Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes

  Aphrodite glanced up. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I mean sure, Pasiphaë is beautiful,’ Poseidon said. ‘But people are always talking about how lovely she is compared to you. And the queen never discourages them. Can you believe that?’

  Aphrodite closed her magazine. Her eyes glowed a dangerous shade of pink. ‘People are comparing this mortal queen to me? She allows it?’

  ‘Yeah! And when was the last time Pasiphaë made a sacrifice at your temple, or called you the best goddess?’

  Aphrodite ran through her mental list of sacrifices and prayers. She kept close track of which mortals paid her the proper respect. Pasiphaë’s name wasn’t anywhere in the top twenty.

  ‘That ungrateful witch,’ Aphrodite said.

  To be fair, Pasiphaë really was a witch. She loved sorcery and potions. She was even more grasping and arrogant than her husband – basically not a nice person at all – but to blame her for not being an Aphrodite fangirl … well, that’s like blaming me for not being a frequent flyer. Zeus and me – we try to stay out of each other’s territory.

  Anyway, Poseidon saw an opportunity for revenge, and he took it. I can’t defend my dad’s choice. Even the best gods can be vicious if you get on their bad side.

  ‘You should totally punish her,’ Poseidon suggested. ‘Make the queen and king a laughing stock for failing to honour me … I mean, failing to honour you.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ Aphrodite asked.

  Poseidon’s eyes gleamed brighter than his Hawaiian shirt. ‘Perhaps the queen should fall in love. She should have the most disgusting, embarrassing love affair of all time.’

  ‘With David Hasselhoff?’

  ‘Worse!’

  ‘Charlie Sheen?’

  ‘Worse! Minos’s royal symbol is a bull, right? In his pens, he keeps a pure white bull that he loves more than anything in the world. What if the queen fell in love with that bull, too … ?’

  Even for Aphrodite, the idea took a moment to sink in. ‘Oh, gods … Oh, you don’t mean … Oh, that’s sick!’

  Poseidon grinned. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Aphrodite took some convincing. She went to the little goddesses’ room, threw up, fixed her face and came back out. ‘Very well,’ she decided. ‘This is an appropriate punishment for a queen who has never honoured me.’

  ‘Or me,’ said Poseidon.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Aphrodite.

  The goddess went to work with her voodoo love magic. The next day, down on Crete, Pasiphaë was walking past the royal bull pens as quickly as possible to avoid the smell when she happened to glance at the king’s prize white bull.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  It was true love.

  Okay, folks. At this point, feel free to put down the book and run around in circles screaming ‘EEEEWWWWW!’ That’s pretty much what I did the first time I heard this story. Greek myths have a lot of gross stuff in them, but this right here is a major league retch-fest.

  The thing is, Pasiphaë had done nothing to deserve it. Sure, she was an awful person who dabbled in dark sorcery, but we all have our faults! She wasn’t the one who had failed to sacrifice the bull. She hadn’t insulted Aphrodite.

  It’s kind of like the Fates were saying, Okay, Minos, you did something bad? Well, see how you like it when we punish THIS RANDOM PERSON OVER HERE!

  Pasiphaë tried to shake her feelings. She knew they were wrong and disgusting. But she couldn’t. She went back to her room and sat on her bed all day, reading books about bulls, drawing pictures of the bull until she ran out of white crayons, writing the bull’s name on all her notebooks: BULL.

  She struggled for weeks, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t really in love with a fine specimen of livestock, but still she walked around in a daze, humming ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ and ‘Milk Cow Blues’.

  She tried to cure herself with spells and potions. Nothing worked.

  Then, in desperation, she tried sorcery to make the bull like her. She found excuses to walk past the bull pen in her best dress with her hair done up nice. She muttered incantations. She poured love potions into the bull’s trough. Nada.

  The bull had absolutely no interest. To him, Pasiphaë was just another stupid human who wasn’t bringing him fresh hay or waving a red flag in his face or doing anything interesting.

  Finally, Pasiphaë sought out the help of the only person she considered even smarter than herself – Daedalus.

  The inventor was in his workshop, looking over architectural drawings for the Knossos Football Stadium and Convention Centre, when the queen came in. She explained her problem and what she wanted him to do about it.

  Daedalus glanced around, wondering if he was being secretly filmed for a reality show. ‘So … Wait. You want me to do what, now?’

  Pasiphae winced. Explaining it once had been embarrassing enough. ‘I need to make the bull notice me. I know he’ll love me back if I can just convince him –’

  ‘He’s a bull.’

  ‘Yes!’ the queen snapped. ‘So I need him to think I’m a cow!’

  Daedalus tried to keep his expression neutral. ‘Um …’

  ‘I’m serious! Use your mechanical super-duper know-how to make me a fake-cow suit. I’ll slip inside, introduce myself to the bull, flirt a little, ask him where he’s from, that sort of thing. I’m sure he’ll fall in love with me!’

  ‘Um –’

  ‘It has to be an attractive fake-cow suit.’

  ‘Your Majesty, I don’t think I can –’

  ‘Of course you can! You’re a genius! What are we paying you for?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure your husband isn’t paying me for this.’

  Pasiphaë sighed. ‘Let me break it down for you. If you breathe a word of this to Minos, I will deny it. You’ll be executed for spreading lies about the queen. If you refuse to help me, I’ll tell Minos you made a pass at me. You’ll be executed for that. The only way to avoid being executed is to help me.’

  A line of sweat trickled down Daedalus’s neck. ‘I – I’m just saying … it isn’t right.’

  ‘You pushed your nephew off the Acropolis! What do you know about right and wrong?’

  Daedalus really wished people would stop bringing that up. One little murder and they never let you forget it.

  He didn’t want to help the queen. A mechanical cow suit so she could chat up a bull? Even Daedalus had limits. But he also had his career and his family to think about. Since arriving on Crete, he’d got married. He now had a little boy named Icarus. Getting executed would make it difficult for Daedalus to attend his son’s kindergarten back-to-school night. The inventor decided he had no choice. He began working on the most attractive fake-cow costume ever built by man.

  As soon as the mechanical disguise was done, the queen slipped inside. Daedalus bribed the guards so they wouldn’t notice anything strange about the inventor wheeling a fake cow from his workshop to the royal bull pen.

  That night, the bull finally noticed Pasiphaë. This is a good time for all of us to put down the book again, run around in circles screaming ‘Ewww!’ and wash our eyes out with Optrex.

  How did Aphrodite and Poseidon feel when their plan worked?

  I hope they weren’t sitting around Mount Olympus, high-fiving each other and saying, ‘We did it!’ I prefer to think they were staring in horror at the scene down in Crete and saying, ‘Oh, gods … what have we done?’

  Nine months later, a very pregnant Queen Pasiphaë was about to give birth.

  King Minos couldn’t wait! He was hoping for a son. He’d even picked out a name: Asterion, in honour of his stepfather, the former king. The people of Crete would love that!

  Minor hitch in the plan: the boy was born a monster.

  From the shoulders down, he was human. From the shoulders up, he had coarse fur, neck tendons like steel cables and the head of a bull. His horns started growing right away, which made it impossible to carry him around in a baby sling without getting gored
.

  The king wasn’t as bright as Daedalus, but he figured out pretty quickly that the kid couldn’t be his. The royal couple argued. They threw things. They screamed and yelled and chased off the servants, all of which must have been pretty upsetting for the poor baby.

  No one was more horrified than Pasiphaë. Aphrodite’s love curse had broken as soon as the baby was born. The queen was disgusted with herself, the gods and especially the baby. She confessed what had happened, but she couldn’t explain her actions. How could she? Anyway, the damage was done. This wasn’t something the royal couple could work through in marriage counselling.

  Pasiphaë moved to a separate apartment in the palace. She lived under house arrest for the rest of her life. Minos was tempted to toss the monster baby into the sea, but something held him back – maybe the old taboo against killing your family, or maybe he had an inkling that the child was a punishment for him: a sick, twisted message from Poseidon. If so, killing the kid would only make the gods angrier.

  Minos tried to hush up the details of the birth, but it was too late. Nursemaids, midwives and servants had all seen the baby. Nothing travels faster than bad news – especially when it happens to someone nobody likes.

  The people of Crete were now sure that their king wasn’t fit to rule. The mutant child was clearly a curse from the gods. The kid’s name, Asterion, was an insult to the old king’s memory, so the people didn’t call him that. Everybody called the boy the Minotaur – the bull of Minos.

  Minos turned bitter. He blamed everyone else – the gods, his wife, the bull, the ungrateful people of Crete. He couldn’t punish them all. His popularity ratings were low enough as it was. But there was one person he could punish – someone who’d been involved in the plot and who made a perfect punching bag. He had Daedalus dragged before him in chains.

  ‘You,’ snarled the king. ‘I gave you a second chance. I gave you a job, a workshop, R&D funding. And this is how you repay me? You have destroyed my reputation, inventor! Unless you can invent something that will make this right, I’ll kill you slowly and painfully! Then I’ll find a way to resurrect you and I’ll kill you again!’

  Daedalus was used to coming up with brilliant ideas. Normally he didn’t have to do so while he was chained up and surrounded by guards with pointy swords, but he was highly motivated to think fast.

  ‘We’ll turn it into a positive!’ he yelped.

  Minos’s stare was as cold as dry ice. ‘My wife fell in love with a bull. She gave birth to a monster. You want to turn that into a positive?’

  ‘Yes!’ Daedalus said. ‘We’ll use that! Look, your people will never love you. That’s obvious.’

  ‘You’re not making this better.’

  ‘But we can make them fear you! Your enemies will tremble when they hear your name. Your own subjects will never dare cross you!’

  The king’s eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Rumours about the Minotaur have already started to spread.’

  ‘His name is Asterion.’

  ‘No, sire! We embrace his monstrousness. We call him the Minotaur. We never show him to anyone. We let imaginations run wild. As bad as he is, we encourage people to think he’s even worse. As he grows, we’ll keep him locked away in the dungeons and feed him … I don’t know, spoiled meat and Tabasco sauce – something to make him really angry. We’ll throw prisoners in his cell from time to time and let the Minotaur practise killing them.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Minos. ‘And I thought I was cruel. Keep talking.’

  ‘Every time the Minotaur kills a prisoner, we’ll give him a piece of candy. He’ll learn to be a vicious, murderous beast! Once he’s fully grown …’ Daedalus got a light in his eyes that made even the king nervous.

  ‘What?’ Minos asked. ‘What happens when he’s grown?’

  ‘By then, I’ll be done building the Minotaur’s new home. It’ll be a prison like no other – a huge maze right behind the palace. The top will be open to the sky, but the walls will be tall and impossible to climb. The corridors will shift and turn. The whole place will be full of traps. And at the centre … that’s where the Minotaur will live.’

  Minos got a chill just imagining it. ‘So … how would we feed him?’

  Daedalus smiled. He was really getting into the whole evil genius thing now. ‘Whenever you have someone you want to punish, you push them into the maze. You promise that if they can find their way out, you’ll let them live, but I’ll make sure no one can ever locate an exit. Eventually they’ll get lost. They’ll die of thirst or hunger … or the Minotaur will find them and eat them. Their screams will echo from the maze across the entire city. The Minotaur will become everyone’s worst nightmare. No one will ever make fun of you again.’

  Minos tapped his chin. ‘I like your plan. Build this maze. We will call it … the Funhouse!’

  ‘Erm, I was thinking something more mysterious and terrifying,’ Daedalus said. ‘Perhaps the Labyrinth?’

  ‘Fine. Whatever. Now get to work before I change my mind and kill you!’

  Daedalus put in more hours on the Labyrinth than he had on any other invention – more than the Daedalus Chisel™, the Daedalus Wax Tablet™, or even the Daedalus Food Processor™ that made mounds and mounds of julienned fries. He worked so hard that he neglected his family. His wife left him. His son Icarus grew up barely knowing his father.

  For fifteen years Daedalus laboured, creating what looked like a trench-warfare playground in the backyard of the palace. Fortunately, it was a really big backyard. If you put the Mall of America, Walt Disney World and twenty football stadiums together, they would have all fitted inside the Labyrinth with room to spare.

  Thirty-foot-tall brick walls zigzagged across the landscape. Corridors narrowed and widened, looping in curlicues, crossing and splitting. Some submerged underground and became tunnels. Others dead-ended or opened into gardens where every plant was poisonous. The walls shifted. Trapdoors and pits riddled the floors.

  If you were sentenced to the Labyrinth, the guards would shove you inside. The entrance would vanish like it had never been there. The maze was so disorientating that as soon as you took three steps you’d be lost. The fact that you could see the sky just made it feel more claustrophobic. It was almost like the Labyrinth was alive – growing and changing and trying to kill you.

  Believe me on this. I’ve been inside. It’s not one of those places where you think, When I grow up, I’m totally taking my kids here every summer!

  Daedalus completed his work just in time. The Minotaur was getting so strong that no cell in the dungeon could hold him. He had entered his teen years and, like a lot of us teens (myself excluded, of course), he could be sulky and angry and destructive. Unlike most teens, the Minotaur had sharp horns, blood-red eyes and fists the size of battering rams. Since he was a little kid, he’d been whipped, beaten and trained to kill. For a piece of candy, he would gladly tear a human apart with his bare hands.

  Somehow, Minos managed to coax the Minotaur into his new home at the centre of Labyrinth – maybe by leaving a trail of Skittles. Once there, the Minotaur was ready to play his part as the most fearsome monster ever. At night he bellowed at the moon, and the sound echoed through the streets of Knossos.

  Minos began throwing prisoners into the maze. Sure enough, they never came back. Either they got lost and died of thirst (if they were lucky), or they met the Minotaur, in which case their dying screams provided a lovely soundtrack for life in the big city.

  The crime rate in Knossos went down ninety-seven percent. So did King Minos’s popularity, but everyone was too scared of him and his monstrous son to say anything. Daedalus’s plan had worked. He’d designed the most complicated, dangerous maze in human history. He’d turned Minos’s disgrace into a source of power and fear.

  For his reward, he was granted life in prison. Yippee! Minos locked Daedalus in his own Labyrinth, in a lovely suite of cells with a fully stocked workshop so he could keep making brilliant things for
the king. The guards checked on him daily, using magical thread to find their way in and out of the maze, and made sure Daedalus wasn’t up to anything funny.

  To encourage the old man’s cooperation, Minos kept Icarus a captive in the palace. Icarus was only allowed to visit his father every other Tuesday, but those visits were the highlight of Daedalus’s miserable new life.

  He wished he’d never heard of Crete or Minos or Pasiphaë. He never wanted to see another bull as long as he lived. Every night he had to listen to the Minotaur mooing and banging around next door. The Labyrinth walls rumbled and groaned as they shifted, making it impossible for the old man to sleep.

  Being a genius inventor and all, Daedalus spent most of his time devising escape plans. Getting through the maze itself was no problem. Daedalus could navigate it easily. But the exit was locked and heavily guarded. Minos’s army patrolled the perimeter 24/7. Even if Daedalus could somehow manage to slip out unnoticed, Minos controlled all the ships in the harbour. Daedalus would be arrested before he could ever board one.

  To make matters worse, his son was the king’s prisoner. If Daedalus fled, Icarus would be executed.

  Daedalus needed a way to get off the island with his son – a way that didn’t involve land or sea. The inventor began working on his greatest bad idea ever.

  Daedalus’s timeline got pushed up when the Labyrinth suffered its first jailbreak. A guy named Theseus pulled it off with a little inside help, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

  For now, let’s just say it put Minos in a seriously bad mood. And when Minos got in a bad mood he tended to take it out on his favourite punching bag: Daedalus. The inventor figured he’d outlived his usefulness. His days were numbered. He sped up work on his amazing terrible idea.

  He told no one about his plans except his son.

  Icarus had grown into a sweet, handsome young man, but he was no inventor. He was no Perdix. Daedalus liked it that way. Icarus worshipped his dad and trusted him completely, so, when Daedalus told him they were breaking out of the Labyrinth together, Icarus did a happy dance.

  ‘Awesome!’ Icarus said. ‘Are you building a bulldozer?’