Chapter 83:: This Mortal Seeming

There are two boys camped out in front of the flat owned by the Drs. Onassis and they both look faintly bored. If anyone notices them, well, the Drs. Onassis are teachers of no small repute, and it is hardly strange or rare for students to perch on their steps, or sprawl before their door, awaiting friends or classmates ho have ventured inside. And these are boys, after all, and of an age to be undergraduates, and if those who see them assume them to be so, and pay no attention to the vine-leaves peeping from one’s dark curls, or to the winged shadowed at the other’s ankles, well, who has the time to truly look at things that do not concern them?

***

“Tire you of life, Princess of Troy?”

“I tired of it, Far Shooter, days after you pulled me from the banks of Troy, and cheated the Ferryman of my fare,” she answers.

“And you, Seer, have you seen your demise?”

“At your hands,” he says, sinking to his knees, “Lord of the Golden Bow.”

Phoebus smiles at both, and the room, though Night beats black wings against the glass, is bright as noon. “Come you to your god thus, in these aging shells?”

Dr. Cassandra Onassis looks up. “I come, Apollo, your priestess, your creature, your mark on me, and your gift.” Cassandra, young-and-not, alive-and-not, human-and-not, incongruous in the warm, well-furnished room, rises to her feet.

“My gift, given with a kiss,” says Phoebus, and the young sun dawn in his eyes, “soured with your refusal,” and now it burns with the rage of drought-inducing, earth-cracking, summers, “I take now from you, Prophetess.” He embraces her, and they stand together, god and god-touched, and with his lips on hers, she diminishes and is wrapped again in flesh and, his encircling arms unfolding, sinks down.

Her twin spares her a single, careless, glance, before Hellenus surges to his feet. “I come, Apollo, your priest, your soldier, your slave.”

“I release you from servitude,” the god smiles, drawing the man close as gently as he had the woman. “Your blood I shall pour out in libation, and your flesh and fat and thigh bones burn, so that the gods might feast on them.” Hellenus’ eyes flick to his sister, and he moves forward half-a step. “And hers. I would not part you in that, nor honour one above the other. Nor in Elysium.”

“She calls me already, Son of Leto,” Hellenus smiles, exultant, “and speaks well of Thanatos’ embrace.”

“Then go to her, Son of Priam,” says the god, and lays his hand on the silver head, “and to lovely Teleute.” Hellenus’ smile freezes, and as Dr. Hector Onassis falls to the floor, the young man with the sun in his eyes turns, smiling, to the last person in the room, trembling in his seat, on the couch in front of the television, where a man is frozen, and his hand frozen, trailing over a ripe field.

“What of you, scholar? Ask you a boon of me?”

“I…” the man stumbles, and looks away, and finds himself forced to look up and stand up. “I would live, my lord.”

“But I am not your lord, scholar, for you do not believe in me. What of you, then, who know all my tales and deem them all untrue, who gain a god’s son and fail to keep him safe?”

“Is… he’s alive?”

Apollo smiles—a winter morning’s sun, now, crisp and carrying no warmth. “What matters that to you? For if he is, he might not thus remain, and if he thus remains, yet you will not see him. Worry not of his fate, scholar, but of yours at my hands. Know you what it is?

Dr. Daniel Miller looks down at the unmoving bodies and up at the beautiful immobile face. “I have some idea,” he says, forced smile ghastly on the terrified face.

***

“I was promised the honour of pouring the libations,” pouts one of the boys descending the steps of the apartment building the Drs Onassis reside in.

“Yet are you so dissatisfied by that, my brother, that even such a feast cannot gladden you?” another teases, an arm flung companionably ‘round his shoulders.

“No feast this, brother, for though the Seers were pleasing, the unbeliever was not.”

“He believed, ere the end,” smiles the man first addressed. “Come, brother, be not thus displeased. My prophets and my kill and my right. Dispute you that?”

He stops on the steps, shrugging the arm off, and looks back while his companion goes on. “I dispute naught, brother, for I would win naught.”

“”I would not fight with you,” says the man, hand light on the boy’s shoulder, “and so your wisdom gladdens my heart, and that even more than this sacrifice.”

“Why linger you here, brothers,” calls the third from the bottom of the stairs, “when our mistress and our queen requires our presence?”

***

Sally Archer gets no answer when she calls Dr. Miller, then, growing steadily more worried, Drs. Cassandra and Hector Onassis. Daniel’s house proves empty, and his neighbour, has not seen Alex, but tells her that Daniel had not got in the evening before. She tries the Onassis flat, exasperated, and more than a little anxious.

Chapter 82:: The Vine To Cure Their Sorrows

In Blackbird Leys, two young men are walking down the street together. They are friends, it seems, judging by the way they have their heads together, and the arm one has thrown around the shoulders of the other, who is afflicted by a slight limp. Their speech shows them to be foreign—neither speaks like the others on the street or in the locality—as much as their faces do.

“It is old, this place.”

“Aye. And yet no prayers, no echoes of them.”

“Always you turn back to that. Seek you to spare these people?”

“Will it not hurt you even a little, to destroy our temples, of old? Not even to raze Thrace?”

“If they prayed to me, it was but little and long ago, brother. I feel no pity, and you feel forever too much.”

“And yet let us not war, brother, for have not we, even we, forsaken all our quarrels?”

His companion smiles, and pulls him towards a pub—the Bullnose Morris, though neither knows it nor cares. “And so we have. Let us drink to this peace between us.”

“Feel you thus convivial, my brother?”

“I feel,” he says, pulling him through the door, eyes scanning those inside, “that we are about to meet a long-lost relative.”

The other, who has not looked around at all, save once, at the man behind the bar, looks, unerring, at the small, squat man occupying a booth at the back of the room. “Time has been unkind to him,” he remarks, allowing himself to be steered towards their quarry.

The other man—far the better-looking, of the two, spares him a glance and a smile before they both drop into seats, on either side of the man. “Hail, brother.”

The man—and he was once a beautiful man, traces remain, under the fat, of something that once drove women mad—looks up at them with the eyes of an animal at bay. “Hullo,” he says, “I’m afraid I don’t…”

“Ah, brother,” says the Lame One—he would not consider it an insult to be thus called, though others in the pub might have, had they heard—and puts a hand—big hand, callused and rough—on the man’s smaller, softer one. “We have travelled long and come far, and now you thus disown us?”

“Truly, brother, you hurt us,” says the one who had first spoken, and smiles—sword-smile, wolf-smile, anything but a nice smile.

The smile he gets in return is its kin. The animal at bay is a lion, a panther, a wolf, a boar. “Δεν είμαι ανίσχυρος, πόλεμος-έμπορος, για όλος αυτός ο να φανώ,(1)” the man hisses, and something in his face—his jovial, ruddy face, changes.

“Δεν έχουμε έρθει να παλεψουμε, αδελφός.(2)” The tight grip on his hand changes to something friendlier. “Σίγουρα μπορούμε να πιούμε εδώ, από κοινού?(3)”

“Drink?” he smiles—a beautiful smile, whispering of wine and warmth and love. “But of course, brother.” Cups appear in front of them, and a bell krater. “For you, my brothers. Drink deep.”

The two share a glance. “You are not concerned, overmuch, with this seeming, then?”

“Are you, Aetnaeus?”

“Yet you seek to preserve them,” Hephaestus’ glance is thoughtful.

“They are beautiful people,” his brother counters.

“And are we Pentheus, my brother, or Lycurgus, that you seek to enfold us in webs of our own spinning?”

The eyes raised to his are shrewd and sinful. “I would not have expected this of you, Ares. Such profundity is unbecoming of you.” The fist that slams down on the table seems to please him better. “Tell me first why I should not seek to preserve them. If the answer pleases me, I may grant you one.”

“Would you serve as a wind-lord’s minion, my beloved brother? You who discovered wine and overran India and terrified even the Gods? And yet,” says Hephaestus, drinking deep of the wine, “it is all that your eternity would come to.”

“’Tis not a pleasing answer, my brother,” he says, eyes blazing in a face that seems far lovelier than a moment before.

“And yet it is a true one, Dionysus,” Ares says, urgent.

“It is sweet,” he smiles, “to hear again my true name, spoken by the lips of gods.”

“Διόνυσος,” Hephaestus says, “Dionysos Acratophorus, giver of unmixed wine. Aesymnetes. Eleutherios. Iacchus. Lyaeus. Oeneus.”

With each word, the small, rotund man they had seen, when first they stepped into the pub, fades, and grows transparent, till all they can see, through a veil of flesh and empty seeming, is the beautiful, beloved, divine boy. “What have they been doing,” Ares breathes, “your companions, that they have left you thus untended? Our sisters, at least, should not have forgotten.”

“Have they not called you by your names, beautiful Son of Semele? Have they been so amiss?” There is tenderness, in Hephaestus’ touch and Ares’ voice and glance, and the others in the pub, who see two young men fawning on a middle-aged drunkard, purse their lips and look away.

“They have had thought of weightier things,” he says, and this is a rueful smile, “and ‘Dino’ served them well enough. Aye, even our sisters.”

“And yet you fight for them, who know not your strength and beauty, and not for us, your brothers, who have come, thus, to you.”

“And what then, were I to help you? What give you me, Ares, that shall call me to your side?”

“Have you not a seat, my brother, at Olympus? Or think you that such honours are to be fetched back?”

“And will not she whose seat it was claim it again?”

“And did she not give it you, my brother, even from her own love for you, and even of her own accord?”

“You would have me abandon those who trust me?”

“I would, my brother,” says Hephaestus, a note of authority creeping into his voice, “for they trust you not at all, and merely seek to harness your power and use it cloak their weaknesses.”

“Yet I would not call Eris weak, nor the Furies.”

“And we shall win my sisters to our side, soon,” Ares promises, “and the Kindly Ones will never consent to stay in servitude.”

“Yet you feared I would,” Dionysus smiles, and rises from the table.

“And we are here to talk you out of it,” Hephaestus smiles, “as good brothers should.” He rises, too, one hand heavy on Dionysus’ shoulder.

“We have travelled long and come far,” Ares says, hand light on Dionysus’ arm, “do you now disown us?”

Dionysus smiles—a wide, breath-taking, happy smile that makes the people at the next table glance their way. “Nay, I do not disown you.” He leans in and kisses first Hephaestus, then Ares, on the right cheek. “Hail, brothers.”

In Blackbird Leys, three young men are walking up the street together. They are friends, it seems, judging by the way they have their heads together, and the arms two have thrown around the shoulders of the third, who is afflicted by a slight limp. Their speech shows them to be foreign—not one speaks like the others on the street or in the locality—as much as their faces do.

***

(1) I am not helpless, War-Monger, for all this seeming.

(2) We have not come to fight, brother.

(3) Surely we can drink here, together?

Chapter 81:: Circean Poison

The enchantress walks in and closed the blinds, momentarily transforming the mundane room in the White Mansion into the Island of Aeaea. Circe always got what she wanted. Be it Odysseus or the army she was now creating for Zephyrus.

Circe reaches down under a rock in her now-transformed room... and pulls out a loom. As she sets it up and starts spinning, a great number of animals start pouring in from an opening somewhere far off. After a few turns of the wheel, the small cave room is crowded with hundreds of carnivores who all seemed to fawn at Circe's feet.

'Men of Old who have been transformed into beasts,' her ethereal address echoes out through the collective commotion of the beasts, 'now comes the time to seek your freedom. A great war is at our doorstep, and the very existence of human beings is under threat. I have called you from your sleep to serve your mistress. On success, which is sure to be ours, you shall be rewarded with freedom from this bestial existence.'

The larger, fiercer of the lions and the tigers roar out in unison as more and more animals start crowding in with the spinning of the . Her fingers did not need to touch it any more. It was spinning on its own.

'I call upon my nephew, the beast that has shaken this earth for centuries,' and as she utters the words, the collective din falls silent. From the midst of the stunned animals, walks in a gigantic figure, half-man, half-bull, with a club resting on his shoulders. He comes up to her and bows his head. With a satisfied smile, Circe pronounces, 'The son of Pasiphae, the Cretan Bull... the Minotaur.'

Stooping down her face to the newcomer's ear, she issues her instructions, only for him to hear, he who would lead this horde. Once she is done, he steps back, bows to her again. With a final smile, she waves her hand, dissolving the cave and its occupants till she is back inside the normal bedroom at the White Mansion.

---

'The job has been done, Zeph.'

'Great Circe, I always knew you could do this. However,' light catches his blue eye as he turns to her, reflecting off it as it would reflect off a cold jewel, 'there is one very important person who we still require. The Olympians seem to have forgotten him, but this mighty god still holds his towering presence all over this world. And only you can win him over to our side.'

'Me! How?' It was Circe's turn to be caught by surprise. 'Who is this?'

Zephyrus walked up to her with with a mysterious smile and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Mesmerized, she walked with him as he led her towards his own room, next door. Through the opened blinds, the sun was setting over the little academic town.

'Your father, Helios,' spoke Zephyrus before he shut the door.

Chapter 80:: Down Eros, Up Mars.

He finds himself again on that too-white plain — not the battle-field, this time, but the first place he had seen — the clearing, and the cave. He is inside the cave, this time, and, though he can see out of it, his feet cannot go where his eyes can. He is rooted, there, and slowly sees his so-white limbs turn to whiter marble, till his eyes are all that can move.

He hears footsteps, and this is a new kind of terror, to know someone near him but being unable to see them. The footsteps stop just outside his field of vision, and someone speaks. Calls him son, and heaps blame on him for deserting his cause, soothes his (imagined) guilt and (very real) fright, and insists, again and again, that he will find a way to escape his captors, and live and fight for his true gods, for his family, for his father. There is a hand — colder than his stone skin — on his face, and a face comes into view. A youthful face, radiant and glorious, and something like a bad imitation of love shining in the inhuman (godlike) eyes. He looks down, marble eyelids refusing to move, and thinks he glimpses wings. His eyes travel upwards, against what little will he exerts, and he finds himself looking again at that perfect-aloof-hateful face. His father’s face, and while he knows — knows, deep inside, bred into bone and blood and breath — that his life is an offering to his father, and his soul but a libation to be poured out at his altar, there is nothing he wants more than to be able to wipe off that calm serenity, that unquestioning awareness that the world and its inhabitants live and die at his whim, or if not his, that of his kin. And something of that hatred-confusion-devotion must show on his immobile face, because he smiles, this bastard god (half-god, really, ennobled beyond his blood) and pats his cheek and touches his sculptured hair, and vanishes. And he finds himself flesh, again, and steps out of the cave on tottering limbs, and falls, and shuts his eyes and opens them into the gloom of the two-room flat in which he has spent the best part of a week, now. He is trapped, still, he realises, trying to sit up, and struggles.

“Sleeping bag, Al’skandar.” He looks towards the voice, heart hammering fast, still. “Wait. Hold still, come on.” Someone’s hand fumbles at his side, and a zipper is pulled down. “There.”

He sits up, forcing his pulse to a normal speed. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” He can’t see Cadmus/Carlton as anything but an indistinct shape moving around the room, and then the lights come on, harsh enough to make him blink his eyes shut. “I was awake, already.”

“I…” Carlton looks haggard, and he wonders what the etiquette is, for inquiring after the health of your de-facto jailer. “Nightmare?”

“I do not know yet,” Carlton says, slowly, “whether it was a true dream or not. But, yeah, scared the fuck out of me.”

He nods. “I’m sure you’ve guessed it was much the same for me.” He reaches up a hand to push his hair from his eyes. “Bastards.”

“Athene visited me,” Cadmus says — hurrah, I can tell the two apart, isn’t that great for me? — eyes a little lost. “She accused me of turning against my gods.”

“Carlton…” he whispers, lost-frustrated-angry — how do you console a hero who is fighting his gods? How, when you have been taken against your will? How not, when you suffer the same plight?

“I am not so easily turned away from my path,” Cadmus says, the determination in his voice artificial, and shallow against the horror-shame-sorrow in him. “They seek to deceive us, to make us help them destroy all humans.”

“My father visited me,” he finds himself saying — what is it in this man, this boy, that makes him offer truth for truth? “Hermes. He held me immobile. He pushed my loathing for him away, and drowned me in belief. Yet I do not believe in him.”

“He is true.”

“Not by my belief,” he grinds out.

Carlton smiles, wry and rueful, and kneels by him and grabs his hand. “Your belief, my friend Al’skandar, might be difficult to withhold.”

He drags his eyes from Carlton’s face — his utterly unremarkable face — to the hand held in his. His injured hand, purple bruises mottling the flesh, a constant pain. But not, because Cadmus winds the bandages off, and the skin underneath is unmarked, and he bends it, large hand curved gently over his smaller fingers, and the agony he is expecting fails to make an appearance.

He drags his eyes back up to meet Cadmus’ terrified black eyes. “A true dream, then.”

“A visitation,” Cadmus smiles. “Is he still not true by your belief?”

“My belief is in me,” he says, forcing himself to pull his hand from Carlton’s.

“Mine…” Carlton — Cadmus? — falters, looks away, towards the door behind which Harmonia is sleeping, towards the one window, towards the door Eris pushed him through, five day ago, now. “My master should be apprised of this. But I have no way of reaching him, nor any news of him. I…” You’re as trapped as we are; mutual jailers. “Should we tell your sister?”

Here we go again, the Cadmus-and-Harmonia Show. Watch in how many ways Cadmus throws himself at Harmonia’s feet, and she stabs his face with her stilettos. It’s the most entertaining thing on T.V. Fucking masochist. “Let her wake of her own accord. No need, nor reason, to disturb her sleep because ours has been disturbed.”

“Indeed no,” Carlton smiles, sheepish, and guilty. “And should not we sleep, too? Hours left till morning.”

Looks like we’ll have to wait for the show to begin, boys and girls. Sorry for the delay, but it’ll be well worth the wait. In the meantime, let’s tune in to the Al’skandar Phillips Show, where our protagonist has added anxiety about his sexual orientation, and a hugely inappropriate crush, to his already overwhelming problem—how to save all humanity from the Olympians and still stay alive. “Yeah. Hours.” He lies back down and forces the bag zipped shut and turns away from Carlton and hopes for a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 79:: Departed Heav'n, and Made Earth War

In a small flat in St. Ebbes, four people—to define that term very loosely—are gathered in one room, around one table. They look similar, the two oldest women, and the one man, though the similarity lies not so much in their features as in the way in which they wear them.

“Have you laid plans, yet?”

“None. Do we know who dare oppose us?”

“Astraeus. Juventas.”

“Juventas?”

“Hebe.”

“Ah.”

“Iris. Charon.”

“Circe. Eris.”

The man looks at the speaking woman, but her face bears no sign of displeasure at this betrayal of two of her children.

“Dionysus. The Furies.”

“They’ll be dangerous. And Eris.” The youngest woman leans forward and puts both arms on the table.

“Disregarding the others is not something we should do, perhaps, though they are, undeniably, less capable of causing trouble. We do, however, have one advantage.”

“Other than the fact that they are messengers and cup-bearers and whatever was Astraeus, anyway?”

“The god of dusk,” the girl says, “and yes, besides that.”

“So tell it me, Athene the Wise and Valorous, for I yearn for the salt waters of my homes, and would, if I can, visit them, once, before this squabble takes up all my time.”

“Time and enough, brother,” says one of the older women—the one who had been speaking, whose face, for all its lovely eyes, is stern and forbidding, “when we have crushed them. Tell us, Pallas.”

“They do not know,” the girl says, grey eyes luminous on the third woman’s face, “that she is here. Nor even that we are, Hera and I.”

“Is that all your news, sister, that you were so mysterious and ceremonial about?” The man rises, hand heavy on the girl's shoulder. “And you, little scholar, is that all you wish to tell us?”

“There is more, brother,” the third woman says, the first words she has spoken, in this room. “So sit, for Hera will tell us all; shall you not, sister, queen?”

***

A young man opens the door to the flat, and stands aside to let a girl walk in, then enters, himself, and shuts it. The room they have entered boasts a number of occupants, already—more, indeed, than it ever has before.

“Have we missed much?” the girl asks, walking over to perch on the arm of the sofa, beside a rather brutally-handsome young man.

The woman seated between him and another, rather more-average—the unkind, including her, have called him uncomely—looking man, smiles up at her. “Nothing at all, Huntress, which we have not also.”

“They are shut up in there, with Athene,” proclaims the youngest there.

“Feel you unworthy, my brother?” asks the man with eyes like the sun and hair like gold.

“Bereft,” he answers, laughing. “Worthless and lowly. Come here, brother, and console me.”

“If you would deign to move,” he suggests, and is pulled down into the armchair for his trouble. “Not quite that abruptly, next time, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” Hermes agrees.

“Tell us all, then.”

“We know nothing you do not also, Phoebe.”

“Hush, Trickster. Are you not grief-struck? Mayhap you have failed to hear everything. Ares,” she pulls at his curls, “tell me.”

“They have Eris,” he says, turning his head a little, “because Aphrodite was foolish enough to keep her our daughter’s guardian.”

“You will have lovers’ quarrels with my wife when you have defeated our Father in battle, brother. Not before.”

Ares shrugs. “And the Furies. And dear drunken Dionysus.”

“No others?”

“Pretty little Hebe, who should know better,” the other man says. “And lords of dusk and messengers, and the sorceress Circe.”

“Thank you, Hephaestus, for your news. Phoebus?”

“My sister?”

“What think you of this?”

“I think I am content to await whatever plans they hatch,” he says, hand out in a wide gesture towards the inner room. “Meanwhile, do tell me how you managed to obtain this… charming residence?”

Ares shares a rare smile with Hephaestus, while Aphrodite shrinks away from both of them. “A simple matter of slaughtering the residents, Apollo.”

Apollo’s lazy smile lights up the room. “How entirely apt, brother.”

“How utterly amusing,” Hermes insists, one slender hand in Phoebus’ hair, “to hear them pray to their crucified god while he sliced them. So neat, too.”

“You cut them up?” This from Artemis, who has stood up, and wanders to Hehaestus. “Your first kill in millennia, and I not there to witness it.”

“There will be others,” Aphrodite says, catching at her arm as she trails it across the back of the sofa. “And we poured out their blood in libation to us, and burnt their flesh.”

“My beautiful, beloved Aphrodite,” Artemis smiles, and Ares, kissing Aphrodite, winks at her. “My lovely, thoughtful sister.”

“Our first offerings, and by the hands of gods. And there will be more,” Apollo smiles. “Thank you.”

“Very many more,” Hermes says, as the inner door opens, and the others come out, “and that soon.”