The Tyrant’s Tomb

With her photographic but disjointed memory, Ella was now the sole source of those old prophecies. Percy, Hazel, and Frank had brought her to Camp Jupiter, where she could live in safety and hopefully re-create the lost books with the help of Tyson, her doting boyfriend. (Cyclops-friend? Interspecies significant other?)

Past that, Ella was an enigma wrapped in red feathers wrapped in a linen shift.

“No, no, no.” She ran one hand through her luxurious swirls of red hair, ruffling it so vigorously I was afraid she might give her scalp lacerations. “Not enough words. ‘Words, words, words.’ Hamlet, act two, scene two.”

She looked in good health for a former street harpy. Her humanlike face was angular but not emaciated. Her arm feathers were carefully preened. Her weight seemed about right for an avian, so she must have been getting plenty of birdseed or tacos or whatever harpies preferred to eat. Her taloned feet had shredded a well-defined path where she paced across the carpet.

“Ella, look!” Tyson announced. “Friends!”

Ella frowned, her eyes sliding off Frank and me as if we were minor annoyances—pictures hung askew on a wall.

“No,” she decided. Her long fingernails clacked together. “Tyson needs more tattoos.”

“Okay!” Tyson grinned as if this were fantastic news. He bounded over to the reclining chair.

“Wait,” I pleaded. It was bad enough to smell the tattoos. If I saw them being made, I was sure I would puke all over Aristophanes. “Ella, before you start, could you please explain what’s going on?”

“‘What’s Going On,’” Ella said. “Marvin Gaye, 1971.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I helped write that song.”

“No.” Ella shook her head. “Written by Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye; inspired by an incident of police brutality.”

Frank smirked at me. “You can’t argue with the harpy.”

“No,” Ella agreed. “You can’t.”

She scuttled over and studied me more carefully, sniffing at my bandaged belly, poking my chest. Her feathers glistened like rust in the rain. “Apollo,” she said. “You’re all wrong, though. Wrong body. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.”

I did not like being compared to a black-and-white horror film, but I’d just been told not to argue with the harpy.

Meanwhile, Tyson adjusted the tattoo chair into a flat bed. He lay on his stomach, the recently inked purple lines of script rippling across his scarred, muscular back.

“Ready!” he announced.

The obvious finally dawned on me.

“The words that memory wrought are set to fire,” I recalled. “You’re rewriting the Sibylline Books on Tyson with hot needles. That’s what the prophecy meant.”

“Yep.” Ella poked my love handles as if assessing them for a writing surface. “Hmm. Nope. Too flabby.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled.

Frank shifted his weight, suddenly looking self-conscious about his own writing surfaces. “Ella says it’s the only way she can record the words in the right order,” he explained. “On living skin.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the last few months, I’d sorted out prophecies by listening to the insane voices of trees, hallucinating in a dark cave, and racing across a fiery crossword puzzle. By comparison, assembling a manuscript on a Cyclops’s back sounded downright civilized.

“But…how far have you gotten?” I asked.

“The first lumbar,” Ella said.

She showed no sign that she was joking.

Facedown on his torture bed, Tyson paddled his feet excitedly. “READY! Oh, boy! Tattoos tickle!”

“Ella,” I tried again, “what I mean is: Have you found anything useful for us concerning—oh, I don’t know—threats in the next four days? Frank said you had a lead?”

“Yep, found the tomb.” She poked my love handles again. “Death, death, death. Lots of death.”

Dearly beloved,

We are gathered here because

Hera stinks. Amen.

IF THERE IS ANYTHING worse than hearing Death, death, death, it’s hearing those words while having your flab poked.

“Can you be more specific?”

I actually wanted to ask: Can you make all of this go away, and can you also stop poking me? But I doubted I would get either wish.

“Cross references,” Ella said.

“Sorry?”

“Tarquin’s tomb,” she said. “The Burning Maze words. Frank told me: Apollo faces death in Tarquin’s tomb unless the doorway to the soundless god is opened by Bellona’s daughter.”

“I know the prophecy,” I said. “I sort of wish people would stop repeating it. What exactly—?”

“Cross-referenced Tarquin and Bellona and soundless god with Tyson’s index.”

I turned to Frank, who seemed to be the only other comprehensible person in the room. “Tyson has an index?”

Frank shrugged. “He wouldn’t be much of a reference book without an index.”

“On the back of my thigh!” Tyson called, still happily kicking his feet, waiting to be engraved with red-hot needles. “Want to see?”

“No! Gods, no. So you cross-referenced—”

“Yep, yep,” said Ella. “No results for Bellona or the soundless god. Hmm.” She tapped the sides of her head. “Need more words for those. But Tarquin’s tomb. Yep. Found a line.”

She scuttled to the tattoo chair, Aristophanes trotting close behind, swatting at her wings. Ella tapped Tyson’s shoulder blade. “Here.”

Tyson giggled.

“A wildcat near the spinning lights,” Ella read aloud. “The tomb of Tarquin with horses bright. To open his door, two-fifty-four.”

Mrow, said Aristophanes.

“No, Aristophanes,” Ella said, her tone softening, “you are not a wildcat.”

The beast purred like a chainsaw.

I waited for more prophecy. Most of the Sibylline Books read like The Joy of Cooking, with sacrificial recipes to placate the gods in the event of certain catastrophes. Plague of locusts ruining your crops? Try the Ceres soufflé with loaves of honey bread roasted over her altar for three days. Earthquake destroying the city? When Neptune comes home tonight, surprise him with three black bulls basted in holy oil and burned in a fire pit with sprigs of rosemary!

But Ella seemed to be done reading.

“Frank,” I said, “did that make any sense to you?”

He frowned. “I thought you would understand it.”

When would people realize that just because I was the god of prophecy didn’t mean I understood prophecies? I was also the god of poetry. Did I understand the metaphors in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? No.

“Ella,” I said, “could those lines describe a location?”

“Yep, yep. Close by, probably. But only to go in. Look around. Find out the right things and leave. Not to kill Tarquinius Superbus. Nope. He’s much too dead to kill. For that, hmm…Need more words.”

Frank Zhang picked at the mural-crown badge on his chest. “Tarquinius Superbus. The last king of Rome. He was considered a myth even back in Imperial Roman times. His tomb was never discovered. Why would he be…?” He gestured around us.