“It’s always a fine morning on Olympus,” he answered. A compliment couldn’t hurt; Hera played a part in overseeing the keeping of the grounds. Yet he could hear the distraction in his own voice as he said it.
As if sensing it herself, Hera’s smile wavered; Apollo considered the possibility that she wanted something from him the way the hawk wants something from the rabbit. Was it related to Zeus’s murder, or matters more mundane?
Or was he paranoid? Either way, he was no rabbit (except for that one time, but that was strictly experimentation). Apollo returned the smile and strode forward to step up onto the same rock and equalize their footing.
“What brings you to the courtyard this morning, Queen Hera?”
Hera’s eyebrow arched at that approach. Too abrupt? She shrugged and looked about the courtyard. “Pomegranates.” She reached up and plucked one. “And looking for you, Stepson. I have a . . .,” She paused, perhaps considering the word. “Request.”
Apollo considered the word himself. Hera’s “requests” tended toward the compulsory end of the spectrum. He gave no response beyond his continued attention.
She went on, regarding the pomegranate. “The world needs more. By which I mean pomegranates. My sacred fruit grows poorly without ample sunlight. I therefore wish you to adjust the sun’s path to shine more toward the poles during the summer. Without depriving the central regions where already they thrive, of course.”
Apollo couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “That may be difficult, Stepmother. Doable, perhaps, but . . . difficult. To do properly, I mean. Especially for both hemispheres. There’s a delicate balance, and—”
She tossed her hand. “Well then forget about the southern hemisphere, there’s less land down there anyway. Just the northern will do fine, for now.”
Styx on a stick, one more problem to deal with! Apollo rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. “Could you not simply reengineer the pomegranate itself to require less sun?”
Hera gaped. “I beg your pardon? I’ll not reengineer that which is perfect! Shall I get Botox injections and dye my hair as well?”
Apollo cleared his throat. “I . . . meant no offense, Queen Hera.”
Hera turned the full force of her regality upon him, eyes narrowed, head high. “Look into it,” she “requested”.
“As you wish. Though it may take a while. I need to do feasibility studies, plan out a new path—plus it’s a change in the established order, so I’ll have to run it past the Erinyes just to be thorough, and you know how busy they are these days. Plus the sun chariots are getting a bit run down.”
“They are automated, are they not? Your sun chariots?”
Apollo let a slightly overwhelmed sigh get away from him. “Yes, but they do need maintenance now and again. I understand number two’s clutch is slipping lately. I’ve been meaning to take a look at it some night, but—” He forced himself to stop before revealing too much of his stress.
Hera cocked her head. “Meaning to? While your work has nearly always been exemplary, Stepson, it won’t do to neglect your duties. You grow too busy, perhaps?”
Idle courtesy, Apollo wondered, or suspicion? Hera wore a smile of indeterminate sincerity.
He smiled back and attempted to lie, knowing it wasn’t his strength. “No, Stepmother. I’ve merely overindulged in the pleasures of our return to the mortal world. Artemis and I went target-shooting just yesterday, in fact.”
“Overindulgence is hardly your nature.” She paused, searching his face. “Do you feel quite all right, Apollo?”
“Yes, just fine.”
“Ah.” Her smile faded for a moment. Or maybe he had imagined it. “Perhaps you’re taking after your father more, now that he’s gone.”
Apollo’s spine straightened involuntarily. If that wasn’t a probing statement, he decided, he was a walrus. What was she on about?
It was true that Hera vocally condemned her husband’s assassination from the moment it became known. To say her marriage to Zeus could be rocky was to say that analogies can be tedious, and Hera had possessed a talent for infuriating Zeus like no other. Spats ending in lightning- struck pomegranate groves were common. Further, Zeus had spawned numerous children via affairs with mortal women; Apollo himself was born of an immortal pairing from which Hera was conspicuously absent.
Yet with all of the squabbling and extramarital affairs, she had stuck by Zeus. Some (and this would be both a real and hypothetical some) would say that she simply enjoyed being married to the king. But as the goddess of marriage, the very concept of divorce offended her—she once turned one of her own priestesses into a cow for even hinting at the idea. Some (a different hypothetical some from the previous one, for variety’s sake) might consider that attitude a prime motive to kill Zeus in order to escape a rather loveless marriage. Yet Hera was not a fan of the concept of love. It was duty that drove her. As abhorrent as divorce was, the murder of one’s own spouse was at least doubly so.
Or so she maintained. A poor liar himself, Apollo was also lousy at judging when someone else was lying. While he knew Hera well enough to believe her condemnation of Zeus’s murder to be genuine, he also knew enough about his own instincts to hold that judgment suspect. After all, some would point out (and this increasingly opinionated some really ought to watch their backs given all the goddess-bashing in which they’ve hypothetically engaged) that it took all of twenty- four hours for her to marry Poseidon once Zeus was dead. Secret affair? Power play? Or was being single simply against her nature?
Caught up in such considerations, Apollo realized he still hadn’t answered Hera’s question. “Not consciously taking after him, if so,” he said finally. “You must miss him yourself, to bring it up.”
He’d said it as a deflection, and it was Hera’s turn to hesitate, but only for a moment before her gaze caught Apollo’s in a net of thorns. “Your father was a troublesome, obstinate, egotistical philanderer. What insanity could possibly possess me to miss that?”
“So you’re glad he was killed, then?”
Apollo sensed the blow a fraction of a second before Hera struck him across the face. He chose not to anger her further by avoiding it. Allowing her strike to speak for her, Hera stepped off the granite and stormed away. She turned, only once, to thrust a commanding finger back at him.
“Pomegranates!” she ordered.
Unable to come up with a response to so masterful an exclamation, Apollo let her go.
Damnation, he really shouldn’t have asked that. Apollo stalked out of the area himself, chagrin beating him in the back of the head like an errant woodpecker.
He was testing her! Yes, he decided, that was it. He was testing her reaction in an attempt to verify her professed innocence. Feeling better about himself, he began to whistle.
Not that the test told him anything concrete. Damnation again.
Apollo continued his journey through the courtyards, searching internally for guidance that wasn’t there. Worry? Check. Stress? Check. Twenty-three recipes for sun tea? Check. Guidance?
“Reply hazy, ask again later.”
He caught a glimpse through the trees of Artemis on a routine stroll of her own, brushing her hands over tall grasses, clearly at peace. Possibly high, but probably just at peace. Some gods had all the luck. His sister hadn’t seen him yet, so Apollo ducked into some trees and headed back toward the Olympian halls.
The courtyards soon gave way to the towering, white marble gate that led into the vast halls and apartments where many of the gods dwelled. Though all of the gods had quarters there, not all of them chose to live there regularly. Hades spent most of his time in, well, Hades (as this was the name of both the god himself and the underworld he ruled, Hades’s lack of imagination eclipsed even Donald Trump’s). Yet Hades (the god, not the realm) still maintained a seldom-used bungalow on Olympus. Aphrodite had a second home in Hollywood. Dionysus lived in Las Vegas. And Zeus—obviously Zeus was gone.
Zeus had shared a part of hi
s quarters with Hera, though one wing was his own entirely. Poseidon ordered it closed after the murder, sealed up in honor of his brother and predecessor. The sea god’s own small quarters were expanded and linked with Hera’s after their marriage, and a majority of his rooms were underwater—a reminder of the undersea dwelling from which his kingly duties so often kept him. If the Olympians used regular contractors, the caulk portion of that renovation bill alone would have bankrupted a small country.
How involved was Poseidon in his brother’s death? Another unanswered question . . .
Apollo made his way to his own quarters, located in the eastern wing overlooking the secondary stables. (Not a day went by that he wasn’t thankful for the olfactory shield Hestia had invented to contain the smell. Apollo loved the fire-breathing horses that once guided the sun chariots, but they subsisted on a steady diet of sulfur and chili.) His footsteps echoed on the polished marble floor like the ticking of a clock—or like actual footsteps, really, but also clock-like. He was out of time for the moment. Work awaited him, again. Dreading the number of messages surely stalking his inbox, he climbed the stairs past the Muses’ quarters on the way to his office.
“Are they insane?” The question burst from the Muses’ quarters, leaving no doubt about the opinion of the one posing it. “How is that the same? No, answer me! How is that the same!”
Apollo halted his climb and turned instead toward the doorway to poke his head through the silk divider curtains. Thalia stalked back and forth in the middle of the atrium, red hair blazing behind her in the sunlight. She focused all her attention on the phone clutched in her hand.
“No, look!” Thalia caught sight of Apollo and put him off with a nod before directing her ire back into the phone. “I don’t care how much of an advance he's getting. You tell those producers the character stays as is or you’re backing out! . . . Who cares if there’s a contract? This is—I’m a Muse! I inspired that whole story! I—” She squeezed her eyes shut to trap welling tears and turned her back. “Fine!” she managed. “Just—fine! You just tell Mr. Brown he’ll—he’ll have to write the next book without me!” She jammed a finger at the screen to end the call and took a few steps toward the window, her breath ragged, her back to Apollo.
“Thalia?” he tried. “Are—?”
She cut him off with a scream culminating in her hurling the phone against a nearby couch. It barely bounced, landing on the cushion in still-pristine condition. She turned on him.
“If you take the character of a jaded, balding, wheelchair-bound mathematician in his late fifties and turn him into a female twenty-two- year-old blonde ex-gymnast stripper who’s just ‘good with numbers,’ how does that possibly retain the spirit of the story? Why can’t so-called ‘creative’ executives leave well enough alone? Or hurl themselves off a cliff? Can I shove one off a cliff, Apollo? It would make me ever so happy.” She smiled with one of her better doe-eyed expressions.
He smiled back, despite his troubles. “Probably not the best idea, Thalia.”
She heaved a sigh and picked up her phone again to polish it. “It wouldn’t have to be a big cliff.” Eyelashes fluttered at him.
“Stressed?”
She wiped the remnants of a tear. “No? Me? Stressed? No, not at all. Why do you ask?”
“I—”
She hurled herself backward onto the couch. “It’s not that every single mortal seems to be invoking us for inspiration for their work. It’s really not. I mean it’s positively risible that every single slack-jaw on the Internet begs for comedic inspiration each time they make a smart-assed crack on a forum; I can more or less keep my sanity by just ignoring them. But dear gods, it’s having to sift through it all!”
“Reminds me of—”
“But hey, I’m a big girl. I can do that, right?” She thrust her fingers into her hair and mussed it, her coiffure looking like a poofed dandelion as she cut him off. “I mean sanity’s overrated anyway, isn’t it? Got to find the really deserving writers and such out there amid the offal, don’t we? Very well, so I’ll miss a few gems in the sifting, but hey, them’s the breaks, that’s luck, not meant to be, right?”
Thalia suddenly caught her reflection in the mirror that made up half of one wall, and her tirade of annoyance continued unabated with a, “Sakes alive, look at my hair!” In a single sweep of her hand, it was perfectly coifed again. Thalia launched a wide-eyed grin at him that all but screamed, “Ta-da!”
Apollo tried to stay on topic. “I suppose that given—”
“But it’s—ugh! It’s those executives!” She jumped to her feet again. “Those studios and producers and focus groups and—and just the diabolical dumbing-down that everyone seems to think is compulsory! It’s driving me positively ape-shit! I mean, excuse me, I know that’s not very becoming, but oh my gods, Apollo!” She unscrewed a bottle of ambrosia and began to pour out a glass without offering any to him. “You just shouldn’t take a 1,000-page novel and turn it into a two-hour movie! It doesn’t work! Do you know how many scripts I’ve inspired since we came back? I mean just scripts, not even books being made into scripts! Every single one of them altered by philistines who think they know better than a Muse! More breasts! More explosions! More fart jokes! Fart jokes! Jiggle-boom-fart-bounce-fart! It’s the nimrod anthem!” She suddenly stopped, considering. “Nimrod.” She giggled. “I like that word.”
As Thalia took the opportunity to down the ambrosia, Apollo took the opportunity to get out a full sentence or two. “You’ve inspired scripts that were changed before. Before we came back into public awareness. It didn’t seem to bother you so much then.”
Thalia finished the glass and poured another. “Yes, but it’s happening more now. Cumulating, drop by drop!” She sighed again, looking at the full glass before setting it down. “Anyway, I’m being boorish, aren’t I? Hi there. How’re you?” She forced a dazzling smile and flashed her lashes again.
He laughed. “Trust me; you don’t want to know.”
“Oh hmm, that certainly doesn’t make me curious at all.”
“I’ve been a bit out of touch. Do you know if your sisters are having the same cliff-shoving urges?”
She shrugged. “More or less. I mean except Urania. You know, I still don’t see why I got science fiction and she didn’t.”
Years ago, as the modern genres came into being, the Muses each took on new duties. Thalia added sci-fi to her existing purviews of comedy and poems about farming.
“You picked it yourself. You like science fiction.”
“Oh there you go, bringing facts into the argument. She muses astronomy; you should’ve made her take it. She’s got, like, zero workload.”
“You drew lots. She picked last. It’s your own fault.”
“She’s only got to worry about astronomy texts, calendar photos, and those stupid little sayings on coffee cups!”
“And bathroom wall graffiti.”
Thalia snorted and then blushed at the sound. “Oh, yeah. Maybe she’s been talking to those executives.”
Apollo walked to the window and gazed out over the stables. Thalia, perhaps sensing he was weighing some sort of decision, said nothing. Her uncharacteristic silence was actually more distracting.
“Thalia,” he said at last, “gather your sisters. There’s something we must speak about. Don’t tell anyone else.”
“Ooh, secretive. Sounds like fun. Give me a couple of hours to get them all here.”
Apollo shook his head. “Not here. Not on Olympus.”
Thalia nodded, perplexed. “Would this have anything to do with cliffs?” she asked. “I’ve got one all picked out.”
CHAPTER SIX
“On all of Olympus, there is no better spy than Hermes, no better prankster, and no better thief.”
—“Your Olympian Gods: Wondrous or Fantastic?” (propaganda booklet)
“Off the record, the fact that a god like Hermes is also the god of merchants has some rather unsettling implications, if you think abou
t it.”
—U.S. Attorney General (not off the record)
IT WAS SEEING Erato and Polyhymnia leave Olympus together that first aroused Hermes’s suspicion. The two sister Muses had feuded for centuries. Going somewhere together meant something interesting was surely happening, and if something interesting was happening, Hermes wanted in. In fairness, he supposed it was curiosity being aroused rather than suspicion, but suspicion was so much more interesting. He’d consider a downgrade to curiosity depending on what was going on. At least he was feeling aroused. Aroused was almost always a good state.
Besides, it was a slow morning and there was an alarming lack of mischief lately for Hermes’s tastes. He loved a good eavesdrop. He’d even recently figured out a way to wire-tap the river Styx, just to listen in on any interesting oaths people made—though little had come of that, and direct spying thrilled him more anyway. Besides, who could be more fun to spy on than the Muse of erotic poetry?
Granted, Erato’s updated portfolio also included crossword puzzles—a choice Hermes could not fathom—so there was a risk that his suspic-iosity would lead to mind-numbing, grid-mounted tedium. Ah well, risk was what existence was all about. Wrapping himself in a cloak of nothingness, heedless of the treacherous boredom that very possibly awaited, Hermes hummed an inspiring anthem and flew off in pursuit.
No crosswords, no crosswords, no crosswords . . .
They were headed, it seemed, for London. So far, so good. If this did turn out to be nothing, he could at least spend a little time kicking around his adopted home.
The modern world just couldn’t seem to get enough of Hermes’s British accent. In the first days of the Return, whenever he consented to an interview, the first question was always about the accent. “That’s a curious accent you have. Why is it different?” “Are you English? I thought all the Olympians were Greek?” “Are you just messing with us or what?”
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