Athena the Proud Page 5

  “Oh, yeah, that’s too bad,” Athena said, nodding. She didn’t tell him not to worry. That his maze was so easy that no one could ever get lost in here, except maybe a two-year-old. Instead she said, “Well, I bet your Minotaur will send shivers down everyone’s spines when they see it tomorrow.” Though she tried to sound super-enthusiastic, she was concerned that when the maze was revealed tomorrow, it was going to be a flop. It had only taken ten minutes or so to reach the Minotaur, and they’d been walking at a pretty leisurely pace.

  Should she tell her friends ahead of time what to expect and warn them to be supportive? she wondered as they left the Minotaur room and headed back through the maze. Regardless, once other visitors came later on, word was bound to get back to Daedalus and King Minos that this labyrinth—which was supposed to be the grand centerpiece of the amusement park—was actually pretty lame. Daedalus’s feelings were sure to be hurt. Worse, it was just possible that Minos might fire him, and that would be awful!

  “Don’t give away any secrets about what you’ve seen, okay?” Daedalus cautioned her as they left the labyrinth through the red door. “We don’t want to ruin the thrills and surprises in store for everyone tomorrow. I can’t wait to see how much fun your friends have trying to figure out the puzzle. If they like the maze as much as you do, buzz will spread. It will become famous!”

  “That truly would be a-maze-ing,” Athena told him. He laughed, but she’d actually been half-joking. Because she would be amazed if the praise and fame he hoped for came to pass once visitors saw how boring the labyrinth was. Should she warn him? Before she could decide, they ran into other students from MOA sightseeing on the palace grounds, and Daedalus bade her farewell. As Athena watched him go, she couldn’t help feeling that the guy was in for a disappointing reaction tomorrow. But still, she would hope for the best.

  That night, there was a lavish dinner in the palace’s Banquet Hall in honor of the visiting students. There were even more frescoes here than in the labyrinth, and the floor was beautifully tiled with mosaics. Bordered by a geometric pattern of red lines, painted blue dolphins frolicked in ocean waves along all four sides of the Hall, which was brightly lit by torches.

  In the center of the hall, between red-painted columns, the girls all sat on pillow-topped benches clustered around one long table, and the boys all sat at another. Athena had worn her best blue chiton with a scalloped hem for the occasion and had wound gold and blue ribbons through her long wavy brown hair. Aphrodite wore pink and red, her hair topped by the cutest silver tiara set with red rubies. Persephone’s chiton was flowy and green, and Artemis had decided on a gold one. Aphrodite had helped her fashion her dark hair into a dramatic twist that had a small golden arrow decoration sticking through it. It was so adorable!

  King Minos and Professor Ladon sat at another table at the front of the room together. Musicians played lutes nearby, and jugglers performed, tossing knives and flaming torches for everyone’s entertainment.

  Glinting in the torchlight, gold and silver serving dishes were piled high with all kinds of delicious things to eat. There were enormous platters of roasted chicken; bunches of luscious purple grapes; hummus made from chickpeas; bread and honey; and huge bowls of leafy green salad with cucumbers, dill, and—perhaps as a tribute to Athena—olives.

  As they sat eating, Athena and her friends compared notes about the various things they’d seen and done since their arrival. Because the aMAZEment Park wasn’t open until tomorrow, mostly they’d spent their time wandering through the various wings of the palace or out in the courtyard at the palace’s center. Athena had done some sketches of a large, dramatic outdoor water fountain that she planned to show Poseidon upon her return to the Academy.

  “Isn’t it great that all of our bedrooms are on the ground floor and open up into the courtyard?” Persephone said excitedly. “It’ll be like sleeping in the middle of a garden!”

  Athena smiled at her enthusiasm as she helped herself to some grapes.

  “No surprise that the goddessgirl of spring and growing things would be so excited about our sleeping arrangements,” Aphrodite noted in amusement.

  Athena had gotten a quick peek at her own room after she and her friends had returned to the main rooms of the palace before dinner. Aphrodite’s and her names had been written in calligraphy on a papyrus card on the door of the room they were to share. And thanks to Heracles her bag had been sitting on the floor next to one of the two canopy beds draped in white satin.

  The room had ocean-blue walls with a wavelike painted decorative border. And there were a half dozen matching blue pillows with white tassels atop the beds. A white wardrobe and a makeup table were the only other pieces of furniture in the small, tidy room. As Persephone had noted, big double doors in all of their rooms opened into the large central courtyard, which was filled with beautiful flowers and fountains.

  “Can you believe we get to be the very first visitors to go on the rides and explore the labyrinth tomorrow? I can hardly wait!” Artemis exclaimed.

  Hearing her reference to the labyrinth, Athena snapped to attention. She frowned inwardly as Artemis speared a potato and dropped it onto her plate.

  Medusa looked across the table at Athena. “You saw the labyrinth, right?” she asked as she tossed twelve grapes into the air. Snap! Snap! Each of the dozen snakes that grew from her head grabbed one and swallowed it down. MOA students had grown used to her snakes snacking like this. However, Ariadne observed it with startled eyes.

  “Yeah, when Heracles brought your bag to our room, he said Daedalus was taking you on a preview tour,” Aphrodite added.

  Athena nodded as she spread butter on a piece of bread. “Yes, I saw it.”

  “And?” asked Artemis, her fork poised halfway between her plate and her mouth.

  Athena glanced at Ariadne. She was sitting between Aphrodite and Pandora. Until this moment Pandora had been peppering the princess with questions, but now all of the girls at the table were looking at Athena. Cassandra and Medusa included.

  Athena gulped, then said brightly, “It was interesting.”

  Persephone cocked her head. “Interesting how?”

  “Oh, you know,” Athena said vaguely. “Lots of twists and turns.”

  Artemis frowned with disappointment. “Is that all?”

  “No! Of course not!” Athena said, aware of Ariadne’s eyes on her. She wished she knew what the girl was thinking. Had she seen the labyrinth yet and formed an opinion? If so, she wasn’t saying.

  Cassandra’s almond-shaped brown eyes lit up as she smiled. “I’m guessing Athena doesn’t want to give away any surprises.” She glanced at her. “Am I right?”

  If that was a prediction, it definitely wasn’t one of her better ones, thought Athena. But she nodded anyway. She only hoped that her friends’ expectations for the labyrinth wouldn’t be completely dashed when they actually went through it tomorrow. Poor Daedalus!

  “Oof. I’m sooo stuffed!” Ariadne said. She pushed her plate away, and then she reached down for her sparkly pink bag and pulled out her knitting.

  Athena approved of her devotion to knitting and often knitted at lunch back at MOA herself. However, to Athena’s skilled eye, the lumpy pink scarf looked way too long already. Apparently Ariadne didn’t think so, since she just kept going on it. As her needles clicked together, she glanced over at the boys’ table. The boys were talking to one of the jugglers and admiring his knives.

  “Theseus is really interested in weaponry,” Ariadne noted. “When he told me that, I was like, wow, really? ’Cause my dad’s got an awesome collection of swords, bows, helmets, and shields.” She paused, then looked up from her knitting. “Do you think maybe I should ask Theseus if he wants to see them?”

  Aphrodite and Athena exchanged a knowing look. For some unfathomable reason (unfathomable to Athena, anyway) Ariadne had fallen for Heracles’ cousin! Was the feeling mutual, though? Theseus seemed way too obsessed with becoming a hero to have any leftover
attention to lavish on a crush. Even one as pretty and sweet (though somewhat bubble-headed, perhaps) as Ariadne.

  “You definitely should ask him,” Aphrodite said.

  “But only if your dad’s collection is securely locked up,” Athena added, only half-joking.

  When dinner was over, a grand entertainment with more jugglers, musicians, gymnasts, and actors began. The jugglers were really good, but even as they tossed flaming torches back and forth, Athena couldn’t stop worrying about tomorrow’s grand opening of the labyrinth. Would it bomb horribly? It was too bad, really, because with a few small improvements the labyrinth could be so much better.

  While the others watched the entertainment, her head began to spin with ideas. Changes she’d have made if she’d been the one to design the maze. The walls needed rearranging, for one thing. And while the stalagmites were nice, why not add stalactites, too!

  As ideas came and went in her mind, she got more and more excited. And fidgety. She couldn’t just stand by and watch the labyrinth Daedalus had worked so hard on flop.

  At last, convinced that he required her help whether he knew it or not, Athena sneaked away from the table. After grabbing a torch from a wall sconce, she made her way out. Once outside the palace, she went around it till she reached the red door topped with the lintel of bull horns. And after slipping inside the door, she sped downstairs.

  6

  Making Improvements

  Friday Night

  LUCKILY THE TORCHES WERE STILL lit in the brown room at the bottom of the stairs, because Athena’s one torch wouldn’t have been enough to light her way. Probably the torches were kept lit day and night, she guessed as she passed through the center arch again. She placed one hand against a wall and kept it there as she went straight to the center of the labyrinth, only pausing briefly to dodge or hop over the brightly colored stalagmites that jutted up from the cement floor.

  Even though the mechanical Minotaur was in exactly the same position as when she’d seen it earlier—it couldn’t have moved, since it was turned off—its fierceness startled her yet again as she came upon it.

  She wagged a finger at it. “Yeah, you do look pretty terrifying. But stop scaring me, okay?” For a few seconds she broke into giggles at her silliness. Then it was time to get serious. She had work to do.

  Starting here at the center of the labyrinth, Athena hurried back through it, pausing here and there to chant a series of “complex” spells she’d learned at the Academy that would break apart the labyrinth walls to create a far more complex maze. They began:

  “Walls, split and move about.

  Make it harder to get out.”

  While chanting the spells, she aimed a finger at various sections along the corridor walls. Crack! Rumble. Rumble. The places she pointed to immediately split off from the whole like calving glaciers. She hopped out of the way as the newly created pieces of wall moved to different positions. Some stayed disconnected and freestanding, while others joined together with pieces to form new angles, turns, and dead ends. She left the frescoed walls intact, however, not wanting to ruin the beautiful wall paintings.

  Now and then she cast other spells along the way to cause stalactites to hang down from above for more color and artistic decoration:

  “Come, stalactites, bright and appealing.

  Grow like icicles from the ceiling.”

  She smiled with satisfaction as the brightly colored, striped, and polka-dotted stalactites appeared overhead. When she’d been younger, she’d sometimes gotten stalagmites and stalactites confused. But then she’d created an easy way to tell them apart. “Stalactite” contained the letter C for “ceiling,” which was where stalactites formed. And “stalagmite” contained the letter G for “ground,” which was where stalagmites grew. After she’d figured that out, remembering which formation was which had become easy-peasy.

  If she’d had more time, she would’ve made additional improvements. Added more monsters, for example. But creating a monster was a much more complicated task than splitting up and moving walls or growing a bunch of stalactites.

  Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to upstage Daedalus’s mechanical Minotaur. It was truly fantastic, and Athena was sure he’d worked hard on it. So instead she contented herself with creating a dozen ghoulishly grinning stone gargoyles to gaze down at her fellow students as they wandered through the maze.

  She knew she’d done a good job of making the labyrinth trickier to navigate when she got turned around a couple of times on her way back out and ended up having to retrace her steps. Yes! Success!

  Once she was finally back in the round room facing the three arched entrances to the labyrinth, she knew she didn’t have time to go up and down the other two tunnels. She’d soon be missed at dinner. So she quickly cast spells from where she stood, sending magic down the first and third tunnels to alter them in ways similar to—and yet different from—how she’d changed the middle one.

  When she was done, a feeling of pride spread through her. She’d tweaked Daedalus’s simple maze into a complex one that would be much more difficult and therefore lots more fun. Her improvements were sure to turn his formerly boring labyrinth into a real star attraction!

  After running up the flight of stairs she’d gone down earlier, Athena pushed through the red door to the outside. Then she hurried back around the palace and made her way to the entrance to the banquet hall to rejoin the dinner party.

  She saw at once that the pillow-topped benches they’d sat on at dinner had been moved from the tables to form an arc closer to the entertainers. Some students had traded places to sit next to their crushes. And everyone on the benches was so engrossed in the mock battle scene now being staged between four actors that no one seemed to notice as Athena took a seat on the far end of a bench.

  Except Ariadne, that is. The black-haired princess eyed her curiously, then smiled and pointed to a costumed “monster” that had just entered through a door near the makeshift stage. The front half of the monster resembled a horse, but its back half sported the wings and tail feathers of a rooster.

  “It’s a Hippalectryon!” Athena heard Artemis exclaim to her crush, Actaeon. Athena recognized it too, as one of the many beasts Professor Ladon had lectured about in Beast-ology class.

  The Hippalectryon tossed its head and snorted as it wobbled toward the four battling actors, who were dressed as soldiers. It flapped its wings and strutted around in such a silly way that she and the others giggled. From the way the goofy monster moved, plus the two pairs of sandaled feet sticking out from beneath it, Athena could tell that there were two actors inside the costume, one standing in front of the other.

  Until now the battling soldier-actors had pretended not to notice the Hippalectryon. But as she watched, it went up to one of the soldiers and nudged him with its long horse snout. The soldier-actor gave a hysterical mock shriek and jumped into the arms of one of his friends. Then the pair of them ran off, disappearing through the same door through which the Hippalectryon had appeared just minutes before.

  As Athena and the rest of the audience laughed, she glanced around the room for Heracles. Though there was a ring of torches around the area where the actors were performing, the seating area was shadowy. She couldn’t see him, which was too bad. She would’ve liked to go sit with him, so they could enjoy this show together.

  When laughter rang out from the audience around her again, Athena’s attention swung back to the mock battle. There were only two soldiers left onstage now, and the Hippalectryon was sitting on one of them. It was tickling him with its tail feathers. Meanwhile, the other soldier sneaked up behind the monster and pretended to poke it in the behind with his sword. With a loud whinny the Hippalectryon leaped clumsily into the air. The soldier that had been beneath him rolled away from the monster and jumped to his feet. Miming terror, he too raced for the exit, causing giggles and chuckles to fill the room.

  Now the Hippalectryon began to chase the sole remaining soldier around an
d around in circles till at last the soldier turned on it. Whomp! He brought his sword down, “slicing” the monster in two so that the front horse half split off from the back rooster half. The two halves fell to the floor, shuddered a few moments, and then lay still. The victorious soldier waved his sword over his head and then bowed to the cheers of the audience.

  Grinning and clapping along with everyone else, Athena craned her neck, looking for Heracles again. She was hoping to catch his eye so they could share a laugh across the crowd. As before, Ariadne looked her way and smiled. She cocked her head toward the vanquished Hippalectryon lying on the floor.

  Athena raised her eyebrows and shoulders, sending her a questioning look. By now the soldiers who had run off had returned to the makeshift stage to take a few bows. They gestured to the slain Hippalectryon at their feet. Suddenly the two halves of the monster came back to life. Jumping up, the actors inside threw off the pieces of their costume.

  Athena’s mouth fell open in surprise. The actors inside were none other than Heracles and Theseus! That must’ve been what Ariadne had been trying to tell her all along with her gestures toward the monster.

  Now Heracles kicked his horse’s head out of the way, and Theseus plucked a tail feather from his dreadlocks. They both bowed as the audience roared and clapped and whistled its approval.

  Athena leaned over to whisper to Aphrodite. “I stepped outside for a minute. How did Heracles and Theseus end up onstage?”

  “The actors asked for volunteers from the audience to play the part of the monster,” Aphrodite whispered back. “Weren’t they great?”

  “Fantastic,” Athena enthused, clapping along with everyone else.

  Once Heracles and Theseus had finished their bows, the real actors invited the rest of the students to come forward to check out the monster costume and other props. Ares was the first to take up the invitation. He was soon followed by most of the audience, including Athena and Ariadne.