Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Sixteen The Flying Wedge

 

 

Move as swiftly as the Wind and be as closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still like the Mountain.

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

 

 

Florida wasn’t at all like we’d expected. In the first place, Jacksonville was under water, a huge shallow bay surrounded by the pristine white-sand beaches which had taken its place, with a fringe of low grass and shrubbery along the shore which carpeted the ocean side of the rolling dunes which receded into the hazy distance. Of Reivers, were there none, nor were there any creatures visible other then random seabirds and the occasional scuttling crab. “Our enemies appear to have decamped,” I said to Beryl and Hera, who were mounted by my side.

“Not necessarily,” Hera noted. “There are mermaids just out there.” She indicated a long jumbled line of roiling waves that framed the beach with surf.

“Mermaids?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course,” she said. “Look there!” she pointed, and by Harry’s bouncing brass balls, a tousled feminine head appeared in the surf as a shallow wave rolled past her, not more than three hundred feet from where we loitered. She was scowling in our general direction with unconcealed hostility.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why she seems quite so ticked off?” I asked her.

“I imagine that she’s somewhat disappointed to find no men among our party,” said Hera.

“Why men, in particular?” I asked again.

She rolled her eyes. “Because mermaids have no particular power over women, of course, so she must be furious.”

“What kind of power?” I asked, then thought to add, “I come from the deep interior of this continent, on the western edge of Pennsylvania, and have only recently encountered any sort of ocean, much less the sorts of creatures who make the oceans their home.”

She looked at me skeptically before she answered, “Their song, of course. Surely you’ve heard of the siren’s song.”

Okay, now I was confused. We were travelling in the company of Sirens, and not one of them would have looked particularly comfortable lurking beneath the waves. “But she looks nothing like a Siren,” I said indignantly.

“Siren with a small ‘ess,’ she said, exasperated, a generic term for female creatures of great power, an homage to the real Sirens, I suppose, as one might refer to a ‘whale’ in several senses, only one of which refers to very large mammals who live in the seas.”

Okay, so I’d heard, at least, of whales. “There’s something else I’ve never seen. Pennsylvania – our place of birth, has no seacoast at all, and the largest bodies of water that I had been personally aware of during the first sixteen years of my life – until I ran across one smallish lake with a green monster in it – were readily contained in a hand-held bucket. Suffice to say that ‘whales’ were not a daily topic of conversation. We have an ancient saying amongst us that ‘ignorance is bliss,’ so I’m a little surprised that we weren’t laughing every day back home, because we were pretty much as ignorant as the days are long in the muggy heat of summer.”

“Pennsylvania,” Hera said, apropos of nothing that I could imagine. “Latin, I see, and so a suitable origin for both of you. You’ll have to arrange a shrine, of course, and I’d suggest a Sybil, since chthonic Goddesses always have a Sybil. In fact, I’d recommend that you select a Sybil each, so they can share in the administration of your growing responsibilities.”

“Why on earth would either of us need a Sybil at all?” I asked her, although I grasped the meaning well enough. In the standard deck, the Sybil is represented by the High Priestess, who rules between the darkness and the light and often stands in for Persephone, who I suppose can represent either of us, although Beryl certainly had the stronger claim, since she was Hades’ more recent conquest. Oddly enough, she represents the balance between male and female as well, the reconciliation of every seeming ‘opposite.’

Hera rolled her eyes. “Surely you don’t contemplate spending every conscious moment adjudicating petty disputes and judgements, do you? If so, you have a lot to learn about command, since planning and delegation are the primary skills of every leader.”

She was right, of course, it was a bit wearing, although with two of us sharing the responsibility of weighing new souls as they arrived in our subterranean realms, the load was somewhat lightened. Since the demise – or recycling – of Zeus Pater, not to mention Apollo and Poseidon, we were also fielding all too many requests from all around the world – exceeding by far the numbers of actual deaths – regarding our personal intervention in everything from children who’d wandered off into the woods to decisions concerning whether it might be advantageous to murder one’s rival for the hand of one potential mate or another, or to lead an expedition against the encroaching plants in areas outside our immediate control. Harry’s Bloody Hell! We were even fielding the odd prayerful appeal to bloody Harry! It wouldn’t surprise me at all to run into him – one of these days – since belief tended to impute reality to Gods and Goddesses, and there were still a very large number of people – all around the modern world – who’d grown up with an extremely passionate belief in Harry, even if that deep-seated belief had been distorted into something that Harry himself probably wouldn’t recognize. I made a mental note to ask him what he thought of this whole business of ‘Harryism,’ the underpinnings of Horticulturist society and power, if ever I came across him. Quite frankly, the Akashic Record wasn’t nearly as well indexed as my Library back ‘home,’ and was a bloody pain-​in-​the-​ass to access unless you had a soul – so to speak – in hand. “I hadn’t planned quite that far ahead,” I admitted. “I’ve been just a bit preoccupied with putting out the fires that were actually burning us of late.”

“Well,” she said, “then that’s your problem! I personally would recommend enlisting the assistance of your dear Maia – the former Hermes, since she can accomplish much of your purpose almost instantaneously. It’s not for nothing that she wears the Talaria, πτερόεντα πέδαλα, the winged sandals of the Divine Messenger, whose powers transcend both time and distance, if only you trouble yourself to demand them.”

I blinked in self-surprise. Hadn’t I studied the Mysteries in depth, at least of late? But then I realized… “I’ve been far too reliant on personal puissance of late.”

She smiled. “I know the feeling well. That whole debacle before the Walls of Troy was a case in point. I should have handled the whole affair with considerably more despatch, since the relationship between affianced individuals lay entirely within my sphere of authority, however much Aphrodite may have wished to meddle. Quite frankly, though, I was angry and out of sorts at the time, and a little play of hot-blooded human passions was a welcome diversion. One of the problems inherent in taking the ‘Long View,’ as your wife Beryl puts it, is that, in the truly long run of things, nothing really matters at all. The end of everything is death, eventually, so every problem – even the minutest – even the greatest – sorts itself out eventually.”

“I suppose you’re right, but I can’t help worrying about the interim, at least in small detail. I don’t accept the so-called ‘fact’ that rapine and pillage means next-​to-​nothing in some grander scheme of things, since it’s individuals who actually suffer the cruelties and deprivations that others inflict on them, however grandiose their oppressors’ flimsy excuses may appear to be.”

Hera smiled. “Hail, holy Goddess, Mother of all mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. Only unto thee do we, the children of Eve, cry out; only unto thee do we send up our sighs, our mourning, and all our tears in this our land of exile. Turn, then, your merciful eyes toward us, most gracious Queen, and lead us home at last.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“That’s the spirit!” Peisinoë said, whilst Hera embraced us both. “Now let’s get this savage little mermaid and her many bloodthirsty sisters sorted out!”

 

 

 

The mermaids turned out to be amazing singers, with a haunting lyric beauty in their voices that beggared description, for how can one delineate perfection within any finite string of mere words? Their voices paradoxically reminded me of quiet starlit nights when that brilliant river of stars, the Milky Way, arched overhead and dazzled us with wonder, reminding us of our homely sanctuary within this tiny inglenook nestled near the fiery Sun, all of this embedded in the vasty universe beyond our sight.

Their leader, one Molpe, told us, “We’ve seen no mariners of late – not for three centuries or more – and the horsemen who most recently used to visit our shores have taken to inland routes, possibly alarmed over the frequent disappearance of their fellows.” Here, she smiled, as if remembering a private joke, but her pointy teeth belied that humor, or at least put a rather grim face on it.

Peisinoë and her sisters embraced them, having artlessly plunged into the sea by way of warm welcome, and Peisinoë said, “Take heart, cousins, our puissant new sister is opening up the sea lanes again, so I imagine that at least some few sailors will venture out once more, although I should warn you that her long-term plan is to gift them with her local form of ambrosia with a view toward eliminating mere males from the Earth entirely.”

Molpe pouted. “But they were delicious, so filled with sin and lust that even one might sate a hundred of us.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured them, “Considering the sheer size of the Earth, I don’t think that sailors will vanish utterly for a hundred years or more, possibly thousands, and I plan to be much more circumspect about offering the bounty of immortality to all and sundry, now that I know its full effects.”

“Oh, good!” Molpe said. “The raiders were quite tasty, almost as delicious as true sailors, but they were much more difficult to catch, and seem to have finally learned to avoid waterways of any sort, since we’re equally at home in lakes and rivers, or any body of water deep enough to ford and too wide to leap across. We’ve had the satisfaction of drastically diminishing their range, though, and have started many on their journey toward rebirth, since most of this peculiar peninsula is underwater now, or very near it. We’ve actually been considering moving northward, but our scouts haven’t reported much activity up there at all for quite some time, and there’s a peculiar vine in the southern continent which appears to have wiped out all or most of the humanity down there.”

“That would probably be the kudzu,” I said. “We’ve made a truce between us in the regions to the north, by the terms of which we supply certain essential nutrients and a few other tangible benefits in exchange for the labor of their drones.”

“How very convenient,” Molpe said. “I trust that the lives of humans aren’t involved.”

“Of course not!” I said, scandalized. “The vines had already overrun many of our… settlements, killing or driving off the inhabitants thereof, until I made a very credible threat to their very existence by pointing out that I controlled a very powerful and intelligent predator that might have been expressly designed for the purpose of attacking the kudzu ‘crowns’ directly, whereupon they capitulated en masse.”

“Predator?” she asked?

‘Gumball!’ I thought to him, ‘Be a dear and come show the nice mermaid your teeth. Pretty please?’

There was a sudden roiling of the sand and Gumball burst from the sandy soil with an aggressive rustle of leaves, then opened wide his toothy maw, which must have been thirty feet wide by now. Gumball was still growing; I suspected that he had designs on increasing his size as a dragon in the Underworld; but plants in general tended to go on forever growing, witness the many truly enormous oaks we’d encountered on our journey, and I had some hope that the giant Sequoias were still extant on the northwestern coasts of North America, the more northern latitudes of which still had marine climates chilly enough to generate the fog and damp which supported them. I made a mental note to check on this, whenever I had the time.

“Impressive!” Molpe said, and her aquatic sisters obviously agreed, as did the Sirens proper. “We have nothing like sentient plants in the Old World, aside from the occasional Dryad or human woman transformed into arboreal form to protect her from sexual assault.”

“Well,” I said with some heat, “it would have seemed to me far more sensible and appropriate if the rapist had been so transformed, thereby not only eliminating the immediate threat, but giving an entirely new meaning to the jocular description of a ‘woody.’ ”

This last, of course, was greeted with puzzled looks, unfamiliar as they were with English idioms, much less slang, and still disinclined to step too far beyond the boundaries of an ingrained sexism going back at least six thousand years or so, since the matriarchies were overthrown.

They all of them had an obvious fondness for predators, though, which I took as a helpful portent. I suppose we all of us, Goddeses, Sirens, humans, and other sentients included, feel a curious sort of kinship with carnivores, since the great majority of our ‘pets’ and other intimate animal companions through the ages had been predators, for the main part, with the possible exception of horses, but then very few of us have ever invited horses to hop up on the bed. Dogs and cats had the predator’s unique combination of relatively compact size, well-controlled sanitary habits, and heightened intelligence, which combined to make them a useful and emotionally-satisfying domestic companion. I pondered that for the moment.

‘If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.’

I made another mental note to seek out some sort of dogs and cats – somewhere along our journeys – and cultivate their friendship once again. I suspect that they were as good for us as we were for them, taking all in all, and one of the many problems associated with the Horticulturist enclaves was the utter lack of pets with whom we might encourage habits of empathy and caring amongst our children. Harry’s Name! As far as I knew, we didn’t even allow dolls as playthings! I know I’d never seen one.

“Sapphire?”

That was Beryl, I think, and I turned toward her with a start. “Yes?”

“What’s happening? You seemed awfully preoccupied.”

“Sorry, I was just thinking about the future, if we ever cease from wandering. I’ve been getting broody lately, as my belly expands and the imminence of motherhood is slowly working itself into my brain.”

She gave me a wry smirk. “Tell me about it. It’s been a long time since last we saw anything at all approximating a nursery. Sylvan bivouacs that change every night just don’t quite cut it for me these days, and I’m not half as far along as you are.”

“I suppose we have a palace in the Underworld, but I don’t think anything really grows down there, much less babies.”

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “There’s plenty of amorous dalliance going on in the Elysian Fields, and not one pregnancy that I know of, and I would know.”

It’s true, she would. I might be the nominal ‘Ruler’ of the Underworld by virtue of having overthrown the former King in a bloodless coup, but Beryl was the real mover and shaker down there. I just did the odd chore or two when she let me, really, the chthonic equivalent of taking out the trash and mopping the floors. “Well put,” I agreed. “Our little band of merry adventurers is coming right along as well. Almost half are visibly enceinte by now, and the other half are working on it, as best I can judge by the number of canoodling couples I glimpse beneath the trees these days.”

Beryl smiled. “Well, military service is difficult and dangerous enough – even when one has a little fiddle in with the Goddess of Death – that we can hardly begrudge them a few comforts in their sack time.”

I grinned back at her. “True, especially as I set a very bad example for them straight off.”

“Never say it! Your own example was an excellent encouragement for the troops, not to mention one of our best recruiting incentives, since the upper ranks in the fortresses imposed strict limitations on family size for the troops, with drastic punishments meted out for any infractions against ‘the good order and discipline of the service.’ In fact, I think our pregnant warriors are far more fierce than most all of the rest, since they’ve got more ‘skin in the game,’ so to speak, and an irrevocable investment in the future.”

“Of course,” I said, “it doesn’t hurt that no one dies forever in this particular outfit. In fact, our healing abilities are such that I don’t think any of us have even come close to dying, with the notable exception of you.”

“Lucky me,” she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

“Well, you know what I meant,” I told her. “What else could possibly have motivated me to beard the old lion in his den, as it were, to take hold of the fabric of reality and rend it into rags and tatters before reweaving it to suit my deepest need?”

She smiled at me then. “Well, you’ve always been a bit of a ball-buster, but I have to confess that you managed to perfect your game when you took on my assumptive ‘husband’ and vanquished him so handily. ”

“Hole in one?”

“You might say that,” she said, and laughed.

I was never much for smooth-talking the ladies, but I was both glib and clever, as well as being very much in love, which is a fairly good foundation, I think. “Well, I had everything in the world that meant anything to me riding on the game, so I gave it my very best effort.”

They say in my books that there are perfect moments, instants in time when everything becomes clear, a brief glimpse into an underlying reality that might well define the rest of your life. This was one of them, at least for me. “While you were gone, I dreamed of you, but I wasn’t asleep. People told me that you were gone, lost amongst the nameless dead, somehow cast aside, but I never believed them, because I could feel your living presence inside me, as tangible as the heat of the sun on my face, but you were in my heart.” I reached out and took her in my arms as I looked deep into her open eyes. “I searched for you across the open meadow, my heart called for you, and suddenly you appeared, seemingly unharmed, but I could feel that you were still held partially in thrall by the cruel tyrant who’d abducted you to begin with, and I knew where to find him, so I called my dear Gumball to deliver me to his presence, to confront the craven villain with the clear light of truth, to bring him to justice come what may, and Gumball didn’t let me down.”

“So,” she said, seemingly unmoved, “just like that, you decided to wrestle with God?”

“Why not?” I said without chagrin. “My strength is the strength of ten, you know, because my heart is pure. Though I’m neither splenitive nor rash, yet I have in me something very dangerous; let him beware who does you any harm. There was a grim shadow on you, a stain inside your heart, so I had to do my very best to either cure you, or to offer at least my fitting vengeance for your hurt – perhaps to make a place for healing to begin – perhaps simply to ensure that the perpetrator of this cruel assault upon your personal integrity could never boast of his distasteful deeds without instantly putting the lie to it in his own person.”

“…and his concomitant pregnancy?” she said, amused.

“Completely unintentional, yet a direct consequence of both of our actions, since he was trying to rape me at the time, and so had certain parts of his anatomy in an unfortunate juxtaposition to mine own when the sudden metamorphosis came full upon him. I’m fairly sure it took him by surprise, and it surprised me as well, but there’s ample precedent. Sometimes ‘just fooling around’ has lasting consequences which quite often come as a shock to both parties involved in the heated contest. Luckily enough, I was pregnant at the time, and so relatively immune from being knocked up twice, for which I thank my lucky stars, but evidently still fertile otherwise, which is probably a good thing to keep in mind for all of us. Remind me to tell our sisters, or at least pass the information on through Captain Topaz, and from thence to official despatches.”

Beryl responded instantly, “I’d have to say that’s almost pure luck, as well, since we have to consider the experience of poor Leda, who was bedded by her royal husband, Tyndareus of Sparta, then raped by Zeus that very same night, and wound up bearing two sets of twins by different fathers, Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, as well as Castor and Pollux. Oddly enough, the four of them were supposedly contained in two swanish eggs – I can only imagine how that must have hurt – and the paternal ancestry of all but Helen is still very much in doubt, although they managed to stuff the ill-fated Castor and Pollux up in the sky to keep them well out of the way, as was often the case with bastards, back in the day.”

“Ouch…,” I said. “The mind boggles even at a single egg big enough to contain two twin babies, I’m afraid, much less two such eggs in a row. I have trouble enough imagining a single infant’s head and shoulders, even when wriggling around to make room. Mind you, though, some accounts have Helen’s mother as the Goddess Nemesis, but that’s probably just poetic license, since it’s difficult to imagine how Helen would have escaped immortality, had both her parents been divine. The confusion about paternity seems perfectly understandable, though, since I imagine that the King of Sparta had every incentive to keep a lid on the rumours, or at least to try. So very few men are sanguine about the notion of their wives being bedded and impregnated by other men, even if one of them is purported to be a ‘God,’ since there’s always the possibility that this was meant by a perfectly ordinary wayward wife to be a cruel and derisive taunt directed at an ageing, wimpy, or otherwise lackluster husband.”

“One notes with prejudice,” Beryl said primly, “that one doesn’t hear of Goddesses shacking up with merely human men all that often, so your critique seems pertinent, at very least, and the masculine allure of my former bedmate was severely compromised by the disappearance of his rather impressive ‘tackle’.”

“So I suppose,” I said, subtly disheartened by her prosaic nonchalance. There was at least one major difference between our otherwise similar transformations. Where I had embraced it, perhaps through some inherent inclination, Beryl retained far more of her original trooper’s personality and inclinations, with only such adjustment to her transformed body as she deemed necessary. The contrast between us was obvious, now that I thought about it; I was focused on romance – for the most part – and enjoyed our sexual relationship as an important aspect of our overall intimacy, but not the sine qua non by any means, Beryl tended to focus upon sex alone, and was much less concerned than I was about emotional context, as evidenced by what had seemed at the time to be her callous taunts toward me about that bastard Hades’ sexual prowess after her abduction and installation as his Queen, evidently supplanting Persephone in his… affections, and her continuing expressions of something approaching nostalgia for the time she’d spent as his captive paramour. That got me thinking about our overall rôles in the current Pantheon, despite our nominal positions. I was nominally the ‘successor’ to Hades, Zeus, Ares, Poseidon, and many others usually numbered amongst the most ‘virile’ of the Gods, yet I seemed to have left behind the entirety of their propensity for random concupiscence involving attractive strangers. I also seemed to be leaving Beryl behind, to my sorrow, but facing eternity tends to make one impatient with anything much less than perfection.

 

 

In the event, the ‘mermaids’ were very fond of me for some reason, although I wasn’t really sure if it were down to the fact that I stood in loco parentis to them as Poseidon’s new eidolon, (εἴδωλον) or kleos (κλέος) – I couldn’t quite decide which was which – or simply because they saw me as a powerful and bloodthirsty heroine whom they admired, since I’d personally slain what must be very many hundreds of men by now, and more than a double handful of Gods. “So, Molpe,” I said. “Do you think it would be useful to lead an expedition south from here? As far as I can see, almost the entirety of historic Florida is underwater now, and those few islands still above the mean high water mark are swept by hurricane surges with great regularity.”

“It’s not quite as desolate as that,” she said. “Over to the west, there’s a fairly substantial peninsula left, about a third of the ancient state, but all the shoreline is drowned, as well as almost everything south of the Orlando Archipelago. There are a very few Raider outposts there, but the climate is perfect for the hostile vines, so they run the risk of being eaten whenever they travel by land, and of course they couldn’t possibly make any lengthy journeys afloat, since that would leave them subject to the same general sort of predation.”

That posed a puzzle for me. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them alone, but neither was I minded to extend my influence to encompass the local kudzu crowns, since they seemed perfectly capable of handling a large part of the Reiver problem in this area on their own, and there didn’t appear to be any civilian fortresses left in the southern archipelago, so persuading them not to eat the Reivers would be counterproductive, at least in the short term. “So, where exactly do these ‘raiders’ catch their victims?”

“As far as we know,” Molpe told me, “they most often travel up into the hills to the mainland north-west, then return driving female slaves before them, usually with a wagon or two of loot, mostly foodstuffs. Their usual paths cross several deep rivers, so we exact our rightful toll, and have toppled the foundations of many bridges to help to ensure their inability to find any sort of completely safe passage over our extensive domains.”

“Toll?” I queried.

“We have the ancient right to enforce a toll upon all maritime commerce, which includes any commercial or sovereign activities taking place within sight or sound of the sea.”

“And what, exactly, is covered by this ‘toll?’ ”

“Lives and goods, of course, but in practice only males are forfeit, and only then if they can be held in thrall, and we’re only truly interested in precious gems and jewelry in the way of goods, so our tax upon commerce is minimal, and we more than make up for that by rescuing ships and lives in peril upon the sea.”

I thought about that before I answered, “By ‘held in thrall,’ I presume that you mean ‘captivated by your voices,’ or is there more than that?”

“There is, actually, in that our mere appearance is just as irresistible as our voices, but only for susceptible individuals, mostly males.”

That confused me. Why in Harry’s Green Hell would anyone’s mere appearance be irresistible? “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite follow the chain of cause and effect.”

“It’s really quite simple. Just like our elder sisters, the Sirens, we punish derelictions of duty, but our scope is somewhat more limited. In the general run of commerce, sailors have a duty to the captain of the vessel, the shipowner, and to the merchants who either charter the vessel itself, or make payment for the delivery of goods on a common carrier. They may also have a range of other duties, to their wives and families, if any, to their sovereign, especially when aboard a man-o’-war, and fail in this obligation to their mortal peril. We ourselves specialize in moral peccadilloes, for the most part, sins against the family and righteous behavior. In this area, of course, our writ encompasses the traditional prerogatives of La Llorona, so any body of water larger than a puddle lies within the scope of our authority.”

“La Llorona?” I said, in complete ignorance.

“The Weeping Woman, the latest incarnation of Cihuacoatl or Coatlicue, ‘The Mother of the Gods,’ an Aztec Goddess with very many incarnations across Middle and South America. She’s somewhat akin to your patroness, Tiamat, but also has some considerable correspondence to you, in that she’s the special protector and saviour of pregnant women, and all matters concerned with the home and family, as well as the mother of us all, the Earth itself, from whom we spring forth and to whose loving embrace we descend at death.”

I thought about that for quite some time, even going so far as to access the Akashic records of some number of my subjects in the Underworld. “You’re right, of course, and are hereby acknowledged and confirmed in your ancient rights by this, my word, and by my hand as significator of my special protection.”

“Thank you, my Queen!” Molpe bowed low and took my hand in hers.

“I gather that philanderers and other abusers of the sanctity of the family are your special charge, and equally the special concern of La Llorona, so this constitutes a special class of oathbreakers.”

“It does.”

“As such, then, I grant you special discretion to handle this particular evil, including both the high justice and the low, depending upon your own evaluation of the situation as a whole.”

“Thank you, my Queen.” She smiled, showing her alarming teeth very prettily. “We are your eager servants.”

I smiled back. I found Molpe’s innocent savagery oddly refreshing, for some reason, not least because she and her companions seemed somehow completely free of angst, perfect soldiers, taking all in all. “I believe we can depend upon you, then, to manage those few Reiver populations still extant. We’d appreciate your coöperation in restoring any captive women you encounter to their families, if at all possible, or to some other supportive environment. To help you in this task, I plan to billet a small company of regular soldiers here, or any other location that seems advisable to you and your sisters. If the kudzu vines become a problem at any time, just let someone know and we’ll enforce our truce with them locally. Until they do, I can’t see them really bothering any of you, since they can’t tolerate salt water at all, and aren’t all that fond of any sort of water.”

“And how,” she asked, “is this rapprochement to be effected?”

“As I pointed out before, we have allies in the plant kingdom far more powerful than they are, and they’re limited in number only by what the local ecosystem can support.” I whistled up Gumball again, who’d been keeping a very low profile of late, having discovered that he quite liked romping around in the Elysian Fields, since he was able to take on any number of his favorite forms at will, although Cerberus and the Imperial Chinese Dragon were his usual choices. He quite liked having three heads to snap at things, and flying was his passion, so he sometimes seemed hard-pressed to choose between them. Gumball almost instantly erupted from the soil again with an admirable show of raw power far more impressive than his earlier entrance, soaring from the earth in a rush of leaves and dirt like a green avalanche in reverse, leaping perhaps sixty feet into the air before crashing to the ground with a toothy smile every bit as feral as that of our bloodthirsty mermaids. This time, he was immediately followed by two of his companions, although they didn’t leap quite so spectacularly. I could tell they were impressed.

Aglaope asked, eyes rounded in astonishment, “What sort of strange creatures are these, that they come at your command?”

“We call them ‘Bandersnatches’ after an ancient story, but human association with these creatures goes back at least a thousand years on this continent, where we commonly kept them as pets, although they started out as a food crop. There're actually related to the mints, but have an edible seed which can be ground into a type of flour and baked into bread This one is my personal companion, Gumball, but we have a few dozen travelling with us and plan to leave a few behind. You’ll find them a great help, I think, in managing the remaining slavers, since they can arrange fatal ambuscades from any location underlain by any sort of dirt. You might think of them as a terrestrial analogue to your mermaids – the equivalent either of a human who simply never learned to speak or read, or perhaps of a very clever dog, I hesitate to assign any sort of equivalency to creatures so profoundly alien to merely human conceptions of intelligence, which tend to be very much constrained by language – who can swim through fertile soil as easily as your sisters do the sea.”

“Can they speak at all?”

“Not directly, but their mental processes are accessible to any with the gift.”

‘Like this?’ Molpe communicated silently.

“Exactly so!” I cried. “You’ll have no trouble at all, provided you pet them from time to time. They’re quite friendly and loving, once you get to know them, and have developed quite a taste for our local form of ambrosia. We’ll leave you a supply, if you like, to keep them happy.”

Molpe’s eyes went wide with wonder. “You’ve dicovered a new source of ἀμβροσία so far from the winged doves of Olympus? How marvelous!”

“We have. Our local recipe includes only milk or cream, with the slightest admixture of the fermented elixir, either neat or as a dried powder. Let it sit for a day or two and it’s fully efficacious. Making it on your own beats waiting on birds six ways from Sunday.”

“Six ways from Sunday?” Molpe said, puzzled once again. “What in the world does that mean?”

“It’s what they call an ‘idiom,’ basically descended from an old way of describing an individual with eyes either askance – something like a hen or cock – or crossed, whom they colloquially described as looking two ways for Sunday, or any other thing. Eventually the notion of a physical quirk took on a life of its own, as idioms do, and came to mean something more like ‘exhaustively,’ or ‘in every conceivable way,’ with the number of different ‘ways’ to look increasing to some larger number for emphasis, or the underlying metaphor misapprehended completely, with random excursions into some sort of pseudo-meaning that seems somehow plausible to the speaker.”

Molpe smirked. “Well, that’s happened enough over the years, even in Greek, the logically-perfect language.”

“Probably,” I agreed, suppressing any inclination toward scepticism. “Every language is continuously pruned and re-sculpted by myriads of artists in sound and meaning, some of whom are poets, and some… somewhat less skilled. Not all of whom have similar attitudes toward their medium, nor even similar familiarity with the basic framework of their common language, yet all of them crib from one another, so the end result is something of a hash.”

“Barbarians are everywhere,” she sniffed. “Discourse is at the heart of civilized life, and eloquence is its currency.”

I tended to agree, but it seemed somehow unfair, because without ready access to the entire world of words and ideas, one starts out in the world of words and discourse heavily-burdened with a crippling handicap. In the real world of the Greeks, aside from the Gods and Goddesses, education was reserved for the upper classes, and there were masses of slaves and other sorts of servants who were not at all free to participate in the social and other benefits enjoyed by the ruling classes. “One advantage of immortality,” I said, “is that it gives one time to become skilled at almost everything one sets one’s hands and heart to do. True mastery of anything, from playing a musical instrument to putting words together to make a story, requires ten thousand hours or more of practice, roughly five years of working at it forty hours a week, but more is always better.”

“Of course it does. That’s what the gymnasia are for.”

“Well, it’s also what my Underworld is for. Regardless of their former status in the world of light, essentially all souls are free citizens in the world below – unless they are prisoners sentenced to a specific term of penance and reconciliation – and are therefore entitled to study and learn anything they choose to take up, whether natural philosophy, the performing arts, rhetoric, literature, the fine arts, or even the unsavory practice of literary criticism.”

“But doesn’t Lethe dissolve their memories before they’re accepted for rebirth?” She frowned.

I shrugged. “Lethe is still available for those who prefer it, but it’s optional under our new joint rule. It seemed to Beryl – who seems to have inherited Persephone’s position and authority, since Persephone herself was weary of the responsibilities entailed by her former position as Hades’ bride, not to mention Hades himself – that it was somewhat schizophrenic to forcibly destroy the memories of the reborn on one end of a lifetime and then encourage them to participate in a Mystery religion to partially replace these hard-won memories on the other. All it really did was provide unwarranted employment for a gang of parasitic sacerdotes and simultaneously discourage the habit of independent thinking.”

Hera blinked, evidently alarmed. “But the religious hierarchy is the foundation of civilised life!”

“Not in America,” I said. “We have both religious and political freedom here, or will have, once the rule of law is fully restored.”

“But what can possibly replace it?”

“Beryl reminded me, not so very long ago, that there was a revolutionary leader born several centuries ago in a province of North America called Mexico, Benito Juárez by name – he’s a very droll fellow, I met him once in the Elysian Fields on Beryl’s recommendation – and he said, ‘Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.’ Being translated from the original, it means roughly, ‘Between individuals, just as between nations, respect for the rights of others is the foundation of peace.’ I can’t argue with his words, even now. As for worship, I’m all in favor of human consciousness of a higher power and/or an overarching concept of morality and human decency, but the best way to encourage that is to give good value for their investment, not send strong-arm bullies around to punish people for some ill-defined ‘impiety,’ especially when the instigators of this enforced devotion quite often make two-year-olds look like revered elder statesmen ripe with patient wisdom and bottomless depths of compassion and loving-kindness.”

“I take it then,” Hera said, bemused, “that orthodoxy is for you neither turpitude nor virtue.”

“Not at all,” I replied, “or not as such. It’s my own opinion that religion is as religion does – and I fully appreciate the irony inherent in this, considering the fact that I seem to be the All-Mother now, as well as the All-Father – so I don’t really care what people either think or believe, especially whether they ‘believe’ in me, as long as they behave like decent human beings.”

“But what about monotheism?” Beryl asked, always willing to argue both sides against the middle.

“Why not? Although it’s either a more-​or-​less silly conceit, or a mere metaphor for the essential uncertainty of the merely human viewpoint, necessarily limited in scope to a single brief lifetime, it’s as good as any other opinion. Between us two, though, we have at least two immortal Goddesses, as well as our former lives as human beings, not to mention our memories of our many former selves, so as long as we don’t engage in a solipsistic kicking contest in which we each claim that the other is a product of our own fevered imagination, we have no real alternative but to admit some sort of divine pantheon, at very least, and since we have a veritable gang of Goddesses ready to hand, most all of whom are rather seamlessly somewhat diffusely interrelated in most peculiar ways, and many of them appear to be other incarnations of our very own ‘selves,’ something more… flexible than mere panentheism seems very much in order. Perhaps some notion of the ‘Cosmic All’ might better fit the bill, although I freely admit that this might easily slide into a sort of existential nihilism, which always sounds silly, once you say it out loud, since it’s perfectly obvious that non-suicidal entities persist in finding meaning to their lives, however frivolous that purpose may appear at first to others.”

Beryl, of course, looked at me with eyes aslant, a skeptical expression on her face, as almost always. “Whatever,” she said. “I personally have little faith in ‘purposes,’ since actions speak much louder to me than mere words and theories.”

“There’s something to be said for that, of course,” I said, temporizing. “On the other hand, truly strategic thinking requires a bit more than merely superficial observation.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said a very strange voice from behind me, layered with a hundred sibilant whispers in uneven cadence that somehow called to mind a mystic chorus of ghosts.

I whirled around, as did Beryl, whilst Hera and Molpe just smiled. There before us… well, formerly behind us… was a very tall and very beautiful woman whose long blonde hair was twined with writhing green and yellow-spotted vipers. I recognized her instantly, of course, Medusa, Μέδουσα, the ancient ruler and protector of human civilization, first amongst the firstborn of the Titans, the first children of Tiamat, born of Κητώ, Keto, from whom the whales I’d heard about had taken their name. “Funny how things work out,” I said, “but welcome, dear sister. I’ve heard of your beauty, of course.”

“Really?” she asked. “So few remember me clearly, these days.”

“I have the advantage, of course,” I said courteously, “of having been Poseidon, in one of many past lives, and could hardly forget the blessed mother of my children, much less your many noble virtues.”

“You were Poseidon?” she exclaimed. “Mind you, there’s a certain arrogance about your bearing that reminds me of him, but he was nothing if not a very manly fellow.”

“I’m sure that we were, but we live under a different dispensation these days, and we all of us share the essential androgyny of the Sirens, or will share in the future.” I grinned for all of us. “The change is in the very air we breathe, and so is both inexorable and inevitable.”

Medusa rolled her eyes. “Well, I can’t say that I’m exactly looking forward to this new world order, but in the course of a long life, one must be prepared to abandon one’s baggage from time to time, and it certainly beats abandoning my body entirely, as I was forced to do for quite some time. Now that was somewhat irritating, but when Athena took over my rôle in the eternal Pantheon, she didn’t have the chops to carry it off on her own, at least in the popular imagination, so had to carry my head around as her badge of office.” Then she laughed. “I imagine it must have irritated her as well, since it would have been a constant reminder of her lesser status in the hearts of her worshipers, who still looked to me for justice and civil order.”

At that, Athena herself, still present in our number, coughed and cleared her throat. “Uhm… if you don’t mind, dear ‘sister,’ I’m actually right here!”

“So?” Medusa arched her brow. “Since when has that mattered to anyone?”

Just what I needed, a cat-fight. “Ladies,” I said ecumenically, “we’re all of us sisters here, and since Tiamat herself is one of our number, albeit somewhere out at sea just this minute, one supposes that we all of us, whatever our current dignities or offices, might properly be described as afterthoughts and copy-cats. The fact is that we all derive much of our power from merely human imaginations and aspirations, as their many attempts to encompass and explain the Universe developed a narrative power that transcended mere mortality and reached out to grasp the heavenly stars. We are both the instigators and the inheritors of that legacy, and should have a decent respect for their opinions and needs. That’s part of the bargain, after all.”

“What ‘bargain?’ ” Hera asked suspiciously.

“That deities derive the entirety of their just powers from the adherence and consent of their worshipers. That’s precisely how Athena supplanted Medusa, in that Medusa’s worshippers were conquered by the Ionians, and it was the Ionians who gave us modern life, for the most part, although they did it largely at the expense of women. That’s why Athena, the most ‘masculine’ Goddess possible – having been created through a particularly bloody sort of ‘parthenogenesis’ which involved Zeus murdering the real mother and then falsely claiming that he ‘gave birth’ to Athena on his own – was forced to adopt her predecessor in the affections of the people as her mask and alter ego. Women are the heart of every religion, and no religion can thrive without their support. Athena – essentially Zeus transmogrified as a Goddess – almost entirely supplanted Zeus in the public mind, just as Metis, Athena’s real mother, had preceded Zeus and his gang of thugs, especially amongst the original inhabitants of Ionia, but only through her literal ‘masquerade’ as Medusa, by means of which she appropriated Medusa’s primordial rôle as ‘Guardian,’ but also as the Mother of all Invention, Wisdom, Courage, Inspiration, Civilization, Law, Justice, Just Warfare, Mathematics, Strength, Strategy, the Fine Arts, all manner of Crafts, and other human skills. In fact, aside from the rather undistinguished career of Zeus as serial rapist, patricide, and bully, he had few qualities that might have endeared him to his supposed ‘subjects.’ It’s no wonder that no one was terribly fond of him.”

“You’re speaking of my husband, upstart!” Hera wasn’t pleased at all by my contemptuous characterization of her departed spouse.

“True, but please bear in mind that his shade now lies within my power, and all his sins are fully-revealed to me, so kindly don’t bother making him out to be better than he was posthumously. If it’s any consolation, he’s well on his way to rebirth, although you aren’t likely to recognise him in feminine form. She’s bound to turn out nicely, if you must know, since my partner and I do very good work, but she’s already drunk deep of Lethe, and won’t remember you at all.”

“Zeus is like you two now? Half woman?” Hera seemed concerned.

“A little more than half, dear Hera, since we’re both of us pregnant, Beryl by your former brother Hades now, and I myself by Beryl. The new avatar of Zeus, of course, cannot be impregnated until she has a living body, but will be equally capable of fathering a child, so will have, I think, the best of both worlds, as will all of us going forward.”

“Am I infected too?” she said.

“Almost certainly, although I could access your Akashic Record if you’re tormented by curiosity.”

“You can access my life?” she asked, alarmed.

“Of course, as can Beryl, if she troubles herself to look. Every one of us, all creatures living, including the so-called ‘immortal’ Gods and Goddesses, eventually knocks upon our subterranean door and is eventually reborn, despite any illusions they might harbour about their putative ‘imperishable’ flesh.”

“But the immortal Gods…!”

I rolled my eyes up toward the azure sky above us. “How, dear Hera, do you suppose most of the original Titans wound up in Tartarus? They were ‘immortals’ too, if you’ll recall, and were overthrown by treachery and deceit, for the most part.” Zeus and his warlike companions, putative ‘immortals’ all, were completely vulnerable to me, at very least, and all are fully within my power even as we dally here, so one can’t count neither upon Nektar nor Ambrosia to keep one completely safe from any harm. There are no certainties in life, even in the lives of the ‘Immortal Gods and Goddesses,’ so it behooves us all to tread humbly upon the Earth – our collective home and Mother – and to take good heed of our sins, for we any of us might at any time be suddenly called upon to atone for them in full.”

“Is that a threat?” Hera said pugnaciously.

“Not at all,” I answered. “Rather, it’s merely a fact of existence in this time and place, since I am the eternal Goddess of the Dead. Although I have no dark designs on any of our present company, sooner or later, all souls come home to me and can rest secure beneath my outspread wings in confident expectation of my sheltering love and care. Unlike the previous Sovereign of the Underworld, I hold no grudges and am committed to the spiritual advancement and eventual rebirth of all the inhabitants of my chthonic realms.”

“Does this largesse include my brother Hades?” Hera asked.

“It does, as I’ve already explained. Indeed, she’s just as pleased as punch to be carrying the first-born child of the Sovereign of the three worlds, the broad earth, the deep sea, and the still more vasty realms below, since it offers bragging rights, at very least.”

“But what about Beryl’s child?” she asked reasonably, perhaps understandably confused by the notion of having two firstborns.

“I have to admit that it’s rather been a puzzle for me as well, but of course Beryl’s child was conceived whilst we were both mortal, and the rules for this sort of thing appear to be almost as complex as the rules of inheritance amongst European royalty, not to mention the fact that that we’ve never been formally married. Pregnancies resulting from rape amongst the Gods, though, appear to follow rather odd rules, no matter who was actually in the process of raping whom. Mind you, I doubt that the ‘rules’ ever contemplated changing sex during the very act, despite the cautionary example of Tiresias, but then she married and had children by her legitimate husband, and was your priestess to boot, dear Hera, although she’s reported to have dallied in the ‘oldest profession’ as well, which was evidently not an uncommon trade for priestesses in ancient times, as it not only made religious observance more attractive for men, but served to bolster the Temple treasuries to boot.”

Hera laughed. “Well, that’s certainly been true in some traditions, but neither has it ever been universal. So, tell me, has sexual congress been better for you as a woman?”

If she thought that she was going to trick me with that old chestnut, she had another think coming. My mama didn’t raise no fools. “Alas, I can’t quite say, since I was a virgin, back when I was a man, so have nothing at all to compare with my more recent experiences.” This was true enough, but I knew the history of Tiresias, so was forewarned. To be perfectly fair, I suspected that the old boy had got it right, since it makes perfect sense in an evolutionary context, considering the mortal hazards females face in pregnancy, maternity, and motherhood, not to mention the fact that heterosexual intercourse usually involved putting up with the antics of men from time to time, but I felt no particular obligation to choose sides in an ancient quarrel.

“Pity,” was all she said, but I could see that my glib answer irritated her.

‘Tough luck,’ I thought. “Yes, isn’t it?” I said, “but then you weren’t all that happy with the opinion of Tiresias, who certainly had far more experience to call upon.”

She said not a word, but I could see she wasn’t well-pleased by my glib observation. I’ve never been all that disciplined about keeping my mouth shut.

Beryl, on the other hand, loves a good fight, and squared off on my behalf straightaway. “If you’re trying to rustle up a ruckus, old woman, you’ve come to the right place, so just let me know how it’s going to go down and I’ll gladly oblige you!”

“Uhm, Hera,” I intervened, “just as a word to the wise, I’ve seen her tear limbs and heads off grown men with her bare hands, so I wouldn’t advise any sort of confrontation, whether physical or magical. She tends to become… enthusiastic.”

Beryl merely smiled, but it was the sort of smile one wouldn’t want to encounter in daily life, the sort of hungry smile that one might see on wolves and tigers.

Hera apparently thought better of her latest comment and said, “It was merely a matter of curiosity, since I’ve heard differing opinions, but I’m terribly sorry if I offended anyone, but rather thought that Sapphire here might be able to satisfy my purely intellectual curiosity.”

“I’m sure she could, if she thought about it – she’s a great one for thinking – but even I would hesitate to quarrel with her, since she’s a lot more vicious than even I am, once she gets her dander up. You saw what happened to a whole passle of the immortal Gods when she became irritated by them, however merciful she’s been postmortem.”

“Well,” I interjected, seeing dudgeon rising between them, “Let’s all focus on more pleasant topics. It’s a lovely day, and we’re in good company. If anyone really wants to kill somebody, just for practice, we could probably find a nest of Reivers somewhere off to the northwest, if we troubled ourselves to look.” Of course, since I’d brought it up, I had to satisfy my own curiosity, despite the possibility of spoiling a bit of the Siren’s fun. I quickly riffled through my mental Tarot, although it was gradually becoming redundant as my psychic awareness of the world-​at-​large improved. “In fact, there’s a largish clan of them not fifteen miles way to the northwest, if you’re interested in a little dust-up, although of course the local mermaids and Tiamat would be left twiddling their thumbs until we were finished.”

“Don’t mind me!” she roared, shaking leaves from the oaks and needles from the pines for quite some distance around us – I could hear the soft sough and susurrations of falling detritus for miles around – one of the more significant irritations of essential omniscience, which seemed to be creeping up on me as time went on. “I’m organizing the local cetaceans as an honour guard to make a court-​in-​exile, since this seems to be the center of human society for the nonce. The Mediterranean was always far too small, I thought, for a proper ocean, and the Pacific tends to be boring with so little land around, except at the edges, and there’s nothing much happening in the way of civilization on either shore in these modern times.” She snorted in a very unladylike manner. She’d never paid all that much attention to the social graces, at least in my estimation, doubtless through having come into existence before any sentient beings were available to form any sort of society with which one might conceivably interact.

I smiled. “I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job of it, since you’ve done such a fine job with the Universe as a whole. Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

‘And please let me know how your own little expedition turns out, why don’t you?’

‘Expedition?’ I eloquently displayed my ignorance.

‘You are going to clear up this little problem with the remaining Reivers, aren’t you?’

‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ I said. ‘I’d planned to leave it to the mermaids as something to pass their time, since there’s not much commerce on the sea to occupy them, much less oath-breakers and villains.’

‘But I could use them in my Restoration project. They’ve always been very fond of life at court, since it gives them an excuse to wear their very best jewelry and exotic finery.’

I hadn’t thought of that, not having had the advantage of observing the mermaids at length in their natural habitats. Thinking quickly, I answered, ‘You’re right, of course, and one could easily make a case that human villains are my responsibility. I was just thinking about getting my European project going, since I have no idea what’s really going on over there.’

‘Why in the world don’t you simply go take a look? Do you think the late Zeus and his companions booked passage on a dirigible when they came calling?’

‘Dirigible?’

‘A sort of lighter-​than-​air balloon used to transport goods and people half a millennium or so in the past. I thought it was rather clever, but it was soon superseded by faster and noisier alternatives, so of course they vanished from the stage, although they did manage to capture the imaginations of the storytellers of that age, and for a few hundreds of years thereafter.’

‘Dirigible,’ the notion fascinated me. We’d obviously need some sort of gas lighter than nitrogen – hydrogen and/or helium came to mind most easily – but it would allow a relatively low-technology society like ours to bypass the oceans in greater safety, and quite possibly with much less investment of time and scarce resources. ‘Unfortunately, we won’t have enough time to reïnvent these handy ærial gadgets before our putative raid,’ I said.

‘Why on earth would you even bother? You have the Sirens right here, with the lesser sirens as your backup troops, and can easily lead them on your own, with Beryl if she longs for a little more action after your long trek.’

‘You seem to forget that the Sirens have wings, like angels, whilst Beryl and I ride on perfectly ordinary horses,’ I told her. ‘I’m fairly sure we’d slow them down.’

She smirked at me, although it was a little difficult to tell, ‘Are you not my own daughter, somewhat removed? I gave birth to Metis, who bore Athena, all of whom are shapeshifters. Since your paramour seems to have supplanted Persephone, the potent Praxidike, one would assume that she inherited her powers as well.’

“Shapeshifting?” I spoke out loud, startled by what seemed like magic mentioned as casually as barley porridge.

“Of course!” she thundered. “Even Zeus that was – as greedy, thick-headed, and clumsy a dolt as one could possibly imagine – was able to disguise himself in many forms, although most of them, quite frankly, lacked even a shred of creativity.” Then she paused for a moment, visibly pondering, before saying, in a bellow only slightly subdued, “The swan thing was rather clever, I have to admit, however perverse and horrifying it must have been for poor Leda.”

Classical mythology had never been my strong suit – or should that be… ‘thealogy?’ In any case, it didn’t surprise me that there was a lot that I still didn’t know about the situation I found myself inhabiting. ‘I suppose that I should have guessed, since Gumball took to shapeshifting with an enthusiasm that astonished me, almost as soon as he’d descended to the Underworld.’

‘Your animal companion isn’t prejudiced in favor of any sort of eternal verities, so retains a childlike joy and freedom,’ she suggested. ‘Transformation is the sine qua non of the Eleusinian and other Mysteries, since facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Easy is the descent to Avernus, for the doorway to the underworld lies open both night and day. But to retrace your steps and return to the sunlight and warm breezes of the world above – that’s a mighty labour.’

‘So Beryl’s return from the Underworld was a similar transformation?’

‘As was your own, of course, and the ready access to the hidden ways enjoyed by your envoy Maia, anciently known as Hermes, but her earliest incarnations were always feminine, since the Gates of Hell and the opening of the womb were seen as the twin way-stations of a single journey.’

‘So Hercules,” I intimated, showing off what little I really knew, “Hera’s man,” was made to don women’s garments by Omphale, the Queen of the Lydians, so that he himself could reënact the true Hero’s Journey, the entire cycle of dying and rebirth, which necessarily involves reïncarnation in bodies of varying sexes.’

‘Exactly! Omphale, herself an incarnation of the primal Goddess of all preliterate humanity, was enacting the rôle of the Psychopomp now taken up by Maia, the spiritual guide who conducts the soul through the frightening cycle of dying and rebirth. Omphale’s very name means the Navel of the World – that is, a personification of the very deepest question, “Who in the world are we?” – and she and Hercules were said to be involved in a very strange relationship, in that she forced him to wear her garments whilst she wore his, and she ordered him around as a husband does his wife, demanding his wifely obeisance and modesty as he performed the daily duties normally required of the woman of the house, including worship paid to the household Gods, like Hestia and Hermes. Now in fact, that in and of itself isn’t really truly odd, since the Holy Mysteries of peoples all around the world quite often feature either male officiants wearing some sort of women’s garments, or women wearing men’s garments, perhaps as a symbol of rebirth, since human beings rarely have any choice about the stations in life they will inhabit on the other side of the veil, so must always be prepared for what’s to come. It’s a pity they didn’t keep at it, though, since I think the world would have been a better place if more people had taken the long view over the years.’

‘Beryl’s been saying that for ages,’ I said.

‘Well, she would have done, wouldn’t she then? As an avatar of the Kore, she would have been terribly concerned about the long-term fecundity of the Earth, given the short-sighted antics of a mostly uninformed humanity.’

‘I myself have often thought that the Mysteries should have been made available to everyone at no cost, since they gradually became commercial “cash cows” that catered to the wealthy, rather than being offered to all and sundry as their birthright.’

‘Well, it’s often been the case that people who are disinclined to actually work for a living quickly gravitate toward the priestly classes. In my day, we discouraged those who had a purely venal “calling” by requiring castration for male postulants, and perpetual virginity for the women.’ She laughed out loud, a sudden thunderstorm of mirth. ‘The vows of perpetual poverty didn’t hurt neither. That’s one thing the Buddhists got right, requiring their priests, or monks, as they called them, to go out begging for their food from the people they serve, each and every day. It tends to keep them relatively honest.’

‘What do you mean, “your day?” It’s not as if you’re dead.’

‘Oh, please! Until I met you, I’d been a virtual slave for almost seven thousand years, it’s not as if I’d been fulfilling any meaningful life plans. As far as that Poseidon jerk-off was concerned, I was merely a useful beast of burden that he used to intimidate his enemies with very little effort on his part. You, on the other hand, blithely changed the entire paradigm, in one fell swoop transmogrifying the sorry sod from Lord and Master into Lunch. My only quibble, and it’s very minor, is that I do wish that you’d persuaded him to discard his armor first, since it felt rather prickly going down.’

‘I know. I did most of the swallowing, if you’ll recall. It was just bad luck that your neck is so very long, compared to the one I’m used to, and so my timing was a little off.’

‘Well, least said is soonest mended, as they say. In any case, you should be off to fight for justice and right innumerable wrongs, since you seem to be the final arbiter of life and death these days.’ “Ladies, your mistress has need of you!” she roared in a voice like thunder, in a staggering declaration of august presence that a thousand lions working as a consortium might only dream of.

Within a few seconds the great mass of Sirens stooped from the sky like great eagles – at least a hundred or more of them – alighting with a curiously graceful unfurling of their wings that raised dust and bits of grass and fallen leaves over half an acre of meadow, including, curiously enough, thousands of wild dandelion florets that danced off into the sky. I made careful note of the incongruous beauty of the scene and day, a slight dusting of clouds drifting across an azure Southern sky, and the trees, the green grass, the slight stirrings of the insects, the song of birds, not at all undaunted by the sudden arrival of the winged women.

Peisinoe spoke first, “We’re at your service, Great Queen.” She bowed slightly and raised her hand in greeting.

“And I, Raidne!” another said, also saluting me with a casual nod and wave.

“Parthenope!” “Leucoisa!” “Aglaope!” “Thelxiepeia!” “Ligeia!” “Teles!” “Thelxiope!” … A hundred names and more rang out in a collective shout of instant readiness for action from the throats of a hundred women, all of them smiling.

“Ladies!” I shouted, “Tiamat, our honored Creatrix and Great Mother has reminded me that we share a common heritage, and have a common obligation to punish evil souls.” I cast my mind about, accessing the Akashic Record in real time. “To the northwest, the main camp of the largest group of remaining raiders and slavers remaining in the Southeast corner of this continent remains untouched. I propose to touch them with the spirit of genuine remorse and repentance as they are escorted personally to the Gates of Hades by the Ladies of this august company.”

Then I gathered my wits about me and reached for a dimly remembered form, rising up with wings that spanned six fathoms. “Up!” I cried, and took to the air in a fury of beating wings! The feeling of stronger muscles across my back was suddenly familiar, as was the matching strength across my chest, a whole vocabulary of movement and interior anatomy as familiar as the memory of trees had been when I first stepped foot into the broad world beyond the citadels.

With a great shout, they rose up behind me, a terrible mass of winged women, the true Sirens of legend, all armed and dangerous. As if we shared one mind, we veered slightly toward a nearby hill and caught the updraft within which we rose, spiraling toward the clouds.

As I flew, I manifested a sword of worth, Excalibur, in very fact, from another incarnation as the Lady of the Lake, Viviane, whose true stories and many names are all twisted up in a thousand lies and legends. Now that I had full access to all my memories, I finally saw exactly why I’d been both loved and feared through half a million years of human history. ‘Noblesse oblige!’ I thought. ‘Unfortunately for some, my duties haven’t always included neither kindness nor mercy.’

Even at the speed of angels, not quite as swift as thought, it took the best part of a quarter of an hour to reach the largish area they’d staked out as their own. Fat lot of good it did them, other than making them easy to find, since the horse trails up from the old peninsula and between their camps were easily visible from our height, their intricate switchbacks and ambuscades laid bare.

As for the Reiver camp in question, it turned out there were three of them. I chose the first at random, indicating its general direction in flight, which I knew would be clue enough for my small flock of avenging angels. The psychic stench of sin is unmistakeable, once you’ve smelt it, and it tends to infect the entire neighborhood, once it sinks in deep.

Hovering for a moment above them – for the sake of a quiet conference, since holding ourselves stationary in mid-air entailed rather more effort than soaring – I said, “I’m rather inclined to believe, from past experience with these general sorts of slavers, that anyone free to walk around unchained is part of the conspiracy, whilst their victims will most probably be confined. They do have firearms, however, which can pierce both flesh and bone, so be careful to kill them suddenly, and all at once, if possible.”

“Not to worry,” said Thelxiepeia, which name I understood to mean something like either ‘solace’ or ‘soothing voice,’ an interesting sort of name for a professional assassin, “the worst that can happen is that we visit you down below and rise refreshed in an instant, not to mention that immortal flesh and bone is notoriously difficult to damage.” She smiled benignly, which somehow didn’t seem all that comforting… in context.

From five thousand feet, through scattered wisps of cloud as we circled above it, moving from damp chill as we passed through thick tendrils of foggy stratocumulus cloud into warm sunlight, the camp seemed roughly similar to those we’d seen in the Appalachias, a low stockade with a more-​or-​less central keep where they kept their loot, and where the leader seemed to live, a slave pen with a fortified sub-stockade off to one side of the camp, a few outbuildings where the troops slept, and a communal kitchen where the slaves served out food that they weren’t allowed to eat. The women would be raped wherever convenient, but were usually returned to the pen when their ‘services’ were no longer desired. My vision seemed sharper somehow, so I guessed that it had something to do with my brand new shape-shifted body, although I was still heavily pregnant, so I hadn’t changed all that much. “Ladies!” I called out softly, pointing to the structures far below us, “Their leaders will usually be found in or near that largish building near the center of the camp, although they do wander around from time to time, and the slave pen is that open stockade off to the side, where they keep captives penned when they’re not being put to immediate use. The rest of the building are usually all the run-​of-​the-​mill gang-related, cookhouse, barracks, and storage, although they will have slaves in them occasionally. They’ll usually have a few pickets out to guard against ambush, so look for locations which overlook trails or other likely approaches to the central camp; they’re very unlikely to guard against anyone dropping in from above, I think.”

“Good!” Peisinoe said, “then let’s have at them, I’ll seek out the sentries first, just for luck, and let Sapphire here have all the fun of dispatching their leader.”

I grinned, already looking forward to it, and plummeted to the ground by simply turning myself upside down, as if I were diving into a lake, then folding my wings close to my flanks and legs as I dropped headfirst toward the camp a mile below us. As I began my plunge, I winked at Peisinoe and blew her a kiss by way of an informal farewell. She, and then the rest of the Siren cohort, followed close behind, the only sounds the rush and susurration of the very air as we plummeted through it, tickling and massaging our feathers as we slipped toward our separate targets. For some reason I noticed that there was no particular sound of wind in my ears, as I would have expected heretofore, so supposed it must be some sort of adaptation inherent in the structure of this body.

All too soon, the keep was just beneath me, possibly four hundred feet below, and through good luck – or fate – a burly man with a long sniper rifle was standing outside, talking to a woman whose ankle was chained to a heavy iron weight. From their instantaneous postures, he was making demands – I actually heard the words, ‘On your knees…’ as I dropped toward them at terminal velocity and she cowered. With a quick flick of my puissant sword, his head was off and rolling on the ground even as I flipped over and spread my wings, feeling the instantaneous pressure in the flight muscles of my chest, and the corresponding tension in my back as I brought myself up short with a graceful movement of my outspread wings, managing to regain my footing with some small degree of elegance. “Are you alright?” I said to the woman, who was cowering with her hands over her ears for some reason.

When she didn’t reply, I asked her again, this time touching her hair and stroking it, “Are you alright? You’re quite safe you know, as my companions have dispatched the last slaver.” Quickly, I looked around to ensure that my words were true, with a view toward remedying any departure from my reassuring description of the current situation with a few more instantaneous translations to the Underworld, if necessary. There were no lingering opportunities at all, the Sirens having followed my example by similar fatal curtailments throughout the camp and were even now seeking out their victims to offer comfort, freedom, and food.

Leaning down, I reached out to inspect the chain around her leg and said, “Please allow me to free you from these cruel fetters.”

The poor woman was still fearful, as might be expected, since winged women with swords were probably not regular visitors to this part of the world, and she had just seen a man decapitated, however much she may have feared and hated him, and however richly he’d deserved his fate.

Gently I reached out and touched her leg, my hand already filled with a large dollop of our ‘cheese,’ spreading it over the visible chafing and scars before grasping the two halves of the wicked thing with both hands and snapped it open as gently as possible, I spread more ‘salve’ over the newly-revealed festering wounds immediately, then inspected her more closely, healing whatever I could find from the outside before giving her a morsel of the solid stuff to eat, which she fell to with gusto, quite evidently starved for nourishment of all sorts.

‘Beryl?’ Considering how she’d seemed to be in a bit of a snit the last time I sent a pack of penitents down to Hell, I thought I’d offer my sympathy, at least. ‘We’ve freed the first camp, but it turns out that there were two satellite camps to the north of the main grouping, so you should receive a few more Reivers posthaste.’

‘No problem,’ she responded. ‘I have the disposition of them well in hand, and have sent most of them to cool their heels in Tartarus for a while, since they seem to have had little time to contemplate their many sins before being dispatched.’

‘Well, I didn’t have much to say, and didn’t want to give them any time to either threaten or harm their hostages in an attempt to bargain their way out of our swift and definitive justice.’

“Well, it was probably a good idea. So you’re going to do the same to the outlying camps?”

“I am, although I’ll leave a few Sirens behind to organize some sort of rescue for the captives. Do you think that you could dispatch a few of our troops to see to setting up some sort of longterm arrangement for them? If the local Reivers followed their usual practice, there’ll be none left behind in wherever they found them with whom they might reunite in any attempt to rebuild their former lives.”

‘Perhaps I can make arrangements for their loved ones down here,’ she said.

‘How would that work?’ I asked.

‘Well, if I could do it for Orpheus and Eurydice, I might as well be even-handed for similar victims of senseless violence. It seems a shame, when you stop to think about it, to make people wait for a second chance to be together, and the situations are very similar, since Eurydice was being pursued by a rapist when she died.’

‘That one didn’t turn out all that nicely for either one of them, as I recall.’

‘Yeah, well, that was under the previous management; we’re more on top of things these days. Other than deliberate cruelty, what was the point of granting poor Orpheus’ heartfelt wish for the return of his beloved, and then snatch her away again because he broke a silly rule that was designed to trick him in the first place?’

‘Especially since Aristaeus got off scot free, even though he’d harried the poor girl to her death,’ I complained sourly.

‘Well, that was then, and this is now. I don’t have the same inclination to whitewash “boyish hijinks” as did the ancient Greeks, who were all male, to hear them tell it.’

‘You know, there are some who say that Eurydice was only a euphemism, and that Orpheus actually tried to woo you away from Hades with his enchanting poetic talents, and that it was Hades himself who threw a crafty snare before the two of you when you tried to escape your unwilling captivity.’

I felt her smile. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, and so on…. Be that as it may, and I admit nothing, you’re not so terribly lacking in lyrical talent yourself, these days, although I’ve never seen you pick up an instrument. Does that make you Orpheus?’

‘If so, I had somewhat better luck in planning the second jailbreak,’ I told her, smiling. ‘As for lyres, I’m not all that bad with my tongue alone.’

‘Naughty girl!’ she said, and then turned to other things. Not that I blamed her, of course. Even with the global population cut down to roughly a tenth of its former count, and birth rates down as well, there were still roughly fifty thousand deaths a day that demanded almost instant attention, and I wasn’t helping. I made a mental note to catch up with my housekeeping as soon as I could spare a moment or two.

Idly, I wondered too if there were sentient beings on other worlds, somewhere in the universe, and exactly who it was who dealt with them if so. I knew it wasn’t either of us.

 

 

The second outpost was warned of our coming, or else their guards were at least more aware of the importance of a proper watch, since they started firing on us as we plummeted to Earth again, first one sentry, followed shortly by another few as his hysterical shouts aroused the camp, although it took them quite some time, by our standards, since we began accelerating with powerful sweeps of our wings as soon as the sentry looked up at us, and even then it took a few seconds for the ugly sod to gather his wits, whilst we covered the full mile back to Earth in less than seven seconds. In all, three sentries managed to get off shots, all badly aimed, since they weren’t used to aiming at an accelerating target, and before they learned that lesson they were dead, two decapitated, and one cleft through from head to crotch, which left a very awkward corpse. The rest didn’t happen to have a rifle near to hand, so were slaughtered as they scrambled to find one, and one was in the midst of raping one of the slaves, so he lost his head as well. His victim was a little hysterical for a while, but was quickly comforted by Leucoisa, who seemed to have quite a knack for it, since the former slave was laughing and calling out to her friends not two minutes later. I think the wings helped. Despite almost two centuries of Horticulturist indoctrination, most of us still had at least a vague notion of what angels were supposed to look like, and the Sirens certainly looked like what the stories described. Hell, I knew what I looked like, heavy bastard sword in hand, with twelve-foot wings splayed high; if I wasn’t an angel, I really ought to be one, although I did lack any sort of halo.

After a suitable interval, I approached the woman I’d rescued, since Leucoisa had moved on to other women by then. “Would you allow me to remove those shackles,” I said to her. “They don’t look at all comfortable, and I hate to see a woman chained.”

“They’re riveted,” she said.

“That’s not a problem,” I answered, bending down to take them in my two hands and rend them as easily as if they were paper, taking care to avoid injuring her as much as possible, although her ankles had been rubbed raw by the iron. Almost instantly, I had a handful of cheesy salve in hand and began soothing her ankle and leg with the healing mixture before moving on to her back, which was crisscrossed with scars and open sores from whipping. I was almost sorry then that I’d acted so quickly to dispatch her tormenter, since I really wanted to kill him twice, at least, this time with more care to ensure his very protracted agony. “Do you happen to know,” I said, “anything about the other outpost of these cowards? We’ve taken good care of the main center of them to the south already, so they’ll be the last we know of in the area.”

“I’ve heard that it’s much the same as this one, except that it sits atop the entrance to a cave, which is where they keep the women.”

“Do you know how big this cave is?”

“No, I’ve never seen it, but I know that it exists, even though they never put me there.”

“Could you tell me your name?” I asked her.

“It’s Cymophane, although they called me ‘Slut’ most of the time. That’s what they called most of us, actually.”

Her affect was dissociated and flat, as was all too common in many women freshly rescued from the Reivers. “No one will ever call you that again, Cymophane. Have you ever seen the precious mineral your name refers to? It’s quite beautiful, but also very tough, usually a sort of tawny orangish color with inclusions of another gem they call rutile, which simply means ‘reddish.’ It’s sometimes called ‘Catseye,’ because it reminded people of the eyes of cats, a small predator that commonly preyed on mice and other small animals, before the Plant Wars started.”

“Predator?” she asked, probably unfamiliar with the word, since we didn’t have many around these days.

“That’s an animal which captures other living beings and kills them, just as we just killed the men who treated you so badly.”

“So you’re one of these ‘predators?’ ” she asked.

“I have to confess that I am, but one of the very best sort, or at least I so flatter myself.”

“I want to be like you!” she said.

“You will be, if you like, and no man will ever have the strength to overpower you again, or force you to do anything against your will, whatever you decide to do in your personal life.”

“Good,” she said, “but I’d prefer to kill as many men as I can.”

I smiled. “Actually, they’re becoming rather scarce, at least locally, but there are places where they still abound. Do you have family anywhere?”

“Not that I know of. I was born in the pens, and never knew my mother, and the women who helped to raise me are all dead now.”

“Do you know what happened to your mother?”

“No. She was probably either killed or traded to some other group of Raiders. No one usually bothers to keep track, in the pens, because it happens a lot.”

‘Beryl!’ I called to her. ‘Please give this last batch a little extra time in Tartarus. I’ve just been talking to one of their victims, and they were a particularly nasty bunch.’

‘So I’ve discovered,’ Beryl answered. ‘Rest assured, my justice was both swift and certain. Even now, their entrails are being plucked by vultures, and will be for the next few centuries, at least.’

‘Thanks, Sweetheart. I should have known that I could depend on you.’

‘Nice to hear you admit it, Sapphire, Queen of the Damned.’

‘No more than you, Dear Heart, though you’re also Queen of the Blessed.’

‘I am, aren’t I? On the other hand, you’re terribly good at taking out the trash, and I am awfully fond of you.’

‘We all have our proper rôles,’ I opined.

She didn’t respond, so I posited an expressive roll of her eyes as I refocused my thoughts.

I returned my attention to Cymophane. “You may be pleased to know, then, that their shades are going to spend the next few hundred years having their livers and bowels snatched out by vultures.”

“That sounds nice, but what are ‘vultures’?” she asked me.

“A type of bird, a winged predator, but not like me. They usually prey on creatures who can no longer move around for any reason.”

“Shouldn’t you be going, then? They do have radios, and will be expecting to talk with someone soon enough.”

I actually hadn’t thought of that, to my chagrin. “You’re right, of course, but I wanted to make sure that you were on the mend before I left. There’s no danger of them escaping my justice, which is very swift and certain, as is that of my companions here.”

“Will I grow wings?” she asked, and seemed hopeful.

“I think it might be arranged,” I answered her with a benign smile. “I seem to be in charge of these sorts of things lately.”

“Good!” she exclaimed. “Now get going and rescue the other women!”

“I’m off, then,” I said, and left, gathering a half dozen Sirens as I walked to the edge of the camp, seeking a little room to spread our wings. There was a nice low cliff there, above a local stream that seemed to head off roughly south, towards the distant ocean, and the approach to the edge was grass, not bushes. The entire area looked as if it had been heavily grazed, but there were no horses present, so I assumed that there was a raiding party out somewhere.

‘Peisinoe,’ I found her. ‘The second camp of these slavers appears to be partially vacated, so I’m guessing that they’re out raiding somewhere. I’m off to rescue the women of the third camp, supposedly the last, but could you spare a few Sirens to go look for the missing Reivers if we don’t find them?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We’re just sitting around doing little besides gossip and grousing right now, so it would be nice to see a little action.’

‘I’ll leave them to you, then, and concentrate on the women of the other camp.’

‘That sounds good to me. Do have fun, and I’ll try not to kill everyone, in case you want to interrogate a couple of them.’

‘It actually doesn’t matter all that much, since I can always access the Akashic Record.’

‘Akashic Record? What’s that?’

‘It’s a little complicated to explain, but it’s sort of like an Oracle, but far more accurate than most, and it really only operates in relation to the present moment, or the past. It’s not really a good predictor of the future, although it can give one excellent clues, just as timely military intelligence can allow one to make reasonable guesses as to the enemy’s future disposition.’

‘Couldn’t you use it to find your missing slavers?’ she said.

‘Yes, but it can take quite some time to sort through the data when you’re not looking for specific individuals, and I’m afraid that the people left in charge of the third outpost may get wind of the fact that the other two have gone silent. In the past, Reivers have reacted to the danger of discovery by simply killing all possible witnesses, so time is really of the essence.’

‘I see, and I agree. Please forgive my ignorance.’

‘Not a problem, I think. I don’t feel any immediate disturbance in the near vicinity, so believe that we still have a bit of time to spare. I’m off, in any case,’ I said.

‘Good hunting!’ she said.

I took off running.

“Cymophane!” I called out, “Would you like to take a little trip to help rescue the remaining captive women?”

She looked suddenly frightened, but then she steeled herself and said, “Yes!”

“Brave girl!” I said, sweeping her up into my protective embrace. “Hang on tight and don’t let go, whatever happens.” I squatted down slightly and then leapt into the air, unfurling my wings to their full span at the same time, then pulled myself aloft with a mighty stroke of my wings, then began to row through the air as I gained altitude, Cymophane held safely in my arms.

‘Sirens! I need two of you, I think, but please no more than two. We need a strong enough force left behind to guard the camp against the remaining outlaws.’

“At once!” Teles said, and then Ligeia said the same, both leaping into instant motion as they sprang into the sky, climbing quickly upward into the clear blue empyrean… well, not literally. In any case, a faint track trodden down by horses led off into the piney woods below us, the likely direction of the third camp. “What do you think?” I called to them as we flew along.

“I smell villainy ahead,” was Ligeia’s reply, which was good enough for me. Thirty miles we flew, the horsepath fading in and out of clarity, depending on the thickness of the foliage, but the stench growing stronger as we neared our destination. Even I could smell it now.

At last we saw it, a typical Reiver fortress, but smaller than usual. There was an outcrop of rock on one side, not quite a cliff, but neither a hill, a solitary bastion thrust up through the woods without any context otherwise, as if some giant had dropped it from his arms, if giants there were who could carry a lump of limestone a hundred feet or so tall and two hundred long, something like a loaf of bread, but harder. There were two sentries we could spy out, one in a makeshift hidey-hole carved into the face of the rock above the camp, but with no clear access to it, unless they had a rope ladder stowed away for access. The other was concealed behind the stockde itself, in a little wooden shack that was little more than a shed roof covering an acute angle formed by two sections of the wall itself. Both looked a little awkward to access, as both strongholds were far too constricted to accommodate our wings. “What do you think?” I said to Teles. “Did anyone think to bring along a bow and a few dozen arrows?” I had a rifle with me, of course, in addition to my puissant glaive, but it was difficult to begin a stealthy assault with a fusillade of bullets.

“It won’t be a problem,” Ligeia said. “I have knives.” She adroitly displayed a half-dozen throwing knives in a very deadly-looking fan, then tucked them away again in some hidden recess of her garments, a white chiton pinned at the shoulders with decorative bronze clasps, with a white himation overall, a surprising elegant outfit for a warrior, but I didn’t doubt her deadly prowess, having seen the Sirens at their work.

“The hole in the rock won’t be much of a problem,” I said. “I can simply land on top of the cliff, drop down over the edge, and catch the edge of the hole as I fall past. Even I should be able to disable the sentry with a well-thrown rock at that distance, and I’m highly motivated.”

Ligeia smiled and answered, “I can take the man in the box on the wall easily enough, since I can simply lift off the roof and grab him.”

“I take it then you’re strong,” I said.

“A bit. Flying tends to develop upper-body strength, and our archetype is inherently robust. It goes with the job description. One of the favorite punishments of old was being rended limb from limb, which makes a terrible mess, especially when tearing off the legs.”

“I imagine.” I answered. “We’ll have to be quick once we start; they have a tendency to hide behind ‘human shields.’ ”

“Cowards!” Ligeia spat toward the ground, although there was a long way down to reach it.

I said, “Let’s be off, then,” and started my stoop towards the top of the rock. They followed.

I landed silently, one great advantage of having wings, and proceeded immediately to carry out my plan. I crawled toward the edge, finding it extremely awkward – one disadvantage of wings – until I reached the edge. Glancing over, I checked the position of the sentry’s spy-hole, then dropped, a five-pound rock in one hand and the other ready to catch the edge. I took him by surprise, although I had to beat my wings just once to catch my hold, since the edge of the spy-hole was more rounded than it looked. My rock crushed his skull quite nicely, though, so I dropped the rest of the way to the ground. Once I’d landed, I looked up the wall of the stockade and saw the roof of the guard station was off, so figured that Ligeia had been successful in her own mission. I couldn’t see any others of the slavers, though, so looked toward the opening of what must be a cave of some sort, although it had a carved lintel and decorative rails on either side of a stone door, all inset into the face of the cliff by some three feet or so, which must make a nice shelter from the rain, but which had prevented our seeing it from above. ‘Harry’s Brass Balls’ I cursed silently. I hadn’t seen any sort of slave pen either, so it must be inside the cave, and the job was no longer looking quite so straightforward, as well as very strange, to judge by the usual Reiver camp. Of course, that explained why the two assaults on the sentries had gone completely unnoticed, as far as I could tell, so it was a mixed blessing, or curse, depending on which way one looked at it. I glanced out toward the yard, where there was a wooden structure that I’d incorrectly assumed was the ‘Big House’ where the leader slept and kept his treasury, but was now looking more like barracks, at least in hindsight. At the same time, it looked pretty damned impregnable, a mini-keep within the main keep, plus that damnable stone door. ‘What in Harry’s Horrendous Green Hell were these guys playing at?’ I thought to myself, but then I had was I modestly imagined was a brilliant idea.

‘Gumball!’ I called out to him with a little extra mental ‘oomph.’ ‘Would you mind going down to the Underworld and coming back in your dragon form? I’m quite sure that you can do that, and if not, I’ll help.’

Then I turned to my fellow assassins, ‘Ligeia! Teles! I’m going to cause a ruckus, I think, so please be aware of any opportunity for mayhem.’

Teles laughed, then said, ‘I like the way you think.’

Then I felt Gumball rising up from Hell to meet me and told him, ‘Gumball, in the enclosure here there’s an ugly log building. I’d like you to take it apart very carefully, in case there are any women inside, but you can eat any men you find.’

Gumball took the simplest path and simply rose up beneath the blocky log building, slowly rending it into individual logs. In the process, I saw three Reivers disappear down his capacious maw and then he looked toward me. I swear that he was grinning. His dragon face was far more expressive than that of his native form. ‘Excellent! my noble Gumball! You’re the best! but now, if you don’t mind, could you please come over here and knock down this damned door?’

With a sudden roar and an eruption of white-hot dragon fire, he attacked the door. Evidently, dragon fire is fairly hot, so the instantaneous application of Gumball's violent blast of flame on the cold stone caused the door to shatter into jagged shards which fell from the doorframe into a heap of rubble. I saw two Reivers staring toward Gumball in horror and took advantage of their discomfiture by throwing my sword through the throat of one and a handy piece of rubble through the skull of another, then I jumped inside to gather up my sword. Over in one corner was a wooden wall with at least seven women staring at the spectacle before them through cracks between the rough-hewn planks, on the other were three more Reivers, even now reaching for their rifles, which had been propped against the stone wall behind them. Big mistake. One should aways keep one’s weapon close to hand. I remedied my own fault by wrenching my sword from deep in the body of the first Reiver and jumped toward the others, already swinging. Through sheer good luck – and more than a little skill, or so I flattered myself – I managed to separate three heads from three bodies with one fell arc of lashing steel, then looked around the rest of the room.

At the far end, in partial darkness – since the place was lit by exactly three smoky candles – sat the damnedest critter I’d ever seen, what looked like a portmanteau of human, snake, and bird, garishly outfitted in yellow, green, and red cloth armor. It looked like a bad choice to go against a dragon, but then I personally couldn’t thank of any choices that weren’t bad in a situation like that.

He seemed to have the same idea, since he made no move toward his own weapons, which appeared to consist of a wooden club studded with flint blades and a wooden spear headed with a very nicely-knapped obsidian spearhead. “Whoo arre yooou?” he hissed at me, a severe speech impediment obvious in his voice, probably resulting from a mouth full of very sharp and pointy teeth and a tongue that was decidedly forked. If a snake could talk – and this one obviously could – he’d sound just like that.

“The global Goddess of the Underworld, and other things too numerous to bother mentioning.” I didn’t want to get into a pissing contest with him, whomever he might be, and my first title really encompassed nearly everything, since everything that lived in any sense came eventually under my dominion, and I was very patient. ‘Mother Earth is waiting for you; there’s a debt you’ve got to pay.’ “And who might you be?” I enquired.

“Quetzalcoatl! Sky God, Vision-Bringer, and Creator of the Universe,” he boasted loudly. He didn’t quite beat his manly chest, but he might as well have.

“Yeah, well,” I said, not in the most friendly manner, I have to admit, “I’ve got quite a few other tricks up my sleeve as well, but I don’t like to hyperbolize. To be perfectly plain, I’m not at all fond of these creeps you seem to be hanging out with, but have nothing in particular against you that I know of, so I’m inviting you to leave the field of conflict and retire in perfect safety.”

“Woman! How dare you!?” He was obviously incensed. “I am the God of War”

“Yeah? You and whose army?” I just happened to be the Goddess of War myself, from a lineage far more ancient, I suspect, and the little creep was starting to annoy me, that was for sure, so I partly blame myself for what happened next.

The snaky guy opened his mouth wider than seemed humanly possible – which was a dead giveaway that he wasn’t really human, I suppose – and stretched out his head to engulf me, or I guess that’s what he’d been planning to do – when two things happened. First, I brought up my sword and plunged it down his open gullet in half a trice, which didn’t do him much good at all, and then Gumball stretched out his scaly neck and ate the guy from his shoulders down, which left his head still hanging on my sword, from which it fell and then went rolling on the ground, managing to find its way into a corner from which it didn’t move. He didn’t say much after that, although his eyes did blink once or twice before they glazed over. “Great job, Gumball!” I praised him effusively, since I was loath to criticise any action taken in the heat of battle, which this clearly was, nor did I forget the fact that Gumball had intervened to save my life, a habit I tended to approve of, and would be extremely reluctant to censure him in any case, even if a more measured approach might have left the reptilian idiot alive. As a treat, I picked up the now redundant head and tossed it to him, and he caught it very nicely. I couldn’t help wondering at the symmetry of it all, since Gumball as a dragon might be considered a type of serpent with wings, whilst this Quetzalcoatl guy had appeared to be a type of serpent with only feathers. Funny how all things seemed to be connected. If I didn’t know better, it might have seemed almost like a story.

‘Beryl, sweetie,’I called instantly to my putative wife, ‘ Gumball and I have sent you a little special gift, along with the Reiver riffraff. He seems to be some sort of snake god in the local pantheon, but he’s not very bright.’

‘They never are, and you don’t have to tell me,’ she said sourly. ‘He’s already whining about his plight, since he expected an entirely different sort of afterlife, is irritated that a mere women struck him dead, by what he loudly declares were unfair means, since he didn’t have time enough to get fully prepared for your treacherous ambush, and doesn’t much care for our mostly self-service franchise down here either, since he believes that he’s entitled to a large retinue of servants, and especially a bevy of sexy women at his beck and call.’

‘Hang on, I’ll be right there,’ I said and changed my viewpoint in a flash of illumination.

I took in the scene in an instant, our little God-boy all puffed up with indignation, Beryl on her throne in high dudgeon, her brows furrowed and her manner tense. ‘Hey, you!’ I said. ‘Snakeboy!’

He turned and glared at me, obviously recognizing the source of all his troubles in me. Tough luck; he’d asked for it. I conjured my virtual deck of cards again and slapped Trump Twenty-One upside his head, The World, a Woman grown in power to rule the cosmos, and the Significator of my own Dominion, which changed everything. All that was other shrank in him until it was subsumed in the face he’d had before he was born, the fœtal tadpole that we’d all started out as, destined to evolve into feminine form with a good jolt of testosterone. He was lucky at that, since I could as easily have jolted him right back into a starfish, the ancient originator of our own roughly five-fold symmetry, and left him with no brains at all.

I sat back to watch him radiate for a few instants before I stopped him, his new Müllerian ducts already fixed, and let him grow until he started breathing on his… make that her own, then put the finishing touches on, stopping her accelerated growth at the equivalent of about eighteen years of age in the waking world. “Wake up!” I said. “Arise reborn!” and she did.

Unfortunately, her personality hadn’t changed all that much, and she immediately tried to attack me again, albeit somewhat less forcefully, so I killed her again. I really didn’t have all that much time to spare for reclamation projects, and we have a whole system set up in the Underworld to rehabilitate lapsed sinners, so I sent her to the back of the line. She’d been working with the slavers, in any case, whatever it was she was doing, so was probably just as much of a jerk as she’d looked like as a God. I can’t see being part snake as any sort of character recommendation, in general, and of course snakes aren’t terribly clever in the first place, so her intellectual capacity may have been limited. A few thousand years spent talking with ordinary people, perhaps even a few scientists and philosophers, might well improve her prospects.

“After all… tomorrow is another day,” I mused aloud.

 

 

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2014 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved