TEN

When the two young people, working together, had got the big boat moving more or less steadily downstream (though only at drifting speed and slowly spinning as it moved), the pale-haired young woman took her longest look yet at Jeremy. Then she demanded of him: "What is your name?"

"Jonathan, ma'am." He grunted as he spoke, meanwhile using his pole again to fend off a waiting snag. He'd had the new name ready, having been expecting the question for some time now. The stubborn conviction would not leave him that Sal's killers were still in pursuit of the treasure she'd been carrying and would cheerfully rip it out of his head first chance they got. If they'd lost his trail, they might well be questioning their way methodically downstream, going from one farm, village, or town to the next.

Briskly the girl nodded her head of white curls. Her thin eyebrows were almost the same color. At that moment the boy belatedly noticed that her earlobes had both been neatly punctured and on each side of her head a small metal ring, as golden as her collar, hung from one of the tiny long-healed holes. Obviously the mutilation had been deliberate and the ornaments were meant to call attention to it. Jeremy had never seen the like before, and it struck him with a shock: Why would anyone. . . ?

His encyclopedic new internal source of information could not precisely explain why, but it assured him that out in the great world such practices in the name of fashion were far from unknown.

"Jonathan, then." The girl nodded again with satisfaction; evidently one name was plenty for him. "You may call me the Lady Carlotta. The gentleman I serve"—she gestured toward the deckhouse with an elegantly wiry wrist—"is Scholar Arnobius. You will address him as 'Scholar' or 'Doctor.' Due to a chain of unlikely, unforeseeable circumstances, the Scholar and I find ourselves here in the middle of this dismal swamp, which one might think would.be forsaken by all the gods.... Some might say that he was mad, to imagine that the god he was trying to talk to would show up...."

Some idea had brought her to a stop, and once more she glanced back upstream. Then her pale brows again contracted, her small fists clenched. Her voice almost died away, then rose to a girlish crescendo: "And we have been abandoned by those scoundrel-bastards of rowers. ..." A pause for breath, giving the rage that had flared up again a chance to die down.

The young woman's voice when she resumed was well controlled, almost calm again. "We came here, the two of us, to this remote and abandoned swampland on a noble quest. My... my master sought knowledge of one particular deity, and I... was doing what I could to help him. We ..." Considering her audience, she fell silent for a moment. Then she began to speak again, slowly and distinctly. "We come from a place—how shall I put it?—an organization ... called the Academy. There—"

"Yes'm, I know that."

Lady Carlotta had already begun the next step in her simplified explanation, but now she paused in midword, derailed by surprise. "You have heard of the Academy."

"Yes'm."

Taking another long look at his mud-smeared figure, ragged and barefoot, she evidently found that claim astounding. "But— Jonathan—how did you know... ? You mean to say you had actual knowledge of the fact that we, the Scholar and I... ?"

"No ma'am." The boy nodded toward the mast. "But I saw your Academy logo. On the flag."

"Oh. But..." Still at a loss, she frowned again. "And how did you happen to recognize that? It's fairly new, and no one else we've encountered on this river has had the least idea about..." She made a gesture of futility.

"I've seen it before," Jeremy answered vaguely. Even as he said the words, he knew that they were not strictly true—the eyes of Jeremy Redthorn had never rested on the Academy's flag before this hour. And at the same moment he felt the little chill that over the past few days had grown terribly familiar.

*     *     *

Soon it was necessary again to pole the boat free of a grasping patch of bottom and then to avoid another overhanging snake, dangerously low. With the boat clear for the time being of snags and mud banks, and making some encouraging progress downstream, the man in the bunk in the deckhouse began to come around. But it took many minutes for his mind to clear entirely; and even when it did, his body remained weak for some time longer.

Jeremy's new memory offered no quick and easy answers concerning the art and difficulties of sailing a boat—and he was not going to plunge in looking for them. Still he made shift to get the sail more or less tied up snugly to its proper supports. Carlotta assisted him, by pulling on lines at his polite request. Now there was less cause for concern that a sudden wind might do them damage.

By the time he had accomplished that, night was coming on, and the only reasonable course seemed to be to choose a suitable small island and tie up—taking care not to be under any overhanging branches.

Carlotta, evidently made nervous by the approaching night, had buckled on her sword again and was peering warily into the dusk. Somehow she had found time and opportunity to change her clothes. "Do you suppose it's safe to light a candle, Jonathan?"

Sticking his head out into the night, he looked and listened and was reassured that his left eye showed him nothing special. He heard no other boats, no splash of oar or paddle. The only flying shape he could make out against the darkening sky was that of a normal owl. Again he thought how wonderful it was to be able to really see, at last!

"I don't think snakes or anything is going to be drawn to the light, ma'am."

The girl hesitated. There was a moment in which Jeremy thought that she looked about twelve years old. "What about... people?"

"I still think we're all right having a light here, ma'am. Just to be safe, we can keep it indoors and the windows shaded."

"We can do that."

He'd already discovered food supplies aboard and behind the cabin a sandbox serving as a kind of hearth. There seemed no reason not to have a fire and do some cooking. Jeremy was sent to get an ember from the earth-filled fireplace. They were a fine pair of aromatic candles that the girl lit, giving steady, mellow light.

When light bloomed in the little cabin, the man suddenly raised himself on one elbow and looked around. He seemed to be trying to peer, with tremulous hope, out through the little window of the deckhouse, on which his companion had just closed the little curtain shade.

"Where is he?" he whispered.

"Who, my lord?" the Lady Carlotta asked.

"He was here," the dry lips murmured weakly. "Before it got dark. I saw him...." Weakly the speaker let himself slump back.

"What did he look like?" the girl asked, as if the question might have some relevance. "Just standing on the ground, or was he—?" She concluded with a gesture vaguely suggesting flight.

"Standing still. Right in front of me."

"Maybe what you saw, my lord, was nothing but too much sun." The girl was tenderly bathing his forehead.

"But I tell you I did see him....It was only for a moment...."

"I warned you about getting too much sun." For the moment she sounded motherly; then she paused and sighed. "Yes, my lord, tell me about it." Her tone suggested that she knew that she would have to hear the story, sooner or later, but did not look forward to the experience.

The man on the bed was marshaling his thoughts, so his answer was a few moments in coming.

At last he came out with it: "Apollo." As the Scholar spoke, his eyes turned toward Jeremy. But as if the boy might be invisible, the man's eyes only gazed right on through him, with no change of expression, before looking away again. "The Lord of Light himself," Arnobius said in a flat voice.

The girl slowly nodded. Turning her face to Jeremy, she silently mouthed the words: Too much sun! Then back to the man again. "How could you be sure, sir? That it was the Far-Worker?"

Scholar Arnobius pulled himself up a little farther toward a sitting position and moved one hand and wrist in a vague gesture. "Glorious," he murmured. "A glorious . .." His voice died away, and the two listeners waited in silence to hear more.

"I don't think, my lord," the girl said, "that any gods have really shown themselves at all. Not to any of us, not today."

No reaction.

She persisted: "I might suggest, my lord, that not everyone at the Academy is going to accept your subjective feelings as evidence of a manifestation of the Lord Apollo."

"Why not?" Rather than resenting a servant's impertinence (Jeremy had already abandoned his tentative acceptance of Carlotta's claim to be a lady), Arnobius sounded lost, a child being denied a treat.

"Because." The girl's elfin shoulders shrugged expressively. "Because, my lord, you have no proof that anything really happened. You say you saw Apollo, but... just standing in front of you? I mean, the god did nothing, gave you nothing—am I right?... He told you nothing? No prophecy or anything of the kind?"

A slow shake of the man's head.

"Well, you don't even have much of a story to tell. I'd say the old ruin back there has been long abandoned by gods and humans alike."

Slowly the man in the bunk nodded. Then he shook his head. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.

"Oh, my sweet lord!" Carlotta put out a small hand to stroke the man's forehead, and the head shaking stopped. He had closed his eyes now and looked as if he had a headache. For the moment he had nothing more to say.

Oh, she really loves him, Jeremy thought. One look at the girl's face now left no doubt of that. But she was worried that he was crazy or going to make an utter fool of himself.

A moment later she had turned back to Jeremy. After she sized him up again, her voice became brisk, demanding. "Jonathan, have we seen any gods?"

"No, ma'am."

The Scholar's eyes came open again. Squinting now like a man who'd taken too much wine, he needed a little while to focus properly on the newcomer. This time his voice came out a little harsher. "Who's this? Not one of our regular crew."

Carlotta, caught up in her dubious role somewhere between lady and servant, sidled closer to him on the bunk and took his hand. "I was trying to tell you earlier, my lord, they're all gone. They deserted their posts like rats when ... when you were overcome back there."

"The crew deserted? Why?"

"Well, I suppose they were frightened, the miserable sons of bitches! You were unconscious, and . . . and things in general began to get a little strange."

"A little strange? How so?"

"Oh, I suppose it was not so much that anything really happened, my lord, as that those gutless fools were afraid it might. With your lordship lying there senseless."

"Oh." The Scholar seemed to be trying to think about it. "The last thing I remember clearly is—it seems to me that I was about halfway through the ritual. This fellow—Jonathan—hadn't arrived yet. The crew were busy, or I assumed they were, with routine affairs . . . whatever they were supposed to be doing. And you"—he looked sharply at Carlotta—"you'd gone into the temple, as I remember?"

"That's right, my lord. I didn't go in very far, wasn't in very long. Then I heard the crew—well, some of their voices were raised. I was puzzled and came out, just in time to see our little boat go round the bend, with the whole worthless bunch of them in it."

She nodded at Jeremy. "This young lad happened along most providentially, my lord, and pitched right in. Otherwise we'd still be stuck in the swamp. I'd say Jonathan has twice the courage of that whole bunch of worthless renegades who were supposed to be our crew."

Jeremy bowed. A newly ingrafted instinct for socially correct behavior, surfacing right on cue, rather to his own surprise, assured him that that was the proper thing to do.

The Scholar Arnobius, on fully recovering consciousness, showed little interest in practical affairs but was content to leave those to his young assistant. Judging from the occasional word Arnobius muttered, as he started to concern himself with the litter on his worktable, he was bitterly disappointed that the god he had been looking for had not, after all, appeared.

Carlotta, on the other hand, had enjoyed some kind of partial success. Jeremy's augmented memory assured him that anyone who so played the servant to a mere Academic was very unlikely to deserve the title of "Lady."

Jeremy tried to listen in without appearing to do so. From what he could overhear, it was evident that the Scholar and his helper or mistress—whatever roles she might play—had come into the swamp with the specific purpose of investigating stories of a ruined temple in these parts.

As soon as Carlotta began to talk about the purpose of their mission here, she switched languages. Jeremy was so intent on the substance of what she was saying that he didn't notice for some time that she had switched—the new tongue was as easy as the old for him to understand.

Eventually the Scholar, whose mind only gradually cleared itself of the cobwebs of drugs and his strenuous attempts at magic, remembered to express gratitude to Jeremy for his timely help and was more than willing to sign him on as a crew member to paddle, run a trapline, or catch fish or serve as a local guide. The fit, trance, or whatever it was had left Arnobius in a weakened condition, and there was no sign that any of the original crew was ever coming back.

And Jeremy's nimble little canoe proved useful to the common cause. It allowed him to go exploring ahead down twisting channels, seeing which ones grew too narrow or too shallow, scouting out the best way to get around islands. Carlotta renewed her curses of the decamping crew members, who had taken with them the expedition's own small craft.

When Jeremy's canoe was hauled on deck, Arnobius and his servant both expressed curiosity at the number of times their new deckhand had burnt his initials into the sides of his canoe—it seemed to them it must have been a slow, painstaking process. They also frowned at some of the letters from other alphabets, the ones Jerry'd been trying to make for the first time. But their shapes were sloppy, and Jeremy was relieved when the scholars decided they were only random scribblings and not writing at all. After all, the scholarly couple had many other things to worry about.

At last the Scholar, frowning, asked him: "You have a burning-glass, then?"

"Had one, sir. I lost it overboard."

"You've been hurt, Jonathan." The lady was staring at the back of his shoulder, where the rent in his shirt revealed a half-healed fury slash. He'd taken his shirt off while working in the heat. Carlotta's face did not reveal whether or not she recognized the wound as having been left by a fury's whip.

"They're getting better now. They're almost healed."

"But what on earth happened to you?" To Jeremy's relief, she wasn't seriously looking for an answer. "Go find yourself some new clothing if you can. Yes, I'm sure you can. There is a crew locker, I believe, behind the deckhouse." Her nose wrinkled. "And I strongly suggest you take a bath in the river before you put the new things on."

"Yes'm."

Jeremy discovered a chest in the small shed, from which the awning that had sheltered the crew protruded, did indeed contain a selection of spare workers' clothing in different sizes, all now available for him to pick from. His vineyard worker's garments or what was left of them, slashed by a fury's whips and still grape-stained, went quickly into the cook fire that Jeremy discovered still smoldering, on its foundation of boxed sand, under the awning. Not into the water—he could visualize the hunters, who must be still fanatically on his trail, fishing the rags out and gaining some magical advantage from them.

Remembering Carlotta's orders, he located a bar of soap and took it with him into the river, where he scrubbed to the best of his ability before he climbed aboard and clothed himself anew.