Downfall of the Gods

by K. J. Parker

  “I wanted to see how you’re getting on.”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity.”

  He turned his head and frowned at me. “Why won’t you forgive me?” he said. “I repented. I was sincere.”

  “You hurt me.”

  He laughed. “That’s impossible.”

  “You did. You damaged me. You inflicted on me an injury that can’t be healed.”

  “Bullshit. To the gods, all things are possible.”

  “It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

  He shrugged. “What did I do that caused you irreparable harm?”

  “You murdered Lysippus.”

  “True.” He waited, then said, “So?”

  “Lysippus the musician,” I said.

  He thought for a moment. “You’re right,” he said, “I remember now, he did write music. Songs and little fiddly bits for flute and strings.” He looked up. “Is that important?”

  Members of my family aren’t often lost for words. I nodded.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  “To you, maybe.”

  “No, but it is. Lysippus was the third biggest landowner in the Republic. He was a vicious, ambitious political animal. His family and mine have been feuding for twelve generations. He was my only real rival for the Consulate. He was about to stage a coup which would’ve thrown the Republic into chaos. Oh yes, and he was an atheist, which is rather ironic, don’t you think.” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “He was also my best friend. And my wife’s lover.”

  If he was expecting me to say anything, he was disappointed.

  “He was all that,” he went on, “and I killed him. It was understandable, and probably necessary. It was my duty. It was also wrong. So I repented. I was sorry for what I’d done. Given my time over again, I wouldn’t do it, and not just because of winding up in here.” He breathed out slowly, then in again. “And now you’re telling me I’m damned for all eternity because he wrote songs?”

  “Very good songs,” I said. “I liked them.”

  I’d upset him. “So fucking what?”

  “So,” I said, “when he died, his talent died with him. It was unique. There will be no more music like that, ever again. I love music. It’s the only thing in the universe which I perceive to be—” I searched helplessly for the word. Stronger? Better? “The only thing beyond my power to command,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Surely not.”

  “Quite true, unfortunately,” I told him. “I can inspire anyone I like with divine genius, but what they come up with will be, well, different. It’ll be wonderful, but it won’t be the music of Lysippus. That’s all lost, gone for ever. Because of you.”

  “And that’s—”

  “Why I won’t forgive you, yes.”

  He was stunned. “Why not just raise him from the dead, if it’s such a big deal?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “But to the gods—”

  “Possible, yes. Allowed, no.”

  He considered me for a long time. “Balls,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”

  THERE, NOW. IF you can’t trust the Goddess, who can you trust?

  Faith is relative, and conditional. Or, if you prefer; just because you believe in me doesn’t necessarily mean you believe me. Why, after all, do you tell the truth? Because it’s the right thing to do, or for fear you’ll be found out? Or because you simply want to impart accurate information?

  To the gods all things are possible. So we can lie through our teeth, if we want to. Sometimes, though, we don’t want to. By the same token, there are other things we can do but choose not to. Even if we really, really want to.

  But let’s not go there.

  HE’D ANNOYED ME so much I went home.

  Is there any point trying to describe something that only a tiny handful of conscious minds in the universe are capable of understanding; and who need no description, since they live there, always have, always will?

  Mind you, people have tried. In the cloudy heights (this is one of my favourites) dwell the gods; War Hall is their home. They are spirits of light, and Light-Spirit rules them. Well; that’s close enough for government work. Home for me is a space almost big enough to be comfortable in, except that I have to share it with a dozen members of my family, as big as me or bigger. Fact; some of us are bigger than others. My father, for example, is the biggest of the big; he’s huge. Query, in fact, whether there’s any limit to his size. Answer (probably); if he wants there to be one, there is.

  Home as I perceive it is a vast castle, bare stone walls, bare stone floor. The dominant colour is sandstone red. The only light slides in sideways through high, narrow windows, or gushes out of hearths. Furniture happens when I want it, then falls away in clouds of dust—indeed; home as I perceive it is dirty, undusted, unkempt. The doors creak, because the hinges are three parts seized. None of the windows open. How the others perceive it I neither know nor care, but I should imagine it’s cleaner and more cheerful.

  The generally accepted form of communication in my family is melodrama. I see us as actors performing in a huge auditorium; so far away that unless we shout and make huge, over-the-top gestures, we can’t be seen or heard. All about perspective, I guess. I don’t like my family, and I’m not comfortable talking about them.

  Father was in his study. I perceive it as a freezing cold stone box, impossibly high ceiling, dark, gloomy, every surface stuffed and crammed with piles of unsorted books and papers; himself slouched in a massive ebony chair, feet up on the desk, book on his knees, not reading. He looked up and scowled at me. “Where have you been?”

  “Out,” I said. “You wanted to see me.”

  “No,” he replied, “I wanted to know where you’d got to.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Can I go now?”

  “Shut up and sit down.”

  To the gods all things are possible, but some things aren’t easy, such as finding somewhere to sit in all that mess. I pushed a sheaf of papers off a chair onto the floor, and perched. “What?”

  He squinted through what I perceived as gold-rimmed spectacles at a bit of paper. “You refused a mortal’s prayer,” he said. “Why?”

  “I felt like it.”

  “You don’t deny it, then.”

  “No.”

  “You felt like it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a properly constituted prayer, correctly phrased and made with sincere intent.”

  “So?”

  He sighed. “It’s all a question,” he said, “of how it looks from the road, as my father used to say. When a mortal prays in correct form and we don’t answer, it looks bad. Brings us into disrepute. You must see that, surely.”

  Please note; Father is head of the family because he bound Grandpa in adamantine chains and imprisoned him at the centre of the earth, where presumably he still is. Quoting Grandpa’s folksy sayings cuts no ice with me. “Yes, and I don’t give a damn.”

  “That’s a rather irresponsible attitude.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  IN OUR FAMILY, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it is like a great city in the middle of settled, fertile countryside. There are a great many roads, leading from countless small villages, and sooner or later they all lead to the city; no matter where you start from, here is where you arrive. We still go through the motions—accusation, defence, rational debate, argument, counter-argument, rebuttal, counter-rebuttal, pre-emptive defensive strike—but there is and can only be one culmination; what are you going to do about it?

  Well; there’s two things he can do: Throw the offender off the ramparts of Heaven. He or she will fall for three days, and on landing will sink a crater a mile wide and fill the air with a dust-cloud that takes a week to settle. After that, he or she will spend a certain time—hundreds or thousands of years—chained to a mountain being gnawed by eagles, or something of the sort, until Father finds he needs him (or her) back h
ome as an ally in the latest family civil war, or until some mortal hero shoots the eagle and cuts the chain, under the fond misapprehension that members of our family understand about gratitude; or Nothing.

  “SPARE ME THE drama, please,” he said wearily. “But don’t you agree? It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes us unpopular. And you can see why, you of all people. You’re the one who’s so mad keen on understanding them.”

  To the gods all things are possible, so I kept my temper. “Wanting to understand them isn’t the same as giving a stuff what they think,” I said. “You should know that,” I added, “of all people.”

  He glowered at me. “I’m asking you as a personal favour to me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Just for once, remember who you are. We have responsibilities.”

  HE’D GOT ME. Quite true. Just as a man has a responsibility to his dog, or a little girl to her dolls. Note, by the way, that I can only explain this concept by reference to mortal analogies. In my family, we don’t have the vocabulary.

  Didn’t mean I had to like it, though. I had no choice—he’d asked nicely; that’s pretty heavy stuff, in my family—but what I did have was a wide degree of room for interpretation.

  Lord Archias was asleep. Imagine that; in twenty-four hours they were going to string him up like onions, and he was sleeping. I prodded him awake. He rolled over and scowled at me.

  “Go away,” he said.

  Playing right into my hands; I was perfectly within my rights to blow him away straight to hell for talking to me like that. “If you want,” I said. “I came here to forgive you, but—”

  I was expecting, and hoping, that he’d collapse, go all to pieces, start grovelling. Instead he frowned. “You’re playing games, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t annoy me,” I warned him.

  He grinned at me. “You were always going to forgive me,” he said, “you’ve got to, it’s the rules. But you made me believe you were going to let me be damned anyway. Playing games.”

  “Careful,” I said. “That’s blasphemy.”

  “So’s what you’re doing.”

  “Incorrect,” I said. “A goddess can’t blaspheme, like

  water can’t get wet.”

  “Technicality. What you’re doing is basically the same thing. You’re making a mockery of what is sacred.

  You’re pissing on the Covenant.”

  I took three long deep breaths to calm myself down.

  “I should burn you down where you stand,” I said. “Yes,” he replied casually. “You should. Really, it’s your duty. But I know you aren’t going to.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Yes. Because you want something from me.

  Otherwise yes, I’d be ashes by now.” He looked at me down far more nose than any circumstances could ever justify. “You’re pathetic,” he said.

  THIS BUSINESS OF the Covenant.

  A mortal who thought he was really clever once posed the question; can God create a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it? Clearly he knew nothing about my family. It’s the sort of thing we do to each other all the time. Because to us all things are possible, we get our kicks, and pass the endless, dreary time, creating rocks the others can’t lift; just to spite them, because we can. As witness my father and me. The rock I can’t lift is when he asks me nicely.

  But the Covenant— Do you really think we’d sign up to something that actually restricted us, confined our freedom of choice and action? And for what in return? No, we abide by it because it pleases us to do so. And if it doesn’t please—Well.

  (Pol reckons we abide by the Covenant because, being infinite, at some level we crave containment; for the same reason that, being imperishable, insensitive to cold and heat and definitively waterproof, nevertheless we sleep indoors, under a roof. Among his other titles and portfolios, Pol is God of Wisdom. I think that says it all.)

  “YOU DO REALISE,” I said, “that since I got here, you’ve forfeited your right to clemency under the Covenant at least three times. Are you stupid, or what?”

  “Maybe I don’t want clemency.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Maybe I don’t want it from you.”

  I don’t gasp, but if I did, I would’ve. “I think I’ll go away and come back later,” I said. “When you’ve had time to think.”

  “I thought you might say that,” he said. “I expect you’ll leave it right to the very last minute, when they’re putting the rope round my neck.” He yawned. “Play your games if you want to. It’s all right. I know you’ll save me. I have faith.”

  “Do you now.”

  He nodded. “I know you want something from me. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, if you want something from me, I know I’ll be just fine. Well? Am I right?”

  “Let’s wait to the very last moment and find out.”

  But he just smiled at me, confident, cocky. Well; it’s not often an immortal gets a chance to try something new. So I decided to be a good loser.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You’ve made your point. Let’s get down to cases. Yes, I’m prepared to grant you clemency. Your life will be spared. More to the point, the sentence of eternal damnation will be lifted. Suspended, anyway. But there are conditions.”

  He looked so smug, I could’ve sworn we must be related. “Good heavens,” he said. “Fancy that.”

  “You’re going to get another chance. If you can prove that you truly feel remorse for what you’ve done, you will be forgiven and the slate will be wiped clean. If not, you’ll find yourself back here. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly.” He waited, then folded his hands in his lap and said, “What do you want?”

  AS I LEFT the prison, I tripped over an old beggar sitting on the steps. He was a horrible creature; one eye, one withered arm, one leg missing from the knee down. “Bless you, sweetheart,” he called out—I’d just trodden on his good hand. “God bless you and keep you.”

  The irony appealed to me, so I gave him a coin, one of the two I had on me, and walked on. “Are you mad?” he called out after me. I stopped and turned round.

  “Five gulden,” he said, with the coin lying flat on his outstretched palm. “Have you no idea of the value of money?”

  I sighed. “Dad,” I said.

  He stood up. The absence of his left leg didn’t hinder him. “Five gulden,” he said, “is a fortune to these people, it’s the price of a farm. Even I know that. You can’t just go flinging it around. First thing you know, they’ll have galloping inflation.”

  “I earned that,” I told him. “By the sweat of my—”

  “I know you did.” He scowled at me. “Well? Did you forgive him, like I told you?”

  “Conditionally.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Dad,” I said, “sit down. People are staring.”

  He sat down quickly. “Conditionally,” he said. “What sort of condition?”

  “It’s perfectly fair,” I told him. “Just like in the Covenant. Sometimes, when they’ve been really bad or you don’t believe they’re truly sincere, you make them prove themselves. More to the point,” I went on quickly, “how dare you come checking up on me like this? It’s insulting.”

  A passer-by dropped a two-groschen in Father’s hat. “Bless you, sir, bless you. The ship you thought was lost will come safe to port in two days’ time.” The man gawped at him for a moment, then hurried away. “Charity is good,” Father said, when I raised an eyebrow at him. “It enriches the giver as well as the receiver. We ought to encourage it. And I wouldn’t need to check up on you if you did as you’re told. What condition?”

  NOW, THEN. ABOUT me.

  I was born—Sorry, I’ll have to be careful here. Wars have been fought and men have been burnt alive over differences in nuance in accounts of how and when I was born. For obvious reasons, I’m reluctant to endorse any one version as against the others. It’s
awkward. I love talking about myself, but one has a responsibility to the weak-minded and the faithful.

  I live at home. Not all of us do. My uncle Thaumastus lives at the bottom of the sea. Likewise my aunt Feralia, who hardly ever leaves her tastefully appointed palace in the Underworld. They claim they have to be on site at all times for the proper performance of their duties. I don’t believe them. I think they saw an excuse to get away from the rest of us, and grabbed it with both hands. I can make no such claim. Love, laughter and joy are everywhere, as Father constantly reminds me, and home is centrally located, in easy reach of all civilised nations. I have a room of my own, if you can call it that, but we’ve never been great ones for knocking on doors in our family, so I might as well sleep in the Great Hall for all the privacy I can expect. I own the clothes I stand up in, when I wear a body. That’s all. What does a god want with possessions, Father’s always saying. He’s quite right, of course; though that doesn’t stop him hoarding all sorts of junk in the treasury of his temple at Blachernae. He thinks we don’t know about that. The idiot.

  Ah well. Naked I came into the world, and what’s the use of owning things when you’re bound to outlast them? If I had a diamond necklace, contact with my soft white breast would wear the stones away in no time. Anyway, what good are things? No attire or ornament could possibly make me any more beautiful than I am already. I do no work, so I need no tools. Nothing in the world, not even being thrown off the ramparts of heaven and digging a mile-wide impact crater, could conceivably harm me, so armour and weapons would be pointless. Cutlery and tableware; we eat with our fingers in our family. We need nothing, have no use for anything. Therefore, we have nothing. Lucky us.

  Correction; we do have something. We have each other.

  Lucky, lucky us.

  “I WON’T DO it,” Pol said. “Absolutely and definitely not.

  No. No way.”

  I smiled at him. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “You’re mad,” he said. “Anyway, Dad’ll never agree.” “Actually—”

  He stared at me. “You’re joking.”

  “He thinks it’s a splendid idea,” he said.