The Sudoku Inheritance

Part I - Foreplay

Zeus, lord of the sky, in charge of all the other guys who hung out on Mount Olympus: Poseidon - ruler of the sea, Eros - god of love, Helios - god of the sun, and of course, Aphrodite - goddess of love and beauty. If she had looked anything like Mira Sorvino, in the movie Mighty Aphrodite, then I would definitely convert to the Greek Church.  

I was running out of fingers to count up all these gods.  

And this was the first of Jasmine's twenty riddles. Twenty small steps for man - one giant leap into paradise. With a bit of luck. 

Soldier on. 

Talking of soldiers, what about the Romans? Mars - god of war, I bet he was always in demand as they ruthlessly carved their motorways through Europe. Jupiter - bringer of peace - or did Holst invent that bit? Diana - the huntress, and Venus - Aphrodite's equivalent. Like the Greeks, the Romans certainly weren't short of a bit of divine totty. 

And Jasmine was divinity itself. True, she didn't openly invite me into her heaven on our first encounter; true, she totally ignored my witty conversation; true, she simply spirited herself away into the night; but she was only playing hard to get. I could tell. That cold-shoulder was definitely a come-on for warmer times ahead. 

So what of the Egyptians? Did they come before the Greeks and the Romans, with their pyramids and sacred cats? Ra, Osiris, Isis, Set and the other sphinx riddlers. 

Jasmine was like the Sphinx itself. Enigmatic. Unreadable. You could also add: cold, frigid and unemotional, but I knew that was all an act. She was waiting for Howard Carter - my alter ego - the great pyramid discoverer, to plunder her treasures. I had already plundered her personal files and stolen this list of twenty bizarre riddles. Well, not stolen exactly - more like... borrowed. 

But the first of those borrowed questions did ask specifically about gods, so maybe the ladies should be excluded. So cross off Venus and Aphrodite for starters. And you too, Mira Sorvino, sorry. 

But don't cross off Jasmine. No way. 

Neither Roman nor Greek, as far as I knew, but with her long black shiny hair, green eyes and tall lithe body, she could easily be descended from Cleopatra herself. And her slightly aquiline nose could well be the product of the Egyptian queen's liaison with Mark Anthony himself. Definitely, 

worthy of an obelisk on the Thames embankment. 

Goddess Jasmine.  

I'm erecting my own obelisk just thinking about her. 

The Norse gods?  

Thor, Odin and the other plundering Viking mobsters: did they come before the Greeks or afterwards? I began to wish I had paid more attention in history instead of watching aircraft out of the window on their flight path over our school, en route to Heathrow. Or watching Miss Jacobs surreptitiously adjusting her stocking tops under the desk. The thought of pillaging Vikings conquering the white flesh of Miss Jacobs suddenly seemed a potent erotic mixture and my mind wandered excitedly over her battlefield. 

I downed another slug of the sweet sticky ski-nectar to try and bring me back to the gods, or more particularly numen Jasmine. I had first seen her only a few hours ago but already she was fully ensconced on my shrine reserved for women to idolise. Jasmine and her impossible riddles or clues. Clues to what, I had no idea. Not that she had asked me to solve them for her. Far from it. They sort of fell out of the scented pink folder that she had left in my car by mistake, and that I just accidentally happened to cursorily read.  

Now, I pride myself on my puzzle-solving abilities. Crosswords, anagrams, tangrams, SuDoku, Killer, Samurai, Tatami, Futoshiki and Goduko are all devoured with equal relish and success. Maybe it's a natural consequence of being a shit-hot IT consultant, or maybe it's vice versa. Modesty apart, I am pretty darn good. I'll give you the solution before most people have even sharpened their pencil.