Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes

  While we’re talking about dead people I’ve encountered, I guess I’d better tackle another difficult subject.

  I gotta take a deep breath. This guy brings up some painful memories.

  Okay. I can do this. Let’s talk about Daedalus, the greatest inventor of all time.

  Daedalus Invents Pretty Much Everything Else

  I have trouble writing about this guy.

  First off, my own experience with him doesn’t jibe with the old stories. Of course, I wasn’t there in Ancient Greece. Some of the stuff I know personally comes from dreams, which aren’t always reliable. I’ll do my best to tell you what Daedalus was like back in the day, but if that seems to contradict what you’ve read in my adventures that’s because it does!

  Secondly, I have a hard time getting into this guy’s head because – and I know this will come as a shock to you – I have never been a genius.

  Gasp! Percy, we thought you had an IQ of a billion!

  Yeah, sorry to burst your bubble. Understanding a super-Einstein type like Daedalus isn’t easy for me. I have enough trouble comprehending my girlfriend, and she’s no slouch in the brainiac department.

  Finally, well … Daedalus’s life was just so weird.

  I guess that’s no surprise. The dude was descended from a handkerchief.

  Maybe we should start with that. See, his great-grandfather Erikthonius was magically born from a rag Athena used to wipe Hephaestus’s godly body fluid off her leg when Hephaestus tried to get too friendly. (For more info, see: The Olympians: Completely Disgusting Stories. Or, you know, that Greek Gods book I wrote.)

  Since you can’t have a better royal title than King Handkerchief, Erikthonius grew up to be the king of Athens. His offspring were demigod descendants of Athena and Hephaestus – the two most ingenious Olympians.

  Daedalus himself was never in line to be king, but he made his Olympian great-great-grandparents proud. He quickly got a reputation for being able to build or repair just about anything.

  Having trouble with your chariot’s suspension? Daedalus can fix that.

  Did your hard drive crash? Call 1-800-555-DAEDALUS.

  You want to build a mansion with a revolving roof deck, an infinity pool and a state-of-the-art security system featuring boiling oil and mechanical crossbows? Piece of cake for the D-Man.

  Soon Daedalus was the most famous man in Athens. His repair shop had a five-year waiting list for new clients. He designed and built all the best houses and temples and shopping centres. He sculpted statues so lifelike they would walk off their pedestals, blend in with the humans and become productive members of society.

  Daedalus invented so many new technologies; every autumn the media went crazy when he presented his latest version of the Daedalus Chisel™, the Daedalus Wax Tablet™ and of course the Daedalus Spear™ with BronzeTip technology (patent pending).

  The guy was a straight-up genius. But being a genius is hard work.

  ‘I’m simply too popular,’ Daedalus said to himself. ‘I’m so busy fixing hard drives and inventing spectacular things I don’t have any me time. I should train an apprentice to do some of the grunt work for me!’

  It so happened that his sister had a son named Perdix. With a name like that, you know he must’ve got teased pretty bad on the playground, but this kid was smart. He had Athena’s intelligence and Hephaestus’s crafting skill. He was a real chip off the old hankie.

  Anyway, Daedalus hired his nephew. At first Daedalus was delighted. Perdix could handle the most complicated repairs. He could look at a blueprint once and have it memorized. He even thought up some modifications for the Daedalus Spear™ 2.0, like the no-slip shaft and the customizable point that came in Sharp, Extra Sharp and Super Sharp. He was happy to give Daedalus the credit. Still, people started whispering, ‘That young kid, Perdix – he’s almost as smart as his uncle!’

  A few months later, Perdix invented a contraption called the pottery wheel. Instead of making your pots by hand, which took forever and resulted in stupid lumpy pots, you could fashion clay on a whirling surface and make nice-looking bowls in just minutes.

  People started saying, ‘That kid, Perdix – he’s even smarter than Daedalus!’

  Clients began asking for Perdix by name. They wanted him to design their mansion’s infinity pool. They wanted him to retrieve the data from their crashed hard drives. Glory and fame started slipping away from Daedalus.

  One day Daedalus was at the top of the Acropolis – the huge clifftop fortress in the centre of Athens – checking the site of a new temple he had designed, when Perdix ran up with a big leather pouch slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Uncle!’ Perdix grinned. ‘You have to see my new invention!’

  Daedalus clenched his fists. At next week’s press conference, he was set to announce the Daedalus Hammer™ and revolutionize the pounding of nails. He didn’t need his upstart nephew stealing the spotlight with some annoyingly cool breakthrough.

  ‘What is it now, Perdix?’ he asked. ‘Please tell me this isn’t more nonsense about bigger displays for my wax tablets.’

  ‘No, Uncle. Look!’ From his leather pouch, Perdix pulled the jawbone of a small animal, with a row of sharp teeth still intact. ‘It’s from a snake!’

  Daedalus scowled. ‘That isn’t an invention.’

  ‘No, Uncle! I was playing around with it, running the teeth across a piece of wood, and I noticed they cut the surface. So I made this!’

  Perdix took out a wide metal blade fixed to a wooden handle. One side of the blade was serrated like a row of teeth. ‘I call it a saw!’

  Daedalus felt like he’d been smacked between the eyes with a Daedalus Hammer™. He immediately realized the potential of Perdix’s invention. Cutting boards with a saw instead of an axe would be easier, faster and more accurate. It would change the lumber industry forever! And, seriously, who hasn’t dreamed of fame and riches in the lumber industry?

  If the saw ever became a thing, Perdix would become famous. Daedalus would be forgotten. Daedalus couldn’t allow this young whippersnapper to eclipse his reputation.

  ‘Not bad.’ Daedalus forced a smile. ‘We’ll run some tests when we get back to the workshop. First, I want your opinion on this section of the cliff. I’m afraid it’s not stable enough to support my new temple.’

  ‘Sure, Uncle!’ Perdix trotted over to the edge of the parapets. ‘Where?’

  ‘About halfway down. Just lean over a bit and you’ll see it. Here, let me hold your saw.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Perdix leaned over. ‘I don’t see –’

  Daedalus pushed the boy off the Acropolis.

  The exact details of how it happened … well, that depends on which story you believe.

  Some say Perdix didn’t actually die. As the kid fell, Athena took pity on him and turned him into a partridge. That’s why perdix means partridge in Ancient Greek. Definitely the goddess didn’t appreciate Daedalus murdering his nephew just because the boy had skills. Athena was all about cultivating new talent. And pushing smart kids off cliffs would lower the city’s test-score averages. From there on out, she made sure Daedalus’s life was cursed. No more big press conferences. No more media frenzy.

  But, if Athena did grant Perdix new life as a bird, how do you explain the big mess where the kid hit the bottom of Acropolis Hill?

  Daedalus saw it happen. He should have just walked away and feigned ignorance. What? Perdix fell? You’re kidding! That kid always was kind of clumsy.

  Guilt got the better of him.

  He climbed down the cliff and wept over Perdix’s body. He wrapped the remains in a tarp and dragged his poor nephew to the edge of town. He tried to dig a grave, but the ground was too rocky. I guess he hadn’t invented the Daedalus Shovel yet.

  A few locals spotted him. Before Daedalus could get away, a crowd gathered.

  ‘What are you burying?’ asked one guy.

  Daedalus was sweating like a marathon
runner. ‘Oh, uh … it’s a snake.’

  The guy looked at the big wrapped-up lump. He nudged it with his foot and Perdix’s right hand flopped out.

  ‘I’m pretty sure snakes don’t have hands,’ the guy said.

  Daedalus broke down in tears and confessed what he’d done.

  The crowd almost lynched him right then and there. You can’t blame them for being angry. Half of them had appointments with Perdix to fix their chariots the next week.

  The crowd constrained themselves. They made a citizen’s arrest and hauled Daedalus before the city judges.

  His trial was the lead story on the Athenian News Network for weeks. His sister, Perdix’s mom, argued for the death penalty. The thing was, Daedalus had done a lot of favours for wealthy citizens over the years. He’d built important buildings and patented many helpful inventions. The judges commuted his death sentence to permanent exile.

  Daedalus left Athens forever. Everyone figured he’d go off and die in a cave somewhere.

  But nope. For the murder he’d committed, Athena meant for Daedalus to live a long and tortured life. The inventor’s punishment was just beginning.

  Daedalus moved to the island of Crete, which happened to be Athens’s biggest rival at the time. King Minos of Crete had the most powerful navy in the Mediterranean. He was always harassing Athenian ships and disrupting their trade.

  You can imagine how the Athenians felt when they learned that their top inventor and hard-drive repairman was now working for King Minos. It’d be kind of like if all of America’s best products were suddenly made in China.

  Oh, wait …

  Anyway, Daedalus arrived at Minos’s palace for his job interview, and Minos was like, ‘Why did you leave your previous position?’

  ‘I was convicted of murder,’ Daedalus said. ‘I pushed my nephew off the Acropolis.’

  Minos stroked his beard. ‘So … it wasn’t about the quality of your work?’

  ‘No. I am as clever and skillful as ever. I just murdered someone.’

  ‘Well, then, I see no problem,’ Minos said. ‘You’re hired!’

  Minos gave him tons of money. He set Daedalus up in a cutting-edge workshop in the capital city of Knossos. Soon Daedalus’s reputation was back, bigger and better than ever. He cranked out dozens of new inventions and built all the best temples and mansions in the kingdom.

  He lived happily ever after for about six minutes.

  The problem was, King Minos had daddy issues. He was the son of Zeus, which sounds like a good thing, but it didn’t help him much as the king of Crete.

  Long story short: the relationship between Zeus and Minos’s mom, Europa, had started in a weird way. Zeus turned into a bull, coaxed Europa onto his back and swam away with her, carrying her across the sea to Crete. Zeus and Europa spent enough time together to have three kids. Minos was the oldest. But eventually Zeus got tired of his mortal girlfriend, the way gods always do, and he went back to Mount Olympus.

  Europa married the king of Crete, a dude named Asterion. That worked out okay for a while. Asterion really loved Europa. They never had any kids of their own, so the king adopted the three little Zeus Juniors.

  When Asterion died, Minos became the king. A lot of the locals grumbled about that. Minos was adopted. His real dad was supposedly Zeus, but they’d heard the same claim from plenty of others before. Every time some unwed girl in the city got pregnant, she was like, ‘Oh, um, yeah. It was totally Zeus!’ Minos’s mom wasn’t even from Crete. She’d illegally immigrated on a bull. Why should Minos be king?

  Minos took this personally. He released his birth certificate showing he’d been born on Crete and everything, but the people didn’t care.

  He married a local princess, Pasiphaë, who was the daughter of the sun god Helios. Together, they had a whole mess of kids, including a smart, beautiful daughter named Ariadne. You would figure that having a son of Zeus for your king and a daughter of Helios for your queen would be good enough, but noooooo. Not for the Cretans. They were still like, Minos is a foreigner. His dad was a bull. I think Minos is secretly working for the cattle!

  Minos decided he needed to do a better job of marketing his brand. People wanted to talk about his parentage? Okay! He was the son of Zeus and proud of it! Minos adopted the bull as his royal symbol. He had bulls painted on his banners. He had Daedalus design a giant mosaic bull for the throne-room floor and engrave golden bull heads on his throne’s armrests. He got bull-patterned silverware, bull topiaries for the garden, even bull-patterned boxer shorts and fuzzy slippers shaped like cute little bull faces. Everybody who came to the palace on Wednesdays got a free bull bobblehead as a door prize.

  Somehow the slippers and bobbleheads didn’t convince his subjects of Minos’s divine right to be king. They kept grumbling and not paying their taxes and whatnot.

  Finally Minos decided he needed a big demonstration of his royal cred – something that would wow the Cretans and settle the matter once and for all. He called in Daedalus, since the inventor was the smartest guy in the kingdom.

  ‘I recommend special effects,’ Daedalus said. ‘Flash powder. Smoke bombs. I could build a huge talking robot to carry you around town and announce to everyone how awesome you are.’

  Minos frowned. ‘No. I need a sign from the gods.’

  ‘I can fake that!’ Daedalus said. ‘We’ll use mirrors, maybe some guys flying around on invisible wires.’

  ‘No!’ Minos snapped. ‘It must not be faked. It must be real.’

  Daedalus scratched his head. ‘You mean like … actually praying to the gods, in public, and hoping they send you a sign? I dunno, boss. Sounds risky.’

  The king was adamant. He had a big platform constructed down by the docks. He called together the entire city population, then raised his arms to the crowd and shouted, ‘Some of you doubt that I am your rightful king! I will prove that the gods support me! I will ask them to give me a sign!’

  In the audience, somebody made a raspberry sound. ‘That’s no proof! You’ll just ask your daddy for a favour.’

  Minos blushed. ‘No!’ Actually, he had been planning to ask Zeus for a bolt of lightning, but now that plan was ruined.

  ‘I will, um, pray to a totally different god!’ He gazed out at the harbour and got an idea. ‘Crete has the world’s greatest navy, right? I will ask Poseidon, lord of the seas, to grant me his blessing!’

  Please, Poseidon, Minos prayed silently. I know we haven’t talked much, but help me out here. I’ll pay you back. Maybe you could make an animal miraculously pop out of the sea. I promise, as soon as this show is over, whatever animal you send, I will sacrifice it to you.

  Down at the bottom of the sea, Poseidon heard his prayer. He didn’t really care about Minos one way or the other, but he liked sacrifices. He also liked people praying to him, and he never passed up an opportunity to look awesome in front of a major naval power.

  ‘Hmm,’ Poseidon said to himself. ‘Minos wants an animal. He likes bulls. I like bulls being sacrificed to me. Hey, I know! I’ll send him a bull!’

  The harbour churned with froth. Boats pitched at their moorings. A forty-foot wave rose up from nowhere, and riding the crest was a massive white bull. He landed on the docks, all cool and regal-looking, his head held high, his white horns gleaming.

  ‘Ooohh! Ahhhhhh!’ said the crowd, because it wasn’t every day a bull surfed a gnarly peak into the harbour.

  The Cretans turned to Minos and started cheering. The king bowed and thanked them and sent everybody home with commemorative bull-shaped coffee mugs.

  The king’s men put a rope around the bull’s neck and led him to the royal bull pen. Later that evening, Minos and Daedalus went to inspect the animal, which was even more magnificent up close – at least twice as big and strong as any other bull in the royal herd.

  ‘Wow,’ Minos said. ‘That’s some bull! I think I’ll keep him for breeding.’

  Daedalus chewed his thumbnail. ‘Um, are you sure, Your Maje
sty? If you promised to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon … well, keeping him wouldn’t be the right thing to do, would it?’

  The king snorted. ‘You pushed your own nephew off the Acropolis. What do you know about right and wrong?’

  Daedalus got a really bad feeling in his gut. Special effects he could control. The Olympian gods … well, even he hadn’t invented a good machine for predicting how they would react. He tried to convince the king to sacrifice the white bull, but Minos wouldn’t listen.

  ‘You worry too much,’ the king told him. ‘I’ll sacrifice one of my other bulls to Poseidon. He won’t care! He probably won’t even notice the difference!’

  Poseidon cared. He noticed the difference.

  When he realized Minos was keeping the beautiful white bull instead of sacrificing it like he had promised, Poseidon blew up like a pufferfish.

  ‘Dude! Making that bull took me like five seconds of hard work! Okay, Minos. You think you’re so great? You love bulls so much? You’ll regret it. I’ll make sure you never want to see another bull in your entire life!’

  Poseidon could have punished Crete directly. He could’ve destroyed Knossos with an earthquake or wiped out the entire Cretan fleet with a tidal wave, but that would’ve only made the people of the island mad at him. Poseidon wanted to humiliate the royal family and make everyone disgusted with Minos and Pasiphaë, but he didn’t want any blowback. He wanted the people of Crete to keep praying and sacrificing at his temple.

  ‘I need a sneaky way to get revenge,’ Poseidon decided. ‘Let’s see … who specializes in sneaky and embarrassing?’

  Poseidon went to see the love goddess, Aphrodite, who was hanging out in her day spa on Mount Olympus.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ Poseidon told her. ‘You know King Minos of Crete?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Aphrodite kept reading her fashion magazine. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘He dissed me! He promised to sacrifice a bull, and he didn’t do it!’

  ‘Mm-hmm?’ Aphrodite scanned the ads for Givenchy bags.

  ‘Also,’ Poseidon said, ‘that queen of his, Pasiphaë – you should’ve heard what she said about you.’