Fleeced Read Free

speechless.
    “Oh, I know,” the bowsprit continued, “there’s never been a competition like it before, and it’ll be tough. But Athena wanted something memorable to mark the occasion. Mind you, everyone knows that Jason’ll win. I mean, he’s just totally awesome.”
    “Awesome, my hoof!” spluttered Aries. “You were stuck on the boat that night! You didn’t see him in the forest at Kolkis. Shivering like a swamp rat in the shadows whilst a teenage girl did all his dirty work!”
    “So you keep saying,” sniffed the bowsprit. “As if Jason would hide when there was a giant snake to fight!” Her face grew soft and dreamy. “Oh, Jason,” she sighed. “Those glorious days we spent at sea together.”
    But Aries had heard enough.
    Swinging his head round he turned back towards the Great Hall and began clomping out.
    “Jason, is it?” he muttered, looking back over his massive shoulders at the bowsprit’s contented face. “Win the quest? And return to Earth where
my
fleece is still hidden?” He harrumphed loudly. “We’ll see about that!”
    2 . Not wishing to dwell on such an unpleasant subject, let’s just say
they didn’t want any messy drips spoiling the golden wool.
    3 . Don’t ask me why locking it up in a vault wouldn’t have been far
more sensible. Ancient Greek kings were clearly barmy.
    4 . With no top teeth and a bottom row like wonky gravestones, rams look like four-legged granddads when they smile, all gummy.

II
A W ALK ON THE W ILD S IDE
    Well, I don’t know about you, but after all that excitement I could do with a decent cup of tea. However, I’ll soldier on without a brew, quite parched, so that I can tell you about Aries’ best friend, Alex.
    Alex was a thirteen-year-old Athenian boy, or at least that’s what he’d been when he died in ancient Greece and come down to the Underworld. Strictly speaking, he was now two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two years old. But have you ever seen a birthday cake with that many candles? Gangly and with hair as black as ripe olives, he loved being dead. Up on Earth he’d been a potter, spending his days in his grandfather’s cool, white workshop, painting pot after pot after pot. Round pots, squat pots, pots with bulbous middles, pots with long necks, pots withcurly handles that snapped off just as you finished painting the picture on them. But down here he was a keeper in the Underworld Zoo, the home to all the old Greek monsters and fabulous animals.
    A kind and thoughtful boy, Alex’s choosing to work in the zoo had been a surprise to his parents, especially to his father Lykos. During his lifetime Lykos had been a hoplite in the Athenian Army and had nursed hopes that his only son might follow in his footsteps one day, into a glorious military career. But Alex, who’d even been named after the greatest army leader of them all, Alexander the Great , couldn’t see anything remotely glorious about tramping off on pointless wars, and despite his father’s insistence that his son learn to box and throw javelins, Alex had remained uninterested. Alex, you see, was a thinker, not a thumper.
    Now, as you might imagine, the Underworld Zoo wasn’t like any zoo you or I have ever visited: no penguins skidded down ice slides, no hippopotamuses slapped about in mud and absolutely no sea lions ever leaped through a hoop for fish. Instead, the arcades rang with hisses and roars, the slap of tentacles and the clang of bronze beaks. Even that familiar eye-watering whiff you get in Earth zoos was here mingled with the stench of burning earthand vomited bile.
    One enclosure held the ghost of the Minotaur , the half-man half-bull creature who prowled within a high-walled maze beneath a viewing balcony. Another held the spectre of the Ceryneian Hind , a deer with golden antlers and hooves made of brass that shot sparks into the air as she scrambled over the rocks. The many-headed Hydra swam in a mesh-covered tank. Wild man-eating horses galloped