The Face of Apollo

by Fred Saberhagen

  After some difficulty the two of them got the craft turned in solidly against the stone dock. Then Jeremy, springing ashore, se­cured it firmly, with another line, to some stonework that seemed likely to endure for a while.

  Now that she had an active helper, the young woman an­nounced her determination to cast off as soon as the unconscious man and a few essentials had been carried aboard. She was ready to abandon certain other items; when Jeremy volun­teered to go back for them, she refused his offer.

  On the inner side of the dock, one or two dark doorways led directly into the broken pyramid. It was too dim in there for Je­remy to even guess at what the building might contain.

  As they were making their slow progress away from the ruined dock, she looked back now and then, in the manner of someone who feared pursuit. Jeremy was quite used to that manner now, having observed it in himself for many days.

  But there was one item, a small box of ivory and ebony, that she made very sure to have on board. Jeremy caught only a brief glimpse of it and did not see where the young woman put it away.

  When he got the chance to take a close look at the uncon­scious man, Jeremy could detect no obvious injuries. Dark-mustached, thin-faced, naturally well muscled but somehow ascetic-looking, about thirty years of age. His nearly naked body was marked in several places with painted symbols, so exten­sively that the natural color of his skin was hard to make out. The designs showed, among other things, his Academic standing. Jeremy could read them now.

  His hands were soft, those of an aristocrat.

  "What happened to him, ma'am?" the boy inquired cautiously. No blood, bruises, or swellings were visible on the unconscious body, which was breathing regularly.

  "Never mind. He has been taken ill. But it will pass. Be care­ful with him! Don't worry; it's not catching."

  But after Jeremy and the girl between them had somehow got the immediate emergency under control, she tersely informed the boy that the man had been rapt in some kind of meditation when the fit came over him.

  "Did you say 'the fit,' ma'am?"

  She wasn't going to waste a lot of time explaining things to a river rat. "Help me move him. We've got to get him down out of the sun. Into the cabin."

  "Yes, ma'am." And once more Jeremy sprang to obey.

  It was a difficult job. The man was a deadweight, his lean body muscular and heavier than it looked, and his unscarred, well-nourished frame was difficult to maneuver. The belt of his scanty loincloth offered about the only handhold.

  The lady—if she deserved that status—unbuckled her sword belt and with a muttered curse threw it aside to clatter on the deck.

  Soon the man's inert frame had somehow been shifted to a safer, more secure position, in one of the two narrow built-in bunks inside the cabin. One bunk was on each side, and both were made up with neat pillows, and smooth, clean sheets the like of which Jeremy had rarely seen before. There was even mos­quito netting.

  Taking a brief look around inside the small cabin, the boy caught a glimpse of men's and women's clothing and other items to be expected in a place where people lived. Most star­tling was the sight of what seemed to him a hundred books— more scrolls and volumes than Jeremy Redthorn had seen, in total, before today. The majority of these were stacked on a worktable, broad as the whole deckhouse, whose remaining sur­face was littered with more papers and parchments, weighted down by the instruments of natural philosophy. Dried bones in a round cup, used for casting lots. A kind of magnifying glass. Tools for dissecting biological specimens? With at one side a dead lizard cut open and fastened down on a board by pins. It looked like some nasty child's experiments in torture, but new memory—when Jeremy dared risk a quick look into its depths—offered reassurance. No, this is a matter of what those who are highly placed at the Academy call odylic philosophy. You look at their entrails and seek omens therein. It is largely a waste of time.

  And he was being given little time or opportunity to gawk. They were outside again, where the young woman directed Je­remy to their next task. Working together, pushing with poles against the shallow bottom, they were eventually able to get the craft moving downstream, like an animal that had to be prodded into recognizing its master's purpose.

  A shadow, not easily distinguishable from that of a large tree's limb, moved on deck. Looking up, Jeremy saw that a giant snake, scales faintly iridescent in the sun, clinging to an overhanging branch was beginning to take an interest in the boat and its con­tents. While Jeremy poled, the woman stood by with drawn sword, fiercely ready to try to hack the thing's head off. Its open mouth looked a foot wide, lined with lovely red and equipped with a full armory of backward-slanting teeth.

  A moment later, the heavy body thudded down on deck, and she struck it and eventually drove it writhing into the water, meanwhile screaming orders at Jeremy to keep on poling. If he didn't, the mast was going to catch on more branches and they'd be hopelessly enmeshed. He understood the situation quite well; her screaming didn't help any, but he put up with it in silence.

  Snake blood spattered as the huge body, thick as Jeremy's waist, contorted and the lashing tail sent small objects flying, philosophers' tools and sailors' also. But head and neck re­mained stubbornly connected.

  When he'd got the boat safely out away from the trees he came to help. At last a combined effort sent the monster overboard with a great splash. But Jeremy's flesh crawled when he saw how other low branches, ones they'd narrowly avoided, were bowed with the weight of more gigantic snakes.

  While Jeremy dug the lower end of a pole into the bottom of the channel and strained his wiry weight against the upper end, doing his best to steer, keeping the catamaran from running afoul again on reeds and stumps, the girl went back into the deck­house to check on the condition of the man. Jeremy could hear her voice, low, asking something, and then a man's voice, sound­ing dull and sleepy, answering.

  Jeremy's feet had been slipping in snaky blood, and he grabbed up a bucket and used a minute to dip water from the river and sluice down the deck.

  In a minute the girl was out again, leaning on the rail. She had now unbelted her sword, as if wanting to be rid of the weight as soon as there were no more snakes. She did not look at Jeremy, and she spoke abstractedly, as if to the world in general: "He began to talk—he kept crying out, 'The god is coming near, the god—' And then he went off, like this...." She turned her head toward Jeremy, looking straight through him, letting her voice trail off.

  "Has he had fits like this before?" Jeremy as a child—and this, he felt confident, was certainly his own memory—had had a playmate subject to falling and convulsing fits. Jeremy didn't know why the question was important now, but he knew a cu­riosity that wanted to be satisfied. Perhaps it was not entirely his own.

  Now the young woman's gaze did at last focus on the boy, as if she had not really seen him until this moment. She seemed to be preparing a sharp retort, only to reconsider it. "Not as bad as this one," she answered at last.

  And, in fact, the man did not truly regain consciousness, and a little later Jeremy entered the deckhouse and put his hand on the man's forehead. The victim sighed, making a sound like one relieved of worry. But he remained unconscious.

  Earlier the girl had stuffed a small roll of cloth into the man's mouth, to keep him from biting his tongue. Now she tentatively eased out the barrier, checking to make sure the fit was over.

  A breeze had come up, feeling welcome on Jeremy's sweaty skin. It would have been even more welcome if they had known what to do with the sail, but new memory gave him no help on that. Out on deck, pieces of the torn-up parchment were blowing about. Jeremy snatched one up. The writing on it was in a lan­guage never seen before by Jeremy Redthorn, but now he could read it readily enough—at least with his left eye—the gods alone knew how. A mere glance, evoking ancient memories, told him that it was part of a set of instructions for conducting a ritual, intended to call up demons. The symbolic destruction of that ritual was part of a gre
ater one for—not summoning—inviting, or beseeching, the attendance of a god.

  And Jeremy also knew, with a certainty that came welling up from his new sea of memory, that neither form of conjuration, as they were written here, had any chance of being effective. The how and why of such matters would take deep plunging in the sea to learn.

  The young woman, gathering up stray scrolls and the other things her man had been using, was putting them away, stuffing them into some kind of chest.

  Also, she had evidently hidden her special little ebony and ivory box somewhere. The box had disappeared when Jeremy looked inside the deckhouse—she must have shoved it under one of the bunks, he thought, or maybe back in one of the far corners. There would be no shortage of hiding places amid the clutter.

  Then it seemed that she gave up, as if admitting to herself that these other things were not worth the effort.

  With a kind of automatic movement, she snatched from Je­remy's hands the scroll he had been looking at. Taking full notice of him for the second time, she pronounced judgment: "You are a bizarre-looking child indeed. Where do you come from?"

  It had been years since anyone had called Jeremy a child, and he didn't know what to think of the description now, particularly when it came from someone not much older than himself. He gestured vaguely with his free hand. "Upstream, ma'am."

  For the moment that was enough to satisfy her curiosity. She gazed at him a second longer, then nodded and went on with what she had been doing.

  The channel they had entered was turning shallow again, and more hard work ensued. This round lasted for several minutes, with girl and boy both leaning hard on poles one minute, pad­dling furiously the next. Jeremy soon found himself giving or­ders—he had some childhood experience with boats, which had been considerably sharpened and deepened during the past few days. This made him a more logical candidate for captain, or at least for temporary pilot, than the girl. Fortunately, she accepted his assumption of command without comment and without ap­parent resentment. Soon they were running free and clear again, back in one of the river's more vigorously flowing channels. Still the open way was narrow, with overhanging branches.

  Every minute or so the young woman turned her head, look­ing back along the way that they had come, as if in fear that someone or something could be following them. Her behavior added to Jeremy's own chronic nervousness.

  "We must get out of this misbegotten swamp," she said aloud.

  "We must find an open channel and move downstream." She added another phrase that the Intruder easily interpreted as an exotic obscenity, couched in a language native to many who lived halfway around the world.

  It had sounded like she was speaking to herself, but Jeremy de­cided to answer anyway. "Yes, ma'am. River's flowin' freer now. Not so many islands 'n' snags 'n' things. There'll be a way."

  Ten

  When the two young people, working together, had got the big boat moving more or less steadily downstream (though only at drifting speed and slowly spinning as it moved), the pale-haired young woman took her longest look yet at Je­remy. Then she demanded of him: "What is your name?"

  "Jonathan, ma'am." He grunted as he spoke, meanwhile using his pole again to fend off a waiting snag. He'd had the new name ready, having been expecting the question for some time now. The stubborn conviction would not leave him that Sal's killers were still in pursuit of the treasure she'd been carrying and would cheerfully rip it out of his head first chance they got. If they'd lost his trail, they might well be questioning their way methodi­cally downstream, going from one farm, village, or town to the next.

  Briskly the girl nodded her head of white curls. Her thin eye­brows were almost the same color. At that moment the boy be­latedly noticed that her earlobes had both been neatly punctured and on each side of her head a small metal ring, as golden as her collar, hung from one of the tiny long-healed holes. Obviously the mutilation had been deliberate and the ornaments were meant to call attention to it. Jeremy had never seen the like be­fore, and it struck him with a shock: Why would anyone. . . ?

  His encyclopedic new internal source of information could not precisely explain why, but it assured him that out in the great world such practices in the name of fashion were far from un­known.

  "Jonathan, then." The girl nodded again with satisfaction; ev­idently one name was plenty for him. "You may call me the Lady Carlotta. The gentleman I serve"—she gestured toward the deckhouse with an elegantly wiry wrist—"is Scholar Arnobius. You will address him as 'Scholar' or 'Doctor.' Due to a chain of unlikely, unforeseeable circumstances, the Scholar and I find our­selves here in the middle of this dismal swamp, which one might think would.be forsaken by all the gods.... Some might say that he was mad, to imagine that the god he was trying to talk to would show up...."

  Some idea had brought her to a stop, and once more she glanced back upstream. Then her pale brows again contracted, her small fists clenched. Her voice almost died away, then rose to a girlish crescendo: "And we have been abandoned by those scoundrel-bastards of rowers. ..." A pause for breath, giving the rage that had flared up again a chance to die down.

  The young woman's voice when she resumed was well con­trolled, almost calm again. "We came here, the two of us, to this remote and abandoned swampland on a noble quest. My... my master sought knowledge of one particular deity, and I... was doing what I could to help him. We ..." Considering her audi­ence, she fell silent for a moment. Then she began to speak again, slowly and distinctly. "We come from a place—how shall I put it?—an organization ... called the Academy. There—"

  "Yes'm, I know that."

  Lady Carlotta had already begun the next step in her simpli­fied explanation, but now she paused in midword, derailed by surprise. "You have heard of the Academy."

  "Yes'm."

  Taking another long look at his mud-smeared figure, ragged and barefoot, she evidently found that claim astounding. "But— Jonathan—how did you know... ? You mean to say you had ac­tual knowledge of the fact that we, the Scholar and I... ?"

  "No ma'am." The boy nodded toward the mast. "But I saw your Academy logo. On the flag."

  "Oh. But..." Still at a loss, she frowned again. "And how did you happen to recognize that? It's fairly new, and no one else we've encountered on this river has had the least idea about..." She made a gesture of futility.

  "I've seen it before," Jeremy answered vaguely. Even as he said the words, he knew that they were not strictly true—the eyes of Jeremy Redthorn had never rested on the Academy's flag before this hour. And at the same moment he felt the little chill that over the past few days had grown terribly familiar.

  Soon it was necessary again to pole the boat free of a grasping patch of bottom and then to avoid another overhanging snake, dangerously low. With the boat clear for the time being of snags and mud banks, and making some encouraging progress down­stream, the man in the bunk in the deckhouse began to come around. But it took many minutes for his mind to clear entirely; and even when it did, his body remained weak for some time longer.

  Jeremy's new memory offered no quick and easy answers con­cerning the art and difficulties of sailing a boat—and he was not going to plunge in looking for them. Still he made shift to get the sail more or less tied up snugly to its proper supports. Car­lotta assisted him, by pulling on lines at his polite request. Now there was less cause for concern that a sudden wind might do them damage.

  By the time he had accomplished that, night was coming on, and the only reasonable course seemed to be to choose a suitable small island and tie up—taking care not to be under any over­hanging branches.

  Carlotta, evidently made nervous by the approaching night, had buckled on her sword again and was peering warily into the dusk. Somehow she had found time and opportunity to change her clothes. "Do you suppose it's safe to light a candle, Jonathan?"

  Sticking his head out into the night, he looked and listened and was reassured that his left eye showed him nothing special. H
e heard no other boats, no splash of oar or paddle. The only flying shape he could make out against the darkening sky was that of a normal owl. Again he thought how wonderful it was to be able to really see, at last!

  "I don't think snakes or anything is going to be drawn to the light, ma'am."

  The girl hesitated. There was a moment in which Jeremy thought that she looked about twelve years old. "What about... people?"

  "I still think we're all right having a light here, ma'am. Just to be safe, we can keep it indoors and the windows shaded."

  "We can do that."

  He'd already discovered food supplies aboard and behind the cabin a sandbox serving as a kind of hearth. There seemed no reason not to have a fire and do some cooking. Jeremy was sent to get an ember from the earth-filled fireplace. They were a fine pair of aromatic candles that the girl lit, giving steady, mellow light.

  When light bloomed in the little cabin, the man suddenly raised himself on one elbow and looked around. He seemed to be trying to peer, with tremulous hope, out through the little window of the deckhouse, on which his companion had just closed the little curtain shade.

  "Where is he?" he whispered.

  "Who, my lord?" the Lady Carlotta asked.

  "He was here," the dry lips murmured weakly. "Before it got dark. I saw him...." Weakly the speaker let himself slump back.

  "What did he look like?" the girl asked, as if the question might have some relevance. "Just standing on the ground, or was he—?" She concluded with a gesture vaguely suggesting flight.

  "Standing still. Right in front of me."

  "Maybe what you saw, my lord, was nothing but too much sun." The girl was tenderly bathing his forehead.

  "But I tell you I did see him....It was only for a moment...."

  "I warned you about getting too much sun." For the moment she sounded motherly; then she paused and sighed. "Yes, my lord, tell me about it." Her tone suggested that she knew that she would have to hear the story, sooner or later, but did not look forward to the experience.