Tom Holt (6 page)

'Look...' Prometheus hisses urgently.

'No,' says the mortal, 'you look. We've had enough of you, got it? After last time.'

'Yeah,' snarls the mortal. 'Dunno how you've got the nerve to come back here after that.'

Prometheus winces slightly. 'I told her,' he said. 'Don't open it, I said.'

The mortal makes a contemptuous noise. 'You told her,' he repeated. 'Don't you know
anything
about women?'

Prometheus shakes his head. 'I did warn her,' he repeated. 'Pandora, I said, just leave it alone and...'

'And you expected her not to open it?' said the mortal.

'Yes.'

'When it had
Open With Care, Free Gift Inside
written on it?'

'Well...' Prometheus flushed slightly. 'All right,' he conceded, 'so that was a bit of an error of judgment on my part. This time, though, I promise you, I'll make it up to you. Here.' He thrust the fennel-stalk into the mortal's hand. 'What d'you make of that, then?' he said eagerly.

'Fennel salad,' said the mortal. 'Thanks a lot.'

'No,' said Prometheus, 'just look inside it, will you?' The mortal peered inside, then reared back, clutching his eyebrows. 'Ouch!' he explained.

'It's fire,' said Prometheus, proudly.

'So that's what you call it,' growled the mortal, rubbing the tip of his nose. 'And you know what you can do with that, my fine friend.'

'Wait a minute,' Prometheus said. He explained about fire.

He explained that with fire, you could see in the dark ('I thought that was carrots,' the mortal interrupted). How you could cook food. How you could smelt metal. How you could boil water, killing the germs, producing steam that could turn a turbine. How you could...

The mortal wasn't listening. He was looking across the darkened valley to where a neighbouring tribe were tentatively building the first log cabin, and grinning mischievously.

'Right; said the mortal, 'thanks, much obliged, don't let me keep you.' He turned to go back in the cave.

'Hold on,' said Prometheus, 'I haven't finished yet.' The mortal stiffened. 'Oh yes?' he said warily. With his left hand he groped for the heavy flint axe he kept behind the door for just such occasions.

'Fire,' said Prometheus, 'is all very well in its way, but I've got something that's really going to change your lives.'

'Change?' enquired the mortal. 'Or just shorten?'

'Change; Prometheus assured him, 'out of all recognition. From being wretched creatures of a day, dragging out a pointless existence in semi-bestial squalor...'

'Here,' said the mortal's wife from inside the cave, 'I heard that.'

'Instead,' Prometheus said urgently, 'you will be the sons and daughters of light, peers of the blessed gods, basking in the glow of the Golden Age of the world. Promise,' he added.

'Oh yes?' said the mortal, his fingers tightening on the handle of his axe. 'That good, is it?'

'Yes,' Prometheus replied. 'Listen to this.'

He cleared his throat, drew himself up to his full height and said, 'When is a door not a door?'

The mortal frowned, puzzled. 'What's a door?' he asked. Prometheus asked himself to give him strength. 'No; he said, 'listen. When is a door not a door?'

The mortal shook his head. 'Dunno,' he replied. 'Maybe if I knew what a door was in the...'

'When,' Prometheus howled desperately, 'it's
ajar!'

The mortal was about to wield the axe when something strange, something that had never happened before, started to take place inside him. It was, he remembered later, a bit like a cough, except it seemed to start in the pit of the stomach, float up into your brain, slosh around for a moment and then come out of your mouth.

For the first time in the history of the human race, a mortal laughed.

Prometheus sagged exhausted against the wall of the cave while the mortal staggered about, his sides heaving with laughter. The rest of the tribe came sprinting up and stood staring at him in disbelief.

'That's a good one, that is,' said the mortal, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. 'When it's a jar; he repeated, and dissolved into a fresh torrent of hysterical laughter.

'Well; said Prometheus, 'it's not
that
good. There's this other one about a chicken...'

The mortal ignored him and turned to the rest of the tribe. 'Here,' he spluttered, 'you lot, listen to this. When is a
door
not a
door?
'

The tribe looked at each other. 'What's a ...?' one of them started to say.

'When it's a JAR!' roared the mortal, and quickly stuffed. his hand in his mouth. There was a deadly silence.

'You've been chewing those funny leaves again,' said the mortal's wife at last. 'I told you, didn't I, they give you those turns ...' Then, simultaneously, something clicked in the tribal consciousness. They all started to laugh. No studio audience ever found anything quite so funny.

'Well,' said Prometheus, backing away, 'I can see you've all got the hang of that quite nicely, so I'd better be getting back. Don't bother to see me out...' And that, of course, is why Prometheus was stripped of his divinity, hounded off Olympus, chained to a rock and condemned to everlasting punishment by his fellow, gods, for the one crime that they could never forgive. But by then it was too late; the harm had been done. Even the Great Flood was powerless to eradicate the effects of Prometheus's treachery from the Earth; for when the waters finally rolled back, a small pun was found clinging to the side of Mount Ararat, and eventually became the ancestor of all the Polish jokes in the history of the world. At last, after aeons of enslavement and repression, Mankind had found a weapon with which to fight the gods. A mere thousand or so years later, in fact, the gods gave the whole thing up as a bad job, as we have already heard, and retreated to the sun; where the few indigenous life-forms, if asked what's black and white and red all over, will simply look at you and ask if you're feeling all right.

Actually, as you will have guessed, this triumph of Man over the gods was inevitable, ever since the Third Primordial, Thing, had made up his mind to get his own back on his uppity nephews. You will have worked out, without any assistance from the narrative staff, exactly what Thing was the God of and what it was that he inserted into each of the Words when Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto weren't looking.

What you may not have realised, however, is that deep down inside them, the gods still haven't given up the fight. Oh no. Not quite. Not yet.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jason scrambled up the last few feet, regained his balance, and looked about him.

He wasn't certain whether or not he was enjoying this.

Up to a point, he said to himself, yes, fine. The belting large predators, charging machine-guns, beheading fabulous monsters, OK. The thinking, no. Nature had, after all, designed him as a superb natural fighting machine equipping him with shoulders like boulders, arms like tree-trunks, sinews like ships' cables and thews (whatever they might be) of a similar high quality. He could lift articulated lorries, leap over crevasses, climb skyscrapers and shoot the eyebrows off a gnat at five hundred yards with anything from an assault rifle to a bow and arrow improvised from a TV aerial and a rubber band.

These accomplishments tended to give him a rather straightforward, positive view of life; any lip off you, he said to the world, and you'd better watch out. Or rather he didn't. You'd expect him to, of course; his father (the shiny one with the thunderbolts, not the one who grew dahlias) undoubtedly did. He didn't. He tended to see the world as a rather endearing mistake that someone would be bound to put right sooner or later. It fascinated him. He rather liked it. The urge to kick seven kinds of shit out of it on the rare occasions when it offered him any hesitant resistance didn't come easily to him.

He liked flowers, too.

Large predators, machine-guns and fabulous monsters had better look out when he was anywhere in the neighbourhood because he didn't hold with them; that was simple enough. They were big enough to look after themselves, they annoyed people and they had it coming. And insofar as Heroism consisted of putting that sort of thing in its place, he was definitely in favour of it, particularly as against, say, accountancy, as a vocation.

The problems were rather more subtle, but Jason wasn't one of those Heroes who define subtlety as not walking off the edges of high buildings. What worried him most of all was the feeling that somehow or other he wasn't in control. Not that he had any particular wish to control anything that wasn't organically attached to him; if someone were to offer him a throne, he would probably decline on the grounds that they didn't agree with him. But he did feel that it would be rather nice to be in control of his own body, actions and -- above all -- thoughts. And he had this nasty feeling that he wasn't.

Someone, somewhere, somehow was taking advantage of him to get things done which ought not to be done; and if only he were in full possession of the facts, he wouldn't have any part of it. It was as if there was this little voice in the back of his head which sometimes asked him, as he was washing off the blood or scoring another notch on the gunstock, whether that had really felt
right.
If it did, said the voice, that's just great, I'm very happy for you. If not...

The voice had this really aggravating habit of rounding off its remarks with three dots, and Jason was inclined to regard that as something of a cop-out. To which the voice replied that if that was how he felt, that was fine, really it was, but ... Sometimes, Jason considered, the little voice got right up his nose. However...

Jason's brow furrowed, and he looked around for the Centaurs. No Centaurs. Funny. The Dream had implied that good, thoroughbred Centaurs were getting a bit scarce these days, and anybody who had any pretensions to being constellation material would be a fool to turn down the chance of kicking the shit out of the ten hand-picked guaranteed genuine specimens who would just happen to be passing through the Caucasus later on this afternoon. Chance of a lifetime. Go for it.

Perhaps, Jason said to himself, they saw me coming and ran for it. That, he knew, would be the sensible course, and the mortal part of him told him that if he was a Thessalian Centaur and got word that a semi-divine headbanger was in the area and would be along as soon as he'd finished lopping the head off an Erymanthian Hydra, he'd be off out of it as fast as his hooves could carry him. But Centaurs, of course, aren't like that. Probably explains why they're getting so rare.

Unless...

Not you again, said Jason to the back of his head. Look, either finish the bloody sentence or shut up, will you? Not for the first time, he felt that the back of his head was becoming a pain in the neck..

Perhaps, Jason said to himself, I'm lost. But if I were lost, there'd be George with the golf buggy; and George was nowhere to be seen. So I can't be lost, therefore I must be here. Funny.

Jason looked round once more, but he could see nothing except mountains, and from what he could remember of his Theory lessons, there weren't any merit points to be gained by getting heavy with the geography. He scratched his head, sat down on a rock and waited for something to happen.

He was hungry.

It had been a long time since he'd had that apple, and there was nothing more edible than a small oak-tree for as far as he could see. That puzzled him, too. Food, like transport, is generally laid on for Heroes by the Management --when was the last time you saw a Hero breaking off in mid-pursuit for a quarter-pounder and a chocolate shake? -- and Jason had come to take it for granted. Actually, the food was pretty terrible but Jason's mother had been one of those women who think boiled potatoes are the staff of life and so he didn't know any better. Army catering had come as a pleasant surprise to him.

Time passed. The sun -- when Apollo called it a day the contract for solar services had been put out to tender, and a consortium of Australian entrepreneurs had made the winning bid -- rolled slowly across the sky. A mild breeze ruffled Jason's hair, reminding him that he'd left his hat behind when he'd parachuted out of the doomed Hercules. He was still hungry. If anything, hungrier.

He stood up, filled his lungs with air, and shouted.

'George!' he called. 'Where's my dinner?'

Nothing. Not so much as a fruit pastille. Jason's monumental jaw set in a firm line, and he gripped the Sword of Whatever-it-was with grim determination. Then he remembered something and drew a small, crumpled card from the top pocket of his battledress.

PIZZA TO GO, it read. WE DELIVER -- ANYTIME, ANYWHERE.

That solved that, then. All he needed now was a callbox.

Jason stopped, swore and threw the Sword of Thingy on the ground. He had had enough. It was just as well for the Thessalian Centaurs that they were nowhere in sight, or they'd have been lunch.

After four hours of searching, Jason had failed to find a single phone booth in the Caucasus mountains. Well, there had been one; but it only took Phonecards.