by Dan Simmons
“Dionysos,” he said.
“My son,” said Zeus. He rubbed his temples as if weary of all this.
“Shall I deliver this scrap to the Healer and the vats, O Son of Kronos?” asked the god of fire.
“No. We shall have one of our kind eat it so that my son may be reborn according to his wishes. Such Communion is painful for the host, but perhaps that will teach the gods and goddesses here on Olympos to take better care when watching out for my children. “
Zeus looked down at Hera, who had come closer and was now sitting on the second stone step of his throne with her right arm laid affectionately along his leg, her white hand touching his knee.
“No, my husband,” she said softly. “Please.”
Zeus smiled. “You choose then, wife.”
Without hesitation, Hera said, “Aphrodite. She’s used to stuffing parts of men into her mouth.”
Zeus shook his head. “Not Aphrodite. She has done nothing since she herself was in the vats to incur my displeasure. Shouldn’t it be Pallas Athena, the immortal who brought this war with the mortals down on us with her intemperate murder of Achilles’ beloved Patroclus? And of the infant son of Hector?”
Hera pulled her arm back. “Athena denies that she did these things, Son of Kronos. And the mortals say that Aphrodite was with Athena when they slaughtered Hector’s babe.”
“We have the vision-pool image of the murder of Patroclus, wife. Do you want me to play it again for you?” Zeus’s voice, so low it resembled distant thunder even when he whispered, now showed signs of growing anger. The effect was of a storm moving into the echoing Hall of the Gods.
“No, Lord,” said Hera. “But you know that Athena insists that it was the missing scholic, Hockenberry, who must have assumed her form and done these things. She swears upon her love for you that…”
Zeus stood impatiently and paced away from the throne. “The scholic morphing bands were not designed to grant a mortal the shape or power of a god,” he snapped. “It’s not possible. However briefly. Some god or goddess from Olympos did those deeds—either Athena or one of our family assuming Athena’s form. Now… choose who will receive the body and blood of my son, Dionysos.”
“Demeter.”
Zeus rubbed his short white beard. “Demeter. My sister. Mother to my much-loved Persephone?”
Hera stood, stepped back, and showed her white hands. “Is there a god on this mount who is not related to you, my husband? I am your sister as well as your wife. At least Demeter has experience giving birth to odd things. And she has little to do these days since there is no grain crop being harvested or sewn by the mortals.”
“So be it,” said Zeus. To Hephaestus he commanded, “Deliver the flesh of my son to Demeter, tell her it is the will of her lord, Zeus himself, that she eat this flesh and bring my son to life again. Assign three of my Furies to watch over her until this birth is achieved.”
The god of fire shrugged and dropped the bit of flesh into one of his pouches. “Do you want to see images from Paris’s pyre?”
“Yes,” said Zeus. He returned to his throne and sat, patting the step that Hera had vacated when she stood.
She obediently returned and took her place, but did not lay her arm on his leg again.
Grumbling to himself, Hephaestus walked over to the dog’s head, lifted it by its ears, and carried it to the vision pool. He crouched there at pool’s edge, pulled a curved metal tool from one of his chest-belts, and worried the dog’s left eyeball out of its socket. There was no blood. He pulled the eye free easily, but red, green, and white strands of optic nerve ran back into the empty eye socket, the cords unreeling as the god of fire pulled. When he had two feet of the glistening strands exposed, he pulled yet another tool from his belt and snipped them.
Pulling mucus and insulation off with his teeth, Hephaestus revealed thin, glittering gold wires within. These he crimped and attached to what looked to be a small metal sphere from one of his pouches. He dropped the eyeball and colored nerve strands into the pool while keeping the sphere next to him.
Immediately the pool filled with three-dimensional images. Sound surrounded the three gods as it emanated from piezo-electric micro-speakers set into the walls and pillars around them.
The images from Ilium were from a dog’s point of view—low, many bare knees and bronze shin-guarding greaves.
“I preferred our old views,” muttered Hera.
“The moravecs detect and shoot down all our drones, even the fucking insect eyes,” said Hephaestus, still fast-forwarding through Paris’s funeral procession. “We’re lucky to have…”
“Silence,” commanded Zeus. The word echoed like thunder from the walls. “There. That. Sound.”
The three watched the last minutes of the funeral rites, including the slaughter of Dionysos by Hector.
They watched Zeus’s son look right at the dog in the crowd when he said, “Eat me.”
“You can turn it off,” said Hera when the images were of Hector dropping the torch onto the waiting pyre.
“No,” said Zeus. “Let it run.”
A minute later, the Lord of Lightning was off his throne and walking toward the holoview pool with his brow furrowed, eyes furious, and fists clenched. “How dare that mortal Hector call upon Boreas and Zephyr to fan the fires containing a god’s guts and balls and bowels! HOW DARE HE!!”
Zeus QT’d out of sight and there was a clap of thunder as the air rushed into the hole in the air where the huge god had been a microsecond earlier.
Hera shook her head. “He watches the ritual murder of his son, Dionysos, easily enough, but flies into a rage when Hector tries to summon the gods of the wind. The Father is losing it, Hephaestus.”
Her son grunted, reeled in the eyeball, and set it and the metal sphere in a pouch. He put the dog’s head in a larger pouch. “Do you need anything else from me this morning, Daughter of Kronos?”
She nodded at the dog’s carcass, its belly panel still flopped open. “Take that with you.”
When her surly son was gone, Hera touched her breast and quantum teleported away from the Great Hall of the Gods.
No one could QT into Hera’s inner sleeping chamber, not even Hera. Long ago—if her immortal memory still served her, since all memories were suspect these days—she had ordered her son Hephaestus to secure her rooms with his artificer’s skills: forcefields of quantum flux, similar but not identical to those the moravec creatures had used to shield Troy and the Achaean camps from divine intrusion, pulsed within the walls; the door to her chamber was flux-infused reinforced titanium, strong enough to hold even an angered Zeus at bay, and Hephaestus had hung it from quantum doorposts snug and tight, locking it all with a secret bolt of a telepathic password that Hera changed daily.
She mentally opened that bolt and slipped in, securing the seamless, gleaming metal barrier behind her and moving into the bathing chamber, discarding her gown and flimsy underthings as she went.
First the ox-eyed Hera drew her bath, which was deep and fed from the purest springs of Olympos ice, heated by Hephaestus’s infernal engines tapping into the core of the old volcano’s warmth. She used the ambrosia first, using it to scrub away all faint stains or shadows of imperfection from her glowing white skin.
Then the white-armed Hera anointed her eternally adorable and enticing body with a deep olive rub, followed by a redolent oil. It was said on Olympos that the fragrance from this oil, used only by Hera, would stir not only every male divinity within the bronze-floored halls of Zeus, but could and did drift down to earth itself in a perfumed cloud that made unsuspecting mortal men lose their minds in frenzies of longing.
Then the daughter of mighty Kronos arranged her shining, ambrosial curls along her sharp-cheeked face and dressed in an ambrosial robe that had been made expressly for her by Athena, when the two had been friends so long ago. The gown was wonderfully smooth, with many designs and figures on it, including a wonderful rose brocade worked into the weft by Athena�
��s fingers and magic loom. Hera pinned this goddess material across her high breasts with a golden brooch, and fastened—just under her breasts—a waistband ornamented with a hundred floating tassels.
Into the lobes of her carefully pierced ears—just peeking out like pale, shy sea-things from her dark-scented curls—Hera looped her earrings, triple drops of mulberry clusters whose silver glint was guaranteed to cast hooks deep into every male heart.
Then back over her brow she veiled herself with a sweet, fresh veil made of suspended gold fabric that glinted like sunlight along her rosy cheekbones. Finally she fastened supple sandals under her soft, pale feet, crossing the gold straps up her smooth calves.
Now, dazzling from head to foot, Hera paused by the reflecting wall at the door to her bath chamber, considered the reflection for a silent moment, and said softly, “You still have it.”
Then she left her chambers and entered the echoing marble hall, touched her left breast, and quantum teleported away.
Hera found Aphrodite, goddess of love, walking alone on the grassy south-facing slopes of Mount Olympos. It was just before sunset, the temples and gods’ homes there on the east side of the caldera were limned in light, and Aphrodite had been admiring the gold glow on the Martian ocean to the north as well as on the icefields near the summit of three huge shield volcanoes visible far to the east, toward which Olympos threw its huge shadow for more than two hundred kilometers. The view was slightly blurred because of the usual forcefield around Olympos, which allowed them to breathe and survive and walk in near Earth-normal gravity here so close to the vacuum of space itself above terraformed Mars, and also blurred because of the shimmering aegis that Zeus had set in place around Olympos at the beginning of the war.
The Hole down there—a circle cut out of Olympos’ shadow, glowing within from a sunset on a different world and filled with lines of busy lights from mortal fires and moving moravec transports—was a reminder of that war.
“Dear child,” Hera called to the goddess of love, “would you do something for me if I asked, or would you refuse it? Are you still angry at me for helping the Argives these ten mortal years past while you defended your beloved Trojans?”
“Queen of the Skies,” said Aphrodite, “Beloved of Zeus, ask me anything. I will be eager to obey. Whatever I can do for one so powerful as yourself.”
The sun had all but set now, casting both goddesses into shadow, but Hera noticed how Aphrodite’s skin and ever-present smile seemed to glow of their own accord. Hera responded sensually to it as a female; she couldn’t imagine how the male gods felt in Aphrodite’s presence, much less the weak-willed mortal men.
Taking a breath—since her next words would commit her to the most dangerous scheme the scheming Hera had ever devised—she said, “Give me your powers to create Love, to command Longing—all the powers you use to overwhelm the gods and mortal men!”
Aphrodite’s smile remained, but her clear eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Of course I will, Daughter of Kronos, if you so request—but why does someone who already lies in the arms of mighty Zeus require my few wiles?”
Hera kept her voice steady as she lied. As most liars do, she gave too many details in her lie. “This war wearies me, Goddess of Love. The plotting and scheming among the gods and among the Argives and Trojans hurts my heart. I go now to the ends of the generous other earth to visit Okeanos, that fountain from which the gods have risen, and Mother Tethys. These two kindly raised me in their own house and took me from Rhea when thundering Zeus, he of the wide brows, drove Kronos deep beneath the earth and the barren salt seas and built our new home here on this cold, red world.”
“But why, Hera,” Aphrodite asked softly, “do you need my poor charms to visit Okeanos and Tethys?”
Hera smiled in her treachery. “The Old Ones have grown apart, their marriage bed grown cold. I go now to visit them and to dissolve their ancient feud and to mend their discord. For too long have they stayed apart from each other and from their bed of love—I would lure them back to love, back to each other’s warm bodies, and no mere words of mine will suffice in this effort. So I ask you, Aphrodite, as your loving friend and one who wishes two old friends to love again, loan me one of the secrets of your charms so that I can secretly help Tethys win back Okeanos to desire.”
Aphrodite’s charming smile grew even more radiant. The sun had set now behind the edge of Mars, the summit of Olympos had been plunged into shadow, but the love goddess’s smile warmed them both. “It would be wrong of me to deny your warmhearted request, O Wife of Zeus, since your husband, our lord, commands us all.”
With that, Aphrodite loosed from beneath her breasts her secret breastband, and held the thin web of cloth and microcircuits in her hand.
Hera stared at it, her mouth suddenly dry. Dare I go forward with this? If Athena discovers what I’m up to, she and her fellow conspirators among the gods will attack me without mercy. If Zeus recognizes my treachery, he will destroy me in a way that no healing vat or alien Healer will ever hope to restore to even a simulacrum of Olympian life. “Tell me how it works,” she whispered to the goddess of love.
“On this band are all the beguilements of seduction,” Aphrodite said softly. “The heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the sibilant slidings of sex, the urgent lover’s cries, and the whispers of endearment.”
“All on that little breastband?” said Hera. “How does it work?”
“It has in it the magic to make any man go mad with lust,” whispered Aphrodite.
“Yes, yes, but how does it work?” Hera heard the impatience in her own words.
“How do I know?” asked the goddess of love, laughing now. “It was part of the package I received when… he … made us gods. A broad spectrum of pheromones? Nano-kindled hormone enactors? Microwaved energy directed directly at the sex and pleasure centers of the brain? It doesn’t matter… although this is only one of my many tricks, it works. Try it on, Wife of Zeus.”
Hera broke into a smile. She tucked the band between and under her high breasts, so that it was barely concealed by her gown. “How do I activate it?”
“Don’t you mean how will you help Mother Tethys activate it?” asked Aphrodite, still smiling.
“Yes, yes.”
“When the moment comes, touch your breast just as you would to activate the QT nanotriggers, but instead of imagining a far place to teleport, let one finger touch the circuited fabric in the breastband and think lustful thoughts.”
“That’s it? That’s all?”
“That is all,” said Aphrodite, “but it will suffice. A new world lies in this band’s weaving.”
“Thank you, Goddess of Love,” Hera said formally. Laser lances were stabbing upward through the forcefield above them. A moravec hornet or spacecraft had come through the Hole and was climbing for space.
“I know you won’t return with your missions unaccomplished,” said Aphrodite. “Whatever your eager heart is hoping to do, I am sure it will be fulfilled.”
Hera smiled at that. Then she touched her breast—careful not to touch the breastband nestled just beneath her nipples—and teleported away, following the quantum trail Zeus had made through folded space-time.
7
At dawn, Hector ordered the funeral fires quenched with wine. Then he and Paris’s most trusted comrades began raking through the embers, taking infinite care to find the bones of Priam’s other son while keeping them separate from the ashes and charred bones of dogs, stallions, and the weakling god. These lesser bones had all fallen far out near the edge of the pyre, while Paris’s charred remains lay near the center.
Weeping, Hector and his battle-comrades gathered Paris’s bones in a golden urn and sealed the urn with a double layer of fat, as was their custom for the brave and noble-born. Then, in solemn procession, they carried the urn through the busy streets and marketplaces—peasants and warriors alike stepping aside to let them pass in silence—and delivered the remains to the field cleared of rubbl
e where the south wing of Priam’s palace had stood before the first Olympian bombing run eight months earlier. In the center of the cratered field rose a temporary tomb made from stone blocks scattered during the bombing—Hecuba, Priam’s wife, queen, and mother to Hector and Paris, had her few recovered bones in that tomb already—and now Hector covered Paris’s urn with a light linen shroud and personally carried it into the barrow.
“Here, Brother, I leave your bones for now,” said Hector in front of the men who’d followed him, “allowing the earth here to enfold you until I enfold you myself in the dim halls of Hades. When this war is over, we will build you and our mother and all those others who fall—most likely including myself—a greater tomb, reminiscent of the House of Death itself. Until then, Brother, farewell.”
Then Hector and his men came out and a hundred waiting Trojan heroes covered over the temporary stone tomb with dirt and piled more rubble and rocks high upon it.
And then Hector—who had not slept for two nights—went in search of Achilles, eager now to re-engage in combat with the gods and hungrier than ever to spill their golden blood.
Cassandra awoke at dawn to find herself all but naked, her robe torn and in disarray, her wrists and ankles tied with silken ropes to the posts of a strange bed. What mischief is this? she wondered, trying to remember if she had once again gotten drunk and passed out with some kinky soldier.
Then she remembered the funeral pyre and fainting into the arms of Andromache and Helen at its fiery conclusion.
Shit, thought Cassandra. My big mouth’s got me in trouble again. She looked around the room—no windows, huge stone blocks, a sense of underground damp. She might well be in someone’s personal underground torture chamber. Cassandra struggled and thrashed against the silken cords. They were smooth, but they were tight and well tied and remained firm.
Shit, Cassandra thought again.