This day, though, I wandered dogless through the Underworld. There was no sign of Cerberus anywhere, no trace even of his glittering turds. Hell’s Gate stood open and the place was deserted. I saw nothing of Charon the boatman of the Styx, nor Hades and Queen Persephone, nor any members of their court, nor the spirits of the dead who should have been in residence here. An abandoned warehouse, dusty and empty. Quickly I fled toward the sunshine.
The island of Delos was where I went next, looking for Apollo. Delos is, or was, his special island, and Apollo had always struck me as the coolest, most level-headed member of the Zeus bunch. Perhaps he had survived whatever astounding debacle it was that had swept the Olympian gods away. And, if so, maybe he could give me a clue to Zeus’s current location.
Big surprise! I went to Delos, but no Apollo.
It was yet another dismal disillusioning journey through the tumbledown sadness that is Greece. This time I flew; not on handsome black-feathered wings, but on a clever machine, a metal tube called an airplane, full of travelers looking more or less like me in my present form. It rose up out of Athens in a welter of sound and fury and took up a course high above the good old wine-dark sea, speckled with tawny archipelagoes, and in very short order came down on a small dry island to the south. This island was called Mykonos, and there I could buy myself passage in one of the boats that made outings several times a day to nearby Delos.
Delos was a dry rubble-field, strewn with fragments of temples, their columns mostly broken off close to the ground. Some marble lions were still intact, lean and vigilant, crouching on their hind legs. They looked hungry. But there wasn’t much else to see. The place had the parched gloom of death about it, the bleak aura of extinction.
I returned to Mykonos on the lunchtime boat, and found myself lodgings in a hillside hotel a short distance outside the pretty little narrow-streeted shorefront town. I ordered me some more mortal food and drank mortal drink. My borrowed body needed such things.
It was on Mykonos that I met Aphrodite.
Or, rather, she met me.
I was sitting by myself, minding my own business, in the hotel’s outdoor bar, which was situated on a cobble-stoned patio bedecked with mosaics and hung with nets and oars and other purported fishing artifacts. I was on my third ouzo of the hour, which possibly was a bit much for the capacities of the body I was using, and I was staring down the hillside pensively at, well, what I have to call the wine-dark sea. (Greece brings out the clichés in anyone. Why should I resist?)
A magnificent long-legged full-bodied blond woman came over to me and said, in a wonderfully throaty, husky voice, “New in town, sailor?”
I stared at her, astounded.
There was the unmistakable radiance of divinity about her. My Geiger counter of godliness was going clickity-clack, full blast. How could I have failed to pick up her emanations the moment I arrived on Mykonos? But I hadn’t, not until she was standing right next to me. She had picked up mine, though.
“Who are you?” I blurted.
“Won’t you ask a lady to sit down, even?”
I jumped to my feet like a nervous schoolboy, hauled a deck chair scrapingly across and positioned it next to mine, and bowed her into it. Then I wigwagged for a waiter. “What do you want to drink?” I rasped. My throat was dry. Nervous schoolboy, yes, indeed.
“I’ll have what you’re having.”
“Parakolo, ouzo on the rocks,” I told the waiter.
She had showers of golden hair tumbling to shoulder length, and catlike yellow eyes, and full ripe lips that broke naturally into the warmest of smiles. The aroma that came from her was one of young wine and green fields at sunrise and swift-coursing streams, but also of lavender and summer heat, of night rain, of surging waves, of midnight winds.
I knew I was consorting with the enemy. I didn’t care.
“Which one are you?” I said again.
“Guess.”
“Aphrodite would be too obvious. You’re probably Ares, or Hephaestus, or Poseidon.”
She laughed, a melodic cadenza of merriment that ran right through the scale and into the infra-voluptuous. “You give me too much credit for deviousness. But I like your way of thinking. Ares in drag, really? Poseidon with a close shave? Hephaestus with a blond wig?” She leaned close. The fragrance of her took on hurricane intensity. “You were right the first time.”
“Aphrodite.”
“None other. I live in Los Angeles now. Taking a little holiday in the mother country. And you? You’re one of the old ones, aren’t you?”
“How can you tell?”
“The archaic emanation you give off. Something out of the pre-Olympian past.” She clinked the ice cubes thoughtfully in her glass, took a long pull of the ouzo, stared me straight in the eyes. “Prometheus? Tethys?” I shook my head. “Someone of that clan, though. I thought all of you old ones were done for a long time ago. But there’s definitely a Titan vibe about you. Which one, I wonder? Most likely one of the really strange ones. Thaumas? Phorcys?”
“Stranger than those,” I said.
She took a few more guesses. Not even close.
“Typhoeus,” I told her finally.
We walked into town for dinner. People turned to look at us in the narrow streets. At her, I mean. She was wearing a filmy orange sun dress with nothing under it and when you were east of her on a westbound street you got quite a show.
“You really don’t think that I’m going to find Zeus?” I asked her.
“Let’s say you have your work cut out for you.”
“Well, so be it. I have to find him.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s my job,” I said. “There’s nothing personal about it. I’m the designated avenger. It’s my sole purpose in existence: to punish Zeus for his war against the children of Gaea. You know that.”
“The war’s been over a long time, Typhoeus. You might as well let bygones be bygones. Anyway, it’s not as though Zeus got to enjoy his victory for long.” We were in the middle of the maze of narrow winding streets that is Mykonos Town. She pointed to a cheerful little restaurant called Catherine’s. “Let’s go in here. I ate here last night and it was pretty good.”
We ordered a bottle of white wine. “I like the body you found for yourself,” she said. “Not particularly handsome, no, but pleasing. The eyes are especially nice. Warm and trustworthy, but also keen, penetrating.”
I would not be drawn away from the main theme. “What happened to the Olympians?” I asked.
“Died off, most of them. One by one. Of neglect. Starvation.”
“Immortal gods don’t die.”
“Some do, some don’t. You know that. Didn’t Argus of the Hundred Eyes kill your very own Echidna? And did she come back to life?”
“But the major gods—”
“Even if they don’t die, they can be forgotten, and the effect’s pretty much the same. While you were locked up under Etna, new gods came in. There wasn’t even a battle. They just moved in, and we had to move along. We disappeared entirely.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“Yes. Totally out of business. You’ve seen the shape our temples are in? Have you seen anybody putting out burnt offerings to us? No, no, it’s all over for us, the worship, the sacrifices. Has been for a long time. We went into exile, the whole kit and kaboodle of us, scattered across the world. I’m sure a lot of us simply died, despite that theoretical immortality of ours. Some hung on, I suppose. But it’s a thousand years since the last time I saw any of them.”
“Which ones did you see then?”
“Apollo—he was getting gray and paunchy. And I caught sight of Hermes, once—I think it was Hermes— slow and short-winded, and limping like Hephaestus.”