing a breathless, blow-by-blow commentary.

"So, yeah, Hercules has been on the rampage for maybe half an hour now," he said, "and we have these amazing scenes of carnage that we're sending you, I mean look at him, he's out of control, totally blotto, got to be, and you can probably hear him, the guy's shouting, through it's impossible to make out what he's actually saying, it's all just kind of a incoherent howl, but - holy cow! Did you see that?" To the cameraman: "Did you get that, Chuck? Hercules just, just, he just walked into a mailbox, and he seemed to hurt himself, stub his toe maybe, and so he just kicked the thing, kicked it clean across the street, and now it's, well, it's embedded I guess is the word, embedded in the side of that building over there, jeez, that was some kick, dude should think of trying out for the NFL, 'cause that mailbox is well and truly stuck in the wall of that building, like a dart in a dartboard, and now - whoa! Somebody's SUV is taking a pasting. Zoom in on that, Chuck. Got it? Herc is really not pleased with that car, he's real ticked off with it, maybe he doesn't like four-by-fours, you know, gas guzzlers, maybe there's some kind of eco thing going on here..."

Hercules was, indeed, hitting the SUV with everything he had, and the chunky oversized car was rapidly getting beaten out of shape. Segments of bodywork flew off. The radiator grille fell. The headlamps popped out and dangled on their wires like enucleated eyeballs still attached to their optic nerves. Finally, with a grunt, Hercules clean-and-jerked the SUV off the ground and tossed it into the air. It came down in the centre of the road on its roof and lay there, crumpled, leaking oil and water.

That was when Hercules noticed the cameraman and the reporter. He came straight over, cloak billowing out behind him. His face was flushed, his eyes bloodshot and swimmy. He reached for the camera. The cameraman shied away, the image veering shakily to one side.

"Give me that," the Olympian growled. "Give me that fucking - that fucking thing, fucker."

"Hey, I'm filming here," the cameraman said. "I'm allowed to film. This is a public space."

"Give!" Hercules made another lunge for the camera, missing, his outstretched arm blurring from right to left.

"Chuck, give it to him," hissed the reporter.

"Freedom of the press," said the cameraman. The man behind the lens was, it seemed, braver than the man who usually stood in front. "In this country we have something called the Constitution. We have rights. We're allowed to shoot whatever we -"

Hercules's third attempt to grab the camera was successful. The onscreen image swerved in all directions, now showing a section of kerb, now the sky, now someone's sneakers, before finally settling on an extreme close-up of the Olympian's own face. Every pore in his skin was visible. The pockmarks on his nose looked like lunar craters.

"Rights?" he boomed, so loud that it overloaded the microphone and his voice crackled with distortion. "Hey! People out there! You hear this man? You think you have rights? Don't make me laugh. What about my right to walk down a street without some moron poking a camera at me? Huh? What about that? What about my right to let off steam and have a few drinks and chat up some nice piece of
eromenos
without some dick of a paparazzi intruding?"

"
Eromenos
?" said Sam.

"Boy lover," said Landesman.

"I'm not paparazzi," the reporter protested. "I'm an accredited journalist with -"

"Shut up, you cheap-suited media monkey," Hercules snapped. Spittle flecked the lens. "I'm talking here. Didn't your mother ever teach you to keep quiet and listen when your betters are talking? Now, where was I? Oh yes. Rights. Understand this, people of America and the rest of the world. You have no rights. Not while we're in charge. You used to have some, maybe, a few, in the early days after we took over. We started out treating you with respect - as much as we felt you deserved. We hoped you'd be wise enough, mature enough, to gladly and meekly accept what we were offering. But
no-o-o
, you objected, you resisted, you fought back, and that was when you forfeited your rights, any rights you thought you had. And now you're doing it once again, resisting. We thought you'd settled down but you haven't. You've started being treacherous, treasonous little savages again, and that means as far as we're concerned the gloves are off and the only right you have left now - hah, right, left, ha ha - the only right you have left is to bow your heads and do whatever the fuck we tell you to. Case in point: these two bottom-feeders."

He swung the camera round to show the reporter, whose suit
was
a cheap designer knockoff, and the cameraman, scruffily but more honestly dressed in jeans, windcheater and Phillies cap. Both of them were very scared, but the cameraman was doing the better job of hiding it. He fixed Hercules with a hard stare.

"See them?" the Olympian sneered. "These cogs in the media machine. They work for... Which channel do you work for?"

The reporter told him.

"Well," said Hercules, "I have a message for your employers, and for everyone watching. And it's this: do not harass us, do not question us, do not cast us in a bad light, do not challenge us - in short, do not fuck with us. Because
this
is what happens to those who do."

The image juddered wildly, as though an earthquake had just struck. It broke up into green and white squares, then stuttered, blinking in and out of blackness. This was soundtracked by yells of pain, and thumps, and then some ghastly wet crunching noises.

Finally normal transmission resumed. The camera had been set down on the ground, on its side. There was a spidery pattern of cracks across the lens. There were spatters of red on the lens as well. And lying within shot, slumped on the now-vertical sidewalk as though leaning against a wall, were the reporter and the cameraman. They were recognisable by their clothes only. Where they had once had heads, now they had collapsed, vaguely head-shaped messes. Their hair was matted with blood and dribbles of brain matter. Shards of skull poked out here and there. The slap-slap sound of Hercules's sandalled footfalls could be heard, diminishing in volume. Far off, a woman started screaming.

Then, thankfully, someone back at the studio had the presence of mind to cut the live feed.

Landesman, Lillicrap and Sam were silent. Stunned. Sickened.

"My God," Landesman said at last. "That was... My God. Truly horrible. But looking on the bright side - and there is one, and we must look on it - Hercules's timing can't be faulted. What a godsend, no pun intended. He's just handed us a propaganda coup. Our second today. First the Agonides clip, now this. Nobody, seeing what we've just seen, can have any uncertainty any more that what the Titans are doing is right, that we're on the side of the angels. If anybody was hesitant about backing us before, they won't be now."

"Popularity is all well and fine," said Sam. "I'd rather have the public on my side than against me. But it's hardly going to help us win the war, is it?"

"We'll see, Sam," said Landesman. "If things continue to go as I hope they do... well, you never know. Public support might just make all the difference."

32. THE MINOTAUR

T
he Resistenza Contru-Diu Corsu, to be honest, did very little actual resisting but talked a good fight and had made enough of a nuisance of itself to warrant the Olympians' interest and earn their antipathy.

That was principally on the strength of two incidents. The first took place during a diplomatic visit by Aphrodite to the island's capital Ajaccio, when the goddess of love came under fire from an RCDC member with an antiquated Kalashnikov. The sniper's accuracy was hampered by three things: the age of his rifle, the half bottle of cognac he had downed beforehand in order to steady his nerves, and the fact that, in his crosshairs, Aphrodite looked so lusciously, delectably beautiful that it seemed to him almost a crime to damage such magnificent female physical perfection in any way. All these factors conspired to make him miss her by a mile and instead wing his country's president and gravely wound the regional
préfet
, both of whom were sharing a podium with the Olympian as they bestowed on her the freedom of the island and a civic medal or some such meaningless official trinket.

Immediately, Aphrodite spoke over the PA system, calling for calm and asking the would-be assassin to step forward and show himself. This the man did, because there were few who could resist the call of Aphrodite's voice or the love that she exuded. He left his rooftop vantage point and walked through the crowd of startled onlookers to the podium, where he knelt submissively before the Olympian, telling her over and over how much he loved her and how sorry he was for trying to kill her. Aphrodite then invited the people from the crowd to come up and hit him. One by one they complied, gladly, with beatific smiles and any hard objects that came to hand. It took them half an hour to beat the man to death, and he relished every minute of his slow capital punishment with a smile no less beatific.

On the other occasion, Apollo dropped by with a view to hunting the indigenous Corsican red deer, an endangered species which he took closer to the brink of extinction by shooting great numbers of them in the Parc Naturel Régional with his bow and arrows. The RCDC, discovering a streak of conservationist concern within themselves that they'd never known they had, waxed indignant. To protect the poor deer they laced the nature reserve with tripwires attached to grenades which were in turn attached to tree trunks. Apollo, however, was too sharp-sighted to fail to spot the tripwires, and decided to make a sport of splitting them from a range of 100 metres or more and detonating the grenades. A couple of the red deer also sprang the traps, inadvertently, which somewhat undercut the whole purpose of laying them in the first place. So much for the RCDC's new-found green credentials. So much, too, for a number of RCDC members. Apollo elected to remain a little longer in Corsica and to hunt much more interesting game. His tally, by the end of his stay, stood at 52 deer, 9 men, 2 women, and one child. Of the twelve humans he bagged, seven definitely belonged to the RCDC, three were suspected of belonging, one had strong ties to the resistance, and one, the child, was simply an innocent bystander who happened to stray into the path of an arrow. Apollo claimed he deeply regretted the death of the last, although he added, with some pride at his own prowess, that his shaft passed clean through the little girl's head, from ear to ear, and continued onward to kill its intended target. A shot in a million, and a quick, instant death that had barely left a mark on the kid. To look at her, lying on the ground, you'd have thought she had just fallen asleep.