by Rick Riordan
‘Barley!’ yelled a third. ‘Barley cannot grow. Curse this schist!’
Hazel’s knees wobbled. The little creatures might have been funny if they weren’t surrounding her, staring up at her with those pointed teeth and hungry green eyes. They were like Cupid piranhas.
‘Y-you mean the rock?’ she managed. ‘This rock is called schist?’
‘Yes, greenstone! Schist!’ the first creature yelled. ‘Nasty rock.’
Hazel began to understand how she’d summoned it. ‘It’s a precious stone. It’s valuable?’
‘Bah!’ said the one in the yellow loincloth. ‘Foolish native people made jewellery from it, yes. Valuable? Maybe. Not as good as wheat.’
‘Or sorghum!’
‘Or barley!’
The others chimed in, calling out different types of grain. They circled the rock, making no effort to climb it – at least not yet. If they decided to swarm her, there was no way she could fend off all of them.
‘You’re Gaia’s servants,’ she guessed, just to keep them talking. Maybe Percy and Frank weren’t too far away. Maybe they’d be able to see her, standing so tall above the fields. She wished that her sword glowed like Percy’s.
The yellow-diapered Cupid snarled. ‘We are the karpoi, spirits of the grain. Children of the Earth Mother, yes! We have been her attendants since forever. Before nasty humans cultivated us, we were wild. We will be again. Wheat will destroy all!’
‘No, sorghum will rule!’
‘Barley shall dominate!’
The others joined in, each karpos cheering for his own variety.
‘Right.’ Hazel swallowed her revulsion. ‘So you’re Wheat, then – you in the yellow, um, britches.’
‘Hmmmm,’ said Wheat. ‘Come down from your schist, demigod. We must take you to our mistress’s army. They will reward us. They will kill you slowly!’
‘Tempting,’ Hazel said, ‘but no thanks.’
‘I will give you wheat!’ said Wheat, as if this were a very fine offer in exchange for her life. ‘So much wheat!’
Hazel tried to think. How far had she been carried? How long would it take her friends to find her? The karpoi were getting bolder, approaching the rock in twos and threes, scratching at the schist to see if it would hurt them.
‘Before I get down …’ She raised her voice, hoping it would carry over the fields. ‘Um, explain something to me, would you? If you’re grain spirits, shouldn’t you be on the gods’ side? Isn’t the goddess of agriculture Ceres –’
‘Evil name!’ Barley wailed.
‘Cultivates us!’ Sorghum spat. ‘Makes us grow in disgusting rows. Lets humans harvest us. Pah! When Gaia is mistress of the world again, we will grow wild, yes!’
‘Well, naturally,’ Hazel said. ‘So this army of hers, where you’re taking me in exchange for wheat –’
‘Or barley,’ Barley offered.
‘Yeah,’ Hazel agreed. ‘This army is where, now?’
‘Just over the ridge!’ Sorghum clapped his hands excitedly. ‘The Earth Mother – oh, yes! – she told us: “Look for the daughter of Pluto who lives again. Find her! Bring her alive! I have many tortures planned for her.” The giant Polybotes will reward us for your life! Then we will march south to destroy the Romans. We can’t be killed, you know. But you can, yes.’
‘That’s wonderful.’ Hazel tried to sound enthusiastic. It wasn’t easy, knowing Gaia had special revenge planned for her. ‘So you – you can’t be killed because Alcyoneus has captured Death, is that it?’
‘Exactly!’ Barley said.
‘And he’s keeping him chained in Alaska,’ Hazel said, ‘at … let’s see, what’s the name of that place?’
Sorghum started to answer, but Wheat flew at him and knocked him down. The karpoi began to fight, dissolving into funnel clouds of grain. Hazel considered making a run for it. Then Wheat re-formed, holding Sorghum in a headlock. ‘Stop!’ he yelled at the others. ‘Multigrain fighting is not allowed!’
The karpoi solidified into chubby Cupid piranhas again.
Wheat pushed Sorghum away.
‘Oh, clever demigod,’ he said. ‘Trying to trick us into giving secrets. No, you’ll never find the lair of Alcyoneus.’
‘I already know where it is,’ she said with false confidence. ‘He’s on the island in Resurrection Bay.’
‘Ha!’ Wheat sneered. ‘That place sank beneath the waves long ago. You should know that! Gaia hates you for it. When you thwarted her plans, she was forced to sleep again. Decades and decades! Alcyoneus – not until the dark times was he able to rise.’
‘The 1980s,’ Barley agreed. ‘Horrible! Horrible!’
‘Yes,’ Wheat said. ‘And our mistress still sleeps. Alcyoneus was forced to bide his time in the north, waiting, planning. Only now does Gaia begin to stir. Oh, but she remembers you, and so does her son!’
Sorghum cackled with glee. ‘You will never find the prison of Thanatos. All of Alaska is the giant’s home. He could be keeping Death anywhere! Years it would take you to find him, and your poor camp has only days. Better you surrender. We will give you grain. So much grain.’
Hazel’s sword felt heavy. She’d dreaded returning to Alaska, but at least she’d had an idea where to start looking for Thanatos. She’d assumed that the island where she had died hadn’t been completely destroyed, or possibly had risen again when Alcyoneus woke. She had hoped that his base would be there. But if the island was really gone she had no idea how to find the giant. Alaska was huge. They could search for decades and never find him.
‘Yes,’ Wheat said, sensing her anguish. ‘Give up.’
Hazel gripped her spatha. ‘Never!’ She raised her voice again, hoping it would somehow reach her friends. ‘If I have to destroy you all, I will. I am the daughter of Pluto!’
The karpoi advanced. They gripped the rock, hissing as if it were scalding hot, but they began to climb.
‘Now you will die,’ Wheat promised, gnashing his teeth. ‘You will feel the wrath of grain!’
Suddenly there was a whistling sound. Wheat’s snarl froze. He looked down at the golden arrow that had just pierced his chest. Then he dissolved into pieces of Weetabix.
XX
Hazel
For a heartbeat, Hazel was just as stunned as the karpoi. Then Frank and Percy burst into the open and began to massacre every source of fibre they could find. Frank shot an arrow through Barley, who crumbled into seeds. Percy slashed Riptide through Sorghum and charged towards Millet and Oats. Hazel jumped down and joined the fight.
Within minutes, the karpoi had been reduced to piles of seeds and various breakfast cereals. Wheat started to re-form, but Percy pulled a lighter from his pack and sparked a flame.
‘Try it,’ he warned, ‘and I’ll set this whole field on fire. Stay dead. Stay away from us, or the grass gets it!’
Frank winced like the flame terrified him. Hazel didn’t understand why, but she shouted at the grain piles anyway: ‘He’ll do it! He’s crazy!’
The remnants of the karpoi scattered in the wind. Frank climbed the rock and watched them go.
Percy extinguished his lighter and grinned at Hazel. ‘Thanks for yelling. We wouldn’t have found you otherwise. How’d you hold them off so long?’
She pointed to the rock. ‘A big pile of schist.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Guys,’ Frank called from the top of the rock. ‘You need to see this.’
Percy and Hazel climbed up to join him. As soon as Hazel saw what he was looking at, she inhaled sharply. ‘Percy, no light! Put away your sword!’
‘Schist!’ He touched the sword tip, and Riptide shrank back into a pen.
Down below them, an army was on the move.
The field dropped into a shallow ravine, where a country road wound north and south. On the opposite side of the road, grassy hills stretched to the horizon, empty of civiliza
tion except for one darkened convenience store at the top of the nearest rise.
The whole ravine was full of monsters – column after column marching south, so many and so close that Hazel was amazed they hadn’t heard her shouting.
She, Frank and Percy crouched against the rock. They watched in disbelief as several dozen large, hairy humanoids passed by, dressed in tattered bits of armour and animal fur. The creatures had six arms each, three sprouting on either side, so they looked like cavemen evolved from insects.
‘Gegenes,’ Hazel whispered. ‘The Earthborn.’
‘You’ve fought them before?’ Percy asked.
She shook her head. ‘Just heard about them in monster class at camp.’ She’d never liked monster class – reading Pliny the Elder and those other musty authors who described legendary monsters from the edges of the Roman Empire. Hazel believed in monsters, but some of the descriptions were so wild she had thought they must be just ridiculous rumours.
Only now, a whole army of those rumours was marching by.
‘The Earthborn fought the Argonauts,’ she murmured. ‘And those things behind them –’
‘Centaurs,’ Percy said. ‘But … that’s not right. Centaurs are good guys.’
Frank made a choking sound. ‘That’s not what we were taught at camp. Centaurs are crazy, always getting drunk and killing heroes.’
Hazel watched as the horse-men cantered past. They were human from the waist up, palomino from the waist down. They were dressed in barbarian armour of hide and bronze, armed with spears and slings. At first, Hazel thought they were wearing Viking helmets. Then she realized they had actual horns jutting from their shaggy hair.
‘Are they supposed to have bull’s horns?’ she asked.
‘Maybe they’re a special breed,’ Frank said. ‘Let’s not ask them, okay?’
Percy gazed further down the road and his face went slack. ‘My gods … Cyclopes.’
Sure enough, lumbering after the centaurs was a battalion of one-eyed ogres, both male and female, each about ten feet tall, wearing armour cobbled out of junkyard metal. Six of the monsters were yoked like oxen, pulling a two-storey-tall siege tower fitted with a giant scorpion ballista.
Percy pressed the sides of his head. ‘Cyclopes. Centaurs. This is wrong. All wrong.’
The monster army was enough to make anyone despair, but Hazel realized that something else was going on with Percy. He looked pale and sickly in the moonlight, as if his memories were trying to come back, scrambling his mind in the process.
She glanced at Frank. ‘We need to get him back to the boat. The sea will make him feel better.’
‘No argument,’ Frank said. ‘There are too many of them. The camp … we have to warn the camp.’
‘They know,’ Percy groaned. ‘Reyna knows.’
A lump formed in Hazel’s throat. There was no way the legion could fight so many. If they were only a few hundred miles north of Camp Jupiter, their quest was already doomed. They could never make it to Alaska and back in time.
‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘Let’s …’
Then she saw the giant.
When he appeared over the ridge, Hazel couldn’t quite believe her eyes. He was taller than the siege tower – thirty feet, at least – with scaly reptilian legs like a Komodo dragon from the waist down and green-blue armour from the waist up. His breastplate was shaped like rows of hungry monstrous faces, their mouths open as if demanding food. His face was human, but his hair was wild and green, like a mop of seaweed. As he turned his head from side to side, snakes dropped from his dreadlocks. Viper dandruff – gross.
He was armed with a massive trident and a weighted net. Just the sight of those weapons made Hazel’s stomach clench. She’d faced that type of fighter in gladiator training many times. It was the trickiest, sneakiest, most evil combat style she knew. This giant was a supersize retiarius.
‘Who is he?’ Frank’s voice quivered. ‘That’s not –’
‘Not Alcyoneus,’ Hazel said weakly. ‘One of his brothers, I think. The one Terminus mentioned. The grain spirit mentioned him, too. That’s Polybotes.’
She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she could feel the giant’s aura of power even from here. She remembered that feeling from the Heart of the Earth as she had raised Alcyoneus – as if she were standing near a powerful magnet, and all the iron in her blood was being drawn towards it. This giant was another child of Gaia – a creature of the earth so malevolent and powerful that he radiated his own gravitational field.
Hazel knew they should leave. Their hiding place on top of the rock would be in plain sight to a creature that tall if he chose to look in their direction. But she sensed something important was about to happen. She and her friends crept a little further down the schist and kept watching.
As the giant got close, a Cyclops woman broke ranks and ran back to speak with him. She was enormous, fat and horribly ugly, wearing a chain-mail dress like a muumuu – but next to the giant she looked like a child.
She pointed to the closed-up convenience store on top of the nearest hill and muttered something about food. The giant snapped back an answer, as if he was annoyed. The female Cyclops barked an order to her kindred, and three of them followed her up the hill.
When they were halfway to the store, a searing light turned night into day. Hazel was blinded. Below her, the enemy army dissolved into chaos, monsters screaming in pain and outrage. Hazel squinted. She felt like she’d just stepped out of a dark theatre into a sunny afternoon.
‘Too pretty!’ the Cyclopes shrieked. ‘Burns our eye!’
The store on the hill was encased in a rainbow, closer and brighter than any Hazel had ever seen. The light was anchored at the store, shooting up into the heavens, bathing the countryside in a weird kaleidoscopic glow.
The lady Cyclops hefted her club and charged at the store. As she hit the rainbow, her whole body began to steam. She wailed in agony and dropped her club, retreating with multi-coloured blisters all over her arms and face.
‘Horrible goddess!’ she bellowed at the store. ‘Give us snacks!’
The other monsters went crazy, charging the convenience store, then running away as the rainbow light burned them. Some threw rocks, spears, swords and even pieces of their armour, all of which burned up in flames of pretty colours.
Finally the giant leader seemed to realize that his troops were throwing away perfectly good equipment.
‘Stop!’ he roared.
With some difficulty, he managed to shout and push and pummel his troops into submission. When they’d quieted down, he approached the rainbow-shielded store himself and stalked around the borders of the light.
‘Goddess!’ he shouted. ‘Come out and surrender!’
No answer from the store. The rainbow continued to shimmer.
The giant raised his trident and net. ‘I am Polybotes! Kneel before me so I may destroy you quickly.’
Apparently, no one in the store was impressed. A tiny dark object came sailing out of the window and landed at the giant’s feet. Polybotes yelled, ‘Grenade!’
He covered his face. His troops hit the ground.
When the thing did not explode, Polybotes bent down cautiously and picked it up.
He roared in outrage. ‘A chocolate muffin? You dare insult me with a chocolate muffin?’ He threw the cake back at the shop, and it vaporized in the light.
The monsters got to their feet. Several muttered hungrily, ‘Chocolate muffin? Where chocolate muffins?’
‘Let’s attack,’ said the lady Cyclops. ‘I am hungry. My boys want snacks!’
‘No!’ Polybotes said. ‘We’re already late. Alcyoneus wants us at the camp in four days’ time. You Cyclopes move inexcusably slowly. We have no time for minor goddesses!’
He aimed that last comment at the store, but got no response.
The lady Cyclops growled. ‘The camp, yes. Vengea
nce! The orange and purple ones destroyed my home. Now Ma Gasket will destroy theirs! Do you hear me, Leo? Jason? Piper? I come to annihilate you!’
The other Cyclopes bellowed in approval. The rest of the monsters joined in.
Hazel’s whole body tingled. She glanced at her friends. ‘Jason,’ she whispered. ‘She fought Jason. He might still be alive.’
Frank nodded. ‘Do those other names mean anything to you?’
Hazel shook her head. She didn’t know any Leo or Piper at camp. Percy still looked sickly and dazed. If the names meant anything to him, he didn’t show it.
Hazel pondered what the Cyclops had said: Orange and purple ones. Purple – obviously the colour of Camp Jupiter. But orange … Percy had shown up in a tattered orange shirt. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Below them, the army began to march south again, but the giant Polybotes stood to one side, frowning and sniffing the air.
‘Sea god,’ he muttered. To Hazel’s horror, he turned in their direction. ‘I smell sea god.’
Percy was shaking. Hazel put her hand on his shoulder and tried to press him flat against the rock.
The lady Cyclops Ma Gasket snarled. ‘Of course you smell sea god! The sea is right over there!’
‘More than that,’ Polybotes insisted. ‘I was born to destroy Neptune. I can sense …’ He frowned, turning his head and shaking out a few more snakes.
‘Do we march or sniff the air?’ Ma Gasket scolded. ‘I don’t get muffins, you don’t get sea god!’
Polybotes growled. ‘Very well. March! March!’ He took one last look at the rainbow-encased store, then raked his fingers through his hair. He brought out three snakes that seemed larger than the rest, with white markings around their necks. ‘A gift, goddess! My name, Polybotes, means “Many-to-Feed”! Here are some hungry mouths for you. See if your store gets many customers with these sentries outside.’
He laughed wickedly and threw the snakes into the tall grass on the hillside.
Then he marched south, his massive Komodo legs shaking the earth. Gradually, the last column of monsters passed over the hills and disappeared into the night.