Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  She’s given herself another attribute as well, Selene realized, looking around at the others. An army. For the first time in millennia, the One Who Musters the People led a troop of soldiers bearing matching shields.

  Theo passed out earpieces so they could all coordinate the music; they’d be standing too far apart on the bridge to communicate any other way.

  Ruth, Minh, and Gabi took their positions beside the shortest cables, closest to the Manhattan side, where they could quickly retreat to safety. Maryam came next, standing before a much larger cable close to the first of the stone towers. Figuring that the portal would likely open in the middle of the bridge, Maryam had chosen her spot to be able to shield the three mortal women most effectively.

  Selene headed to her position just in front of the second tower, where the suspension cables stretched the longest. She had the easiest part in the orchestra: the A in each chord. All the rest of her attention would be focused on reaching out for her family, willing the portal to open into the right time and place to rescue them.

  Theo stood in the direct center of the bridge, where the suspension wires shortened once more beneath the main cables’ swoop. As Selene walked by, she put a hand on his arm. “Hit the C-sharp in the first three chords and then, for the fourth, you don’t play anything when it modulates to the minor third,” she reminded him.

  His cocky smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I got this.”

  “You’ll be the first one through the portal. You swing that hammer, open the cleft to Tartarus, and get the hell out again,” she insisted, grasping his arm hard now. “I’ll run right in and get everyone out, but you just keep going, okay? Meet up with the other thanatoi on the Manhattan side.”

  He kissed her lightly. “Understood.”

  Esme and Philippe walked past them to the tall cables beyond the second tower, where they could strike two of the deeper notes. Maryam had already marked the correct wires for them with strips of glow-in-the-dark tape. With a little extra help from the Columbia physics department, they’d also secured extra contact mics, signal processors, and speakers, which they attached to each cable. This time, when they played the bridge, they’d all hear the music.

  Selene nudged her earpiece a little tighter against her skull. The wind picked up, warm and moist, lifting the hair from her neck. She wrapped her hand around the thick cable beside her, feeling the faint vibrations as the bridge sang in response to the breeze. Only Maryam, as the conductor of their symphony, had a microphone, but Selene wished she could speak to Theo again. She hadn’t forgotten Dennis’s warning when they’d stood before the portal on Olympus. Once you go in, you might not be able to get back out. She’d chosen not to remind Theo of that. He, she felt certain, would have no trouble escaping, since he’d done it once before. She would try to do the same, but if she failed, it was a price she’d have to pay to release her family from their captivity.

  I’m not lying to Theo, she told herself for the fifth time. He knows the risks we take, and if I don’t make it out, he’ll know this time it wasn’t from lack of trying or lack of love. He won’t mourn me again—he’ll know I live on with the rest of my family. It’s not the future I’d choose, but it’s one we’ll both survive.

  Maryam’s voice sounded in her ear. “Prepare for the first note. On three.”

  Selene raised her mallet. She watched Theo, standing in the center of the bridge, do the same with Flint’s hammer.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Selene swung her mallet as hard as she could.

  Eight notes resounded at once, the subsonic frequencies so deep they could travel through the earth itself. The transposed sound issued from the speakers in a ringing chord, higher-pitched than Selene had expected, but rich with overtones and undertones. This was the sound of a universe filled with brilliant, blinding light, as crimson hot as a million suns. The tones rang for a full thirty seconds—the universe cooled. The crimson light faded to orange, to yellow, to green—a primordial fog as rainbow hued as the waters that fed the Lake of Memory. Maryam started the count over.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Almost the same chord this time—only Maryam had shifted position, striking a half step up from her first note. And yet with that one tiny change, light became matter.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Now half the musicians stayed where they were; the other half scurried to nearby cables. The result was eerie, discordant, unpleasant. Pythagoras and his followers would’ve cringed at such a chord. Yet as with most things, the world was less perfect than mortals believed. It was with this sound that the fog began to clear, to separate, the peaks of sound waves condensing into galaxies, and the troughs expanding into empty blackness. The kosmos was born.

  Selene watched Theo heft his shield on one arm, still carrying Flint’s hammer in the other. He was ready.

  She lifted her own mallet for the final note while the previous chord’s discordant tones still rang in her ears. She tried to block it all out and hear a different song instead: the song that would take her to her family. She sang the ancient Orphic hymns aloud, reciting the gods’ epithets in turn:

  Strong-handed Hephaestus, all-taming artisan …

  Royal Hera, blessed queen of majestic mien …

  Blue-haired Poseidon, whose awful hand bears the brazen trident …

  Persephone of budding fruits …

  Revered Demeter, who dwells in Eleusis …

  Hestia, mistress of unwearying flame …

  Reveling Dionysus, who delights in blood and vines and sacred rage …

  Maryam counted one last time. Selene knew that the three mortal women would already be running off the bridge, Philippe following them for protection. This chord needed only four notes.

  She struck her cable one final time. The sound was softer, anticlimactic, unresolved, but her own song rose to drown it out. Now she sang not in homage to the Athanatoi trapped in Tartarus, but to her own twin. Somewhere, Apollo’s spirit still resided in the Delphi of his own imagining; he could lend her strength now. The ancient hymn’s lyrics were strangely apt, as if Orpheus had known this night would come, a night when Artemis would call upon Apollo to start a world anew.

  You hold the bounds

  Of the whole world;

  The beginning and the end to come are yours.

  It is for this you have

  The master seal of the entire kosmos.

  As the last chord drifted into silence, Selene closed her eyes and reached for her family.

  O blessed ones, hear the suppliant voice as I summon you.

  She repeated the final line, a whispered chant now: “Hear the suppliant voice as I summon you. I summon you. I summon you.”

  Beneath her feet, the bridge lurched and swayed as if a sudden gale had loosed it from its moorings.

  Selene’s eyes snapped open, and she grabbed hold of the cable to steady herself. The signal processors cracked; the contact mics flew from the cables. All was silent but for the terrifying creak and groan of metal and wood. The walkway reverberated, waving with the violence of subsonic frequencies, but no breeze fluttered the American flag flying above the stone tower.

  Maryam shouted over the earpiece: “The bridge is playing the song back to us!”

  Selene’s eyes flew to Theo, who’d planted his feet like a surfer. His face paled, but he held the hammer ready.

  Before the next echoed note could shake the bridge, Maryam hurtled forward from the Manhattan side and Esme from the Brooklyn half.

  The next wave hit. This time, Esme toppled to the ground and lay spread-eagled as the walkway lurched beneath her. Maryam grabbed onto the railing, just managing to stay upright.

  When that tone subsided, Selene let go of her cable and rushed toward Theo, taking her place at his side. Esme struggled to her feet and joined them. Maryam sprinted forward, spear held horizontally before her like a tightrope walker seeking balance.

  The four stood together, back-to-back, as the third subson
ic chord rocked the bridge.

  Selene could no longer see the walkway beneath her feet or the web of cables around her.

  The lights of Manhattan disappeared.

  Only her lover, her sister, and her cousin remained, suspended in a world of starless black. Selene unslung her bow and nocked a black-fletched arrow to the string.

  She couldn’t feel the bridge’s final chord.

  She smelled the ripe grain an instant before she felt it brushing her thighs an instant before she heard the buzz of the cicadas an instant before she felt the sunlight heat her face an instant before she saw the Acropolis in the distance an instant before she became a goddess again.

  Chapter 54

  MOTHER OF DESIRE

  “NOW!”

  Selene’s voice rang in Theo’s ears like the baying of hounds. She stood nearly twice her usual height, her skin glowing with a goddess’s aura and the white streak in her hair once again as black as a midnight sky.

  “Now!” she repeated, pointing urgently to the hammer in his hands.

  He raised it overhead and slammed it through the sunbright barley and into the rich earth below. He’d used the hammer before to cave in the windows on the Statue of Liberty’s crown. It had proved more powerful than any sledgehammer. But he still assumed it would take more than one blow to open a rift all the way to Tartarus.

  Instead, a dozen wide cracks raced across the ground from the spot of the hammer’s strike, like lightning forking across the sky. He jumped backward as the cracks expanded and the ground crumbled. No gentle wisp of divine pneuma emerged—great columns of gray vapor shot from the cleft to stain the brilliant blue above.

  Selene grabbed his arm with a hand as big as his head. She took the hammer from him—no doubt Flint would need it to battle the giants in Tartarus.

  “You did it,” she shouted. “Now go!” With her other massive hand, she pointed to the rift in the world, where the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway and the glimmering Manhattan skyline hung suspended a foot above the ground.

  “Not without you.”

  Her silver eyes flashed with anger as she raised her arm, lifting him three feet from the ground as if to fling him bodily back through the portal.

  “Don’t you dare!” he shouted at her. “We make our own choices. That’s the deal, Selene.”

  Athena, standing even taller than her sister, spoke with a voice clarion bright and as resonant as a war drum. “We go now, or you’ll have no choices at all. The portal won’t stay open long.”

  Selene gave an exasperated growl and yanked Theo higher so they were eye to enormous eye. He stared into the mirror of her left pupil. That’s me, he thought. Glasses askew, looking just a tad terrified. No way I can convince a ten-foot-tall goddess to listen to me. But Selene must’ve seen him differently, because she pulled him close and pressed her lips against his in a kiss that covered half his face.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, lowering him quickly to the ground.

  Golden bow at the ready, a quiver of gleaming gold and silver arrows at her waist, she leapt into the gray cloud above Tartarus and disappeared from view. Athena, who had tied a rope around her waist and secured one end with a spike in the ground, followed suit more cautiously.

  Esme—Aphrodite, now—stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the chasm before her. To Theo’s shock, she’d removed her clothes sometime in the last three minutes, revealing ten feet of glowing, creamy flesh. Her body was softer, rounder than modern standards of beauty might prefer, but Theo still couldn’t stop his blood from pumping harder when he looked at her. Her nipples were gilded with gold rather than rosy flesh. Unlike the male gods, whose penises the Greeks had sculpted in loving detail, Aphrodite’s ancient statues usually depicted her covering herself with a robe or her own hand—at most, she displayed only a smooth, unbroken triangle of flesh. But the real Aphrodite clearly didn’t care that the Latin pudendum meant “something to be ashamed of.” Her lower lips swelled from her body, slightly parted in invitation. Her folds blushed a coral pink that matched the color of her upper lips with disturbing exactness.

  She looked over at Theo and caught him staring. “It feels wrong to wear clothes here,” she said glumly. “I rarely did during my time as a goddess. But this is all you see, isn’t it?”

  Theo didn’t think it would do him much good to lie to her, so he simply kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ve spent centuries learning other ways to seduce men, other ways to display my beauty. But here there’s no need. I could have you right here in the field before your lover even returns.”

  Theo opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off.

  “Don’t bother. You think you’d resist me, and you’d be wrong, but that’s my point. You wouldn’t love me at all. In fact, you’d be racked with guilt and self-loathing the whole time, and you’d have sex with me anyway. Because that’s what happens when the Mother of Desire is standing next to you.” Her face turned hard—or at least, as hard as it could when her features were supernaturally smooth and soft. She scooped up her pile of discarded clothes in one large hand and turned toward the portal. “I knew I shouldn’t have come back.” She strode toward the opening, raising one bare leg to step through into Manhattan.

  She stopped short with a lurch. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t. It’s … blocked.” She slammed a palm on what looked like open space, then wheeled back to Theo. “You got out the first time. Go on! Go through and then maybe you can pull me after.”

  He shook his head. “No can do.”

  Aphrodite marched toward him. He forced himself not to flinch, not to turn away. He didn’t raise his sword, knowing her attack would come not through force but through gentler wiles. But he lifted the iron shield Athena had made for him, bracing himself. “I’m not going without Selene.”

  “Love, huh?” She snorted delicately. “I can’t fight my own most precious attribute, can I?”

  Theo lowered the shield. “Then help her so we can all get out of this place together.”

  The Laughter-Loving Goddess threw back her head and chortled. Throaty, sensuous, burbling with delight. “You’re as good at getting your way as I am!”

  Still laughing, she jumped feetfirst into Tartarus.

  I hope she’s right, he thought, casting a wary glance at the portal. The edges of the opening had already begun to waver.

  Tartarus, so the poets said, was as far below the earth as the sky was above it. A brazen anvil would drop for nine days and nine nights before it finally thudded against the bottom of the pit on the tenth. Selene didn’t have that long.

  Good thing the poets were wrong.

  She fell through storm clouds so thick they clung to her limbs like a shroud. The darkest of them swirled like a giant snake, twisting and rolling through the air in great coils. Typhoeus. The winged Storm Giant with two serpents for his legs and a hundred more for his fingers, whom Zeus had cast into Tartarus for trying to steal the heavens from their rightful king. Now he guarded the pit, making sure that whomever else Zeus hurled into its depths would never emerge again.

  One thing at a time, she thought. First, find Hephaestus and the others. Then worry about getting out again.

  A breath later, her booted feet slammed into rock. She crouched to ease her landing, resting a hand upon the ground. The stone was slick to the touch, as if covered with a thin layer of wet moss. Perhaps it was, but Selene couldn’t tell. Everything was black. Not like a moonless night or even her mother’s womb, but something beyond dark. Even her own aura had been quenched. This, she remembered, was not just a prison for monsters. It was the home of Night itself. The birthplace of the River Styx. It was, in a word, stygian.

  How will I find them if I can’t see my hand in front of my face? she wondered. And why the FUCK didn’t I bring a flashlight?

  A thud beside her. Then a shower of sparks and a ringing clash as spear struck shield, announcing the arrival of the Giant Killer. I
n that brief flash of light, Selene saw her half sister, her flushed cheeks slick with vapor and her brilliant gray eyes gleaming ferociously.

  Then the sound of rummaging. A flashlight clicked on, the beam pointed straight at Selene.

  She shielded her eyes against the sudden glare. “Hey!”

  Athena held out a second flashlight to her.

  Selene grunted a thanks.

  Even with the flashlights, they could see nothing beyond a wall of cloud on all sides, so dark that it seemed to suck away the light rather than reflect it back at them. Despite the swirling mists, no wind brushed their skin or rushed past their ears.

  “Hephaestus!” Selene shouted into the silence. “Hestia! Demeter!”

  They didn’t appear. But Aphrodite did, landing lightly beside them, completely nude but for her mirror shield, her golden hair loosed by her fall to brush against her ankles like a superhero’s cape.

  “Where are they?” she asked immediately. “We don’t have time to dawdle.”

  “I don’t know,” Athena snapped at her.

  “You don’t have a plan?” Aphrodite returned.

  “Of course I do,” the Goddess of Wisdom huffed. “A plan to get us out. I didn’t think it’d be hard to find them in the first place.”

  “Demeter!” Selene called again.

  “You really think they can hear us?” Aphrodite scoffed. “The fog swallows all sound down here.”

  A distant roar shook the air around them.

  “What was it you said about swallowing all sounds?” Selene asked grimly.

  Aphrodite blanched. “What is that?”

  A piercing scream like the brakes on a New York subway train.