Pantheon (The Tamar Black Saga)

by Nicola Rhodes

  No, he decided. Even that would not work. One god could certainly kill another; they knew that. But the whole lot of them? Even the power of Zeus was not going to be enough.

  In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realised that this had been a very, very bad plan. There was nothing they could do here. They just did not have enough power. What they needed, he thought in frustration, was the power of a Djinn, and, unfortunately, that was just what they could not have.

  ‘Come and swim with me,’ urged Aphrodite tugging on his arm. He found this side of her particularly repellent. She was like a spoiled child.

  ‘Just take no for an answer, will you?’ he said silently.

  ‘I don’t like the water,’ he said aloud.

  Then he looked up and saw that Tamar was being subjected to similar urgings by Zeus, and that Apollo, finally deciding that he had had enough, had stepped in. Of course, Denny thought, they both just wanted to see her naked.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ he decided. ‘It’s time to get the hell out of here anyway.’

  He stood up – too late. Apollo was not the only one who had had enough of Zeus’s importuning. Tamar had spent the better part of five thousand years with an immovable contempt for gods of all shapes and sizes, and this had been backed by the fact that she herself had had far more power than they. Even as a slave, no god had power over her; that privilege was reserved for humanity. This may have been the reason why she slapped Zeus in the face.

  The atmosphere changed immediately. As if a sudden cold wind had blown everyone’s laughter away, a deathly silence fell, and no one moved. But the tension in the air was palpable. The gods were angry. Angry but uncertain. It was likely that nothing like this had ever happened before. Denny only had a few seconds while their uncertainly lasted.

  As Zeus opened his mouth to roar Denny bounded forward and stood before him.

  He said nothing but he forced as much silent threat into his face as it would hold. There was a long moment of uncertainty. And then, for the first time in forever, the unthinkable happened. Denny flinched first.

  And that was it. It was over. Zeus roared in triumph and raised a massive fist. Denny grabbed Tamar and dived for cover.

  Aphrodite was wringing her hands. ‘Daddy, no!’ she wailed. ‘I want him! Leave him alone!’

  In his fury, Zeus directed his next lightning bolt straight at Aphrodite. ‘Be silent!’ he roared. ‘Who is the king here anyway?’

  Aphrodite rose from the ground with such a look of pure venom on her face that Denny, who happened to catch sight of it, blanched.

  Then it was Denny’s turn, and he was unlikely to survive it in his current condition.

  Tamar acted fast; she scrambled to her feet and interposed herself between the enraged king of the gods and the fallen Denny. What she thought she was doing was anybody’s guess.

  She stood there waiting for death, there was nothing else she could do, and after he had disposed of her. Denny would also die. Tamar would not have minded so much if she could have taken them all with her. What really annoyed her was that they had failed.

  She did not see her Djinn counterpart rising up behind her.

  She had come out of the bottle to see what all the commotion was about and was just in time to see Zeus raise his fist ready to throw a lightning bolt and hurl Tamar into oblivion. There was nothing she could do to protect Tamar or Denny, as they were not true masters. But there was something she could do, something that might just save them both. No time to think … just do it.

  She joined with Tamar. Like a spirit taking over a living body, she simply walked forward into Tamar.

  As the familiar power surged through her, Tamar lifted off the ground slightly, and a bright light shone out from the ends of her fingertips, her toes and the top of her head like high beams, they blasted outward and filled the space with a light so bright that the gods had to cover their eyes. Then she floated gently to the ground. ‘Ooh,’ she said, and there was a slight echo to her voice. ‘That’s better. I was a bit worried that there might have been a little overload there,’

  The lightning struck her full in the chest, but earthed harmlessly at her feet. She did not even seem to notice it. She swept her arm in a wide arc as if swatting the air and Zeus went flying sideways and backwards for quite a distance.

  ‘Now, that’s what I’m talking about!’ she yelled jubilantly. ‘Oh, yeah, I’m back!’

  Denny bounced to his feet. ‘Retreat,’ he hissed.

  Tamar came to her senses at once. He was right, time to go. Zeus was stunned, but even now, he was getting ponderously to his feet. They needed a new plan.

  * * *

  ‘Strike one,’ said Tamar as they were getting their bearings back on the ground.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ said Denny. ‘We could be dead.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said cheerfully. ‘At least we get to have another go at them.’

  ‘About that,’ said Denny. ‘What happened?’

  Tamar held up the (now empty) bottle. ‘You know how she and I are really the same person?’ she said. ‘Well, it’s just a little bit more literal now.’

  ‘She’s in there with you?’

  ‘No, she is me, and I’m her. It’s metaphysical. Don’t try to understand it. ‘It’s like, the power is my power, I just needed it back, and she hadn’t lost it yet so… Oh Lord, when you try to explain it in regular terms you just can’t.’

  ‘So, she’s gone? I mean the you from this time, is gone?’

  ‘I am the me from this time, the me from our time doesn’t exist see? Except I’m here somehow, so I’m still that me too. I have all my memories and everything. And I’m still free. As in, not a slave.’

  ‘You’re both of you?’ said Denny, his face creasing into a perplexed frown.

  ‘And neither,’ she said, which only confused him even more.

  Seeing this, she tried to explain. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘try this on for size. You and I no longer exist in the future, in our own time right? So in order to retrieve the power that I once had, I had to come back in time to a point when I still had that power.’

  ‘But that isn’t how it happened,’ objected Denny.

  ‘No, but the result is the same,’ she said. ‘Now, as a Djinn, I had considerable power but no freedom and, therefore, no identity, at least no identity that I could separate from that power. The power was me, and I was the power (no jokes about He-Man please) and that was all. My personality was incidental. And as a mortal I had my freedom, I was just me, all me, but I had no power. Now, I have both – again. Now, I’m me, and I have the power too. She was the power – in some ways that was all she was. All I was, I should say.’

  ‘Both and neither,’ said Denny. ‘I see. Did you know that this would happen if she – if you …’

  ‘Yes, at least I knew it in an abstract way. That is to say, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. But I would have known if I’d thought about it. But it honestly never occurred to me.’

  ‘It occurred to her – obviously. Why do you think she did it?’

  ‘Because it’s what I would have done. The alternative was watching you die, and that’s unacceptable to me. Any me apparently.’

  A thunderous crash from the top of Olympus brought their minds back to more immediate concerns.

  ‘We should get far away from here,’ said Denny.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s the last place they’ll look for us. And you notice they haven’t come after us yet. They’re scared.’

  ‘Scared enough to gather a huge army of gods and other … things and come after us and crush us.’ Denny said. ‘I’d bet my… I’d bet on it.’

  ‘And you would be right,’ said someone from behind him.

  ‘Aphrodite?’ said Denny turning in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I have come to offer my help to you,’ she said, ‘if you agree to spare me of course.’

  ~ Chapter Eight ~
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br />   This was a master that Tamar hated bitterly – of course she never liked any of them much but honestly …

  If you were going to use a Djinn for criminal activity – and many did, she was used to that – at least have the sense to think … well bigger!

  All this petty thievery was getting on her nerves. She was capable of so much more. But apparently Barry had no further ambition than to be a biggish fish in a very small pond and not get put behind bars. Tamar could do this standing on her head.

  And he was so stupid! Not, it had to be said, stupid enough to have made his three wishes and have done with it (she had been stuck here with him for twenty years now) but certainly stupid enough to drive her crazy.

  ‘If I were free …’ She began the familiar train of thought but stopped herself. It was no use – she would never be free. She had finally given up on that one about twenty years ago. She had just awoken one day to the cold and absolute realisation that it was never ever going to happen. Not in this life.

  * * *

  ‘But she can’t be on our side,’ said Denny after Aphrodite had withdrawn to let them discuss it. ‘She’s the enemy.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ said Tamar stubbornly. ‘Pitting the gods against each other is a good plan actually and if we can get one god to join us maybe we can get others.’ said Tamar.

  ‘You mean we get a lot of them on our side, and then just sit back and let them all kill each other?’ Denny gave the idea some thought. ‘It’s a bit …’ he began. ‘Mind you …’ he continued. ‘But it’ll never work. We’ll never get any more of them to join us – or at least not enough of them and anyway …’

  ‘I know it’s a bit morally ambiguous,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, I don’t have a problem with that,’ he told her. ‘Any gods that join us will be doing it mostly to save their own skins at the expense of the others. They’ll deserve everything they get. Okay,’ he said decisively. ‘On that basis, she’s in.’

  Since Tamar had got what she wanted, she forbore to point out that Aphrodite had more than likely decided to join them out of a desire a – for Denny himself, and b – for revenge on Zeus – and who could blame her for that? The bastard had thrown a bolt of lightning at her.

  Aphrodite took the news with an air of smug satisfaction. ‘I knew you’d see it my way,’ she seemed to say. ‘After all I am the goddess of love. Where would the world be without me? But those other gods … who needs them?’

  Tamar and Denny read these thoughts in her face as clearly as if she had spoken them out loud, which may have been what she intended of course.

  But their original problem remained; how to kill the gods? They were beginning to feel as if maybe they were not supposed to manage it at all. It would not be the first time that Clive had sent them on a wild goose chase, or that the clerks had set them up. Because, no matter what, they were trapped here. They might technically have the power to go home now, but they had nothing to go home to. Not until the gods were dead and history was set back on course.

  ‘You weren’t exactly what we were expecting,’ Aphrodite confided. ‘I mean no wonder Prometheus would rather have stayed chained to a rock than try to tell the gods that two mortals, and one of them a girl too, were the ones who would finish us all off. They wouldn’t have believed him anyway.’

  ‘What was that?’ demanded Denny. ‘I thought Prometheus was chained to that rock for stealing fire from the gods.’

  ‘Oh yes, he was. But Zeus found out that he knew the name of the one who would eventually destroy the gods and he offered to let him go if he would tell. But he wouldn’t. Said they’d just have to wait and see. At least that’s what I heard.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Tamar noting Aphrodite’s use of the word “they”.

  ‘Titans,’ said Denny. ‘Now there’s an idea.’

  ‘He’s the only one left,’ said Tamar. ‘But he certainly hates the gods. And a Titan is always impressive.’

  ‘He’d scare the sandals off Zeus,’ chipped in Aphrodite. ‘I’d love to see his face if you unchained Prometheus. Can you do that?’

  ‘I thought Heracles had already freed him.’ said Denny.

  ‘P.R. job,’ said Tamar dismissively.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Aphrodite in surprise. ‘But how did you know that?’

  ‘I must have read it somewhere,’ said Tamar.

  ‘Read it somewhere?’ said Aphrodite. ‘Mortals can read?’

  ‘I can whistle and chew gum at the same time too,’ said Tamar acerbically. ‘There’s really no end to my talents.’

  ‘We could probably free Prometheus somehow,’ said Denny. ‘If we knew where he was?’ he looked at Aphrodite.

  ‘He’s in the underworld somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘I thought he was on a mountain,’

  ‘Oh, he is. There are many worlds within the underworld.’

  ‘I can vouch for that,’ said Tamar mysteriously. ‘And we’ll never find him without some sort of guide.’ She did not seem terribly surprised to discover that Prometheus was in the underworld. ‘Isn’t he chained up with the chains of Hephaestus?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but Heph doesn’t know … Oh all right, I suppose I could ask him. We don’t get on,’ she confided to Denny in an aside. ‘Arranged marriage. Total disaster.’

  ‘Your fault,’ muttered Tamar. ‘I thought he was a pretty nice bloke.’

  Aphrodite heard this. ‘Oh, he’s nice enough, but he’s so dull.’ she sighed. ‘And bitter too. After Hera threw him off Olympus for being too ugly, he never got over it. Said marrying him to me was the final insult.’

  ‘Why?’ said Denny.

  ‘The goddess of love and beauty,’ supplied Tamar. ‘Zeus did it for a joke.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Aphrodite. ‘Funny sense of humour if you ask me. Anyway Heph was pretty awful about it. Acted like it was all my fault. So I left him.’

  ‘I thought he chucked you out after he caught you with Ares,’ said Tamar tactlessly.

  ‘What do you think I was doing with Ares in the first place?’ said Aphrodite. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about it,’ she added. ‘Who are you anyway?’

  ‘It sounds as if Hephaestus has got no reason to like the gods on Olympus either,’ said Denny. ‘Maybe you two could bury your differences on this one …?’

  ‘I would think he’d be only too glad to help us free Prometheus,’ added Tamar, ‘if it was going to upset Zeus.’

  ‘And I’m sure that if anyone can get around him, it’s you,’ put in Denny smoothly.

  Aphrodite preened. ‘I’m sure I can,’ she said. ‘But why do you care about freeing Prometheus anyway?’ she asked suddenly. ‘What does that have to do with anything anyway? Surely you don’t need him?’

  ‘That’s our business,’ said Tamar curtly. Aphrodite really was not as empty headed as she appeared. ‘We don’t need you either if it comes to that, so I’d stop asking questions if I were you. We have our own plans, and if you want to be involved you’ll do as you’re told, or we might as well just kill you now.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Aphrodite backed down immediately. ‘I was just asking … but I won’t anymore.’

  ‘Why don’t we just kill her?’ said Tamar later. ‘Two down?’

  ‘No,’ said Denny. ‘Not yet anyway. She might come in handy. It was you that said so in the first place. And it’s beginning to look like you were right.’

  ‘Prometheus and hopefully Hephaestus too,’ said Tamar. ‘If she can deliver them, we’ll be on our way to an army. We’ve been down this road before.’

  ‘Not quite like this, though,’ he said. ‘We don’t want either side to win this time.’

  ‘And just how are we going to free Prometheus anyway?’ said Tamar. ‘I can’t do it. At least, I’m not certain, but I couldn’t break the chains of Hephaestus when Askphrit used them on Hecaté and we know that the Athame is no use on them either.’

  This was, unfortunately, true.


  ‘Anyway,’ she resumed. ‘One thing at a time, we have to find him first. And I think maybe I should be the one to talk to Hephaestus. Just at first anyway. I mean, when Aphrodite said they didn’t get on she wasn’t telling the half of it. And if she’s still mooning over you … Well that’s just going to get his back up even more.’

  ‘She seems to be over that,’ said Denny.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ said Tamar. ‘We thought Cindy was over it – several times. And look how that turned out.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ said Denny with a shudder. ‘Okay, you talk to him. I think you’re right. But we still need her to tell us where to find him.’

  ‘You don’t … like her do you?’ asked Tamar, narrowing her eyes at him.

  ‘No, not exactly like her,’ he said. ‘But she’s all right compared to some of the others I suppose.’

  ‘You do like her,’ accused Tamar her temper flaring suddenly.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said defensively. ‘Bringing her on board was your idea not mine.’ he reminded her again.

  ‘Well, you didn’t exactly put up much of a fight about it,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘Because you were right,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about? You can’t possibly be jealous. Not of her surely. You have no reason to be jealous of anyone in any case. Not on my account. You never get jealous anyway.’

  ‘Oh, yes I do,’ she admitted calming down a little. ‘I was terribly jealous of Cindy at one time you know. I wanted to kill her.’

  ‘You were?’ Denny was startled. ‘I never knew you had it in you.’

  ‘It’s … hard sometimes,’ she said.

  ‘No kidding,’ he said dryly. ‘What do you think it’s like for me? If there’s a straight man in the whole world who can resist you …’ He left the sentence hanging.

  Tamar pulled a face. ‘I thought it didn’t bother you,’ she said.