The Age of Zeus

69. COUNCIL OF WAR

Argus pinpointed Poseidon's whereabouts. Hermes fetched him. The twelve Olympians sat in session in the naos of the main temple. Zeus presided. Sam looked on from the sidelines.

A council of war.

"We go nuclear," said Athena. "Argus has control over the world's atomic arsenals. It's high time we took advantage of that. We bomb London. That'll halt this thing in its tracks. You know this, O Zeus."

"I can't countenance it, O Athena the Owl-Eyed," said Zeus.

"Why not? I'm the one you consult when it comes to tactics. Have I not advised you well in the past? Have I not helped steer you successfully around countless potential pitfalls? So this is what I am recommending now. Wipe out London with one of Britain's own ICBMs, and this new insurgency we're seeing will melt away — gone in a flash."

She hadn't always been Athena. Once, she had been a brilliant business strategist, a consultant whom corporations hired at staggering expense to tell them how to get one over on the competition and expand their own interests. Then she tried to play off two rival pharmaceutical giants against each other, for the sheer pleasure of manipulating them both, and got caught at it.

"I agree with my stepsister," said Dionysus. "Why must we exert ourselves over and over again quashing these uprisings when there's a far less effortful option open to us? All Argus need do is think it, and the deed is done."

Dionysus had been a vintner and bon viveur who hosted lavish, booze-sodden parties that could last for days. The good times ended for him after one of his guests killed another with a broken bottle in a drunken brawl.

"Typical!" barked Ares. "You're soft in every way, Dionysus. Soft and lazy. I, myself, will gladly take on these mortals hand to hand on the slopes of fair, snow-capped Olympus. The clash and clangour of combat is my music. Bloodshed and screams are my meat and drink."

Before he was enlisted into the Pantheon, Ares had been a soldier, a good one, born for discipline and killing, if a little too apt to sacrifice the former in the name of the latter. His involvement in a massacre of civilians in some west African hellhole town prompted a dishonourable discharge and a descent into alcoholism. There were frequent arrests for affray, until Xander Landesman came along.

"And I will fight alongside my stepbrother," Apollo declared. "My arrows stand ready to pierce a thousand mortal breasts." He and Ares clasped fists, a sinewy display of shared philosophy.

Apollo used to be an Olympic-class archer, a toxophilite of the first rank, until he took a bribe from a betting syndicate and blew a contest he should have won easily. The scandal was hushed up but his career never hit the bullseye again.

"I'm minded to side with Athena and Dionysus on this one," said Hades. "In the thick of combat isn't a place I'm too comfortable being, and there's something rather elegantly fitting about using one of the mortals' own weapons of mass destruction against them. So much death in the space of a handful of seconds — I find the idea positively thrilling."

An embalmer by trade, Hades had been noted among his peers in the field of mortuary science for the skill and care he took over his work. With cosmetics brush and restorative wax he could render even the most unsightly corpse viewable. He prided himself on having saved many a family the distress of a closed-casket funeral. Unfortunately, it emerged that his affinity with dead bodies didn't end with smartening them up and making them look lifelike. A colleague caught him in the morgue one night, lavishing the wrong kind of attention on a recently deceased lingerie model on the slab. Vocational oblivion beckoned, but so did Xander Landesman.

"Perhaps," argued Aphrodite, "we should offer them one last chance. Set a deadline. Give them until, say, next Monday to reconsider and pull back, then if they don't comply, attack. Isn't it better to show forbearance and allow their better natures a chance to shine through?"

Aphrodite had previously been a madam running one of the most exclusive bordellos on the planet, a harem-like haven for playboys, plutocrats and princelings. Her abiding philosophy was that the relationship between prostitute and client was a sacred one, akin to true love, and in support of that, money was never mentioned on her premises. Credit cards were silently swiped and exorbitantly debited, and from there on in it was l'amour all the way. This didn't save her, though, when the inevitable police raid and prosecution for brothel keeping came. Her clients, showing anything but love, turned on her in order to protect themselves, and she had been facing a lengthy stint behind bars, until a certain arms dealer's son approached her with a tempting proposition.

"Hardly," sniffed Poseidon. "They don't have better natures, O Protectress of Births. Haven't you realised that yet? Give even an inch of ground and they'll think you're weak. Gods cannot be seen to be weak. Say the word, Zeus, and I'll capsize every warship out there."

So said a man who'd been a keen amateur yachtsman and also a shipping magnate who routinely overloaded his cargo vessels in order to maximise profits. Dozens of crewmen were lost at sea as his freighters foundered in rough weather, shipped water and sank. Eventually his avarice left him with nothing, no fleet of any kind except his own private 30-foot schooner, and when that was repossessed in order to help offset his legal defence team's costs, he knew he was going under. Xander Landesman threw him a lifeline.

"I wouldn't dismiss my wife's proposal so quickly," said Hephaestus. "Aphrodite is sensitive to what goes on in the hearts of men — "

"The hearts and the loins," Ares interjected.

"— and," Hephaestus went on, ignoring him, "she is right to hope that maybe, in this case, people will come to their senses before it is too late. However," he added, "should that not happen, I have something up my sleeve that will assist us in the conflict. Athena suggested I build this particular item, and I think, once you see it in action, you'll be impressed, both by her foresight and my dexterity."

He'd been a sculptor, an expert in metalcraft, praised for the way he could replicate the texture and flow of organic objects with inorganic materials. But as with many an artist, he was flawed, temperamental, prone to bouts of rage and depression. Like the stuff he worked with, he was either cold and inflexible or incandescently hot and dangerous. He lost friends, fell from grace, his creative fire sputtered out — and then, at the hands of the man who would be Zeus, he was forged anew in the crucible of science.

"In my view," said Demeter, "in this summer heat, we must reap when the harvest is ripe."

"And that means…?" said Apollo.

"Mortals are corn. You be the scythe."

"That's what I thought it meant."

Demeter was an ex-doctor, a member of the caring profession who grew complacent and stopped caring. Stopped caring to the extent that she neglected the patients whose health she was responsible for, especially the elderly ones. Many of them were left permanently damaged, and some even died, as a consequence of treatable conditions she'd failed to diagnose. She was struck off the medical register. Then came a chance to redeem herself.

"Demeter and I," said Hera, "see eye to eye on this, as on so many matters. Cerberus will enter the fray at my command, as will Typhon, Scylla and, it goes without saying, the Harpies. You must make the decision, my husband, but I'm sure you will make the correct one."

Hera had been a veterinarian, good with animals, but that wasn't Xander's only criterion for choosing her. She'd been married no less than four times by the age of thirty-five, always to unfaithful men, and he'd wanted someone who was familiar with the burden of the wronged wife — who even took a perverse pleasure from it.

"I am He Who Presides Over Contests," said Hermes. "If it is your will, Zeus, I shall preside over this one too, this clash between us and the mortals. Wherever you ask me to be, there shall I go."

Hermes had been Darren Pugh. His predecessor had been a getaway driver, of all things, a criminal who'd turned informant and had to go into witness protection. But Hermes the second, the replacement, was the erstwhile Darren Pugh. The elusive, slippery traitor.

Sam watched them as they debated, and superimposed over all of them was her knowledge of the people they had been, the lives they had led before Xander Landesman approached them with the tantalising prospect of godlike powers. What a sorry bunch. Losers, perverts, cheats, crooks, the lowest of the low, and Xander had taken them and elevated them to the highest of the high.

And now he was offering her the same opportunity.

"What do you say, Sam?" he had asked her in the Temple of Apotheosis, a few hours earlier.

Her immediate reply had been, "You've just described to me a dozen or so utter scumbags, and you're asking if I'd like to join them?"

"'Scumbags' they may have been, but they were also uniquely suited to the roles I'd planned for them to play. Each had the requisite characteristics, a background in tune with the abilities I intended to give him or her. Each, too, was in dire straits, at low ebb, with very limited future prospects."

"You made them an offer they couldn't refuse."

" Wouldn't refuse. It had to be consensual. Otherwise the indoctrination wouldn't take. No form of hypnosis can make a subject do something he or she wouldn't do naturally. That's another movie canard, the idea of the mesmerised victim becoming an assassin or whatever. My Olympians couldn't behave as they do if it wasn't already inherent in their psychologies. Athena's ruthless streak is that of the boardroom schemer she used to be. Ares's warrior aggression has been there since his soldiering days."

"Did they know, going in, that they would be losing all memory of their old selves?"

"It was made crystal clear to them that I would be rewriting their conscious minds, erasing their pasts so that they would know nothing about themselves other than that they were gods. All of them were happy with that. It was, I feel, one of the great attractions of the procedure for them. They'd all done things they weren't at ease with, things that had earned them opprobrium and shame. I was giving them the opportunity to start again, afresh, all sins forgotten, like a religious rebirth. That and supranormal powers — an irresistible combination."

"Not to me," Sam said. "I've no interest in forgetting who I am."

"Really, Sam? Strikes me there's a lot of past baggage you'd gladly let go of if you could. Your parents' deaths. You boyfriend's death. Your miscarriage. Your stalled police career. Perhaps also the Titans' abject failure in realising their objective. All that, I could whisk away from you, as though you were a soul in the afterlife drinking from the river Lethe, whose waters remove all remembrance of a person's time on earth. I could rid you of the pain you carry around inside you, the deep-seated traumas that have left you as you are — reserved, aloof, untrusting, cynical."

"I am none of those things!"

"You may not think so, but you do not see yourself as others see you. Have you ever loved anyone? Truly?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes."

"Adrian Walters?"

"Ade."

"One man. And before him? After?"

She nearly said Ramsay's name, but didn't.

"And was it love?" Zeus said. "Or more of a convenient arrangement? Ade was in the same line of work as you, therefore comfortably within the parameters of what you knew and understood. He was also inferior to you in professional terms, so not likely to threaten your self-image in that respect."

"You can't know any of that."

"I've done my homework, with Argus's assistance. I can read you, Sam, same as I read all of the candidates I chose for apotheosis. I can see into you. It's a gift I have. You're a smart but inhibited woman, with so much anger inside you, a well of frustration and aggrievedness. And I can save you from that. I can tap that well, relieve the pressure. I can unshackle you from your self-made chains, open you up to who you truly are and what you'd truly like to be. Come on, admit it, isn't that just the least bit tempting? The possibility of absolute freedom, absolute selfhood, a life lived without constraint or regret?"

Not tempting, no. Not at all.

Well, perhaps slightly.

"It does hurt," Zeus said. "It takes several days, it involves courses of injections and infusions, and the physiological alterations these cause are unpleasant while they are happening. But does the athlete not endure great hardship as he trains to become the best in his field? Does the ballerina not go through agonies as she distorts her feet and builds up calluses? If we are to become sublime, do we not have to pay first in sacrifice and suffering? You will sit in that chair and experience a sometimes unbearable level of discomfort and distress. The restraints may be necessary from time to time, if only to stop you harming yourself or me in the throes of change. And you will listen to the myths constantly while the procedure is in progress, until the transformation is complete and you are no longer Sam Akehurst but someone else, a greater being, superior in every way."

"Who?" said Sam. "Who would I become?"

"You are interested, aren't you?"

"No. Hypothetical question. Which goddess do you think I'm most like?"

"Well, it's a matter of serendipity more than anything. We have a vacancy. It just so happens that you'd be ideal to fill it."

"Artemis." She knew it. She'd known it all along, somehow.

"Artemis," Zeus confirmed. "The cool, calculating, vicious huntress. Lethal in a fight, and not one who likes to be slighted or wronged. That was a portion of her file I played to you just now. Artemis's revenge on Actaeon, who had the temerity to spy on her and saw her in her nakedness. Artemis was a virgin — inapplicable in your case, obviously, but for the ancient Greeks that was how they conceptualised her subsidiary function as divine patron of chastity and virtue. She was their idealised notion of feminine justice, untouched, untouchable, to be admired from afar but not to be roused to fury."

"The previous Artemis had dark hair."

"I believe there's such a thing as hair dye."

"She was a good three inches taller than me."

"Once you have her spear in your hands, no one will notice the height difference."

"I can't even use a spear."

"Apollo will teach you, and I will see to it that you have an aptitude for the weapon."

"And I'm no killer."

"Oh, and what were you doing in that suit my father designed if it wasn't killing? Did you not hunt down our monsters? Kill them?"

"And 'feminine justice'?"

Zeus widened his eyes. "To someone who was once a female detective sergeant, do I have to make the parallel any plainer? Sam, you are Artemis. Nobody could be the new Goddess of the Hunt better than you. You were made for it."

"Except…"

"Yes?"

"It seems like some kind of sick joke," Sam said. "I loathe Artemis. I've loathed her for so long. Since Hyde Park."

"Where this Ade of yours died."

"She killed him. Her and Apollo."

"From the accounts I've read, she didn't kill him. Neither did Apollo. He drowned. He died in the Serpentine, in a stampede, saving a girl's life."

"A stampede Artemis and Apollo caused. If it wasn't for them, he'd never even have been there."

"But did Artemis's spear go through him? Did one of Apollo's arrows? No. If anything killed him, it was his own bravery."

"But I hate her. I hate you all."

"And isn't it time to give that up?" Zeus said gently. "Where has it got you? Nowhere. Imagine if you were one of us instead. Helping shape the world. Making the future brighter, safer, better. Hating no one except those who would oppose you. Being part of the greatest force for good humankind has ever known."

A last counterargument, all Sam could muster at that moment amid the turmoil she was feeling: "Why didn't you use all this as a force for good?" She meant the chair, the serums in their phials. "Your advances in genetic engineering. Didn't it ever occur to you that, rather than make a handful of people gods, you could make everyone gods? Demeter can heal. Damn it, with a thousand like her, a few hundred even, you could set up hospitals all over the planet and cure every known disease. And think, if everyone could teleport like Hermes, there'd be no need for mechanical transport any more. No buses, no cars, no trains — no pollution. Poseidon — an army of Poseidons could irrigate deserts, make it so that crops can grow anywhere, help end famine and drought. You yourself — couldn't a host of people harnessing lightning solve the world's energy problems somehow?"

"Sam, ideas like those did flit through my mind briefly, once, before I dismissed them as the pure naivety they are. Could I have turned everyone on earth into a god? Should I? Well, apart from the impracticality and inordinate expense of attempting to do that, what do you think the result would be? Chaos. Utter chaos. People teleporting willy-nilly everywhere? What would happen to privacy, crime levels, the principles of territory and international borders? Hordes of Demeters curing all ills? So what about the population explosion that would ensue? Where would we find room for those billions of people who don't die when they're meant to?

"Say we decide to dole out the strength of a Hercules. Who to? A select few? Who'd choose that select few? So let's be democratic and give it to everyone. But if everyone is as strong as Hercules, what's the point? All it'll lead to is an exponential rise in property damage and personal injury, people literally not realising their own strength, breaking things and each other. Over and above all that, who would control this world of gods? How would it be policed? Someone even more powerful would be needed to oversee it, gods' gods. Which gets us back to where we are now."

He gesticulated with both hands, clutching empty air.

"It just doesn't work, Sam. It's not feasible. I recognised that from the start. What I could do to people needed to be done with precision and great forethought. It couldn't be universal, it had to be specific, targeted, a laser not a blunderbuss. Don't change everyone. Change a few who can change things for everyone else."

Sam could see the logic in this. It was inhuman logic, but logic nonetheless.

"So," Zeus said. "What's it to be? What's the answer? Yes or no?"

Another Landesman presenting her with another life-defining decision.

"I need time," Sam said. "Time to think."

Zeus leaned back. Sighed. "I feared you might say that."

"Just a few days."

"Sounds like a no to me."

"No, it's not definitely a no," Sam said, and was surprised to find that this was the truth. It was 99 % a no, but somewhere in her that 1 % of yes was whispering softly, wheedling, saying, Why not? Why not?

At last Zeus had relented. A few days. No, pin it down. She had to decide by this coming Saturday.

Sunday, Sam had said. Three whole days from now.

Sunday, Zeus had agreed. He couldn't spare her any longer than that. He needed his Artemis, especially with the mortals making their move on Olympus. This lot could be fought off, but if Sam was right and more followed in their wake, then he wanted the full Dodekatheonic complement of Olympians available.

Now, at the council of war, having heard out his fellow Olympians, Zeus delivered his verdict.

"I am of the view," he said, "that any attack on Olympus must be met with immediate and devastating counterforce. Let us wait, though, until whoever is coming has got here. Let us let the mortals assemble outside, and let us let them make the opening gambit. That will save us the trouble of going to seek them out and also make us look like the aggrieved party, the provoked rather than the provokers. Surely you can all see the beneficial aspects of that. Athena, a nuclear strike is simply not on. If we need to level a city — well, we've shown we can do that ourselves, haven't we, without recourse to manmade technological armaments. Having Argus assume control of the nuclear arsenals was to prevent their use, not commandeer them for our own purposes. It ill befits us as gods to drop bombs. What mortals can do, we cannot, and vice versa. That," he said, addressing all of them once more, "is my thinking on this. Let none demur."

None did. Athena looked disgruntled but resigned. The Cloud-Gatherer had spoken. His word was diktat.

"My daughter," he said, taking her under his arm as the meeting broke up, "don't be downcast. Your great mind will be vital in the coming days, apportioning our resources across the field of battle, deploying your family against the foe. Surely you relish such a challenge."

A smile played about Athena's serious lips. It seemed she did relish it, as a matter of fact.

Then Zeus came over to Sam.

"Three days," he murmured, too low for anyone else to hear. "I shall be patiently waiting."

"And if the answer isn't the one you want? Isn't this whole thing supposed to be voluntary?"

"You won't disappoint me," Zeus told her, genially but with the force of conviction. "I know you won't."