[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo

by Fred Saberhagen

  Suddenly confusion gripped him, and he thought in panic: What had happened to the treasure Sal had entrusted to him? Something of transcendent importance, having to do with some god ... it had come loose from inside his shirt. . . . Only after some seconds of frantic groping and fumbling did he remember where it was now.

  He sat on the grass with his head in his hands. How could he have forgotten that, even for a moment? But it was almost as if that strange invasion of his body had happened to someone else.

  And Sal had kept saying she was unworthy. If so, what about Jeremy Redthorn? Yes. Of course. But that had been before. Now, things were different. Whatever sacrilege had been involved was now an accomplished fact. The worthiness of Jeremy Redthorn was no longer of any concern—because Jeremy Redthorn was no longer the same person.

  Taking stock of himself, Jeremy noted additional changes. The lash marks were notably less painful than when he'd fallen asleep—how long ago? Surely less than an hour. There were still raised lumps, sore to the touch—but no worse than that. Other­wise he felt healthy, and there was no longer any trace of fever.

  And there was yet another thing....Somehow the experience of the last hour had left him with the impression that he was not alone.

  But not even his improved vision or hearing could discover anyone else with him on the island.

  He had the feeling that there was a Watcher, one who kept just out of sight while looking continually over Jeremy's shoul­der. But who the Watcher was or why he or she was observing him so steadily the boy had no clue.

  Also, the feeling was gradually growing on him that he had been used by some power outside himself. But he did not know exactly how or for what purpose.

  Presently he stirred and got up and stripped and went into the water again, with a sudden awareness of being dirty and want­ing to be clean. Meanwhile he noticed that his body had become a nest of various unpleasant smells. Probably it had been that way for a long time—and what in all the hells had made him think putting mud in his hair would be of any use in deceiving his pursuers? He did his best to soak it out. He couldn't remember exactly when he'd last had a real bath, but he badly needed one now and found himself wishing for hot water and soap. And maybe a good scrub brush. But he would have to make do with the cool river. He brought his garments into the water and did what he could to wash them, too.

  Swimming a few lazy strokes upstream, then floating on his back and drifting down, he gradually regained a sense of reality. Here he was in his own body, where he belonged, as much in control of all its parts as he had ever been. His sight had been changed by Sal's thing of magic—changed for the better—and his hearing was a little different, too. And that, as far as he could tell, was all. Sal hadn't been killed or hurt by carrying the thing around with her. Other things, not this, had destroyed her.

  And the dream he'd just experienced was only a dream. He'd had others not too different from it. Except for the part about strangling furies, of course. And then the utter terror at the end....

  Well... all right. This last dream had been like nothing else he'd ever experienced.

  Around the boy floating in the water the drowsy afternoon was still and peaceful, the sun lowering, sunset not far away.

  Looking through his left eye at the sun, he beheld a new and subtle fringe of glory. At first he squinted tentatively, but then it seemed to him that his new eye could bear the full burden of the world's light without being dazzled, without dulling a bit of its new keenness when he looked away. Not his right eye, though; that was no better than before.

  Despite the exquisite terror with which the dream had ended, he didn't want to forget it and wasn't going to. The bit about killing furies had been good, but not the best. No, the best part— even though it, too, frightened him a little—had been when Sal was beckoning to him from the water and for one glorious mo­ment he had known that everything was going to be all right, be­cause she was not dead after all.

  EIGHT

  The night that followed was one that Jeremy would remember for the rest of his life. Because on that night he first saw the stars.

  All day he had been keenly aware of his improved eyesight. In fact, long minutes passed when he could hardly think of any­thing else, and so he later told himself that he ought to have an­ticipated the commonplace miracle. But he was still distracted by grief and heavily occupied most of the time with the problems of immediate survival. So it was that the first pure point of celestial light, appearing just as the sun was going down, took him com­pletely by surprise. Until that moment, the contents of the sky had been the furthest thing from his thoughts.

  And then, marvellously, the stars were there.

  Somehow the boy was surprised by the fact that the revelation was so gradual. Very soon after that first startling, soul-piercing point at sunset, there came another twinkle, in a different part of the sky. And presently another. In a little while there were dozens, eventually hundreds. The onset of the multitudes, the thousands, which required hours to reach its full development, cost him time on his journey, holding him openmouthed and marveling for a long time when he might have been paddling.

  On each succeeding night Jeremy hoped for a clear sky and looked forward with keen anticipation to the celestial show. More often than not he had his wish. Also, the events of one night began to blur into those of another, and so it went with the sleepy days as well, as a kind of routine established itself in his journey downstream. Sal's bequest had markedly improved his left eye's ability to distinguish shapes in darkness, which helped him avoid snags, sandbars, and islands. But now he often lost time by forgetting to paddle, in his sheer wonderment at the stars.

  Each day at sunrise he beached his canoe in the most shel­tered spot that he could find. He had begun his journey fully in­tending to count the days of its duration. But when three had passed, he began to wonder whether the true number might be four. From that time on, his uncertainty grew. But when he con­sidered the situation carefully, he supposed it didn't matter much.

  His daytime slumbers continued to be enlivened by dreams of the strange, newly vivid kind, sometimes erotic and sometimes not. In them the nameless, beardless, dark-haired youth fre­quently appeared, usually unclothed, but sometimes wrapped in a white robe secured by a golden clasp. Always he played a com­manding role. Sometimes he casually strangled furies, beckoning to them, willing them to fly near him, so that they were com­pelled to come, like moths around a flame. Then, smiling, he would snatch them out of the air, one at a time, and wring their necks like so many helpless pigeons, while Jeremy, the silent wit­ness, silently cheered the slaughter on.

  Sometimes, in other dreams, the Nameless One effortlessly se­duced young maidens. And not only girls but older women, too, females in all colors and sizes, some of races Jeremy had never seen before. Many of their bodies were lovelier than he had ever imagined the human form could be, and the shapeliest of them behaved in wanton and provocative ways, making the boy groan in his sleep.

  And there were dreams in which the Dark Youth remained apart from human contact, his fingers plucking at his seven-stringed instrument—a device whose counterpart in waking life the dreamer's eyes had never seen—producing fast rhythms to which the women danced. These were followed by haunting melodies to which no one could dance that seemed to have noth­ing to do with the body at all but stayed with Jeremy long after he had awakened. In these episodes it seemed that the musician sang, but Jeremy could never hear his voice.

  And in one memorable dream the Nameless One had put away the instrument of seven strings, along with all thoughts of music and of soft amusement. Now he looked a head taller than before, his beardless face hard as stone, his white cloak rippling with what might have been a savage wind. He was standing on a field of battle, wearing on his back a quiver filled with arrows, clutching in his powerful left hand an archer's bow that seemed to be made from—of all things—silver. As Jeremy watched, awe­struck, his dream companion raised his bare
right fist and swung it against a towering stone wall, while hundreds of human sol­diers who had been sheltering behind the barrier took to their heels in panic. Some of the soldiers were too slow to run away, and their little human bodies were crushed by falling stones. The thunder of the toppling wall awoke the dreamer to a summer storm of lightning.

  During Jeremy's waking nighttime hours, while he kept paddling steadily downriver under the entrancing stars (he had identified two constellations, enough to make him confident of which way was north), his thoughts continued to revolve around the ques­tion of how he was to carry out the sacred mission entrusted to him by Sal (by Sal who had called him by the name of love!). How was he ever to accomplish that now, when the magic thing that he was supposed to deliver had vanished into his own head?

  One unwelcome possibility did cross his mind. Suppose that when he located one of the people for whom the magic thing was meant, that person would have to kill the unhappy messen­ger in order to retrieve the treasure?

  Well, so be it, then. Jeremy's current mood was appropriately heroic and abandoned. He would do anything for Sal, who had set him free and given him the stars.

  Contemplation brought him to one truth at least, which was that everyone he'd ever really cared about was dead. He had to fight against bleak intervals of despair. In an effort to distract himself from endless mourning, he set himself certain mental tasks. One challenge was to recall every word that he had ever heard about the city of Pangur Ban and the Academy, which lay somewhere nearby. It seemed hard to believe that he was really traveling to such places, and yet he had no choice. And trying to remember what he had heard about them was futile, because he had never heard more than a dozen words or so. He would just have to learn what he needed to know when he got there.

  In his entire life the boy had heard people speak of the Acad­emy not more than two or three times, and always as part of a catalog of the accomplishments of Lord Victor Lugard, who ruled at Pangur Ban. But those few sentences, spoken in awe and wonder, about matters that the speaker did not pretend to un­derstand, had created in the boy's imagination a place where might be gathered all the wise folk of the world, and where an ex­planation for the mysteries of the world could be available.

  Early one morning, two days after Sal's mysterious prize had vanished into his head, Jeremy was much mystified when he caught sight for the first time of a mysterious towering shape on the horizon. It was certainly miles away; how many miles he could not try to guess.

  And somehow he knew just what it was. The answer came ris­ing unbidden out of some newly acquired depth of memory.

  Everyone had heard of the Mountain of the Cave. Halfway up its slopes, at a point perhaps a mile above sea level, the Cave of the Oracle opened a supposed entry to the Underworld and of­fered a shrine where rich and poor alike might hope to have their futures revealed to them, might truly be told which road to take to find success. The first time Jeremy's vision showed him that strange shape was near dawn, when he was just about to head in to shore for the day. The first sight of the strange high ridge, with its top shrouded in even stranger clouds, shook him, brought him up short paddling.

  What in all the worlds? And yet he had no need to ask the question. The boy stared, letting the canoe drift. He squinted—this was fast becoming a habit with him—and tried closing first one eye, then the other.

  The distant Mountain stood well off to the north and west, so that the river in its gentle windings, tending generally west and south, never carried him directly toward it. In fact, there were times when he was being borne in the exactly opposite direction.

  When he experimentally closed his left eye, the Mountain's distant image disappeared entirely, swallowed up in sunglare and horizon haze and, of course, the chronic blur of his nearsight­edness.

  During the afternoons late summer storms sometimes produced hard rain. On these occasions, if the opportunity offered, Jeremy dragged his canoe entirely up onshore and overturned it, creat­ing a shelter beneath which he contrived to get some sleep. Any­way, getting wet was no real problem as long as the weather remained warm.

  Sometimes now, at night when he thought he was making good headway toward his invisible goal (though getting some­what farther from the Mountain), keeping wide awake beneath the stars, Jeremy had a renewed impression that he was no longer traveling alone. His Watcher companion was with him now.

  Sal had warned him that the Academy was hundreds of miles distant and that the journey downriver would take many days. She had started to coach him on the exact location of her goal, but they hadn't got far enough with that to do him any good now. He soon gave up trying to estimate how far he had come since leaving his uncle's village—and by now he had definitely lost count of the number of days in his downstream journey. He regretted not having started a tally of scratches on a gunwale with Sal's knife.

  At about this time he noted that his canoe had begun to leak, though so far only slightly; so far he could manage, with a little bailing by hand two or three times a night. Being run aground every morning, sometimes on rough shores, wasn't doing the wooden bottom any good. He could of course try to steal an­other boat along the way, but the theft would leave a mark of his passage, and he had little doubt that those who had hounded Sal to her death were now after him.

  Back at the Raisinmakers' village, in sight of the twin shrines of Dionysus and Priapus, extensive interrogation was in progress. Magicians in the employ of Lord Kalakh were active—and had already set up an image of their master, stern and ageless-looking, with bulging eyes, by which they meant to keep them­selves in tune with his will. This despite the fact that neither Lord Kalakh nor his chief lieutenants had much faith in magicians.

  Gods, now, were a different matter altogether.

  His Lordship had impressed upon this crew of raiders, before dispatching them, the fact that in recent months the goodwill of at least one faction of the gods had been shown to be essential to any human being who took the quest for power seriously. And since Hades had already shown himself victorious, it was with Hades that Lord Kalakh meant to ally himself.

  Questioning, most of it rather stressful, had been proceeding steadily. The surviving inhabitants of Uncle Humbert's village had been counted, along with their dead, and the survivors ques­tioned as to who had been in the village but could not now be ac­counted for.

  The body of the woman who had been carrying the Face was readily identified—but of the treasure itself there was no sign.

  As it happened, both of Jeremy's relatives had survived and made no difficulty about telling the questioners whatever they could about their unhappy nephew. It was a shame if the lad had managed to get himself in some deep trouble, so that pow­erful folk had to put themselves to the trouble of coming look­ing for him, but it was a hard world, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Another of the villagers thought that the lad named Jeremy had been one of those carried off by the harpies.

  "There were no harpies here," the officer corrected sternly. "Nothing that flew here was big enough to carry anyone."

  The villager had to admit the likelihood of error.

  There was also the possibility that the boy Jeremy Redthorn had been drowned while trying to get away; there was no evi­dence one way or another on that. At least two boats were miss­ing, but in the confusion accompanying the attack some might have simply drifted away.

  The body bore old, half-healed fury whip marks as well as fresh ones. The villagers all stared in wonder at the dead servant of a defeated god, and none of them would admit to ever seeing her alive.

  The body had already been stripped and all the clothing and possessions that might have been the woman's subjected to the closest scrutiny. The officer assigned to conduct the last stage of the search had no scruples about opening her head with knife and hatchet and probing gorily about inside the skull. In the normal course of events a Face would eject itself when its wearer died—but no possibility must be overlook
ed.

  "And of course if she had been wearing the Face we want, in­stead of carrying it..." The speaker, a junior officer in Kalakh's Special Forces, let his comment die away.

  His colleague was ready to complete it for him. "Unlikely she'd be lying there now. Or that anyone as small as we are would be opening her skull," he finished dryly.

  From the last stage of the search the man who'd undertaken it looked up a moment later, his hands stained with fresh gore but empty. "No, sir, nothing."

  "Damn all in Hades' name!" The junior officer looked around him, at ruin and ashes, soldiers and moping villagers, a planted field and a patch of forest. "Possibly this missing Redthorn does have it with him—or she may have hidden it somewhere nearby. We must search the entire area—kill no more of these people. It will be necessary to interrogate them all over again." He paused. "If this missing youth does have it—well, which way would you flee, Carlo, if you were trying to get away from here in a hurry? Downstream, of course."

  Now the river was carrying Jeremy past larger villages, here and there a sizable town, amid an increasing traffic of sailboats and barges. Now, even with superb eyesight, he began to have trou­ble locating places to lay over during the day, spots along the shore where he might hope to pass the daylight hours entirely un­observed. Perhaps, he thought, at this distance from Uncle Hum­bert's village it no longer mattered if people noticed him. But the fury's lash marks were still sore—though a little less each day— and he still felt hunted.

  It was hard to keep himself from looking again and again under the thwarts of the canoe, in hopes of finding another chunk of stale corn bread, on the possibility that another might have miraculously appeared. Now and then, drifting near dawn or sunset, while his stomach growled with hunger, the fugitive yearned to catch some fish, but he lacked the means of doing so. The little cache did contain flint and steel to make a fire, but in this season he had no need of extra warmth.