Pantheon (The Tamar Black Saga)

by Nicola Rhodes

  She turned out to be a far better driver than Denny. She did not hit nearly so many potholes for one thing, and she had also mastered the complicated art of stopping.

  Denny, however, was far too exhausted by this time to fully appreciate her talent in this area. He would have been fast asleep had she tied him to the back of the cart and dragged him along the road.

  They were jogging along at a fair pace now, and taking it in turns to drive so that the other could sleep might have been a little lonely, but it certainly made up the time. In a few more days (if the horse held up) they would be there. Of course, they had to stop occasionally to let the horse rest. This, Denny said, was the main advantage of a motorbike over your average domesticated quadruped. The other being that you could get a motorbike up to seventy on a decent road. The horse’s fastest speed seemed to be around ten miles per hour, and it was interminably slow to Denny who liked to go fast – the faster the better.

  ‘Grass is cheaper than petrol,’ was what Tamar had to say about it. ‘And it’s not as of you don’t get there in the end.’

  But getting there in the end was not the point of travelling as far as Denny was concerned. Watching the scenery whiz past in a blur was the only point in going anywhere his opinion. This meant that he had never actually seen proper scenery before. He was finding it boring.

  ‘At least it’s faster than walking,’ she said.

  ‘Only just,’ he countered grumpily.

  ‘More comfortable too,’ she added, as if she had not heard him. Since Denny’s unshod feet were now beginning to heal up, he had to concede that this was true.

  By the time they reached Rome, the appendages on the end of his legs would probably resemble actual feet again instead of the bloody lumps of raw meat that they had been turning into.

  Rome was not as impressive as Denny had expected it to be. It seemed, to his modern eyes, to be little more than an overgrown village. But still large and busy enough to be bewildering to the eyes of a stranger. However, Tamar appeared to know her way around well enough.

  ‘Petreius’s place is over this way.’ She pointed west. ‘Come on, if we’re quick we can catch me before I have to fight again.’

  ~ Chapter Five ~

  Denny had done his own share of public forum fighting, usually in some hideous seedy bar. But he had never seen anything like this. Bare knuckle was brutal but compared to the gladiatorial arena it was a ballet recital.

  Anything was a weapon. The fighters had swords, axes, nets, chains, you name it … And the point, he knew, was not to beat your opponent into submission, but rather to kill him.

  Tamar had, no doubt, killed in this ring. The thought gave him a horrible cold feeling, but she had been a slave at the time, the ultimate guilt had not been hers, he kept telling himself. But what had it done to her? How had this experience contributed to her view of humanity? Especially when she herself had not been human? When he had first met her, he remembered her as having a pretty skewed view of humanity in general. But there had been no hatred there and only a little contempt. In view of what he now knew, he considered this little short of a miracle.

  ‘In there,’ she said, as they threaded their way through the crowd. She pointed to a small door. ‘Behind that are the cages,’ she said. ‘God, it all comes back to me now. Horrible. Men locked up in cages, only allowed out to fight. And me in my little bottle.’

  ‘And it’s … you’re in there too?’ he said.

  ‘Yup,’ she agreed with rather overdone carelessness.

  Down some stone steps, and into a dank looking cellar-like arrangement. This was where the private entrepreneur kept his fighting slaves.

  There were indeed cages, some occupied, but search as they might, they could see no sign of Tamar’s bottle.

  They were heading despondently back up the steps, Tamar having decided that Petreius, must have the bottle with him, which could only mean that she was scheduled to fight, when they heard footsteps coming the other way – down the steps.

  ‘That’s him,’ hissed Tamar. ‘He’s coming to let me out into the arena.’

  ‘Quick – hide,’ hissed Denny.

  They scrambled down the steps and hid behind one of the cages, breathing heavily.

  They did not see the actual moment when Petreius let Tamar out of the bottle. But as soon as he was gone, they both flew to the barred window from where the arena could be seen – if you stood on a crate anyway.

  For Denny it was a peculiar experience, with a Tamar behind him and a Tamar in front of him – this last dressed in an armoured breastplate and carrying a sword, oddly she wore no helmet such as the others had worn. It looked dangerous, but of course, Denny knew it was not, not for her.

  He watched this other Tamar squaring up to her opponent as he had seen his own Tamar do many times, but never quite like this. She swung the sword a few times as if getting the balance of it, but Denny knew what she was really doing. She was grandstanding – playing for the crowd. He shook his head; he had never thought he would see the day.

  Tamar turned her head away. ‘I can’t watch,’ she said. ‘Oh, God look at that,’ she added, proving herself a liar, as she clearly was watching.

  ‘Showing off a bit,’ agreed Denny. ‘But I suppose you weren’t doing anything that wasn’t expected of you.’

  The crowd seemed to like it anyway.

  ‘I can still be ashamed of it,’ she said. ‘It really wasn’t funny, you know. That man wasn’t my enemy, I didn’t even know him. He was fodder – nothing more. It’s horrible.’

  Ah! So that was it. Denny turned away from the spectacle to look at her. ‘It wasn’t your fault you know,’ he said. ‘And you don’t think you’re a good person?’ he muttered.

  ‘Does he know?’ he asked. ‘That man you’re fighting now, does he know what he’s up against, or does he think that you’re just a girl?’

  ‘What?’ she said, nonplussed. ‘What does that matter? – No, they weren’t told as far as I know.’

  ‘Then that makes him a pretty big scumbag in my book,’ said Denny.

  ‘No, he was a slave too,’ she said. ‘He had no choice either.’

  ‘There’s always a choice,’ said Denny. ‘Except for you.’

  ‘You’re just trying to make me feel better,’ she said.

  There was no denying this.

  There was a loud roar from the crowd and then they began chanting something that Denny did not understand, but a probable translation was: ‘KILL, KILL, KILL.’

  ‘It’s almost over,’ Tamar confirmed. ‘Petreius will be back soon with the bottle. Better get ready.’

  There was a wild cheering.

  ‘I just killed him.’ said Tamar in a hollow voice.

  ‘Well, look at it this way,’ said Denny. ‘In a hundred years, who’s going to care?’ As far as reassurance went this was probably the worst example of a sympathetic statement that anyone in the history of the world ever came up with, and Tamar made him feel it. ‘I still care,’ she snapped. ‘And as far as I’m concerned, it happened over two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Look sharp,’ she added. ‘Here he comes.’

  Petreius entered the dungeon-like cellar holding the bottle in one hand and a bag of coins in the other. He looked extremely pleased with himself.

  He put the bottle down and opened the bag, chuckling to himself in a manner that, under the circumstances, Denny found completely nauseating.

  He then counted and recounted his loot for an interminable length of time chuckling the whole time. Denny’s fingers itched to get around his throat, but he restrained himself. Eventually Petreius rose and tucked the bag into his robes, and then he turned and picked up the bottle and tucked that away too before heading toward the steps.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ muttered Denny and he slid out of his hiding place and grabbed a training staff that was hanging up on the wall and felled Petreius with one blow. He grabbed the bottle, and he and Tamar fled up the steps.

 
‘This is getting to be a bad habit,’ Denny observed.

  ‘Yes,’ said a tall figure in a hooded robe (who had been watching the whole thing unobserved) to their fleeing backs. ‘It certainly is.’

  * * *

  Petreius had a stable – for some reason this seemed appropriate, they ran inside.

  Denny opened the bottle, and Tamar appeared with a yawn. She realised that she had a new master and began the spiel in a bored tone.

  Denny held up a hand. ‘That’s okay, I know the drill,’ he said.

  Tamar Djinn sighed. ‘Here comes the new master,’ she drawled, ‘same as the old master. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Ehm, I’m not exactly the same,’ said Denny. ‘Tamar!’ he called.

  ‘You know my name?’ she said, surprised.

  ‘No, he knows my name.’ said Tamar appearing from behind the door.

  ‘I do not think I can help you,’ she said, after they had explained the situation as well as they themselves understood it.

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t want to, you understand? I can’t. Oh, I can take you both back to Olympus, and I could have killed the gods for you if you could wish for it. But I cannot return powers to you that you never had in the first place, and I do not think that you fully comprehend your situation. You are not who you think you are.’ She addressed Tamar. ‘You are not what the future holds for me. I will never be you.’ She turned to Denny. ‘And you and I are not destined to meet sometime in the future, which is a shame really.’ And she winked at him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Denny, knowing that she would be compelled to answer him since he was technically her master.

  ‘Nice try,’ she said. ‘But since you aren’t real, I don’t have to do what you say if I don’t like, so don’t try it. However, I like you, so I will try to explain.

  ‘You two, as you are now, no longer exist. Any fool can see that. If I understand your explanation properly, it clearly happened when the old gods returned and everything changed. Obviously, for some reason, you two will never meet, which means that, as a part of this version of the world, I will never have that particular future and if I don’t, then you can’t be the future incarnation of me. The me from your time is probably still a slave and always will be. God, I’m depressing myself now.’

  ‘You certainly are,’ agreed Tamar.

  ‘Are you saying we really don’t exist?’ said Denny. ‘And everything we remember never happened to us at all?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, yes it did, obviously, but then it didn’t. After the world changed, your old lives were deleted and written over. Your powers,’ she pointed at Denny, ‘and your freedom,’ she indicated Tamar, ‘never happened.’

  ‘Then how is it that we’re here at all?’

  Djinn Tamar shrugged. ‘Beats me,’ she said. ‘Mind you, you did say that some of the deleted files were still running. Maybe that accounts for it.’

  ‘No, we’d be real if that was it,’ said Tamar, ‘and you say we aren’t. I think Clive had something to do with it.’

  ‘You have very strong auras,’ said Djinn Tamar suddenly. ‘Very powerful, you’d give any psychic a terrible headache, either of you. I think it’s possible that you just held on somehow, that you both had such a strong sense of self, of who you are, that it left a footprint in the world, a hole that just fitted your shape and you …’

  Tamar groaned.

  Denny was trying not to laugh. ‘You were right,’ he told Djinn Tamar. ‘You definitely aren’t her.’

  Djinn Tamar pouted. ‘You shouldn’t mock what you don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘But that’s just it,’ said Denny. ‘We do understand. We’ve been inside the mainframe. And it just doesn’t work like that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, whatever,’ said Tamar briskly. ‘If we get rid of the gods as per spec and on schedule, then all of this should just get back to normal shouldn’t it. If you help us,’ she said to herself. ‘All this,’ and she waved her arms at Denny like a game show assistant demonstrating the prizes. ‘Can be yours.’

  Djinn Tamar looked keenly at Denny. A strange longing came into her eyes. ‘We-ell,’ she said. ‘It’s tempting, I’ll give you that. But … Oh, hell,’ she said irritably. ‘I wish I could, I mean I really, really, wish I could, you have no idea how much I wish I could. But…well it’s not going to work you see?’

  ‘Because we aren’t real,’ said Denny with sudden insight.

  ‘Right. You can’t be my master under the circumstances, and I can’t do anything really major, like kill a lot of gods without a proper wish.’

  ‘What can you do?’ asked Denny. ‘Can you get us back to Greece?’

  ‘Yes, but to what end?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘Let’s just say, we have nothing left to lose now,’ said Tamar. ‘And we aren’t giving up so easily. At the very least, you can handle the transport for us as long as we are running on empty as far as the power supply goes, and, as long as we have the bottle, you can’t be anyone else’s slave.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Djinn Tamar. ‘I’ll do whatever I can. It’ll be a relief to get out of this rat hole anyway. But what about Petreius? Technically, I’m still his Djinn, if you aren’t really my masters.’

  ‘Stuff Petreius,’ said Tamar, crudely. ‘People lose stuff all the time. Let’s just say he should have kept a better eye on you.’

  ‘But the rules …’ began Djinn Tamar. ‘

  ‘Ha!’ interrupted Tamar. ‘The sacred bloody rules. I can’t believe I was ever that naïve.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Denny to Djinn Tamar. ‘We’ve been down this road before. It’ll be all right.’

  * * *

  ‘I don’t like her,’ Djinn Tamar confided to Denny, ‘which is odd, don’t you think, considering she’s me – well sort of.’

  Denny thought about it. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘It’s not really.’

  Djinn Tamar had been as good as her word, and they had appeared suddenly in a small village near the foot of Mount Olympus to the extreme surprise of the locals. All apart from one local sorcerer who claimed he had summoned them and that their arrival had been foreseen in any case.

  ‘She doesn’t like me either,’ said Djinn Tamar. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Denny. ‘It’s just hard for her. You are her from a time when she wasn’t very happy. I mean that’s true isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s happy?’ said Djinn Tamar, shrugging.

  The village elders, on the instructions of the sorcerer, had made them welcome and given them a hut to themselves. They were, in a bizarre twist of fate, expected to deal with the village’s “god” problem.

  According to the sorcerer and his young assistant, the village was under a curse from the gods. Whatever they had done to earn the wrath of the gods was now long forgotten in the depths of time. They had begged and prayed and made sacrifice to the gods for the curse to be lifted but all to no avail. But Arpagius, the self-styled sorcerer, had told them to desist from demeaning themselves, for there was a prophecy that heroes from far away would come and save them from the curse. And he offered to try the summoning at the correct time and lo and behold, it had worked. His young assistant, who went by the unlikely name of Dexius, had been somewhat sceptical about the whole thing until the moment that two Tamars and a Denny had manifested right in front of the magical fire that Arpagius had built (and this seemed like more than a coincidence even to Tamar). Now he seemed mostly terrified. Like many of the other villagers, he was decidedly nervous about the idea of challenging the gods now that it came to it. What if it only made things worse? So far, only the iron will of Arpagius was holding things together.

  The village certainly appeared to be under some sort of curse. There was little food – according to Arpagius, every year most of the crops were destroyed by tremendous thunderstorms sent down by Zeus. Their cattle and sheep were taken in the night by wild dogs thought to be the dogs of Ares.


  And the village was attacked on a fairly regular basis by various gods – usually Athena. ‘And she’s a terrible temper on her that Athena,’ said Arpagius with a blithe disregard for piety, ‘seems to take the whole thing personally.’

  ‘Why don’t you all just move away?’ asked Denny logically.

  ‘And where would we go?’ asked Arpagius severely. ‘You can’t just uproot an entire village and move it somewhere else you know. The tax collectors wouldn’t allow it anyway. Everyone stays put. That’s the rules.’*

  *[You may be wondering at this point, how it was that Denny was suddenly able to hold a conversation in ancient Greek. The answer, of course, is that he didn’t. This was the power of the Djinn at work. Denny spoke English but he was heard in Greek and vice versa. ]

  ‘Doesn’t anybody leave?’ asked Tamar.

  ‘Oh, yes, a few more go every year. But where they go and what becomes of them no one knows. They probably end up in the army or in prison.’

  ‘Better than here,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s starving.’

  ‘I can help with that,’ piped up Djinn Tamar. ‘A feast fit for the … ehm … a magnificent feast every day – no problem.’ And she proceeded to prove it.

  This was fine – wonderful even – as far as it went. But, unfortunately, it did not really go to the root of the problem.

  Curse or no curse, the plan was to kill off the gods and Djinn Tamar had no way of transporting them into the home of the gods, this village had been as close as she was able to get them. (Tamar knew this to be true; the Djinn Tamar could not lie to her since she knew everything that the other knew.) And what did they think they were going to do when they got there anyway, as she pointed out. But, sorry as they were for the villagers, they had not, as Denny pointed out, come all this way simply to offer emergency aid.

  ‘Does this prophecy offer any ideas on exactly how we are supposed to solve your problem?’ asked Denny.

  ‘It is said that you will tackle the gods on Olympus itself,’ said Arpagius.

  This sounded good to Denny. ‘Any clues on how we get there?’ he asked hopefully.