“Behold Tartarus,” cries Zeus, “the lowest depths of the House of Hades, a place as far below hell as Hades’ home is beneath the earth itself. Do you remember—you senior gods and goddesses amongst us—when you followed me into that ten-year war with the Titans who ruled before us? Do you remember that I cast Kronos and Rhea—my own parents—beyond these iron gates and brazen thresholds—aye, and Iapetus, too, for all his god-power?”
The hall is silent except for the muted roars and bellows and screams coming up from the open Tartarus Pit. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a hole to hell, not a hologram, falling away not thirty feet from where I cower.
“IF I CAST MY PARENTS DOWN INTO THIS PIT OF PITS FOR ALL ETERNITY,” roars Zeus, “DO YOU DOUBT THAT I WILL THROW YOUR SCREAMING SOUL THERE IN A SECOND?”
The gods and goddesses do not answer, except to take several paces farther back from that foul void.
Zeus smiles terribly. “Come, try me, immortals, so that all can learn.”
A huge golden cable falls from the roof of the hall, straddling the hole to hell. Gods and goddesses scurry to get out of the way of its fall. It strikes marble with a resounding crash. The rope is thicker than a ship’s hawser and seems to be spun of thousands of inch-thick strands of true gold. It must weigh many tons.
Zeus strides down his golden stairs and lifts the cable, holding it easily in his giant hands. “Grasp your end,” he says almost cheerfully.
The gods and goddesses look at each other and do not move.
“GRASP YOUR END!”
Hundreds of immortals and their immortal servants rush to comply, scrambling for a handhold on the long cable like kids at a picnic tug-of-war. In a minute there is Zeus alone on his side of the Tartarus Pit, casually holding the cable, and the countless mob of gods and goddesses on the other side, powerful god-hands gripped tight on gold.
“Drag me down,” says Zeus. “Drag me down from sky to earth to Hades and deeper, to Tartarus’ stinking depths. Drag me down, I say.”
Not a single god moves a bronzed muscle.
“DRAG ME DOWN, I COMMAND THEE!” Zeus grasps the golden cable and begins to haul on it. Gods’ sandals slip and squeak and scuff on marble. Several hundred gods and goddesses all in a row are pulled closer to the pit, some stumbling, some going to their knees.
“PULL, GODDAMN YOU!” howls Zeus. “PULL OR BE DRAGGED INTO STINKING TARTARUS UNTIL TIME ITSELF ROTS AWAY FROM THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE!”
Zeus tugs again and twenty yards of gold cable coils behind him. The conga line of gods and goddesses and graces and furies and nereids and nymphs and you-name-it on the other side—everyone pulling except purple-gowned Night—slides and screeches closer to the pit. Athena is the first on the cable and is only thirty feet from the edge when she screams, “Pull, you gods! Pull the old bastard in!!”
Ares and Apollo and Hermes and Poseidon and the rest of the most powerful gods put their backs into it. They quit sliding. The cable pulls tighter, fraying and creaking from the tension. The goddesses scream and pull in unison, Hera—Zeus’s wife—pulling even harder than the others. The gold cable stretches and groans.
Zeus laughs. He is holding them all at check with only one hand on the rope. Now he grabs the cable with his other hand and pulls again.
The gods scream like children on a roller coaster. Athena and those near her on the cable go sliding across the marble as if it were ice, closer and closer to the raging Tartarus Pit, even as dozens of lesser immortals surrender and throw themselves away from the cable. But Athena will not release her grip. The gray-eyed goddess is pulled relentlessly to the edge of the steaming trapdoor to hell. It looks as if the whole line of straining, sweating, cursing immortals is going in.
Zeus laughs and drops the cable. Score upon score of gods and goddesses fly backward and land unceremoniously on their immortal asses.
“You gods and goddesses, children, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, and servants—you cannot drag me down,” says Zeus. He walks back to his throne and sits. “Not even if you pulled your arms from their sockets, if you pulled yourselves to death, could you budge me if I do not choose to move. I am Zeus, the highest, mightiest of kings.”
He raises one huge finger. “But . . . if I choose to drag you up in earnest, I’d hoist you off this Olympos, dangle you in black space above Tartarus, tie on the earth and sea as well, hook the end around the horn of this hill called Olympos, and leave you dangling there in darkness until the sun grows cold.”
If I hadn’t just seen what I have seen, I’d think the old bastard was bluffing. Now I know better.
Athena gets to her feet, not more than a yard from the edge of the Tartarus Pit, and says, “Our Father, son of Kronos, who art in the highest throne of heaven, we know your power, Lord. Who can stand against you? Not us . . .”
All the immortals seem to be holding their breath. Athena’s temper is legendary, her diplomacy skills frequently lacking—if she says the wrong thing now . . .
“Even so,” says Zeus’s gray-eyed daughter, “we pity these mortals, my doomed Argive spearmen, acting out their little roles on their little stage, dying their terrible deaths, drowning in their own blood at the end of their little lives.”
She takes another two steps, so that the tips of her sandals are hanging over the edge of the black pit. Somewhere thousands of feet below her in the lightning-lashed Tartarus darkness, something large bellows in pain and fear. “Yes, Zeus,” continues Athena, “we will keep clear of the war as you command. But grant us—at the very least—permission to offer our mortal favorites tactics that may save them, so that they all won’t fall beneath the lightning of your immortal wrath.”
Zeus looks at his daughter a long moment and I for one can’t read his eyes. Fury? Humor? Impatience?
“Tritogeneia—third-born child—dear daughter,” says Zeus, “your courage has always given me a headache. But do not lose heart, for nothing of the lesson I showed you here today flows from anger, but only seeks to show all gathered here the consequences of their disobedience.”
And having spoken, Zeus steps down from his throne and his personal chariot flies in between the giant pillars, his pair of bronze-hooved horses—real, I see, not holograms—landing near him, their golden manes streaming behind them. Strapping on his golden armor and lifting his whip from its stand, Zeus climbs aboard his battle car, cracks the lash, and I watch the matched team and chariot roll across marble and then take to the air, circling the hall once a hundred feet above the gods’ and goddesses’ heads before flying out between the pillars and disappearing in a crack of quantum thunder.
Slowly the gods and goddesses and lesser sorts file out of the hall, murmuring and plotting among themselves, none—I’m sure—planning to obey their lord and king.
And me—I just sit here for a while—invisible and glad to be so. My jaw is hanging slack and I am breathing shallowly, like a whipped dog on a hot day. It feels like I’m drooling slightly.
Sometimes, up here on Olympos, it’s hard to believe completely in cause and effect and the scientific method.
25
Texas Redwood Forest
Daeman was all alone now, just him and the sonie in the forest clearing, and he didn’t like it.
After Savi left, Odysseus had told his endless, pointless story and walked into the woods at the end of it. Hannah had waited a minute and then gone after the old man. (Daeman had known immediately that morning that Hannah and the bearded man had slept together the night before—his sex radar was seldom wrong.) A few minutes later, Ada and the other old man, Harman, had said they were going for a short walk and then disappeared under the trees in the opposite direction. (Daeman knew that they’d had sex the night before as well. Evidently he and the old witch, Savi, were the only ones not having any fun.)