Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians companion #5.5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,70

ground right in front of her, which was littered with rocks.

She froze. “Husband, I have an idea. The bones of our mother. What if the prophecy doesn’t literally mean the bones of our mother? It might be a…what do you call those things? Limericks?”

“No, a limerick is a naughty poem,” Deucalion said. “You mean, a metaphor?”

“Yes! What if the bones of our mother is a metaphor?”

“Okay. But a metaphor for what?”

“The mother of everything…Mother Earth,” Pyrrha suggested. “And her bones—”

“Could mean these rocks!” Deucalion cried. “Wow, you’re smart!”

“That’s why you married me.”

So Deucalion and Pyrrha started picking up rocks and chucking them over their shoulders as they walked. They didn’t look behind them, but they could hear the rocks cracking apart like eggs as they hit the ground. Later, the king and queen found out that each rock had turned into a human. When Deucalion threw one, it turned into a man. When Pyrrha threw one, it turned into a woman.

So Zeus let the human race repopulate itself.

I’m not sure if that means we’re still the bronze race, or if we’re the stone race, or maybe the rockers? Either way, Zeus was glad to let the humans back into the world, because without them, he wouldn’t have had any pretty mortal girls to chase after.

You can’t swing a cat in Ancient Greece without hitting at least one of Zeus’s ex-girlfriends. We’ve already covered a lot of his romances, so I don’t think we need to talk about many of them here. I’ll just mention that Zeus had absolutely no shame and was endlessly creative when it came to wooing women. With each girlfriend, he shape-shifted into some weird form to get her attention. He rarely appeared in the same guise twice.

Once he got cuddly with a girl while in the form of a swan. Another time, he visited his girlfriend as a shower of golden light. He cornered other women in the forms of a snake, an eagle, a satyr, and an ant. (Seriously, how do you corner somebody when you’re an ant, and how would you…never mind.) Zeus even tricked some women by appearing as their husbands. That’s just low.

One particularly sneaky trick was when he kidnapped this lady named Europa. She was a princess. (Naturally. Aren’t they always princesses?) Zeus spied her one day at the beach, hanging out with her friends.

Zeus didn’t want to appear to her in his real godly form, because a) Hera might notice and get mad, b) when gods showed up, girls tended to run away for good reason, and c) he really wanted to talk to Europa alone. Don’t you hate it when you want to talk to a girl alone, but they always seem to travel in packs, like wolves? It’s annoying.

So Zeus transformed into a bull and galloped across the beach. He wasn’t a scary bull, though. He had soft gray eyes and a butterscotch-yellow hide with a white spot on his forehead. His horns were pearly white. He stopped on a grassy hillside near the beach and started grazing, like, Ho-hum. Don’t mind me.

All the girls noticed him. At first, they weren’t sure what to think. But the bull didn’t do anything threatening. It looked kind of cute and gentle, as far as bulls go.

“Let’s check it out,” Europa said. “He looks pretty!”

So the girls swarmed around the bull and started petting his back and feeding him handfuls of grass. The bull made gentle lowing sounds. He gave Europa the big soft eyes and generally acted cuddly and sweet.

“Awwwwwww,” all the girls said.

Europa noticed that the bull also smelled wonderful—like a combination of leather and Old Spice. She had an overpowering urge to adopt him and take him home.

Bull Zeus nuzzled her dress and then lowered his head, sinking to his front knees.

“OMG!” Europa cried. “I think he wants to take me for a ride!”

Generally speaking, princesses weren’t supposed to ride bulls, but this bull seemed so sweet and tame, Europa climbed right on his back.

“Come on, girls!” Europa called. “Let’s all—WHAA!”

Before she could help her friends climb aboard, the bull bolted straight for the ocean. Europa clung to his neck, terrified that she might get thrown. She was much too afraid to try climbing off while the bull was rampaging.

In no time, the bull was three hundred feet out to sea. Europa’s friends called to her desperately, but the beach was getting farther and farther away, and Europa wasn’t a good swimmer. She had no idea where the