The Age of Zeus

24. THE CHIMERA

F rom time to time Russia still glowered at her neighbours, those pilot-fish states that had formerly swum alongside the great Soviet shark but now insisted on going their own separate ways. Russia seemed to yearn for their company, missing them, missing the old days. She felt naked without them, stripped of the veil of respectability these coerced allies had given to her plans for expansion and eventual world domination. She wanted them back, though knowing there wasn't a hope in hell of getting what she wanted.

The Chimera stalked Russia's western frontier, zigzagging along the overlap between her and eastern Europe, through Baltic buffer nations such as Latvia, Belarus and the Ukraine. It was, by some degree, the bizarrest of all the Olympian monsters, being composed of the fore part of a lion, the middle part of a goat, and the hind part of a large snake. How these three disparate portions coexisted was mystery and miracle. That the Chimera could walk at all, given the contrast between its powerful leonine forelegs and its spindly caprine rearlegs, was amazing in itself. Yet it moved with a surprising supple grace, its thick scaly tail lending support and stability. It was, in fact, a fearsome hunter, combining the lion's stalking skills with the goat's surefootedness, all aided and abetted by an inbuilt serpentine cunning. Somebody had once filmed a cameraphone clip of the Chimera pouncing on and killing a Shetland pony — a multimillion-view hit when uploaded onto YouTube. The little horse could be seen running as fast as its stumpy legs could carry it, but it never stood a chance.

Although the Chimera's stamping grounds ranged far and wide, it frequently returned to the same place, the rural south-east corner of Estonia, not far from Lake Peipsi, the fourth largest freshwater lake on the continent. There was a reason for this, albeit one not widely known. A local dairy-farming family, the Lepiks, had taken to feeding it. Some years back the patriarch of the family, Joosep, had lost several head of cattle to the monster, good livestock getting massacred day after day for a week. Fed up of this, and noting that the Chimera never ate more than a quarter of the meat from each of its kills, Joosep had reasoned that it didn't need much to fill its belly, which was, after all, goat-sized. Why not, then, donate a segment of meat at a time, to prevent entire cows being superfluously destroyed?

On a tree stump, the remnants of a once-towering pine, Joosep had laid out a haunch of beef for the Chimera. The monster had taken it and devoured it, bones and all, and the next night had returned for more.

So a pattern had begun. Whenever the Chimera paid a visit, the Lepiks would lay out meat for it every evening until at last it went away again. This had become something of a ritual, a means of propitiating the beast and sparing the family and the herd from its depredations. A single cow, in managed portions, could last ten days. That meant nine other cows saved, a good trade-off. Of course, had Joosep Lepik not started feeding the Chimera in the first place, the monster might not have kept coming back. But it was too late to remedy that now. Besides, Joosep had a developed a strange affection for the Chimera, a grudging admiration. He liked to watch from the safety of a nearby timber barn as the monster approached the tree stump and retrieved the offering set out there. It was a thrill, of course, to observe this extraordinary misfit creature in the flesh, at such close range.

But there was more to it than that. While a young man, barely in his twenties, Joosep had had an accident with a tractor, a Soviet-built Kharkov T-25, a bloody-minded brute of a machine that never seemed to work and only ever caused trouble on the rare occasions it did work. He'd climbed out of the tractor cab to adjust the plough at the rear, leaving the engine idling in neutral. The gear lever had slipped and the tractor had lurched into reverse before stalling. It hadn't travelled far, just a couple of metres, or particularly fast, but it had moved with enough speed and force for the plough to knock Joosep down and shear his left leg off at the thigh. Though now fitted with a false leg, Joosep walked with barely a limp. He prided himself on the fact that nobody could tell from appearances that he was minus a limb. And so he felt a kinship with the Chimera, which looked as if it should be crippled even though it was not. The monster had become a magical touchstone for him. On some basic level he identified with it. Getting run over by that tractor had nearly killed him. He shouldn't be alive, let alone ambulatory. The same applied to the Chimera.

One night in late March, Joosep was in his usual spot in the barn, up in the hayloft, peeping out through a knothole in a wall plank at the tree stump some forty paces away. A fresh, juicy rack of ribs rested there, slowly contributing to the patina of bloodstains that coated the stump's upper surface. The moon was high and full. It was a bright, not too cold night. The hour was almost ten. The Chimera should have been here by now. Shortly after sunset was its customary time for turning up for its free dinner. Where had it got to?

Joosep wondered, with a pang, if the Chimera had moved on again, early. Each of its visits lasted a fortnight or so. So far, this time, it had been here for only a handful of days. Well, it was a free agent. It came and went as it pleased. If it had left the area, it would be back again soon enough.

Joosep was thinking about wending his way back to the farmhouse when he glimpsed a flash of light in the hills that overlooked the Lepik family property. Further flashes followed, up there in the woods, accompanied by a series of faint but distinct pops that could only be gunfire. Joosep couldn't help himself. He left the barn, heading out for a closer look.

He was less than a kilometre from the woods when he saw the Chimera suddenly come bounding out into the open. It hurtled across a pasture, and it looked to Joosep — although he found this hard to believe — that the monster was in a state of alarm. It was fleeing for its life. But from what?

Phantoms.

That was what Joosep thought as he saw a quartet of figures emerge from among the trees, giving chase to the Chimera. They seemed to be people but he couldn't be sure because, somehow, he could barely make them out. Though his eyesight was good and the moonlight strong, their outlines seemed to ripple and waver, now there, now not. He saw them by the shadows they cast more than anything. And they were moving so fast, too fast, surely, to be people. Nothing human could run at such speeds. Hermes could, but then was he human?

The four flitting figures caught up with the Chimera, and within seconds the monster was being subjected to sustained bursts of gunfire that pinned it to the ground and made its body twitch and stutter all over. The coup de grace was delivered by something which Joosep presumed was a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. All at once there was an almighty, dazzling explosion that seemed to light up the entire landscape, and as the echoes of its roar caromed away through the hills and the glowing afterimage faded from Joosep's vision, he perceived that the Chimera was no more. Where the monster had been crouching there was now a smoking crater in the earth, dotted with flickers of flame. Never again would this fantastic beast lope down to the Lepik homestead to seize its gladly given sacrifice off the tree-stump altar.

The four phantoms set off back up the hillside, melting into the woods, and Joosep watched them go. He couldn't imagine who — what — these people were. They might not even be people. In a world where the Ancient Greek Pantheon walked, real and alive, anything was possible. What he did grasp was that something major was afoot. Death had been brought to an Olympian monster. That was not some casual, random act. That was the deliberate breaking of a taboo, and tantamount to a declaration of war.

Wearily, feeling all of a sudden very old and very lame, Joosep turned and limped off homeward, into the dark.

That same night, among the bill of mythopornographic delights being offered by Blue Eros to its subscribers was a cinematic masterpiece detailing a young girl's initiation into the world of mixed-sex threesomes, set against the backdrop of the Trojan War. Troilists And Cressida.