The Age Of Zeus (37 page)

She went straight from his company to the Minotaur's, and of the two it was the latter she found more congenial. Five days into her allotted week, she was sure she had gained the monster's confidence. Its eyes, though still fearsome in their redness, looked at her now with something like trust. The monster almost seemed glad to see her whenever she entered the pen. At first she'd thought this was because she brought food - a straightforward stimulus response, animal conditioning. But then she'd tried going in empty-handed, and still the Minotaur seemed glad. It approached her expectantly, but wasn't angry or disappointed to discover she didn't come bearing sustenance.

That afternoon, after butting heads with Landes-man, she plucked up the courage to touch the Minotaur. She placed a hand on its brow, taking time over the movement so as not to startle the beast. The Minotaur, to her surprise, didn't object, didn't toss her hand aside. Instead it crooned softly at the physical contact. Sam began to stroke and scratch the knotty tuft of hair between its horns. The Minotaur almost cooed with delight.

She knew then.

She had mastered the monster.

42. THE NEW LABOURS
OF HERCULES

T
he first New Labour that Hercules performed was demolishing a condemned tenement building in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. He collapsed the derelict three-storey brownstone with his bare fists, and took tangible delight in doing so. Then he cleared away the rubble, piling it by the armful into a fleet of municipal dumper trucks. The site was slated to be turned into a play park and sensory garden for kids in the neighbourhood.

The second New Labour involved a hunt for one of the urban-legendary giant alligators reputed to lurk in the New York sewer system. Much to everyone's surprise, Hercules returned from his jaunt into the underworld hauling the corpse of just such a beast, a caiman some 25 feet long from nose to tail which was taken to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West to be stuffed, mounted and put on display.

New Labour number three was a somewhat controversial one. Hephaestus had fashioned a statue of none other than Zeus himself, 112 feet tall, one foot taller than the Statue of Liberty, and similarly made of copper. Hercules helped hoist the Zeus statue into place on a plinth on Governors Island so that it gazed across the Upper Bay towards Manhattan and dominated the view southwest from Battery Park much as the Statue of Liberty did. Naturally, plenty of New Yorkers grumbled. They all knew what the Statue of Liberty symbolised. What did the statue of Zeus stand for? Some, however - people who were perhaps of a more sentimental outlook - felt that after all these years of solitary spinsterhood it was high time ol' Lady Liberty had a mate.

Hercules's fourth New Labour was unplanned and impromptu, and occurred just as he'd completed the third. One of the Staten Island Ferry boats got into difficulties coming in to dock at Manhattan. The captain would later profess himself mystified as to what happened. He'd made the back-and-forth trip countless times and thought he knew the tides and currents in the bay intimately. He could have berthed that boat blindfolded. But then a sudden, inexplicable and very powerful rip caught the ferry, twisted her round and began pushing her sideways towards the pier at great speed. Nothing the captain could do would impede her progress or correct the profound list to starboard she had developed. Two likely outcomes awaited: either the ferry would hit the pier broad abeam, crushing dockworkers and possibly holing herself and sinking, or she would roll over and capsize. Neither was, to say the least, desirable.

Then, salvation.

It came in the form of Hercules, who had just alighted from a coastguard motor launch and who now leapt into action, bracing himself between the ferry's hull and the pier. With his immense strength he halted the boat, staved off a collision, and averted disaster. A couple of hundred commuters cheered and the captain hooted his foghorn in appreciation. Hercules took a bow - hero of the hour.

That night, in a comedy club just off Times Square, a young rising star of the circuit made an observation that drew boos and jeers and caused a number of his audience to walk out in high dudgeon. What if, he mused, the ferry "accident" hadn't been accidental? What if Poseidon had been lurking somewhere on the sidelines and had created the freak current that imperilled the boat? What if, in other words, the whole event had been staged? A put-up job?

But you didn't say such a thing, not so soon after a near-calamity and not when your audience was made up of locals who were becoming increasingly enamoured of Hercules and were inclined to forgive him for his past misdemeanours. You might
think
it, but you certainly didn't say it. Or, if you were going to say it and you were in a comedy club, you should at least try to make a joke out of it.

New Labour number five seemed trivial by comparison with the previous one: laying the foundation stone for a new shopping mall in Rockaway. A half-ton foundation stone, admittedly, the hefting and placing of which by one man, unaided by machinery, was no mean feat. But still, after he had saved all those lives, somewhat underwhelming.

The sixth New Labour was begun but never finished.

43. OSCILLO-KNIVES

T
hey were digging up the roads around Gramercy Park. They'd been digging them up for weeks. They dug them up day and night, night and day. Resurfacing was in progress. Soon there would be new silk-smooth asphalt. But in the meantime, as the stressed, bleary-eyed residents of the area knew all too well, there was digging-up. Jackhammers clank-clattering away well into the small hours, interspersed with truck-reversing warning klaxons and the sound of workmen hollering. Arc-lights that glared at the dark and made it go away. Continuous racket and hassle, meaning no sleep in the city that never sleeps.

Hercules came one evening to help speed things along. He stamped on the old asphalt, breaking it away in chunks from the layer of Portland cement concrete below, and then he tossed the chunks into skips to be carted off at a later date. Workmen leaned on their idle tools and were duly impressed, although their union representative did put in a call to his boss, the general president of the local Teamsters chapter, just to check whether Hercules's voluntary contribution to the project would affect his men's overtime bonuses. He was told that the mayor had promised it wouldn't.

The Titans sprang their ambush just as Hercules was prising up a particularly sizeable lump of asphalt. The Olympian's hands were full. He was preoccupied. A black-armoured figured zoomed in at blazing speed, a shadow in the arc-lights, and Hercules stumbled, dropping his burden. He cursed, and noticed that his arm hurt. He looked down and saw a gash in the bare skin of his right biceps, a wound that widened before his very eyes, exposing subcutaneous fat, then raw muscle, and then the shiny whiteness of bone.

Hercules roared, as much in indignation as pain. His biceps! His big, beautiful biceps! Ruined! He was proud of his physique. He knew how impressive his body looked. Many a young man had openly admired Hercules's naked self, gasped at those abs, run fascinated fingertips over those quads, and spent a long time in close-up, salivating appreciation of those fine dimpled glutes. But of his biceps muscles Hercules was particularly fond. They were superbly defined and, he thought, defined him superbly.

And now, somehow, one of them had been slashed through to the bone, all but cleaved in two.

Blood came, welling up like oil from the desert, filling the wound and brimming over.

"Hey big guy, you OK?" one of the workmen asked.

"I don't know," said Hercules. His brain was fuddled. He had no idea what was going on.

Then a shadow flitted towards him. A human figure. Something in its hand.

This time Hercules actually heard the wound being inflicted - heard the sound of his own skin being split, his own flesh being parted, a wet hiss, a slick unzipping of living tissue. It was presaged by a brief hum, which he had no way of identifying as the noise of an oscillo-knife, a Landesman-devised weapon whose razor-sharp 10-inch ceramic blade was given additional cutting power by means of 3,000-Hertz micro-pulses generated by a compact vibrational unit in the hilt. To this knife, any substance up to and including solid concrete was butter. Flesh, even the extraordinarily dense and durable bodily tissue of the godling, presented no obstacle.

The second wound was to Hercules's left flank, just below the ribs. A third caught him on the calf, narrowly missing severing his Achilles tendon. The shadow figures were coming in from all directions. They criss-crossed him like cars around a police officer directing traffic at an intersection. His back was raked. His left pectoral was sliced. Hercules turned this way and that, snarling spittle and spite.

"Slow down, you fuckers!" he railed. "Slow down so I can see you! Stop and fight like men!"

He got his wish.

One of the shadows decelerated to a halt in front of him, going from vague blur to solid three-dimensionality. Hercules saw a man sheathed in protective gear, helmed, visored, with a pump-action shotgun in his hands.

"Who," he growled, "the fuck are you?"

The armoured man pursed his lips as though in sympathy. "Bleeding pretty badly there, mate," he said in an Australian accent. "Of course, it's nothing Demeter couldn't fix. Only, your healer Sheila's not going to get here in time."

Hercules eyed the shotgun contemptuously. "You can't kill me with
that
."

"Reckon? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet this'll hurt heaps."

The shotgun belched. The skin was flayed from Hercules's right trapezius. The Olympian staggered but stayed upright. He was dimly aware of the workmen, who only moments earlier had been looking on with pleasure as he did their job for them, running away now as fast as they could, hightailing it out of there, ditching their hardhats and high-viz vests to lighten the load.

Another shotgun round shredded Hercules's other, treasured biceps.

"I'll kill you," he snarled at his assailant. "Fucking strangle you with my bare hands until your head pops off like a champagne cork."

"Vivid image," said the Australian. "Shame neither of your arms is working properly any more."

"Then I'll chew your head off with my teeth."

"Yeah, yeah. I had a brother, you know. Malcolm was his name. Malc."

"So?"

"Lived in Sydney. You killed him with a car. You don't even know you did, but you did."

"Do you think I care?"

"I think you do now."

Hercules's laugh was a caustic croak. "All you mortals are so feeble, so frail. You're like strands of spun sugar, and I am a hammer. I break you. It can't be helped. I brush past you and you crumble. I'm used to it. So should you be."

"'I break you'? This from the fella who's being cut to ribbons."

"Even like this," Hercules said, "I can pulverise you."

"Come on then, you big beardy shirt-lifter. Come and have a go."

The Olympian let out an enraged "Gnaaarrrhhh!" and lurched forwards as emphatically as his mutilated body would allow - which wasn't a lot. He was hit by yet another shotgun round, he had no clear sense where, he hurt all over so one further source of pain did not much make of a difference, it was one amongst a chorus of screaming voices - and then his target vanished from view.

After that, Hercules found himself on his knees in the broken roadway. He was howling in helpless fury, a baited bear hounded by dogs. The black-clad figures swooped in again, again, again, cutting, cutting. He was being made an example of. He was being made to suffer. Crucified. Tears sprang to his eyes. The injustice of it. His blood soaked the shattered asphalt around him. Genteel Gramercy Park had a new sound to keep it awake, the keening wail of a beleaguered, dying demigod.