by Tom Holt
The girl put her head on one side and nibbled absently at her shoulder-blade. ‘You really expect me to believe you’ve had a change of heart?’ she asked. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yes,’ said Jason.
‘No, you haven’t.’
Jason felt a tiny green shoot of irritability thrusting its head up through the surface of his general bewilderment. ‘What are you,’ he demanded, ‘a mind-reader or something? ’
‘Yes.’
Jason took that one in his stride. ‘In that case,’ he said ‘you can see that my mind is made up. Now, if you don’t mind . . .’
The girl recrossed her legs petulantly. ‘Are you throwing me out?’ she said.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ Jason said. ‘And you can tell your friends that if I’ve got to be bossed about by one side or the other, I might as well be bossed about by Jupiter. After all, he is my Dad and he is winning.’
‘Bossed about?’
‘Yes,’ said Jason, with a sudden access of feeling, ‘bloody well bossed about. Do this. Do that. Fulfil your Destiny. Chop the head off that serpent over there. Steal those golden apples. The hell with the lot of you. I’m sick and tired of being ordered around by people, and if you think I’m going to betray my own father just to be ordered around by you lot . . .’
‘But Jason . . .’
‘Don’t Jason me,’ Jason said. ‘I’ve had all the Jasoning I can handle tonight already. Now put your feathers back on and sling your hook, all right?
‘Jason . . .’
‘And it’s no good you saying you’re a protected species, because in this house the Wildlife and Countryside Act has no jurisdiction. Clear off before I stuff a cushion with you.’
‘Jason . . .’
‘I mean, you can say that Jupiter and his mob leave a lot to be desired, but what sort of a world would it be if there was a bunch of comedians in charge? Everybody would be so busy telling each other jokes, sooner or later someone would forget to plant any crops and then where would we be?’
‘Jason . . .’
Jason Derry made an exasperated noise, grabbed the Sword and whirled it round his head, neatly but unintentionally slicing through the electric light flex. The girl squawked, grew feathers, and hopped onto the windowsill.
‘Out!’ Jason said. The eagle gave him a filthy look, spread its wings and vanished.
Trembling slightly, Jason closed the window, put the Sword away and climbed back into bed; and not long afterwards, he was asleep again. That, he realised in retrospect, was a mistake.
He had been sleeping quite happily for upwards of a quarter of an hour when a dream came to him. Since the window was shut, the dream had to squeeze in via the mains through the severed electric flex, and it stood at the head of Jason’s bed for thirty seconds or so, getting its breath back. Then it gingerly inserted itself into his mind and got down to business.
It seemed to Jason as if he was standing in a queue. It was a long queue, and he couldn’t see the end, and he didn’t know what it was for. The people in front of him and behind him had no faces; the fronts of their heads were blank and polished, with no openings on them.
The queue shuffled forwards and, because it was a dream, the whole sequence was able to fast-forward a bit, so that Jason was aware that he had been in the queue for an intolerably long time without that part of the dream taking more than a sixtieth of a second. Then quite suddenly he was at the front of the queue, and he saw Jupiter; and standing beside him, Mars and Pluto. They had big felt-tip marker pens in their hands, and as the people in the queue shuffled past them they drew in faces on the blank surfaces of their heads. Or at least they put in two blobs for eyes and an upside-down semicircle for the mouth; a sad face. Then they pushed each person over the edge of a cliff.
Well yes, said Jason’s subconscious mind. Fair comment, I suppose. Allegory is all about value-judgments anyway and maybe I shouldn’t have had that cheese sandwich before turning in.
Then he looked round and saw another queue, parallel to the one he was in. It was exactly the same, except that Gelos and Prometheus were at the head of it, and the faces they drew in had upright semicircles for mouths; smiling faces. And when these people were pushed over the cliff, they didn’t fall. Instead, they drifted up into the air like space-walking astronauts, hovered for a few moments, touched down again and walked round to the back of the queue.
Heavy, said Jason’s subconscious. If Sigmund Freud could see what was going on here, he’d have me in a padded cell so quick my feet wouldn’t touch.
Then he suddenly found himself at the front of Jupiter’s queue, and Jupiter - Dad - was drawing a face on him. A sad face. Then he felt a large hand in the small of his back and he was flying through the air over the edge of the cliff. He opened his mouth to scream and could feel the ink smudging.
And then, as he fell (but slowly, since it was a dream), he saw three dots in the sky, very far away. The further he fell, the larger the dots became, until they turned into three eagles. Two of them flew straight past, but the third swooped down, caught hold of him in one talon and carried him back up. The other talon held a bag of chips, which it offered to him.
Then he was back on the cliff top again, and feeling extremely angry. He had a duster in his hand now, and he walked up to Jupiter, wiped his face off, and drew in a very sad face indeed. Then he picked the god up and tossed him over the edge. His subconscious mind started kicking up no end of a fuss but he ignored it. It felt good.
The dream grinned and stood up. The bit with the duster had been its own idea, and although it knew that Thing didn’t really approve of ad-libbing, it felt that it was probably the duster which had turned the scales. Pausing only to blow deep sleep into Jason’s eyes, the dream trickled back up into the light flex and vanished.
Half an hour or so later, Jason woke up, sweating. He could hear something.
He listened carefully. Nothing. He swore drowsily and tried to go back to sleep. Then he heard it again. It was the sound of a dog, or three dogs, or one dog with three heads, barking.
Indigestion woke up suddenly, gurgled, realised what was going on and made a grab for the alarm clock.
At the fourth attempt he made contact and prevailed upon it to stop ringing. That made things better. Slightly.
The various personifications of abstract concepts who form the non-commissioned ranks of the divine hierarchy - Greed, Fear, Spring, Hope, Pennsylvania, Wealth and Appendicitis, to name but a few; Plato refers to them as the Forms, and why not? - have an arduous time of it. As their great spokesman Discontent put it on the occasion of the January Rising of 1979,9 the Forms do all the work but the gods get all the gravy. This dichotomy between work done and status accorded was marked enough before the gods left Olympus; after the move, however, the gods delegated the entire management of their various portfolios to their respective teams of Forms - Mars handing over the conduct of war to Death, Fear and Victory; Minerva appointing as her attorneys Philosophy, Prudence and (curiously enough) Needlepoint; and so on - but neglected to raise their salaries, grant them the right to receive the worship of mortals or even let them use the Management Cloakrooms. Each Form remains answerable to his Head of Department for any errors or omissions, but receives little or no practical assistance with anything but the broadest and most far-reaching policy decisions. A certain degree of resentment was inevitable; and the final straw is believed by many to have been the so-called Form-busting measures introduced by Jupiter in the early 1980s. As a result of these, all Forms are now ultimately under the jurisdiction of the Great Sky-God himself.
As a Form Grade D in the College of Humours, Indigestion generally had little to do with Jupiter, and he was heartily glad of it. The work was bad enough as it was without having the Lord of Tempests to contend with. Only the previous evening, for example, Indigestion had been ordered to attend a reception for the Australian Ambassador in Moscow, with instructions to afflict no fewer than three hundred and twenty-seven guest
s. What with one thing and another, and in particular the Australian trade attaché’s wager that he could drink the Secretary of State for Production under the table, it was well after half past three in the morning before Indigestion had finally got to bed, and now he found that he had woken up with something of a headache.
Having dealt ruthlessly with his clock-radio, Indigestion tried turning over and going back to sleep, but somehow the knack had left him. After a little fruitless cursing, therefore, the wretched Form got out of bed, put on his dressing-gown inside-out and went in search of orange juice.
Fortuitously, he found some in the fridge and drank it quickly. He was just starting to feel that he might, with the assistance of the best medical attention, eventually recover when the telephone rang.
It was a loud telephone at the best of times. Indigestion located the receiver and put it as close to his head as he dared.
‘Lo?’ he mumbled.
‘Morning, Ind,’ said a cheerful voice at the other end. ‘How’s tricks?’
Indigestion winced. ‘Could you please speak a little more quietly, please?’ he whispered. ‘I have a slight . . .’
‘My God, Ind,’ said the voice, ‘you aren’t hung over again, are you? Beats me how you manage it.’
Indigestion scowled at the receiver until he discovered that contracting his brows made the rest of his head hurt. It was in the nature of Health, his immediate superior, to be rude; but just now he wasn’t in the mood to make allowances.
‘I was working late last night,’ he replied coldly. ‘And it is my day off . . .’
‘Sorry, Ind,’ Health said, ‘all leave cancelled, by order. Be at the departure bay by nine sharp.’
‘Hel . . .’
‘Sorry, mate,’ said his boss, ‘that’s how it is. All maladies and infirmities to report immediately; no excuses accepted.’
‘Oh come on, Hel . . .’
‘No buts, chum,’ said Health. ‘Oh yes, and you’ll be in charge. You’ll like that, won’t you? Try not to cock it all up, there’s a good lad.’
‘Bloody hell, Hel . . .’
Health laughed. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But I can’t make it. Off sick,’ he explained. ‘Actually, I promised faithfully to take the old bag round the shops this morning, and if I don’t she’ll kill me. But that’s just between you and me, right?’
Despite his annoyance, Indigestion could feel a slight flicker of sympathy for his superior. Health was, after all, married to Efficiency. Ruthless Efficiency, the lads in Vouchers called her.
‘So what’s so important that I’ve got to work on my day off?’ Indigestion said resignedly. ‘If it’s just another ’flu epidemic . . .’
‘If only it was,’ Health replied. ‘No, my son, there’s something extremely mega happening upstairs. No idea what it is. But the order is that we’ve got to go and afflict Prometheus. ASAP.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Indigestion said, ‘I thought you just . . .’
‘Prometheus,’ Health repeated. ‘The coach leaves at 09.12, and remember to call the register. All absentees to be reported to me personally. Have a good time.’
The line went dead, and Indigestion knew how it felt. He climbed into his work clothes, retrieved his toolkit from behind the sofa, where it had fallen last night, and staggered off towards the bus depot.
He got there just in time to see a flight of winged chariots howling off overhead, packed full of heavily-armed Spectral Warriors. If there was a single dragon anywhere in the cosmos with a tooth left in its head, he reckoned, it would be something of a miracle.
Thanks to Mrs. Health’s determination to do her shopping instead of her work, someone had made one almighty mess of the transport arrangements; and when Indigestion arrived at Bay 340, he was informed that the coaches intended to convey the Maladies to the Caucasus mountains had been commandeered by Vulcan and the Cyclopes to transport themselves and their mobile workshop. All the other coaches were spoken for, of course; and with all the winged chariots taken by the military, it looked as if Prometheus, whatever he was going to have to endure today, would be doing so in virtually perfect health. After ten minutes or so of running round arguing with irritable Forms with clipboards, Indigestion happened to bump into Venezuela, who was standing in a long queue behind the only telephone box on the concourse that didn’t take phonecards.
‘What are you doing here?’ Indigestion asked.
‘Standing in for Violence,’ Venezuela explained. ‘He’d got tickets for some poetry reading or other, so I said I’d help out. If I’d known what was going on, I wouldn’t have bothered.
‘What is going on?’ Indigestion asked.
Venezuela grinned. ‘Balloon’s finally gone up,’ she said. ‘The word is that the Old Fool has finally flipped and put a contract out on You Know Who.’
Such is the level of paranoia in heaven that periphrases such as You Know Who are practically meaningless.
Indigestion sighed and asked her to be more specific.
‘You know,’ Venezuela hissed. ‘Laughing Boy.’
Indigestion stared at her. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.
‘On the contrary,’ Venezuela replied, ‘if the Big J’s to be believed, this is your last opportunity to be anything but serious. Twenty-four hours from now is to be VG Day, and the password is Killing Joke, if you’re interested.’
‘Look,’ said Indigestion, ‘what on earth is going on? What have I missed?’
‘Well,’ Venezuela replied, looking round carefully, ‘I was talking to Rumour, and he reckons that that Hero who went off the rails and we all had to look for; you know, the Derry kid . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Indigestion, ‘I know him.’
‘Do you?’
‘He’s been eating a lot recently,’ Indigestion explained. ‘Go on.’
‘Apparently,’ said Venezuela, ‘the Derry boy was subverted by You Know Who . . .’
‘Look . . .’
‘All right,’ said Venezuela, ‘by the person we don’t talk about whose name begins with G and who makes people laugh. You know that old prophesy thing.’
Indigestion nodded; a mistake on his part.
‘And then,’ Venezuela continued, ‘when the two of them - Derry and the Person in question - had broken out of wherever he’s been holed up all this while - beating up Ma and Plu on the way, I might add - the Big J very cleverly managed to nobble Derry and make him change sides.’
‘I thought he’d already done that.’
‘Yes,’ said Venezuela. ‘I mean no. Look, he was on our side, right? Then he defects to them. Now Jupiter’s got him to come back to us. Quite the human tennis ball, in fact.’
‘Quite.’
‘Apparently,’ Venezuela went on, ‘Jupiter fixed it by getting at Derry through his mother. Anyway, that’s what Bliss told me a moment ago; but you know Bliss, dead ignorant. And so what that means is that the enemy’s come out into the open but without a Hero. In dead shtuck, in other words. And so it’s all hands to the pump time, to see if we can nail him before he gets back to his place of safety. Fun, isn’t it?’
Indigestion breathed in deeply and sighed. Venezuela wasn’t the sort of person one would choose to talk to when one has a poorly head, but he had caught the gist of it. ‘Hang on, though,’ he said. ‘If we’re supposed to be going after Gel . . .’
‘Shh!’
‘All right, after You Know Who, why did Hel say we were all being sent to afflict Prometh . . .’
‘Shhhh!’
‘. . . Whatsit?’ said Indigestion. ‘Surely we should all . . .’
Venezuela grinned. ‘And who do you think the Great Smartass will go running to once he’s realised his pet Hero’s ditched him?’
‘Oh,’ said Indigestion, ‘I see.’
‘Particularly,’ Venezuela added, ‘when he hears that his old buddy and fellow traitor is being beset by maladies and Spectral Warriors and so forth. Be round there like a shot, don’t you worry, and then we’l
l have him. Smart thinking, no?’
Indigestion nodded - slowly this time - and pulled a wry face. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I suppose it had to happen. Look, do you know where I can get hold of at least four large coaches? We should have been on the road about fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Coaches are a bit tricky,’ Venezuela replied, ‘but if a winged chariot or so’d be any use to you . . .’
‘Fine.’
‘You could try OFT,’ Venezuela said. ‘Oh marvellous, the call-box is free. You got change for a twenty?’
Indigestion finally tracked Old Father Time down in the bar drinking Guinness, and talked him into a loan of his old but reliable Vulcan V12 Camaro. It would be rather a tight squeeze getting all the Maladies on it, he reckoned, but it was worth a try; and in the circumstances, if the worst came to the worst, it probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if they left Tennis Elbow behind.
Once he’d found the vehicle, put the horses in the shafts, put the harness on the horses, checked the tyre pressures and wound back the in-flight movie it was nearly half-past ten. Fortunately, Old Father Time’s chariot can cope with that sort of problem, and by a quarter to eleven Indigestion was coming in to land on the peak of one of the Caucasus mountains. Not that he was the first to arrive; not by a long way.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was raining.
‘Aren’t you going to take a coat?’ said Mrs. Derry.
‘No,’ Jason replied, thinking of something else.
‘Don’t be silly, Jason,’ Mrs. Derry said. ‘Here, I’ll get you one.’ She disappeared and returned with one of Mr. Derry’s anoraks. ‘And you aren’t going out in those shoes.’
Through the window, Jason could see George in the golf cart, looking at his watch. Was today the Serpent-Haired Gorgon of Sphacteria or the Hundred-Headed Hell-Dragon? Not that it mattered terribly much. Once you’ve slain one, you’ve slain them all. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I might be a bit late tonight, don’t . . .’
‘You aren’t leaving this house till you change those shoes.’