Tom Holt (23 page)

'Yes, Mum.' In a sudden access of memory, Jason seemed to recall himself breaking into the Underground, conspiring to overthrow Jupiter, duffing up two gods and rounding it all off by pulverising fifty crack Hell-troopers. Or did he? All of a sudden he became aware that the memory can play strange tricks. Very probably he'd imagined it all.

'Goodnight, Mum,' he said.

'Mind you brush your teeth.'

'Yes, Mum.'

'Goodnight, Jason.'

'Night, Mum.'

When he got to his room, he noticed that all his Mars posters had disappeared and that someone, probably the Revenue, had been and impounded all his personal records. He found some of them later in a large cardboard box on top of the wardrobe, and the rest of them the next morning neatly packaged up in black dustbin bags outside the back door.

It wouldn't have been much of a consolation to Jason even if he'd known, but Hercules had had more or less the same trouble with his wife. The most notable occasion was on his return after the completion of the Twelve Labours, to find that in his absence Megara of the Fair Ankles had given half his clothes to a jumble sale, put a further quarter in the loft and washed and ironed the remaining quarter, thereby destroying at a stroke the carefully-compiled ambience of thirty years of blood, toil, tears and sweat. Mythology records that, at this point, Hercules lost his rag good and proper and settled his family's hash once and for all with several hearty blows of his club. This is all, of course, pure nonsense. Mythology, it should be remembered, is composed largely by men. What actually happened, apart from a few unheeded protests, was nothing at all, and the reason why Megara fades out of the Hercules legend at this point is that while Hercules was away killing monsters and averting evils, Megara had happened to meet a rather nice insurance broker who, although shorter, punier and incapable of dealing with any form of hostile wildlife bigger than a money-spider, was at least there at weekends and public holidays.

As Jason slept, a number of very insistent dreams came and stood beside him. He swatted them with a back issue of
Model Railway Enthusiast
and went back to sleep.

'Gel.'

'Here, Pro. Fire away.'

'Trouble.'

'What?'

'Big trouble.'

'All right, so it's big trouble. What?'

Telepathic communication is actually much faster than this. It belts through the air at a simply alarming rate, just like the new information technology that so nearly reproduces it, and so we can legitimately omit Prometheus's resume of the scene between Jason and Mrs. Derry, logging back in at the point when Gelos says 'Oh
shit!',
without having abridged more than three seconds of actual time.

'Oh
shit!'

'Exactly,' agreed Prometheus. 'Now what do we do?''

'Nothing for it, is there?'

'You mean...'

'That's right,' thought Gelos gravely. 'The eagle has landed.'

In the sick-bay of the sun, Aesculapius was doing more business in one afternoon than he had done for the last fifty years.

'Right,' he said briskly, 'this may hurt a little.'

Nobody knows exactly why doctors say that. It can't be to set the patient at his ease, because anybody above the age. of three knows from bitter experience that the words are the invariable prologue to agony, just as 'You may feel a little bit woozy for the next twenty-four hours' means that you're going to spend the next three days bumping into things and feeling like an LSD addict after a particularly bad trip, and 'It's just for a few routine tests' means that it's now too late to see about some life insurance. Perhaps they do it on purpose, just in case you weren't actually scared rigid to start with.

Mars shut his eyes and braced his few remaining rigid components. There was a click, a flare of therapeutic orange flame, and the noise of a god complaining.

'You can put your clothes back on now,' said Aesculapius.

'Want to bet?' Mars replied.

'That will do,' said Aesculapius. 'Next, please.'

Mars dragged himself off the couch and Pluto took his place.

'Now then,' said the heavenly physician, 'what seems to be the trouble?'

Pluto scowled at him. 'Did you do anatomy at medical school?' he asked. Aesculapius nodded.

'Very well then,' Pluto replied. 'Look at my skeleton and start counting the gaps.'

Aesculapius ignored him and started prodding him about. 'Hm,' he said at last, 'we've got a few bones missing here and there, I see. And what have we been getting up to to get ourselves in this state, then?'

'I'd rather not discuss it,' Pluto said. 'A dog was involved.'

Aesculapius, being a doctor, is at perfect liberty to ignore anything anyone says to him. 'We'll have to see what we can do about that,' he said briskly. 'Wait there.'

He went to the bone cupboard, picked out a number of bones from the stock, and tried them for size. They more or less fitted, roughly as an 11/16 inch bolt will fit a 15 mm thread if you ease it into place with a lump hammer. He fitted them quickly and fairly accurately and told Pluto to stand up.

'Ow,' said Pluto. Aesculapius helped him to his feet, told him to practise, and advised him that he might possibly experience some slight discomfort for the next forty-eight hours. Then he shooed him out and sat down for a quiet half-hour with a cup of Bovril and a gynaecological journal.

Outside his surgery, Mars and Pluto compared notes.

'It's not good, is it?' Mars said.

'Distinctly worrying,' Pluto agreed. 'What I want to know is how that confounded Derry boy managed it.'

Well,' said Mars, 'in my case he sort of drew back his left hand like this...'

'No, no,' said Pluto, wincing slightly, 'that's not what I meant. How did he get the power to fight with gods? Mortals can't fight with gods, not usually; it's just not possible, like wrestling with the wind. We're in a different dimension to them -- unless, of course, they have help.'

'Help,' said Mars bitterly, 'isn't usually hard to find, is it? I have scars to prove it.'

'Oh, I agree with you,' Pluto said. 'In the past, one of us has always been only too glad to give his or her pet champion a helping hand against the rest of us. But not in this case, surely. We're all united; nobody has anything at all to gain from enabling Derry to fight with us. So, either he has the ability himself, without the need for any assistance which means that he's a bigger god than any of us -- or else someone very big indeed is helping him out. And the only Person that big is...'

'Exactly,' said Mars. 'And Jupiter may be... He looked anxiously around him, 'but he's not as crazy as all that. He's more worried by all this than any of us. That can only mean that the boy did manage to get through and make contact with...'

'Yes,' said Pluto hurriedly. 'It really isn't looking terribly good, is it?'

'Quite right,' said a third voice. 'And while we're on the subject, you both think I'm crazy, do you?'

The two gods looked round and saw Jupiter standing behind them. He hadn't been there five seconds ago, but really, that is neither here nor there. When you're dealing with an omnipresent supreme being, even looking behind the sofa and turning on all the taps is a complete waste of time.

'Anyway,' said. Jupiter briskly, 'I've solved everything, with no help from any of you clowns, as usual. All our troubles are over; you can get back to loafing about and looking decorative. Put your collar straight, Ma. You look like you've just been let out of prison.'

And Jupiter vanished. Mars turned to Pluto and shrugged.

'What we need right now,' he said, 'is a drink.'

Pluto nodded.

'Or two drinks.'

'Quite right.'

Having come to this eminently reasonable conclusion, they left the sick-bay and were crossing over the road to the bar when they were knocked down by Phoebus Apollo, who was test-driving a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle converted into a chariot drawn by four winged dragons.

Jason was woken from deep sleep by a sound uncannily like a large bird tapping on his window with its beak.

Being half-divine, Jason could sleep through most things, but not this. After a period of semi-consciousness, during which he was troubled with dreams involving huge thrushes knocking snails out of brightly-coloured shells, he pulled himself out of bed, groped hazily for the Sword of Who The Hell Cares, Anyway, and tottered to the window. He pulled aside the curtain and saw a large bird tapping on the glass.

'Shoo,' he said.

The bird refused to shoo. He noticed that it was in fact an eagle, and although one eagle looked pretty much like another to him, he made an intuitive assumption and opened the window six inches.

'What do you want?' he asked.

The eagle replied by thrusting a talon in the crack and shrieking. With a sigh, Jason opened the window fully and the eagle hopped in, shook the rain out of its feathers and turned into an extremely beautiful young woman.

'Hello,' she said. 'Sorry if I woke you. Have you got a moment?'

Jason nodded and waved vaguely at a chair. It had rather a lot of socks on it, some of them of considerable maturity, but the girl affected not to notice them.

'I'm Eagle,' she said, 'but you can call me Mary.'

Jason nodded again. He was fresh out of words:

'I'm a friend of Prometheus,' the girl went on. 'And Gelos. Gelos isn't actually called Gelos, by the way; or at least he is, but it's not his real name. Really he's called Thing.'

Jason nodded a third time, as if this was the most logical thing he had ever heard. The girl smiled at him, crossed her legs and went on.

'What they want to know is, would you do them a small favour? It's to do with what Thing -- that's Gelos -- was telling you about earlier on; you know, Jupiter and the diversionary tactics? I'm sorry to bother you with it now, but there have been gods watching the house most of the night, and I've only just managed to get rid of them.'

Jason's befuddled expression must have seemed to the girl like a request for an explanation of how she had managed that, because she coloured slightly. 'Oh, it was easy,' she said. 'I just told each of them in turn that I'd meet them in ten minutes behind the...'

'Ah.'

'So,' said the girl, 'what they'd like you to do is...'

'No,' Jason said. 'Sorry.'

The girl stared at him. 'Sorry?'

'Yes.'

'No,' said the girl, 'I meant sorry meaning what was that you said.'

'I said sorry.'

'Before that.'

'No.'

'Oh.' the girl frowned. Why?'

'I'm busy tomorrow,' Jason replied. 'Another time, maybe.'

This seemed to have a strange effect on the girl. First she peered closely at her arms and then her legs; then she got up and looked at herself in the mirror. Having apparently satisfied herself that all was well, she came and sat down again.

'No, but seriously,' she said, 'what we'd like you to do is...'

'Really, no,' Jason answered. 'No can do. Out of the question.

'But...'

'In fact,' Jason went on, 'I hate to do this, but I'm afraid the whole thing's off. I've thought it over, and the fact is that I'm not going through with it. After all, Jupiter
is
my father, and it really isn't...'

'He tried to kill you.'

'Well yes, there is that,' Jason admitted. 'In a sense there's something in what you say, but...'

'He sent Mars, and Pluto, and a hundred Hell-troopers.'

'The Hell-troopers were just for fun, surely,' Jason said. 'I mean, you can't be expected to take an opponent seriously when he pops up out of the ground at you like one of those fast-motion films of a tree growing.'

The girl put her head on one side and nibbled absently at her shoulder-blade. 'You really expect me to believe you've had a change of heart?' she asked. 'Seriously?'

'Yes,' said Jason.

'No, you haven't.'

Jason felt a tiny green shoot of irritability thrusting its head up through the surface of his general bewilderment. 'What are you,' he demanded, 'a mind-reader or something?'

'Yes.'

Jason took that one in his stride. 'In that case,' he said 'you can see that my mind is made up. Now, if you don't mind...'

The girl recrossed her legs petulantly. 'Are you throwing me out?' she said.

'In a manner of speaking, yes.' Jason said. 'And you can tell your friends that if I've got to be bossed about by one side or the other, I might as well be bossed about by Jupiter. After all, he is my Dad and he is winning.'

'Bossed about?'

'Yes,' said Jason, with a sudden access of feeling, 'bloody well bossed about. Do this. Do that. Fulfil your Destiny. Chop the head off that serpent over there. Steal those golden apples. The hell with the lot of you. I'm sick and tired of being ordered around by people, and if you think I'm going to betray my own father just to be ordered around by you lot...'