Poseidon, however, had quit the scene long before the wave he had conjured up was spent. Hermes came to collect him, appearing at his side as if from nowhere and spiriting them both back to Mount Olympus.
The sun was setting over Rome as Dionysus and Hades arrived there. It was the time of passeggio, when Romans put on their very best clothes and went promenading. To anyone but an Italian it looked like pointless milling about, a continual round of ambling in one direction then doubling back and ambling the other way, pausing now and then to kiss and greet and chat. To the participants, however, it was a dignified social gavotte. The younger ones flirted and gabbled, the older ones ate gelati and exchanged news and views.
Today there was much to talk about: the Olympians, their monsters, the recent events in France and America. The usually ebullient evening atmosphere was subdued, and there were fewer people out and about than was customary in such clement weather, but the general feeling in the city was that life must go on as normal. Besides, what had happened elsewhere couldn't happen here, could it? Not in Rome.
But it could, of course, and did. No sooner had Dionysus strode into the Piazza Santa Maria in the Trastevere district than he set to work. With one hand aloft and splayed, he spread his influence among the unsuspecting crowds. It radiated out from him, a powerful sense of intoxication, a surge of heady glee expanding in a circle of which he was the centre point. People began to giggle. Then, quickly, the euphoria turned to rowdiness. Everybody staggered around, bumping into one another. Tempers flared. Fights erupted. Soon the entire square was filled with Romans in their designer finery punching, kicking, biting, headbutting, clawing at one another. Blood flowed. Eyeballs were gouged. Dislodged teeth flew. Bones snapped. Here and there arose the sound of hysterical laughter, as well as hoots like the cries of mad gibbons. Civilised citizens were transformed into a vicious, howling, mauling rabble. It was quite a decline and fall.
Then came Hades's turn. In another part of Rome, the area around the Trevi Fountain, he removed the black leather gloves that were his constant item of apparel and began to touch people. A finger to someone's cheek, a tap on the side of the head, that was all it took. A moment of skin-to-skin contact, and the person fell down stone dead. Hades glided from victim to victim, repeatedly performing this lethal laying on of hands, so that there were a score of corpses on the ground before it became widely apparent what he was up to. A woman screamed as her husband, for no apparent reason, suddenly collapsed beside her. The scream intensified as the woman saw and recognised Hades, and then it was cut short as the Olympian stroked her bare forearm and she too keeled over, as lifeless as the statues of tritons and horses that presided over the fountain which she and her beloved had just, moments earlier, been admiring.
There was panic, Romans and tourists fleeing in every direction, trying to escape from Hades. He merely smiled a lipless smile and continued to touch anyone who strayed within his reach. The terror of the crowd was disorderly, confused. Some who thought they were running away from the Olympian were actually running towards him. Hades accounted for a further seventeen lives before the area was entirely vacated and it was just him alone, standing among thirty-odd sprawled bodies, some of them floating in the waters of the fountain. His cadaverous yellowy face was lit up with a gleam of intense satisfaction as he slipped his gloves back on.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the sun was rising over the Sydney Opera House, lending the white sails of that building a glowing pink blush. Rosy-fingered dawn didn't last long, however. The sun had barely cracked the horizon when clouds started to amass, dark as ink blots in the sky, all but extinguishing the nascent daylight. Growls of thunder pealed overhead. No rain came, but a cold wind hissed along the esplanade that stood between the Opera House and the waters of Sydney Harbour. Early-morning joggers turned their heads in alarm. Businesspeople taking the scenic route to their offices, hoping to get a head start on the day's work, anxiously bent forward and quickened their pace.
Zeus was there, in the shadow of the building. The thunderclouds were his, and so was the lightning that now flickered within them. His to command. He raised both arms and called the lightning down. It zigzagged onto the opera house's roofs. It jagged from the bases of the clouds in blinding white jolts. It struck and struck again, and concrete exploded, the roofs shattered, the roofs caved in like eggshells. Zeus stood, legs apart, and directed the lightning bolts like a conductor conducting a symphony. He orchestrated the building's destruction with dramatic gesticulations and lofty shakes of the head and a look on his face of stern-eyed rapture. To reduce a marvellous specimen of modernist architecture, fourteen years in construction, to a heap of rubble and dust took him a little under five minutes. Some passers-by suffered in the process, either getting hit by falling debris or else fried by wayward lightning bolts. Their deaths were unintentional but hardly a source of regret. These things happened.
And with that, it was over. There were no further demonstrations of power. A number of the world's great landmarks were gone — besmirched, ruined — along with several hundred human beings. That was the extent of the Olympians' revenge for a handful of dead monsters.
"It could have been worse," Landesman remarked, and he wasn't being callous or flippant. It could have been far worse. One might even argue that the Pantheon had let the world off lightly. Given what it was in their capacity to do, they had acted with something approaching restraint. They had vented their anger on symbols, emblems of human aspiration and achievement, more than on actual humans.
A shroud of guilt hung over Bleaney Island nonetheless. For a day or so, nobody could quite meet anybody else's eye. Conversations were curt and choppy. People retreated to their rooms; sedated themselves with television and booze. Sam could see it in faces, almost hear the sound of it — consciences being wrestled with. An inner struggle grinding away. Are these losses acceptable? Should we carry on? Do we have the right to?
She herself could see no solution other than to press ahead. Giving up now would mean the Olympians had got their way, yet again, and surely the whole aim of Titanomachy II was to prevent that.
She went to find Landesman. He wasn't in his office, but Lillicrap was next door in his office, a smaller and much less plushly furnished space than his boss's.
"Be with you in a moment," Lillicrap said, holding up a finger. He scowled at the laptop that sat on the steel-frame desk in front of him. "Just going over some figures."