by Joan Holub
“What’s our challenge, if you know it?” Athena asked yet another marionette. Unfortunately, just as she asked this, the giants arrived. Though breathless from running, there was nothing wrong with their ears, and they heard the marionette’s answer too.
“Simply pick up the small ancient stone, called a rune, which sits upon the center of the temple roof. But you must do so without touching the roof itself,” said the marionette. Poof! Now only five marionettes were left.
Instantly, Ares, Apollo, and some other students raced over to begin climbing the temple walls, aiming for the roof. The giants were faster. They grabbed the chain links that ran along the top of the temple, preparing to leap over them.
“What happens if we do touch the temple’s roof?” Pandora blurted. This earned her a dark look from Poseidon.
Amphitrite spoke up quickly, “Good question. I’d like to know the answer too.” The giants and immortals who’d started climbing obviously wanted to hear the answer also, because they paused and looked over at the marionettes.
“If you touch the roof, you’ll turn into a newt,” said the marionette. Poof! That left only four of them.
Looking wary now, the giants backed away from the temple. The students did too. If any of them turned into a newt, they’d have to drop out of the competition. And, well, they’d be a newt.
“What now?” Eris asked. When another marionette opened its jaws to speak, she turned on it. “Not you! I wasn’t asking you. I was talking to the other teams.”
But it was too late. “Now you must figure out how to complete the challenge,” the marionette told her. Poof! Three of them were left.
“Duh! Don’t we know that already?” asked the giant with orange steam coming from the top of his head.
“Yes.” Poof! Now only two marionettes remained. Porphy and the others jumped on the orange-steam giant, pummeling him for wasting a question.
“Wait! I know!” Apollo said to the other students. “From now on, let’s discuss questions before we officially ask them.”
This idea was agreed upon, and various suggestions about what to ask were made. “Let’s ask them how to successfully complete the challenge,” Amphitrite put in.
“Good one,” said Poseidon. The rest of the team members nodded approval, so she put the question to the marionettes. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way of preventing the giants from also hearing the answer. But as it turned out, that didn’t matter.
“That is one question we cannot answer,” said one of the two remaining marionettes. “You must figure it out for yourself,” said the other. Since they couldn’t give an answer, neither of them poofed away.
“I have another idea,” said Amphitrite. “But . . .” She tossed her head toward the listening giants.
Pheme took the hint that she didn’t want the giants to overhear her idea. “Hey, giants?” Pheme called to them. “I think the world needs to learn more about you guys. Come over here for an interview that’ll make you famous!” Looking excited, the giants gathered around her a ways off.
Meanwhile, Amphitrite waved the other students closer and whispered her plan. “It involves climbing trees, shooting arrows, and walking tightropes. I’m no good at any of those things, so I hope some of you are.”
“Go on,” said Poseidon.
She did, and after she explained everything, the students broke from their huddle. Immediately, Poseidon shinnied up the tree and whispered in a marionette’s ear. Seeing this, the giants broke away from Pheme to see what he was up to.
“Fifty feet,” the marionette replied loudly, in answer to Poseidon’s question. Poof! Now only one puppet remained.
“Hey!” complained Porphy. Green steam pumped angrily from his stone-egg crown. “No fair. We not hear question.”
“Poseidon asked how many feet twenty-five giants have,” Isis fibbed quickly.
“Oh,” said the giant. But he frowned as if he suspected he was being tricked.
Which he was, Amphitrite knew. Because all five student teams were in on her plan, and Isis’s fib was part of it. Students began pulling vines from the tree and tying them together to form a rope. One that was way longer than fifty feet.
The giants could only look on in confusion. “This challenge is going to take a while,” Medusa explained with her fingers crossed behind her back. “So we’re weaving hammocks in case we have to sleep here overnight.”
Although it wasn’t true, the giants seemed to buy it. Next, Ares’ and Athena’s teams announced that they were each going to walk around the temple and meet on its far side to try to figure out another way to get the rune. As they’d hoped, the giants insisted on tagging along. It was all part of the crafty plan Amphitrite had come up with.
While the giants were gone, the vine rope was completed and looped into a coil for easy carrying. Apollo took the coil with him and climbed onto a high branch. After tying one end of the vine securely to the tree, he stood on the branch and pulled a golden arrow from the quiver he wore. He drew it in his bow, took careful aim, and fired.
“Quick as a wink, fly through two links!” he commanded. His arrows were magical, and this one played a happy tune as it flew through the air to do his bidding.
Whoosh! The arrow shot through the hole in the nearest link of the chain that encircled the top of the temple’s turrets. It was a blur as it continued onward through another chain link on the opposite side of the roof, just as if it were threading a needle. Amazing!
“Good shot! Got it!” Ares’ voice called out from the far side of the temple. The knotted vine now stretched from the tree through a link above the roof of the temple from one side to the other through another link, and down to Ares and the others on the ground.
Apollo shinnied down the tree and Poseidon climbed up. All eyes were glued to Poseidon, everyone holding their breath as they watched the plan unfold. Even the last marionette looked on in fascination as Poseidon grabbed onto the taut vine. Hand over hand, he began pulling himself along it, his legs dangling in midair below.
Within minutes, he was hanging from the vine just above the center of the roof. Hooking the back of his knees over the vine, he flipped to momentarily hang upside down. Amphitrite clasped her hands tight, seriously hoping that this brave godboy wouldn’t wind up a newt. Grabbing the small stone rune from the middle of the roof, Poseidon then righted himself, tucked the rune into his pocket, and returned on the vine to the others, victorious.
“Score!” he crowed. He hopped off the branch and held out his palm, displaying the rune to them all.
“That was amazing!” said Amphitrite.
As others offered him their congratulations, they all studied the strange markings on the rune, wondering what they meant. Before their eyes, the markings quickly rearranged themselves into the words: Go to the city that is not allowed. Then the rune leaped from his palm and flew back to lie on the center of the castle roof again.
“It must be our next clue!” said Athena.
Seeing all this, Pheme jotted a message 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. And one from Gaia, too.
Pheme read both messages aloud.
“Zeus writes, ‘Well done students!’ ”
“Gaia writes back, ‘They did not play fair! Your students banded together.’ ”
“Yeah, that’s thirty-eight against four,” Porphy put in. Of course, he’d gotten the numbers all wrong. There were only twenty-five students left in the competition. And when he’d counted his own team members, he’d forgotten to add himself in to make five.
“Now Gaia writes, ‘I demand that Ares’ team be eliminated for bad sportsmanship,’ ” read Pheme.
“Yeah!” The giants all glared at Makhai and Kydoimos from Ares’ team.
“Did those two do something against the rules to help us win?” Pandora asked the students nearby.
Heracles nodded,
smiling. “When we were on the other side of the castle, they accidentally shot arrows at the giants. Nailed them in the . . .”
“But . . . that wasn’t Ares’ fault!” Hades yelled out.
“Yeah! You don’t think it was bad sportsmanship for your team to crush our carts and chariots outside the Pantheon?” Ares huffed at the giants in his team’s defense.
“He’s right!” said his sister Eris. “Uh-huh!” agreed his teammate Isis. “Can’t we all just get along?” Harmonia said, trying to maintain peace and harmony.
Pheme looked up from her scroll-gadget. “Zeus has declared Apollo’s team the winner of this challenge because he provided the crucial archery skill that made Amphitrite’s plan possible, stringing the vine that allowed Poseidon to get the rune.”
Amphitrite was surprised at the decision since Poseidon had been the one to actually risk becoming a newt when he’d plucked the rune from the castle roof. Really, it had been a team effort, though, so choosing one winner couldn’t have been easy for Zeus. Amphitrite could see from the mix of emotions flitting across Poseidon’s face that he was trying to accept Zeus’s ruling. Good for him. She sent him a supportive smile.
“And Ares’ team is officially eliminated,” said Pheme. “That is final. Ares, remove your team from the playing field.”
Looking reluctant but resigned, Ares and his team released the silver wings on their sandals and rose to hover a few inches in the air. Since Isis didn’t have winged sandals, she held Eris’s hand.
“We’ll be watching on our scrolls and rooting for you. Shout if you need our help,” Amphitrite heard Ares murmur to Poseidon.
Then Ares and his team took off. “Good luck!” they called back to the remaining four teams led by Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, and Medusa.
There was an unhappy silence among the students after Ares’ team left, but the giants were grinning. Then, Heracles shouted, “Let’s win this thing!” Cheers greeted his determined cry.
Pandora scrunched up her nose in confusion. “But how? Where’s the city that’s not allowed?” Which was exactly what Amphitrite had been wondering.
The last marionette’s wooden bones rattled in the wind, then it answered. “As the rune instructed, you must now proceed to the Forbidden City in China to face another challenge in the Temple of Heaven,” it told them. “But first, you need sleep.”
Athena snapped her fingers. “So that’s it. Forbidden. As in not allowed.”
As the puppet poofed into nothingness, a jagged white streak lit up the sky. Then, Ka-BOOM! It was followed by a crash of thunder. The students and the giants all looked up as a second bolt of lightning hit a group of clouds above them. In an instant the slug grew dark. A light snow began to fall, drifting down to cover the ground.
“Look! Someone—probably Zeus—has drawn a map for us in the snow,” said Amphitrite. She pointed at a big dot on the map. “And I’m guessing that’s the Forbidden City. As she and the others studied it, she yawned, feeling suddenly exhausted.
“This is not normal snow,” she heard someone say.
Amphitrite nodded. “Yeah. It’s not even cold or anything. I think it’s some kind of magic to make us all go to—”
But before she could finish, she, the other students, and the giants, too, all dropped off to sleep.
8
More Challenges
Poseidon
THE GIANTS ARE GONE!” SOMEONE shouted early the next morning.
“Whah?” Poseidon sat up and stretched. He’d been sleeping on the ground under the strange tree at Uppsala. Instantly recalling all that had happened the previous day, he jumped to his feet. The magic snow and its map had disappeared.
He remembered the directions to the Temple of Heaven well enough to get there, though. Did his competitors? Since he still hoped to win a temple in his name when the games were over, he wouldn’t exactly be sorry if they’d forgotten the directions and wound up getting lost. He was glad the student teams had pulled together to defeat the giants in yesterday’s challenge, but he was still smarting from Apollo’s team having been given credit for the win.
“Think those giants decided to quit and go home?” Pandora wondered aloud.
“I seriously doubt it,” scoffed Medusa’s sister Stheno.
“Get up, everyone!” yelled Delphinius. “The giants have gotten a head start on us.”
“I’m starving,” said Actaeon, one of the mortals on Apollo’s team.
“Look up,” Thetis said, pointing overhead. “That tree grew fruit overnight!” She’d been sitting on the tree’s roots, combing her long turquoise hair. Now she stowed the comb in her scalloped chiton’s pocket, and they all began picking the low-hanging fruit she’d spotted.
A few minutes later, Poseidon felt a hand slide into his. It was hers. She smiled and handed him an apple. Then they all winged up and away in their magical sandals, munching the only breakfast they would have. He’d been a little worried that she might actually outshine him yesterday with her arrow-through-the-vine plan. But she hadn’t tried to do any such thing. She’d been a real team player. Maybe that Oracle-O cookie hadn’t known what it was talking about after all.
“The temples in the competition have all been lined up in a clockwise direction so far, have you noticed?” Thetis said to him as they flew. “So I’m guessing the rest of the temples after the Forbidden City will be in countries between China and Greece.”
“Maybe the sixth and final one will be in Greece itself,” said Poseidon. One of the ribbons he’d pinned to his tunic blew upward, tickling his neck. He pressed a hand over it, smoothing it down.
“Why do you wear all those things? Are they medals?” Thetis asked, gesturing the apple she held toward all the ribbons and pins on his tunic.
“They’re favors. For luck.” Poseidon nodded toward the mortal boy who was winging along just ahead of them, his hand holding Athena’s. “See how Heracles is wearing an owl pin on his lion-skin cape? That’s one of Athena’s goddess symbols. She loaned that pin to him for the games, and he gave her that lion pin she’s wearing.”
“And over there? See that flash of gold at Dionysus’s neck? The necklace with a charm hanging from it? It’s not really his style, but he wore it because Medusa gave it to him for luck. And she’s wearing a sprig of grapevine he gave her.
“And I’m pretty sure that orange ribbon on Eros’s tunic is a gift from Pheme. Orange is her favorite color. They’re all favors students have traded. To lend each other luck and protection.”
“Who gave you all the ones you have?” Thetis asked, her eyes going wide as she surveyed the number he wore. She took a last bite of her apple, then tossed its core away to fall into a forest they were passing over.
“Fans,” he told her, tossing his core after hers. “Mortals, mainly.” He didn’t add that they were mostly from girls. Girls he didn’t even know. For the first time ever, he wished that someone he cared about—or at least knew well—had sent him even a single one of the favors he wore.
Thetis cocked her head at him, her eyes on his face. As if she’d guessed his thoughts. Which made him feel weirdly embarrassed.
He didn’t want her to know how lonely he sometimes felt. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him. He needed to get a grip, or he was going to lose his focus. Maybe even lose the games! And get crushed by giants, too.
He flashed her his patented cute-guy smile. “Mortals are always sending small gifts to the immortals on Mount Olympus,” he said in a confident voice. “You know how it is.”
“Not really,” she said. “That’s never happened to me.”
What was she thinking now? he wondered when she fell silent. He almost asked, but then Delphinius and Hades winged over, with Pandora between them. The five of them traveled the rest of the way to China as a group, discussing the competition and all that had happened.
By noon that day they found themselves hovering over the Forbidden City. It stood within a bigger complex and was not only protected by
a wall, but by water-filled moats!
“I hope our challenge isn’t that we have to break into that city,” said Hades, eyeing the fortifications dubiously.
Poseidon shook his head, picturing the snow map from the night before in his mind. “I think that’s the Temple of Heaven over there, outside the walls of the Forbidden City,” he told them, pointing. The temple was big, round, brightly painted in reds and golds, and had three circular blue roofs stacked one floor above the other, pagoda-style. The center of the uppermost roof rose to a point topped with a round gold knob. Nearby were flower gardens, fountains, and a bell tower.
A group of mortal girls were hanging around the gardens. They shrieked with joy upon seeing the immortals land. “Poseidon!” One girl ran over to him. Jumping up and down, she thrust out a scroll. “Would you sign my scrollbook?”
“Mine too!” “Mine too!” pleaded the other girls.
“Sure,” Poseidon said in a smooth, assured voice. It was easy to slip back into the role he was used to. Admired godboy of MOA. But after a minute he looked around. “Thetis?”
“I’m here,” she said with a sigh. She was behind him. “The others went inside already. If you can tear yourself away from your fans, maybe we should go inside too? I thought you wanted to beat those giants!”
Whoa, thought Poseidon. She sounded a little ticked off. What was her hurry all of a sudden? Then it struck him. Could she be a tiny bit jealous of those other girls’ attention? That had to be it. Which must mean she liked him, he thought happily. “Sorry, gotta go now,” he said to his girl fans. Then he followed Thetis inside the temple.
Two Chinese girl guides about their same age welcomed them. Both wore shiny red robes with bell-shaped sleeves and wide gold belts. They led his team into a circular room with numerous tall red columns, where the other competitors waited. The other four teams (including the giants) were gathered around tables set with clay bowls.
Poseidon, Thetis, and their team took seats on low pillows around the table reserved for them. Then they dug in to the delicious food set before them. The bowls were heaped with a variety of Chinese delicacies, such as stir-fried rice with egg and vegetables. There was nectar to drink as well.