John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

Boggin said, "Pelagaeus is still a suspect. Suppose the Chaoticists offered to let him keep the living sea and the island of Atlantis, if he would help them tear down the sky and sink the lands and mountains occupied by human beings into the brine? The offer would tempt him."

"He is not the only suspect. Of course, the Vine God would welcome war between Cosmos and Chaos; he is a creature of madness, drunkenness, revelry, disorder."

Boggin said, "And yet he also presides over public festivals and feasts, and soothes the weary toil of man with the refreshments and pleasures of the vine. Some say there is none who delights more in the happiness of mortal man aside from Dionysus. He is a strange fellow, but I would not head my list of warmongers with his name."

"He was one of the three who conspired with Chaos against Heaven."

"I did not say he was off the list. I just would not put him at the top of it."

"Who would you put?"

"That remains to be seen. On the one hand, Lord Trismegistus, the Swift God, the Father of Lies. He has no hope of gaming the purple by any peaceful means. He was the second of the Three."

"If he were not in Tartarus, I would suspect him. The fact that he is dead excuses him."

Boggin said, "Did you see his dead body with your own eyes, fingerprint it, check its retinal eye patterns, put your hands into its wounds?"

"Of course not. Lord Trismegistus fell into the Abyss, with the silver arrows of the Huntress sticking into him."

"Then do not count him dead. That could have been an actor, or a wax mannequin. Or the Huntress could have conspired with him, and shot him with blunt trick arrows into bladders full of pig's blood he had beneath his robe."

"Put him on the list then, if you fear the work of those who no longer exist." The Laestrygonian sneered again.

"No. I still put Trismegistus at the bottom of the list. He had concourse with Chaos before any other of the Triad; he knew the royal families in Chaos, he loved their people, and adopted their ways. They say he had a wife among them. Would he kill the children of his friends just to start a war where more of his friends would die? A war that, I should add, would put him no closer to the purple. Does he want to rule the wreckage of creation, once all created things are dead? It does not sound like him."

"Who else is on your list, then? So far the Vine God is the only suspect."

"Good Infantophage, you have not mentioned the third leg of the Triad. Dionysus and Trismegistus are but two. What of the Gray-Eyed Lady, the Wise One? What of the Lady Tritogenia?"

"She is a woman."

"Does the word 'Queen' or 'Empress' not exist in your limited vocabulary, my dear Centurion? Lady Athena Tritogenia would make a better ruler than your master. She loses battles less often."

"She is a virgin. How would she establish a dynasty? The Huntress is crippled in the same way. I suspect they are sterile, or lesbians. Why else would they don armor, and fight and hunt? Besides, if a woman could take the purple, why has not the Queen of Heaven taken the throne? Both Mulciber and Mavors would support the claim of the Queen Mother, Lady Hera."

"So are you putting all three ladies on the list of suspects, good Centurion?"

"No. The Huntress has no following worth mention; she slays Chaoticists when she finds them and skins them like beasts. She would not welcome war. The Gray-Eyed Lady I think is too wise to let war loose upon the universe, for any cause. She wins more often than my master because she fights like a woman, timidly, and only when she knows victory is with her. No son of Uranus would cooperate with Lady Hera Basilissa for any reason whatsoever. From the first moment of time, they had no greater foe than the Queen. Rule, Law, Good Order are her watchwords. Even Lord Terminus was wild and chaotic, compared to her."

Boggin smiled. "I see you share your master's good opinion of the Queen of Heaven."

"There would be neither grain nor roads nor laws without her. Do you dispute this?"

"I was one of the ones she sent to harass Aeneas, who, as far as I could see, had broken none of her precious rules. But no matter! The Queen and two virgins are not on the list. Do we need to discuss the Goddess of Households, or the Goddess of Love?"

"Lady Hestia is the eldest of all of them, older even than the Unseen One. What she did in the before-times, or what she learned from Rhea, no one knows. There is a power in her she keeps hidden.

My master Mavors respects her."

"And he shows his respect for the institution of marriage by getting together with the wife of his brother, no doubt to sing hymns to the Lady Hestia, while holding hands chastely."

"Do not mock the Lord Mavors!"

"Me? Why should I? When the very existence of Archer, the young Love God, advertises the virtue of Lord Mavors for all the world to see? What need have I to add to that mockery? I would plunge my manhood between the silky thighs of the Lady Cyprian if she wanted me to plug up the hole of loneliness she feels in her life, and I would never fear the consequences. Mock him? I envy him! Indeed, I will not put the Love Goddess on any list, or even speak ill of her in a whisper; she is the one who made me fall in love with Orithyia, and look at how that turned out. She wants her son on the throne, and she wants all wars to stop, forever, so everyone can get on with their mooning and sobbing and waiting and mating. I would suspect myself before I would suspect the doe-eyed Aphrodite. Of the women goddesses, who is left?"

"The Queen of Grain."

"Unimaginable."

"Agreed," said the Laestrygonian softly. "Even I (and I am as loyal as his own right hand is to Lord Mavors), I would embrace my own spear before I would raise a weapon against the Lady Mother Demeter. The only one left is the limp-wristed poet."

"I thought we were listing goddesses."

"We are."

"We are speaking of the Bright God, the one they call the Destroyer?"

"The Flaming Solar Faggot, I call him. His hand is on the harp-string these days, not the bow-string."

"You amaze me, Centurion, in the breadth, or shall I say, the depth, of your wisdom. It is like a hole without a bottom. You must have studied for years to learn the art of forgetting every lesson in history.

The Destroyer is the greatest god of us all, invincible in war, a master of all arts and sciences, a philosopher, learned in letters, a prophet who sees the secrets of the future___Do you recall that he shot one million arrows at the Telchine demon called Phython, when that monster was nigh to destroying all of the established Earth? Alone and without aid, the Destroyer fought him on the sea and in the air, burned him with arrows of fire, and broke his back over his shining knee. So great was that battle that some of those ar-rows are still in flight through the upper heavens. When they fall to Earth, they make a streak that men call falling stars, and they are held to be a sign of good luck."

"A million, you said? How many missed? In my company, we get a stroke of the rod for every arrow that misses the target."

"The Destroyer is not on my list at all. He does not want the throne; he does not want for there to be a throne at all, but prefers we had the demos vote, as they did in Athens."

"He is also not on my list. The boy-kisser does not have the balls it would take to conspire against my lord Mavors."

"Well, then, who is left?"

"The young Love God. The Archer. Remember? Our Emperor. The one the Three Queens assigned to rule over us now that Lord Terminus is gone."

"You mean Lord Eros, son of Mavors and Cyprian. I recall him well. We endured the rule of Love in Heaven for all of thirteen years, during which time he disbanded the army, emptied the treasury, trampled on all of our ancient rights and privileges, turned the tablets of the laws on their heads, so that the innocent were punished and the guilty were spared. They say the English who lived in this land, during their years of darkness, prayed to their god to spare them from the fury of the Norsemen. Were their god a real one, I would pray: 'Spare me, O Lord, from the Compassion of Reformers!'"