The Heir of Olympus and the Forest Realm (45 page)

They sat there in silence for ten minutes. Then, still without looking at him, Artemis broke the silence. “Your arm—that is from the River of Souls, yes?”

“Yep, Styx,” Gordie said, bristling with pride.

“A very useful tool,” she said. “Hand me your garments.” She held out her hand and he gave her his sweatshirt. She turned it over in her hands, inspecting it with interest. “Very thick,” she muttered. Holding it away from her body, she wrung it out. A torrent of water flowed out of it. She did this twice more. Then she swiped it through the flames, held it above the orange tongues for a moment, and then swiped it through again. She handed it back to him.

“Wow, this is damn near dry!” Gordie said. “Thanks!”

“You are welcome. You should do the same with your lower coverings.” She nodded toward his sweatpants.

“Um, that’s okay,” he said, blushing.

“Suit yourself. You should go now. Time is short.” She did not look at him.

“I suppose so.” Gordie lumbered to his feet and donned his sweatshirt. It was damp, but warm from the fire, as if he had taken it out of the dryer a few minutes early. He slung the bat back over his shoulder. “Well, I’ll see you soon.” He smiled weakly.

“I hope so,” she said.

“Any advice for gryphon hunting?”

“Be wary, be wise, and most of all, be quick.”

“Noted,” he said, feeling let down. “Will you be here?”

“I cannot say.” She didn’t look up.

“I’m sorry about the werewolf,” Gordie said, and she finally looked at him. “Or the lycanthrope, if that’s more accurate.”

“Kynigos,” she said. “That was his name.” Gordie was shocked: he hadn’t imagined the creature as a being with autonomy, much less a name. An owl hooted.

“It was an accident—”

“It is no matter. It was a good kill. He would have wanted to die at hunt.” She looked back down at the fire. He stood there for a moment, but she said no more.

Gordie turned and walked towards the distant mountain. A large, birdlike creature soared around its peak. He guessed if he were a little closer he might see four legs tucked beneath its massive body instead of two. A shrill cry rang from the dark sky, and this time his goose bumps had nothing to do with the cold.

17

The Ascent

Gordie had begun his journey in a brisk walk towards the mountain, but he realized that if he wanted to still possess his power when he reached the peak—and preferably for the return trip—that he better adopt a sense of urgency. Furthermore, he had no idea what time he had awoken from his dream (which turned out to be a clever ruse), and still did not know how much time remained before 8:00 am when his power would be drained. He broke into a run beneath the star-filled heavens.

Sprinting helped fight off the cold that seeped into him, especially in his numbing legs, which were trapped in a pair of drenched sweatpants. It also helped abate the sense of fear that prickled inside him, as he always had the sensation that he was being watched. He was confident, however, in his speed, and did not believe that any hunters would be able to catch him as he tore past every plant species in the known universe.

Every breath fogged out in front of his face and dispersed as he rushed through it. The droopy leaves of a willow rushed upward as he passed, as if calling after him, but then dropped to their usual torpor. At one point he heard a familiar squalor, and looked up to see the multi-colored monkeys chasing after him from above, cackling like children playing tag. Soon he outstripped them, and gladly.

As Gordie ran, it occurred to him that his bat remained perfectly still in its holder, not slamming against his back as he went—the sling was made with expertise. He made a note to commend Chiron when next he saw him, and remembered for the first time since he left, the promise he had made to stay inside the cave. He imagined Chiron’s disappointment upon his return from the forest, whether he was triumphant or not. This fear conjured the memory of another he had disappointed recently: he remembered the day of his father’s death when he had failed to complete his chores, forcing Robert to stay home and finish them for him before Zeus’s attack ended his life. Gordie’s eyes stung. He mustered all his concentration to sprint faster, hoping he could escape the pain.

The mountain drew ever-closer. Within minutes he was standing at the base looking up. No mythological beast circled the peak as he had seen from his first vantage point. The mountain was eerily still. He looked right and left, and noted with interest that the trees formed a perfect circle around the base—no foliage grew on the slopes. Loose brown dirt gave way to gravel as the incline increased, and then rock as the mountain rose in earnest.

First, the ground rose steadily, and he jogged until the slope became too steep, forcing him to lunge his way uphill. He stopped for a moment and looked back. The corridor that led from the river to the mountain was so straight that he knew it could not be natural. Many miles back he saw an orange glimmer that told him Artemis remained by the fire, waiting—that was good. As he was looking back in that direction, he noticed a disturbance in the tree line and froze.

When he was with Artemis earlier he thought he had heard a rustle in the bushes—this time he was positive. He drew his bat, and watched the thicket where he had seen the commotion.

The night was silent. Gordie shivered as the wind brushed him, but he kept his eyes trained on the spot. With a flurry, a smallish figure came bursting out of the undergrowth and bounded up the lower slope. His hooves were well-suited to navigating this terrain, reminding Gordie of a mountain goat, which was no surprise, considering the creature leaping toward him had goat legs. He smiled and breathed a sigh of relief before he replaced his bat and awaited Laktizon’s arrival.

“Hey . . . er, buddy!” he called, struggling to remember his name, as he waved hello.

“Gordie! Gordie!” Laktizon said. Gordie became suddenly aware that the satyr was distressed.

“What’s wrong?” He slid down the slope a ways to meet the young goat-boy, and put his hand on Laktizon’s shoulder as he approached. “Is everything okay?”

“Pheuge! Pheuge!” He was waving his arms and breathing rapidly.

“I don’t understand,” Gordie said, shaking his head. “What is it?”

“Ithi oikade! Pheuge!” Gordie couldn’t understand, but then Laktizon pointed back in the direction of the river and waved his hand, then mimed swimming. Gordie finally understood, and Laktizon must have recognized it in his eyes because he added softly, “Nai, ithi oikade.” He looked at Gordie with big, sad eyes.

“I can’t go.” Gordie shook his head slowly. “I have to go up there.” He pointed up the mountain.

“Ouk!” Laktizon pleaded. “Ithi oikade.” His big eyes were glossy.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t go. But you could do
me
a favor.” Gordie grabbed Laktizon by both shoulders and looked him in the face. “Can you stay there,” he pointed at the trees, “and be my lookout?” Gordie pointed to his own eyes and then pointed a finger outward, waving it back and forth across the landscape. Then he pointed at Laktizon’s eyes and repeated the gesture. Laktizon opened his mouth as if to argue again, but then shut it tight and nodded with resignation.

“Good boy.” Gordie smiled wide and patted the satyr on the shoulder. Laktizon turned and scrabbled down the dusty hillside. Gordie watched him until he ducked into the trees, then turned and looked up at the looming mountain. Half the moon was cut off by it from his vantage point, and the face he was on was not as well lit as the surrounding landscape. He knew the darkness would only increase as he walked further under the mountain’s shadow.

He stared at the rock face, wondering if climbing it would even be possible. He had no mountain climbing equipment: what if he came upon a sheer rock wall with no handholds? Thinking this way, his confidence started to wane. But then, with his fists clenched, staring at the distant peak, he whispered into the night, “If there aren’t handholds, I’ll
make
handholds.” And with that he trudged on.

When his sneakers started slipping in the gravel, the incline forced him to adapt something like a crawl, scrabbling his way upward, hands scratching away at the pebbles as he went. Some part of him wondered if he was drawing too much attention to himself. He didn’t know what might be watching: he didn’t want to tip off the gryphon to his pending arrival. But there was nothing for it, so he scrambled on, trying, and almost succeeding, to run on all fours like a beast. Soon he was struggling for purchase as the gravel-covered slope became sheer rock and the slope increased. The climb wasn’t yet vertical, but he was forced to crawl on his belly to remain fastened to the surface, pulling himself upward as he went. Then the climb became vertical.

Gordie managed to find handholds easily enough as he hugged the cold stone. Occasionally, he would launch himself upward to grab a cleft that was just out of reach, and he would smile to himself. Although the cold still bit at him, he found that he was enjoying himself. There was something liberating about scaling a mountain, especially one that he presumed few humans had climbed before. Absorbed in his task, he became overconfident and nonchalant, until he found a handhold that did not want to be used.

As he wedged his hand into a tight crack, the fissure began to widen. He experienced a moment of complete terror as he felt his grip slip and he slid down a foot before grabbing a small lip. Closing his eyes, he rested his face against the stone, trying to steady his breath. His anxiety was so acute that he felt something akin to vertigo, like the surface he was on was shifting and sliding beneath him. He waited for this sensation to pass, but it did not. He opened his eyes and blinked rapidly.

The lip that he was holding onto was not a lip but a lid—a lower eyelid, to be exact. Six inches away, a blood-red iris the size of his head shifted back and forth, and Gordie’s eyes widened in shock, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. He felt a wave of nausea as he began to move outward. A loud cracking, earth-shaking sound accompanied his movement, and he realized the stone-giant, to whose face he clung, was pulling away from its bed in the sheer rock.

Then Gordie nearly had the wind squeezed out of him as a giant rock fist closed around his body and pulled him off the wall, holding him like a hoagie. He could feel his feet dangling beneath the fingers, but fortunately, the massive digits blocked his view to the ground. Unfortunately, the giant stone face looked angry. Two massive eyebrows knitted together to form the world’s most indestructible unibrow. The plump lips of the creature were bared in a scowl, and those red eyes glared at him with pure loathing. The pressure increased.

Slowly, painfully, the granite hand squeezed, and Gordie’s eyes started to pop out of his head. He was struggling for breath, kicking his feet, flailing to no avail. Little stars began bursting into his vision as the pain increased. A small voice in the back of his mind was whining,
But I thought I was invincible
. The night began to darken and panic started to set in. Then in an instant, the pressure abated and he sucked in an enormous breath.

Color, sound, cold all flooded back into him. As he gasped for air, he looked up at the monster’s face, and the sight confused him. Its enormous eyes were closed and it was shielding its face with its free hand. Little pebbles pelted its open palm, somehow reaching this height from the ground like gravelly bottle rockets. Gordie looked around, whipping his head from side to side, until he looked down.

Hundreds of feet below, Laktizon hopped back and forth on the loose pebbles, firing handfuls of rocks upward from a slingshot and stooping to reload, all with the agility of a cheetah. Gordie would have laughed if he weren’t in such a predicament; instead, he took advantage of the rock-giant’s distraction. He started spreading his limbs outward, first pushing his elbows away from their position where they had been pinned at his side, and pressing his toes against the rock on both sides, pushing until his legs began to spread apart. With an enormous strain, he was able to raise his arms and press his palms against the stone, pushing outward with more leverage.

Slowly but surely, the rock gave way. After he loosened the vice, he scrabbled up on top of the monster’s wrist. Gordie took a good look at the giant in full in order to find an escape route. The stone-giant was hunched forward, its head and shoulders leaning out from the previously flat surface of the rock, leaving a massive, anthropomorphic hole in the rock wall. Looking down, Gordie could see the outline of the rest of its body, even the bulbous projections of legs made out of stacked boulders, which were still nested in the wall. The giant kept its eyes shut tight, its hand blocking the tiny projectiles. It moaned and groaned—a deep sad noise reminiscent of shifting tectonic plates.

Gordie crawled as quickly as he could up the outstretched arm, trying not to look down as he went. He scrambled up onto the thing’s shoulder and looked down its back. Dark rock melted into darkness. Shifting his body, he hugged the back of the giant’s head (hoping that its sense of touch was appropriately dull), until he hung from its shoulders like an undersized cape. He took a deep breath and said, “Here. We. Go.”

He pushed off the thing, sliding down the rock wall behind it. The slide only took him ten feet before he was able to press his feet into the giant’s back. Gordie came to a halt with his back against the hard stone of the mountain behind the giant—in near total darkness. He began to push outward, the exertion making blood rush to his head as his jaw clenched and his temples throbbed. He knew he was supposed to breathe through it, but the strain wouldn’t allow him to exhale.

His legs extended, inch by inch. When they were straight, he started to walk his way down further into the darkness. Down and down he went until he was certain the thing should be tumbling forward out of its cradle. He stopped for a moment with his legs stretched, taking a few breaths to prepare for one final push.

Then his legs started to compress as the monster tried to reclaim its throne. The tiny sliver of sky above shrank and disappeared as Gordie’s knees buckled, and he was given a lesson on the definition of darkness.

He pressed his back flat against the wall and dug his elbow into the rock as he pushed back. The stone ground into his limbs and the pain was excruciating, but he had, for the moment, stopped the giant’s momentum. His legs trembled. He heard the whisper of cracking stone and shifting rock as he strained. His head was fit to explode. He gritted his teeth, and slowly the giant-stone-body began to inch forward. As light from the starry sky broke back into the chamber, Gordie could see the tremble of his legs. His muscles screamed in protest, but he ignored them. The momentum stopped again, and—veins bulging, spittle seeping from his mouth—he summoned the strength for one final push.

“HHHRRRAAAAHHHH!” he yelled as his legs extended and the giant went tumbling forward. Gordie began to fall too. The wall behind him was not completely vertical, so he rode it down like a slide until he was lurched forward onto his chest, his head hanging over the cliff that hadn’t existed before the monster was coerced from its seat. He heard a whistling noise and felt the wind whip past him, and was vaguely aware of a passage behind him, but he had no time to investigate.

The rock-giant fell in slow-motion. Gordie saw Laktizon scrambling to get out from under it. Its shadow was enormous, and he feared the satyr wouldn’t get away in time. Without thinking, he pushed himself over the edge.

As he dove, his view of Laktizon was obscured by the giant’s falling form. He approached it rapidly, having pinned his arms to his side to mimic the aerodynamics of a missile, until he neared the monolith that was the monster’s torso. Ten feet before he splattered his face on it, Gordie spread his arms and legs out wide. His momentum slowed and he landed on the giant’s back on all fours. He didn’t know how much time he had before they crashed to earth, so he unsheathed his bat and started wailing away.