Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Thirteen Preëmptive Strike

 

 

All is fair in love and war.

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

 

Stepping into Gumball’s open mouth was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, a leap of faith into an unknown future, but of course my whole career since leaving The Castle — my childhood home — in disgrace had been comprised of similar high-stakes wagers, and this was something that had to be undertaken by someone, and who better than me? In the first place I’d been swallowed up by Gumball before, so I knew roughly what to expect, but — most importantly — I didn’t really think that anyone else had the sang froid to pull it off.

I took a good look around at the piney woods around me. It was a beautiful sunny day, with a quiet sough of wind from off the distant sea that took the edge off the heat, but didn’t blow my hair around. ‘Perfect!’ I thought, as Gumball swallowed me and a stygian darkness pressed in on me, not welcomed, but at least familiar.

It actually wasn’t quite as bad as it had been when first he’d engulfed me, because Gumball had been in a bit of a hurry at the time, so I didn’t suffer the indignity of being tumbled around with half a ton of dirt, but it wasn’t pleasant either. I’d told him to dive down as deeply as he could — for purely symbolic reasons — so hypoxia soon had me gasping for breath, but of course there was no air to be had, clasped tight in Gumball’s keeping, well away from the regions of oxygen and sunlight. I began to feel a little queer, so I held the image of Death in mind as my soul left my body behind, fully prepared to offer my peculiar blessings to all and sundry.…

…It was just as Beryl had described it, the sudden rush, the ravishment, being caught up by a violent man of incredible power, a fell God hooded in darkness and cloaked by endless Night. Hades, in very fact, arrogant and cruel in the still heart of his shadowy dominion, just as Beryl had described, but I wasn’t nearly as overawed, having been forewarned as to his nature. He pressed against me, obviously intent upon claiming me as his very own, the filthy bugger.

“You’re mine!” he shouted in triumph, his voice a basso profondo so deep that it made my teeth ache, and his lecherous tone made his lascivious intentions fairly clear, so my suspicions about his predacious nature seemed more than justified.

“Fat chance, you musclebound asshole!” I shouted, slapping him on the forehead with Trump Five, The Chariot, from the Golden Tarot, an armored woman with a white staff and wearing a royal crown, a Warrior Queen — Boadicea? It was she who led the last great uprising of the Celts against their Roman conquerors. The name means ‘Victory!’ but hers was only a moral victory in that she wasn’t quite defeated, but then she hadn’t had nearly my own advantages of preternatural strength and speed — perfectly balanced upon a stone pedestal drawn freely through a rushing torrent by a pair of swans. True leadership and power is earned, not taken by force, and all physical movement is paradoxical, an illusion reïnforced by our quaint belief that the Earth itself is at the center of the Universe when, in very fact, any ‘center’ is exactly as real — or unreal — as any other. The only reality that truly exists is that which lies within, and the only actor with the power to change that reality is yourself, so I was in complete control of the situation and I promptly did something which startled him; I pulled him toward me with force majeure, then kissed him, putting plenty of spit in it, swabbing his mouth with my tongue. Feh! It was very clear to me that this particular God wasn’t at all fastidious in his oral hygiene, but I hadn’t kissed him because I was growing fond of the nasty bastard; I kissed him as an invasive assault on his personal integrity, because I knew what my physical kisses did to those I kissed, having seen the inevitable progression of the infection I’d discovered and promulgated many times before, although of course this kiss was metaphorical. As above, so below, as Hermes Trismegistus once observed, and one could hardly find a below as deeply-rooted as this one. He wasn’t the slightest bit aware of the fact that he’d already been defeated, and kissing women didn’t seem to be any part of the ancient Greek social context, since he seemed to be taken slightly aback. It seemed unlikely — all in all — that he thought anything more about it at all than as the silly sentimentality of a mere female, if he could even be described as having thought at all, the musclebound twit. ‘The more fool, then, was he, since I had a thousand potent symbols in my arsenal, and he’d just led with his cock, rarely a shrewd wager in any world, much less in the psychic realm, because it hadn’t impressed me at all.’ He’d thought to rape me, but in fact I was raping him, stripping him of every vestige of masculine power, intent upon leaving him as naked as a newborn babe, and just as vulnerable.

He faltered slightly in his pathetic attempt to overcome my now negligent resistance, and I mocked him, “What’s the matter, Limp-Dick? Can’t get it up? What is it with all you Greek Gods anyway? Whilst it’s clear that you do seem to be male — sort of — what with the black beard and all, you’ve all got puny little ‘packages’ like six-year-old boys. Or maybe that’s because those tiny boy-pricks are so enticing, is that it? Does your mouth just water, thinking about those cute little boy buns?”

He gave an incoherent roar of rage, redoubling his efforts, but failed to move me one whit.

I smacked him then with Trump Three, The Empress, an archetype of Gaia — or Ceres to use the Roman name — crowned with wheat and surrounded by symbols of fertility, without which primal fecundity life would vanish from the Earth, and in which context males were merely a belated afterthought, now both made redundant by my fortuitous discovery and exemplified in my own pregnant body. I held up another card to mock him. “You’ll notice” I taunted him again, “that Trump Four, The Emperor to match his true sovereign, is a fat old man sitting alone in a stone prison, his only access to the outside world a tiny window through which he couldn’t possibly squeeze his own fat belly, and even that small temptation to engage the world is guarded by a bird that looks suspiciously like a vulture, a carrion-feeder that preys on corpses… Oh! Wait! I’m so sorry! That’s you! isn’t it? And the regal lion at your feet just happens to look like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, yet another fairytale about overblown male humbugs and frauds! All the real power in Oz was held by women, of course, whether for good or ill, and I’ve just ‘Ozified’ this ossified ‘man cave’ with a bevy of fecund beauties.” This was not an idle boast, of course, since through Hades I’d infected the essential core of his former realm. ‘As above, so below.’

I felt him hesitate and instantly played Trump Eight, my own personal Significator, Strength, in this incarnation of the universal Tarot a seated woman whose servant — a mounted knight on a charger — is behind her, deferential and subject to both her temporal and spiritual power — as shown by the lion in her lap and the infinity symbol above her head — yet is herself untouched by any sort of male domination, metaphorically depicted by the shield on the lion’s back, which is also centered on her womb and private parts by symbolic proxy. “You’re soon to be my handmaiden, little Hadesette,” I said forcefully, willing his final transubstantiation through the psychic correspondence of my transformative kiss. ‘As above, so below!’ I thought. “The golden dawn is upon you, Άιδα Θεᾱ, and you stand revealed as what you are now, a young girl with at least the possibility of atoning for your many crimes through service to your rightful Queen!” I showed my last Trump, Twenty-One, The World, a woman grown to power, sheltering all humanity under her scarlet cloak, in her hand the arrow of truth which pierces through hypocrisy and false seemings. Of a sudden, our shadowy Queendom was invaded by a sourceless light which permeated all of that secret space and left no darkness behind wherein nothing evil might lie hidden. It wasn’t at all as gloomy as it had been, but I thought a little vegetation might go a long way to making the place seem more inviting, so with a wave of my feathered sceptre — very nearly the same sort of broadhead arrow which had made short work of the flower of French Chivalry at Agincourt — I made it so, transforming the stony castle keep into an annex of the Elysian Fields. “If you’re a very good girl in future, I might let you serve me in other ways, but for now you’ll bear a miraculous child from your newly-virgin body, an heir to carry forth your lineage of light and love when I release you to rebirth.” Hey, it might seem cruel — and was certainly a sneaky trick to play — but what better way to convey his… her new rôle as he transcended the now-outmoded sexist Greek scheme of things? I expected that it might take some time for my New World Order to trickle down to every field and byway, although I made a mental note to tackle Ares and Zeus sometime soon. From the sorry example that the former Hades had set — supposedly the fiercest warrior amongst the Olympians during the Titanomachy — the other two brothers ought to be pushovers, although of course those two might pull the trigger on themselves, as both were notorious philanderers, and the new and improved Hades — as one of my progeny — was far more than passing beautiful, and exquisitely infectious. If mere Helen’s face had launched a thousand ships, almost any of my girls could easily commence the Ragnarök, much less Hades, with whom I’d taken special care. She was my personal pìece de résistance, a woman for whom the Gods themselves would quarrel.

I looked around me, well pleased with all my workings. “Gumball!” I said quietly, “take me home!”

When he arrived, he looked a lot like Cerberus, having evidently picked up a few bad habits during our joint descent into the Underworld. “Gumball!” I chided him, “Don’t be like that! You’ll scare the children!”

I swear he pouted, and I have to admit that it was easier to read his mood as a sort-of dog than it had ever been as his own sweet self, so I reassured him. “Oh, Sweetie, you can be a hell-hound whenever you like, as long as it’s in battle and the babies are all safely tucked away, but wouldn’t you really rather be a dragon?” I held the mental image of a dragon in my mind, an Imperial five-toed dragon, of course, with golden armored scales and lovely wings, so he tried it on for size, instantly rising toward the stone skies above us before swooping back down in a rush of divine wind and fire. He was obviously very pleased with himself.

“Now, isn’t that lots better than being a silly dog?” I asked, and he roared his agreement. If I’d been corporeal at the time, I might actually have been singed, although it was rather spectacular, so I blinked.

“Then let’s go back up into the light. We’ll have lots of time to play down here, since I obviously have new responsibilities now, but my first duty is to my baby, and I don’t want to injure her through lack of oxygen.” That was a little bit of a copout, of course, since we’d spent zero biological time since I’d left my body behind in existential stasis. I could have spent a hundred spiritual years tidying up the place without a single heartbeat ticking by within my living body. Come to think of it, if ichor now flowed through my symbolic arteries and veins, did immortality cross the placental barrier? I couldn’t think why it wouldn’t, since Castor and Pollux had managed to inherit based upon the status of their different fathers, despite being ‘twins,’ born at the same time to one mother who’d been impregnated by two males, one mortal and one divine, within moments of one another, but Leda, their mother, was mortal. Then again, Selene’s daughters by Endymion were all immortal, as far as I could remember, despite the father’s ambiguous status, and if immortality were only inherited based upon paternity, I’d have none of it, and wouldn’t allow any such blatant sexism within my dominions, at very least. Beryl and I would have to be especially thoughtful, when choosing our baby’s name, since she’d have to live with it for a very long time.

 

 

Beryl was waiting for me when I reëmerged into the open air, of course, obviously having noticed that I’d been busy turning her subterranean empire upside down. “Where the Hell have you been?” she said, although ‘said’ might be a trifle understated. ‘Screamed’ might actually have been the better word.

I took some time to look around, filling my eyes with the world, the sky, with her dear — but furious — visage. “Funny you should mention that,” I said archly, the ghost of a smile playing across my luscious lips, now somewhat improved upon through my recent ascension to divinity. “I’ve been busy harrowing Hell, of course, as I’m sure you know, so I assume the question was merely rhetorical.” I did mention that sang froid was my particular speciality, didn’t I? “And your precise point was?”

“What on Earth were you doing endangering the baby like that?” she screamed again, evidently having not quite given up on the notion of overawing me.

I was in no mood to be intimidated. “In the first place,” I said calmly, filled with infinite compassion and benevolence, “there was no particular danger, and you may have noticed that this baby of ours has two mothers, despite the fact that I seem to have taken on the job of actually carrying it, yet I haven’t seen you holding back from any putative ‘dangers’ thus far. We’re both of us soldiers, for Harry’s sake. What’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the other goose, as far as I’m concerned, so don’t be silly.” I may have been a tiny bit irritated after all, now that I actually thought about it. Blame my hormones.

“But what did you do?” she shouted, one step down from screaming, which was an improvement, at least.

“Just what I said I’d do,” I answered, feeling quite pleased with myself, despite her annoying cavil. “I snipped his little balls, and little was the operative word, if you know what I mean, which I was surprised to notice, since I’d been given quite the opposite impression by someone I know. None-the-less, if anyone is going to be ‘messing’ with you, it’s going to be me, or we can go our separate ways. I was getting a little tired of hearing you boast about how über-masculine that overbearing macho twit was, in any case. It was, I think, in extremely poor taste, especially considering as how I’m now your Consort and Co-Queen. Lèse majesté works both ways, you know.”

“What do you mean,” she said, her eyebrows narrowed.

“According to the Olympian rules,” I explained, “whomever knocks the head honcho off his throne generally replaces him, a sort of ‘winner-takes-all’ strategy that eliminates all that messy business of campaigning and free elections. I may not have been ‘chosen,’ as you so delicately put it — although I do admit that he tried to force the issue — but I decided to choose myself, which is just as good, as it turns out, and allowed me to ignore his halitosis and many other distasteful personal traits completely. Hades himself won the rulership of the Underworld in a game of pick-up-sticks after he and his fellow Olympian Gods had bumped off their Titanic predecessors, so he can hardly complain, not that ‘hard’ is at all likely to come to mind when she is mentioned in future,” I mused with pointed irony, then smiled benignly, my hands resting on my distended belly like a pregnant Gioconda.

Beryl stood gaping, her lips trembling with words unspoken, until she finally said, “I see that I underestimated you.”

“You have,” I agreed, agreeably. “I sincerely hope that it doesn’t become a habit.”

“Aren’t you worried about the other Gods?” she asked suspiciously.

“Not a bit,” I said, sanguine. “If they have any sense, they’ll stay out of my way. If not, Olympus can always use another couple of Goddesses, and the rest of the world’s religions will eventually either toe our mark or go down into oblivion. When I supplanted Hades, I drank down his immortality, just as he and his fellow Olympians had cannibalized the powers of the Gods who came before them, in an ancient cycle of vampiric regicide that’s probably been going on for half a million years or more. You can’t stop progress, and the Underworld is already looking lots better than it was before I took over. Quite frankly, Hades had let the place go to hell and gone. I’ve already had many heartfelt professions of gratitude from the unfortunate denizens of Tartarus since I put in the pool tables and an exercise yard. They may have been wicked, but that’s no particular reason to be inhumane. People change, and perhaps they’ll be more likely to change for the good in a nicer environment. My only real worry is the next set of Gods who come along, since the current versions are wimps, as far as I can see.”

“What do you mean?” she asked me again, although I’d never known her to be slow on the uptake. I reckoned that her sojourn underground had been harder on her that she’d let on. I deeply sympathized.

“There’s been a huge turnover problem in the God business historically, with old versions being supplanted by ‘new and improved’ revisions every few thousand years. The old Gods had only human support to prop them up, though, and never all that many of them, since there were dozens of competitors who had to share out the merely human ‘True Believers’ between them. In my case — and yours, of course, now I’ve changed the paradigm — we have the plants believing in us these days as saviours as well as avenging angels, and the relative difference between our populations is so great that the total number of human beings still alive on Earth are little more than a rounding error. Gumball quite enjoys being my dragon in his off hours, so I’m sure he’ll tell all his friends, who will, of course, tell theirs, and pretty soon we’ll all have green dragons flying around in our subconsciouses.”

“But what exactly do you mean by that extraordinary claim?” she asked again, which I thought was less than gracious, since I’d believed her story from the outset, or at least I did when it gradually transformed from dream into recollection in her mind, or maybe it was the other way around, until I’d changed from dream to memory.

“Watch this!” I said, then addressed the world at large. “Gumball, would you mind fetching me a few of our loyal goblins, please?”

About three seconds later, Gumball positively flew from the untouched soil before us and spat out three green goblins, none the worse for wear, who promptly kowtowed, and stayed there prostrate on the ground.

“Q…E…D?” I asked.

“Point taken,” she said, still puzzled, but getting there.

 

 

Beryl was still ticked off at me, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t because I’d managed to transmogrify her quondam boy-toy into the broadly-defined opposite. She was quite a bit more conservative than I had ever been, and so resisted change of almost any sort, and here I’d gone and turned the afterlife she’d just discovered straight upside down. ‘It’s those pesky “eternal verities” that are getting in her way,’ I thought. ‘Gods and Goddesses had probably rarely entered her thoughts before I’d come along — Horticulturist society was far too pragmatic, since we’d lived with mortal danger almost every day, which tends to reduce the scope of one’s concentration most wonderfully. There used to be a saying, that there were no atheists in foxholes, but the corollary was, of course, that there were no churches in them either, and very few philosophers — but we’d been so very busy overturning so very many cultural icons that my messing with the spiritual realm just might have seemed like some sort of tipping point.’ “Look, Cuisle mo Chroí, I’m sorry,” I said.

She sniffed — the slightly more subtle equivalent of a raucous raspberry — and answered succinctly, “Go to Hell!”

“No, thanks, Sweetie. I’ve been there, and done that, as they say, but surely you realize that I wouldn’t have done it at all if you hadn’t been taunting me about your wonderful experiences down there. It pissed me off, since it attacked me in a manner for which I had no possible response, and it assumed an aura of heterosexist privilege which was both demeaning and offensive.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you do almost the exact same thing from time to time!” she shouted at me, causing heads to turn amongst the nearest troops.

“I don’t see how I could,” I said more quietly, taken aback by her unexpected vehemence.

“Not one of us were asked if we wanted to join your little army, were we?!” she started to say forcefully, then lowered her voice mid-sentence, suddenly more aware of our nearby listeners.

I thought about that, considering both the inaccuracy of her heated characterization and her obvious passion, before I answered. “As I recall, Beryl, you and your then-misguided and belligerent companions were trying to destroy my little farmstead at the time, and would have killed me if I’d given you the slightest opportunity. In point of fact, at least two of your number did try to kill me, and were dissuaded only because they couldn’t prevail against me in hand-to-hand combat. I thought I showed remarkable forbearance and compassion, taking all in all, when I could just as easily have killed your entire entourage, in which case we probably wouldn’t be having this tiresome conversation. Please do let me know if you would have preferred death, but I far prefer you alive.” I rolled my eyes, just a bit disheartened, but I couldn’t help it. People do get worked up about the damnedest stuff from time to time.

“Don’t be silly, Sapphire,” she said, glaring at me with lips drawn tight. “You’ll notice that I did come back to you, which very few have ever done before. But it wasn’t as if I were living a miserable existence down there, starving and tortured, then escaped from Hell through sheer desperation. In fact, as far as the Underworld goes, I had the cushiest billet available, as the ruling Queen, subservient only to Hades Himself. I made a conscious decision to return to light and life because I literally dreamed of you. I couldn’t stay away, once I’d remembered.”

That shut me up, which is sometimes pretty difficult to accomplish, I admit. “I realize that now, Dear Heart, but I didn’t at the time. In fact, I murdered each and every one of the remaining Reivers when I reached the bottom of the mountain path with neither hesitation nor remorse, using the thin excuse that one of their number had violated a negotiated truce, which was quite unlike me. Of course, I’d killed your attacker straightaway, but that was in hot blood. The rest of them I murdered in pure ferocity and hatred, because just one of them had dared to raise a hand against you.”

She smiled then, and looked at me fondly, then said, “I know, Sweetheart. I had to consign most of them to Tartarus, one of my first official acts, almost immediately after I arrived, although a very few, much less than a handful, wound up in the meadows of Asphodel, and only one of those had the barest chance of eventually working his way up to the Elysian Fields, if he manages to apply himself and learns his life lessons very well.” She was quiet for a while before she said, “Once I’d finally remembered, at least in my dreams, I understood your passion and was both proud and flattered. That’s part of what inspired me to return, in fact, and the fellow who shot me wasn’t very daring at all, as it turned out. He’d fired at our backs while lying in wait, like the miserable coward that he was, and was still so nervous that he managed to miss his main target, which was you, and felled me almost by chance.”

That surprised me. I hadn’t thought to check upon him whilst I was in the Underworld, and frankly hadn’t really given a damn what had happened to him, as long as he was dead. “At the time, it didn’t feel all that noble. It felt more like revenge,” I answered bleakly.

Beryl clucked her tongue and said, “Not at all, I think, when you really think about it. Please remember that you have a wonderful gift for inspired improvisation. Nobility is as nobility does, and there’s ample precedent for institutional revenge as enlightened public policy — even if you weren’t thinking quite as calmly and insightfully about the issue as usual — and it amounted to a valuable object lesson for both the rescued women — who were very pleased to observe justice at work after experiencing terror and cruelty with little hope of rescue — and any future Reivers who chance to hear the tale. If groups of lawbreakers are free to take traitorous individual potshots at those who’ve magnanimously spared their lives, the whole concept of surrender and parole breaks down, and the victors have no choice but to kill every one of their opponents without quarter in future, which is bad for everyone, because it inspires a vicious desperation that can easily spill over to include the murder of innocent noncombatants as ‘bargaining chips’ meant to persuade their pursuers to let them off scot free.” She reached out to take my hand. “No, once a truce is broken, there’s no going back and saying, ‘Well, I had my fingers crossed.’ The order to surrender was quite properly accepted by their chief and relayed quite clearly to the rest of them, since we both heard him shouting as we walked blithely down the path, made careless by our relatively easy victory, and by means of which deceptive tactic the cowardly ambuscade was carried out which killed me. In the end, each and every member of the falsely-surrendered troop can be quite properly be called upon to pay for their collective crime with their lives. Any other course of action breeds chaos and confusion amongst the troops, and so interferes with the good order and discipline of the military services in general.”

I was puzzled. “How so?”

“Because every soldier is bound to obey the lawful orders of their superiors, and a formal surrender is exactly such an order. If any soldier is free to disregard that order on a whim, it implies that the entire contract though which the soldier subsumes his will and actions to the larger State is broken. In turn, that means that their collective immunity from individual prosecution for otherwise lawful killings, as ordered by their superior officers, is null and void. In fact, any and every officer or soldier of their group would themselves have had the duty to kill the traitor immediately, but they made no move to do so, for whatever reason, nor did they mention the fact that there was a sniper lying in concealment while the terms of the surrender were made and accepted, nor even made any disavowal of his action after the fact — thus each and severally forfeiting their privileges and guarantees of safety as prisoners of war in their totality — just as we would have been reciprocally obliged to defend them with our own lives if they’d come under attack by other Reivers for surrendering in the first place.”

I wondered at first, exactly how she could describe the situation so clearly, but then remembered that she’d probably encountered the very people…? spirits…? whom I’d dispatched to her dominions. “But wouldn’t the doctrine of command responsibility limit any retaliation to those actually in command at the time?”

Beryl rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, since when did the Horticultural Services rely all that much on rules and regulations?”

She had me there. In practice, despite our military pretensions back in the enclaves, we weren't all that different than the Reivers, except that we didn't actually keep slaves. What we did have were supposedly ‘free’ women so starved for food and creature comforts that the lowliest troops had ready access to sexual favors for the cost of a decent meal.

“In the first place,” she said, “the Reivers really had no legitimate command structure to begin with, because they were criminals, not soldiers, and would have been shot on sight for the simple reason that they were armed men outside the walls of an enclave without the protection of an issue protective suit. In the second place, they'd murdered and enslaved citizens of the enclaves, so were our deadly enemies despite being nominally ‘human.’ And in the third place, if there was any general principle that guided our forces it was ‘Kill it right away if looks at all odd.’ ”

“Whoa! That’s harsh!” I said. That was also the longest stretch of words I’d ever heard from her, so maybe chatting with dead poets and philosophers had ‘rubbed off’ on her somehow.

“Not really. Of all our former Reivers, only Rebecca is truly an asset. The rest are kept in line by rigorously-enforced military discipline, but the moral weakness that led them to a life of crime is still there, lurking just beneath the surface. I catch a whiff of it from time to time, especially since taking up the rôle of Queen and Justicar in the Afterlife.”

I nodded my agreement, albeit a bit reluctantly. That was one of the reasons I’d given them all odd names, to remind me when I wasn’t deliberately snooping into their thoughts. “I keep my eye on them as well,” I said, “but their transformation puts them at a disadvantage if they tried to return to their former occupation, despite their increased strength and quickness, not to mention the fact that either of us could find them in a heartbeat if they bolted, and I did let slip the fact that we’d set the burrowers on them if they did, during our original demand for their surrender.”

“True,” she admitted. I’m sure that most of them would be too frightened even to run away, but I suppose the best of us are tempted toward sin from time to time. I remember stealing a can of corned beef hash once, when I was just a boy. It had evidently dropped unnoticed from a supply cart and had rolled into a dark corner. I was very hungry at the time, as so many of our children were, and there was no one looking, so I wrapped it in a rag and walked casually into the public latrine, sat in a stall, and then ate the contents right down to the shine on the can. I was very lucky to get away with it, but I did, and managed to toss the empty can over the parapet a short time later. They did that a lot with trash in our enclave, so it didn’t stand out from the rest of the junk lying scattered at the bottom of the wall.”

I nodded. “And I was goofing off on watch when my father caught me at it. Sinners all are we. That’s how we all got picked for foraging duty, I’m sure.” I grinned, feeling quite chipper after discovering Beryl’s ‘shady’ past. “Face it, Sweetie, it was destiny for both of us.”

She quirked one eyebrow at me and said, smiling, “Of course it was, Sweetie. I arranged it.”

 

 

When next I opened my eyes I was flat on my back and Beryl was looking down at me as she knelt beside me. She smiled sweetly. “Feeling better now, are we?”

“What happened?” I said stupidly. I say ‘stupid’ because I knew what happened. My poor brain had been inundated with billions of life histories, and most of their conclusions. What I didn’t fully realize was exactly why it had happened.

This time she grinned. “What? You thought being Queen of the Underworld was all a bed of roses? It’s hard work, mostly, although it does have its moments. In fact, now that you’ve taken over the rôle of our former regent, I expect we’ll only have to work half as hard. Hades was never much of a one for fiddling with mere details. He was more of a ‘big picture’ kind of guy.”

“In other words,” I said sourly, “he didn’t do squat, but wandered around pointing out flaws in other people’s work?.”

She laughed out loud, and could hardly stop giggling long enough to answer, “Pretty much.”

I smiled. “I thought so. From our very brief acquaintance, I recognized the type.” I stopped, considering. “But what am I supposed to do with all this stuff floating around in my head? It’s like I’ve been plugged directly into the akashic record; I think of someone and suddenly their whole life pops into my head.”

“Akashic?” she asked.

“It was in one of the books in that ‘occult’ shop I showed you, but it’s by no means required reading. Supposedly, it’s some sort of transcendental ‘library’ that contains every speck of knowledge, the pre-scientific equivalent of the Holographic Universe hypothesis implied by certain theories of quantum gravity and string theory.”

Beryl looked puzzled for a bit before she said, “Well, isn’t that also suggested by the reality of the Moirai, the Fates, who apportion the destiny of every creature? One doesn’t have to rifle through the dusty interiors of occult shops — or even scientific laboratories — to find similar beliefs and theories, since the notion is inherently suggested by human observations of the natural processes of the starry firmament.”

“Moirai?” I said, remembering a memory I’d never had before. “Moirai!”

“Indeed. The ancient Greeks were co-inheritors of the entire store of Indo-European knowledge inherited from all our ancestors, going right back to Africa. There’s nothing new under the sun, when push comes to shove, and one tradition is as good as any other, as far as I can tell, and I ought to know, having been in the Goddess business for simply weeks longer than you have.”

I rolled my eyes. Beryl could be a drama queen at times. Still… “I remember now,” I said, reminiscing. “You were Ereshkigal once, and Hel.” I was still sorting out my memories.

“And many more, Freyja, Morena, Kali, Maman Brigitte, Nirá¹›ti, Izanami-no-Mikoto, Nephthys, Sins Sagaana…, the list goes on and on.”

“And I was Isis, ’Elat, Ereshkigal, Anu, and a thousand sister wives and husbands…,” I responded.

“Many more than that,” she said, looking at me fondly, “but who’s counting?”

“Well, poetic license…,” I answered. “It grows tiresome to ramble on and on; we’d be here all day and night for the next year or two.”

“Depending on how rapidly you talked….” She stopped talking for a while, then said, “About the guy who shot me, you may or may not be pleased to know that I devised a special punishment, just for him — without the slightest hint of rancor, I hasten to add — as part of my new duties; despite your general dispensation which ameliorated the plight of the relatively innocuous denizens of Tartarus, he’s still chained spreadeagled between two giant boulders whilst jackals feast on his private parts, although they continually grow back, which of course keeps the jackals very happy. They’d done nothing wrong, and they have a good life otherwise; a guaranteed food supply, a safe place to rest when they’re feeling tired, and of course they’re a mated pair.”

I thought about that for a while, running over the facts of the case in my mind, along with the motivations and character of the shooter which were now at my fingertips, as it were, before I answered, “Well, each ka chooses its own reward, I think. It does no good in terms of learning one’s life lessons if it doesn’t hurt, for some people.” Then I thought some more and added, “The jackals must have been rather nice, though, for jackals….”

She nodded, pleased that I’d noticed. “They were, and were quite delighted with their eternal reward in the Afterlife, although they do sometimes miss the companionship of their fellows, but there’s not enough of him to feed a pack, and well they know it, plus, their utter safety from lions and other predators — not to mention diseases and old age — makes a very acceptable tradeoff for them both.”

I nodded, understanding. “You done good, Sweetheart, and thank you for both your concern and your desire for revenge. It’s just enough to appease and flatter me without going too far over the top.”

“Since I now command the Erinyes, insofar as they aren’t nominally autonomous, revenge directed toward those who spill innocent blood is a small portion of my bailiwick, the active and prospective counterpart to retributive justice at leisure. So the private bits weren’t too much?”

“Not at all! They weren’t using them for anything at all nice, so having them serve as an object lesson for onlookers is admirable utility, as far as I’m concerned. I personally wouldn’t have been nearly as understanding and compassionate.”

She grinned. “Well, that’s nice to know, then. Coming up with inventive penances is really a big part of the fun.”

I could see that, really I could. Contemplating the billions of souls I would inevitably encounter without the respite of a few excursions into creativity would be a truly deadly bore.

 

 

It was about a week into my Godesshood that I first asked — Okay, I’d been reluctant to admit that I hadn’t fully realized what I was getting myself into — “Do you have the same litany of supplications and daily trivia constantly pouring through your head that I do?”

Beryl answered very promptly, so I supposed that she wasn’t quite as distracted by it, “Of course! I told you the Goddess business was hard work.”

“Do I have to do something with all of them?”

She laughed. “Not at all. In fact, most people don’t really expect an answer to their prayers. It’d be a poor sort of world if we were constantly treated like babies — get a poopy diaper, whine about it, then instant diaper change and lots of attention. How boring could it be? — Most people just like to ‘touch base’ from time to time, and use this decidedly one-sided ‘conversation’ to keep themselves ‘grounded’ in whatever it is that they perceive as the ultimate foundation of reality.”

“Oh, great!” I complained. “It’s a lot like listening to a million whiny teenagers all at once.”

She laughed. “Now dear, you mustn’t be cruel. They can’t help their lack of eternal perspective. Taking the long view is a lot easier when you have the luxury of a distant place to stand.”

“Sort of like Archimedes….” I mused.

“Archimedes?” She asked.

“Greek guy; he’s downstairs now, in fact, in the Elysian Fields having a jolly gabfest with Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla. Doesn’t want to be reborn, as he’s having the time of his life just as he is, and isn’t particularly interested in learning about computers and crap, since there aren’t any to play with in the present world, nor is this particular time an exciting time for research.”

“Computers?” she asked, bewildered by the word.

“Fancy gadgets for performing various kinds of calculations very quickly. Went out of fashion  — in this country at least — more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The population and economy couldn’t support them.”

“Well, that will have turn around eventually,” she said firmly. “We’ll have to get up off our asses sometime within the next half million years or so, or be caught with our collective pants down when the next supernova goes off and wipes out most life on Earth.”

The vehemence of her instant response amazed me. I hadn’t imagined that the subject would be of any interest to her. It certainly wasn’t to me, nor did I see what earthly use a ‘computer’ might be. “Supernova?”

“Big stellar explosion, very exciting stuff, especially when it happens in the local neighborhood.”

“Stars explode?” I felt like a rube. I hadn’t run across anything like that in my library. Of course, the library was a big place, and I hadn’t explored everywhere.

“All the time. Ask what’s-his-face — Ali ibn Ridwan! — Tycho Brahe, and Sir Fred Hoyle about them. They keep up with all that stuff and are all agog to see the effects of one up close. Of course, being spirits, they have no personal ‘skin in the game,’ so to speak. I understand that it will be a Type Ia thingie set off in what they call a binary star system in which one member is a white dwarf. If the stars are close enough, the white dwarf sucks off a little of the other star’s atmosphere all the time, eventually becoming massive enough that it collapses into something called ‘degenerate matter,’ which releases enormous amounts of energy and blows the bigger star apart, usually, or strips off big chunks of its stellar atmosphere. You’d have to ask them about the details, or almost any of the science guys. Most of them are hanging around waiting around for better budgets in the real world; have been for centuries….”

“Harry’s Brass Balls, Beryl! Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”

“Nothing to be done, Sweetie. It’s an inevitable physical process caused by gravity, and gravity don’t sleep, as they say in the song. We operate in the spiritual realm — mostly — so it doesn’t really affect us, although of course I’ve made plans for a huge influx of souls when the time comes, but it will be a long time before any of them can be reborn, which is a pity, but everyone experiences disappointment from time to time in the course of a very long life.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so infernally calm about this.”

“It’s the Long View, Sweetie,” she said, producing an enigmatic smile that she simply must have practiced, “You’ll have to take the Long View or you’ll go crazy down here. Eventually, life will reëmerge, evolution will happen, and Gaia will rebuild a stable ecosystem. If we manage to restart an interest in scientific research that was notably absent during the years that led up to the Dandelion Wars, we can cut the time and danger considerably, of course, but most people have a great deal of trouble looking beyond the ends of their noses. As far as I know — and I ought to know, if anyone does — our gang down in the Underworld are the only people still interested in theoretical science at all. That’s why so few of them are interested in being reborn these days. There’s at least a hundred years of hard slogging ahead to get anywhere near the level of expertise we had in almost every field of knowledge.”

Well, Harry’s Hell! It’s just one damned thing after another, isn’t it? “I’ll put it on my ‘To Do’ list,” I said. “Start up a University or two. Do you suppose that any of your pet ‘thinkers’ would be willing to volunteer?”

Beryl answered promptly. “I’ll ask around, but I can be very persuasive, given the incentive. There’s one guy who had a relatively ‘low-tech’ notion of building what he called a ‘Dyson Sphere,’ named after himself, of course. Really clever people tend to have egos to match, so you’ll probably like him.”

“…or hate him,” I said. “So what’s a Dyson Sphere?”

“It’s essentially a gigantic shell that surrounds a star, allowing the people who live near the star to capture essentially all its output of energy and use it for whatever they want. Of course, if they’re capturing all that energy before it escapes into the void, it stands to reason that it might possibly be used to capture energy flowing the other way, thereby protecting the Earth from supernovas almost by accident.”

Okay, I was boggled. First Greek Gods and Goddeses, now red rubber balls around the Sun! “So what’s the catch?”

“Well, there’s a couple of things that seem a little dicey, according to some of them — They have astonishing arguments about it, actually — First, it turns out that the neutrino flux from such a supernova is quite likely to approach lethality, and shielding against neutrinos is essentially impossible. The second problem is that the structure would have to be amazingly lightweight, and of course we don’t exactly know how to build such stuff.”

“Neutrinos?”

“Teeny-tiny particles with essentially no electrical charge that slip through ordinary matter like nobody’s business. Back when they were still building ‘neutrino detectors,’ they usually poked them deep underground, or at the bottom of the sea, to keep ordinary radiation from interfering with the results.”

“But how are they a danger, then?”

“If you have enough of them. they add up, and it turns out that supernovas are very nice tools for generating neutrinos by the very large bucketful, although they also pump out X-rays and other types of radiation. They tell me that one of the last major extinction events on Earth was very likely caused by a supernova hundreds of lightyears away.”

“Really?”

“Well, you couldn’t prove it by me, but the ‘boys’ tell me that they could demonstrate it by ‘isotope’ variations in dust collected at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Isotopes?”

“Look, Sapphire,” she said, exasperated, “this is all outside my personal knowledge and interest. If you want to know more, go talk to the science boys yourself. I just thought that you might like to know what we’ll be looking at in the next few millennia so you could plan for it.”

“How in Harry’s Hell am I supposed to plan for a star exploding?!” I shouted, forgetting my potential audience in my excitement.

“The same way that you planned for taking over military operations for the Western Hemisphere and the world, of course,” she said quietly, “one careful step at a time, punctuated by occasional flashes of brilliant improvisation and luck. Do you actually see any real obstacles in your path? Or are you just being modest for the sake of form?”

One of the major problems of being in a relationship is that — if one happens to be… slightly improvisational… at times — one’s partner inevitably has a very long memory. “Uhmmm… Maybe both,” I said. “I’ve always been happier talking than actually doing things. If I didn’t have you to keep me honest, and give me the occasional kick in the pants, I’d probably never get anything done.”

“Well, you’d better get busy, then. You’ve only got a few hundred thousand years to rebuild the educational infrastructure for a modern technological civilization, solve the problem of interplanetary travel and construction, and rescue humanity from its own short-sightedness in time to save the entire solar system from catastrophe.”

“Can’t I just figure out a way to eliminate the star?”

“Not at all. We’re all of us the beneficiaries of supernovas past, without which we wouldn’t be here. Who knows how many future peoples and civilizations might hang by the slender thread of that same stellar catastrophe that might discomfit or annoy us?”

It was a pretty — if annoying — paradox. This ‘Long View’ that Sapphire had gone on about was difficult to swallow when seen from the dispassionate viewpoint she’d just described, although of course I tended to be a bit more excitable than she was, usually. I reckon she’d had more experience with this Goddess thing than I had, despite my recent pretensions and somewhat bellicose confrontation with Hades earlier. Still, I couldn’t manage to regret besting him, so I suppose my ego was still intact, all in all. I just wasn’t feeling quite as proud of myself as I’d been before.

 

 

Of course, I’ve always been an optimist, so it didn’t take me long to figure it out, so I rode off to see Lynette, our resident expert on botany and the scientific method. Although she’d been forbidden to do any more dissections on bandersnatches, she’d grown up in Sweden, and had done most of her work there, so the New World was an exciting challenge for her.

It took me a while to find her, since she was off in the woods collecting specimens with a bodyguard of half a dozen troops to protect her. She tended to become engrossed with new discoveries, so she wasn’t the best of sentries. Still, she was definitely our best actual scientist. “Lynette! How good to see you!”

She looked at me with deep suspicion. I was, after all, the one who’d imposed a few minor limits on the scope of her scientific curiosity. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Lynette, I’m very sorry if we’d stepped off on the wrong foot, as it were, but I have a project in hand that I thought might interest you, and I wanted to present it to you as soon as possible.”

Now, she was even more leery. “What is it?”

“I want to set up a university, and I know your own experience is substantial.”

She seemed dumbfounded. “A university? In the midst of a wilderness? Where do you plan to put it?”

“Wherever you like, of course. If you’re to be the head of it, it must be entirely up to you. My own home is quite a bit inland from here, but has an extensive library, but there are probably other libraries and museums to be found. There was a very substantial library some leagues north of here, but it was unfortunately drowned in the rising seas quite some time ago. I don’t actually know if any of the contents were saved, but where one library survived, there must surely be many others.”

“You say there is an extant library in the place you came from?”

“There is, with what must be tens of thousands of volumes.”

“Tens of thousands?” She seemed amazed.

“Easily,” I said. “There may well be more. I didn’t count them, but there are five floors above the ground level in a very large building, and each floor is densely packed with books. From references in their catalog, I noticed that there’s supposedly a university library in the general area as well, but I never set off to find the actual buildings, so I can’t actually vouch for the current state of their holdings.”

“But where would we find teachers? students? From what I gather about this oddly rough-hewn society of yours, you’re just coming out of what was essentially centuries of barbarism.”

“True, but your own example suggests that there might be many scientists in our dominions in the netherworld who would welcome a chance to explore new frontiers of knowledge, and perhaps even those now less knowledgeable who would welcome a chance to learn from them. Under the new regime, we can offer these souls the possibility of rebirth with all their memories intact, unlike the former dispensation which mandated a draught of the river Lethe before passing through the veil between death and life. We can also offer them new bodies such as your own, stronger, more fit, better coördinated, and probably more intelligent as well. I noticed a great improvement in my own intellectual capacity and memory when I transformed, and believe it to be a general side-effect. How does it seem to you?”

She blinked, caught be surprise. “Now that you mention it, I do seem more capable of many things, as well as possessing an innate skill and dexterity in combat that I’d never imagined possible.”

“Now imagine your formidable intellect facing new challenges, quite possibly the exploration of the worlds of our own solar system, and eventually beyond. We did it once, so there must be records somewhere, and if not, no matter; we know that these things are possible, and what humans did once, we can do again.” I could see from her expression that I had her.

“What would I have to do?”

I smiled. “I’ll bump you up in rank to general officer… let’s say Brigadier General, to maintain a distinction to Beryl’s position in the military hierarchy, and to make it much less likely that you’ll ever encounter anyone higher in the military pecking order. As far as I know, the highest rank in the enclaves is Major, or possibly Lieutenant Colonel in some of the major bases… then cut you a set of orders to take charge of libraries and any other educational or scientific institutions you encounter. It might be good to start back home, since I know that the infrastructure of the city was essentially intact, but you’ll be essentially on your own regarding what you do and where you go. Your mission is only to rebuild a scientific civilization, so it would be presumptuous of me to offer anything but general direction and advice.”

“And what would that advice be?”

“Sometime in the future, we don’t know when, the Earth we live on will be rendered uninhabitable for some finite period of time. You’ll have to ask a few cosmologists and astronomers, once we get some volunteers. We’ll be recruiting engineers and architects as well as scientists of all sorts, because I  — at least — have no idea what will be necessary to survive a cosmic catastrophe. We’ll simply have to improvise.”

Lynette furrowed her brow, obviously thinking. “I’m not really familiar with this theory, but have a vague recollection of hearing someone mention global catastrophe as happening in Earth’s past, and as a possibility in the future. It seemed outlandish, though, so I didn’t pay much attention. Assuming its reality, diversity is probably one strategy we should explore. If we journeyed to the distant stars, for example, and established colonies, we’d be much less vulnerable as a species to the destruction of any particular habitat. That’s a long-term goal, of course, not something we can figure on doing immediately, and physics is quite outside my own area of expertise.”

To me, this sounded far more practical than constructing spherical shells around the Sun, and mirrored the time-proven biological mechanisms for long-term survival: adapt, multiply, and explore the limits of one’s habitat. “That might be a very good start,” I said, “but we might also start thinking about whether our current adaptations include radiation resistance, and if not, how to compensate. If damaging radiation is inevitable, perhaps some sort of resistance — or increase in resistance — might be possible.”

“That seems reasonable,” she admitted. “It seems highly unlikely that we could actually transport a significant proportion of even the human population off Earth, much less enough of our complex œcological communities to ensure a stable off-world future for all of our children’s children’s children.”

“Œcology?” I’d never heard the word used in quite that context before. “ Are there more than the one? Can an entire œcology be transported somewhere else?”

“Yes, at least in theory. Strictly speaking, œcology is the scientific study of the entirety of plant and animal communities within a given area, so by default an œcology is limited to a finite area. As such, it would include predators of all sorts, both herbivores and carnivores, as well of the plants they feed upon, and the millions of lichens, fungi, microörganisms, and insects required to create the soil they thrive in out of bare rock and sand. Loosely, it can also include plant and/or animal communities managed primarily by human intervention, although these tend to be much less robust.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Because human-managed monocultures always require a huge amount of effort to prevent reversion to the local norm, whatever that may be. The most efficient food production tends to be performed in those environments exploited by hunter/gatherer societies, because they’re inherently more stable under a wide range of stressors. The traditional ‘market garden’ is a variation of that, with a great variety of foodstuffs grown in any given area, which minimises predation by specialist insects and prolongs the harvest season over as much time as possible with readily-available resources in the local climate.”

“Okay,” I said, “that’s about as much as I want to know about that! I like the idea of having a life sciences guy in charge, because the problem is basically how do we stay alive and healthy in a dangerous environment, not how do we create new gadgets. If we simply must have a gadget, let it be the simplest and least intrusive gadget possible, and make sure that we’re still human beings after we use it.”

“Agreed. Should I coördinate with Queen Persephone about the selection of scientists, or should I go through you?”

“It doesn’t matter. She already had a few candidates picked out that I know of, and may have many more, so she might be able to offer helpful suggestions, and so lessen the time required to get things underway.”

“Alright, then, when do I leave?”

“I reckon it will take a few weeks to select your initial science crew and have Beryl or me reïncarnate them, but our only limitation there is really the number of bandersnatches available as incubators. Please don’t feel constrained,, though; we almost certainly have hundreds of thousands of years before anything happens locally, and probably even longer, so it’s a longterm project that simply can’t be allowed to remain on hold until we bother to address it. I fully expect it to take at least that long — considering the daunting magnitude of the job — so it’s well past time to get the effort underway. At the same time, I don’t want an overabundance of haste to preclude the identification of anyone who really ought to be part of the effort, so my best judgement is to ‘proceed with all deliberate speed.’ ”

“I’m at your service, my dread queen,” he said and bowed.

I’m really going to have to discourage that. Obsequiousness is rarely a good quality to find in a scientist.

 

 

It was actually several months before we got going again. The problem was that — thus far, despite my optimistic assumptions — Gumball was the only bandersnatch who actually had the trick of reïncarnation down pat. The others were extremely enthusiastic, but evidently lacked the discipline… or ki… or something to follow through. I wasn’t too disheartened. Even Genghis Khan didn’t manage to conquer the entire world during his lifetime, although of course he was only a man.

I asked Beryl what she thought about the problem, but she had no more clue than I did.

“You do understand,” she said, “that the usual method of rebirth involves the creation of a baby, but a baby’s mental capacity isn’t quite up to containing an adult soul. That’s one of the reasons for Lethe; it’s the means by which the soul can be trimmed to fit, as it were, without using up more mental resources than a baby has available, as well as allowing the soul to develop along different lines, hopefully improving itself in the process, thus leading to a better outcome. What Gumball did for me was a miracle of sorts, but even then my memories were hazy, especially at first. I do think that I’m fully recovered now, but how does one identify memories that might be absent?”

That stumped me. I didn’t know, and didn’t suppose that I could know. Everyone forgets things from time to time, whether it be the birthdays of dear friends or the location where one misplaced the watchamacallit one had just been fiddling with. Even if we compared our separate memories, there would surely be things that she remembered and I didn’t, and vice versa. What exactly would either possibility actually prove? “I think I have to agree with another adventurer in strange lands, ‘We must cultivate our gardens.’ Let’s both leave philosophy to the philosophers.”

She had the graciousness to laugh, entirely without rancour, then said, “So says the most ‘philosophical’ conqueror since Marcus Aurelius.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m hardly a philosopher.”

“What are you, then? Who else finds themselves in a city with infinite food and leisure and decides to spend most of her time studying in libraries and bookstores? Philosopher, ‘philá³sophos, philo-sophá­a,’ a lover of wisdom, that’s just you all over.”

“But…but you know all that stuff too, don’t you?”

“Not by inclination; it sort of came with the job….” She stopped herself, then added, “…Well, a large part of it came from you as well, since you do share your enthusiasms.” Then she stopped talking again, her brow furrowed a bit, before adding, “Your tarot cards were especially handy, actually, because they gave me a reference point aside from what was thrust upon me, and so helped me to avoid being totally subsumed in that sexist hierarchical milieu that pervaded Hell.”

 

 

It took us almost three weeks to march down the coast of the Atlantic down through North Carolina on our way to Charleston, where there was supposed to be another major Horticulturlist base, although not quite on the scale of Hampton Roads in the Tidewater region of the Virginia Coast, what with reäffirming — or reëstablishing — our agreements with those Kudzu crowns that we encountered — surprisingly few, although I finally figured out, with a little help from Lynette, that the low-lying lands near the coast were often too salty for them to thrive —and offering general humanitarian aid to the remaining enclaves of human beings, most of whom had been at least besieged by the kudzu, those that hadn’t been overrun entirely and consumed.

It was beautiful, though, in those parts which hadn’t been overrun by the kudzu, thicket after thicket of ancient live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, separated by low yellow-green grassy promontories outlining the twisting channels of brackish water leading toward the distant sea horizon, reminding me of Sydney Lanier’s poem about the sea-marshes of Glynn:

     Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
     With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
     Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,--
          Emerald twilights,--
          Virginal shy lights,
     Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
     When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
     Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
     Of the heavenly woods and glades,
     That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
     The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;

Okay, so the marshes of Glynn were actually up in Georgia, quite a bit north of where we were, but the poem matched my mood, since it was all about love, and the setting was pretty much what the poem described so many centuries before, and I was feeling a strange mixture of bemused nostalgia and irritation, neither of which had any clear referent at the moment.

Of course, I was heavily gravid, and exactly as uncomfortable as pregnant women have been since humanity began walking around on two legs. I’d have thought that being transformed and enhanced by the fungal infection would have made childbearing much easier, what with vastly-increased strength and general durability, but my baby shared my transformation, and had managed to start shifting around right at fourteen weeks, progressed to rolling, then kickboxing lessons and synchronized swimming by the beginning of the third trimester. I think baby was doing jumping jacks at the moment, although it was difficult to say, since I didn’t have X-ray vision, more’s the pity. I would have liked to see the tiny person who’d been having so much fun inside my belly, not to mention the interesting dance she was doing on my bladder right that very minute. I sighed and said to Beryl, “Would you mind stopping for a bit? I’ve got to pee again.”

She rolled her eyes at me and smirked. “Again?”

“Look!” I said “Blame bipedalism. Blame a fastidious desire to avoid peeing on my saddle and have warm urine trickling down my leg, but human bodies are an awkward compromise between our fishy roots and the exigencies of running through the open savannah in ancient Africa. If we were still fish, of course, the problem of when and were to pee would be moot, but then one has the mental challenge of living and breathing in an enormous lake of sewage. If I were a fish, I’m sure that I’d be grateful — in some sense — for my lack of comprehension.” As I looked at her, she looked a little miffed, so I looked more closely. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” I noticed her flush at that. ‘Gotcha!’ I thought. “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Here I am flaunting my pregnancy and you’re stuck with being the ‘responsible warrior’ and ‘protector’ in our little family.”

Her face held a flicker of her usual good humor as she said, “Worse luck, I’m stuck with the job until we succeed in your ambitious plan for global domination. I’m just a tiny bit better at it than you are, and every little bit helps when one wants to rule the world.”

I contemplated that for a long heartbeat or two before I replied. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Seems to,” she answered, as unpretentious as any monk.

“In my defense, I can only plead that I have a niggling uncertainty gnawing at my theoretical serenity as an expectant mother. Where I should be concentrating on creating a cozy ‘nest’ for our baby, I’m very worried about the possibility of some vagary of accelerated evolution creating something so powerful that we can’t overcome it. Paranoia is the other dominant leitmotif of pregnancy, or so I was given to understand through my research in the Library.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

I could tell by the way she pursed her lips and looked off slightly to the side that she was well aware of the fact. “Liar. Of course you did, just as I’m sure you’ve noticed my other more-or-less instinctual drive.”

“Which is,” she said smirking again.

“Pair bonding, of course. After I pee, do you think we might have time for a little nookie? What with the heat and the incessant motion of this damned horse between my legs, I’m getting a little crazy here.”

She laughed, but not unkindly. “Well, considering that we’re all cavalry these days, I believe that we could poll the troops and find almost unanimous agreement amongst the ranks.”

“Ahh, but it’s not the ranks I’m interested in.” I sidled my mount alongside hers, our legs brushing lightly against each other. “It’s the good opinion of my closest friend and confidant that I crave, a need that burns more brightly every day.”

“You forgot to mention ‘lover.’ ”

I grinned. “Well, that’s rather the point right now, isn’t it? Put your money where your mouth is, Sweetie, or put your mouth where your honey is… so to speak.”

“Oooh! I do love it when you talk dirty!”

 

 

Well, that’s about as deeply as I want to explore that particular interlude, except that I thought it marked a new stage in our relationship, which has had its ups and downs, if you’ll pardon the tiny bons mots. At least we seemed to be on the same page now, which I suppose is another little jest, since I’m typing this record of our journeys even as you read it, or should that be ‘was typing?’ and ‘you’ll read?’ Writing like this is something like entering a time machine, since I have no idea when and where my words are going to wind up after having been scattered to the winds. Anyway, we all of us handle trauma in unique ways, I think, and I tend to make light of things, at least in retrospect, whilst Beryl takes every moment much more to heart. I’d grieved, but only deep inside me when my mother died, because it was forbidden to show any emotion when ‘weaklings’ were ‘culled’ from our ranks, and then again when Beryl was snatched away from me by a coward’s assault with a deadly weapon, but my instantaneous reaction was rage, deadly fury, and I externalized it through killing all the men in any way responsible, even if peripherally. I think… I hope… that my spiritual duel with her arrogant rapist made things easier for her, since he, or rather she, was in the same boat now, and no longer in any position to gloat in any sort of lascivious pride. ‘How have the mighty fallen!’ as they say.

 

 

It wasn’t until two weeks later that Beryl finally realized that she was late, and not in a good way. We’d been very careful to take no chances whatsoever of winding up with both of us hors de combat, so it was almost immediately apparent that the late and unlamented Hades had fired a Parthian shot at his erstwhile ‘bride’ with truly lasting repercussions.

Beryl wasn’t so much devastated as amazed and angry, since it had been more than four months since her resurrection, and as far as any of us knew her body had remained in the waking world, either digested or transmogrified by Gumball as he recreated her mortal body. “Well,” she said resignedly at last, after a lengthy and impassioned rant that made her mount more than a little skittish as we rode alongside the ruined road that led into Savannah, according to our antique maps, “Zeus impregnated Danaë in a shower of gold, so who knows how the Greek Gods arranged such things. All that’s really certain is that the former Hades is just as vulnerable to pregnancy now, and there are a lot of players out there with an axe to grind where he’s concerned, so I don’t doubt that she’ll be keeping busy changing diapers for the next millennium or so.”

I was enormously pleased to hear her say that, since it confirmed — at least in part — that my transformation of Hades had subsumed his numinous presence in her mind and memory with a new and less imposing instantiation of lesser divinity and existential threat. We both knew that he was the anomalous ‘male’ progenitor of her child, since I’d done several readings and Beryl had consulted arcane sources I wasn’t nearly as familiar with as I was with my homely bits of pasteboard. “I hope so,” I said. “I took a great deal of care with her outward appearance and inner qualities as well. According to the criteria in my Beauty Book, she’s the quintessence of feminine perfection and allure, well-calculated to entice male-identified Gods and Demigods from every Western Pantheon to woo her, so there ought to be a throng of love-struck suitors queueing at her doorstep by now.”

“I thought that you were the one who did’t like revenge,” Beryl said.

“It’s not revenge at all, nor is her new situation onerous in any way. She delights in her own perfection, and unlike Narcissus, she longs for admirers in whose eyes she sees the true reflection of her seductive charm. Unlike that heedless boy, our new Demigoddess is well able to fulfil both her own passion and that of her many lovers in a manner deeply satisfying to both.”

“So her ‘punishment’ is eternal ecstasy?”

“More or less,” I said judiciously. “She’s fecundity personified as well, so she’ll also have the blessing of her many beautiful children, and their children after her. Assuming some other Goddess doesn’t come along and fiddle with my creations, she have an exponential explosion of tangible blessings without end. What more could anyone ask?”

“What more could anyone possibly desire?” she said facetiously, rolling her eyes with just a hint of sarcasm and more than a trace of resentment.

I smirked at her. “Well, she may have a bit of trouble finding a lover as powerfully fulfilling as her old avatar was purported to be, but that’s the only potential cloud that I can see on her otherwise limitless horizon.”

She blushed. “I may have exaggerated a bit,” she admitted. “You know me, the eternal optimist; I do try to look on the bright side of most situations, however disconcerting they might appear to be at first.”

“Not to mention that you like to tease me,” I said smiling, careful to avoid any hint of censure.

“Well, there’s that. As a Goddess, I definitely have a few minor flaws.”

“Impulsive and capricious come rather to mind, but I could hardly fault you for that….”

“True, despite excursions into meticulous calculation, you do tend to improvise at times.” she said, and she was smiling as well, a good sign, as far as I was concerned.

“Well, yes, I admit it, and I’m getting worse as the pregnancy hormones invade my brain. The worst of it is that I’m craving tastes that I’ve never actually experienced, so I don’t have the slightest clue what it is I actually want. The culinary style of the fortresses wasn’t exactly haut cuisine, at least amongst the ranks and lower officers, so all I really know is that I’m missing something. I’ve even tried gnawing on kudzu vines, although the experiment creeped me out.”

“Oh, great! Then that’s another thing I’ve got to look forward to, and me without ever having had the little ‘talk’ with my mother.”

“Tut, tut! Don’t exaggerate. If your mother has passed from the waking world, she’s certainly available in our dominions below.”

“Well, the same goes for you then, doesn’t it? Tell you what, you ask her, and then give me the benefit of your wisdom. I can’t believe you didn’t find a book on the subject in your famous library and memorize it!”

That hit a nerve. In very fact, I hadn’t, and hadn’t even thought about it. “I did see several books meant for expectant mothers,” I confessed, “but they all assumed that the woman would be married to a supportive man, would be under a Doctor’s care, also presumptively male, and at the time I wasn’t particularly enamored of the whole notion of men in general, had much less viewed them as potential bed partners or intimate attendants, and was further determined to act in such a way that I’d never require any one of these two assumptive co-participants, firmly focused upon perpetual virginity.” I looked at her with a sly smile playing over my lips. “So much for good intentions, eh?.”

Beryl laughed harshly, a short explosion of hateful resentment. “I’m living proof that ‘intentions’ don’t mean a thing. The matter can be taken out of one’s own control.” She seemed slightly bitter.

I was boundlessly forgiving and compassionate. I’d experienced his ugly attentions to a much lesser degree, but well remembered the disgust he’d engendered in me, even if he hadn’t quite managed the other sort of breeding…. At least I hoped he hadn’t; after seeing how Beryl had been affected, long after the psychic coupling which had been the presumptive cause, and couldn’t completely discount the possibility of belated twins, like Leda in her bestial encounter with Zeus, another serial rapist, and had borne quadruplets, half of them mortal by her husband, the rest divine by God the Father, Deus Pater. I said nothing about this, but would worry about it later. “Or one’s self-control can be willingly let slip away,” I said quietly, “as it did when I fell in love with you. As it turns out, absolute autonomy is an illusion, and all our lives are intertwined, if that’s any consolation. I’m sure that you remember me giving this speech — or something like it — to the many pregnant women we’ve rescued from the Reivers, and I’m still not exactly sure how genetic inheritance arranges itself amongst the immortal Gods and Goddesses, but your baby is by now undoubtedly transformed in such a way that everything specifically belonging to the ‘male’ Hades has been stripped away, leaving only Rhea and Rhea’s mother Gaia as her true ancestors, the grandmothers of our second child together. Hades himself was only an ancillary, the entity who delivered a divine heritage far older and more powerful than he was. My own memory of our realm tells me that the Queen of Hell has always been the center of the ancient Mysteries, with Hades introduced almost as an afterthought, essentially to explain why a Queen was able to rule in Hell, despite Her cult being deeply embedded in an otherwise tediously patriarchal society, women as a whole being profoundly associated with the notional cycle of birth and death from sources far more ancient than mere Gods. The oldest representation of a Deity ever found in the archeological record — indeed, the oldest sculptural figure of any sort — depicts a woman, the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels, created something like thirty-five or forty thousand years ago by the Aurignacian peoples of Europe and southwest Asia, although of course Goddesses in general are far older than that.”

She laughed at that, not happily. “I remember, although I hadn’t managed to twist it around as prettily as you just did, and it does seem ironic — now that I think about it — that since you transmitted the spiritual equivalent of the fungal infection which transformed him, it’s probably true that we’d have to add you somewhere to the list of our unexpected baby’s spiritual progenitors.” She stopped talking for a while, then added, “That actually cheers me up a bit.”

I sidled my mare closer to her gelding and reached out my hand. “Unexpected doesn’t mean unloved, dear heart, as I’m sure you know. It’s enough for me to know that it’s your baby, and that she’ll have you as her mother.”

She took my hand and quietly said, “True. On that distant day when I left the Citadel to forage in company with a small band of misfits, who would have guessed that I was destined to meet my lover, the future mother of our children?”

‘Damn! For an unsentimental woman, Beryl lapsed from time to time into what often approximated maudlin sentimentality!’ “Is it too soon to call a temporary halt to the forward progress of our band of soldiers?” I asked her very prettily.

She laughed, as bold and chipper as a lark perched at the margins of a marshy meadow proclaiming his mastery of the skies to all and sundry. “I suppose not. We have many pregnant troops these days, so I imagine their needs are similar to your own. Now that I appear to be ‘knocked up’ as well, it probably behooves me to comport myself in sympathy with the general trend.” She raised her voice. “Captain! Please choose an appropriate stopping place for a meal and rest break!”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Captain Topaz Booker said smartly from behind us. “Platoon! Make for that clearing to the right for a short bivouac and meal break!” she called out loudly, motioning toward a likely spot about a hundred yards ahead of our loose column. That’s all she had to say to set much in motion. We were all of us so accustomed to our perpetual campaign that we had the details of camp life well in hand, so outriders immediately set about the task of finding wood for cooking fires and water for both the camp kitchen and the horses. Although there was a slough within easy sight to our left, it was likely brackish, so we might have to range a little further inland for sweet water. It was a tradeoff; inland, the water was usually fresh but the woods and underbrush were thicker, almost impassable at times without tiresome and slow trail-breaking with machete and axe. Here at the sea margins the way was often clear, although we did have to forge the occasional stream or river on our way south.

In the interest of overall speed, we’d skirted the coast as closely as possible, despite the occasional need for a detour to avoid river crossings too deep or broad to safely forge. We’d often encountered the remains of bridges, some of them looking surprisingly sturdy, but experience had taught us not to trust them. Often, what seemed like a sturdy highway from above was supported only by a rusting cobweb of steel below, so after a few near-fatalities, and one horse which had to be put down with a broken fetlock when she’d plunged through a hidden weakness that opened into void, we avoided them religiously. We didn’t even use them when they ran over dry land, since travel on them was uncomfortable for our horses for any lengthy period and tended to split their hooves. They were unshod, since decent iron was difficult to come by, most of the easily-accessible salvage having been taken by one group or another. I made myself a mental note, now that I thought about it, to add exploration for iron deposits and the redevelopment of iron and steel foundries to my list of things to do… every metal, actually, now that I thought about it, and rare earths as well, since I knew that the latter were essential to the creation of the sorts of electronics we’d need to recreate our real civilization. As our population grew, we couldn’t depend upon salvage, but would have to start making things for ourselves, growing our own food, reïnventing tractors and farm equipment, milling facilities, manufactories of all sorts, and a thousand details that I was sure would come to me in time. My mind might have boggled — at one time — but having descended to Hell and returned had been a bit of an education, so I was developing that ‘Long View’ that Beryl nattered on about.

The clearing Topaz had found for us was broad and fertile, with plenty of what the horses thought of as succulent hay, just moist enough to be comfortable in their mouths, but not so green and sugary that there was any chance of them foundering with painful hoof laminitis. From a human perspective it was beautiful as well, with a vista that extended across the grass and through the trees to the broad expanse of brackish slough beyond, fringed with cattails and rushes, with a few pockets of cordgrass. The sea was near enough — though invisible over a sandy rise on the other side off the slough — that I could hear the surf and smell the salt in the air, an undercurrent to the leafy odors of the bay trees, live oaks, and palmettos that formed the bulk of the nearby forest. There was even a small stream running along one edge of the open meadow, and when tasted by one of our many troopers — Carnelia, I think her name was — it proved to be fresh, which would save us quite a bit of trouble hauling buckets.

“Well, this is awfully cushy, Sweetheart,” I said to Beryl, then went on to declaim:

     “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
     A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
     Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
     And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

Beryl rolled her eyes. “Funny, we seem to lack all three of the accessories, so you’d better be saying that all you need is me, since I can’t supply any of the other ingredients you claim are needed in paradise.”

“Of course I do, Dear Heart. What I meant to say was:

     Here with cool Water beneath the green Trees,
     A Bit of dry Hardtack — a little Salt,
     And Thou beside me in the Wilderness —
     And Wilderness is all I’ll ever need.”

Beryl sighed. “You do know that you’re almost impossibly glib, don’t you?”

“Au contraire, mon amour. I’m nothing if not sincere. What I am, at least on my better days, is eloquent, but never superficial. Originally, the word meant smooth or slippery, and referred to physical agility as well as verbal skills, so might as easily refer to a juggler or gymnast as to an orator. Any skill or ability can be perverted toward evil ends, though, without reference to the particular ability, just as a ‘strongman’ might refer either to someone who can easily rescue a hapless traveler from the bottom of a crevasse, or to someone who can beat and rob an innocent victim, or even kill them, with equal facility. Intention is almost everything, although of course execution does play a substantial rôle.”

Beryl looked away, toward the hidden sea just over the nearest dunes. “Speaking of execution, do you detect something very dangerous approaching?”

Quickly, I chose a mental card, the nine of Swords. “Get up and out!” I screamed to our resting troops, “Scram! We have incoming nasties from the east and we need much better cover! Into the trees! Get up! Get up and out!”

To their credit, they wasted no time, but abandoned most of the gear, grabbed their weapons, and stampeded the horses inland with shouts and flapping cloths and flogging ropes as they ran. I grabbed the nearest rocket launcher and aimed it seaward even as I backed toward relative safety. On general principle, I let fly an HE missile toward my perception of the threat and quickly grabbed another whilst Beryl did the same, as we both snatched up several satchels filled with missiles and chased after the troops. Then I heard the roar of what sounded like surf, but it rolled on and on. “Grab the biggest trees that you can find!” I screamed again. “We’re going to get wet! Keep the horses moving if you can, but save yourselves!”

“Any idea what’s behind us?” Beryl asked, calm despite our flight from whatever lay behind us.

“I suspect some creature of Poseidon, or whatever he’s calling himself these days, so a Kraken, a Cetus, or some other form of sea monster, broadly-defined.” I turned to look, saw water spilling over the farthest dunes, and screamed, “Up! Up! Up into the biggest trees you can find!” I looked over toward Beryl, not fifteen feet away, “Beryl! Jump! I shouted as I did the same, choosing the nearest large oak, reasoning that oak roots are typically broad and fairly deep, so would resist the coming onslaught of ocean, at least, though what was behind it was still in question.”

Beryl made a similar choice, and we both started climbing, putting as much height between our bodies and the oncoming wave as possible without getting so high as to depend upon frail branches. She was already higher than I was — she’d always been more athletic — and she called out, “Look sharp, girls! and hang tight! Here it comes!”

On came the dirty turgid flood, but that was the least of it, because behind it came the monster, a hulking behemoth of a beast at least as large as one of what they’d called ‘aircraft carriers’ still mothballed up in Hampton Roads. It looked like some sort of a weird cross between a giant squid and an even bigger walrus, with a touch of dragon thrown in for fun. “That, I suppose, is the Κητος Αιθιοπιος, the Cetus Æthiopius, especially imported from across the broad ocean just for us.”

Beryl looked at the dreadful thing and said, “We’re going to need some bigger missiles.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved