The Gorgon's Blood Solution

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “There’s an enchantment that hides us from the eyes of everyone except our own. I can’t figure out how you saw us at all,” Porenn replied promptly. They were entering the village proper, and the sides of the road were lined with women who stood in front of their homes and buildings, staring intently at Marco as he passed by them.

  Although they were already holding hands together on the sword, Marco unconsciously drew closer to Porenn as he passed under the hostile scrutiny, and the two reached the door to Lady Iasco’s pink building with their hips often bumping together as they walked.

  “We said you could have the girl as a hostage, not a bride,” one of the bodyguards said sourly as the pair came through the doorway into the entry hall. “Has he treated you well, Porenn?” the woman asked.

  “He has been a gentleman,” the girl replied, as she moved slightly apart from Marco.

  Then, to his surprise, she leaned back towards him, and rose up on her toes as she used their hands on the sword to pull him down to his level; her face had a slightly reddish blush. “I have to go to the bathroom, Marco. Will you let me go? I promise I’ll come right back,” she whispered.

  “Is it right here in this building?” he asked.

  “Just around the corner. I’ll show you the door,” she whispered back, and tugged him down a short side hall, where she stopped in front of a door as the guards followed them. “I’ll be right back, I promise,” she told Marco as she squeezed his hand.

  He gave a tight smile to try to show her that he trusted her, then he gently transferred the sword handle to his other hand, releasing her as he backed up against the wall next to the door, separated from Porenn for the first time since they had gripped each other’s hands.

  She looked at him with a smile, then entered the doorway.

  Marco stood watching the guards who were watching him.

  Five seconds later he heard a shout from the door way. “Let me go!” he heard Porenn shout.

  There was rattling from the room beyond the door.

  “Porenn?” he called loudly.

  “We have her – she’s free!” came a voice from the next door down the hallway as it flew open and another guard came out. “Get him!” the woman ordered.

  And with that, a frenetic battle erupted in the temple hallway. Three guards came at Marco at once, two with swords and one with a mace, as he stood backed against the wall. He froze in horror at both the betrayal by Porenn and by the certainty of defeat that he faced.

  He held the sword out in front of him with both hands gripping the hilt with a death grip, and as soon as the first attacker swung her weapon at him, he moved the sword to block the slice. Or rather, the sword seemed to move itself. There was no effort on his part, but his hands gripped the sword as it rose swiftly and parried the attack, blocking the guard’s sword upward and away. His weapon followed that by suddenly reversing direction and stabbing viciously at the woman who had the mace. His unexpected attack forced her to swerve her own body, and her swinging ball of spiked metal flew harmlessly above Marco and crashed into the wall, embedding the weapon there.

  Marco felt his sword pull itself back closer to him, and he blocked a stabbing attack by the third guard, driving her sword down to the floor. He instinctively lifted a foot and stamped down hard on the attacker’s weapon. He realized he was barefoot as his toes landed atop the flat of the blade and knocked it free from the hand of the surprised attacker.

  The first guard recovered from her blocked attack in the time that Marco fought off the other two guards, and she swung her blade again. Marco felt his sword raise itself up higher to block her powerful slice at him, and then the momentum of his arms caused his whole body to twirl in a motion that astonished him as well as his assailants, and he found himself free from the attack, facing the guards from a new location. The sword has fought off the attack superbly, and then had maneuvered him to a position of freedom. It was an extraordinary weapon!

  “Where is she? Where’s Porenn? Why did she lie to me?” he shouted.

  “She didn’t lie,” a voice spoke to him from overhead.

  He looked up, and realized that the hallway he was standing in was an atrium that rose up to a ceiling three floors above him, with a balcony that covered each wall overhead.

  Behind him he saw Lady Iasco, standing with Porenn and a guard.

  “Put your weapons down ladies,” Iasco ordered in a steely voice.

  Marco turned and saw the guards staring up at the balcony, their eyes growing large with astonishment at the order. All three of them simultaneously lowered their gaze to look back at him again, and then with contemptuous expressions they lowered their weapons.

  “Marco, please forgive my assistants. They were overzealous in their duties. This will not happen again,” she spoke past him to the guards.

  “But the prophecy, my lady!” one of the guards protested.

  “I didn’t know, Marco!” Porenn called out suddenly, wanting him to know of her innocence in the affair.

  “If you would like to take the stairs behind you, please come up here and meet me, so that we can go to the balcony and talk,” the lady told him.

  “The interpretation of the prophecy is not your concern. Go back to your stations,” she instructed the guards, who grumbled as they disbanded.

  Minutes later Marco was seated in a chair on a balcony on the pink building, looking out over the village harbor, where a small fishing boat was sailing out to sea. It looked peaceful, but Marco knew that there was little hope for peace in the village for him.

  “Would you like some fruit?” Iasco came out onto the balcony after Marco had waited, carrying a tray with her own hands; Porenn had apparently been dismissed, for the two of them sat alone. She placed the tray on a small table between their two chairs, then gracefully sat down beside him.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she asked rhetorically, as he picked up a bunch of grapes and began to eat them ravenously.

  “I can’t keep you here, that’s obvious. I can’t just ship you out. I don’t want to imprison you. But you must be here for some purpose. From what Porenn told me of your story – and I think I believe most of it – the spirit of the great healer has brought you here for some purpose, I believe,” she told him.

  “I think my friend Kreewhite is out there at sea waiting for me,” Marco said eagerly. “If you’ll just give me leave to walk the shoreline, I’m sure I can find him, or he’ll find me, and we can be on our way. I didn’t mean to come here to break any rules – I didn’t mean to come here at all. We just happened to see the island without knowing what it was.”

  “For both our sakes, I don’t believe it’s a good idea to let you just wander around the island,” Iasco answered. “I’m going to assign a guard to you to keep an eye on you and to keep an eye out for you for the next couple of days while I pray at the temple for some guidance from the spirit of Asclepius, or from the Lord,” she said.

  “I’d rather just stay with Porenn,” Marco replied.

  “No,” Iasco said drily, “I don’t think that will happen. She has been reassigned to a duty on the far side of the island, far from you. She was just a little too quick in manipulating the situation this morning to spend time with you. I don’t need the two of you spending any more time together.

  “She’s clever girl,” Iasco chuckled. “You stay here and eat, while I go fetch someone,” the priestess ordered as she rose. She gracefully walked away without waiting for any reply, and Marco turned to devouring the contents of the tray for several minutes.

  He had no idea what was going to happen. If Porenn had been available, he would have perhaps enjoyed the idea of staying on the island with the companionable girl for a little while, provided he was in her company. Iasco seemed determined to prevent that from happening however, he realized glumly.

  “Here Marco,” the voice of the priestess spoke from the doorway behind him. He turned quickly from the empty tray to see her coming back out onto the balcon
y, in the company of another woman, a woman dressed in the leather military togs of the guards.

  “This is Albany. She will be your companion and protector for the next few days while I consider your circumstances,” Iasco introduced the woman as Marco rose from his seat.

  He examined the woman coolly. She was of medium height, with close cropped hair that was sprinkled with gray throughout. She looked at him with eyes that told him she had seen many things in life, and she brooked no nonsense. But there was no hostility in her stare, only a hard appraisal of him.

  “I’m not sure the young man will really need a protector, if what I heard about his little entanglement down below is true,” Albany spoke for the first time.

  “He’s not to be allowed to leave the island. He’s not to be allowed to go in pursuit of Porenn. He’s not to be allowed to do any ‘man things’ to any of our girls,” Iasco instructed. “And he’s not to be harassed or abused by any of our girls either,” she added. “Other than those rules, he’s to be given freedom of the island. I don’t think there are any harmful intentions in his heart, and I hope there’s some good common sense in his brain.

  “Now, off with the two of you. My day has been wrecked by our little adventure this morning and I have a million things to do,” Iasco shook hands with Albany, then turned to Marco. Flustered by the circumstances, he quickly bowed to her, then followed Albany out the door and off the balcony.

  “It’s good to see that you’ve got at least a sliver of good manners,” the guard commented as they re-entered the hall. “Now, where would you like to go?”

  “Is there someplace I can get some bread or meat to eat?” Marco asked. “The fruit was good, but I want something solid.”

  “Do you have any money?” Albany asked.

  “I’ve got a sword, a pair of pants, and a vest, and that’s it,” Marco replied.

  “You’ve got more than that, from what I hear, but nothing that’s going to buy you a meal,” Albany said wrily. “Well, we could go to the guard mess hall and get something there, but I’m not sure I want to take you in there just now.

  “Can I trust you to behave?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Come with me,” the guard told him and she set out walking at a brisk pace. They left the building, walking past guards who looked at Marco ominously, then they walked up one of the side streets that climbed the sloping mountainside portion of the village, and turned into a dim doorway. Inside, Albany opened a door and led Marco in.

  “Here, this is the library. You stay here, don’t talk to anybody, don’t let anyone see you, don’t go anywhere else, don’t do anything at all,” Albany instructed him. “I’ll go get some food and bring it up here to you.

  “No one who might want to mix it up with you is going to think to come to the library, so you’ll be fine here as long as you don’t call attention to yourself. Do you understand?” she asked.

  “I’ll stay here and won’t talk to anyone, don’t worry,” Marco said earnestly.

  And with that, Albany was gone. Marco was alone for the first time since the screaming girls had awoken him that morning, and he let out a deep breath of relaxation, able to let some of his tension temporarily slip away. He slipped away from the wall that held windows looking out over the street, and he slipped between two of the many book cases.

  There were dozens of books lining the shelves. He randomly pulled an ornately illustrated, hand-scribed tome entitled “The Wellness of Blessings”. He randomly opened a page in the front of the book, and saw an image of Jesus on the cross, beneath which were written the words, “All prayers for healing and wellness must be from a pure heart, one ordained to place love of our savior as the highest means of finding relief from pain.”

  He closed the book and restored it to its position, then looked at another book, one which had drawings of plants, and told of their medicinal properties. He was intrigued by the similarity of the concepts to some of the alchemical formulas he had prepared, and he leafed through several pages. Something caught his attention from the corner of his eye, and he looked up to see a very large book lying on its side on top of the bookcase.

  Marco put the botanical lesson book away, and stretched upward to pull the big volume down. He examined the dusty cover, and saw that it had no title on the leather-bound wood. There was no title page either; the first page was a very old parchment that contained closely scribed writing, and it appeared to end abruptly. There was no writing on the back side of the page, but the narrative carried on at the top of the next page, and Marco realized that the pages had at one time been a scroll, which had been cut into pages.

  He began to read again, and as he did, he realized with a start that the text was referring to obscure alchemical theories, things that Master Algornia had tried to teach him over the course of his apprenticeship in the shop in the Lion City. Purification was constantly referred to – using various elements to purify the flaws in people. He took the book and walked back out to the front of the room, where he sat on the floor by the window, and began to read the book clearly by the light that came streaming in through the glass.

  He came to a page on which a profile of a man’s head was drawn above letters that spelled HERMES TRISMEG. Below that he saw an image of a caduceus. The images were familiar, and he realized with a start that they were the same as the images on the coin he had swallowed in the Lion City, the coin given to him by the old woman who had disappeared.

  The words inside the book were nonsense and indecipherable at first, as Marco’s brain slowly shifted gears from thinking about survival among a village of hostile women to thinking in terms of the principles and practices of alchemy once again. As he perused the pages he was surprised by the continual stream of triggered memories that came flooding back to his mind, the memories that Algornia had managed to plant more securely than Marco had realized as he had sat and daydreamed in the shop on the square. And other concepts seemed to leap into his comprehension as well, ideas that surprised him with their complexity and alchemical relevance.

  He came to the end of the opening prologue, and the pages became a long, comprehensive list of formulae for concoctions. They all were related to healing he realized, as he began to leaf through the book. The whole book was hundreds of formulae for treatments of illnesses, injuries, conditions, even diseases of the mind! And they all made sense to him. He would be able to create any of the cures the book spelled out, given the proper ingredients, he grasped with a start.

  Marco sat with the book propped open in his lap, his eyes closed, as he tried to recall the various mixtures he had worked on related to healing over the course of his service to Algornia. None of the formulae in the book seemed familiar, and the book seemed capable of treating a vastly greater range of conditions that Algornia had ever worked on.

  “Are you sleeping?” Albany’s voice made Marco jump, as he opened his eyes and saw her standing in the doorway, holding a paper-wrapped parcel.

  “I, I was just resting my eyes,” Marco stuttered.

  “If you’d rather take a nap, I can put your food aside for later,” the guard said as she displayed the food she had brought.

  Marco’s stomach growled loudly at the recollection of food. “I’d like to eat now,” he answered.

  Albany came and slowly lowered herself to the floor, then laid the parcel between them. “I think I brought enough for both of us to have a bite, if you don’t mind sharing.”

  “That sounds good,” Marco said, as he unwrapped the paper and looked at the pile of rolls, slices of meat and cheese, and small bottle of wine that were contained within. “There’s more than enough to share,” he looked warily up at Albany’s face, and saw that there was an expression of curiosity in her eyes. He realized abruptly that he had set his sword down back in the book cases when he had reached for the alchemical text, and he was alone with a woman, weaponless.

  “You’re just sitting here quietly reading a book while there’s
a hundred women wandering around the town trying to figure out where you are; now isn’t that funny,” she said as she took a bread roll from the package and bit into it.

  “Am I going to be safe?” he asked as he picked up a wedge of yellow cheese and bit off the end.

  “I think so,” Albany answered, speaking around the food in her mouth. “The Lady has sent out a pretty clear message. If anything does manage to happen to you, it will look like an accident – for all I know, it might even really be an accident!” she laughed, and Marco gave an uncertain chuckle with her.

  “Of course the other problem is what the little vixen Porenn started. There are a bunch of women who just want to ‘talk’ with a man, they say.

  “I’m already working to squelch that problem,” she said.

  “How’s that?” Marco’s curiosity was intense.

  “I’ve told everyone that Porenn said you were a lousy lover,” Albany answered, then laughed loudly at the injured look on Marco’s face.

  “Stop worrying, I didn’t really say that of course, and even if I did, there’d still be those who would want to find out for themselves. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you the opportunity to satisfy their appetites. Women have gotten along just fine on this island for centuries; we’re not going to let you screw everything up here in the next couple of days.”

  They ate in silence after that, as Marco considered the implications of Albany’s report, and mulled over the surprising information. At length they finished their meal.

  “What would you like to do now?” Albany asked.

  Marco looked at the angle of the sunlight coming in through the window; it appeared to be late afternoon. “I’d like to go take a walk along the beach,” he said, dreaming that he might catch a glimpse of Kreewhite, and be magically rescued from his predicament.

  “Along the beach,” Albany muttered to herself. “Now, in the daylight, or would you like to wait until the evening, after dark, when you won’t be quite so identifiable?”