"Thanks to great Apollo," Jeremy murmured automatically, joining his voice to a dozen others.
Problems sometimes arose, as Katy explained, with people who wanted to steal or lure away the queen and start their own hive somewhere else.
Jeremy tried to imagine what might happen if a swarm were summoned to try to fight off a fury or a whole flight of furies. Memory failed to come up with any examples immediately, and he let the idea drop. Bees are restricted to altitudes near the ground. If there was flesh and blood inside a fury accoutrement, the long stingers would find it out.
Heavy smoke and hailstorms offered a temporary defense against a swarm, as did sufficiently cold weather or heavy rain.
"Some of the old folk claim that our bees fly for many miles, as far as halfway up the Mountain of the Oracle—there's some rare good things grow there, if you get up high enough."
"You've been there?"
The girl nodded. "Sometimes I carry bees from our hives to meadows where the flowers are good and thick. Release them there, and they know how to find their way home and tell their hive mates. Then a thousand workers, or ten thousand, will go to where the blossoms are prime."
"That's good for the honey, I suppose."
Katherine nodded, large-eyed and solemn. Gods, but she was beautiful!
"Do you go by yourself? Isn't it dangerous?"
"Folk around here know that we in this village are best left alone. These ... these men must have come from far away."
Due to the timely intervention of its patron god, the village as a whole had suffered comparatively little damage, though a few individuals were devastated. One house had burned almost to the ground, but none of the others had suffered more than minor vandalism.
As the day faded, and the sense of terror turned gradually to rejoicing, Jeremy was introduced to a drink made by the fermentation of honey and water and called madhu. Memory assured him that it was of course a form of mead.
Jeremy Redthorn had gained a minimal knowledge of wine-making, hearsay picked up while laboring at his uncle's elbow, but the Intruder had vastly more. Jeremy could step in and make mead—pretty successfully, with the magical help of his augmented vision and other magical enhancements having to do with the preservation of crops. Or at least he might discuss the process with local experts.
But the experience of Jeremy's blood and brain in the consumption of alcoholic drinks was decidedly minimal, and Uncle Humbert's wine had nothing like the entrancing impact of madhu.
Meanwhile, the dance of victory went on, giving signs of blending into a kind of harvest celebration. The villagers were celebrating the fact of their survival, the first real attack on their village in a long time, and the practical annihilation of their enemies.
Again he heard it said of the attackers: "They must have come from far away. Bandits around here would know better."
Fears were expressed for the young men who'd ridden out with the Scholar and Ferrante. Jeremy was asked for reassurance: "He's a crafty war leader, no doubt? Knows what he's doing? Our young men have little skill or knowledge when it comes to fighting."
Jeremy did his best to convey reassurance, without actually saying much.
Katy, he was pleased to note, was now drinking madhu, too. Her fingers stroked his face, with a touch that seemed less affection than frank curiosity.
"You were trying to help me, I know, and I thank you. But I didn't really need..."
After having been chased by Death, knocked down gravel slides, and robbed and wrestled about by bandits, Jeremy was long overdue for a new issue of clothes for himself. He might have taken some from a well-dressed bandit—had any such creature existed among their corpses. Nor could he find his riding boots that one of them had stolen. Katy's brother, who'd moved out last year, had left some that might fit.
"He was tall and strong, like you."
"Like me?" It was very odd to hear himself described as tall and strong. Just a little over middle height, maybe, but... there was hope. He thought he was still growing.
He also got some ointment applied to the old scrape on his hip and thigh—actually, it was healing quite well. And while injuries were on his mind, he took note of the fact that not a trace now remained of his three lash wounds.
Then he took the trouble to seek out another mirror. The mayor's house had a big one of real glass, no more depending upon the water in a perhaps-enchanted well. Had he really grown taller in the two weeks or so since leaving the Academy? Apart from the way they'd been damaged in his most recent adventures, he realized that the clothes he'd put on new shortly before leaving the Academy no longer fit him very well. Even if they hadn't been torn and dirty, they were beginning to seem too small, too short in arms and legs, too tight across the shoulders.
The madhu—he was now on his second small glass—made him giggle.
Katherine was trying to look after him. It seemed to be the other young women of the village against whom she was most interested in protecting him.
He put down his drinking cup, picked up a lyre someone had left lying about, and twanged the strings. People fell silent and turned their heads toward him. This wasn't what he wanted, being the center of attention, and he soon put the instrument down again.
Wandering the village in the aftermath of victory, Jeremy looked, in the last bright rays of the lowering sun, down into the reflecting surface of the well beside Apollo's shrine. What the shimmering surface down there showed him surprised and worried him.
Was it the reflection of the stone god that seemed to be holding out a pointing arm? Right over his shoulder.
And then the figure holding out a pointing arm collapsed. No, it hadn't been the statue after all.
People were wont to see strange things when they drank too much madhu, especially when the honey it was made from contained the vital chemicals of certain plants, and no one took much notice of one more vision.
The music went swirling out raggedly across the town square, and villagers and visitors alike took part in a wild dance, mourning and celebration both confabulated into one outpouring of emotion.
And Jeremy, with the world spinning round him in a kind of out-of-body experience, needed a little time to realize that the crashed and intoxicated figure was his own. Somehow he seemed to have achieved a viewpoint outside his body—memory assured him that madhu could do that sometimes.
The sprawled-out form sure as hell didn't look much like the Dark Youth. Much too skinny and red-haired and angular for that. And the face—! On the other hand, Jeremy supposed it was the Intruder after all, because the two of them were sharing the same body. Jeremy hoped it was a good-enough body for a god. Not what the Dark Youth was used to—but so far he hadn't complained.
And now Jeremy had come to be back inside it, too. He giggled. Never in his life had he imagined a god having to pee, or shit, or get dirty and hurt and sometimes smell really bad. None of those human things seemed at all right and proper. Definitely inappropriate. But there they were.
The music blared, and someone passed him a jug again. He accepted gratefully, first swigging from the jug like everyone else, then refilling his cup; madhu was delicious stuff. Someday he would have to thank his fellow deity, Dionysus, for inventing it.
And he belched, emitting what seemed to him a fragrant cloud.
One of the village girls whose name he didn't know danced by, flowers in her hair and smiling at him, and Jeremy reached out and squeezed her thigh in passing, giving the young skin and the muscles moving beneath it a good feel. The way she smiled at him, she didn't mind at all. But he wasn't going to try to do anything more to this girl or with her. Right now, just sitting here and drinking madhu provided Jeremy Redthorn with all the good feelings that he needed.
Come to think of it, though, where had Katy gone? He looked around—no sign of her at the moment.
And he, Jeremy Redthorn, no longer had the least doubt about the correct name of his own personal god—the god
Intruder. The boy could even dare to come right out and speak that name, now that he was drunk enough.
Hi there, Apollo. My closest companion, my old pal, the Far-Worker. My buddy the Lord of Light. To Jeremy it seemed that he had said the words aloud, and he giggled with the reaction of relief and madhu.
He looked around with tipsy caution, turning his head to left and right. If he had spoken aloud, it seemed that no one had heard him amid all the noise. No one outside his own head.
Maybe no one inside it was paying attention, either. There were moments, like now, when there didn't seem to be anyone present but himself.
Time passed. The celebration inside the mayor's house went roaring on around Jeremy, while he sat with his eyes closed head spinning.
He felt greatly relieved when enough time had passed to let him feel confident that there would be no answer.
TWENTY-THREE
For the first time in his life, Jeremy was waking up with a bad hangover. Whether or not Apollo was also a victim he couldn't tell. But he could hope so.
The first problem of the morning was a sunbeam of what seemed unbearable, unnatural brightness, stabbing at his eyelids. The left eye dealt with this assault no more successfully than did the right. When Jeremy turned his head away from the sun, he discovered that his head ached and his mouth felt furry. Also that he was lying on his back in an unfamiliar room, with a stiff neck, at the edge of a mound of pillows and upended furniture. Unfamiliar snoring drifted over from the other side of the mound.
Gradually he remembered where he was and how he'd got there. He'd begun yesterday as a helpless prisoner and had ended it as a victorious god—or at least as the partner of one. And the day had ended in a party—oh gods, yes, the party.
Feeling not in the least like a victorious god, he tried to get to his feet. Sinking back with a groan, he decided to put off his next attempt indefinitely.
The girls. The singing and the dancing.
Katy.
Now he had raised himself sufficiently to let him look around. Yes, this was the room where most of the party, the dancing anyway, had taken place. Four or five other people, defeated in their bout with Dionysus but still breathing, had fallen asleep in the same large room—not quite all in the same pile. The casualties included some of the village girls—but not her. Seen in a frame of nausea and suffering, all of the strewn bodies, men and women alike, were repulsive creatures.
As he must be himself.
And oh, oh gods, the madhu.
Slowly Jeremy levered his way onto all fours and from there to a standing position—more or less. He swayed on his feet. There was a smell of vomit. Well, at least it wasn't his.
Fighting down the desire to throw up, groping his way through stabbing daylight with eyes more shut than open, Jeremy stumbled out-of-doors. It seemed to him tremendously unfair that gods should be immune to these aftereffects. Or, if he himself was now indeed a god, that he should still be subject to them. Never mind; he'd think about it later.
He made it to the privy out back, stepping over a couple of snoring male villagers on the way. On emerging from the wooden outhouse he slowly found his way back to the town square, intending to slake his horrendous thirst at the fountain. When he reached the square he discovered that some saintly women had tea brewing.
When he tried to remember everything that had happened at the party, Jeremy had trouble shaking the feeling that Carlotta had been there, too, joining in last night's celebration. But that of course was nonsense. Carlotta, whatever she might be up to, had to be many miles away. Maybe there'd been someone from the village who'd looked like her, sounded like her—yes, that was quite possible, though Jeremy couldn't remember now who it had really been.
Ferrante, who soon came to souse his head in the water of the public fountain, looked about as unhealthy as Jeremy felt but demonstrated a perverse soldierly pride in his condition. Also, the young lancer was a prolific source of good, or at least confident, advice on how to deal with a hangover.
"When did you get back?" Jeremy demanded. "Is the Scholar here?"
"Some scholar. He'd make a mean sergeant, I can tell you."
Ferrante reported tersely on the punitive pursuit, which had evidently been bloodily successful. About an hour before dawn, the Scholar and the members of his impromptu posse had ridden back into the Honeymakers' village. And described how one of the local youths had been holding up, proudly displaying, the scalps and the ears of the bandits who had not been able to escape after all.
* * *
When Jeremy finally saw Arnobius, he wondered whether the Scholar's campus colleagues would have recognized him. The Scholar now looked tired but formidable, with a war hatchet stuck in his belt, his beard growing, and wearing different clothing, grumbling that one still seemed to have got away. The villagers who had ridden with him, a handful of young, adventurous men, regarded him with great respect.
The change was so substantial that it crossed Jeremy's mind to wonder if Arnobius had recently come into possession of a fragment of the Face of Mars. But Jeremy's left eye denied that any such transformation had taken place, and so far the Scholar had displayed no traces of truly superhuman powers. It was just that he had never been exactly the person that everyone took him for. Arnobius said to him: "Would have brought you along, Jonathan, if I'd thought of it. As matters turned out, we were enough."
One of the first tasks of the morning was not wisely undertaken on a queasy stomach. More than a dozen dead bandits, sting-swollen to the point where their mothers would not have known them (the lone specimen mangled by human hands and weapons looked by far the most human), had already been collected and decently covered, but this morning they had to be hauled in dung carts to a place well out past the edge of town. At a site where mounds of earth of all ages identified the municipal dump, their bodies were stripped of any remaining valuables and then swiftly disposed of in a common unmarked grave.
Meanwhile, elaborate and very sober funeral preparations were under way for those villagers who had been killed. By no means everyone in the village had been involved in last night's party.
The half-dozen seriously injured people had already been put in the care of healers and midwives.
On every hand Jeremy heard expressions of gratitude to Apollo, whose domain of domesticated flocks and herds obviously stretched to include apiaries. But as the morning wore on he realized that no one in the village seemed to have any idea of the important role that he, Jeremy Redthorn, had played by closely cooperating with the god. His only reaction to the discovery was relief.
Order had been quickly restored within the village, though half the population were still wailing in their pain and grief and rage. Others to vent their feelings had begun to play loud music and to dance. Almost every one of the villagers who had run away at the start of the raid came trickling back over the next few hours, to listen in amazement to the tales of the violence, horror, and retribution that they'd missed.
By midmorning a feast of celebration was being prepared, according to local custom.
Two or three of the villagers had gone out before dawn to the hives, which were all located well outside town, to soothe the excited domestic swarms and try to reestablish peaceful production. Having the swarms so disturbed was sure to be bad for business, and the village depended largely on trading its honey for its livelihood.
This morning Katherine Mirandola, who seemed to have spent the end of the night properly at home with her parents, looked red-eyed, her face swollen. She had been weeping bitterly, out of sympathy with several of her friends who'd suffered far worse than she. Jeremy on greeting her held out his arms to offer comfort, and she wept briefly on his shoulder.
He asked what had happened to the youth who'd tried ineffectually to help her. Turned out that he had fled the village now and no one knew where he was.
Katy explained that the young man who'd been courting the girl, Fran, who'd been repeatedly raped was n
ow treating her coolly and evidently found her much less desirable.
"That's a damned shame."
"Yes. But now there's nothing to be done about it."
Jeremy also braced himself for more searching questions from the newly forceful leader regarding his own behavior in the crisis—but when everyone was under extreme stress, one would have to behave strangely indeed to attract notice, and he hadn't done that. Physically, he hadn't done much of anything at all.
Anyway, the Scholar had no questions for him. It struck him as odd that Arnobius should not be interested in the godly intervention by which the village had been saved. But so it was.
Arnobius, having effortlessly assumed command, did not seem inclined to relinquish it. After offering the villagers some gratuitous advice on how to defend themselves and their homes in the future, he announced that it was necessary to provide some defense for his party of Academics. Of course they were going on to the Oracle of the Cave, and they would now adopt the guise of pilgrims headed in that direction.
"That way, we're less likely to attract undesirable attention. Having now been deprived of our escort—with one notable exception—we must escort ourselves. Assuming the Harbor lancers are still in the area, if we fail to rejoin them it will be no one's fault but our own."
Ferrante, as the only member of the original military bodyguard still present for duty, was now promoted to second in command for military matters. Arnobius briskly gave him the rank of Sergeant.
It was easy to see that Ferrante had mixed feelings about this advancement—naturally he was pleased, but on the other hand, he couldn't help wondering what right this civilian had to assign him any rank at all. And when things sorted themselves out, what was his rightful commanding officer going to say?
The Scholar was frowning at Jeremy, as if he had finally taken notice of him. "Jonathan, what about you?"
"If it's up to me, sir, I prefer to remain a civilian."
[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo Page 23