The Age of Zeus

61. A VIEW

T hey removed her TITAN suit at some point. Shortly before that, or maybe it was after, someone placed hands on Sam, touching her stomach where Artemis's spear had gone in. This hurt abysmally. The pressure of the hands was almost unendurable. Then something warm and sparkling seemed to flow into her, like liquid summer-night stars, and the pain went away and was replaced by a deep-seated sensation somewhat like a tickle and somewhat like an itch but neither, and better, and worse. Sam prised open her eyelids just enough to catch a glimpse of a woman she had never met but recognised all the same — a woman with unruly hair and plain, outdoorsy looks, her complexion coarse and plum-coloured, her cheeks jowling over her jawline. Demeter.

The Olympian stood up after her ministering was done, and swayed for a moment, as though suddenly emptied of all energy, then tottered out of sight, and Sam tried to track her as she moved away but darkness closed in and she plunged back into unconsciousness, although not before hearing Demeter murmur to someone, curtly, "She'll live."

Later, there was food being spooned between her lips. She took it in — some kind of soup — in grateful slurps. Who was feeding her? Was that Zeus himself?

Later still, voices in the room. Hushed. Heated. Arguing over her. About her. Why keep her captive? Why heal her? Why let her live? Why not simply kill her?

"Because it is my will," was the final, definitive answer to all these questions, and it came from — him again — Zeus.

And then, just like that, Sam found herself fully awake, and alone, and feeling better than she had in ages, refreshed as if after the sleep of a lifetime. She was stretched out on a couch in a bedchamber furnished in the ancient Hellenic style. Drapes billowed. There were urns and amphorae everywhere, patterned in orange and black, some with figures painted on them — warriors, huntsmen, poets with lyres. Repeating zigzag and spiral motifs ran along the top of the walls, and a mosaic by the door depicted… she wasn't sure what, until she inspected it close up and worked out that what she was looking at were scenes from Tartarus, a panorama of the torments of the damned.

Here was Sisyphus, eternally and unsuccessfully pushing that boulder up that hill. Here, Tantalus, unable to slake his thirst from the pool he stood in or eat the grapes that dangled just out of reach overhead. And here, Ixion, strapped to his ever-revolving fiery wheel.

Turning away from this rather charmless piece of decor, Sam went to the window, which was small and unglassed, the source of the thin, cold draught that nudged the drapes. She looked out, already knowing what she would see, just needing it confirmed.

A view from on high.

From a mountaintop, across folds of pine-forested crag and foothill to a far-off, urbanised plain and beyond, in haze, a coastline, the sea.

The view, she knew, from Mount Olympus.

She tortoised her head out of the window. Below her lay a long, straight drop into a deep cleft, whose far side was capped with battlements. Both faces of the cleft were smooth and precipitous. Sam peered hard, but potential handholds and footholds were few and far between. Climbing out of here was simply not an option.

"There is no exit that way," a voice behind her confirmed.

Sam whirled. Zeus had entered, accompanied by Ares.

"At least," he added, "not unless you consider falling to your death an exit. Which you might, but it would be a pity and a waste. How are you, Tethys? Well, I trust?"

"All right."

"You'll have noticed that your wound, which was a fatal one, is troubling you no more. Gone as if it never was, I think you'll find."

Sam's hand went to her stomach, reflexively, and stroked it through the cotton of the peplos someone had dressed her in. The skin was perfectly smooth. There was no trace of injury, not even any scar tissue. Nor did she feel any residual internal ache. Nothing.

"Demeter," said Zeus, "has never seen fit to use her powers on a mortal before. You should feel honoured."

"Remind me to thank her," Sam said, "when I next see her and I'm kicking her teeth in."

"Oh, Tethys, Tethys. Or would you prefer I call you Samantha Akehurst?"

"Sam, if you must."

"Your aggression does you credit, Sam. It's made you a remarkable foe. But surely you can see that the time for such petulant posturing is over. Besides, you don't have your fancy suit of armour. You pose no threat to me, or to anyone here."

"Oh yeah? Then why have you come along with Tall, Dumb And Clueless there? If you're not afraid of me, send the big hairy goon out of the room and we'll chat alone."

Ares scowled, unfolding his arms menacingly.

"No, no," Zeus said, staying him with a hand. "Sam shouldn't be punished for speaking her mind. She has a point. Am I afraid of you, Sam? No I am not. Of course not. But were I to have come in here by myself, and you were to attack me in some kind of maenad frenzy, it would be inconvenient and undesirable to have to deal with."

"And lightning bolts don't work so well indoors," Sam said.

"There is that," Zeus conceded. "Hence an escort, as a precaution. One that, I am sure, will not be necessary. Eh?"

She shrugged. "So why am I a prisoner? And what happened back at Bleaney after Hermes kidnapped me? Where are the other Titans? Are they here too? Oh yes, and why does Hermes not look like Hermes used to?"

"So many questions. Perhaps you'd like to shove me into an interview room and shine a lamp in my face while you're about it."

"Watched many TV cop shows lately?"

"Let me take your first enquiry first. You're here as our guest" — he laid emphasis on the word — "because I'm hoping to persuade you how reckless and misguided your war against us has been. As for the results of our little island fracas, I can show you shortly. And on the subject of Hermes — well, frankly I'm not sure what you're getting at. Hermes is still Hermes. His helmet, his sandals, his caduceus, his speed, his ability to teleport, all the things that make him the Divine Messenger, the Luck Bringer, the Conveyor Of Souls, are there."

"All the things," said Sam, "except him. He's changed. Face, body, voice — they all belong to someone I met once a while back."

"I really don't know what you mean."

"In the same way that your face and all the rest of it belong to a man called Xander Landesman."

"Never heard of him." Zeus was beaming benignly, as one might when conversing with a person whose sanity one was beginning to doubt. "Xander… who?"

"Landesman. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about."

"No acting here. I honestly don't."

"You are Alexander Landesman," she said, spelling it out, "son of Regis and Arianna Landesman, and you're probably something of a genius because you invented a way of genetically — "

Zeus, still beaming, overrode her. "Do you have any idea what she's on about?" he asked Ares.

Ares twitched his massive shoulders. "Search me, O Cloud-Gatherer. Mortals. They do get some strange notions in their heads sometimes."

"Right, I see," Sam said. "That's how we're going to play it, are we? You are gods. The original Dodekatheon, newly emerged in the twenty-first century. Not a bunch of biotechnologically souped-up human beings, but the genuine article."

"That is so," said Zeus.

"OK. Then the obvious thing to do, as I have this opportunity, is ask where you've been for the past couple of thousand years. Why's it only recently that you decided to come out into the open?"

"We," said Zeus, "were biding our time. Before the arrival of what is known as the Common Era, belief in us was waning — had, indeed, dwindled almost to nothing. Other faiths, other creeds, had sprung up to take the place of us, and so rather than linger on, superfluous, like party guests who have outstayed their welcome, we went into recess. We withdrew from the world, ceased to have any truck with mortals, left you to go on your way with your Yahweh and your Allah and your Krishna and your Buddha and their ilk. It was a period of what one might call, I suppose, divine hibernation. Did you not hear my speech to the United Nations all those years back, when we returned? I explained all this then."

"Obviously I wasn't paying close enough attention. Maybe I was too busy marvelling at Ares's great godly forearms. Or buffing my nails, I can't remember which."

"The woman cannot keep a civil tongue," Ares growled. "Let me at her, O Father Of Gods And Men. I'll teach her how to show respect."

"No, restrain yourself, Ares the Slaughter-Stained," Zeus said. "She is trying to provoke us. Let's not give her the satisfaction of rising to the bait. We are her superiors, after all. Her elders and betters. Sam, our worshippers began looking elsewhere for their divine guidance and we simply didn't feel we were needed any more, so we left this earthly plane, although we continued to keep an eye on things here from afar, because we were, and remain, rather attached to you mortals. A millennium passed, then another, and we perceived what a mess you were making of things. Your religions seemed to be leading you down all sorts of terrible paths, to inquisitions, to pogroms, to endless internecine wars. At their best they were being used as methods of mind control, enslaving the masses with the promise of a reward in the life hereafter, and even where they were rejected there was still wholesale torture and slaughter. The atrocities of Communism, for example, were inflicted in the name of a political system predicated in no small part on atheism.

"In the end, we could no longer stand idly by. Enough was enough. Somebody had to take the world by the scruff of the neck and set it straight again. Somebody had to drag you people out of the mire into which you had got yourselves and down into which you were remorselessly sinking further and further every day. At my instigation, we Olympians manifested in the mortal realm once more, taking fleshly form as we so often did of old. Our role this time was to be proactive and change things for the better. This, I would submit, we have achieved. Not without cost, but is there not some wise contemporary adage about omelettes and eggs?"

"Yes, Xander, there is."

"I told you, I know of no person by the name of Xander… Landman, was it? Please stop trying to insinuate that I am something less than I am. You're taking some poor innocent's name in vain. Perhaps, because you yourself have pretended to Titanhood, you feel I pretend to godhood. In fact, now I recall Aphrodite telling me how you levelled a similar accusation against her and Dionysus. You are, in this regard, quite clearly delusional."

Sam almost laughed. " I'm delusional? All right, let's say for argument's sake I am. I still don't see why, if everything you're claiming is true, you didn't step in sooner. I mean, what about the Second World War? Where were you when Hitler was rounding up and gassing the Jews? That, surely, was the time to get involved. You didn't have to leave it another sixty years."

The reference to the Holocaust didn't appear to faze the man who was Xander Landesman, grandson of Austrian Jewish refugees. He simply said, "And what about the hundreds of other occasions we could have stepped in? What about all the other despots and fanatics throughout history? Should we have returned from limbo to smite Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Torquemada, Stalin, Pol Pot? No. We considered it but held off. On balance, in spite of these tragedies and injustices, humankind still seemed to be thriving, progressing. It was only at the turn of this century that it became apparent that this was no longer the case. That was when we realised that mortals were, indisputably, on course to their own doom, spiralling downward into the abyss with no hope of salvation or rescue — apart from us. And so we came. At the eleventh hour, perhaps, but better late than never. And now, Sam, speaking of late, evening is fast falling and I would dearly love to take you on a tour before the sun is gone."

"A tour?"

"As I said, I have things to show you, and things to persuade you of. Come with us and see what very few other mortals have been privileged to see. Come and see Olympus!"