Hi! I haven't updated for a while, but it's the school holidays where I live now, so I will hopefully update a few times during the next two weeks (I'm really lazy). Enjoy this next chapter!
She sighed in defeat and shook her head.
"You don't understand, do you? The gods are laughing at both of us. If the raft will not appear, that means they've closed Ogygia. You're stuck here the same as me. You can never leave."
The boy's face closed down, and stiffly, he marched out of her cave.
The next few days, the boy mostly left her alone. At one point, he came complaining to her, unsure of how long he had been on the island. She had responded with a vague, "Time is difficult here." He left, looking dissatisfied and irritated.
Calypso pretended not to see, but she noticed that the boy spent his time wandering aimlessly around the circumference of the island, and was growing steadily thinner. A bit of guilt ate at her insides, knowing that he slept on a bed of drop cloths among the remnants of her dining table, while every other hero that had washed up on her island was treated to a bed with feather pillows and cotton sheets. She quickly brushed the thought aside.
On the third day, Calypso cracked. She finally took pity on the boy and had her servants to leave bowls of stew and goblets of apple cider on the edge of her garden. She might hate him, but she wasn't cruel enough to let him survive on the infinite supply of breath mints he pulled out of his tool belt.
Under further observation, Calypso noted that he was a son of Hephaestus. The evidence was that he was constantly fiddling with screw and bits of metal that he seemingly pulled out of nowhere. That, and he constantly caught on fire. Sighing, Calypso wove him a set of clothes on her loom. He was pleased to see that they fit him well, but he burned through them within a day. So she wove him another set. And another. And another.
He came to see her in her cave once, presumably to nag her with some bothersome question, but the sight of him startled her so much that she started yelling and pegging pots at his head. That scared him off fairly quickly.
A couple days later, Calypso heard some clanging and banging. At first, she ignored it, but when it didn't stop, Calypso grabbed a basket of grapes and freshly baked bread, then marched down to the beach.
The looking around, she noticed that the boy had pitched a camp built on sticks and a canvas close to the footpath. He had even somehow built himself a bench and a worktable from some driftwood and dead cedar branches. Definitely a son of Hephaestus. Trying not to let on how impressed she was, he walked over to where he was standing at a mud brick forge, hammering at some Celestial bronze he had somehow managed to get his hands on.
"Smoke and fire," she snapped. "Clanging on metal all day long. You're scaring away the birds!"
Actually, Calypso hadn't even thought of the birds until now, she just thought that telling him he that the banging was annoying her sounded a bit childish.
"Oh, no, not the birds!" he grumbled without stopping his work.
Calypso rolled her eyes, she had forgotten how irksome he was. "What do you hope to accomplish?"
He glanced up, and cursed when his hammer almost smashed his thumb. He stared for a moment, his face covered in soot and sweat. He actually looked kind of cute. Snap out of it, Calypso!
After an awkward pause, the boy broke the silence.
"I'm hoping to get off this island. That is what you want, right?"
Calypso scowled, and set down her basket of food.
"You haven't eaten in two days." Not that she was paying attention. Not at all. "Take a break and eat."
"Two days?" the boy asked, looking rather surprised. "Thanks, I'll, uh, try to hammer more quietly."
"Huh." Honestly, she didn't believe he would.
As Calypso strolled back to her cave, it occurred to her that she didn't even know his name. Strange how she didn't realise that earlier.
When she arrived at her garden, Calypso walked over to her fountain. Then she stopped. Something was different. The irritating clicking sound that had annoyed her for several years, had ceased, and the satyrs on her fountain were all standing upright. It was fixed. She turned around and also noted that the rod on the entrance of her cave was level, so the curtains no longer dragged across the ground. Also, her pruning shears were sitting on a bench nearby. Gleaming. They hadn't done that for a while. Calypso stared in astonishment. That boy was so strange.
She turned back to the fountain, determined to find out more about the boy.
Hope you enjoyed this chapter! It never says in the book how Calypso found out Leo's name, so I'll write about that in the next chapter. PLEASE review, and thank you so, so SO much to my reviewers. I have seven reviews now! *happy dance* XD
xX-FutureCelebrity-Xx