Hermes: Chapter 3

Hermes was nineteen when Artemis arrived on Olympus.

After the Chaos ended and Eros reopened the gate to the other world, Jer-Jes and Hades arrived first. They replaced the prior gods, who had called for them before departing. Those gods lost followers and had to leave. Their fault but at least they kept Olympus going by arranging for replacements. If Hermes hadn’t despised them for nearly ruining a good thing, he’d have been grateful.

Hestia (Hal) and Poseidon (Posey or Poloma) arrived a year later. Some humans did that, found their way to Olympus as they pursued rumors and dreams and half-memories spoken about by from others. Jes-Jes appointed Hal and Posey as the god of the house and the god of the sea. The role or title mattered, not the biological sex.

When Hermes recruited Athena, Apollo, and Ares at Jes-Jer’s request, he stuck to conventional expectations. Jer-Jes next chose Demeter from one of the newest arrivals. They had put off appointing an agricultural god, someone who could compete with their authority. Demeter was flighty and easy to distract with mangled pseudo-intellectual theories, though in recent years, she’d proved plenty smart at shoring up support.

Hermes recruited Hephaestus and Ven, also at Jer-Jes’s request. Ven was Venus or Aphrodite and male since Jes-Jer insisted on “diversity...the world has changed, Hermes.”

He knew better than to take them seriously. What they wanted was carefully constructed change and difference—nothing too radical or random, nothing that might actually challenge their authority. Opportunities for speechifying. Nothing actually outside-the-box.

They were not gods who took risks. They almost didn’t appoint Artemis, who asked for the position.

That day, Hermes was summoned to city hall. Passing into the inner room—the “boardroom,” he called it to himself—he found Jes and Jer circling a slim woman who stood without flinching, hands in pockets of a long coat. She was quiet, undefensive, her posture and expression elements Hermes only pretended to have. To this woman, they were natural.

“She wants to be Artemis,” Jes said, and Hermes understood that he'd been called there to be an audience, and Jes-Jer began a monologue about the candidate’s qualities.

She certainly had the right look. Not that flawless almond skin; high cheekbones, arched brows over dark eyes that gave nothing away; bow-shaped lips were a requirement but a goddess should draw notice and command respect. She could hunt and shoot, which Jes-Jer wavered over. They didn’t seem sure whether they should applaud “old-fashioned” violence in a woman or condemn it. Or fear it.

“She will help Ares fend off the monsters from the North,” Jes pointed out.

The Artemis listened to it all calmly. Hermes listened to Jes-Jer, watched Artemis with his own expressionless face (contrived, in his case), and thought he’d never encountered someone so magnificent.  

* * * 

He admired Artemis at her temple where she was training youngsters in self-defense. Some of them might become her Votaries; some might go work for Ares.

The temple was near where Reiche School was in the other Portland's West End. When Olympus moved to Portland, Hermes immediately explored that city, learning all of its districts and roadways. Olympus copied bits and pieces. It imposed older buildings on copied landscape. But the copying was like students copying and pasting A.I. The gods didn’t always know what had been brought over. Hermes disliked being surprised. He now knew Olympus better than all the gods except, possibly, Kouros.

Artemis’s temple was not the school. It was bits and pieces of the older Maine Medical Center—faded brick with turrets and a cupola. It looked Gothic. Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. She was also the goddess of pregnant women, which Hermes didn’t entirely understand since she was one of the virgin goddesses and fulfilled that requirement. In any case, most of the pregnant women she helped visited what Ven called “the Pump Room” in a square-like building a few blocks away. And most women on Olympus either gave birth in their homes, helped by Hestia, or in Aesculapius's hospital.

Artemis stepped back to study her students. Hermes went to stand beside her.

“Watch your footwork, JJ,” Artemis said without raising her voice, and JJ adjusted.

Hermes didn’t speak. He didn’t with Artemis. He never needed to cajole her or remind her or outmaneuver her. When she wanted something, she asked. When she didn’t, she said so. And she never lied.

“I don’t do relationships,” she told Hermes practically the same day they met.

He didn’t care. He never wanted Artemis to change.

“So?” she said when her students took off, full of energy, not at all cowed at being taught by a goddess though they gave Artemis full bows. That was something else Artemis could do—attract immediate deference without eliciting fear.

Hermes said, “You use hounds?”

“Hunting dogs. I’ve thought about it. But no. They take a great deal of training. I would need an assistant.”

Hermes added Assistant for Artemis to the list in his head. Assistants were “minor gods,” also appointed by Jes-Jer. The current matter created an opportunity for Hermes to bargain with them on Artemis’s behalf.  

“Do you know of any—other than Apollo’s greyhounds?”

“Other than Hades’s slobbering greeter?” Artemis smiled faintly. “No. Not alive.”

“Dead?”

Artemis turned towards her temple and beckoned Hermes to follow. They entered through the doorless porch. The atrium held the standard altar. Passages as complex as those found in a multi-decades-old hospital weaved into parts of the temple behind the altar. Hermes followed Artemis down a corridor that resembled something from a 1930s asylum: dusty tiles; doors on either side. Artemis wasn’t much for décor, at least not in the outer areas.

She turned into a passage that went off at a sudden angle before appearing to turn back on itself. She entered a room that Hermes had visited before Artemis was appointed. (He had checked out all the temples, even Jes-Jer’s, before all the new gods arrived. He regularly scouted most of them. But not Artemis’s.) Back then, the room was a sunroom. It looked out towards the distant bay, though the view was partly masked by trees.

When Hermes visited, the sunroom was empty aside from a worn couch and a wooden table. Now, the worn couch was pushed against the wall. The room held a number of chairs facing a short podium. There was the same table covered with stacks of papers, and a water bubbler that Artemis requested several years ago.

Artemis said, “You remember Jodie Thebley? She did research on Olympian lore before she died.”

“She got Jes-Jer nervous.”

“Waste of their time. Jodie was conventional. She wouldn’t have reported anything that damaged the gods.”

“Except remind citizens that gods are temporary. They exist only due to citizens’ offerings.”

“She didn’t research the Chaos. She went back further.” Artemis picked up a slim volume from one of the stacks. “You know how some tales come from the other world and some tales originated here.”

“Sure.”

“She thinks that the tale of Actaeon originated here.”

She handed Hermes the volume. He skimmed the pages, written in Josie Thebley’s unexcitable script:

Actaeon was a young hunter with a pack of friends. The story is that he pursued the Artemis. She refused him, but he was convinced that persistence would mean more to her than respect for her status and her adherence to virginity. He entered her domain, which at the time spread across the West End. There, he and his friends made themselves at home around a small pool. When Artemis came to bath, the friends were insolent while Actaeon continued to press his suit. The tale goes that Artemis transformed the young men into hounds who turned on their leader, Actaeon, and ripped him to shreds.

 “Serves the guy right,” Hermes said, and Artemis hemmed agreement.

She said, “It might have happened. The earliest gods also used natural law but it was—what’s the term Kouros uses?—textbook, the natural law as understood at that time, which included spells and magic.”

“What happened to the dogs? Did they turn back into humans?”

“There aren’t any notes on that. In any case, human or canine, they would be dead.”

Hermes had been afraid of that.