Zeus's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By noon the law was a piece of paper and nothing else. Zeus stood on the marble below his tower and watched the gods drift away from the banner. They had given him the day. They had not given him a way to keep it. A law without a hand behind it was a rumor. He knew the next god to break it would prove that out loud, and the one after that would not even bother to hide. He walked the open ground past the council steps and stopped where the hill flattened into bare stone. This was the place. He called for the eagle. The bird came down through the clouds with lightning running in its feathers and landed on his wrist. He spoke the order plain. Build here. Build it so they see it from every door on the mountain. He set the work himself. He had the stone cut from the mountain and dragged up the slope. He raised a marble seat on a high base and set a likeness of himself upon it, crowned, holding a bolt. He placed the eagle in bronze beside the throne, wings half open, claws on the base. He cut the law's first line into the plinth so any god passing could read it. Then, across the path, he laid the foundation of a hall with wide steps and tall doors. He called it the place of answer. Any god accused under the law would be brought through those doors and stand before the seat outside until the council ruled. He called Hermes to him and gave him one task. Carry the summons. The first god named under the law would be walked up that path by Hermes himself, in daylight, where the others could watch. Hermes looked at the hall, looked at the monument, and did not argue. He took the staff and went. Then Zeus did the thing he had not yet done. He walked to the foot of the new monument and laid his own hand on the base. He swore, where any god could see, that he would be the first dragged up that path if he broke the law he had written. The eagle above him cried once. The bronze did not move, but the oath went into the docket beside it, cut by the same hand that cut the law. The mark held. The threat was real now, and it pointed at him first. Hera watched from the far steps. She had not sworn. She did not need to. She read the hall's tall doors and the seat above them and counted what they meant. Zeus had given his law teeth. He had also shown every god in earshot where those teeth would bite first. She turned back toward her own rooms with a small, careful smile, already deciding which god to push through those doors before he could.