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    Death and the Underworld
    Death and the Underworld
    Death and the Underworld
    Ebook108 pages52 minutes

    Death and the Underworld

    By Anthony Horowitz

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    About this ebook

    A collection of five bite-size myths from across the globe, Death and the Underworld by bestselling author Anthony Horowitz includes the tales from Greek, Indian and Norse myth.

    Part of the Legends series of six books, Death and the Underworld tells the tales of the great unknown. Only the very brave or very foolish will venture down into the realm of the afterlife by choice, and they will seldom live to tell the tale . . .

    Featuring black and white illustrations, the Legends series by Anthony Horowitz, the author of the phenomenally successful Alex Rider series, brings classic stories to life with thrilling imagination.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateMay 6, 2011
    ISBN9781447203797
    Death and the Underworld
    Author

    Anthony Horowitz

    ANTHONY HOROWITZ is the author of the US bestselling Magpie Murders and The Word is Murder, and one of the most prolific and successful writers in the English language; he may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author. His novel Trigger Mortis features original material from Ian Fleming. His most recent Sherlock Holmes novel, Moriarty, is a reader favorite; and his bestselling Alex Rider series for young adults has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide. As a TV screenwriter, he created both Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyle’s War on PBS. Horowitz regularly contributes to a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines, and in January 2014 was awarded an OBE.

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    • 4/5
      Half a dozen tales from various mythologies dealing with death. I was pleased to that Horowitz looked beyond the Greco-Roman myths so common in these types of collections and included stories from India, Scandinavia, and West Africa.

    Book preview

    Death and the Underworld - Anthony Horowitz

    Horowitz

    West Africa was gripped by the unrelenting hand of famine. Its arid breath whispered over the land, blighting the crops and blistering the livestock. Its shadow fell across the villages, stretching ever further in the remorseless sunlight. The water holes shrivelled and dried up. The mud hardened then cracked. Wherever the people went, black flies followed, sucking the last drops of moisture from the corners of their eyes and mouths. If famine was the king, the flies were its most loyal knights.

    It was a cruel time. Every minute of every day became an exhausting struggle to find food, to break into the unyielding earth for water, to save the pathetically withered things that had been root vegetables or plants. The people struggled and prayed for rain. They knew they would survive. They had been through it all before.

    But in one village there was a young boy who could work no longer. He had not eaten meat for so long (he thought) that he had forgotten what it tasted like. He was tired of the daily labouring, tired of seeing the blank determination that hung on the faces of his friends and relatives. And so one day he left the village, slipping away into the jungle to find his fortune – or at the very least, to renew his acquaintance with the flavour of meat.

    For three days he walked without stumbling on so much as a parrot that he might pop into a pot. But on the third day, just as he was about to turn round and go home again, he came across something very peculiar. There were forty or fifty black ropes – at least, they looked like ropes – running along the jungle floor. The ropes ran in both directions for as far as he could see. Acting on impulse, puzzled as to what they might be, the boy decided to follow them and accordingly turned to the left.

    He walked for more than a mile before the mystery was explained. The ropes weren’t ropes at all. They were hair. And the boy had followed them to the scalp of their owner.

    It was, of course, a giant. He was sitting outside a mud hut (from a distance, the boy had mistaken the hut for a small mountain) fast asleep. The giant was pitch black, the same colour as his remarkable hair, and this made the whiteness of his teeth seem all the more brilliant. These were the first things the boy noticed. The second was that despite the famine, the giant looked remarkably well fed.

    The boy was just wondering whether he should stay where he was or head for home as fast as his feet would carry him when he became aware of a movement. The giant’s eyes had opened, and he was regarding the boy with a sort of tired puzzlement.

    ‘What are you?’ he demanded, yawning.

    ‘Please, sir . . . I’m a boy,’ the boy said. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you up. I was looking for meat.’

    ‘How did you find me?’

    ‘Well, sir . . . I followed your hair.’

    ‘You mean, you’ve been haring through the jungle?’

    The giant roared with laughter at his own joke, the sound making the ground vibrate. The boy laughed too, although he hadn’t actually thought it was very funny. But then, when somebody one hundred times as big as you makes a joke, it’s probably a good idea to laugh.

    ‘If you want meat,’ the giant said, when he had calmed down, ‘I will give it to you. But you will have to earn it. You will have to stay here and work for me.’

    And so the boy remained, sweeping and chopping wood for the fire. And in return for these simple tasks, the giant was true to his word and fed him with as much steak as he could eat.

    There came a time, however, when the boy became homesick. It had been months since he had seen his parents and his village and so he asked the giant for permission to take a short holiday.

    ‘Of course,’ the giant said. ‘But you must send me someone to take your place while you’re gone.’

    ‘I’ll do that,’ the boy promised and,

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