by Tom Holt
He instinctively took a step back and put his hand on his sword-hilt. He was suddenly aware that he was big enough and ugly enough to do what the hell he liked, and the realisation was incredibly wonderful.
Mary smiled. ‘You see?’ she said.
Jason deflated like one of those balloons that people blow up at parties and then let go. ‘You . . .’
‘Exactly,’ Mary said. ‘It’s worked. You’ve defied us, too.’
‘Oh.’ With what remained of his mental strength, Jason wrestled with the idea. ‘Have I?’
‘Looked like it from here.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely.’ Mary came towards him and put her hands gently on his shoulders. ‘We all knew you had it in you,’ she said.
‘So,’ Jason said, ‘I could tell you all to go and get stuffed, right now, if I wanted to.’
‘If you wanted to,’ Mary said, ‘yes.’
‘And nobody can tell me what to do?’
‘Nobody can tell you,’ Mary said softly, her lips close to his ear. ‘But that doesn’t stop them asking, does it?’
‘No,’ Jason said. ‘I suppose not.’
Had Jason attended Professor Haagedorn’s course at Wounded Elbow University, Wyoming, on predestination theory, he would have known that free will is perfectly possible, in the same way as a free lunch is perfectly possible. Just not very likely, that’s all.
‘And you wouldn’t,’ Mary whispered, ‘want the gods to abolish laughter, now would you?’
‘Well,’ Jason said, ‘no, I suppose not.’
‘And you don’t really think that Jupiter and Mars and Minerva and all that lot ought to be allowed to take the Universe over again, do you?’
‘I . . .’
‘Just think what a mess they made of it all last time.’
‘Er . . .’
‘So you will help, won’t you?’ Mary said. ‘Please?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘That’s six and two makes eight, doubled for a free go, plus six penalty points because you revoked on the bidding, plus six above the line for a straight flush, plus fifteen for a clear round in Mercury, plus three bonus points for breaking service, makes . . .’ Demeter had run out of fingers. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Right, that’s six and two makes eight . . .’
‘Forty-six,’ said Minerva coldly. ‘Can we get on now, please?’
‘Oh yes,’ Demeter added, ‘and another two for passing Novgorod. Forty-eight.’
Minerva gave her a look that would have kept milk fresh in the Sahara. ‘Forty-eight, then,’ she said. ‘Now . . .’
‘And,’ Demeter said, ‘another one for having two options in play during the same contract. Forty-nine.’
‘Fancy!’ Minerva replied. ‘Now, if you’ve quite finished with the dice, perhaps I might have a . . .’
She threw, and the dice clattered on the marble floor of the sun.
‘Oh hard luck, Min,’ Demeter commiserated. ‘That’s the third time you’ve done that.’
‘Yes,’ Minerva said. ‘I had noticed, thank you.’
‘Not your day today, is it?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Now then.’ Demeter scooped up the dice, blew on them (where did she get into that dreadfully common habit, Minerva wondered) and threw them, not omitting to shout ‘Ha!’ at the approved moment. ‘Oh look,’ she said, ‘Double nine again. I am having a good day, aren’t I?’
‘If you throw double nine one more time in this turn,’ Minerva said distantly, ‘you go to Hades for three moves.’
‘Well,’ Demeter replied, ‘that’s hardly likely, is it?’
‘It was hardly likely you’d throw it the last three times.’
‘Fool’s luck,’ Demeter replied cheerfully. ‘Well well, isn’t that fortunate. You were just about to invade me and now I can invade you instead. Jolly hard luck, Min.’
Minerva closed her eyes for a moment, just long enough for a goddess to count to ten. ‘Well, never mind,’ she said, ‘it’s only a Game after all.’
The very thought of Minerva regarding it as only a Game was too much for Demeter. She sniggered. Then she invaded.
‘It really isn’t your day, is it?’ she said. ‘Look, all your armies have run out of petrol on the other side of the desert. Now if that isn’t just the rottenest possible . . .’
Minerva stood up. ‘How you can sit there wasting your time with this frivolous nonsense when there’s important work to be done completely amazes me,’ she said, and sniffed. Demeter looked up.
‘Want to give it a rest for a bit, do you?’ she said.
‘I do think that in the circumstances . . .’
‘You losing, you mean?’
‘I am not losing.’
‘Yes you are,’ Demeter replied. ‘But since it’s only a Game, what do you care? Actually, I wouldn’t mind a few minutes’ break myself. Cheerio.’
And, having ostentatiously noted the positions of the pieces on the board, Demeter wandered away in the direction of the kitchen. As she sat and stared at her stranded army in the flowing, trackless sands, Minerva found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it was a pity that Demeter had come into being several million years before Australia did. Otherwise, she felt, they would have been made for each other.
Frivolous nonsense, Minerva reminded herself. Instead, she would go and find out what was happening and do something about it.
Better to observe the passage of events, she climbed the spiral staircase to the Observation Saloon and sat in the Viewing Chair. From there, thanks to a freak refraction of light through the atmosphere of a profoundly bizarre Betamax world, it was possible to see the minutest details of what was going on on the surface of Earth. Minerva leaned forward in the Chair and concentrated on a certain spot in the Caucasus mountains.
What she saw was . . .
For the first time in a long time, a very long time, a very long time indeed, Mars was beginning to think that life wasn’t such a pain in the neck after all.
Fighting he didn’t hold with, but he was a born organiser, in the way that profoundly disorganised people often are. Without pausing to pluck the untidy desk and overflowing cupboard under the stairs out of his own eye, he delighted in sorting out the messes of others. Give him a clipboard, a box file and seven thousand little yellow stickers and he was as happy as a lamb in springtime.
‘All right,’ he was shouting, ‘what’s the hold-up? Get that lot unloaded and down to Base Camp 2 and look sharp about it. There’s fifteen thousand tons of prefabricated girder bridge trying to get through . . . Oh, for crying out loud, you pillocks, not that way round. And who forgot to bring the butane cylinders?’
The Forms, stripped to their shirt-sleeves and sweating despite the cold, ignored him. In their opinion, in order to lynch one heavily-chained Titan there hadn’t really been any need to bring one hundred and five thousand tons of pretzels, eight million forage caps, forty-seven million reams of white A4 duplicating paper, fifty-nine miles of three-core electric flex and seventy thousand soldering-irons. Someone, they felt, had got just the teeniest bit carried away. As for the piano . . .
Stupidity, promoted for the day to the rank of Staff Drum Lieutenant, tapped Mars gingerly on the shoulder.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘excuse me, sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘What should we do with the piano, sir?’
Mars glowered at him. ‘Put it in the mobile officers’ club,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’
‘But sir,’ said the Form, ‘we didn’t bring the mobile officers’ . . .’
‘You what?’
‘It wasn’t on the manifest, sir,’ said the Form. ‘Look . . .’
He thrust a clipboard under Mars’s nose. The Widow-Maker groaned.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘In that case, clear out one of those mobile field chiropody units, put in a few chairs and tables, get some bottles and some glassware and a few cut flowers and shove the piano in that. Whatever the hel
l happened to initiative?’
‘Sir!’ Stupidity saluted briskly, turned and wandered away, shaking his head sadly. Bloody amateurs.
For his part, Mars sat down on a half-empty packing case that had contained forty-six thousand pairs of tropical weight nylon undersocks, licked the tip of his biro, and started to write.
From: C-in-C, Caucasus Theatre
To: Divisional Commanders
Re: Centralised Stationery Distribution . . .
He was just getting nicely into it when a Colonel of Spectral Warriors came and stood over him, casting a shadow over his page.
‘All ready to go, sir,’ said the Spectral Warrior.
‘Sorry?’
‘All units deployed, sir,’ the Warrior explained. ‘Weapons checked, intelligence reports received and analysed, ammunition distributed, sir.’
Mars looked up. ‘So?’
‘So,’ said the Spectral Warrior, ‘do we go get the bastard, or what? Sir,’ he added.
Mars wobbled nervously. ‘Are you sure everything’s ready?’ he said.
‘Positive, sir.’
‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have a final kit inspection and a general stocktaking at brigade level?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Lines of supply all in place, are they? Pontoon bridges all built?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Everybody returned their pink pension scheme questionnaires? ’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mars swallowed hard. This was the bit he didn’t like.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what you’re saying is, there’s absolutely nothing to stop us getting on with it.’
‘Correct, sir.’
‘Ah,’ Mars replied. ‘Fine. Well done, everybody. Well then, I suppose we’d all better . . .’
Just then, a tiny dot appeared in the sky. It was so small and so far away that you’d have thought nobody would have noticed it. Somehow, though, everybody did.
‘Hold it a moment, Colonel,’ Mars said. ‘What do you make of that?’
The Spectral Warrior shaded his eyes with his hands. ‘Looks like an eagle to me, sir. And a man. And a dog. Sir.’
Mars suddenly began to feel a very familiar feeling of being about an eighth of an inch away from the smelly stuff. ‘Well don’t just stand there,’ he snapped. ‘Get going. Nail the little sod.’
The Colonel saluted, then turned back, perplexed. ‘By that, sir, do you mean the Titan or the eagle with the . . .?’
By then, of course, it was all too late. The dot had become bigger. It had also become three dots. Three dots streaming through the air. Three dots . . .
‘Fire!’ Mars yelled hysterically. Nothing happened.
Jason, meanwhile, had leapt from the eagle’s back and was standing on a mountain-top, brandishing the Sword. At his feet, the Triple-Headed Hell-Hound was baying with two heads; the third was sniffing something on the ground directly under Jason’s left foot - and overhead the eagle circled menacingly.
‘This is asinine,’ Mars yelled at his huge, silent, foot-shuffling army. ‘There’s twenty million of us and three of them. Pull your bloody fingers out, the lot of you!’
In the Spectral ranks, nobody moved. As for the Forms, they were all trying to turn back into figures of speech without anybody noticing. Stupidity hid behind the piano and, rather counter-intuitively, began to pray.
Then, from the Divine ranks, a single figure stepped forward.
‘Hoo-bloody-ray,’ muttered the Widow-Maker. ‘Now can we please make a start, before the little jerk dies of old age?’
Nobody paid any attention to him. Forty million eyes were fixed on the one black shape strolling easily up the side of the mountain towards Jason, the eagle and the dog.
In the snooker-room of the Spectral Warriors Social Club and Institute one can, if one has the necessary degree of masochistic nerve, hear all the nastiest, most stomach-churning stories in the world’s repertoire. Approximately seventy-two per cent of them share the same central character.
For example, there was the occasion on which Jupiter put out a contract on the King of Trasimene, who had incurred the Sky-Father’s unquenchable enmity by wearing lemon socks with an Old Carrhasians tie. Owing to a complicated nexus of oracles, oaths and rainbow-sealed covenants, the gods were forbidden to offer violence in any shape or form to Gorgias II during his lifetime. So they sent for the one being in the whole of Creation capable of dealing with the problem, with the exception of the Air Traffic Controller at Athens Airport, unquestionably the most widely feared and hated being in the whole of the Universe. And sure enough, twenty-four hours later, Gorgias II had ceased to exist. Nothing was ever found of him, not so much as a trouser-button or a fire-blackened cufflink. A consignment of two dozen lavender silk cravats ordered by him from Gieves and Hawkes were found on arrival to have dissolved into their component atoms and soaked away into the wrapping-paper.
Some said that he had worked it by travelling back through time, hanging around Gorgias’s mother shortly before she met Gorgias’s father, and so preventing him from ever being born. Others pointed to the appearance of an unpredicted bifurcation in the fabric of possibility, closely followed by a violent eruption of molten logic in Macedonia measuring 34.76 on the Rictus scale, and the observation of a hitherto unrecorded star in the constellation of the Distributor Cap. Most people, however, just shuddered and tried not to think about it.
There was a silence you could have filled cracks with by the time he reached the top of the mountain, and Jason could hear nothing but the sound of his own heart pounding. It wasn’t a very pleasant sensation, since he could tell that this wasn’t just ordinary Let’s-get-the-blood-moving-along-chaps pounding; this was the heart demanding to be let out . . .
‘Hi.’
‘Er,’ Jason replied. Not the snappiest of answers, perhaps, and maybe Boswell wouldn’t have jotted it down if Johnson had said it of a Saturday night down the Cheshire Cheese; but it is worth recording as one of the few replies that he has ever received from a potential victim.
‘Nice up here, isn’t it?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Good view.’
‘I . . .’
‘Apparently, you can see Stavropol from here,’ he said, staring out in entirely the wrong direction. ‘On a clear day of course,’ he added.
‘Er.’
‘Stavropol,’ he went on, ‘is somewhere I’ve never been actually, but they say you can get a really authentic shish kebab at Jagadai’s Café, down by the railway arches; I mean, you can really taste the little bits of burnt wool and everything. I forget who told me that.’
‘Um.’
He turned round, swung his arms and appeared to do deep breathing exercises. ‘Lovely air, too,’ he said, and coughed. ‘Sort of crisp.’
Jason squeezed a little of this highly recommended air into his chest, past the rather large blockage that had formed in his windpipe, but all he did with it after all that effort was say ‘Um’ again.
‘Sorry?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is nice, isn’t it?’
A tiny message wriggled up Jason’s spine and clambered into his brain. This guy is scared, it said, and was immediately shushed by millions of nervous brain cells. That, presumably, is why it’s known as the nervous system.
‘Er,’ said he.
They looked at each other.
Just as Jason felt his bowel muscles starting to give up - not, of course, that he knew the meaning of fear; it must have been something he ate - he made a slight whimpering noise, put both hands over his ears and started to run back down the mountain, as fast as his legs could carry him or maybe just a little faster. One little brain cell inside Jason’s head smirked, said I told you so, and then wondered why it found it so hard to make friends. Jason, meanwhile, was dashing off down the mountain after him, and when he tripped over his flowing black robe and sprawled headlong, Jason wasn’t far behind.
‘Come on out of it, you,’ Jason replied sternly. It’s remarkable what an effect the sight of a cowering enemy can have on one’s vocabulary; if someone had asked Jason right then for a word meaning ‘Painful emotion caused by impending danger or evil’, he’d probably have replied ‘Seasickness’.
‘No.’
‘All right then,’ said Jason. ‘Suits me.’
The ball uncurled itself quickly, and Jason could see two eye-sockets staring up at him from the recesses of his shroudlike hood.
‘Please don’t say it,’ he said.
Jason blinked, but managed to keep his stern, remorseless expression steady and not giggle. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he replied. ‘Say what, exactly?’
‘The Joke,’ he replied. ‘Whatever you do, please don’t say it. Not that I’m saying you wouldn’t do it terribly well, but . . .’
Jason remembered. The Joke, of course; Gelos’s joke, the great joke, joke of jokes. So that was what they were all afraid of . . .
‘There was this guy,’ he said savagely, ‘went into this hardware shop, right, and he said . . .’
‘Eeeeeeeeeeek!’
‘Don’t panic. It’s all right,’ Jason said. ‘Just kidding about. But you tell your pals down there that next time . . .’
‘Yes. Right.’
‘Got that?’
He nodded vigorously. If he’d had a tail, he’d have wagged it, and that would have been Jason’s stern, remorseless expression gone for good.
‘Fine,’ said Jason. ‘Now push off.’
He scrambled up, gave Jason a look of pure terror, and then bounced away down the slope and into the serried ranks of Spectral Warriors, who retreated slightly. The eagle, who had been circling overhead, swooped down and pitched on Jason’s shoulder.
‘Ouch,’ Jason said.
The eagle ignored him and put its beak next to his ear. Eagles cannot, of course, whisper, because of the bone structure of their beaks.
‘Yes,’ Jason said. ‘Nice one.’
The eagle spread its wings and launched itself into the air. For his part, Jason straightened his spine, put his shoulders back, and faced the Divine Army, ranged below him in the natural amphitheatre formed by the mountain slopes. He took a deep breath and tried to imagine he was wearing a loud check suit and a red nose.
