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

  The Face of Apollo

  By Fred Saberhagen

  Ebook version 1.0

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE FACE OF APOLLO

  Copyright © 1998 by Fred Saberhagen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Design by Basha Durand

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Saberhagen, Fred

  The face of Apollo / Fred Saberhagen.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(The first Book of the gods)

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book."

  ISBN 0-312-86623-2(HC)

  ISBN 0-312-86408-6(PK)

  I. Title. II. Series: Saberhagen, Fred. Book of the gods; 1.

  PS3569.A215F3 1998

  813'.54—dc21 97-34384

  CIP

  First Edition: April 1998

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  I know more than Apollo,

  For oft when he lies sleeping,

  I see the stars at bloody wars

  In the wounded welkin weeping

  —Tom O'Bedlam's Song, Anonymous

  PROLOGUE

  To the people who could not escape the Cave, it seemed that the bones of the earth were shaking. The sun and stars, sources of light and courage, were out of sight and very far away.

  On and on the murderous struggle raged, filling the under­ground darkness with reverberating thunder, lancing it through with flares of unnatural light. Two titans fought against each other, each commanding the personal powers of a god and each supported by a squad of merely human allies. Two gods, dueling to the death in the echoing chambers of a vast cavern, came to­gether with profound hatred and full abandon, each committing every scrap of resource, holding nothing in reserve. Here was all-out bitter violence, carried extravagantly beyond the merely human.

  When their most powerful weapons had been exhausted, they came at last to grappling hand to hand. The thunder of their bat­tle, the bellowing of their two voices raised in rage and pain, deafened and dazed the few humans—less than two dozen alto­gether—unlucky enough to have been trapped with the pair in­side the Cave of Prophecy. The searing lightning of divine wrath, the flaring blasts of godlike power, came near to blinding human eyes that had earlier grown accustomed to the Cave's deep dark­ness. Clouds of dust from newly shattered rock, along with the fumes of slagged and burning earth, choked human lungs.

  Well before the struggle entered its climactic stage, the two factions of human warriors had ceased trying to accomplish any­thing beyond their own survival. It was obvious to all of them that nothing they were capable of doing would affect the out­come, and those who were still capable of movement now bent all their efforts on crawling, scrambling, for their lives, concerned only to get out of the way of the pair of monsters wielding su­perhuman force.

  From one second to the next it seemed that the level of fury al­ready reached could not possibly be sustained. And yet that level not only endured but was surpassed, turning the cave into an in­ferno, shaking the walls of solid rock.

  One of the mere humans who was still alive, a lithe young woman with darkish blond hair, had crawled aside, seeking shel­ter behind a hump of limestone on the Cave's floor. Her clothing was torn, her skin bleeding from half a dozen minor injuries.

  Meanwhile the giants' struggle stormed on, its outcome im­possible for anyone to know. Now one of the fighters was down and now the other.

  Just when it seemed to the cowering human witnesses that there could be no end, that the fight must swallow the whole world and drag on through eternity, there came at last an unexpected lull in violence, a little breathing space in which it was pos­sible for men and women in the Cave to regain the ability to see and hear. Some of them, recovering with amazing speed, tried to raise a chant, the words of which were promptly lost again in the renewed fury of the fight. The lips of the young woman moved, mouthing the words no one could hear:

  Apollo, Apollo, Apollo must win.

  And across the Cave, in another half-protected niche, another human chanted: Hades, Hades, King of Darkness!

  In the next instant the tumult rose up again, reaching its cli­max in a last burst of violence more cataclysmic than any that had gone before. Once more the bones of earth were set quiver­ing, and high in the rocky wall of one of the Cave's great cham­bers a rent was torn—letting in a single shaft of sunlight.

  The beam of light was sharply outlined in its passage through the dusty air within the Cave.

  When the echoes of that splitting rock had died away, there followed an interval of relative near-silence, broken only by shud­derings, quivering of the stony walls, receding roarings, and gur­glings, where veins of water had been turned to steam in the abused and ravaged earth. Here and there the lesser sound of human sobbing fell on deafened ears, evidence that breath still re­mained in yet another human body.

  Only seven human followers of great Apollo had survived inside the Cave until this moment, close enough to see the fight and yet managing to live through it. The ranking officer among them, a man accustomed to the leadership of a hundred warriors, now counted only six behind him. Their monstrous chief opponent had withdrawn, to do so needing the help of the remnant of his own human army. Apollo's seven were left in possession of the field.

  But the retreat of their enemies meant almost nothing when balanced against their loss.

  All seven were stunned by the fearful knowledge that their god was dead.

  Moved by a common impulse, they crawled and staggered, dragging their wounded, deafened, half-blinded bodies out of their separate hiding places and back into the great Cave room where the climax of the fight had taken place. There the disaster was confirmed.

  In their several ways the human survivors vocalized and acted out their grief. One or two of them wondered aloud, and seri­ously, if the sun was going to come up ever again.

  They derived a certain measure of relief, these folk who had served Apollo, simply from seeing that light shine in, however faintly, through the great Cave's newly riven walls. The light of the universe had not been extinguished with Apollo's death. That fact alone was enough to give them strength to carry on.

  The filtered light was faint, but it was enough to let their eyes confirm what their ears had already told them, that their master's monstrous opponent, Hades the Pitiless, most hated of all di­vinities, had withdrawn.

  A haggard, bloodstained woman among the seven, her black hair scorched, raised empty hands in a vague gesture. "Damned Hades must be injured, too."

  "He's gone to where he may recover—down, far down below." The surviving officer was looking at one of the doorways to the Cave room, a void of black that swallowed the faint wash of sun­light, giving nothing back. Gray clouds of dust still hung thick in the air.

  Another man choked out: "May he burn and melt in his own hell!"

  "But he will not. He will be back, to eat us all." The tones of the last speaker, another woman, were dull and hopeless. "Our god is dead." In their battle-deafness the seven were almost shouting at each other, though none realized the fact.

>   "We must not give up hope," said the man who had once com­manded a hundred. "Not yet! Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo." He looked round, coughing in clouds of choking dust. "We must have light in here. Someone get me more light. There is Some­thing I must find."

  A hush fell over the other six. Presently one of them, guided in near-darkness by the sight of sparks in smoldering wood, lo­cated a fragment of what had once been a tool or weapon. The piece had caught part of a bolt of electric force, hurled by one or the other of the chief combatants. Now human lungs blew into sure life the faint seeds of a mundane material fire. Human skill nurtured a small flame into steadiness, giving human eyes light enough to distinguish objects in the deep shadows where the thin shaft of sunlight could not penetrate.

  Crude torchlight flaring orange enabled the human survivors to look at one another—only three of them had picked up their weapons again; all of them were smeared with dust and most with blood. None were as old as thirty years, and all of their eyes were desperate.

  Around them on the rock floor of the Cave of Prophecy were scattered a score and more of other human bodies, friend and foe commingled, and some of each still breathed. But that could wait. All that could wait.

  More light as usual gave courage. First they were compelled to make absolutely sure of the tragedy—their god had perished. They could see all that was left of him—which was not much.

  Apollo was dead, but hope was not. Not yet.

  The officer was down on his knees, sifting through the rubble with his fingers. "You know what we must find. Help me to look for it."

  "Here's something," another remarked after a few moments' search. "That way did Hades go." Now in the crude torchlight the visual evidence was plain. There were marks were someone— or something—had been dragged away, gone dragging and slid­ing down, into impenetrable darkness.

  "Helped by humans. The Bad One was hit so hard that he needed human help, even to crawl away."

  "Gravely wounded, then! Is that not blood?"

  They all stared at the dark stains on the rocks. It was blood, but whose? No one could tell if it had spilled from divine veins.

  "Not dead, though. Hades is not dead, l-l-like, l-l-like—" The words came stuttering and stumbling, in a voice on the point of breaking into wrenching sobs.

  Another found a crumb of hope. "It might be that our Enemy will die of his wounds, down there."

  "No. Down in the depths he will recover." Several people drew back a step. It was all too easy to imagine the Lord of Darkness returning at any moment and with a single gesture sweeping them all out of existence.

  "I fear that the Pitiless One still lives." A voice broke in agony. "But Apollo is dead!"

  "Enough of that!" the officer shouted hoarsely. "Long live Apollo!"

  And with that he rose to his feet, having found what he had been groping for in the dust, a small object and inconspicuous. With the sound of a sob in his throat, he hastened to wrap his right hand in a fragment of cloth, torn from his own tattered uni­form. Only then did he touch his discovery, holding it up in the torchlight for all to see. It was no bigger than the palm of his hand, a thin and ragged-looking object of translucent gray, with a hint of restless movement inside.

  "The Face!" another cried.

  "We must save it."

  Hoarse murmurs echoed that thought. "Until, in time, our god may be reborn."

  "Save it, and carry it, to ... who knows the names of worthy folk?"

  The people in the Cave exchanged looks expressing ignorance. Finally the leader said, "I can think of only two. Certainly none of us."

  There followed a violent shaking of heads. Unanimously the seven counted themselves unworthy even to touch the remnant of Apollo's Face.

  "But how can we carry it to safety?" asked the young woman with the dark blond hair. "It's damned unlikely that any of us are ever going to leave the Cave alive."

  No one in the small group had much doubt that the human al­lies of Hades were in command of all the known exits—but the struggle of titans had created some new openings in the rock.

  The weight of decision rested on the officer, and he assumed it firmly: "I think our chances are better than that. But we must split up and go in seven different ways. We will draw lots to see which of us carries ... this."

  Moments later, the seven had cast lots and the eyes of the other six were all turned upon the young woman with dark blond hair.

  In the days that followed, the spreading reports and rumors telling of the fight were in general agreement on the fact that the god Apollo, known also as Lord of Light, Far-Worker, Phoe­bus, Lord of the Silver Bow, and by an almost uncountable num­ber of other names, was truly dead. But the accounts were by no means unanimous regarding the fate of Hades, the Sun God's dreadful dark opponent. Some said that the two superbeings had annihilated each other. Others insisted that the Dark One, at­tended by the monster Cerberus, had now dared to emerge into the world and was stalking victoriously about. A third group held that the Lord of the Underworld, the final destroyer of Apollo, had been himself gravely injured in the duel and had re­treated deep into the bowels of the earth to nurse his wounds.

  And there were many humans now—none of whom had been close to the Mountain and the Cave of the Oracle during the fight—who insisted that all the gods were dead and had been dead for decades or even centuries, if indeed they had ever been more than superstitions.

  The full truth turned out to be stranger than any of the stories that were told.

  ONE

  Weeks later, and more than a hundred miles from the Cave of Prophecy, dusk had ended the day's work for the inhabitants of a quiet riverside village. In a small house on the edge of the village, three people sat at a table: a gray-haired man and woman and a red-haired boy who had just turned fif­teen. By the dim and flaring light of a smoky fish-oil lamp the three were concluding an uneventful day with a supper of oat­meal, raisins, and fresh-caught fish.

  This was, in fact, a very minor birthday party. Aunt Lynn had sung Jeremy a song—and poured him a second glass of wine.

  Tonight gray-bearded Uncle Humbert had emptied somewhat more of the wine jug into his own cup than usual and had started telling stories. On most nights, and most days, Jeremy's uncle had little enough to say about anything. But tonight the birthday occasion had been melded with the prospect of a good harvest, now in late summer already under way. For the latter reason Humbert was in a good mood now, refilling his clay cup yet again from the cheap jug on the table.

  Tonight was going to be one of the rare times when Uncle drank enough wine to alter his behavior. Not that Jeremy had ever seen his uncle take enough to bring on any drastic change. The only noticeable effect was that he would start chuckling and hiccuping and then reel off a string of stories concerning the legendary gods, gradually focusing more and more on their romantic encounters.

  Months ago Jeremy had given up expecting ever to be thanked for his hard work. He had to admit that the old people worked hard, too, most of the time. It was just the way things were when you lived on the land.

  As a rule, the boy consumed only one cup of wine at a meal. His uncle was stingy about that, as about much else. But tonight

  Jeremy dared to pour himself a second cup, and his uncle looked at him for a moment but then let it pass.

  The boy was not particularly restricted in his consumption of wine but so far had not been tempted to overdo it—he wasn't sure he liked the sensations brought on by swallowing more than a little of the red stuff straight.

  Earlier Aunt Lynn, contemplating the fact of his turning fif­teen, had asked him, "S'pose you might be marrying soon?"

  That was a surprise; he wondered if the old woman really hadn't noticed that he was barely on speaking terms with any of the other villagers, male or female, young or old. The folk here tended to view any outsiders with suspicion. "Don't know who I'd marry."

  Aunt Lynn sat thinking that over. Or more likely her mind was already on somet
hing else—the gods knew what. Now Je­remy sat drawing little circles with his finger in the spots of spilled wine on the table. Often it seemed to the boy that there must be more than one generation between himself and the two gray people now sitting at his right and left. Such were the dif­ferences. Now Uncle Humbert, tongue well loosened, was well into his third tale concerned with the old days, a time when the world was young and the gods, too, were young and vital beings, fully capable of bearing the responsibility for keeping the uni­verse more or less in order. Jeremy supposed the old folk must have heard the stories thousands of times, but they never seemed tired of telling or hearing them yet again.

  Many people viewed the past, when supposedly the gods had been dependable and frequently beneficent, as a Golden Age, ir­retrievably lost in this late and degenerate period of the world. But Uncle Humbert's view, as his nephew had become ac­quainted with it over the past several months, was somewhat dif­ferent. A deity might do a human being a favor now and then, on a whim, but by and large the gods were not beneficent. Instead they viewed the world as their own playground and humanity as merely an amusing set of toys.

  Humbert derived a kind of satisfaction from this view of life—it was not his fault that the world, as he saw it, had cheated him in many ways. Certain of the gods seemed to spend a good deal of their time thinking up nasty tricks to play on Uncle Humbert. Jeremy supposed that seeing himself as a victim of the gods allowed Humbert to have a feeling of importance.

  The other half of Humbert's audience on most nights for the past five months had been his weary, overworked nephew. Tonight was no exception, and the boy sat, head spinning over his second cup, falling asleep with his head propped up in one hand, both his elbows on the table. Nothing was forcing him to stay at the table—he could have got up at any moment and climbed the ladder to his bed. But, in fact, he wanted to hear the stories. Any distraction from the mundane world in which he spent the monotony of his days was welcome.