“I don’t think we can leave,” Albany answered.
A moment later the door opened, and the first woman returned. “We found them, just as you said. Portia was able to confirm that the boy attacked them. Marcella has been sent to the temple for healing, and may live. Mitment is dead, and the boy is charged with murder,” she announced, as two other women entered the room.
“We’ll take him to his cell now. Albany, you are dismissed,” she finished.
“Lois, you can’t arrest the boy!” Albany shouted in astonishment. “He only protected himself, and me!”
“We have a dead woman. We have your word and Portia’s word that he killed Mitment. You can leave now, or you can go to a cell,” Lois answered.
“Albany, don’t leave me,” Marco whispered.
His guard looked at him, then looked around the room. “If you try to arrest him, you’ll lose more guards,” Albany said aloud. “He bested three of the good ones already.
“Take the case to her ladyship and let her judge,” Albany argued.
“Albany, leave, or go to his cell with him,” Lois ordered.
Albany looked at Marco, then turned and fled out the door.
Marco stood, and realized that he had drawn his sword while Albany had deserted him.
“Put that thing down, or you’re going to get hurt,” Lois addressed Marco.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Marco said, feeling the confidence that the sword instilled in him. “But I’m not going to let you lock me up.”
The other women in the chamber began to spread out, their own weapons drawn, as they moved into positions that would allow them to come at Marco from a variety of directions. He slowly edged towards the door, hoping to run, even though he knew there was no place he could safely run to.
Before he could reach for the handle, there was a sudden clap of thunder overhead, and the light coming in through the windows grew dramatically dimmer in an instant. A strong gust of wind began to howl along the street outside, and the door burst open with a loud crash as it flew back and hit the wall behind it, making Marco leap two steps away.
In the open doorway stood the Lady Iasco, and behind her stood Albany and a pair of guards that Marco did not recognize.
“Put your weapons down!” she spoke in a voice that seemed too large to come from her figure, a voice that seemed amplified by the power of the stormy weather that raged behind her.
The guards who were stalking Marco dropped their weapons in an instant, cowed by the open anger that was writ large on the lady’s face. Marco lowered his weapon, but did not immediately drop it, though he rested the point on the floor of the hall.
“You too, man!” Iasco looked directly at Marco and shouted her command. He looked at the other guards, then looked at the lady in the doorway, her hair blowing up around her face from the rear as the wind outside stormed down the street. Marco saw Albany standing behind the lady, her clothing rippling wildly from the wind, and he saw her gesture for him to put his weapon down. He pursed his lips grimly, then complied, gently resting the hilt of the sword against the wall behind him.
“Now,” Iasco said in a commanding tone, as she stepped into the room, “something has gone extraordinarily wrong here. Someone bring Portia in here right now.
“I don’t care where she is or what condition she’s in,” Iasco pre-empted any protests. “I’ll hear her story, and I’ll hear the boy’s story.” Albany and the guards stepped in, and closed the door behind them.
There were long moments of nervous silence as everyone waited, and then a guard returned with Portia, the attacker on the beach, whose neck bore a pair of scratches from where Marco’s sword point had bit into her flesh. She had evidently been bathing when compelled to attend the extraordinary hearing, for her hair was wet, and her clothes clung to her body in a state of dampness.
“Portia, you will answer all questions with absolute honesty. If I detect any dishonesty, I shall ban you from the isle – forever. Do you understand?” Iasco asked.
“Yes, my lady,” the woman answered in a quiet voice, her eyes downcast and her face pale.
“Did you and the others go to the beach last night to ambush the boy?” Iasco bluntly asked the question.
“Yes, your ladyship,” Portia immediately answered, her eyes still looking at the floor.
“And did you intent to kill him?” Iasco further questioned without pause.
“No, maybe yes. I’m not sure, my lady. We wanted to at least scare him, or hurt him. He’s a threat to the isle – the prophecy says so. We wanted to protect everyone here, and our way of life,” Portia’s answer flew from her lips.
“Marco,” the lady turned to face the boy, who stood just a few steps from her, “how quickly can you leave this island?”
“As soon as I spot my friend, I’ll leave,” he answered. “I just need to watch the shore line and see if he is still around the island, or if he gave up on finding me.”
“There will be one of our ships, filled with supplicants, arriving at the dock in four days,” the lady said in a voice that brooked no nonsense. “If you’re still here when that ship gets here, you’ll be immediately placed on it and sailed away to its first port of call.
“I had wondered if there might be some way to allow you to spend some time with us,” Iasco continued, drawing gasps from the others in the crowd. “For it appears to me there is a purpose to your arrival here. But clearly, the dynamics you bring to our society will not allow that.
“I order you into exile for the next four days,” she told him, making him look at her with widened eyes. “There is an empty shepherdess’s cabin on the south end of the isle.
“Albany,” she spoke without looking over shoulder, “you will accompany him to the cabin immediately. You will remain in the vicinity to oversee him, but you will have no interaction with him. You will make sure no one else has any exchanges with him as well. If his friend does not take him away in four days, you will bring him back here, and put him on the ship that leaves our harbor.
“Do you understand?” the leader of the women asked the guard.
“Yes, my lady,” Marco’s guard replied.
“Good,” Iasco said. The wind outside abruptly diminished in volume, and the clouds overhead parted, allowing the sun’s rays to once again reach the village. “Take the boy to get supplies and then take him away from us.”
“Marco, come here,” she ordered.
He felt compelled to respond, and to his own surprise he found himself kneeling directly before her.
“I give you my benediction,” she told him, as he felt her hand rest firmly upon his head. “May the blessings of the isle protect you, and may you fulfill your destiny to serve the temple of Asclepius.
“Now rise, and depart with Albany,” she ordered. “The rest of you remain here, to face justice.”
Marco stood and looked at the lady for a moment, then bowed, picked up his sword, and brushed past her to step out into the street with Albany, who closed the door behind them.
“Thank you Albany,” he said immediately.
“I don’t approve of you being here,” the guard answered, “but I believe in justice. Now, let’s get going,” she stalked away, leading Marco to follow her.
After she appropriated two sacks of food items for them, along with sets of blankets, she started towards the edge of the village.
“Wait!” Marco called out, causing her to stop. “Can I take the book from the library to read at the cabin?” he asked.
Albany pursed her lips in a look of disapproval. “I suppose so,” she agreed, and diverted up a side road towards the library.
An hour later the two of them were all alone, miles out of town, following a narrow trail that ran atop a short cliff that looked out over the rocky shoreline below. Marco constantly shifted his gaze between the footing of the trail, and the water of the sea just off-shore, searching for any sign of Kreewhite. They walked on without talking for another two hours, unti
l a cottage and a small barn came into view in a green valley that led down to the beach below.
“Here it is,” Albany said. “You take the cottage, and I’ll take the barn. You stay in the cottage or you go watch the sea, but don’t do anything else,” she warned him.
“I understand,” he agreed with a sigh. They parted, and he entered the cottage, where he placed his supplies on a table in the front room, and spread his blankets over a plain wooden bed frame in the back room. He pulled the book of alchemy out of the blankets, and took it with him out in front of the cottage, where he sat down and held the book in his lap.
He alternated his attention between staring out at the sea and reading the book. The formulae within the volume were fascinating, and were growing in fascination to him. He read of cures and remedies for ailments that were both widespread and rare, and he devoured page after page of information, finding to his surprise that the things he read stuck inside his head with the greatest of ease.
When the sun started to set, he put the book aside and walked down to the beach. The sun was setting to the west, off to his right, and the sea was sending long, rolling waves up onto the rocks and sand of the beach front. He stood and looked out for the longest time, as the sun went down and darkness succeeded the brilliant colors of the sunset, and he thought about the likelihood that he wasn’t going to spot his merboy friend, that Kreewhite and he were unlikely to find one another.
When he returned to his cottage he could faintly detect Albany also returning to her shelter, and he longed for her to say something, to let him know that they could still communicate. She was in some ways already a mother-like figure in his eyes, and it hurt to be so completely cut off from her.
He sat in the darkness and ate a small meal of foodstuffs from his bag, then lay in his cot and fell into a troubled sleep, filled with dreams of being stranded and chased around the island full of women forever.
The next day, Marco took his book and went down to the beach again. He read and studied the waterfront all morning, under the watchful eye of Albany. In the afternoon he left the book in his cottage and began to walk along the beach, looking out at the blue sea. As he followed the landscape up onto bluffs that looked down at the water, he could see patches of lighter and darker blue in the waters closest to the island, and he could watch the shadows of small clouds go racing across the surface of the water. But he saw no sign of Kreewhite that afternoon as he walked miles along the waterfront, and then miles back, followed by Albany the whole time.
That night, Marco slept. It was a disturbed sleep, interrupted by dreams all night long, and he remembered the dreams when he awoke. He dreamed of alchemy; he dreamed of himself mixing the various formulae he had read about from the great book on the isle. He dreamed of the elements he mixed together; he dreamed of the patients and customers coming to a shop and asking for him to tend to their needs. He dreamed of going places to procure exotic ingredients, and he even dreamed of going through purification rituals with customers to prepare them for the cures he sold to them.
When he awoke, Marco was bleary-eyed from his troubled slumber. He walked along the seashore in the morning, heading back in the direction of the village, until Albany spoke to him to tell him to go no closer to the society of women. He turned and returned to the cottage, where he took up the book once again, and finished devouring the final pages of its elaborate last compounds and compositions while he sat on the beach in the afternoon.
When he was done with the book, he closed it carefully and let it sit in his lap as he closed his eyes and tried to comprehend all the information and implications of the things he had read. It was a staggering collection of cures for problems that affected people around the world, he was sure, and he was astonished to think that it all had been learned, and written down, then grown to be unknown and lost information. The knowledge was swirling in his head, seeking to escape, to be put into action.
There was a sudden flash of light, a searingly brilliant flaring that made him wince and close his eyes, then there was a burning sensation on the front of his shoulder. He pressed his hand over the painful spot, and felt a rough texture in the location. The bright light that shone with reddish intensity through his eyelids dimmed immediately, and when he opened his eyes the light was gone. He sat blindly for many long seconds, until his eyes gradually adjusted to the ambient light. There was a dark patch on the front of his shoulder, right where the pain had been, but in looking at it Marco could detect no clear pattern, just a small tangle of bloody lines tracing across his skin, not far from his heart.
“You are marked as my champion,” a voice told him, and then it said no more. It was the voice from the caverns, he was sure. He sat still and listened but no further communications came immediately, and when they did, he could tell it was from a more worldly source.
“Marco!” he heard his name faintly called.
‘Marco!” the voice was familiar; it made his heart beat fast, and he opened his eyes.
Out among the sparkling waves he saw a dark spot, and he could vaguely see the motion of an arm waving above the water’s surface.
“Kreewhite?” he shouted, as he hastily removed the book from his lap and stood up. He shaded his eyes and stared, then started to run out across the stones on the beach, and began to splash through the water.
“Marco?” he heard Albany’s voice call faintly from somewhere behind him, from her spot upon the island’s dunes from which she had watched him.
“Kreewhite!” he was up to his waist in the cool water, and his friend was waiting for him only a few feet further out. As the water rose to the middle of his chest, the two of them embraced joyfully.
“I’m so glad to find you!” Kreewhite shouted as he wrapped his arms around his friend, who bobbed slightly in the water.
“I didn’t expect I’d ever see you again,” Marco said at the same time. “How are you?”
“I’m good; I’m fine. How are you? You seem to be healthy and healed; you look better than before,” the merboy spoke.
“I am – I’m all healed,” Marco agreed. “When I started climbing up into that cave, it took me through a magical healing pool. I kept climbing for hours, and I came out up there,” he turned and pointed, “on the top of the mountain.
“This island is full of women, nothing but women,” he explained.
“Nothing wrong with that, is there?” Kreewhite asked with a wolfish grin.
“You wouldn’t think so, but they say it’s against the law for a man to be on the island. A couple of them tried to kill me. They’re going to exile me from the island tomorrow unless you take me away to your home,” Marco said holding joyfully onto Kreewhite’s arms.
“I can’t Marco,” the merboy said abruptly, a sober look on his face.
“After I couldn’t find you, I went in search of my village to seek help. When I found them yesterday, they said I couldn’t bring a human back to our home if he already was safe on land. And I had told them that you were safe on an island,” Kreewhite told him.
“I could carry you across the water, the way I did to bring you here, if you want me to take you someplace, but I can’t take you home to my people,” he told his friend, as his eyes searched Marco’s face carefully.
Marco’s face went blank momentarily. “It’s okay. That will be okay,” Marco assured his friend. “The women say there’s a ship coming tomorrow, and it can take me away to a human city somewhere. I’d rather be with you,” he said, “but I’m going to be okay, I hope.”
“Are you sure?” Kreewhite asked. “I can carry you, or I can follow your ship and help you,” he offered.
“No, you’ve already saved my life,” the boy assured the merboy. “I’ll be fine. But I’ll miss you. I had hoped that we’d be able to spend some time together again.” He felt disappointed, but also a sense of fate – he knew now that he would allow the women of the isle to put him down in some city somewhere, and let him go on with living.
“You ca
n call me if you need me!” Kreewhite said excitedly.
“How can I do that?” Marco asked in astonishment. “Are you going to follow me?”
“No, but you can tell the dolphins, and they can tell me,” Kreewhite answered.
The look of disbelief on Marco’s face was profound.
“There are almost always dolphins around. There are lots of them, they like people, and they’re kind of nosy,” Kreewhite explained. “We can talk to them, sort of the way you talk to animals on land, but the dolphins can talk back to us,” the merboy continued. “I can teach you a couple of phrases to tell the dolphins, and then they’ll come find me.”
“Really? You’re not making this up?” Marco asked in astonished delight. The whole notion of using dolphins to send messages to merpeople was astounding.
“I am not making this up,” Kreewhite affirmed. “Here’s what you do; you put your face down in the water, then you repeat these words,” he demonstrated by loudly uttering a series of grunts, squeaks, and moans underwater.
“Now you try,” he urged.
“Would you repeat those sounds?” Marco plaintively asked, and tried to listen to the short sequence that Kreewhite repeated.
As he repeated the sounds for a third time, a trio of fins came rushing through the water rapidly towards them, then began to circle immediately around them, as the dolphins clicked and squealed in an endless stream of sound. Kreewhite put his face into the water and made a responding series of noises.
One dolphin gave a single squeak, and then the trio grew silent, and floated motionlessly next to Kreewhite. Marco could see their dark eyes focused on the face of the merboy, which remained underwater.
Kreewhite raised his face. “They are astonished, but they love this idea. Go ahead and try making your call,” he commanded.
Unable to believe what was happening, Marco lowered his face into the water, and even in the salty water he kept his eyes open, observing the dolphins close-by as he began to squeak and click and grunt his message. When he finished he raised his face out of the water and looked at Kreewhite hopefully, as the dolphins suddenly began swimming in a rapid circle around them and splashed their flippers.
The Gorgon's Blood Solution Page 13
