Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods by Rick Riordan

Author:Rick Riordan [Riordan, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141356358
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
Published: 2014-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Athena Adopts a Handkerchief

SO ABOUT A MILLION PAGES AGO, I mentioned Zeus’s first wife, the Titan Metis. Remember her? Neither did I. I had to go back and look. All these names: Metis and Thetis and Themis and Feta Cheese – I get a headache trying to keep them straight.

Anyway, here’s a recap:

Last week on The Real Gods of Olympus: Metis was pregnant with Zeus’s child. She had a prophecy that the child would be a girl, but if Metis and Zeus had another child after that it would be a boy who would grow up to take Zeus’s place. Hearing this, Zeus did the natural thing. He panicked and swallowed his pregnant wife whole.

Dun-dun!

What happened next?

Well, immortals can’t die, even when they’re ingested by other immortals, so Metis gave birth to her daughter right there in Zeus’s gut.

(Feel free to get sick now. Or you can wait. It gets worse …)

Metis eventually faded into pure thought, since she was the Titan of deep thoughts anyway. She became nothing more than a nagging voice in the back of Zeus’s mind.

As for her daughter, she grew up in Zeus’s body, the same way the earlier Olympians had grown up in Kronos’s belly. Once the child was an adult (a small, super-compressed, very uncomfortable adult) she started looking for a way to escape into the world. None of the options seemed good. If she erupted from Zeus’s mouth, everyone would laugh at her and say she had been vomited. That was undignified. If she followed Zeus’s digestive tract the other way – Nope! That was even grosser. She was a strong young goddess, so she might have been able to break out of Zeus’s chest, but then everybody would think she was one of the monsters from the Alien movies and, again, that was not the kind of entrance she was looking for.

Finally she had an idea. She dissolved into pure thought – a little trick her mother, Metis, had taught her – and travelled up Zeus’s spinal cord straight into his brain, where she re-formed. She started kicking and hammering and screaming inside Zeus’s skull, making as much racket as she could. (Maybe she had a lot of room to move around in there because Zeus’s brain was so small. Don’t tell him I said that.)

As you can imagine, this gave Zeus a splitting headache.

He couldn’t sleep all night with the pounding in his skull. The next morning, he stumbled into breakfast and tried to eat, but he kept wincing, screaming and pounding his fork on the table, yelling, ‘STOP IT! STOP IT!’

Hera and Demeter exchanged worried looks.

‘Uh, my husband?’ Hera asked. ‘Everything … okay?’

‘Headache!’ Zeus bellowed. ‘Bad, bad headache!’

As if to prove his point, the lord of the universe slammed his face into his pancakes, which demolished the pancakes and the plate and put a crack in the table, but did nothing for his headache.

‘Aspirin?’ Apollo suggested. (He was the god of healing.)

‘Nice cup of tea?’ Hestia suggested.

‘I could split your skull open,’ offered Hephaestus, the blacksmith god.

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