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flattened farmhouses in Sardinia and knocked over ten mosques deep in
the Tuni-sian Sahara. But the real blast was aimed eastward across the
water, over toward Greece, and it went across that peninsula like a scythe,
taking out half the treetops from Agios Nikolaus on the Ionian side to
Athens over on the Aegean, and kept on going clear into Turkey.
It was a little signal, so to speak. I was heading that way myself, with
some very ancient scores to settle.
I started down the mountainside, fast. The lava surging all around my
thudding feet meant nothing to me.
Call me Typhoeus. Call me Titan.
I suppose I might have attracted a bit of attention as I made my way
down those fiery slopes and past all the elegant seaside resorts that now
were going crazy with hysteria over the eruption, and went striding into the
sea midway between Fiumefreddo and Taormina. I am, after all, something
of a monster, by your standards: four hun-dred feet high, let us say, with all
those heads, dragon heads at that, and eyes that spurt flame, and thick
black bristles everywhere on my body and swarms of coiling vipers
sprouting from my thighs. The gods themselves have been known to turn
and run at the mere sight of me. Some of them, once upon a time, fled all
the way to Egypt when I yelled Boo!
But perhaps the eruption and the associated earthquakes kept the
people of eastern Sicily so very preoccupied just then that they didn t take
time to notice what sort of being it was that was walking down the side of
Mount Etna and perambulating off toward the sea. Or maybe they didn t
believe their eyes. Or it could be that they simply nodded and said, Sure.
Why not?
I hit the water running and put my heads down and swam swiftly
Greeceward across the cool blue sea without even bothering to come up
for breath. What would have been the point? The air behind me smelled of
fire and brimstone. And I was in a hurry.
Zeus, I thought. I m coming to get you, you bastard!
As I said, I m a Titan. It s the family name, not a description. We
Titans were the race of Elder Gods the first drafts, so to speak, for the
deities that you people would eventually worship the ones that Zeus
walloped into oblivion long before Bill Gates came down from Mount Sinai
with MS-DOS. Long before Homer sang. Long before the Flood. Long
before, as a matter of fact, anything that might mean anything to you.
Gaea was our mother. The Earth, in other words. The mother of us all,
really.
In the early days of the world broad-bosomed Gaea brought forth all
sorts of gods and giants and monsters. Out of her came far-seeing Uranus,
the sky, and then he and Gaea created the first dozen Titans, Oceanus and
Cro-nus and Rhea and that bunch.
The original twelve Titans spawned a lot of others: Atlas, who now
holds up the world; and tricky Prometh-eus, who taught humans how to use
fire and got himself the world s worst case of cirrhosis for his trouble, and
silly scatterbrained Epimetheus, who had that thing with Pandora, and so
on. There were snake-limbed giants like Porphyrion and Alcyoneus, and
hundred-armed fifteen-headed beauties like Briareus and Cottus and Gyes,
and other oversized folk like the three one-eyed Cyclopes, Arges of the
storms and Brontes of the thunder and Steropes of the lightning, and so on.
Oh, what a crowd we were!
The universe was our oyster, so I m told. It must have been good
times for all and sundry. I hadn t been born yet, in that era when Uranus was
king.
But very early on there was that nasty business between Uranus and
his son Cronus, which ended very badly for Uranus, the bloody little deal
with the sharp sickle, and Cronus became the top god for a while, until he
made the mistake of letting Zeus get born. That was it, for Cronus. In this
business you have to watch out for overambitious sons. Cronus tried he
swallowed each of his children as they were born, to keep them from doing
to him what he had done to Uranus but Zeus, the last-born, eluded him.
Very unfortunate for Cronus.
Family history. Dirty linen.
As for Zeus, who as you can see showed up on the scene quite late
but eventually came to be in charge of things, he s my half-sister Rhea s
son, so I suppose you d call him my nephew. I call him my nemesis.
After Zeus had finished off Cronus he mopped up the rest of the
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