TWENTY

Having turned resolutely in the opposite direction from where their captives had hoped to go, the bandits brought their little knot of prisoners to a halt at a place where the Mountain, looming at a distance of ten miles or so, presented them with a fine view when they turned back to look at it.

Only a quarter of a mile away, reported the scouts sent out by the new bandit leader, lay what one of their scouts reported as the Honeymakers' village.

From the recesses of Jeremy's natural memory drifted a vague recollection that Sal had once mentioned a village of that name, wondering if she had reached it. But Apollo's fund of information assured him that there were many such, scattered around the world.

What exactly had Sal's words been, on that occasion? Bees would be a help; cattle would be a help. Yes, she had said that, or something very like it. But then of course she'd been delirious much of the time.

Observing the village at hand from a little distance above it on a wooded hillside, where he had been herded together with his fellow prisoners, Jeremy saw that it was two or three times the size of the settlement where Uncle Humbert and Aunt Lynn had grown their grapes—and no doubt still did, if they yet lived. Here the houses seemed more sturdily built and were in a different style.

Jeremy could see a few of the villagers, moving about, and his augmented vision strongly hinted to him that there was something special about these people. There was a moment when he thought he could almost see the ghostly figure of the Dark Youth, walking among them in the swirling white cape that he wore for business. Almost, but not quite.

The majority of the bandits now pulled out pilgrim costumes, pale cloaks and habits, which they slid on over their ordinary clothes and their sheathed weapons.

The three prisoners were left, closely guarded by a couple of their nastier-looking captors, outside the town until the attack had succeeded. They were warned to make no outcry. "Unless you want to go back to Lord Victor's service with a few parts missing."

Yet another village to be overrun, to die under the impact of a surprise attack by the forces of evil. The boy began to feel ill in anticipation of what was going to happen to these innocent people. Judging from what he could see of them, small figures moving in the distance, they were common-enough folk, a natural mixture of young and old. He could hear someone in the village calling in a loud voice, speaking a dialect quite similar to that with which Jeremy had grown up.

And now, once more, Jeremy's left-eye vision, which he had begun to fear had deserted him, was definitely becoming active. When he looked at these villagers from a distance, it seemed to him that each of them sprouted a thick growth of almost invisible quills, like some kind of magical porcupines. He understood that this was only symbolic, but what did it mean? He could only assume it to be some kind of warning. Maybe these people could not be attacked with impunity. Well, that was fine with him. He wasn't going to try to pass the warning on.

And his god eye also reported that something in the center of town, other than its people, was definitely glowing, with a diffuse but steady radiance. The source of this light, whatever it might be, was still out of Jeremy's sight, hidden from his view behind a leafy mass of shade trees, but its presence was undeniable.

And the more Jeremy looked at these simple folk, the stronger grew the feeling that they were, or ought to be, familiar old friends or helpers . . . who had played a role in his life, somewhere, a long time back, though he couldn't recall exactly how or when or where. Damn it, he knew them somehow....

Before he had time to consider the matter at any length, the attack was under way. The watchers on the hill could hear the screams of sudden terror, and they saw how a couple of villagers were cut down in cold blood.

About half the population, crying their alarm, fled the little settlement, with a bandit or two shooting a few desultory arrows after them; and the other half were not so lucky. Half a dozen girls and young women among them were rounded up; if the rest were content to sit or stand by and watch the despoiling of their daughters and their property, it seemed they would not be molested much.

A few minutes later, being prodded and herded with his fellow captives down from the hill and into the little village square, Jeremy was able to get a direct look at the source of the strange glow. It centered on the statue at the center of the crude shrine, the figure of a nude man holding what might have been a lyre under its left arm. With a sense of grim inevitability Jeremy recognized the unskillful carving as intended to represent Apollo.

Now the program of serious terror got under way.

The marauders swaggered in, cowed anyone who looked at them, kicked open the few doors that were slammed at their approach, and began disarming men—though none of these village men were bearing real weapons. Still several were knocked down, cowed, disabled.

One or two brave boys and angry women met similar fates. Dogs that barked and challenged were ruthlessly cut down.

The bandits seemed unconcerned about the villagers who had managed to hide or run away—it was probably a safe assumption they had really nowhere to run for effective help.

An old man, evidently some kind of a local leader, stepped forward, trembling. Jeremy gathered, from the few words that he could overhear, that one of the young women already being molested was the old man's daughter or granddaughter.

Although his relatives were now trying to hold him back, he protested in a quavering voice, "It is a very foolish thing that you are doing—"

The old man, now being surrounded by a little circle of bandits, screamed out his plea for Apollo's help against the darkness, the barbarians.

"Other gods rule now, you old fool," one told him in a pitying, almost kindly voice.

"In fact," said another, adopting a thoughtful attitude, "we ourselves are the only gods you need. What's the matter? Don't you recognize us?"

A roar of laughter burst out around the little circle. "Anyway, we're the only ones taking any interest in you today! Let's hear some prayers."

The words that came out of the old man's mouth were not a prayer, and a bandit's fist soon shut it for him.

Jeremy meanwhile was experiencing an increasing sense of remoteness. He realized now that he'd been mistaken about the Intruder—the alien power inside his skull had not fallen idle. Something was going on, but he could not tell exactly what. Whatever it was produced a feeling of disorientation, unsteadiness, apart from what could be blamed on the horror he had to watch. And now there was a kind of humming sound—was it inside his head or out?—that he could not identify. It was a distant very faint but slowly growing noise, a wavery, polyphonic drone, that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Jeremy closed his eyes—not so much in an effort to blot out horror as to seek something else; he knew not what. There passed before his view a parade of all the images of the gods that he had ever seen, most particularly a collection of the statues and paintings he had walked among while at the Academy.

He knew that Apollo (the being whose image at the Academy bore that label) was considered God of "Distance, Death, Terror, and Awe," "Divine Distance," "Crops and Herds," "Alexikakos,"

Averter of Evil.

Now and again Jeremy grew afraid that the alien thing inside his head cared not at all what might happen to any portion of his own proper mind or body.

The voices of the terrified villagers, men, women, and children, muttering, sobbing, in repeated and hopeless prayer, had blended into that other droning sound, so Jeremy could no longer separate the components of what he heard.

The repeated invocation of Apollo, the sight of the crude smiling statue, riveted Jeremy's attention. There again was the one presence he could not escape; the Intruder inside his head, however ungodlike certain aspects of his behavior, had to be in some way identified or at least connected with Apollo—with the entity to which humans gave that name.

And he, Jeremy Redthorn, now carried some portion of that god's substance—whatever that might mean—within his skull.

After the carnage of the early minutes of the invasion, when the feeble attempts at resistance were bloodily put down, but before the leisurely rape and looting really got under way, the bandits had the idea of putting the hostages they wanted to save in a safe place and detailing one of their number to look out for them.

"We don't want you getting hurt by accident." A wicked chuckle and a hard poke in the gut. "Wouldn't be good for business. On the other hand, we don't want you to forget where you belong and just go wandering off when we're not looking."

The safe place turned out to be the front room of the mayor's whitewashed house, only the width of a narrow street from the central plaza. Neither it nor any of the adjoining houses had yet been set on fire.

Of course, the bandit assigned to look after the potential hostages might soon desert his post.

One of the more clever and observant bandits, as he sat with his fellows rummaging through some of the loot they were so easily collecting in the village, was made uneasy by the degree to which the Honeymaker villagers appear perfectly helpless and undefended. Jeremy heard him say to a colleague, "I don't get it."

"What's that?"

"Don't understand this place. Why hasn't someone eaten these folk up long ago? Surely there must be some bold fellows like ourselves living in this part of the world?"

The other shrugged. He reached out and broke something, just to be breaking it. "Maybe they have a protector. Or had one."

"Who? There's no flag."

"Maybe there's some superstition."

And now, inside one of the little houses, some anonymous voice was raised, formally calling upon the power of Apollo to protect the village.

"Sorry, old god; you're not up with the times." Someone was befouling Apollo's shrine, absently hurling a piece of garbage at it.

The bandit who had already begun to worry was worried more by the profanation.

Jeremy suddenly understood that the old man, once leader in the village, had also at one time been a priest of Apollo and maybe still thought that was his calling. Yes, the same old man the bandits had clubbed down once already. Amazingly he had dragged himself back to his feet, and now he was wiping at his blood-streaked face, meanwhile tottering toward the tiny shrine, in the middle of the little village square, beside the well.

The boy now found his attention drawn more closely to the shrine, the image of whose central statue was beginning to burn a dazzling white in his left eye. It had been a poor piece of work to begin with, when it was new, though doubtless the best that some local artisan could manage. Poor to begin with and now long-neglected. The scale of the sculpture was somewhat smaller than human life-size. Several green vines that needed water were trying to twine up the wood and stone. The central carven figure, as compared with the Academic representations of the god, was crude, thick-waisted, and with awkward legs, although Jeremy still got the sense that long years ago some would-be artist had done his or her best to make it handsome.

"Alexikakos," Averter of Evil.

Jeremy could read the names and prayers in the old scrawlings, misspelled in several languages, and the laborious carvings on the shrine, which must have been old when the grandparents of today's elders first laid eyes on it—half of the words were in no language that Jeremy Redthorn had ever seen before. But he could read all of them now—at least the ones that were not too much obscured by vines.

The new bandit leader was very confident. "I don't take much stock in gods."

. . . and all the time the droning in the background, building slowly. Very slowly. Maybe, after all, it existed only in Jeremy's head, a sign that the god who lived in there was angry. ...

. . . and Jeremy's thoughts kept coming back to the shrine, which was probably older than the village itself and certainly had been here before any of the current houses had been built. He wasn't sure how he knew that, but it just looked old. . . .

And gradually, inwardly, a certainty, a kind of peace, was stealing over him. Jerry could feel more strongly than ever his union with Apollo. The divine Intruder's presence was now as real to him as his own.

Alexikakos, defend us now.

As seen through Jeremy's left eye, the crude old statue was gradually taking on quite a different aspect.

He turned his head a little, squinting into sunlight. On the surface of his consciousness, he was dizzy with horror and with the ache of the blood in his hands and feet being cut off by cords. Deeper down, the roaring and humming in his head had grown into something steady and reliable. Was Apollo himself going to come stalking down the little street, his Silver Bow in hand, dealing vengeance right and left against the desecrators? In the boy's current mental state, some such demonstration seemed a real possibility.

Once again the bandits were laughing at the old man, and now they watched him crawl and slowly regain his feet and stagger for a while before they clubbed him down again. Even now he was still breathing, but he no longer tried to raise his head.

Jeremy, on the verge of trance, could no longer hear either the laughter or the breathing.

Blood splashed upon the shrine, making a new noise that did get through. Jeremy's left ear could hear the liquid spattering, though there were only a few fine drops, striking as gently as soft rain. The tiny sound they made, much softer than the endless litany of prayers, so faint it ought not to have been audible in all the uproar, did not end when the blood had ceased to fly. Rather, it seemed to go on vibrating, vibrating, endlessly and ominously into the distance.

It blurred into the old droning noise, which even now was only faintly audible. No one else was paying attention to it as yet, but it was now growing ringingly distinct in Jeremy's left ear.

Looking up, the boy saw that a strange cloud had come into being in the western sky. It was almost too thin to see, and yet it was thick enough to drag a shadow across the sun.