by Rick Riordan
‘Blast!’ Tantalus muttered.
‘Ah, well,’ Dionysus said, his voice dripping with false sympathy. ‘Perhaps a few more days. Believe me, old chap, working at this camp will be torture enough. I’m sure your old curse will fade eventually.’
‘Eventually,’ muttered Tantalus, staring at Dionysus’s Diet Coke. ‘Do you have any idea how dry one’s throat gets after three thousand years?’
‘You’re that spirit from the Fields of Punishment,’ I said. ‘The one who stands in the lake with the fruit tree hanging over you, but you can’t eat or drink.’
Tantalus sneered at me. ‘A real scholar, aren’t you, boy?’
‘You must’ve done something really horrible when you were alive,’ I said, mildly impressed. ‘What was it?’
Tantalus’s eyes narrowed. Behind him, the satyrs were shaking their heads vigorously, trying to warn me.
‘I’ll be watching you, Percy Jackson,’ Tantalus said. ‘I don’t want any problems at my camp.’
‘Your camp has problems already … sir.’
‘Oh, go sit down, Johnson,’ Dionysus sighed. ‘I believe that table over there is yours – the one where no one else ever wants to sit.’
My face was burning, but I knew better than to talk back. Dionysus was an overgrown brat, but he was an immortal, superpowerful overgrown brat. I said, ‘Come on, Tyson.’
‘Oh, no,’ Tantalus said. ‘The monster stays here. We must decide what to do with it.’
‘Him’, I snapped. ‘His name is Tyson.’
The new activities director raised an eyebrow.
‘Tyson saved the camp,’ I insisted. ‘He pounded those bronze bulls. Otherwise they would’ve burned down this whole place.’
‘Yes,’ Tantalus sighed, ‘and what a pity that would’ve been.’
Dionysus snickered.
‘Leave us,’ Tantalus ordered, ‘while we decide this creature’s fate.’
Tyson looked at me with fear in his one big eye, but I knew I couldn’t disobey a direct order from the camp directors. Not openly, anyway.
‘I’ll be right over here, big guy,’ I promised. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find you a good place to sleep tonight.’
Tyson nodded. ‘I believe you. You are my friend.’
Which made me feel a whole lot guiltier.
I trudged over to the Poseidon table and slumped onto the bench. A wood nymph brought me a plate of Olympian olive-and-pepperoni pizza, but I wasn’t hungry. I’d been almost killed twice today. I’d managed to end my school year with a complete disaster. Camp Half-Blood was in serious trouble and Chiron had told me not to do anything about it.
I didn’t feel very thankful, but I took my dinner, as was customary, up to the bronze brazier and scraped part of it into the flames.
‘Poseidon,’ I murmured, ‘accept my offering.’
And send me some help while you’re at it, I prayed silently. Please.
The smoke from the burning pizza changed into something fragrant – the smell of a clean sea breeze with wildflowers mixed in – but I had no idea if that meant my father was really listening.
I went back to my seat. I didn’t think things could get much worse. But then Tantalus had one of the satyrs blow the conch horn to get our attention for announcements.
* * *
‘Yes, well,’ Tantalus said, once the talking had died down. ‘Another fine meal! Or so I am told.’ As he spoke, he inched his hand towards his refilled dinner plate, as if maybe the food wouldn’t notice what he was doing, but it did. It shot away down the table as soon as he got within twenty centimetres.
‘And here on my first day of authority,’ he continued, ‘I’d like to say what a pleasant form of punishment it is to be here. Over the course of the summer, I hope to torture, er, interact with each and every one of you children. You all look good enough to eat.’
Dionysus clapped politely, leading to some half-hearted applause from the satyrs. Tyson was still standing at the head table, looking uncomfortable, but every time he tried to scoot out of the limelight, Tantalus pulled him back.
‘And now some changes!’ Tantalus gave the campers a crooked smile. ‘We are reinstituting the chariot races!’
Murmuring broke out at all the tables – excitement, fear, disbelief.
‘Now I know,’ Tantalus continued, raising his voice, ‘that these races were discontinued some years ago due to, ah, technical problems.’
‘Three deaths and twenty-six mutilations,’ someone at the Apollo table called.
‘Yes, yes!’ Tantalus said. ‘But I know that you will all join me in welcoming the return of this camp tradition. Golden laurels will go to the winning charioteers each month. Teams may register in the morning! The first race will be held in three days’ time. We will release you from most of your regular activities to prepare your chariots and choose your horses. Oh, and did I mention, the victorious team’s cabin will have no chores for the month in which they win?’
An explosion of excited conversation – no KP for a whole month? No stable cleaning? Was he serious?
Then the last person I expected to object did so.
‘But, sir!’ Clarisse said. She looked nervous, but she stood up to speak from the Ares table. Some of the campers snickered when they saw the YOU MOO, GIRL! sign on her back. ‘What about patrol duty? I mean, if we drop everything to ready our chariots –’
‘Ah, the hero of the day,’ Tantalus exclaimed. ‘Brave Clarisse, who single-handedly bested the bronze bulls!’
Clarisse blinked, then blushed. ‘Um, I didn’t –’
‘And modest, too.’ Tantalus grinned. ‘Not to worry, my dear! This is a summer camp. We are here to enjoy ourselves, yes?’
‘But the tree –’
‘And now,’ Tantalus said, as several of Clarisse’s cabin mates pulled her back into her seat, ‘before we proceed to the campfire and sing-along, one slight housekeeping issue. Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase have seen fit, for some reason, to bring this here.’ Tantalus waved a hand towards Tyson.
Uneasy murmuring spread among the campers. A lot of sideways looks at me. I wanted to kill Tantalus.
‘Now, of course,’ he said, ‘Cyclopes have a reputation for being bloodthirsty monsters with a very small brain capacity. Under normal circumstances, I would release this beast into the woods and have you hunt it down with torches and pointed sticks. But who knows? Perhaps this Cyclops is not as horrible as most of its brethren. Until it proves worthy of destruction, we need a place to keep it! I’ve thought about the stables, but that will make the horses nervous. Hermes’s cabin, possibly?’
Silence at the Hermes table. Travis and Connor Stoll developed a sudden interest in the tablecloth. I couldn’t blame them. The Hermes cabin was always full to bursting. There was no way they could take in a two-metre Cyclops.
‘Come now,’ Tantalus chided. ‘The monster may be able to do some menial chores. Any suggestions as to where such a beast should be kennelled?’
Suddenly everybody gasped.
Tantalus scooted away from Tyson in surprise. All I could do was stare in disbelief at the brilliant green light that was about to change my life – a dazzling holographic image that had appeared above Tyson’s head.
With a sickening twist in my stomach, I remembered what Annabeth had said about Cyclopes, They’re the children of nature spirits and gods … Well, one god in particular, usually …
Swirling over Tyson was a glowing green trident – the same symbol that had appeared above me the day Poseidon had claimed me as his son.
There was a moment of awed silence.
Being claimed was a rare event. Some campers waited in vain for it their whole lives. When I’d been claimed by Poseidon last summer, everyone had reverently knelt. But now, they followed Tantalus’s lead, and Tantalus roared with laughter. ‘Well! I think we know where to put the beast now. By the gods, I can see the family resemblance!’
Everybody laughed except Annabeth and a few of my other
friends.
Tyson didn’t seem to notice. He was too mystified, trying to swat the glowing trident that was now fading over his head. He was too innocent to understand how much they were making fun of him, how cruel people were.
But I got it.
I had a new cabin mate. I had a monster for a half-brother.
6 Demon Pigeons Attack
The next few days were torture, just like Tantalus wanted.
First there was Tyson moving into the Poseidon cabin, giggling to himself every fifteen seconds and saying, ‘Percy is my brother?’ like he’d just won the lottery.
‘Aw, Tyson,’ I’d say. ‘It’s not that simple.’
But there was no explaining it to him. He was in heaven. And me … as much as I liked the big guy, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed. Ashamed. There, I said it.
My father, the all-powerful Poseidon, had got moony-eyed for some nature spirit, and Tyson had been the result. I mean, I’d read the myths about Cyclopes. I even remembered that they were often Poseidon’s children. But I’d never really processed that this made them my … family. Until I had Tyson living with me in the next bunk.
And then there were the comments from the other campers. Suddenly, I wasn’t Percy Jackson, the cool guy who’d retrieved Zeus’s lightning bolt last summer. Now I was Percy Jackson, the poor schmuck with the ugly monster for a brother.
‘He’s not my real brother!’ I protested whenever Tyson wasn’t around. ‘He’s more like a half-brother on the monstrous side of the family. Like … a half-brother twice removed, or something.’
Nobody bought it.
I admit – I was angry at my dad. I felt like being his son was now a joke.
Annabeth tried to make me feel better. She suggested we team up for the chariot race to take our minds off our problems. Don’t get me wrong – we both hated Tantalus and we were worried sick about camp – but we didn’t know what to do about it. Until we could come up with some brilliant plan to save Thalia’s tree, we figured we might as well go along with the races. After all, Annabeth’s mom, Athena, had invented the chariot, and my dad had created horses. Together we would own that track.
One morning Annabeth and I were sitting by the canoe lake sketching chariot designs when some jokers from Aphrodite’s cabin walked by and asked me if I needed to borrow some eyeliner for my eye … ‘Oh, sorry, eyes.’
As they walked away laughing, Annabeth grumbled, ‘Just ignore them, Percy. It isn’t your fault you have a monster for a brother.’
‘He’s not my brother!’ I snapped. ‘And he’s not a monster, either!’
Annabeth raised her eyebrows. ‘Hey, don’t get mad at me! And technically, he is a monster.’
‘Well, you gave him permission to enter the camp.’
‘Because it was the only way to save your life! I mean … I’m sorry, Percy, I didn’t expect Poseidon to claim him. Cyclopes are the most deceitful, treacherous –’
‘He is not! What have you got against Cyclopes, anyway?’
Annabeth’s ears turned pink. I got the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me – something bad.
‘Just forget it,’ she said. ‘Now, the axle for this chariot –’
‘You’re treating him like he’s this horrible thing,’ I said. ‘He saved my life.’
Annabeth threw down her pencil and stood. ‘Then maybe you should design a chariot with him’.
‘Maybe I should.’
‘Fine!’
‘Fine!’
She stormed off and left me feeling even worse than before.
The next couple of days, I tried to keep my mind off my problems.
Silena Beauregard, one of the nicer girls from Aphrodite’s cabin, gave me my first riding lesson on a pegasus. She explained that there was only one immortal winged horse named Pegasus, who still wandered free somewhere in the skies, but over the aeons he’d sired a lot of children, none quite so fast or heroic, but all named after the first and greatest.
Being the son of the sea god, I never liked going into the air. My dad had this rivalry with Zeus, so I tried to stay out of the lord of the sky’s domain as much as possible. But riding a winged horse felt different. It didn’t make me nearly as nervous as being in an aeroplane. Maybe that was because my dad had created horses out of sea foam, so the pegasi were sort of … neutral territory. I could understand their thoughts. I wasn’t surprised when my pegasus went galloping over the treetops or chased a flock of seagulls into a cloud.
The problem was that Tyson wanted to ride the ‘chicken ponies’, too, but the pegasi got skittish whenever he approached. I told them telepathically that Tyson wouldn’t hurt them, but they didn’t seem to believe me. That made Tyson cry.
The only person at camp who had no problem with Tyson was Beckendorf from the Hephaestus cabin. The blacksmith god had always worked with Cyclopes in his forges, so Beckendorf took Tyson down to the armoury to teach him metalworking. He said he’d have Tyson crafting magic items like a master in no time.
After lunch, I worked out in the arena with Apollo’s cabin. Swordplay had always been my strength. People said I was better at it than any camper in the last hundred years, except maybe Luke. People always compared me to Luke.
I thrashed the Apollo guys easily. I should’ve been testing myself against the Ares and Athena cabins, since they had the best sword fighters, but I didn’t get along with Clarisse and her siblings, and after my argument with Annabeth, I just didn’t want to see her.
I went to archery class, even though I was terrible at it, and it wasn’t the same without Chiron teaching. In arts and crafts, I started a marble bust of Poseidon, but it started looking like Sylvester Stallone, so I ditched it. I scaled the climbing wall in full lava-and-earthquake mode. And in the evenings, I did border patrol. Even though Tantalus had insisted we forget trying to protect the camp, some of the campers had quietly kept it up, working out a schedule during our free times.
I sat at the top of Half-Blood Hill and watched the dryads come and go, singing to the dying pine tree. Satyrs brought their reed pipes and played nature magic songs, and for a while the pine needles seemed to get fuller. The flowers on the hill smelled a little sweeter and the grass looked greener. But as soon as the music stopped, the sickness crept back into the air. The whole hill seemed to be infected, dying from the poison that had sunk into the tree’s roots. The longer I sat there, the angrier I got.
Luke had done this. I remembered his sly smile, the dragon-claw scar across his face. He’d pretended to be my friend, and the whole time he’d been Kronos’s number-one servant.
I opened the palm of my hand. The scar Luke had given me last summer was fading, but I could still see it – a white asterisk-shaped wound where his pit scorpion had stung me.
I thought about what Luke had told me right before he’d tried to kill me: Goodbye, Percy. There is a new Golden Age coming. You won’t be part of it.
At night, I had more dreams of Grover. Sometimes, I just heard snatches of his voice. Once, I heard him say, It’s here. Another time, He likes sheep.
I thought about telling Annabeth about my dreams, but I would’ve felt stupid. I mean, He likes sheep? She would’ve thought I was crazy.
The night before the race, Tyson and I finished our chariot. It was wicked cool. Tyson had made the metal parts in the armoury’s forges. I’d sanded the wood and put the carriage together. It was blue and white, with wave designs on the sides and a trident painted on the front. After all that work, it seemed only fair that Tyson would ride shotgun with me, though I knew the horses wouldn’t like it, and Tyson’s extra weight would slow us down.
As we were turning in for bed, Tyson said, ‘You are mad?’
I realized I’d been scowling. ‘Nah. I’m not mad.’
He lay down in his bunk and was quiet in the dark. His body was way too long for his bed. When he pulled up the covers, his feet stuck out the bottom. ‘I am a monster.’
‘Don’t say that.’
I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the ceiling and felt like I was dying slowly, right along with Thalia’s tree.
‘It’s just … I never had a half-brother before.’ I tried to keep my voice from cracking. ‘It’s really different for me. And I’m worried about the camp. And another friend of mine, Grover … he might be in trouble. I keep feeling like I should be doing something to help, but I don’t know what.’
Tyson said nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘It’s not your fault. I’m mad at Poseidon. I feel like he’s trying to embarrass me, like he’s trying to compare us or something, and I don’t understand why.’
I heard a deep rumbling sound. Tyson was snoring.
I sighed. ‘Goodnight, big guy.’
And I closed my eyes, too.
* * *
In my dream, Grover was wearing a wedding dress.
It didn’t fit him very well. The gown was too long and the hem was caked with dried mud. The neckline kept falling off his shoulders. A tattered veil covered his face.
He was standing in a dank cave, lit only by torches. There was a cot in one corner and an old-fashioned loom in the other, a length of white cloth half woven on the frame. And he was staring right at me, like I was a TV programme he’d been waiting for. ‘Thank the gods!’ he yelped. ‘Can you hear me?’
My dream-self was slow to respond. I was still looking around, taking in the stalactite ceiling, the stench of sheep and goats, the growling and grumbling and bleating sounds that seemed to echo from behind a refrigerator-sized boulder, which was blocking the room’s only exit, as if there were a much larger cavern beyond it.
‘Percy?’ Grover said. ‘Please, I don’t have the strength to project any better. You have to hear me!’
