[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo Page 6

  With every movement of his right shoulder, propelling him­self downstream, the pain of the fury's lash wound brought tears to Jeremy's eyes. But still it wasn't the pain, sharp as that was, that brought the tears. They were welling up because his injuries were the same as Sal's and tied the two of them more closely together.

  Gradually, as the hours of darkness passed, and the heavenly blurs of the newly risen moon and fading Milky Way slowly shifted their positions toward the west, his distance from the vil­lage grew into miles. The red glow faded and at length was gone completely. When the first morning grayness tinged the eastern sky, Jeremy paddled in to shore and grounded his canoe under the dim, spiky silhouette of a willow thicket.

  Stumbling ashore in exhaustion, then dragging his boat up higher until it was firmly beached, he lay down on his left side, sparing his right shoulder, and, despite his injuries and the fact that his stomach was empty, fell quickly into a dreamless stupor.

  ... he frowned with the breaking of the last filaments of some dream. Something important had been conveyed to him while he slept—he had the feeling it was a vital message of some kind— but he could not remember what it was.

  He was waking up now, and it was daylight. Even before open­ing his eyes Jeremy felt for the pouch inside his shirt. Sal's trea­sure was still there, but strangely, the mysterious contents seemed to have softened and even slightly changed shape, so that when Jeremy had rolled over in his sleep the corners and hard edges he'd earlier detected had somehow modified their contours to keep from stabbing him.

  His three wounds and their demanding pain seemed to awaken only an instant after he did. He felt slightly but ominously un­well, in mind and body, and he dreaded fever and delirium. Only too well he remembered Sal's illness, caught from the furies' slashes on her flesh, a sickness that had been close to killing her even before the second attack swept in.

  With eyes open and Sal's treasure in hand he lay quietly for a while, trying to think, but only gloomy imaginings were the re­sult. By the time he roused himself and looked around, morning was far advanced. Mist was rising from the river, his shirt and trousers were still almost dripping wet from last night's soaking, and the air was almost chill. Every time he started to move, the fury's lash marks stabbed his back and legs with renewed sensa­tion. Pain settled in to a steady throbbing.

  He hadn't yet even tried to investigate the wounds. Only now did his probing fingers discover that the cloth of shirt and trousers had actually been cut by the blows, just as Sal's clothing had been.

  * * *

  It was common knowledge that some hundreds of miles down­stream the greater river to which the Aeron was a tributary emp­tied into the sea, which Jeremy could not remember ever seeing—though from his first dim understanding of what an ocean must be like he had yearned to see it.

  And he had known, even before encountering Sal, that at that river's mouth there was a harbor, where huge ships from the far corners of the world sailed in and out, and that the city beside the harbor, Pangur Ban, was overlooked by the castle of a great lord, Victor, whose power largely sponsored the Academy. Before meeting Sal, Jeremy had never spent any time at all thinking about the Academy, but often he had yearned to see the ocean.

  Gradually the mist began to dissipate, as if the sun, supposedly Apollo's property, were truly burning it away. Jeremy raised his eyes to behold above him a great tangle of the feathery leaves of willow branches. Beyond the topmost branches arched a partly cloudy sky.. ..

  Slowly he got to his feet, forcing himself to move despite the pain, and began to walk about, rubbing his eyes. Scratching his head, he thought, All that part of my life is over now. Sal is dead. But he had the strange feeling that, thanks to her, he, Jeremy Redthorn, had somehow come back to life. He had a job to do now. And he was going to do it, if it killed him.

  Peering about him, he tried in his nearsighted fashion to see something of what lay across the broad surface of the river. He could see a line of hazy green that must mean trees, but not much beyond that. Patiently listening for what his ears could tell him, he eventually decided that there were no towns or villages nearby—he would have heard some sound of human activity, carrying across the water, and there had been nothing of the kind. Sniffing the breeze, he caught only river smells, no traces of a settlement's inevitable smoke.

  After walking along the shore for a few yards upstream and down, he concluded that he had come aground on a fairly sizable island. The river was much wider here than it had been at Uncle's village, at least one large tributary evidently having come in.

  At the moment the sky was empty of any threat.

  * * *

  Jeremy's stomach, unfed for many hours, continued to insist that food should be the first order of business. He could only re­member with regret the food he'd been carrying to Sal—after all his swimming and struggling, only a few wet crumbs remained. Searching his stolen canoe without much hope, he discovered under the forward thwart a small closed compartment, contain­ing half a stale corn cake, from which someone must have been breaking off pieces to use as fishbait. The bait served as break­fast, washed down with river water. Now, in late summer, he might well be able to gather some berries in whatever woods he came across. With any luck he could find mushrooms, too. And the wild cherries were now ripe enough to eat without too much fear of bellyache.

  Wading in the shallows right beside the shore, he tried without success to snatch fish out of the water with his hands. He'd seen that trick done successfully once or twice. It gave him something to occupy his mind and hands, though probably success would have done him no good anyway, for he lacked the means to make a fire, and he wasn't yet starved enough to try raw fish. He'd heard of people eating turtles, which ought to be easier to catch, and also that turtle eggs could be good food. But he had no idea where to look for them.

  Jeremy's best guess was that he might have made twenty miles or more down the winding stream during the night—maybe, if he was lucky, half that distance as a fury might fly. Having reached what appeared to be a snug hideaway, he decided to stay where he was until night fell again. He had no idea how well furies could see at night or whether they, and their two-legged mas­ters, might still be looking for him—but they hadn't found him last night, when he'd been moving on the open water.

  If he made a practice of lying low every day and traveling only at night, he would escape observation by fisherfolk in other boats and by people on shore, as well as by at least some of his enemies aloft. He could not shake the idea that some of the beasts and people who'd attacked Uncle Humbert's village might still be following him downstream.

  Now, it seemed he'd done about all the planning he could do at the moment. The urge to do something else had been growing in the back of his mind, and now he could think of no reason to put it off any longer—he meant to take a good look at Sal's parting gift.

  For some reason she'd been reluctant even to tell him what it was. Not that it mattered; whether it turned out to be priceless di­amonds or worthless trash, he was going to take it on to Profes­sor Alexander—or Margaret Chalandon—or die in the attempt. But it seemed to the boy that he at least had a right to know what he was carrying.

  He felt inside his shirt to make sure that the strange thing was still where he had put it.

  It was time to take it out and give it a look. He didn't see how he could be any worse off for knowing what it was.

  Once more thing bothered Jeremy. Why had Sal, when her treasure was mentioned, kept saying that she was not worthy? Not worthy to do what?

  SIX

  Making a conscious effort to distract himself from on-going hunger and pain, Jeremy sat down on the grass, holding the pouch, meaning to examine its contents carefully. His vision had always been keen at close range, and now he was working in full daylight.

  He tore open the crude stitches that, as he now discovered, had been holding the pouch closed. Taking out the single object it contained, he held it up against the lig
ht. It was a fragment of a carved or molded face, apparently broken or cut from a mask or statue.

  For one eerie moment he had an idea that the thing might be alive, for certainly something inside it was engaged in rapid movement, reminding him of the dance of sunlight on rippling water. Inside the semitransparent object, which was no thicker than his finger, he beheld a ceaseless rapid internal flow, of ... of something . . . that might have been ice-clear water, or even light itself, if there could be light that illuminated nothing. Je­remy found it practically impossible to determine the direction or the speed of flow. The apparent internal waves kept reflecting from the edges, and they went on and on without weakening.

  And, stranger still, why should Jeremy have thought that the pupil of the crystal eye in the broken mask had darkened mo­mentarily, had turned to look in his direction and even twinkled at him? For just a moment he had the fleeting impression that the eye was part of the face of someone he had known .. . but then again it seemed no more than a piece of strangely colored glass. Not really glass, though. This was not hard or brittle enough for glass.

  Whatever it might cost him, he would carry this object to Pro­fessor Alexander at the Academy. Or to Margaret Chalandon. Silently he renewed his last pledge to Sal.

  Brushing his hair out of his eyes, he turned the object over and over in his hands.

  Its thickness varied from about a quarter of an inch to half an inch. It was approximately four inches from top to bottom and six or seven along the curve from right to left. The ceaseless flow of ... something or other inside it went on as tirelessly as before.

  Somehow Jeremy had never doubted, from his first look at this fragment of a modeled face, that it was intended to be mas­culine. There was no sign of beard or mustache, and it would have been hard for him to explain how he could be so sure. The most prominent feature of the fragment was the single eye that it contained—the left—which had been carved or molded from the same piece of strange warm, flexible, transparent stuff as all the rest. The eyeball showed an appropriately subtle bulge of pupil, and the details of the open lid were clear. No attempt had been made to represent eyelashes. An inch above the upper lid, another smooth small bulge suggested the eyebrow. A larger one below outlined the cheekbone. No telling what the nose looked like, because the fragment broke off cleanly just past the inner corner of the eye. On the other side it extended well back along the side of the head, far enough to include the temple and most of the left ear. Along the top of the fragment, in the region of the temple, was a modeled suggestion of hair curled close against the skull.

  Around the whole irregular perimeter of the translucent shard the edges were somewhat jagged, though Jeremy remembered that they had not scratched his skin. Now when he pushed at the small projections with a finger, he found that they bent easily, springing back into their original shape as soon as the pressure was released. Everything about the piece he was holding sug­gested strongly that it was only a remnant, torn or broken from a larger image, that of a whole face or even an entire body.

  What he was looking at was most likely meant to be the image of a god. Jeremy reached that conclusion simply because, in his experience, people made representations of deities much more often than of mere humans. Which god this might be Jeremy had no idea, though somehow he felt sure that it was neither Dionysus nor Priapus. What the whole face of the statue or carv­ing might have looked like—assuming it had once been complete—was impossible to say, but Jeremy thought that it had not been, would not be, ugly.

  Well, few gods were hard to look at. Or at least very few of their portrayals were. He realized suddenly that few of the artists who made them could ever have seen the gods themselves.

  Brushing his own stubborn hair out of the way again, he held the fragment of a face close to his nearsighted eyes for a long time, tilting it this way and that, turning it around, and trying to think of why it could be so enormously valuable. Sal had been willing to give her life to see that it got to where it was meant to go.

  The expression on the god's face, the boy at last decided, con­veyed a kind of arrogance. Definitely there seemed to be an ex­pression, despite the fact that he was looking at only about a sixth or a seventh of a whole countenance.

  When Jeremy stroked the fragment with his callused fingers, it produced a pleasant sensation in his hands. Something more, he decided, than simply pleasant. But faint, and almost indescrib­able. An eerie tingling. There had to be magic in a thing like this. Real magic, such as some folk had told him wistfully was gone from the world for good.

  The sensation in his hands bothered him, and even frightened him a little. Telling himself he couldn't spend all his time just looking at the mask, Jeremy stuffed it back inside the pouch and put the pouch again into his shirt, where it lay once more against his ribs, seemingly as inert as a piece of leather.

  Time to think of something else. He kept wondering, now that the sun was up again, if the flying devils with their poisoned whips were combing the river's shores and all its islands, if they would be back at any moment, looking for him.

  Well, if they were, there wasn't much he could do about it, be­sides traveling at night—but maybe he could do a little more. There was no use continuing to let his hair grow long when he had left behind him the village full of people the growth was meant to challenge. With some idea of altering his distinctive appearance, to make any searchers' task a little harder, he un­sheathed Sal's knife and slashed off most of his hair, down to within a couple of finger widths of his scalp. Actually using the knife made him admire it more. He thought that a man would be able to shave with a blade like this—his own face still lacked any whiskers to practice on.

  Despite its hard-edged keenness, the blade was nicked in places and the point slightly blunted, as if it had seen hard use. There were traces of what Jeremy decided had to be dried blood. Prob­ably she'd used it as a weapon, against some beast or human—she'd never talked to him about the struggle she must have been through before they met.

  Struck by a new idea, Jeremy now squatted on the riverbank and scooped up handfuls of thick black mud, with which he heavily smeared the top of his head, down to the hairline all around. Most of the stuff dripped and slid off, but enough re­mained to cover pretty thoroughly what remained of his hair. He could hope that flyers, or men in boats, who came searching for a redheaded youth would be deceived if they saw him only from a distance. A worm came wriggling out out of his mudpack to inch across Jeremy's face, and abstractedly he brushed it away.

  He'd been hoping that the wounds inflicted by the fury would bother him less as the day advanced, but the opposite turned out to be true. He took some comfort from the fact that so far he seemed to have no fever. The stinging wounds had fallen where he couldn't see them, but he once more explored them with his fingers.

  Both legs of his trousers were slit in back, horizontally, where the second and third whip blows had landed. All three of his wounds were almost impossible for him to see, but his fingers could feel welts, raised and sensitive, as well as thin crusts of dried blood, scabbing over beneath the holes slashed in the homespun fabric of shirt and trousers. Well, he'd had a good look at Sal's wounds and thought these were not as bad. He didn't have anything to use for bandages, unless he tore pieces from his shirt or trousers—but then bandages really hadn't done Sal any good.

  The boy dozed for a while, then woke again in the heat of the day, with the sun not far from straight overhead. Jeremy helped himself to a drink, straight from the river, and then decided to go into the water, hoping to soothe his lash marks. He'd have to emerge from under the sheltering willows to reach water deep enough to submerge himself up to his neck, but he thought it un­likely that anyone would notice his presence, as long as he al­lowed only his head to show above the surface.

  As he started to pull off his shirt, the pouch holding the mask fragment fell out on the grass. The pouch, no longer sewn tightly shut, came open, and the irregular glassy oval popped briskly
out of it, like something with a will of its own, announcing that it de­clined to be hidden.

  Delaying his cooling bath, Jeremy sat down naked on the grassy bank, dangling his feet in the water, and once more picked up Sal's peculiar legacy. He wondered if some kind of magical compulsion had come with it. He'd be forced to keep on study­ing the thing, until. . .

  Until what? Jeremy didn't know.

  There seemed no reason to think the piece was anything but what it looked like—a fragment that had been torn or broken from a mask or from a statue, maybe in some village shrine. But who'd ever seen a statue made of material like this?

  A mask, then? Maybe. The jagged edges argued that the object had once been larger, and certainly this one piece wasn't big enough to serve as even a partial mask—no one could hope to hide his identity by covering one eye and one ear. Anyway, there was no strap, no string, no way to fasten it on a wearer's face.

  Besides, what would be the point of wearing a transparent mask? The import must be purely magical. The visible interior flow, as of water, wasn't enough to obscure his fingers on the other side. Well, he'd never seen or heard of a transparent statue either.

  The more he handled the thing, the more of a pleasant tingling it sent into his fingers.

  On a sudden impulse Jeremy carried the shard down to the back of his right leg, where he stroked it tentatively, very gently, along the slash mark of the fury's lash. Even when he pressed a little harder, the contact didn't hurt but soothed.

  Presently Jeremy lay back on the grassy bank with his eyes closed. Raising one leg at a time, he stroked some more, first giv­ing the injury on the back of the right leg a thorough treatment, then moving to the left leg. The medicine, the magic, whatever it was, was really doing the wounds some good. After a minute or so he thought the swollen welts were actually getting smaller, and certainly the pain was relieved. Presently he shifted his at­tention to the sore place on his shoulder and enjoyed a similar re­sult.