Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

by Rick Riordan

  The next time Hippolytos went home to visit his dad, King Theseus (who is a whole other story, that dude), they got into this huge argument. Dad wanted Hippolytos to get married so he could have kids and carry on the family name when he became king, blah, blah, blah.

  Hippolytos said, “No! I want to stay with Artemis and hunt!”

  Theseus roared in frustration. “If you love her so much, why don’t you marry her?”

  “She’s a maiden goddess, Dad! You never listen!”

  The argument got more and more heated, because up in Olympus, Aphrodite was inflaming their passions. Sure, she was the goddess of love, but there really isn’t much difference between love and hate. They both get out of control easily, and one turns into the other. Trust me. I know.

  Finally, Theseus drew a sword and killed his own son.

  Whoops.

  Of course the king was horribly ashamed. He placed the prince’s body in the royal crypts and ran off to mourn in private. Meanwhile, Artemis heard the news and came rushing to the tomb.

  Weeping with rage, she gathered up the body of Hippolytos. “No! No, no, no! I will not lose another best friend. I won’t!”

  She flew out of the city, carrying Hippolytos’s body. She searched all of Greece until she found the best physician in the world—a guy named Asklepios. He was a son of Apollo, the god of healing, but Asklepios was even better at healing than his dad. Probably that was because Asklepios spent all his time actually healing, while Apollo flirted and gave concerts in the park.

  “Aunt Artemis!” said Asklepios. “Good to see you!”

  Artemis laid the body of Hippolytos at his feet. “Asklepios, I need you to heal Hippolytos. Please! This is beyond even my powers.”

  “Hmm,” Asklepios said. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s dead,” Artemis said.

  “That’s a serious condition. It’s almost always fatal. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  Asklepios mixed some herbs, cooked a potion, and force-fed it to the dead prince, who immediately woke up.

  “Thank the Fates!” Artemis said. “Asklepios, you’re the best!”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  Actually, it was a problem. Aphrodite complained to Zeus. She was such a sore loser. Then Hades complained. Asklepios couldn’t go around bringing the dead back to life. That would cause chaos in the mortal world and the Underworld. Zeus agreed. He zapped Asklepios with lightning and killed him, which is why you can’t go to the doctor today and ask him to resurrect your dead relatives. Zeus declared that level of medicine off-limits.

  As for Hippolytos, Artemis made sure he stayed safe. She whisked him off to Italy, where he became a priest at one of her sacred shrines and lived to a ripe old age.

  After that, Artemis decided not to get too close to any of her followers. It was just too dangerous for them. She also became wary about inviting any more men into the Hunt.

  That’s okay with me. I like Artemis, but I don’t do well with nature. Also, I don’t like hunting. I do like girls, but my girlfriend would not be okay with me hanging out with eighty beautiful women in the wilderness.

  She’s kind of possessive that way.

  HERMES GOES TO JUVIE

  IT WOULD BE FASTER to list the things Hermes wasn’t the god of, because that guy had a lot going on.

  He was the god of travel, so he was the patron of anyone who used the roads. That meant merchants, messengers, ambassadors, traveling performers, and herders bringing their livestock to market. It also meant bandits, thieves, drifters, and those annoying caravans of retired people in RVs heading south for the winter.

  Hermes was in charge of guiding dead souls to the Underworld. He was Zeus’s personal FedEx service, carrying his boss’s messages all around the globe with guaranteed overnight delivery. He was also the god of (take a deep breath) commerce, languages, thievery, cheeseburgers, trickery, eloquent speaking, feasts, cheeseburgers, hospitality, guard dogs, birds of omen, gymnastics, athletic competitions, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, and telling fortunes with dice.

  Okay, I just tossed in the cheeseburgers to see if you were paying attention. Also, I’m hungry.

  Basically, Hermes was in charge of anything and everyone you might encounter while traveling—the good stuff and the bad. So if you take a trip, you’d better hope that Hermes is in a good mood. Otherwise you’ll wind up sleeping in the airport, or stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire. Since everybody in Ancient Greece needed to travel at one time or another, Hermes was an important, well-respected dude.

  Hard to believe he was born in a cave and got arrested when he was twelve hours old.

  His mom, Maia, tried to keep him out of trouble. She was a Titan, the daughter of Atlas; and when she became pregnant with Zeus’s baby (which makes her what, like girlfriend #458? Is anybody keeping track?), she tried to protect herself so she wouldn’t end like most of Zeus’s girlfriends—cursed and harassed by Hera.

  Maia hid in a cave on Mount Cyllene in central Greece, where she gave birth to cute little Hermes. She realized her kid was a baby god, so she decided she had better be careful. You can never tell when a baby god will start dancing and singing and shooting people. (She’d heard stories from Leto.) Maia nursed Baby Hermes and swaddled him tight in his blankets so he couldn’t move or get into trouble. She placed him in a woven basket for a cradle and began singing a lullaby about the different gods and their favorite animals, because even back then, baby songs were all about farm animals and stuff. She sang about Artemis and her dogs, Poseidon and his horses, Apollo and his herd of sacred cows—the finest and tastiest cattle in the world. Soon Hermes was sleeping peacefully. Maia stumbled to her bed and passed out, because giving birth was hard work.

  As soon as Hermes heard his mom snoring, he opened his eyes.

  The young god struggled in his swaddling blankets. “Seriously?” he murmured. “Born for thirty minutes, and I’m already in a straitjacket? Mom must really not trust me. Smart lady.”

  He wriggled free and jumped out of the crib. Hermes still looked like a newborn, but only because he wasn’t ready to start growing yet. He figured a baby could get away with stuff that an older kid couldn’t. He stretched his arms, did a few jumping jacks, and hiked up his diapers.

  “All that singing about cows made me hungry,” he said. “I could go for a steak!”

  He strolled out of the cave, figuring it couldn’t be too hard to find Apollo’s cattle. He’d only gone a few steps when he tripped on something hard.

  “Ow!” Hermes knelt down and realized that he’d stumbled over a tortoise.

  “Hey, little buddy,” Hermes said. “You’re the first animal I’ve run across! I guess you’ll be one of my sacred creatures. How would you like that?”

  The tortoise just stared at him.

  “That’s a nice shell you’ve got.” Hermes wrapped his knuckles on the tortoise’s back. “All dappled and pretty. How about I take you inside the cave where I can get a better look? I won’t hurt you.”

  Hermes was strong for a baby. Actually, he was strong for anybody. He picked up the tortoise and brought it inside. Looking over its shell, he had a sudden idea. He remembered the way his mother’s voice had echoed through the cave when she sang her lullaby, becoming louder and richer. Hermes had enjoyed that. This tortoise shell might amplify sound the same way, like a miniature cave—if there was no tortoise inside it.

  “You know what, little buddy?” Hermes said. “I changed my mind. I’m afraid I will hurt you.”

  Gross-out alert. Hermes chopped off the tortoise’s head and legs. He scooped out the rest of it with his mom’s soup ladle. (Hey, I’m sorry. Back then, people butchered animals all the time for meat or hide or shell or whatever. This is why my friend Piper became a vegetarian.)

  Anyway, once Hermes hollowed out the shell, he blew into it. The sound
echoed deeply, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted. Outside the cave, he could hear owls, crickets, frogs, and a bunch of other critters making sounds at different pitches, all at the same time. Hermes wanted something like that—a bunch of sounds simultaneously. Over by the fire, he spotted some long, stringy sheep tendons that Maia had set out to dry for sewing or whatever.

  Hermes thought, Hmm.

  He stretched one tendon between his foot and hand. He plucked it with his free hand, and the gut string vibrated. The tighter he made the string, the higher the note.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This’ll work.”

  He glanced at his mom to make sure she was still asleep. Then Hermes set to work. From his mom’s loom, he took a couple of wooden dowels and ran them through the tortoise shell so that they stuck out the neck hole like horns. Then he fastened a third dowel across the top, between the two braces, so they looked kind of like football goalposts. He ran seven strings from the top of the neck to the base of the tortoise shell. Then he tuned the strings to different pitches. When he strummed, the sound was amazing. Hermes had invented the first stringed instrument, which he decided to call a lyre. (Why? Maybe because he was a liar, I don’t know.)

  If he’d spent a few more hours working, he probably could’ve invented the acoustic guitar, the stand-up bass, and the Fender Stratocaster too; but by now he was really hungry. He hid his new lyre in the blankets of his cradle and set out to find those yummy magic cows.

  He climbed to the top of Mount Cyllene—hey, no big deal for such a buff baby—and peered across Greece, watching and listening. Apollo kept his cows well hidden at night, in a secret meadow in Pieria, which was about three hundred miles north of Cyllene, but Hermes had excellent senses. In no time, he heard a distant: “Mooo.”

  Another cow said, “Shhh. We’re hiding!”

  The first cow said, “Sorry.”

  Up on the mountaintop, Hermes grinned. “Ha! I’ve got you now, cows.”

  Three hundred miles? No problem! Hermes ran there in about an hour—which must have looked really strange, this newborn god tearing across Greece, his hands still covered in tortoise blood. Fortunately it was nighttime and nobody saw him.

  When he got to the secret meadow, Hermes drooled at the sight of so many delicious big fat healthy heifers, hundreds of them grazing in the tall grass between the base of a mountain and the sandy shores of the Mediterranean.

  “I don’t want to be greedy,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’ll just take fifty or so. But how to cover my tracks?”

  He couldn’t just stuff fifty cows in a sack and sneak away. And if he herded them, Apollo would easily be able to follow the hoofprints of so many animals.

  Hermes stared at the beach. Then he examined some nearby crape myrtle trees. Not sure what he was doing exactly, he broke off some twigs and young branches from the myrtles. He remembered that back in Maia’s cave, his cradle had been a woven basket, and he started to weave the branches and twigs into big paddles. He wrapped these around his feet and created the first snowshoes—which was pretty amazing, since it never snowed in Greece.

  Hermes took a few steps in the grass, then on the sand. The paddle shoes left wide, vague impressions that completely masked the size of his feet.

  Perfect, he thought. That covers me. And now for the cows…

  He waded across the meadow in his new shoes. He managed to separate the herd, shooing fifty of the fattest, juiciest cows away from the rest. Those fifty he drove sideways toward the beach.

  Once they reached the sand, Hermes snapped his fingers and whistled to get the cows’ attention. When all fifty of them were looking at him, their tails facing the ocean, he said, “Okay, guys. Now back it up. Back it up!”

  Ever tried to get fifty cows walking backward? It’s not easy. Hermes kept their attention on him, whistling and making back-up noises like, “BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!” while he waved his arms and advanced toward the water. The cattle shuffled backward, right into the surf. Then Hermes turned them south and herded them a few hundred yards through the waves before leading them onto dry land again.

  When he looked back, he had to appreciate his own trickery. It looked as if fifty cows had marched out of the sea and joined the main herd. No one would be able to tell where the missing cows had gone. Hermes had left no footprints that could be traced to him.

  He led the cows south through the fields of Greece.

  By this time it was after midnight, so Hermes figured he wouldn’t be seen. Unfortunately, one old mortal farmer named Battus was out tending his grapevines. Maybe Battus couldn’t sleep, or maybe he always pruned his grapes at night; but when he saw this little baby leading fifty cows down the road, the old dude’s eyes bugged out of his head.

  “What?” he warbled. “How?”

  Hermes forced a smile. “’Sup?” He considered killing the old man. He didn’t want any witnesses. But Hermes was a thief, not a murderer. Besides, he already had the blood of an innocent tortoise on his hands. “I’m just taking my cows for a walk. What’s your name, old-timer?”

  “Battus.” Battus couldn’t believe he was having a conversation with a baby. Maybe he was still asleep in bed, dreaming.

  “Well, Battus,” said Hermes, “it would be best if you forgot you saw me. Anybody asks, I was never here. Do that, and I’ll make sure you get some awesome blessings when I take my place on Mount Olympus, okay?”

  “Erm…okay.”

  “Cool. And, hey, is that a knife in your belt? Could I borrow that?”

  Battus gave the baby god his pruning knife, and Hermes led his cattle onward.

  Finally Hermes found a nice cave where he could hide the stolen cows. He penned forty-eight of them inside so he could eat them later, or maybe sell them on the black market. He hadn’t decided yet. Then he used the old man’s knife to butcher the last two.

  Again, a pretty creepy image—a baby god with a knife, slaughtering cows—but Hermes wasn’t squeamish. He built a fire and sacrificed the best cuts of meat to the Olympian gods (including himself, naturally). Then he put more meat on a spit, roasted it, and stuffed himself with tasty beef.

  “Aw, that was good!” Hermes belched with appreciation. “Man, it’s getting late. Or early, I guess. I’d better get home.”

  He cleaned up in a nearby stream, because he didn’t think his mom wanted to see her newborn child covered in blood. Then, just for fun, he took a couple of cow bones, hollowed them into flutes, and tied them together at one end in a V so that he could play them both simultaneously (because just one flute is boring). He waddled home with a full belly, playing soft music on his new double flute to keep himself awake. He got back to Maia’s cave just before dawn, crawled into his cradle, and tucked his V-flute under his blankets with his lyre. Then he passed out. Even for a baby god, it had been a long first night.

  The next morning, Apollo flew to Pieria to count his cows. He always liked to start the day by admiring his cattle.

  When he realized that fifty of them were missing, he freaked. He ran around yelling, “Here, cows! Here, cows!” He found hoofprints leading out of the sea, as if his cattle had gone for a swim and then returned, but that made no sense. He saw some huge, shallow indentions in the sand, like a very thin guy with size twenty-five shoes had been walking around—but again, that made no sense.

  Apollo searched most of the morning, until finally he came across the old farmer Battus, who was still pruning his vines. After the “talking baby” incident, Battus hadn’t been able to get any sleep.

  “Old man!” Apollo called. “Have you seen fifty cows walking this way? Possibly led by a very lightweight giant with size twenty-five shoes?”

  Battus winced. He was no good at lying. Apollo could tell immediately that the farmer was trying to hide something.

  “I might add,” said Apollo, “that I am a god. It would be a very good idea to tell me the truth.”
>
  Battus heaved a sigh. “It was a baby.”

  Apollo frowned. “What, now?”

  Battus told him the story, which was so weird Apollo decided it must be the truth. Apollo knew of only one newborn god. He’d heard rumors that the Titan Maia had given birth last night on Mount Cyllene. (Apollo always tried to keep up with the latest gossip.) It seemed unlikely that a newborn child could be responsible for a cattle theft three hundred miles away, but Apollo himself had started singing and dancing as soon as he came out of the womb, so it wasn’t impossible.

  He flew down to Maia’s cave and woke up the mama Titan. “Your kid stole my cows!” he told her.

  Maia rubbed her eyes. She looked at baby Hermes, still lying in his cradle, swaddled in blankets…though his belly did look a lot bigger, and was that a dribble of A.1. Steak Sauce on his chin?

  “Uh, you must have the wrong baby,” Maia said. “He’s been here all night.”

  Apollo snorted. “It had to be him. Look at the steak sauce on his chin! My cows are probably stashed around here somewhere.”

  Maia shrugged. “You’re welcome to look.”

  Apollo tore through the cave, searching inside pots, behind the loom, under the bedrolls. Amazingly, fifty cows were not hidden in any of those places.

  Finally Apollo marched to the baby’s cradle. “All right, kid. Fess up. Where are my cattle?”

  Hermes opened his eyes and tried to look as cute as possible. “Goo goo?”

  “Nice try,” Apollo grumbled. “I can smell the beef on your breath.”

  Hermes stifled a curse. He knew he should’ve eaten some breath mints.

  “Dear cousin Apollo,” he said brightly, “good morning to you! You think I’ve stolen some cattle? Can’t you see that I’m just a baby?”

  Apollo balled his fists. “Where are they, you little punk?”

  “I have no idea,” Hermes said. “How could a little guy like me hide fifty cows?”

  “Ha!” Apollo cried. “I never said there were fifty!”