Achilles rounds on the limping god. “Where are our people? What have you and the other immortals done with them?”
The Artificer holds both palms high. “It wasn’t our doing, son of Peleus. Not even great Zeus’s. Some other force emptied out this Earth, not us. We Olympian gods need our worshipers. Living without our mortal grovelers, idolators, and altar-builders would be like narcissists—and I know Narcissus well—living in a world without mirrored surfaces. This wasn’t our deed.”
“You expect me to believe there are other gods?” asks Achilles, sword still half-raised.
“Big fleas have little fleas, and little fleas have littler fleas to bite ‘em, and littler fleas have even smaller fleas, and so on ad infinitum, or some doggerel like that,” says the bearded immortal.
“Be silent,” says Achilles. He pats the now actively chewing dog on the head one last time and turns his back on Hephaestus.
They pass through the vestibule into the main hall—the throne room as it were—where Achilles had been received years earlier by Odysseus and his wife Penelope. Odysseus’ son Telemachus had been a shy boy of six then, barely up to the task of bowing to the assembled Myrmidons and then hurriedly being led away by his nurse. The throne room is now empty.
Hephaestus is consulting one of his instrument-boxes. “This way,” he says, leading Achilles from the throne room back across the brightly frescoed vestibule to a longer, darker room. It is the banquet hall, dominated by a low table thirty feet long.
Zeus is sprawled supine on the table, his arms and legs thrown akimbo. He is naked and he is snoring. The banquet hall is a mess—cups, bowls, and utensils thrown everywhere, arrows spilled out all over the floor from where a great quiver had fallen from the wall, another wall missing a tapestry that was bunched up under the snoring Father of the Gods.
“It’s Absolute Sleep, all right,” grumbles Hephaestus.
“It sounds like it,” says Achilles. “I’m surprised the timbers don’t collapse from the snores and snorts.” The mankiller is stepping carefully over the heads of barbed arrows that are scattered on the floor. Although few Greek warriors admit it, most use deadly substances for poison on their speartips and arrowheads, and the only thing Achilles, son of Peleus, knows from the Oracle’s and his mother Thetis’s predictions of his own death is that a poisoned arrowhead piercing the only mortal part of his body will be the cause of his demise. But neither his immortal mother nor the Fates had ever told him exactly where or when he will die, or who will fire the deadly arrow. It would be too absurdly ironic, Achilles thinks now, to prick a toe on one of Odysseus’ ancient fallen arrows and die in agony even before he can waken Zeus to demand that Penthesilea be saved.
“No, I mean Absolute Sleep was the fucking drug Hera used to knock him out,” says the Artificer. “It was a potion I helped develop into aerosol form, although Nyx was the original chemist.”
“Can you wake him?”
“Oh, I think so, yes, yes, I think so,” says Hephaestus, pulling small bags and boxes off the ribbons laced to his leather vest and harnesses, peering into the boxes, rejecting some things, setting other vials and small devices on the tapestry-rumpled table next to Zeus’s giant thigh.
While the bearded dwarf-god fusses and assembles things, Achilles takes his first close-up gaze at Zeus the Father of All Gods and Men, He Who Marshals the Storm Clouds.
Zeus is fifteen feet tall, impressive even as he sprawls on his back, spraddle-legged on the tapestry and table, heavily muscled and perfectly formed, even his beard oiled into perfect curls, but other than the minor matters of size and physical perfection, he is just a big man who has enjoyed a great fuck and gone to sleep. The divine penis—almost as long as Achilles’ sword—still lies swollen, pink, and flaccid on the Lord God’s oily divine thigh. The God Who Gathers Storms is snoring and drooling like a pig.
“This should wake him up,” says Hephaestus. He holds up a syringe—something Achilles has never seen before—ending in a needle more than a foot long.
“By the gods!” cries Achilles. “Are you going to stick that into Father Zeus?”
“Straight into his lying, lusting heart,” says Hephaestus with a nasty cackle. “This is one thousand cc’s of pure divine adrenaline mixed with my own little recipe of various amphetamines—the only antidote to Absolute Sleep.”
“What will he do when he wakes?” asks Achilles, pulling his shield in front of him.
Hephaestus shrugs. “I’m not going to hang around to find out. I’m QTing out of here the second I inject this cocktail. Zeus’s response to being wakened with a needle in his heart is your problem, son of Peleus.”
Achilles grabs the dwarf-god by the beard and pulls him closer. “Oh, I guarantee it will be our problem if it is a problem, Crippled Artificer.”
“What do you want me to do, mortal? Wait here and hold your hand? It was your fucking idea to wake him up.”
“It’s also in your interest to awaken Zeus, god of one short leg,” says Achilles, not relinquishing his grip on the immortal’s beard.
“How so?” Hephaestus squints out of his good eye.
“You help me with this,” whispers Achilles, leaning closer to the grungy god’s misshapen ear, “and in a week it could be you who sits on the golden throne in the Hall of the Gods, not Zeus.”
“How can that be?” asks Hephaestus, but he is also whispering now. He still squints, but suddenly there is an eagerness in that squinting.
Still whispering, still holding Hephaestus’s beard in his fist, Achilles tells the Artificer his plan.
Zeus awakens with a roar.
As good as his word, Hephaestus has fled the instant he injected the adrenaline into the Father of the Gods’ heart, pausing only to pull the long needle free and fling the syringe from him. Three seconds later Zeus sits up, roars so loudly that Achilles has to clasp his hands over his ears, and then the Father leaps to his feet, overturns the thirty-foot-long heavy wooden table, and smashes out the entire south wall of Odysseus’ house.
“HERA!!!!” booms Zeus. “GOD DAMN YOU!”
Achilles forces himself not to cringe and cower, but he does step back while Zeus rips out the last of the wall, uses a timber to smash the overhanging chariot-wheel candle-chandelier to a thousand pieces, destroys the heavy, tumbled table with one smash of his giant fist, and paces wildly back and forth.
Finally the Father of All Gods seems to notice Achilles standing in the doorway to the vestibule. “YOU!”
“Me,” agrees Achilles, son of Peleus. His sword is in its belt loop, his shield politely strapped over his shoulder rather than on his forearm. His hands are empty and open. The god-killing long knife that Athena had given him for use in murdering Aphrodite is in his broad belt, but out of sight.
“What are you doing on Olympos?” growls Zeus. He is still naked. He holds his forehead with his huge left hand and Achilles can see the headache pain throbbing through Zeus the Father’s bloodshot eyes. Evidently Absolute Sleep leaves a hangover.
“You are not on Olympos, Lord Zeus,” Achilles says softly. “You’re on the isle of Ithaca—under a golden cloud of concealment—in the banquet hall of Odysseus, son of Laertes.”
Zeus squints around him. Then he frowns more deeply. Finally he looks down on Achilles once again, “How long have I been asleep, mortal?”
“Two weeks, Father,” says Achilles.
“You, Argive, fleet-footed mankiller, you couldn’t have awakened me here from whatever potion-charm white-armed Hera used to drug me. Which god revived me and why?”
“O Zeus Who Marshals the Thunderheads,” says Achilles, lowering his head and eyes almost meekly, as he has seen the meek do so many times, “I will tell you all you seek to know—and it is true that while most of the immortals on Olympos abandoned you, at least one god remained your loyal servant—but first I must ask for a boon.”