The Gorgon's Blood Solution (19 page)

After his swim, he climbed back to his room and brought his blankets out onto the roof again.  He was careful to keep at least a sheet wrapped around himself, much to Mirra’s approval and amusement, for she continued to come up to his room to awaken him every morning.

When she awoke him the next morning, he jumped in startlement, a bad dream about a woman murdered by the ill-intended man interrupted by her touch on his shoulder, and he sat straight up immediately.

“Goodness!” she leaned hurriedly back into the window.   “Is everything okay?” she asked.

Marco looked around, wide-eyed, trying to reconcile the dream and the reality of the morning.  “Yes,” he murmured.  “Everything is fine.  Is breakfast ready?”

“As ready as it can be,” the cook affirmed, and then left him.

Marco waved over at the two women who watched him through their window every morning, and they shyly waved back, then disappeared from view, and he went downstairs to start his day.

“Gabrielle says that you’re going to save another life today,” Mirra commented as she placed a plate of food before him at the kitchen table.

“It’s true,” Gabrielle added.  “You’re going to save someone’s life, there’s no doubt.

“But he’ll be angry with you.  He’ll come after you when it doesn’t work,” she reminded him.

“I won’t charge him anything if it doesn’t work, so he won’t have lost anything.  And if he goes to someone else to get a philter, she’ll be protected from that by the potion we’ve given her already,” Marco grinned at how beautifully the whole plot seemed to work.

“My boy, Marches would be proud of you,” Gabrielle said.

“Who is this man?” Mirra asked from across the kitchen as she began to clean the dishes.

“Greystone,” Gabrielle answered.

There was a clattering sound, as Mirra dropped a bowl.  Both Gabrielle and Marco looked up in surprise at the slip by the usually sure-handed cook.

“Sorry.  I know him,” Mirra explained awkwardly as she bent to pick up the dish.

In a flash of insight, Marco realized an extraordinary coincidence.

“Is he?” he started to ask, then stopped himself.

Mirra looked at him, then looked over at where Sybele slept in her basket, and nodded her head.

Marco’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.  He lowered his head to resume eating his food, thinking furiously, knowing that the particulars were none of his business, but wondering how the gentle girl who fixed his food had come to be in such circumstances.  He’d never asked the girl about Sybele’s father, never given it any thought, or had any questions about Mirra’s relationships or home or anything else.  It suddenly struck him that he should know something more about the girl as a person, and he wondered why he had never asked her anything.

Marco finished his meal silently, then excused himself and went to the work room, where he began looking through the long shelves of
supplies, wondering if he had everything that one of the old formulae called for.  He had taken Mirra for granted, and he felt a sudden wish to do something for her as a person, not just for her his household cook, or as the mother of the baby he had helped to save.

He searched for the items he wanted, until he heard the door to the shop open and close, and he realized that Mirra had already left the shop.

“Is she gone?” he hurriedly asked Gabrielle as he rushed to the front of the shop.  The land lady was opening the windows and doors to start the day.

“Who?  Mirra?  Yes, she and Sybele are on their way,” the owner affirmed.  “She seemed in a bit of a hurry to be on her way.”

A customer entered the store, having apparently waited for the door to open, and soon Marco was promising to create and deliver an ointment to restore old leather to a “good-as-new shape.”

He returned to the workshop.  The leather restorer was curiously akin to the other project he had thought about starting to work on that morning, and he already had some elements out that were common to both lotions, so he began mixing the items together, until Gabrielle came and knocked on the door.

“Greystone is here,” she said shortly.

Marco led her out to the front of the store.  “Here’s the hair you wanted,” the man said without any preliminary conversation.  He held a few strands of long red hair between his thumb and finger.

“I’ll be right back,” Marco promised.  He took the hair back to the workroom and sat down.  He didn’t really need the girl’s hair for his treatment – he had simply asked for it when he had been stalling during their first encounter, trying to figure out how best to avoid helping Greystone.  He sat and waited three minutes, long enough to seem to have done something, then he picked up the small stone jar he had filled with the protective liquid, and took it back to the front.

“Make the girl drink this,” he instructed.  “Pour it in her soup, or over her dinner, or any other way you want to serve it to her,” he handed it over to Greystone.  “When she falls in love with you, bring the money back here and everything will be settled.”

“And if she doesn’t love me because of this, I owe you nothing?” Greystone asked, as he clutched the jar.  “I think it’s a fine way to do business.”  He turned and left the shop, and Gabrielle turned to Marco.

“You’ve just done one woman a great favor,” Gabrielle told Marco.  “I wish you could do the same for every other woman in the city.”

Marco smiled a sad smile, then went back to the workshop, and returned to working on the lotion intended to be rubbed on the leather that their recent customer wanted to save.  By early afternoon it was finished, and he then devoted hours of work to the other lotion, the one meant for Mirra, and worked through to the evening.  He wondered if he should ask Gabrielle; he was using the supplies she owned after all, but a part of him whispered that whatever he was doing for Mirra should be kept private between the two of them, and so he didn’t bring it up.

The next morning, Mirra came to awaken him.  He had slept in his room instead of on the roof, due to the threat of rain.  He caught her hand after she reached over to prod his shoulder, and he looked at her.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said with a quiet dignity.

“It’s not that,” he said.  “It’s something else.  I have a potion I made, just for you, to rub on your face,” he told her as he pulled the small, stoppered jar from under his bed.  His hands pressed her hair away from her face, revealing all the features she worked so hard to hide.  He opened the jar and dabbed some of the contents on his finger, then sat up higher and gently rubbed it over her cheeks.  He dabbed another fingertip, as she sat in stonelike rigid silence, and r
ubbed it across her forehead, and the bridge of her nose, then took a third dip and traced his fingers down her throat, behind her ears, and his fingers began to unintentionally slip inside the neckline of her dress to reach the blemishes that extended below his sight.  She gave a shudder, and her hand tentatively reached up.

“Please, don’t,” she asked in a begging tone, mistaking his intentions.

“Here, you take it and use it twice a day,” he told her as he removed his fingers from her flesh, and handed her the jar of lotion.

She took it without comment and then left the room, leaving before Marco explained the lotion, and unsure of whether she intended to use the gift or not.

Greystone returned to the shop later that morning.  “I gave her the potion and nothing happened,” he said with barely controlled anger.

“Marches always told me that these potions take two or three days to fully work,” Gabrielle spoke up.  “I wondered sometimes if he had given me a potion to make me love him.  I was teasing him of course, but he always insisted that he hadn’t.”

“The other alchemist said that his potion would take effect immediately,” Greystone responded.

“If you want to spend your money on them, go ahead,” Marco told him.  “But otherwise wait until ours has a chance.”

The man stalked out of the store, angry, but too frugal to pay for immediate satisfaction.  “Did Marches say that philters take that long to work?” Marco turned to Gabrielle.

“No, not really,” she answered.  “But I thought we might as well put that nasty man off for as long as we can,” she gave him a prim little smile.

“There’s something else we need to do,” she told him.  She removed her small, old-fashioned purse from her belt, and took out several silvers.  “I’m not sure what the terms of our agreement were, but I know that you have earned every last pinch of these coins.  Take them as your wages for the past week,” she laid the coins on the counter.

It was a great deal of money to Marco, more than he had ever received at once in his life.  “I don’t know if you owe me all that much,” he protested, making no move to pick up the coins.

“I owe you more than that,” Gabrielle answered.  “You’ve been fair and kind to the people who come here.  You’ve stopped Allied from taking advantage of me, after I trusted him to be a good neighbor.  And I hear that you’ve been a very good alchemist.

“People in the neighborhood say that you are giving products – especially cures and medicines – that no one else in the city can give.  I hope that if I pay you well, you’ll consider staying for a while and taking care of my neighborhood,” she pressed the coins towards him.

Marco looked at the coins.  They were nearly half the value of all that he had earned for her in the past few days, and they did also represent a large first step towards the payment needed to buy passage aboard a ship bound back to the Lion City.

“I’ll use this one to buy some new supplies to replace what I’ve used so far,” Marco pushed one silver to the side.  “Thank you Gabrielle,” he said.

“Now maybe you can go out some night and do something besides go swimming,” she lectured him.  “There are lots of pretty girls who’d be happy to be invited out by the handsome young alchemist, I’ve been told.”  She raised her eyebrows at him to emphasize the message, and he grinned in response, then picked up the coins and pocketed them.

“I’ll go down to the market now and see what I can buy,” Marco told her.  He gently rubbed his hand on her shoulder affectionately, then left to go shopping.

At the market place, Marco bought a few items, but found many of the alchemy needs to be unavailable.  As he wandered among the stalls he was surprised to hear his name called, then turned to see Mirra approaching him.  Her skin was already noticeably smoother on her face, he realized with satisfaction, though he had only applied the first treatment a few hours earlier.

“There’s the girl you saved,” Mirra told him as she reached him and hooked her arm through his.  She was carrying a market basket, but not her baby, he saw.

“What girl?” he asked in confusion, his mind wandering back to the dock in the Lion City, when he had rescued Angelica and her maid.

“Sibeal,”Mirra said.  She pointed at a redheaded girl who was walking with an older woman and a younger girl.  “She’s the girl Greystone wants to marry, so he can get his hands on her dowry money.”

“She’s a pretty girl,” Marco commented as he watched her smile demurely at something her companion said.

“That’s her mother; she’s a wealthy widow,” Mirra added, “and her maid.”

“What was that you put on my face this morning?  My skin’s been tingling all day since then,” she asked.

“Have you looked in a mirror?” Marco asked.

“We don’t have a mirror.  My brother and I barely have enough money to feed ourselves; we can’t buy knick-knacks,” she answered.

Marco looked for a vendor selling jewelry, and led Mirra to the stall, where there was a small mirror hanging on a post, so that customers could examine the jewelry they wished to buy.  “Look at yourself,” Marco pointed, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her towards the mirror.

“Why?  Did my skin turn green?” Mirra asked, then she gave a startled exclamation.

“The mirror is for paying customers,” the vendor in the booth, reminded Marco, who tugged at Mirra and pulled away from the jewelry.

“What did you do to me?” she asked him breathlessly, her eyes searching his face intently.

“I gave you a little potion.  Keeping applying it twice a day until it’s all gone, and your complexion should be better,” he told her.

“Why?  Why are you so nice?  I can’t pay you.  You don’t seem to really want me to sleep with you, and you could have better women if you wanted.  Why are you doing this for me?” she asked.

Marco stopped, and grasped her arms, making the other shoppers strolling through the crowded aisle break around them.  “I’m just treating you the way I would want to be treated.  You’ve been good to me, waking me up and feeding me, and I am just trying to return the favor.  You seem like a person who deserves to have something nice happen for a change.”

“Where do you go at night?” she asked suddenly.

“I go down to the harbor,” he answered, caught off-guard by the question. 

“And you go swimming?” she asked.  “Alone?”

He paused, not sure how to answer.

“Who do you swim with?” she asked.  “Do you have a girlfriend in the city?  I thought you had just arrived, from what Gabrielle told me, and it sounded like you were alone.”

“No, I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said hastily.  “But I need to go back to the shop and put these supplies away,” he felt that he had to escape the conversation.  He released his hold on her arms, and started moving along again in the traffic.