"And I will fight alongside my stepbrother," Apollo declared. "My arrows stand ready to pierce a thousand mortal breasts." He and Ares clasped fists, a sinewy display of shared philosophy.
Apollo used to be an Olympic-class archer, a toxophilite of the first rank, until he took a bribe from a betting syndicate and blew a contest he should have won easily. The scandal was hushed up but his career never hit the bullseye again.
"I'm minded to side with Athena and Dionysus on this one," said Hades. "In the thick of combat isn't a place I'm too comfortable being, and there's something rather elegantly fitting about using one of the mortals' own weapons of mass destruction against them. So much death in the space of a handful of seconds — I find the idea positively thrilling."
An embalmer by trade, Hades had been noted among his peers in the field of mortuary science for the skill and care he took over his work. With cosmetics brush and restorative wax he could render even the most unsightly corpse viewable. He prided himself on having saved many a family the distress of a closed-casket funeral. Unfortunately, it emerged that his affinity with dead bodies didn't end with smartening them up and making them look lifelike. A colleague caught him in the morgue one night, lavishing the wrong kind of attention on a recently deceased lingerie model on the slab. Vocational oblivion beckoned, but so did Xander Landesman.
"Perhaps," argued Aphrodite, "we should offer them one last chance. Set a deadline. Give them until, say, next Monday to reconsider and pull back, then if they don't comply, attack. Isn't it better to show forbearance and allow their better natures a chance to shine through?"
Aphrodite had previously been a madam running one of the most exclusive bordellos on the planet, a harem-like haven for playboys, plutocrats and princelings. Her abiding philosophy was that the relationship between prostitute and client was a sacred one, akin to true love, and in support of that, money was never mentioned on her premises. Credit cards were silently swiped and exorbitantly debited, and from there on in it was l'amour all the way. This didn't save her, though, when the inevitable police raid and prosecution for brothel keeping came. Her clients, showing anything but love, turned on her in order to protect themselves, and she had been facing a lengthy stint behind bars, until a certain arms dealer's son approached her with a tempting proposition.
"Hardly," sniffed Poseidon. "They don't have better natures, O Protectress of Births. Haven't you realised that yet? Give even an inch of ground and they'll think you're weak. Gods cannot be seen to be weak. Say the word, Zeus, and I'll capsize every warship out there."
So said a man who'd been a keen amateur yachtsman and also a shipping magnate who routinely overloaded his cargo vessels in order to maximise profits. Dozens of crewmen were lost at sea as his freighters foundered in rough weather, shipped water and sank. Eventually his avarice left him with nothing, no fleet of any kind except his own private 30-foot schooner, and when that was repossessed in order to help offset his legal defence team's costs, he knew he was going under. Xander Landesman threw him a lifeline.
"I wouldn't dismiss my wife's proposal so quickly," said Hephaestus. "Aphrodite is sensitive to what goes on in the hearts of men — "
"The hearts and the loins," Ares interjected.
"— and," Hephaestus went on, ignoring him, "she is right to hope that maybe, in this case, people will come to their senses before it is too late. However," he added, "should that not happen, I have something up my sleeve that will assist us in the conflict. Athena suggested I build this particular item, and I think, once you see it in action, you'll be impressed, both by her foresight and my dexterity."
He'd been a sculptor, an expert in metalcraft, praised for the way he could replicate the texture and flow of organic objects with inorganic materials. But as with many an artist, he was flawed, temperamental, prone to bouts of rage and depression. Like the stuff he worked with, he was either cold and inflexible or incandescently hot and dangerous. He lost friends, fell from grace, his creative fire sputtered out — and then, at the hands of the man who would be Zeus, he was forged anew in the crucible of science.
"In my view," said Demeter, "in this summer heat, we must reap when the harvest is ripe."
"And that means…?" said Apollo.
"Mortals are corn. You be the scythe."
"That's what I thought it meant."
Demeter was an ex-doctor, a member of the caring profession who grew complacent and stopped caring. Stopped caring to the extent that she neglected the patients whose health she was responsible for, especially the elderly ones. Many of them were left permanently damaged, and some even died, as a consequence of treatable conditions she'd failed to diagnose. She was struck off the medical register. Then came a chance to redeem herself.
"Demeter and I," said Hera, "see eye to eye on this, as on so many matters. Cerberus will enter the fray at my command, as will Typhon, Scylla and, it goes without saying, the Harpies. You must make the decision, my husband, but I'm sure you will make the correct one."
Hera had been a veterinarian, good with animals, but that wasn't Xander's only criterion for choosing her. She'd been married no less than four times by the age of thirty-five, always to unfaithful men, and he'd wanted someone who was familiar with the burden of the wronged wife — who even took a perverse pleasure from it.
"I am He Who Presides Over Contests," said Hermes. "If it is your will, Zeus, I shall preside over this one too, this clash between us and the mortals. Wherever you ask me to be, there shall I go."
Hermes had been Darren Pugh. His predecessor had been a getaway driver, of all things, a criminal who'd turned informant and had to go into witness protection. But Hermes the second, the replacement, was the erstwhile Darren Pugh. The elusive, slippery traitor.
Sam watched them as they debated, and superimposed over all of them was her knowledge of the people they had been, the lives they had led before Xander Landesman approached them with the tantalising prospect of godlike powers. What a sorry bunch. Losers, perverts, cheats, crooks, the lowest of the low, and Xander had taken them and elevated them to the highest of the high.
And now he was offering her the same opportunity.
"What do you say, Sam?" he had asked her in the Temple of Apotheosis, a few hours earlier.
Her immediate reply had been, "You've just described to me a dozen or so utter scumbags, and you're asking if I'd like to join them?"
"'Scumbags' they may have been, but they were also uniquely suited to the roles I'd planned for them to play. Each had the requisite characteristics, a background in tune with the abilities I intended to give him or her. Each, too, was in dire straits, at low ebb, with very limited future prospects."
"You made them an offer they couldn't refuse."
" Wouldn't refuse. It had to be consensual. Otherwise the indoctrination wouldn't take. No form of hypnosis can make a subject do something he or she wouldn't do naturally. That's another movie canard, the idea of the mesmerised victim becoming an assassin or whatever. My Olympians couldn't behave as they do if it wasn't already inherent in their psychologies. Athena's ruthless streak is that of the boardroom schemer she used to be. Ares's warrior aggression has been there since his soldiering days."
"Did they know, going in, that they would be losing all memory of their old selves?"
"It was made crystal clear to them that I would be rewriting their conscious minds, erasing their pasts so that they would know nothing about themselves other than that they were gods. All of them were happy with that. It was, I feel, one of the great attractions of the procedure for them. They'd all done things they weren't at ease with, things that had earned them opprobrium and shame. I was giving them the opportunity to start again, afresh, all sins forgotten, like a religious rebirth. That and supranormal powers — an irresistible combination."