Beast Keeper Read online

  “We can’t help it,” they mooed. “It’s that leftover ambrosia cake. It doesn’t suit any of our stomachs. It gives us terrible gas!”

  The other beasts jeered and hissed as Demon walked toward them and tried to avoid the row of snapping jaws and tearing claws on either side.

  “STINKY COWS! STINKY COWS! STINKY COWS!”

  It was sadly true. The Cattle of the Sun stank more than any of the other beasts. They reeked. No wonder the whole of Olympus smelled of poo. Demon staggered back from their pen and bumped into the barred door of a stable opposite. A large clawed paw lashed out and caught him on the shoulder, ripping his tunic and tearing deep into his flesh. It hurt so much that Demon jerked away and fell to his knees, trying not to scream. Immediately the snakes on his collar whipped around and plunged their tongues into the wound. It stopped hurting at once, and he could feel the gash closing up.

  “Th-th-thanks,” he whispered. Offy and Yukus coiled themselves back around his neck.

  “It wasssss our pleasssssure,” they hissed into his ear.

  Demon got up slowly and turned around. A huge creature with the head and wings of an eagle and a lion’s body stared at him with golden eyes. Demon walked forward and put his hands on the bars. It was important not to show he was afraid. Animals didn’t respect you if you were frightened.

  “You’re a griffin, aren’t you?” he asked. The creature spat, and the spit sizzled slightly as it hit the ground.

  “Yes,” it said aggressively. “So?” Its sharp beak darted out and clacked shut just by his ear. Demon dodged away just in time to avoid another serious injury.

  “So, I’m here to look after you all,” Demon said in a loud, firm voice (even though he was quaking like a pile of jellied eels inside). “Zeus’s orders. If you want clean beds and someone to listen to what you need, then you’ll quit the clawing and biting stuff.” His voice dropped, and became what he hoped was threatening. “I’m quite sure Zeus would be VERY interested to hear that you were trying to kill the stable boy HE appointed. He wouldn’t be very pleased. In fact he might even come and PAY YOU A VISIT.” Demon held his breath and waited. Surely no one wanted a visit from Zeus.

  But the griffin wasn’t backing down. It spat at him again, hitting the hem of his tunic, and making a big smoking hole. “Hate humans,” it hissed.

  Demon crouched down in front of it. “Why do you hate humans?” he asked. The griffin snorted.

  “We ALL hate humans,” it snarled. “Specially half-god humans like you. That’s what most of the heroes are, see? The gods send us down to the earthly realms to fight them or give them some sort of adventure. We’re immortal, of course, so we can’t really die. After we get ‘killed’ down there, we come back up here to recover. And then they send us back down to do it all over again. No one really cares about us beasts. We’re just entertainment—a bit of fun for the gods—their dangerous little pets.” Then a whole chorus of angry voices joined in.

  Yes. A bit of fun.

  You should see my spear scars.

  That Heracles is the worst. Always off destroying us beasts.

  I got a lump of burning lead shoved down my throat.

  I got my tails chopped off.

  I have to spend every day tearing out some poor guy’s liver—and I don’t even like liver.

  IT’S NOT FAIR!

  As the noise grew louder and louder, Demon remembered his dad’s pipes. He got them out and blew a long series of silvery notes. Immediate silence. It was like a miracle.

  “You poor things,” he said into the quiet. “That all sounds terrible. But look at me! I’m not a hero. I may be the son of Pan, but really I’m just a scrawny boy who loves all creatures, tame or wild. And I’d never hurt any of you.” He paused. “I-I’m all alone up here s-so I’d really like us to be friends. I promise to do my best for you. Will you help me?” One of the tears he’d been holding back for so long escaped and trickled down his cheek. He brushed it away crossly as the griffin glared down its beak at him, poked out a very long forked tongue, and licked its beak meaningfully.

  “You threatened us with a visit from Zeus, Pan’s scrawny kid. I don’t like threats. How about the rest of you?” Any normal human would just have heard a cacophony of growls and moos and squeaks and snarls and roars and barks and howls.

  Demon just heard:

  “NO.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE STABLE BOY

  Demon was exhausted every single night from then on. He just curled up in his bed of straw, pulled the faun’s spider-silk blanket over him, and slept like a dead person. He was bitten and bruised and clawed and stung at least twenty times a day by various beasts. Offy and Yukus had to work on him pretty much full time to keep him alive. Hephaestus had lent him one of his metal robots for a few days, and together they had shoveled and forked and wheelbarrowed what seemed like enough beast poo to create several new muckheap mountains. Demon thought he could hear the hundred-armed monsters roaring their appreciation at their massive poo feast from the bottom of the chute.

  Demon had talked to Hephaestus about the Cattle of the Sun and their windy stomachs. Thankfully the smith god had asked Helios, the sun god, for some of the special golden hay he fed his horses. That had solved the problem, and now the cattle sparkled and shone and—more to the point—smelled of nothing but the aroma of clean, well-fed beasts. There was no chance of the gods or goddesses complaining now, he hoped.

  He didn’t have much to do with the gods really, apart from Hephaestus, who was turning out to be quite kind, for an immortal. There was just the occasional flash, whoosh, and thump as the Iris Express landed, or a brief message via a cherub requesting that this beast or that be made ready to go down to the earthly realms, or the crack and roar of thunder and lightning from Zeus and Hera’s big palace on the farthest hill. Demon didn’t mind—the less he had to do with the gods, the better, he thought.

  Outside his work at the Stables, Demon was almost happy. He missed his mom a lot, of course, but the nymphs and naiads and dryads soon began to treat him like a little brother. They teased him and told him snippets of gossip about the gods and goddesses. In this way he learned that Zeus was a terrible flirt who was always getting into trouble with his wife, that Dionysus had invented a new kind of grape drink that made everybody very giggly and silly, that Aphrodite had just redecorated her palace in fifty different shades of pink and was always meddling in the lives of mortal lovers . . . and that Hera was best avoided at all times, if you knew what was good for you.

  Inside the Stables he was learning to deal with his charges little by little. They saw that he really did seem to care about their welfare, and most of them tolerated him. Even the griffin was becoming friendlier. It only bit him halfheartedly now, and Demon suspected it might even have a sense of humor when he found out that it liked to hide in a dark corner of its cage and then leap out at him. It was certainly becoming much chattier, and it seemed to enjoy giving him advice. The job he liked best was exercising the little herd of Ethiopian winged horses. He brushed and brushed them until their coats shone like ivory and onyx and bronze. Then he polished their little gold horns and wiped their wings down with scented oil he found in the storeroom. The boss horse was called Keith, and at first he had tended to snap and bite and rear when Demon tried to get on his back. However, after Demon had discovered that he liked his left ear scratched in a certain way, they’d come to an arrangement. Ten minutes scratching equaled a half-hour exercise flight. Demon thought that was very fair. So every day he found himself soaring through the air over Olympus at the head of six flying horses. They flew a loop-the-loop over Hephaestus’s mountain and chased the fiery spark spirits high into the atmosphere. It was definitely better than herding goats and sheep, he reckoned.

  Not all the beasts were as easy to please as Keith, though. It had taken him a whole week to learn how to get near enough
to feed the unicorns, let alone milk them. There’d been a series of increasingly angry messages from Aphrodite (who wanted her annual unicorn milk bath), and so he’d had to ask for advice fast.

  “How do you milk a unicorn, please?” he politely asked Melanie the water naiad as he filled the buckets at her spring. But she was busy admiring her new necklace of raindrops and wouldn’t answer him. The cherubs just giggled and pelted him with petals. The nymphs were more helpful.

  “They like girls,” said the head nymph, whose name was Althea.

  Demon looked at her. “Don’t know if you’d noticed,” he said, slightly sarcastically, “but I’m not one.”

  That started a lot of giggling and nudging, but Althea just looked at her sisters and they fell silent.

  “We owe you,” she said. “Those smelly Stables were just about killing our noses—we all felt really sick until you came along and cleaned up. So one of us will do the milking for you morning and evening, if you’ll let us have the wool from the Golden Ram when you shear him. It makes the finest embroidery thread, you know, and we like it for decorating our dresses.”

  “It’s a deal,” said Demon. He had never sheared a winged sheep before, but was willing to try anything to get Aphrodite off his back.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE HOSPITAL SHED

  Demon felt that he’d really settled into his new job, when the casualties started coming in to the Stables. The Nemean Lion was first. He arrived one morning on the Iris Express, and immediately an alarm in the Stables started to sound.

  “Incoming wounded, incoming wounded,” squawked a carved head on the back wall. Demon had wondered what it was for, and now he knew. He started to panic at once.

  “What do I do?” he asked the griffin, whose clawed toenails he was clipping at the time. The griffin nodded toward a long, low wagon that stood propped against the end wall of the Stables.

  “Off you go with that,” he said. “Iris usually dumps the wounded at the foot of the Express for someone to collect and bring back. Whoever is hurt needs to go in the hospital shed to be patched up. You do know where that is, don’t you?”

  Demon shook his head. How could he have been so stupid? On his very first day, the beasts had told him they often got hurt. Why hadn’t he checked the hospital out? He shot out of the griffin’s stable, forgetting to latch the door behind him. He grabbed the stretcher wagon and started to run, cursing himself all the way. He’d helped out plenty of normal animals with his mom, but he didn’t have her healing herbs or bandages or anything here—and he absolutely hated seeing an animal in pain.

  What he found at the foot of the Iris Express was worse than he could ever have imagined. A huge, bald pink lion lay there, moaning in agony.

  “My skin, my special skin,” it groaned.

  Demon approached cautiously. Its skin might have gone, but its claws and teeth were definitely still present.

  “I’m Demon,” he said softly, squatting down beside it. “Will you let me help you?”

  The lion rolled its eyes and groaned some more as Demon hauled it onto the stretcher as gently as he could. It bit him twice, and scratched him seventeen times, but the magic snakes whipped into action, and the blood stopped oozing in almost no time at all. Demon hardly noticed—he was too busy trying to work out what he should do with the poor thing.

  “Over here,” yelled the griffin. It flicked its door open with a paw and escaped from its open cage. “Lucky for you I’m not the Minotaur, or you might have been in big trouble, Pan’s scrawny kid,” it said.

  The griffin pointed a claw at a big thatched shed right at the back of the Stables. Demon had thought it was a storage shed of some kind. Sorting out the main Stables had taken all his time and energy, so he hadn’t checked it out yet.

  Then the griffin saw the Nemean Lion and whistled through its beak. “By Chiron’s hooves, mate. Who got you? That’s a terrible state you’re in.”

  “Heracles,” moaned the lion. “Hera’s set him twelve impossible tasks as a punishment for killing his poor wife and children. Apparently she’s got a little list marked ‘Labors for Heracles,’ and she’s going to tick them off one by one.” The lion moaned some more. “He’s gone and ripped off my poor skin and made it into invincible armor. Heracles was bad enough before, but now none of us are safe. I’m only the first casualty you’ll have to deal with, you mark my words.”

  With that, its eyes rolled up in its skinless head, and it fainted. Demon looked around the shelves. There were dirty, unrolled bandages, half-empty bottles, spilled herbs, and a variety of blunt instruments that looked as if they’d been used for cutlery.

  “Silenus wasn’t great at doctoring,” said the griffin, stating the obvious. Demon stared at the lion in despair. He hadn’t a clue where to start mending it. The griffin came over and head-butted him gently. “I’d have a word with Hephaestus,” it advised him. “He’s a god who cares enough to fix most things. Unlike most of the others,” it muttered bitterly.

  By the time he reached Hephaestus’s mountain, Demon was panting like a boy who’d run four marathons. He had to drink a whole glass of the revolting ambrosia before he could even speak. When he’d explained the problem, Hephaestus scratched his head.

  “You need some of my magic bandages, I should think,” he said. “I keep them around in case any of the nymphs come in here and get burned. Happens sometimes when the forge is at full blast and I don’t notice them standing there. Should help soothe the lion down—and then we can think about making him a new pelt. You can get the Caucasian Eagle to nip over to Pandora’s house on his way back from tearing old Prometheus’s liver out, and ask Epimetheus if he has any skin left over from making all those furry earth animals.”

  Hephaestus rummaged around on the shelves to the left of the furnace and pulled out a square green package that smelled of the familiar scent of lavender and aloe, with something Demon didn’t recognize thrown in. “Here you are—slap that all over him for now. I’ll be along in a bit to see how you’re doing.”

  The lion did look funny covered in sticky green gauze, but he also seemed to be more comfortable. Demon fed him leftover ambrosia through a straw when he woke, and then the lion told him about the fight with Heracles. By the time he’d finished, Demon reckoned that if he ever met Heracles, he was going to punch the wretched hero on the nose . . . however strong and big he was. Nice people did NOT go around pulling skins off poor innocent lions.

  Later that night, Hephaestus turned up as promised. He limped into the hospital shed carrying a large silver box with brass handles, which he set down on the floor.

  “Should have given you this before, really,” he said. “It’s got the same sort of magic in it as Offy and Yukus use on you—only it’s for beasts. Just open it when you’ve got a medical emergency, and you’ll find it tells you what you need for most cases. Think it’ll provide a cure for just about anything that happens to your beasts. There’s this, too.” He handed over a short length of silver rope. “Ties anything. Expands as needed. Won’t come undone. And I ground some of my calming crystals into the core of it in case your dad’s pipes aren’t handy. You can belt it around your tunic.”

  Demon forgot Hephaestus was one of the gods. He jumped up and hugged him.

  “Thanks, Heffy,” he said. “You’re the best!” Hephaestus grinned down at him and ruffled his hair.

  “Irreverent cub,” he said. “Don’t you go calling Zeus ‘Zeusie,’ now, or you’ll find yourself a pile of ash faster than you can blink. And mind you don’t forget to send that message with the Caucasian Eagle. You definitely need new skin for the lion—but unfortunately the box won’t provide enough of it. It only does patches.”

  When the Caucasian Eagle returned the next day, it was carrying a small bag in its claws. “Here you are,” it said, dropping it at Demon’s feet. “Epimetheus says that’s the very last of the skin,
so don’t go asking for any more. Now, where’s my ambrosia? Filthy stuff, but it takes away the taste of liver. I REALLY hate that wretched liver,” it grumbled, flying off to its perch and tucking its head under its wing.

  Demon thanked it and picked up the bag, yawning. He’d been up with the Nemean Lion all night, playing Pan’s pipes to soothe it, changing its dressings in between scrubbing and tidying up the hospital shed.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, upending the bag on the now shiny, clean counter. There was a tiny but distinct silence as he and the lion looked at what had fallen out. There was no getting away from it. The skin that Epimetheus had sent was spotty with a hint of fluff. It was also a strange shade of bright green. “Er, perhaps it’s just gone a bit moldy and it’ll wash off,” Demon said in an optimistic tone. He wasn’t hopeful, though. When he brushed at the skin, it stayed firmly green. Like new grass.

  “I’ll be a laughingstock,” moaned the lion. “Lions have flat, tawny skin. If you put that on me, I’ll be the Greater Green-Spotted Nemean Lion.”

  “Think of it as a fashion statement,” said Demon encouragingly. “I’m sure all the lady lions will love it. Would you rather stay as you are and be the Lesser Pink Bald Nemean Lion?”

  “Go on, then,” said the lion. “I don’t care anymore. I shall ask the gods to let me go into retirement in a nice lonely cave somewhere, if they insist on sending me back to the earthly realms.”

  The new skin fit—just. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, and there were a couple of odd bulgy lumps where Demon had had to smooth and squash bits of lion into rather too little skin—but at least the Nemean Lion looked like a lion again (though a very oddly colored and slightly fluffy one).

  Demon put him into a nice darkened stable to rest—and Hephaestus brought over some meaty scraps from one of the god feasts. The lion gobbled them up in seconds. Demon’s first medical emergency seemed to be over, and he hadn’t even needed to use the silver box. He felt quite proud of himself.