The Face of Apollo Read online

  For anyone who had much experience with the bees, it was easy to tell by the sound whether the swarm was angry or just on the move somewhere.

  One insect landed close in front of Jeremy's eyes, on the cen­tral pedestal of the village shrine. In his left eye the small live body glowed with a vital fire.

  Some of the bees producing special honey for these villagers had bodies half as long as a man's hand. Odylic bees, some prod­uct of what the legendary technofolk had done to life a thousand years ago or more. Others of the six-legged honeymakers were only half as long—but that would be quite large enough. Large, multifaceted eyes. All workers, these, and with ferocious stingers. Their wings snarled at the air, mere blurs, too fast for Jeremy's right eye to follow, although his left, moving in the same track, could catch detailed pictures. It seemed that nothing in nature ought to move as fast as those thin wings.

  When Jeremy saw the first, isolated bee scout, it was easy to mistake its right-eye image for that of a hummingbird. But when he saw it through his left eye, there could be no mistake.

  A moment later it had come down on a bandit's neck. And a moment after that, with a twitching of its posterior against his skin, it had done one of the things that a bee does best.

  A large swarm of them, descending in their mindless anger, could rout any human army, inflicting heavy loss of life on any who tried to stand and fight. Protective clothing was of course possible, but ordinary military armor had so many chinks and gaps that it was practically useless.

  And now the bees descended in their thousands, on all who were not marked with the Eye of Apollo. Jeremy, looking around him, thought not a single citizen of the village was being stung.

  Suddenly the brigand nearest Jeremy bellowed and began making frantic thrashing motions with his arms.

  The three rapists who had been coupling with the girl released her—they suddenly needed all their hands for something else— and she collapsed on the floor and crawled away, trying to pull the remnants of her clothing around her. But there were no bees on her body, not a single one, and she was no longer in need of the fragile protection clothes could give.

  The three who had been her chief attackers displayed much greater energy, and the sounds that they were making grew even louder than before, even less human. One man, with the lower half of his clothing off, replaced with a breechclout of buzzing brown and blue, went out of the house through a window, two others through the door. Their limbs were all in frantic motion, legs springing in a useless and spasmodic dance, arms swatting in a frenzy, hands working without hope at the task of scraping, beating away, the droning, writhing layer of gauzy, speed-blurred wings and furry bodies, poison needles, and piercing sound that had now engulfed them. The men whose legs still functioned might have tried to run, except that now they could no longer see. Jeremy observed clearly the complete disappearance of one of the bandits' heads inside a clump, a knot, of angry bees. When the pink-white surface that had once been the man's face ap­peared again, his head was swollen beyond all recognition as a human part, the mouth all filled with foam.

  The droning had now risen to what seemed a deafening vol­ume. It was almost enough to drown the screams of men.

  Few of the other bandits were any better off. Swords and bat­tle hatchets and short spears were waving in a few hands, but to no avail. Jeremy observed more than one demonstration of the fact that an active man or woman could catch one of the insects in one hand and crush it or knock it out of the air with a brisk arm swing. Of course the human would almost certainly survive the painful sting of a single bee. But meanwhile three more bees, or a dozen, or a hundred would be stinging him. And Apollo's memory informed Jeremy, quite dispassionately, that ten or a dozen stings from the stock of these apiaries were very com­monly enough to kill an adult human.

  So far Jeremy had not been stung, and he knew, with perfect confidence, that he was not going to be. So he raised his bound hands before his face and began steadily worrying with his teeth at the cord fastening his wrists. Really he was very tired, much energy had been drained from him, and as soon as this was over (it ought not to take long now) he was going to have to rest.

  The droning had reached a kind of plateau; it was no longer getting louder.

  Now and then Jeremy glanced up toward the elevated statue in the shrine while around him the screaming voices grew even louder. It seemed to the boy for a moment that the faint smile had broadened on the stone lips of the shrine's awkward, almost ugly Apollo. One bee landed on the lichened head, then abruptly propelled itself away again. As if, Jeremy mused, it might have paused there briefly to deliver a message—or simply to ac­knowledge the image of its god.

  Twenty- Two

  All the little houses up and down the street that had been forced to swallow bandits were now vomiting them out like poison, and Jeremy could see and hear the invaders dying horribly, all up and down the little street. They broke and screamed and ran, each pursued by his own angry little cloud, and two of them somehow had found cameloids somewhere and appeared to be getting away.

  Now the girl whom Jeremy had heard called Katy came un­molested out into the square and started helping Jeremy get free of his bonds. He welcomed her assistance, though others seemed to need it more than he did. The area of the shrine and the little square surrounding it was almost entirely free of bees, and with Katy's fingers, small but strong, digging at the knots, the loosen­ing of his ropes proceeded steadily.

  "Don't be afraid," Katy was urging him. "If you're calm, they won't sting you." She had achieved a remarkable steadiness in her own voice, considering all that had recently happened, and she was standing very close to Jeremy, as if to shield him with her body. Now and then her soft breasts pushed at his side and chest.

  She was almost as tall as Jeremy himself, her body generously curved, in a way quite different from Carlotta's. Honey-colored hair hung now in disarray, and gray eyes looked startling in a tanned face. If she was going to have hysterics, following her res­cue, they weren't going to hit her for a while yet.

  "What did you mean, in there, when you told me you'd saved me?"

  "I was trying to help you. Make you feel better."

  Another village girl now came around carrying a basin of water, and Katy produced a clean-looking rag from somewhere and pulled aside the flap of Jeremy's torn trousers and started dabbling at the dried blood on the old but still untended scrape he'd got by falling in the gravel back when Professor Tamarack, also known as Death, had been pursuing him. In his memory that seemed a year ago.

  "I'm not afraid," he murmured in reply to Katy's first remark. And he wasn't. But in fact he wasn't calm either, not with her standing as close as she was. In truth he was beginning to feel a mighty arousal—how much this was due to Apollo's involve­ment in his sex life he couldn't tell, but the Sun God had a leg­endary reputation along that line, while on the other hand Jeremy Redthorn considered such a reaction mighty inappro­priate just now, what with all the screaming barely quieted and death and grief still everywhere around them. He supposed the right thing for him to do would be to tell Katy politely that he could manage perfectly by himself and she should go and help one of the villagers who were still screaming. But if he said that, he feared she might actually move away from him. Jeremy stood with closed eyes and let her go on with what she was doing.

  Meanwhile, other villagers had shown and were still showing a variety of reactions to their winged rescuers' arrival. Some cow­ered down, pulling clothes and blankets over their heads in a des­perate though unnecessary attempt to obtain shelter. Many others realized very quickly that they were now safe. But only very slowly, gradually, did some of those who had been most terrified come to understand that they were not in danger. Not anymore.

  "I think you meant more than just trying to make me feel bet­ter," Katy said abstractedly. "I think you were doing something that really helped. Or at least you thought you were."

  And here at last came Arnobius, red-faced and
disheveled, having finally got free of all the entanglements inside the house. No longer bothered by bandit guardians, he now came following Jeremy out into the street, hopping on his bound legs, to stand there beside his young attendant. The Scholar gaped silently around him, getting a firsthand look at a major god's idea of retribution. Jeremy wondered if the man had any idea of what was really going on.

  Jeremy, his own hands now free, got busy trying to help the man who had been—who still believed himself to be—his mas­ter. Meanwhile Katy had moved away, gone to try to comfort some screaming friend.

  But Arnobius just now did not seem to have anything at all on his mind, beyond grossly practical matters. He was shouting in rage for the people who were trying to loose his hands to hurry up. Couldn't they see that now was the time to strike back, while the enemy was distracted?

  Here, thought Jeremy, was one practical matter in which the newly worldly Scholar was mistaken. There was no longer any need for human hands to strike back and, indeed, not much chance of their doing so. The enemies of the village were far worse than distracted.

  Arnobius had not been stung, nor had anyone marked by Je­remy with Apollo's protection. None of the villagers—inevitably, he'd missed a few—seemed to have suffered more than a sting or two. But he could see how each person of them winced now and then when each felt, briefly, the hairy, feathery extension of some insect's body on their backs and necks and legs, the small wind of their saviors' blurring wings ... and now, thank Apollo for his influence, the girl who had untied Jeremy was once more hugging him in triumph and delight. Their embrace crushed the bodies of a bee or two, but against the two young bodies their stingers still remained harmlessly encased. The deaths of such units were triv­ial incidents in swarm life, nothing to alarm the mass of insects that still seemed to fill the air.

  Once Ferrante had got free, he went mumbling and ranting and swearing up and down the street, in his hand a sword taken from a dead bandit, looking for a live one to cut to pieces.

  Arnobius, sounding for all the world like his brother, John, was barking orders.

  Ferrante, after only a momentary hesitation, leaped to obey— even if Lord John's brother was only a mere civilian. The two snatched up weapons from the sting-bloated, unrecognizable bodies of dead bandits. Now the Scholar, ignoring Jeremy for the moment, was snapping what sounded like orders at some of the young village men, and a few of them were nodding enthusiastically. In moments they were aboard the remaining cameloids and the animals were run-pacing out of town, at a speed that raised a cloud of dust.

  When there were no more live bandits to be seen but only dead ones, the girl Katy led Jeremy by the hand back behind the houses.

  "Come with me. I want to see if my family's all right."

  Also, she wanted to assure them that she was all right, aside from some torn clothes. When they had reached a small house in the next small street, several family members, including small children, came running out of hiding to embrace her.

  Katy's full name turned out to be Katherine Mirandola. She introduced Jeremy to her family as a man who'd tried to help her, and their enthusiastic gratitude knew almost no bounds.

  Katy, not one to let questions drop when she found them in­teresting, still wanted to know what Jeremy had meant when he had told her that she was saved: how had he known what was going to happen?

  "I have good eyes and ears." Then he saw that wasn't going to work as an explanation. "I'll give you all the details someday. But why does your village have a shrine to Apollo?"

  Katy eventually explained to Jeremy some things about the his­tory of the village. In the old days, at least, any local band of hardy, vicious warriors would have been glad to turn back po­litely when confronted by a soft and innocent-looking young Honeymaker lass who was annoyed with them. Under ordinary conditions, individuals of the Honeymaker tribe or culture were introduced to at least one of the swarms, or to the Swarm, as ba­bies—from then bees recognized these individuals as friends or, at least, folk to be tolerated.

  And all the while, the stone lips of Apollo atop his shrine kept on smiling faintly. Jeremy Redthorn remembered clearly some of the things he'd learned at the Academy. Among the Far-Worker's many other attributes, he was patron of all domestic animals, including bees....

  Almost all of the buzzing insects had now dispersed, sorting themselves out somehow into their proper swarms, and then those in turn gradually dissolving as individuals returned to the interrupted tasks of peace. One of the larger bees, only one, landed on Jeremy's head, just as another—perhaps the same one—had landed on the stone god, then quickly whirred away. The boy flinched involuntarily at the unexpected contact but then sat still. In a strange way the touch of power had been com­forting, as if someone or something of great authority had pat­ted him benignly on the head.

  Meanwhile, the swarms of bees had efficiently dispersed and gone back to their regular peaceful activities, as industrious in re­treat as they had been in attack. One villager was regretting out loud that it would probably be days before honey production got back to normal. Most people weren't worried about that yet. For one thing, they had the swollen, blackened bodies of the human victims to consider. A few, driven mad by pain, had torn their own clothing to shreds.

  About a quarter of an hour after the first sting, the slaughter was over, the swarms once more dispersed, become mere vague receding shadows in the sky, and those of the former hostages whose release had been overlooked till now were soon set at lib­erty; none of them and none of the villagers had suffered any stings.

  Some villagers formed a bucket brigade to put out the blaze in the house that had been torched. Everyone in line worked hard, though the building was already beyond saving.

  Jeremy's sense of the Intruder's intimate presence now faded rapidly.

  As soon as Jeremy had a few moments to himself, he walked back to the shrine, which for the moment was once more unat­tended, and stood there, his hand on one foot of the statue as it stood elevated on its pedestal.

  Around him all the tumult of triumph and grief and anger was gradually fading into a tired silence. He thought of praying to Apollo but told himself that that was foolish. Why? Because the words he had been taught to use in childhood all sounded idiotic now. A deeper reason was that he was afraid that some clear god voice would respond, maybe with laughter, right inside his head. Somehow the thought of a plain communication from the In­truder was terrifying.

  But he needn't have worried. No clear voice sounded, and no derisive laughter either.

  He looked around for the Scholar, then remembered where Arnobius had gone.

  There came a new outburst of shouting voices, blurred with the promise of violence. Jeremy looked around, to see that the vil­lagers had discovered one surviving bandit, upon whom they now fell with screams of rage. Evidently the wretch had shut himself up in a closet, where the bees could not get at him, and then had been too frightened to come out.

  Gleefully the more able-bodied of the man's former victims and their friends dragged him out into the sunlight and then en­ergetically disposed of him. No one raised any objection as the villagers, with smiling, cheerful faces, maimed him horribly and seemed to be voting on whether to let him go in that condition. But before the vote could be formally concluded, several people lost patience and beat out the bandit's life, with an assortment of wooden garden tools.

  Lying like ballast in the Intruder's cool memory were sights in­finitely worse—Jeremy did not call them up, because he was afraid. But there they lay, and somehow their weighty presence helped.

  Still none of the villagers attributed the success of their de­fense to Jeremy. But he knew, in a way that he could not have ex­plained, what he had done.

  Fervently he craved someone to discuss his problems with. The Intruder himself was of course no use in this regard, and Jeremy was not surprised that he seemed to have gone to earth again; the boy felt as alone inside his head as he'd ever been.

&n
bsp; When he tried to talk to Katy about his problems, she of course could not begin to understand. But she listened earnestly and nodded sympathetically, and that helped more than he'd thought it would.

  The old man who'd been almost killed in the village square was still alive. Jeremy on impulse let his hand rest for a mo­ment on the heavily bandaged head, and a moment later the old man's eyes came open, looking first at Jeremy, then past his shoulder.

  And the old man's reedy voice murmured, with great certainty: "It was Apollo, then, who saved us. Saved everyone."

  Everyone hadn't been saved, but no one was going to quibble. "Of course. The Lord Apollo. I will make rich sacrifices—or I would, were it not well-known that he is one god who has little taste for such extravagances."

  "What does he have a taste for, then?"

  The old man had suddenly sat up, as if he might be going to recover after all. "Ha. Who can say? Devout prayers from his fol­lowers, I suppose. Beautiful women, certainly, any number of them—and I've heard it said that he is not averse to now and then taking a handsome boy or two to bed, just for variety."

  Jeremy shuddered inwardly at the thought of coupling with even a girlish-looking lad. The Intruder was going to have to fight him for control if he had any such diversions planned.

  A few Honeymakers, at least a few legendary ones in the past, had enjoyed the power of summoning a swarm by magic from a distance.

  "But I have never seen it like this," the old man said. Looking up and down the street again, he shook his head. "Never any­thing like this. All thanks to great Apollo."

  "Thanks to great Apollo," Jeremy murmured automatically, joining his voice to a dozen others.

  Problems sometimes arose, as Katy explained, with people who wanted to steal or lure away the queen and start their own hive somewhere else.