The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "And...?" said Sam.

  Landesman didn't finish the sentence, peremptorily starting a new one instead. "So we continue as we are, for now. We stay on the course as it is set. I have our next three monsters lined up. This is going to be an exhausting few days for you, Sam. The scheduling is tight. But since you insist on participating in every op, it's your own fault. You're going to be on your knees by the end, probably, but you'll only have yourself to blame."

  "I'm my own worst enemy, Mr Landesman."

  "Fortunately for us you're also the Olympians.'" Landesman handed her a sheet of paper. "Here's your itinerary. I'm calling this job Operation: Three Lions. You'll see why. Phoebe, Coeus, Oceanus, Mnemosyne and Hyperion will be travelling with you. Feel free to use whichever of them you want on each phase of the op, in whatever permutation you see fit. If all goes well, you should be back within the week - and all will, I have no doubt, go well."

  22. THE GRIFFIN

  The Griffin was loose in Kashmir, prowling that mountainous zone of contention between India and Pakistan. The Olympians had stationed it there to serve as a warning to the subcontinent's two great feuding powers: we are keeping an eye on you. The huge lion/eagle hybrid flew among the peaks of the Himalayas and the Karakoram Range, and every so often, when it was hungry, swooped into the nearest valley community and made off with a calf, a goat or, very occasionally, a small child. Inhabitants on both sides of the line of control could have importuned their nations' rulers to do something about the monster, but never bothered. It wasn't that they were fatalistic. It was just that they knew nothing would come of any efforts made in that direction. The governments in New Delhi and Islamabad, although they could agree on little else, were of one mind when it came to the Olympians: Don't rock the boat. Thus the Griffin was free to roam and raid and kill with impunity, like some deranged policeman, unconstrained by law. Once, a posse of villagers from the Indian-administered part of the region banded together and went after it, armed with rifles. They were never seen again.

  The Griffin was known to have several nests in the area, all of them high up above the snowline. Anyone with any sense shunned the locations of these nests. They were places of ill omen.

  On a particular day in March, however, a goatherd from a village near the Burzil Pass, in the Pakistani Northern Areas, was searching for a kid which had gone astray from the flock. He had a feeling that the quest would be fruitless. The Griffin had been sighted not far from that spot only yesterday, and the kid was doubtless even now being digested in the beast's stomach. The goatherd went looking anyway, because he was young and dutiful and it was his father's flock and he wanted to be able to tell the old man, who was sick at home with a fever, that he had at least tried to find the lost animal.

  And wonder of wonders, he did. The bleating baby goat came trotting into view along a narrow, stony path that led up to a rocky overhang where the Griffin liked to roost when it was in the vicinity. The kid was covered in blood and seemed distressed, but a quick examination showed that it was unhurt. The goatherd thanked God for this small blessing. Curiosity then impelled him to venture a short way further up the path. If the blood was not the kid's own, where could it have possibly come from?

  The goatherd, whose name was Asif Abbasi, got to within 500 metres of the overhang. He was trembling, praying to Allah the Compassionate, Allah the Merciful, with every breath. He unslung the telescopic rifle gunsight that hung around his neck on a piece of string. It had been a gift from his uncle in Karachi, a spice merchant who also ran a lucrative sideline in military-surplus goods. The cash-strapped Pakistani army was unburdening itself of as much equipment as it could spare, in order to make ends meet and keep going. Asif put the gunsight to his eye and zeroed in on the Griffin's nest. The monster was certainly there, but it was not moving. It lay on its side, and Asif knew with sudden, startling certainty that it was dead. He crept a little closer and focused the gunsight again on the monster. The Griffin's wings were spread out flat on the ground. There was a huge hole in its tawny-furred belly. Spilled blue and purple entrails steamed in the high-altitude air.

  Asif raced home, breathless, to spread the news. No one in his village believed him at first. Asif had a reputation as something of a fantasist. So adamant was he that he wasn't making things up, however, that at last a deputation of headmen went out to check on his story. They returned grim-faced.

  The village went into panic. The Griffin was slain, and none of them had done it but the Olympians would nevertheless assume they were to blame. Vengeance would be swift and terrible. The villagers resolved to keep the monster's death a secret.

  But the truth would leak out eventually. Truth always did.

  Meanwhile the Blue Eros channel was broadcasting a movie about a horny teenager who repeatedly had sex with his middle-aged but still very beddable mother. It was called Oedipussy.

  23. THE SPHINX

  Fundamentalist terrorist factions in the Middle East had been having a frustrating time of it lately. Every way they turned, their plans were being curtailed and derailed. No longer were they able to recruit fresh young converts at the mosques and madrasas, for fear of the Olympians finding out. Hardline preachers could not publicly condemn Western imperialism, call for jihad, or instigate a fatwa, for much the same reason. The dream of obtaining a nuclear warhead from some rogue state and detonating it on Israeli soil or mainland America was now further than ever from being realised. Even simple suicide bombings had become trickier to organise and pull off successfully. The Olympians invariably seemed to know when one was imminent and would arrive and neutralise the would-be martyr before he'd had a chance to press the trigger. Hermes could move faster than thought, and the suicide bomber, rather than sending himself to paradise and everyone around him to hell in a single fiery burst, would instead wind up lying in the dirt, watching blood pump from the severed stump of his arm while his hand rested a couple of metres away, still clutching a disconnected detonator. Death would come to him eventually, but the beat of its black wings was slow and heavy with failure, and the seventy-two virgins waiting patiently to greet him in the afterlife would just have to bestow the flowers of their womanhood on some other holy warrior who'd made a better job of his self-immolation.

  The terrorists had been driven underground, deep underground, and were fissured, split into tiny discrete cells that had scant contact with one another, since all phone and email communication was now in effect bugged. Argus had wiretapped the planet. Still the terrorists persisted with their plans as best they could. The hope of establishing a worldwide caliphate was not abandoned. One day the one true religion would rule all, and any unbelievers would be put to the sword. The infidel Pantheon might have the advantage for now, but this state of affairs would not last indefinitely.

  For the past month terror cells in Syria had been suffering particularly harsh harassment, not directly at the hands of the Olympians themselves but courtesy of one of their monsters, the Sphinx. The creature was an abomination, a fusion of lion, bird and woman that was unclean to behold, not least because it went around flagrantly displaying its naked female torso and its uncovered female head - an offence to the eyes of the Almighty in so many ways.

  The Sphinx haunted crossroads and narrow passes where men walked, and anyone it waylaid, it posed questions to. Its mythical forebear was famous for setting riddles and killing those who answered them incorrectly. This Sphinx, however, merely requested information, in a strange, etiolated yet hideously compelling voice. It asked for the whereabouts of terrorists. It asked if you knew of anyone who was plotting, or who knew someone who was plotting, any kind of religiously motivated attack or atrocity.

  And always, when you replied, you told it the truth. You found yourself forced to. It was impossible not to comply with the Sphinx's interrogation. Something in its tone seemed to wheedle facts out of you, however desperately you tried to keep them buried. Many said the Sphinx's voice reminded them of their mother's - was in fact a perfe
ct simulacrum of their mother's - and who could lie to their mother? Its face, too, had something universally maternal about it, making your recall something you'd forgotten, how beautiful your mother had looked when, as an infant, you lay gazing up at her while she cradled you in her arms or tucked you up in bed. Never mind the lion body or the pair of immense wings that wafted softly in the air as the Sphinx spoke. Never mind the flawless, globular breasts. It was the face and the voice that captivated you and that wormed secrets out of you far more efficient and effectively than any truth serum or torture, and afterwards left you feeling weirdly better about yourself, as if a great weight had been lifted from your shoulders. Unless you happened to be a fundamentalist terrorist, in which case you would confess as much to the Sphinx and it would, having gleaned all further useful data out of you, lift a great weight from your shoulders in another way, by lopping off your head with a single savage swipe of its forepaw.

  The Sphinx either relayed any useful titbits it garnered to the Olympians, and they would act appropriately, or else, if the mood took it, it would respond of its own accord. If, say, it had just learned the location of a terrorist hideout, it would fly there and slaughter everyone it found. It seldom encountered resistance. With a few well-chosen words the Sphinx calmed and entranced its opponents, before proceeding to annihilate them at its leisure.

  Then one day, abruptly, the Sphinx was gone. Syria - all Syria, not just its extremists - breathed a sigh of relief. The general consensus was that the monster had completed its tour of duty in the region and been recalled to Olympus, although this was more hope than belief. Rooting out terrorism was a neverending task, like rooting out weeds in a garden.

  Few made the connection between the Sphinx's sudden departure and the discovery of a heap of mashed, mutilated animal body-parts not far from the highway running between An-Nabk and Damascus. The remains were stumbled upon by a group of schoolchildren, who assumed this gory, flyblown abattoir scene was what was left after jackals had brought down a couple of camels. A vet summoned by police concurred. He made a witness statement to that effect. Camels. Definitely. Without a shadow of a doubt.

  The vet said this because he was frightened to say what he really thought. The consequences would be too dire. He saw to it that the "camels" were buried at the site, and told no one, not even his wife, that there had been bird feathers amid the mammalian mess, along with portions of anatomy that looked, to his untrained eye, human.

  Among the adult entertainments on offer from Blue Eros on the day of the Sphinx's disappearance was a retelling of the affair between Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, peregrine survivor of the sack of Troy. The original elegiac narrative of passionate but destiny-doomed love had been spiced up - and perhaps, who knows, improved - by the inclusion of sex toys and sodomy. The film's title? Dildo And Anus.

  24. THE CHIMERA

  From time to time Russia still glowered at her neighbours, those pilot-fish states that had formerly swum alongside the great Soviet shark but now insisted on going their own separate ways. Russia seemed to yearn for their company, missing them, missing the old days. She felt naked without them, stripped of the veil of respectability these coerced allies had given to her plans for expansion and eventual world domination. She wanted them back, though knowing there wasn't a hope in hell of getting what she wanted.

  The Chimera stalked Russia's western frontier, zigzagging along the overlap between her and eastern Europe, through Baltic buffer nations such as Latvia, Belarus and the Ukraine. It was, by some degree, the bizarrest of all the Olympian monsters, being composed of the fore part of a lion, the middle part of a goat, and the hind part of a large snake. How these three disparate portions coexisted was mystery and miracle. That the Chimera could walk at all, given the contrast between its powerful leonine forelegs and its spindly caprine rearlegs, was amazing in itself. Yet it moved with a surprising supple grace, its thick scaly tail lending support and stability. It was, in fact, a fearsome hunter, combining the lion's stalking skills with the goat's surefootedness, all aided and abetted by an inbuilt serpentine cunning. Somebody had once filmed a cameraphone clip of the Chimera pouncing on and killing a Shetland pony - a multimillion-view hit when uploaded onto YouTube. The little horse could be seen running as fast as its stumpy legs could carry it, but it never stood a chance.

  Although the Chimera's stamping grounds ranged far and wide, it frequently returned to the same place, the rural south-east corner of Estonia, not far from Lake Peipsi, the fourth largest freshwater lake on the continent. There was a reason for this, albeit one not widely known. A local dairy-farming family, the Lepiks, had taken to feeding it. Some years back the patriarch of the family, Joosep, had lost several head of cattle to the monster, good livestock getting massacred day after day for a week. Fed up of this, and noting that the Chimera never ate more than a quarter of the meat from each of its kills, Joosep had reasoned that it didn't need much to fill its belly, which was, after all, goat-sized. Why not, then, donate a segment of meat at a time, to prevent entire cows being superfluously destroyed?

  On a tree stump, the remnants of a once-towering pine, Joosep had laid out a haunch of beef for the Chimera. The monster had taken it and devoured it, bones and all, and the next night had returned for more.

  So a pattern had begun. Whenever the Chimera paid a visit, the Lepiks would lay out meat for it every evening until at last it went away again. This had become something of a ritual, a means of propitiating the beast and sparing the family and the herd from its depredations. A single cow, in managed portions, could last ten days. That meant nine other cows saved, a good trade-off. Of course, had Joosep Lepik not started feeding the Chimera in the first place, the monster might not have kept coming back. But it was too late to remedy that now. Besides, Joosep had a developed a strange affection for the Chimera, a grudging admiration. He liked to watch from the safety of a nearby timber barn as the monster approached the tree stump and retrieved the offering set out there. It was a thrill, of course, to observe this extraordinary misfit creature in the flesh, at such close range.

  But there was more to it than that. While a young man, barely in his twenties, Joosep had had an accident with a tractor, a Soviet-built Kharkov T-25, a bloody-minded brute of a machine that never seemed to work and only ever caused trouble on the rare occasions it did work. He'd climbed out of the tractor cab to adjust the plough at the rear, leaving the engine idling in neutral. The gear lever had slipped and the tractor had lurched into reverse before stalling. It hadn't travelled far, just a couple of metres, or particularly fast, but it had moved with enough speed and force for the plough to knock Joosep down and shear his left leg off at the thigh. Though now fitted with a false leg, Joosep walked with barely a limp. He prided himself on the fact that nobody could tell from appearances that he was minus a limb. And so he felt a kinship with the Chimera, which looked as if it should be crippled even though it was not. The monster had become a magical touchstone for him. On some basic level he identified with it. Getting run over by that tractor had nearly killed him. He shouldn't be alive, let alone ambulatory. The same applied to the Chimera.

  One night in late March, Joosep was in his usual spot in the barn, up in the hayloft, peeping out through a knothole in a wall plank at the tree stump some forty paces away. A fresh, juicy rack of ribs rested there, slowly contributing to the patina of bloodstains that coated the stump's upper surface. The moon was high and full. It was a bright, not too cold night. The hour was almost ten. The Chimera should have been here by now. Shortly after sunset was its customary time for turning up for its free dinner. Where had it got to?

  Joosep wondered, with a pang, if the Chimera had moved on again, early. Each of its visits lasted a fortnight or so. So far, this time, it had been here for only a handful of days. Well, it was a free agent. It came and went as it pleased. If it had left the area, it would be back again soon enough.

  Joosep was thinking about wending his way back to the farmhouse when
he glimpsed a flash of light in the hills that overlooked the Lepik family property. Further flashes followed, up there in the woods, accompanied by a series of faint but distinct pops that could only be gunfire. Joosep couldn't help himself. He left the barn, heading out for a closer look.

  He was less than a kilometre from the woods when he saw the Chimera suddenly come bounding out into the open. It hurtled across a pasture, and it looked to Joosep - although he found this hard to believe - that the monster was in a state of alarm. It was fleeing for its life. But from what?

  Phantoms.

  That was what Joosep thought as he saw a quartet of figures emerge from among the trees, giving chase to the Chimera. They seemed to be people but he couldn't be sure because, somehow, he could barely make them out. Though his eyesight was good and the moonlight strong, their outlines seemed to ripple and waver, now there, now not. He saw them by the shadows they cast more than anything. And they were moving so fast, too fast, surely, to be people. Nothing human could run at such speeds. Hermes could, but then was he human?

  The four flitting figures caught up with the Chimera, and within seconds the monster was being subjected to sustained bursts of gunfire that pinned it to the ground and made its body twitch and stutter all over. The coup de grâce was delivered by something which Joosep presumed was a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. All at once there was an almighty, dazzling explosion that seemed to light up the entire landscape, and as the echoes of its roar caromed away through the hills and the glowing afterimage faded from Joosep's vision, he perceived that the Chimera was no more. Where the monster had been crouching there was now a smoking crater in the earth, dotted with flickers of flame. Never again would this fantastic beast lope down to the Lepik homestead to seize its gladly given sacrifice off the tree-stump altar.

  The four phantoms set off back up the hillside, melting into the woods, and Joosep watched them go. He couldn't imagine who - what - these people were. They might not even be people. In a world where the Ancient Greek Pantheon walked, real and alive, anything was possible. What he did grasp was that something major was afoot. Death had been brought to an Olympian monster. That was not some casual, random act. That was the deliberate breaking of a taboo, and tantamount to a declaration of war.