The Tower of Nero
Screech-Bling raised his hands and click-click-clicked for attention. “Friends! Shareholders! I see you all!”
The troglodytes tapped their spoons against their stone cups, making a sound like a thousand clattering bones.
“Out of courtesy for our uncivilized guests,” Screech-Bling continued, “I shall speak in the barbaric language of the crust-dwellers.”
Nico tipped his fine top hat. “I see the honor you give us. Thank you, CEO Screech-Bling, for not eating us, and also speaking in our tongue.”
Screech-Bling nodded with a smug expression that said, No problem, kid. We’re just awesome that way. “The Italian wall lizard has told us many things!”
A board member standing behind him, the one with the cowboy hat, whispered in his ear.
“I mean the Italian son of Hades!” Screech-Bling corrected. “He has explained the evil plans of Emperor Nero!”
The trogs muttered and hissed. Apparently, Nero’s infamy had spread even to the deepest-dwelling corporations of hat-wearers. Screech-Bling pronounced the name Nee-ACK-row, with a sound in the middle like a cat being strangled, which seemed appropriate.
“The son of Hades wishes our help!” said Screech-Bling. “The emperor has vats of fire-liquid. Many of you know the ones I speak of. Loud and clumsy was the digging when they installed those vats. Shoddy the workmanship!”
“Shoddy!” agreed many of the trogs.
“Soon,” said the CEO, “Nee-ACK-row will unleash burning death across the Crusty Crust. The son of Hades has asked our help to dig to these vats and eat them!”
“You mean disable them?” Nico suggested.
“Yes, that!” Screech-Bling agreed. “Your language is crude and difficult!”
On the opposite side of the circle, the board member with the police hat made a small notice-me sort of growl. “O Screech-Bling, these fires will not reach us. We are too deep! Should we not let the Crusty Crust burn?”
“Hey!” Will spoke for the first time, looking about as serious as someone can while wearing a lampshade. “We’re talking about millions of innocent lives.”
Police Hat snarled. “We trogs are only hundreds. We do not breed and breed and choke the world with our waste. Our lives are rare and precious. You crust-dwellers? No. Besides, you are blind to our existence. You would not help us.”
“Grr-Fred speaks the truth,” said Cowboy Hat. “No offense to our guests.”
The child with the propeller beanie chose this moment to appear at my side, grinning and offering me a wicker basket covered by a napkin. “Breadsticks?”
I was so upset I declined.
“—assure our guests,” Screech-Bling was saying. “We have welcomed you to our table. We see you as intelligent beings. You must not think we are against your kind. We bear you no ill will! We simply do not care whether you live or die.”
There was a general muttering of agreement. Click-Wrong gave me a kindly glance that implied, You can’t argue with that logic!
The scary thing was, back when I was a god, I might have agreed with the trogs. I’d destroyed a few cities myself in the old days. Humans always popped up again like weeds. Why fret about one little fiery apocalypse in New York?
Now, though, one of those “not-so-rare” lives was Estelle Blofis’s, giggler and future ruler of the Crusty Crust. And her parents, Sally and Paul…In fact, there wasn’t a single mortal I considered expendable. Not one deserved to be snuffed out by Nero’s cruelty. The revelation stunned me. I had become a human-life hoarder!
“It’s not just crust-dwellers,” Nico was saying, his tone remarkably calm. “Lizards, skinks, frogs, snakes…Your food supply will burn.”
This caused some uneasy mumbling, but I sensed that the trogs were still not swayed. They might have to range as far as New Jersey or Long Island to gather their reptiles. They might have to live on breadsticks for a while. But so what? The threat wasn’t critical to their lives or their stock prices.
“What about hats?” Will asked. “How many haberdasheries will burn if we don’t stop Nero? Dead haberdashers cannot make trog haberdashery.”
More grumbling, but clearly this argument wasn’t enough, either.
With a growing sense of helplessness, I realized that we wouldn’t be able to convince the troglodytes by appealing to their self-interest. If only a few hundred of them existed, why should they gamble their own lives by tunneling into Nero’s doomsday reservoir? No god or corporation would accept that level of risk.
Before I realized what I was doing, I had risen to my feet. “Stop! Hear me, troglodytes!”
The crowd grew dangerously still. Hundreds of large brown eyes fixed on me.
One trog whispered, “Who is that?”
His companion whispered back, “Don’t know, but he can’t be important. He’s wearing a Mets hat.”
Nico gave me an urgent sit-down-before-you-get-us-killed look.
“Friends,” I said, “this is not about reptiles and hats.”
The trogs gasped. I had just implied that two of their favorite things were no more important than crust-dweller lives.
I forged ahead. “The trogs are civilized! But what makes a people civilized?”
“Hats!” yelled one.
“Language!” yelled another.
“Soup?” inquired a third.
“You can see,” I said. “That is how you greeted us. You saw the son of Hades. And I don’t mean just seeing with your eyes. You see value, and honor, and worthiness. You see things as they are. Is this not true?”
The trogs nodded reluctantly, confirming that, yes, in terms of importance, seeing was probably up there with reptiles and hats.
“You’re right about the crust-dwellers being blind,” I admitted. “In many ways, they are. So was I, for centuries.”
“Centuries?” Click-Wrong leaned away as if realizing I was well past my expiration date. “Who are you?”
“I was Apollo,” I said. “God of the sun. Now I am a mortal named Lester.”
No one seemed awed or incredulous—just confused. Someone whispered to a friend, “What’s a sun?” Another asked, “What’s a Lester?”
“I thought I knew all the races of the world,” I continued, “but I didn’t believe troglodytes existed until Nico brought me here. I see your importance now! Like you, I once thought crust-dwellers’ lives were common and unimportant. I have learned otherwise. I would like to help you see them as I have. Their value has nothing to do with hats.”
Screech-Bling narrowed his large brown eyes. “Nothing to do with hats?”
“If I may?” As nonthreateningly as I could, I brought out my ukulele.
Nico’s expression changed from urgency to despair, like I had signed our death warrants. I was used to such silent criticism from his father. Hades has zero appreciation for the fine arts.
I strummed a C major chord. The sound reverberated through the cavern like tonal thunder. Trogs covered their ears. Their jaws dropped. They stared in wonder as I began to sing.
As I had at Camp Jupiter, I made up the words as I went along. I sang of my trials, my travels with Meg, and all the heroes who had helped us along the way. I sang of sacrifices and triumphs. I sang of Jason, our fallen shareholder, with honesty and heartache, though I may have embellished the number of fine hats he wore. I sang of the challenges we now faced—Nero’s ultimatum for my surrender, the fiery death he had in mind for New York, and the even greater menace of Python, waiting in the caverns of Delphi, hoping to strangle the future itself.