Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  Someone stole the laptop belonging to the Norwegian Askeladden, or “Ash Lad,” and downloaded child pornography onto it. The young man had no alternative but to destroy the computer and pray that no one in authority traced the download to his IP address.

  The Joke Shop Jamboree attendees became unnerved by the change in atmosphere. Several of them closed down their trade stands, gathered up their belongings, and headed home. They weren’t quite sure why they did this, but one man within my earshot said, “Doesn’t feel right any more. I’ve stopped having a good time.” Another seemed to think the living-theatre actors – for that was what everyone assumed we were, by now – were taking things too far. “Nothing against performance art,” he said, “but, I don’t know, these dudes... Feels like they’ve got a mean streak in ’em.”

  I bided my time that day, watching as the others busily cat-and-moused. Why sully my hands? I noticed Gad doing much the same, and Set, and Loki. The second-stringers could scratch and scrabble amongst themselves all they liked. We top guns were holding back, keeping our powder dry. Let them do the dirty work for us, after which we could pick off the survivors, if there were any.

  As evening fell, attention coalesced around a four-way poker game between Gwydion, Huehuecoyotl, Eshu and Hermes. I had long since stopped bothering to learn the avatars’ real names. It was hardly worth the effort, and superfluous to my needs. Hermes I think was called Apostolis, but the rest could have been Larry, Curly and Moe for all I cared. I had no interest in them as people, only as rivals, obstacles to be got out of the way.

  Now, poker is all about bluff and nerve, everyone knows that. So really it’s the perfect game for tricksters. Throw in the fact that all four participants were cheating madly, and each was aware that his opponents were cheating madly, and the stage was set for some of the most devious, unsporting card play ever.

  Moreover, the stakes weren’t money, or gambling chips, or even matchsticks. These four were playing for punishments. Whoever lost a hand had to accept a punch from all three others. There was no limit to how hard the blows could be, nor where they could land, and they were to be taken without flinching or shying away, otherwise the recipient was disqualified.

  So it was a test of physical endurance as well as a battle of chance and skill. The players sat with increasing numbers of bruises, blood dripping from facial injuries, eyes swelling shut, lips puffing up, loosened teeth, through round after gruelling round. Fresh decks of cards had to be cracked open to replace ones that were too blood-smeared to be usable. The baize on the table became more and more liberally dotted with dark brown stains.

  The rest of us looked on from the sidelines. It was a grim, but fascinating spectacle. We were in a private room, well away from the main body of the hotel, so the sound of fists smacking flesh, the cries of pain, even the occasional involuntary massed gasp from the audience wouldn’t draw any unwelcome attention.

  After an hour, Gwydion and Eshu were fighting to stay conscious. Gwydion’s co-ordination was off, so an attempt to introduce a queen of diamonds from up his sleeve into his hand was clumsy and he was spotted doing it. “Saw that!” exclaimed Huehuecoyotl, and because he had been caught in the act, Gwydion’s hand was forfeit, with the consequence that it was again his turn to get hit.

  Eshu and Hermes both delivered solid punches to his midriff, but it was a devastating roundhouse from the Peruvian that finally put paid to the Welshman’s involvement in the contest. Gwydion crumpled to the floor, and no amount of face-patting or limb-shaking could revive him. He was out cold and out of contention.

  The remaining three resumed play. The level of card-sharping and sleight of hand in the game was phenomenal. Nothing else could account for the extraordinary number of flushes, full houses and four-of-a-kinds that cropped up, well above the statistical average. Sometimes it appeared there must be six kings in any given deck and even more aces. In any reputable gaming joint, this lot would have been turfed out on their ears long ago.

  Eshu was next to go. One moment he was sitting there, cards fanned, head bobbing a little but otherwise essentially steady. Next moment, he was slumped face first on the table, burbling incoherently into the baize. Set and the Monkey King carried him off to a corner.

  Which left only Hermes and Huehuecoyotl. Greek and Peruvian glared at each other, steely-eyed. The knuckles of their punching hands were red raw. Hermes’s nose appeared to be broken. A gash in Huehuecoyotl’s brow bled profusely.

  Hermes lost, then Huehuecoyotl, then Hermes again.

  The room had the metallic, meaty reek of a butcher’s shop.

  Trembling, Hermes laid down his next hand. A flush, all clubs, but not high. He knew it was no good.

  Silently, triumphantly, Huehuecoyotl trumped it with four tens.

  Nobody thought Hermes would be able to carry on after the swingeing chop to the neck that Huehuecoyotl gave him. But the young Greek struggled to his feet, wheezingly retook his seat, and began shuffling the cards once more. He dealt, and with the swaying slowness of punchdrunk boxers, the two of them examined their hands, discarded a couple of cards, and drew substitutes from the pool. Each then gazed across the table to see what move his opponent would make.

  “Call it,” said Hermes.

  “You call it,” Huehuecoyotl replied.

  If I’d been a betting man I would have laid a wager on the Peruvian to win outright. He seemed sturdier than the Greek, in body and in temperament. He looked like he could withstand hardship far longer and with greater equanimity than the slightly built youngster facing him.

  But I was wrong. Hermes laid out a royal flush, to which Huehuecoyotl was able to respond with a mere full house, aces over nines.

  Hermes rose and crossed over to dish out the penalty.

  Huehuecoyotl, however, held up his palms in surrender. “Enough. No more.” His face was half masked in his own blood. “I give in. You have won.”

  He stood up and managed three tottering steps towards the door before his legs collapsed under him.

  Hermes was rewarded with a round of applause from the avatar onlookers.

  “So this is us now,” said Gad, looking round the room. “All that’s left. We’re down to the final eight.”

  Besides him, Hermes and myself, we had Loki/Solveig, Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Crow and Set.

  Somehow it felt inevitable. We were the eight best-known names, the ones who were the most celebrated, the ones whose stories were still most often told. Who else was likely to have made it this far?

  We all shared a moment in which we basked in our own durability and popularity. Anansi, for once, was quiet within me, almost as if he wasn’t there, and yet conversely I had never felt closer to him, never felt more as though he and I were made for each other. He was a part of me and I was a part of him. Anansi and Dion Yeboah, intimately joined, inseparable, like Siamese twins.

  Which raised a question in my mind.

  LATER, IN MY room, I voiced it.

  “What happens when this is over?”

  What do you mean what happens?

  “When the contest’s done, what do you gods do? Do you just... go?”

  Yes, we go.

  “You leave us?”

  Why stay? What would be the point? We have places to be, people to see, tales to be a part of.

  “No, I understand that. It’s just... After all this, all we’ve done, it seems a pity.”

  I thought you’d be pleased to see the back of me. Your life can be yours again. You didn’t really want to be in this contest, did you?

  “Not at first.”

  So what’s the problem? When it’s over, we’re over. You go your way, I go mine.

  I couldn’t find a way of telling him, although I had a strong suspicion he knew anyway, that thanks to him I was evolving into something that I could never have imagined I could be. Anansi had brought an element of anarchy to my world, a sense that rules truly were made to be broken, not just bent. I feared that wi
thout him my horizons would shrink back. I would always be good at what I do, but I would never again have the feeling that I had the potential to be great.

  I could tell you it’ll be like a boy-and-his-pet Hollywood movie, Dion, said Anansi. You know, that schmaltzy “I’ll always be in your heart” bullshit. But I won’t always be in your heart. Better get used to the idea.

  I STEPPED OUTSIDE onto the swimming pool area for some air. The night was oppressively hot and muggy, but I could feel a breeze stirring. The weather was changing. Clouds had amassed to the west, blotting out the stars. Lightning flickered in their bellies.

  Storm coming, said Anansi, as if I couldn’t already tell.

  “Storm coming,” said a voice nearby. It was Susanoo-no-Mikoto. He edged up to me, and for a time we stood side by side near the rim of the empty pool, a careful, respectful distance apart. We watched the silent jags of lightning over the peaks of the Sierra Nevada and listened to the chirrup of the cicadas, whose song sounded more reticent than normal, fitful and subdued.

  “Cigarette?” The Japanese man held out a pack of Lucky Strikes.

  I shook my head.

  He lit up. “Storms are good,” he said, exhaling smoke.

  “You would say that.”

  “Because Susanoo-no-Mikoto is a storm god? Yes. So many of the tricksters are. Storms bring chaos. Chaos is desirable.”

  “They also bring disaster.”

  “Disaster. Calamity. Opportunity. Renewal.” He shrugged. “All the same thing. The other gods threw Susanoo out of heaven. That you could call a disaster.”

  “He squabbled with his sister over which of them was more powerful. He stole her fertility beads and fashioned new gods out of them, to prove his point. Then he threw a flayed pony through the roof of her house. Getting thrown out of heaven wasn’t some kind of misfortune, it was no more than he deserved.”

  Susanoo-no-Mikoto’s avatar bowed, as though he himself had been personally responsible for the god’s actions. “It was not a desirable outcome. Yet – and this is my argument – Susanoo turned a bad situation around. On earth, he met an elderly couple who begged him to slay an eight-headed, eight-tailed monster that had eaten seven of their eight daughters. He did, and one of its tails became the famous sword Grass Mower, which he gave to Amaterasu, his sister, as a peace offering. He also gained a wife into the bargain, the eighth, uneaten daughter, who fell in love with him for his bravery. So you see, out of downfall and misery, benefits may still come.”

  “Point made.” I glanced towards the clouds. They were anvil-shaped thunderheads, slowly prowling towards Sweetwater, like a fleet of gigantic battleships closing in. “If nothing else, we should be in for a noisy night, and who knows what will go on under cover of that.”

  I looked back at the Japanese man, but he was gone. He had slipped away indoors, leaving just a puff of cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

  AN HOUR LATER, the storm was on top of us. The lightning now had thunder to accompany it, some of the loudest, most jolting bursts of sound I’ve ever heard. Each one was like a stick of dynamite going off directly overhead. Ear-splitting. You couldn’t help but duck and recoil.

  Then came rain, sheeting torrents of it. The rain pummelled the hotel with such force, it seemed a wonder the building could withstand it. And that was only the beginning. The downpour grew more and more intense, until I had serious doubts as to whether there would actually be a Friendly Inn in the morning. Walls, floor, ceiling, everything was vibrating and shaking. This was Mother Nature as we never see her in our temperate British Isles, primordial and unfettered.

  At around 10PM the electricity went out, perhaps not surprisingly. It wasn’t just the hotel that was affected. A glance out of the window showed me that all of Sweetwater had gone dark. Along the main street, not a single lightbulb shone. The only illumination came from the intermittent lightning flashes, which revealed glimpses of buildings and parked cars through shimmering cataracts of rain.

  This could not have been better for Anansi and me. In readiness, I had already synched up Solveig’s infrared camera to my iPhone. I panned the camera round my room, and the phone’s screen registered a pin-sharp green image, everything as clear as day. I had an edge over my competition. I could see in the dark.

  SUN WUKONG WAS my target. Earlier in the day I had ascertained which room he was in by asking Gladys at reception for a quick glance at the register. She had been reluctant to comply at first, but a crisp fifty-dollar bill soon persuaded her to set professional discretion aside. She was only human.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’m going to turn my back for a second, just to check for something in these here key cubbyholes behind me. So if you should happen to lean over the desk and take a gander at the computer screen while I’m doing that, well, tain’t my fault, is it now?”

  There was only one Chinese name among those listed on the rather ancient black-and-white monitor: Xhu Jiang. Room 134.

  One other piece of preparation I’d made was buying a couple of dozen peaches from Sweetwater’s principal – and indeed only – grocery store.

  If there’s one thing anyone knows about the Monkey King, it’s that he loves peaches. He even went so far as to steal some from heaven, although those particular fruits happened to be the peaches of immortality that grew in the garden of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West. For this act of effrontery, Sun Wukong earned the contempt of the other gods, much as Susanoo-no-Mikoto did for his crimes against his sister, and was exiled to earth for a time.

  It isn’t always easy being the trickster, the black sheep of the family, the rogue, as Anansi himself would be the first to admit. People don’t appreciate being robbed or conned, and summary and arbitrary justice often awaits the perpetrator.

  But who can fight one’s own true nature?

  I LAID THE peaches in a trail starting outside Xhu Jiang’s room and leading down the corridor. Then I rapped on the door and ran away as fast as I could, using the infrared camera image to guide me unerringly through the pitch blackness. The pounding of the rain muffled my footfalls.

  Lurking at the far end of the corridor, I saw the simian-faced Xhu emerge from his room. He peered quizzically in either direction.

  The peaches, the peaches, Anansi urged. Smell the peaches.

  The peaches were superbly ripe. Their perfume-like aroma had filled my room all afternoon. Now I was hoping that Xhu, even though he was to all intents and purposes blind in the lightless, windowless corridor, would pay attention to his sense of smell. Sun Wukong would take over from the hapless Xhu Jiang and send him straight into my clutches.

  On my iPhone screen, the green figure in the doorway raised his head. He was sniffing. Scenting.

  Good, said Anansi. Good monkey. That’s it. Take the bait.

  Then he crouched down and started groping on the floor in front of him. His hand found a peach. He snatched it up, took a bite of its flesh and let out a soft hoot of delight.

  He sniffed again. More peaches, his nose was telling him.

  He tucked the first into a pocket in his pyjama bottoms and ventured along the corridor, not quite on all fours but almost. He soon located the next peach, and the next. He was excited, his head questing this way and that. He’d thrown caution to the wind. The only thought that occupied his brain was all the delectable fruit that someone appeared to have carelessly left lying around. After his pockets were full, he folded up the front of his pyjama top to make a pouch and stowed further peaches in there.

  As he advanced towards the junction with the next corridor, I retreated down that same corridor, depositing more peaches as I went. Another peach was placed on the threshold of a janitor’s closet whose door I had managed to pry open beforehand. A final peach was positioned inside the closet, far enough in that Xhu would have no choice but to enter if he wanted to get it.

  Xhu rounded the corner, picking his way through the dark with painstaking slowness. I thought he was going to miss the next pea
ch. His hand kept feeling around on the floor but not quite touching it. If he believed the trail had run out, he would no doubt return to his room quite satisfied with the haul of fruit he already had, and my plan would have failed.

  Eventually, however, his fingers made contact with the peach. He added it to the ones in the pouch and went forwards. He was walking on his haunches, balancing himself on the knuckles of his free hand, more monkey than man at this moment. Soon he was at the janitor’s closet, facing its wide-open doorway, although he himself could not know that. I was standing mere feet away, keeping as still as I could, breathing as shallowly as I could. My iPhone showed Xhu in close-up, squatting there with one arm across his chest to support his makeshift pouch and its bulge of sweet-tasting cargo. Did he sense my proximity? Had it at last dawned on him that he might be heading into a trap? He was hesitating. I could see greed and suspicion vying with each other in his face.

  He knows there’s one more peach, said Anansi. It’s right in front of him.

  Could Xhu resist the temptation? More to the point, could Sun Wukong?

  The answer was no. Xhu loped across the threshold, and that was my cue to move.

  Quickly! yelled Anansi. You’ve got to hit him fast and hard – harder than you might think. Now! While he’s still bent over.

  I darted in behind him and booted him in the backside with all the force I could muster. Xhu went barrelling headlong into the closet, colliding with the shelves at the rear. An avalanche of cleaning products – cloths, sponges, cans of spray polish, bottles of bleach – tumbled down on top of him. Peaches fell from his pyjama top and rolled everywhere.