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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
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...The%20Face%20of%20Apollo%20(v1.
1%20htm).html (29 of 221) [2/4/2004 11:11:04 PM]
Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo 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.
* * *
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