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known the truth. And if he nobly gave his slave assistant proper credit, he would have made himself look
inferior. Or so I feared. Either way it would have upset things between us or so I thought. Turned out
there was nothing much between us anyway."
Jeremy nodded slowly.
Carlotta's eyes had once again gone distant. "When I look back, I can see he'd already started the process
of dumping me. There was no more talk of keeping me with him always. I had some idea that if I waited
until just the exactly right moment to present him with this great gift of the Sandals but somehow the
exactly right moment never came."
Later, on the night when the Scholar had told Carlotta he was giving her away, she'd got the Sandals out
of hiding and begun to use them secretly. At first she'd only gone skimming and dancing out over the sea
at night, simply for the sense of power and freedom they provided, with no further conscious goal in
mind. But she'd soon found herself returning to the hidden temple in the swamp, searching for more
secrets of power and wealth. Any slave knew that wealth was power gold made its own magic, at least
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo
as strong as any other kind.
Now the trip from the Academy to the distant temple, through midnight skies, took her less than half an
hour.
At first she didn't know why she had chosen that place as her goal or exactly what she was looking for.
Except that she now wanted, needed, a weapon, some new means of power. It was as if the Sandals heard
her whispering to herself and carried her to what she needed.
Finding herself again inside that broken structure, now and then having to dance aside from killer snakes,
she discovered that her instinct had been correct. She located what she was looking for, and she knew it
was what she had been seeking the moment she laid her eyes on it.
She'd known since her first visit that some great treasure must be hidden in that spot but had decided it
would be safer where it was. As long as she had the Sandals, she could always go back for it.
"One thing I soon discovered is that these little red shoes give their wearer more than speed. More than
the ability to fly, great as that is. Even if you don't know precisely where the thing is that you're looking
for, they'll take you to it."
"That's a tremendous power."
"You should know Apollo!"
"Maybe I should. If I'm a god, I should know a lot of things that I don't."
"Because you are afraid to look for them."
Jeremy was still sitting on the log, and he sighed and closed his eyes. "Yes, probably. Go on; you were
telling me about when you went back to the temple."
There had been a time, Carlotta said, when she wanted to make herself great only for the sake of the man
she loved if she came to him as a goddess, or something like one, then he'd be forced to take her
seriously.
"But I should have known better. You." She pointed at Jeremy. "You were already a god when you
encountered us. Sometime before that you'd somehow found Apollo's Face and put it on."
"I didn't know what I was doing."
"Didn't you? But you did it. You were Apollo himself, the first time you stood in front of Arnobius, and
he saw nothing but a grubby human. No more did I, for that matter."
Slowly Jeremy nodded. "That's true. Drugged or awake, he never knew either of us. He never understood
Jeremy Redthorn any more than he did Apollo."
"And what does Apollo now have to say to me? Or to the Trickster who now lives in me?"
Jeremy waited for some inner prompting but there was only passivity. Slowly he raised both hands,
palms up. "Nothing, it seems. What does Loki have to say to me?"
The girl's eyes wandered over him. "I don't know. But Carlotta wishes you no harm.
"That night when I first came to you, out on the deck, that was of course before I knew you were a god.
Still, by that time I'd noticed something about you that I found very hard to resist. A strength and value,
so that I wanted you on my side.
"I was trying to recruit you as my helper, even before I went back to the temple and found the Face and
the other treasure. Of course I had the Sandals then, but I needed a partner that I could trust."
Carlotta told Jeremy she'd half-suspected he was a runaway slave, who'd somehow managed to get free of
his metal collar.
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo
The plan she'd formulated then had been daring but not impossible. Jeremy could have got clear of the
Academy with her help, not to mention Apollo's. They could have returned to the temple in a small boat
and loaded a cargo of gold and jewels.
"Before I had the Trickster's power and skills to call upon, there was a definite limit to how much I could
carry, flying with the Sandals."
Then, with Jeremy doing the heavy work under Carlotta's guidance, they would have been off across the
swamps to freedom there were other lords, other cities in which they might manage to convert some of
the jewels to wealth.
He said: "It wouldn't have worked. Apollo would never have let me go running off like that. He's
determined to go to the Oracle, where there are things he wants to do. He has other uses for my mind and
body."
She only stared at him for a while, not saying anything.
He asked Carlotta: "What are you going to do now?"
"Do you know, I'm not sure? I want to have a talk with Arnobius of course." She nodded in the
direction of the sleeping figures by the fire. "And do something with him, or about him. Not at the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]