Ye Gods!

by Tom Holt

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ Jason shouted, ‘a funny thing happened to me on the way to the Caucasus this evening. I was walking along, minding my own business, when this man . . .’

  He paused and looked down. The Spectral Warriors Forms and gods had all gone, vanished into thin air, and he was alone. Except for the three-headed dog, of course; and the eagle, who floated over and nodded approvingly.

  ‘It’s the way you tell them,’ it said.

  ‘Look!’ said the eagle.

  Jason turned round. ‘Where?’ he said.

  ‘There,’ replied the eagle. Since eagles cannot talk, it naturally follows that they cannot have voices that are resonant with awe and reverence. So it must have been Jason’s imagination.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ Jason said. ‘Are you sure you’re . . .’

  ‘There, you cretin,’ said the eagle. ‘Oh, blow you.’ It spread its wings and floated off on a gust of warm air that had no meteorological foundation whatsoever. Jason stared hard but couldn’t make out anything. It was getting late and cold and he couldn’t really see that he was needed here any more; and he was beginning to feel peckish. He thought of Baisbekian’s Diner.

  Then the mountain behind him cleared its throat.

  Readers are asked to pay close attention to what follows, as the author cannot be held responsible for any sensations of disorientation or confusion which may result from careless reading practices.

  ‘Jason,’ said the mountain, ‘are you busy for a moment?’

  Jason thought hard. No, he decided, mountains can’t talk, and neither can eagles, for that matter, let alone three-headed dogs. In a world such as this, there is much to be said for staying in bed with your head under the pillows.

  ‘Hello?’ he ventured.

  ‘Yes, hello to you too,’ said the mountain. ‘Are you busy for a moment?’

  ‘That depends,’ Jason replied.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what you had in mind,’ Jason said. ‘And if you’re a mountain, will you please stop talking to me, because I only have a very tenuous grip on reality at the best of times, and . . .’

  ‘I’m not a mountain.’

  ‘It’s all very well you saying that,’ Jason said, ‘but how can I be sure? You look pretty much like a mountain to me.’

  ‘What you’re looking at is indeed a mountain,’ said the mountain. ‘I happen to be behind the mountain. Does this clarify matters for you?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jason replied. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Prometheus.’

  Little wheels went round in Jason’s mind, and the result was three oranges and a Hold. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘yes. Right. Where exactly are you, then?’

  ‘Behind the bloody mountain, like I just said.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jason. ‘Give me . . .’ He made a quick estimate. ‘Give me half an hour and I’ll be with you.’

  In fact, it took him just under twenty minutes to get within sight of the Titan, thanks to a short-cut through a narrow ravine, which fortunately didn’t say anything to him as he clambered through it.

  ‘What kept you?’

  ‘Look.’ Jason had turned his ankle in the ravine and accordingly he wasn’t feeling at his most lovable. ‘Would you mind just explaining . . .?’

  ‘The chains,’ said Prometheus.

  ‘Yes,’ Jason replied. ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘Aren’t they what?’

  ‘Chains.’

  Prometheus raised his head, uprooting a large tree, and looked at him. ‘Just cut them, will you?’

  In the back of his mind - the only part still capable of function - the right question drifted to the surface and bobbed uncertainly.

  ‘Why?’ Jason asked.

  ‘What do you mean, why?’ Prometheus said. ‘Because they’re stopping me from moving, that’s why. Get on with it, please.’

  ‘But,’ Jason said, ‘what I mean is, why should I? I tried to go into all this before, but things kept happening and I never came to a satisfactory conclusion. Look, will someone please give me some idea of what’s happening, because otherwise I’m going on strike.’

  As it happens, there have been occasional strikes by Heroes, the most notable being the Withdrawal of the Labours of Hercules; however, they rarely last long and never achieve anything, perhaps because all Heroism is intrinsically unnecessary. When Hercules fell out with Jupiter following a breakdown of negotiations over unsocial hours payments, for example, Jupiter replied by drafting in contingents of Forms who were able to do Hercules’s feats in half the time and without terrorising supernatural wildlife or stopping every twenty minutes to beget children. On the other hand, it is felt that Heroes marching up and down outside temples with placards looks bad, and in any event the demands of the average Hero are so modest that it would be mean minded not to agree to them.10

  ‘You can’t,’ Prometheus said, however. ‘The schedule’s too tight.’

  ‘What schedule?’

  ‘Just cut the chains,’ Prometheus replied. ‘Come on, will you?’

  ‘Oh for crying out . . .’ Jason hefted the Sword of That’s A Silly Name For A Sword, Anyway, whirled it round his head, and sliced through the nearest chain. The shock of the metal biting into the adamant jarred every bone in his body. The chain fell in two.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘And the next one.’

  ‘All right, keep your hair on.’

  ‘It’s not my hair I’m concerned about.’

  ‘If I cut through the next chain, will you tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘If you don’t cut through the next chain, I won’t tell you what’s going on.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Two down, two to go.’

  ‘Look . . .’

  ‘You’ll find it over there, at the top of that mountain. It won’t take you a quarter of an hour if you run.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I see,’ Jupiter said.

  Big chief speak with forked tongue. It was obvious, to Mars at least, that Jupiter didn’t see, one little bit. Whether in the long run it would be worth making one last effort to enlighten him was something that Mars (who, unlike Apollo, is not a prophetic deity) could only guess at. He guessed safe.

  ‘All those Forms,’ Jupiter continued, ‘all those Spectral Warriors, all that overtime, and you ran away. Because,’ said the Thunderer, his eyebrows coming together, ‘one mortal offered - I’m sorry, threatened - to tell you a joke.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mars, ‘yes.’

  ‘A joke.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Jupiter stroked his beard, and the static electricity thereby generated would have removed the need for nuclear power in the industrialised nations for a century. ‘Don’t you think you might have been a trifle over-cautious, all things considered? Played it just a little too safe?’

  Mars straightened his back and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Definitely not.’

  Jupiter raised an eyebrow. Nobody ever said Definitely to him unless they were absolutely convinced of something or else had a great desire to be a frog. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘we ought to have a board meeting.’

  Mars, feeling like a turkey on Christmas Eve who hears that everyone has been converted to Jainism overnight, nodded and hurried out of the Presence.

  He found Minerva in the sun-lounge, lying on the sofa with her shoes off reading Harpers & Goddess. She looked at him over her spectacles.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Board meeting,’ Mars replied. ‘In ten minutes in the Great Hall.’

  ‘Board meeting?’ Minerva swung her legs to the floor and put heel to slingback. ‘What’s happening, Ma?’ she said. ‘There hasn’t been a board meeting for eleven hundred years. He’s not on about privatisation again, is he, because I went through the figures and . . .’

  Mars frowned. He had thought it strange that Minerva had been lying around reading at a time like this anyway. ‘It’s the Prometh
eus situation,’ he said, ‘what do you think? Look, I’ve got to dash. Ask someone else, all right?’

  ‘What Prometheus situation? I thought you’d . . .’

  ‘It was a wash-out,’ Mars replied quickly. ‘So now . . .’

  ‘You messed it up, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Flair,’ Mars replied. ‘Either you’ve got it or you haven’t.’

  ‘Right.’ Minerva stood up briskly and marched out of the sun-lounge. Oh dear, said Mars to himself, it’s going to be one of those meetings.

  He found Apollo in the library, Diana in the gym and Neptune beside the swimming-pool, and then rushed off to find Demeter, who wasn’t in the kitchen. Instead he found Pluto, making himself a cup of tea.

  ‘Board meeting,’ he announced.

  ‘You don’t say?’ Pluto replied. ‘Well, well.’ The spoon writhed between his fingers, hissed and slithered away behind the sink.

  Demeter turned out to have been in the kitchen garden, weeding the sunflowers. ‘What’s a board meeting?’ was her reaction, and when he explained she asked if this would be a good time to raise the issue of rainfall allowances for the cloud-shepherds. As he chased off to round up the rest of the quorum, Mars found himself speculating as to why he bothered.

  ‘Ye gods!’ he muttered under his breath.

  Clang.

  ‘Now,’ Jason said, ‘Will you explain?’

  The Earth shook. Slowly, very slowly, painfully slowly, the Titan flexed muscles that hadn’t moved since before the destruction of Atlantis. He wiggled his toes, scattering topsoil in a whirling cloud.

  ‘Only,’ Jason went on, ‘so many downright weird things have been happening lately, with me all mixed up in them, that unless someone lets me in on it all pretty soon . . .’

  Imagine the sound - the last thing we want is endless product liability lawsuits, and so we will only tax one area of sensory perception to its uttermost limits at a time - the sound of a glacier scoring its way across a landscape at forty miles an hour instead of its usual mile every four thousand years. That’s Prometheus getting to his knees.

  The next sense we will dislocate with sheer vastness is sight. Imagine a mountain rearing up in front of your eyes, stretching, complaining, and then standing upright. That’s Prometheus getting to his feet.

  And finally, imagine the sort of earthquake you’d get if some gigantic and malevolent deity squeezed the Earth like an enormous spot, sending molten magma spouting out of all its half-healed volcanoes, faults and fissures. That’s what it felt like to be standing in the Caucasus when Prometheus landed after he’d jumped up, punched the air and yelled ‘Yo!’ at the top of his voice.

  ‘When you’ve quite finished,’ Jason said.

  The Titan looked down at the tiny dot below him, and grinned. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d love to stop and chat for a bit, but I have to get going. Ask the eagle, she’ll tell you.’

  Then, with a stride that arched over mountains, the Titan walked off. Far away, Jason could hear a sound like someone very tall and strong punching the palm of his hand with his fist and saying ‘Right!’

  ‘Be like that,’ Jason said, and started to walk down the mountain. He had gone about thirty yards when a foot the size of York Minster landed beside him.

  ‘Jason Derry?’

  Metaphor is tricksy stuff. It is not actually possible to jump out of one’s skin; but it is possible to try. Jason tried.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ The voice was slightly muffled, but that was because the words had to travel through a lot of thick cloud before they reached Jason’s ears. ‘Has he gone?’

  Jason looked up. By craning his neck until he felt something give, he could just see, far up in the sky, a belt buckle. ‘Sorry?,’ he said. Then, for no reason at all that he could see, his lips arched into a grin and he felt a laugh creep cough-like across his lungs. No need to ask who the tall person was.

  ‘Prometheus,’ said the voice of Gelos. ‘Has he gone yet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which way?’

  Jason blinked. ‘I’d have thought you’d be able to see him from up there.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ said the voice. ‘My eyes aren’t what they were, I can’t pick out little tiny details any more. Look, time’s pressing rather; we’ve only got five minutes before the orbits are lined up, so . . .’

  Jason may have been small compared to Gelos, but by now he was so fed up that mere size really didn’t matter. ‘Right, Buster,’ he said grimly. ‘Tell me what’s going on or I’ll . . .’ He stared up at the mountain of toecap that rose high above his head. ‘Or I’ll give you a chiropody session you’ll never forget. You hear me?’

  Gelos chuckled. ‘I won’t tell you,’ he said, ‘but you can watch.’

  A hand - we can tell it was a hand because we’re far enough away to see it all in proportion; to Jason it was just a very big pink thing - reached down and very gently flicked Jason up into its own palm. ‘Which way?’ the voice repeated.

  With a monumental effort Jason hauled himself up out of a ravine that was in fact Gelos’s life line. ‘Straight ahead,’ he said. ‘Head for that tall mountain over there.’

  The enormous thing lurched forward. ‘Which mountain? ’

  ‘The one you just trod on.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Gelos, ‘I can see him for myself now. Hey, Pro!’

  Far away, Jason could see the Titan. He seemed to have grown; so, in fact had Jason. Actually, all that had happened was that his brain had adjusted the field of view and proportion registers of his brain to enable him to cope with the scale on which he was now operating. Under normal circumstances this would have taken several million years of evolution, but we can only assume that Jason was a quick learner. Anyway, he could see Prometheus, and above him he could see Gelos, and below him very much below him - he could see the world. There was just about enough room on it for them both to stand, although very soon there wouldn’t be.

  ‘Hold tight, Jason Derry.’ It sounded as if both giants had said it at the same time; and that wasn’t as remarkable as it might have been, since now that Jason could see them both clearly, he noticed that they looked extremely alike. Sort of like twins; or reflections in a mirror. No, let’s stop pussyfooting. They are exactly alike.

  And now there was only one of them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Jason.

  ‘Yes?’ There were two voices; but both speaking in perfect harmony and coming from one throat. The two giants had merged.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jason. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Excuse us,’ said the giant(s), ‘but we need our hands free, so if you wouldn’t mind . . .’

  Jason felt himself travelling through the air at devastating speed; and then what he could now perceive was a hand put him in what he was able to recognise as a shirt pocket. The pocket of a very big shirt; so big that the gaps between the weave of the cotton were large enough to fly an airliner through. Fortunately, the fibres of the cotton were as wide as the average motorway, and so there was no danger of falling through; and through the weave, Jason had a splendid view of what happened next.

  High above his head he could see the stars; not as little points of light but as huge balls of fiery gas. The planets of the solar system were so big that he felt he could reach out and touch them. But what he mostly noticed was the other Earths.

  We know them to be Betamax worlds, but Jason didn’t. He just thought they were a lot of identical - fairly identical - copies of the thing he remembered having seen on globes. One of these globes was swinging down through the firmament, dragging a moon behind it like a very fat lady with a very fat dog on a lead. The giant(s) reached out a hand, grabbed hold of it, closed his/their fingers round it and said, ‘Gotcha!’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The giant(s) smiled. ‘Saving the world,’ he/they said.

  ‘Ah,’ J
ason said. ‘Right.’

  ‘Not this one, of course,’ the giant(s) went on. ‘The other one.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘This one,’ said the giant(s), tossing the Betamax world up in the air and catching it, ‘is a right little tinker.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Here,’ said the giant(s), ‘look for yourself.’

  ‘No, really,’ Jason said. ‘I’m quite happy to take your word for it.’

  The giant(s) laughed. ‘You wanted to know what was going on, you look and see for yourself. Here, catch.’ And the giant(s) threw the planet to Jason.

  Who, to his everlasting amazement, caught it.

  According to ancestral belief, Delphi is the dead centre of the world; or, as the ancient Hellenes so quaintly put it, the earth’s navel. On a hot day in high season, however, armpit might be a more fitting description.

  Betty-Lou Fisichelli plodded from her office across the road from the museum up towards the temple site to post the day’s messages in the usual place. Not that there was anything much: Is this a good time to invest in Far Eastern unit trusts? and Congratulations! You have been selected as a lucky finalist in our prize draw didn’t seem to her to be crammed with arcane significance and could probably wait. Nevertheless, a good Pythoness doesn’t take it upon herself to edit; only to relay.

  When she finally reached the Treasury of the Athenians, she found it deserted except for forty-six French tourists, a three-headed dog and an eagle. Oddly enough, the tourists didn’t seem able to see the dog or the eagle, but nothing tourists failed to notice surprised Ms. Fisichelli any more. What did surprise her was that the eagle was there at all.

  ‘You!’ she said.

  The eagle looked down at its talons and made a very slight but deprecating gesture.

  ‘How you’ve got the nerve to show your beak here,’ Ms. Fisichelli went on, ‘after the way you . . .’ She tailed off. The dog was looking at her.