[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo Page 2

  Now Jeremy's eyelids opened a little wider. Uncle Humbert was varying his performance somewhat tonight. He was actually telling a tale that the boy hadn't heard before, in the five months that he'd been living here.

  The legend that Jeremy had never heard before related how two male gods, Dionysus and one other, Mercury according to Uncle, who happened to be traveling together in disguise, made a wager between themselves as to what kind of reception they would be granted at the next peasants' hut if they appeared incognito.

  "So, they wrapped 'emselves up in their cloaks, and—hiccup— walked on."

  Aunt Lynn, who tonight had hoisted an extra cup or two her­self, was already shrieking with laughter at almost every line of every story and pounding her husband on the arm. Silently Je­remy marveled at her. No doubt she had heard this one a hun­dred times before, or a thousand, in a quarter-century or so of marriage and already knew the point of the joke, but that didn't dampen her enjoyment. Jeremy hadn't heard it yet and didn't much care whether he heard it now.

  Uncle Humbert's raspy voice resumed. "So great Hermes— some call'm Mercury—'n' Lord Di'nysus went on and stopped at the next peasants' hut. It was a grim old man who came to th' door, but the gods could see he had a young and lively wife. . .. She was jus' standing there behind the old man, kind of smiling at the visitors ... an' when she saw they were two han'some, young-lookin' men, dressed like they were rich, she winked at 'em...."

  Aunt Lynn had largely got over her latest laughing fit and now sat smiling, giggling a little, listening patiently. She might be thinking that she could have been burdened with a husband a lot worse than Humbert, who hardly ever beat her. And Jeremy was already so well grown that Uncle, not exactly huge and powerful himself, would doubtless have thought twice or thrice before whaling into him—but then, such speculation was probably un­fair. In the boy's experience Uncle Humbert had never demon­strated a wish to beat on anyone—his faults were of a different kind.

  The story came quickly to its inevitable end, with the grim, greedy old peasant cuckolded, the lecherous gods triumphant, the young wife, for the moment, satisfied. Judging by Uncle Humbert's laughter, the old man still enjoyed the joke as much as the first time he'd heard it, doubtless when he was a young and lecherous lad himself. The thought crossed Jeremy's mind that his father would never have told stories like this—not in the family circle, anyway—and his mother would never have laughed at them.

  That was the last joke of the night, probably because it was the last that Uncle could dredge up out of his memory just now. When all three people stood up from the table, the boy, still too young to have a beard at all, was exactly the same height as the aging graybeard who was not yet fifty.

  While the woman puttered about, carrying out a minimum of table clearing and kitchen work, young Jeremy turned away from his elders with a muttered, "Good night," and began to drag his tired body up to the loft where he routinely slept. That second cup of wine was buzzing in his head, and once his callused foot sole almost slipped free from a smooth-worn rung on the built-in wooden ladder.

  Now in the early night the tiny unlighted loft was still hot with' the day-long roasting of summer sun. Without pausing, the boy crawled straight through the narrow, cramped, oven-like space and slid right on out of it again, through the crude opening that served as its single window. He emerged into moonlit night on the flat roof of an adjoining shed.

  Here he immediately paused to pull off his homespun shirt.

  The open air was cooler now than it had been all day, and a slight breeze had come up at sunset, promising to minimize the number of active mosquitoes. To Jeremy's right and left the branches of a shade tree rustled faintly, brushing the shed roof. Even in daylight this flat space, obscured by leaves and branches, was all but invisible from any of the other village houses. In a moment Jeremy had shed his trousers, too.

  He drained his bladder over the edge of the roof, saving him­self a walk to the backyard privy. Then he stretched out naked on the sun-warmed shingles of the flat, slightly sloping surface, his shirt rolled up for a pillow beneath his head.

  There, almost straight above him, was the moon. Jeremy could manage to locate a bright moon in a clear sky, though for him its image had never been more than a blur and talk of lunar phases was practically meaningless. Stars were far beyond his capabil­ity—never in his life had his nearsighted vision let him discover even the brightest, except that once or twice, on frozen winter nights, he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, a blurry version of the Dog Star's twinkling point. Now and then, when Venus was es­pecially bright, he had been able to make out her wandering image near dawn or sunset, a smaller, whiter version of the moon blur. But tonight, though his eyelids were sagging with wine and weariness, he marveled at how moonlight—and what must be the communal glow of the multitude of bright points he had been told were there—had transformed the world into a silvery mystery.

  Earlier in the day, Aunt Lynn had said she'd heard a boatman from downriver talking about some kind of strange battle, sup­posed to have recently taken place at the Cave of Prophecy. Whole human armies had been engaged, and two or more gods had fought to the death.

  Uncle had only sighed on hearing the story. "The gods all died a long time ago," was his comment finally. " 'Fore I was born." Then he went on to speak of several deities as if they had been personal acquaintances. "Dionysus, now—there was a god for you. One who led an interesting life." Uncle Humbert, whose voice was gravelly but not unpleasant, supplied the emphasis with a wink and a nod and a laugh.

  Jeremy wanted to ask his uncle just how well he had known Dionysus—who had died before Humbert was born—just to see what the old man would say. But the boy felt too tired to bother. Besides, he had the feeling that his uncle would simply ig­nore the question.

  Now, despite fatigue, an inner restlessness compelled Jeremy to hold his eyelids open a little longer. Not everyone agreed with Uncle Humbert that all the gods had been dead for a human lifetime or longer. Somewhere up there in the distant heavens, or so the stories had it, the gods still lived, or some of them at least, though they were no more to be seen by any human eyes than Je­remy could see the stars. Unless the stories about a recent battle might be true. . . .

  Others of that divine company, according to other stories, pre­ferred to spend their time in inaccessible mountain fastnesses on earth—high places, from which they sometimes came down to bother people or befriend them.... At least in the old days, hun­dreds of years ago, they had done that.

  He wondered if the gods, whatever gods there might be in re­ality, behaved anything at all like their representations in Uncle's stories. People who were inclined to philosophy argued about such matters, and even Jeremy's parents had not been sure. But Jeremy preferred to believe that there were some gods in the world. Because magic really happened, sometimes. Not that he had actually experienced any himself. But there were so many stories that he thought there must be something ...

  ... his mind was drifting now. Let Dionysus and Hermes come to the door of this house tonight, and they'd find a crabbed old man, but no young wife to make the visit worth their while. Nei­ther gods nor men could work up much craving for Aunt Lynn. From down in the dark house the rhythmic snores of Jeremy's aunt and uncle were already drifting up. Wine and hard work had stupefied them; and in the real world, what else could any­one look forward to but sleep?

  Weariness and wine quickly pushed Jeremy over into the bor­derland of sleep. And now the invisible boundary had been passed. Bright dreams came, beginning with the young peasant wife of Uncle Humbert's tale, as she lay on her back in her small bedroom, making an eager offering of herself to the gods. Her husband had been got cleverly out of the way, and now she wantonly displayed her naked body. Between her raised knees stood the towering figure of jolly, bearded Dionysus, his muscles and his phallus alike demonstrating his superiority to mere mankind.

  And now, in the sudden manner of dreams, the body of the farmwife on h
er bed was replaced by that of a certain village girl about Jeremy's age. Her name was Myra, and more than once this summer the boy had seen her cooling herself in the river. Each time, Myra and her younger girl companions had looked their suspicion and dislike at the red-haired, odd-looking newcomer. They'd turned their backs on the intruder in their vil­lage, who spoke with a strange accent. Whichever way Myra stood in the water, however she moved, her long dark hair tan­talizingly obscured her bare breasts and the curved flesh of her body jiggled.

  The boy on the shed roof was drifting now, between sleep and waking. Something delightful was about to happen.

  Well, and what did he care if some ignorant village girl might choose not to let him near her? Let her act any way she liked. Here, behind the closed lids of his eyes, he was the king, the god, the ruler, and he would decide what happened and what did not.

  And even in the dream, the question could arise: What would Dionysus, if there really was a Dionysus, do with a girl like Myra? How great, how marvelous, to be a god!

  But in another moment the dream was deepening again. The fascinating images were as real as life itself. And it was Jeremy, not Dionysus, who stood between the raised knees of the female on the bed. Even as Myra smiled up at him and reached out her arms, even as their bodies melted into one . . .

  Groaning, he came partially awake at the last moment, enough to know that he was lying alone and had spent himself on wooden shingles. Real life was messy, however marvelous the dreams it sometimes brought.

  Less than a minute later, Jeremy had turned on his back again, once more asleep. This time his dreams were of the unseen stars.

  TWO

  On the afternoon of the following day, Jeremy was fighting a heavy wheelbarrow down a steep path, moving in the gen­eral direction of the village on one of his many trips from the vineyard on the upper hillside, a lean and shabby figure, almost staggering down the well-worn path on unshod feet, his face shaded by a mass of red hair, stringy arms strained taut sup­porting the wheelbarrow's handles. Several times on the descent the weight of the load caused him to stumble slightly, on the verge of losing control, as he guided the mass of the crude con­veyance piled with freshly picked grapes, bunches with here and there a few leaves. Purple skins with green highlights, clustered thickly on their stems, ripe and bursting with the weight of their own juice, bound for the vats in which the juice would be crushed out of them, they made a staggering load. Jeremy's skin and clothing alike were stained in patches with the royal purple of their juice.

  These were truly exotic grapes that people grew in the Raisin-makers' village. Only a comparative few, mostly those on Hum­bert's vines, were pressed for wine, because the real strong point of the local crop was that they made superb raisins. Jeremy had liked the homemade raisins, for the first four months or so, but for the past two months had been heartily sick of them.

  Soon the village wine vats would be full and future barrow loads of grapes would have to go to the other side of the village, where they would be spread out on boards and dried into more raisins. Then Jeremy would be kept busy for weeks to come, con­tinuously turning the grapes in the sun and guarding them vigi­lantly against insects. At least he might be granted a break from the wheelbarrow.

  An alternative possibility was that when he had finished the job of hauling grapes he would be assigned to the job of bring­ing down to the river's edge some tons of rocks, of a convenient size to be used as the foundation for a new dock.

  Long hours of toil since sunrise had already wiped away all thought of last night's dreams and needs. He was muttering and grumbling to himself in smoldering anger—an eternity of noth­ing but more work seemed to stretch out before the weary youth—when he heard a voice calling, from the direction of the patch of woods at his right side:

  "Help me."

  The whisper was so soft, almost inaudible, that for the space of several heartbeats Jeremy was unsure that he had heard any­thing at all. But the strangeness of the call had brought him to a halt. Memories of dreams very briefly flickered through his mind.

  Then the faint call was repeated. The words were as real as heat and work and aching muscles, and they had nothing at all to do with dreams.

  In the course of a day, other workers came and went along the path at intervals, but at the moment Jeremy had it all to himself. From where he stood right now, no other human being was vis­ible, except for two or three in the far distance. No one was in the field that lay to his left, richly green with late summer crops, or nearby on his right, where the land was too uneven for practical tilling and had been allowed to remain in woods. Ahead, the fringe of the village, visible among shade trees, was also for the moment empty of people.

  The boy pushed back his mass of red hair—he had decided to let it grow as long as possible, since it seemed to put off and of­fend the natives of this village—and looked a little deeper into the woods. His gaze was drawn to the spot where a growing bush and the pile of vine cuttings beside it made a kind of hiding place. In the next moment Jeremy let out a soft breath of won­der at the sight of the dark eyes of a young woman. She was lying motionless on her side on the ground, head slightly raised, gaz­ing back at him.

  The two upright supports of the wheeled barrow hit the bar­ren earth of the pathway with a thud. Letting his load sit where it was, Jeremy stepped three paces off the path and went down on one knee in the tall weeds beside the woman—or girl. Despite her weakened, worn appearance, he thought she was only a lit­tle older than he.

  She was curled up on the ground, motionless as a frightened rabbit, lying on her right side, her right arm mostly concealed be­neath her body, her knees drawn up. The attitude in which she lay told him that she must be injured. Dark eyes moved, in a be­grimed and anguished face. His first look told him little about the woman's clothing save that it was dark and concealed most of her body. Dark boots and trousers and a loose blouse or jacket mottled gray and brown. At some time, perhaps many days ago, some kind of camouflage paint had been smeared on the exposed portions of her skin, so it was hard to tell its natural color.

  Casting a quick look around, he made sure that they were still unobserved. Then he ducked around a bush and crouched down right beside the stranger.

  The stranger's dark eyes glistened at him, with an intensity that tried to probe his very soul. Her next words came almost as softly as before, with pauses for breath between them. "Don't. . . betray . .. me."

  "I won't." He gave his soft-voiced answer immediately, in great sincerity, and without thought of what the consequences might be. Even before he had any idea of how he might betray her if he wanted to. Some part of him had been ready to respond to the appeal, as if he had somehow known all along that it was coming.

  "I see you . . . passing ... up and down the path."

  "That's my work. I work here, for my uncle."

  In the same weak voice she said: "They are hunting me. They are going to kill me." After a longer pause, while Jeremy could feel the hair on the back of his neck trying to stand up, the woman added, as if to herself in afterthought: "They've killed me already."

  "Who is ... ? But you're hurt." Jeremy had suddenly taken no­tice of the bloodstains, dried dark on dark clothing.

  She shook her head; all explanations could wait. The dry-lipped whisper went on: "Water. Bring me some water. Please."

  He grabbed up the gourd bottle, hanging on one side of the barrow, and handed it over.

  At first she was unable even to sit up, and he had to hoist the stranger's slender torso with an arm around her shoulders, which were bony and solid, though not big. Even with his help, she made the move only with some difficulty. Her face was begrimed and stained with dried blood, on top of everything else.

  When the gourd had been completely drained in a few rapid swallows, he handed her a rich cluster of grapes; she hadn't asked for food, but her appearance suggested that she could use some. She looked to be in need of nourishment as well as water. She at­tacked t
he grapes ravenously, swallowing seeds and all, the juice staining her lips purple, and reached for more when Jeremy held them out.

  Her hair was a darkish blond, once cut short, now raggedly regrown long enough to tangle.

  The boy's heart turned over in him at the appeal. It was hard to be sure with her face painted and in her wounded condition, but he guessed that the woman hiding at the edge of the brush pile had perhaps four or five more years than his fifteen.

  "That's good," she murmured, eyes closed, savoring the after­taste of the water. "Very good."

  "What can I do?"

  The water and grapes had not strengthened her voice any. Still she could utter no more than a few words with a single breath. "Help me get... down the river . .. before ... they find me."

  "Oh." He looked around, feeling his mind a blank whirl. But he felt no doubt of what he ought to do. "First I better move you farther from the path. Someone'll see you here."

  She nodded but winced and came near crying out when he tugged at her awkwardly, accidentally putting his hand on a place where she had been hurt. Blood had soaked through her gar­ments and dried, on her back and on the seat of her pants. But he did succeed in shifting her, for the few necessary yards, to a spot surrounded by taller bushes, where she would be completely out of sight as long as she lay still.

  "Lay me down again. Oh gods, what pain! Put me down."

  Hastily he did. As gently as he could.

  "Did anyone ... hear me?"

  Jeremy looked around cautiously, back toward the path, up the path and down. "No. There's no one."

  Suddenly he was feeling more fully alive than he had for months and months, ever since moving into Uncle Humbert's house. He wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of his home­spun shirt. No one else from the village had seen the mysterious stranger yet, or there would already be a noisy uproar. And he accepted without thinking about it that it was important that no one in the village must learn of her presence.