Tom Holt (37 page)

He finally tracked it down at the south-eastern corner of the cloud and went in. The only other customer was Neptune, who was sitting at the bar trying to drown his sorrows -- a difficult undertaking for a sea-god.

'Siddown, Ma,' he said: 'Have a li'l drink. Think we just got time for a quick one.'

'What are you having?'

'Think I'll have a Gorgon's Revenge.'

Mars looked at him. 'Are you sure?'

Neptune hiccupped and grinned. 'Course I'm sure,' he replied. 'It's the only time in the history of the world a man can have five Gorgon's Revenges on an empty stomach and not have to worry about the morning after. Gesundheit.'

'You have a point there, Uncle Nep,' said Mars. 'Make mine the same.'

Soon afterwards the barman brought the drinks, and Neptune, by way of experiment, picked out a diamond from his dress crown and dropped it into the glass. It dissolved.

'I've always wondered what they put in these things,' he remarked, staring into the glass. The fumes blinded him for a moment.

'Best not to ask, so they say,' replied Mars. 'Well, here's health.'

Neptune looked round. 'Where?'

'No,' Mars said, 'it's a toast. Cheers.'

'Mud in your eye,' Neptune answered. They drank deeply and for a long time were silent.

'I think I'll have another one of those,' said Neptune.

'Why not?' Mars replied. 'That way, things can only get better.'

The cloud, meanwhile, had smashed its way through a very confused stratosphere and was rushing down towards the surface of the planet. It was just gathering momentum nicely when the prayers hit it.

Being hit by a prayer is no joke. The first thing that happened was that all the lights went out. When the backup power supply came on, Neptune and Mars found themselves looking at something quite unexpected.

'Here,' Neptune demanded querulously, 'what do they put in these things?'

A shaft of golden light had impaled the cloud like a skewer through a veal
souvlaki.
There were a lot of -- well, it went against the grain to say this, but there was no avoiding the fact that they were angels. They were also holding flaming swords.

'How do they do that?' asked Mars.

'I dunno,' Neptune replied. 'Oven-gloves, maybe.'

As if the sunbeam and the angels weren't bad enough, there were other indications that something quite out of the ordinary was happening. There were a lot of quite unsolicited flowers, for example, and the air was heavy with strong, sweet, cheap perfume. Both Mars and Neptune suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to grant requests.

'I don't know about you,' Neptune said, 'but right now I'm feeling a bit funny. I think I'll just go and lie down for a minute.'

Mars nodded carefully.. 'Good idea,' he said. "Which way is the door?'

Outside they stopped again and stared. Peculiar though the other manifestations had been, this was something else.

It was Jupiter. Jupiter standing in the middle of the cloud's parade ground. Jupiter smiling.

You could see at once that he was fighting it, with every fibre of his supreme being. And the harder he tried, it seemed, the harder it was to resist. The golden sunbeam had got him right in the navel.

'Do you think we ought to ...' Mars's voice drained away.

'Help, you mean?'

'Well, yes.'

Neptune shook his head. 'Wouldn't do that,' he said.

'You wouldn't?'

'Certainly not,' he said. Twenty thousand years of sibling rivalry blossomed on his face into a grin the size of California. 'That'd be blasphemy.'

'Blasphemy?'

'Absolutely,' Neptune replied. 'To attempt to assist Jupiter would be implicitly to deny his omnipotence. No, let the old bastard sort it out for himself. I'm going back to the bar.'

'But...'

'My shout.'

Mars shot another glance at the Father of Gods and Men and headed back to the Mess tent.

'What's going on, Nep?' he asked.

'It's a prayer,' Neptune replied, hopping up onto a bar stool and eating olives. 'A biggy, too. In fact, that's the biggest prayer I've ever seen in the whole of my life. And Jupe's got it right through his guts. Champagne!' he called to the barman.

Apollo and Mary arrived in the Caucasus just in time to see the cloud grind to a halt, waver and slowly start to retreat back into the sun. The golden shaft gradually faded, until there was nothing left but a little sprinkling of silver filings, the residue of a few inappropriate prayers contributed by members of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

'Thanks for the lift,' Mary said. 'Now, are you going to hang around and catch the fun?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'Of course you have a choice,' Mary replied, pressing very gently with the small knife. 'Weren't you listening to what I was saying about gods having free will?'

'I don't mean a choice between staying and getting knifed,' Apollo said. 'I don't really call that a choice, do you?'

'It's what you expect the mortals to put up with most of the time,' Mary started to say; but then she remembered what her mother had told her about not talking politics on a first date. Her mother hadn't mentioned the social effects of digging a small knife in the guy's back, so presumably that was OK.

'All right then,' Apollo was saying, 'so what's happening?'

'So far as I can see,' Mary replied, 'the gods have just tried to land and blow the Earth away, but all the prayers and faith you managed to whip up have forced them back again. That's it so far as destroying the Earth goes, at least for now. In about five minutes, I expect Jupiter will be back to kill somebody.'

'Fine.'

'Oh look,' Mary interrupted, 'there's Pro and Gel and the Derry kid. I think we should go over and have a word with them, don't you? They might be able to think of something to stop Jupiter killing us all. That'd be nice, wouldn't it?'

'Absolutely.'

Mary bit her lip indecisively. On the one hand, she knew it was totally counterproductive to go around throwing yourself at people; on the other hand, she had the feeling that unless she gave some sort of hint or indication at this stage, a promising relationship might simply fade away and die.

'I don't know if you were wondering,' she said, 'but there isn't anything between me and the Derry kid.'

'No?'

'No.'

'Well, there we go,' Apollo said. 'Do you think you might take that knife out of my back now?'

'There should be,' Mary went on. 'I mean, it was fated and so forth. But what the hell, just because a thing's fated doesn't mean to say you're stuck with it, does it?'

'Doesn't it?'

'And as for Pro and me,' Mary went on, finding it all rather harder work than she had originally anticipated but staying with it nevertheless, 'we really are just good friends. I mean, what there is between me and Pro is very special, don't get me wrong, but really, there's the age difference, the size difference, the species difference. You've got to be realistic about things like that, haven't you?'

'Ouch,' Apollo replied.

'Oh hell,
sorry,'
Mary replied. 'I'm just so clumsy sometimes you wouldn't believe it. My mother used to say to me...'

Prometheus had seen them and was hurrying over. He looked the same, but there was somehow something different about him; if he had been a tune he'd be in stereo instead of mono.

'Pol, my boy,' he shouted, 'good of you to come. Just in time, too.'

'Hello, Uncle Pro,' replied Apollo resignedly. 'Look, if I'd known it was all going to get as messy as this...'

'Don't be silly,' Prometheus said. 'And anyway, everything is going to be fine. We've got the eagle, the dog and the Derry boy...'

'Hello, said Jason, sheepishly. Meeting new gods for the first time always made him a little bit bashful.

Apollo nodded briefly and smiled a tight-lipped smile and then resumed his search for knowledge. 'Look, Uncle Pro,' he started to say, but Prometheus silenced him with a gesture of his hand.

'I know,' he said. 'But there's nothing to worry about. If Jupiter starts getting violent, Jason here will threaten to tell him the Joke.'

'What joke?'

'The Joke, idiot.'

Apollo's eyes widened like balloons in the course of being inflated. 'You mean to say
he
knows the Joke?'

'Most of it,' Prometheus replied. 'All of it except the punch line.'

'Ah. But even so...'

'It's all right, don't worry,' Prometheus replied. 'I made sure that neither part of the Joke would be volatile without the other.'

Apollo thought of something. 'How come you know the Joke, Uncle Pro?'

'Uncle Pro doesn't know the Joke,' said Prometheus, 'but I do.'

Apollo didn't understand at first; then the truth dawned on him. He backed away. 'You mean you're...'

'Thing.'

'Yes.' Apollo said, 'Begins with a G... On the tip of my tongue...'

'No, you fool, that's my name,' Prometheus snapped. 'It has pleased me to call myself Gelos and play at being a. mere Form for a number of years, but in fact I'm your great-uncle, brother of Cronus and Rhea. Do you believe me?'

'Yes.'

'Well,' said Prometheus, 'just in case you don't...'

He narrowed his eyes and gave Apollo a good long stare. Suddenly Apollo started to laugh, until he could feel his lungs straining to bursting point. In fact he was just about to black out when the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

'Again for the sake of convenience,' Prometheus continued, 'I'm sharing bodies with my old friend Prometheus at the moment. Minds, too. We've always had similar tastes m minds, Pro and I, haven't we, Pro? Yes, ever since I can remember, except I like mine a bit less cluttered. Well, we won't go into that now; it takes all sorts. I was only going to say. Later, Pro, all right? Please yourself, then. Sorry, Pol, as I was saying...'

But before he could continue, his head snapped upwards. Apollo followed his gaze and saw something high up by the sun. He recognised it.

'What is it?' Mary said.

'Jupiter's coming back,' Prometheus replied. 'Right, everyone -- action stations.'

'What might those be, exactly?'

'Er, you know, get ready and everything.'

'I take it,' Apollo said, 'that you do have a plan.'

'A plan, yes.'

'A plan of battle,' Apollo said. 'Stratagems and so forth.'

'Sort of.'

'And are you going to let us into the secret, or are we --ouch! For pity's sake, woman, mind what you're doing with that knife. You could do someone an injury.'

'It's all right, Mary,' Prometheus said, 'you can put it away now. Apollo won't desert us at a time like this.'

'Won't he though!' Apollo turned to make a dash for his chariot, only to feel the beginnings of another big laugh clogging his windpipe. 'All right,' he sighed, 'you win.'

'Let's hope so, anyway,' Prometheus replied. 'Now then, Pol, you and I and Mary and the dog will form the rear-guard, and the rest of us...'

'That only leaves me,' said Jason.

'The rest of us will form the front line contingents. Ready, Jason?'

'No.'

'Here they come.'

Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn't necessary for Jupiter to come at all. But if there was one thing the Sky-Father loved it was melodrama, and if there was going to be a big fight, he wanted to be there in person, pitching in and watching the bodies go splat. Sitting in the sun hurling thunderbolts was a poor substitute, he always felt, for actually getting to grips with an enemy's intestines.

His list of priorities was quite clear in his mind. Family first; Apollo and that ungrateful little git Jason Derry -- he had something really hot in mind for him. Then, once the first flush of exuberance had worn off and been replaced with nice, grim resentment, he'd sort out Prometheus and that damn eagle. That would leave the highlight of the proceedings, his Uncle Thing, till last. Uncle Thing was the part he was looking forward to most.

As he roared through the air like a vindictive meteor, he quickly ran through the fundamentals of anatomy in his mind. A mental picture of his antagonists with little dotted lines and pairs of scissors drawn all over them draped itself across the retina of his inner eye and he made no effort to get rid of it.

Behind him streamed the selected elite of the divine special services unit. There was no point in cluttering the place up with rookies and idiots, not now that the demolition programme had been shelved indefinitely. For killing bolshy immortals you need quality, not quantity; and the Forms hurtling Earthwards in Jupiter's wake were the sort of abstraction that only a very powerful and extremely unbalanced mind could conceive of. Even he got the creeps just thinking about them, and yet they were merely personifications of the contents of his own head. Now that was scary.