The Age Of Zeus (22 page)

Hera, at his side, nodded in vehement agreement. She, keeper of the monsters, was doubtless feeling a sharper grief than any of her fellow Olympians. Her eyes gleamed with imperious indignation.

"We do not know who you are, you butchers, you murderers," Zeus said, "but rest assured, we will find out, and once we know your names and where you live, we will come for you and we will pinch you out like match flames. In the meantime, you must learn that your actions have consequences, if not immediately for you then for others. A show of our displeasure is in order. World, prepare yourself. See, once again, what it means to incur the wrath of your divine guardians."

Zeus directed a grave, searching stare into the camera. Blue-white light crackled in his eyes.

Then the transmission from Olympus ended, the screen went blank, and a moment later the BBC studio reappeared. The newscaster and the Pantheonic Affairs correspondent were looking at each other with expressions that were, frankly, alarmed.

"Well, that's... That's certainly..." said the newscaster, and groped for a description.

"A worrisome turn of events," the correspondent said. "Zeus sounding there like he means business."

The newscaster collected herself. "What, in your view, will the 'consequences' he just mentioned be, Tom?"

"No idea, Julia. But I expect it won't be long before we find out, and I, for one, am not looking forward to it."

"Oh God."

"Indeed. Oh God."

26. REPERCUSSIONS

L
andesman ordered the screen switched off. A hubbub broke out among the Titans and the technicians, a dozen voices speaking at once. Landesman requested, and got, silence.

"Let's just take a moment, shall we?" he said. "Think things through calmly and rationally. We knew something like this was going to happen. It was inevitable. There was no way the Olympians weren't going to react once they twigged what we're up to. All we can hope for is that the fallout is relatively mild."

"People are going to die," said Søndergaard.

"We don't know that yet," said Landesman. "We'll have to wait and see."

"I signed up to stop the Olympians," said Tsang. "I didn't sign up to provoke them into attacking civilians."

"What did you
think
they were going to do, Fred?" Landesman asked with some asperity. "Sit back and take it? What have they ever done when they've felt threatened? Lashed out. It's their way. We need to be grown-up about this. We need to accept that there will, alas, be unavoidable by-products of our campaign. There will be - that ugly euphemism - collateral damage. It simply can't be helped. Sam, you'll back me up here, won't you?"

"I hate it," Sam said. "I'm sure you hate it too, Mr Landesman. We all do. But..." She couldn't see a way around it. Landesman was right. The Olympians were bound to strike back. That had been their policy from the very start: let no insult or protest go unpunished. "We are at war now. We started it. The Olympians are taking it to the next level. How could they not? And it will keep on escalating if we carry on, that's obvious. So what do we do? Do we stop? We could, and then whatever repercussions the Olympians have in mind right now will be the end of it. War over. Titanomachy II dribbles to a halt. I don't know about any of you but that seems pretty ignominious to me. It'd make everything we've done so far a waste. Soleil's death - pointless.

"The alternative is to forge on in the full and frank knowledge that non-combatants are going to suffer. We have to weigh that against what we're hoping to accomplish. Is it worth it? Is it a good trade-off? I don't know. I'd like to think so. I don't have much stomach for watching the Olympians penalise others for what we've done, but equally, every death they cause in our name, every life they take as retribution, is one more reason to keep fighting against them, one further incentive to topple the bastards. That's the only consolation I can see, but I think it counts for something."

A "Hear! Hear!" came from Ramsay, and was echoed by Mahmoud, Barrington and Chisholm. If the others were less convinced by her argument, none of them showed it.

"Well said, Sam," said Landesman. "Couldn't have put it better myself."

After that it was simply a question of waiting - waiting to find out what the Olympians were going to do and how bad it was going to be. Landesman had BBC News put back up on the screen, along with a number of rolling-news channels including CNN, Al-Jazeera and the Nippon News Network in inset windows. Zeus's message was being played and replayed across the world, translated or subtitled in every known language, spreading to the farthest corners of the globe, reaching places where it was midnight or later and few were awake to hear and heed. Landesman viewed it over and over, scowling hard. To Sam it seemed as though he was scrutinising the speech, analysing Zeus's every word, every nuance, in the hope of gleaning some insight from it, some clue as to what the Pantheon had in mind.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be only a lenient rebuke, a token gesture, a slap on the wrist. Some destruction of property, a handful of deaths, no more.

She didn't really believe that, though. If she knew anything about the Olympians, it was that they rarely did things by halves.

27. LOST LANDMARKS

I
t began in Paris.

A breezy spring morning in the City of Light. Tourists milled beneath the Eiffel Tower, queuing for tickets to travel up in the lifts or posing for photographs with the mighty metal structure behind them. The first hint any of them had that something was awry was a deep, resonant groan like the creak of some immense door easing open on rusty hinges. All looked up. Those standing at a distance, those perhaps peering through camera viewfinders, got the clearest impression of what was going on. The upper section of the Tower had begun to tilt. No, not tilt. To
bend
. It was angling away from true, bowing to one side like the head of a wilting flower, hundreds of tons of iron girder unstraightening, the tower's outline starting to describe a shallow and then a not so shallow arc. Thin screams issued from up in its framework, and on the ground. People started running - and, from the top of the structure, falling. One moment you were admiring the panorama of the French capital from the summit of its tallest edifice. The next, the floor was tipping beneath you and you had lost your footing and gone sliding over the safety railings. Some in the tower, though, did not plunge to their deaths. They were trapped between the shifting, twisting girders and crushed. A few were killed by two-inch rivets that popped out from their sockets with the force of bullets.

When the Eiffel Tower finally stopped moving, it was bent double, apex pointing downwards, the tip of the radio transmitter antenna that crowned it now almost touching the ground. Its sweeping uprightness had become an inverted U. What had once been a thrusting erection now drooped in impotence, beyond resurrection, and for several nights running many a Frenchman would find, to his intense dismay, that he was unable to perform satisfactorily for his wife, or for that matter his mistress, and even though he would know where the blame lay, it was still no great comfort.

But, for now, all that mattered was the tragedy of dozens of tourist corpses strewn below the disfigured Tower or stuck within its iron innards like flies in a spider web.

Hephaestus was responsible. Hephaestus the stunted, lame blacksmith, telekinetic manipulator of all things metal. From his position in the Parc du Champs de Mars, south of the Tower, he took a moment to survey his handiwork, and was pleased with what he had wrought; more accurately, unwrought. Then Hermes arrived to whisk him home.

A couple of hours later, visitors to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial were appalled to see Ares and Hercules setting about the carved presidential faces with their fists and feet. First to go was Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt followed, then Jefferson, and finally Washington. Each solemn granite visage cracked and crumbled from the forehead downward, slumping away in fragments. God and demigod abseiled down the faces on ropes, pounding and stamping until the sculptures were destroyed. A handful of tourists and one tour guide didn't get clear in time and were engulfed by tumbling rubble. Ares and Hercules laughed heartily, schoolboys taking part in an enormous prank.

At roughly the same time, almost 1,400 miles away, over on the western seaboard of the United States, a wave of gigantic proportions arose in the Pacific and came sweeping into San Francisco Bay. In the space of a minute it grew from nothing to a height of nearly 500 feet. Calm wine-dark sea became a towering, foam-capped wedge of water that swallowed ferries, fishing vessels, police boats and pleasure cruisers whole and rolled onward looking for more. Eventually this super-tsunami collided with the Golden Gate Bridge with an impact as forceful and as deafening as an atomic bomb. The bridge didn't stand a chance, and neither did the occupants of the vehicles that were driving across it at the time. Three-foot-thick steel bracing cables snapped like baling twine. The twin stanchions buckled and toppled from their concrete bases. The entire structure was shunted sideways, snapping free of its anchor points at either end. Parts of the bridge slammed onto Alcatraz Island, whole sections of roadway embedding themselves in the empty prison buildings. Other parts fetched up further inland, borne on the ebb of the super-tsunami to places like Oakland, San Rafael and Fremont. The wave even carried on down as far as San Jose, its last eddies struck with enough power still in them to capsize boats in the marinas in San Mateo and overturn planes on the runway at Moffett Federal Airfield. All of the Bay's coastal areas were ravaged. The eventual death toll reached the mid three figures.

Poseidon, however, had quit the scene long before the wave he had conjured up was spent. Hermes came to collect him, appearing at his side as if from nowhere and spiriting them both back to Mount Olympus.

The sun was setting over Rome as Dionysus and Hades arrived there. It was the time of
passeggio
, when Romans put on their very best clothes and went promenading. To anyone but an Italian it looked like pointless milling about, a continual round of ambling in one direction then doubling back and ambling the other way, pausing now and then to kiss and greet and chat. To the participants, however, it was a dignified social gavotte. The younger ones flirted and gabbled, the older ones ate
gelati
and exchanged news and views.

Today there was much to talk about: the Olympians, their monsters, the recent events in France and America. The usually ebullient evening atmosphere was subdued, and there were fewer people out and about than was customary in such clement weather, but the general feeling in the city was that life must go on as normal. Besides, what had happened elsewhere couldn't happen here, could it? Not in Rome.

But it could, of course, and did. No sooner had Dionysus strode into the Piazza Santa Maria in the Trastevere district than he set to work. With one hand aloft and splayed, he spread his influence among the unsuspecting crowds. It radiated out from him, a powerful sense of intoxication, a surge of heady glee expanding in a circle of which he was the centre point. People began to giggle. Then, quickly, the euphoria turned to rowdiness. Everybody staggered around, bumping into one another. Tempers flared. Fights erupted. Soon the entire square was filled with Romans in their designer finery punching, kicking, biting, headbutting, clawing at one another. Blood flowed. Eyeballs were gouged. Dislodged teeth flew. Bones snapped. Here and there arose the sound of hysterical laughter, as well as hoots like the cries of mad gibbons. Civilised citizens were transformed into a vicious, howling, mauling rabble. It was quite a decline and fall.