The Face of Apollo Page 9

  One night, two hours before dawn, driven by hunger to take serious chances, he decided to raid the henhouse of an isolated farm whose buildings, atop a wooded bluff a little inland from the river, showed up plainly enough in silhouette against the stars.

  Roots and berries were only maintaining him on the brink of starvation. If he ever hoped to dine on chicken, on fresh meat of any kind, he would probably never see a better opportunity than this.

  Tying his boat up loosely, in readiness for a quick getaway, he stepped ashore and padded his barefoot way inland as quietly as possible. The complication he had feared most, an alert watch­dog, soon came to pass; the animal gave a few preliminary growls when Jeremy was still some thirty yards away, even though the boy had taken the precaution of approaching from downwind.

  Under his breath Jeremy muttered oaths and blasphemies against a variety of gods. At least the dog had not yet barked. Grim determination had grown in him; he was too hungry to give up. Anyway, he had known for a long time that the worst thing you could do when faced by a dangerous animal was turn around and run.

  Drawing Sal's businesslike little knife and holding it ready for a desperate defense, Jeremy stuttered out some low-voiced non­sense, meant to be soothing. To his joy and surprise, the attempt was an immediate success. The mammoth dark shape of a long­haired dog came jostling right up to him, but with a reassuring tail wag and not growling, only whining as if to entreat a favor. A wet nose nuzzled at his hand. Having sheathed his knife again, Jeremy spent a minute standing in a cold sweat of relief, scratch­ing the grateful, panting beast behind its ears. Then he resumed his progress toward the henhouse. His new friend was content to follow a step or two behind. Obviously the dog was taking a be­nign interest in his affairs, with the air of a guide standing by to do a favor if requested.

  Every few steps the starving two-legged marauder paused to glance toward the small darkened farmhouse. But everything there remained as quiet as before.

  In the stable a dromedary snorted, a long groaning snuffle, and shuffled its feet inside its stall. But that was all.

  Moving cautiously in deep shadow, with the dog still com­panionably at his side, Jeremy approached the henhouse, only to find it surrounded by a tall fence, obviously meant to keep in­truders out as well as hold chickens in. The barrier consisted of thin vertical stakes bound together with a network of tough withes and cordvines, the spaces between the stakes too narrow to admit even the body of a chicken. There was a gate leading into the enclosure, but unhappily for the boy's purposes it was fastened at the top with a kind of lock, and on top of that was an oddly shaped device that appeared to be a kind of metal box.

  And now Jeremy started nervously and almost began to run. With his left ear (but not with his right, he thoughtfully ob­served) he could hear the box making a ghostly clamor, which grew louder when he stood on tiptoe and stretched out a hand toward it.

  Looking over his shoulder, the apprentice chicken thief be­held the house still dark and silent. The dog beside him was quite unperturbed. Gradually the boy allowed himself to believe that the noise existed nowhere but in his own left ear.

  And with that belief came understanding: he had just received, through his mysterious silent partner, a timely warning—the contraption was precariously balanced, and he supposed it was designed to make a racket if it was disturbed. When he began to unwind the cord, it produced a loud rattling sound.

  Reluctantly he gave up on the gate and moved away, but his hunger would not let him abandon all hopes of chicken dinner. Sliding along the fence, peering in through the thin palings from one new angle after another, the boy half-absently resumed the whispering that had already served him so well this night.

  "C'mon, hens—one of you anyway—how 'bout a nice fat one? Or you could just send me out some eggs, if you don't..." His voice trailed away, as his jaw dropped.

  A sleepy bird, white-feathered and as young and plump as any thief could wish, had hopped down off its roost somewhere in the dark interior and now came stalking out of the henhouse, di­rectly toward him. In another moment the chicken was right be­side the fence and fluttering high enough for Jeremy, who had forced a lean arm between the stakes, to grab it by the neck, turn­ing fowl into food before it could utter a single squawk.

  Even as he performed the act, he recalled in a vivid flash of memory a dream in which with this same right hand (yet not en­tirely the same) he had exerted about the same amount of effort and strangled a fury.

  He could ponder dreams some other time, after hunger had been stayed. Right now he lifted the dead chicken, wings and feet still beating, near the top of the fence, to a position where he could reach over the top with his other hand and grab it.

  On leaving the farmyard, with his dinner-to-be in hand, he found it necessary to quietly discourage the watchdog, who was whining and wanting to come with him. When Jeremy was a hundred yards away, he could hear the animal howling its regret at his departure.

  At the moment he was too engrossed in his hunger to try to reason out what had just happened. Still, he took the time to move his boat downstream another quarter-mile or so, just in case the farmer, wondering what the hell was wrong with his dog, grew suspicious and came looking around.

  Established at last in a modest riverside encampment, pro­tected from onshore observation by the riparian thicket where he'd tied his boat, Jeremy busily plucked feathers and beheaded and gutted and cleaned the bird with Sal's sharp knife. By now the eastern sky had grown sufficiently light to let him see what he was doing.

  Starvation had not yet reached the point where he would try to eat a chicken raw. But, in order to roast the fowl, he was going to have to make a fire.

  And damn it all, this was naturally the time for his bad luck to take another turn. Try as he might, the flint and steel refused to work. Somehow everything must have got wet again. To make matters worse, all the tinder he could find was damp from a re­cent rain. Even on the bottom of such logs and fallen branches as he could find. It seemed he'd have to wait, his stomach growl­ing, until some hours of sunlight had dried things out.

  Fumbling and cursing, Jeremy at last gave up the futile at­tempt to strike a spark. Then he squinted as the first direct rays of sunlight came striking in over the water to hit him in the face.

  Fire? You want fire? Plenty of it, right there in the sky ... if only it might be possible to borrow just a little of that... if only he had a burning glass.

  A moment later, when he looked down at the wood and tinder in front of him, he was startled. Suddenly his left eye had begun to show him a small, bright spot, like a sharp reflection of the sun, right on a piece of kindling. At last the boy cautiously reached out a hand and touched the spot. He could feel nothing there but the dull, unreflective wood ... except that the wood felt warm!

  This called for investigation.

  Jeremy soon discovered that when he sat with his face in direct sunlight and squinted down at an angle, focusing the gaze of his left eye on the tinder he had arranged, a spark of white light flared at the spot he'd picked. When he maintained the direction of his gaze for half a minute, the white light began to generate a small orange glow that he could see with both eyes. A wisp of whitish smoke arose.

  And presently, having added some more of the dampish twigs and grass and wood, he had a real fire, one hot enough to dry more stuff for it to burn and big enough to roast his chicken, after he'd impaled it on a green stick. Carefully he kept turning the fowl around, and soon delicious smells arose. In his hunger, he began tearing off and eating pieces of meat before the whole bird was cooked.

  When he had satisfied his belly for the time being, Jeremy tried again to raise fire from the sun, just for the hell of it and got the same result. Nothing to it. Now the feat was even easier than be­fore—maybe, he supposed, because the sun was getting higher in the sky and hotter.

  Having thrown chicken bones, feathers, and offal into the river, he sat picking his teeth with a splinter and
thinking about it while he watched the fire that he had made in wood die down. By all the gods! It just beat anything that he had ever seen. He had been given magic in his eye, all right.

  For the first time in what seemed years, Jeremy began to con­sider new possibilities of fun.

  Eventually he lay back and drifted into musing over what pow­ers the mask piece might have given him that he hadn't even dis­covered yet.

  Of course there were nagging questions, too. Why would a chicken and a dog be compelled to listen to him, to do what he wanted, when a fish in the river was not? But the questions were not enough to keep him from dozing off into a delicious sleep.

  His journey went on, day by day. And still, by day and night, though not so frequently now as at the beginning of his flight, Je­remy anxiously looked upstream for pursuing boats and scanned the sky for furies. Eventually the idea at least crossed Jeremy's mind of someday trying to burn a fury out of the sky by con­centrating sun glare fatally upon it. Only in dreams could he— or the Dark Youth—summon up strength enough to wring their necks, but it would give him great satisfaction, in waking life, to at least mark some of those great gray wings with smoking spots of pain, send them in screaming flight over the horizon. But as a practical matter he had to admit that the damned things would never hold still long enough for him to do that. Such fire raising as he could do now with his eye was a slow process.

  On a couple of occasions he'd seen a burning-glass in opera­tion, and this was much the same thing. But... his eye?

  Of course, the eye endowed with such power didn't seem to be entirely his, Jeremy Redthorn's, any longer.

  In succeeding days, the traveler managed to feed himself rea­sonably well. Partly he succeeded by helping himself to more fruit, both wild and cultivated. Strawberries were easy to find. Apples, peaches, and cherries came from orchards along the shore, melons from a vine-strewn field. Jeremy's left eye outlined for him, in subtle light, certain pathways, certain objects, indi­cating where the harvest would be profitable. Several times he dared prowl close enough to houses to dig up carrots and pota­toes out of kitchen gardens. Coming upon some wild grapes, Je­remy tried them, too, and enjoyed them, though he'd thought he'd lost his taste for grapes of any kind long months ago. These had a sharply different flavor from the special doomed-to-be-raisins variety that Uncle grew and of which the boy had hauled so many loads.

  But his special vision was of no help at all in gathering that which grew independent of cultivation. Something there to think about—but he didn't know what to think.

  And in the nights that followed he repeated his feat of chicken stealing, several times, with growing confidence and consistent success. Minor variation brought him a goose on one night, a turkey on another. Soon starvation ceased to be a real fear, and so did watchdogs—he might have had a whole pack of them, eager to join him on his journey, had he wanted to encumber himself with such an escort.

  Whenever he had sunlight or even when clouds were no worse than a light overcast, he could make a fire. He tried bright moon­light once and thought he might have succeeded had he had the patience to persist long enough.

  During late afternoons, while he lay ashore waiting for darkness to bring what he hoped would be safe travel time, Jeremy amused himself by borrowing the sun's last energies with his left eye, to burn his initials into the wooden side of his beached canoe. He hadn't really thought about the matter before, but of course there were several different ways to make each letter of the alphabet— there, for example—JAY—TEE—in cursive. And there were other styles of making letters .. . other languages, of course.. . .

  How many of each category could he call to mind? Too many, he realized, feeling a faint chill at heart. Far more than Jeremy Redthorn, in half a dozen years of simple village schooling, had ever learned. There were some people, his new memory recalled, living about five hundred miles over that way, who made their let­ters in this style. Meanwhile a certain tribe dwelling a long, long way over in the opposite direction wrote down their words in entirely different characters. And meanwhile, way over there, at a truly enormous distance, on the far side of the great round world—

  He sat back on the ground beside his boat and sighed.

  Yes, of course the world was round. And amazingly large. He didn't know when or how he'd gained the knowledge, but so it was. Now he could see it in his new mind's eye as the planet Earth. Dimly he could evoke the shape of continents and oceans. Names of distant places, cities, countries, oceans, lakes, and rivers. Might his parents have told him such things, years ago, shown him a globe? He couldn't remember them doing anything like that.

  But they might have, yes, of course. They might have taught him some of all this, but not all.

  How much of all this had he really learned in the school in his home village?

  He couldn't remember any teacher, or his parents, actually telling him any of these things.

  On the other hand, he now had a firm awareness that globe models of the world definitely existed. Along with many, many elaborate maps. Even if there hadn't been anything like that in his old village school. The Academy had them, and so did a thou­sand other seats of knowledge, places of learning, scattered around the world.

  Now, every time Jeremy turned his thoughts in a new direc­tion, he discovered his memory freshly stocked with dozens, hun­dreds, perhaps thousands of facts, likely and unlikely. One discovery in this enormous warehouse tended to lead to another, until it seemed that a whole cascade, an avalanche, of facts and words and images was about to come pouring down on his head, burying him from sight. It sometimes frightened him to think of all the things he might now find, in his own mind, if he really tried. Things that had been newly stuffed into his head, without his knowing—

  Stop it, he sternly warned himself.

  And yet it was impossible to entirely stop the wondering, the inward search. The freshly loaded cargo of information was in place, as impossible to ignore as were the powers of sex, now that his body had grown into them. His mind was compelled to keep teasing and worrying at the edges of the vast, the unbeliev­able, oversupply of memories and knowledge.

  Of course, all this had come to him as a result of Sal's great gift.

  But what good was it all going to be to him?

  How, for example, could Jeremy Redthorn, who'd spent the entirety of his short life in a couple of tiny and obscure villages, possibly have any idea of the teaching tools with which the Acad­emy was equipped? Yet so it was. And if Jeremy tried, he could call up a rather hazy image of the place, many white stone build­ings with red tile roofs. He could even see, as if in old and hazy memory, some of the people there and how they went about their business.

  Jumping to his feet, he paced back and forth on the small strip of sheltered island beach he'd chosen for his current resting place. Around him, the world was bigger than he'd ever imagined it might be—and he could sure as hell see more of it.

  Maybe he should think about girls for a while and pass the time that way. It was damn sure time to think about something besides the thing, the god mask or whatever it was, that had poured itself like liquid into his head.

  He was afraid that his new memory could tell him exactly who that Face belonged to and what its presence was going to do to its human host—but he feared the answers too much to dare to frame the questions.

  Nine

  At last Jeremy's chronic fear of pursuit assumed objective form. Once during the early morning and once again during the following night, the fleeing boy in his small boat was overtaken by flotillas of war canoes loaded with armed men.

  Even in darkness, his left eye could see them clearly enough for him to distinguish what they were and whose insignia they bore—one force carried the blue flower on a white ground of Lord Kalakh, whose troops had taken part in several massacres. The second was less fearsome, the Republic of Morelles, dis­playing burgundy and yellow. In each case their multiple wakes gently rocked his small craft as they passed.


  Jeremy's left eye saw the warboats and their occupants differ­ently than his right. The colors of boats and people varied slightly, in subtle ways that the boy supposed must have some sig­nificance, though he was unable to interpret the variations. The craft belonging to Kalakh, though painted white and blue, glowed in small spots with a bright but phantasmal red that he took as a serious warning.

  Jeremy understood, without really thinking about it, that what he was seeing was only part of the ongoing maneuvering for power among rival warlords. Basically it was part of the same struggle that had killed his parents half a year ago. Aided by his marvelous new eyesight, he was able to steer well clear of these bodies of marine infantry. They in turn paid him no attention as they hurried on their way. Each time this happened he stopped paddling and frankly stared—what else would a lone figure in a boat be likely to do?—and each time he was ignored.

  On a third occasion he was overtaken after dawn, still looking for his day's resting place. He panicked in the belief that the squadron of boats coming downstream at great speed, either Lord Kalakh's or those of some unknown power, were, in fact, pursuing him. For several minutes he paddled frantically in a mad effort to stay ahead—but when he despaired of outspeed­ing all those husky rowers and set his course for shore, they simply ignored him and continued straight down the river. Watching them speed by, while his heart and lungs gradually resumed their normal action, he allowed himself to believe for the first time that there might be no one actively pursuing him, tracking him downstream from Uncle Humbert's village.

  If it was true that no one was actively hunting him, then maybe he had overestimated the importance of Sal's mysterious gift—and of himself as its custodian and her messenger. Was it possible that the raid he had just survived had been launched for some purpose unconnected with Sal and her treasure? Or for no purpose at all except as an exercise in savagery? But Jeremy had trouble believing that. The men riding into the village had been intent and purposeful, though the creatures they commanded had blundered; and Sal, though terrified to see them, had not been really surprised.