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

by Fred Saberhagen

  And it hurt Jeremy far more than his bruises and his bonds, more than defeat and death, to see Kate, his helpless love, now tied in place beside him.

  Looking at Kate once more, he thought, for just a moment, that deep in her eyes lay a hint of some wild hope. He wanted to speak to her, but he could find no words.

  ... his eyes had sagged closed, despite his effort to keep them open. But now they opened again. Because someone, either Katy or some invisible presence, had put lips close to his ear and whis­pered, "Remember whose house we are in."

  Willing hands were busy making the final arrangements, free­ing the doomed couple from all their bonds except those that held them to the central stake above the trap and would slide free from that support when it opened.

  Toward the rear of the auditorium, Hades, as if hoping to observe more closely, was leaning forward a little more toward the light.

  Someone, perhaps it was Lord Kalakh himself, was conclud­ing a triumphant speech, of which not one word reached Je­remy/Apollo's mind.

  "But where does the great jest lie?" he asked himself. And whether the question had been spoken aloud or not no longer mattered, for even now the lever was being pulled.

  The villains' laughter rose in a triumphant roar—

  Kate's startling gray eyes were open, looking steadily at him, and meaning and courage poured out of them. As if that could be enough, even now, to sustain them both.

  As the executioner leaned his weight upon the lever, the small circle of doom beneath the couple's feet shuddered once and only slightly—and the round lid of stone over the pit remained right where it was, solid as the living bedrock. But in perfect syn­chrony with that small shudder, a heavy jolt ran through the whole enormous edifice. Bright cracks sprang out zigzag, with the suddenness of lightning, down the curve of the dark stone dome, at half a dozen places round its encircling curve.

  In the brief and breathless interval that followed, the Trick­ster's laughter suddenly burst up, a clear fountain of sharp sound from Katy's lips. That sound and all others were drowned out an instant later by a great avalanche of noise. On every side of Je­remy and Kate, leaving them standing together, bound safely in place on what was now a pinnacle, the entire massive amphithe­ater crumbled and fell away, its fabric dissolving, in the time-space of a long-drawn breath, entirely into thunder and dust. In the background, audible even above the thunder of collapse, rose the terrible bellowing of Hades, engulfed in rage and pain, stabbed by a flaming lance of afternoon sunlight, sent crawling and scurrying in a desperate retreat.

  The sun in all its vast and soothing energy shone full on Je­remy as well. In a moment he was able to turn his head and focus light and burn Katy's rope bonds through, first in one place and then another. In another moment her hands were reaching to support him and then to set him free. And presently, at whose command he was never afterward quite sure, two great eagles, of a size and strength that was more than natural, came to carry them both to safety, letting them down easily from the now-isolated pinnacle that had been the trapdoor into the descending shaft. The dungeon of horror below was filled with rubble now—and with the bodies of the audience.

  Fresh wind was whirling a great cloud of dust away. Jeremy could now get a fresh view of what, only a minute ago, had been the inside of the auditorium and was now an expanse of rubble covering an open slope. With the pulling of the executioner's trigger, the whole of the packed chamber had collapsed, dome, sides, and sloping floor alike gone sliding thunderously away, ca­reening and crashing in all directions down the steep slope of natural bedrock that moments earlier had been its support.

  Gone in the crash, and doubtless now buried in its debris, were Lord Kalakh and all of his key aides and officers who had been present with him.

  It was hardly possible to hope that Hades had been killed. He would be sun-scorched and beaten now but no worse than half-dead, and he would have found underground passage home through the Mountain-piercing tunnel.

  No sooner had the eagles set Jeremy and Kate down upon a fresh mound of rubble than Vulcan was suddenly present and a golden maiden to hand Jeremy his recovered Bow and the one Arrow he had never used. Armed again, though still almost stag­gering with pain and weakness, he looked around for his foes— but those few who were still alive were already out of sight as they went scrambling in retreat.

  Minutes had passed, and still it seemed that the last echoes of the prolonged crash refused to die. The fact was that it had provoked landslides, whose sound rose in a great but now diminishing roar, down the Mountain's distant flanks. More clouds of bitter dust came welling up, mixed with a little smoke.

  And the Trickster, gripping Jeremy by the arms, then hugging him, once more laughed her glorious laugh: "Couldn't you re­member whose house this is?"

  "It wouldn't have destroyed either of your Faces anyway," Andy was assuring him, a little later, leaning out of the new chariot in which he'd just landed on the Mountain's top. Now it was possible to observe how much the new Hephaestus looked like Andy—and sounded like him, too. "At least I don't see how it could have. That was nothin' but a latrine rumor from the start. Oh, the dungeon was real enough. Don't know who built it, but I had to fix it up a little."

  "Small comfort." Apollo/Jeremy was sitting on a rock in the full light of sunset, trying to regain some strength and sanity. His right arm was around Kate, who was sitting close beside him.

  Jeremy Redthorn's brush with death had freed him of the fear of being used up, worn out, a human body too frail a vessel to bear all the forces that a god pours into it. It seemed to him now that that view was based on an essential fallacy. Humans were stronger than they looked or felt, and the gods with their Faces, however powerful, were only human creations. Eventually the human body that he still shared with Apollo would die—but Apollo would not be anxious to discard him when he tired and aged. Apollo, as long as he remained Jeremy Redthorn's partner, could want nothing that Jeremy Redthorn did not want.

  Hephaestus produced what actually looked like a guilty blush. "Damn it, Jer, we didn't want it to work out like this—we hoped you could get a couple Arrows into Hades, kill him dead. But you never know what'll happen in a fight, so Katy and I thought we better work on the house here, and we got this little business ready, with the trapdoor and the walls and so on. Just in case."

  "Might've told me."

  "Meant to tell you, damn it! But by the time I got in touch with Kate and we settled what kind of plan would have the best chance, you'd already gone rushin' off to fight. Damn, boy! For someone who didn't want to join the army ..."

  "I did manage to whisper in your ear," said Katy, almost whis­pering again. Suddenly her lips were once more very close.

  Arnobius could not be found anywhere. Not even his body. But after those climactic landslides, a lot of other people were miss­ing, too.

  Some of the Lugard reinforcements had eventually arrived. Lord John had come through the battle alive and despite his in­juries and weariness was now directing the search for his brother's body.

  It appeared that the Lugards would now have at least nominal control over the new ruin atop the Mountain and of the sup­posedly important Oracle as well.

  But, Jeremy thought, everyone who came to the Cave, what­ever happened to its Oracle, would have to realize that both Cave and Mountain had now come under Apollo's control.

  This might be an excellent time, Apollo's thought suggested, for a Council of Gods to be convened, to debate the future of the world—excluding, of course, those deities who wanted to de­stroy it or preserve it as their private plaything. Other Faces, other gods, must now be abroad in the world again, and there must be some way of making contact with them. But that could wait a little while.

  "If Zeus himself shows up to dispute the matter with me, to put in some kind of a claim about Olympus—well, we'll see. But I'm not going to argue with a tree stump. Anyway, the point is that an end is now decreed to human sacrifice upon these premises—anywh
ere on the Mountain. Apollo will not have that."

  "What manner of worship would my lord prefer?" This was Katy, putting on a face of what looked almost like innocent hu­mility.

  Jeremy smiled, but very faintly. "I want no one to worship me." (And he wondered privately just what the Gatekeeper had meant when he told the Lord Apollo: "I made you.")

  "A god who wants no servants! Well! But I expect many a spot­less animal will be sacrificed in your name, here in the Cave and elsewhere. Folk want to worship someone—or something."

  "If killing animals makes them feel better, let them. At least they'll have some meat—Kate?"

  "Yes?"

  "What I really wish is that you and I could go and live on our own farm somewhere—even growing grapes. Or be Honeymak­ers, maybe."

  Katy nodded her head, very slowly. Obviously humoring him. And with a sigh he had to admit that she was right.

  The possibilities arising from such intimate union with a god range far beyond anything conceivable by ordinary human imagination.

  All the doors to the great universe would be open to you, if you dared to use them. You would be no longer merely human.

  "Merely?"

  Once incorporate a fragment of divinity within yourself, and there may be no way to ever get rid of it again.

  "But maybe there's a fragment already there, in all of us. And anyway, who would want to get rid of it?"