The Gorgon's Blood Solution (8 page)

Chapter 6 – Kreewhite

Marco awoke again in total darkness.  He awoke to the sounds of groans, sounds that he realized came from his own throat.

“Just rest and let your body heal,” a voice in the dark hold told him. 

Marco listened to the sounds of the ship, the timbers creaking and the distant sails above flapping in the breeze, along with the sound of hushed conversations taking place upon the deck.  “I hurt so badly,” he sobbed.  He tried to move his left hand, but only succeeded in knocking it lightly against a wooden beam, which made him cry out.

“Sshh, don’t call their attention to you,” the voice warned gently.  It spoke with a strange speech pattern; every vowel seemed to be pronounced long, or slightly long, making Marco pause to make sure he understood.

“Where are we?  Who are you?” Marco groaned as he tried to lay still.

“I’m your friend,” the voice told him.  “Just rest easy friend,” Marco heard the voice say, and gentle fingers stroked his scalp, calming him so that he breathed quietly, until minutes later, when there was a grating sound overhead, and then there was a splash nearby, followed by the grating sound above in the darkness again.

Marco felt his companion move with a steady, rhythmic sensation, and seconds later the voice was back.  “It’s a fish,” the friend said joyfully.  “Would you like some?”

“I’m not hungry,” Marco answered.  He felt too much pain to feel any hunger.

“You need to eat something,” his fellow captive said.  There was a wet tearing sound.  “Here,” the voice urged him, “It’s just a small bite,” and something damp and cool was pressed against his lips.

Marco obliged the caregiver.  He let the fragment of fish enter his mouth and he began to chew, then hastily spit it out.

“It’s raw!” he protested.

“Ah,” the voice said sadly.  “Yes,” and after that the other captive said no more, as Marco drifted in and out of consciousness, unaware of his friend silently eating the raw fish.

The next day, Marco awoke when the foul bilge brightened suddenly.  He blinked as he looked up, and saw the outline of a man’s torso standing in front of a bright blue sky overhead.  A draft of fresh air came blowing down into the hold, a blessed relief from the fetid air that lingered inside the bottom of the hull.

A voice spoke gruffly in the Corsairs’ language, then paused.

The voice of Marco’s friend in the bilge answered quickly, from somewhere right behind Marco.

The voice overhead responded, then slammed the hatch shut.

“You speak their language?” Marco asked slowly.  “What did he say?”

His companion paused.  “He asked if we were still alive,” came the answer.

“And you told him ‘yes’?” Marco confirmed.  “What did he say?”

There was another pause.  “He said, ‘that’s too bad,’”, Marco’s companion reluctantly told Marco.

Marco felt his stomach muscles tighten with fear.  “What will they do with us?  Do you know?”

“Let’s not borrow tomorrow’s troubles for today,” the voice declined to speculate.  “What’s your name?” it asked.

“I’m Marco.  What’s your name?” he asked in return.

“My name is Kreewhite,” the voice answered.

“Are you, are you a boy or a girl?  I’m sorry to ask,” Marco wanted to know.

The companion laughed.  “I’m a boy.”

“I couldn’t tell.  It’s so dark down here,” Marco tried to explain, realizing belatedly that the question needn’t have been asked.

“Have they thrown any more fish down lately?” he asked.  “I think I’m hungry enough to eat some raw.”

“No, no more fish recently,” the other boy answered.  “You can sip some of this bilge water.  It’s awful, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“But,” Marco couldn’t even bring himself to express his disgust at the thought of all that was mixed in among the water that sloshed around them.

“Don’t say anything, try not to think anything,” Kreewhite advised.  “It is the only option.”

Marco sucked some moisture off his fingers, wishing he couldn’t consider what he was doing.

“Where are you from?” Kreewhite asked Marco, attempting to distract him.

“I’m from the Lion City,” Marco explained.  “The Corsairs tried to raid the city, but they didn’t do as well as they expected.

“I hurt their sorcerer,” he confided.  “And they had to get away in a hurry without his magic to protect them.”

“Their sorcerer is hurt?” Kreewhite asked with interest.  “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a while.”

“Why?” Marco wanted to know.

“The sorcerer,” Kreewhite paused, “had a special interest in me.  Whatever happens to me won’t be good, but it will be less bad if the sorcerer isn’t involved.”

Marco could hear the fear and hatred in his companion’s voice.

“If I can help you, I will,” Marco solemnly promised.  “But first I’ll have to heal enough to help myself,” he said ruefully.

He slept again for several hours, and when he awoke, the motion of the ship was different, and the sounds were ominous.

“This is what a storm sounds like on the surface of the sea,” Kreewhite explained.  “It just started getting rough a couple of hours ago.”

“Is it day or night outside?” Marco asked.

“I don’t know any more,” Kreewhite said wearily.

Marco felt his stomach churning from the motion of the ship, as the storm rocked and bucked it violently over the next several hours.  His stomach was too empty though to do more than heave emptily, as he forced himself to suck drops of the stagnant bilge water from his fingers from time to time.

A sudden freak gust of wind managed to catch the hatch that covered the opening to the bilge, and the two boys heard a sudden sharp rendering sound.  There were a brisk breeze suddenly blowing through their quarters, and fresh rainwater began to spray voluminously down upon them.  There was dim gray light, punctuated by flashes of lightning, and after the third flash, Marco turned his aching body around to try to see what his companion looked like.

When the next flash of light arrived, he screamed.

Chapter 7 – The Shipwreck

“You’re not human!” Marco shouted after his scream.  A rush of adrenaline gave him the energy to overcome the aches and injuries his body felt, and he awkwardly scrambled several feet away from Kreewhite.

“You’re a mermaid!”

“Actually, I’m a merboy, and if I were to live long enough to grow up, I would be a merman,” Kreewhite said in a jaunty tone.

“You’re real,” Marco said.  “I didn’t know mermaids, or mermen, were real.”  He remained at a distance from the impossible embodiment of the voice he had known since awakening in the ship.

“And what do you think now?  Am I real?  Haven’t I really been here with you for all this time, trying to take care of you?” Kreewhite asked in a challenging voice.

“You have,” Marco acknowledged.  He tried to catch his breath at the astonishment of the momentary vision he had of the boy’s torso that had tapered into a long, fluid tail.  A sudden wave of water somehow managed to sweep up into the stormy air above the ship’s sails and hurtle across the deck of the Corsair ship, then drop its torrential mass of weight down into the bilge, crashing on Marco and sweeping him across the bottom of the hold, so that he crashed into Kreewhite, who grabbed him and held him steadily as the water went racing by.

“Thank you,” Marco sputtered as he exhaled a portion of the water that had pounded down upon him.  He realized that his right hand was gripping Kreewhite’s arm fiercely.  As he started to loosen his grip, there was a horrible sound, a deafening, ripping noise.  The sound was a so
und, and also a feeling too; it was so overwhelming that both boys felt their bodies quiver with the vibrations of the clamor, as the main mast of the ship, a tall, massively round, stout obelisk of wood, cracked and began to bend, ripping itself from its attachments to the hull as the force of the wind gusts above caught its canvas sails and pressed it beyond its capacity to endure.

“Kreewhite!” Marco exclaimed.  His adrenaline continued to drive him beyond awareness of the pain in his body.  The sound of the crashing mast, and the vibrations of the weakening hull were suddenly joined by a wash of fresh sea water.  The disastrous movement of the mast began to wrench open the seams between the mighty planks in the hull, and copious amounts of water seeped in, to the point that Marco felt waves of the bilge water quickly breaking against his torso, instead of his thighs, as he lay on the bottom of the ship.

There was a babble of shouts on the deck overhead, as the Corsair crew realized the eminent failure that was about to overtake their ship in the midst of the stormy sea. 

“We’ve got to get ready to get out of here,” Kreewhite shouted, even though the two of them were within arm’s length of one another.   “We could get trapped in the wreckage if we don’t escape!”

Another flash of lightning showed how high above the overhead hatchway remained.  “The water’s rising, and we’re getting closer, but I’m afraid the ship’s going to come apart around us before we can float to the hatch to escape.”

They both looked up at the hatch, which flickered into constant view as the lightening in the stormy sky continually revealed and shone down through the opening.

“Take your clothes off,” Kreewhite suddenly said to Marco, as the water level deepened to the point that they were starting to float.

“What?” Marco asked incredulously.

“We’re going to be out in the sea in a few minutes if we’re going to survive, and if you have all those heavy clothes and boots on, you’ll be too heavy for me to support for very long,” Kreewhite explained hastily.

Marco suddenly understood.  “I’ve only got the one hand I can use,” he told Kreewhite.  “Would you pull my boots off my feet?”

The two released their hold on one another, then Marco felt the tug of Kreewhite sliding the boots away from his feet.

“Thanks,” he said gratefully as he slowly used the fingers of his one good hand to release his pants and pull them off, then remove his shirt as well, groaning with the pain of the cloth scraping against the raw flesh on his back.  By the time he finished, the water had risen higher, and the men overhead were no longer shouting so loudly to one another.   The boat’s motions were different too, as the amount of water that had gushed into the hull began to take on the motions of the water outside.

The two were clinging to one another, listening to the sounds of the ship’s timbers snapping and buckling amidst the destructive winds and seas.  Debris was clashing loudly as it fell around them.   Marco looked up at the hatchway, now growing close enough that Marco envisioned himself leaping up out of the water and grasping the sill.

Just as he looked, there were a series of lightning flashes, and the ghastly pale face of the sorcerer appeared.  He looked down at the two prisoners who were now flotsam, and he shouted something in his barbaric language.  He lowered his hand and pointed it at them as he spoke, and suddenly Marco was caught off-guard as Kreewhite pulled him down under the water.

There was a loud noise, a shock wave in the water that tumbled them both forward, and then a wave of momentary heat.  The blast threw the two companions apart as they were tumbled downward towards the bottom of the hull.  Marco felt his head hit something hard, and he inhaled a mouthful of salty water.

Hold on, Marco!” he heard Kreewhite’s voice carry clearly under the water, and a moment later he felt the merboy grab his torso and move him swiftly through the water.

Their heads breached the surface of the water that sat inside the hull of the sinking ship, giving Marco the chance to exhale, then inhale noisily as he coughed and sputtered and tried to clear his lungs of the water he had taken in.

“Marco, can you reach up to that sill and pull yourself up there?” Kreewhite asked urgently, his mouth next to Marco’s ear.

Marco looked up at the very close opening through which flashes of lightning glowered.   It was only four feet overhead.

“I can try.  I’ve only got one good hand,” Marco responded.

“When you get to the deck, go to the back of the ship, and get ready to jump when you see me in the water,” Kreewhite explained.

“How will you get there?” Marco asked, treading water as he held onto the merboy.

“I’ll make it, no problem,” Kreewhite said.  “Are you ready?  Go!”

Marco bunched his muscles and tried to boost himself out of the water.  He rose a few inches, then suddenly felt Kreewhite’s hands grab his legs and thrust him upward energetically.  The fingers on his good hand grabbed the edge of the open hatch, and pulled desperately, adding to his momentum.  He flung his crippled hand over the edge and lurched his torso, so that his stomach scrapped along the wooden edge of the opening, and then he landed, his legs flailing in empty air.  He raised his feet and rolled to his left, and suddenly he was on the deck of the ship.

A wave crashed upon the deck and the rain fell in drenching sheets, and the impact of the wave pushed him back towards the opening momentarily before he grabbed a rope and held on tightly.

As the wave passed beyond him he rose to his knees and looked around.  There were no men in sight, while a pair of small boats appeared to bob among the fearsome waves not far from the ship.  As Marco began to press himself forward through the wind and the rain, he looked over his shoulder at the small boats, and saw a yellow dome suddenly appear over one of the boats, a sign that the sorcerer was in the vessel and taking steps to protect himself from the storm.

Marco stumbled upon the deck, and as he started to flail, he caught a glimpse of something shooting skyward, leaving the ship behind as the gale-force winds caught it and sent it flying off to the left.  Marco moved his hand, which landed on the handle of a sword that had been abandoned on the ship’s deck, and he instinctively grabbed ahold of the hilt, then clung to it as he made his way towards the rear of the ship, while more and more waves began sweeping across the deck of the sinking ship.  The sword felt solid, like something that could keep him safe, and in some mysterious way it felt lucky too.  He didn’t know what to expect, or what to do, but he knew Kreewhite had given him direction, and he clung to that instruction as the only thing he knew or understood in the horrific situation he was trapped in.

“Marco!  You made it!” he heard Kreewhite’s voice faintly as scrambled to the railing that marked the rear of the Corsair’s ship.

“Jump!” the merboy called.  “Jump in the water.  I’ll get you and we’ll find someplace safe.”

Marco lifted his leg with difficulty, and straddled the railing, still holding onto his new-found sword, then tumbled forward, into the turbulent water of the sea.

  Kreewhite was with him immediately, placing an arm around his shoulder to hold his head in the air between the pounding of the constant waves.

“Drop that sword!  It’s weighing you down!” Kreewhite advised.

“I want to keep it; it feels lucky,” Marco shouted over the sounds of the waves.

“It won’t be lucky for you if you carry it to the bottom,” Kreewhite told him.

Marco said nothing more, as he silently acknowledged within his mind that Kreewhite was right, and that he should prepare to forgo the excitement of holding the sword.  He felt the two of them start to move forcefully across the surface of the sea, moving up and over the swells of the large waves, as Kreewhite seemed to effortlessly propel the two of them with the rhythmic motion of his tail flukes.

“Where are we headed?” Marco asked after a few moments.

“Out of the storm, I hope,” Kreewhite answered.  “The dawn seems to be breaking behind us, so I’m going towards the sunset side of the sea, where the storms usually come from.

“I don’t know where we are,” he answered Marco’s unspoken question.  “After sunrise I may be able to find out.”

They were silent after that, as Kreewhite masterfully carried the pair of them through the gradually calming waters, as the sky behind them grew gray with the dull light of the sun rising behind the clouds in the east.

Kreewhite stopped when they reached a large, floating wooden plank, possibly a piece of some unfortunate ship’s wreckage, similar to their own ship’s demise.  “You stay here and hold on to this,” the merboy instructed Marco.  “I’m going to go look around and see if I can find out where we are.  I’ll be back in a little while.  Don’t go anywhere,” he instructed Marco.

“What if a mermaid comes along?” Marco laughingly asked.

“Especially if a mermaid comes along,” Kreewhite answered with a grin.  “I get first chance to strike up a conversation with her!”

“I won’t argue,” Marco agreed, as he slung his arms over the wooden plank.  He watched as Kreewhite disappeared, his large, greenish-golden tail flipping upward to splash Marco soundly with a drenching shower of seawater as the merboy disappeared beneath the waves.

Marco hung onto the wooden plank, and tried to look around, hoping to see something – anything – that would offer some break in the monotonous view he had of water and more water.  There was nothing, except the promise of a break in the clouds overhead, as the gray overcast grew lighter in patches.

With a sigh, he closed his eyes and laid his head back, resting from the exhaustion he felt in every bone and muscle of his battered body.  He didn’t fall asleep, but his pain-wracked mind wandered amidst speculation about the past and the future.  He wondered if the citizens of the Lion City had recovered most of their loot, and he particularly wondered if Angelica and her maid had been safely rescued.  At the same time he dreamed about Kreewhite taking him someplace safe, someplace from which he made his way back to the city, back to a hero’s welcome for his role in fighting the sorcerer, disrupting the Corsair’s defense of their looted goods and unraveling their planned escape.

When he opened his eyes, the sea was calm, the sky overhead was clear, and the sun was shining down from high overhead.

“Marco, are you awake?” Kreewhite was next to him, his head rising from the water.

“We might as well get going,” Kreewhite told him.  “Are you ready?”

“Where are we going?  Is it close by?” Marco asked.

“Well,” Kreewhite paused, “I’m not sure.  I couldn’t find any landmarks I recognized, and none of the currents taste familiar,” he admitted.  “We’re lost.”

Marco grabbed the sword off the top of his wooden plank.

“So what is your plan?” he sighed.

“We’ll start going in the direction of the rising sun.  I have a feeling that my people’s home is in that direction.”

“But you’re not sure?” Marco pressed.

“No,” Kreewhite let his own frustration show in the tone of his short answer.  “Do you have a better idea?  Would you like to just float here?”

“Not at all,” Marco hastily assured the merboy.  “You’ve saved my life.  I trust your judgment.  I’m ready to go east.”

“That’s the human word for the place where the sun brings daylight – east?” Kreewhite asked.

“Yes,” Marco answered.

“Such a short word for such an important task,” Kreewhite murmured.  “Here,” he positioned himself next to Marco.  “Lie down on my back and hold on,” he floated prone in the water as Marco awkwardly moved over and positioned himself on Kreewhite’s broad back, his sword tucked between their two bodies as his right hand held onto a shoulder and his injured left hand dangled uselessly.