Tom Holt

by 4 Ye Gods!

  'I'm sorry,' said Jason, 'but shouldn't there be roads?'

  The girls frowned and looked at each other. 'You what?' they said.

  'A crossroads,' Jason explained. 'One road leading straight, narrow and uphill, towards a distant prospect of the battlements of the Shining City; the other winding broad and downhill, leading to, you know, thing.'

  The girls looked at him.

  'Well,' said Virtue, 'yes, now you come to mention it, strictly speaking. But since you seem to know all that already, do you think we could possibly...'

  'Ah,' said Jason. 'Yes, of course. Well...'

  Thirty seconds passed. Luxury looked at her watch. Considering where it was pinned, this was no mean achievement.

  'I'm sorry; said Jason, 'and I hate to be difficult, but I'm going to have to insist on the roads.'

  There was a deep sigh. 'Please yourself, then,' said Luxury. 'Look, will you just hold on a minute while I turn down the gas? Vir, do the roads for me, there's a love.'

  Virtue nodded.

  Jason stared. There, in front of him, lay two roads, just as he'd imagined them. Except that the road of Luxury was paved with violets, not primroses, and the road of Virtue had a big sign saying NO SERVICES FOR 200 MILES beside the verge.

  'Will that do?' said Virtue.

  'Well...' Jason replied. This should be easy, of course, but...'

  Just then Luxury came back, removing a pinny with The World's Best Cook on it. 'Got it working, Vir?' she asked.

  'Just about; Virtue replied. 'Better get someone in to look at it tomorrow though, otherwise we won't...'

  The words dried on her lips. From out of the blue a large yellow placard had appeared and plonked itself down at a point just before the two roads diverged. On it was traced, in letters of synthesized fire, the word

  DIVERSION

  and a big white arrow pointing due west.

  'Ah,' said Jason happily, and followed the arrow.

  'Clever,' said Vulcan with grudging admiration.

  'Lermontov's gambit on a double fluke score. Neat.'

  Apollo gave him a worried look, such as William Tell might have given Isaac Newton. 'Actually...'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He had been walking along the Diversion for about twenty minutes, whistling tunelessly and eating an apple he'd found in the pocket of his battledress, when Jason met the Erymanthian Hydra.

  Since we took time out to describe Virtue and Luxury, let us also paint a verbal picture of the Erymanthian Hydra. You'll like this.*

  Picture to yourself a bull, just an ordinary bull. Now paint it gold. Now remove the head -- this is one we prepared before the programme -- and add the head of a lion. Using a pair of long tweezers, tease out the hairs of the lion's mane and replace them with six-foot-long hissing vipers. If you have any vipers left over, nip out the bull's tail and pop them in there. Now remove the feet (do not discard; these can be used to make a nourishing stock) and substitute for them the talons of a gryphon. If you have no gryphon, a hippocamp will do just as well. Garnish with the wings of a dragon. Run away, terribly fast.

  *So to speak. If you do find yourself enjoying what follows, we recommend that you seek professional help.

  The Erymanthian Hydra is a confounded nuisance. It eats people. And cars. And railway shunting yards. It makes disconcerting howling noises in the middle of the night and has been known to tear open dustbin bags with its chalcedony talons.

  As it saw Jason approaching, the Erymanthian Hydra sniggered softly, lifted up its ghastly head, ran a comb through its vipers, and sprang out from behind its rock.

  'Hello,' it said. 'I'm the Erymanthian ouch!'

  Jason sheathed his sword, lifted the monster's severed head by its still-hissing locks, and looked around for a rubbish-bin.

  Demeter, ex-Goddess of the Earth, sat down on the cushion recently vacated by Vulcan, blew her nose, and looked at the Earth.

  'How's he doing?' she asked.

  Apollo looked round, refused the offer of a freshly-baked upside-down cake and frowned.

  'It's hard to say; he replied, 'on account of, I don't know what he's supposed to be doing yet.'

  Demeter raised an exquisitely plucked eyebrow and reached for the score-card. 'Easy,' she said. 'Visit to Kingdom of Colchis,' she read out, 'passing through Caucasus mountains. Meets Witch (2), gives Judgment of Jason (6), slays Erymanthian Hydra (10)...'

  'Yes, yes, all right; said Apollo, 'but what's he do in the end?'

  'I'm getting to that,' replied Demeter, running her finger down the envelope. 'Thessalian Centaurs ... Recovers Golden Fleece (2,000; replay). Where's he got to now?'

  'That's just it,' Apollo said. 'You see, he's going the wrong way.'

  'You what?' Demeter looked up sharply.

  'He's going the wrong way; Apollo repeated. 'Look.'

  'He can't be.'

  'He is,' Apollo assured her. 'There, see for yourself.' The two gods focused their eyes and zoomed in on a rocky outcrop in the Caucasus. On a low crag stood a group of well-armed Thessalian Centaurs. Most of them had their arms folded. Some were tapping their hooves. Their leader had given up looking at his watch and was shaking it to see if it had stopped.

  'He's late?' Demeter guessed. The intellectual requirements for making corn grow are not stringent.

  'More than that,' Apollo replied. 'He's missed them out completely.'

  The two deities looked at each other.

  'Perhaps,' Demeter ventured, 'he's just chicken.' Apollo looked down at the spot on the hillside where the blood of the Erymanthian Hydra had just burnt a crater in the living rock. 'No,' he said, 'I don't think it can be that. It's more as if he's... well, going somewhere else.'

  Demeter raised both eyebrows this time. 'But that's impossible,' she said.

  'Well,' Apollo replied, 'it's very unprofessional.' Demeter scratched her nose thoughtfully and, from sheer force of habit, produced half a million bushels of barley from behind her ear. 'Never heard of such a thing,' she said. 'Next thing, he'll be having a mind of his own. Can't have that.'

  What, he can't?'

  'No, we can't.'

  'Oh, I see.'

  Apollo leaned forward and twiddled with a free-floating knob. The Earth seemed to grow larger.

  'So where exactly is he headed?' Demeter asked.

  'Good question,' Apollo replied. 'Now, let's see...'

  Apollo produced a pair of field glasses. 'We might know that,' he said, 'when we've worked out where he's going.'

  'Clever,' Demeter said, impressed. 'Whose turn is it, by the way?'

  Apollo looked up. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I'd completely forgotten about the Game. Let's see, now; my go's over, and so it's you and...'

  He fell silent, and his lips were pursed. 'I see,' he said. 'Or at least it's possible. I suppose.'

  "Who is it?'

  'Guess.'

  Demeter's forehead wrinkled like a thrice-ploughed field. 'You know I'm no good at guessing,' she said. 'You'll have to tell me.'

  Apollo said nothing, and handed her the Celestial Envelope.

  'Oh,' said Demeter. 'Oh gosh!'

  So what exactly was it, you are no doubt asking, that Prometheus stole from the gods and brought down to Earth, presumably not hidden in the hollow stalk of a piece of fennel?*

  It is a dark night on the slopes of Mount Olympus. The Thirteen Olympians are sitting round the flickering light of Apollo's tripod, on the rim of which a number of tiny three-dimensional figures made out of coloured light are scurrying about in some sort of frantic dance. From the interior of the tripod comes the faint sound of music. The gods are watching Life Wish III.

  *Otherwise it'd have got burnt.

  Jupiter leans back in his chair and pulls the ring on a can of nectar. Demeter emerges from the kitchen with a tray of stars in batter and advises her fellow gods to eat them while they're hot. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  Down below, however, on the surface of the Earth, things
are not quite so jolly. Far from it. In their dark caves, our earliest forefathers huddle goose-pimpled in the smelly skins of mammoths and nibble listlessly at drumsticks of raw mouse. There is silence, except for occasional choking noises or the elder of the tribe saying how thoroughly unpleasant all this is. Then more silence, eventually broken by another elder saying that it is true that this is unpleasant, but that being eaten by the sabre-toothed tiger is probably worse.

  Back to Olympus. The thirteenth Olympian quietly gets up from his place on the sofa, puts his slippers on and creeps away into the kitchen. From the vegetable rack he selects a suitable fennel stalk, lights a match and pops it in. He waits for a moment, until he is satisfied that the small glow of fire is thoroughly concealed. Then he tiptoes off the edge of the mountain and sprints away towards Earth.

  He stops outside a large cave and knocks on the rock. After a while, a man in an ill-fitting goatskin comes to the mouth of the cave and peers at the stranger.

  'Oh,' he says. 'It's you again, is it?'

  Prometheus peers anxiously at the sky. 'Yes,' he whispers. 'Look...'

  'Piss off; says the mortal and makes a gesture with his arm. What he is trying to do is slam the door in the Titan's face; since there is no door, however, he has to rely on mime.

  'Look...' Prometheus hisses urgently.

  'No,' says the mortal, 'you look. We've had enough of you, got it? After last time.'

  'Yeah,' snarls the mortal. 'Dunno how you've got the nerve to come back here after that.'

  Prometheus winces slightly. 'I told her,' he said. 'Don't open it, I said.'

  The mortal makes a contemptuous noise. 'You told her,' he repeated. 'Don't you know anything about women?'

  Prometheus shakes his head. 'I did warn her,' he repeated. 'Pandora, I said, just leave it alone and...'

  'And you expected her not to open it?' said the mortal.

  'Yes.'

  'When it had Open With Care, Free Gift Inside written on it?'

  'Well...' Prometheus flushed slightly. 'All right,' he conceded, 'so that was a bit of an error of judgment on my part. This time, though, I promise you, I'll make it up to you. Here.' He thrust the fennel-stalk into the mortal's hand. 'What d'you make of that, then?' he said eagerly.

  'Fennel salad,' said the mortal. 'Thanks a lot.'

  'No,' said Prometheus, 'just look inside it, will you?' The mortal peered inside, then reared back, clutching his eyebrows. 'Ouch!' he explained.

  'It's fire,' said Prometheus, proudly.

  'So that's what you call it,' growled the mortal, rubbing the tip of his nose. 'And you know what you can do with that, my fine friend.'

  'Wait a minute,' Prometheus said. He explained about fire.

  He explained that with fire, you could see in the dark ('I thought that was carrots,' the mortal interrupted). How you could cook food. How you could smelt metal. How you could boil water, killing the germs, producing steam that could turn a turbine. How you could...

  The mortal wasn't listening. He was looking across the darkened valley to where a neighbouring tribe were tentatively building the first log cabin, and grinning mischievously.

  'Right; said the mortal, 'thanks, much obliged, don't let me keep you.' He turned to go back in the cave.

  'Hold on,' said Prometheus, 'I haven't finished yet.' The mortal stiffened. 'Oh yes?' he said warily. With his left hand he groped for the heavy flint axe he kept behind the door for just such occasions.

  'Fire,' said Prometheus, 'is all very well in its way, but I've got something that's really going to change your lives.'

  'Change?' enquired the mortal. 'Or just shorten?'

  'Change; Prometheus assured him, 'out of all recognition. From being wretched creatures of a day, dragging out a pointless existence in semi-bestial squalor...'

  'Here,' said the mortal's wife from inside the cave, 'I heard that.'

  'Instead,' Prometheus said urgently, 'you will be the sons and daughters of light, peers of the blessed gods, basking in the glow of the Golden Age of the world. Promise,' he added.

  'Oh yes?' said the mortal, his fingers tightening on the handle of his axe. 'That good, is it?'

  'Yes,' Prometheus replied. 'Listen to this.'

  He cleared his throat, drew himself up to his full height and said, 'When is a door not a door?'

  The mortal frowned, puzzled. 'What's a door?' he asked. Prometheus asked himself to give him strength. 'No; he said, 'listen. When is a door not a door?'

  The mortal shook his head. 'Dunno,' he replied. 'Maybe if I knew what a door was in the...'

  'When,' Prometheus howled desperately, 'it's ajar!'

  The mortal was about to wield the axe when something strange, something that had never happened before, started to take place inside him. It was, he remembered later, a bit like a cough, except it seemed to start in the pit of the stomach, float up into your brain, slosh around for a moment and then come out of your mouth.

  For the first time in the history of the human race, a mortal laughed.

  Prometheus sagged exhausted against the wall of the cave while the mortal staggered about, his sides heaving with laughter. The rest of the tribe came sprinting up and stood staring at him in disbelief.

  'That's a good one, that is,' said the mortal, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. 'When it's a jar; he repeated, and dissolved into a fresh torrent of hysterical laughter.

  'Well; said Prometheus, 'it's not that good. There's this other one about a chicken...'

  The mortal ignored him and turned to the rest of the tribe. 'Here,' he spluttered, 'you lot, listen to this. When is a door not a door?'

  The tribe looked at each other. 'What's a ...?' one of them started to say.

  'When it's a JAR!' roared the mortal, and quickly stuffed. his hand in his mouth. There was a deadly silence.

  'You've been chewing those funny leaves again,' said the mortal's wife at last. 'I told you, didn't I, they give you those turns ...' Then, simultaneously, something clicked in the tribal consciousness. They all started to laugh. No studio audience ever found anything quite so funny.

  'Well,' said Prometheus, backing away, 'I can see you've all got the hang of that quite nicely, so I'd better be getting back. Don't bother to see me out...' And that, of course, is why Prometheus was stripped of his divinity, hounded off Olympus, chained to a rock and condemned to everlasting punishment by his fellow, gods, for the one crime that they could never forgive. But by then it was too late; the harm had been done. Even the Great Flood was powerless to eradicate the effects of Prometheus's treachery from the Earth; for when the waters finally rolled back, a small pun was found clinging to the side of Mount Ararat, and eventually became the ancestor of all the Polish jokes in the history of the world. At last, after aeons of enslavement and repression, Mankind had found a weapon with which to fight the gods. A mere thousand or so years later, in fact, the gods gave the whole thing up as a bad job, as we have already heard, and retreated to the sun; where the few indigenous life-forms, if asked what's black and white and red all over, will simply look at you and ask if you're feeling all right.

  Actually, as you will have guessed, this triumph of Man over the gods was inevitable, ever since the Third Primordial, Thing, had made up his mind to get his own back on his uppity nephews. You will have worked out, without any assistance from the narrative staff, exactly what Thing was the God of and what it was that he inserted into each of the Words when Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto weren't looking.

  What you may not have realised, however, is that deep down inside them, the gods still haven't given up the fight. Oh no. Not quite. Not yet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jason scrambled up the last few feet, regained his balance, and looked about him.

  He wasn't certain whether or not he was enjoying this.

  Up to a point, he said to himself, yes, fine. The belting large predators, charging machine-guns, beheading fabulous monsters, OK. The thinking, no. Nature had, after all, d
esigned him as a superb natural fighting machine equipping him with shoulders like boulders, arms like tree-trunks, sinews like ships' cables and thews (whatever they might be) of a similar high quality. He could lift articulated lorries, leap over crevasses, climb skyscrapers and shoot the eyebrows off a gnat at five hundred yards with anything from an assault rifle to a bow and arrow improvised from a TV aerial and a rubber band.

  These accomplishments tended to give him a rather straightforward, positive view of life; any lip off you, he said to the world, and you'd better watch out. Or rather he didn't. You'd expect him to, of course; his father (the shiny one with the thunderbolts, not the one who grew dahlias) undoubtedly did. He didn't. He tended to see the world as a rather endearing mistake that someone would be bound to put right sooner or later. It fascinated him. He rather liked it. The urge to kick seven kinds of shit out of it on the rare occasions when it offered him any hesitant resistance didn't come easily to him.

  He liked flowers, too.

  Large predators, machine-guns and fabulous monsters had better look out when he was anywhere in the neighbourhood because he didn't hold with them; that was simple enough. They were big enough to look after themselves, they annoyed people and they had it coming. And insofar as Heroism consisted of putting that sort of thing in its place, he was definitely in favour of it, particularly as against, say, accountancy, as a vocation.

  The problems were rather more subtle, but Jason wasn't one of those Heroes who define subtlety as not walking off the edges of high buildings. What worried him most of all was the feeling that somehow or other he wasn't in control. Not that he had any particular wish to control anything that wasn't organically attached to him; if someone were to offer him a throne, he would probably decline on the grounds that they didn't agree with him. But he did feel that it would be rather nice to be in control of his own body, actions and -- above all -- thoughts. And he had this nasty feeling that he wasn't.