Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 04 - God of the Golden Fleece

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2024-12-23 0 0 887.16KB 391 页 5.9玖币
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God of the Golden Fleece
Fred Saberhagen
ONE
Proteus
The winning end of a bitter and deadly struggle brought him up thrashing and
splashing in salt water, stumbling waist-deep through the warm sea, emerging
under a clear sky from which the light of sunset was fading fast. Leftover rage
and fear poured fierce energy through his veins, but the memory of the disaster
that he had just survived was fading faster than the sunset. Something had hit
him in the head, and only fragments of what had just happened were still clear
in his mind.
He had a vivid memory of a head as big as a farm wagon, two arms the size of
massive trees, mounted on shoulders to match. One of the sea-going type of
Giants, almost human above the waist in shape if not in size; but from the hips
down, no real legs, only a pair of huge, twisting fish-tails, ending in
something like whale-flukes instead of feet. The thing would never be able to
walk properly, but it sure as all the hells could swim.
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He had been on a ship, and the Giant had come swimming after it like a whale,
bent on destruction. The deck and hull crushed in by blows from those tree-trunk
arms, the vessel capsized, and everyone aboard had gone into the deep blue sea.
He couldn't remember how he had got away, but here he was. Now if only his head
would cease to hurt . . .
When the Giant had reared up out of the sea, throwing everyone into a panic, the
ship had been carrying its passengers to . . .
The survivor began to feel a new terror now, subtler than the fear of Giants,
but equally unpleasant. It came with the realization that he could no longer
remember why he had been aboard the ship, or where it had been taking him.
Or even who he was.
Start again. When the vessel broke up, when the monster sent it to the bottom .
. .
No, start yet again. He was going to have to start much earlier than that. But
he could not. Because he could not even remember who he was.
The man who waded might have broken out in a cold sweat, but it was hard to
tell, when every inch of his skin was already soaked by the Great Sea. He could
find not a single scrap of memory before his presence on that doomed ship. So,
start with the ship, and try to work from that.
He could recall only a few more details, all trivial. Besides one or two clear
images of the attacking Giant, there were only some additional colors, shapes,
certain ugly noises . . .
The left side of the man's head, where his exploring fingers now discovered an
aching lump, still throbbed from the savage impact of something hard. Turning to
look backward as he moved, even as his feet kept taking him toward the land, he
scanned the empty watery horizon in the direction opposite the sunset. Night was
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gathering out there, and stars were beginning to appear over the endless sea.
Darkness was advancing from the east, but nothing else. There were no monsters
in pursuit.
It was horrible that he could not remember where he had been going. Or why he
had been on the ship. Or who he was . . .
A helpless groan came welling up, and the wader had to fight down panic. It
seemed that virtually a whole lifetime had been swept away.
There was almost nothing left of himself at all, no solid identity anywhere. Who
was he? What was he doing here, in what looked like and felt like, and so had to
be, the middle of the Great Sea? There ought to be, there had to be, more to him
than this, a naked wading body with an aching, almost empty head, laboring under
a burden of fear and rage, a terror that wanted to hit back with murderous fury.
Damn the Giant! Could a man's whole self be erased by one medium-hard knock on
the head?
Turning his back again on the empty, darkening east, he kept on trudging
shoreward in the gentle surf. He was praying now, to every god and goddess he
could think of, that his memories, his vanished life, would suddenly come back
to him—and it had better happen soon. There were two small fires on the beach
some sixty or seventy yards ahead, and a beached ship, with people milling
around, and instinct warned him that before he met those folk, whoever they
were, he had better have some idea of who he was and what he was doing in the
world.
Looking down at himself, he realized that he was wearing nothing that might
provide a clue to his identity, carrying nothing—not even a ring on a finger or
in an ear. Not even an amulet hung around his muscular neck. The man paused in
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his wading, suddenly puzzled by his utter and complete nakedness. It was as if
he had just left his clothing on a beach somewhere and gone in for a casual
swim.
All this time he had been making steady progress toward the shore. Now the
gentle waves surged up no higher than the wader's thighs, and every step forward
raised him another inch on the sandy bottom's shallow slope. When his thick
brown hair and beard had shed their weight of water they would be curly, but
right now they were still almost straight, streaming and dribbling little
threads of ocean. The unclad body gradually revealed as the water shallowed was
no bigger than average, and looked to be in its youthful prime, no more than
thirty years of age, strong and slightly rounded toward chubbiness.
Again he looked back into the darkening east, this time over one shoulder, as he
kept wading forward. But still there was only watery emptiness to see, shrouded
in advancing night.
What kind of reception he might get from the people on the beach ahead he could
not guess. But he had nowhere else to go.
What had he been doing on that boat or ship, just before he was almost killed?
It seemed unbearable that he did not know. Going somewhere, trying to accomplish
something terribly important, yes . . .
A certain great purpose, having some connection with a ship, yes, that was it!
Not the vessel whose sinking had almost taken him down with it, but a totally
different one. With a flash of disproportionate relief he realized that the ship
he had been trying to find was doubtless the very one drawn up on the beach
ahead.
Eagerly, now, the man emerging from the sea pressed on. The careened vessel was
a new-looking bireme, lean and straight, and big enough to carry forty oars, two
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banks on each side. The new wood of her hull, except for the spots where it was
brightly painted, glowed almost golden in fading sunset light.
One more slender shard of memory fell into place. It was a woman who had imbued
him with the sense of purpose, maybe given him his orders—it might have been as
simple and direct as that.
It was a blessed relief to feel that things were at least starting to come back.
But what exactly the nameless woman had been trying to get him to do remained a
mystery. Whoever she was, the man could almost see her face in memory, almost
hear her exact words—almost, but not quite.
Still he kept wading forward almost automatically, toward the beached ship and
the men around her, a sizable group on a long shoreline otherwise deserted.
It looked a pleasant enough place, and the wader somehow assumed it was an
island, rather than a mainland shore. Bathed now in fading sunset light were
green palm trees, pelicans, and other signs of peaceful nature . . . all
reassuring. One last time he looked back over his left shoulder, seeing only the
straight line of the horizon, and the gathering of night. The Giant that had
almost killed him was evidently miles away by now.
His rage and fear were not gone, far from it, but now they had subsided, enough
to be kept out of sight. Now he was close enough to see, in declining sunlight,
the name on the ship's prow, above the painted, staring eye. And the word when
he could see it—Argo—made a connection, established a faint link with all the
memories that he had almost lost.
Overhead a gull was screaming, as if in derision, finding rich amusement in the
way the world went on, how human beings and others managed their affairs. The
Argo was long and narrow, the outer row of seats on each side slightly raised.
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The central deck, barely wide enough for two human bodies to edge past each
other, was raised a little higher still, so the two inboard rows of oarsmen
would actually sit beneath it, less exposed to sun and rain. In the middle of
that raised deck would be a hole to hold a mast, whose foot would nestle snugly
in a notch in the bottom planks below. And in fact a suitably long pole had been
unstepped and laid aside, and a new-looking linen sail more or less neatly
furled. No one was now aboard the ship, which rested tilted sharply sideways on
the sand.
Every line of the long ship breathed adventure, and the man approaching could
see a great, challenging, staring eye, blue with a white rim, and a thin black
outline surrounding that, bigger than his whole head, painted on the near side
of the prow, just forward of the name. The other side, of course, would bear
another symmetrically positioned eye.
Right now the oars had all been shipped aboard. There was every indication that
the rowers were all finished with their labors for the day. Half of them were
swimming and plunging naked in the shallow water, mock-fighting with splashes
like small boys, uttering rowdy yells, washing away the day's heat and the sweat
of rowing. Their bodies were of all human colors, from tropical black to
sunburnt blond, except that none of them were old. No gray hair was immediately
visible.
The remaining half were up on shore, some clad and some not, mainly clustered
around a couple of brisk small fires, from which a smell of roasting meat came
wafting out to sea. A meal was in the middle stages of preparation. Someone had
been butchering small animals on the beach, and had started the process of
tidying up, bundling bones and offal and fat together, into packages that would
soon be burned as offerings to certain gods. Meanwhile the humans as always were
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claiming the good meat as their share, a state of affairs to which no god ever
seemed to raise objection.
It was hard to tell if any of the men up on the beach were servants; certainly
none of them, at the moment, were wearing the fine robes of aristocrats. There
were no women or children anywhere in sight, but plenty of weapons, a good
variety of spears and bows and swords; it seemed a very military kind of
expedition, or maybe a band of high-class pirates. The man just arriving felt a
soothing, baseless certainty that he had come to the right place.
What now? It seemed to him that there was one man in particular he ought to
find. The woman responsible for his being here had told him—had practically
commanded him—something . . .
And as the newcomer drew ever closer to the gathering, he saw what he had
somehow expected, that this was no crew of ordinary sailors. Youth and health
and strength were everywhere, along with a kind of inborn arrogance. There was
not a single metal slave-collar to be seen, though more than a few magic amulets
hung on slender chains around muscled necks. Where scars showed on the hard
bodies, they suggested the impact of weapons or claws rather than the lash.
A couple of men had turned now and were watching with interest the newcomer's
arrival. But neither of them was the one man he had really come here to find.
Another of those ahead, standing waist-deep in the water at the center of a
small circle of attention, had an air of leadership. For one thing he was very
tall, and a kind of dominance showed in him, even in this superior company, even
unclothed as he was. The newcomer changed the course of his steady, splashing
advance to head directly toward this individual.
When the tall man turned his head to look in his direction, the man from the sea
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stopped a few feet away and said in a clear, determined voice: "Sir, if you are
the famous Jason, captain of the Argo, I have been sent to join you." The name
had popped into his head at the precise instant when he had to have it.
The leader's whole head seemed a dark, luxuriant mass of hair and beard. The
closer the newcomer got to him, the stronger his arms and shoulders looked. He
said: "My name is Jason." The dark eyes studied the man before him with
fatalistic calm. The voice was mild but authoritative. "Where do you come from?"
The nameless stranger had lost his own identity, but he still knew who Jason
was. He thought that name would mean something to almost everyone in the world.
It was a relief to discover that certain parts of his memory were still intact,
things a man would have to know about to function in the world. Jason's fame as
a warrior, and particularly as the heroic slayer of the Calydonian boar, had
spread swiftly during the last few years. It had been no trouble at all for
Jason to recruit forty volunteer adventurers to accompany him on a special
quest, even if they had no certainty of what its object was. As soon as the word
spread that he was undertaking a great adventure and wanted followers, hundreds
of men had come from everywhere, seemingly from every corner of the earth,
certainly from as far away as the news had had time to travel. Very few were
accepted, of those who applied without a special invitation.
"Out of the sea, Lord Jason."
The leader's voice was still mild. "No need to address me as if I were royalty.
I do not—yet—sit on a throne or wear a crown. And I suppose, from the way you
look and the manner of your arrival, that you have some tale to tell of
shipwreck?" Suddenly Jason's tone became more casual, less interested, as a new
thought struck him. "Were you sent to us as a servant? Our original plan was to
have several attendants meet us on this island. But I sent word many days ago to
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cancel that arrangement. What's your name?"
"Proteus." This answer, too, came automatically, for which the man who gave it
was deeply thankful; he took the timely access of memory as a hopeful sign that
other essential facts might come popping back as soon as they were absolutely
needed. Immediately his aching head began to feel better.
Jason was looking directly at him, but still Proteus had the feeling that the
leader was giving him only a fraction of his attention. The big man said, as if
he did not much care: "I don't remember anyone of that name applying to join my
company. Then you are one of the servants who were originally to meet us here?"
Up on the beach, one of the young men had picked up a conch shell and was trying
to blow it, just for fun. But he had no idea of how to do it properly, and was
producing an ungodly noise, making Proteus uncomfortable.
Before he was forced to find an answer for Jason's question, another tall youth
came splashing up to the leader and started talking to him about someone called
Hercules, who, it seemed, had been a member of the company of Argonauts when
they began their voyage a few days ago. Proteus, still distracted by his own
secret problems, had some trouble making out just what the difficulty was now.
As nearly as he could tell, this fellow Hercules and his nephew, named Enkidu,
had been somehow stranded yesterday, left behind either by accident or design,
when the Argo had put in along the shores of the river Chius, in the land of
Mysia.
Other members of the crew of Heroes were now listening in, even as they boyishly
traded splashes or just stood around nearby. Some of these made comments
indicating they hadn't realized that two of their shipmates had been missing for
a day. Evidently, out of this group of some forty young men, many were still
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largely unknown to one another, though they had been crammed together on a ship
for several days.
Meanwhile, Proteus felt a growing certainty that the purpose, the compulsion,
that had brought him here required, as a next step, that he find some way to
join this noble crew. She, the nearly-forgotten but commanding woman, must have
ordered him to join the Argonauts. More and more Proteus wanted to know just who
that woman was, what had made her think she had a right to order him around.
Also he wanted to find out why he felt it necessary to obey—he would be almost
afraid to know the answer to that one.
Meanwhile, he was going to do his damnedest to keep secret his weakness, the
fact of his ruined memory. Once he admitted that, why would they believe him
about anything? And Jason and his crew must not know why he was here. Because it
was a matter of life and death, that someone should not find that out . . . come
to think of it, it was the nameless woman who had commanded secrecy. With an
inward sigh Proteus acknowledged to himself that whatever secret she wanted kept
was safe enough for the time being, since he himself could not remember what it
was.
And then he was brought back, with a start, to his immediate situation. Jason
had just said something that required a response, and was looking at him
expectantly.
"I would like to know," repeated the leader, in a tone of patient tolerance,
"just what happened to the boat? The one that must have brought you somewhere
near this island?"
That question he could answer. "A Giant came up out of the sea, and broke it
into bits. I fear that no one else survived."
Naturally enough, this produced immediate consternation among the men who heard
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摘要：

GodoftheGoldenFleece FredSaberhagen    ONE   ProteusThewinningendofabitteranddeadlystrugglebroughthimupthrashingandsplashinginsaltwater,stumblingwaist-deepthroughthewarmsea,emergingunderaclearskyfromwhichthelightofsunsetwasfadingfast.Leftoverrageandfearpouredfierceenergythroughhisveins,butthememoryo...

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