Tom Holt

by 4 Ye Gods!

  'Where?' said Jason quickly.

  'Hidden,' replied the giant. 'Now, if you will do me a little favour, I'm sure the eagle will be happy to...'

  'Yes; said Jason. 'Hurry up, will you, I'm starving.' The giant raised his head petulantly. 'Not so fast, young man,' he said. 'First, you will have to listen to a certain amount of tedious explanation.'

  'All right; Jason said, 'but make it quick, because...'

  'In the beginning,' said the giant slowly, 'was the Word...'

  'What do you mean,' said Diana angrily, 'you've lost him?'

  'Just that,' Apollo replied. 'One minute he was there, standing about looking hungry, the next minute he was gone.'

  Diana made an exasperated noise and turned to Demeter.

  'Dee,' she said, 'you tell me. It's no use trying to get any sense out of Pol when he's in one of his moods. What's been happening?'

  Demeter shrugged. 'He's absolutely right; she said. 'He just sort of walked out of sight. Bing,' she added.

  Diana frowned and turned to Minerva, who was leaning on her spear-shaft looking sage. Pure habit.

  'But that's impossible,' she said. 'Heroes can't just disappear. Perhaps he's gone down a hole or something.'

  'I thought of that,' said Apollo, ignoring the fact that he was apparently too idiotic to be audible. 'So I tried the infra-red scanner. Nothing. Look.'

  He flicked a free-floating switch and the Earth suddenly looked as if it was bathed in blood.

  'Satisfied?' said Apollo. 'Nothing. Nor has he borrowed a Cloak of Invisibility, wandered into another dimension or disguised himself in a false beard and a raincoat. He's just gone. Phut!'

  Diana set her lips in a thin line. Bing she could just about handle, but phut! was something else. 'Don't be so feeble, Pol,' she said. 'Send a messenger or something.'

  Apollo grinned at her. 'I did,' he said. 'I've had Sleep, Death, Thought, Time and Indigestion flying backwards and forwards over the Caucasus for the last twenty minutes. Nothing. Except; he added, 'a bloody great big chit for mileage allowance, which someone isn't going to be too pleased about...'

  Diana sagged slightly. 'Perhaps they didn't look properly,' she ventured. Minerva gave her a look.

  'All right,' said Minerva, 'but he must be somewhere. Everyone always is. Have you spoken to his driver?'

  'George,' said Apollo, 'is at this very moment trying to convince thirty-two very irritable Thessalian Centaurs that his master has just had to pop back for a pair of winged sandals and will be along in a minute. He's-as baffled as the rest of us.'

  Minerva bit her lip. On her right shoulder, her owl shifted from leg to leg nervously.

  'Well,' she said, 'obviously he's out there somewhere, but...'

  'Look,' said Apollo, 'didn't I just...'

  'Let me finish, will you? But,' Minerva went on, 'all reasonable and diligent enquiries...'

  'Thank you.'

  '... have failed to reveal exactly where,' Minerva said.

  'We are gods, and nothing can be hidden from us. Except,' she went on, 'by other gods.'

  There was a short pause.

  'Oh,' Demeter said, 'I see what you're driving at. You think one of us...'

  Minerva breathed in in the manner she usually reserved for her male relatives. 'No, dear,' she said, 'Not one of us here now, because none of us, not even Pol, would be so very childish. One of us gods, on the other hand, as opposed to the mortals or the Tooth Fairy, yes. That, I would suggest, narrows the field down a bit, wouldn't you think?'

  Demeter blinked. 'Does it?' she asked.

  Minerva smiled terribly. 'Apollo, dear,' she said, 'why don't you take Demeter away and find her something to grow? I'm sure we needn't detain her further, and perhaps we'd all get on that bit faster if...'

  'Oh do shut up, Mm,' Demeter said. 'And get to the point, if you've got one.'

  'Very well, then,' Minerva said. 'What I'm trying to suggest to you is this. A Hero has disappeared. He must be out there somewhere. Therefore a god must have hidden him. Now, don't you think that points rather at Someone in Particular?'

  Even Demeter couldn't fail to catch her drift. The poet Homer describes Jupiter as He Whose Delight Is In Thunder, but poets have to be polite. His fellow gods prefer to describe him as He Whose Delight Is In Being Bloody Difficult.

  'He wouldn't,' Diana said, 'would he? I mean, why?'

  Minerva smiled. 'Bonus points,' she said.

  'Bonus points?'

  'Precisely,' Minerva replied. 'Typical underhand cheating.'

  Gods, it should be explained, have no objection to overhand cheating, which they prefer to call Fate. Overhand cheating consists of wiping out whole cities with the plague or flattening your opponent's best Hero with a thunderbolt. Anything that is devious, however, or smacks of low cunning, they regard with great distaste, largely because it's usually too clever for them to follow.

  'What he's done,' Minerva went on, 'is to magic this Jason away for three or four moves, and then he'll pop him back in when we least expect it. Then one of us'll be left with a headless dragon or a defeated army and absolutely nothing at all we can do about it. Well, I for one...'

  'I'm not so sure,' said Apollo.

  Minerva turned and looked at him. 'Well,' she said, 'if you have an alternative explanation, I'm sure we'd all be only too pleased...'

  'No,' Apollo confessed, 'I haven't. I just don't think...'

  'I know,' Minerva interrupted. 'You never have, either. Now then, I suggest that we send Mercury, with the Lamp of Truth and the Celestial Trufflehound. That ought to have him out of it in no time.'

  Just then, a shining portal opened in the wall of the sun and all the gods rose instinctively to their feet. They always do. Partly this is because all gods, despite their incessant bickering and backbiting, have an innate respect for the Father of Gods and Men. The fact that He tends to throw those who don't off the battlements also has something to do with it.

  'Right,' said Jupiter, taking his place on the golden throne that none but he ever dared sit in, 'who's the smartass?'

  'Right,' said Jason, 'fine. Now, about those cakes...'

  Prometheus sighed. 'And so,' he said, 'what do you think?'

  'Think?'

  'Yes,' said Prometheus. 'About the morality of it?'

  'Morality?' Jason's brow furrowed, and he considered long and hard. 'Dunno,' he said at last.

  'You don't know,' Prometheus repeated. 'I see. I must say that I find that tremendously encouraging.'

  'It's not something I think about a lot,' said Jason, 'morality.'

  'Really?'

  'Not,' he went on, 'in my line of work. I'm more, you know, blue-collar. Mine not to reason why, that sort of thing.'

  'You're more,' said the Titan slowly, 'a sort of hired thug?'

  'Exactly,' Jason said. 'The way I see it is, somebody somewhere knows what's going on, so who am I to make difficulties?'

  'Well now,' said Prometheus, 'I know what's going on, and I'm prepared to pay in hard confectionery. What about it?'

  Jason frowned. 'What,' he said, 'me take orders from you instead of him?'

  'Very neatly put. Yes.'

  'I don't think he'd like it,' Jason said. 'And, well, you know what happens to people who...'

  Prometheus laughed and rattled his chains until the mountains shook. 'Yes,' he said, 'I have a pretty shrewd idea. A pity. Well, I'm sorry to have troubled you. The biscuits are three paces east under the roots of a thornbush. The eagle will show you.'

  Great, Jason said to himself as he tore open the packet and put tooth to chocolate. Great...

  Not you again. Go away.

  Sure...

  I said go away, will you? I really don't need this right now.

  Exactly...

  All right then, out with it. What are you getting at?

  Nothing...

  Good, because if you haven't got anything to say, you can just push off and leave me in...

  In...

  Slowly, Jas
on got up, finished his mouthful, and turned to face the giant.

  'Excuse me,' he said.

  The giant turned his head -- imagine Hounslow suddenly picking itself up and rolling over on one side and stared at Jason, who saw the two round blue eyes for the first time. He swallowed and choked on a crumb.

  'Yes?' he said softly.

  'Well,' Jason said, 'I don't suppose there's anything I could do without him actually knowing, is there?'

  Prometheus laughed. 'As it happens; he said, 'there is.'

  CHAPTER SIX

  Although it was now over five years since Sergeant Smith had had his funny experience, he still hadn't recovered from it, and his superiors at the Axe Cross police station had long since decided that being a desk sergeant was all he was fit for now. As -they saw it, when batty old ladies came in claiming to have seen flying saucers, they would at least be sure of a sympathetic audience.

  Anyone less likely than the sergeant to be a dreamer of dreams it is hard to imagine. A long, hard youth spent watching fights outside chip shops and arresting the more seriously injured participants should have cauterised his powers of imagination many years ago; but the fact remained that he claimed to have seen Something, and ever since he had been as unshakable in his story as an interviewing officer telling the court that during interrogation the defendant had repeatedly got up and banged his head violently against the leg of the table.

  It had happened, Sergeant Smith insisted, on a Thursday, about a quarter past eleven at night, bang in the middle of Pool Street, just opposite the bus shelter. This guy had appeared out of nowhere, wearing a sort of bronze bodywarmer and a short skirt, screaming blue murder and carrying what the sergeant, a man of limited vocabulary, could only describe as a bloody great sword. Naturally, the sergeant had immediately taken up a position behind the bus shelter for the purposes of more efficient surveillance, and from there he had a -clear view of the man running down Pool Street as far as the Co-op, stopping dead in his tracks and being confronted with some kind of very big reptile, which he proceeded to attack. During the course of the struggle, what the sergeant stubbornly maintained was a bloody great hand materialised out of thin air, grabbed the man and the strange beast, lifted them up in the air and deposited them both in the carpark of the Bunch of Grapes; whereupon the tarmac of the carpark turned bright pink and started to glow eerily. As the combatants touched down, big black letters appeared on the surface of the carpark, spelling out the legend TRIPLE DEED SCORE.

  Then the man had cut off the reptile's head, and the sergeant fainted.

  Subsequent investigation of the scene of the alleged incident revealed nothing but three sets of car keys and a half-eaten doner kebab, and the only other person who claimed to have seen anything unusual had been a regular customer of the Bunch of Grapes, who saw unusual things as a matter of course. The fact that when, a year or so later, a new landlord from up north somewhere took over the Grapes he changed the name of the place to the George and Dragon was dismissed as sheer coincidence.

  It so happened that Sergeant Smith was for once not dwelling on this incident when a woman walked into the police station and asked to report a missing person.

  'I wouldn't have troubled you; she said, looking over her shoulder, 'but my, er, husband's a bit of a worrier.'

  'Oh yes?' said the sergeant, and reached for the book. 'So who's gone missing, then?'

  'My son,' said the woman.

  'Name?'

  The woman thought for a moment. 'Mine or his?' she asked.

  'Let's start with yours, shall we?' said the sergeant. 'Derry; said the woman. 'Phyllis Eva.'

  'Right,' said a voice from the cloud of heat, 'let's all get our fingers out and clear up this mess, shall we?'

  The other gods took his words as a sign that they could sit down now, and all began talking at once. Jupiter banged the altar in front of him with the butt end of his thunderbolt and cleared his throat with a sound like the Alps falling onto a drumskin.

  'First,' -- the word resounded in the utter silence 'first,' --said Jupiter, rather less loudly this time, 'let's find out who saw him last.'

  Apollo stood up nervously, holding an envelope between shaking fingers. 'Well,' he said, 'I've been trying to reconstruct his movements, and so far as I can make out, his driver took him up to the Witch's hut. There he collected the Sword of... of...' Apollo looked down at his notes. 'Glycerion, used it to slay the Erymanthian, er, Hydra, and then went to make the Judgment of Jason.' He paused self-consciously.

  'And?' said Jupiter. 'Presumably he then followed the Road of Virtue. What next?'

  'Actually,' mumbled Apollo, 'he didn't.'

  Jupiter frowned, his eyebrows like mating rain-forests. 'Didn't he?'

  'Strictly speaking, no; said Apollo. 'Not as such.'

  'You mean he followed the Road of Luxury?' Jupiter enquired. The Old Fool was keeping his temper remarkably well in the circumstances, the other gods felt, but they couldn't help noticing that it had started raining quite heavily down below on the Earth. 'This is something to do with this new Free Will crap everyone's always on about, I suppose. Still...'

  'Actually,' Apollo interrupted, 'he followed the Road Marked Diversion...'

  'Sorry?'

  'Diversion,' Apollo whispered.

  There was a very long silence; so deep that the gods could hear the rain lashing down on Earth, millions of miles away. Good, Demeter said to herself, for the crops.

  'Diversion,' said Jupiter quietly. 'I see.'

  'It was my go, you see,' Apollo went on, 'and there was a ten-point Killer Scorpion left over from the Wanderings of Odysseus in a cave just round the corner, and I thought, since he was there it'd be no trouble if he just...'

  'You diverted him?'

  'More or less, yes, I suppose you could say that, really, though it was more a sort of short-cut, because it should have brought him out by the Thessalian Centaurs if only he'd followed the little yellow markers like he was supposed to, and the scorpion has been getting up the noses of the locals for ages now and it really did seem like a good idea at the...' Apollo's jaw gradually stopped moving and he swallowed hard, smiled and speculated as to where he would be likely to land.

  'And that,' Jupiter said, 'was the last anyone saw of him?' Apollo nodded, rather more times than was necessary. Uncharacteristically, Jupiter managed to keep his feelings under control, admittedly only by blowing the stars known to astronomers as Orion's Belt into a million pieces.

  'Ah well,' he growled, 'we all make mistakes, don't we? And it wasn't as if you did it on purpose, or could be expected to know what'll be likely to happen. I mean,' he added savagely, 'it's not as if you're bloody well omniscient, is it?'

  'No, er...'

  'The main thing,' Jupiter went on, 'is to keep calm, and not go doing anything silly' -- and as he spoke, a jagged fork of lightning crashed into a nuclear power station in the Urals -- 'which we all might regret later. It's all too easy, in circumstances like these' -- a long-dormant volcano in the Andaman Islands let out a horrifying burp that was felt in Melbourne -- 'to go all to pieces and make matters very much worse, but if we all try and keep absolutely... WHAT THE HELL DID YOU THINK YOU WERE PLAYING AT, YOU DICK... Out in the silence of deep space, the enormous masses of flaming matter released by the explosion in the constellation of Orion were suddenly drawn together as by an unseen hand to form new stars, thereby preserving the equilibrium of the cosmos and forming a new star-pattern known to future generations of astronomers as Orion's Braces. A junior nuclear technician was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union for having the foresight to nail an improvised lightning conductor to the side of his generator, and as the seismic ripples in the Indian Ocean subsided, the major powers issued simultaneous denials and postponed all nuclear tests for a week. It even stopped raining.

  'OF ALL THE...' Jupiter checked himself, closed his eyes and counted up to forty million. 'Do you realise, you stupid little git, what you've done?'

  Apollo sho
ok his head.

  'Then,' the Thunderer went on, 'perhaps it's time you had a little geography lesson. Starting,' he added, 'with a field trip.'

  Observers at the new European Observatory in Switzerland later swore blind that a very large meteorite landed heavily in the Caucasus Mountains. However, it all happened so fast that nobody else saw it, and it was later put down to a bit of fluff getting on the lens of the telescope.

  'Can you hear me down there?' Jupiter said.

  Apollo picked himself up Out of his crater, dusted himself off and said 'Yes.'

  'You are now,' Jupiter went on, 'in the Caucasus Mountains, not far from the scene of the Choice of Jason. You have, in fact, been Diverted.' Jupiter chuckled. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'just over there' -- forked lightning helpfully indicated the direction 'is where a Certain Very Bad Person is chained to a rock. Now do you see what I'm getting at?'

  Apollo nodded.

  'Good,' said Jupiter. 'Now do you see what a silly billy you've been?'

  The ex-God of the Sun said Yes, he saw perfectly and it went without saying that he'd never do anything so idiotic ever again and it was typical of Jupiter to take such a reasonable view of the whole episode and would it be too much trouble to send Aesculapius the Healer down when it was quite convenient because he thought that he'd clumsily managed to break his leg.

  Jupiter sighed. 'That's all right, then,' he said. 'Go and fetch him, somebody. And fill in that hole,' he added, scowling at the crater. 'Mortals tend to notice things like that these days.'

  Shortly afterwards, Apollo was restored to the Council of Heaven, smelling strongly of liniment but otherwise intact. Jupiter moved on to the next stage in the debate.

  'Anyway,' he said, 'where were we? Oh yes, Jason. Well, we now know where he went, but we still don't know where he got to. Mercury!'

  There was a sudden rush of air, and Mercury, messenger of the gods, was standing among them. On his feet were winged sandals, in his left hand the caduceus which is his badge of office, in his right hand three large, flat cardboard boxes.