Eras change, eras change. And you’d better check on how they’ve been changing in these parts, my lad. Hermes tuned his attention to the radio spectrum and caught the voice of an English-speaking military pilot. “—Roger.” For a moment he was jolted. Two centuries ago, no gentleman would have said that where any lady might be listening. Then he recalled hearing the modern usage in the Old World.
We really should have been paying closer attention to mortal affairs. Especially in the New World. Sheer laxity to ignore half the globe this long a while.
Immortals got hidebound, he reflected. And once humans stopped worshiping them, they got—might as well be blunt—lazy. The Olympians had done little in Europe since the Renaissance, nothing in America since the birth of Thomas Jefferson. The fact that they had never been served by the American people, and thus had no particular tradition of interest in the affairs of that folk, was no excuse.
Certainly Hermes, the Wayfarer, ought to have paid frequent visits. But at least he was the one who had discovered the need for an investigation.
A prayer, startling him to alertness, and in that heightened state, the sudden faint sense of something else, of a newborn god.…
He peered ahead. At his speed, the western horizon had begun to show a dark line which betokened land. The wings on his helmet and sandals beat strongly. Men aboard a coastwise freighter thought they glimpsed a small cyclone race by, yelling, kicking up chop and froth, lit by one brass-colored sunset ray.
Yet, despite his haste, Hermes traveled with less than his olden blitheness. If nothing else, he was hungry.
Vanessa Talbott had not called on Aphrodite that Saturday because she was a devotee. In fact, earlier she had invoked the devil. To be precise, she had clenched her fists and muttered, “Oh, hell damn everything, anyway,” after she overcame her weeping.
That was when she said aloud, “I won’t cry any more. He isn’t worth crying over.”
She took a turn about the apartment. It pressed on her with sights hard to endure—the heapedup books she and Roy had read and talked about; a picture he had taken one day when they went sailing and later enlarged and framed; a dust-free spot by the south window, where the drop-cloth used to lie beneath his easel; her guitar, which she would play for him while she sang, giving him music to accompany his work; the bed they’d bought at the Goodwill—
“Th-th-the trouble is,” Vanny admitted, “he is worth it. Damn him.”
She wanted wildly to get out. Only where? What for? Not to some easily found party among his friends (who had never quite become hers). They had too little idea of privacy, even the privacy of the heart. Nor, on some excuse, to the home of one of her friends (who had never quite become his). They were too reserved, too shyly intent on minding their own business. So? Out at random, through banging city streets, to end with a movie or, worse, smoke and boom-boom and wheedling strangers in a bar?
Stay put, girl, she told herself. Use the weekend to get rested. Make a cheerful, impenetrable face ready for Monday.
She’d announced her engagement to Roy Elkins, promising young landscape and portrait painter, at the office last month. The congratulations had doubled her pleasure. They were nice people at the computer center. It would be hard to tell them that the wedding was off. Thank God, she’d never said she and Roy were already living together! That had been mainly to avoid her parents getting word in Iowa. They were dears, but they wouldn’t have understood. I’m not sure I do either. Roy was the first, the first. He was going to be the last. Now—Yeah, I’m lucky. It’d have hurt too much to let them know how much I hurt.
The place was hot and stuffy. She pushed a window open. Westering sunlight fell pale on brick walls opposite. Traffic was light in this area at this hour, but the city grumbled everywhere around. She leaned out and inhaled a few breaths. They were chill, moist, and smog-acrid. Soon’s we’d saved enough money, I’d quit my job and we’d buy an old Connecticut farmhouse and fix it ourselves—“Oh, hell damn everything, anyway.”
How about a drink? Ought to be some bourbon left.
Vanny grimaced. Her father’s cautions against drinking alone, or ever drinking much, had stayed with her more firmly than his Lutheran faith and Republican politics. The fact that Roy seldom touched hard liquor had reinforced them.
Of course, our stash.… She hesitated, then shrugged. Her father had never warned her about solitary turning on.
The smoke soothed. She wasn’t a head. Nor was Roy. They’d share a stick maybe once or twice a week, after he convinced her that the prohibition was silly and she learned she could hold her reaction down to the mild glow which was the most she wanted. This time she went a little further, got a little high, all by herself in an old armchair.
Her glance wandered. Among objects which cluttered the mantel was a miniature Aphrodite of Milos. She and Roy had both fallen in love with the original before they met each other. He said that was the softest back in the world; she spoke of the peace in that face, a happiness too deep for laughter.
Dizziness passed through her. She lifted her hands. “Aphrodite,” she begged, “help. Bring him home to me.”
Afterward she realized that her appeal had been completely sincere. Won’t do, girl, she decided. Next would come the nice men in white coats. She extinguished and stored the joint, sought the kitchen, scrambled a dish of eggs—chopping a scallion and measuring out turmeric for them was helpful to her—and brewed a pot of tea: Lapsang Soochong, that is, hot, red, and tarry-tasting. Meanwhile an early fall dusk blew in from the sea.
Sobered, she noticed how cold the place had gotten. She took her cup and saucer and went to close the living room window she had left open. The only light streamed out of the kitchen behind her.
That illuminated the god who flew in between her drapes.
Hermes whipped his caduceus forward. “Halt!” he commanded. The small bowl and plate which the young woman had dropped came to a midair stop. The liquid which had splashed from them returned. Hermes guided them gently to a table. She didn’t notice.
He smiled at her. “Rejoice,” he said in his best English. “Be not afeared. No harm shall befall you, mademoiselle, damme if ’twill.”
She was good to look upon, tall, well-curved, golden-haired, blue-eyed, fresh-featured. He was glad to see that the brief modern modes he had observed on mortal females elsewhere had reached America. However, Yahweh’s nudity taboo (how full of crotchets the old fellow was) kept sufficient effect that he had been wise to will a tunic upon his own form.
“Who … what—?” The girl backed from him till a wall blocked her. She breathed hard. This was, interesting to watch, but Hermes wanted to dispel the distress behind the bosom.
“I beg pardon for liberties taken,” he said, bowing. His helmet fluttered wings to tip itself. “Under the circumstances, d’ye see, mademoiselle, discretion appeared advisable. ’Twould never do to compromise a lady, bless me, no. My intention is naught but to proffer assistance. Pray be of cheer.”
She straightened and met his gaze squarely. He liked that. Broadening his smile, he let her examine him inch by inch. He liked that too. The lasses always found him a winsome lad; the ancient Hellenes had portrayed him accurately, even, given certain moods, in the Hermae.
“Okay,” she said at last, slowly, shaken underneath but with returned poise. “What’s the gag, Mercury, and how did you do your stunt? A third-floor window and no fire escape beneath.”
“I am not precisely Mercurius, mademoiselle. You must know Olympian Hermes. You invoked the Lady, did you not?” He saluted Aphrodite’s eidolon.
She edged toward the hall door. “What do you mean?” Her tone pretended composure, but he understood that she believed she was humoring a madman till she could escape.
“You sent her the first honest prayer given an Olympian in, lo, these many centuries,” he explained, “albeit ’twas I, the messenger, who heard and came, as is my function.”
The doorknob in her hand gave confidence. �
�Come off it, Charlie. Why should gods pay attention, if they exist? They sure haven’t answered a lot of people who’ve needed help a lot worse.”
She has sense, Hermes thought. I shall have to be frank. “Well, mademoiselle, peculiar circumstances do ensphere you, linkage to a mystery puissant and awful. That joined your religious probity in drawing me hither. Belike the gods have need of you.”
She half opened the door. “Go quietly,” she said. “Or I run out hollering for the police.”
“By your leave,” Hermes replied, “a demonstration.”
Suddenly he glowed, a nacreous radiance that filled the twilit room, a smell of incense and a twitter of pipes through its bleakness. Green boughs sprouted from a wooden table. Hermes rose toward the ceiling.
After a silent minute, the girl closed the door. “I’m not in some kind of dream,” she said wonderingly. “I can tick off too many details, I can think too well. Okay, god or Martian or whatever you are, come on down and let’s talk.”
He declined her offer of refreshment, though hunger gnawed in him. “My kind lacks not for mortal food.”
“What, then?” She sat in a chair opposite his, almost at ease now. The blinds drawn, ordinary electric bulbs lit, he might have been any visitor except for his costume … and yes, classic countenance, curly hair, supple body.… How brilliant those gray eyes were!
“Tell me first your own grief.” As he gained practice in contemporary speech, the music came back to his tones. “You begged the Lady to restore your lover to you. What has borne him off?”
She spread her hands. “I’m square,” she said bitterly.
Hermes cocked his head. “I’d call you anything but,” he laughed. Quicksilver fast, he turned sympathetic again. “ ’Twas a—You found yourselves too unlike?”
“Uh-huh. We loved each other but we bugged each other.”
“Fleas?” His glance disapproved of the untidiness around.
“Annoyed. For instance, he hated my trying to keep this apartment in order—hen-fuss, he called it—and I hated the way he’d litter stuff around and yell when I so much as dusted the books. I wanted him to take better care of the money; you wouldn’t believe how much went down the drain, and our. hopes with it. He wanted me to stop pestering him about such trifles when he was struggling to make a picture come out right.” Vanny sighed. “The breakup was yesterday. He’d gone to a party last week that I couldn’t make because of working late. I learned he’d ended in bed with another girl. When I … taxed him, he said why not and I was free to do likewise. I couldn’t see that. The fight got worse and worse till he yelled he’d be damned if he’d anchor himself like a barnacle. He collected his gear and left.”
Hermes arched his brows. “Meseems—seems to me you were pretty unreasonable. What’s it to you if he has an occasional romp? Penelope never jawed Odysseus after he got back.”
Some of her calm deserted her. “The name’s Vanessa, not Penelope. And—and if he doesn’t think any more of me than to not care if I—” She squeezed her lids shut.
Hermes waited. His mission was too urgent for haste. The snakes on his caduceus did twitch a bit.
At length she met his gaze and said, “All right. Let’s have your story. Why’re you here? You mentioned food.”
He thought she showed scant respect, especially for one whose whole universe had been upset by the fact of his existence. However, she was not really a worshiper of the Olympians. The sincerity of her appeal to Aphrodite had come in a moment of intoxication. And he had had to admit that all pantheons shared reality. Unless she comprehended that, she probably couldn’t help him. Therefore, this being more or less Jesus territory, why should she fall on her knees?
Or was it? Stronger than before, he sensed a new divinity brooding over the land, to which she had some tie. Young, but already immense, altogether enigmatic, the being must be approached with caution. The very mention of it had better be led up to most gradually.
“Well, yes,” Hermes said. “We do lack proper nourishment.”
Vanny considered him. “You don’t look starved.”
“I spoke of nourishment, not fuel,” he snapped. Now that he had been reminded of it, his emptiness made him irritable. “Listen, you could keep going through life on, uh, steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice. Right? But suppose you got absolutely nothing else ever. Steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice for breakfast, for lunch, for supper, for a bedtime snack and a birthday treat, year after year, decade after decade, steak, potatoes, string beans, milk, and orange juice. Wouldn’t you cross the world on foot and offer your left arm for a chance at a plate of chop suey?”
Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed.
“Oh, indeed,” Hermes snorted. “I can hardly say ‘nectar and ambrosia’ without gagging.”
“But—a whole planet—”
“Mortal food has no appeal. Not after celestial.” Hermes curbed his temper. “Let’s continue the analogy. A bowl of unsalted oatmeal wouldn’t really break the monotony of steak, potatoes—Never mind.” He paused. “Suppose you finally got access, in addition, to … chop suey, I said … okay, we’ll add roast duck, trout, borscht, ice cream, apples, and farofa. That’d be good at first. Given another ten or twenty years, though, wouldn’t you again be so bored that you could barely push down enough food to stay alive?
“Next consider that the gods are immortal. Think in terms of thousands of years.” Hermes shuddered.
Presently he added, quieter: “That’s the basic reason we gave up the burnt offerings you read about in Homer. We passed word on to our priests that these were no longer welcome in a more civilized milieu. That was partly true, of course. We’d cultivated our palates, after we ran into older sets of gods who sneered behind their hands at our barbarous habits. But mainly … during a millennium, thighbones wrapped in fat and cast on the flames grew bloody tedious.
“Nectar and ambrosia were fine to begin with. But in the end—well, maybe it amused Athene and Apollo a while longer than the rest of us, to play one-upmanship about differences in vintage or seasoning that nobody else could detect; or maybe they were just putting up a front. Ares and Hephaestus had long since been sneaking off to Yahweh for a whiff of his burnt offerings.”
Hermes brightened a little. “Then I got an idea,” he said. “That was when Poseidon came home from Egypt raving about the beer Isis had opened for him.” I don’t think that was all she opened; gods get jaded in many different ways. “Me, I’d never cared for Egyptian cuisine. But it occurred to me, the world is wide and full of pantheons. Why not launch systematic explorations?”
“Oh, my,” Vanny whispered. “You did? Like, smorgasbord in Valhalla?”
“Actually,” Hermes said, “Odin was serving pork and mead at the time. His kitchen’s improved some since. Ah, in China, though—the table set by the Jade Emperor—!”
For a minute he was lost in reminiscence. Then he sagged. “That also got predictable,” he mumbled. “After the thousandth dish of won ton, no matter how you swap the sauces around, what good is the thousand and first?”
“I suppose,” she ventured, “I suppose the foreign gods visit you?”
“Yes, yes. Naturally … I mean supernaturally. Makes for occasional problems. The Old Woman of the Sea thinks manners require a thunderous belch at the end of the meal; and that boarding house reach of Krishna’s—And the newer gods, especially, are hard to please, picky, you know. Not that we Olympians don’t draw the line here and there.”
While his unhappiness was genuine as he called it to mind. Hermes was not unaware of sympathy in those blue eyes, upon those soft lips. “The custom’s dying out,” he let gust wearily from him. “They’re as tired of the same over and over at our table as we are at theirs. I haven’t seen some of them—Why, come to think of it, I haven’t seen good old Marduk for fifteen hundred years.”
“How about the Western Hemisphere?” Vanny suggested. “For instance, have you ever been to an
old-fashioned American church supper?”
Hermes started half out of his seat. “What?” he cried.
She in her turn was astonished. “Why, the food can be delicious. When I was a little girl in Iowa—”
Hermes rose. Sweat glowed red on his brow. “I didn’t realize you were that kind of person,” he clipped. “Good-by.”
“What’s the matter?” She sprang to her own feet and plucked at his sleeve. “Please.”
“I’ve been to an old-fashioned American church supper,” he said grimly. “I didn’t stay.”
“But—but—”
Seeing her bewilderment, he checked himself. “Could there be a misunderstanding?” he inquired. “This was about five centuries ago. I can’t wrap my tongue around the god’s name. Whitsly-Putsly—something like that.”
“Oh,” she said. “Aztec.”
Discourse got straightened out. “No Olympian has visited hereabouts at all for a long time,” Hermes explained. “We knew it’d become Jesus and Yahweh country, except for a few enclaves, and saw no reason to bother, since we can find that closer to home. And as for those enclaves, well, yes, we used to drop in on persons like Coyote, so we know about maize and pumpkins and succotash and whatnot.”
In the course of this, he had taken her hands in his. They were warm. He aimed a brave smile down at her. “Believe me, we’ve tried everywhere,” he said. “We still carry on, however futilely. Like the past week for me. I’m the Wayfarer, you know; I get around more than my kinfolk. Call it gadding if you want, it helps pass the centuries and helps maintain friendly relations between the pantheons.
“I left Olympus for Mount Athos, where I ascended to the Christian Paradise. St. Francis gave me bread and wine. He’s a decent little chap, although I do wish he’d bathe oftener. Next evening I called on Yahweh and shared his kosher altar. (He has a few devotees left in the Near Eastern hills who sacrifice in the ancient way. Mostly, though, gods prefer ethereal food as they grow older and more sophisticated.) Next day I had business ’way north, and ended up at Aegir’s board on the bottom of the Baltic—lutefisk and akvavit. Frankly, that gave me a hangover; so I ducked south again, sunned myself in Arabia, and spent that night with Mohammed, who doesn’t drink.” He forebore to mention what hospitality was otherwise offered. “After that, yesterday, it was out across Oceanus for a night in Tir-nan-Og, where the Sidhe cooked me a rasher of bacon and honestly believed they were giving me a treat. That’s where I heard rumors of a new god in America. When your prayer blew by on the west wind, it tipped the scales and I decided to come investigate. But I’ve had no bite or sup today, and hungry and discouraged I am.”
The Unicorn Trade Page 15
