and Ramsay had pocketed a few of them before leaving Bleaney. 'Solute epinephrine, with added cortisol to speed up the absorption rate. Enough of a dose to negate the effect of your intoxication power, at least until we can get out of range. So, if you want to discuss the possibility of a truce, fine, let's discuss it. The first whiff of treachery, and this is over.'
Dionysus and Aphrodite glanced at one another.
'Well-prepared,' she said.
'And so businesslike,' he said, somewhat reproachfully.
'Not everyone has your laidback attitude, Dionysus.' Aphrodite turned to Sam. 'My admiration for you increases. May we know your names? What should we call you?'
'Tethys,' Sam said. 'And he's Hyperion, she's Mnemosyne.'
'Titans,' Aphrodite said, quick as a flash. 'Of course. The ancient enemy. Obvious. Apt. But how about some real names?'
'You give us yours, we'll give you ours.'
'You know ours. Dionysus, Aphrodite.'
'No, that's who you want everyone to think you are. You were born human. You know that.'
'I was born from the sea,' Aphrodite said. 'When Cronus cast Uranus's severed genitals into the ocean, the waves swirled and foamed around them, and I emerged fully-formed from that foam.'
'Whereas I was born not once but three times,' said Dionysus. 'First, to my mother Semele, a princess of Thebes, whom Zeus impregnated. She died while I was still in the womb so Zeus removed me from her body and sewed me up inside his thigh, a second womb where I grew to term. Then as a child I was killed, at the behest of jealous Hera, by none other than the Titans, the real ones. They rent me limb from limb, roasted me and ate me, but Athena and Zeus buried my heart and my other remains and Rhea re-combined the parts and brought me back to life, my third birth. Thus, like the grapevine dying each winter and flourishing again each spring, I can be seen to embody the cycle of death and resurrect-'
'Yeah, yeah,' said Ramsay. 'This isn't you talking. This is stuff outta some Greek myth textbook.'
'I assure you — Hyperion, is it? — I assure you, Hyperion, I speak nothing but fact.'
'And Athena sprang from Zeus's brow,' said Sam, 'and Hera gave birth to Hephaestus through parthenogenesis, in retaliation for Zeus not conceiving Athena with her, and so on and so on. All these old stories, they're not true, and they're not how you Olympians really came to be.'
'Oh?' said Aphrodite, narrowing her starry-lashed eyes. 'And how did we come to be, if not in those ways which the poets and bards have long enshrined in song?'
Sam studied the two of them. She was usually pretty good at spotting liars, and neither was giving any of the telltale signs. Yet they were no more genuinely Dionysus and Aphrodite than Xander Landesman was genuinely Zeus. Did they not understand that they were impostors? And if not, how not?
Not germane to the matter at hand, said the voice of DI Prothero in the back of her mind.
'It doesn't matter,' she said, 'and anyway it's off-topic. You two put out word that you wanted a friendly meeting with us.'
'Yes,' said Dionysus. 'How did you get to hear? Was it directly from one of the Lotus Eaters? No point cultivating an association with these people if we can't put them to work for us every once in a while.'
'I'd rather not say.' In the event, the message had come via a roundabout route, from a Lotus Eater who was an acquaintance of Landesman's. According to Ramsay, the Lotus Eater had mentioned it in passing during a phone conversation — an invitation from Dionysus and Aphrodite to their anonymous opponents to come for a parley — and Landesman had in turn mentioned it to Lillicrap, who'd just happened to let it slip to a tech within earshot of Ramsay. Ramsay had no idea whether the last had been a setup deliberately contrived by Landesman or just mere happenstance. Either way, he'd decided that here was an opportunity too good to pass up.
'We get to scope out two of the opposition at first hand,' he'd told Sam, 'and if it turns out the Olympians really are desperate for peace, then we'll know for sure that we've got 'em scared.' A tap of his forehead. 'The mental edge.'
For her part, Sam had begun to wonder whether a truce might not be the best solution available. A compromise, yes, but better than the alternative, which was a war of attrition she didn't believe the Titans could win.
'Would I be right in thinking,' she continued, 'that you're doing this without Zeus's permission?'
'Without even his knowledge,' said Dionysus, rubbing his head in such a way that he accidentally nudged his wreath of entwined vine stems. For the rest of the meeting it sat cocked at an angle, no longer the dignified symbol of dominion. 'This is purely our own initiative, mine and Beautiful-Buttocked Aphrodite's. You don't mind me using that particular epithet, do you, Aphrodite?'
'There are worse.'
'Mighty Zeus would strike us down with a thunderbolt if he got wind of what we're up to,' Dionysus went on. 'He is consumed utterly with hatred of you people. He shan't be content until you're all dead. You should hear him ranting on about you. Your hubris! Your impiety! Ares and Athena are absolutely on his side, as is Hera, of course, and the Twins. Hades too. Even Aphrodite's husband Hephaestus spits tacks whenever the subject of you comes up on Olympus, as you can imagine happens quite often.'
'We two,' said Aphrodite, 'like to think we're more reasonable than the rest of the Pantheon. More kindly disposed toward mortals, as well. We're actually rather fond of you lot, on the whole.'
'Both of us like a bit of fun,' said Dionysus, 'and don't you mortals too? After all, without intoxicants and fornication, how dull would life be? Our Lotus Eaters understand that. One needs to let go from time to time, go wild, take leave of one's senses, otherwise existence is an airless tomb that slowly suffocates.'
'Dionysus the Blossoming and I believe,' said Aphrodite, 'that you — you Titans, as we now know to call you — and we Olympians could keep going at one another hammer and tongs, and all that will result will be just more unpleasantness, more bloodshed, more deaths. There is another way. There must be. Hopefully, you and we can establish some common ground here this evening. We can lay the foundation for further talks in which we can work out a way for Olympians and Titans to coexist. What, for example, is your ultimate goal? Tell us. Perhaps it's something that can be achieved through negotiation rather than conflict.'
'Killing all of you is our ultimate goal,' Ramsay said.
Aphrodite's lip curled delicately at his bluntness. 'But say you accomplish that, Hyperion. Unlikely, but say you do. Then?'
'Then, speaking for myself, I retire to the West Indies and spend the rest of my days deep-sea fishing, drinking pina coladas out of coconut shells and reggae dancing with girls with big round behinds.'
'And you, Mnemosyne?'
'Get on with my life again. Maybe run a delicatessen. That was my dream as a little girl.'
'What about you, Tethys?'
'I don't have a plan as such,' said Sam. 'Haven't thought that far ahead.'
'Some might call that a lack of foresight. Others, a lack of confidence.'
'I'd call it being pragmatic.'
'And as a group do you Titans have a strategy for what happens if you do destroy us? Can you imagine how a post-Pantheonic world would operate?'
'Can you?'
'I don't have to. There will be no such thing. We're immortal. We will rule for ever.'
'Immortal, yet you can be killed.'
'Hercules was only a demigod.'
'And Hermes?'
'He hasn't been confirmed dead.'
'But you fear death. You don't like it when people come gunning for you. You retaliate hard.'
'A natural reaction. Nobody, not even a god, wishes to be hurt or harmed.'
'I have already died once,' Dionysus said, 'as I explained just now. I have no great desire to repeat the experience.'
'You believe all of this stuff, don't you?' Sam said. 'You're thoroughly convinced you're divine beings.'
'Belief implies the absence of fact,' Aphrodite replied. 'I don't need to be convinced of anything about myself. One look in the mirror is all it takes. I am Aphrodite, Laughing Aphrodite, Aphrodite the Dark-Eyed, the Silver-
