Tom Holt (36 page)

'We'd better get it back from him quick,' Prometheus said.

'By
we
...'

'Don't stand there arguing the toss. Get the bloody thing.'

Jason shrugged and reached for the surface-to-air scotch egg. It shied away. Jason started to protest, and Prometheus apologised. 'What are you up to, though?' he added.

'Canine psychology,' Jason replied. 'I'll also need a Bakewell tart and some sausages.'

These were provided and Jason wandered over to the boulder, sat down and started to eat. A moment later, the dog was sitting beside him giving him that wistful, pathetic look that all dogs seem to have in common. Then it opened its mouth to make the quintessential doggy hopeful panting noise, and of course the Betamax world rolled out of its jaws and trundled along the ground. Prometheus swooped down, picked it up and shoved it inside the front of his robe. Jason popped a foodstuff into each of the three sets of jaws, collected the Betamax world and let fly.

For the record, the Betamax world didn't leave the space/time continuum at all. The friction it encountered on leaving the Earth's atmosphere set it alight and it soon degenerated into a comet; given its unique genesis, however, it did not behave exactly as other comets do; that is to say, it combined the regularity of trajectory which is a characteristic of comets with the innate cussedness of all divine or semi-divine artefacts. For the rest of time, therefore, it circled through the galaxy, turning up with remorseless regularity exactly when it was least expected.

In any event, it ceased to be a Betamax world, and that was just as well. Because no sooner had it left Jason's hand than the sky darkened and the sun made a dash for the safety of a dense cloudbank, pausing only to glint significantly on the speartips of the vanguard of a huge divine army making its way rapidly towards the surface of the planet.

Religious revivals have been endemic on the Number One World ever since the gods retired and went to live in the sun. Nobody is exactly sure why. One view is that mankind has a desperate need to believe in something, preferably something so blatantly absurd that only blind, unquestioning faith will suffice -- for example, the belief which sprang up in the late nineteenth century and was still widely current in Jason Derry's time and which held that human beings were not in fact created at all but were somehow the descendants of bald, mutant monkeys. The other view is that there is never anything much on television during the summer.

Never, though, has there been a religious revival as sudden and as widespread as the one which followed Apollo's first broadcast to the world. Perhaps it was simply his magnetic charisma -- Apollo, after all, looked like a young Greek god,* had a particularly appealing smile and a way of looking into the camera as if it had been the camera he had been searching for all these years -- or perhaps it was simply the fact that what he was saying happened to be true. In any event, no sooner had he left the studio and wandered out into the carpark to reclaim his chariot than the entire world suddenly decided that it had seen the light. Those who had seen the broadcast immediately went and told those who hadn't and (being human) threatened to burn them alive if they didn't join in. So quickly, in fact, did the revival gather momentum that half an hour after the broadcast not only was there a High Priest of Durham but he was on TV asking for money.

Another aspect of this revival that made it different from most of its predecessors was the fact that although the gods were now universally believed in and revered, they were also intensely unpopular. Apollo had not pulled his punches. He had made it perfectly clear that the gods were not cuddly.

There had, of course, been religious protest groups before -- one thinks automatically of the Guild of Merchant Plasterers Against the Crucifixion which enjoyed a brief prominence during the English Civil War -- but none of them had expressly set out to believe the gods into oblivion. That, however, was what Apollo had achieved, simply by stating that it was ordained that if Mankind truly had faith, the gods would not be able to achieve their intended purpose. There was an oracle in precisely those terms, he had said. Which was, of course, perfectly true; as the god of prophecies he had seen to it personally.

*He was a young Greek god, which helped.

The eagle came swooping back just as he had got the winged horse back into the traces of the chariot.

'Well?' Apollo asked.

'Absolutely,' the eagle replied. She had been sent to check that the broadcast had achieved the desired effect, and had just flown round the world in thirty-seven seconds. 'It's worked like a charm.'

'Are you sure?'

'No problems,' replied the eagle. 'Everybody singing hymns and sacrificing like it was going out of fashion. If I was a white ram right now, I'd be very scared indeed.'

'Fine.' Apollo replied. 'Look, do you have to do that?'

'Do what?'

'Sharpen your beak against my spoiler. I've only just had this chariot resprayed, and...'

'Sorry,' said the eagle. 'Would it help if I assumed human form?'

Apollo remembered that he had seen the eagle in human form not long ago. 'Yes,' he said. 'Why not?'

The eagle became Mary, and sat in the passenger seat of the chariot. She adjusted the rear-view mirror and examined herself in it.

'The trouble with being an eagle,' she said at last, 'is, it does terrible things to your skin. Dries it out. It'll take three days in a mud-pack to get rid of these lines.'

'What's going to happen now?' Apollo asked. Mary looked at him and giggled.

'I don't know, do I?' she said. 'Who do you think I am, God almighty?'

Apollo frowned irritably. 'You seemed to have a pretty good idea just now,' he said, 'when you were telling me what to do. If this is some kind of practical joke...'

Mary assured him that it wasn't. 'If it was a joke,' she said, 'the last thing it would be would be practical. No, I know what should happen now, of course, but there are no guarantees.'

'What should happen, then?'

'Jupiter,' Mary said, 'should set out to destroy the Earth. Halfway down, he will be met with a surge of faith in an essentially non-violent, ecologically aware carbon copy of himself who wouldn't willingly uproot a dandelion if there was any way of avoiding it. All this faith will get right up his spine and he'll be forced to pigeonhole the entire project.'

'Fine.'

Well, up to a point fine,' said Mary, powdering her nose. 'The difficulty will be that he'll be very much aware that he wants to demolish the earth but can't, and this may make him resentful. And from what I can remember of the faith mechanics I learnt at college, there's nothing to stop him taking it out on someone in a big way, just so long as that person doesn't happen to be a planet. If I were you,' she concluded, closing her powder compact with a snap, 'I'd be distinctly edgy.'

'Me?'

'You,' said Mary. 'I don't want to worry you, but you are directly responsible for thwarting him. He should be arriving any time now.'

Apollo looked up at the sky; there was a thick bank of black cloud moving in from the east, and another from the west. Although he wasn't to know it, there was in fact another contingent trying to get in from the north, but it had got held up in a contraflow system over Finland.

'What can I do?' he said.

'Try and be dignified about it,' Mary replied. 'Well, it's been nice. Ciao.'

'Hold on,' Apollo said, grabbing her by the wrist.

'Oh, don't let's start all that again.'

Apollo blushed furiously. 'I didn't mean that,' he said. 'I mean, you've got me into this, now you'd better...'

'Nothing to do with me,' Mary said, 'Gods have free will, remember. And now I really do have to be going.'

'Where?'

'To meet the others. Prometheus and Gelos and the Derry kid. So if you'll just stop crushing my wrist for a moment, I'll be getting along.'

'Let me give you a lift,' Apollo said.

Actually, said a tiny voice at the back of Mary's mind, in a part of her brain that she had recently only used for operating some semi-redundant feathers on her left wing, he's quite good-looking, in a way. For a god. Nice smile.

'All right, she said. 'Head for the Caucasus.'

'Why?'

'That's where the others are. Come on, hurry up.'

'We'll be safe there?'

Mary considered this for a moment. 'I always think safe is such a terribly subjective word, don't you?'

'What word would you choose, then?'

'Conveniently-situated.'

'Oh.' Apollo hesitated, his hand on the ignition key. The starter motor system had been one of the trickiest parts of the whole conversion job, and Vulcan had finally managed it by wiring the starter motor up to an electrode fitted to the lead horse's rump. When you turned the key, it gave the horse a severe electric shock. Being a divine horse, it was supposed to understand by that that the driver wanted to be taken somewhere; but even divine horses can only stand so much of that sort of thing before they start lashing out with their hind legs. Fortunately for his peace of mind, Apollo wasn't mechanically minded and hadn't yet considered how the thing worked. 'Conveniently situated for what?'

'For a good view of the battle of course.'

Apollo was firmly of the opinion that the best view of a battle in which Jupiter was on the opposing or less friendly side was from the other side of space and, if possible, time, and said so. Mary replied by taking what later turned out to be a small sacrificial dagger from her handbag and pressing it, not unkindly, into the small of Apollo's back.

'I'm hijacking this chariot to the Caucasus,' she said. 'You know you're immortal but maybe I'm not convinced. Shall we go now?'

'I...' Apollo considered for a moment and then turned the ignition key. 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' he asked.

'Yes,' Mary replied confidently. She was by inclination a truthful person, so it was for the best, she reckoned, that he hadn't asked her if what she was doing was sensible or not.

One of the leading drawbacks to travelling to battle in the heart of an inky black thundercloud is that you get very wet indeed. If you are carrying an ample supply of lightning bolts, there is also the risk of a serious short-circuit. Jupiter was therefore not at his most affable during the journey from the sun to Earth. The Captain of Spectral Warriors who had interrupted his light lunch with an enquiry about the possibility of overtime payments for the Forces of Darkness (it being daytime) and who was now buzzing sadly along behind the Host in the shape of a small bee, was generally considered to have got away with it lightly.

Minerva, as Officer i/c Destruction, North-western Sector, was sitting in her winged-dragon-propelled mobile command centre studying a confused bundle of maps and a dog-eared copy of Baedeker when Mars knocked tentatively at the door and stepped in.

'Well, Ma, what is it now?' Minerva took off her glasses and looked at him sourly. She tended to be impatient with failures, and the fact that after the previous debacle Mars had been temporarily suspended from his duties at War and put in charge of Troop Welfare and Entertainment made her less ready to waste valuable time on him than she would otherwise have been, which was not very. 'If you want me to sing in the Camp Concert, I'm afraid I'm far too busy.'

Mars, who had heard Minerva sing, assured her that he quite understood. 'No,' he said, 'what I really wanted was a quiet word about what's going to happen when we destroy the world.'

'We've been into that already,' Minerva said. 'And I do take your point, but there it is. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.'

'I don't want a bloody omelette, Mm.' Mars gave her a despairing look. 'For crying out loud, we're all going to die in about twenty minutes and nobody seems to care a damn. What's got into you all?'

'We're trying not to think about it,' Minerva replied, putting her spectacles back on and returning to her paperwork. 'I can only recommend that you try to do the same. Close the door after you, please.'

On his way back to the Welfare Office, Mars met Diana. She had been given the post of Annihilation Liaison Officer, and she had been going round the army trying to find Out what it meant.

'I don't know,' Mars replied when she asked him. 'I don't particularly want to find out, either. The whole point about knowledge, I always thought, was that you find something out and then you remember it for the rest of your life. In the circumstances it all seems rather pointless, don't you think?'

Diana ignored him. 'I'm a bit worried about Pol,' she said.

'Pol?' Mars stared. 'You're worried about Apollo?'

'Well, he is my brother,' Diana replied defensively. 'I'm just hoping he's going to be all right.'

'How can he be all right?' Mars shouted. 'He's going to die in just under fifteen minutes, according to the schedule. So are the rest of us.'

'All right, yes, you needn't go on about it,' Diana replied. 'What I mean is, is he going to be all right till then?'

Mars left her and wandered off in search of the Officers' Mess. In his opinion, the description fitted the entire enterprise, but the part of it he was interested in was the small, tastefully furnished area selling intoxicants.