Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (34 page)

“Um…Io.”

“Come, then, Io.” Hera led the cow away, softly singing, “Io, Io, it’s off to the grove we go.”

As soon as she was gone, Zeus cursed his horrible luck. He kicked some rocks and summoned lightning to blow up trees.

“I was
this close
!”
he yelled. “I
have
to get that cow back. Who do I know who can steal cows…?”

Of course, he called Hermes.

When Zeus explained the problem, Hermes grinned. “No worries, boss. I’ll sneak into that grove and—”

“It won’t be that simple,” Zeus warned. “Hera said the cow would be well guarded. I’m afraid I know what she meant. She’s got this new giant working for her, a dude named Argus.”

Hermes frowned. “So? I’ll either sneak past him or kill him. I’ve got a sword.”

Zeus shook his head. “This guy is huge and strong and quick. You can’t beat him in a fair fight, even with your sword. And as for sneaking…no way. The guy has eyes in the back of his head, and—”

Hermes laughed. “I’ve heard that before.”

“No. I mean he
literally
has eyes in the back of his head. And on his arms and legs and all over his body. A
hundred
eyes.”

“That’s disgusting!”

“I know, right? But he never rests, and he’s always looking in every direction. If he’s guarding Io…”

Hermes scratched his head. “Don’t worry, boss. I’ll figure something out.”

So off he flew. When he got to Hera’s sacred grove, Hermes saw Io the white cow tied to an olive tree. Standing right next to her was the giant Argus.

Just like Zeus had said, Argus was covered with eyes, all blinking and looking around in a dizzy, psychedelic way that made Hermes a little queasy. Argus was about ten feet tall, and the dude obviously worked out. He was holding a big wooden club with iron spikes on the end. Hermes wondered if Argus had eyes in his palms, and if so, whether he got black eyes from holding his club all day.

Hermes changed his form so that he looked like a simple mortal shepherd. His caduceus morphed into a regular wooden staff. He strolled into the grove, whistling casually, and acted surprised when he saw Argus.

“Oh, hello!” Hermes smiled. “My, aren’t you tall!”

Argus blinked several hundred times. He was used to people teasing him about his eyes, but this shepherd didn’t seem horrified or disgusted. The giant wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Hermes wiped his forehead. “Hot day, isn’t it? Mind if I sit and rest?”

Without waiting for permission, Hermes made himself comfortable in the meadow. He set his staff next to him and secretly willed it to begin working its magic on Argus. The caduceus sent out waves of sleepiness—making Argus feel kind of like how you would in sixth period after lunch on a hot day.

SLEEP,
the caduceus seemed to say.

But Argus was a big guy with lots of eyes. He’d been bred specifically
not
to fall asleep. Hermes figured it would take a while. He had to buy time.

“Man, what a day I’ve had!” he told the giant. He pulled out a jug of water. “Join me, my friend, and I’ll tell you all about it! Happy to share this ice-cold water with you!”

Argus was really thirsty. He’d been standing in the blazing sun all day, watching this stupid cow, as Hera had commanded. But the cow was boring.

Still, he was on duty. He shook his head, which was all he could do. He didn’t like to talk, because it would reveal the eyes inside his mouth and all over his tongue.

Hermes started chatting. He was the god of travel, so he knew a
bunch
of good stories. He’d heard jokes from all over the world. And messengers had to be good at speaking, so Hermes knew how to entertain. He regaled Argus with the latest gossip about the gods.

“I heard this one god Hermes stole Apollo’s cattle!” Hermes said with a grin. Then he proceeded to tell the story as if it had happened to somebody else.

Meanwhile, the caduceus kept pulsing with magic, filling the air with a heavy layer of drowsiness, like a comfortable blanket.

After half an hour, Argus dropped his club. He sat next to Hermes and accepted some water.

Hermes kept joking with him, telling him stories, until Argus felt like they were old friends.

SLEEP,
said the caduceus.

After another hour, Argus’s eyes began to get heavy. He knew he was supposed to be on duty, but he couldn’t remember why. His imagination was drifting through the wonderful stories that Hermes told.

Finally Hermes started singing a lullaby. “This is one my mother sang for me when I was just a baby.” He sang the same song he’d heard in his cradle the night he was born, about Artemis’s dogs and Poseidon’s horses and Apollo’s cows.

Argus’s head drooped once, twice—
bam
. All his eyes closed, and the giant began to snore.

Hermes kept singing. Very slowly he got to his feet and drew his sword. He crept behind Argus and chopped off the giant’s head.

“Nighty-night!” Hermes said cheerfully. (I take back what I said earlier. Hermes
was
a murderer.)

Hermes untied Io the cow and brought her back to Zeus.

Hera was enraged, but she couldn’t prove what had happened. Zeus was delighted. Hermes got a nice little bonus in his next paycheck. Poor Io…once Zeus was tired of dating her, Hera turned her into a cow permanently and sent a gadfly to sting her for the rest of her life, so Io had to be constantly on the move, roaming from country to country.

But,
c’est la cow!
At least Hermes got the satisfaction of a job well done.

DIONYSUS CONQUERS
THE
WORLD
WITH A
REFRESHING BEVERAGE

I
 
SAVED THIS GUY FOR LAST
,
because he’s likely to turn me into a porpoise if I say anything bad about him. And honestly, I’m not sure I can say anything
good
.

Here goes nothing….

A while back I told you about this princess Semele who got vaporized while she was pregnant with Zeus’s kid? Anyway, Zeus had to rescue the premature baby by sewing him into his right thigh to keep him alive.

(Yeah, I know. Just another boring day in the life of a god.)

Several months later, the baby was getting big and uncomfortable in Zeus’s leg, so Zeus figured the kid was ready to be born. Zeus undid the stitches. Amazingly, the kid came out alive and healthy.

Zeus wrapped him in a blanket, but he didn’t know anything about raising babies, so he called in Hermes.

“Hey,” Zeus said, “take this baby down to the mortal world. I think Semele had a sister or something. Find her and ask her to raise this kid until he’s older.”

“Sure, boss.” Hermes took the baby and looked him over. “Is he a god or a demigod or what?”

“Not sure yet,” Zeus said. “We’ll have to wait and see. But I don’t want to be changing diapers in the meantime.”

“I hear you. What’s his name?”

The kid started screaming and yelling.

“For now,” Zeus decided, “let’s call him Bacchus.”

Hermes grinned. “
The noisy one
? Nice.”

“One more thing: Hera will be looking for him. She hasn’t been able to mess with the kid while he’s been stuck in my thigh, but she’ll notice that the big lump is gone now.”

“Yeah, that lump was kind of obvious.”

“Might be best if Bacchus’s aunt raises him like he’s a girl, just for a while. Maybe that will throw Hera off the scent.”

Hermes frowned. He didn’t see how raising the baby as a girl would help. Hera wasn’t so easily fooled, but Hermes knew better than to argue with the boss.

“Got it,” he said. “Off I go!”

Hermes had no trouble finding the baby’s Aunt Ino and Uncle Athamas. They agreed to raise Bacchus with their own children, and the boy grew up at a normal human rate—not super-accelerated, like a god. Everybody decided he must be a demigod, but that just made Zeus more fearful that Hera would try to rip the kid apart.

As requested, Ino and Athamas dressed Bacchus in girl’s clothing to keep his identity secret. The first few years of his life, Bacchus was very confused. He wasn’t sure why his foster parents called him “he” in private and “she” in public. At first he thought
all
kids were treated that way.

Then, when he was three years old, Hera struck. Somehow she discovered where the baby was living, and she flew down from Olympus, intent on revenge. By the time Zeus found out what was happening, he only had a few seconds to act. He managed to zap Bacchus into the form of a goat so that Hera wouldn’t notice him, but Bacchus’s foster parents weren’t so lucky. Hera spotted them and inflicted them with a violent form of madness.

Uncle Athamas thought his oldest son, Learkhos, was a deer and killed him with a bow and arrow. Aunt Ino thought their younger son, Melikertes, needed a hot bath—a
really
hot bath, so she drowned him in a basin of boiling water. Then Ino and Athamas realized what they’d done. In despair, they both leaped off the side of a cliff and plummeted to their deaths.

That Hera…she’s all about wholesome family values.

Zeus managed to retrieve Bacchus and turn him back into a child, but the experience haunted Bacchus. He learned that madness could be used as a weapon. He’d learned that goats were good. (In fact, the goat became one of his sacred animals.) And he learned that you couldn’t hide who you were just by putting on different clothes. Later on, he became the god of anybody who felt confused about his or her own gender, because Dionysus could relate.

Anyway, Zeus looked around for a new set of foster parents. Big shock: not many people volunteered after hearing what Hera had done to Ino and Athamas. Finally Zeus flew to Mount Nysa on the Greek mainland and convinced the nymphs there to raise Bacchus. Zeus promised to make them immortal if they just did him this favor, and that was a hard deal to refuse. Young Bacchus became known as “the godly son of Zeus who lives on Nysa,” which got shortened to
Dios
(god) of Nysa, which eventually became his new name: Dionysus, though he was still called Bacchus, the noisy one, especially after he ate beans or cabbage. Which is way more than you wanted to know.

Dionysus grew up on Mount Nysa with the nymphs as his foster mothers and the satyrs as his foster fathers. Satyrs are pretty wild and chaotic (no offense to my satyr friends), so it’s no surprise Dionysus turned out a little out-of-the-ordinary.

Occasionally he played with mortal kids from the nearby farms, and Dionysus
became popular for his magic tricks with plants. He discovered early on that he could produce drinkable nectar by crushing any kind of plant matter—twigs, leaves, bark, roots, whatever. Cypress-tree syrup? No problem. Fennel juice? Yum!

The other kids would challenge him, like, “Bet you can’t make a drink out of that thorn bush!” Dionysus would pick up a rock, smash some branches, and golden sap would flow from the wounded plant. Dionysus would collect it in cups, mix some water, add miniature umbrellas, and
voilà,
iced thorn-bush spritzers for everyone.

An entertaining trick—but none of Dionysus’s early recipes caught on. Fennel juice just wasn’t that popular, after all.

Then one day Dionysus was out in the woods with his best friend, a young satyr boy named Ampelos. They spotted a thick vine curled around the branch of an elm tree about twenty feet above their heads. Dionysus froze in his tracks.

“What is it?” Ampelos asked.

“That vine up there,” Dionysus said. “What kind of plant is that?”

Ampelos frowned. The vine didn’t look like anything special to him. It was thick and bristly, with wide green leaves and no fruit or flowers that he could see. “Well, it’s not ivy. Or honeysuckle. Dunno. Never seen it before. Come on!”

But Dionysus stood transfixed. There was something important about that plant—something that could change the world.

“I have to get a closer look.” Dionysus tried to scale the trunk of the elm, but he was a lousy climber. He fell on his butt in the leaves.

Ampelos laughed. “If it’s so important to you, I’ll get it. Leave the climbing to satyrs.”

Dionysus felt a sudden chill of dread. He didn’t want Ampelos going up there. But he also wanted the vine.

“Be careful,” he said.

Ampelos rolled his eyes. “I’ve climbed higher trees than this!”

The young satyr clambered up the trunk and was soon straddling the elm branch. “Easy peasy!” He started prying the vine from the branch, feeding the end down to Dionysus like a rope. “Got it?”

Dionysus reached up and grabbed the vine.