Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  She slipped two arrows between the knuckles of her right hand and aimed their razor-sharp tips at the back of the thief’s neck. This would be much easier if I could just kill him right now, she thought. But that wasn’t part of the plan. She needed him to talk first. And she couldn’t simply shoot him in the leg and tie him up—she’d tried that with the last Mithraist she’d stalked. He’d been about to haul off an altar from a mithraeum in Rome. When she’d charged toward him, her arrow at the ready, he’d simply used his own dagger to stab himself in the heart before she could elicit more than a terrified moan. Clearly, the Mithraists were under strict instructions to avoid capture at all costs.

  She spread her knuckles a little wider. With a nearly inaudible thrum, both arrows flew between the window bars and into the sanctuary. The young man grunted in astonished pain and dropped his tools as the shafts simultaneously pierced the backs of both his hands. He tried to rise, but she tore through the doorway, moving nearly as fast as the arrows, and smashed him to the ground; the back of his skull thwacked against the tiles. The lamp rocked, its beam spotlighting the impassive face of the carven Mithras watching the chaos below.

  She grabbed the shafts in the thief’s hands and stood above him, her feet braced on either side of his hips.

  “Tell me where the rest of your friends are, mortal.”

  He stared up at her, pale eyes narrowed with pain, but said nothing.

  The Huntress shook her head with a frown. “Is that how you want to play this? Do you know who I am?”

  His lips twisted. “Do you?”

  She barked a laugh in his face. “Right now, I’m She Who Leads the Chase. And you’re my prey.” She levered the shafts wider, tearing at the holes in his hands. “Don’t forget—some predators like to play with their food. So start talking while you still have a few fingers left.”

  Chapter 2

  THE PHILOSOPHER

  Professor Theodore Schultz usually spent Columbia’s summer session teaching small seminars to an eclectic mix of the university’s overeager and underachieving. On days as nice as this one, when the sunlight burned hot and the breeze blew cool, he liked to bring his classes onto the quad. Surrounded by youthful faces—enthusiastic and bored and everything in between—he imparted his love for myth and history in much the same way he imagined Plato or Aristotle might have in ancient Athens’s outdoor agora.

  But today Theo sat on the quad with only books and notes to surround him. He barely noticed the smell of new-cut grass or the laughter of a nearby circle of students playing Frisbee. Despite the sun beating on his shoulders, his mind kept tumbling back to the previous December. He could still feel the wind’s bite, the snow’s sting. It all came back in an instant: the desperate flight over New York Harbor in Hermes’ winged cap, the weight of Selene’s limp body, her sad “I love you, you know” as she pushed away his grip and slipped through the clouds. He’d been spared the sight of his lover’s body slamming into the water and splintering apart. That didn’t stop him from imagining it every time he closed his eyes.

  When he’d first met Selene, he’d thought her odd. A private investigator who kept the world at bay with an icy stare and a bitter laugh. Her reticence made sense once he learned—after a week of terror and elation—that she was actually the Greek goddess Artemis. As with all the Olympians, her powers had faded after millennia bereft of worship but, unlike her avaricious kin, Selene had never stooped to brutality to restore her strength.

  Nonetheless, she’d been unable to prevent the series of human sacrifices that had restored many of her abilities. With Theo at her side, she’d become an avenging goddess once more, her senses keen as a hawk’s, her strength beyond mortal imagining. He’d thought her invincible. He was wrong.

  After her death at the hands of the Mithraic cult, he’d been broken in both body and spirit, unable to eat, barely able to speak. For the first time in his thirty-three years, he’d thought death would be easier than living. With his friends’ help, he’d finally moved out of that darkness, but he’d still spent the spring semester too devastated by grief to do more than sleepwalk through the classes he supposedly taught. The university administration readily agreed he should take the summer off. They probably imagined he’d spend it recuperating on a beach. Instead, he’d barely left the library, and when he did, on a day like today, he took the books with him.

  He adjusted his glasses and rolled his neck. You’re a Makarites, he reminded himself. A “Blessed One.” You can find the answers you seek, just like Jason found the Golden Fleece. In antiquity, epic heroes such as Jason and Perseus had won the title of Makarites by feats of arms. Theo, on the other hand, had earned the epithet through his studies of the gods and their stories. His status as a Makarites attracted the Olympians; it even allowed him to use the divine weapons most of the gods were too faded to wield themselves. But so far, it hadn’t helped him on his current—and most vital—quest.

  He put aside a treatise on Platonic solids and pulled a narrow wooden sounding board from his satchel. Hunching over it, he plucked the single string.

  “Didn’t know you were the hippie sing-along type.”

  He looked up to see Ruth Willever standing before him, her face alight with gentle teasing.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” He managed an answering smile for his friend.

  “I saw you working outside, and I was done at the lab, so I thought I’d pick you up and walk you home.”

  “I feel like a fifties schoolgirl. You want to carry my books?”

  She laughed too heartily for his lame joke, no doubt thrilled that he’d attempted any humor at all.

  “I’ve got plenty of books of my own, thank you.” She lifted her capacious tote bag, probably full of tomes on kidney function or enzyme structure or something else Theo found impressive and soporific in equal measure. He didn’t ask why she was coming over to his house; since he’d lost Selene, Ruth had become his unofficial housemate and perennial dinner guest. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t eat at all. “It’s six o’clock,” she reminded him.

  “I thought I still had half an hour before my daily force-feeding.”

  She plopped down beside him, hiking her skirt to her knees so she could stretch her bare legs across the cushion of grass. “I’m early. Too nice a day to stay at a lab bench.” She glanced at the sounding board on his lap. “Do I even want to know what that is?”

  “It’s a monochord.” He plucked the single string again.

  “Seems like you’d play some pretty crappy songs with only one string.”

  “It’s more than a musical instrument. It’s an ancient experimental apparatus.”

  Ruth’s eyes lit. No skepticism, no doubt, just complete fascination. “Explain.”

  So he did. He’d spent so long alone with his research that sharing his findings—even the limited portion he could allow Ruth to know—felt like kindling a long-dormant spark. In the grief of the last six months, he’d lost sight of his lifelong passion for learning. Now Ruth’s excitement fed his own, and he found himself actually enjoying his discoveries for the first time since he’d made them.

  He lifted the monochord with a hint of his old flair for theatrics. “I’m about to demonstrate the discovery that fundamentally altered mankind’s perception of the universe.”

  Ruth put a hand to her heart in a suitably dramatic gasp. “My goodness. Please go on.”

  The gesture made him pause. Teasing, play, fun … they still felt awkward to Theo. He felt like a stroke victim deprived of speech, laboriously relearning the words he’d known since childhood. Ruth was his therapist, coaxing and prodding him toward recovery even when she pretended not to. Now she sat staring at him hopefully. Waiting.

  “The Greeks once sought the answers to life’s mysteries in myth,” he said finally.

  Her smile froze, dimmed. Theo, too, had once sought answers in the ancient stories. In a woman who’d stepped out of myth itself to take over his life. A woman light-years awa
y from everything Ruth represented.

  “But eventually,” he went on, ignoring her obvious discomfort, “as their civilization progressed, Plato and Socrates and the other philosophers began to look for new ways to understand the world.”

  “They turned to science?” The sudden insistence in Ruth’s tone pulled him up short. It was the closest she’d ever come to outright begging him to finally move past Selene and turn to her instead.

  “Yes, they did,” he said with careful emphasis. He looked away from her flash of disappointment and down to his instrument once more. “Not all at once, not very quickly, but yeah. Greek philosophers walked along a bridge between worlds, trying to reconcile their religious beliefs with their new understanding of logic and reason. It all started with Pythagoras.”

  Ruth crossed her legs and leaned her chin on a fist in a pose of determined interest. “A squared plus b squared equals c squared,” she said with forced cheer.

  I don’t deserve her, Theo thought, not for the first time. Another woman would’ve gotten fed up with my depression months ago. “I see you haven’t forgotten ninth-grade geometry,” he said, offering a small smile. “But the truth is, Pythagoras probably didn’t discover his right-triangle theorem; the Babylonians knew about it long before the Greeks. His real contribution”—Theo lifted the monochord—“was this.”

  He plucked the string once more. Then he placed a finger exactly halfway along it and plucked it again, the note considerably higher. “See, I make the string half as long, and the new note is exactly one octave above the first.” He slid his finger down the string. “If I stop the string two-thirds of the way down, it produces a perfect fifth. Make it three-quarters instead, and we get a perfect fourth.” He demonstrated each interval in turn, then repeated the pattern as he kept talking. “Those three ratios—one to two, two to three, three to four—produce three intervals that just happen to be the most pleasing to the ear, at least in Western music.”

  Seeing Ruth’s foot tapping, he couldn’t resist altering the rhythm of the notes just slightly and launching into the guitar riff from “Wild Thing.” Ruth’s eyebrows shot upward and soon she was crooning, “You make my heart sing!” in her sweet contralto, twitching her fists in a series of highly restrained dance moves.

  Theo couldn’t help grinning and singing along. I haven’t smiled this much in months, he realized. It was almost enough to make him forget the real purpose behind his research into Pythagoras. Almost.

  He finished the song with the closest approximation to a trill he could coax from the single string and then gave Ruth a round of applause. She bowed shyly and lay back on the grass with a laugh, her head only a few inches from his lap. She squinted against the sun, then shaded her eyes and tilted her face toward him.

  “So what do your harmonic ratios have to do with Mithraism?” she asked carefully.

  Ruth had learned the truth about the Athanatoi—Those Who Do Not Die—the night he lost Selene. Sometimes he thought she didn’t totally believe it all—his semi-immortal girlfriend and her Olympian family, the ancient Mithras cult out to kill them led by Saturn, Selene’s own grandfather—but she pretended for his sake. She knew Saturn had escaped after causing Selene’s death, and she believed that Theo’s research aimed at finding him again. A hundred times, she’d told him revenge wouldn’t bring him happiness. He’d managed to convince her that he just needed to stop the Mithraists before they hurt anyone else. She didn’t like his explanation, but she’d finally accepted it.

  Too bad it wasn’t true.

  “Mithraism is a syncretic religion,” he told her now. “It combines elements from all sorts of sources. And some of their beliefs about astronomy and salvation may have been inspired by Pythagoras.” That much was true, although it was far from the real reason for his interest.

  “Huh. And I thought Pythagoras was just a mathematician,” Ruth said a little wistfully, as if nostalgic for a time before the gods had waltzed into her life. Yet she’d stuck by Theo for the last six months, nursing him through the injuries—both physical and otherwise—that he’d received the night he and Selene drove the Mithraists from New York.

  “Nope, definitely more than a mathematician.” Theo reclined on his elbows so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck. “His discovery—that mathematical ratios produce real-world harmonies—changed the Greeks’ entire understanding of the world. It was like they’d uncovered a secret language that held the keys to existence. After all, if mathematics and numbers underlay something as fundamental as music—as harmony—then maybe they underlay the rest of the world, too.”

  “They do,” she offered. “I mean, that’s what scientists believe.” She blinked at him, her face only a foot from his own. “That math and algorithms and quantifiable evidence can explain everything.”

  “So says Dr. Ruth Willever, the microbiologist,” he teased. “A poet might disagree.” A classicist might disagree, he amended silently. Math can’t explain why even as I’m staring at Ruth’s smile, I’m thinking of Selene’s. Only the ancient elegies can do that. A snippet of the Roman poet Meleager floated across his brain.

  Where am I drifting?

  Swept on by Love’s relentless tide,

  Helpless in my steering,

  Once more to doom I ride.

  “Theo?” Ruth laid a gentle hand on his shoulder and didn’t let go.

  “Hmm? Sorry. I was …” With Selene, he was about to say, but Ruth cut him off.

  “You were about to tell me what you’re doing with the monochord,” she prompted, heading off his melancholy. “I still don’t see why you’re researching harmonic ratios in the first place.”

  Theo pulled away from her touch and plucked the string again thoughtfully. “The Pythagoreans didn’t understand the physics behind the note’s frequency, but they understood that the ratios of the lengths of the string related to the pitch of the sound. And they decided that those same digits that make up the harmonic ratios—one, two, three, four—must be the fundamental numbers in the universe.”

  He put the monochord aside and grabbed one of his notebooks, flipping to a page of his more innocuous scribblings. He showed Ruth a sketched figure: four dots in a row, then three above it, then two, then one, creating an equilateral triangle consisting of ten total dots.

  “The Pythagoreans called this triangle a tetractys,” he explained. “A ‘fourness’ that represented the perfect number. They thought its unity, its symmetry—four lines, four numbers, three equal sides of four dots each—must be magical.”

  Ruth looked skeptical for the first time. “Magical? More like basic geometry.”

  “They thought the tetractys might be part of a larger pattern.” He searched for the right way to explain the ancient mysticism to Ruth’s logical brain. He couldn’t tell her too much—she’d probably have him committed if she knew the whole truth—but he always thought better aloud. It was why he’d liked having a partner.

  Before thoughts of Selene could derail him again, he pressed forward with his explanation. “Remember how the Mithraists believed in shifting the celestial spheres to bring about the Last Age, so they could achieve salvation with their resurrected god?” Ruth nodded. “Well, the Pythagoreans believed something similar: that the ultimate goal of existence was to achieve unity with the divine.”

  “And they did that … how?”

  “By being a philosophos. A ‘lover of knowledge.’”

  “A philosopher?” She rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, but not Kant or Nietzsche or some nineteenth-century effete sitting around pondering the meaning of morality. More like a natural philosopher.” She still looked dubious. “The word ‘scientist’ comes from the Latin for ‘knowledge,’ you know. So that makes you basically just a philosopher in a lab coat.”

  She looked mildly affronted but gestured for him to go on.

  “The philosophers studied nature to uncover the pattern that unifies creation. That pattern, they believed, embodied the wisdom of the
gods. The divine will that created the world. And once they found that pattern, if they found it, they could reach the ultimate purity of the soul. They could become gods themselves.”

  Ruth laughed, her patience for mysticism clearly running thin. “Sounds like unified field theory, if you ask me.” When Theo looked at her curiously, she went on with a shrug. “You know, how quantum mechanics and general relativity don’t play by the same rules. Einstein spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a theory that worked for both.”

  “A pattern that unifies creation, huh?”

  “Yup. But he didn’t find it. No one has.” She rose to her feet, looking down at Theo pointedly. “And something tells me, despite all the library books you’ve got spread across the quad, you won’t either.”

  He shrugged, trying to look appropriately sheepish.

  “Theo …” she began, a suspicious frown tugging at her lips. “How is all this going to help you figure out where the Mithraists’ leader is hiding?”

  Saturn … Every time Theo thought of the old man with his curved sickle he had to fight back a tide of rage. Selene’s grandfather was both the God of Time and the Pater, or “Father,” of the Holy Order of the Soldiers of Theodosius, also known as the Host. A secret cult dedicated to destroying the Olympians in order to allow the rebirth of Mithras-as-Jesus. The Host’s initiates had killed four Athanatoi before Selene and Theo finally confronted Saturn himself on the Statue of Liberty’s torch last Christmas Eve. In the end, his men had unleashed a lightning bolt to chase them from the sky.

  Theo saw it again: Selene falling through the clouds like a needle piercing the fabric of the world.

  “You said that’s what you were working toward, right?” Ruth pressed, dragging him back to the present. “You’re going to help find the Pater so he doesn’t hurt anyone else?”