Amphitrite the Bubbly

by Joan Holub

  She was right that it was nothing new. Still, seeing it all through her fresh eyes was kind of exhilarating. He was about to tell her so, when a voice called out.

  “Hey! There you are!” Hades whizzed up in one of MOA’s chariots with Delphinius and Pandora. The five of them flew side by side the rest of the way to Rome and landed at the Pantheon early that afternoon.

  Athena’s team had beaten them to it and was already heading up the building’s front steps. And Ares’ team was also just landing. Pandora and Thetis waved to them all.

  Didn’t they get that this was a contest? wondered Poseidon, feeling a little grumpy. You weren’t supposed to be so friendly with other teams when you were trying to outdo them!

  “Too bad we’re not the first team to get here,” Delphinius noted. Then he punched an encouraging fist in the air. “But we’ll still win this thing!”

  “Yeah!” shouted Pandora, high-fiving him.

  “We’ll outshine them all!” Thetis added, grinning.

  Outshine? Poseidon eyed her suspiciously as he remembered the Oracle-O cookie fortune. Was her choice of words deliberate? Did she truly hope to outshine him? She didn’t seem like a competitive type of person, but how well did he really know her? They hadn’t hung around together all that long.

  The relaxed feeling that had come over him during their trip vanished completely. He drew Thetis aside. “I meant to tell you—that was an awesome score back in Delphi. You coming up with the solution to the Oracle’s clue. But keep that kind of info just between the five of us from now on, okay? No need to give the other teams a heads-up.”

  She frowned at him. “If you say so.”

  Huh? He scowled at her. He’d just given her a compliment, in his own way. And that was good advice, whether she realized it or not. Sensing her disappointment in him, he said uncomfortably, “Well, see you inside.” Then he rushed across the brick street to catch up to Hades and Delphinius and start up the steps of the Pantheon with them.

  Pandora was already inside by now, her curious nature leading her to rush in ahead of the rest of them on the heels of Athena’s team. Poseidon looked over one shoulder to be sure Thetis was coming too and felt relieved when he saw that she was. Though he wasn’t sure how much he should trust her, she was still a member of his team. And he felt . . . well . . . responsible for her. Or something like that, anyway.

  Eight granite columns that stood ten times as tall as the immortals fronted the Pantheon, with two more rows of four behind them. “They look like humongous soldiers guarding the temple’s entrance,” Hades commented as Thetis caught up to the three boys.

  “Interesting observation,” she said. “That kind of detail could help us with our first challenge here. Especially if it’s another riddle.”

  “And they’re Corinthian columns,” Poseidon added quickly. “You can tell because they’re decorated at the top with carved acanthus leaves.”

  Thetis smiled slightly, but Hades shot him a look that plainly said, Duh, everyone knows that, god-dude.

  Poseidon immediately wished he could take back his comment. What was he doing—trying to impress Thetis? Usually girls tried to impress him! For some reason he wanted her approval, though. Wanted her to think of him as a good guy and to look up to him.

  After passing through a rectangular reception area, the students entered a massive round room that was topped with a concrete dome ceiling. At the dome’s highest point, there was a circular opening. He could see sky through it.

  Thetis pointed up at it. “The oculus.”

  “Now what?” said Pandora.

  “Now we eat!” Delphinius said. His eyes had gone round with excitement, and he was pointing toward a long table across the room from where they were standing. Clay bowls decorated with black-silhouetted figures were laid out on it.

  “That must be the food Zeus promised would be ready for us at each stop,” Poseidon said. But his hungry team wasn’t listening, for they had already started over to the table.

  And indeed, the bowls were filled with favorite foods of the gods, he saw when he joined them. Yambrosia stew and ambrosia salads. Underworld stew, too (a traditional stew of potatoes, meat, and carrots, flavored with an Underworld plant called asphodel). Nectaroni and cheese. Celestial soup with noodles shaped like planets and stars. There were even cartons of nectar to drink.

  But there were also Roman figs, dates, nuts, pears, grapes, cakes, and honey. Spying a note on the table beside the Roman treats, Poseidon picked it up. “The note’s from the Roman caretakers of the Pantheon, thanking us for a crate of urns filled with Greek food.”

  “My dad must’ve had the urns delivered before we got here,” said Athena. “Probably to stimulate more cultural exchange. Few things make friendships form faster than sharing good food!”

  Poseidon’s team members eagerly grabbed plates and began to fill them. The scent of food was hard to resist. But he had his eye on the ultimate goal. Winning the games. It would be smart to poke around the Pantheon and get familiar with everything here now, before they were presented with their first real challenge.

  “Food later; studying up on this place now,” he called out to his team.

  Delphinius froze, a forkful of nectaroni halfway to his mouth. “C’mon, god-dude. We’re starving,” he protested. “I mean, you’re the best, but let’s chill out and refuel.”

  “Everybody else is eating,” Thetis pointed out. And it was true. Most of the teams had arrived by now and were gathered around the table as well.

  Ping. Ping. Ping. All the students cocked their heads at the sound.

  “What was that?” asked Pandora.

  “The MOA herald’s lyrebell?” asked Hades.

  “It’s our scrolls,” said Thetis, pulling hers out of the pocket of her scalloped golden chiton. “I think we all just got a message.”

  All over the Pantheon, students reached for their scroll-gadgets and unrolled them. The message had apparently come to everyone at once. Clever device Zeus had created, thought Poseidon. He pulled his purple team leader scroll from his pocket to read:

  Chow now.

  Your first challenge will come at noon.

  —Zeus

  “So I guess it’s fine to go ahead and eat?” asked Pandora.

  Poseidon nodded, giving up. “We’ve got an hour till noon.”

  “Yeah! You’re the boss. Let’s dig in!” said Delphinius. He wolfed down his nectaroni, then forked up another bite.

  Once everyone on Poseidon’s team had eaten their fill, they walked around to familiarize themselves with the temple. Hades and Delphinius even went outside again to scope out the exterior. Like Thetis had said, who knew what details might come in handy? The more information they had, the better!

  Poseidon noticed Thetis gazing up at the ceiling and went over to her. “The distance from the ground up to the oculus measures the same as the width of the Pantheon’s dome,” she told him. “I read that in the sea scroll I told you about.”

  “Good fact. Might help us somehow,” Poseidon approved. This girl was turning out to be almost as brainy as Athena, who often had her head in a bookscroll back at MOA.

  Suddenly Thetis gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” Seeing that she was still looking up at the oculus, Poseidon looked up too. But all he saw through the opening was blue sky and puffy white clouds.

  Thetis shook her head and then shrugged. “Uh, nothing, I guess. It’s just . . . for a second, I thought I saw an eyeball looking down at us through the oculus.”

  “I’ll wing up and check,” said Poseidon. “Just in case there really is something on the roof. Might be some kind of clue!”

  “Tell the others to keep surveying the area,” he told her before he zoomed straight up and through the oculus in his winged sandals. When other team captains saw what he was up to, they did the same, wondering if he knew something they didn’t.

  Within seconds, Poseidon and five other captains were standing on the roof of the Panth
eon, looking out over the city. Artemis was the only captain not among them, Poseidon noticed. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her—or any of her team members, either—at the Pantheon yet.

  “Why are we up here?” Medusa asked him point-blank. One of her immortal sisters had brought her up since she was mortal and couldn’t make her winged sandals fly without help.

  “For the view,” Poseidon joked. Lifting a hand to shade his eyes, he gazed out over the surrounding rooftops and trees with pretended interest. The others followed his gaze, still thinking he must know something they didn’t.

  “Thetis didn’t happen to share any more interesting information about this building, did she?” Apollo asked craftily.

  “Maybe,” said Poseidon, grinning. But he was really just looking around for anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t spot a thing, though. Certainly nothing as weird as a big eyeball.

  Athena was flying around the edge of the roof, studying it closely. No doubt, like him she was looking for details that might help her team in the coming challenge.

  “Hey! Reporters and artists,” Ares announced in delight. Sure enough, a group of mortals in the streets below were glancing up at them while busily taking notes or sketching on the scrolls they held.

  “They must’ve heard that immortals were here,” added Iris.

  Feeling self-conscious, Poseidon lifted a hand to smooth back his hair. But it was already perfect, as usual. All three boy captains struck poses for the artists, trying to look as muscular as possible.

  Mortal villagers gathered down there too, waving up at the captains. Some of the girls were blowing kisses and holding signs they’d made. One girl’s sign read: Poseidon is Sea-rrific!

  Ares grinned. “I bet Thetis agrees with that sign.”

  “Huh?” said Poseidon. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s your new crush, right?”

  “No, she’s not my—” Poseidon broke off to glance around at the others on the roof. They were all watching him now with expressions of amusement. Was that what everyone thought? he wondered. Just because he’d given her a ride over and caught her when she was falling? “I barely know her,” he said with a frown. “She’s on my team. That’s all.”

  “Don’t be such a dripcompoop. Ares was just teasing,” said Medusa.

  Poseidon stiffened. He’d been called that and worse over the years, forever teased about his drippyness. “Ha-ha,” he said. “Not.”

  If only he could let the teasing roll off his back—or maybe drip off his back—but he’d never been able to do that. He was constantly worried about what other students at the Academy thought of him. It was hard to measure up when you were competing with godboys like Ares, the god of war. Or with mortal boys like Heracles, who was the strongest mortal in the world.

  And they weren’t his only rivals at MOA. Apollo, Dionysus, and Hephaestus—the list of their accomplishments was long and impressive. It was an uphill battle, trying to gain Zeus’s notice with these other guys around. Kind of exhausting, actually.

  But he was up to the challenge! Everyone knew that Zeus was totally into competitions. He was bound to be super impressed when Poseidon’s team won the Temple Games.

  With a flap of her small orange wings, Pheme sailed up through the oculus to join them on top of the roof. “Artemis’s team went to Sicily by mistake,” she announced. “They thought the first clue had something to do with Mr. Cyclops’s home island. There’s no way they could get here in time to win now. So her team is officially out of the race. I’ll post the news to everyone’s scrolls.” With that, she dropped down through the oculus and into the Pantheon again.

  “That’s awful!” said Athena.

  “Poor Artemis,” groaned Iris.

  Apollo looked disappointed. “I was wondering why I hadn’t seen any of her team here. I was considering using our twin telepathy to try to find her if she didn’t show soon.” He and Artemis shared a kind of ESP that let them locate each other by bringing the other twin’s image to mind.

  No one liked to see a friend strike out, but that was the way competitions were, Poseidon thought. He felt sorry for Artemis and her team too, but he also couldn’t help thinking one down, five other teams to go! Luckily, every team would win some kind of prize in the end, so it wasn’t that awful of him to be kind of happy about Artemis’s mistake, right?

  Ping! Everyone’s scrolls broadcasted the news about Artemis. There was also a message from Zeus explaining their first challenge. It read:

  Find the coffers.

  Count their rings,

  Times twenty-eight.

  Minus the height of Pantheon

  Plus the width of its dome.

  (The use of winged sandals is not

  allowed in this challenge.)

  Everyone on the roof crammed back through the oculus to meet with their teams on the Pantheon floor. Each team huddled in a group, trying to figure out the answer to Zeus’s riddle first.

  Not far away, Poseidon heard Kydoimos on Ares’ team whine, “Math? I thought these challenges would be games of skill. Ha!”

  “Math is a skill,” the Egyptian goddess Isis informed him. The beads in her long hair clicked together as she shook her head at him scornfully.

  “He meant the athletic kind of skill,” his friend Makhai said hotly.

  “Anyone have any helpful ideas on how we’ll measure the height of this building without being able to use our sandals to fly up to the dome?” Ares butted in to ask his team.

  Poseidon couldn’t hear the rest, but smiled over what he had heard. Ares’ sister Eris, the goddess of discord, seemed to be having her usual unsettling effect. Luckily, it was just Ares’ team that was arguing so far.

  “Okay,” Poseidon said to his four teammates. “Any ideas?”

  “Coffins are usually found in cemeteries, aren’t they?” said Pandora.

  “No, it was coffers, see?” said Thetis. She showed Pandora the words that Zeus had sent them on the scroll again.

  “Coffers are like treasure chests,” added Hades. “So they could have rings and other jewelry inside them.”

  “Then we just need to find the chests, open them, and count how many rings are inside,” said Delphinius. “Easy peasy. Except for one thing. I didn’t see any chests or trunks when I was looking around earlier. Did any of you?”

  They all shook their heads. But a moment later Thetis’s face lit up. “Hey, I just remembered that there’s another meaning for coffers.”

  Poseidon raised his eyebrows. “Which is?”

  “Those indented squares that cover the ceiling in here? They’re called coffers,” she explained. “And they’re lined up in rows that circle this dome, just like big . . .”

  “Rings?” Pandora gasped, and tilted her head to look up.

  “Keep your head down,” Poseidon growled at her and the others. “We don’t want to give away the solution to this challenge before we’ve even figured it out ourselves.” Without tilting his head, he raised his eyes upward. Visually counting, he said, “There are five rows, er, rings of those square coffer things. Everyone count the number of squares in each row. But try not to be obvious about it.”

  “We only need to count one row. All the rows have the same number,” said Thetis. “See how they line up both ways, up and down?”

  “She’s right,” said Delphinius. “They get smaller when the dome begins to curve higher, so the same number of coffers still fits in a ring.”

  “Uh-oh! Don’t look now, but isn’t Athena’s team staring at the ceiling too?” Pandora hissed. “They’ve probably figured out Zeus’s clue too. Hurry!”

  “I count twenty-eight squares in the bottom ring,” said Hades. “Like Zeus’s riddle.”

  “Twenty-eight times five. That’s . . . ,” said Thetis.

  “One hundred and forty coffers,” Poseidon said.

  Delphinius clapped him on the back. “Is this guy good at math, or what? Now how do we figure out the height and width of the do
me?”

  Everyone looked at Thetis. “Well,” she said. “I don’t remember the measurements from the scrollbook I read. But like I told Poseidon, I do remember that the height and width are the same.”

  While they’d been talking, some of the other team members had found ropes in a storage closet along the Pantheon wall and rushed outside with them. “Since magic isn’t allowed, they can’t use their winged sandals. So they’ll probably climb the outer walls using those ropes,” guessed Hades. “Then they’ll drop the ropes down through the oculus to measure the distance to the floor. That’ll all take a while.”

  “Think we should measure the width of the floor instead?” said Pandora.

  “That would be easier and smarter. Good thing we’re the only ones who know it measures the same as the ceiling height,” said Delphinius.

  He, Pandora, and Hades all started to step off the floor’s width, heel to toe and heel to toe. Before they’d gone far, Poseidon and Thetis both exclaimed, “Wait!” at the exact same second, halting them in their tracks. Her eyes sparkled up at him with the knowledge that they’d both realized the same thing at the same time.

  “We don’t have to measure the floor or the ceiling,” Poseidon told them in a low voice.

  Thetis nodded. “Because they’re the same. So no matter what they measure, subtracting one from the other like the clue says to do will cancel both out to zero. Which means that it’s only the coffer count that, um, counts. So the answer to the challenge is . . .” She looked over at Poseidon, waiting.

  “One hundred and forty!” he shouted.

  Hearing this, Pheme jotted the number down on her scroll, sending it off to Zeus.

  Almost immediately, all the teams’ scrolls chimed Ping! Ping! When everyone checked them, they found the same message from Zeus. It read:

  Congratulations!

  Score one for Poseidon’s team, winner of the first challenge.

  5 rings of ceiling coffers x 28 coffers in a ring = 140 coffers

  140 + (142 feet high – 142 feet wide) = 140