hero? My brother, Apollo? Oh, no…please tell me it wasn’t him.”
“It—it was you!” Kallisto wailed.
Artemis stared at her. “Run that by me again.”
Kallisto told the story of how Zeus had appeared to her in Artemis’s form.
The goddess burned with rage. She wanted to throttle her father Zeus, but there’s only so much you can do when your dad is the king of the universe. She looked at Kallisto and shook her head in pity.
“You were my favorite,” Artemis said. “If you had come to me immediately, I could have helped you. I would have found you a rich, handsome husband and let you settle into a new life in the city of your choice. I would have allowed you to retire from the Hunt with honor. You could have gone in peace. Zeus’s assault was not your fault.”
Kallisto sobbed. “But I didn’t want to lose you! I wanted to stay!”
Artemis felt like her heart was breaking, but she couldn’t show it. She had rules about her followers. She couldn’t allow those rules to be broken, not even by her best friend. “Kallisto, your crime was keeping the secret from me. You dishonored me, and your sisters of the Hunt, by not being honest. You defiled our company of maidens when you were not a maiden yourself. That I cannot forgive.”
“But…but, Artemis—”
“No more talk!” Artemis pointed at Kallisto, and the young lady began to change. She grew in size. Her limbs became shorter and thicker. Her clothes, which had helped her hide her condition, became a suffocating thick coat of brown fur. Kallisto turned into a brown bear. When she tried to talk, she could only roar.
“Go, now,” Artemis said, trying not to cry. “Your new shape will remind you that you can never be in my sight. If I see you again, I must kill you. LEAVE!”
Kallisto bounded away through the woods. She gave birth to a human son named Arkas, who returned to the world of mortals and eventually became a king. But soon after, poor Kallisto was killed by hunters.
Zeus felt some remorse. He turned Kallisto into a constellation, Ursa Major, or the Big Bear—as if that could make up for ruining her life.
Kind of strange: after the incident with Kallisto, Artemis’s next two best friends were both guys. I’m not sure why. Maybe she figured they couldn’t hurt her any worse than Kallisto had, or if they did, at least she wouldn’t be surprised, since guys were naturally jerks. Or maybe she was trying to prove to herself that she would never go back on her own vow of maidenhood, even with the most interesting guy she could find.
Her first male friend was Orion, who had a shady past. For one thing, he was a giant. But he was short for a giant, maybe seven feet tall, and he looked humanoid enough that he could almost pass for a mortal. For a long time he worked for the king of Chios as the royal hunter. Then Orion got in a little trouble with the king’s daughter. When the king found out, he had Orion blinded with a searing hot iron. Then he kicked him out of the kingdom.
Orion stumbled around Greece until he happened to run into the blacksmith god Hephaestus. Orion told him his tragic story. The giant sounded genuinely sorry, so Hephaestus—who knew a lot about tragedy and second chances—designed mechanical eyes that allowed Orion to see again.
Orion retired to Delos, where he met Artemis. She thought he was a nice-enough guy. He didn’t try to hide his past crimes. He also had incredible hunting skills. His years of blindness had sharpened his other senses, and his mechanical eyes gave him all sorts of cool night vision/targeting abilities. He became the first male ever to join the Hunters of Artemis.
I’m not sure how the other followers felt about that. The Hunters had never been co-ed before. But Orion didn’t try anything funny. He kept his distance from the girls when they were bathing. He helped out with the chores just like everybody else. Pretty soon he became fast friends with Artemis.
The only problem: Orion was a little too good at hunting. One day he was out by himself, and he got carried away. He shot sixteen bears, twelve lions, and several monsters that he couldn’t even name. Then he started shooting harmless stuff: deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds, wombats. Maybe he just snapped. Maybe Apollo drove him crazy, because Apollo didn’t like how much time this