The Sea of Monsters(22)

“Too many!” I yelled to Annabeth. “How do you get rid of them?”

She stabbed at a pigeon with her knife. “Hercules used noise! Brass bells! He scared them away with the most horrible sound he could—”

Her eyes got wide. “Percy … Chiron’s collection!”

I understood instantly. “You think it’ll work?”

She handed her fighter the reins and leaped from her chariot into mine like it was the easiest thing in the world. “To the Big House! It’s our only chance!”

Clarisse has just pulled across the finish line, completely unopposed, and seemed to notice for the first time how serious the bird problem was.

When she saw us driving away, she yelled, “You’re running? The fight is here, cowards!”

She drew her sword and charged for the stands.

I urged our horses into a gallop. The chariot rumbled through the strawberry fields, across the volleyball pit, and lurched to a halt in front of the Big House. Annabeth and I ran inside, tearing down the hallway to Chiron’s apartment.

His boom box was still on his nightstand. So were his favorite CDs. I grabbed the most repulsive one I could find, Annabeth snatched the boom box, and together we ran back outside.

Down at the track, the chariots were in flames. Wounded campers ran in every direction, with birds shredding their clothes and pulling out their hair, while Tantalus chased breakfast pastries around the stands, every once in a while yelling, “Everything’s under control! Not to worry.’”

We pulled up to the finish line. Annabeth got the boom box ready. I prayed the batteries weren’t dead.

I pressed PLAY and started up Chiron’s favorite—the All-Time Greatest Hits of Dean Martin.

Suddenly the air was filled with violins and a bunch of guys moaning in Italian.

The demon pigeons went nuts. They started flying in circles, running into each other like they wanted to bash their own brains out. Then they abandoned the track altogether and flew skyward in a huge dark wave.

“Now!” shouted Annabeth. “Archers!”

With clear targets, Apollo’s archers had flawless aim. Most of them could nock five or six arrows at once. Within minutes, the ground was littered with dead bronze-beaked pigeons, and the survivors were a distant trail of smoke on the horizon.

The camp was saved, but the wreckage wasn’t pretty. Most of the chariots had been completely destroyed. Almost everyone was wounded, bleeding from multiple bird pecks. The kids from Aphrodite’s cabin were screaming because their hairdos had been ruined and their clothes pooped on.

“Bravo!” Tantalus said, but he wasn’t looking at me or Annabeth. “We have our first winner!”

He walked to “He finish line and awarded the golden laurels for the race to a stunned-looking Clarisse.

Then he turned and smiled at me. “And now to punish the troublemakers who disrupted this race.”

Chapter Seven: I Accept Gifts From A Stranger

The way Tantalus saw it, the Stymphalian birds had simply been minding their own business in the woods and would not have attacked if Annabeth, Tyson, and I hadn’t disturbed them with our bad chariot driving.

This was so completely unfair, I told Tantalus to go chase a doughnut, which didn’t help his mood. He sentenced us to kitchen patrol—scrubbing pots and platters all afternoon in the underground kitchen with the cleaning harpies. The harpies washed with lava instead of water, to get that extra-clean sparkle and kill ninety-nine point nine percent of all germs, so Annabeth and I had to wear asbestos gloves and aprons.

Tyson didn’t mind. He plunged his bare hands right in and started scrubbing, but Annabeth and I had to suffer through hours of hot, dangerous work, especially since there were tons of extra plates. Tantalus had ordered a special luncheon banquet to celebrate Clarisse’s chariot victory—a full-course meal featuring country-fried Stymphalian death-bird.

The only good thing about our punishment was that it gave Annabeth and me a common enemy and lots of time to talk. After listening to my dream about Grover again, she looked like she might be starting to believe me.

“If he’s really found it,” she murmured, “and if we could retrieve it—”

“Hold on,” I said. “You act like this … whatever-it-is Grover found is the only thing in the world that could save the camp. What is it?”

“I’ll give you a hint. What do you get when you skin a ram?”

“Messy?”

She sighed. ” A fleece. The coat of a ram is called a fleece. And if that ram happens to have golden wool—”

“The Golden Fleece. Are you serious?”

Annabeth scrapped a plateful of death-bird bones into the lava. “Percy, remember the Gray Sisters? They said they knew the location of the thing you seek. And they mentioned Jason. Three thousand years ago, they told him how to find the Golden Fleece. You do know the story of Jason and the Argonauts?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That old movie with the clay skeletons.”

Annabeth rolled her eyes. “Oh my gods, Percy! You are so hopeless.”

”What?” I demanded.

“Just listen. The real story of the Fleece: there were these two children of Zeus, Cadmus and Europa, okay? They were about to get offered up as human sacrifices, when they prayed to Zeus to save them. So Zeus sent this magical flying ram with golden wool, which picked them up in Greece and carried them all the way to Colchis in Asia Minor. Well, actually it carried Cadmus. Europa fell off and died along the way, but that’s not important.”