“Get out of my way,” he growled.
“You’re actually in front of me,” Artemis pointed out. “You’re not coming to the meeting dressed like that, are you?”
“What fucking meeting?”
“You know, Athena’s thing.”
Artemis squeezed past him and put her key in the door.
“Oh, fuck,” said Apollo. “I’d forgotten about that. Look, can you make up some excuse for me? I don’t want to go. I feel like shit. It’s a fucking pointless waste of time anyway.”
Without opening the door, Artemis turned to face him. Apollo noted the familiar look of righteous annoyance in her eye. He braced himself.
“First of all,” said Artemis, “I would appreciate it if you didn’t constantly use that word in front of me.”
“You mean fuck?” said Apollo.
Artemis winced.
“I find it deeply offensive,” she said.
Apollo rolled his eyes.
“Next,” said Artemis, “you might want to start taking your responsibilities to this planet seriously.”
“What responsibilities?” said Apollo.
“Look at yourself!” said Artemis.
She reached over and picked the plastic wrapper of a cigarette pack off the side of his shirt.
“Where did you spend last night? In the gutter? What kind of an example does that set to the mortals out there that should be looking up to you?”
“It may have escaped your notice,” said Apollo, “but most of the ‘mortals out there’ would rather not look up to anyone at all, and the people that they do look up to are exactly the kind of people who spend their nights asleep in gutters or nightclubs and not those who go out running before dawn and never have sex.”
“Be that as it may,” said Artemis, “even you cannot deny that this family is facing an unprecedented crisis. And that Athena might be able to help us. If she can get her words out straight . . .”
“What makes you think I care about this family?”
“I know you care about yourself. And I know you want to get your power back.”
“I wouldn’t need to get my power back if you hadn’t taken it away from me.”
“That was a democratic decision for the good of everyone. You had been risking yourself—”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You had been risking us all—”
“Just shut up. Shut the fuck up, you stupid, uptight, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck, don’t do anything that might almost be interpreted as fun, sanctimonious little fucking virgin. Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck, I’ve had enough. I’m not going to this fucking meeting, I don’t care what happens to the fucking family, you can tell Athena what the fuck you like, just as long as you get out of my fucking face and stay out of it.”
Apollo grabbed the keys, turned the locks, and opened the door, then threw the keys down the stairs and into the street before slamming the door between him and his twin.
“And don’t you fucking start,” he muttered toward the door to the living room, where he assumed that other mothball-cunted bitch Athena was already preparing for her tedious, useless meeting.
Shrugging off the insult from Apollo—after all, you could only be hurt by someone whose opinion you respected—Artemis picked up the keys and let herself into the house. She couldn’t deny that he had a point—not about herself, of course, but about the chances of Athena’s meeting being a success. It wasn’t that Athena didn’t know what she was talking about—she had, certainly, a brilliant mind and a genius for strategy. It was that she was completely incapable of communicating to the rest of the gods any of the ideas she came up with. Athena may have been designated the goddess of wisdom, but unfortunately, wisdom and clarity are not quite the same thing. Still, thought Artemis as she entered the living room, maybe this would be the time that Athena finally got her message across. It had to happen one day.
Although all of the comfortable chairs were as yet untaken, Artemis sat on a hard wooden stool from the kitchen that Athena had placed at the far end of the front row. She liked to remind the others that she, at least, was unselfish and prepared to make sacrifices. She watched as Athena put carefully stapled handouts on each of the empty seats and wondered whether anybody else was actually going to turn up. Athena had made a huge fuss about this meeting and spent ages rearranging the furniture in the living room into equally spaced rows, the better for everyone to see her. Watching Athena now—efficient, conservatively dressed, those totally unnecessary spectacles balanced at the top of her strong, serious nose—Artemis asked herself, not for the first time, whether there was actually any need for a goddess of wisdom. She, Artemis, could do the job just as well as Athena did, she had no doubt, and still have time left over to hunt as much as she wanted to. Of course, Athena liked to believe that she was the most important of all the gods, and Artemis was pretty sure that, in her own head, she was lining herself up as the successor to Zeus. But that was never going to happen. Artemis was determined: never.
The next god to arrive was Hermes, his slim, athletic form encased in a tailored business suit, topped and tailed with his winged helmet and boots.
“Is this going to take long?” he said.
“Is that the first thing you say every time you walk into a room?” said Artemis.
“Well, is it?” said Hermes, ignoring her. “Unlike the rest of you, I actually have things to do with my time.”
“And don’t tell me, time is money?”
“Funny you should say that, but it is,” said Hermes, unable to keep a sulky tone from entering his voice.
He was the baby brother of the family and had always suffered from an inferiority complex, stemming from the indignity of having, throughout his life, been forced to carry everyone else’s messages for them, alongside performing endless other duties that the rest considered undesirable and palmed off on him.
“I will,” said Athena, “of course be delivering the information required in the most concise and apposite manner, but this is a complex issue that affects us all, and I would ask you to treat this meeting with appropriate respect. There’s a handout on the chair.”
“Can I just read it and go?” said Hermes.
“No.”
Artemis was not at all surprised to see Hermes select the largest, least broken of the armchairs and sling himself into it, kicking his winged heels over the arm and flicking in a desultory way through Athena’s fact sheet. Artemis watched him attempt to conceal a frown of confusion on his face, the same frown of confusion that she had only recently concealed on her own face when reading the same sheet. This did not bode well.
Gradually the other gods arrived and took their seats in order of comfort. Artemis noted that Aphrodite seemed to be in a particularly good mood, which worried her a little. She wondered who had been made to suffer in the pursuit of it. It wasn’t Eros, who, sitting two seats away from her, was looking relieved for some reason, or Ares, who had headed straight to the back of the room, taken one glance at the handout, dropped it on the floor, and was now flicking through a ring binder of his own that he rested on his knee, making copious notes. Dionysus had cheerily poured Aphrodite a glass of wine when he had arrived, so it couldn’t have been him. Hephaestus was sharing the sofa with his wife, whispering in her ear and cuddling her. Demeter was huddled, pale and disheveled, in a chair in the corner, but she had taken on a ghostlike mien ever since the death of the clematis and could probably be discounted too. So it must have been Apollo, which would explain his appalling mood this morning. She wondered what Aphrodite had done, and if it was something she should be concerned about. She was so irritated with Apollo, though, that she chose to put it out of her mind.
At the front of the room, Athena cleared her throat, and everyone reluctantly stopped what they were doing and looked over at her.
“Are all delegates in attendance?” she said.
“Apollo isn’t,” said Artemis.
“Can anyone proffer any intel
ligence pertaining to his absence?” said Athena.
“He was in the club last night,” volunteered Dionysus. “Drank at least a gallon of my wine and was last seen snoring with his head jammed underneath a bar stool. I doubt he’ll be putting in an appearance today.”
Artemis didn’t add anything to this.
“That is entirely typical,” said Athena. “I informed him only yesterday that this gathering was to comprise a very important dissemination of information. Perhaps we should postpone—”
She was immediately drowned out by a chorus of groans and complaints from the rest of the gods, especially Hermes, who knew that he would be in charge of finding another date that everybody could make.
“Very well,” said Athena. “Hermes, could you ensure that all of the key representations are conveyed to our absent sibling?”
“Will do,” said Hermes.
“Excellent,” said Athena. “Thus. To commence. If I could request that all gathered deities address themselves to the schemata reproduced on the uppermost sheet of your textual bundle: ‘Concerning the necessity for increasing the potency of the true gods and goddesses, parenthesis Olympian close parenthesis, with additional suggestions for the implementation of organized religion–based solutions within the crowded global multifaith context.’ ”
Artemis hated it when circumstances forced her to agree with Apollo.
Once Apollo was certain that all of the other gods had arrived at Athena’s meeting—an event that could be guaranteed to go on for hours—he left his bedroom, where he had been pacing with increasing agitation, and climbed the stairs. Whatever happened now would be Artemis’s fault. She had asked for it. If it wasn’t for her interference and for her self-important little performance on the front steps that morning, he would have just gone to bed and slept off his hangover; or, rather, circumstances would have been so different that he wouldn’t have had a hangover at all. Now she, and the rest of them, could answer for the consequences of her own behavior.
He followed the corridor down past the clutch of bedrooms to the very end, to the door that led up to the next floor. Nobody had passed through this door for years, in either direction. He persuaded himself that the twinge he felt in his stomach was not fear and made himself open the door. The handle turned only with some effort, but the door wasn’t locked. He pushed the door forward and it opened with a disgruntled creak. Immediately on the other side rose a dim staircase, cobweb-laced and caked with solidified layers of dust and grime. The air was thick and old, unstirred for years. On one of the steps, near his eye level, a fat, sleek rat observed him; above it, a pair of giant cockroaches were mating on the wall. It reminded him of the state of the rest of the house, before Alice . . . Quelling that thought, he stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him and plunging himself into almost total darkness. There was a dim light coming from the top of the staircase though, and he followed this, the stairs groaning with each step that took him spiraling upward to the forbidden top floor of the house.
At the top of the staircase he reached a landing with bare floorboards, a small window, and another door leading off it, plain and unpainted. In front of the door, on an equally plain wooden chair, sat a woman Apollo had not seen for many years: his stepmother, Hera, the sister and wife of Zeus.
They looked at each other. Neither blinked. She had sat there, as far as he knew, for more than two decades, unmoving, alone except for a brace of peacocks, currently prostrate at her feet. She had hair the color of blackmail, a spine as straight as a guillotine, and a face that could sink ships. If she was even slightly surprised to receive her first visitor in twenty years, she didn’t deign to show it.
“Hera,” said Apollo. “I won’t say it’s a pleasure.”
Hera didn’t move, her mouth a cold, thin line.
“Let’s not waste time with small talk,” said Apollo.
“I’d prefer not to waste time with talk of any kind,” said Hera, “but I can see you’re not giving me the choice.”
“I have some information,” said Apollo. “Information that you might find—”
“Cut to it,” interrupted Hera.
“Right.” Apollo swallowed. “It’s like this. There is a plot against you in this house.”
“You astonish me,” said Hera. “I always thought I was such a popular goddess.”
“At this very moment,” continued Apollo, “the conspirators are gathered in the, ah, living room”—how he wished there were a more dramatic word than living room; lounge, he’d decided, would have been even worse—“plotting your doom.”
“And?” said Hera.
She held his gaze. Apollo looked down at the peacocks. They were so uninterested in what he was saying that they had begun pushing a grain of dust back and forth to each other with their beaks, ignoring him completely. He looked back up at his stepmother.
“They plan to kill you,” said Apollo.
Hera shrugged. “They won’t succeed. Is that all you have to say? If so, you can leave.”
“And Zeus.”
“I’m sorry?” For the first time, a twitch disturbed Hera’s impassive face.
“They plan to kill Zeus as well.”
“None of you would dare,” said Hera, but she sounded nervous now.
“Why not?” said Apollo. “That was how Zeus got the job, wasn’t it? He killed his father. His father killed his father . . .”
“Zeus is stronger than you imagine,” said Hera. “He is not ready to die.”
“You look worried,” said Apollo.
“I’m not worried.”
“You sound worried.”
“I’m not worried.”
Apollo waited. Hera’s flint eyes darted toward the staircase. Apollo waited some more.
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” said Hera.
“Why would I lie to you?” said Apollo.
“Why would you tell me the truth?” said Hera.
Apollo considered this.
“Mainly I’m trying to drop my siblings in the shit,” he said.
Now it was Hera’s turn to consider.
“Well, I’ll admit that does sound like you,” she conceded.
But she didn’t elaborate on this thought, and she didn’t make a move from her chair.
“If you think,” said Apollo, “that this is just some plan for me to get you out of the way so that I can kill Zeus myself . . .”
An involuntary twitch from Hera’s eyebrow confirmed this hypothesis.
“Well, don’t worry. It’s not. I swear.”
No movement from Hera.
“I swear on Styx,” said Apollo.
Still no movement from Hera.
“Okay. I swear on Styx that I’m not here to kill or harm Zeus. Satisfied?”
Hera stood. Only her peacocks knew how long it had been since she last stood, but it was done smoothly, with no creaking or clicking of joints.
“Stay here,” she said. “Guard him. And, Apollo?”
“Yes?”
“If you have any love for him, if you have even an ounce of loyalty left in your raisin of a heart, you will not open that door.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Apollo. “I don’t want to see him in that state anyway.”
Hera reached over and slapped him, hard.
“That’s for disrespecting your father,” she said.
Apollo nodded. The loss of pride was worth it, just this once. He could take revenge on her some other time. Gesturing to her peacocks to follow her, Hera swept down the stairs. Apollo smelled the fresh air creep in from downstairs as she opened the door to the main house.
“I’ll be back,” Hera’s voice called up to him. “Don’t, whatever you do, let him out.”
Then the clean current of air was cut off, and he was left alone, choking in the staleness.
“Two birds with one stone,” said Apollo. “Well, that was a piece of piss.”
He walked around Hera’s empty chair and opened the doo
r to Zeus’s room.
19
DOWNSTAIRS, ARTEMIS WAS fighting to stay focused. Athena had borrowed an overhead projector from the university department with which she was affiliated and was currently executing an intricate design that, from what Artemis could make out, was supposed to represent the current market interplay of existing faiths and the—what was it she had said?—“import strategy for niche exploitation and growth.” It didn’t help that she was projecting the import strategy onto their peeling floral wallpaper, so that it looked less like a business plan and more like postmatch analysis for some particularly complex piece of jungle warfare. Which at least, Artemis thought, yawning, would have been more interesting than this.
She looked around the room. Aphrodite and Hephaestus were kissing violently—Artemis turned her head away quickly but still couldn’t help but notice Hephaestus’s hairy hand up Aphrodite’s skirt. Eros and Hermes were playing noughts and crosses. Ares was working away at his own file as busily as before. The only people who seemed to be paying any attention whatsoever were Demeter and Dionysus, but it was impossible to tell whether Demeter was hearing anything aside from her own doom-laden internal monologue, and as for Dionysus, closer inspection revealed a discreet pair of headphones in his ears connecting to some kind of music player in his pocket. Meanwhile, at the front of the room, Athena continued her presentation, but Artemis knew her well enough to spot the desperation in her movements, the note of hysteria in her voice as she tried and tried to put across the information that was so obvious to her but that nobody else could understand. It was no use. Artemis let go of her concentration and allowed her thoughts to drift.
She found herself imagining being dead. Running through the Elysian Fields, not a care in the underworld. She thought of how much her family would miss her when she was gone. How they would finally realize the extent to which they had always taken her for granted. How they would belatedly appreciate the importance of having someone specific to watch over hunting, and chastity, and the moon. Maybe they would even come to visit her and tell her how sorry they were for the lowly way in which they had always treated her. The upperworld would be in a terrible state, of course, but at long last that wouldn’t be her problem anymore.
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