Perseus and the Monstrous Medusa Read online

  Contents

  Greetings, Mortal Readers

  1. In Search of Hairy Snakes

  2. Magic All Around

  3. What’s the Deal with Perseus?

  4. Three Teams

  5. One Eye, One Tooth

  6. Medusa

  7. The Monster’s Weakness

  8. The Face in the Aegis

  9. The Mysterious Horse

  10. Where Is Pythia?

  About Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams

  For our heroic readers:

  Tobey I., Kristen S., Zubin N., Ela N., Lily-Ann S., Megan D., Brenden S., Caitlin R., Hannah R., Tiffany W., Justin W., Christine D.-H., Khanya S., Sven S., Coen S., Keira J., Keny Y., Koko Y., Tait L., Tristan and Jake B., Mia and Alyssa T., the Andrade family, Raymond H., Kenzo S., Raven G., Patricia P., Nick R., Rebecca S., Katherine Q., Marilyn M., Kathy C., Valerie U., Angela L., Bibi L., Gabriella G., and you!

  —J. H. and S. W.

  Greetings, Mortal Readers,

  I am Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, in Greece. I have the power to see the future. Hear my prophecy:

  Ahead, I see dancers lurking. Wait—make that danger lurking. (The future can be blurry, especially when my eyeglasses are foggy.)

  Anyhoo, beware! Titan giants seek to rule all of Earth’s domains—oceans, mountains, forests, and the depths of the Underwear. Oops—make that Underworld. Led by King Cronus, they are out to destroy us all!

  Yet I foresee hope. A band of rightful rulers called Olympians will arise. Though their size and youth are no match for the Titans, they will be giant in heart, mind, and spirit. They await their leader—a very special boy. One who is destined to become king of the gods and ruler of the heavens.

  If he is brave enough.

  And if he and his friends work together as one. And if they can learn to use their new amazing flowers—um, amazing powers—in time to save the world!

  CHAPTER ONE

  In Search of Hairy Snakes

  Apollo strummed his lyre and sang as he and eleven other Olympians—six boys and six girls, all of them about ten years old—marched along the coastline of Greece:

  “The hairy snakes, the hairy snakes!

  We’ll find them soon, make no mistake.

  But will they have hair, cute and curly?

  Or hair that’s wild and whirly twirly?

  I wonder if it’s short and neat?

  Or if it hangs down to their feet?”

  Zeus, the black-haired, blue-eyed leader of the group, sighed in annoyance. Apollo had been singing about the Olympians’ current quest for the last two miles. “Will you please stop singing that song?” Zeus asked him.

  “Yeah, snakes don’t have long hair. Or feet,” Hera scoffed. She and Zeus’s two other sisters, Demeter and Hestia, were walking right behind Zeus, Apollo, and gray-eyed Athena. Zeus’s brothers, Hades and Poseidon, trooped side by side a little ways back of them.

  “Well, these snakes are probably Creatures of Chaos, so they might have feet,” said Apollo. “You don’t know.”

  Ares, who came next with the blond and beautiful Aphrodite, waved his spear. “I hope they’re giant, hairy jungle snakes! That would be a great fight!” The god of war’s red eyes shone at the thought.

  Zeus shuddered. In his humble opinion, there’d been far too much fighting during all their other quests. As leader of the Olympians, he felt it was his duty to help them avoid fights whenever possible. Unfortunately they didn’t always have that choice.

  “Let’s just hope they’re not poisonous snakes,” called out Artemis, who was Apollo’s twin sister. With a golden bow and a quiver of silver arrows slung across her back, she was marching alongside her brother.

  “I bet I could make a mechanical snake,” mused Hephaestus as he struggled to keep pace with the others. He’d crafted the cool silver cane that helped him walk. It was carved with wicked-looking skulls. He was a genius when it came to crafting mechanical metal machinery, tools, and creatures.

  “Can we please stop talking about snakes?” Zeus asked the group. “I know Pythia told us to find hairy ones. But she’s never exactly right when she sends us on a quest. For all we know, we could be looking for . . . fairy cakes instead of hairy snakes. Or something like that, anyway.”

  Ares frowned. “Fairy cakes? That wouldn’t be much of a fight.”

  “Well, I’m tired of fighting,” said Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. “I wish these quests were over and we could all go home.”

  “We’re Olympians!” cried Poseidon, whose eyes were as turquoise as the sea. “We have no home—not until we defeat King Cronus and the other Titans.” Titans were giants as tall as oak trees.

  “And the Cronies,” Ares added. Cronies were the army of half-giants who obeyed King Cronus. “We’ve got to defeat them, too!”

  It was from Pythia, the Oracle at Delphi—who could see the future but not always clearly—that the Olympians had learned their destiny. Which was to save Greece from evil Cronus and the cruel Titans. Then the Olympians would rule in King Cronus’s place. And it was also from Pythia that Zeus had found out he was destined to become the ruler of everyone. The number one guy in charge.

  At the moment, though, Zeus would gladly have let someone else take charge. And not just because he didn’t want another fight on his hands. No. He could handle another fight if he had to . . . as long as it didn’t involve snakes. Especially hairy, scary, and possibly poisonous ones. He had faced enemies as tall as mountains, but snakes? He shuddered.

  “Let me just say that when we are finally done with all our quests and have defeated our enemies, I plan to ban snakes!” Zeus declared.

  Aphrodite’s blue eyes went round. “I’ve never seen one. What do they look like?”

  “What, were you born yesterday?” Hera asked. Then she grinned. “Oh, right! You were.”

  She wasn’t just teasing. It was true. Pretty Aphrodite had risen from the ocean the day before on a mound of bubbles. There were still a lot of things she didn’t know about the world.

  “Snakes are like worms, only way bigger,” explained Hades. He was the ruler of the Underworld, a gloomy, smelly place belowground. “They have fangs that can bite you and sometimes poison you, and they slither along silently so you don’t know they’re coming.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Aphrodite, sounding blissfully unconcerned. Then she asked, “What’s a worm?”

  “Can we please talk about something else?” Zeus pleaded.

  “Ooh, Boltbrain is afraid of snakes,” Hera teased in a singsong voice.

  Usually Zeus could put up with her teasing, but not about this. “Just forget it!” He stomped ahead of the group and kept on marching. The path they were on wound along the top of a ridge. Down below, he could see ocean waves lapping against the sandy shore.

  Athena ran up to him. “Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about snakes right now, but I need to tell you something.”

  Zeus sighed. “What?”

  “Well, it’s about the aegis,” she said. She opened the front of her cloak to reveal the shiny, gold shield she wore over her chest. Decorated with gold studs, the aegis was a magical object. Hera had found it in a Titan’s house, and Pythia said it belonged to both Zeus and Athena.

  “You know that image that appears on the aegis sometimes? The one that turned the spiders into stone?” Athena asked.

  Zeus nodded. Sometimes the face of a terrifying woman with snakes on her head appeared on the shield. That image had recently scared off some spiders that had wanted to munch the Olympians for dinner.

  Zeus stopped walking as something dawned on him. “Hey! The woman on that shield! You think she could be real? You think her snakes a
re the ones Pythia meant us to find?” he asked Athena. The rest of the Olympians had caught up to Athena and him and were all listening now.

  Hephaestus leaned on his silver cane. “A real woman with live snake hair?” he snorted. “Who ever heard of that? It’s crazy!”

  “Well, I had never heard of metal beasts that were alive, either, until I met you,” Zeus told him. They’d found Hephaestus on an island, where he’d terrorized them with mechanical beasts such as a silver lion and a gold dog.

  “Those creatures were the result of my genius,” Hephaestus boasted. “But snake hair? That’s just not natural.”

  “Neither are men who hop around on one foot, or women with wings and beaks,” Hera pointed out. “But we’ve seen those before, too.”

  “I don’t think we’ll really know what we’re looking for until we find it,” Demeter said thoughtfully. “That’s how it always seems to work out.”

  Poseidon yawned, then called to Zeus. “Yo, Bro! It’s gonna be dark soon. Can we find a place to camp?”

  Zeus scanned the land up ahead. The path they were on forked in two directions. The right path hugged the coast, and the left one led to what looked like a large orchard. Before he could decide which way they should go, Hera stepped up beside him. “I’ll handle it!” she told him.

  She took a peacock feather—her magical object—from her pocket. “Feather, show us what’s ahead, so we can safely go to bed,” she chanted. The feather only obeyed her when she spoke in rhyme. At her command it flew off down the coastal path.

  “You know, technically, we don’t sleep in beds when we camp,” Apollo pointed out.

  “I know that,” Hera snapped. “But ‘bed’ rhymes with ‘ahead.’ And anyway, everyone knows that ‘going to bed’ means ‘going to sleep.’ ”

  “Hey, you’re the one who got all up in my face about snakes with feet,” Apollo reminded her. “If you’re going be picky about my rhymes, then I can be picky about yours.”

  Hera frowned in annoyance. Boys, she mouthed to Demeter and Hestia, and both girls giggled.

  Zeus just rolled his eyes. The Olympians were always bickering among themselves. But fortunately, when push came to shove, they always came together as a team.

  “My feather’s back!” Hera announced as it whooshed into her hand a few minutes later. When she gazed into the peacock feather’s colorful eye, a look of alarm spread across her face.

  “Cronies are coming!” she yelled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Magic All Around

  There! I see them!” cried Hades. Sure enough, two half-giant Cronies as big as apple trees came charging down the coastline toward them. Both of the muscled brutes held long spears. Sunlight gleamed off their metal helmets. They were scary dudes!

  “Prepare to die, Olympians!” the one with the spear yelled.

  “Yeah!” his buddy echoed, waving his club.

  Zeus’s hand instantly grabbed the dagger-sized lightning bolt that hung from his belt. When no one else had been able to, he had pulled the zigzag-shaped blade from a stone in Pythia’s temple in Delphi. Now it was his magical object, and it had never let him down.

  “Bolt, large!” Zeus commanded.

  The thunderbolt immediately grew until it was longer than Zeus was tall. When he pointed it at the two Cronies, it sparked with electric energy. “Blast ’em!” he yelled.

  Zap! A jagged charge of electricity hit the first Crony. “Ow!” yelped the half giant. Cartwheeling his arms, he fell backward. Thump! He slammed into the second Crony.

  “Watch it, blockhead!” yelled the second one, but it was too late. The force of the zap sent both Cronies toppling over. They rolled down the hilly coastline, tumbling head over behind, screaming at each other the whole way down.

  Splash! They landed in the ocean.

  “That ought to cool you off!” shouted Zeus.

  The other Olympians hollered and cheered. They’d all drawn their various weapons and magical objects too, but it turned out that only Zeus’s lightning bolt had been needed this time.

  “You’ll be sorry!” one of the Cronies promised.

  Ares laughed and shook his spear. “We’re not scared!”

  Poseidon raised his trident, a three-pronged spear that was his magical object. “Yeah, bring it on, you drips!”

  “The coast is clear now. And so is the orchard,” Hera said, gazing into her feather’s eye.

  “Let’s try the orchard,” said Hestia. “There’ll be fruit to eat.”

  “Okay, let’s get moving,” Zeus said. “Before any more Cronies show up!

  As they headed off, Athena grabbed a fallen tree branch with lots of leaves on it. She began sweeping the footprints they were leaving. “I’ll brush our tracks away as we walk, so our enemies can’t track us.”

  “Good idea,” Zeus said.

  Athena grinned. “They don’t call me the goddess of cleverness for nothing.”

  Zeus’s thunderbolt shrank to dagger size again, and he returned it to his belt. “Nice job, Bolt,” he said, giving it a pat. As they marched on, he grabbed his second magical object—the oval stone amulet that he wore on a cord around his neck. “Chip, find us a safe place to camp in the orchard up ahead.”

  Sparkling bubbles trailed behind Aphrodite as she skipped over to him just then.

  “Ooh, let me see your pretty magic rock!” she begged sweetly.

  Zeus held up the amulet so she could see it better. “Afety-sip is-thip ay-wip!” Chip said in its special language. A glowing green arrow appeared on the stone’s smooth surface.

  Aphrodite jumped back in surprise. “I’ve never seen a talking rock before!” she exclaimed.

  Hera rolled her eyes. “It just gave us directions in Chip Latin. You move the first letter of each word to the end of the word and add ‘ip.’ ”

  “Oh, I get it. So did Chip just say, ‘Skip the pasty ape’?” Aphrodite guessed.

  Zeus laughed. “No. It was ‘Safety this way.’ ”

  Now Ares ran up. He pushed his way between Aphrodite and Zeus. “Want to see what my magic object can do, Aphrodite? I call it the Spear of Fear. Because our enemies should fear it!”

  Competing for Aphrodite’s attention as well, Hephaestus thrust his cane between her and Ares. “My cane isn’t magic, but aren’t the skulls on it awesome? I crafted it myself,” he boasted.

  Aphrodite smiled at all three boys.

  Phwwwt! Something sliced through the air, right past their heads! It was a silver arrow. It whizzed onward and into the branches of an apple tree at the edge of the orchard. There, it shook several apples loose to the ground.

  “Can your rock, spear, or cane do that?” Artemis asked the boys who’d been fawning over Aphrodite. She grinned as her arrow flew back to her.

  Before Ares and Hephaestus could reply, Poseidon laughed. “How did you know I was getting hungry?” he asked her, running off to grab some apples.

  “We’re all hungry,” said Hera. She and some of the others grabbed apples to snack on too.

  Zeus looked down at Chip. “Almost there.” Twenty minutes later, a green X finally appeared on Chip. That meant they had reached a good camping spot.

  “Okay, this is it,” Zeus announced.

  They had stopped in an open area right in the middle of the huge orchard. A stream bubbled through the clearing, which was surrounded by apple, orange, and fig trees.

  “Good job, Chip!” said Demeter, looking around at the trees. “There’s plenty to eat here.”

  “Why does it matter?” Hephaestus asked her. “With those magic seeds you carry in your pouch, you could grow us stuff to eat anytime, right?”

  “I don’t have many seeds,” Demeter explained. “So I use them only when necessary.”

  Poseidon ran toward the stream. “I see fish jumping in there!” he shouted. “I’m going to catch us some dinner!” His magical trident could cause tidal waves and make water bubble up where there had been none before. It was also great at spearing
fish.

  “Hey, I can spear fish too!” cried Ares, joining him.

  Hestia began to collect branches. “I’ll get a fire going,” she said. Her magical object, a torch, burned with an eternal flame.

  “And I’ll loosen some more fruit from these trees,” Artemis offered, stringing her bow again.

  Hades looked down at the magic helmet he carried—the Helm of Darkness. Whenever he put it on, he became invisible. “I’d use my magic helmet to help with dinner,” he said, “but I don’t see how turning invisible would be useful.”

  “Maybe you could sneak up on the fish and grab them?” Hera joked.

  Hades grinned. “That’s not such a bad idea. I bet it would work! Hey, Fishboy and Spearhead, wait for me!” He ran off to join Poseidon and Ares.

  Zeus smiled to see everyone using their magical objects and working together as a team again. It had made him so happy when he had first discovered that he had brothers and sisters. Sure, it was weird that their father was King Cronus and their mom was the not-mean queen Rhea. But Zeus had grown up all alone, raised by some bees and a goat. So having a family now felt great—even if it was kind of complicated.

  When Poseidon, Ares, and Hades came back to the camp with fish, Zeus took his thunderbolt from his belt again. Leaving Bolt small, he aimed it at one of the three big fish stuck on the points of Poseidon’s trident.

  “Fry some fish, Bolt!” Zeus commanded.

  Zap! Soon the three tasty-smelling fish were sizzling. Next Bolt flew to fry the fish Ares had speared and those Hades had caught in his hands when he’d gone invisible. Zap! Zap! Mission accomplished, Bolt zoomed back to Zeus.

  Zeus smiled down at his magical object as he slipped it back into his belt. “What would I do without you, Bolt?”

  Meanwhile Hephaestus and Apollo sat on the ground and watched Hestia start a campfire. “So, I guess we’re the only two guys here without magical objects, right?” Hephaestus asked Apollo. “I mean, my cane is pretty cool, but it can’t actually do magic.”