The Face of Apollo Page 34

  "Well—what happened was not that Apollo exactly picked me out. And I certainly didn't choose him. I had no idea ..."

  The girl found this talk puzzling. "What, then?"

  "And a fantastic story it is." She stroked his particolored hair—at the moment he was lying with his head in her lap. "If I hadn't seen what I have seen ..."

  "You'd think me mad. Of course. But it's true. I am a god."

  "I'm convinced. But will others believe you when you tell them?"

  "If it's important that they believe—why, I can do things that will make them listen." His voice was dull. He raised his hands and looked at them. "I think that all of the other gods must be like me. None of them are grander beings than I am."

  The silent help and comfort of the efficient powers of sanctuary enabled the couple to hide out successfully for several days—days in which Katy fed Jeremy, until he regained the strength to feed himself. Days and frigid nights in which they became true lovers and she warmed him, not least with her own body.

  Katy here told him what questions she'd once hoped to get the Oracle to answer. What the girls in the village had talked about. How she hoped her family was in good health—she worried about her aging father.

  "I'll see what I can do for him, when I take you home."

  Jeremy no longer had any doubts about the seriousness of his feelings for Kate. Therefore, he'd have to take her into his confi­dence. Which would mean, among other things, telling her the important things about Sal and his own attachment to her.

  Kate if she loved Jeremy would feel jealous in some sense of Sal. And she suspected she had reason to be jealous of Carlotta, too.

  Jeremy tried to be reassuring. "But you don't need to be jeal­ous. You never need worry about that. I know Sal's dead now. And at that time I was someone else."

  Katherine had spent more time—a full day, by ordinary mea­sure, but a subjective eternity—than Jeremy down in the Cave, and now in a sense she possessed a better understanding than he did on what the behavior of the Enemy was and also how great was the danger that the gods of the Underworld were about to launch another excursion from below.

  And, maybe, she could better estimate how badly Hades and Cerberus had actually been hurt.

  Even while the couple were secure in their temporary sanctu­ary, she dreaded more than anything else being caught again and once more dragged under the earth.

  She feared that even these golden sands could part, and in­stead of some inroad of the sea below there would be dark Hades, reaching up. ...

  At Jeremy's urging she told him of important things she had experienced, seen and heard, down there while awaiting rescue.

  She'd gained a working knowledge of the strengths and weak­nesses of hell itself.

  "The darkness was almost the worst part. There were . . . things ... down there, talking to each other...."

  And he had to hold her. Stroked by the healing hand of Apollo she fell asleep. And into that guarded sleep he thought that no foul dreams would dare intrude.

  Despite the weakness brought on by his wound, he had gained an inner assurance. He'd now acquired confidence in the powers he was being loaned and even some skill in the weapon's use—mainly it was a matter of getting his own thoughts, fears, and in­stincts out of the way once he'd picked out a target. He'd had to learn how and when to abandon his own nerves and muscles, the fine control over what had once been exclusively his own body, to the Intruder.

  After an interval of several days, when Jeremy'd regained his strength he went looking around their bedroom to see where the Sandals had got to. It was a measure of how secure they had come to feel here that they made no effort to guard their treasure.

  "Kate, I must go looking for the Bow. My Bow and Arrows. I'm well enough now, and this is my fight more than anyone else's. I am the one who has a god inside my head."

  After some discussion, Katherine agreed to his plan, because it had to be his task to carry on the fight. It was up to Jeremy to carry on the fight because he was the one who carried the god in­side his head. Sandals or not, she lacked the powers of godhood and would have been helpless against Thanatos, Cerberus, or Hades. "You might succeed in running away from them, but now just running away is not enough."

  Superficially it seemed that the safest place for Katherine was right here on the island of sanctuary, even if she were alone.

  Jeremy thought hard about it, holding an inner consultation. "No, not a good idea. Not if Apollo is not here with you." He thought it completely impossible for Hades to come here, but he didn't trust Circe, dead or alive.

  He had to assume that Hades also could find his way to Vul­can's workshop. But according to Apollo's memory, the Lord of the Underworld couldn't go there himself, because the journey could not be completed underground. It was doubtful whether the prohibition was absolute, but certainly Hades would avoid any prolonged exposure to sunlight and open air, at almost any cost. Other memories, remote in time, assured Jeremy that his chief Enemy would find the varied composition of starlight even more painful.

  And the Lord of the Underworld would also hesitate to trust any emissary not to seize for himself the powers that were bound to be available in Vulcan's laboratory—assuming Hades himself knew the secret of getting in.

  But Hades would not scruple to send some of his allies and auxiliaries to deny access to Apollo or any of his followers.

  Would Vulcan himself be in the workshop? Apollo didn't know, but he could remember that the Artisan invariably locked up the door, whenever he left the place unoccupied.

  Apollo did not know the secret of getting into the workshop either. But he was willing and eager to make an effort to find out whether even Hephaestus could really hide something from the Lord of Light.

  Gradually Jeremy was daring to probe deeper and deeper into the vast stores of memory available, to discover practically every­thing that Apollo himself knew about the god's own recent his­tory. ... It worried him that even in the Far-Worker's memory gaps existed. Here was no perfection or omnipotence.

  Gradually everyone was being compelled to the belief that the great fight between Apollo and Hades, said to have happened a month or two ago, had actually taken place. The commonly ac­cepted version was that Hades had struck down the previous avatar of Apollo. That version of the Lord of Light had fallen on the spot, and the mere human who then wore the gods's Face had died instantly. But the servants of the Oracle didn't understand this?

  One thing Jeremy felt sure of: neither the servants of the Ora­cle, nor anyone else he'd yet spoken to—certainly not the Acad­emics—knew what the hell was going on in general with regard to gods and people and the part each species played in the uni­verse. Folk like Arnobius, and his colleagues at the Academy, who'd spent their lives wrestling with the theories about gods, seemed really no wiser on the subject than anyone else.

  Thirty-One

  By dawn on his fourth morning in sanctuary, Jeremy had the feeling that the benign environment of the Isle of Dawn had done its work; his arm was as ready as it was going to be, and Apollo was once more ready to take over the controls of the shared body. It was time to go hunting. He knew this when he awoke from a dream in which he had seen his familiar dream companion standing tall, pointing toward the horizon.

  Inwardly the most important thing to Jeremy was that from now on he had Katy at his side.

  It was now unavoidable that Kate and Jeremy separate for a time while he went to seek the required Bow and Arrows.

  "I have to go back to the Mountain. Hades will be behind, but not too far behind, the humans who are fighting for him."

  Jeremy had no doubt that with the Sandals on and strength re­gained he could have carried his lover on his back or in his arms for almost any distance—but when he entered combat, her pres­ence would probably be disastrous for them both. Then his over­riding concern would be for her safety. He knew, without any divine guidance, that that was not the way to win a fight against an opponent of Ha
des's stature.

  Now he could race safely down the Mountainside or up a nearly vertical cliff. It was almost as if the Sandals had their own voice: Where do you want to go? I will take you there.

  It proved possible also to race like a gliding spider across the surface of a body of water, tripping over the waves or dodging them. The water had a different feeling to it than the earth when it passed beneath his flying feet.

  Jeremy's plan on leaving the sanctuary had been to transport his love back to her village. He could think of no safer place for Kate to pass the time until Apollo had settled his business with the Underworld.

  He was still nagged by an inward fear, not supported by any evidence, that Apollo disapproved of Katy and Jeremy's power­ful attachment to her—that the god at some point would ruth­lessly move to get her out of the way.

  Jeremy worried, but so far nothing of the kind had taken place.

  Now it was her turn to ride on his back while he carried bow and arrows in his hands. "Hold on tight—as tightly as I held to you."

  A human could do marvels wearing the Sandals. But with a god's feet in them, the effect was transcendental. The air rushed past his face at a speed that made it difficult to breathe. Katy's arms held tight, and her face was buried in his shoulder.

  "We are making a small detour."

  "Why?"

  "There's something I have remembered." He didn't want to tell Katy that he was following Circe's advice, in going first to visit the temple of Hermes in the swamp.

  Katy wanted to arm herself, before they risked re-entering the great world, and asked his advice on how to do so, even though she had no training or experience in using weapons of any kind. He looked at her fondly. "Then carry whatever makes you feel comfortable. Anyway, there don't seem to be any arms here, ex­cept for what we brought with us."

  Jeremy hoped this would be only a brief stop before he took Katy home and then went Bow hunting.

  Carlotta had hinted at a vast treasure remaining in the temple in the swamp, and Jeremy assumed that her urging him to visit the place might have something to do with the treasure.

  But as matters worked out, all thoughts of gold were promptly driven from his mind.

  When Jeremy and Katy arrived at the swamp temple, he landed on the crumbling quay just outside the shadowed main entrance to the temple. Apollo's ear soon detected a faint sound from inside—they were not alone.

  Cautious investigation promptly discovered Carlotta/Trick­ster inside one of the rooms not far from the entrance.

  She was dying, and even the healing power of Apollo, or as much of it as Jeremy was able to apply, was not enough to pull her back. As the Trickster she knew this and was not afraid. But the girl Carlotta was afraid of death. She said that she had taken refuge in the temple in an effort to hide from the bad gods.

  Katy went to get the dying girl a drink. Apollo continued to exert his curative powers, but at this stage they were not going to be enough. Perhaps if he had found her earlier. Jeremy said, try­ing not to make it a reproach, "You told me you would be safe."

  "I misjudged Hades' nastiness."

  Jeremy was no longer much concerned about Arnobius—but Carlotta, evidently unable to stop thinking of him, brought up the man's name and mentioned his brother, too.

  What with one thing and another, she'd never got around to punishing either of them further.

  Her last words were: "What bothers me now is ... I have to die, and the Trickster doesn't."

  Jeremy Redthorn could appreciate the point.

  Carlotta in death looked worn and small, her body insignificant.

  Moments after her last breath, the god Face she had been wearing ejected itself from inside her head. There came a visible bubbling out of eye and ear. A flow of something clear and active that within a couple of seconds had solidified to make a small familiar shape, one-eyed and one-eared. It was sharper-featured than the Face of Apollo or Thanatos but showed the same transparency alive with mysterious movement.

  Gently Jeremy lifted the strange-looking object free of the dead face and handed it to the living girl who was standing pet­rified beside him. The thought had crossed his mind that he ought to warn Katy to put on gloves or, if that was impractical, to wrap her hands in something before she touched the Face—but then Apollo decided that such a warning would be pointless, given what was certain to come next.

  The girl stood looking down at the Face in her hands as if it was a cup of poison—as if she understood already what must be. Jeremy knew that there was no blood on it, no material trace of any of the human bodies it had inhabited down through the cen­turies.

  When Jeremy spoke he thought that his voice was purely his own. "Katy? We have to decide what to do with this."

  Her startling gray eyes looked up. " 'We'? How can I have any idea of what's best to do?"

  "Because you're involved. It's not possible to destroy the thing; at least, Apollo doesn't know any way of doing it. I'm wearing one god Face now, as we all know, and this seems to mean that I can't put on another." Though even as he spoke he was trying recklessly to do that very thing, pressing the Trickster mask against his eyes, to no avail.

  Kate watched, still not understanding—or not ready to admit that she understood.

  Jeremy said to her: "You must wear it. In the long run that will be safest for you, and everybody else."

  Long seconds passed before Kate could speak. "I? Become a goddess?"

  When Jeremy was silent, she shook her head and put her hands behind her back and took a small step backward, away from him.

  He said: "Apollo is telling me that that's what you should do."

  "Well. How can either of us argue with the Lord Apollo?"

  Suddenly Jeremy was as weary as if he had been wounded again. "I don't know if I want to argue with him, Kate. Anyway, I can't. Not in this. We can't destroy a Face; we can't hide it where it can't be found. The point is that if you don't wear the Trick­ster now ... someone else will eventually get his hands on it and use it. Quite likely it will be one of those men who held you pris­oner in the Cave. Because they'll be looking for this Face now, looking like crazy, and no one else will be."

  "Jeremy. What are you telling me I should do?"

  "I—all I know is that the god in my head ought to know what he's talking about." He raised both hands to his head as if he weren't sure whether to crush his skull between them or tear it open and let the intruder out. "Damn it, Kate, what I want most is to protect you, but I don't know how!"

  Kate's voice was quieter now. "What will it mean to us, Jerry, if I do wear it? What'll it mean to you and me?"

  Slowly Jeremy Redthorn shook his head. "It's not going to change how I feel about you. You're never going to have to worry about that."

  With a gesture like one downing a fatal cup, she raised the thing of magic in both hands and pressed it hard against her face.

  In the next instant she moved staggering back a couple of steps, as if her balance had become uncertain. Jeremy was at her side in an instant, offering support. "Kate? Are you all right?"

  The face she raised to him showed no sign of change—except that her expression was suddenly transformed, full of life and al­most gay. "Of course I'm all right, darling! My, you didn't tell me it was going to feel as good as this." She stretched her arms and turned, this way and that. He was glad, of course, that the trans­formation seemed to have been easy for her—all the same, he found the very easiness of it somehow unsettling.

  "You don't have to carry me any longer, Jeremy."

  "How will you travel? Get anywhere?"

  "Carlotta managed to get here, from the Mountain, remem­ber? The chariot she used is still available. It's waiting out behind the temple, and I can use it now."

  "Do you still want to go home?"

  "Eventually I will."

  "I still want you to be safe."

  "The safest place for a country girl may not be the safest for a goddess. Besides, I don't know that I
can sit still for very long."

  Jeremy, not knowing what else to do, soon agreed that it would be a good idea for Katy/Trickster to try to get word to Lord John Lugard, or to Arnobius, that the Cave was open for occu­pation—and maybe even a better idea to seize control of the Castle on the heights.

  Solemnly Apollo warned Katy, as she tentatively tested her new powers, to steer clear of the deep Cave and the monstrous things that now ruled there. They were not to be provoked until Apollo at last descended in his full power to root them out, kill them, or drive them deeper still.

  Naturally both Jeremy and Katy wondered what had hap­pened to Ferrante and to Arnobius.

  Katy, getting used to wearing the Trickster's Face, giggled, fi­nally, a surprising and uncharacteristic sound. Her eyes flashed at Jeremy with unwonted brightness. She had changed—of course she had, he told himself irritably. No one could put on a god's Face and remain the same. But nothing really important had been altered. She was still Kate—

  Just as he was still Jeremy Redthorn.

  Bidding a cheerful Katy an uncertain good-bye, Jeremy, retain­ing the Sandals for himself, now went looking for Ferrante.

  "Will you go home soon?" he asked once more.

  "Of course. After I've . . . looked around a little, got used to ... to being what I am."

  Locating Ferrante took some searching, among the skirmishing that simmered around the Mountain's flanks. Hundreds or thou­sands of men belonging to the army of Lord Kalakh, their col­ors blue and white, had now come on the scene.

  Apollo, putting to work the special powers of the Sandals, concentrated on finding the man he wanted. Within a quarter of an hour he had located him.

  The Sandals brought the Sun God swooping down on Ferrante in the bottom of a wooded canyon on the Mountain's flank, where the sergeant had to be pulled out of a hot fight. The task was easy enough in this case for Apollo, the sight of whom was sufficient to dissolve a fierce skirmish and send half a dozen of Lord Kalakh's men scrambling in terrified flight.