Age of Heroes (10 page)

As they crossed the Departures hall, they had to stop twice so that Chase could deal with people who recognised him. He dutifully chatted with the strangers and then posed for selfies, plastering on the game-for-anything grin that he’d direct at the camera while trekking through mud and worse.

“That’s how it is for me, cuz,” he said in the cab, en route to Manhattan. “Goes with the territory.
Monster Hunter
fans. Anywhere in public in America, I get mobbed.”

“There were two of them. Two separate people. That’s hardly ‘mobbed’.”

“Jealous much?”

“No.” Maybe a little. “It does worry me somewhat, though, that you’ve become so famous. One of the aims when you’re someone like us is to try to remain as low-profile as possible, isn’t it?”

“Says Mr Bestseller List.”

“Touché. But at least my ugly mug isn’t being beamed into millions of homes every Thursday evening.”

“Not forgetting the reruns on National Geographic.”

Theo glanced at the cab driver. The plastic safety partition between them and him afforded some privacy, and anyway the guy seemed to be focused more on negotiating through the heavy, crawling traffic than on his passengers. Every so often he would curse loudly in a thick Ukrainian accent, and at one point Theo heard him say, “Grand Central Parkway? Grand Central Parking Lot, more like.” But his voice was muffled, and if they kept theirs low, he wouldn’t overhear them.

“Without wishing to get into specifics,” Theo said, “how long do you expect to carry on
Monster Hunt-
ing
?
”

“The execs reckon we can squeeze a couple more seasons out of the format.”

“And then? Won’t there be demand for some sort of follow-up?”

“If there is, I’ll just say no. I realise I can’t stay, for want of a better word, a celebrity indefinitely. When I’ve had my fifteen minutes, I’ll slip into a new identity, in another country, and pretty soon everyone will have forgotten about Chase Chance. I’m going to have my fun while it lasts – and of course, you know, clean up what needs cleaning up” – his dangerous beasts – “but you don’t need to fret. I’m not going to get careless.”

“I just felt the issue should be raised,” said Theo. “As it happens, I’m planning to start fading into obscurity myself, in the not too-distant-future. Pull the reclusive author schtick.”

“Pynchon, Salinger.”

“Yeah. Maybe get myself a house in the woods up in Vermont or Connecticut and communicate with my agent and publisher by email only.”

“How about Maine? It’s nice there.”

“Maine? Scary place, according to its best-known resident. Somewhere to avoid if you don’t want to get killed by demonic clowns or eaten by rabid St Bernards.”

“Ah, you couldn’t stand the competition, that’s all,” said Chase. “Couldn’t live there knowing you’d always be the
other
guy, the Man Who Wouldn’t Be King.”

“That was quite witty. For you.”

“Thanks. I’m pretty pleased with it myself. Of course, you have a bad track record with kings.”

Theo smirked. “What’s he called now? Evander Arlington?”

“Yeah,” said Chase. “Evander Arlington. Don’t suppose you’ve seen the old bastard lately? He’s got a place in Midtown, not that far from yours. Super deluxe penthouse. He ever invite you over?”

“Not much chance of that.”

“Still hasn’t forgiven you, huh? Guy can sure hold a grudge.”

“I eloped with his daughter and then ditched her. Not to mention what I did to his, ahem, stepson. You bet he holds a grudge.”

They chatted inconsequentially for the rest of the journey. Only once they were at Theo’s apartment could they drop their guard and speak freely.

“So. Anthony Peregrine. Aeneas. Here’s the deal.” Chase fetched out a few pages of computer printout. “I requested a pathologist’s report from the coroner in Ushuaia. He couldn’t see a reason for one. To him, it was just an accident. Anthony Peregrine went solo-skiing, there was an avalanche, he got caught by it, end of story.”

“He a skier?”

“Anthony? Some of his travel pieces have been about alpine resorts and chalets and black runs and the rest, so yeah, I’d say so. Anyway, I kicked up a fuss. Made noises about getting the US ambassador involved. Played the arrogant-American-abroad card. Got my way in the end.”

Theo handed him a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Chase clinked it against Theo’s own cup, said “Cheers,” and took a grateful sip. The overnight flight from Tierra del Fuego had been long and bumpy, and he hadn’t slept much.

“This here is a copy of the report,” he went on. “How’s your Spanish?”

“Poor to non-existent.”

“Well, I lived in Spain for a stretch and became fluent, but that was six hundred years ago and the lingo’s changed a lot since then. Still, I can just about make sense of what’s written here, except for the really technical bits, and... Well, there’s something that doesn’t quite add up.”

Theo frowned. “Go on.”

“Mostly Aeneas’s injuries are consistent with getting crushed by several thousand tons of snow sliding downhill at a couple of hundred miles an hour. Contusions. Lacerations. Bone fractures. It was what’s known as a slab avalanche, one that contains huge chunks of hardened snow. That’s way worse than a powder avalanche, the other kind. It’s like getting hit by a wave of boulders. However...”

Chase pointed to a section of text.

“There were a number of wounds on the body that Dr Dominguez, the pathologist, noted as ‘
anómalo
’.”

“Abnormal. Anomalous.”

“Correct. Some deep gouges that he assumes were caused by loose tree branches travelling at high velocity and perforating the flesh. Except, he couldn’t find any traces of wood in them. No splinters, no tiny fragments, as you might expect there would be. Large ragged holes that were clean inside.”

“As if they weren’t caused naturally at all. As if they were made using a knife?”

“Dr Dominguez wouldn’t commit himself that far. He was keen for it to be an accidental death.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because ski tourism is big business in that part of Argentina. An avalanche kills a lone skier, that’s bad news, sure, but it won’t deter visitors. Avalanches are one of the risks you take, especially if you go way off-piste on your own, like Anthony apparently did. They’re acceptable. What wouldn’t be acceptable is someone getting murdered on the slopes. That would get holidaymakers rushing to cancel their bookings.”

“You think someone in authority leaned on him?”

“Not necessarily. I think Dr Dominguez knows how things work and was hedging his bets. Didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. The perforation injuries were suspicious, but not enough to warrant taking it any further. Hence, tentatively, judiciously,
anómalo
.”

“The fact remains,” said Theo, “that however badly Anthony – Aeneas – got hurt by the avalanche, he wouldn’t have died. He’d have been hospitalised for months and had a long road to recovery, and his doctors would be amazed that he healed so well. It would be a minor medical miracle, but eventually he would pull through and be as good as new again.”

“The advantages of having a dash of divine ichor running through your veins.”

“So, if not the avalanche, something else killed him.”

“Looks that way. What, though?”

“That’s the honking big question. How easy is it to kill a demigod?”

“Total physical destruction can do it,” said Chase. “Dardanus, the guy who founded Troy – he was one of Zeus’s – he was living in Herculaneum when Vesuvius blew up, several miles closer than Pompeii. The pyroclastic flow cooked him to a crisp. There’s no coming back from that. Autolykos of Phokis was at Nagasaki on August 9th 1945. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Keryx was a viscount in France in the late eighteenth century during the Reign of Terror,” said Theo. “I tried to save him.”

“Oh yeah, your Scarlet Pimpernel routine. Don’t tell me.” Chase mimed a guillotine blade chopping through his neck and made a squishy slicing sound in the back of his throat.

“Regrettably, yes. I was locked up in the Bastille myself when they took him away in the tumbril to the Place de la Révolution. I did stage a breakout, but too late.”

“Couldn’t he have tried to escape himself?”

“I think Keryx had been playing the part of the louche aristocrat for so long, he’d gotten soft. You should have seen him as the Vicomte de wherever-it-was. All lace handkerchiefs and beauty spots and full-bottom wigs. A regular at Louis XVI’s banquets at Versailles, mincing around with the other nobles. Probably had forgotten he had the edge on his jailers and the
sans-culottes
. He could have struggled free of them if he’d wanted.”

“Guess he didn’t want it enough.”

“Guess not. Even then, I might have brought him back from the dead if I’d been able to find head and body and reunite them, but the revolutionaries were in the habit of carting off the corpses of the guillotined to a tannery, rendering them down and turning the skins into leather.”

“Niiice. At any rate, Anthony Peregrine’s corpse was all in one piece.”

“There’s only one thing we know of that’s capable of killing a demigod as though he or she were human,” said Theo. “One thing that’s guaranteed to give a fatal wound.”

“One? You mean twelve.”

“But all twelve are safely stowed away. Put beyond use. It must be something else.”

“You don’t think maybe it’s just extreme old age?” Chase said. “I was mulling this over on the plane. What if, after three millennia plus, our bodies are finally wearing out? Nothing lasts forever. Even immortality, surely, has got to come to an end sometime.” He rolled up one shirtsleeve to expose bandaging. “Something took a big bite out of me the other day.”

“What was it?”

“Chupacabra. Long story. And of course I’ll get better. Of course the wound will mend and there won’t be a trace of it left, not even a scar. But what if, for once, that doesn’t happen? What if there turns out to be a limit to our recuperative powers? Could it be that we’re coming to the end of the ride? That the god half of us is exhausted, tapped out, and all that’s left is the mortal?”

Theo shook his head.

“Are you shaking your head because you don’t believe it?” said Chase. “Or because you don’t
want
to believe it?”

“Neither. As of right now, I don’t have enough information to decide either way. I’m just... pondering.”

“Well, ponder this, cousin Theseus. The time of the gods is long past. Our fathers and mothers and all the rest of them, they retired to Olympus, pulled up the drawbridge, and nobody’s seen them or heard a peep from them since. Perhaps now, three thousand years on, the time of their offspring is also past. Perhaps now, finally, it’s our turn.”

C
HASE TOOK A
long swig of coffee, studying Theo, seeing his words sink in.

“‘Theseus,’” said Theo eventually.

“What?”

“It’s just... It’s been a while since you called me by that name. Since anyone did.”

“Yeah, I know it’s not protocol. Always use the alias. But, hey, we’re alone, just the two of us, just family. And it kind of seemed appropriate, you know? In keeping with the whole portentous vibe I was going for.”

“Theseus. Perseus. When I say the names out loud, I don’t really think of them as being us, not anymore,” said Theo. “First and foremost I think of them as the myths. The ones people have written books about and made movies about. The ones people use as metaphors – consider to have
been
metaphors. Theseus who killed the Minotaur. Perseus who killed the Gorgon Medusa. Not genuine living beings but archetypes. I almost forget that we
were
real.”

“Still are.”

“Yes, but that sense of dissonance. It’s weird. Like the time I went to see
Ariadne auf Naxos
when it premiered Stateside back in 1928. Hopped a train to Philadelphia to catch the first night, and came back perplexed. I’m not even in it. I mean, Theseus isn’t. It’s about Ariadne after I allegedly abandoned her, and she’s pining for me, and then the whole thing degenerates into a broad comedy before she ends up in the arms of Dionysus, only he’s called Bacchus in the opera. Strauss clearly didn’t care if he mixed up Roman and Greek naming.”

“You told me Ariadne was a grade-A ballbreaker. You only hooked up with her because she knew the way through Minos’s labyrinth.”

“It’s not as if she didn’t get anything out of it,” Theo protested. “That’s the point Strauss seems to have missed, probably because Hesiod, Diodorus and Pausanias all missed it too. Ariadne hated her father. She hated Knossos. I was her ticket off Crete. What we had, her and me, it was mutual need. It wasn’t love, or even lust. Well, a little bit lust. She was a beauty, after all. She was...” He gripped the air with his hands, indicating both feminine shapeliness and the manly approach to handling it. “But when we were done, we were done. I didn’t dump her. I just had other business to take care of, and she’d got what she wanted, and so we went our separate ways. She was never the jilted fiancée she’s been painted as ever since.”

“Didn’t help that you shacked up with her sister not long after,” Chase pointed out.

“Phaedra? That was regrettable. A beauty too, like Ariadne, but at least she seemed more stable, less scheming.”

“How’d that work out?”

Theo lowered his gaze. Phaedra’s passion for his son Hippolytus – her stepson – had not been requited, but Theo had not realised it until it was almost too late. Believing Hippolytus to be guilty of semi-incest and of cuckolding his own father, he ordered the boy into exile. In Euripides’s play about these events, a terrifying bull emerged from the sea and Hippolytus’s chariot horses panicked and threw the boy to the ground, although the truth was rather more mundane: Hippolytus whipped the horses to a frenzy, took a corner too fast, and careered head-on into a cypress tree.

Theo cradled the dying teenager in his arms, and there was a reconciliation of sorts, expressions of forgiveness on both sides, but for ages afterward he blamed himself. He held himself accountable for his son’s death and was a broken man, a shadow of the stalwart champion he was before. Phaedra hanged herself, overcome with remorse, and had it been possible for a demigod to commit suicide, Theo might well have done so too.