Time of Contempt (11 page)

He will
, thought Ciri suddenly, feeling dizzy.
He’ll sail on great white sailing ships . . . He’ll sail to countries no one has seen before him . . . Fabio Sachs, explorer. He’ll give his name to a cape, to the very furthest point of an as-yet unnamed continent. When he’s fifty-four, married with a son and three daughters, he’ll die far from his home and his loved ones . . . of an as-yet unnamed disease . . .

‘Ciri! What’s the matter with you?’

She rubbed her face. She felt as though she were coming up through water, rising to the surface from the bottom of a deep, ice-cold lake.

‘It’s nothing . . .’ she mumbled, looking around and coming back to herself. ‘I felt dizzy . . . It’s because of this heat. And because of that incense from the tent . . .’

‘Because of that cabbage, more like,’ said Fabio seriously. ‘We oughtn’t to have eaten so much. My belly’s gurgling too.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ snapped Ciri, lifting her head briskly and actually feeling better. The thoughts that had flown through her mind like a whirlwind dissipated and were lost in oblivion. ‘Come on, Fabio. Let’s go.’

‘Do you want a pear?’

‘Course I do.’

A group of teenage boys were playing spinning tops for money. The top, carefully wound up with string, had to be set spinning with a deft tug, like cracking a whip, to make it follow a circular path around a course drawn with chalk. Ciri had beaten most of the boys in Skellige and all the novices at the Temple of Melitele at spinning tops. So she was toying with the thought of joining the game and relieving the urchins not only of their coppers, but also of their patched britches, when her attention was suddenly caught by some loud cheering.

At the very end of a row of tents and booths stood a curious semicircular enclosure squeezed between the foot of the wall and some stone steps. It was formed from sheets of canvas stretched over six-foot poles. There was an entrance between two of the poles, blocked by a tall, pockmarked man wearing a jerkin and striped trousers tucked into sailor’s boots. A small group of people milled around in front of him, and folk would throw a few coppers into the pockmarked man’s hand and then disappear behind the canvas. The pockmarked man was dropping the money into a large sack, which he jingled as he shouted hoarsely.

‘Roll up, roll up! Over here! You will see, with your own eyes, the most frightful creature the gods ever created! Horror of horrors! A live basilisk, the venomous terror of the Zerrikan deserts, the devil incarnate, an insatiable man-eater! You’ve never seen such a monster, folks. Freshly caught, brought from beyond the seas in a coracle. Come and see this vicious, live basilisk with your own eyes, because you’ll never see one again. Not never, not nowhere! Last chance! Here, behind me, for a mere fifteen groats. Just ten groats for women with children!’

‘Ha,’ said Ciri, shooing wasps away from the pears. ‘A basilisk? A live one? This I must see. I’ve only seen them in books. Come on, Fabio.’

‘I haven’t got any more money . . .’

‘But I have. I’ll pay for you. Come on, in we go.’

‘That’ll be six,’ said the pockmarked man, looking down at the four coppers in his palm. ‘
Three
five-groat pieces each. Only women with children get in cheap.’

‘He,’ replied Ciri, pointing at Fabio with a pear, ‘is a child. And I’m a woman.’

‘Only women carrying children,’ growled the pockmarked man. ‘Go on, chuck in two more five-groat pieces, clever little miss, or scram and let other people through. Make haste, folks! Only three more empty spaces!’

Inside the canvas enclosure townspeople were milling around, forming a solid ring around a stage constructed of wooden planks. On the stage stood a wooden cage covered with a carpet. Having let in the final spectators, the pockmarked man jumped onto the stage, seized a long pole and used it to pull the carpet away. The air filled with the smell of offal mixed with an unpleasant reptilian stench. The spectators rumbled and stepped back a little.

‘You are being sensible, good people,’ said the pockmarked man. ‘Not too close, for it may be perilous!’

Inside the cage, which was far too cramped for it, lay a lizard. It was covered in dark, strangely shaped scales and curled up into a ball. When the pockmarked man knocked the cage with his pole, the reptile writhed, grated its scales against the bars, extended its long neck and let out a piercing hiss, revealing sharp, white fangs, which contrasted vividly with the almost black scales around its maw. The spectators exhaled audibly. A shaggy little dog in the arms of a woman who looked like a stallholder yapped shrilly.

‘Look carefully, good people,’ called the pockmarked man. ‘And be glad that beasts like this don’t live near our city! This monstrous basilisk is from distant Zerrikania! Don’t come any closer because, though it’s secure in a cage, its breath alone could poison you!’

Ciri and Fabio finally pushed their way through the ring of spectators.

‘The basilisk,’ continued the pockmarked man on stage, resting on the pole like a guard leaning on his halberd, ‘is the most venomous beast in the world! For the basilisk is the king of all the serpents! Were there more basilisks, this world would disappear without a trace! Fortunately, it is a most rare monster; it only ever hatches from an egg laid by a cockerel. And you know yourselves that not every cockerel can lay an egg, but only a knavish one who presents his rump to another cockerel in the manner of a mother hen.’

The spectators reacted with general laughter to this superior – or possibly posterior – joke. The only person not laughing was Ciri. She didn’t take her eyes off the creature, which, disturbed by the noise, was writhing and banging against the bars of the cage, biting them and vainly trying to spread its wings in the cramped space.

‘An egg laid by a cockerel like that,’ continued the pockmarked man, ‘must be brooded by a hundred and one venomous snakes! And when the basilisk hatches from the egg –’

‘That isn’t a basilisk,’ said Ciri, chewing a bergamot pear. The pockmarked man looked at her, askance.

‘– when the basilisk hatches, I was saying,’ he continued, ‘then it devours all the snakes in the nest, imbibing their venom without suffering any harm from it. It becomes so swollen with venom itself that it is able to kill not only with its teeth, not only with its touch, but with its breath alone! And when a mounted knight ups and stabs a basilisk with his spear, the poison runs up the shaft, killing both rider and horse outright!’

‘That’s the falsest lie,’ said Ciri aloud, spitting out a pip.

‘It’s the truest truth!’ protested the pockmarked man. ‘He kills them; he kills the horse and its rider!’

‘Yeah, right!’

‘Be quiet, miss!’ shouted the market trader with the dog. ‘Don’t interfere! We want to marvel and listen!’

‘Ciri, stop it,’ whispered Fabio, nudging her in the ribs. Ciri snorted at him, reaching into the basket for another pear.

‘Every animal,’ said the pockmarked man, raising his voice against the murmur which was intensifying among the spectators, ‘flees the basilisk as soon as it hears its hiss. Every animal, even a dragon – what am I saying? – even a cockrodile, and a cockrodile is awfully dreadful, as anyone who’s seen one knows. The one and only animal that doesn’t fear the basilisk is the marten. The marten, when it sees the monster in the wilderness, runs as fast as it can into the forest, looks for certain herbs known only to it and eats them. Then the basilisk’s venom is harmless, and the marten can bite it to death . . .’

Ciri snorted with laughter and made a long-drawn-out, extremely rude noise with her lips.

‘Hey, little know-it-all!’ burst out the pockmarked man. ‘If it’s not to your liking, you know where the door is! No one’s forcing you to listen or look at the basilisk!’

‘That’s no basilisk!’

‘Oh, yeah? So what is it, Miss Know-It-All?’

‘It’s a wyvern,’ said Ciri, throwing away the pear stalk and licking her fingers. ‘It’s a common wyvern. Young, small, starving and dirty. But a wyvern, that’s all. Vyverne, in the Elder Speech.’

‘Oh, look at this!’ shouted the pockmarked man. ‘What a clever clogs! Shut your trap, because when I—’

‘I say,’ spoke up a fair-haired young man in a velvet beret and a squire’s doublet without a coat of arms. He had a delicate, pale girl in an apricot dress on his arm. ‘Not so fast, my good animal catcher! Do not threaten the noble lady, for I will readily tan your hide with my sword. And furthermore, something smacks of trickery here!’

‘What trickery, young sir knight?’ choked the pockmarked man. ‘She’s lying, the horri— I meant to say, the high-born young lady is in error. It
is
a basilisk!’

‘It’s a wyvern,’ repeated Ciri.

‘What do you mean, a Vernon! It’s a basilisk! Just look how menacing it is, how it hisses, how it bites at its cage! Look at those teeth! It’s got teeth, I tell you, like—’

‘Like a wyvern,’ scowled Ciri.

‘If you’ve taken leave of your senses,’ said the pockmarked man, fixing her with a gaze that a real basilisk would have been proud of, ‘then come closer! Step up, and let it breathe on you! You laughed at its venom. Now let’s see you croak! Come along, step up!’

‘Not a problem,’ said Ciri, pulling her arm out of Fabio’s grasp and taking a step forward.

‘I shan’t allow it!’ cried the fair-haired squire, dropping his apricot companion’s arm and blocking Ciri’s way. ‘It cannot be! You are risking too much, fair lady.’

Ciri, who had never been addressed like that before, blushed a little, looked at the young man and fluttered her eyelids in a way she had tried out numerous times on the scribe Jarre.

‘There’s no risk whatsoever, noble knight,’ she smiled seductively, in spite of all Yennefer’s warnings, and reminders about the fable of the simpleton gazing foolishly at the cheese. ‘Nothing will happen to me. That so-called poisonous breath is claptrap.’

‘I would, however, like to stand beside you,’ said the youth, putting his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘To protect and defend . . . Will you allow me?’

‘I will,’ said Ciri, not knowing why the expression of rage on the apricot maiden’s face was causing her such pleasure.

‘It is I who shall protect and defend her!’ said Fabio, sticking his chest out and looking at the squire defiantly. ‘And I shall stand with her too!’

‘Gentlemen.’ Ciri puffed herself up with pride and stuck her nose in the air. ‘A little more dignity. Don’t shove. There’ll be room enough for everyone.’

The ring of spectators swayed and murmured as she bravely approached the cage, followed so closely by the boys that she could almost feel their breath on her neck. The wyvern hissed furiously and struggled, its reptilian stench assaulting their noses. Fabio gasped loudly, but Ciri didn’t withdraw. She drew even closer and held out a hand, almost touching the cage. The monster hurled itself at the bars, raking them with its teeth. The crowd swayed once more and someone cried out.

‘Well?’ Ciri turned around, hands proudly on her hips. ‘Did I die? Has that so-called venomous monster poisoned me? He’s no more a basilisk than I’m a—’

She broke off, seeing the sudden paleness on the faces of Fabio and the squire. She turned around quickly and saw two bars of the cage parting under the force of the enraged lizard, tearing rusty nails out of the frame.

‘Run!’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘The cage is breaking!’

The crowd rushed, screaming, for the door. Several of them tried to tear their way through the canvas sheeting, but they only managed to entangle themselves and others in it, eventually collapsing into a struggling, yelling mass of humanity. Just as Ciri was trying to jump out of the way the squire seized her arm, and the two of them staggered, tripped and fell to the ground, taking Fabio down with them. Anxious yaps came from the stallholder’s shaggy little dog, colourful swearwords from the pockmarked man and piercing shrieks from the disorientated apricot maiden.

The bars of the cage broke with a crack and the wyvern struggled free. The pockmarked man jumped down from the stage and tried to restrain it with his pole, but the writhing monster knocked it out of his hand with one blow of its claws and lashed him with its spiny tail, transforming his pockmarked cheek into a bloody pulp. Hissing and spreading its tattered wings, the wyvern flew down from the stage; its sights were set on Ciri, Fabio and the squire, who were trying to get to their feet. The apricot maiden fainted and fell flat on her back. Ciri tensed, preparing to jump, but realised she wouldn’t make it.

They were saved by the shaggy little dog who, still yapping shrilly, broke free from its owner’s arms – she had fallen and become entangled in her own six skirts – and lunged at the monster. The wyvern hissed, rose up, pinned the cur down with its talons, twisted its body with a swift, serpentine movement and sank its teeth into the dog’s neck. The dog howled wildly.

The squire struggled to his knees and reached down to his side, but didn’t find his hilt. Ciri had been too quick for him. She had drawn his sword from its scabbard in a lightning-fast movement and leapt into a half-turn. The wyvern rose, the dog’s severed head hanging in its sharp-toothed jaws.

It seemed to Ciri that all the movements she had learned in Kaer Morhen were performing themselves, almost without her conscious will or participation. She slashed the astonished wyvern in the belly and immediately spun away to avoid it. The lunging lizard fell to the sand spurting blood. Ciri jumped over it, skilfully avoiding its swishing tail. Then, with a sure, accurate and powerful blow, she hacked into the monster’s neck, jumped back, and made an instinctive – but now unnecessary – evasive manoeuvre, and then struck again at once, this time chopping through its backbone. The wyvern writhed briefly in pain and then stopped moving; only its serpentine tail continued to thrash and slap the ground, raining sand all around.

Ciri quickly shoved the bloodied sword into the squire’s hand.

‘Danger over!’ she shouted to the fleeing crowd and the spectators still trying to extricate themselves from the canvas sheeting. ‘The monster’s dead! This brave knight has killed him dead . . .’