Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (22 page)

Athena looked back and forth between the tapestries, trying to judge which one was better.

Some stories will tell you that Athena won the contest, but that’s not true. In fact, Athena was forced to admit that the two tapestries were exactly equal in quality.

“It’s a tie,” she said grudgingly. “Your skill, your technique, your use of color….As much as I want to, I can’t find any fault.”

Arachne tried to stand up tall, but the work had taken something out of her. Her hands hurt. Her back was sore and she stooped from the effort. “What now, then? A rematch? Unless you’re scared….”

Athena finally lost her temper. She took the shuttle out of her loom—a length of wood like a square baseball bat. “Now, I beat the crud out of you for insulting the gods!”

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

The goddess hit Arachne over the head as the mortal weaver scuttled around, trying to hide. At first, the crowd was horrified. Then they did what humans often do when they’re frightened and nervous and somebody
else
is getting a beating…They began to laugh and make fun of Arachne.

“Get her, Athena!” one cried.

“Yeah, who’s the boss, now, little girl?” said another.

The same mortals who had gazed in wonder at Arachne’s work and had stood around her hut for days hoping for free tapestries now turned against her, calling her names and jeering as Athena hit her.

Cruel? You bet. But if you ask me, that mob painted a picture of humans that’s just as true and just as scathing as Arachne’s tapestry about the gods.

Finally Athena’s anger subsided. She turned and saw all the mortals laughing and pointing at Arachne, and Athena realized maybe she’d gone too far with the punishment.

“Enough!” the goddess yelled at the crowd. “Would you turn on one of your own people so quickly? At least Arachne had some talent! What makes
you
people so special?”

While Athena was occupied chewing out the crowd, Arachne struggled to her feet. Every part of her body hurt, but most of the damage was to her pride. Weaving was her only joy, and Athena had taken that away. Arachne would never be able to take pleasure in her work again. The townspeople she’d tried so hard to please had turned against her too. Her eyes stung with shame and hatred and self-pity.

She rushed to the loom and gathered up a thick row of threads—enough to form a makeshift rope. She tied a noose and put it around her neck, then looped the other end of the rope over the rafter beam above her.

By the time Athena and the crowd noticed, Arachne was hanging from the ceiling, trying to kill herself.

“Foolish girl,” Athena said. She was overcome with pity, but she also hated suicide. It was a cowardly act. “I will not let you die. You will live on, and weave forever.”

She changed Arachne into a spider, and from then on, Arachne and her children have continued to weave webs. Spiders hate Athena, and Athena hates them right back. But spiders also hate humans, because Arachne never forgot her shame and her anger at being ridiculed.

So what’s the moral of the story? The old preachy storytellers will claim:
Don’t compare yourself to the gods, because you can’t be that good.
But that’s not true.

Arachne
was
that good.

Maybe the lesson is:
Know when to brag and when to keep your mouth shut.
Or:
Sometimes life isn’t fair, even if you
are
as gifted as Athena.
Or maybe:
Don’t give away free tapestries.

I’ll let you decide.

Athena tore up the tapestries from that contest, as beautiful as they were. Because honestly, I don’t think anybody came away from that encounter looking very good.

You may be getting the idea that Athena…well, how to put this delicately? She might’ve been the wisdom goddess, but she didn’t always make the smartest choices.

For one thing, she was self-conscious. For instance, the way she invented the flute. She was walking in the woods near Athens one day when she heard a nest of snakes hissing, and she thought, Huh, a bunch of long tubular things that make noise.
And just like that she got the idea for a new musical instrument. She hollowed out a reed, made some holes in it, blew on one end, and beautiful music came out.

At first she was really proud of her flute. She wasn’t even the goddess of music, and here she’d invented a cool new sound. She took her flute up to Olympus, eager to show the other gods, but as soon as she started playing, the other goddesses started giggling and whispering to each other.

Athena stopped mid-song. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” said Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

“The music is lovely, my dear,” Hera said, trying not to laugh.

Now, honestly, the other goddesses were intimidated by Athena, because she was so smart and strong. Naturally, they made fun of her behind her back and tried to shut her out of the clique. Athena disliked the other goddesses. She thought most of them were silly and shallow. But she also wanted to fit in, and it made her mad when they teased her.

“Why are you laughing?” Athena demanded.

“Well…” Demeter suppressed a smile. “It’s just that when you play the flute, your eyes cross and your cheeks puff out, and you make this funny shape with your mouth.”

“Like this…” Aphrodite demonstrated, doing her best imitation of Athena’s flute face, which looked sort of like a constipated duck’s.

The gods and goddesses busted out laughing. Athena fled in humiliation. You would think, being the goddess of wisdom, she’d be able to laugh it off and not let it get under her skin; but she felt so burned she threw the flute away, letting it fall to the earth.

She even issued a curse. “Whoever dares play
that
thing again,” she muttered to herself, “let the
worst
fortune befall him!”

Eventually the flute would get picked up, but that’s a story for later….

After that, Athena became even more self-conscious about her looks. As a warrior goddess, she’d already decided that she would never get married. She didn’t want any man claiming to be her master, and she didn’t have time for that silly love nonsense Aphrodite was always gossiping about.

Because of this, Athena was very sensitive about her privacy. One night she decided to go to a swimming hole in central Greece, just to relax. She bathed naked, and while she was washing off in the waterfall, enjoying the peace and quiet, she heard this choking, whimpering sound.

She looked over at the riverbank and saw this old mortal dude
just staring at her with his jaw hanging open and his eyes as big as drachmas.

Athena screamed.

The dude screamed.

Athena splashed water in his eyes and yelled, “Blindness!” Instantly, the man lost his sight forever. His eyes turned pure white. He stumbled backward, bumped into a tree, and fell on his butt.

“M-m-mistress!” he wailed. “I—I’m so sorry! I didn’t—”

“Who are you?” Athena demanded.

The poor guy explained that his name was Teiresias. He had just been out for a walk from the nearest city, Thebes. He had no idea Athena was there, and he was really, really sorry.

Athena’s anger cooled, because obviously the man was telling the truth.

“You must remain blind,” she said, “because no man may see me nude without being punished.”

Teiresias gulped. “Um…okay…”

“However,” Athena continued, “since this was an accident, I will compensate you for your blindness by giving you other gifts.”

“Like…another set of eyes?” Teiresias asked.

Athena managed a smile. “Sort of. From now on, you will be able to understand the language of birds. I will give you a staff, and with the help of the birds, you will be able to walk almost as if you had your own sight.”

I’m not sure how that worked, exactly. I would’ve been worried that the birds would play jokes on me, like,
A little farther. Turn left. Now, run!
And I’d pitch over a cliff, or ram headfirst into a brick wall. But apparently the arrangement worked out okay for Teiresias, and the birds took care of him. It also shows how Athena could calm down and moderate her punishments.

The one thing she couldn’t stand, however, were guys flirting with her. Which brings us to the story of her and Hephaestus. Okay, deep breath, because things are about to get
weird.

So, Hephaestus was the crippled blacksmith god. More on him later.

Right now, all you need to know is that ever since he helped Athena get out of Zeus’ forehead, Hephaestus had had a crush on her. This made sense, because they were both into crafts and tools. They were both deep thinkers and enjoyed solving mechanical problems.

The problem was that Athena hated romance and never even wanted to hold hands with a guy, much less
marry
one. Even if Hephaestus had been handsome, Athena would have turned him down. But Hephaestus was most definitely ugly: Grade-A Industrial-Strength Ugly with Extra Gross.

He tried in his own way to flirt with her, like,
Hey, baby, want to see my hammer collection?
And stuff like that.

Athena power walked away from him, but Hephaestus limped after her. Athena didn’t want to scream and run, because she wasn’t a helpless mortal girl, or one of those silly “pink princess” goddesses who fainted and fluttered their eyelashes or whatever. She was the goddess of war!

She just kept moving away from Hephaestus, snapping at him to leave her alone. Finally the poor guy was sweating and panting like crazy, because it wasn’t easy for him to move on his crippled legs. He flung himself at Athena, wrapping his arms around her waist.

“Please,” he begged. “You’re the perfect woman for me!”

He buried his face in her skirt and sobbed and sniveled, and some of his godly sweat and snot rubbed off on her bare leg where the skirt was parted, and Athena was like, “Gross!”

She kicked Hephaestus away and snatched up the nearest piece of cloth she could find—maybe a handkerchief or a napkin or something. She wiped the godly moisture off her leg and tossed the gross piece of cloth off Olympus, where it fluttered slowly down to the earth.

Then
she ran away.

That should’ve been the end of the story, but something weird happened to that piece of cloth. It contained the essence of both Athena and Hephaestus, and somehow, when it hit the earth, it grew into a mortal baby boy.

Up on Olympus, Athena heard the baby crying. She tried to ignore it, but to her surprise, motherly instinct stirred inside her. She flew down to the earth and picked up the child. She understood how he had been born, and though the whole thing was still totally disgusting to her, she couldn’t blame the little boy.

“I suppose technically you are my son,” she decided, “even though I am still a maiden goddess. I will claim you as my own, and name you Erikthonius.”

(She gets one chance to name a kid, and
that’s
what she picks? Don’t ask me.)

“If I’m going to raise you,” she continued, “I should first make you immortal. I know just the thing….”

She got a wooden chest and put the baby inside. Then she created a magical serpent and put it in there too. (By the way, this is
really
not something you should try at home.) The baby boy Erikthonius fell asleep contentedly with the snake curled around him.

“There,” Athena said. “A few days in that box, and the serpent will enhance your godly qualities. You will cease to be mortal and you’ll become one of the gods!”

She closed the chest and took it to the Acropolis in Athens, which was, of course, her most sacred place. She gave the box to the daughters of Kekrops, the first king of Athens.

“Don’t open this box!” she warned the princesses. “It has to stay closed, or bad things will happen.”

The princesses promised, but after only one night, they got curious. They were pretty sure they heard a baby in there, cooing and gurgling, and they were afraid the kid was in trouble.

“What kind of goddess puts a baby in a box?” one of them muttered. “We’d better check.”

The princesses opened the box and saw the snake curled around the baby. I’m not sure why it freaked them out so badly. Maybe they saw godly light in there or something, but the girls went insane. They dropped the box and ran straight off the side of the Acropolis’s cliffs, plummeting to their deaths.

As for the baby, he was fine, but the spell was broken before he could become immortal. The snake slithered away and Athena came to cradle the child. She was raging mad, but since she couldn’t scold the princesses, seeing as they were dead, and all, she took out her vengeance on their dad, King Kekrops. Once Erikthonius grew up, he kicked out Kekrops and took over as king of Athens. That’s why the Athenian kings liked to say they were descended from Hephaestus and Athena, even though Athena was an eternal maiden.

So don’t tell me Athena can’t have kids, because there’s the story that says otherwise. Besides, I’m dating one of Athena’s daughters, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t spring from a dirty handkerchief.

Hmm. Actually, I’ve never asked her.

Nah, forget it. I don’t want to know.