Hera pulled her arm back. “Athena denies that she did these things, Son of Kronos. And the mortals say that Aphrodite was with Athena when they slaughtered Hector’s babe.”
“We have the vision-pool image of the murder of Patroclus, wife. Do you want me to play it again for you?” Zeus’s voice, so low it resembled distant thunder even when he whispered, now showed signs of growing anger. The effect was of a storm moving into the echoing Hall of the Gods.
“No, Lord,” said Hera. “But you know that Athena insists that it was the missing scholic, Hockenberry, who must have assumed her form and done these things. She swears upon her love for you that…”
Zeus stood impatiently and paced away from the throne. “The scholic morphing bands were not designed to grant a mortal the shape or power of a god,” he snapped. “It’s not possible. However briefly. Some god or goddess from Olympos did those deeds—either Athena or one of our family assuming Athena’s form. Now… choose who will receive the body and blood of my son, Dionysos.”
“Demeter.”
Zeus rubbed his short white beard. “Demeter. My sister. Mother to my much-loved Persephone?”
Hera stood, stepped back, and showed her white hands. “Is there a god on this mount who is not related to you, my husband? I am your sister as well as your wife. At least Demeter has experience giving birth to odd things. And she has little to do these days since there is no grain crop being harvested or sewn by the mortals.”
“So be it,” said Zeus. To Hephaestus he commanded, “Deliver the flesh of my son to Demeter, tell her it is the will of her lord, Zeus himself, that she eat this flesh and bring my son to life again. Assign three of my Furies to watch over her until this birth is achieved.”
The god of fire shrugged and dropped the bit of flesh into one of his pouches. “Do you want to see images from Paris’s pyre?”
“Yes,” said Zeus. He returned to his throne and sat, patting the step that Hera had vacated when she stood.
She obediently returned and took her place, but did not lay her arm on his leg again.
Grumbling to himself, Hephaestus walked over to the dog’s head, lifted it by its ears, and carried it to the vision pool. He crouched there at pool’s edge, pulled a curved metal tool from one of his chest-belts, and worried the dog’s left eyeball out of its socket. There was no blood. He pulled the eye free easily, but red, green, and white strands of optic nerve ran back into the empty eye socket, the cords unreeling as the god of fire pulled. When he had two feet of the glistening strands exposed, he pulled yet another tool from his belt and snipped them.
Pulling mucus and insulation off with his teeth, Hephaestus revealed thin, glittering gold wires within. These he crimped and attached to what looked to be a small metal sphere from one of his pouches. He dropped the eyeball and colored nerve strands into the pool while keeping the sphere next to him.
Immediately the pool filled with three-dimensional images. Sound surrounded the three gods as it emanated from piezo-electric micro-speakers set into the walls and pillars around them.
The images from Ilium were from a dog’s point of view—low, many bare knees and bronze shin-guarding greaves.
“I preferred our old views,” muttered Hera.
“The moravecs detect and shoot down all our drones, even the fucking insect eyes,” said Hephaestus, still fast-forwarding through Paris’s funeral procession. “We’re lucky to have…”
“Silence,” commanded Zeus. The word echoed like thunder from the walls. “There. That. Sound.”
The three watched the last minutes of the funeral rites, including the slaughter of Dionysos by Hector.
They watched Zeus’s son look right at the dog in the crowd when he said, “Eat me.”
“You can turn it off,” said Hera when the images were of Hector dropping the torch onto the waiting pyre.
“No,” said Zeus. “Let it run.”
A minute later, the Lord of Lightning was off his throne and walking toward the holoview pool with his brow furrowed, eyes furious, and fists clenched. “How dare that mortal Hector call upon Boreas and Zephyr to fan the fires containing a god’s guts and balls and bowels! HOW DARE HE!!”
Zeus QT’d out of sight and there was a clap of thunder as the air rushed into the hole in the air where the huge god had been a microsecond earlier.
Hera shook her head. “He watches the ritual murder of his son, Dionysos, easily enough, but flies into a rage when Hector tries to summon the gods of the wind. The Father is losing it, Hephaestus.”
Her son grunted, reeled in the eyeball, and set it and the metal sphere in a pouch. He put the dog’s head in a larger pouch. “Do you need anything else from me this morning, Daughter of Kronos?”
She nodded at the dog’s carcass, its belly panel still flopped open. “Take that with you.”
When her surly son was gone, Hera touched her breast and quantum teleported away from the Great Hall of the Gods.
No one could QT into Hera’s inner sleeping chamber, not even Hera. Long ago—if her immortal memory still served her, since all memories were suspect these days—she had ordered her son Hephaestus to secure her rooms with his artificer’s skills: forcefields of quantum flux, similar but not identical to those the moravec creatures had used to shield Troy and the Achaean camps from divine intrusion, pulsed within the walls; the door to her chamber was flux-infused reinforced titanium, strong enough to hold even an angered Zeus at bay, and Hephaestus had hung it from quantum doorposts snug and tight, locking it all with a secret bolt of a telepathic password that Hera changed daily.
She mentally opened that bolt and slipped in, securing the seamless, gleaming metal barrier behind her and moving into the bathing chamber, discarding her gown and flimsy underthings as she went.
First the ox-eyed Hera drew her bath, which was deep and fed from the purest springs of Olympos ice, heated by Hephaestus’s infernal engines tapping into the core of the old volcano’s warmth. She used the ambrosia first, using it to scrub away all faint stains or shadows of imperfection from her glowing white skin.
Then the white-armed Hera anointed her eternally adorable and enticing body with a deep olive rub, followed by a redolent oil. It was said on Olympos that the fragrance from this oil, used only by Hera, would stir not only every male divinity within the bronze-floored halls of Zeus, but could and did drift down to earth itself in a perfumed cloud that made unsuspecting mortal men lose their minds in frenzies of longing.
Then the daughter of mighty Kronos arranged her shining, ambrosial curls along her sharp-cheeked face and dressed in an ambrosial robe that had been made expressly for her by Athena, when the two had been friends so long ago. The gown was wonderfully smooth, with many designs and figures on it, including a wonderful rose brocade worked into the weft by Athena’s fingers and magic loom. Hera pinned this goddess material across her high breasts with a golden brooch, and fastened—just under her breasts—a waistband ornamented with a hundred floating tassels.
Into the lobes of her carefully pierced ears—just peeking out like pale, shy sea-things from her dark-scented curls—Hera looped her earrings, triple drops of mulberry clusters whose silver glint was guaranteed to cast hooks deep into every male heart.
Then back over her brow she veiled herself with a sweet, fresh veil made of suspended gold fabric that glinted like sunlight along her rosy cheekbones. Finally she fastened supple sandals under her soft, pale feet, crossing the gold straps up her smooth calves.