Olympus: It's Not Just a Game

Chapter 20

           
            "Oh, help!" Mrs. Morrison murmured to herself.

            Wheeler glided into the room.  "What's up, Mom?"

            She shushed him and led him into the back room.  "He's fallen asleep, poor thing."

            "Poor thing?" Wheeler answered irritably.  "Well, wake him up.  You've got to go to work.  I've got to go to school."

            She looked at her watch.  "Oh, my," she said.  "The man's been up all night," she argued.  "He needs his sleep."  She looked suspiciously at her son, scrutinizing the dark circles under his eyes.  "And so do you, young man.  I never should have agreed to this."

            "He said he was going to pay me for it."

            "True — and there's a check on the table for two hundred and twenty-five dollars."

            "Well, it's worth it, then," Wheeler yawned.

            "I've got half a mind to put you to bed and call your teacher," his mother answered.  "It won't do for you to get sick."

            "Mom, I'm as healthy as a horse," he replied.  "Healthier.  If I'd been a horse, they'd have shot me."

            She winced at his cynicism.  "Oh, Simon, don't do that to yourself," she begged.  Then she made up her mind.  "I'm calling your teacher.  You're staying home today.  You get straight A's at that school as it is.  You can miss one day."

            Wheeler had no objections to missing school.  Between the numbing boredom of most of his classes and rejection from most of his peers, he had long thought of school as a form of cruel and unusual punishment.  "But what about him?" he objected.

            "You crawl up on that couch," his mother replied.  "When that man wakes up, you just explain to him that I had to go to work."

            Wheeler rolled his eyes to protest, but found himself yawning again.  Suddenly, taking a nap made a lot of sense.  "Okay," he agreed.  "I'll do it.  And I'll even try to be polite.  But I don't like the guy."

            "You don't have to like him," his mother said.  "Just don't get into a fight."

            Back in Olympus, Nancy thought she spotted the tip of a mast on the horizon, but it wasn't quite opposite the direction Benjamin indicated.  They were debating whether to change course when Jacob pointed out something much closer.  Everyone stared at the water off to the starboard bow, which boiled ominously for a second or two.  Then, a hundred yards closer, the water boiled again.  In moments the sea was dotted with white, foaming patches which came swiftly and steadily toward their ship.  Abruptly, a huge green head exploded from the sea, with jaws opened wide enough to close around their craft.  It was a sea serpent!

            The attack was swift and fierce.  At the creature's first lunge, their mast snapped off against its underbelly, and the crippled ship wobbled free of the enormous, crushing coil.  But then the head reared up out of the water, ready for a second loop.

            "Jump for it!" shouted Mr. Avery.  They hurled themselves from the boat just as it was enfolded in a green and deadly embrace.  The head reared thirty feet out of the water, and then plunged down on the helpless form of Mad.  He dangled from its jaws for one horrifying moment, and his screams filled the air.  Then the serpent tossed him up into the air and gulped him down.

            Nancy knew it was a matter of moments before she followed him down that slimy gullet, but then something caught the serpent's eye.  It looked up into the sky, right into the blazing sun.  Nancy could not tell what it had seen, but she could hear something that hurtled from above, whistling as it came.

            The whistling grew louder.  It was wind through feathers...the feathers of mighty wings, the wings of a flying horse.  The horse carried a mounted rider upon its back, yet it fell like a hawk upon its prey.

            The plummeting horse was only thirty feet from the uplifted head of the serpent when the knight hurled his spear.  It struck like a lightning bolt, piercing the scales, and plunged into the creature's neck.  The horse flung out its mighty wings, trying to pull up out of the dive before it plunged into the sea.  Its back hooves struck the wavetops, shooting up cascades of spray.

            Wheeling, the horse beat its way back up into the air, as the rider drew a glittering sword from a scabbard.  The sword caught the sunlight and split it into fragments as if the blade were on fire.  But the serpent was not idly waiting for the attack.  The spear wound had not killed it, but had enraged it.  The surface of the sea boiled with the lashing body of the serpent, whose head was far below.  The horse and rider circled above the foam, waiting for the serpent's head to reappear.  When it did, it rocketed out of the water like a missile.  The serpent lunged at the horse like a trout at a fly.  Nancy gasped as the horse gave a mighty clap of its wings, flinging horse and rider up and over in a backward somersault.  The knight somehow clung to the saddle even as he slashed at the enormous throat of the serpent as it shot past him.