Read Online Downfall of the Gods by K. J. Parker - Free Book Online Page A

famine, pestilence, death. But within seventy-two hours there’d be earthquakes and a tidal wave. A week after that, a disease would start wiping out livestock. Bitter rain would fall, poisoning the rivers and killing the growing crops. The temperature would rise by at least three degrees, and so would sea level. All these disasters would cause panic among the mortals, who’d start blaming each other, giving credence to weird and savage religious cults; there’d be war, leading to floods of refugees crowding into the cities of the plain; more war, more famine, more pestilence and more death. All my fault. All because I couldn’t be bothered to show up.
    “But that’s stupid,” I said. “And why the hell did nobody tell me?”
    “You didn’t know?”
    “Of course not, or else I’d have made damn sure I was there.”
    He frowned. “How could you not know?”
    “Maybe because nobody saw fit to tell me?”
    “Well, we assumed—” He closed his eyes, and sighed. “Wonderful. What is it about this family? Why doesn’t anybody talk to anybody else?”
    He didn’t need me to tell him that. “So,” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”
    “Me?” He looked genuinely surprised. “Nothing.”
    “You’re just going to sit there and let thousands of humans die.”
    And I didn’t need to ask. I knew the answer. It would be yes. Yes, because there wasn’t really anything he could do. Theoretically, of course; theoretically, he could restrain the winds, order Thaumastus to hold back the sea, press down the earth’s crust with his foot to stop the fissures opening, reach out his hand and pluck the plague birds out of the sky and lock them in an adamantine cage, blow a mighty breath to scatter the poison clouds—he could do all that, because to the king of the gods all things are possible. But he didn’t have to, because nobody and nothing can make him do anything, and it wasn’t his fault. And, when it comes right down to it, why should he? After all, they’re only mortals. Plenty more, in a couple of dozen generations’ time, where they came from.
    “Please?” I said.
    I KNEW IT wouldn’t be that easy.
    To do him justice, he saw to all the urgent business first, the holding back and the ordering and the stamping and the plucking and the puffing. Only when he’d finished with all that and was sure everything was going to be all right did he turn to me and pull a very sad face.
    “Sorry, Pumpkin,” he said.
    “Dad—”
    “This is going to hurt me,” he said, “ a lot more than it hurts you.”
    I got as far as “In that case—”. Then he grabbed me by the ankle, swung me round his head three times and hurled me from the ramparts of heaven.
    I T TAKES THREE days to fall. I spent them reflecting on various aspects of ethical theory.
    First, I reflected (my ankle hurt where he’d squashed it in his great paw; my ankle is divine substance, therefore in theory impervious to feeling, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Presumably he wanted it to hurt, so it did), let’s start with the Givens. The prime Given is that Might is Right. Right is, by definition, the will of the strongest, just as among humans the law is by definition the king’s will. Pretty uncontroversial stuff. Nobody in their right mind’s going to argue with that.
    Except, I found myself doing so; mostly to pass the time, because three days with nothing to do except fall is boring . Is what the strongest wants necessarily Right? Well, of course it is.
    To understand that, consider the meaning of the word Right. Doesn’t take long to figure out that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s not like black or left or serrated or strawberry-flavoured; it has no objective meaning. ‘Right’ is just a shorthand way of saying ‘what we think is right’. Because the strongest must always prevail, therefore, their notion of what they think is right must also always prevail. Glad we’d got that settled.
    And the