Marco had never committed such an act of violence in his life. He watched the face of the sorcerer change, as the man’s attention to the distant pier shifted. The man’s mouth opened wide, and the color drained from his face. The sorcerer was wordless, making no sound. His grip on Marco loosened, and one hand groped down to his stomach to find Marco’s right hand still wrapped around the hilt of the knife.
The sorcerer’s fingers tried momentarily to unwrap Marco’s fingers from the knife, and then his efforts grew weak. Marco saw his eyes roll up into his head, then his eyelids shut, his head flopped to the side, and the man collapsed. And as he did, the great yellow dome all around the pier flickered for a moment, then vanished.
There was a violent cawing sound from overhead, and a large black raven dove at Marco, making him duck his head momentarily. When he looked up, the raven was gone.
Darkness rushed onto the pier in the absence of the glowing yellow dome, and Marco blinked as the torches at the end of the pier became the primary illumination of the scene taking place around him. He felt the sorcerer falling, and his knife remained stuck in the flesh, pulling Marco downward as he tried to maintain his hold on the hilt.
The crowd of citizens of the city gave a great roar, a full-throated, blood-thirsty roar of delight as the protective dome disappeared, and they instantly surged forward against the Corsair defenders on the pier, who immediately began to retreat in Marco’s direction.
Marco was on his knees, drawn down by the weight of the unconscious sorcerer. He pulled forcefully on his knife, and it came free from the sorcerer’s body. Marco hastily swiped the blade on the injured man’s robe, then stuck his knife back in his waist band. He heard the approaching sound of the advancing battlefront between the retreating Corsairs and the onrushing citizens of the Lion City.
He grabbed for the golden tureen and bent over the edge of the pier, hoping he could recover at least one item of value for Angelica to prove his value to her. He lay on his stomach and stretched his arms below the top of the pier, only able to effectively use his right hand to guide the heavy metal object to a resting place from which he planned to grab it later.
As he lay prone on the wooden boards of the pier, there was a sudden stamping of feet. He ignored it momentarily as the bowl settled into place; when he turned his head to see what was happening, he was horrified to see a trio of Corsairs nearly upon him.
One of them began hacking with his sword at the ropes tying the ship to the pier, while another one lifted the sorcerer from the pier, and began to carry him towards the ship.
The third Corsair kicked Marco in the side of his head, the heavy boot connecting painfully, and drawing a scream from Marco as he tasted blood from the inside of his mouth. Before he could begin to move to protect himself, the Corsair stomped with his boot again, driving it heavily into Marco’s lower back, and causing further unspeakable pain.
More Corsairs were running towards the ship now. Their orderly retreat down the pier turned into a rout, and they began to flee towards the ship that their comrades were attempting to prepare for a hasty departure.
The Corsair grabbed the back of Marco’s shirt and pants, lifting the whimpering boy with ease, and tossed him bodily inside the hull of the ship. He used his sword to hack at the nearest rope that tied the ship to the pier, and the boat began to bounce actively as more of the retreating Corsairs began to arrive, hurling themselves off the pier and onto the deck of the ship. The first arrivals grabbed long, stout poles from the inside of the ship, and began straining to push the ship away from the pierside.
City residents began arriving. They grabbed the last Corsairs before the men could jump onto the boat, and then the widening gap between the escaping vessel and the pier, doomed the last Corsair arrivals to a violent death at the hands of the mob. The Corsair ship was pelted with a unrelenting stream of thrown objects – knives, spears, rocks, paving bricks.
Marco was passed out, lying atop a pile of ropes and cables on the deck of the ship. The Corsairs worked around him as they quickly unshipped oars, then maneuvered their ship towards the mouth of the dark harbor to escape from the raid on the city that had turned so deadly for the attackers. As they grunted and slid back and forth on their benches, putting every last ounce of possible effort into rowing themselves to safety, they muttered questions to each other about what had gone wrong, what had happened to the sorcerer to cause his magical protection to fail, and they mourned the companions they had left behind to certain death, and especially they mourned all the spoils of war they had failed to come away with after the promising beginning to their raid on the unsuspecting Lion City.
Once the ship passed the jetty that protected the harbor from rough seas, the Corsairs raised their sails, relieving them of the need to row to safety. Their highest ranking leader listened to the stories about finding the gravely wounded sorcerer, who remained unconscious, and finding the living and thieving Marco in the immediate vicinity.
Marco, still unconscious, was tied to the mast, and flogged with twenty five strokes of the whip before sunrise even began. The brutal assault raised whimpers from the youth, who was then thrown down into the bilge compartment of the ship, as the crew left him to suffer; they presumed his guilt in defeating their raid, and intended to make him suffer more fully when – and if – the sorcerer awoke to confirm their suspicions. And if the sorcerer didn’t revive to confirm Marco’s guilt, the boy would at best be sold in a slave market in some distant land on the south shore of the great sea.
Marco’s body was washed over repeatedly by the foul, briny fluids that sloshed within the bilge, until he gained partial consciousness many hours later.
“Mother,” he murmured, his consciousness spurred by the faint glimmer of light that filtered down into the bilge from the sunlight that fell on the sailing ship in the mid-afternoon. Marco had not seen his mother in several years, not since she had packed a wrapped meal for him and sent him on his way out of the family’s small, poverty-stricken mountain village. He had been destined to go to a broker in the Lion City, one who had promised to secure an apprenticeship for him with a furniture maker. When Marco arrived in the city two days later, his meal long gone, the boy dirty and hungry and alone, the broker informed him that his family’s payment had not been sufficient for the furniture maker after all. And that’s how Marco had been shuffled off to the much less reputable career of alchemist, though he no doubt enjoyed his apprenticeship with Algornia much more than he would have liked being an apprentice who made stools and tables and chairs.
“Mother,” he murmured again, as his broken body tried to avoid awakening to the excruciating pain that awaited it.
“Sshh,” a comforting voice answered, and a hand stroked his scalp gently. “Sleep some more and rest,” the voice soothed him, and Marco obeyed, dropping back into a deeper unconsciousness.
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, follo
wed 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 sound, 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.
The Gorgon's Blood Solution Page 7
