Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (32 page)

Orion stumbled around Greece until he happened to run into the blacksmith god Hephaestus. Orion told him his tragic story. The giant sounded genuinely sorry, so Hephaestus—who knew a lot about tragedy and second chances—designed mechanical eyes that allowed Orion to see again.

Orion retired to Delos, where he met Artemis. She thought he was a nice-enough guy. He didn’t try to hide his past crimes. He also had incredible hunting skills. His years of blindness had sharpened his other senses, and his mechanical eyes gave him all sorts of cool night vision/targeting abilities. He became the first male ever to join the Hunters of Artemis.

I’m not sure how the other followers felt about that. The Hunters had never been co-ed before. But Orion didn’t try anything funny. He kept his distance from the girls when they were bathing. He helped out with the chores just like everybody else. Pretty soon he became fast friends with Artemis.

The only problem: Orion was a little
too
good at hunting. One day he was out by himself, and he got carried away. He shot sixteen bears, twelve lions, and several monsters that he couldn’t even name. Then he started shooting harmless stuff: deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds, wombats. Maybe he just snapped. Maybe Apollo drove him crazy, because Apollo didn’t like how much time this dude was spending with his sister.

Anyway, Orion soon had a mound of dead wombat carcasses piled up around him. He painted his face with squirrel blood and put leaves in his hair and started screaming, “I will kill all the animals in the world! All of them! Die, stupid furry critters!”

This didn’t really fit with the Hunters’ nature-friendly mission statement. It also didn’t please Gaea the Earth Mother. Orion was screaming so loudly that he got her attention, even while she was sleeping, and Gaea muttered to herself: “You want to kill something, punk? Try this.”

Just behind Orion, a massive scorpion emerged from a fissure in the ground. The giant turned and got a poisonous stinger right in the chest.

That was the end of Orion. Artemis went searching for him, and when she found his cold, lifeless body, surrounded (for some bizarre reason) by thousands of dead furry critters, her heart was broken again. This time
Artemis
made a constellation. She put Orion in the sky, with a scorpion nearby, so his story would live forever.

I guess the moral is: don’t try to massacre bunnies, squirrels, and wombats. They didn’t do anything to you, and you might find that they have a very big scorpion friend.

Artemis’s last best friend was a prince named Hippolytos. The guy was handsome and charming and had no interest in romance at all. He just wanted to spend all his time hunting. In other words, he was Artemis’s perfect
man. She accepted him into the Hunt, which must have been a challenge for some of her female followers. The guy was a little too attractive for his own good.

Still, Hippolytos was a model follower. He kept his vows and never gave the ladies a second look.

Not everybody liked this, though. Up on Olympus, Aphrodite the goddess of love was outraged.

“Are you
kidding
me?” she wailed. “A hot guy like that, hanging out with eighty beautiful women, and he’s not interested? This is an insult! This is
not
okay!”

The next time Hippolytos went home to visit his dad, King Theseus (who is a whole other story, that dude), they got into this huge argument. Dad wanted Hippolytos to get married so he could have kids and carry on the family name when he became king, blah, blah, blah.

Hippolytos said, “No! I want to stay with Artemis and hunt!”

Theseus roared in frustration. “If you
love
her so much, why don’t you
marry her?”

“She’s a maiden goddess, Dad! You never listen!”

The argument got more and more heated, because up in Olympus, Aphrodite was inflaming their passions. Sure, she was the goddess of love, but there really isn’t much difference between love and hate. They both get out of control easily, and one turns into the other. Trust me. I know.

Finally, Theseus drew a sword and killed his own son.

Whoops.

Of course the king was horribly ashamed. He placed the prince’s body in the royal crypts and ran off to mourn in private. Meanwhile, Artemis heard the news and came rushing to the tomb.

Weeping with rage, she gathered up the body of Hippolytos. “No! No, no, no! I will
not
lose another best friend. I
won’t
!”

She flew out of the city, carrying Hippolytos’s body. She searched all of Greece until she found the best physician in the world—a guy named Asklepios. He was a son of Apollo, the god of healing, but Asklepios was even better at healing than his dad. Probably that was because Asklepios spent all his time
actually
healing, while Apollo flirted and gave concerts in the park.

“Aunt Artemis!” said Asklepios. “Good to see you!”

Artemis laid the body of Hippolytos at his feet. “Asklepios, I need you to heal Hippolytos. Please! This is beyond even my powers.”

“Hmm,” Asklepios said. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s dead,” Artemis said.

“That’s a serious condition. It’s almost always fatal. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Asklepios mixed some herbs, cooked a potion, and force-fed it to the dead prince, who immediately woke up.

“Thank the Fates!” Artemis said. “Asklepios, you’re the best!”

“Hey, no problem.”

Actually, it
was
a problem. Aphrodite complained to Zeus. She was
such
a sore loser. Then Hades complained. Asklepios couldn’t go around bringing the dead back to life. That would cause chaos in the mortal world and the Underworld. Zeus agreed. He zapped Asklepios with lightning and killed him, which is why you can’t go to the doctor today and ask him to resurrect your dead relatives. Zeus declared that level of medicine off-limits.

As for Hippolytos, Artemis made sure he stayed safe. She whisked him off to Italy, where he became a priest at one of her sacred shrines and lived to a ripe old age.

After that, Artemis decided not to get too close to any of her followers. It was just too dangerous for them. She also became wary about inviting any more men into the Hunt.

That’s okay with me. I like Artemis, but I don’t do well with nature. Also, I don’t like hunting. I
do
like girls, but my girlfriend would
not
be okay with me hanging out with eighty beautiful women in the wilderness.

She’s kind of possessive that way.

HERMES GOES
TO
JUVIE

I
T WOULD BE FASTER
to list the things Hermes
wasn’t
the god of, because that guy had a lot going on.

He was the god of travel, so he was the patron of anyone who used the roads. That meant merchants, messengers, ambassadors, traveling performers, and herders bringing their livestock to market. It also meant bandits, thieves, drifters, and those annoying caravans of retired people in RVs heading south for the winter.

Hermes was in charge of guiding dead souls to the Underworld. He was Zeus’s personal FedEx service, carrying his boss’s messages all around the globe with guaranteed overnight delivery. He was also the god of (take a deep breath) commerce, languages, thievery, cheeseburgers, trickery, eloquent speaking, feasts, cheeseburgers, hospitality, guard dogs, birds of omen, gymnastics, athletic competitions, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, and telling fortunes with dice.

Okay, I just tossed in the cheeseburgers to see if you were paying attention. Also, I’m hungry.

Basically, Hermes was in charge of anything and everyone you might encounter while traveling—the good stuff and the bad. So if you take a trip, you’d better hope that Hermes is in a good mood. Otherwise you’ll wind up sleeping in the airport, or stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire. Since everybody in Ancient Greece needed to travel at one time or another, Hermes was an important, well-respected dude.

Hard to believe he was born in a cave and got arrested when he was twelve hours old.

His mom, Maia, tried to keep him out of trouble. She was a Titan, the daughter of Atlas; and when she became pregnant with Zeus’s baby (which makes her what, like girlfriend #458? Is anybody keeping track?), she tried to protect herself so she wouldn’t end like
most
of Zeus’s girlfriends—cursed and harassed by Hera.

Maia hid in a cave on Mount Cyllene in central Greece, where she gave birth to cute little Hermes. She realized her kid was a baby god, so she decided she had better be careful. You can never tell when a baby god will start dancing and singing and shooting people. (She’d heard stories from Leto.) Maia nursed Baby Hermes and swaddled him tight in his blankets so he couldn’t move or get into trouble. She placed him in a woven basket for a cradle and began singing a lullaby about the different gods and their favorite animals, because even back then, baby songs were all about farm animals and stuff. She sang about Artemis and her dogs, Poseidon and his horses, Apollo and his herd of sacred cows—the finest and tastiest cattle in the world. Soon Hermes was sleeping peacefully. Maia stumbled to her bed and passed out, because giving birth was hard work.

As soon as Hermes heard his mom snoring, he opened his eyes.

The young god struggled in his swaddling blankets. “Seriously?” he murmured. “Born for thirty minutes, and I’m already in a straitjacket? Mom must really not trust me. Smart lady.”

He wriggled free and jumped out of the crib. Hermes still looked like a newborn, but only because he wasn’t ready to start growing yet. He figured a baby could get away with stuff that an older kid couldn’t. He stretched his arms, did a few jumping jacks, and hiked up his diapers.

“All that singing about cows made me hungry,” he said. “I could go for a steak!”

He strolled out of the cave, figuring it couldn’t be too hard to find Apollo’s cattle. He’d only gone a few steps when he tripped on something hard.

“Ow!” Hermes knelt down and realized that he’d stumbled over a tortoise.

“Hey, little buddy,” Hermes said. “You’re the first animal I’ve run across! I guess you’ll be one of my sacred creatures. How would you like that?”

The tortoise just stared at him.

“That’s a nice shell you’ve got.” Hermes wrapped his knuckles on the tortoise’s back. “All dappled and pretty. How about I take you inside the cave where I can get a better look? I won’t hurt you.”

Hermes was strong for a baby. Actually, he was strong for
anybody.
He picked up the tortoise and brought it inside. Looking over its shell, he had a sudden idea. He remembered the way his mother’s voice had echoed through the cave when she sang her lullaby, becoming louder and richer. Hermes had enjoyed that. This tortoise shell might amplify sound the same way, like a miniature cave—if there was no tortoise inside it.

“You know what, little buddy?” Hermes said. “I changed my mind. I’m afraid I
will
hurt you.”

Gross-out alert. Hermes chopped off the tortoise’s head and legs. He scooped out the rest of it with his mom’s soup ladle. (Hey, I’m sorry. Back then, people butchered animals all the time for meat or hide or shell or whatever. This is why my friend Piper became a vegetarian.)

Anyway, once Hermes hollowed out the shell, he blew into it. The sound echoed deeply, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted. Outside the cave, he could hear owls, crickets, frogs, and a bunch of other critters making sounds at different pitches, all at the same time. Hermes wanted something like that—a bunch of sounds simultaneously. Over by the fire, he spotted some long, stringy sheep tendons that Maia had set out to dry for sewing or whatever.

Hermes thought, Hmm.

He stretched one tendon between his foot and hand. He plucked it with his free hand, and the gut string vibrated. The tighter he made the string, the higher the note.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “This’ll work.”

He glanced at his mom to make sure she was still asleep. Then Hermes set to work. From his mom’s loom, he took a couple of wooden dowels and ran them through the tortoise shell so that they stuck out the neck hole like horns. Then he fastened a third dowel across the top, between the two braces, so they looked kind of like football goalposts. He ran seven strings from the top of the neck to the base of the tortoise shell. Then he tuned the strings to different pitches. When he strummed, the sound was amazing. Hermes had invented the first stringed instrument, which he decided to call a lyre. (Why? Maybe because he
was
a liar, I don’t know.)

If he’d spent a few more hours working, he probably could’ve invented the acoustic guitar, the stand-up bass, and the Fender Stratocaster too; but by now he was
really
hungry. He hid his new lyre in the blankets of his cradle and set out to find those yummy magic cows.

He climbed to the top of Mount Cyllene—hey, no big deal for such a buff baby—and peered across Greece, watching and listening. Apollo kept his cows well hidden at night, in a secret meadow in Pieria, which was about three hundred miles north of Cyllene, but Hermes had excellent senses. In no time, he heard a distant: “Mooo.”

Another cow said, “Shhh. We’re hiding!”

The first cow said, “Sorry.”

Up on the mountaintop, Hermes grinned. “Ha! I’ve got you now, cows.”

Three hundred miles? No problem! Hermes ran there in about an hour—which must have looked really strange, this newborn god tearing across Greece,
his hands still covered in tortoise blood. Fortunately it was nighttime and nobody
saw him.

When he got to the secret meadow, Hermes drooled at the sight of so many delicious big fat healthy heifers, hundreds of them grazing in the tall grass between the base of a mountain and the sandy shores of the Mediterranean.

“I don’t want to be greedy,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’ll just take fifty or so. But how to cover my tracks?”

He couldn’t just stuff fifty cows in a sack and sneak away. And if he herded them, Apollo would easily be able to follow the hoofprints of so many animals.

Hermes stared at the beach. Then he examined some nearby crape myrtle trees. Not sure what he was doing exactly, he broke off some twigs and young branches from the myrtles. He remembered that back in Maia’s cave, his cradle had been a woven basket, and he started to weave the branches and twigs into big paddles. He wrapped these around his feet and created the first snowshoes—which was pretty amazing, since it never snowed in Greece.

Hermes took a few steps in the grass, then on the sand. The paddle shoes left wide, vague impressions that completely masked the size of his feet.

Perfect, he thought. That covers
me.
And now for the cows…

He waded across the meadow in his new shoes. He managed to separate the herd, shooing fifty of the fattest, juiciest cows away from the rest. Those fifty he drove sideways toward the beach.

Once they reached the sand, Hermes snapped his fingers and whistled to get the cows’ attention. When all fifty of them were looking at him, their tails facing the ocean, he said, “Okay, guys. Now back it up. Back it up!”

Ever tried to get fifty cows walking backward? It’s not easy. Hermes kept their attention on him, whistling and making back-up noises like,
“BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!”
while he waved his arms and advanced toward the water. The cattle shuffled backward, right into the surf. Then Hermes turned them south and herded them a few hundred yards through the waves before leading them onto dry land again.