by Rick Riordan
‘I’m not dying here,’ Meg grumbled.
Her appearance said otherwise. She had bloody knuckles and skinned knees. Her green dress, a prized gift from Percy Jackson’s mother, looked like it had been used as a sabre-toothed tiger’s scratching post. She had ripped off her left legging and used it to staunch the bleeding cut on her thigh, but the fabric was already soaked through.
Nevertheless, her eyes shone defiantly. The rhinestones still glittered on the tips of her cat-eye glasses. I’d learned never to count out Meg McCaffrey while her rhinestones still glittered.
She rummaged through her seed packages, squinting at the labels. ‘Roses. Daffodils. Squash. Carrots.’
‘No …’ Grover bumped his fist against his forehead. ‘Arbutus is like … a flowering tree. Argh, I should know this.’
I sympathized with his memory problems. I should have known many things: the weaknesses of strixes, the nearest secret exit from the Labyrinth, Zeus’s private number so I could call him and plead for my life. But my mind was blank. My legs had begun to tremble – perhaps a sign I would soon be able to walk again – but this didn’t cheer me up. I had nowhere to go, except to choose whether I wanted to die at the top of this chamber or the bottom.
Meg kept shuffling seed packets. ‘Rutabaga, wisteria, pyracantha, strawberries –’
‘Strawberries!’ Grover yelped so loudly I thought he was trying for another blast of Panic. ‘That’s it! The arbutus is a strawberry tree!’
Meg frowned. ‘Strawberries don’t grow on trees. They’re genus Fragaria, part of the rose family.’
‘Yes, yes, I know!’ Grover rolled his hands like he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. ‘And arbutus is in the heath family, but –’
‘What are you two talking about?’ I demanded. I wondered if they were sharing the Arrow of Dodona’s Wi-Fi connection to look up information on botany.com. ‘We’re about to die, and you’re arguing about plant genera?’
‘Fragaria might be close enough!’ Grover insisted. ‘Arbutus fruit looks like strawberries. That’s why it’s called a strawberry tree. I met an arbutus dryad once. We got in this big argument about it. Besides, I specialize in strawberry-growing. All the satyrs from Camp Half-Blood do!’
Meg stared doubtfully at her packet of strawberry seeds. ‘I dunno.’
Below us, a dozen strixes burst forth from the mouth of the tunnel, shrieking in a chorus of pre-disembowelment fury.
‘TRY THE FRAGGLE ROCK!’ I yelled.
‘Fragaria,’ Meg corrected.
‘WHATEVER!’
Rather than throwing her strawberry seeds into the void, Meg ripped open the packet and shook them out along the edge of the ramp with maddening slowness.
‘Hurry.’ I fumbled for my bow. ‘We’ve got maybe thirty seconds.’
‘Hold on.’ Meg tapped out the last of the seeds.
‘Fifteen seconds!’
‘Wait.’ Meg tossed aside the packet. She placed her hands over the seeds like she was about to play the keyboard (which, by the way, she can’t do well, despite my efforts to teach her).
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Go.’
Grover raised his pipes and began a frantic version of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ in triple time. I forgot about my bow and grabbed my ukulele, joining him in the song. I didn’t know if it would help, but, if I was going to get ripped apart, at least I wanted to go out playing the Beatles.
Just as the wave of strixes was about to hit, the seeds exploded like a battery of fireworks. Green streamers arced across the void, anchoring against the far wall and forming a row of vines that reminded me of the strings of a giant lute. The strixes could have easily flown through the gaps, but instead they went crazy, veering to avoid the plants and colliding with each other in mid-air.
Meanwhile, the vines thickened, leaves unfurled, white flowers bloomed and strawberries ripened, filling the air with their sweet fragrance.
The chamber rumbled. Wherever the strawberry plants touched the stone, the brick cracked and dissolved, giving the strawberries an easier place to root.
Meg lifted her hands from her imaginary keyboard. ‘Is the Labyrinth … helping?’
‘I don’t know!’ I said, strumming furiously on an F minor 7. ‘But don’t stop!’
With impossible speed, the strawberries spread across the walls in a tide of green.
I was just thinking, Wow, imagine what the plants could do with sunlight! when the domed ceiling cracked like an eggshell. Brilliant rays stabbed through the darkness. Chunks of rock rained down, smashing into the birds, punching through strawberry vines (which, unlike the strixes, grew back almost immediately).
As soon as the sunlight hit the birds, they screamed and dissolved into dust.
Grover lowered his panpipes. I set down my ukulele. We watched in amazement as the plants continued to grow, interlacing until a strawberry-runner trampoline stretched across the entire area of the room at our feet.
The ceiling had disintegrated, revealing a brilliant blue sky. Hot dry air wafted down like the breath from an open oven.
Grover raised his face to the light. He sniffled, tears glistening on his cheeks.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.
He stared at me. The heartbreak on his face was more painful to look at than the sunlight.
‘The smell of warm strawberries,’ he said. ‘Like Camp Half-Blood. It’s been so long …’
I felt an unfamiliar twinge in my chest. I patted Grover’s knee. I had not spent much time at Camp Half-Blood, the training ground for Greek demigods on Long Island, but I understood how he felt. I wondered how my children were doing there: Kayla, Will, Austin. I remembered sitting with them at the campfire, singing ‘My Mother Was a Minotaur’ as we ate burnt marshmallows off a stick. Such perfect camaraderie is rare, even in an immortal life.
Meg leaned against the wall. Her complexion was pasty, her breathing ragged.
I dug through my pockets and found a broken square of ambrosia in a napkin. I did not keep the stuff for myself. In my mortal state, eating the food of the gods might cause me to spontaneously combust. But Meg, I had found, was not always good about taking her ambrosia.
‘Eat.’ I pressed the napkin into her hand. ‘It’ll help the paralysis pass more quickly.’
She clenched her jaw, as if about to yell, I DON’T WANNA!, then apparently decided she liked the idea of having working legs again. She began nibbling on the ambrosia.
‘What’s up there?’ she asked, frowning at the blue sky.
Grover brushed the tears from his face. ‘We’ve made it. The Labyrinth brought us right to our base.’
‘Our base?’ I was delighted to learn we had a base. I hoped that meant security, a soft bed and perhaps an espresso machine.
‘Yeah.’ Grover swallowed nervously. ‘Assuming anything is left of it. Let’s find out.’
4
Welcome to my base
We have rocks, sand and ruins
Did I mention rocks?
They tell me I reached the surface.
I don’t remember.
Meg was partially paralysed, and Grover had already carried me halfway up the ramp, so it seems wrong that I was the one who passed out, but what can I say? That Fm7 chord on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ must have taken more out of me than I realized.
I do remember feverish dreams.
Before me rose a graceful olive-skinned woman, her long auburn hair gathered up in a doughnut braid, her sleeveless dress as light and grey as moth’s wings. She looked about twenty, but her eyes were black pearls – their hard lustre formed over centuries, a defensive shell hiding untold sorrow and disappointment. They were the eyes of an immortal who had seen great civilizations fall.
We stood together on a stone platform, at the edge of what looked like an indoor swimming pool filled with lava. The air shimmered with heat. Ashes stung my eyes.
The woman raised her arms in a supplicating gesture. Glowing red iron cuffs shackled her wri
sts. Molten chains anchored her to the platform, though the hot metal did not seem to burn her.
‘I am sorry,’ she said.
Somehow, I knew she wasn’t speaking to me. I was only observing this scene through the eyes of someone else. She’d just delivered bad news to this other person, crushing news, though I had no idea what it was.
‘I would spare you if I could,’ she continued. ‘I would spare her. But I cannot. Tell Apollo he must come. Only he can release me, though it is a …’ She choked as if a shard of glass had wedged in her throat. ‘Four letters,’ she croaked. ‘Starts with T.’
Trap, I thought. The answer is trap!
I felt briefly thrilled, the way you do when you’re watching a game show and you know the answer. If only I were the contestant, you think, I’d win all the prizes!
Then I realized I didn’t like this game show. Especially if the answer was trap. Especially if that trap was the grand prize waiting for me.
The woman’s image dissolved into flames.
I found myself in a different place – a covered terrace overlooking a moonlit bay. In the distance, shrouded in mist, rose the familiar dark profile of Mount Vesuvius, but Vesuvius as it had been before the eruption of 79 CE blew its summit to pieces, destroying Pompeii and wiping out thousands of Romans. (You can blame Vulcan for that. He was having a bad week.)
The evening sky was bruised purple, the coastline lit only by firelight, the moon and the stars. Under my feet, the terrace’s mosaic floor glittered with gold and silver tiles, the sort of artwork very few Romans could afford. On the walls, multicoloured frescoes were framed in silk draperies that had to have cost hundreds of thousands of denarii. I knew where I must be: an imperial villa, one of the many pleasure palaces that lined the Gulf of Naples in the early days of the empire. Normally such a place would have blazed with light throughout the night, as a show of power and opulence, but the torches on this terrace were dark, wrapped in black cloth.
In the shadow of a column, a slender young man stood facing the sea. His expression was obscured, but his posture spoke of impatience. He tugged on his white robes, crossed his arms over his chest and tapped his sandalled foot against the floor.
A second man appeared, marching onto the terrace with the clink of armour and the laboured breathing of a heavy-set fighter. A praetorian guard’s helmet hid his face.
He knelt before the younger man. ‘It is done, Princeps.’
Princeps. Latin for first in line or first citizen – that lovely euphemism the Roman emperors used to downplay just how absolute their power was.
‘Are you sure this time?’ asked a young, reedy voice. ‘I don’t want any more surprises.’
The praetor grunted. ‘Very sure, Princeps.’
The guard held out his massive hairy forearms. Bloody scratches glistened in the moonlight, as if desperate fingernails had raked his flesh.
‘What did you use?’ The younger man sounded fascinated.
‘His own pillow,’ the big man said. ‘Seemed easiest.’
The younger man laughed. ‘The old pig deserved it. I wait years for him to die, finally we announce he’s kicked the situla, and he has the nerve to wake up again? I don’t think so. Tomorrow will be a new, better day for Rome.’
He stepped into the moonlight, revealing his face – a face I had hoped never to see again.
He was handsome in a thin, angular way, though his ears stuck out a bit too much. His smile was twisted. His eyes had all the warmth of a barracuda’s.
Even if you do not recognize his features, dear reader, I am sure you have met him. He is the school bully too charming to get caught; the one who thinks up the cruellest pranks, has others carry out his dirty work and still maintains a perfect reputation with the teachers. He is the boy who pulls the legs off insects and tortures stray animals, yet laughs with such pure delight he can almost convince you it is harmless fun. He’s the boy who steals money from the temple collection plates, behind the backs of old ladies who praise him for being such a nice young man.
He is that person, that type of evil.
And tonight he had a new name, which would not foretell a better day for Rome.
The praetorian guard lowered his head. ‘Hail, Caesar!’
I awoke from my dream shivering.
‘Good timing,’ Grover said.
I sat up. My head throbbed. My mouth tasted like strix dust.
I was lying under a makeshift lean-to – a blue plastic tarp set on a hillside overlooking the desert. The sun was going down. Next to me, Meg was curled up asleep, her hand resting on my wrist. I suppose that was sweet, except I knew where her fingers had been. (Hint: in her nostrils.)
On a nearby slab of rock, Grover sat sipping water from his flask. Judging from his weary expression, I guessed he had been keeping watch over us while we slept.
‘I passed out?’ I gathered.
He tossed me the flask. ‘I thought I slept hard. You’ve been out for hours.’
I took a drink, then rubbed the gunk from my eyes, wishing I could wipe the dreams from my head as easily: a woman chained in a fiery room, a trap for Apollo, a new Caesar with the pleasant smile of a fine young sociopath.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. Dreams aren’t necessarily true.
No, I answered myself. Only the bad ones. Like those.
I focused on Meg, snoring in the shade of our tarp. Her leg was freshly bandaged. She wore a clean T-shirt over her tattered dress. I tried to extricate my wrist from her grip, but she held on tighter.
‘She’s all right,’ Grover assured me. ‘At least physically. Fell asleep after we got you situated.’ He frowned. ‘She didn’t seem happy about being here, though. Said she couldn’t handle this place. Wanted to leave. I was afraid she’d jump back into the Labyrinth, but I convinced her she needed to rest first. I played some music to relax her.’
I scanned our surroundings, wondering what had upset Meg so badly.
Below us stretched a landscape only slightly more hospitable than Mars. (I mean the planet, not the god, though I suppose neither is much of a host.) Sun-blasted ochre mountains ringed a valley patchworked with unnaturally green golf courses, dusty barren flats and sprawling neighbourhoods of white stucco walls, red-tiled roofs and blue swimming pools. Lining the streets, rows of listless palm trees stuck up like raggedy seams. Asphalt parking lots shimmered in the heat. A brown haze hung in the air, filling the valley like watery gravy.
‘Palm Springs,’ I said.
I’d known the city well in the 1950s. I was pretty sure I’d hosted a party with Frank Sinatra just down the road there, by that golf course – but it felt like another life. Probably because it had been.
Now the area seemed much less welcoming – the temperature too scorching for an early spring evening, the air too heavy and acrid. Something was wrong, something I couldn’t quite place.
I scanned our immediate surroundings. We were camped at the crest of a hill, the San Jacinto wilderness at our backs to the west, the sprawl of Palm Springs at our feet to the east. A gravel road skirted the base of the hill, winding towards the nearest neighbourhood about half a mile below, but I could tell that our hilltop had once boasted a large structure.
Sunk in the rocky slope were half a dozen hollow brickwork cylinders, each perhaps thirty feet in diameter, like the shells of ruined sugar mills. The structures were of varying heights, in varying stages of disintegration, but their tops were all level with one another, so I guessed they must have been massive support columns for a stilt house. Judging from the detritus that littered the hillside – shards of glass, charred planks, blackened clumps of brick – I guessed that the house must have burned down many years before.
Then I realized: we must have climbed out of one of those cylinders to escape the Labyrinth.
I turned to Grover. ‘The strixes?’
He shook his head. ‘If any survived, they wouldn’t risk the daylight, even if they could get through the strawberries. The plant
s have filled the entire shaft.’ He pointed to the furthest ring of brickwork, where we must have emerged. ‘Nobody’s getting in or out that way any more.’
‘But …’ I gestured at the ruins. ‘Surely this isn’t your base?’
I was hoping he would correct me. Oh, no, our base is that nice house down there with the Olympic-size swimming pool, right next to the fifteenth hole!
Instead, he had the nerve to look pleased. ‘Yeah. This place has powerful natural energy. It’s a perfect sanctuary. Can’t you feel the life force?’
I picked up a charred brick. ‘Life force?’
‘You’ll see.’ Grover took off his cap and scratched between his horns. ‘The way things have been, all the dryads have to stay dormant until sunset. It’s the only way they can survive. But they’ll be waking up soon.’
The way things have been.
I glanced west. The sun had just dropped behind the mountains. The sky was marbled with heavy layers of red and black, more appropriate for Mordor than Southern California.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.
Grover gazed sadly into the distance. ‘You haven’t seen the news? Biggest forest fires in state history. On top of the drought, the heat waves and the earthquakes.’ He shuddered. ‘Thousands of dryads have died. Thousands more have gone into hibernation. If these were just normal natural disasters, that would be bad enough, but –’
Meg yelped in her sleep. She sat up abruptly, blinking in confusion. From the panic in her eyes, I guessed her dreams had been even worse than mine.
‘W-we’re really here?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t dream it?’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’re safe.’
She shook her head, her lips quivering. ‘No. No, I’m not.’
With fumbling fingers, she removed her glasses, as if she might be able to handle her surroundings better if they were fuzzier. ‘I can’t be here. Not again.’
‘Again?’ I asked.
A line from the Indiana prophecy tugged at my memory: Demeter’s daughter finds her ancient roots. ‘You mean you lived here?’