The Gorgon's Blood Solution (14 page)

“Wait!” Marco called out, causing her to stop.  “Can I take the book from the library to read at the cabin?” he asked.

Albany pursed her lips in a look of disapproval.  “I suppose so,” she agreed, and diverted up a side road towards the library.

An hour later the two of them were all alone, miles out of town, following a narrow trail that ran atop a short cliff that looked out over the rocky shoreline below.  Marco constantly shifted his gaze between the footing of the trail, and the water of the sea just off-shore, searching for any sign of Kreewhite.  They walked on without talking for another two hours, until a cottage and a small barn came into view in a green valley that led down to the beach below.

“Here it is,” Albany said.  “You take the cottage, and I’ll take the barn.  You stay in the cottage or you go watch the sea, but don’t do anything else,” she warned him.

“I understand,” he agreed with a sigh.  They parted, and he entered the cottage, where he placed his supplies on a table in the front room, and spread his blankets over a plain wooden bed frame in the back room.  He pulled the book of alchemy out of the blankets, and took it with him out in front of the cottage, where he sat down and held the book in his lap. 

He alternated his attention between staring out at the sea and reading the book.  The formulae within the volume were fascinating, and were growing in fascination to him.  He read of cures and remedies for ailments that were both widespread and rare, and he devoured page after page of information, finding to his surprise that the things he read stuck inside his head with the greatest of ease.

When the sun started to set, he put the book aside and walked down to the beach.  The sun was setting to the west, off to his right, and the sea was sending long, rolling waves up onto the rocks and sand of the beach front.  He stood and looked out for the longest time, as the sun went down and darkness succeeded the brilliant colors of the sunset, and he thought about the likelihood that he wasn’t going to spot his merboy friend, that Kreewhite and he were unlikely to find one another.

When he returned to his cottage he could faintly detect Albany also returning to her shelter, and he longed for her to say something, to let him know that they could still communicate.  She was in some ways already a mother-like figure in his eyes, and it hurt to be so completely cut off from her.

He sat in the darkness and ate a small meal of foodstuffs from his bag, then lay in his cot and fell into a troubled sleep, filled with dreams of being stranded and chased around the island full of women forever.

The next day, Marco took his book and went down to the beach again.  He read and studied the waterfront all morning, under the watchful eye of Albany.  In the afternoon he left the book in his cottage and began to walk along the beach, looking out at the blue sea.  As he followed the landscape up onto bluffs that looked down at the water, he could see patches of lighter and darker blue in the waters closest to the island, and he could watch the shadows of small clouds go racing across the surface of the water.  But he saw no sign of Kreewhite that afternoon as he walked miles along the waterfront, and then miles back, followed by Albany the whole time.

That night, Marco slept.  It was a disturbed sleep, interrupted by dreams all night long, and he remembered the dreams when he awoke.  He dreamed of alchemy; he dreamed of himself mixing the various formulae he had read about from the great book on the isle.  He dreamed of the elements he mixed together; he dreamed of the patients and customers coming to a shop and asking for him to tend to their needs.  He dreamed of going places to procure exotic ingredients, and he even dreamed of going through purification rituals with customers to prepare them for the cures he sold to them.

When he awoke, Marco was bleary-eyed from his troubled slumber.  He walked along the seashore in the morning, heading back in the direction of the village, until Albany spoke to him to tell him to go no closer to the society of women.  He turned and returned to the cottage, where he took up the book once again, and finished devouring the final pages of its elaborate last compounds and compositions while he sat on the beach in the afternoon.

When he was done with the book, he closed it carefully and let it sit in his lap as he closed his eyes and tried to comprehend all the information and implications of the things he had read.  It was a staggering collection of cures for problems that affected people around the world, he was sure, and he was astonished to think that it all had been learned, and written down, then grown to be unknown and lost information.  The knowledge was swirling in his head, seeking to escape, to be put into action.

There was a sudden flash of light, a searingly brilliant flaring that made him wince and close his eyes, then there was a burning sensation on the front of his shoulder.  He pressed his hand over the painful spot, and felt a rough texture in the location.  The bright light that shone with reddish intensity through his eyelids dimmed immediately, and when he opened his eyes the light was gone.  He sat blindly for many long seconds, until his eyes gradually adjusted to the ambient light.  There was a dark patch on the front of his shoulder, right where the pain had been, but in looking at it Marco could detect no clear pattern, just a small tangle of bloody lines tracing across his skin, not far from his heart.

“You are marked as my champion,” a voice told him, and then it said no more.  It was the voice from the caverns, he was sure.  He sat still and listened but no further communications came immediately, and when they did, he could tell it was from a more worldly source.

“Marco!” he heard his name faintly called.

‘Marco!” the voice was familiar; it made his heart beat fast, and he opened his eyes.

Out among the sparkling waves he saw a dark spot, and he could vaguely see the motion of an arm waving above the water’s surface.

“Kreewhite?” he shouted, as he hastily removed the book from his lap and stood up.  He shaded his eyes and stared, then started to run out across the stones on the beach, and began to splash through the water.

“Marco?” he heard Albany’s voice call faintly from somewhere behind him, from her spot upon the island’s dunes from which she had watched him.

“Kreewhite!” he was up to his waist in the cool water, and his friend was waiting for him only a few feet further out.  As the water rose to the middle of his chest, the two of them embraced joyfully.

“I’m so glad to find you!” Kreewhite shouted as he wrapped his arms around his friend, who bobbed slightly in the water.

“I didn’t expect I’d ever see you again,” Marco said at the same time.  “How are you?”

“I’m good; I’m fine.  How are you?  You seem to be healthy and healed; you look better than before,” the merboy spoke.

“I am – I’m all healed,” Marco agreed.  “When I started climbing up into that cave, it took me through a magical healing pool.  I kept climbing for hours, and I came out up there,” he turned and pointed, “on the top of the mountain.

“This island is full of women, nothing but women,” he explained.

“Nothing wrong with that, is there?” Kreewhite asked with a wolfish grin.

“You wouldn’t think so, but they say it’s against the law for a man to be on the island.  A couple of them tried to kill me.  They’re going to exile me from the island tomorrow unless you take me away to your home,” Marco said holding joyfully onto Kreewhite’s arms.

“I can’t Marco,” the merboy said abruptly, a sober look on his face.

“After I couldn’t find you, I went in search of my village to seek help.  When I found them yesterday, they said I couldn’t bring a human back to our home if he already was safe on land.  And I had told them that you were safe on an island,” Kreewhite told him.

“I could carry you across the water, the way I did to bring you here, if you want me to take you someplace, but I can’t take you home to my people,” he told his friend, as his eyes searched Marco’s face carefully.

Marco’s face went blank momentarily.  “It’s okay.  That will be okay,” Marco assured his friend.  “The women say there’s a ship coming tomorrow, and it can take me away to a human city somewhere.  I’d rather be with you,” he said, “but I’m going to be okay, I hope.”

“Are you sure?” Kreewhite asked.  “I can carry you, or I can follow your ship and help you,” he offered.

“No, you’ve already saved my life,” the boy assured the merboy.  “I’ll be fine.  But I’ll miss you.  I had hoped that we’d be able to spend some time together again.”  He felt disappointed, but also a sense of fate – he knew now that he would allow the women of the isle to put him down in some city somewhere, and let him go on with living.

“You can call me if you need me!” Kreewhite said excitedly.

“How can I do that?” Marco asked in astonishment.  “Are you going to follow me?”

“No, but you can tell the dolphins, and they can tell me,” Kreewhite answered.

The look of disbelief on Marco’s face was profound.

“There are almost always dolphins around.  There are lots of them, they like people, and they’re kind of nosy,” Kreewhite explained.  “We can talk to them, sort of the way you talk to animals on land, but the dolphins can talk back to us,” the merboy continued.  “I can teach you a couple of phrases to tell the dolphins, and then they’ll come find me.”

“Really?  You’re not making this up?” Marco asked in astonished delight.  The whole notion of using dolphins to send messages to merpeople was astounding.

“I am not making this up,” Kreewhite affirmed.  “Here’s what you do; you put your face down in the water, then you repeat these words,” he demonstrated by loudly uttering a series of grunts, squeaks, and moans underwater.

“Now you try,” he urged.

“Would you repeat those sounds?” Marco plaintively asked, and tried to listen to the short sequence that Kreewhite repeated.

As he repeated the sounds for a third time, a trio of fins came rushing through the water rapidly towards them, then began to circle immediately around them, as the dolphins clicked and squealed in an endless stream of sound.  Kreewhite put his face into the water and made a responding series of noises.

One dolphin gave a single squeak, and then the trio grew silent, and floated motionlessly next to Kreewhite.  Marco could see their dark eyes focused on the face of the merboy, which remained underwater.

Kreewhite raised his face.  “They are astonished, but they love this idea.  Go ahead and try making your call,” he commanded.

Unable to believe what was happening, Marco lowered his face into the water, and even in the salty water he kept his eyes open, observing the dolphins close-by as he began to squeak and click and grunt his message.  When he finished he raised his face out of the water and looked at Kreewhite hopefully, as the dolphins suddenly began swimming in a rapid circle around them and splashed their flippers.

“That wasn’t bad.  You told them that their mothers were dogfishes and that they live in coral reefs.  It was pretty close for a first try at speaking their language.  They’re laughing hysterically right now,” the merboy said with a grin.

“Let me try it again.  Teach me the sounds,” Marco urged.

“This is the first part,” Kreewhite broke it down, giving a long squeak and a grunt.  “That tells them you’re calling any dolphin.

“This part,” he clicked, squealed, then doubled-clicked his tongue, “tells them you are a friend of the merpeople.”  Kreewhite proceeded to breakdown the message further, helping Macro to reconstruct it piece by piece.

Minutes later, Marco finished practicing the phrase in the air.  He stuck his face back in the water, and uttered the careful collection of sounds.  The dolphins paused in their circling and floated in the water close to the boy and the merboy.  When Marco finished the experiment, one of the dolphins came over and pressed its snout against his face, and moments later another one surprised him by swimming from behind him and passing between his legs.

Marco raised his face, and saw that Kreewhite was grinning at him.  “You did very well!  Even with your accent, the dolphins and I understood you perfectly!  They want to take you swimming to celebrate.”

“Marco!” he heard Albany’s voice call from the shore, and he saw that the guard was walked down to the very edge of the water.  “Marco!  Is that what I think?”

“Let’s go swimming,” Marco said in a low voice to Kreewhite.

“This is my friend, Albany.  We’re going to go for a swim; I’ll be back in a little while,” he said then turned his back to the shore and flopped forward into the water.

Two dolphins immediately took up positions on either side of him, and slipped themselves under his arms, so that he grabbed hold of their fins, and began to fly through the water as they glided along the surface.

“Marco!” he faintly heard Albany’s voice one more time, and then his group was too far out to sea to hear any more.

Kreewhite was swimming alongside, and he made a quick squeak that caused the small squadron to veer rapidly to the left.  They began to pass along parallel to the shoreline, the dolphins keeping Marco mostly above the surface of the sea, occasionally dipping him underneath.  It was exhilarating!  Marco felt alive, as the spray of the water dashed across his face, and the sea breeze made his wet clothes flap.

He looked at the shore and saw the high cliffs that he remembered had housed the entrance to the cave that he and Kreewhite had entered four nights earlier.  “Can we go over there?  Can we go see the cave again?” he shouted to his friend.