Clotho the Fate

by Joan Holub

  Splat! An arrow smacked Euphemus on Atalanta’s team. His first X. Then, in quick succession, two more arrows struck him. Three strikes! Immediately, a trap door in the floor opened up under the boy’s feet. It stayed open just long enough for him to fall downward and away through a chute. Then the trap door disappeared without a trace. Once he was gone, Atalanta’s team had one less member. Which meant they were down to four now.

  Apparently growing terrified at all the action going on around them, Arachne waved her skinny legs in the air. “Yoo-hoo!” she shouted to the other team. “We give up! Don’t splat us.”

  “Stop it!” Clotho demanded. “You’re attracting attention. You’re going to get us paint-bombed!”

  Arachne’s eyes lit up. “Hey, good thinking. I’ve changed my mind. If the only way out of this arena is to get triple Xs, we should actually try to get splatted!”

  “No way!” Clotho replied. “No one else is trying to lose on purpose to escape the arena. I refuse to either.”

  Throughout the game Meleager had kept a protective eye on his new crush, Atalanta. Which posed a problem for his team. When the boar charged her while she was aiming at the centaurs on Meleager’s team, he chose to help her instead of them. Ducking behind a large rock, he aimed at the boar and called out to her, “Run, girl!” Zing! The boar veered away and his shot missed.

  The centaurs frowned. “Hey! What about us? We’re your teammates. You should help us, not her!”

  “Yeah! This young woman can protect herself, dude!” Atalanta informed Meleager, cocking a thumb at her chest. “Besides, I’m a way better shot than you.” So saying, she planted her sandaled feet wide and fired off two arrows from her bow, catching the centaurs off guard. Zing! Zing!

  “Hey!” “Rats!” they yelled in disappointment as her red Xs splatted them. Since these were their third strikes each, trap doors opened beneath them. Whoosh! With identical expressions of surprise on their faces, both tumbled downward and away.

  “Score!” shouted Atalanta, punching her bow high. She turned her aim toward Meleager then, but he’d already bounced away on a trampoline. On his team, only he and his two cousins remained now. Atalanta’s team still had four.

  Minutes later, during a brief pause in the action, Clotho saw that the centaurs and Euphemus were now back upstairs on the balcony. They’d joined those at the railing to watch the ongoing battle. Since all who’d struck out seemed unharmed, she guessed they had met with a soft landing when they’d fallen through the arena floor. There must be pads down there, and a staircase that led back up to the balcony. Phew! Good to know!

  She ducked as Meleager’s cousins doubled down on their offense, firing in many directions. In no time at all Theseus from Team Atalanta wore two Xs. Suddenly the boar managed to headbutt him into a high, wild somersault, causing a third X to appear on his rear end. Apparently, a headbutt equaled being splatted with an arrow or spear in this game. When Theseus reached the arena floor again, a trap door opened under him and he disappeared. Whoosh!

  Only three were left on each team now, counting both captains.

  Splat! Jason was hit a third time, and gone from the game. Now it was down to three against two. Meleager and his cousins against Atalanta and Clotho. And the boar against them all! Clotho could hardly believe she had managed to survive so far.

  The teams continued on the offense, chasing the Calydonian boar around and around a huge shape-shifting rock until the boar reversed course to chase them! Tired at last, it hid in some scraggly bushes.

  Clotho got caught up in the action, bouncing around from one trampoline to another. Arrows and spears flew. It was total chaos! A free-for-all!

  “Any advice, Athena and Heracles?” Atalanta called up to the bleachers as she took cover behind a topiary shaped like a giant rabbit. “Didn’t you guys capture a boar once?”

  “Yeah, the Erymanthian boar,” Heracles shouted down to her.

  “It was a talking boar, though,” Athena added. “So we were able to trick it into visiting Heracles’ cousin, who had to listen to it tell its favorite long, boring stories because he was trapped in a vase. I doubt that will work with this boar, unfortunately.”

  “Blah blah blah,” Arachne muttered from Clotho’s shoulder as Clotho boinged from a flower-shaped trampoline onto a snowflake-shaped one. “What a show-off. That Athena thinks she’s sooo clever.” In spite of the revenge Athena had visited upon her, Arachne had obviously not learned a lesson about giving due respect to immortals!

  “You shouldn’t say such things. Besides, I think Athena’s nice,” Clotho told the mouthy spider. Luckily, Arachne’s voice was tiny, and the sounds of the fighting were loud. No one else seemed to have heard her latest insult.

  Moments later Atalanta found a clear shot at the boar. Zing! Her arrow glanced off its nose. Splat! She tried another. Zing! Another splat! And the boar’s ear fell off and hit the ground with a metallic-sounding clank.

  Metallic-sounding? What was up with that? wondered Clotho. Then it dawned on her. The boar wasn’t real! She clapped a hand to her forehead. Duh! A real boar would endanger the lives of the players. And using a real boar would also be animal cruelty! So this boar must be only a mechanical representation of the famous Calydonian boar, created for this game.

  Two red Xs appeared on the boar’s side. “Two strikes! One more, you dumb ol’ boar; then your bacon will be mine,” crowed Atalanta.

  The boar turned. Eyes on her, it pawed the ground. Then, snorting with rage, it charged!

  Atalanta quickly nocked a new arrow in her bow. But before she could fire it off, Meleager leaped toward her and elbowed her out of the way.

  “Go hide while I handle this!” he commanded. Zing! He heaved his spear and broadsided the approaching boar. Splat! A third red X appeared on its side. The beast went up in a puff of smoke. And in its place there now stood a dazzling, jeweled, boar-shaped trophy!

  8 Tricked!

  SUDDENLY THE MUSICAL NOTES OF a lute sounded in the arena. The king had said that the sound of a lute would signal: Game over!

  “Yay, Team Meleager! We have the most players left on our team. We won!” yelled Plexippus and Toxeus. They bumped fists and held the trophy high in triumph. Their joy was short-lived, however.

  They and everyone else were astonished to see Meleager suddenly grab the trophy and go down on bended knee before Atalanta. He held it out to her. “As a token of my esteem, I award this trophy to you,” he told her.

  A hush fell over the arena, bleachers, and balcony. Atalanta hesitated for a moment, but then she accepted the trophy. “Uh, thanks.”

  “Wait! Our team won. Why should she get the prize?” protested Plexippus.

  “Yeah! No fair,” complained Toxeus.

  Meleager huffed. “I’m the team captain, so we play by my rules. What I say goes!”

  Huh? Clotho could guess how Meleager’s cousins must feel. Too often she’d been bossed around in the name of rules she’d had no part in making. By her sisters. And Zeus, too! Maybe finally disobeying his no-hanging-with-mortals rule today had made her rebellious. Because she was starting to think that everyone should get to have input on rules that affected them––in most cases, anyway.

  Before she could suggest that Meleager talk things over with his cousins and listen to their objections, the prince turned his bow and arrow on the two boys. Zing! Zing! He splatted them both!

  They had been tagged twice already, so when a third red X appeared on Toxeus’s elbow and a third one on Plexippus’s chest, they were done for. Whoosh! They were whisked away through trap doors.

  The crowd on the balcony responded to Meleager’s betrayal of his own team members with stunned silence. As if to make clear that the game was now officially over, however, the arena’s metal exit gate clanked and swung itself open.

  Quickly Clotho, Atalanta, and Meleager took off their battle gear and put their sandals back on. Clotho slung the straps of her travel bag over her shoulder as all three hurried back
up the ramp. While making their way to the balcony, they could hear the murmurs of astonishment begin to rise from the onlookers there.

  “Can you believe it?” Clotho heard Apollo say.

  “No! I mean, he shot his own team members out of the game!” Poseidon exclaimed.

  “Yeah! And he gave their trophy to the competition!” Ares said, sounding disgusted as well as bewildered.

  Up on the balcony again at last, Clotho was just in time to hear Artemis say, “Atalanta deserved it. I mean, she got in the most shots at the boar. Two to Meleager’s one.”

  “Yeah, I think it’s sweet that he wanted her to have the trophy,” said Aphrodite.

  Athena leaned over to Artemis. “Hey! Speaking of that boar, I just now got what you meant when you warned us that this game would be a little boring. You meant BOAR-ing!”

  Artemis grinned. “Hephaestus made that replica of the Calydonian boar for me out of some magical metal in his blacksmith shop back at Mount Olympus Academy. No matter how many times it’s splatted out of the arena at the end of a game, it’ll return again to play another one when summoned. That godboy is amazingly skilled.”

  Now that the game had finally ended, members of both teams seemed to have accepted the unusual outcome. All were being good sports about it. They were being celebrated as heroes of the day for having performed in the first game ever in the arena. Even Plexippus and Toxeus were clapping others on their backs in high spirits.

  Although Meleager still seemed to be crushing on Atalanta, following her around like a little lost puppy, she was doing her best to ignore him. Finally, however, she lost her patience. She cupped a hand to her ear and said to him, “I think I hear the king and queen calling you.” When he turned to look for his parents, she slipped out of Game On!, taking the trophy with her.

  Meleager drooped when he realized she’d tricked him, but then perked up again when Heracles came over to talk to him. Clotho wondered if Meleager would ever come to regret handing his team’s trophy over to Atalanta. Or maybe he was just happy to have done something that made her smile.

  “Kitten snacks?” said Arachne’s tiny voice, reminding Clotho of her plan to get food for the kitten they’d left back at the shop in the IM. Over at the snack table Clotho quickly found a takeaway container, put some tuna sandwiches and other kitten-friendly tidbits inside it, and stowed it in her bag. With the spider still riding on her shoulder, she was about to sneak out to the atrium when the king produced a new surprise.

  “Another Calydonian Boar Hunt game will begin tomorrow,” he announced to the crowd. “So do return, MOA students. You might just be chosen to play! And with the added excitement of your immortal abilities, mortals will surely want to be in the audience.”

  “Every game, every day, will be slightly different, so expect the unexpected,” the queen added with a wink.

  Nodding, the king continued. “Over the coming weeks, a half-dozen more games will be added. They’ll rotate in and out of our three-sectioned arena.”

  “We think you’ll enjoy all the thrilling, action-packed excitement we’ve planned. Take a look at this preview of just one of those new games, which opens tomorrow!” the queen called out.

  With that the king pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling. This opened the curtain that hid a second pizza-slice-shaped area of the arena. Whoosh!

  Clotho was drawn to the railing to discover what had been revealed. To her surprise, Hades and Persephone were hard at work down in the arena, hanging a sign over what looked to be a new game. Popping up from their task, both were obviously startled to find so many eyes on them. This must be the secret project Persephone had mentioned in Cassandra’s bakery earlier that morning!

  “Ta-da!” boomed the king, gesturing grandly toward the pair. “As you can see, Persephone and Hades are finishing up the creation of our second game even now: Tartarus Two, the Underworld.”

  The goddessgirl and godboy smiled and waved up at the crowd in the balcony. It seemed that Persephone hadn’t gone to help Hades in the real Underworld as Athena and Aphrodite had thought. Instead, she’d been helping him create an Underworld game here in the IM.

  Looks interesting, thought Clotho, leaning as far as she could over the railing to peer down. She spotted a large pool with fruit trees nearby, a river of lava, lots of rocks, and clumps of white flowers. Asphodel, she knew: flowers that grew throughout the Underworld.

  Pheme had been standing near Clotho at the railing. Now she whipped out a notescroll and feather pen and called down to Persephone and Hades. “Tell us about Tartarus Two. I’ll write an article about it for Teen Scrollazine.”

  Persephone’s green eyes lit with excitement. “Well, as everyone knows, only the truly evil wind up being punished in the real Tartarus down in the Underworld. It’s the deepest, scariest, gloomiest place ever! In Tartarus Two, players will be banished to our pretend Tartarus here for various silly reasons and will then have to try to escape fun yet puzzling punishments to get themselves out.”

  “Sheesh, immortals just love punishing people, right?” Arachne grumbled.

  “You heard what Artemis read from her Revenge-ology scroll: When a mortal insults a god or goddess, retribution is required,” Clotho replied quietly so as not to be overheard. “So maybe you’re lucky Athena didn’t send you to the real Tartarus after that tapestry you made poking fun at Zeus. By making you a spider, at least her punishment allowed you to still be able to weave your webs.”

  Arachne appeared to consider that for a moment, one leg scratching her body. “Whatever,” she muttered. She spun out a long thread from Clotho’s shoulder down to her travel bag and ducked inside it.

  Clotho turned to go, but stopped when she felt a sharp pull on her hair. “Ow!” Looking down, she saw that a lock of her long black hair had somehow gotten tangled around the balcony railing. As she untangled it, an image of a knotted, tangled thread floating skyward formed in her mind.

  Huh? Before she could decide what this could mean, a strange, glittery breeze swirled onto the balcony, bringing a papyrus scroll with it. “I come from Mount Olympus with a message for the Fates from Zeus himself!” the wind howled. “Fates, are you present?”

  Uh-oh, thought Clotho, going pale. Zeus knew she was here? Since his message wasn’t addressed to her in particular, he must think her sisters were here as well. What could he want? Had he heard that she’d been mingling with mortals? Was he angry? Did he have punishment on his mind? Yikes!

  “The Fates?” Pandora echoed, sounding awed. “Here?” Everyone looked around, murmuring excitedly. Picturing the instant complaint party that might begin if Pandora or any other mortals found out she was the one the magic breeze was looking for (well, one of the ones), Clotho ducked her head. Eyeing the exit, she began to edge away through the crowd. She couldn’t let the messagescroll find her! But then she heard something that stopped her in her tracks.

  “The Fates aren’t so smart. I know for a fact that my mom tricked them.” It was Meleager, and he was boasting to Ares, Poseidon, and Apollo. The four boys were standing right behind her.

  “Oh yeah? How’d your mom do that?” Poseidon demanded to know. Clotho stood as if frozen, eavesdropping (while pretending not to).

  “Well… I’m not supposed to tell,” Prince Meleager admitted in a low voice. It was obvious to her that he wanted to impress the godboys, though. He leaned in closer. “My mom says that when I was born, she dreamed that my Thread of Fate was tangled and knotted.”

  Clotho’s forehead wrinkled as a long-ago memory tugged at her. Tangle. Meleager. Suddenly her brain connected the dots. That Thread of Fate she’d tangled twelve years ago? It had been his!

  “In my mom’s dream, the three Fates told her that my destiny was to die as soon as a log burning in our fireplace turned to ashes,” Meleager went on. “So my mom simply removed the log before it could burn up. And here I am, still alive. Easy-peasy!”

  Ares folded his arms over his chest, appearing skeptical. “No way!
The Fates can’t be tricked like that.”

  Meleager placed a hand over his heart. “True story. On my honor.”

  Argh! thought Clotho. Her sisters had always warned that if she broke even one rule—in this case the rule against stopping partway through the telling of a fate years ago—it would have consequences. They’d been right. It had been an accident, but still.

  And here at the IM today, she’d broken Rule #3 big-time by hanging out with numerous mortals on purpose. She shuddered to think what unexpected consequences might come from that.

  Feeling confused, and wanting to keep the messagescroll from finding her, Clotho scurried off. Had Zeus discovered her twelve-year-old mistake? Was that what his messagescroll for the Fates was all about? Gulp! When the strange breeze whooshed it closer, she put on a burst of speed and zoomed away from it.

  Not watching where she was going, she accidentally bumped into a mortal boy. “Ow,” he cried out, hopping around. “You stepped on my toe!” It was that boy she’d seen earlier in the green cape.

  “I’m so sorry. ’Scuse me,” she threw the words over her shoulder at him as she dashed for the exit.

  Seconds later, she was pushing through the door into Arachne’s shop again. First thing, she checked for the kitten. It wasn’t there. But when she called, “Here, kitty, kitty!” it came scampering in through the hole in the wall she’d discovered before. She scraped the tuna from the little sandwiches she’d brought onto a plate and set that, the other snacks, and a bowl of fresh water on the kitchenette floor. That adorable sweetie pie quickly gobbled up every morsel. Aww!

  It had only just finished when all at once the shop door began to rattle. With a startled hiss, the kitten dove into a basket of yarn to hide as the door whooshed open. The determined breeze carrying that messagescroll whisked inside. Clotho watched in dismay as it whirled around the shop, sending yarn balls and spools of ribbon rolling across the floor. Scissors and shears hanging on the pegboard swayed in its wake, clinking together like wind chimes.