TWENTY-ONE

Three or four of the girls and young women of the village had been seized by the bandits and dragged into the comparatively large central house the raiders were making into a kind of headquarters. Jeremy and the other hostages who had been stuffed in here for safekeeping could hear the sounds of mumbled threats, hysteria, and tearing cloth.

One of the girls had been somehow selected to be first. Four men were beginning to abuse her, one kissing her, others' hands being thrust inside her clothing.

One of the young men of the village, who seemed to have a special interest in her, stood looking in a window and called out in mental anguish: "Fran!"

And the local youth essayed at least a symbolic struggle, as if he would interfere with what was being done to Fran—but when one of the bandits glared at him menacingly and raised a weapon, the young man fell silent. He turned away and hid his face, and in another moment he had left the window and vanished into the street outside.

The girl he was worried about screamed as the bandit leader and two of his cohorts held her down and forced her legs apart. Again there was the sound of ripping cloth. When the girl continued to struggle fiercely, one of the men struck her several blows.

Another one of the attackers had brought a jug of honey from the kitchen in the rear of the house and was pouring it over the victim's exposed body, while others held her arms and legs. The act amused his comrades greatly, and their laughter roared out.

Arnobius, who had been jammed down beside Jeremy on a kind of couch, with Ferrante on his other side, was leaning forward in a way that put a strain on his bound arms. He kept cursing the bandits, in a low, savage voice, an effort to which the men were taking no attention at all. Now the brigands began to take their turns between the young girl's legs.

And all the while, the strange new noise continued its slow growth. Jeremy was intensely conscious of it, more so than of the atrocities being performed almost literally under his nose. In another minute or two, despite the continued laughter and the screams, the unidentified sound had grown loud enough to force itself on people's attention. One after another noticed the droning and looked round, puzzled. It was not really loud—not yet— but the volume was steadily swelling. And there was a penetrating quality about it that was soon strong enough to distract even a rapist.

Jeremy was only vaguely aware of the atrocities being performed right in front of him. Or of the nagging pain of his scraped knee and hip, souvenirs of his attempt to run away from Death. Or of the bonds that painfully constrained his hands and feet. He sat in the place where he had been made to sit, among his fellow prisoners and sharing their enforced passivity. His bound hands hung in front of him; his eyes were half-closed. Here under a roof, shaded from the sun, all he would have to work with if he wanted to try fire making was the indirect sunlight from the windows. Jeremy thought it would probably have taken him a long time to burn his ropes away. But, in fact, he wasn't even trying to do that.

The Intruder had given him definite orders, though they had not come in words. Wordlessly but effectively Jeremy had been made to understand that the ropes that bound him were of no consequence—not right now. Because now his mind had been caught up, enlisted, in a far greater effort, in work that seemed likely to stretch certain of its abilities to the utmost.

In this striving Jeremy willingly allowed himself to be swept along. More than that, he was not content to accept a purely passive role, whether or not he would have been allowed to do so. His mind was fiercely willing to do the work that he was now being given—because he saw, however dimly, what the end result was going to be.

Had it not been for the days and weeks in which Jeremy had already begun to accustom himself to the Intruder, the overwhelming presence that he now felt might have proved too much for him. The sense of being invaded, possessed, co-opted, could easily have overwhelmed his sanity. As matters stood, the natural stability of his mind endured and was even strengthened by this sensation of divided sovereignty.

And perhaps—the boy was beginning to believe—the Intruder experienced natural limitations in the assumption of control.

Only gradually did the boy come to understand just what tasks he had been assigned and how his mind was to go about carrying them out. He had to put up with a complete lack of any verbal explanations, but over all was the reassuring certainty that a tremendous effort was being made against his enemies—his and those of the god who dwelt inside his head. He, Jeremy Redthorn, had been enlisted as an essential partner. His mind, most particularly certain parts of it whose existence he had barely suspected until now, was being borrowed, stretched into a new shape—and used.

And in the process, the boundaries of what he had considered himself were becoming indistinct.

Jeremy Redthorn and the Intruder—the Intruder and Jeremy Redthorn.

Inside the human skull they shared, the boundaries between the two had blurred, but the boy had no sense that they were struggling against each other for control. From the beginning of their union, deity and human had never fought each other openly. And now they were fighting side by side, in the same brain and body, making an effort of a very different kind.

Slowly, with considerable confusion at the start, Jeremy Redthorn came to a better understanding of what must be done. At first he was aware of only the necessary actions and not the effects they would achieve.

So intensely was Jeremy's concentration focused on his assigned job that he was almost able to ignore the horrors that still went on and on directly in front of the couch on which his body sat. He did not turn his head away from the endlessly screaming girl and her tormentors, did not even avert his eyes from what the grunting men were so intent on doing. The animal sounds that the girl and her attackers made seemed to reach him only from a distance. He was hardly aware at all of anything else that might be happening in the house or in the dusty sunlit village square in front of it.

Jeremy was not even aware that down the street one of the houses had been set on fire and bandits were laughing at the owner's hopeless attempt to put out the blaze with water from the village well. Two of them offered to help, but then with howls of merriment they emptied their buckets on the man instead of his burning house.

At the moment Jeremy's mind was actively serving as a source of energy, of raw psychic force, fueling the will and purpose of the Intruder. And neither was immediately concerned with what was happening in the village. Both were busy at a considerable distance from the house where their shared body sat, both engaged in an urgent business of finding and calling, of combing the grasses and fields of flowers for something that was urgently required. To find it they were sweeping the air above all the fields and woods within a mile of the village. Their task was a gathering of necessary forces, an accumulation and a summoning of vital power.

But before that job could be completed, another important task arose. The major part of Jeremy Redthorn's awareness was sent drifting back into the village again, into the house where his bound body still slumped on a couch, unharmed in the midst of horror.

Out in the street before the house, some people of the village were running uselessly to and fro, and as each one came within Jeremy's field of view he looked steadily at the passing man, woman, or child. He knew that the directed gaze of his left eye could mark them, and he was marking each of them with the Eye of Apollo, tagging them for salvation. Nor did he forget to turn his head and tag each of his fellow hostages as well. Also, he saved the girl in front of him—he was most careful to save her. Not that he could do anything about the ordeal she was enduring now. But he had the power to redeem her from sufferings considerably worse.

No human eye was able to see the markings—save only one of Jeremy's, which made them. These were signs not meant to be perceived by human sight—but when the need for them arose, they would be unmistakable to those very different organs of vision for which they were intended.

Turning his head, Jeremy impulsively marked another girl, the one named Katy, who lay on the floor of the house tied up and crying while she waited her turn at being raped. In a calm voice he said to her: "It's all right; I've saved you." Amazingly, she heard him, and turned up a face of tear-stained wonder.

One of the men who stood awaiting his chance to get between the legs of the first girl also heard and didn't seem to know whether to laugh or be outraged. He turned toward Jeremy a dark and heavy mustache that jittered with the twitching of his red face. "You think you save the little bitch there, hey?"

"Not from you," said Jeremy remotely.

"What then?"

"You won't have time to hurt her."

"What?"

"From what is coming for you. Though probably she'd be safe from that anyway." The boy was speaking absently, with the larger portion of his mind still engaged out in the open air, half a mile away.

The mustached mouth was hanging open, forehead furrowed in a total lack of comprehension.

Jeremy, with his attention jarred back to the immediate vicinity of his own body, abruptly realized that he was slacking off on his other assigned job; not all of the villagers were going to come within his field of vision as long as he stayed inside the house.

A moment later he had jumped to his feet. Ferrante was now thrashing around, trying to get loose. The bandit detailed to guard prisoners was busy at the moment restraining Arnobius, who in his frustrated fury seemed actually on the point of getting his hands loose, and Jeremy's move took their warden by surprise.

In another moment the boy was hopping and stumbling, almost falling on his bound legs, out of the house and into the adjacent village square, where he took a stand and tried to focus the direct gaze of his left eye at least momentarily upon each and every villager. Now he might really be able to get them all—gods, let him not miss even one! With each such focused glance, a tiny flash of energy went forth and made a mark. A mark invisible to human eyes, but still—

Jeremy had only a vague general understanding of just what he was accomplishing by doing this, yet he never doubted that it must be done. The Dark Youth, the Intruder, had commanded it, though not in words.

On the other side of the little shrine, the old man let out one more yell: "Alexikakos, protect us now!"

Jeremy had only a few seconds, standing unsteadily upright in the village square, trying to mark every inhabitant with his gaze, before his bandit guardian, having settled with Ferrante and the Scholar for the moment, came screaming out to seize him by the collar and began to drag him back into the house by main force. But before Jeremy's captor had got him back to the door, the man abruptly let him go, so that the boy on his bound legs fell flat in the dusty village street.

And all this time the droning sound had been increasing steadily. No doubt about it now—it was very real, as physical, as a blow, and it was still rising.

The bandit who had been struggling with Jeremy heard it plainly now, in the same moment as did his fellows deployed elsewhere around the village. In that moment all of them abruptly realized that they might have worse things to worry about than some rebellious hostages.

The peculiar noise had now acquired such volume, such a murmurous insistence, that Jeremy could be absolutely sure it had objective reality outside his own head. All around him other faces, those of attackers and victims alike, were turning from side to side with puzzled expressions. No one was able to ignore it any longer.

If you have keen ears, you can sometimes hear the swarm-cloud coming half a mile away. Somehow he might have remembered that—though in Jeremy Redthorn's past there was nothing remotely like it.

And now truly the cloud of insects was dense enough for its shadow to darken the sun, casting a vague pool of shadow in advance of its swift approach.

Jeremy Redthorn's eyes had never seen the like before, and he sensed that a long, long time had passed since even the Intruder had seen the like. In flight the great bees of certain swarms made a peculiar, distinctive buzz-fluttering sound, and a whole swarm in the air generates a heavy roar.

For anyone who had much experience with the bees, it was easy to tell by the sound whether the swarm was angry or just on the move somewhere.

One insect landed close in front of Jeremy's eyes, on the central pedestal of the village shrine. In his left eye the small live body glowed with a vital fire.

Some of the bees producing special honey for these villagers had bodies half as long as a man's hand. Odylic bees, some product of what the legendary technofolk had done to life a thousand years ago or more. Others of the six-legged honeymakers were only half as long—but that would be quite large enough. Large, multifaceted eyes. All workers, these, and with ferocious stingers. Their wings snarled at the air, mere blurs, too fast for Jeremy's right eye to follow, although his left, moving in the same track, could catch detailed pictures. It seemed that nothing in nature ought to move as fast as those thin wings.

When Jeremy saw the first, isolated bee scout, it was easy to mistake its right-eye image for that of a hummingbird. But when he saw it through his left eye, there could be no mistake.

A moment later it had come down on a bandit's neck. And a moment after that, with a twitching of its posterior against his skin, it had done one of the things that a bee does best.

A large swarm of them, descending in their mindless anger, could rout any human army, inflicting heavy loss of life on any who tried to stand and fight. Protective clothing was of course possible, but ordinary military armor had so many chinks and gaps that it was practically useless.

And now the bees descended in their thousands, on all who were not marked with the Eye of Apollo. Jeremy, looking around him, thought not a single citizen of the village was being stung.

Suddenly the brigand nearest Jeremy bellowed and began making frantic thrashing motions with his arms.

The three rapists who had been coupling with the girl released her—they suddenly needed all their hands for something else— and she collapsed on the floor and crawled away, trying to pull the remnants of her clothing around her. But there were no bees on her body, not a single one, and she was no longer in need of the fragile protection clothes could give.

The three who had been her chief attackers displayed much greater energy, and the sounds that they were making grew even louder than before, even less human. One man, with the lower half of his clothing off, replaced with a breechclout of buzzing brown and blue, went out of the house through a window, two others through the door. Their limbs were all in frantic motion, legs springing in a useless and spasmodic dance, arms swatting in a frenzy, hands working without hope at the task of scraping, beating away, the droning, writhing layer of gauzy, speed-blurred wings and furry bodies, poison needles, and piercing sound that had now engulfed them. The men whose legs still functioned might have tried to run, except that now they could no longer see. Jeremy observed clearly the complete disappearance of one of the bandits' heads inside a clump, a knot, of angry bees. When the pink-white surface that had once been the man's face appeared again, his head was swollen beyond all recognition as a human part, the mouth all filled with foam.

The droning had now risen to what seemed a deafening volume. It was almost enough to drown the screams of men.

Few of the other bandits were any better off. Swords and battle hatchets and short spears were waving in a few hands, but to no avail. Jeremy observed more than one demonstration of the fact that an active man or woman could catch one of the insects in one hand and crush it or knock it out of the air with a brisk arm swing. Of course the human would almost certainly survive the painful sting of a single bee. But meanwhile three more bees, or a dozen, or a hundred would be stinging him. And Apollo's memory informed Jeremy, quite dispassionately, that ten or a dozen stings from the stock of these apiaries were very commonly enough to kill an adult human.

So far Jeremy had not been stung, and he knew, with perfect confidence, that he was not going to be. So he raised his bound hands before his face and began steadily worrying with his teeth at the cord fastening his wrists. Really he was very tired, much energy had been drained from him, and as soon as this was over (it ought not to take long now) he was going to have to rest.

The droning had reached a kind of plateau; it was no longer getting louder.

Now and then Jeremy glanced up toward the elevated statue in the shrine while around him the screaming voices grew even louder. It seemed to the boy for a moment that the faint smile had broadened on the stone lips of the shrine's awkward, almost ugly Apollo. One bee landed on the lichened head, then abruptly propelled itself away again. As if, Jeremy mused, it might have paused there briefly to deliver a message—or simply to acknowledge the image of its god.