The Gorgon's Blood Solution (31 page)

Marco was exhausted from the walk, and sore.  He had no idea that walking could induce such pain and fatigue in the stitches and injuries that were spread across his torso and right arm.  He entered his designated room and lay down to rest, until a soft knock on the door an hour later roused him.

He drew his sword for the sake of precaution.  “Who is it?” he asked after he sat up.

“Albany,” came the answer through the door, and he relaxed the grip on his sword.

“Come in,” he called, and watched as the stern-faced guard entered his room.  She stood in the doorway and stared at him for several seconds, her eyes roving over the evidence of his injuries, and came to rest on the bandaged wrist.

“You’ve had a rough time, it appears,” she said simply.

“And this was in a friendly city.  Imagine what they’ll do to me here if I stick around?” he teased her.

She snorted in disgust.  “What brings you back to stir up trouble for the lady?” she asked.

“This,” he held up the stump of his right hand.  “Iasco says that she can re-attach my hand.”

Albany’s eyes widened.  “She’s Lady Iasco but even for her that will be quite a feat.  Who cut it off?”

Marco paused.  “I did,” he said in an even tone.  “It had to be done, or we all would have died.”

She stared at him and shook her head.   “The more I know, the more I think Marcella and Portia are lucky to be alive,” she commented on the attackers who he had not killed when he had been ambushed during his first visit to the island.

“I’d like to go back to our cottage by the sea.  Can we do that tonight?” he asked.  He wanted to be someplace where no other women would be around, and he wanted someplace where he could go into the water and talk to the dolphins, to perhaps pass a message along to Kieweeooee, or even Kreewhite.

“Do you think you can walk that far?” Albany asked skeptically.

Marco remembered the hour long jaunt that he had made when he was healthy.  It would take two or three hours now, he reckoned, but it was achievable and he nodded his head.

“I’ll go ask to speak to her ladyship, to make sure this meets with her approval,” Albany said.  “You’ll stay here?”

He nodded his head again, and lay down to rest, as his guard left the room.

When he awoke, Albany was standing over him.

“Her ladyship agreed to allow you to go to your cottage, though looking at you, I’m afraid you’ll fall apart on me,” she said.  “But if you’re determined to go, I’ve got a bag of supplies to last us a few days.”

“I’m ready,” Marco replied.  He sat up.  “Would you help me put my shirt on?” he asked, and sat quietly as she pulled it down over his head.

They left the village without overt hostility following them, only silent stares of disapproval.  The walk was slowed by Marco’s halting gait and his frequent stops to rest, but they arrived before sunset in the same abandoned, isolated setting where they had stayed before.  Marco sat and watched the sunset over the water as Albany pulled out food stuffs and water skins for their meal.

I met a girl, Albany,” Marco finally said, breaking the silence as they sat together on the front stoop.  He ate awkwardly with only one hand, and the guard handed him things as he needed them.

“That explains why you got so cut up,” she said with a straight face, making him grin.

“I’m going to propose to her when I see her next time,” Albany looked at him and said nothing.

“I had a man propose to me once,” she said after a long pause.

“Did you accept?” Marco asked, surprised by the revelation.

“Yes,” she answered, “but my mother told me she had a dream that the man who proposed to me would kill me, and she told me to join the Order of Ophiuchus instead.

“So I did.  I turned him down, and joined the order and came to the isle twenty years ago,” she said no more.

“And?” Marco asked, as the sun sank deeper.

“And he married another woman, who had three children with him, one of them probably about your age.  Neither one of them is dead as far as I know,” she said with a sigh.

“I won’t kill Mirra,” Marco tried to make light of the conversation.  He stood up.  “I’m going to go down to the beach; I want to call the dolphins and talk to them.”

“You’re not going to try to swim away with them, are you?” Albany asked.  “I heard about how you got away from the Lady’s messengers; it was a neat trick.  I’m surprised the lady herself isn’t the one who put those slices across your body to teach you a lesson for that!”

“She didn’t.  She hasn’t so far.  She saved my life, as a matter of fact,” Marco answered, thinking of the yellow dome Iasco had created in the palace ballroom, the one that had saved him from the ravens.

“Would you do me a favor?” Marco asked.  Albany nodded.  “I can’t open these pants with just one hand.  Would you unbutton them for me?”

He looked away as she acted without comment.

“You can slide those off, but wait ‘til I go in,” Albany said, and then she was gone inside.  Marco slid the pants o
ff and walked down to the beach, then waded into the warm water up to his waist, and dropped his face into the water.

“I seek my friend Kieweeooee,” he called.  “Do any of Kieweeooee’s friends hear me call?”

There was no immediate answer, and after a minute he tried again.  “Does anyone know my friend Kieweeooee?  Does anyone know the merboy Kreewhite?”

He was hopeful.  He stood and looked up at the stars that were emerging into the darkening sky overhead.

“Who calls for a friend?” a voice suddenly spoke up very close by.  Marco fruitlessly looked around in the darkness, then submerged his face and spoke.

“I am Marco, and I called for Kieweeooee, and for Kreewhite.  Do you know them?” he responded.

A dolphin glided up and bumped gently against his leg.  “You have legs; you are a land creature, yet you speak the language of our people not terribly.  How does this come to be?”

“The merboy, Kreewhite, taught me some of your words, and then when I was lonely on a place far from here, I started speaking to Kieweeooee, and we became friends.  I was hurt, and did not speak to her for several days, and then I was brought here for healing.  I wanted to find out how she is doing,” Marco struggled to find the right sounds to express the long speech, but managed to convey his message.

“I will tell your tale to others, who will tell others, and perhaps it will reach your friend,” the dolphin told Marco.  “I am going back to my pod now, friend with legs.  Farewell,” and the animal swam away.

Satisfied with the contact, Marco returned to the cottage, and crawled atop the bundle of blankets Albany had laid out for him.  He slept soundly through the night.

Chapter 22 – The Lady’s Origins Story

Marco awoke and saw Albany sitting on the stoop outside the front of the cottage.  The sun was well above the horizon, and the guard was chewing on a small loaf of bread.  He wrapped a cover around himself and sat down beside her.

“How long will we stay here?” he asked.

“Are you bored already?” Albany asked.  She handed him half of her bread.

“No,” he answered.  “I just wondered.”

“Lady Iasco will send for us when she has time to spend on you.  It may be a while.   I’ve got enough food for a week, at her suggestion,” Albany told him.

And so they spent their time in isolation, neither of them dissatisfied with the arrangement.  Marco spoke with the same dolphin - Whaley, and one or two others, every day.  There were no reports about Kieweeooee or Kreewhite, but Marco discovered that he was considered a local point of wonder, and numerous dolphins came swimming through the waters off the cottage in order to see the legged animal that spoke their language.

On the sixth day of their idyllic stay at the cottage, a woman arrived in the mid-morning.  “Her Ladyship requests that you return to the village immediately, so that she may move the boy to his next location,” the messenger told Albany, pointedly ignoring Marco.  She departed as soon as her message was delivered.

Marco’s strength was returning, and his badly shredded torso was well on its way to healing.  He walked down to the beach and told the dolphins that he was leaving that spot, but would talk to others again soon whenever he had a chance to return to the water.

“I wouldn’t go telling everyone that you talk to fishes,” Albany advised as they started walking back.  “You seem strange enough as it is.”

Marco disregarded the mis-identity of the dolphins as fish.  The dolphins, starting with Kieweeooee had made an emphatic point of telling him that they were different from, and better than, fish.

“I haven’t told many people,” he cautiously agreed.  “Just Mirra.”

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t listened to my mother.  But I would have missed a good life here,” Albany answered.  “You should propose to your girl, and marry her.”

Marco listened thoughtfully, and wondered at Albany’s admission.  The two of them had not talked a great deal with one another during their time at the cottage, but they had developed a greater trust for one another, and he believed the advice was offered sincerely.  He intended to propose to Mirra in any case, as soon as he returned to Barcelon.

They returned to the village early in the afternoon, and Albany took Marco directly to Iasco’s home.  “I’m placing you back in the lady’s care,” his guard said.  “May her blessings be upon you.  And I hope for your sake and ours that you can leave the island soon!” she gave a brief smile.  She started to hold out her hand to shake, then paused as she realized Marco no longer had a right hand, and her face took on a look of embarrassment.

“I’ll shake your hand after the lady restores mine to me soon, I promise,” he told her, trying to assuage her discomfort.

“That’s a deal,” she smiled, and then she was gone, and Marco was alone.

He walked to a long hallway with many doors on either side of it, and wondered which one was Lady Iasco’s room, if any of them were.  There was only one way to find out, he decided.

“Can anyone help me find the Lady?” he asked in a loud voice.  Within seconds, over a dozen heads with shocked expressions poked out of their respective doorways to see how a male voice could be heard in their building, and a woman came stalking rapidly down the hall towards him.

“You should not be here!” she hissed.  “I know her Ladyship has sanctioned your presence, but you still should not be here.”

Marco stood silently, waiting for the woman’s anger to finish its course.

“Can you tell me where Lady Iasco is?” he asked after waiting several seconds more.

“She’s at the stables, waiting for you.  Lois!” the woman called, and a servant hurried into the hallway.  “Lead him to the Lady at the stables, and don’t dawdle,” she commanded, then turned her back and returned to her room in high dudgeon.

“Come along,” the servant said urgently, eager to be out of the way of the woman’s wrath.  Marco followed her through a maze of turns and halls and stairs to arrive at a door that led to a stable yard, where the Lady Iasco stood with a half dozen other women and a pair of ponies, as the women all chatted amiably among themselves.

“Ah, here’s our young nobleman,” the lady said easily as the servant hastily retreated after delivering Marco.  “We’ve saved a seat atop one of the ponies for you.”

Marco looked at the group of women, none of who evidently intended to ride up the side of the small mountain that constituted the island, and his pride rose to the top of his conscious.  “I’ll walk, if it’s all the same to you,” he said.

Iasco looked at him with a mocking smile.  “I told the ladies that our young marquess would refuse to ride if the ladies didn’t ride.  Let me introduce our escorts,” she told Marco.  “Here are Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, and Merope.

“I think you’re fit enough to make the trip, especially since we’ll only ride halfway up tonight,” she told him.  “Lead on, Merope,” she called to a fair-haired girl in the group, who took the halter of one of the ponies and led the group out of the yard.

“I was just getting ready to tell the ladies what Folence’s first written appraisal of you was,” Iasco told Marco as they began to ascend the winding path that led upward.

“I received this letter more than a fortnight ago, and immediately chartered our ship to take me to Barcelon, as you know,” Iasco said, as she pulled a piece of parchment out of a fold in her gown.

“My great lady,” her voice softened as she mumbled through the salutation. “We have the boy you desire, though you’ve asked for a greater challenge than I would have expected.  He came to my attention accidentally when we received word of an alchemist who was doing miraculous work to beat the plague, curing what was incurable, and giving his goods away as though they had no worth.

“I intended to examine this phenomena at a later date, not associating the alchemist with your vagabond champion who I never expected to see in our unfashionable city.  The duke’s mistress caused quite a stir by the way,” Iasco’s voice dropped off as she edited out the extraneous gossip that Folence had dropped into the letter.

“Ah, here,” her voice strengthened.  “I’d like to be able to tell you that I’ve thrashed your runaway hero to within an inch of his life, after the idiocy I’ve seen him exercise,” there came a soft round of tittering from the accompanying women who were listening to the recitation of the letter.  “Fortunately he only performs his most stupid experiments on his own body – unfortunately, he very nearly succeeded in suicide, although he had some justification for the dramatic damage he inflicted upon himself.

“He tried to fight off a hostile possession of his soul,” Iasco paused.  “Hmm, I’ll have to ask her if there is ever a non-hostile possession of one’s soul,” she commented, then returned to the script in her hand.  “By subjecting the evil power – while still within his own body, mind you! – to exposure to gorgon’s blood!

“And I believe he knows what it is and what he’s doing!  The crafty little urchin gave me the slip once, but I caught up with him by following the nymph who seems to be enamored of him.  I’ll have to discuss her case with you later, as she seems to be unnaturally and extraordinarily enhanced in her beauty, though I cannot tell what the boy did to her,” Iasco paused again.  “You seem to distract our good Folence somehow Marco, she rarely gossips so much.”

Iasco murmured through a few more lines.  “Here,” she came to a point of interest, and read again.  “The boy fought a sorcerer, and won!  He wasn’t apparently in any eminent danger himself; he must just have a death wish, which he very nearly found to be granted.  He fought a powerful sorcerer – and he won!  He knows alchemy and something more; he has a good heart; and he’s apparently durable enough to withstand his own foolishly self-inflicted wounds.  You’ve got a rare champion in the making, if you can keep him alive long enough so that he learns who he is.

“Once we’ve healed him, I’ll plan to send him to you soon unless you send directions otherwise.  We’ll take good care of him; I find that I’m actually a bit fond of him myself,” Iasco stopped reading and folded the letter up.

“There’s more of course, but you made quite an impression on Folence, and she’s not someone easily impressed,” Marco had the sudden insight that Iasco was reading the letter to impress the women with Folence’s judgment of him, not to make him laugh at the woman’s report.  Despite Folence’s last claim, the priestess in Barcelon had certainly done nothing while he was with her to make Marco think she held him in any particularly high esteem.  Women seemed better able to hide their emotions, he concluded.

“So Marco, you killed a powerful sorcerer in Barcelon,” Iasco said.

Her tone made him turn to look at her.  They were starting to ascend the mountain at a steeper angle, and he was starting to breath more heavily, and he waited a moment as his mind registered what had been nagging at it for some time, and then he remembered.

“The sorcerer!  Right as he died,” Marco began, then paused.  “Right before he died, his skin changed.  It suddenly showed,” he paused again, then decided to speak bluntly, “it showed stripes, just like you have on your skin.  He hadn’t looked that way before.”

“What you saw was his natural skin pattern.  He’d been covering it up most of his life until that time,” Iasco replied.

“I’ll tell you a story, Marco, one that perhaps no one else on this island, except one or two old friends, has ever heard, in part,” Iasco said.  Without looking, Marco could sense the ears of the others perking up, straining to hear their leader tell a story that was apparently not widely known.

“You may think that some of this is myth, but I was taught it all as history,” the lady began.  “Many ages ago, the people of my race lived on a great island far out in the western ocean.  They were accomplished and intelligent people, who built beautiful and luxurious cities, the comparison of which has never been seen since.

“But they were a proud people, who thought that their success was only through their own deeds.  They had no faith in the lord – at best they worshiped his simple pagan faces with only half-hearted faith  – and even those temples became deserted and scorned.  They developed an empire, and they mistreated their conquered people,” she continued.  “The leaders of the people grew foolish and wasteful and cruel.

“But a few of the people of the island understood that they were in a nation that was heading towards its doom.  They had dreams and visions of a day of settlement coming, and they saw it as if it were a storm cloud on the horizon, approaching in full view.  Those people prepared and considered and acted on the vision they had.  They all fled the island in a great flotilla of ships that sailed eastward,” Iasco’s epic story continued.

“Their ships were pursued by ships of the navy of the foolish king, who did not wish to have anyone deserting from him.  On the first day that the navy began its chase of those who flew from the evil, an enormous dark cloud erupted, and the earth shook violently, and then a wave as tall as a mountain came racing from the west across the ocean surface.  It struck the island kingdom like the hand of God wiping away an insect, and the entire realm was destroyed.  The wave continued on, and it sank the king’s entire navy.

“So those refugees sailed on until they found a new land, and they left their ships and they marched across the land, into a beautiful, vast hidden valley high among the mountains in that part of the world.  And they chose a new king, a wise man who had long counseled them to flee from the evil and to live in peace.

“His name was Prester John,” Iasco told Marco and the others, as they continued to climb.  “And when a prophet of the lord came through the mountains to the people, Prester John led them all to convert to the new religion.

“He lived and ruled for 240 years.  His great-great grandson was king when I was born in the kingdom of Prester John,” she told them.  “And once again, foolishness had begun to descend upon those who had spent too long sitting in places of power.  Our family lived in a small village in the northern mountains, far away from the splendor of the king’s palace.   My parents and my brother and I didn’t know or care about the things the kings and his courtiers did or said, and nobody in our village worried about such things.

“But the king got into a war with the tribes to the north when he tried to invade their territories, and the tribesmen were willing to fight to protect their homes.  So the king’s army, which had bad generals who were the king’s friends, lost badly.  The king raised new taxes to pay for more fighting, and my parents and my village suffered greatly.

“But the war went on, and not only did the king’s cronies lose more, then the tribesmen came and invaded our kingdom in retaliation. 

“My brother and I were in the mountain pasture one early morning tending our goats, when the tribesmen came to our village.  They did to our people what the king’s soldiers had done to their people – they killed them all,” Iasco’s  voice had a heart-wrenching note of sadness as her story continued, while the setting of the sun and the slowly creeping darkness that arrived only accented her words.