The Face of Apollo Page 25

  "I went into room after room. Some of them were of crazy shapes, and a few were huge. On the walls there were paintings, as old as the building itself, and many of the paintings were very strange. And some statues. . . . I didn't want to look at those closely, because they frightened me. I can admit that now. Maybe some of them still would, even though I'm now who I am.

  "There were... things... that I suppose had once been pieces of furniture, but by the time I saw them they'd rotted away until only scraps of wood were left.

  "Everything in there was half-engulfed in lichens and mold and mildew.... Anyway, to cut the story short, I came at last to a place—it was a kind of strongroom, but the door was standing ajar. Inside there was a shrine to a certain god. And below the shrine a kind of cabinet, made of both wood and stone, intri­cately carved.

  "I thought the handle of the door seemed to reach out for my hand, beckoning. And when I pulled it open, I found something inside—something very important. And at that moment every­thing was changed for me, forever." The transformed version of Carlotta paused, staring into the distance.

  "The Trickster's Face," Jeremy supplied.

  Her eyes came back to him. She blinked. "Oh no."

  "No?"

  "No. Finding the Face, becoming a goddess, came later. You see, that shrine in the temple in the swamp belonged to Hermes." She paused, looking at him curiously. "But hasn't. . . your own god ... told you all this already?"

  "I've been afraid to ask him much of anything. And he tells me very little. Never comes out and just says anything in clear words. I suppose he's taking it easy on me. Because I can't get over my fear of ... of being swallowed up in his memory. Con­sumed by him."

  Carlotta nodded. "I know what you mean. Trickster's fright­ening, too, though she's not... Apollo." The last word came out in a reverent hush.

  Jeremy was shaking his head. "Carlotta, by all the gods, but I'm glad you—glad I now have someone I can talk to, about all this!" Impulsively he seized her hand. "But you were telling me what you found in the ruined temple, that day we met."

  "Yes. Let me try to keep the story in some kind of order." She sighed and took a moment to gather her thoughts. "What I dis­covered in the cabinet, on that first day, was, of course, the Sandals." Jumping to her feet and pirouetting slowly before him, she reminded him how gloriously her feet were shod. "Jeremy, did you never guess what truly frightened our crew of boatmen into running off?"

  "I never thought much about it. I've had a lot of other prob­lems to keep me busy."

  "Well, it was the sight of me that did it! Of course as soon as I found Sandals looking like these I had to try them on, and as soon as I tried them on I discovered what they were good for.

  "When our worthless crew saw me fly out of the temple—dip­ping and darting in the air like a bird—they pointed at me and screamed and ran around for a minute like beheaded chickens. Then they chose to pile into the little boat and paddle like hell off into the swamp. Even though they had some idea of what kind of things lived in the swamp, they chose that rather than stay ... in the presence of what I had become."

  At the time, the sight of the fleeing men, whom she certainly hadn't liked, had provoked in her a giddy laughter, but the men's desertion had proven to be no joke, and soon her anger had flared. If it hadn't been for Jeremy happening along, she would have been forced to use the Sandals to get help—and there would have been no keeping them secret after that.

  Now Carlotta gave a fuller demonstration of the Sandals' darting power, moving to the distance of a hundred normal paces and back again, all in the blink of an eye.

  "Beautiful," said Jeremy, and confirmed with a glance that his three companions were still asleep. Perhaps if it were not for Apollo, he would have been as terrified as the boatmen.

  She said: "I think that even you, even with Apollo in your body, will not be able to move as swiftly and smoothly as this." Apollo's memory, when pressed, confirmed the fact—and pumped up more information, before he could turn off the flow. "Hephaestus made them," Jeremy blurted out, pointing at her feet.

  "That's right."

  "And what did Arnobius say, when you came flying out? But that's right; he didn't see you, because he was already out cold by then. So you hid the Sandals, carrying them in that little box, and kept the secret of their existence from him."

  "Right again."

  "I thought you loved him, then."

  The figure of the goddess spread her arms in a very human gesture. "Johnny, I did, and I meant to tell him. At least that's what I told myself. But then you came along, complicating mat­ters further, because I didn't entirely trust you.

  "You remember how he wasn't fully himself again for several days. By the time he had recovered, I'd had time to think. And the more I thought, the more I worried."

  "Why?"

  "By then, I began to fear that I'd waited too long. He'd won­der why I'd kept the discovery quiet....I think the truth was that I feared losing him."

  "How would having the Sandals—?"

  "For one thing, because it was I—his slave, his inferior helper—who'd actually made the great discovery. The Sandals of Hermes, wrought for him by Hephaestus! And I'd found them, not the great Scholar. He'd found the temple in the swamp, but then he'd failed. Suddenly things became too real for him to han­dle. Instead of simply exploring the way I did, finding what was there to be found, he stupefied himself with drugs and wasted his time with almost useless diagrams and spells, games he could have played at home.

  "If he denied me credit for the great discovery, claimed it for himself—well, he and I would always have known the truth. And if he nobly gave his slave assistant proper credit, he would have made himself look inferior. Or so I feared. Either way it would have upset things between us—or so I thought. Turned out there was nothing much between us anyway."

  Jeremy nodded slowly.

  Carlotta's eyes had once again gone distant. "When I look back, I can see he'd already started the process of dumping me. There was no more talk of keeping me with him always. I had some idea that if I waited until just the exactly right moment to present him with this great gift of the Sandals—but somehow the exactly right moment never came."

  Later, on the night when the Scholar had told Carlotta he was giving her away, she'd got the Sandals out of hiding and begun to use them secretly. At first she'd only gone skimming and danc­ing out over the sea at night, simply for the sense of power and freedom they provided, with no further conscious goal in mind. But she'd soon found herself returning to the hidden temple in the swamp, searching for more secrets of power and wealth. Any slave knew that wealth was power—gold made its own magic, at least as strong as any other kind.

  Now the trip from the Academy to the distant temple, through midnight skies, took her less than half an hour.

  At first she didn't know why she had chosen that place as her goal or exactly what she was looking for. Except that she now wanted, needed, a weapon, some new means of power. It was as if the Sandals heard her whispering to herself and carried her to what she needed.

  Finding herself again inside that broken structure, now and then having to dance aside from killer snakes, she discovered that her instinct had been correct. She located what she was look­ing for, and she knew it was what she had been seeking the mo­ment she laid her eyes on it.

  She'd known since her first visit that some great treasure must be hidden in that spot but had decided it would be safer where it was. As long as she had the Sandals, she could always go back for it.

  "One thing I soon discovered is that these little red shoes give their wearer more than speed. More than the ability to fly, great as that is. Even if you don't know precisely where the thing is that you're looking for, they'll take you to it."

  "That's a tremendous power."

  "You should know—Apollo!"

  "Maybe I should. If I'm a god, I should know a lot of things that I don't."

  "Because you are afraid to loo
k for them."

  Jeremy was still sitting on the log, and he sighed and closed his eyes. "Yes, probably. Go on; you were telling me about when you went back to the temple."

  There had been a time, Carlotta said, when she wanted to make herself great only for the sake of the man she loved—if she came to him as a goddess, or something like one, then he'd be forced to take her seriously.

  "But I should have known better. You." She pointed at Je­remy. "You were already a god when you encountered us. Some­time before that you'd somehow found Apollo's Face and put it on."

  "I didn't know what I was doing."

  "Didn't you? But you did it. You were Apollo himself, the first time you stood in front of Arnobius, and he saw nothing but a grubby human. No more did I, for that matter."

  Slowly Jeremy nodded. "That's true. Drugged or awake, he never knew either of us. He never understood Jeremy Redthorn any more than he did Apollo."

  "And what does Apollo now have to say to me? Or to the Trickster who now lives in me?"

  Jeremy waited for some inner prompting—but there was only passivity. Slowly he raised both hands, palms up. "Nothing, it seems. What does Loki have to say to me?"

  The girl's eyes wandered over him. "I don't know. But Carlotta wishes you no harm.

  "That night when I first came to you, out on the deck, that was of course before I knew you were a god. Still, by that time I'd no­ticed something about you that I found very hard to resist. A strength and value, so that I wanted you on my side.

  "I was trying to recruit you as my helper, even before I went back to the temple and found the Face and the other treasure. Of course I had the Sandals then, but I needed a partner that I could trust."

  Carlotta told Jeremy she'd half-suspected he was a runaway slave, who'd somehow managed to get free of his metal collar.

  The plan she'd formulated then had been daring but not im­possible. Jeremy could have got clear of the Academy with her help, not to mention Apollo's. They could have returned to the temple in a small boat and loaded a cargo of gold and jewels.

  "Before I had the Trickster's power and skills to call upon, there was a definite limit to how much I could carry, flying with the Sandals."

  Then, with Jeremy doing the heavy work under Carlotta's guidance, they would have been off across the swamps to free­dom—there were other lords, other cities in which they might manage to convert some of the jewels to wealth.

  He said: "It wouldn't have worked. Apollo would never have let me go running off like that. He's determined to go to the Or­acle, where there are things he wants to do. He has other uses for my mind and body."

  She only stared at him for a while, not saying anything.

  He asked Carlotta: "What are you going to do now?"

  "Do you know, I'm not sure? I want to have a talk with Arnobius—of course." She nodded in the direction of the sleep­ing figures by the fire. "And do something with him, or about him. Not at the moment, but in a little while. But I wanted to see you first. Is Apollo going to mind if I do something to Arnobius?"

  Jeremy looked inward, for some signal that did not come. He said, "As far as I can tell, he's not."

  Carlotta brightened. And in the twinkling of an eye, the San­dals carried her away.

  Apollo, still earthbound, resumed his watch over his sleeping human companions.

  The four pilgrims on resuming their hike soon found themselves on a trail that went angling across the Mountain's lower slopes. Viewed from their current position, the upper Mountain re­gained the same shape it had had when seen from many miles away—it appeared now an extended range, with a long crest of uneven height, no longer giving the illusion of being a cone with a sharp peak. Here they could be within a few minutes of John and his troops and never know it. It was perfectly possible that other expeditions, armies even, could be going up simulta­neously to right and left. And that none of the rival groups might be aware of the others until they all converged near the treeless top.

  At least on the side now visible, forests and meadows clothed the Mountain up to about three-fourths of the way to the top—the uppermost fourth was barren rock. The higher ranks of trees were already showing patches of autumn coloring.

  For an hour or so, which on this steep path translated into a mile or two of horizontal distance, the explorers climbed with the Mountain on their right. Then came a switchback, which moved the rock wall around to their left. Meanwhile, on the lower side, their increasing altitude gradually spread before them a vista of valley, forest, and field, marked with winding rivers and an oc­casional road. Somewhere in the distance, more miles away than Jeremy wanted to guess, the hazy sea was faintly visible. Down in the lowlands the colors of late summer were shading into those of early autumn. Sheer height, now totaling thousands of feet, tended to give unaccustomed lowlanders, including Jeremy, a queasy feeling in their stomachs.

  Katy was the only human member of the group who had pre­viously been up the Mountain this far, and indeed all the way to the Oracle, to which she knew the trail. When the men wondered aloud what questions she might have asked there, she only shook her head in silence.

  Apollo certainly had been to the Cave before, though the ex­perience of this laborious climb on foot did not seem to be stored in his memory. With a minimal effort Jeremy could call up a clear memory of what lay just ahead at any point on this portion of the trail. But as usual, there was much in which his inner god did not seem interested.

  The entrance to the Cave lay approximately a mile above the level of the sea. From that point the Mountain went up at least as far again; just how far was impossible to say. People had dif­ferent ideas on the subject.

  Ferrante had never been on the Mountain before, but he wasn't held back by ignorance. He said flatly: "The gods are up there."

  It was Kate who asked him: "You believe in the gods?"

  "Whenever I get up the Mountain far enough I do. Anyway, I've heard too many stories, from too many people, about what happened in the Cave a couple months ago."

  In shade the air was definitely cooler here, though the direct sun could scorch worse than ever. At almost a mile above the sea, autumn had already begun, and the nights were sharply cold, under an unbelievable profusion of stars. In the hours after mid­night, tiny icicles began to form wherever water dripped.

  Wooded ravines and small, fertile valleys opened on the uphill side of the path, which was now on the right side, now on the left, according to the way the switchback had last turned. Here and there small anonymous peasants' huts were tucked away, their windows peering out of small patches of woods whose rear lim­its were not discernible.

  Jeremy wondered if woodcutters could live on these slopes. No doubt they could, if they could get their product to market. Certainly large trees were plentiful enough. The woods, like the Mountain itself, sometimes gave the impression of being magi­cally extended. Hermits and would-be wizards occasionally. But you'd need villages and towns in which to sell your wood. And the villages up here, if there were any at all, were uniformly tiny.

  Jeremy liked to spend a fair amount of time away from his com­panions. He had much to think about, and thinking was gener­ally easier when he was alone. If he was indeed invested with Apollo's powers, he ought to be doing more than he was doing. But he couldn't dart about the world as Carlotta did and wouldn't have known what to do with such speed if he pos­sessed it.

  So he spent a good part of the time climbing by himself, vol­unteering to forage for wood or food.

  Time was passing, the sun lowering. Jeremy was beginning to be bothered by the fact that Katy was no longer in sight. As guide, she of course, more than any of the others, was likely to be scout­ing ahead. But now several minutes had passed since Jeremy had started looking to find her waiting beside the trail.

  Soon he mentioned his concern to Arnobius and Andy.

  He told himself that he wasn't really worried about her— not yet.

  Would Carlotta, out of some twisted an
ger, possibly jealousy, have done anything to her? . . . But no, he told himself firmly, that was a foolish thought.

  His thoughts returned to Carlotta, who, now that she was also the Trickster, should possess, according to all the information Je­remy could summon up, the ability to look exactly like anyone she chose.

  Still he could barely force himself to probe Apollo's memory, and then only under the pressure of immediate need. He was unable to plunge down to the depths where he might find infor­mation concerning his colleagues in the pantheon and the subject of godhood in general. If he could have convinced himself that some specific, urgent need had to be met, then maybe—but Je­remy wasn't sure that he'd be able to plunge in even then.

  Well, he thought, so be it then. So far the Lord Intruder seemed to be working on the plan of bringing important matters to Jeremy's attention only when the moment had arrived to do something about them. Well, he had to assume that one of the greatest gods in the world knew what he was doing.

  And Katy was still missing. Jeremy moved on, all his senses in a heightened state of alertness. He was trying to call up powers that he knew must be his, if he could only find the way to use them.

  Goats grazing in their high, sloped pastures, some of which seemed tilted more than halfway to the vertical, looked down over their white beards at the intrusive climbers. The beasts' eyes seemed to have the penetrating gaze of wizards, and one re­minded Jeremy irresistibly of a certain archivist he'd encoun­tered in the distant library.

  Except for a goatherd or two, the climbers encountered no other traffic as they ascended, but certainly the path was not overgrown. It was as if some subtle magic kept it clear. Around it, strange-looking ferns and wildflowers grew in profusion. A swarm of ordinary bees droned somewhere in the middle dis­tance. The common noise had acquired a newly ominous significance, sounding a minor echo of Apollo's vengeance.