The Face of Apollo Page 14

  Crossing the harbor from the river's mouth with a skilled crew on board, the expedition's catamaran put in smoothly to a well-made dock, a mile outside the city walls, where a few other vessels of various types were moored. One or two were large seagoing ships, the first that Jeremy Redthorn had ever laid eyes on.

  And then the Argos was at the dock, with a small horde of deckhands and dockworkers working to make her fast.

  Thirteen

  An hour or so after disembarking from the Argos, Jeremy, his existence for the moment almost forgotten by no­bility and commoners alike, was standing on a hill overlooking the low buildings of the Academy, which stretched for a couple of hundred yards along the harbor side of a long, narrow, curv­ing peninsula. He was alone, except for his permanent, silent companion.

  Here Jeremy got his first look at the full ocean, the domain (so it was claimed by the Scholar and his colleagues and others who took gods seriously) of Poseidon. Jeremy saw a gray and limit­less expanse, ending at an indeterminate horizon. Here his left-eye view was not much different than his right. Only an occasional strange brilliant sparkle showed upon a wave. Nor did his left ear find anything worth emphasizing in the rush and sigh of surf.

  The dark shapes of seals and sea lions, awkward on the land, decorated the rocks and beaches, their smooth bodies now and again lunging into the water or up out of it. Some were heavily mutated, their species showing great individual variety. Another amazing sight for the country boy, and another in which his left eye drew him no special pictures. And more gulls, in varieties of shape and color suggesting hundreds of mutated subspecies, cry­ing and clamoring above.

  Though the Intruder did not seem particularly interested in the limitless expanse of sea and sky, Jeremy Redthorn was. When the boy on the hilltop managed to tear his eyes away from the distant blue horizon, the Academy struck him as a marvel, too, more striking as he got closer to it. The sprawling white build­ings, few of them taller than two stories, roofed with red tile and set amid gardens, connected by paths of ground seashells, created an awe-inspiring impression in the mind of the country boy.

  How old were most of these red-roofed, white stone build­ings? Some only a few years, as Jeremy was soon to discover; the Academy had undergone a notable expansion in recent times, as a direct result of the new stirrings in the world of magic, the profession of odylic science. But a few of the structures at the core of the establishment were very old, and of these one or two were of a vastly different style.

  Here, new memories assured Jeremy Redthorn, were many men and women who considered themselves learned in the busi­ness of the gods. At first it seemed to him impossible that here his special condition, the presence of the Intruder, would not be quickly discovered.

  But the Intruder did not seem particularly concerned.

  Within a few hours of his arrival on the grounds of the Academy, Jeremy began to learn something about how and when the insti­tution had been founded. The only trouble was that his new memory strongly suggested that the story as he now heard it was wrong in several details—he wasn't going to dig to find out.

  When Jeremy at last found himself mingling, as a servant, with Arnobius's Academic colleagues, none of them paid him much attention to the fact that Scholar Arnobius happened to have a new servant. They took only momentary notice when he was pointed out to them by Arnobius, or by Carlotta, as a sharp-eyed lad. The boy became an object of desultory interest, but only in a distinctly minor way.

  Very soon after his arrival, Jeremy was taken in charge by a fe­male housekeeper, an overseer of the staff who tended the many Academic lodgings on campus. To this woman Arnobius, his mind as usual engaged somewhere in the lofty realms of philos­ophy, gave a few careless words of instruction regarding his new personal attendant.

  Plainly horrified by the appearance of her new charge, still wearing an ill-fitting rower's uniform and by her standards far from sufficiently clean, the housekeeper snorted and turned away, gesturing imperiously for him to follow her. She led Je­remy down seemingly endless flights of stairs in a narrow passage between gray walls. On a lower level they emerged into a kind of barracks, evidently for male civilian workers. Here she com­manded him to bathe—the barracks boasted showers with hot running water, the first that Jeremy Redthorn had ever seen.

  Gratefully he took advantage of the opportunity and after­ward in clean clothes was sent to have his hair cut even shorter than his own rude trim had left it, evidently the accepted style for servants in these parts.

  At the barbershop he appeared wearing new sandals and the white trousers and jacket of the low-ranked support staff. Un­dergarments had been provided also, and care was actually taken to see that the clothes fit him. His jacket was marked with col­ored threads that, he was given to understand, marked him as an Academician's personal servant. Catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he could see that his appearance had been consider­ably transformed.

  "Will you need a razor, Jonathan?" The chief housekeeper frowned, inspecting Jeremy's smooth cheeks. "No, not yet." With a final look around she left him in the barbershop.

  It was a well-lit, serviceable room that, as Jeremy later discov­ered, occasionally served as a surgery for students and perma­nent members of the lower class.

  There was only one barber. Seated in the central chair and ar­guing with the civilian barber about the relative length of side­burns was a compactly built young soldier in Lugard green and blue.

  "I can't grow hair where there ain't none, Corporal," the bar­ber was remonstrating. "You want me to trim for sideburns, you got to produce 'em first. Then I can trim 'em down."

  "Private, not Corporal! See any stripes on my sleeve? Private Andy Ferrante. And damn it, man, I got hair! I can feel it hangin' down the sides of my bloody head!"

  "That's all sprouting from above your ears, son. Take a good look at yourself in a mirror sometime." Not that any such device was currently in evidence; probably, thought Jeremy, the cus­tomers here were generally not paying for their own haircuts and what they thought of them meant little to the barber.

  Private Andy Ferrante appealed to the next customer in line, who happened to be Jeremy. "Ain't I got sideburns he could trim? Tell the truth!"

  Jeremy moved closer, to give the matter careful study. "Truth is, you've got no more than I do. Which is just about zero."

  "Yeah? That's really it, huh?" Ferrante's face, keyed up for fighting, or at least for argument, fell.

  From then on the haircut went peacefully enough. Ferrante kept on chatting. When he stood up from the chair, he was shorter than Jeremy, though two years older, at seventeen. His look was intense, open, and guileless, his face not particularly handsome. When he saw Jeremy looking at his left hand, from which the smallest finger and its nearest mate were missing, he re­marked that he had lost them in a fight. Gradually Jeremy's in­terested questions brought out that several months ago Ferrante had distinguished himself in a skirmish against Lord Kalakh's troops, in particular by carrying a wounded officer to safety, and had lost part of a hand in the process.

  "Did they give you a medal?" By now Jeremy was in the bar­ber chair and scissors and comb were busy around his ears.

  "Yeah. Not worth much. Good thing wasn't on my sword hand. Ever done any fighting?"

  "Couple of times I would have, but I had nothing to fight with."

  "Join the army; you'll get your chance."

  Jeremy only shook his head. Ferrante was not in the least put off by this lack of martial enthusiasm. "You're right; don't join the goddamned army. Crazy to join if you've got a good job on the outside, which it looks like you do." He eyed the thread marks on Jeremy's new tunic.

  Ferrante, as it turned out, was here on campus as part of the permanent bodyguard of about a dozen men now assigned the Scholar. The current military and political situation being what it was, prudence dictated precautions against assassination and kidnapping plots.

  Jeremy got the impression that Andy didn't ge
t on all that well with the other members of the small military unit. Likely this was because the other men were all some years older, while his combat veteran's status and his cool attitude kept them from treating him like a kid.

  Several human factions were involved in the sporadic warfare, in a tangle of alliances and enmities. Everyone wanted to take advantage somehow of whatever change impended in the status of the gods.

  The barber was finally moved to comment on the fact that the roots of his newest customer's hair were growing in very dark.

  "Damn, kid, never seen anything like it."

  "Like what?"

  "This hair of yours."

  No mirror was available. Questioning brought out the fact that some of the roots were dark, scattered in random patches across his scalp, producing a mixture of curly red and curly black. The more the longer, older red hair was cut away, the more noticeable was the effect.

  Again the work with comb and scissors paused. "The dye job on your hair could use a touch-up, kid. Course I'd have to charge extra. Or does your new boss want you to let it grow in natural?"

  Jeremy, whose mind had been far off, trying to imagine army life, looked up blankly. "Dye job?"

  "Of course with your coloring, the red almost looks more nat­ural than the black. You can see where the darker stuff is grow­ing in at the roots."

  "The black?"

  The barber began speaking slowly, as to one of inferior intel­ligence. "You want a touch-up, I got some nice red. If your boss likes it that way."

  "No. No dye." Belated understanding came, with a slow chill down Jeremy's spine. The Dark Youth. "Just cut it."

  "You still look weird, fellow." This was Ferrante again, as­sertive, with an easy assumption of familiarity. Evidently he had no urgent business to call him elsewhere. But somehow the words did not seem intended to give offense.

  The boy in the barber's chair grinned wryly, thinking: If you only knew. He said: "I don't know what I can do about it, though."

  The barber was still bemused by the remarkable case before him. He turned aside and after an obvious internal struggle dug a small mirror out of a drawer and held it up for Jeremy to see himself.

  In the glass the boy's left eye showed him quite a different self-image than his right. He was still far from closely resembling the Dark Youth, not yet anyway—but Jeremy thought that he could now see a definite family likeness.

  A few minutes later, he and the young soldier left the barber­shop together.

  "Not many uniforms here on campus," the civilian remarked.

  "Nah. Only about a dozen of us."

  Jeremy looked around with interest at the scattering of passersby. "And I guess it's easy to tell who's a servant—they're dressed like me. Most of the rest of these people must be students?"

  "Yeah. Students, men and women both, mostly have long hair. A lot of 'em, especially the ones from wealthy families, dress like they just fell off a manure cart.

  "And there are the slaves, of course. Only a few. They all have metal collars."

  "Slaves?" A hasty internal check with the Intruder's memory: yes, all true enough. With a mental jolt the boy suddenly grasped the significance of the golden collar that Carlotta wore. Her neckband was thinly wrought and of fine workmanship; its golden thickness might be easily cut or broken. Still, in this part of the world no one but a slave would wear such a thing.

  Ferrante, pressed for more information on the subject of slaves, provided what he could. As far as he knew, with one or two exceptions, the only examples on the grounds of the Academy belonged to visiting academics, who had brought them from their respective homelands as personal servants. Jeremy's mem­ory when called upon confirmed the fact: the peculiar institution was rare indeed here in the Harbor Lord's domain. But, perhaps for the very reason that it was so uncommon, it had never been strictly outlawed.

  Ancient law and custom of Pangur Ban, indistinguishably blended and extended to the grounds of the Academy, required slaves to wear distinguishing metal collars welded on.

  In Carlotta's case the collar was definitely a symbolic rather than a real bond; Jeremy wondered if it was even welded into place. But it did mean, must mean, that the Scholar literally owned her.

  Her story, which Jeremy later heard confirmed by several sources, was that the girl had been a gift to Lord Victor's from some other potentate, known to Ferrante only as the sultan. It wouldn't have been politic to reject her or, once the gift had been accepted, to simply set her free.

  Ferrante, being off duty for the remainder of the day but cur­rently penniless and unable to afford the amusements of the nearby town, volunteered to show his new acquaintance around the grounds.

  Ferrante said to Jeremy, "Suppose your master should send you to the stables with a message—you'd best know where they are. Anyway, it's a place I like t' hang around."

  Out on the grounds of the Academy, back toward the stables, Jeremy's footsteps slowed when he realized he was soon going to encounter a large number of domestic animals. Only now did he begin to fully comprehend the extreme strangeness of the ways in which domesticated beasts reacted to him. Herd animals seemed particularly keen on displaying their devotion—if that was the proper word for it. Here were a dozen cameloids or dromedaries, property of the Academy or its masters, peacefully grazing in a field fenced off from the grassy common where teachers and students, distinguished by their own varieties of white uniforms, strolled or gathered in fine weather to dispute in groups.

  As soon as Jeremy came within sight of the pasture, these an­imals tended to congregate along the fence and look at him, sniff­ing and cocking their ears, as if they were greatly intrigued by his mere presence and could not wait to discover what he might do next. Fortunately, he noticed the silent scrutiny before any­one else did—even more fortunately, as soon as he silently willed the beasts to turn away and go about their regular affairs, they did so.

  It was lucky, too, that Jeremy's companion's thoughts were elsewhere at the moment.

  The same thing happened with the nearest members of a herd of beef and milk cattle, who slowly followed him along their side of a fence, gazing at him in what might have been some bovine equivalent of adoration. The swine in a large pen behaved in the same way. He saw a flock of chickens farther on but detoured to stay away from them.

  At times he found his chief objective in coming to the Academy drifting toward the back of his mind. Jeremy had to strug­gle to keep from impulsively trying to question his new employ­ers and acquaintances as to whether they had known Sal—but he could think of no good way to frame the questions, especially as he had got the distinct impression that that was not her real name. He kept his resolution to refrain from making any direct inquiries about Sal until he could be reasonably sure that he had reached the man for whom Sal had intended the message. Je­remy could only hope that there would be some way short of killing him to rid himself of the thing of power and pass it on to where it belonged.

  Nor could Jeremy keep from wondering if Sal had ever lived in one of these white buildings and, if so, for how long and what kind of a life she'd had. Maybe she'd been here as a student. She would have had a family of some kind, of course. Probably a lover—or a score of lovers—but that imagined picture hurt to look at.

  Somehow it was difficult for Jeremy to picture Sal, as he had known her, staying here in any capacity. Whatever controlled his enhanced powers of sight and thought had no clues to offer him regarding the question.

  Apollo's eye provided Jeremy with fitful flashes of insight, oc­curring here and there across the Academic scene, coming into being unexpectedly and flickering away again. And it gradually showed him more details, when he looked at what he considered special things, things he very much wanted to ask about—but he continued to be cautious in his questions about anything he saw in the special way, not wanting to reveal the powers he possessed. Not until he could accomplish the mission that he believed Sal had entrusted to him.

  It had
already occurred to Jeremy that the fact that one of his eyes was still restricted to purely human perception was proba­bly an advantage. The difference let him distinguish between mere natural oddities and the special things that only a god could see.

  The Academy grounds and buildings held many sights that Je­remy had never seen before—as well as things that he had never come close to imagining—but in most cases the left Eye of Apollo provided at least a partial explanation. And Jeremy had begun to develop skill at interpreting the hitherto unknown sounds occasionally brought to him by his left ear.

  One series of these special sounds reminded him of something he'd heard in some of his recent, special dreams—the music of the string-plucked lyre.

  Fourteen

  The living quarters assigned to Jeremy were tiny, a mere curtained alcove off the hallway connecting bedroom and living room in the Scholar's apartment. Carlotta had her own modest apartment on the next floor up, and on the floor above that were quartered the dozen men of Arnobius's military body­guard, one of whom was almost always on duty at the door to the Scholar's apartment, with another standing guard in the shrubbery beneath its windows.

  So far, Jeremy's duties were not demanding; they consisted of general housekeeping for the Scholar, running errands, and re­minding him of appointments, which Arnobius tended to forget.

  Carlotta spent at least as much time in her master's apartment as in her own, so she and Jeremy were frequently in each other's company.

  On the third day of Jeremy's stay at the Academy, the Scholar sent him to the library with a note addressed to one of the archivists asking if a particular old manuscript, dealing with the origins of odylic science, was available.

  On entering the vast main room—really a series of rooms, connected by high, broad archways—the boy's feet slowed and his mouth fell open. It was a revelation. The hundred or so books that the Scholar had had with him on the boat and that had seemed to Jeremy (who at the time did not consult his new mem­ory on the subject) an unbelievable number were as nothing com­pared to the thousands arrayed here. A faint intriguing smell of dust and ink, parchment and paper, testified to the presence of ancient texts. Marble busts of gods and humans looked down from atop some of the high bookcases. Tall windows, admitting great swathes of light, looked out on green lawns and treetops nearby, green hills more distant. Somewhere in the background a droning argument was in progress: two voices, each patient and scholarly and certain of being in the right.