“And Penthesilea?”
“Just within this hour did she awake and gird herself—and so did her twelve companions—for this mortal combat to come. They rode out of the city to cheers only a short time ago and just passed the Brane Hole.”
“Is Pallas Athena with her?”
“I’m here.” Athena, glorious in her golden battle armor, had just QT’d into instant solidity next to Poseidon. “Penthesilea has been sent off to her doom… and Achilles’. The mortals everywhere are in a state of shrill confusion.”
Hera reached out to touch the glorious goddess’s metal-wrapped wrist. “I know this was hard for you, sister-in-arms. Achilles has been your favorite since he was born.”
Pallas shook her bright, helmeted head. “No longer. The mortal lied about me killing and carrying off his friend Patroclus. He lifted his sword against me and all my Olympian kin and kind. He can’t be sent down to the shady halls of Hades too soon for my pleasure.”
“It’s Zeus whom I still fear,” interrupted Poseidon. His battle armor was a deep-sea verdigris, with elaborate loops of waves, fishes, squids, leviathans, and sharks. His helmet bracketed his eyes with the raised fighting pincers of crabs.
“Hephaestus’ potion will keep our dreaded majesty snoring like a pig for seven days and seven nights,” said Hera. “It’s vital that we achieve all of our goals within that time—Achilles dead or exiled, Agamemnon returned as leader of the Argives, Ilium overthrown or at least the ten-year-war resumed beyond hope of peace. Then Zeus will be confronted with facts he cannot change.”
“His wrath will be terrible still,” said Athena.
Hera laughed. “You deign to tell me about the son of Kronos’ wrath? Zeus’s anger makes mighty Achilles’ wrath look like the stone-kicking pouts of a sullen and beardless boy. But leave the Father to me. I will handle Zeus when all our ends are met. Now, we must…”
Before she could finish, other gods and goddesses began winking into existence there on the long lawn in front of the Hall of the Gods on the shore of Caldera Lake. Flying chariots, complete with holograms of their straining steeds pulling them, zoomed in from each point of the compass and landed nearby until the lawn filled up with cars. The gods and goddesses gravitated into three groups: those pressing close to Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the other champions of the Greeks; those others filling in the ranks behind glowering Apollo—principal champion of the Trojans—Apollo’s sister Artemis, then Ares, his sister Aphrodite, their mother Leto, Demeter, and others who had also long fought for the triumph of Troy; and the third group, who had not yet taken sides. The quantum and chariot-borne convergence continued until there were hundreds of immortals clustered on the long lawn.
“Why is everyone here?” cried Hera, amusement in her voice. “Is there no one guarding the ramparts of Olympos today?”
“Shut up, schemer!” shouted Apollo. “This plot to overthrow Ilium today is yours. And no one can find Lord Zeus to stop it.”
“Oh,” said white-armed Hera, “is the Lord of the Silver Bow so frightened by unseen events that he must run to his father?”
Ares, the war god, fresh from the healing and resurrection vats three times now after his ill-considered combats with Achilles, stepped up next to Phoebus Apollo. “Female,” gritted the tempestuous god of battle, growing to his full fighting height of more than fifteen feet, “we continue to suffer your existence because you’re the incestuous wife of our Lord Zeus. There is no other reason.”
Hera laughed her most calculatingly maddening laugh. “Incestuous wife,” she taunted. “Ironic talk from a god who beds his sister more than any other woman, goddess or mortal.”
Ares lifted his long killing spear. Apollo drew his powerful bow and notched an arrow. Aphrodite unlimbered her smaller but no less deadly bow.
“Would you incite violence against our queen?” asked Athena, stepping between Hera and the bows and spear. Every god on the summit had brought their personal forcefields up to full strength at the sight of the weapons being readied.
“Don’t speak to me of inciting violence!” shouted red-faced Ares at Pallas Athena. “What insolence. Do you remember only months ago when you spurred on Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, to wound me with his lance? Or how you cast your own immortal’s spear at me, wounding me, thinking yourself safely cloaked in your concealing cloud?”
Athena shrugged. “It was on the battlefield. My blood was up.”
“That’s your excuse for trying to kill me, you immortal bitch?” roared Ares. “Your blood was up?”
“Where is Zeus?” demanded Apollo, speaking to Hera.
“I am not my husband’s keeper,” said white-armed Hera. “Although he needs one at times.”
“Where is Zeus?” repeated Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow.
“Zeus will have nothing to do with the events of men or gods for many days more,” said Hera. “Perhaps he will never return. What happens next in the world below, we on Olympos shall determine.”
Apollo notched the heavy, heat-seeking arrow back, but did not yet lift the bow.
Thetis, sea goddess, Nereid, daughter of Nereus—the true Old Man of the Sea—and Achilles’ immortal mother by the mortal man Peleus, stepped between the two angry groups. She wore no armor, only her elaborate gown sewn to look like patterns of seaweed and shells.
“Sister, brothers, cousins all,” she began, “stop this show of petulance and pride before we harm ourselves and our mortal children, and fatally offend our Almighty Father, who will return—no matter where he is, he will return—carrying the wrath at our defiance on his noble brow and death-dealing lightning in his hands.”
“Oh, shut up,” cried Ares, shifting the long killing spear in his right hand to throwing position. “If you hadn’t dipped your wailing, mortal brat in the sacred river to make him near-immortal, Ilium would have triumphed ten years ago.”
“I dipped no one in the river,” said Thetis, drawing herself up to her full height and folding her slightly scaly arms across her breasts. “My darling Achilles was chosen by the Fates for his great destiny, not by me. When he was newborn—and following the Fates’ imperious advice sent through thoughts alone—I nightly laid the infant in the Celestial Fire itself, purging him, through his own pain and suffering—(but even then, though only a baby, my Achilles did not cry out!)—of his father’s mortal parts. By night I scarred and burned him terribly. By day I healed his scorched and blackened baby flesh with the same ambrosia we use to freshen our own immortal bodies—only this ambrosia was made more effective by the Fates’ secret alchemy. And I would have made my babe immortal, succeeded in insuring Achilles’ pure divinity, had I not been spied on by my husband, the mere human man Peleus, who, seeing our only child twitching and searing and writhing in the flames, seized him by the heel and pulled him free from the Celestial Fire only minutes before my process of deification would have been finished and done with.
“Then, ignoring my objections as all husbands will, the well-meaning but meddling Peleus carried our babe off to Chiron, the wisest and least man-hating of all the centaur race, rearer of many heroes himself, who tended Achilles through childhood, healing him by herbs and salves known only to the centaur savants, then growing him strong by nourishing him with the livers of lions and the marrow of bears.”
“Would that the little bastard had died in the flames,” said Aphrodite.
Thetis lost her mind at that and rushed at the goddess of love, wielding no weapons but the long fishbone-nails at the ends of her fingers.