Hera pursed her lips, deepening the already-present wrinkle lines around her mouth. “And they probably are, too. I despise most of those bastards with every damned fiber of my being, but this is the sort of crisis that puts even us on something approaching the same side.. These aren’t the times when we’re making a mad dash to grab metas up to solidify our own power, or to draw our own lines, increase our little fiefdoms. It’s all or nothing days now, life or death. Tends to put things in perspective.”
I smiled. “If that’s the case, why don’t you put aside your petty differences and work with Omega on this?”
She gave me a smile right back, but it was thin and patronizing. “I don’t know. Why don’t you do the same with Erich Winter?” She gave it a second to sink in and stayed cool. “Because of bad blood. After enough of it passes between you, it becomes a river you have a hard time crossing. I don’t want to go back to them, hat in hand, and I doubt they much want to face up to me. So for the next little while, we’ll each just ignore the other and keep scrambling to do everything we can to keep Century from destroying our world.”
I sniffed, trying to ignore the faint smell of her perfume. It was fit for an old lady and not much else. “Have it your way, I suppose.”
“Besides,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “I still haven’t forgiven those bastards for some of the things they did in the olden days. I bet they could say much the same about me.”
“When you say the olden days,” Breandan interjected, “do you mean like … um …”
“Xerxes’s invasion of Greece,” Hera said, almost indifferently. “That one caused some major ripples in the hierarchy at the time. A lot of us were in different countries around the world, only getting together for special occasions and content to rule our own little lands, managing the humans from a distance, exercising our power judiciously. Everybody did their own thing. We were fragmented in our own states, but it was working.”
Her expression hardened. “Then some meta-jackass named Xerxes gets his loincloth in a twist and decides to declare himself a living god and starts invading the lands of others. He was hardly the first to try it, but … you know what an Athena-type is?” She looked rather pointedly at me.
“Sure,” I said. “I met one just the other day.”
“That boy could rile an army,” she said with a smile. “I never did get the whole story, but I suspect one of his parents was an Ares. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t taught them how to fight us. Made a mess out of our defense at Thermopylae.” She let her smile fade. “That was the beginning of the end for us, and a great many of us weren’t happy about it. Omega, though, they took it the worst. The Primus at the time was—well, guess.”
“Your hubby,” I said, and she let her amusement show.
“We were about done by then, but yes,” she said. “The power of the gods, our ability to control man by annunciation and revelation, was fading. I said we should step into the shadows. We, who lived longer than most, who knew human whim and desire better than the shorter-lived humans did themselves, we could exert control without being blatantly obvious about it.” She smiled again. “Leave it to a man to think that he needs to use a hammer when the touch of a hand will do. He never did quite get that lesson. Fortunately, when his brother took over after Zeus’s death, he understood it.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Poseidon?”
“Hell, yes,” Hera said. “You didn’t think I meant Hades, did you? No offense, but he would have made a worse Primus than Zeus, bastard that he was. Besides, he was dead by then, thank the stars.”
There were a few parts of what she said that flagged my attention, and I started to ask some questions, but she went on and I found myself listening along.
“Poseidon took over Omega, backed by the four ministers,” she said, “and he, with considerably less ego than his brother, recognized that there were other ways to rule the world. So he took us into the shadows, behind the scenes, made us legends and whispers. It took a while to make the transition, but he made money the tool by which we got what we wanted from mankind, and it worked pretty well for a couple thousand years, if I may say.”
“Why did you break off from them?” I asked, the less pressing questions fading to the back of my mind for later.
“Because Poseidon died,” she said. “And because the man who replaced him had not near the integrity of Poseidon, and took Omega in directions I didn’t think it should go.”