Chapter 51 A God and a Titan
When Hermes woke, he thought he’d drowned.
With each shallow breath, his lungs ached. The air around him felt heavy, as though he was suspended in tar. He tried to move, but his limbs were bound, his eyes smothered, his mouth gagged by what tasted like a filthy rag. Something cold and hard circled his neck.
Fragments of memory returned to him. He’d been hovering over the battle outside Troy when he’d been impaled by an arrow.
He’d healed himself and killed a swathe of mortal soldiers, their feeble swords no match for his power.
A woman in silver armour had been fighting Aeneas, just as the stone had foretold. Hermes had saved him.
Then she came.
Panic reached for him across the darkness. Fighting its smothering grasp, he delved within himself, searching for his life-threads.
He could not feel them.
Where are you? he screamed inside his mind. Where are you!?
But the voice did not answer.
As he squirmed, he realized that his armour had been removed and he’d been stripped down to the white tunic he always wore beneath it. He was defenceless, powerless and alone in the dark.
‘He’s awake.’
‘Take the blindfold off.’
Not alone after all.
Searing light burned his eyes as the cloth covering his face was yanked free. Blinking, the inside of what appeared to be a shabby tent came into focus.
Two people stood in front of him: the fierce woman in battered silver armour who had fought Aeneas and a tall man with flame-red hair.
‘I’m going to take off your gag,’ said the man. ‘You will not scream if you value your life.’
‘Or your teeth,’ added the woman.
Hermes nodded swiftly, then retched as the rag was loosened, the foul material raking over his tongue.
‘You will regret this,’ he spat.
The woman smiled. Somehow it was more fearsome than her scowl.
‘Why did your family not come to the battle?’ asked the man.
‘It is over?’
The man snorted. ‘It ended in a bloody stalemate hours ago. You’ve been out for almost a day. Answer my question.’
Hermes blinked the moisture from his eyes. How had this mortal known that his siblings intended to be at the battle, only changing their plans at the last moment when their father ordered them to search for the Titan girl? He would reveal nothing more to this man.
‘I am a god. I am Hermes, son of the King of Heaven, and I will rain retribution down on you and all you love for daring to –’
‘You will do no such thing,’ said a third voice.
The woman and the man parted as another person walked into Hermes’ frame of vision. Her slight body was draped in a long black robe, her dark hair clipped short around a strong-jawed face from which blazed a pair of oak-brown eyes.
He thought his heart might explode it was beating so fast. Hades’ remains, charred and smouldering in the depths of Tartarus, stole unbidden into his mind. He squeezed his eyes shut, desperately scouring his body for a hint of his power. Still nothing. Wet warmth spread across his thighs.
‘Answer his question. Why did the other Olympians not come to witness the battle?’ The Titan’s face was marred by a tangle of emotions he could not divine.
Finally, Hermes regained his voice. ‘W-what have you done to me?’
Her lip curled. ‘You can thank Hades for that collar. Feels like drowning, doesn’t it?’
A sob lodged in Hermes’ throat as he thought again of his dead uncle, then Poseidon. The Lord of the Sea would never willingly part with his most prized weapon.
‘You killed Poseidon too …’ he breathed.
Her mouth tightened. ‘I will ask once more. Why did you come alone?’
Hermes’ stomach plummeted through the ground.
‘I …’ He bit the insides of his cheeks. Surely his siblings would be looking for him by now …
Then cold realization trickled down his spine.
He’d confided in no one, not even Hephaestus, about the vision he’d seen in the shard of omphalos stone, or his plan to fly to Troy.
The rest of the divine children were far away, searching across Greece for the Titan girl, all unaware that she was here.
If both Hades and Poseidon had fallen against her, what hope did he have?
‘Did it have something to do with this?’ From behind her back, the Titan produced a small cloth-wrapped object. She laid it on her palm and peeled away the fabric to reveal the omphalos shard.
Hermes drew a sharp breath. She’d been through his belongings.
‘Enough,’ hissed the woman in the silver breastplate. ‘Kill him.’
Hermes’ heart lurched into his throat. ‘No, please …’
The Titan ignored the other woman. ‘Why did you come alone? Where are your siblings? Your father?’
Tears burned rivers of salt down his cheeks. He was a fool. He was such a fool.
‘They will come … they will come for me …’
‘Pathetic,’ spat the flame-haired man.
Suddenly, the other woman drew a blade from her thigh and lunged towards him.
‘Atalanta,’ barked the Titan.
The woman paused, her knife dangerously close to Hermes’ jugular.
‘He is one of them. He killed countless soldiers. He tried to kill me and you,’ she snarled.
‘Step outside.’
Hermes cringed back, the hatred radiating from Atalanta’s face scalding like a burning hearth.
‘I said, outside.’
With a grunt, the woman withdrew her blade from his neck and paced from the tent.
The Titan’s eyes raked over him before turning to the flame-haired man.
‘Watch him.’
Then she too swept through the entrance.
Atalanta rounded on Danae as soon as she stepped into the daylight.
‘Why the fuck is that thing still alive?’
‘We need him.’
‘The plan was to kill the false gods who came to the battlefield, not keep them as hostages.’
‘There’s been enough death for one day. Besides, he’s more valuable to us alive. We still don’t know why the other Olympians did not come. And with that collar on he’s no threat.’
‘How can you say that? He’s one of them!’
‘He’s a boy!’
Atalanta’s lip curled. ‘Don’t tell me you’re fooled by his looks. He’s just as flint-hearted as the rest of them.’
Danae drew a breath. ‘We cannot go on like this.’
Atalanta folded her arms, the rise and fall of her chest betraying the schooled chill of her glower.
‘Despite what we’ve been through together, in the war against Olympus I am your leader. You must follow my orders, like you once did with Heracles.’
Atalanta was quiet for a moment, then she huffed a sharp breath through her nose. ‘Do you know why Heracles, Telamon, Dolos, Hylas and I worked so well together all those years?’
Danae waited.
‘We never fucked each other.’
‘Atalanta …’ Darkness swirled at the edges of her vision: unspoken truths that might rip her apart if given voice. She’d made a choice like this before, standing in front of Heracles’ tent at the foot of a snow-swathed mountain. Duty before desire. She could do it again. She must.
‘You’re right.’
Atalanta’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
‘Ending the reign of thunder is what matters most. Anything that jeopardizes my ability to do that is … I cannot …’ Danae swallowed the lump in her throat.
She glanced down at the ground, churned to mud by yesterday’s downpour, then raised her eyes to meet Atalanta’s.
‘I need you to swear that I can depend on you. That you will follow my orders as your captain. Just your captain. It is the only way this will work.’
The warrior gazed at her long and hard.
Part of her wanted Atalanta to rail, to fight for them, to drag the truth of why Danae had fled that night from the locked cavern of her chest.
Despite knowing it was for the best, she was crushed when Atalanta finally said, ‘I swear it.’
Danae paced through the labyrinth of tents.
Above her, clouds wisped across the bone-pale sky like a fire’s dying breath.
Her black robe and cloak were soaked in mud up to her knees, like everything in the camp since the Greek army had returned the previous night, forced to call a stalemate with Troy before they dashed their entire force against those impenetrable walls.
Groans wafted through the air from the scores of injured men left to heal in their tents, with nothing but a swig of wine to stave off the pain.
Beyond the Ithacan quarter, between the camp and the plain, a large trench had been dug.
Hundreds of bodies lay within it, washed and stripped of their armour, ready for a journey to the Underworld they would never take.
A ram had been slaughtered, its blood mixed with honey wine, water and barley. Libations for the dead.
In her disguise as a seer, Danae should have been with Calchas, prowling about the mass grave, intoning the funeral rites, but she had more pressing matters to attend to.
On reaching her destination, Danae flung open the awning draped over the King of Ithaca’s tent.
Odysseus looked up at her. One of his eyes was swollen shut, a freshly stitched gash above his brow. He stood before a map of the Trojan defences splayed on the table, candles burning in small bronze dishes at its corners.
‘Your plan failed,’ said Danae. ‘Only one god came to the battle.’
Hylas stood on the other side of the table, leaning on his crutch, his eyes flicking between Danae and the king.
‘Things did not play out as expected, however –’
‘Even now, you can’t admit you made a mistake,’ Danae spat. ‘Your sources were wrong.’
Odysseus pressed his fingers into the edges of the map. ‘Has Hermes revealed any useful information?’
Danae folded her arms. ‘He had the omphalos shard. He must have recovered it from the Underworld.’
Odysseus loosed a long breath. ‘It is good we have retrieved the shard, it will be invaluable in the war to come.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You should have told me about the collar.’
‘You should not have promised me a plan you could not deliver.’
He stepped towards her. ‘The men are talking. Some are saying they saw two gods fighting on the battlefield. I have done what I can to dispel the rumours and convinced Agamemnon their words were born of battle fever, but you should have taken greater care –’
‘How many Children of Prometheus soldiers died?’