Tom Holt (11 page)

In her small but well-appointed flat in the suburbs of Delphi, Ms. Fisichelli was on the point of explaining the Great Primordial to her apprentice.

'Have you got all that?' she said, 'or would you like me to run through it one more time?'

'No,' said the apprentice, helping herself to a handful of olives, 'that's fine. So then what happened?'

'Well,' said Betty-Lou, 'after Prometheus had told the Joke to the caveman, of course all the gods were furious. They just sort of flipped.'

'Really,' said the apprentice, removing a stone from her mouth with more grace than the act properly required. 'And?'

'And so,' said the Pythoness, 'once they'd gotten control of themselves again...'

'Have an olive.'

Ms. Fisichelli hesitated. 'No thanks,' she said.

'They're good, really.'

'Well...'

A moment later, the Pythoness spat out a stone into the ashtray and continued, 'When they'd gotten control of themselves, they all decided to see if they couldn't do something about it. So first they grabbed Prometheus and chained him to this rock up in the Caucasus somewhere, and they got this eagle...'

'Go on,' said the apprentice, crossing the room to the drinks tray, 'I'm listening.'

'They got this eagle...'

'Can I get you something?'

'No, thanks,' said the Pythoness. There was no doubt about it, Mary was a natural Pythoness, virtually, well, instinctive, but she sometimes wished she didn't find it all quite so easy. When she'd been doing basic training, she'd had to sit up nights learning this stuff by heart. 'They got this eagle; she said, 'and every morning and every evening, it tears out Prometheus's liver with its beak.'

'Heavy!'

'And every afternoon,' Ms. Fisichelli went on, slightly shaken, 'and every night, the liver sort of, well, grows again. And that's how Prometheus was punished for his betrayal of the gods.'

Mary was sitting down again, cross-legged on the sofa, her mouth full of olives and retsina. 'Haven't you missed something?' she said.

'Have I?'

'About the Unbinding,' Mary said. 'You know, how one day...'

'Oh yes; the Pythoness said, 'right. One day, it is prophesied, a Hero will come who will cut the chains, slay the eagle, and release the god...'

'You sure?'

The Pythoness frowned. 'About what?'

'About the eagle; Mary said. 'That bit doesn't sound right.'

'Doesn't it?' Betty-Lou asked, puzzled. 'Why not?' Mary shrugged and removed another olive-stone. 'Oh, I don't know,' she said. 'Don't mind me. Go on.'

Betty-Lou folded her hands in her lap. 'The next thing the gods did; she continued, 'was try to devise a plan to remove Laughter from the world. Unfortunately, everything they did failed; whatever they inflicted on the mortals, the one thing they steadfastly refused to give up was Laughter. And so the Divine Plan has yet to be carried out, and Laughter lies hidden somewhere in the bowels of the earth, so deep that even winged Mercury, the messenger of the gods, cannot find him. One day, however, it is written that a young demi-god, son of Jupiter himself, will discover the hiding-place of the unseemly sprite and will carry him back to heaven where he belongs. Then the gods will return, mortals will once again respect them and know their place, and the new Golden Age will begin...'

The Pythoness broke off her narrative. Her apprentice was giving her one of those disconcerting looks of hers. 'Well?' she asked brusquely.

'A new Golden Age?'

'Yes,' said the Pythoness firmly, 'that's right.'

'Just like the first one, huh?'

'Yes,' said the Pythoness, firmly. Nobody could object to
that,
surely?

'That would be,' the apprentice went on, 'the time when we mortals lived in caves, dressed in skins and ate raw meat, couldn't read or write, died young of horrible diseases, got eaten by wild animals, were thoroughly scared of the dark, and couldn't even take our minds off it all by having a good laugh about something.'

'Yes,' said the Pythoness.

'And that was the Golden Age?'

'Yes.'

'Fine,' said the apprentice. 'I see. Sorry, you were saying?'

'Yes,' said Ms. Fisichelli, 'well, I think that's about enough for one evening, don't you? Anyhow, it's getting late, and I've got essays to mark and...'

'Okay,' Mary said, uncurling herself enchantingly from the sofa, 'thanks a lot. See you tomorrow at the seminar.'

'Yes, yes indeed,' said the Pythoness, absently. 'Early Classical epigraphy, isn't it?'

'The use of computers in modern archaeology',' Mary corrected her. 'Or is that Friday?' she added kindly.

'No,' said the Pythoness, 'you're quite right. What could I have been thinking of? See you then.'

'Goodnight, then.'

'Goodnight.'

The Pythoness listened for the soft click of the door closing, and then sat down to do some nice, comfy worrying. It was, she reminded herself, her duty to select a suitable successor from the archaeology students who attended her classes at the American School, and by and large she was convinced that she'd made the right choice. Such aptitude. Such intuition. Such ability to learn. Greek, even, on her mother's side, though her father was a nicely prosaic mining engineer from Pennsylvania. It was almost, Betty-Lou told herself, as if she knew it all already. And yet there was something not quite exactly right about Mary Stamnos.

'It's no good, dammit,' she said to herself as she poured out two saucers of milk (one for her cat and one for the Sacred Serpent). 'He'll have to be told.'

'Well?' Minerva demanded, 'so where was he?'

'Eating,' Apollo replied.

Minerva frowned. 'I don't seem to remember asking you what he was doing; she said. 'Where was he?'

'At some sort of village cafe in the Caucasus,' Apollo said, trying his best to be very sweet to his- sister, 'eating.'

'All the time?'

'Yes,' Apollo confirmed. 'Mercury interviewed the waiter specially. It all tallies perfectly. He was there from when they opened right through to closing time. The waiter remembers him very well because he left a tip big enough to enable the waiter to open his own tractor factory, and he says...'

Minerva gave him a look. 'No, you mark my words, something has been going on, and the only possible explanation is that You-Know-Who was involved.'

'I don't, actually.'

'What?'

'Know who.'

Minerva made an exasperated gesture and mimed someone laughing while carrying a stalk of fennel. 'Oh,
him,'
Apollo said quickly. 'No, apparently Merc questioned him very closely. And, of course, the Eagle. Nothing. Couldn't have been lying, he reckoned, or he'd have known. Very shrewd, Merc is, sometimes, and lying... well, it's a sort of hobby of his, so...'

He could tell from the way she was looking at him and the owl on her shoulder was sniggering into its wing-feathers that his big sister wasn't convinced. So what, Apollo thought, neither am I, particularly. I just want to get Min off my back so I can look into it myself.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'one thing's for sure -- there's no harm done. Mission accomplished, ten Centaurs reduced to quick-fry steak and the Golden Fleece safely recovered and restored to the Sacred Grove at Blachernas,* so I guess the best thing is just to pretend it never happened, okay?'

'No it is not,' Minerva said. 'There's going to have to be an enquiry.'

Apollo nodded vigorously. 'Oh yes,' he said, 'there'll definitely have to be an
enquiry,
no doubt about that. In fact,

*Fortuitously now the Kavkad branch of the Standard Chartered Bank.

I'd say you'd better get it set up straight away. Sooner the better, really, don't you think?'

Minerva nodded and stalked away, and Apollo grinned. How Minerva had got to be Goddess of Wisdom, he said to himself, was another story entirely but nothing to do with her IQ.

Having satisfied himself that Minerva really had gone away and wasn't hiding behind a helium flare eavesdropping, Apollo put down the lyre he'd been pretending to resting and switched on the Commentary.

'And now we're going over to the ringside where Derek is just about to have a word with President George Jones, the American premier whose team the Yankees have just succeeded in putting a manned space station into lunar orbit. Well, George, I bet you're over the moon about this one...'

A scowl flitted over Apollo's face and he clicked the switch off. There was more to all this, he felt, than met the All-Seeing Eye, even if the effects hadn't immediately made themselves noticeable. He went to find Mars.

He found the ex-God of War in the bar, pouring himself a large ambrosia and ginger ale with a shaking hand.

'Do you know; Mars said, 'what those crazy bastards nearly did to me?'

'No,' Apollo said, 'Look...'

'I mean; Mars went on, they wanted to run their own show, so it stands to reason, they don't need me to fight their battles for them any more. How I see it, I'm just in the way. In fact; he added bitterly, 'that's it exactly, except that what I'm usually in the way of is something made of lead and travelling fast. Look, Pol, see what those jerks in the Middle East did to my armour?' He held up what at first sight looked like a collander, but which turned out to be a helmet with holes in it. 'Well,' he said, 'this time I've had enough. First thing, I'm going to go to him and I'm going to lay my cards on the table. JOM, I'm going to say, either you let me have some decent protective clothing or else you can stick your lousy job up where the sun shines out of; and if he wants to chuck me off the Edge, that's all right by me, because right now...'

Apollo gave him a soothing smile and the torrent of words subsided. Smiling was probably what Apollo was best at.

'While you were down there,' he said, 'you didn't happen to notice anything -- well,
odd,
did you?'

Mars laughed miserably. 'Depends what you'd call odd, doesn't it?' he replied. 'I mean, if a whopping great SAM missile up the backside is odd, then yes, I did. Really, Pol, I ask you, I was just standing there minding my' own business and wham! Be honest with me, chum, do I look like a bloody tank?'

'Possibly,' Apollo said. 'Maybe they were just nervous. Or bad shots. But apart from that, did you see anything which sort of caught your eye? Out of the ordinary, anything like that?'

Mars poured himself another drink, a lot of which ended up on the bar-top. 'Out of the ordinary?'

'That's it.'

'Let's see; Mars said. 'The Sri Lankans beating up on the Tamils. The Ethiopians stomping on the Eritreans. The Chinese swapping missiles with the Vietnamese. The Irish shooting up the British. The British shooting up the Argentines. The Americans dropping bombs on the Libyans. The Libyans setting off bombs under everybody else. No, can't say that I did.'

'Right; Apollo said, 'fine. Only while you were out, you see, we lost a Hero.'

Mars shook his head vigorously. 'Wasn't me,' he said. 'All the ones who copped it today were complete cowards, the lot of them.'

'No,' Apollo said, 'not lost in that sense. Mislaid. He sort of wandered off for a bit between choosing the Path of Virtue and duffing up some Centaurs.'

'I don't know, really,' said Mars, sloshing his drink round in his glass thoughtfully. 'Heroes, you know, they're a bloody funny lot, believe you me.'

'What are you getting at, exactly?' Apollo enquired patiently.

'Simple,' Mars said. 'It doesn't say this in any of the books, mind, but I've been watching the little creeps long enough to have twigged this one for myself. They don't belong in the human race. They aren't human. Mortal, maybe, but not human. Or not
exclusively
human. Do you see what I'm getting at?'

'No.'

'Ah.' Mars reached for the bottle again. 'Fancy one?'

'Not just now, thanks.'

'Suit yourself. Let me put it another way. You remember how there are all the different worlds, because of the bifurcation of thingy and all that stuff we had to learn when we were kids?'

'Some of it; Apollo replied. 'Actually, I spent most of those lessons looking out of the window.'

'Me too,' Mars admitted, 'but I looked up my notes the other day. Now the way I think it works is that your Hero, being all sort of different, he can flip back and forward between the different possible worlds all at the same time. Like, suppose there's a choice...'

'As it might be,' said Apollo, 'between conspiring with Prometheus and sitting under a tree eating shish kebabs?'

'Exactly,' said Mars, 'very imaginative example, that. Suppose there's a choice between your two courses of action, right? Your ordinary mortal makes the choice, and he splits off into two different mortals on two different worlds. One does the conspiring; one has the kebabs. All clear so far?'

'Give or take a bit, yes.'