The Gorgon's Blood Solution (10 page)

He stopped and inventoried his whole body in a momentary self-examination, and realized that he felt no pain, that there were no injuries, and that all signs of the attack by the sorcerer on the pier in the Lion City were erased.  He felt whole and healthy; if anything, he felt even stronger than he thought he had been before.

The movement of the sword caught his eye, as it flickered about while he flexed his arms, and he stared at the transformation.  The blade was beautifully reflective, shinier than anything he had ever seen before.  The corrosion and dull appearance it had possessed when he had grabbed it off the deck of the Corsair’s ship were gone.

“Thank you,” Marco looked up and spoke to the voice.  “This is impossible, and wonderful.  Thank you for your healing power.  I cannot tell you how wonderful this is!”

There was no answer, though Marco stood in hushed silence, waiting for the voice.  At length he reached forward again and pressed the door open then walked through, limp-free and comfortable.

“I have healed you so that you may be my champion,” the voice said as Marco crossed the threshold to the next chamber.

“What champion do you need?” Marco asked.  “There must be someone better than me.  I’m just a boy, almost,” he explained.

There was no answer once again, only silence.  Marco’s attention strayed from waiting for the voice to looking around him.

The voice spoke no more, though he waited.  In the dim light that filtered into the room where he stood, he saw that he was in a small room, with rough, uncut rocky faces on all sides.  There was no ceiling to the room – the room ascended upward into an uncapped darkness above.

Among the protruding and receding rocks on the walls, Marco saw something like a means of passage.  It was as steep as a step ladder, and it meandered back and forth for as long as it was in sight.  There was no other direction in which he could advance.

“Am I supposed to climb up there?  What’s up there?” Marco asked the empty dimness around him, but he received no answer.

He stood in confusion, considering whether to return the way he had come, or to move on.  He felt his stomach growl, and realized that he was extremely hungry.  There was no food behind him he knew, so he decided to start to climb, and to hope that either he would find an exit, or that the voice would guide him to an exit.

He wanted food, and he wanted to see Kreewhite, he realized, as he placed his free hand in a crevice and began to pull himself up.  He held onto the sword with one hand, while his bare feet groped among the crannies of the stone, seeking shelves and openings into which he could step.  He shifted the sword from hand to hand as he climbed, depending upon whether one hand or the other was growing tired, or whether he had to switch direction and free a particular hand to allow him to reach his next gripping point.

The chimney-like cave never grew completely dark, even as he moved upward and away from his starting point.  He could see well enough to see where to place his hand’s next move, but the points below him and the points above him quickly disappeared into vague nothingness.

After what seemed like a full day of climbing, he stopped to rest at a spot where the direction of his climb switched, and a small open space became an opportunity to sit and pause.  Marco wondered what had happened to Kreewhite.  He hoped the merboy was out in the open sea, free and swimming through the waters.  He wondered if he would be able to find an exit from the caves and find a way to return to the shore line of the island, where he might be able to rendezvous with Kreewhite, so that they could resume their journey together.

He casually wondered what was happening in Algornia’s shop, and whether he was missed by his master, but then the thought left his mind as he looked upward at the darkness, and began climbing again.  His newly healed muscles, as strong and marvelous as they felt in their miraculous recovery from the crippling attacks he had suffered at the hands of the Corsairs, began to send signals of fatigue and pain as he continued to climb, telling him that his long ascent was overcoming their capacity to continue.

And then, just as he planned to stop and rest again, possibly even sleep, he found himself reaching the summit of his journey.  The shaft he had climbed reached and opened in the center of a large, flat-floored cavern, and he crawled out onto it, then stood up and walked away from the edge of the opening.

The room was just as dark as the shaft had been, with only the faintest of light coming from some indistinct source.  There was no sound of any type, other than the faint echoes of his own movements.  He held his sword down and used it as a cane, helping him to assure that the floor in the dark chamber was whole as he cautiously shuffled forward.

After just a few minutes of movement, he reached a wall.  As he ran his hand across the stone it felt smooth, the evident handiwork of men, and he took hope that perhaps he would meet someone, anyone who could release him into the open world, and hopefully give him a meal and some clothes.  He walked along the wall, one hand holding the sword down to assure that the floor ran on, while the fingers on the other hand ran along the wall to keep it in constant contact, for Marco was sure that in that manner he would come to a door that would be his exit from the underground chamber.

Within a few steps he abruptly stopped, as he fingers ran across a wide seam in the stony wall, and the new section of wall seemed to give slightly.  Marco pressed harder against the wall, and he felt elation as the section of stone rocked back and forth.  He lifted the hand that held the sword, then pressed both hands against the edge of the wall, and braced his bare feet on the floor as he gave a mighty shove than made the wall fly open under the force of his effort, and he stumbled through the opening into a new room.

He could see inside the new room.  He stood still when he stopped his momentum, and looked up.  There was light.  There was a high arched dome overhead, and an opening in the very center of the ceiling, through which he could see a small portion of a field of stars twinkling with luminous intensity, and then to his surprise he saw a flash of light as a shooting star sailed across his narrow field of vision.

On the wall opposite from him was a relatively blinding circle of light, the place where a shaft of moonlight landed on a pale white wall after entering through the opening above.  Except for a floor that was solid, not liquid, the room he was in was a copy of the temple he had been in below, at sea level with Kreewhite.  The ceiling was domed, there was a circle of columns inside the walls, and everything was a creamy, pale white color.  The moonlight reflected off the far wall and illuminated the room with a brightness that was disconcerting after Kestrel’s long confinement in the caverns beneath the ground.  There was an altar, a slab of raised stone, sitting two steps above the floor, in the center of the temple, and there was nothing else but him.  The altar held a silver platter, and upon the platter was a single apple.  Without hesitation, Marco grabbed the apple and devoured the fruit to the point of nibbling relentlessly around the core to consume every obtainable bit of edible flesh.

After he finished the apple, Marco turned and looked around the room, and realized that the stone panel he had pressed open had swung closed behind him.  It was, in fact, indistinguishable from the adjoining panels, and as he pressed against the various parts of the wall that he felt must be the doorway, none of them moved in the slightest degree.  He gave a great sigh and slumped down to the floor, knowing that in one sense he had simply traded one place of confinement for another.

With a view of open sky though, and more importantly, with evidence of human activity as evidenced by the presence of the apple, Marco felt better about his new location, and the prospects for achieving release.  He closed his eyes, and fell soundly asleep, exhausted physically and mentally by the long, strange journey that had brought him to the temple.

Chapter 10 – Porenn

Marco awoke to the sound of screams.

His head was tilted forward, his chin rested on his chest as he slept, and the screams startled him, so that he raised his head abruptly and banged it against the solid marble wall behind him, making a resounding whacking sound from the painful contact.

He staggered upward, one hand pressing the sword out in front of him protectively while the other hand rubbed the back of his skull, and he looked up.

He let out a shout of his own, conscious immediately of his own dire circumstances.

Four girls, wearing white gowns that flowed elegantly along the lines of their bodies, were standing in front of an open doorway.   One held a silver platter that held a single apple, identical to the fruit he had eaten during the night.

He was standing naked before them, with only the sword in his hand as insufficient coverage, and all the girls were staring at him, screaming.  Their screams were loud and piercing, and at first they were wordless shrieks, but they evolved into words as the girls continued to stand, and stare, and shout.

“Iasco!  Help us!” shouted one girl.

“A blasphemer in the temple,” screamed another.

“It’s a boy, a naked boy!” a third voice drilled her words into the air.

“He’s naked, completely naked!  This boy is naked!” another voice insistently screamed.

Marco glanced around in terror, then spotted the empty platter on the altar, the one he had eaten the apple off the night before.  He lunged towards the altar, which was also the same direction  the girls were in.

The girls screamed with renewed vigor as he moved, but they remained rooted to the spot by the doorway, staring at him as they screamed, and Marco was conscious of the direction of their eyes.

Marco grabbed the platter and swung it quickly down in front of himself.  “Go away!” he shouted.  “Stop staring at me!  Go!”

The girls looked up from the platter to his face, and their screams stopped.  They stood silently together in a cluster by the doorway, then, without any spoken communication between them, they turned as one and ran out of the doorway, leaving it ajar, and leaving Marco alone in the temple.

“Holy mother!” Marco swore in astonishment.

“You may call me that if you wish, but it doesn’t really fit,” a deep feminine voice addressed Marco from the doorway.  He reflexively checked the platter to make sure it provided his strategic coverage.

“I’ve been head priestess here for a long time, and I’ve heard many stories from my predecessors, but finding a naked boy in the Apex temple is something new,” the woman paused.

Marco studied her.  Like the young girls who had first discovered him, the woman wore a simple white dress, sleeveless and elegant.  She was older though, much older, or perhaps not, Marco couldn’t decide.  Her hair was a brilliant silver color, but didn’t appear to be the gray hair of an aged person.  The hair color stood out in its contrast with the exotically striped skin the woman sported, a dark complexion that had stripes of lighter skin precisely detailed in refined stripes.  She reminded Marco of a few alley cats he had seen in the Lion City, with stripes that were as clearly defined in their fur as the lady’s stripes were defined on her skin.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.  “Are you the champion?”

Her question reminded Marco of the bodiless voice that had spoken to him in the cavern the day – or night – before.  There too he had been asked if he was a champion.

“Were you the one who spoke to me down there?” Marco asked.

“So you answer a question with a question, do you,” the exotic woman replied.  “Either you are extremely confident of your position – exposed though you appear to me,” she smiled at her own pun, “or perhaps your manners are just poor, or perhaps your wits are too addled to know how to answer.”

“I can answer questions,” Marco replied brusquely.  “I just want to know what this is all about.  Who are you?  Why did you bring me here?  Is Kreewhite okay?” he asked.

“We seem to be speaking past one another,” the woman replied patiently.  “I – we – did not bring you here.  Somehow you have placed yourself in a temple where you should not be, on an island upon which you should not be.   If you are here as the great healer’s champion, then we welcome you, and we’ll even offer to clothe you,” she said with a ghost of a smile.

“And if you are not here as a champion, then I must know how you got here, and who you are,” her tone was not threatening, yet there was no mistaking the implications of her comment.

“My friend and I swam into a cave yesterday, a cave that was a temple, and I climbed up the caves last night and came out here in this temple,” Marco said.  “And the voice started talking to me; that’s why I went up into the cave.

“May I have some clothes?” he suddenly asked.  “And some food?”

“I was wondering how long we were going to go before that subject came up,” the woman told him.  “So just tell me, who are you, and how did you really get here?  Answer that, and we’ll get some clothes for you, we’ll feed you, and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do with you.”

“My name is Marco.  I’m from the Lion City.  I was taken by Corsairs, and when their ship wrecked in a storm, my friend and I swam to this island.  We saw a cave in a cliff, and we swam in,” Marco recited, feeling angry and drained and defeated by all the circumstances piling up.  “The cave was a temple, much like this one,” he repeated.  “I climbed up from it – and I got healed,” he remembered to add that detail, “then I climbed out into this temple last night, and I woke up when all those girls started screaming.”

The woman looked at him, her head cocked slightly to one side, giving him a measuring stare that made Marco nervous.

“I think I believe you believe that is the truth.  Stay right here while I have some clothes brought up,” she commanded, then stepped back out the doorway and spoke to someone apparently close by, though out of Marco’s sight.

“Your clothes will be here in a minute,” she told him as she looked back into the temple.

“What is this place?  Where am I?” Marco asked, hopeful that something was going to finally go right for him.

“This is the temple of Asclepius, on the isle of Ophiuchus, where no man may ever set foot,” the woman’s voice was brisk.  Her words shocked Marco, who had no idea that there was a place that forbid men to be present.

“That was the name of the place where I was healed,” he told the woman instead, remembering the bath he had walked through in the cave.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“In the cave below, I walked through a big trough of liquid of some kind, and it healed away all my injuries,” he explained.  “It was the bath of Asclepius.”

“We’ll talk,” the woman said, as a girl arrived and handed her a bundle of cloth.  “Here are your clothes,” she said promptly, walking carefully towards Marco with the bundle.  “Will you put the sword down please?” she asked as she approached.

Marco placed the sword on top of the altar, while holding the platter in place.  The woman placed the bundle on the altar as well, then stepped back.  “We will wait outside while you get dressed.   Come out and join us,” she suggested, then walked back to the doorway, and took the delivery girl with her out of the temple.

Marco lunged at the bundle with one hand and hastily pulled out a pair of pants, then stepped into them and immediately lifted them to his waist, as he discarded the platter that had served him in his time of need.  There was a shirt, which felt too tight, and a vest, that felt acceptable, and a cloak as well, though Marco felt no need to wear it.

He left the platter and the unneeded clothes on the altar, then cautiously stepped to the doorway and looked out.  He stopped and consumed the extraordinary view.  The temple was high upon the crest of the island, and as he looked out he could see the vast blue ocean shining in the sunlight in every direction.  Somewhere out there was Kreewhite, and his way to leave the island, he knew.

Closer to him, on the grassy sward that was adjacent to the temple,
there was a small crowd of women.  Most prominently in his eyes, the striped-skinned woman stood with a pair of enormous, heavily armed women flanking her, clearly serving as bodyguards, and looking at him as though he were a threat to be attacked.

“Marco, welcome to the island of Ophiuchus.  For the time being,” she raised her voice slightly to emphasize her words, “we welcome you as our guest, and we will treat you with respect,” she said, causing a ripple of stirring to pass through the crowd.

“Come with me please, to my offices, and we will give you some breakfast while we discuss your situation,” she proposed.

“The weapon, my lady,” one of her bodyguards spoke up immediately.  “The law not only forbids men on the island, but it forbids weapons to anyone who is not a high initiate in our order.”

The bodyguards were larger than him, and intimidating.  He didn’t like the idea of being unarmed in their presence until he saw some demonstration of good faith, even though he knew he had little ability to wield the weapon effectively against anyone with training.

“No,” he immediately said.  “I’m not giving up my sword.”

One of the guards instantly stepped in front of the woman who had met with him, while the other held her sword competently, and began to step towards him.

“Wait,” the head lady spoke up.  “There’s no reason for this Marco.  You will come to no harm.”  She glanced around the crowd.

“So you say,” Marco answered, drawing an angry murmur from the others around the scene.

No one spoke for several long seconds, until a voice broke out from the crowd.  “I can carry his weapon for him, and walk beside him, as a hostage,” someone offered.

“Stand forth, Porenn,” the leader directed.  A diminutive girl, much tinier than anyone else present, slid between two larger girls who had blocked her from Marco’s view.  She appeared to just as old, or slightly older even, than Marco, but her body frame was slender and petite.  Had he only seen her from behind, Marco suspected he would have mistaken her for a girl many years younger.

“Will you agree to give your weapon to Porenn, to carry for you, as your hostage, when we go down to the temple complex?” the woman asked.

It was confusing for Marco.  It was a complex situation – he had been thrust into a position where women with weapons threatened him, and he had no idea of what to expect.  He knew he could win a fight with the small woman who offered to be his hostage, but he foresaw many scenarios in which she took the sword and ran with it, or threw it, or otherwise deprived him of it when he might need it.

“We can hold it together, each of us with a grasp on the handle,” Porenn spoke up, as if she read his mind, making another rustle of murmurs pass through the crowd, which appeared to be growing bigger as more women arrived to watch.

She sounded confident, Marco thought, as though she would still have the upper hand.  Yet he had no alternative.  He let the point of the sword drop to the ground, then held the hilt out in front of him,  aimed at her, and he waited silently for her to walk up to him.

She reached him and stood directly before him.  She made no move to grab the sword, but her eyes stared at his, seeming to judge him.  She broke the long probe after the two of them had examined each for several seconds, gave a bob of her head, then grinned as she suddenly dropped into an elegant curtsy.

“Hello, my name is Porenn, and I will be your hostage while you are on the isle of healing and hope.  I may be small, but I am mightier than I look,” she made the women around them laugh nervously, and Marco sensed that the girl had cleverly managed to defuse some of the tension in the situation.

“Thank you for your offer,” he mumbled his reply, and he gently shook his hand to offer her the opportunity to grip the sword with him.

“We’ll see you on the eastern balcony,” one of the bodyguards said to the two sword-holders as Porenn placed her hand atop Marco’s, and the temple leader departed with her bodyguards and with most of the crowd, going down a pair of paths on the hillside.

Marco watched them go, but barely noticed the movement, as his attention was distracted by the feeling of Porenn’s fingers lacing themselves among his on the sword handle.  Her fingers were small, yet seemed long for a girl her size, and they felt strong.  She had a fragrance, he suddenly realized as she stood so close to him, a fragrance that reminded him of the smell of the balsam powder that Algornia kept in his shop in the Lion City.  He used the balsam in making healing potions he remembered.

“Come along everyone,” he heard a voice call from below, and the handful of women who remained watching the two turned to leave them alone.

“Who are you?” Porenn asked him looking up at him as the two of them stood in front of the temple.

”I am just a boy who is lost, and in way over my head,” Marco told her.

“How did you get here?  We watch all the ships that come to the harbor.  Even the sailors on our ships have to be women,” she said.

“It’s a long story,” Marco replied, and he gave a sigh.

“Come here,” Porenn tugged on his hand, and pulled him towards the edge of the green lawn.  They stepped over, then stood and looked down, where Marco saw the crowd of women following the two paths down the steep hillside.  “See that pink building?” Porenn pointed with her free hand to a building, one of several, in a village far below, down by a harbor.  “That’s where we’re going.  You’ve got plenty of time to tell your story while we walk.  Come on,” she spoke in a gay tone of voice, as if they were going on a friendly walk in the countryside, and she tugged him towards the trail.