[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo Page 3

  It never occurred to Jeremy to wonder who the people hunt­ing her might be. The only thing in the world that mattered was the bond that had already sprung into existence between himself and this other human who had come here from some enormous distance. He could not yet have defined the nature of this tie, but it was very strong and sharply separated the pair of them from everyone else he had encountered since moving to this vil­lage.

  The boy crouched over her reclining form, staring, wondering. He had not yet grasped any of the details of what had happened, but already he understood that his whole life had just been dras­tically changed.

  The young woman's eyes were almost closed again. "Thank you for saving my life."

  Jeremy could find no response. He hadn't done anything, yet, to earn those words. But he would. He only grunted, feeling like the village idiot, his face turning red beneath its thousand freckles.

  The woman, her mind obviously absorbed in bigger problems, took no notice of his embarrassment. With a faint crackle of dried twigs, she slightly raised her head, squinting and sniffing. "I smell woodsmoke in the wind, sometimes. And something rotten."

  "That's the clam meats. Some of the people fish for clams. To get the shells."

  She shook her head. "I hear people. I see ... Actually, I can't see much of anything from here." She squinted again, turning her head a little to the right.

  "Yes. How long have you been here, lying in the woods?"

  "I don't know. Hours. Maybe days. It was starting to get day­light. And I couldn't walk anymore. I was afraid ... to try to crawl to the water. Afraid someone would see me. Is this a Hon­eymakers' village?"

  "No. Nothing like that." He wasn't sure that he had under­stood the question or heard it right. "We keep no bees."

  "Gods help me, then." She paused. "Is there a shrine in your village? What god?"

  "Not really mine. But yes, there's a small shrine." Every village Jeremy had ever seen had some kind of shrine, though most of them had been long neglected. "Dionysus and Priapus, both. One god for wine and one for vineyards."

  "I see. Not much good. Apollo help me. Bees might do some good. Do you have cattle?"

  "Cattle? No." Bees? What good could they do? And cattle? With a chill it came to him that this person, with whom he was suddenly so intimately connected, might be delirious.

  "Where am I, then?"

  He told her the formal name of the village, archaic words meaning the town of raisinmakers, giving it the pronunciation he had learned from his aunt and uncle. But he could see in the stranger's face that the words meant nothing to her.

  "But the river," she persisted stubbornly. "We're right beside a river here. You said freshwater clams."

  "That's right."

  "Is it the Aeron? I couldn't see it. I had to come across coun­try."

  "Yes, the Aeron."

  At last the young woman had heard an answer from which she could derive a little comfort. Jeremy thought her body re­laxed slightly.

  "There are boats here, then," she said. "People beside a river have boats."

  "Yes, ma'am. Some of them do a lot of fishing. There must be a dozen boats."

  "Then there must be some way ... I could get a boat."

  "I can get one for you," the boy promised instantly. Stealing a boat of course would be the only way to obtain one, and an hour ago it would not have occurred to Jeremy to steal anything. His parents had taught him that thievery was simply wrong, not something that honorable people did.

  But when he learned that, he had been living in a different world.

  The young woman turned uneasily. Her movement, the ex­pression on her face, showed that something was really hurting her. "Water. Please, I need more water." She had quickly finished off the few mouthfuls Jeremy had left in the bottle. "Is there any other food?"

  He gave her some more grapes from his barrow and tore off a chunk of bread from his lunchtime supply and handed it over. And then he almost ran, delivering his barrow load, going by way of the well to get more water, that he might get back to the stranger more quickly. He had promised her fervently that he would soon be back.

  During the remainder of the day, Jeremy went on about his usual work, shoving the empty barrow rattling uphill, wrestling it down again with a full load, and feeling that everyone was watching him. Despite this, he managed to bring more water to the fugi­tive and this time some real food, a piece of corn bread and scraps of fried fish. In fact, everyone in the village was intent on their own affairs and paid him no attention at all. Ordinary river water was the easiest to get, and most of the people in the village drank it all the time.

  In the evening, the first time Jeremy had seen his aunt and uncle since early morning, Aunt Lynn commented that he was moody. But then, he was considered to be moody most of the time anyway, and neither of the old people said any more about it.

  Not until next morning, when he was making his first visit of the day to the stranger in her hiding place, did she ask him, between bites of fish and corn bread: "What's your name?"

  "Jeremy. Jeremy Redthorn."

  The ghost of a smile came and went on her pallid lips. "Redthorn suits you."

  Meaning his hair, of course. He nodded.

  After he had brought her food the first time, she told him, "If you must call me something, call me Sal."

  "Sal. I like that name."

  And she smiled in a way that made him certain that the name she had told him was not her own.

  "When can I get you a boat?"

  "I better wait. Until I get a little stronger—just a little. And I can move. Can you spare a minute just to stay and talk?"

  He nodded. If Uncle Humbert thought that Jeremy was slack­ing on the job he would yell at him but was unlikely to try to im­pose any penalty. Generally Jeremy worked hard for most of his waking hours—because working was about the only way to keep from thinking about other things, topics that continually plagued him. Such as dead parents, live girls who sometimes could be seen with no clothes on, and a life that had no future, only an endless path down which he walked, pushing a loaded barrow.

  Sal in her soft voice asked: "You live with your parents, Je­remy? Brothers? Sisters?"

  Jeremy tossed his mass of red hair in a quick negative motion. "Nothing like that." His voice was harsh, and suddenly it broke deep. "My father and mother are dead. I live with my aunt and uncle."

  Looking up at him, she thought that his face was not attrac­tive in any conventional way, running to odd angles and high bones prominent in cheeks too young to sprout a beard. Green­ish eyes peered through a tight-curled mass of reddish hair. Face and wiry neck and exposed arms were largely a mass of freckles. Jeremy's arms and legs tended to be long and would one day be powerful. His hands and feet had already got most of their grow­ing done; his shoulders were sloping and still narrow. Today his right knee was starting to show through a hole in trousers that, though Aunt Lynn had made them only a couple of months ago, were already beginning to be too short.

  Sometimes when Jeremy saw the woman again she seemed a lit­tle stronger, her speech a little easier. And then again he would come back and find her weaker than ever before.

  What if she should die? What in all the hells was he ever going to do then?

  Once she reached up her small, hard hand and clutched at one of his. "Jeremy. I don't want to make any trouble for you. But there's something I must do. Something more important than anything else—than anything. More than what happens to you. Or to me either. So you must help me to get downstream. You must."

  He listened carefully, trying to learn what the important thing was—whatever it was, he was going to do it. "I can try. Yes, I can help you. Anything! How far down do you want to go?"

  "All the way. Hundreds of miles from here. All the way to the sea."

  Yes. And in that moment he understood suddenly, with a sense of vast relief, that he would get her a boat and, when she left, he was going with her.

  "You haven't
told anyone else? About me?"

  "No! Never fear; I won't." Jeremy feared to trust anyone else in the village with the knowledge of his discovery. Certainly he knew better than to trust his aunt or uncle in any matter like this.

  "Who is your mayor—or do you have a mayor?"

  He shook his head. "This place is too small for that."

  "How many houses?"

  "About a dozen." Then he added an earnest caution: "The people here hate strangers. They'd keep no secret for you. This place is not like my old home—my real home."

  "What was that like?"

  Jeremy shook his head. He could find no words to begin to de­scribe the differences between his home village, the place where he'd spent his first fourteen years, and this. There everyone had known him and his parents had been alive.

  Marvellously, Sal seemed to get the idea anyway. "Yes. There's a great world out there, isn't there?"

  He nodded. At least he could hope there was. He was inartic­ulately grateful for her understanding.

  For the past half a year he'd been an orphan, feeling much alienated. Uncle Humbert was not basically unkind, but such daring as he possessed, and Aunt Lynn's as well, had been stretched to the limits by taking in a refugee. Both of them sometimes looked at Jeremy in a way that seemed to indicate that they regretted their decision. Apparently it just wasn't done, in the Raisinmakers' village.

  The truth was that Uncle Humbert, with no children of his own, had been unable to refuse the prospect of cheap labor that the boy provided. He could do a man's work now, at only a frac­tion of the expense of a hired man.

  No, Jeremy had no illusions about what would happen to Sal—or to himself, but never mind that—if he appealed to his uncle and his aunt for help. He and Sal would both be in deep trouble, he'd bet on that, though he could not make out what the exact shape of the trouble would be. Nor could the boy think of a single soul in the village who might be sympathetic enough to take the slightest risk on behalf of an injured stranger.

  Vaguely the image of Myra crossed Jeremy's mind. This time her image appeared fully clothed, and there was nothing vivid about it. In fact, her form was insubstantial. Because Jeremy had no time, no inclination, to think of Myra now. The village girl meant no more than anyone else who lived here, and suddenly none of them meant anything at all.

  THREE

  Again, as Jeremy hurried about his work, he had the sen­sation of being watched. But he saw and heard nothing to support the feeling. Everyone in the village was busy as usual, preoccupied with work, the busy harvesttime of midsummer—Uncle Humbert had explained how the variously mutated vari­eties of grapes came to maturity in sequence and disasters might befall them unless they were tended and harvested in exactly the right way.

  The ruts in the village's only street still held puddles from last week's rain. Half a dozen small houses lined each side. Half the menfolk went fishing in the river Aeron, sometimes hauling in freshwater clams. The shells were sold by the ton to carters, who carried them off to the cities, to be cut up by craft workers and polished for use as decorations, bought by folk who could not af­ford more precious metals, jewels, or ivory. Now and then a pearl appeared, but these of the freshwater kind were only of minor value.

  The next time Jeremy returned to the little patch of woods where Sal lay nested he traveled most of the way along the river­side path. This brought him right past the local riparian shrine to Priapus, a squat figure carved in black stone, who seemed to be brooding over his own massive male organs, and to Dionysus, whose tall, youthful form was carved in pale marble, handsomely entwined with ivy and other vines. Beside the taller god crouched a marble panther, and he held in his left hand his thyrsus staff, a rod with a pinecone at the end. His right hand was raised as if to confer a blessing upon passersby. A fountain, an adjunct to the main well of the village, tinkled into a small pond at the stone gods' feet.

  Starting some twenty yards from the shrine, piles of clamshells, separated by irregular distances, lay along the bank, waiting to be hauled away by boat or by wagon. The meats, mot­tled black and white like soft marble, in warm weather quickly beginning to rot, were hauled up the hill by barrow to fertilize the vines and hops and vegetables. Pushing a barrow filled with clam meats, as Jeremy had learned early in the summer, was a stinking job, beset by many flies, much worse than hauling grapes.

  When days and weeks of the growing season went by without adequate rain, which had happened more than once since the beginning of summer, Jeremy and others filled kegs and barrels with river water and pushed and dragged them up the hill. Uncle Humbert's vineyard was comparatively high on the slope.

  Today those villagers not toiling in the vineyards were out in their boats fishing. Some kind of seasonal run of fish was on, and the general scarcity of people in the vicinity of the village during the day made it easier for a fugitive to hide nearby with­out being noticed.

  Suddenly, as a result of his responding to a whispered cry for help, a great weight of responsibility had descended on Jeremy's shoulders. Now, for the first time in his life, someone else was to­tally dependent on him. But what might have been a great prob­lem was, in effect, no burden at all. Because suddenly life had a purpose. The only problem was that he might fail.

  Sal said to him: "This puts a great burden on you, Jeremy."

  He blinked at her. "What does?"

  "Me. I depend on you for everything."

  "No!" He shook his head, trying to make her understand. "I mean, that's not a problem."

  The boy had just scrounged up some food, which his client at­tacked with savage hunger. Her mouth was still full when she said: "My name is something you need not know." His hurt must have shown in his face, for immediately she added: "It's for your own good. And others'. What you don't know you can never tell."

  "I'll never tell!"

  "Of course not!" She put out her hand to gently stroke his. Somehow the touch seemed the most marvelous that he had ever known. He was touched by the fact that her hand was smaller than his. He could feel the roughness of her fingers, as callused as his own.

  "I see you can be trusted." And she had turned her head again to favor him with that look, on which it now seemed that his life depended.

  Before he could find any words to answer that, there came a noise nearby, a scurrying among dead leaves, making them both start, but when the sound came again they could tell that it was only some small animal.

  Jeremy settled down again beside her, still holding her hand. As long as he sat here, he would be able to hold her hand. "Who hurt you this way?" he whispered fiercely. "Who is it that's hunt­ing you?"

  "Who? The servants of hell. Lord Kalakh's men. If I tell you who isn't hunting me, the list will be shorter." She bestowed on Jeremy a faint, wan smile and sighed. "Yet I've done nothing wrong."

  "I wouldn't care if you had!" he burst out impulsively. That wasn't what worried him. What did concern him was a new fear that she might be growing feverish, delirious. He dared to feel her forehead, an act that brought only a vague smile as reaction from the patient. Yes, she was too warm. If only there were someone he could call upon for help. . . . About all that he could do was bring more water and a scrap of cloth to wet and try to cool her forehead with it.

  When Jeremy saw the young woman again, Sal in her feverish weakness increased her pleas and demands to be taken or sent downriver. She was determined to go soon, if she died in the at­tempt. Jeremy tried to soothe her and keep her lying still. Well, he was going to take her where she wanted to go; that was all there was to it.

  The very worst part of the situation now was that Sal's mind seemed to be wandering. Jeremy feared that if she really went off her head, she might get up and wander off and do herself some harm. And there was a second problem, related to the first: he couldn't tell if she was getting stronger or weaker. She had re­fused his offer to try to find a healer for her, turned it down so fiercely that he wasn't going to bring it up again. He had to admit that if
she was determined to keep her secrets, she was probably right.

  Several times, in her periods of intermittent fever and delir­ium, Sal murmured about the seven. As far as Jeremy could make out, this was the number of people who were involved with her in some business of life-and-death importance. Then she fell into an intense pleading with one of the seven to do something. Or, perhaps, not to do the opposite.

  Almost half of what Sal babbled in her fever was in another language, like nothing that Jeremy had ever heard before. He could not understand a word.

  When she paused, he asked: "Who are the seven?"

  Sal's eyes looked a little clearer now, and her voice was almost tragic. "Who told you about that?"

  "You did. Just now. I'm sorry if I—"

  "Oh god. Oh, Lord of the Sun. What am I going to do?"

  "Trust me." He dared to put his hand on her forehead and al­most jerked it away again, the fever was so high.

  She shook her head, as if his vehemence had pained her. "I have a right to carry what I'm carrying. But I can't use it. If only I were worthy."

  To Jeremy it sounded almost as if she thought he was accus­ing her of stealing something—as if he'd care, one way or the other. Sal was his, and he was hers; she trusted him. "What is this thing you're carrying that's so important? I could keep it for you. I could hide it."

  Sal drew a deep breath, despite the pain that breathing seemed to cause. "What I bear with me ... is a terrible burden. Mustn't put that burden on you. Not yet."

  The suggestion that she might not trust him as utterly and au­tomatically as he trusted her struck him with a sharp pang of an­guish.

  His hurt feelings must have been plain in his face. "No, dear. My good Jeremy. All the good gods bless and help you. Wouldn't be safe for you to know ..."

  He couldn't tell if she meant not safe for him or for the secret. Her fever was getting worse again. She had started to wander, more than a little, in her speech.