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until some hours of sunlight had dried things out.
Fumbling and cursing, Jeremy at last gave up the futile attempt to strike a
spark. Then he squinted as the first direct rays of sunlight came striking in
over the water to hit him in the face.
Fire? You want fire? Plenty of it, right there in the sky . . . if only it
might be possible to borrow just a little of that
. . . if only he had a burning glass.
A moment later, when he looked down at the wood and tinder in front of him, he
was startled. Suddenly his left eye had begun to show him a small, bright
spot, like a sharp reflection of the sun, right on a piece of kindling. At
last the boy cautiously reached out a hand and touched the spot. He could feel
nothing there but the dull, unreflective wood . . . except that the wood felt
warm!
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo
This called for investigation.
Jeremy soon discovered that when he sat with his face in direct sunlight and
squinted down at an angle, focusing the gaze of his left eye on the tinder he
had arranged, a spark of white light flared at the spot he'd picked. When he
maintained the direction of his gaze for half a minute, the white light began
to generate a small orange glow that he could see with both eyes. A wisp of
whitish smoke arose.
And presently, having added some more of the dampish twigs and grass and wood,
he had a real fire, one hot enough to dry more stuff for it to burn and big
enough to roast his chicken, after he'd impaled it on a green stick. Carefully
he kept turning the fowl around, and soon delicious smells arose. In his
hunger, he began tearing off and eating pieces of meat before the whole bird
was cooked.
When he had satisfied his belly for the time being, Jeremy tried again to
raise fire from the sun, just for the hell of it and got the same result.
Nothing to it. Now the feat was even easier than before maybe, he supposed,
because the sun was getting higher in the sky and hotter.
Having thrown chicken bones, feathers, and offal into the river, he sat
picking his teeth with a splinter and thinking about it while he watched the
fire that he had made in wood die down. By all the gods! It just beat anything
that he had ever seen. He had been given magic in his eye, all right.
For the first time in what seemed years, Jeremy began to consider new
possibilities of fun.
Eventually he lay back and drifted into musing over what powers the mask piece
might have given him that he hadn't even discovered yet.
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Of course there were nagging questions, too. Why would a chicken and a dog be
compelled to listen to him, to do what he wanted, when a fish in the river was
not? But the questions were not enough to keep him from dozing off into a
delicious sleep.
His journey went on, day by day. And still, by day and night, though not so
frequently now as at the beginning of his flight, Jeremy anxiously looked
upstream for pursuing boats and scanned the sky for furies. Eventually the
idea at least crossed Jeremy's mind of someday trying to burn a fury out of
the sky by concentrating sun glare fatally upon it. Only in dreams could he or
the Dark Youth summon up strength enough to wring their necks, but it would
give him great satisfaction, in waking life, to at least mark some of those
great gray wings with smoking spots of pain, send them in screaming flight
over the horizon. But as a practical matter he had to admit that the damned
things would never hold still long enough for him to do that. Such fire
raising as he could do now with his eye was a slow process.
On a couple of occasions he'd seen a burning-glass in operation, and this was
much the same thing. But . .
. his eye?
Of course, the eye endowed with such power didn't seem to be entirely his,
Jeremy Redthorn's, any longer.
In succeeding days, the traveler managed to feed himself reasonably well.
Partly he succeeded by helping himself to more fruit, both wild and
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