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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 be-fore 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 con-sider new possibilities of fun.
Eventually he lay back and drifted into musing over what pow-ers the mask piece might have given him
that he hadn't even dis-covered yet.
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, Je-remy 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 con-centrating 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
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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 opera-tion, and this was much the same thing.
But... hiseye?
Of course, the eye endowed with such power didn't seem to be entirelyhis,Jeremy Redthorn's, any
longer.
In succeeding days, the traveler managed to feed himself rea-sonably well. Partly he succeeded by
helping himself to more fruit, both wild and cultivated. Strawberries were easy to find. Apples, peaches,
and cherries came from orchards along the shore, melons from a vine-strewn field. Jeremy's left eye
outlined for him, in subtle light, certain pathways, certain objects, indi-cating where the harvest would be
profitable. Several times he dared prowl close enough to houses to dig up carrots and pota-toes out of
kitchen gardens. Coming upon some wild grapes, Je-remy tried them, too, and enjoyed them, though
he'd thought he'd lost his taste for grapes of any kind long months ago. These had a sharply different
flavor from the special doomed-to-be-raisins variety that Uncle grew and of which the boy had hauled so
many loads.
But his special vision was of no help at all in gathering that which grew independent of cultivation.
Something there to think about but he didn't know what to think.
And in the nights that followed he repeated his feat of chicken stealing, several times, with growing
confidence and consistent success. Minor variation brought him a goose on one night, a turkey on
another. Soon starvation ceased to be a real fear, and so did watchdogs he might have had a whole
pack of them, eager to join him on his journey, had he wanted to encumber himself with such an escort.
Whenever he had sunlight or even when clouds were no worse than a light overcast, he could make a
fire. He tried bright moon-light once and thought he might have succeeded had he had the patience to
persist long enough.
During late afternoons, while he lay ashore waiting for darkness to bring what he hoped would be safe
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