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smoothly to a well-made dock, a mile outside the city walls, where a few other vessels of various types
were moored. One or two were large seagoing ships, the first that Jeremy Redthorn had ever laid eyes on.
And then the Argos was at the dock, with a small horde of deckhands and dockworkers working to make
her fast.
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo
THIRTEEN
An hour or so after disembarking from the Argos, Jeremy, his existence for the moment almost forgotten
by nobility and commoners alike, was standing on a hill overlooking the low buildings of the Academy,
which stretched for a couple of hundred yards along the harbor side of a long, narrow, curving peninsula.
He was alone, except for his permanent, silent companion.
Here Jeremy got his first look at the full ocean, the domain (so it was claimed by the Scholar and his
colleagues and others who took gods seriously) of Poseidon. Jeremy saw a gray and limitless expanse,
ending at an indeterminate horizon. Here his left-eye view was not much different than his right. Only an
occasional strange brilliant sparkle showed upon a wave. Nor did his left ear find anything worth
emphasizing in the rush and sigh of surf.
The dark shapes of seals and sea lions, awkward on the land, decorated the rocks and beaches, their
smooth bodies now and again lunging into the water or up out of it. Some were heavily mutated, their
species showing great individual variety. Another amazing sight for the country boy, and another in
which his left eye drew him no special pictures. And more gulls, in varieties of shape and color
suggesting hundreds of mutated subspecies, crying and clamoring above.
Though the Intruder did not seem particularly interested in the limitless expanse of sea and sky, Jeremy
Redthorn was. When the boy on the hilltop managed to tear his eyes away from the distant blue horizon,
the Academy struck him as a marvel, too, more striking as he got closer to it. The sprawling white
buildings, few of them taller than two stories, roofed with red tile and set amid gardens, connected by
paths of ground seashells, created an awe-inspiring impression in the mind of the country boy.
How old were most of these red-roofed, white stone buildings? Some only a few years, as Jeremy was
soon to discover; the Academy had undergone a notable expansion in recent times, as a direct result of
the new stirrings in the world of magic, the profession of odylic science. But a few of the structures at the
core of the establishment were very old, and of these one or two were of a vastly different style.
Here, new memories assured Jeremy Redthorn, were many men and women who considered themselves
learned in the business of the gods. At first it seemed to him impossible that here his special condition,
the presence of the Intruder, would not be quickly discovered.
But the Intruder did not seem particularly concerned.
Within a few hours of his arrival on the grounds of the Academy, Jeremy began to learn something about
how and when the institution had been founded. The only trouble was that his new memory strongly
suggested that the story as he now heard it was wrong in several details he wasn't going to dig to find
out.
When Jeremy at last found himself mingling, as a servant, with Arnobius's Academic colleagues, none of
them paid him much attention to the fact that Scholar Arnobius happened to have a new servant. They
took only momentary notice when he was pointed out to them by Arnobius, or by Carlotta, as a sharp-
eyed lad. The boy became an object of desultory interest, but only in a distinctly minor way.
Very soon after his arrival, Jeremy was taken in charge by a female housekeeper, an overseer of the staff
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo
who tended the many Academic lodgings on campus. To this woman Arnobius, his mind as usual
engaged somewhere in the lofty realms of philosophy, gave a few careless words of instruction regarding
his new personal attendant.
Plainly horrified by the appearance of her new charge, still wearing an ill-fitting rower's uniform and by
her standards far from sufficiently clean, the housekeeper snorted and turned away, gesturing imperiously
for him to follow her. She led Jeremy down seemingly endless flights of stairs in a narrow passage
between gray walls. On a lower level they emerged into a kind of barracks, evidently for male civilian
workers. Here she commanded him to bathe the barracks boasted showers with hot running water, the
first that Jeremy Redthorn had ever seen.
Gratefully he took advantage of the opportunity and afterward in clean clothes was sent to have his hair
cut even shorter than his own rude trim had left it, evidently the accepted style for servants in these parts.
At the barbershop he appeared wearing new sandals and the white trousers and jacket of the low-ranked
support staff. Undergarments had been provided also, and care was actually taken to see that the clothes
fit him. His jacket was marked with colored threads that, he was given to understand, marked him as an
Academician's personal servant. Catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he could see that his
appearance had been considerably transformed.
"Will you need a razor, Jonathan?" The chief housekeeper frowned, inspecting Jeremy's smooth cheeks.
"No, not yet." With a final look around she left him in the barbershop.
It was a well-lit, serviceable room that, as Jeremy later discovered, occasionally served as a surgery for
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