Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (20 page)

Aegipan kept playing. His melodies were like sunlight in the morning and a cool stream trickling through the woods and the smell of your girlfriend’s freshly shampooed hair….

Sorry. I got distracted. What was I saying?

Right…the satyr god. His music evoked everything good and beautiful. When Typhoeus got close, he heard the sweet song floating in the air, and he stopped in utter confusion.

“That doesn’t sound like screaming,” the giant muttered to himself. “It’s not an explosion, either. What
is
that?”

Safe to say that they didn’t have a lot of music in Tartarus, and if they did, it was more along the lines of funeral dirges and death metal.

Typhoeus finally spotted the satyr god kicking back in the meadow, playing his pipes. Typhoeus could’ve stomped him flat, obviously, but Aegipan looked completely unconcerned.

Typhoeus was baffled. He knelt down to take a closer look at the satyr. For a few moments, the world was silent except for the burning wake of destruction behind the giant, and the sweet music of the panpipes.

The storm giant had never heard anything so beautiful. It certainly was better than his she-monster wife’s nagging voice and the crying of his monstrous children.

Without even meaning to, Typhoeus heaved a deep contented sigh, which was so powerful, it parted Aegipan’s hair and disturbed his song.

The satyr god finally looked up, but he didn’t seem scared.

(In fact, Aegipan
was
terrified, but he hid it well, possibly because he knew Hermes was standing by, ready for a quick extraction if things went bad.)

“Oh, hello,” said Aegipan. “I didn’t notice you.”

Typhoeus tilted his massive head. “I am as tall as the sky, shrouded in darkness, and I have been destroying the world. How did you not notice me?”

“I guess I was busy with my music.” Aegipan started playing again. Immediately Typhoeus felt his massive heart lift with joy that was almost better than when he contemplated destroying the gods.

“I like your music,” Typhoeus decided. “I may not kill you.”

“Thank you,” Aegipan said calmly, and went back to playing.

“When I destroy the gods, I will take over Mount Olympus. I will make you my court musician so you can perform for me.”

Aegipan just kept playing his soft happy song.

“I will need good music,” Typhoeus decided. “You can write a great ballad about me—a song of how I conquered the world!”

Aegipan stopped and suddenly looked sad. “Hmm…if only…no. No, it’s impossible.”

“What?” Typhoeus boomed.

It was really hard for Aegipan to remember the plan and stay calm with a massive storm giant looming over him, the hundreds of snake-head fingers dripping poison and glaring at him with red eyes.

Hermes is nearby,
Aegipan reminded himself.
I can do this.

“Well, I would love to write a song about you,” Aegipan said. “But such a majestic tune shouldn’t be played on panpipes. I would need a harp.”

“You can have any harp in the world,” Typhoeus promised.

“Very gracious, my lord,” Aegipan said, “but it would need strings made from some incredibly tough sinew…
much
stronger than cow or horse guts. Otherwise, the strings would burst when I tried to play a song about your power and majesty. No mortal instrument could withstand such a song!”

This made perfect sense to Typhoeus. Then he had a thought.

“I know just the thing!” Typhoeus set his pack on the ground and dug out Zeus’s tendons. “You may use these to make your harp.”

“Oh, that’s perfect!” Aegipan said, though he really wanted to scream,
That’s disgusting!
“As soon as you conquer the universe, I will make a harp worthy of your song.” Aegipan lifted his panpipes and played a few notes of a soft sleepy lullaby. “But that must be incredibly hard work, conquering the world, even for an incomparable being such as yourself.”

Aegipan played a little more, invoking a lazy afternoon, the cool shade of a tree by a brook, the gentle swinging of a comfortable hammock. Typhoeus’s eyes began to get heavy.

“Yes…tiring work,” Typhoeus agreed. “Nobody appreciates how I labor!” He sat down, shaking the mountains. “Destroying cities. Poisoning oceans. Fighting with the moon. It’s exhausting!”

“Yes, my lord,” Aegipan said. “If you’d like, I will play you some music while you rest for a moment, before your tiring climb to victory on Mount Olympus.”

“Hmm. Music.” Typhoeus’s eyelids drooped. “Perhaps just a short…Zzzzzz.”

His massive head slumped against his chest, and the storm giant began to snore. Aegipan played his sweetest lullaby to keep the giant dreaming happily.

Meanwhile, Hermes sneaked out and took the sinews, then stealthily dug around in Typhoeus’s man purse until he found Zeus’s lightning bolts. He nodded at Aegipan, like,
Keep playing!
,
then flew off to Zeus’s cave.

It was messy work, sticking tendons back into the sky god’s arms and legs, using careful zaps from a lightning bolt to reattach everything. A couple of times Hermes put the tendons on backward. When Zeus tried to move his arm, he slapped himself in the back of the head.

“Sorry!” Hermes said. “I can fix that!”

Finally Zeus was back to normal. Being an immortal god, he healed fast; and once he held his lightning bolts again, anger surged through him, making him feel stronger than ever.

“Time for payback,” he grumbled.

“What can I do?” Hermes asked.

“Stay out of the way,” Zeus said.

“I can do that.”

Zeus marched from the cave and grew in size until he was almost half as tall as Typhoeus—which was
huge
for a god. As soon as Hermes plucked up Aegipan and flew him to safety, Zeus yelled, “WAKE UP!”

He slammed Typhoeus in the face with a thunderbolt, which was kind of like having a star go supernova right up your nostrils.

Typhoeus fell flat on the ground, but Zeus blasted him again. The giant staggered, trying to rise. He was still half asleep, dazed and confused and wondering what had happened to the nice satyr with the pretty music. Zeus was hitting him with lightning…but that was impossible, wasn’t it?

BLAM!

KA-BOOM!

The giant went into full retreat. Lightning crackled around him and blew the snakes right off his fingers, shredding his cloud of darkness and blinding him over and over.

Before Typhoeus could recover, he stumbled into the sea. Zeus ripped a mountain from the earth and held it over his head.

“EAT ETNA!” Zeus bellowed. (Because that was the name of the mountain.)

He smashed Typhoeus under the weight of Mount Etna, and the storm giant has been trapped there ever since, rumbling beneath megatons of rock and occasionally causing volcanic explosions.

So that’s how Zeus saved the universe, with a little assist from Hermes and Aegipan. I’m not sure if Hermes got a reward, but Aegipan was given a constellation to honor his bravery. It’s in the shape of a goat with a fish’s tail, to commemorate the form he took when he escaped Typhoeus. Later on, that constellation became a zodiac symbol. We call it Capricorn.

And finally, hooray, I can stop talking about Zeus.

The bad news: it’s time to talk about a goddess who dislikes my dad and isn’t very fond of me, either. But I’ll try to be fair, because after all, she’s my girlfriend Annabeth’s mom—good old crafty, scary-smart Athena.

ATHENA ADOPTS
A
HANDKERCHIEF

S
O ABOUT A MILLION PAGES AGO
,
I mentioned Zeus’s first wife, the Titan Metis. Remember her? Neither did I. I had to go back and look. All these names: Metis and Thetis and Themis and Feta Cheese
—
I get a headache trying to keep them straight.

Anyway, here’s a recap:

Last week on
The Real Gods of Olympus
:
Metis was pregnant with Zeus’s child. She had a prophecy that the child would be a girl, but if Metis and Zeus had
another
child after that, it would be a boy who would grow up to take Zeus’s place. Hearing this, Zeus did the natural thing. He panicked and swallowed his pregnant wife whole.

Dun-dun!

What happened next?

Well, immortals can’t die, even when they’re ingested by other immortals, so Metis gave birth to her daughter right there in Zeus’s gut.

(Feel free to get sick now. Or you can wait. It gets worse….)

Metis eventually faded into pure thought, since she was the Titan of deep thoughts anyway. She became nothing more than a nagging voice in the back of Zeus’s mind.

As for her daughter, she grew up in Zeus’s body, the same way the earlier Olympians had grown up in Kronos’s belly. Once the child was an adult (a small, super-compressed, very uncomfortable adult) she started looking for a way to escape into the world. None of the options seemed good. If she erupted from Zeus’s mouth, everyone would laugh at her and say she had been vomited. That was undignified. If she followed Zeus’s digestive track the other way—Nope! That was even grosser. She was a strong young goddess, so she might have been able to break out of Zeus’s chest, but then everybody would think she was one of the monsters from the
Alien
movies, and again, that was not the kind of entrance she was looking for.

Finally she had an idea. She dissolved into pure thought—a little trick her mother, Metis, had taught her—and traveled up Zeus’s spinal cord straight into his brain, where she re-formed. She started kicking and hammering and screaming inside Zeus’s skull, making as much racket as she could. (Maybe she had a lot of room to move around in there because Zeus’s brain was so small. Don’t tell him I said that.)

As you can imagine, this gave Zeus a splitting headache.

He couldn’t sleep all night with the pounding in his skull. The next morning he stumbled into breakfast and tried to eat, but he kept wincing, screaming, and pounding his fork on the table, screaming, “STOP IT! STOP IT!”

Hera and Demeter exchanged worried looks.

“Uh, my husband?” Hera asked. “Everything…okay?”

“Headache!” Zeus bellowed. “Bad, bad headache!”

As if to prove his point, the lord of the universe slammed his face into his pancakes, which demolished the pancakes and the plate and put a crack in the table, but did nothing for his headache.

“Aspirin?” Apollo suggested. (He was the god of healing.)

“Nice cup of tea?” Hestia suggested.

“I could split your skull open,” offered Hephaestus, the blacksmith god.

“Hephaestus!” Hera cried. “Don’t talk to your father that way!”

“What?” Hephaestus demanded. “Clearly he’s got a problem in there. I could open up the hood and take a look. Might relieve the pressure. Besides, he’s immortal. It won’t kill him.”

“No, thanks…” Zeus grimaced. “I…” Suddenly red spots danced before Zeus’s eyes. Pain racked his body, and a voice in his head screamed:
LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!

Zeus fell from his chair, writhing in agony. “Cut my skull!” he wailed. “Get it out of me!”

The other gods turned pale with fear. Even Apollo froze, and he had like, a dozen Boy Scout badges in first aid.

Hephaestus rose from his seat. “Right. I’ll get my awl.” (Which was basically an industrial-strength ice pick for making holes in thick surfaces, like metal, or gods’ heads.) “The rest of you, get Zeus on his throne and hold him down.”

The Olympians prepped for emergency brain surgery. They dragged Zeus to his throne and held him steady while Hephaestus retrieved his tools. The blacksmith god wasted no time. He marched up to Zeus, set the point of the awl in the middle of the sky god’s forehead, raised his hammer, and
BANG!

After that, they called him One-Hit Hephaestus
.

He used enough force to penetrate the skull without turning Zeus into a god-kebab. From the awl point to the bridge of Zeus’s nose, a fissure spread—just wide enough for Athena to squeeze her way out.

She sprang from Zeus’s forehead and, right in front of their eyes, grew until she was a fully formed adult goddess, dressed in gray robes and battle armor, wearing a bronze helmet and holding a spear and shield.

I’m not sure where she got the outfit. Maybe Athena magically created it, or maybe Zeus ate clothing and weaponry for snacks. At any rate, the goddess made quite an entrance.

“Hello, everyone,” she said calmly. “I am Athena, goddess of warfare and wisdom.”

Demeter passed out. Hera looked scandalized, since her husband had just
given birth to a child from his own forehead, and Hera was fairly certain Athena
wasn’t
her
daughter.

Ares the war god said, “You can’t be in charge of war! That’s my job!”

“I said warfare and
wisdom
,” Athena explained. “I’ll oversee the
sort of combat that requires planning, craftiness, and high intelligence. You can still be in charge of the stupid, bloody, ‘manly man’ aspects of war.”

“Oh, all right,” said Ares. Then he frowned. “Wait…
what?
”

Hephaestus sewed up the crack in Zeus’s head. Despite the misgivings of the other gods, Zeus insisted that they welcome his daughter Athena into their ranks. That’s how she became one of the Olympians.

Like you heard, she was the goddess of wisdom, which included good advice and useful skills. She gave the Greeks the olive tree, but she also taught them about calculating numbers, weaving cloth, using oxen to pull their plows, flossing after every meal, and a bunch of other helpful tips.

As the goddess of warfare, she was more about playing defense than offense. She didn’t
enjoy
combat, but she knew that sometimes it was necessary. She always tried to win through good strategy and sneaky tricks. She tried to minimize casualties, whereas Ares loved violence and liked nothing better than a battlefield littered with mangled corpses. (Yeah, he is a sweetheart, that guy.)

Athena’s sacred plant was the olive tree, since that was her big gift to the Athenians. Her sacred animals were the owl and the snake. Supposedly, the owl was a symbol of wisdom from the heavens. The snake symbolized wisdom from the earth. Me, I never understood that. If owls were so wise, why would they go around asking
Who?
all the time, like they couldn’t remember their own names? Snakes have never struck me as very smart, either; but apparently the Greeks thought that when snakes hissed, they were whispering important secrets.
Yeah, that’s right, Mr. Greek Dude. Hold that rattlesnake a little closer to your ear. He’s got something to tell you.

Athena is easy to spot in the old Greek statues and paintings. She pretty much always wears the same thing. Her helmet is decorated with rams, horses, griffons, and sphinxes, and it has a big fancy Mohawk-type plume on the top. She usually carries her shield and spear, and wears a sleeveless Spartan-style dress with a magic cloak called the Aegis draped over her shoulders. According to the legends, the cloak is lined in snakeskin and is pinned with the bronzed head of Medusa, kind of like a corsage. Sometimes you’ll hear the Aegis described as the goddess’s shield rather than her cloak. I guess nobody has ever looked closely enough to tell for sure which is right, because with the head of the Medusa there…well, the whole point of that thing is to make you run away screaming.

In a lot of stories, Athena gives the Aegis to Zeus as a present, so it’s technically
his
; but she borrows it from time to time like,
Hey, Dad, can I borrow the severed head of Medusa tonight? I’m going out with my friends.

Okay, honey, just bring it back by midnight, and don’t petrify anyone.

One of the biggest mysteries about Athena is why she’s called
Pallas Athena.
For the longest time, I thought people were saying Palace Athena, like it was a hotel in Vegas, or maybe Athena’s secret lair.

Even the Greeks couldn’t agree on why their favorite goddess had the nickname
Pallas,
but here’s the way
I
heard it.

When Athena was a young goddess, fresh out of Zeus’s forehead, her dad sent her to live with the nymphs of Lake Tritones in Libya on the North African coast.

“You’ll like them,” Zeus promised. “They’re warlike women, just like you. They might even teach you a few combat tricks!”

“I doubt that,” Athena said. “Why are you sending me away?”

Zeus tried for a smile, which wasn’t easy, since his forehead still hurt. “Look, my little war-muffin—”

“Don’t call me that!”

“You’ve been stuck inside my guts your whole life,” Zeus said. “This’ll give you a chance to learn about the wide world. And it’ll give the other Olympians time to get used to the idea of you being on the gods’ council. Honestly, you’re a little intimidating to them. You’re smart
and
powerful.”

Athena was flattered, so she agreed to spend some time in Africa.

She loved it there, just as Zeus had predicted. The nymphs of Lake Tritones were excellent fighters and athletes, maybe because they lived in such a harsh environment. Athena learned all sorts of super-secret ninja-nymph combat techniques. The nymphs thought Athena was the best thing since sliced ambrosia.

Her dearest friend was Pallas, the only nymph who could occasionally beat Athena in hand-to-hand combat. They shared the same taste in armor and weapons. They had the same sense of humor. They thought so much alike they could finish each other’s sentences. In no time, they became BFFs.

Then one day, Athena and Pallas were sparring by the lakeside when Zeus happened to look down from the sky to see how Athena was doing.

Zeus was shocked. Athena and Pallas fought with such speed and intensity, Zeus couldn’t believe it was a mock combat. Athena looked like she was about to be killed! (And, yeah, I know she was immortal so she couldn’t actually be killed, but Zeus was an overprotective dad. In the heat of the moment, he forgot.)

Pallas thrust her javelin at Athena’s chest and Zeus overreacted. He appeared in the sky right behind Athena and held up the Aegis
(which he was keeping at the time) so Pallas couldn’t help but see it.