Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Fourteen Military Intelligence

 

 

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

 

When the salty torrent struck my tree it was instantly torn away and tumbled in the flood, spinning me under and above the rushing tide in what seemed like less than heartbeats, staccato opportunities to snatch a breath interspersed with long sojourns underwater. Surprisingly enough, at least to me — perhaps not to past generations of mothers-to-be before me — my thoughts were not of my own safety, but that of my child, and I was filled with a vicious rage that some petty Godling was trying to harm my baby. I was not a happy camper, despite the fact that this particular camp had been my idea to begin with. ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men…’ I wanted to kill him slowly, whoever he was, and the thought of murder brought me a pellucid instant of clarity; although I didn’t have the protection of Gumball, I was in almost the same situation because I could hardly breathe from one swirling plunge into salty water so darkly filled with sand and muck that I couldn’t see to brief seconds of light and air that I could barely discern, because my eyes were streaming tears from the debris beneath my eyelids. I fled my body in an instant, first to the Underworld to gather in omniscience and power, and then flashing back to the world above, where I confronted the rider — to Earthly eyes invisible — who sat astride the monster and goaded it on with pricks of his golden trident. Poseidon then, almost certainly, or possibly Neptune; there was little difference between them other than their native language. I hadn’t thought of either when I’d made my little hit list. The more fool then, me, since he was one of the Holy Trinity who ruled the major divisions of Creation. ‘So, Earth-Shaker, you defy me?’

‘More than that, I will exterminate you and your pathetic stable of trollops!’ he shouted on the psychic plane. ‘Abomination! Whore! You defiled my noble brother first with your sorcerous magic and then with your unnatural rape of his person, engendering yet another of your foul brood on him as if he were a mere woman!’

‘But Πλούτων,’ I explained, ‘the formerly-grim Ploutōn, was in the process of attempting to rape me — an effort at which he failed in limp chagrin, by the way, undoubtedly because I didn’t sufficiently resemble a ten-year-old boy — and is still alive, despite his pathetic attempt to violate my person, and now possesses a much more suitable form in which to thrive. More than that, she is extremely pleased by her new incarnation as Macaria, more blessed with many gifts, I think, than any mere Olympian, the only woman-born Goddess without a father, a virgin birth somewhat similar to that of sea-born Aphrodite — ruler of hearts, spontaneously created from the natural elements as an essential miracle — whose ætherial beauty she now exceeds three times over and whose divine power quite o’ertops the mere Olympians, whose heads were ever in the clouds — with the exception of yourself, of course, since you plunged your own thick skull into a bucket. You and Zeus treated her like dirt when she was still a male, and then cheated her during that so-called game of lots in which you divvied up the spoils of your collective murderous assault upon your parents and ancestors, though she was your elder brother and should, by rights, have held pride of place amongst the Olympians — as she would have done were it not for Hera’s scheming with the Cyclopes —, so why in all the Worlds would she owe you either fealty or concern? Her destiny lies far above you, for she will be exalted to the same extent that you will be abased and withered into darkness and obscurity. You, unlike the thrice-divine Macaria, whose heart is now filled with mercy and love, had planned to viciously murder innocents, and have been caught redhanded, so I’m sorry to inform you that your coming fate will be a cautionary tale for the ages.’

‘You can try, vile witch! You’ll never succeed! It was I who vanquished both Oceanus and Tethys with my prowess and courage! A thousand Gods could not defeat me within my own realm, even when I bring it with me onto the land!’

Those Greeks! From my enhanced perspective as the newest/oldest Queen of the Underworld, I was as familiar with a thousand Greek battles as I was with the palm of my own hand. Ritual posturing and ‘manly’ braggadocio were an integral prelude to their battles. His next trick would probably be to turn around and show me his bare ass by way of taunting me, although in a culture where pederasty was almost ubiquitous amongst the upper classes, perhaps it was meant as a bit of a tease as well. ‘Puerile prattle, you jabbering jackass! I brought your fatheaded brother low with a bit of pasteboard and a kiss, do you really think that you can stand against me with mere weapons?’

‘Foul Enchantress! My brother was betrayed by you and your evil magic! Your unmanly sorcery merely took him by surprise! I’ll kill you now in vengeance, hang your putrid corpse raped, splayed and gutted upon a tree to humiliate your followers, and then slaughter the lot of them like swine!’ He sneered at me then, supremely confident in his Godly power.

Rape again. What was it with these nasty pricks? Well, I’m not usually one to bandy words about unnecessarily, so I took up the bident I’d inherited from Hades, donned the tricorn Ἄϊδος κυνέην, the Haidos kuneÄ“n — that star-steel helm which conceals the wearer even from immortal eyes — and struck him through the liver. ‘Have at you, then!’ I said calmly and jerked my weapon from his immortal flesh with all my strength, which was considerable. The edged barbs on the two spearpoints made this action rather messy, so I added, for his benefit, ‘Ouch! that’s just got to hurt.’

It must have done, because he was enraged! ‘More treachery!’ he shouted, his voice so low in timbre that it was almost subsonic, like the throbbing low notes of an earthquake. He rallied, though, and laid about him with his trident, twirling the shaft like a deadly baton and stabbing out with both head and butt at random, trying to connect with my invisible deathless flesh as I danced around him, cutting, slashing, lunging as opportunity presented itself. Great Harry! He was strong! He was very fast as well, but thus far I was faster and, perhaps, just a tiny bit stronger. I hadn’t counted upon the size of his demesne, which contained most of the biomass upon this Earth, so we partly shared the strength inherent in its plants, whilst he had the advantage of its fauna.

He fleered at me, ‘Not laughing now, I see! You may have the trick of my brother’s invisibility, but you’re only a woman, in the end, and no match for a real man’s power!’

I knew better than to respond, both to avoid giving away my position before he inferred it from the wounds appearing on his person and because I imagined that it might unnerve him. More than that, the sexist pig annoyed me! I began to do what I do best, to think things through. He was mounted on a Cetus, but something about that niggled at the back of my brain, even as I pursued my close and furious assault. His position astride the thing’s neck was a significant advantage for him, since he was partially shielded by the hulking body of the monstrous beast, as well as being aided by the restless movements of the Cetus itself, although its own vision was as useless as that of Poseidon. The problem was that the random additional changes in his instantaneous position made my own efforts considerably less effective than they could be, and I was getting just a little tired.

I reckon that my continued silence annoyed him, or perhaps it was the bloody wounds that I was still managing to inflict on his Godly body that ticked him off. He was oozing ichor — the pearly stuff the Gods use for blood — at quite a rate when he shouted, ‘Coward! Show yourself and face me like a man!’

I repressed a snort. Like an total moron, more like it, a total… Tiamat! I suddenly remembered a brief mention of the divine Creatrix of the universe in monstrous form, the shining embodiment of the salt waters. But if She were the Goddess incarnate, then She was Me! I instantly jumped from my current form to hers and was instantly filled with raw power and some little confusion as I finally realized exactly Who I was. I turned my massive head around and bit off the spindly legs of the twit riding me, snip, snap! Then I bit off his head, which rather cut short his irritating curses. Even immortals can be discommoded by decapitation, so he was well on his way to my subterranean domain at the moment, and good riddance to him!

In the blessed silence, I quickly snatched up the trident which had fallen from his lifeless hands, then made a mental note to arrange some suitable fate for him in the Netherworld, probably not nearly as comfy as the gig I’d found for Hades, since he was something of a shirttail relation, although I hadn’t realized it at the time. ‘Everything comes out in the wash,’ I thought, quite pleased by how well everything was working out thus far.

Thinking of which, I still had myself and Beryl to succor, and our troops, and anyone else caught up in the local tsunami that had swept in Poseidon, the nasty twerp. Beryl was still in her tree, having chosen one with a sturdier root system, obviously, but I couldn’t see me, so I figured I was still underwater. ‘Beryl!’ I thought. ‘Can you see me?’

Ever quick on the uptake, she replied instantly, ‘Last I saw, your tree had capsized and seems stable, so I reckon you’re somewhere in the vicinity of that one!’ She pointed into the near distance.

I saw the one she meant and lunged for it, saying, ‘Hang tight! I’m going to make some waves!’ Luckily, my neck was rather flexible and elongated, something like a turtle’s, so I stretched out and snapped up my tree, then shook it out over Beryl’s, releasing my body to fall into her arms. Instantly, I leapt back into my body, drawing a shuddering breath as I managed to focus, trying to see through the mud and sand and salty water still caked in my eyes. “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” I said. “Now let’s go find our girls.”

They’d been considerably ahead of us, and their trees were bigger, so they were already climbing down by the time we’d managed to wade through the saltwater and debris to walk out on the oozing dark muck that used to be our grassy meadow.

“Captain Topaz!” Beryl called out, “Report!”

She turned to us and said with admirable aplomb, “No casualties, Ma’am, other than five horses, two of them carrying foals. We haven’t tallied any loss of supplies, but believe that these losses will be minimal, once we search out the scattered packs, other than food and water, most of which can be easily replaced if spoilt.”

“Any loss or irreparable damage to our ordnance or ammunition?” she asked, punctilious when it counted.

“Not that we know of, although we haven’t completed our detailed inventory.”

“Very good, Captain. Carry on.” Then she turned to me and asked, “So, where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “What in Harry’s Green Hell are we supposed to do with Her?” She gestured toward the Cetus, who had us both fixed in her stern regard. It was somewhat disconcerting.

“I’m not sure. She’s Tiamat, the Queen of Heaven, ancestress of us all, or something very like her, Creatrix of the starry Universe, preceded only by Chaos, also female, by all accounts. Poseidon awaits our pleasure in the Underworld, but I’d as soon you had the judgement of him, since I doubt that I could be at all dispassionate. He pissed me off.”

“Already done,” she said. “I sent him off to Tartarus to commune with the few remaining bad Titans for a few millennia, which I’m sure will do him a world of good.”

Tiamat herself intervened, ‘I take it you’re referring to Poseidon?’

“We are,” I said.

‘How was it, exactly, that you were able to coerce me into performing your personal will? I felt like a bystander, watching myself from the outside, as it seemed, which I conclude was my consciousness in your body.’

“I apologize, but it was an act of desperation. Poseidon was using you to overcome my superior fighting skills, which I thought was quite unfair. Because we are all three of us related, in that you’re the spiritual ancestress of the two of us, indeed every Goddess of the Mediterranean tradition, as well as the ultimate Creatrix of everything living, I was able to use our psychic link to temporarily share your soul with mine and swap our respective viewpoints.”

She spoke aloud for the first time, in a voice like rolling thunder, “So does this mean that I’m no longer bound to Poseidon’s will?”

“Exactly so,” I said. “The entire Pantheon is being rewritten even as we speak, since the so-called ‘rulers’ of the Earth, the Oceans, and the Underworld have been diminished by two thirds. Zeus in his many analogues is the only one left, and his future tenure in the pantheon is dependent entirely upon his continued good behavior, for which trait he’s never been famous.”

She smiled a fearsome smile, quite filled with teeth and menace, the sight of which which was even more disconcerting than her voice. “Oh, Goodie!” she said, as pleased as punch. One might actually get used to her reverberating voice after a bit, if one heard it from very very far away. Up close, it tended to test one’s footing, and left one’s ears ringing when she got excited.

“Believe me,” I said, “I was extremely relieved to escape his sexual assault as well.”

“Yes, well, what’s the point of having Divine powers if one doesn’t have the fun of raping the odd woman from time to time,” she thundered dryly, “They all do it, from Abzá» to Yahweh to Zeus; some young girl gets knocked up and all the men applaud. Sexual assault without adverse consequence seems to be an almost universal male fantasy, possibly a vestigial memory from the days when they were all brainless fishes, not that they’ve actually improved themselves all that much since.”

One gathered that her low opinion of men in general wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to keep secret, since everyone with a dozen miles or so could easily hear her. She was definitely not the sort of Goddess one might ordinarily choose with whom to share an intimate tête-à-tête. I suppose that when one has created the Universe and all within it one develops a certain cavalier attitude toward the finer points of social nuance. “So,” I said, “were you around at the very beginning?”

“It depends on how you look at it,” she said resoundingly. “As you seem to discovered, we’re all of us related, since our powers result  — at least in part — from the adulation of worshippers, and worshippers tend toward faddishness, as a general rule, so Gods and Goddesses mutate over time, even changing from one sex into another. For quite a while, for example, I was male — once Goddesses fell out of favor — albeit in a vague sort of way, which of course didn’t prevent me from impregnating a young Jewish maiden by means of force majeure, leaving her no more choice in the matter than had Danaá«. It was expected of Gods, quite naturally, since they’d have difficulty coming up with offspring otherwise, the God business never having been conducive to long-term stability, neither in aspect nor relationships, and of course it had been prophesied, which is about as dirty a deal as you can imagine, if you happen to be the unlucky target of one.”

“I imagine it must be, ” I said.

“Well, you should know,” she thundered, “since it’s happened to the two of you, albeit in separate instances and through separate causes.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Of course!” she rumbled like an earthquake. “In a world with millions of people in it, someone is just as likely to have said ‘It’s going to rain fishes tomorrow’ as not, even if they meant it as hyperbole, so if fishes literally rain from the sky, it’s been ‘prophesied,’ and that doesn’t even take into account after-the-fact ‘predictions,’ the sort of thing where someone claims that they ‘knew it all along’ when the most unlikely events transpire. There are few things people enjoy saying more than ‘I told you so.’ ”

I had to admit the likelihood of that, since I myself had made vague plans to ‘take care of’ Zeus and the rest of the male Olympians after defeating Hades. All I’d have to do was mention that tidy fact and Poseidon’s downfall would have been ‘prophesied,’ even though my ‘plan’ had had no specificity at all at the time. “So when I told Beryl that she could become pregnant when she was first transformed, that counted as a ‘prophecy?’ ”

“Of course!” she laughed, which knocked down a few of the nearest trees and left my ears ringing slightly, “and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving pair of lovers. I’m very pleased to see at least two of my many daughters finally set about putting things right, as well as contributing to the next generation of Goddesses, but I’m especially looking forward to seeing that blustering twit Zeus brought down a peg or two. I’ve never liked him, not one little bit, in any of his many incarnations.” She grimaced in a peculiar manner which might well have been a smile, had it been a little less bloodthirsty and had a few less fangs showing, each and every one of them very long and very sharp.

“Well, it ought to be a bit easier now,” I said, “since I now hold both Poseidon’s trident and Hades’ bident and helm, although Zeus still has his thunderbolts.”

“They are formidable,” she roared helpfully, “but I can ask my cyclopic offspring to give you some of those as well, if you think it will help. They were and are the ones who created the thunderbolts for Zeus when Hera asked them very nicely, so I can both provide an ample supply of them and cut off his own provisions from their makers, although I don’t know exactly how many he might have in store.”

“I thought that was Hephæstus; and isn’t he an Olympian?”

“By courtesy, not by birth. He was adopted into the official roster due to his excellent services in arming the Gods, so of course he had to change his form slightly, but was never-the-less usually depicted as either lame or partially-sighted, supposedly because one of his eyes was burnt by the fires of the forge he worked at, or his limbs were broken in a fall from Olympus, or some other crippling mishap, a curious defect to persist in a supposed immortal with an ideal Aspect.”

“Politics!” Beryl cursed, disgusted.

“Can’t be helped,” Tiamat rumbled philosophically. “In the ever-shifting continuum of Divinity, relative positions and status are continually changing. Look how suddenly my own position has been exalted by one or two of my related Avatars…,” she beamed with obvious pride, “from beast of burden to Creatrix of the Universe once more. It’s not necessarily the strongest who survive, nor even the most intelligent; it’s those most instantly prepared to cope with and take advantage of any local change in circumstance.”

“I quite agree, since we’ve seen this in our own experience,” I said. “We both of us started out as doomed sacrifices to a supposed ‘common good,’ but now we not only lead a powerful army against disjoint forces of oppression and injustice locally, but command the countless legions of the Dead in a struggle for the soul of the world and the future of humanity. We’re well upon our way toward changing the destiny of every living thing on Earth for the better, or so we hope.”

“One for all and all for one!” Tiamat thundered with startling force, blasting us all with a breath like very brief hurricane. “It just struck me that we three together are a new Holy Trinity, supplanting that of airy Olympus and its analogs, grounded in the real world, determined to heal the world and preserve it for future generations.”

“Uhmmm,” I added, “Did we forget to mention that we plan to move the planet out of the local neighborhood sometime in the eventual future?”

“Really?” she boomed, surprised.

“Why ever not?” I asked rhetorically. “Archimedes thought that he could do it, and he was only a man.”

“Supernovas are the real danger,” Beryl added. “Just ask our pal Ali ibn Ridwan and his brainy cronies. They’re convinced that there’s one ticking towards eventual ignition somewhere in the local neighborhood, and that it will destroy most life on Earth when it happens.”

“Oh!” Tiamat exploded like a lightning flash behind nearby clouds, but somewhat more imposing and much less cryptic. “Supernovas! I remember using quite a few of those things when I made this little corner of the Universe. It takes quite a while to get the recipe just right, you know, and there’s a lot of stirring involved.” She gnashed her teeth, sounding something like an avalanche. “It’s worse than a dratted Risotto con Fagioli Bolognese, what with a jillion finicky dashes of this or that required for perfection.”

I looked over to Beryl, trying not to laugh at the sheer incongruity of talking with the Creātrix of the Universe using kitchen metaphors, although it made about as much sense as anything else in my crazy life, so I smiled instead. “Well, it looks like the right guide’s shown up for our little pilgrimage, if we ever manage to get our stuff together.”

“I have every confidence in you, my very dear Sapphire,” Beryl said. “After all you’ve managed thus far with little more than native intelligence, devastating beauty, and impeccable taste in clothing and accessories, I don’t suppose that recreating the best parts of a global scientific civilization from scratch will be much trouble at all.”

“Thank you, Dear,” I answered carefully. With Beryl, I rarely knew exactly whether she was being sincere, ironic, or merely droll. It kept me on my toes, let me tell you.

“You’re very welcome, Sweetheart,” she replied, which failed to make the context clear at all.

 

 

Tiamat was still with us, albeit currently frolicking about a mile offshore. The open sea was her natural environment, she’d said, at least when she wasn’t brooding over the face of the deep, an explanation that wasn’t truly satisfying. I had the impression that she was using these alternatives either as a metaphor or an allegory, since my short acquaintance with her mind had left me at a loss for words to reconcile the vague impressions her memories had left behind with any conceivable configuration of our current reality. One good thing was that she’d told us that there weren’t any supernovas scheduled for at least a million years, so that took a huge burden off my immediate planning schedule, since we’d managed to go from savagery to the Moon in far less time than that, and hadn’t then had the advantage of knowing that high technology — beyond pointed sticks and flakes of rock — was even remotely possible when we began our journey toward civilization. I sincerely hoped that we’d get it right this time around, but divine inspirations had failed before — we had the living proof before us — and ordinary people — not to mention Divinities — tended to twist things around to suit their current convenience or mood. What with all the things we were handling even now, neither Beryl nor I had time to pay all that much attention to the details of everything that was going on at once. Whilst there was some satisfaction in seeing to the final disposition of miscreants and villains, we really couldn’t keep track of every instance of depravity, instead relying on whatever passed for the Akashic Record, although one of Beryl’s scientific philosophers down in the Elysian Fields had called it ‘The Holographic Universe,’ whatever in Harry’s Green Hell that meant.

“The girls are starting to talk, you know.” Beryl interrupted my musings.

“What do you mean?” I asked cleverly.

“Well, Tiamat is making them a little nervous, and then there’s the whole bringing me back from the dead thing; they think you’re some kind of witch.”

“But I had nothing to do with bringing you back from the dead,” I protested. “That was Gumball’s idea.”

“And whose creature is Gumball, exactly? Some of them think that he’s your familiar.”

“That’s just silly!” I said.

“Oh, absolutely!” she said, “and I certainly agree with you, but ignorance and stupidity are as impenetrable as… well, ignorance and stupidity. In general, people believe what they want to believe, and you may possibly recall casting a ‘spell’ on them that changed them into sort-of-women, as close as one could come and still account for the perpetuation of the human species.”

“Harry’s Flaming Brass Balls!” I cursed, “what is it with these women?! Don’t they have anything better to do than sit around making up stupid stories?”

“Well, no,” Beryl said, as if this were obvious. “In the first place, that’s what people do. We’ve been doing it for the best part of a million years or so, and the stories always get away from themselves, since every storyteller wants to ‘improve’ upon whatever’s been said before. Eventually, the stories snowball and you’ve got people like us, the inheritors of a million years of human hopes and dreams, the defining limits of human imagination.”

I glared at her for lack of anything better to do. “Well, I don’t have to like it, do I?”

“Perhaps not, but it’s our duty as officers to be aware of it and to control it as much as possible, consistent with the good order and discipline of the Horticultural service.”

“But how in Harry’s Green Hell are we supposed to control it?! I certainly didn’t tell them that I was some sort of evil sorceress, and it doesn’t strike me as immediately obvious that simply saying that I’m not is going to make the slightest bit of difference!”

“Oh, please!” she said. “Don’t be dense. It’s perfectly obvious that you are a witch, for all practical purposes, so the only real question is whether you’re a good witch, or a bad witch.”

“Yeah, me and Dorothy!” I groused.

“Dorothy?” Beryl seemed puzzled.

“A character in a very old children’s book who wound up in the middle of a very strange situation. In her story, though, no one died.” I thought for a bit. “Well, except for the two wicked witches, and they did have slaves, though. Maybe there’s some parallel?”

“Oh, please!” she said again. “Be serious! What’s wrong with telling them the truth? It’s certainly a lot simpler than spinning yet another tall tale!”

“Who’d believe it?!” I shouted.

“Almost anyone with any sense,” she retorted immediately. “Look around yourself! You’ve got enormous monsters from the vasty deep at your beck and call, you’ve apparently resurrected a fallen comrade, gone to Hell and overthrown the former tyrant, then were yourself visibly resurrected, rising from the earth like Aphrodite borne upon the waves, calmed the waters of a giant flood, preserved all your followers alive when any sensible mundane story would have ended in many personal tragedies. True, we lost a few horses, but not that many, certainly not enough to impair our effectiveness as heavy cavalry in our continuing campaign through the American Southeast, and more than that, you’ve made peace with the plants — evidently all of them — a gambit no mere human had managed to pull off for the last three centuries or so. This is the age of miracles and wonders, for Harry’s sake! If not you, then who?”

“Uhm…, unh…,” I struggled for the proper words.

“Exactly!” she said smugly.

 

 

“Ladies! Be at ease, and may I have your attention, please?” I shouted, all the local troops were gathered in the open meadow before me, another gem selected by the incomparable Captain Topaz. It was a bright, sunshiny day and the live-oaks and sedges around us cast cool morning shadows on the grass. Tiamat, lounging in the water offshore, loomed ominously, outlined against the sun and casting her own shadow over a portion of the meadow. Several of our girls were keeping a wary eye upon her. Couldn’t be helped. Our troopers, though well-disciplined and spirited campaigners against humans — and even our former enemies the Kudzu crowns — were slightly out of their depth when confronted by the sort of creatures usually seen only in nightmares.

“I’m sure many of you have noticed our newest companion” — there was an expected nervous laugh — “and I know that rumors are rife, but I assure you that her continued presence here is the result of personal curiosity, not malice.”

“Ma’am?” Captain Topaz spoke up on behalf of the troops, by arrangement, I might add, “I’m sure that many of us had noticed that she showed up at the exact moment that we were attacked, How can we be sure that she wasn’t the aggressor?”

“I believe that she can answer that better than I can, Captain, so I’ll let her speak for herself.”I turned to face the Eldest of the local Gods, cheating slightly toward my audience. “Tiamat?”

“Captain Topaz,” she roared, “when I arrived I was driven as a slave, but had nothing to do with the earthquake which caused the greatest damage; that was caused by my rider, the late Poseidon. Some of you may have noticed me snapping off his head when his power over me was broken by your leader Sapphire. I have to admit that I was angry with him, since he’d kept me in captivity for the best part of three thousand years.”

Topaz riposted smoothly, also scripted, “And who was this Poseidon fellow?”

“An ancient and immortal entity of immense power who ruled over the sea until quite recently.” Tiamat had a way of making her rhetorical points memorable, since when she spoke, people couldn’t help but be impressed, if only from the volume of her voice. “Many knew him as a God; others only knew him as the rumour of an ancient myth, but he was once a mortal man who happened to have a run of very good luck. Eventually, as these things inevitably transpire, he ran into someone who was having a slightly better streak of good fortune, and he fell. Whilst he was still alive, he possessed a dangerous weapon which could generate earthquakes, and it was this weapon which caused the flood I floated in upon.”

“What sort of weapon could possibly cause an earthquake?”

‘Good girl, Captain Topaz!’ Taking my cue, I spoke up then, “Like every truly advanced technology, it looks impossible, but here it is.” I held up Poseidon’s Trident, then tapped the business end very lightly on the ground before me, which caused a minor temblor. “As you’ll notice, this artifact is a weapon of immense power and now belongs to me, but I’m not going to fiddle around with it until I put a little space between it and anyone I care about. I have the impression that someone might be hurt if I was less than very careful.”

“How came it into your possession?” Topaz asked.

“I took it from his hand as we fought, so it’s mine by right of combat, as are all the other relics of his former power.”

“How is it that we were unable to see this battle?” Topaz continued. “It seemed almost as if he were fighting with himself.”

“At the time,” I said, “I was wearing a forfeit of arms taken from yet another ancient enemy, the man I finally vanquished after bringing back Brigadier General Beryl Farquhar from his realms, the so-called ‘Helm of Darkness,’ which obscures the visible presence of the wearer through some scientific mechanism which I don’t fully understand.” I produced it with something of a flourish and displayed it. “You’ll notice that it doesn’t look like much, but in use it’s very potent.” I ostentatiously placed it on my head, watching for their reactions as I vanished from their sight, then took it off and reappeared. I grinned. “As you can see, or rather couldn’t see, it’s a really nice trick. Poseidon was hard pressed to find me, despite raw superiority in strength and combat knowledge honed by thousands of years of experience. It was touch and go until his power over Tiamat slipped far enough that she was able to help me.” I shaded the literal truth a bit there, but life is complicated enough without introducing profitless metaphysics.

“But where did this so-called ‘Helm of Darkness’ come from?” another trooper asked.

That was outside the script, but scripts can only carry one so far. Eventually, we must all needs improvise. “I’m not exactly sure. I took it from the King of the Underworld, a fellow called Hades — or sometimes Pluto — the same guy who kidnapped Beryl when she was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet.” I finessed the issue of her actual death on a hunch. “I finally defeated him by means of that same fungal infection which has transformed us all, so he became a female version of himself, and was thereby very much discommoded. She’s doing well though, and is happy with her new outlook on life. Not every battle necessarily ends in slaughter, and changing hearts and minds is a better longterm strategy than simply creating desolation and calling it peace.” I essayed a cheery smile. Who says that the Gods have to be grim and pretentious?

“Now wait just a minute!” one of the women said, frowning. “I was there and saw her dead body. I was the one who laid her with the other casualties. She’d bled out; I could tell from her ghastly pallor. She was as cold and stiff as any other corpse.”

That wasn’t in the script, so I tried to recover. “And yet here she stands before you,” I said reasonably. “Does she look like a corpse to you? Is it common for dead people to be pregnant?”

That caused a stir. “Is Major General Farquhar really pregnant?” asked another, not the trooper who’d objected to begin with.

Beryl spoke up, “I am, unfortunately by my captor but, like many of you, I’ll make the best of it. Babies can’t choose their parents, and mothers the world over have had as little control over their pregnancies, as we all of us know. As women, we do the best we can with what we have, and certainly the babies are innocent, however unsuitable the father may have been. As Lieutenant General McKenzie said not so very long ago, most actual genetic contribution by any male has been largely suppressed by the fungal enhancements that have given us all our strength and agility. I’m not particularly worried about any adverse long-term effect due to any lingering physical inheritance from my rapist, since most of what’s left is down only to his mother and his grandmothers.”

Well, my soi-disant ‘script’ was veering off into chaos now. So much for scheming. “Look,” I said, “the point of all this is that people like Tiamat are a part of the natural world, just like the kudzu crowns and the rider who caused the earthquake and tsunami. Just because we haven’t personally encountered something before doesn’t mean that it’s unnatural. In fact, there’s almost always a perfectly logical explanation, even if it takes us a while to work out exactly what that is.”

Captain Topaz gave me a sceptical look, not at all intimidated by my rank. “You’re telling us that this giant monster before us is a perfectly ordinary denizen of the western Atlantic ocean? That she’s the sort of thing we might see sunning herself on the beach in Hampton Roads? You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t believe you. In fact, if I might be so bold…,” she raised her voice, “…Miss Tiamat, are there any others of your kind in the ocean?”

Tiamat laughed, a sudden rumble of near-subsonic rolling thunder, “Of course not! There’s only one of me in all the universe, and there’s been only me for nearly fourteen billion years, from long before the earth itself was formed, in very fact!”

I rolled my eyes. Tiamat didn’t seem at all inclined to conform to my expectations, but I didn’t know what to say or do to regain control of the situation.

Topaz intervened, suddenly even more suspicious of our eldritch guest. “Wait a minute! What do you mean, fourteen billion years? The Earth isn’t that old, not by a long shot!”

“Of course it isn’t,” Tiamat crooned as one might comfort a small child, if that child happened to be about the size of Mount Rogers. My ears were ringing.

“Well! I’m glad that’s settled!” Topaz said smugly.

“The Earth,” Tiamat informed us, “is only about four and a half billion years old, since entire generations of stars had to be born and die in order to create the stuff the Earth is made of. You can’t have organic life without carbon, and a surprising amount of heavy metals as well.”

The Eldest Goddess certainly had the knack of making people feel comfortable, or at least mystified, which can sometimes be nearly as good, and certainly everyone within this whole section of the State would have reason to feel enlightened right about now, having finally been presented with a coherent expantion of the origin of the Universe by someone who’d actually witnessed the Primal Scene. The unflappable Captain Topaz was certainly feeling right at home, just to judge by the way her jaw was dropping as her eyes glazed over. “But… but… Harry…”

“Harry who?” Tiamat bellowed with her usual level of subtlety.

“Harry, our great Liberator!”

Her brows knit together slightly, I think, although it was difficult to read facial expressions on… whatever sort of beast Tiamat currently manifested. “I think,” she mused,“that you must be referring to Ἡρακλῆς, HÄ“raklÄ“s, Hera’s Glory. He was quite the hero, admittedly, but only a man. You have far more powerful champions by your side right now.”

“More powerful than the Holy Harry?” Captain Topaz sounded doubtful.

“Of course. You see before you the current manifestations of Δημήτηρ, DÄ“mÄ“tÄ“r, sometimes called Erinys, the Raging One, because of her deadly ferocity, and her daughter Περσεφόνη, Persephone, Kore, the Maiden, the ruler of both the seasons of the year and life and death itself, although of course their names are many and manifold. You know them as Sapphire and Beryl.”

‘Oh, crap! That’s torn it!’ “Uhm, Tiamat,”I said, “we weren’t exactly going to mention that just yet.”

“Nonsense! It’s a family reunion! Even now you carry Despoina, your long-lost daughter by Poseidon, so it’s entirely fitting that you’ve just now killed him. He was always a bit of an asshole, to use the modern idiom, and as a father he was an utter dickwad.”

“Tiamat!” I shouted involuntarily. She was telling everyone within sight — and some who weren’t — things about us that even I didn’t know. “I’m not sure that this is the proper forum for airing dirty laundry!”

“Feh! I’m too old to keep secrets,” she thundered. “In any event, bottling things up inside never does anyone any good in the long run. Trust me, dears, having everything laid right out on the table is better for everyone in the long run! Don’t they teach you kids anything in school these days?”

“Not much, actually,” I admitted. “Our society’s been pretty focused on basic necessities for quite some time, and a lot of things have fallen into disrepair, including the public educational system.”

“Have you no gymnasia? No philosophers? No sophists to educate your youth?” Tiamat was astonished and dismayed.

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I do have tentative plans to remedy this lack, but the exigencies of a military campaign have delayed the execution of my preliminary schemes.” I paused for a long moment, reflecting. “Lynette!” I yelled. “Is Lynette anywhere handy?”

Topaz answered, “She’s off on a collecting expedition right now, but we expect her back in a day or two.”

“That won’t do,” I said. “Tiamat, could you try and find her?”

She obliged immediately. “Lynette!” she shouted, probably almost loud enough to be heard in Europe, I know my ears were really ringing this time. “Lynette! Your Queen would like to see you!”

‘Oh, swell! Now everybody in the damned State knows, or close to it.’ “Thank you, Mother,” I said with what I thought must be admirable restraint. I made a mental note to check up on my real mother sometime soonish, since I now had an entirely different perspective on her death than I had before. Whatever her imagined ‘sins’ within the constricted Horticulturist worldview, I remembered her as a loving mother and wife, so I couldn’t imagine her being stuck in Tartarus or anywhere bad; the Horticulturist writ didn’t run nearly that far. I hoped for the Elysian Fields, or somewhere equally nice, but wherever she was, I vowed to make her situation better. I deliberately avoided accessing her Akashic record, since I want our first meeting to be spontaneous and at least somewhat egalitarian.

“Uhm, Tiamat, please don’t take offence, but would you mind doing the mental telepathy thing again? It makes me nervous having everyone within this part of the state hear your end of our conversation without hearing anything from me. It’s kind of disconcerting, more or less the opposite of talking to one’s self.”

‘That’s only because you haven’t mastered the art of talking to everyone at once. You’ll get the knack of it soon enough, you’ll see,’ she communicated with an overtone of blithe serenity.

‘I can do that?’

‘Of course,’ she said benignly, ‘You’re one of my many avatars — and one of the most talented. I can’t recall ever meeting one of me with the trick of swapping viewpoints — and you don’t suppose I wasted my valuable time shouting revelations from the tops of mountaintops, do you?’

I thought about that before I answered. ‘I have to admit that it was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. I realised as I was fighting Poseidon that you were familiar to me, but thought of you as an ancestor at the time, with something more of a psychic link than identity. It’s difficult to explain, since I find my present personal knowledge being expanded by that of you and Demeter and of a thousand other Goddesses. It’s extremely disconcerting, something like an ongoing trance.’

‘I believe your lover Beryl — by the way, your new relationship and sex is an awfully nice innovation. I can relish simplifying my own complicated love life in future — called it “the long view.” ’

‘Or satori. I suspect the two concepts are roughly equivalent.’

‘You might want to pay attention to your memories of Quan Yin, then,’ she informed me. ‘She has the most intimate experience as Goddess, Saint, and Sage.’

I did just that — surprised that it seemed so easy to do so, once she’d put the notion into my head — and belatedly discovered that I’d chosen one of my Attributes, the Imperial five-toed dragon I rode to calm the seas for mariners in trouble — or for any who were sore beset, especially women — for Gumball, whom I now recognised as a spirit friend and companion from long ages past, having been a bear when I was Artemis the Huntress, a scorpion when I was Isis in my dual rôles as protector of the honored dead and as the mistress of magic, an owl when I was Hekate, keeper of the gateways between the worlds, and on and on into the very distant past, my Spirit Friend and Guide. ‘So I see,’ I replied, and I did.

 

 

The very next sunrise was accompanied by the growing smell of thunder in the air, although the sky was perfectly clear, an azure bowl of slightly hazy cerulean that extended out toward infinity, so pristine that one could imagine invisible angels on the wing so far above the Earth that their wings beat in the subtly-charged vacuum of near-Earth space, wrapped in the sheltering cocoon of the Terran magnetic field, yet still bathed in the fiery radiance of the Sun’s untempered flux of brilliant light. In fact, I could hear their shrill and longing cries to one another, and feel their unending loneliness.

Then, I felt a stirring in the air. ‘Heads up, ladies,’ I told them privately. ‘We have visitors.’

‘Zeus and his hangers-on,’ Tiamat observed. ‘I recognize their boisterous roiling of the æther.’

‘Oh, goody!’ I said. ‘Have you noticed how crowded it’s been getting up here since I started mucking about with religious figures?’

Beryl snorted aloud. ‘The wisdom of the old aphorism, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” does come rather to mind, not that I’ve ever actually seen a dog except in metaphor.’

‘Hey!’ I said indignantly. ‘they started it, both times!’

‘Only on a technicality,’ Beryl observed. ‘From Hades’ viewpoint, he had a perfect right to exercise his dominion over anyone who entered his realm, and Poseidon was enraged by your treatment of his brother.’

I glared at her. ‘We’ve had this conversation before. Hades made it my business when he… interfered with you. You can’t claim that Poseidon had the right to murder our entire party for my single act of lá¨se-majesté! Hades and Poseidon both usurped the Gods and Goddesses who came before them, and the whole sorry crew of them had evidently overthrown our friend Tiamat here, under several of her many names.’

‘Well, to be perfectly fair,’ the object of my contention chimed in cheerfully, ‘they’re all of them aspects of me, including yourselves, since I’m the divine spark in all of you. You might profitably regard this entire episode as a metaphor for social change. Almost every narrative of the Beginning of the world starts out with me, even now, under one or another of my Names, since I’m synonymous with the Deep, the starry universe itself, within which metaphorical waters all life — and thus every God and Goddess — eventually emerged.’

Harry’s brass balls, but I hated it when she pontificated. ‘The trouble is, dear Tiamat, Mother of us all, is that most of the Gods and Goddesses appear to have forgotten that untidy fact. They certainly don’t act like any sort of children one might encounter in daily life, or at least any of those one might be proud to acknowledge.’

‘Possibly, but consider your own history; your own mother was murdered by your father, was she not? Why then pretend that families aren’t complicated things, even in this earthly realm? The first families arose from nothing, with no examples to guide them, and children tend to be undisciplined without a larger culture to constrain their childish tantrums. As you yourself noted quite some time ago, we seem to have a dearth of sociopaths lately, now that you’ve eliminated almost all the local slavers.’

Well, that startled me, until I realized, ‘Are you omniscient then?’

‘Of course I am, within my purview, which covers quite a scope, since it encompasses all Creation. I’m sure you’ve noticed that a very slightly circumscribed version of the same deep knowledge attends your own duties as the High Queen of Hell. You do realize, of course, that they’ll be calling the place “Beryl” soon enough, following the example of your predecessor in the rôle.’ She seemed to find this amusing, because she laughed out loud, the sound echoing from distant hills. I frowned. In the course of my sometimes uneven career, I’ve noticed that here are few things more amusing to some people than seeing other people in embarrassing situations.

‘I’m sorry if I seemed ignorant; I’m an amateur at all this stuff.’

‘Not at all!’ she said. ‘You’re doing very well! It takes a while to regain your sense of perspective after undergoing a radical shift in your worldview, especially after surmounting what might appear to be impossible obstacles — such as, for example, rampaging Gods getting up in your face and disrespecting you.’

I was taken aback. Hadn’t she herself recently experienced just such a change of fortune when she and I together had killed Poseidon? ‘But aren’t you a free agent now? Didn’t you just tell me that you hadn’t liked being ordered around by the blustering fool?’

‘Of course I did. I enjoy being at the top of my game as much as the next woman, but these things come and go.’

‘What do you mean?’ Beryl asked.

‘I mean that this is not the first Universe I’ve created, nor will it be the last. Universes are as fragile and ephemeral as soap bubbles, mere fluctuations in the infinite expanse of all that is. Change is the only constant reality.’ She grinned, a somewhat horrifying sight if taken out of context. ‘Indras all of us.’

That last remark was truly mystifying. ‘Indras?’ I said.

‘An obscure reference to an entirely different worldview. It was an inside joke, so never mind it. As it turns out, all such worldviews are only approximate, so the details hardly ever matter.’ Without another word, she turned and swam off toward the deep waters much further offshore, then sank beneath the distant grey-blue swells.

“Harry’s Holy Hell!” I exclaimed. “She sure doesn’t waste a lot of time on being polite, does she?”

“Well, even I’ve noticed that old people tend to grow impatient with the young,” Beryl mused. “Not that we had all that much experience with aged people within the Enclaves, at least among the enlisted population and their dependents. There were too many ways to incur disciplinary punishments for relatively minor infractions that led to fatal consequences.”

“True. The only old people I ever encountered back home were either officers or officer’s wives, who tended to be impatient with their ‘inferiors’ in the best of circumstances. I’d never really thought of it as a way to cull the surplus population, because foraging tended to weed out the young men in any case, and starvation and disease usually took unmarried women when they grew too old to barter sex for food from the ranks at any rate.” I thought about that for a moment before adding, “How did we ever get so messed up in the first place, do you suppose?”

“Who knows?” Beryl shrugged. “In almost every human society, there are many who seek unfair advantage; the Reivers are — or were — just the most egregious local example, but the higher ranks of the Horticulturalists that we both sprang from weren’t immune from conspicuous excess and self-serving greed. You might as well ask, ‘What makes some people selfish and cruel whilst others are not?’ There’s a shade in our dominions, one Benito Juá¡rez, who famously said, ‘Entre los individuos, como entre las Naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.’ Of course, Emanuel Kant had much the same idea, building upon the notion of honesty and hospitality to envision a new world order, but even that’s built upon the very ancient Greek concept of ξενία, xená­a, the divine obligation to treat every visitor well.”

“ ‘And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.’ The Golden Rule, as they say.” I thought about it for a moment or two. “Looking back, it’s the foundation of every coherent human relationship and society. Pity more people haven’t realized that over the ages. We’d have had a lot less murders and general cruelty.”

“True,” she said, “but now that the Gods are walking around on Earth again, the ancient consequences prevail. Perhaps we’ll soon see a return to ancient courtesies.”

I laughed. “We’d better see a change, since we seem to be the arbiters of final consequences these days. Do you suppose we really ought to make public examples of a few jerks from time to time? That seems to have been the ancient practice, not that the old systems were without flaws, since the Gods were somehow exempt from the general obligations of host and guest, and thus tended to spread chaos and misery wherever they roamed.”

“Don’t you think that that’s rather a function of the metaphor?” Beryl asked. “If the Gods hold ultimate power over everything, doesn’t it beg the question of whether they merely dropped the ball in any particular misfortune, or was the mishap both purposeful and malicious?”

“I think we get the Gods that we deserve,” I said. “Hateful people generate savage Gods, whilst compassionate people call forth kindly Spirits from the vasty deep. It’s all a matter of predisposition on the part of any particular God’s adherents, I believe. Even our dear Tiamat, primordial Creatrix of our starry Universe and Eternal Mother of us all, was ultimately bound by the prejudices of her congregation, most of whom were caught up in a sexist patriarchal mindset that left her trapped in the rá´le of servant to a male. You’ll note that she was almost instantly freed when her then ‘Master’ was foolish enough to use her to attack a large group of women with quite the opposite opinion.”

“Speaking of which,” Beryl observed, glancing toward the near horizon, “our uninvited guests appear to be on the threshold of a capital mistake.”

“Well, let’s be sure to offer them a very warm welcome then.” We both stood quietly to wait for the roiling in the firmament just now building to resolve itself into what the perpetrators fondly imagined was an intimidating tableau vivant of lightning and thunder heralding, one supposes, the advent of Zeus and three of his sons, Ares, Hephaestus, and Appollo, his brothers Hades and Poseidon having previously ‘taken care of’ in one way or another.

We didn’t have long to wait. Right on schedule, the Heavens parted in a brilliant display, revealing a celestial host all arrayed in gold and silver armour, brandishing edged and hafted weapons of impeccable polish and sharpness, in at least two cases augmented by thunderbolts humming angrily with an excess of pent-up power. The whole crew of them, Olympians and a motley rabble of hangers-on, were black-bearded thugs with bulging muscles, the scruffy sort one might see posing around the barracks in homoerotic display, although of course acting out more intimate behaviors wasn’t tolerated in the Horticultural Forces, strictly speaking. ‘Thunderbolts?’ I thought dismissively, ‘I’ll give them thunderbolts in spades!’ Quickly, I sorted through the nearer rocks hurtling through our solar system and gave just one a little twist through space and time to appear above their heads, still travelling at orbital speeds, in this particular case around twenty-seven thousand miles an hour after a long fall in from the Oort Cloud toward the Sun. My little hunk of iron — and it was little, less than ten pounds or two — first made itself known as a sudden flash of brilliant light, then a streak of light descending from the zenith something like a slow bolt of lightning, but with considerably more power behind it. The sound of its passage caught up with it only after it impacted with a thunderous roar and a sudden rush of heat and light. Even Tiamat might have been surprised, but I was very pleased, especially by how well I’d calculated the exact balance between weight and speed to make an effective weapon that wouldn’t completely disintegrate during its impact with the upper atmosphere yet still packed just enough power to forestall any possible attack. The hostile Gods were far less pleased. Even immortal flesh doesn’t recuperate quickly after being vaporized.

“Harry’s Brass Balls!” Beryl exclaimed. “What was that?!”

“A little innovation of my own,” I said modestly. “I felt a little guilty about the notion of ‘borrowing’ thunderbolts from Tiamat’s Titans, since Zeus and his cronies were armed with the same weapon, so snatched a small bit of the perpetual rain of incoming meteoroids and trimmed up its orbit a little.” I grinned. “I feel a little like David when he faced down Goliath with a single stone, because it seems to have left our Gang of Four just a tiny bit discombobulated.” In fact, the Gang was history, together with many of their followers, already knocking at the gates of Hell in spirit form.

“I can see that,” Beryl said. “In fact, I’ve already sent most of them down to Tartarus to stew for a while, contemplating their many sins over the long millennia since their birth.” She paused, then added, “Hephaestus I felt sorry for, though, and have already granted him rebirth with a draught of Lethe. I’m sure she’ll turn out better this time, free of physical deformities and surrounded by those who will love her as she ought to have been before. That so-called Olympian ‘family’ of theirs was about as dysfunctional as a bag of rocks. I do note that we have a least a few survivors, though, so we’d best see about tending to their wounds.”

“Seems fair about Hephaestus, at least,” I agreed with her. “They treated her like dirt, and of course we can’t leave those on the outskirts of the local disaster to suffer in pain and terror.”

“Captain Topaz!”I called out. “Could you arrange a rescue party for our erstwhile foes? I don’t think that there will be any further trouble from them, since their leaders have been vanquished.” This was said as much for their benefit as ours, and indeed many took the hint and threw down their arms in tacit surrender, the only notable exceptions being those who were already hors de combat.

“Yes, Ma’am!” she said promptly, a testament to her own cool head in the face of unprecedented violence. Still, one supposes that the sight of Tiamat was quite enough to dispel any notion that today was going to be a day like any other.

“What was it exactly that you did?” Beryl asked me.

“I rounded up a nickel-iron meteoroid and brought it down to Earth to be a sign and a wonder for any who might think to attack us again.”

“ ‘Brought’ sounds much less spectacular than what you managed,” she observed drily.

“Well, you know how I do like a bit of showmanship.” I smiled at her, thinking of her own proclivities toward flamboyance.

“I do, but whatever made you think of it?”

“I’ve been cogitating on our supernova problem and wondering if I could collect enough angular momentum to simply spirit the Earth itself to somewhere far away, although there are still logistical problems to face, like how to keep warm without a Sun.”

“Couldn’t we take the Sun with us?”

I grimaced. “It’s a problem, since shifting around that much mass in our immediate stellar neighborhood is as likely to precipitate one sort of supernova or another as not. Tiamat might be able to handle it, but juggling a million balls in the air at once has never been my strongest suit. I’m much better at putting together a snazzy outfit, or telling someone what their best and most flattering colors might be.”

“Have you asked her?”

“No, but my memories of being her don’t include much in the way of either subtlety or delicate coá¶rdination. On the battlefield, she can’t be equalled, but she’s not the best dancing partner. I hesitate to bother her with silly questions in any case. We’ve already talked about the problem, and she seems perfectly content to let the world go hang and move on to the next project.”

“Whilst you have a sentimental attachment to our place of birth.”

“Exactly. Tiamat is necessarily a Goddess of Chaos, which tends to discourage fixed attachments. Whilst the Underworld may or may not have any temporal or physical extension into mundane reality, we’re essentially dependent on the world of light and air for our population, not to mention destinations for those of our many guests who move on to rebirth, so we’re heavily invested in the long-term survival of our entire œcology, to adopt Lynette’s terminology. Without a living Earth, the Underworld will eventually become a static fossil, inhabited only by shades and ghostly memories, Earth’s attic.” I changed the subject. “Hermes!” I called out. “Your presence is required!”

There was a flicker of motion from somewhere outside ordinary reality and a very fit young man appeared before us, cloaked in a white chlamys with a broad-brimmed πέτασος, the low-crowned sombrero favored by shepherds and wayfarers. He carried his herald’s staff, a simple wooden rod about seven feet in length, twined with carven serpents and crowned with wings, the symbol of his holy office. “I am here, my Dread Queen.” He bowed low.

“I see you’ve heard the news, which somehow doesn’t surprise me,” I said to him.

“Indeed, my Queen. I had the honor of escorting the former Gods to your chthonic domains, so I was naturally curious.” He bowed again, somehow including Beryl in his courtesy as well, ever the diplomat.

I rolled my eyes. Hermes was a charmer, but a rogue and a trickster from way back. Give him a few minutes and he could talk the knickers off a nun. Give him a few minutes more and he could charm the robes off a priest. “That will be quite enough of that,” I said. “I have a commission for you which may tax even your considerable skills. It’s come to my attention that the likelihood of Earth being adversely impacted by lethal radiation from distant stellar explosions makes our long-term tenancy — ‘long-term,’ in this case, being tens of millions of years or more — fairly unlikely.”

“And this is bad?” he asked. “Everything living dies eventually, which is a lucky break for those who remain, or no one would have room to turn around, much less get anything done.”

“And yet,” I said, “for purely maudlin reasons, it would be nice if some remnant remained of this world in times to come, since it’s shaped all of us, including you. There’s a difference between mere death and the utter dissolution of everything we know.”

He stared at me, as if I were talking gibberish, which I suppose I was from his viewpoint. None-the-less, I held power over him as his liege lord, however reluctant he might be to admit it. “Exactly how,” he said, “do you propose avoiding the common fate of everything living in this particular instance?”

“I thought about moving the entire solar system outside the plane of our galaxy.”

“Wouldn’t that be a little drastic? I’m sure the sky would look a little odd with half the starry vault gone missing.”

“It might, but it seems possible within the time period I have in mind, and partially emptying the sky of stars is exactly my purpose, since it’s stars that threaten us in the very long view. One or another of the poles of our Sun seem appropriate to my purpose, since increased solar emissions there would avoid impacting the Earth itself, but the current position of the Sun suggests that heading south would be the quickest journey into relatively uninhabited regions, which argues for the northern pole. It would simply be a matter of selectively enhancing and accelerating preëisting coronal mass ejections at the Sun’s north pole, much as Zeus and other thunderbolt wielders have historically concentrated the power of the electrical potential between the clouds and the earth below, but on a much grander scale. While slow, there’s no particular hurry, since it’s extremely unlikely that a local supernova will exterminate life on Earth any time within the next few million years.”

He looked puzzled. “It sounds as if you have this all worked out; so why would you need me?”

“Because moving the Sun with all its planets intact is a delicate operation, and there is no one that I know who would be better at juggling a thousand minutia at once than you.” My beauty book had had a few tips on how generally to please men, as well as a massive compendium of tricks and studied artifice in the business of looking beautiful. ‘Wheedling’ was the word they’d used to describe this particular technique, with the emphasis being on acting something like a child whilst looking like a sexually-powerful woman who wanted to flatter a man. Not that I had any actual intention of following through on my teasing provocation. It was a delicate balance between seduction and ice princess. Hey, you work with what you’ve got. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and I wanted a little enthusiasm from the people I needed to work on my behalf.

He looked very pleased with himself. “You have my word that I will do my best, dread Queen.” He bowed low in mute homage.

See, it works…. I was appropriately blandished, though not, perhaps, quite so much as he might have preferred. “I have every faith in you, my noble Herald and King of Arms. I’ll let you know when our Sophists have come up with a more inclusive plan of operations.”

Again bowing low, he took his silent leave.

I wasn’t at all displeased to see his back. Diplomacy was not my strongest suit, and there was a constant current of underlying lust and greed beneath his pretty words that creeped me out a bit. ‘Welcome to the monkey house,’ I thought to myself. “There’s an old saying,” I mused aloud, “ ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.’ ”

“Always good advice,” Beryl replied. “You don’t want to give that sort of man enough room to sneak around behind your back. He probably carries an extra dagger, or more likely two.”

 

 

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012-2014 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved