Crimson Rivers [1] - Percy jackson

Chapter 7: Demon Pigeons Attack

The next few days were torture, just like Tantalus wanted. First, there was Tyson moving into the Poseidon cabin, giggling to himself every fifteen seconds and saying, ‘Percy is my brother?’ like he’d just won the lottery.

‘Aw, Tyson,’ we’d say. ‘It’s not that simple.’ But there was no explaining it to him. He was in heaven. And Percy … as much as he liked the big guy, he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed. Ashamed. There, I said it.

His father, the all-powerful Poseidon, had got moony-eyed for some nature
spirit, and Tyson had been the result. I mean, I’d read the myths about Cyclopes. I even remembered that they were often Poseidon’s children. But I’d never really processed that this made them Percy's … family. Until he had Tyson living with him in the next bunk.

And then there were the comments from the other campers. Suddenly, he wasn’t
Percy Jackson, the cool guy who’d retrieved Zeus’s lightning bolt last summer. Now he was Percy Jackson, the poor schmuck with the ugly monster for a brother. ‘He’s not my real brother!’ Percy protested whenever Tyson wasn’t around. ‘He’s more like a half-brother on the monstrous side of the family. Like … a half-brother twice removed, or something.’

Nobody bought it. He was angry at my dad. He felt like being his son was now a joke. So I tried to make Percy feel better. I suggested we team up for the chariot race to take our minds off our problems. Don’t get me wrong – we both hated Tantalus and we were worried sick about camp – but we didn’t know what
to do about it. Until we could come up with some brilliant plan to save Thalia’s tree, we figured we might as well go along with the races.

One morning Percy and I were sitting by the canoe lake sketching chariot
designs when some jokers from Aphrodite’s cabin walked by and asked Percy if heneeded to borrow some eyeliner for my eye … ‘Oh, sorry, eyes.’

As they walked away laughing, I grumbled, ‘Just ignore them, Percy.
It isn’t your fault you have a monster for a brother.’

‘He’s not my brother!’ he snapped. ‘And he’s not a monster, either!’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Hey, don’t get mad at me! And technically, he
is a monster.’

‘Well, you gave him permission to enter the camp.’

‘Because it was the only way to save your life! I mean … I’m sorry, Percy, I
didn’t expect Poseidon to claim him. Cyclopes are the most deceitful,
treacherous –’

‘He is not! What have you got against Cyclopes, anyway?’

I didnt wanna argue the logistics so i said ‘Just forget it, now, the axle for this chariot –’

‘You’re treating him like he’s this horrible thing,’ he said. ‘He saved our life.’

I threw down my pencil and stood. ‘Then maybe you should design a chariot with him’.

‘Maybe I should.’

‘Fine!’

‘Fine!’

-------

The next couple of days, I tried to keep my mind off my problems. Silena Beauregard, one of the nicer girls from Aphrodite’s cabin, gave Percy his
first riding lesson on a pegasus. She explained that there was only one immortal winged horse named Pegasus, who still wandered free somewhere in the skies, but over the aeons he’d sired a lot of children, none quite so fast or heroic, but all named after the first and greatest.

Being the son of the sea god, Percy was never liked going into the air. His dad had this rivalry with Zeus, so he tried to stay out of the lord of the sky’s domain as much as possible. But riding a winged horse felt different. It didn’t make him nearly as nervous as being in an aeroplane. Maybe that was because his dad had created horses out of sea foam, so the pegasi were sort of … neutral territory. Percy could understand their thoughts. I wasn’t surprised when his pegasus went galloping over the treetops or chased a flock of seagulls into a cloud. The problem was that Tyson wanted to ride the ‘chicken ponies’, too, but the
pegasi got skittish whenever he approached.

He told them telepathically that Tyson
wouldn’t hurt them, but they didn’t seem to believe him. That made Tyson cry. The only person at camp who had no problem with Tyson was Beckendorf
from the Hephaestus cabin. The blacksmith god had always worked with Cyclopes in his forges, so Beckendorf took Tyson down to the armoury to teach him metalworking. He said he’d have Tyson crafting magic items like a master in no time.

After lunch, we worked out in the arena with Apollo’s cabin. Swordplay had
always been Percy and Is strength. People said Percy was better at it than any camper in the last hundred years, except maybe Luke. People always compared him to Luke.

We thrashed the Apollo guys easily. We should’ve been testing ourselves against the Ares and Athena cabins, since they had the best sword fighters, but we didn’t get along with Clarisse and her siblings.

Percy went to archery class, even though he was terrible at it, and it wasn’t the same without Chiron teaching. In arts and crafts, he started a marble bust of Poseidon, but it started looking like Sylvester Stallone, so he ditched it. We scaled the climbing wall in full lava-and-earthquake mode. In the evenings, We did border patrol.
Even though Tantalus had insisted we forget trying to protect the camp, some of the campers had quietly kept it up, working out a schedule during our free times. Wesat at the top of Half-Blood Hill and watched the dryads come and go,
singing to the dying pine tree. Satyrs brought their reed pipes and played nature magic songs, and for a while the pine needles seemed to get fuller. The flowers on the hill smelled a little sweeter and the grass looked greener.