The Age of Zeus

70. THREE DAYS

Friday.

British troops, nearly a thousand of them in all, were massing to the south-west and east of Olympus. Satellite imagery showed them bivouacked on the plains north of Larisa and along the coast in the mountain's shadow. American supplies were being airlifted in and distributed. Japanese ships, meanwhile, were cruising through the Straits of Gibraltar, bound once more for the Thermaikos Gulf.

Internationally, diplomatic efforts were under way to defuse the situation. Plenty of people weren't comfortable with the idea of armies taking action independently of their governments, but the unease was felt most keenly at executive level. Catesby Bartlett flew to New York to try to obtain a UN Security Council resolution forbidding Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall from going through with a siege of the Olympians' stronghold. The Prime Minister's hope was that fear of contravening the will of the UN, and of being branded a war criminal as a result, would deter Sir Neville. However, both America and Russia vetoed the proposal, China abstained from voting, and Bartlett's transatlantic trip was all for naught.

University students across the globe abandoned their lectures and libraries for a day in order to take part in protest rallies, but with one or two exceptions these took the form of pro- rather than anti-military demonstrations. The vast majority of the world's undergraduates were supportive of the stance taken by Britain's armed forces, which led to the unusual sight of youths carrying placards with crossed-out peace symbols on them and drawings of doves surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal red line through the middle, brandishing these as they chanted slogans such as "Hell yes — make a mess" and "All we are saying is don't give them a chance." On the more liberal campuses, such as Berkeley and Paris, scuffles broke out between the protestors and their professors, who were of the old school and angered that the ideals they themselves had once marched for, back in the day, were being so roundly spurned by the post-Olympian generation. As was often the case with academics, they'd failed to grasp that society around them had changed and they had not changed with it. The times were topsy-turvy now. The enemy was not the Man any more, it was the God.

Saturday.

The British troops' numbers were bolstered by the arrival of contingents from France, Australia, Spain, Italy and Russia, along with handfuls of soldiers from Israel and several north African nations, all of whom had come of their own accord, without the express consent (but probably with the tacit approval) of their superiors. Freelancers, among them a couple of dozen RCDC members, swelled the ranks. All at once the landscape around Larisa was smattered with impromptu camps, rows of tents in oblongs like patches of corduroy on a jacket.

On that afternoon the Harpies spotted British scouts who had crept to within binocular distance of the stronghold in order to reconnoitre. The bird-women swooped, and the scouts were plucked from the ground and carried screaming into the sky, where the Harpies proceeded to tear them apart in a leisurely, almost playful fashion. Limbs were tossed from taloned foot to taloned foot, a gruesome game of catch. Entrails were flung high, snapped up as they fell, gobbled on the wing. The Olympians looked on from the battlements with some satisfaction, not least Hera. Sam, on the other hand, went to her room and stayed there until the whole ghastly spectacle was over.

Zeus came to her afterwards, to find out if she was any closer to a decision.

"Not yet."

"I have no wish to put any pressure on you," he said. "I just want to be sure that you're not prevaricating in the hope that some sort of salvation is going to arrive. Remember Penelope."

"Penelope?"

"Odysseus's wife. While her husband was off on his wanderings and widely believed to be dead, she was beset by suitors, so she told them she wouldn't consider marrying any of them until she had finished weaving a shroud for her husband's late father Laertes. Every day she wove a little more of the shroud. Every night she unpicked the work she had done during the day. It was in vain. She was found out eventually. And if this is all some ruse of yours, a way to buy time for yourself, rest assured that it, too, is in vain. Those troops gathering around us will not get within a hundred yards of this stronghold, let alone set foot inside. If what the Harpies have just done hasn't driven home that fact, it ought to have."

"I still have one more day."

"Tomorrow, then. If your answer's yes — and I believe it will be — you won't regret it, Sam."

"And if it's no?"

"Then regret will be the least of your concerns."

It was a long night. And bitterly cold. It never got truly warm up on Olympus, which didn't seem to bother any of the Pantheon but certainly didn't agree with Sam, especially when she couldn't sleep. She piled blankets on herself until there was such a weight of them she could hardly breathe, but still the chill seeped through. There was a chill inside her too, to match. An icy dread.

How much did she want to live?

That was what it boiled down to. The alternatives were: agree to become Artemis, or die.

Being Artemis would mean survival but it would be a kind of half-life at best. Zeus had promised an existence untrammelled by doubt or scruple, absolute godlike freedom. The price, though, would be the loss of everything that she had been up to that point, all her memories, her essential Sam-ness. Wasn't that, in itself, tantamount to death? The other Olympians had embraced the opportunity of oblivion, the chance to forget all their inadequacies and misdeeds, and she could see the allure of that. Her own life hadn't exactly been an unblemished catalogue of triumphs. But had it been so bad that she'd be prepared simply to dump it all and start again as someone else? Wasn't that just a little too easy?

Then again, wasn't taking the other option, death, also just a little too easy? If nothing else, as Artemis she would have influence. Not to mention power. The same kind of power she had enjoyed while clad in her TITAN suit, had luxuriated in, been exhilarated by. And it would not be just while she had the suit on but all the time. All the time. Power in perpetuity. To be able to spring and strike as she'd seen Artemis do, to wield that spear like a darting needle, to be preternaturally strong, indefatigable, a creature of enhanced senses and reflexes — that would be something, wouldn't it?

There was a third way, though. Tomorrow was crate delivery day. That was why she'd haggled with Zeus for an extra day in which to make up her mind. Assuming that the helicopter was still coming in as scheduled despite the rapidly changing circumstances on the ground, Sam could always make that desperate leap onto the departing crate and hope to be choppered clear of the stronghold.

Which would be the equivalent of giving Zeus a big no and would almost certainly lead to her death. But at least it wouldn't be a cheap death — an easy death — and that would count for something.

Tomorrow.

Sunday.

Sunday came, and with the dawn there arose one of those mists that often plagued Olympus, a dense white shroud that was turbulent and wind-tormented but also, conversely, brought a stillness and hush to the mountaintop, muffling the stronghold, cutting it off from the rest of the world. The moment Sam stepped outdoors into the damp milkiness of the mist, she felt a crushing sense of despair. The helicopter would not be coming. Not in these conditions, surely.

She wandered, disconsolate, hearing the cries of the Harpies as they called to one another through the mist, a sound that was deadened and distant and strangely forlorn. She noticed that the bird-women seemed agitated this morning, chittering querulously rather than screeching as normal. Perhaps it was the mist. Their primary sense of perception, their eyesight, was useless, and this unnerved them.

Ares was up early too. She came across him in the amphitheatre. He was clad in his full copper armour, swinging his battle axe, lunging at invisible foes, his feet kicking up plumes of the sand that covered the arena floor. He looked avid, aroused, like a young man on a first date.

"Athena says an attack is likely today," he told Sam, "and I believe her. I can smell it on the wind, can't you? The scent of impending conflict. Iron and blood. My axe will be dripping wet by evening's end."

She moved on, leaving him to his limbering up. Her footsteps took her eventually to the agora, where she sat and waited, even though it was pointless because there would be no helicopter. She sat and waited because there was nothing else to do. Time was up. Zeus needed to know if she was to be his new Artemis or not. She still wasn't sure, which suggested she was coming round to the idea. That was the thing about her and dying, Sam had discovered. Unless she had no choice in the matter, she invariably preferred living. As a certain sage individual, Dai Prothero no less, once put it: "There's only one place where death is worth more than life, Akehurst, and that's on the Scrabble board."

Shortly before nine, when the helicopter was due, the Olympians began arriving at the agora in ones and twos. Soon they had all assembled, and when Sam expressed surprise, Zeus said, "The delivery always comes, whatever the weather. The helicopter's a Super Puma, equipped with the full array of navigation sensors and synthetic radar imaging. A good pilot can fly by instruments alone, thanks to that. Takes a steady nerve, I understand, but these are brave men — and the Greeks wouldn't want to disappoint us, would they?"

In a lower voice, and with an expectant twitch of those circumflex eyebrows of his, he added, "So? Sunday is here. Are we near an answer?"

"Almost," said Sam, and Zeus seemed satisfied with this and turned away, and so did she. Suddenly all a-tingle, she focused her attention on last week's crate, which was sitting near the centre of the agora, ready for pick-up. It was sheathed in a cargo net whose corners were gathered together and attached to a figure-of-eight loop at the top. The cargo net's matrix of ropes would make it easy to scramble up the side and would provide something to cling on to as the crate was being flown away. If the pilot climbed quickly, Sam might just manage to disappear into the mist before the Olympians could react. Zeus wouldn't be able to zap the helicopter with lightning if he couldn't see it, and likewise Apollo, who was toting bow and quiver this morning, couldn't hit her with an arrow if his target was not clearly visible. As for Hermes, he might be able to teleport onto the crate but as long as she didn't let him grab her he couldn't teleport off again with her. He might, besides, think twice about landing on a moving object, especially if he was jumping blind and if the moving object was swaying around none too far from a set of whirring rotor blades. A slight miscalculation, and Hermes the Luck-Bringer would be Hermes the Headless.

The mist, then, far from being a catastrophe, might just be the best thing to have happened to Sam in ages.

All she had to go was get the timing right. Usually the Olympians were so eager to crack open the new crate that they didn't pay much heed to the old one as it was being hoisted away. She'd have to dash for it at the very instant it lifted off from the agora, though, and she'd have to keep an eye out, also, for Hephaestus. He alone never got particularly excited about the divulging of the new crate's contents, so his attention would not be fully on it. He, of all of them, might catch her in the act and raise the alarm. If she made sure to sneak round so that she was out of his line of sight… yes, then this could work. Sam could hardly believe it. Finally, finally, a chance of getting out of the stronghold. A slim chance, to be sure, the thinnest of slivers, but that was better than before, when there had been none whatsoever.

And now the beating of rotor blades could be heard, ever so faint but distinct nonetheless, like the purr of some gigantic cat, and the most wonderful sound in all the world as far as Sam was concerned. The sound of hope.

She sidled over to the perimeter of the agora, away from the Olympians, who were clustered together peering skyward, and then she diverted towards the empty crate, getting as close as she dared without it looking suspicious. The helicopter noise grew louder, becoming a pulsating roar, and then there it was, a dark shape looming overhead in the mist, a giant grey tadpole, and its downwash tore the vaporous air into sharp, spiralling vortices, and at last the Super Puma came clearly into view, searchlight ablaze, with the crate swinging below in its cargo-net papoose. The Olympians' robes whipped around them as the chopper descended, their hair thrashed in all directions, and then the crate touched down and Hermes darted on top of it and detached it from the winch hook. The cargo net slid away like a negligee, puddling around the crate's base. Hermes vanished and reappeared on the other crate, lifting up the figure-of-eight loop and beckoning to the pilot to come over. Ares, meanwhile, slotted the blade of his axe into the edge where two sides of the new crate met and started to jemmy them apart. The screech of nails being wrenched out of wood was audible even above the cacophony of the helicopter's vanes and turbines.

Sam braced herself. Thirty yards or so to the empty crate. How many seconds to sprint that far? Four? Five? She could do this. She just needed to choose the exact right moment to start her run. Wait for it. Wait for it.

The pilot seemed to be taking an abnormally long time manoeuvring over to the empty crate, or perhaps that was just how Sam perceived it with her adrenaline flowing and her heart rate speeding up with anticipation. The hook glided towards Hermes slowly, so slowly she began to think it was never going to get there.

In the meantime, Ares had set down his axe and was levering the side off the crate with his bare hands, and now it came free, and he stepped back to let it fall, and it did, an eight-foot-square slab of plywood boards swung outwards with a weird kind of grace, slumping flat onto the flagstones, and the Olympians craned their necks to look inside, and Athena was at the front, and Sam heard the gunshot, a loud and extraordinarily familiar percussive snap, and Athena's proud, large, magnificent forehead disintegrated, her helmet flew backwards as though yanked off by an invisible wire, and she reeled away from the crate with a shattered cavity where the front of her skull had been, and her eyes rolled white, and brains spilled like pink blancmange from a broken bowl, and she collapsed into Zeus's arms and he caught her, held her, and his expression was incomprehension, bafflement, as were all the Olympians' expressions, but not Sam's.

She understood.

Even before five TITAN-suited figures burst forth from the crate, she understood.

No bodies equals no proof.

Hyperion led the way, and he was yelling, "Trojan horse! Trojan goddamn horse! We're in! We did it! Now let's plug as many of these motherfuckers as we can before they figure out we're not the weekly drop-off from the Athens Stop And Shop."