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

by Fred Saberhagen

  Andy was aghast, relieved, and shocked all over again when he realized who had saved his life and was confronting him. The young soldier's left hand, already lacking two fingers, was drip­ping blood again. "Jerry? My gods, it's true! What you told me before you went into the Cave."

  "True enough. I need help, a fighting man I can rely on. Are you ready for a ride?"

  Andy wiped his blooded sword on the leaves of a nearby bush and slapped it firmly back into its scabbard. "Ready as I'll ever be—if that's what we need to do."

  Jeremy said: "That hand looks bad. Give it here a moment."

  Gingerly the other held out the mangled part. At first it was as if they were simply shaking hands, left-handed. Then Ferrante, shooting him an uncertain look, said: "We stand here holding hands like two schoolgirls."

  "Don't worry; the next person I take to bed will be a school­girl and not you."

  Ferrante looked at him sharply, then suddenly asked: "Kate?"

  Jeremy only nodded. Later, he thought, would be time enough to explain what had become of Kate.

  Apollo's powers could compress ten days or more of healing into as many seconds; at the end of that brief time the bleeding had stopped and some function had come back.

  Jeremy bent over and gestured toward his own back, and Andy hopped aboard.

  There followed another long airborne jaunt, over water, some of it during the hours of darkness. Dawn at altitude was spec­tacular. For Jeremy this was becoming almost routine, but for his passenger it was a different matter. Ferrante clung to him as tightly as a one-armed tackier in a game of runball, and his bearer, glancing back once, saw that the young soldier's eyes were closed.

  Keeping his voice as calm and matter-of-fact as possible, Je­remy explained to his passenger en route that they were looking for the workshop of Hephaestus and that Apollo knew where it was—or where it used to be. The age of the memory inspired awe even as it undermined confidence; and even then, the Sun God had only glimpsed the place from outside.

  Even as Jeremy talked, a new suggestion, born in Apollo's memory, came drifting up into his awareness: that if they could enter Vulcan's workshop, they might well find there yet another god Face—or even more than one. Now it became clear why he had felt he must bring Ferrante with him—if indeed another Face became available, it should be given to a trusted friend to wear, as soon as possible.

  When Jeremy looked down and saw their destination take form out of the mist, below his jogging feet, what he beheld was noth­ing like the Isle of Dawn.

  "We'll be down in a minute."

  Ferrante growled something unintelligible.

  "Are you ready to move?" Jeremy asked his passenger when they had landed and were both standing on a shelf of dark, slip­pery rock, only a few feet above the level of the sea. Atop the rock a large building fit the image of their goal as carried in the god's memory. "I know, we both need food and rest; but I think this cannot wait."

  Ferrante at first shook his head, too much overcome to speak. At last he got out: "Give me ten minutes." He stretched and lim­bered his arms and legs, drew his short sword, and practiced a few cuts and thrusts.

  Then Andy paused, staring at what two hours ago had been the freshly wounded remnant of a hand. The new cuts were quite solidly healed, and even the long-healed stumps of missing dig­its on the same hand were itching and stretching. Each remnant of a finger was longer, by half an inch, than it had been.

  "In a few days you should have them back," Jeremy assured him.

  The two men advanced on foot, Apollo in his Sandals leading the way, and circled partway round the tall building as they climbed toward it. Seabirds rose up screaming, but so far their approach had provoked no other response.

  Ferrante asked, "You expect fighting?"

  "I don't know what to expect, except that I'm probably going to need some kind of help." It was a shading of the truth.

  "Well, I'm here; I'm ready." And spit and once more loosened his blade in its scabbard. "Seen what you can do. Less'n the sons of bitches come at us in a whole army, we oughta be able to whip their ass." He shook his head, held up his left fist, and flexed it, still marveling at the healing and restoration of his hand. "Itches like hell."

  "Sorry about that."

  "Have to get used to having five fingers again—but I ain't about to complain."

  This glacier-bound island, in the middle of a fog-bound northern ocean, gave no sign of ever having been inhabited by humans at all. That, thought Jeremy, was probably one reason why Vulcan had chosen the site, at some distant time in the past.

  The place seemed to have been sited and designed with the idea of making it approachable only by a god. Someone who could fly. When Jeremy thought about it, he knew that few of Apollo's colleagues possessed any innate powers of flight—a pair of Vulcan's Sandals, or the functional equivalent, were re­quired. If conditions were stable for a long time, most deities would manage to get themselves so equipped.

  As they were clambering around the outside, looking for some way to obtain entrance, their efforts apparently disturbed only gulls and other seabirds.

  "Tell me—damn it all! Do I still call you Jerry?"

  "I hope so. I'm trying to hang on to being human."

  Ferrante needed a moment to think about that. "All right then, Jerry. Tell me—look into that extra memory you say you got and tell me this—did Vulcan or Hephaestus or whatever name you give him build his own workshop? If not, who built this place?"

  "I've been trying to come up with that, and I don't know. Apollo doesn't know."

  Now they had almost completed a full circuit of the huge building and had come back on a higher level to a position di­rectly in front of what appeared to be its main entrance. Flock after flock of wild birds flew up screaming. Waves pounded sav­agely against sheer cliffs of ice, which offered the seafarer little choice of landing places. Cliffs half rock and half ice, the latter portion thunderously fragmenting into glaciers. A thin plume of natural smoke promised that the Artisan (Apollo recalled an ugly face, bad temper, heavily muscled arms and shoulders, and gnarled legs that did not quite match in size) would be well pro­vided with handy volcanic heat to draw on as a source of power.

  At places the climb was so steep and smooth that Jeremy had to give his human helper a boost up. Now they were approach­ing the place whose appearance from a distance had suggested it might be the front door.

  And when he came to consider the walls of the workshop it­self, even the Far-Worker wondered what power could have wrought metal and stone into such configurations.

  Down far below, under the sea and earth alike, the senses of Apollo perceived fire—life of such intensity, and energy, as to keep dark Hades from any underground approach against this spot.

  Still there was no apparent means of getting in.

  There were visible doors, or what from a little distance had ap­peared to be doors, but with surfaces absolutely smooth and no way to get a grip to try to open them. Beating on them, even with all the strength the Lord of Light could muster, blows that would have demolished ordinary masonry, made no visible im­pression. At the most they only bent slightly inward and then sprang back elastically.

  One wall seemed to be composed entirely of doors, so that there was no way to tell which of them might be real and which were only decorations on a solid surface.

  When Apollo let out a god-voiced bellowing for Hephaestus to come out or to let them in, Ferrante grimaced and plugged his ears with his fingers. But the noise drew no response from inside.

  Anxiously Jeremy/Apollo looked around for some tool or weapon to employ, but there was nothing but chunks of rock and ice.

  An alternate possible entrance was suggested by a visible door, or transparent sealed window, of ice, fitted neatly into a thick wall of the same material. When the door was forcibly attacked (Apollo battering it with the hardest rock pieces he could find, then focusing upon it the full heat of the magnified sun) the body of it went meltin
g and crumbling and sliding away, revealing what had been behind it—another door of ice, this one just a lit­tle smaller than the first. Each of the series was a few inches smaller than the one before it and, long before the progression had reached its end, too small to squeeze through. Each door frame seemed to be of adamant, impossible to enlarge.

  "Dammit, there's got to be a way! Nobody builds a place like this without there's some way in!"

  Hours passed, and darkness fell. It was fortunate that they had brought some food with them, carried in a pack on Ferrante's back as he himself had been borne on Apollo's. Apollo could wring fire out of driftwood and drifted seaweed and pile rocks for a makeshift shelter so that his merely human companion was able to pass a night of no more than ordinary discomfort, by a soldier's standards.

  When dawn arrived with no improvement in their position, Je­remy decided to leave it up to the Sandals to find a way in for them—they, too, were a product of Vulcan's art.

  Finally they gave up on the doors and sought some other means of entrance. Their attention was then caught by a raw hole, in a part of the rock that served as the building's founda­tion, which Apollo's strength was finally able to sufficiently en­large, to allow them to squeeze in.

  But when at last they burst inside, momentary triumph turned quickly to dismay. The sweating intruders stood reeling in a shock of bitter disappointment. All the rooms of the workshop inside lay in ruins. Several overturned workbenches and a floor littered with fragments of tools and materials—but nothing, nothing at all of any value left.

  It was obvious that the place had been thoroughly plundered, long ago, so long that the seabirds were coming in to build their nests. The only practical way to gain entrance was to enlarge one of the cracks that had admitted birds. The place smelled of the sea and of ice and rust and of desertion.

  The doors of cabinets and lockers stood open, and raw spots on the walls and ceilings showed where some kind of connections had been ripped free.

  "Cleaned out. Everything's gone."

  For Jeremy it was a sickening blow—and he could see the same reaction in Ferrante's face and feel how deeply his invisible companion shared it, too. "This means that someone else may have come here and made off with a hundred Faces. Or two hun­dred. But who?"

  For the moment, neither Jeremy nor his companion could come up with a useful idea. They were about to leave, in near-despair, when...

  "Wait a minute."

  Some idea, some clue, led Jeremy/Apollo back. "Those doors, where we were first trying to get in, weren't really doors."

  "True enough. So?"

  "Then maybe . . ." He couldn't express his hunch clearly in words. But it led him back into the ravaged interior.

  "What the hell we looking for?"

  "We won't know till we find it. A hidden door. An opening. A... something."

  A thorough search ensued, probing examination of all seem­ingly blank, unhelpful surfaces.

  At last it was Apollo, aided by some subtle secret sense or the trace of an ancient memory, who found it out. At the back of the smallest, dirtiest cabinet in one of the ruined rooms, a panel re­mained unopened. But at the Sun God's touch it silently swung aside.

  Andy, crouching beside him, swore. Apollo muttered some­thing in an ancient language.

  Before them, when they had passed through the small aper­ture, stretched a whole suite of undamaged rooms, larger than the decoy rooms. Here was the true workshop of Hephaestus, packed with strangeness and loaded with wonders. Inside, the air was warm and clean. Soft globes of bioluminescence filled the sealed rooms with pleasant light.

  The central chamber of the suite was circular, and in its cen­ter stood a massive forge, now all unfueled and empty. When they laid hands upon its edge, it felt as cold as a rock on the bot­tom of the arctic sea. Going down from its center, deep into the earth, was a round black hole in which a single spider of sur­passing boldness had spun a web and taken residence.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The two comrades stood under miraculously clear lighting, produced by white tongues of inexplicable magic fire that danced across the room close under the high ceiling, heating the space below to a comfortable level as well as illumi­nating it.

  But neither Jeremy nor Andy was watching the flames. Their whole attention was drawn to an object that lay, as if carelessly cast down, in the middle of a cleared space on the scarred upper surface of what seemed to be the main workbench.

  "What's this?" Andy demanded, pointing.

  Jeremy had come to a halt on the other side of the bench, which had been wrought of massive timbers. "Just what you think it is. A Face."

  "So that's what they look like. But whose? Which god?" Fer­rante obviously didn't want to touch the thing.

  Even Apollo couldn't be sure, without touching it, of the iden­tity of the god whose powers had been thus encapsulated. But the moment Jeremy picked up the Face, he knew absolutely, though he could not have explained his certainty. What he held in his hands was a model of the rugged countenance of Vulcan himself, showing a furrowed brow and a hint of ugliness, the whole combining to suggest great power. Jeremy noted, without understanding, that this Face, like the three others he had seen, had only one eye and one ear.

  Neither of its discoverers could think of a reason why the Face of Hephaestus should have been carelessly left lying here.

  Carefully Jeremy put the object back exactly where he had picked it up and then with Andy began a careful search of the whole inner, secret workshop.

  At the beginning of this search Apollo's avatar had substantial hopes of discovering some version of the Silver Bow, or some of its Arrows, left by some previous incarnation of Vulcan. But nothing of the kind was to be found, nor did the searchers turn up anything at all that seemed likely to be of practical value. The most interesting discovery was in a room next to that containing the workbench, where one wall held a row of simple wooden racks, of a size and shape that suggested they might have been designed to hold a score or more of Faces. But all the racks were empty. There might be a space marked for the Face of War, sug­gesting it had been kept there—and in this case the empty space struck Jeremy as ominous.

  God or not, he was feeling tired, and he sat down for a few minutes' rest, his face in his hands. The situation reminded Je­remy of one of the logic puzzles with which his father in bygone years had sometimes tried to entertain him: If there exists an is­land where one god makes masks or Faces for all the gods who do not make their own. . .

  Up on his feet again, he went prowling restlessly about. Here stood a row of statues, busts, of godlike heads, in bronze and marble, reminding Jeremy of the display at the Academy. Why would Hephaestus have wanted to provide himself with such a show?

  Other shapes of wood suggested molds or templates for body armor in a variety of sizes. But again there was nothing that looked useful waiting to be taken, only a bewildering variety of tools, materials, and objects less readily definable, about which Apollo seemed to know no more than Jeremy Redthorn.

  Putting down an oddly shaped bowl—or it might have been a helmet, for someone with a truly strange head—Jeremy looked around and noted without any particular surprise that Ferrante had returned to the central bench. There the young soldier stood, his head over the bench, leaning on his spread arms, both hands gripping its edges. He was staring in utter fascination at the Face of Vulcan. In a near-whisper he asked the world: "What do we do with this?"

  "You put it on," said Jeremy softly. The decision had been building in him over the last few minutes—not that there had ever been much doubt about it.

  Eyes startled—but not totally surprised, not totally reluc­tant—looked up at him. "I what?"

  "Andy, I don't think we have any choice. Much better you than some others I've run into. I absolutely can't do it."

  Everything Apollo could remember, all that Jeremy could learn from others, including the new memories now available to Ferrante, confirmed the idea that no human c
ould wear the Face of more than one god or goddess at a time.

  "Sort of like the idea that an egg can be fertilized only once."

  "We could destroy it?" Ferrante's tone made it a question.

  Jeremy spread his hands. "I don't know how. Even Apollo doesn't know a way. I've heard a rumor that on top of the Moun­tain of the Oracle there's a place where Faces can be wiped out of existence—"

  The young soldier's face showed how much credence he put in rumors.

  Jeremy continued: "Maybe Hephaestus knows how to destroy a Face—but he won't even exist until someone puts this on." He concluded his thought silently: And then maybe he won't want to reveal his secrets—and then you won't want to either.

  Ferrante with a sudden grab picked up the Face. But then he stood for several seconds hesitating, juggling the thing like a hot potato, struck by whatever sensation it produced in his fingers. "I'd be a god," he murmured.

  At the last moment Jeremy felt compelled to give a warning. "It will mean, in a way, giving up your life."

  Troubled eyes looked up again. "You glad you put yours on?"

  Jeremy thought for a long moment. "Yes."

  "Then here I go....How?"

  "Just press it against your own face, as if you just wanted to look through the eye. That's how it worked for me. And for Car­lotta." And for Kate. He didn't want to worry Andy with that news just yet.

  When the Face of Hephaestus had disappeared into his head Andy Ferrante stood for a long moment with his eyes closed, looking as if he were in pain.

  "It'll be all right, Andy."

  There was a slight sound behind Apollo/Jeremy, and he/they spun around, both startled. The doors of a closet-size cabinet, previously locked, had opened, and from inside two life-size golden maidens had emerged, walking in the manner of obedi­ent servants.