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  The Wild Card

  Fallacious Rose

  Copyright © 2018

  Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

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  Preface

  Gaia looks upon this child of hers, this son, and she is afraid for him.

  Ever since She set them down upon this world of fire and molten rock, Gaia has worked hard to create a place where they can be content - and of which She can be proud. She has Her memories of home to work from, and Her vision of paradise, and now the cooling rock hosts tiny tendrils of life, too small for the eye to see. But not too small for Gaia.

  The creation of life is a difficult process. One can create alone, using one's own life-thread, but often the result is weak, and soon withers. Alternatively, one can create with another, each lending a little of their strength and difference - but the results are unpredictable. Or one life can flow into another, creating a third, a combination of the two with twice the force - it is this that Cronos wants.

  But Gaia resists. Cronos is the only being - besides Her - that she has ever known, and yet, she hates him. It is impossible that She could make a mistake - nevertheless, Gaia feels that She has done so. Cronos is arrogant, and overbearing, and perpetually angry: he is satisfied with nothing. She refuses to be swallowed up in his eternal disappointment.

  So together, they have created children - each an intricate amalgam of energy, matter and life-thread. But Cronos, their co-creator, finds each lacking, so he binds them back into himself, and grows stronger and more arrogant with each obliteration, while she grows weaker. Gaia senses that this is not what She intended, when she placed them both here to make a new beginning.

  But this child, Zeus, is nothing less than perfect, and she wishes to keep him safe, to see him come to his full power, able to act as a check to Cronos' destructive egoism. And this is the first time that she hides anything from Cronos: it is her first lie. She hides the boy in a cavern in the cooling earth, and makes no more children, but waits.

  By the time he is grown, the world is forested and the mountains have risen like crested waves over the land. Small things whisper and hide among the trees. She looks on it with pleasure, but Cronos scowls, because not everything is as he would have wished. Cronos wants to create his own memories, his own paradise - not Hers.

  Least of all is he pleased with their child Zeus, now full grown. To show his displeasure, with both hands he takes a valley grown fertile and lush, and rips it apart, so that many of Gaia's small creations are swallowed into the void. We must begin again, he says - and build as I desire, not as She does. As for him, he is flawed, useless - a living reproach to our skills. And you have hidden him from me.

  He reaches for the boy, and with one, rapid motion, he tears out his right eye, as if to prove just how imperfect he is. But Zeus, like his creators, is more than mere flesh, and he has not survived millennia for nothing. He puts his hands on his creator's shoulders and cleaves him in two, a rich valley of flesh and blood and energy, while Gaia sears the core with liquid flame. And so Cronos - and not his son - returns to the earth, to become part of the foundations of the worlds that are to come.

  Chapter 1

  Naina sits at the feet of her father, her golden hair tangled artfully across her eyes. Zeus-Ra stretches out his old hand, the blue veins criss-crossing the fragile desert of his skin, and lays it on her shoulder.

  "He has abandoned us," she whispers, in a small, sweet, broken voice, like a little girl denied sweets, and bends her bright head even lower, hiding the angry tears. It is for Zeus-Ra to be angry - and he is.

  "Ingrate," he rages, coughing a little as he spits out the words. Under the white robes, his thin chest heaves and rasps. Anyone would think, listening to him, that here was an old, old man with not long to live - but Zeus-Ra has lived for millennia, and expects to live for as long again. But he finds that the disguise of age suits his mood, these days, as the weariness of eternity draws long upon him. "And the child? Does he know he has a child?"

  "Not yet." Naina draws her grey velvet cloak aside to look down on the face of the baby sleeping on her breast, silver-haired and with eyes of aqua like his father. "I do not want him to know of this. I will tell him when the time is right."

  When the time is right, she thinks. When her son is grown, and can take revenge on a man who left him to grow up fatherless, while he spent his time with a mortal slut.

  "Hmmm." Zeus-Ra smells a rat. But his daughter Naina has inherited his own cunning, and that pleases him. That, and her beauty, which is unrivalled even among immortals. She has no mother - only him, and for him, there is only her. His son Set, born of Hera his wife, is firmly in second place, and unruly at times. He knows that Naina takes Set into her bed, and approves - she needs allies, and this is one way for a woman to make them. But Baldur - his transgression is another matter. He calls for his sister Frigg, Baldur’s mother, and waits on his High Seat, while Naina glides away, a small, smug smile on her rosebud mouth, and the baby clutched to her like a curse.

  Chapter 2

  Nestled at the foot of a towering mass of rock and scree, on the edge of an expanse of mirror-still water, in the depths of central Norway, a tiny chalet perched like a bird, an eyrie of light and warmth. Triple-glazed picture windows looked out on a small timber wharf, a boat tied up to its post.

  Outside, the steep face of the valley rose straight up from the winter blue waters of the fjord, white rocks mirrored in its glassy surface. Inside the chalet, a wood fire burned cosy behind glass, and polished pine glowed golden brown.

  Green pulled the doona up to her chin, and yawned. Suddenly the man beside her sat up and tilted his head, as if listening.

  "I have been called," he said, throwing the covers aside.

  "Called where? What do you mean?"

  Green rolled over lazily to look at Baldur. The sun cast a long golden beam across the bed, illuminating the fine white hairs on his naked thigh. Her hand whispered across, light as a cat’s paw, and he twitched. There was something irresistible about tickling a god. She thought of it as a mortal’s revenge.

  "They have called me to Council. I’m to be reprimanded."

  "So you’re in the shit," Green paraphrased. She looked into his eyes, searching for signs of anxiety - the kind of emotion a normal guy might show if the boss called him in for a talking-to. He smiled back, serene as usual, but she thought she saw a shadow darken the bright face. His features flickered, a trick of the light - or so she used to think. Now, she wasn’t so sure. A god can be flesh - but so much else. The whole immortal thing was hard to comprehend - but right now, sleepy with the pleasures of the night, she let it go.

  He brought her breakfast - a Scandinavian feast of cheese and bread and dried fruit, but no meat or fish, in deference to her vegetarianism. They ate cross-legged on the bed, careless of crumbs and naked. Green glanced under her lashes as she ate, and glanced again. She hadn’t yet got used to the beauty of him - she wondered if there would come a time when she’d see him naked and be able to think about shopping, or work - something ordinary and mundane.

  If they had time, maybe - but then, there was no way of knowing whether this thing would last long enough for familiarity to set in. After all, he was a god, and she was nobody much - and this was the kind of fantasy romance you read about in cheap paperbacks. You didn’t expect to come home to it. It definitely had to have a use-by date.

  "It’s all because of me, right?" she speculated. "Because you saved me - and gods aren’t supposed to intervene."

  He ran his forefinger down her pleasingly imperfect nose.

  "Because of you, but I am glad of it. I was commanded not to interven
e, and I disobeyed. Zeus-Ra is angered, and my mother too."

  "Your mother? Now that’s serious," she said, grimacing. "But what can they do, really? You’re a god."

  Baldur might be a god, but he ate like a mortal. She watched him tear off a piece of sourdough with the Hollywood-white teeth, following it with an olive. Not only did he eat, but he…

  "Yes," he said. "Like you. When I take this shape, I’m as human as you are. If you dissected me, you’d find no surprises. Are you answered?"

  Her eyes crinkled. "I wish you wouldn’t listen to me, you know - when I think."

  "I cannot help it."

  He leaned forward for a kiss, tasting of fresh coffee and new bread. His turquoise eyes still startled her, especially close up - who had eyes that colour but Baldur? Green didn’t think she’d ever get used to them.

  "So what will happen - at the Council?" She felt a tremor of fear on his behalf - new to her, because for the short time they’d known each other, she’d thought of him as pretty much immune to the normal run of accidents and incidents.

  "There is a range of punishments available for those who transgress the rules. But death is not one of them, so do not be anxious, my little beast."

  She grabbed two fistfuls of straight silver hair and yanked hard.

  "Stop calling me that!"

  "Ow!" Baldur captured her hands swiftly and held them still. "You are a cruel woman. I call you that in love. To name a thing is to take away its power to hurt."

  "But I’m only a mortal. I can’t really hurt you, can I."

  "No," he said, rubbing his scalp. "That is the theory."

  "So... that means I can do anything I like, right?"

  He smiled cautiously.

  "What would you like to do to me, hell cat?"

  "Ha." She thought about it. Tickling, for one.

  He was on top of her in a second, holding her arms above her head on the pillow.

  "You must not tickle a god. It’s in the commandments."

  "What commandments? I don’t remember any commandments involving you."

  "That must be because I have not written them yet. Have you got a pen?"

  Green snorted. Who did he think he was, Moses? As if Moses had ever been this sexy...sitting astride her, silver hair cascading over his broad shoulders, torso rippling with muscle...but all that wasn’t important right now. She averted her eyes.

  "What is this Council, anyway? "

  "The Council are the nine who preside over the Game," Baldur said, rolling off to lie beside her. "Zeus-Ra has the High Seat - his judgement rules all. My mother Frigg is one of the nine, but Set also sits there - and his mother Hera, and my aunts and uncles. There will be those who support me, and those who are against - it is like one of your courts of law, only with nine judges and no jury."

  Green digested this, reaching for another slice of Danish cheddar. "There are only nine immortals, then? I always thought there were lots - I mean, I didn’t believe in any gods before I met you - but doesn’t every culture have hundreds of them?"

  He laughed.

  "There are thousands of us - and would have been thousands more, but for the War that destroyed most of the elder race, long ago. But only nine have real power in Asgard - the others play the Game but do not make the rules or adjudicate them. It is not a democracy."

  "So where do they - I mean you - where do they all live? Could I go there?"

  "Hmm." He bit his lip, thinking. "It’s hard to explain...have you ever thought about how the world must look if you’re a housefly?"

  "Big, I guess."

  "Not just big - different. Think of a fly on a table. To the insect, the table is an island - but the concept of ‘table’ has no meaning. To a fly, there is no significance in a man-made object on which humans eat. You follow?"

  She bridled. "No need to be patronising. I get it."

  "Ok." He leaned back, hands behind his head. She let her eyes linger on the light fuzz that curled on his broad chest, and snaked down in a v shape towards his belly. It was hard not to be distracted. "So how if you are a blind fish, living in a cave where light has never penetrated? You see nothing, but you feel the electrical charge given off by prey swimming nearby. How does the world seem to you then?"

  "Dark?" she said, not really seeing where this was leading. Idly, she began to play with the fuzz. He frowned, a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  "You asked the question, so you should pay attention to the answer."

  "Sorry." She withdrew her hand guiltily.

  "So, to continue." Green rolled her eyes. This was starting to sound like one of her university psychology lectures. "Light and dark mean nothing to this fish. Only touch and vibration. This is its world. But you - you’re a human, you have your own five senses, and more that you are not aware of. To the fish, perhaps you are a god - but still, you must inhabit the world your senses create for you. You’re designed to know this world as a human - through human eyes, human ears, a human brain. But we immortals - we inhabit many worlds, and pass from one to another as you would pass through a doorway in your own house. For us, flesh is but one of many disguises - it does not constrain us, though we return to it when we die. Does that make sense?"

  "So that’s why you shimmer sometimes." She thought of the way his body sometimes seemed insubstantial, like a hologram produced by a machine behind a curtain, which could be turned off at any moment.

  "As it must seem to you," he agreed.

  "Many worlds? You mean, this one, and Asgard - where your mother is, and Zeus-Ra?"

  "There are others. Even an immortal cannot see all of them - we are limited by what we are - like you. But they are all - in a sense - here. Just a different kind of here."

  She nodded. It made sense - sort of. So thousands of immortals could be walking around on earth, anywhere, anytime - and she couldn’t perceive them. For instance Baldur’s mum. She could be right here - in this pine-built chalet on the fjord, or even in this king size bed.

  Baldur burst out laughing.

  "Do not worry - among gods it is rude to enter a house uninvited."

  His mother - Green remembered what she’d been meaning to ask.

  "You said your mother was angry with you. Why? Didn’t she want you to save me?"

  He reached for her hand, turning it over, palm upward. If a god could look guilty, she sure as hell recognised the emotion when she saw it.

  "There is something I have to tell you, and I am afraid you will not like it, my beautiful one."

  She sat up, all ears.

  "What? Your mother doesn’t like me?"

  He smiled faintly. "She does not - but that does not matter. It’s something else. I think you have heard of arranged marriages, yes?"

  "Yeah, sure. In India and the Middle East, those sort of places."

  "Long ago, as I said, there was a great war between the two immortal Clans - the Red and the Gold. I am a Gold, my mother too. When the war ended, to cement the peace, marriages were arranged between the two Clans."

  She stiffened, her heart sinking.

  "And you’re telling me - "

  "My assigned - my wife, in human terms - is called Naina, of the Red Clan. She is the daughter of Zeus-Ra. I do not care for her - but I cannot break the union."

  Green pulled her hand away abruptly and walked away to the big plate glass window, her back to Baldur. She stared out over the still water. She might have known. There was a goddess, with Baldur’s name on her. And if she was as stunning as Baldur -

  "Is she beautiful?"

  He nodded.

  "Yes, very. It does not matter. She is not flesh, she can be what she wills, beautiful or not."

  Green felt a surge of jealousy invade her, making her feel queasy and cold.

  "So right now, I’m the Other Woman."

  He nodded awkwardly, pulling on his jeans. This wasn’t a conversation to be had naked.

  "She is not faithful to me, either. Set is her lover, and others. But she is
jealous."

  "She’s jealous? So you’re both screwing around, and she’s jealous. Of me?"

  If she hadn’t been so taken aback she would have found it funny. She certainly had nothing for a goddess to be jealous of. Except Baldur - for the moment. Until he went back to his wife.

  Ironic - she’d often thought Baldur must have a woman in every port - well, it made sense, he was too goodlooking to be single. It had never crossed her mind that Baldur might have an immortal wife or girlfriend. So he was taken. She felt faint - and then a horrible thought occurred to her.

  "Hang on, what does she actually look like? I mean, when she’s taken on ‘flesh’?"

  Baldur put his head in his hands.

  "She is golden-haired, blue eyed, fair skinned."

  "And she likes to attend exorcisms?"

  "Not as a rule, no - but you are right, you have met before. She likes to help Set with his dirty work."

  Green pressed her cheek against the cool glass, picturing the blonde demon who’d flung her around like a doll, having the time of her life - the last time they met. Perfect casting for the wronged wife - gorgeous, vengeful - and all powerful.

  She felt hot and cold all at the same time, and blindingly angry. "So finally I get it. All this shit that’s been happening to me is your fault. She hates me because of you - and Set, Dionysos, whatever the hell he’s called, hates me because of her."

  Baldur crossed the room and set both arms around her rigid body. She sat within his embrace like a statue. She’s so beautiful - she thought. And me - I’m nothing. Not beautiful, not immortal, not powerful. Just stupid, fugly old Green.

  "She is not all powerful, none of us are. Really, we are not gods, any more than you are - we’re just beings who have grown arrogant in our power. As for Set, he has his reasons for wanting you dead, and they are nothing to do with Naina. To him, she is just a tool, as we all are."

  She watched a falcon circle, riding the updrafts, and breathed in, then out. The bird stooped, faster than a dropped stone, and rose with something bright in its talons.