The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,58

be looking that up?”

“Ah, I see.” Katie Leigh rested her head in the palm of her hand and started to drum her fingers in rhythmic time on her cheek. “I hadn’t thought about that. It is a bit of a random inquiry. Maybe they overheard someone talking about her and their curiosity was too much to stand. That happens to me all the time.”

“Yeah, but you’re Katie Leigh Chapman. This is Brock and the Cranes. I don’t picture them holing themselves up in the Library searching for the answers to all of life’s questions.” Katie Leigh stopped drumming on her cheek for a moment to give Landon another contemptuous glare.

“Well, I still think they must have overheard someone talking about Artemis. As you said, it isn’t something they would have encountered in their studies here, and based on Brock’s inability to even know the gender of the goddess, he obviously didn’t have any real prior knowledge on the subject, which leads me to stand by my hypothesis. But I have to give him some credit. He did know she had something to do with mythology, so there’s some underlying context there that at least pointed him in the right direction.”

“Quick question, what do your parents do for a living?” Landon interjected.

“My mother’s a psychologist and my father’s a doctor of anthropology.”

“Ah, so that’s why you talk that way,” Landon said as if coming to a life changing realization.

“Ha. Funny,” Katie Leigh replied, sounding less than amused. “But now that I’m thinking about it again, his reaction to my correcting him was a bit harsh. Maybe I surprised him . . . and they were trying to do this without anyone knowing. Yeah, that would make sense. I was a victim of circumstance. As they say, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“So now I think the real question isn’t why was he looking for Artemis, but who did he overhear talking about her that it made him so curious that he ran to the Library to find out anything he could on her?”

Landon stared at a blank space on the ceiling as he followed Katie Leigh’s train of thought. She seemed to be onto something. The ‘why’ was obvious: Brock wanted to know who Artemis was. However, the motivation behind that search was the real mystery. Landon couldn’t explain it, but for some reason he couldn’t shake the feeling that Artemis was somehow linked to the mysterious girl.

CHAPTER TEN

SAND AND STONES

Landon turned his late night attentions away from the comfort of fiction and literature and moved to the Folklore and Mythology section of the Library, scouring the shelves for anything that stood out. If the Gymnasium hadn’t blocked the Internet, he would have just searched for her on his laptop, but since that wasn’t an option, he took to the books.

Thanks to his mother, he already knew who Artemis was in the mythological sense. But at his core, he expected to find something in the texts that would stand out—some reference or clue that would prove there was more to Artemis in this situation than just being an ancient Greek goddess.

He started with Apollodorus’ Library and checked the entries on Artemis, then reread all the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that referenced Diana, Artemis’ Roman name. He reviewed Hesiod’s Theogony, and then by chance, while searching the other mythology books, happened upon a work by Callimachus, Hymn III to Artemis. With every book, Landon jotted notes in one of his course notebooks, writing everything he thought might be important.

What he’d found was that Artemis was the goddess of the moon, the hunt, wild animals and wilderness, the patron of virgins, and midwife to the gods. She was the bringer and reliever of disease in women. After she was born on the island of Delos, she sat on her father Zeus’ lap and made a few wishes. First, she asked to always remain chaste; second, to have more names than her twin brother; and third, she desired a bow and arrows fashioned by the forgers of Olympus, the Cyclopes. She then asked for a hunting tunic, a number of young maidens, all chaste, and things to keep her revered by all. Zeus obliged all of her requests.

She was a woman dedicated to her godly duties and the hunt, and took vengeance on anyone who dishonored or disappointed her. Artemis turned a man, Acteon, into a stag for accidentally stumbling across her bathing in a lake. She killed Adonis by