The Age of Zeus

23. THE SPHINX

F undamentalist terrorist factions in the Middle East had been having a frustrating time of it lately. Every way they turned, their plans were being curtailed and derailed. No longer were they able to recruit fresh young converts at the mosques and madrasas, for fear of the Olympians finding out. Hardline preachers could not publicly condemn Western imperialism, call for jihad, or instigate a fatwa, for much the same reason. The dream of obtaining a nuclear warhead from some rogue state and detonating it on Israeli soil or mainland America was now further than ever from being realised. Even simple suicide bombings had become trickier to organise and pull off successfully. The Olympians invariably seemed to know when one was imminent and would arrive and neutralise the would-be martyr before he'd had a chance to press the trigger. Hermes could move faster than thought, and the suicide bomber, rather than sending himself to paradise and everyone around him to hell in a single fiery burst, would instead wind up lying in the dirt, watching blood pump from the severed stump of his arm while his hand rested a couple of metres away, still clutching a disconnected detonator. Death would come to him eventually, but the beat of its black wings was slow and heavy with failure, and the seventy-two virgins waiting patiently to greet him in the afterlife would just have to bestow the flowers of their womanhood on some other holy warrior who'd made a better job of his self-immolation.

The terrorists had been driven underground, deep underground, and were fissured, split into tiny discrete cells that had scant contact with one another, since all phone and email communication was now in effect bugged. Argus had wiretapped the planet. Still the terrorists persisted with their plans as best they could. The hope of establishing a worldwide caliphate was not abandoned. One day the one true religion would rule all, and any unbelievers would be put to the sword. The infidel Pantheon might have the advantage for now, but this state of affairs would not last indefinitely.

For the past month terror cells in Syria had been suffering particularly harsh harassment, not directly at the hands of the Olympians themselves but courtesy of one of their monsters, the Sphinx. The creature was an abomination, a fusion of lion, bird and woman that was unclean to behold, not least because it went around flagrantly displaying its naked female torso and its uncovered female head — an offence to the eyes of the Almighty in so many ways.

The Sphinx haunted crossroads and narrow passes where men walked, and anyone it waylaid, it posed questions to. Its mythical forebear was famous for setting riddles and killing those who answered them incorrectly. This Sphinx, however, merely requested information, in a strange, etiolated yet hideously compelling voice. It asked for the whereabouts of terrorists. It asked if you knew of anyone who was plotting, or who knew someone who was plotting, any kind of religiously motivated attack or atrocity.

And always, when you replied, you told it the truth. You found yourself forced to. It was impossible not to comply with the Sphinx's interrogation. Something in its tone seemed to wheedle facts out of you, however desperately you tried to keep them buried. Many said the Sphinx's voice reminded them of their mother's — was in fact a perfect simulacrum of their mother's — and who could lie to their mother? Its face, too, had something universally maternal about it, making your recall something you'd forgotten, how beautiful your mother had looked when, as an infant, you lay gazing up at her while she cradled you in her arms or tucked you up in bed. Never mind the lion body or the pair of immense wings that wafted softly in the air as the Sphinx spoke. Never mind the flawless, globular breasts. It was the face and the voice that captivated you and that wormed secrets out of you far more efficient and effectively than any truth serum or torture, and afterwards left you feeling weirdly better about yourself, as if a great weight had been lifted from your shoulders. Unless you happened to be a fundamentalist terrorist, in which case you would confess as much to the Sphinx and it would, having gleaned all further useful data out of you, lift a great weight from your shoulders in another way, by lopping off your head with a single savage swipe of its forepaw.

The Sphinx either relayed any useful titbits it garnered to the Olympians, and they would act appropriately, or else, if the mood took it, it would respond of its own accord. If, say, it had just learned the location of a terrorist hideout, it would fly there and slaughter everyone it found. It seldom encountered resistance. With a few well-chosen words the Sphinx calmed and entranced its opponents, before proceeding to annihilate them at its leisure.

Then one day, abruptly, the Sphinx was gone. Syria — all Syria, not just its extremists — breathed a sigh of relief. The general consensus was that the monster had completed its tour of duty in the region and been recalled to Olympus, although this was more hope than belief. Rooting out terrorism was a neverending task, like rooting out weeds in a garden.

Few made the connection between the Sphinx's sudden departure and the discovery of a heap of mashed, mutilated animal body-parts not far from the highway running between An-Nabk and Damascus. The remains were stumbled upon by a group of schoolchildren, who assumed this gory, flyblown abattoir scene was what was left after jackals had brought down a couple of camels. A vet summoned by police concurred. He made a witness statement to that effect. Camels. Definitely. Without a shadow of a doubt.

The vet said this because he was frightened to say what he really thought. The consequences would be too dire. He saw to it that the "camels" were buried at the site, and told no one, not even his wife, that there had been bird feathers amid the mammalian mess, along with portions of anatomy that looked, to his untrained eye, human.

Among the adult entertainments on offer from Blue Eros on the day of the Sphinx's disappearance was a retelling of the affair between Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, peregrine survivor of the sack of Troy. The original elegiac narrative of passionate but destiny-doomed love had been spiced up — and perhaps, who knows, improved — by the inclusion of sex toys and sodomy. The film's title? Dildo And Anus.