“I will tell your tale to others, who will tell others, and perhaps it will reach your friend,” the dolphin told Marco. “I am going back to my pod now, friend with legs. Farewell,” and the animal swam away.
Satisfied with the contact, Marco returned to the cottage, and crawled atop the bundle of blankets Albany had laid out for him. He slept soundly through the night.
Chapter 22 – The Lady’s Origins Story
Marco awoke and saw Albany sitting on the stoop outside the front of the cottage. The sun was well above the horizon, and the guard was chewing on a small loaf of bread. He wrapped a cover around himself and sat down beside her.
“How long will we stay here?” he asked.
“Are you bored already?” Albany asked. She handed him half of her bread.
“No,” he answered. “I just wondered.”
“Lady Iasco will send for us when she has time to spend on you. It may be a while. I’ve got enough food for a week, at her suggestion,” Albany told him.
And so they spent their time in isolation, neither of them dissatisfied with the arrangement. Marco spoke with the same dolphin - Whaley, and one or two others, every day. There were no reports about Kieweeooee or Kreewhite, but Marco discovered that he was considered a local point of wonder, and numerous dolphins came swimming through the waters off the cottage in order to see the legged animal that spoke their language.
On the sixth day of their idyllic stay at the cottage, a woman arrived in the mid-morning. “Her Ladyship requests that you return to the village immediately, so that she may move the boy to his next location,” the messenger told Albany, pointedly ignoring Marco. She departed as soon as her message was delivered.
Marco’s strength was returning, and his badly shredded torso was well on its way to healing. He walked down to the beach and told the dolphins that he was leaving that spot, but would talk to others again soon whenever he had a chance to return to the water.
“I wouldn’t go telling everyone that you talk to fishes,” Albany advised as they started walking back. “You seem strange enough as it is.”
Marco disregarded the mis-identity of the dolphins as fish. The dolphins, starting with Kieweeooee had made an emphatic point of telling him that they were different from, and better than, fish.
“I haven’t told many people,” he cautiously agreed. “Just Mirra.”
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t listened to my mother. But I would have missed a good life here,” Albany answered. “You should propose to your girl, and marry her.”
Marco listened thoughtfully, and wondered at Albany’s admission. The two of them had not talked a great deal with one another during their time at the cottage, but they had developed a greater trust for one another, and he believed the advice was offered sincerely. He intended to propose to Mirra in any case, as soon as he returned to Barcelon.
They returned to the village early in the afternoon, and Albany took Marco directly to Iasco’s home. “I’m placing you back in the lady’s care,” his guard said. “May her blessings be upon you. And I hope for your sake and ours that you can leave the island soon!” she gave a brief smile. She started to hold out her hand to shake, then paused as she realized Marco no longer had a right hand, and her face took on a look of embarrassment.
“I’ll shake your hand after the lady restores mine to me soon, I promise,” he told her, trying to assuage her discomfort.
“That’s a deal,” she smiled, and then she was gone, and Marco was alone.
He walked to a long hallway with many doors on either side of it, and wondered which one was Lady Iasco’s room, if any of them were. There was only one way to find out, he decided.
“Can anyone help me find the Lady?” he asked in a loud voice. Within seconds, over a dozen heads with shocked expressions poked out of their respective doorways to see how a male voice could be heard in their building, and a woman came stalking rapidly down the hall towards him.
“You should not be here!” she hissed. “I know her Ladyship has sanctioned your presence, but you still should not be here.”
Marco stood silently, waiting for the woman’s anger to finish its course.
“Can you tell me where Lady Iasco is?” he asked after waiting several seconds more.
“She’s at the stables, waiting for you. Lois!” the woman called, and a servant hurried into the hallway. “Lead him to the Lady at the stables, and don’t dawdle,” she commanded, then turned her back and returned to her room in high dudgeon.
“Come along,” the servant said urgently, eager to be out of the way of the woman’s wrath. Marco followed her through a maze of turns and halls and stairs to arrive at a door that led to a stable yard, where the Lady Iasco stood with a half dozen other women and a pair of ponies, as the women all chatted amiably among themselves.
“Ah, here’s our young nobleman,” the lady said easily as the servant hastily retreated after delivering Marco. “We’ve saved a seat atop one of the ponies for you.”
Marco looked at the group of women, none of who evidently intended to ride up the side of the small mountain that constituted the island, and his pride rose to the top of his conscious. “I’ll walk, if it’s all the same to you,” he said.
Iasco looked at him with a mocking smile. “I told the ladies that our young marquess would refuse to ride if the ladies didn’t ride. Let me introduce our escorts,” she told Marco. “Here are Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, and Merope.
“I think you’re fit enough to make the trip, especially since we’ll only ride halfway up tonight,” she told him. “Lead on, Merope,” she called to a fair-haired girl in the group, who took the halter of one of the ponies and led the group out of the yard.
“I was just getting ready to tell the ladies what Folence’s first written appraisal of you was,” Iasco told Marco as they began to ascend the winding path that led upward.
“I received this letter more than a fortnight ago, and immediately chartered our ship to take me to Barcelon, as you know,” Iasco said, as she pulled a piece of parchment out of a fold in her gown.
“My great lady,” her voice softened as she mumbled through the salutation. “We have the boy you desire, though you’ve asked for a greater challenge than I would have expected. He came to my attention accidentally when we received word of an alchemist who was doing miraculous work to beat the plague, curing what was incurable, and giving his goods away as though they had no worth.
“I intended to examine this phenomena at a later date, not associating the alchemist with your vagabond champion who I never expected to see in our unfashionable city. The duke’s mistress caused quite a stir by the way,” Iasco’s voice dropped off as she edited out the extraneous gossip that Folence had dropped into the letter.
“Ah, here,” her voice strengthened. “I’d like to be able to tell you that I’ve thrashed your runaway hero to within an inch of his life, after the idiocy I’ve seen him exercise,” there came a soft round of tittering from the accompanying women who were listening to the recitation of the letter. “Fortunately he only performs his most stupid experiments on his own body – unfortunately, he very nearly succeeded in suicide, although he had some justification for the dramatic damage he inflicted upon himself.
“He tried to fight off a hostile possession of his soul,” Iasco paused. “Hmm, I’ll have to ask her if there is ever a non-hostile possession of one’s soul,” she commented, then returned to the script in her hand. “By subjecting the evil power – while still within his own body, mind you! – to exposure to gorgon’s blood!
“And I believe he knows what it is and what he’s doing! The crafty little urchin gave me the slip once, but I caught up with him by following the nymph who seems to be enamored of him. I’ll have to discuss her case with you later, as she seems to be unnaturally and extraordinarily enhanced in her beauty, though I cannot tell what the boy did to her,” Iasco paused again. “You seem to distract our good Folence somehow Marco, she rarely
gossips so much.”
Iasco murmured through a few more lines. “Here,” she came to a point of interest, and read again. “The boy fought a sorcerer, and won! He wasn’t apparently in any eminent danger himself; he must just have a death wish, which he very nearly found to be granted. He fought a powerful sorcerer – and he won! He knows alchemy and something more; he has a good heart; and he’s apparently durable enough to withstand his own foolishly self-inflicted wounds. You’ve got a rare champion in the making, if you can keep him alive long enough so that he learns who he is.
“Once we’ve healed him, I’ll plan to send him to you soon unless you send directions otherwise. We’ll take good care of him; I find that I’m actually a bit fond of him myself,” Iasco stopped reading and folded the letter up.
“There’s more of course, but you made quite an impression on Folence, and she’s not someone easily impressed,” Marco had the sudden insight that Iasco was reading the letter to impress the women with Folence’s judgment of him, not to make him laugh at the woman’s report. Despite Folence’s last claim, the priestess in Barcelon had certainly done nothing while he was with her to make Marco think she held him in any particularly high esteem. Women seemed better able to hide their emotions, he concluded.
“So Marco, you killed a powerful sorcerer in Barcelon,” Iasco said.
Her tone made him turn to look at her. They were starting to ascend the mountain at a steeper angle, and he was starting to breath more heavily, and he waited a moment as his mind registered what had been nagging at it for some time, and then he remembered.
“The sorcerer! Right as he died,” Marco began, then paused. “Right before he died, his skin changed. It suddenly showed,” he paused again, then decided to speak bluntly, “it showed stripes, just like you have on your skin. He hadn’t looked that way before.”
“What you saw was his natural skin pattern. He’d been covering it up most of his life until that time,” Iasco replied.
“I’ll tell you a story, Marco, one that perhaps no one else on this island, except one or two old friends, has ever heard, in part,” Iasco said. Without looking, Marco could sense the ears of the others perking up, straining to hear their leader tell a story that was apparently not widely known.
“You may think that some of this is myth, but I was taught it all as history,” the lady began. “Many ages ago, the people of my race lived on a great island far out in the western ocean. They were accomplished and intelligent people, who built beautiful and luxurious cities, the comparison of which has never been seen since.
“But they were a proud people, who thought that their success was only through their own deeds. They had no faith in the lord – at best they worshiped his simple pagan faces with only half-hearted faith – and even those temples became deserted and scorned. They developed an empire, and they mistreated their conquered people,” she continued. “The leaders of the people grew foolish and wasteful and cruel.
“But a few of the people of the island understood that they were in a nation that was heading towards its doom. They had dreams and visions of a day of settlement coming, and they saw it as if it were a storm cloud on the horizon, approaching in full view. Those people prepared and considered and acted on the vision they had. They all fled the island in a great flotilla of ships that sailed eastward,” Iasco’s epic story continued.
“Their ships were pursued by ships of the navy of the foolish king, who did not wish to have anyone deserting from him. On the first day that the navy began its chase of those who flew from the evil, an enormous dark cloud erupted, and the earth shook violently, and then a wave as tall as a mountain came racing from the west across the ocean surface. It struck the island kingdom like the hand of God wiping away an insect, and the entire realm was destroyed. The wave continued on, and it sank the king’s entire navy.
“So those refugees sailed on until they found a new land, and they left their ships and they marched across the land, into a beautiful, vast hidden valley high among the mountains in that part of the world. And they chose a new king, a wise man who had long counseled them to flee from the evil and to live in peace.
“His name was Prester John,” Iasco told Marco and the others, as they continued to climb. “And when a prophet of the lord came through the mountains to the people, Prester John led them all to convert to the new religion.
“He lived and ruled for 240 years. His great-great grandson was king when I was born in the kingdom of Prester John,” she told them. “And once again, foolishness had begun to descend upon those who had spent too long sitting in places of power. Our family lived in a small village in the northern mountains, far away from the splendor of the king’s palace. My parents and my brother and I didn’t know or care about the things the kings and his courtiers did or said, and nobody in our village worried about such things.
“But the king got into a war with the tribes to the north when he tried to invade their territories, and the tribesmen were willing to fight to protect their homes. So the king’s army, which had bad generals who were the king’s friends, lost badly. The king raised new taxes to pay for more fighting, and my parents and my village suffered greatly.
“But the war went on, and not only did the king’s cronies lose more, then the tribesmen came and invaded our kingdom in retaliation.
“My brother and I were in the mountain pasture one early morning tending our goats, when the tribesmen came to our village. They did to our people what the king’s soldiers had done to their people – they killed them all,” Iasco’s voice had a heart-wrenching note of sadness as her story continued, while the setting of the sun and the slowly creeping darkness that arrived only accented her words.
“So my brother and I ran for safety. We took our goats and we went east, far east. I was young, about ten, and my brother was three years older. We walked for weeks, and ate our goats one by one, until we only had three left, and we found a man living in a cave, who was kind to us, and took us in, and raised us as his servants, I suppose,” she reckoned. “He didn’t love us, or treat us like family, but he was fair, and sheltered us. And after a while, when he trusted us, he started to teach us things.
“It turned out he was a sorcerer, a very ancient one, who lived alone in his cave. He taught us many of his secrets and many of the ancient practices of sorcery,” Marco heard one of the girls give a small gasp at the revelation.
“Yes, I learned sorcery,” Iasco said in response to the gasp. “How did I do with it, Marco?” she asked.
“You saved my life,” he said as he thought of the yellow dome that had protected him from the attacking birds in the Barcelon palace. “You were masterful.”
“Thank you. Such a sweet boy,” she said in a tone that sounded wistful.
“And the day came that the sorcerer told us we were old enough to live on our own. He didn’t tell us we had to leave, but he seemed ready for us to leave, so for a few days my brother and I talked. We talked about what to do, and where to go, and why.
“My brother,” by now the sky was nearly completely dark, “my brother hadn’t spoken much about our parents during the years we lived with the sorcerer, but when the time came to leave, he talked about revenge and fighting and honor.
“I told him I just wanted to go someplace with society, with lots of people – like a big city, where we could make a home and have neighbors and learn to live a full life with friends, and lovers, I supposed,” Marco could imagine that the girls were blushing in the darkness at the thought of their leader having lovers.
“He was angry, and I was determined, and after we talked for a while, we decided we would have to go our separate ways. He wouldn’t go with me to the north, to the cities of people, and I wasn’t going to go with him to the court of Prester John’s kingdom. Then one morning he was gone; he didn’t say good bye, he just left.
“So the next day I left too, and I traveled north to the cities, where I worked telling fortunes and casting spells and doing other th
ings,” she paused, and Marco realized with a start that they were no longer walking, that the entire group had stopped and was listening in the dark to Lady Iasco’s story.
“I became betrothed to a prince in a small land called Rurita, south of the Great Sea, after I healed his mother’s incurable disease.” She waited as the murmurs arose and died down.
“And then one day my brother showed up. He had heard of a sorceress who did good works, and he was running from the men who were after his soul.
“He told me his story. He had gone to Prester John’s court, and had killed the king and his advisors. He had used his sorcery power – he was more powerful than I was – and he had told the king why he was doing it, and then he had gotten his bloody revenge.
“And when he did, the Docleatae, the tribe of the nation on the south of Prester John’s kingdom invaded. Without a king or a court, there was no leadership, no one for the people and the nobles to rally around, and the invasion killed and enslaved thousands of people. Because of what my brother did, terrible things happened, and he was unhinged when he realized the results of his actions.
“Let’s unpack and prepare to spend the night here,” she spoke in a quieter voice. “I’ll tell you more after we prepare some food.”
Marco watched the women efficiently unload items from the pony, and start a fire. Iasco made him sit on a large rock and rest. The women served out dishes of food within minutes, and they all sat around a small fire, eating their meals off wooden platters. The women joked among themselves quietly, talking about sore legs and blisters and who was in the best shape, but all of them were waiting for Lady Iasco to return to the long, biographical story she had begun, a story that none of them had ever heard in any respect.
The Gorgon's Blood Solution Page 29
