The Tyrant's Tomb

encounters. I doubted he had.
Koronis’s ravens…Harpocrates…
It was no coincidence they were both haunting me today like the Ghosts
of Saturnalias Past. Tarquin had orchestrated all this with me in mind. He
was forcing me to confront some of my greatest hits of dreadfulness. Even if
I survived the challenges, my friends would see exactly what kind of dirtbag
I was. The shame would weigh me down and make me ineffective—the
same way Tarquin used to add rocks to a cage around his enemy’s head, until
eventually, the burden was too much. The prisoner would collapse and
drown in a shallow pool, and Tarquin could claim, I didn’t kill him. He just
wasn’t strong enough.
I took a deep breath. “All right, I was a bully. I see that now. I will march
right into that box and apologize. And then hope Harpocrates doesn’t
vaporize me.”
Reyna did not look thrilled. She pushed up her sleeve, revealing a simple
black watch on her wrist. She checked the time, perhaps wondering how
long it would take to get me vaporized and then get back to camp.
“Assuming we can get through those doors,” she said, “what are we up
against? Tell me about Harpocrates.”
I tried to summon a mental image of the god. “He usually looks like a
child. Perhaps ten years old?”
“You bullied a ten-year-old,” Meg grumbled.
“He looks ten. I didn’t say he was ten. He has a shaved head except for a
ponytail on one side.”
“Is that an Egyptian thing?” Reyna asked.
“Yes, for children. Harpocrates was originally an incarnation of the god
Horus—Harpa-Khruti, Horus the Child. Anyway, when Alexander the Great
invaded Egypt, the Greeks found all these statues of the god and didn’t know
what to make of him. He was usually depicted with his finger to his lips.” I
demonstrated.
“Like be quiet,” Meg said.
“That’s exactly what the Greeks thought. The gesture had nothing to do
with shh. It symbolized the hieroglyph for child. Nevertheless, the Greeks
decided he must be the god of silence and secrets. They changed his name to
Harpocrates. They built some shrines, started worshipping him, and boom,
he’s a Greek-Egyptian hybrid god.”
Meg snorted. “It can’t be that easy to make a new god.”