The Gorgon's Blood Solution

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “Marco, wait!” Teresa’s voice called after him, with a catch as she spoke his name, but he was in no mood to accommodate her, and he blundered onward through the next room, and the room after that, where he found a tub of water that he splashed liberally upon his face. He wiped his shirt across his brow, observing the smear of make-up that appeared on the cloth of his shirt, then he finished dressing and found the back way out of the building, as he emerged in a narrow alley.

  He wasn’t going to go back to Algornia’s shop that evening, he knew that. And his emotions were too roiled to enjoy the prospect of romping through the festival activities with his friends. He’d go by the cheap wine shop down by the docks, he decided, and take a bottle of the terribly adulterated sweet wine that the shop sold in such vast quantities. He’d spend a nice quiet evening in his hidden retreat, drinking his wine and letting the horror of the afternoon gradually melt away.

  Although the afternoon hadn’t been a complete horror. Considering the circumstances, or perhaps because of the circumstances, his new acquaintance with Constance had been a pleasant diversion from the degradation of his forced impersonation of a girl. Perhaps when he had sufficiently recovered, he’d journey back to the shop to try to extend his acquaintance with the lovely girl.

  Chapter 4 – Corsair Raid

  By the time Marco reached the wine shop near the docks, the sun was setting, and the crowds in the streets were growing more crowded, and more boisterous. Marco wandered through the traffic in the streets, observing the numerous boatloads of revelers that floated upon the canals, and saw numerous men and boys already soaked wet, evidence that they had fallen or been pushed into the water during their revelries – and the sun had not yet even set.

  Marco was astonished at the brazenness Teresa has shown by arriving to witness his painful experience while modeling the gowns at her mother’s shop. He couldn’t believe that the girl had been so bold as to not only inflict the whole ordeal upon him, but then had come to watch him suffer. It was beyond his understanding how anyone could enjoy seeing someone else in the kind of pain he had felt. Just remembering made his stomach tense up again.

  He wished there was some way to avenge himself on the girl, to subject her to the same kind of humiliation he had suffered. But he knew that no matter how much he might fantasize about such revenge, Teresa would always be the beloved granddaughter of the man who was in charge of his life and his future – she would always be on a level playing field at worst, if not have a tremendous advantage over him as long as Algornia doted on her.

  He reached the wine shop and waited in line along with over a dozen others who wanted to purchase a cheap skin of wine. They wanted to enhance their memories of the day, though, while he wanted to forget his afternoon. He hoped he could forget only the afternoon, because, he realized, he had actually enjoyed the morning.

  Hard as it was to believe, he had been so absorbed in the alchemical activity, the creation of the love philter, that the morning hours had flown by, filled with his intense attention to the formula he had been following. Until the ill-fated modeling assignment, he had felt a greater connection to alchemy, a deeper desire to understand it and experiment in it and develop and create through it.

  Once Marco had his skin of wine, he suddenly had doubts about whether he really wanted to just hide in his dark room, or whether he did perhaps want to go find his friends after all, and carouse in the festival’s madcap antics late into the night. Bianca might tell him the story of the puppet show, and he always enjoyed her animated style of conversation. He might even happen to run into Constance, a possibility that offered both the potential of delight as well as a reminder of his ordeal at the shop. He started to return to the heart of the city away from the docks but even as his mind weighed the opportunities that would await him among the festival crowds, he spotted a girl who looked much like Teresa, and he had another change of heart. He took a swig of wine, then walked out onto the docks.

  The wooden piers were empty of activity. The dockworkers, and even the guards, had left their places empty to go to the carnival that was filling the streets, leaving Marco with easy access to his small sanctuary. He stopped and took a swig of the wine, sweetened with sugar to make the cheap drink palatable to the impoverished clientele that frequented the wine shop, then climbed down the ladder and around the pillars that held the heavy planks above, and pushed aside the dark carpet that constituted his door. He fumbled for the flint and steel he needed to strike a light, and in time he had his small lantern lit. He poured in enough oil to burn for three hours or so, turned the wick down, then settled into the nest of pillows that he slept on, and whistled a tuneless melody.

  He let his mind roam along many paths of imagination, but often the paths all seemed to come to the same imaginative destination, one that invariably involved the lovely Constance from the dressmakers shop. He managed to be her hero, to save her from any number of threatening circumstances in his fantasies – he rescued her from thugs, he saved her from drowning in a canal, he pulled her from a burning building. Each rescue led to a heartwarming embrace and confession of mutual affection and attraction.

  And so he fell asleep, his wine mostly undrunk, his mind falling further away from the emotions of the day.

  He awoke in the dark, and sat up, startled. His lantern had burned up all its oil, and something had awakened him suddenly.

  As Marco tried to collect his wits he heard a noise, the sound of a ship gently striking the pier, and he realized that it was just such a sound that had awoken him. That meant that two ships had arrived late in the evening, which was an unheard-of occurrence.

  As he sat puzzling over the strange circumstances, he heard a third ship bump into position, and then the distant sound of a fourth ship, arriving at a different pier. Completely perplexed, he fumbled about and managed to strike a new light, and set his lantern burning again with more oil added to its tank.

  There was no reason for four ships to come into the harbor in the middle of the night. The fishermen hadn’t left yet for the morning catch, he presumed, and the shippers and traders didn’t try to navigate in the dark. He stood up, and uncertainly shuffled towards his blanketed doorway, his skin of wine unconsciously grasped in one hand.

  He heard the thump of many pairs of boots and bare feet, gently treading somewhere over his head. People were walking overhead, a great many people. Marco could not imagine who could be coming to the docks to meet the unusual arriving boats, nor could he imagine what large group of people could be disembarking from a small fleet of boats in the middle of the night. He felt a sudden premonition of something bad happening, and he reached down to pick up the rusty knife that he kept in the room, an imagined piece of defense that he had relied on for a sliver of peace of mind when he had first started sleeping in the room.

  With one hand holding the wine skin and the other hand holding the knife, he cautiously pressed the blanket slightly to one side and sidled out of the room. He let the blanket swing back shut behind him, trapping the faint rays of the lantern inside the room, and he let his eyes adjust to the darkness, while his ears better heard the unmuffled noises of the people overhead.

  He heard softly whispered words, and at first he thought the impact of the wine was filling his ears with wool, because he could make no sense of the words he heard. The he realized with a shock that people overhead were speaking a foreign language, a sibilant shushing sound that was vaguely familiar, but bone-chilling in its import.

  It was a raid! The Lion City was being raided! Marco had heard old housewives warnings about the Corsairs who would come to the city and take away bad children; it was a frightening tool used to coerce children into obedience, but it had its basis in a historical reality. There had been Corsair raids in the distance past in the port city, at a time within the living memory of the older residents of the city.

  And now they were back! The Corsairs were in the city, on a mission to quickly grab riches and captives. The goods wou
ld travel back to the raiders’ home cities in the far east, the homes and markets along the southern shore of the great sea, while the captives would become slaves. There were a handful of people in the city who were said to be former slaves, people who had regained their freedom by whatever means – a handful of such people. They told terrible stories of the fates they had suffered, and the worse fates that had befallen others who had been swept away from their homes, in other places that had been raided.

  Marco felt himself actually quaking with fear, as he realized how close he was to an unfolding disaster. He was trapped directly beneath the raiders, with no way to get out to go alert the town of the danger that was arriving at the waterfront. If anything, he was in danger of being caught himself, if any curious Corsairs were to decide to explore the empty spaces beneath the docks.

  He needed to go back into his room, blow out his lamp, and wait for the raid to finish, he concluded. He couldn’t get out of the waterfront to either run away or raise a warning, so he needed to sit silently, let time pass, and let the Corsairs to go on their way when they finished grabbing all the plunder they could lay their hands on. And then The Lion City would, like Marco himself, crawl out of its state of shock and assess the damage that had been done.

  Algornia’s shop wasn’t likely to suffer any troubles, Marco suddenly thought, as his mind skittered around various aspects of the raid. The shop wasn’t particularly close to the docks, so it wasn’t going to be an easy, early target. Nor was it particularly inviting-looking from the outside; it had a musty appearance in Marco’s eyes – he had always secretly wished his master would improve the exterior of the shop to make it look more inviting, exotic, and mysteriously alluring. As it stood, there was nothing about the plain dark exterior that would be likely to catch the eyes of the Corsairs and invite them to imagine wealthy plunder within.

  He thought about what the raiders were likely to visit. There were warehouses adjacent to the docks; those would be easy and obvious targets, though he didn’t know how much actual value would be contained among all the ordinary and everyday inventory of wool or other mundane commodities. There were also a number of large, well-furnished houses not far past the warehouses, the homes to the families of the traders who profited from their fleets going in and out of the city’s harbor. Those houses were likely to be extensively ransacked, Marco guessed. And then there was just random chance as to what was inviting enough and close enough to draw the attention of the Corsairs, depending on how long they planned to stay in the city and loot it, certainly not more than a few hours he assumed.

  Marco fumbled with his hand behind him, the hand that held the knife. He found the edge of the blanket without looking, as his head continued to face directly upwards, looking at the dark underside of the pier where the Corsairs were walking. Just as he got ready to duck into his room, a bright flash of yellow light lit up the entire area. He could see the posts and the beams and the structures that all existed around his room, as the reflected dim yellow light penetrated down to where even sunlight never reached in the shadows beneath the dock.

  The footsteps overhead momentarily faltered, but then resumed their movement, though they were growing less dense. Presumably most of the raiders had actually left the pier, Marco guessed.

  The light dimmed within seconds, but remained at a low level, equal to the light of a sunny day down where Marco stood in the damp underside of the dockyards. He released the blanket, and stood. The light was astonishing, and frightening, especially coming as it did in conjunction with the Corsairs. Marco couldn’t imagine what they could have done to create such illumination; there was no heat, or crackling sound to indicate a huge fire burning.

  As the number of footsteps continued to dwindle, Marco decided he needed to see what was happening overhead. He gently reached into the room and placed his wineskin within. He then searched around in the dim light, looking for the most discrete and indirect way he could travel to avoid detection, and set out. He walked along the top of a beam, then jumped over to another one, and made his way to the edge of the pier, where empty space stood between him and the next pier over, which jutted out from the shoreside docks just as his pier did. The gap between the two piers was close to twenty yards, wide enough for a ship to tie up at each pier, side-by-side as they conducted their exchange of goods.

  He was on the side of the pier away from the Corsair ships, though he could see their dark bulk on the other side of the pier he was climbing on. He climbed up a piling, getting a painful splinter in his finger from the rough wood, and getting smeared with waterproof pitch that was intended to protect the wood from the seawater. When he was just below the level of the pier he stopped. Overhead he could see a light yellow dome. It was high overhead, perhaps fifty or sixty feet above the surface of the pier. He heard no sounds of anyone walking or moving in the vicinity of where he had arisen, so he stuck his head up cautiously, and looked around.

  There were three viscous-looking ships moored to the pier he clung to, and he saw a fourth ship tied to the next pier. The ships had a clearly war-like appearance, with shields raised along parts of their sides, and weapons visibly stacked on their decks. But Marco took little real notice of the ships as his eyes focused on a score of men who loitered on the pier, just yards away from him, towards the city end of the pier. The men were all dressed in dark clothes, many wearing chainmail, some wearing helmets; neither item was customarily seen in The Lion City. They men all held weapons – swords, pikes and axes, and they stood together in a circle. Their deep voices rumbled in the unknown language, and Marco crouched down slightly as he studied the situation.

  Nearly all the rest of the people Marco had heard walking overhead were gone. There were a few fleet shadows moving on the land adjacent to the piers, but apparently most of the invaders had entered the city already. There were distant sounds of shouts and screams, just a few, and Marco would have presumed they were part of the festivities taking place had it not been for what he was witnessing, which made him suspect there was a more sinister cause to the noise. The drunkedness and festive activity would help the Corsairs in their assault though, Marco realized. Few people would be alert and ready to fight back – the emptiness of the docks and the lack of guards were testament to that; and many people would take shouts and noise for granted at first, until disaster suddenly sprang upon them.

  Marco stood and watched for several minutes, as the group of Corsairs on the pier held a long conversation, one in which most of them seemed to listen to a speech by a man dressed in a gown, one who stood out from the others in that regard. He pointed upward from time to time, and made gestures, as Marco watched without understanding.

  Marco ducked his head back below the surface of the pier, and sat down on the crossbeam he had stood upon, trying to comprehend what he should do next. It was implausible to imagine that he could do anything in such circumstances, he realized. The only thing he could do was go back to his room and hide; wait for the few hours it would take for the terrible raid to end, then return to the city and find out what had happened.

  Just as he reached his logical conclusion, he heard a scream, a much louder, closer scream than he had heard previously. The scream was not from some distant part of the city – it sounded so close that Marco believed it came from the end of the pier. He cautiously raised his head again to examine the scene.

  All but one member of the group of men on the pier had migrated down to the end of the pier, down where it met the docks. They remained on the inside of the extraordinary yellow dome, as did Marco and the ships and a portion of the harbor’s waters. The city was outside the dome, and a group of Corsairs in the city mingled on the outside of the dome. The solitary Corsair who remained in the middle of the pier – the one who had been speaking to the earlier group – raised his arms, and spoke words that were harsh, different from the sibilant sounds of the language the Corsairs had used to that point.

  The man’s voices grew shriller, and his hands came
together, then parted slowly, and as they did, Marco’s attention was diverted. A gateway within the yellow dome was lifting – the color difference disappeared at the end of the pier by the dockside, and the Corsairs from the city came bustling through the opening onto the pier, carrying heaps of riches and goods they had stolen. And carrying people as well.

  There were more than a half dozen people, mostly women, being carried out along the pier towards Marco. The men who carried them, and the men who carried the other booty, broke apart into small groups, and went to locations convenient to the three different ships that were tied to the pier. Goods and captives were placed down in heaps, and the screaming captives were roughly handled as they were laid down and bound with stout ropes. Marco felt his throat tighten and his heart drop as he watched the young women being mistreated, then left in place as the Corsairs left them behind and returned to the city to gather more goods.

  The solitary man on the pier watched the others leave – other than those who remained inside the dome, at the end of the pier – and then he repeated his incantations and gestures, and the yellow dome slid back down to the ground, sealing the pier and the ships off once again. Marco watched in stunned fear; that man, that very man – the one closest to him – was a sorcerer. The man was wielding incredible powers. Marco didn’t understand what the yellow dome was supposed to do, but he did know that it inspired fear and awe in him – awe of the unfathomable power and awe of the man who could control it.

  There was a ruckus at the end of the pier, and Marco turned to see that a group of the local gendarmes of the city had arrived at the dock. Their identity was not in doubt – they wore the same colorful, extravagant uniforms they wore when they walked about on patrol through the city. In Marco’s opinion they had no real role in the city other than to try to look pretty to impress girls who they flirted with as they walked by on the streets. They certainly never seemed to prevent or avenge any crimes that Marco saw.