The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice)

by Quyle, Jeffrey

  “Do you know what cypress trees are?” Marco asked, looking up at Aleo. “I could use a cone from a blue cypress, if you know where to find one.”

  The pixies all instantly huddled together in the middle of the air near Marco’s head, and then one of them shot away from the rest as the group broke apart.

  “Gawail is the fastest flyer; he is going to go get a cone for you,” Aleo told Marco.

  “That’s good,” Marco said, astonished that the pixies had been able to identify the location of a cone and send someone there so quickly.

  “I’m going to start mixing some things together to try to treat her,” Marco told the worried father. “Tell your friends I appreciate the light they provide, and I’ll need more as we work on this.”

  “They’re more than friends; these are my family. All of us in this hall are members of the same clan,” Aleo explained. “They will do anything to help.”

  With illumination – and shifting shadows – provided by the floating pixies, Marco worked to combine one set of ingredients into a formula to treat fever, then began to work on a second set of materials to mix together to treat the hallucinations. He stopped after a half hour of labor, and stroked his hand across his brow to wipe away his sweat.

  “Could I have some hot water, and a bowl?” he asked, then watched as one pixie dove into its nest and produced a bowl the size of a thimble, while another flew away.

  “I need a larger bowl. Would one of you go ask Kate if she has a bowl?” he suggested, and watched as another pixie flew away. “If Kate has a bowl, tell her to bring hot water in it,” Marco shouted out to the disappearing pixie.

  Minutes later Kate appeared, wearing only skimpy undergarments; both her clothing and her hair were dripping wet.

  “You needed this?” she asked, kneeling down beside him as she handed him a warm metal bowl filled with hot water.

  “Yes,” Marco replied, taking the bowl and immediately adding the ingredients to treat the fever to it. He stirred them languidly, then stopped, and took the miniscule pixie bowl and dipped it into the aromatic broth. “Here, start dripping this into her mouth, a few drops at a time, and make sure she swallows it before you give her more.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked as she watched him.

  Marco watched Aleo take the small bowl and float down to his daughter, where he and another pixie gently straightened Ariel’s body and propped her head in the other pixie’s lap, as Aleo started dripping small amounts of liquid.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Marco admitted. “I’m trying to treat the symptoms, but I don’t really know the disease. She’s a pixie, and I don’t know anything about them,” he said in frustration.

  “Don’t take it hard, Marco. Just do your best and leave the rest in God’s hands,” Kate told him with a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  “Those hot pools feel wonderful! You’ll have to come join us soon,” she told him, as he emptied out the rest of the liquid in Kate’s bowl.

  “Would you go rinse this out and refill it?” he asked her, handing her bowl back to her. He watched as she rose and began running away, her lithe figure disappearing quickly in the evening gloom.

  “How’s it going?” Marco asked Aleo.

  “She’s already had several drops,” the pixie answered. “When will she wake up?”

  “I hope that after we give her the next medicine, she will be better, but I don’t know for sure. We still need the blue cypress cone to make that medicine work,” Marco replied.

  Even as he said it, a small light came streaking down out of the sky and paused its motion in front of him. Gawail floated in the air, both hands wrapped around a small cone, which Marco gently took from the deliverer.

  “Thank you,” he told the pixie as he began to gently pry the cone apart and shake the seeds into the collection of materials he had set aside for the second cure. He began to hastily grind the ingredients together, and didn’t even notice Kate’s return until she placed her bowl of hot water in front of him.

  “Thanks,” he spoke again as he dumped his ingredients into the water and began to stir the mixture, willing the water to pick up the healing potency of his potion as quickly as possible.

  “Now, give me another pixie bowl,” he spoke out loud to no one in particular as he watched the water in Kate’s bowl change color as the strength of his ground-up mixture seeped into the liquid. He accepted an anonymous pixie’s bowl and scooped it into Kate’s, then held it out for the pixies. “Let this cool for a minute, then start dripping this into her mouth,” he told them.

  The pixies and Marco and Kate all sat silently as the new medicine began to be dispersed into the unconscious patient. “How long will it take?” Kate whispered to Marco.

  “I don’t know,” he softly answered as he shook his head. “My medicines are prepared for human bodies, and I can’t tell how they’ll affect a pixie. I’m just trying to treat the symptoms, and praying for the best outcome. She’s such a pretty little thing it’s hard to see her lying unconscious like that.”

  They waited several minutes, until Aleo finally stopped dripping the liquid into his daughter. He looked up at Marco.

  “I know you tried, blessed one. I had hopes that your blessing might be strong enough to bring better things to my daughter. Thank you,” he said, with a catch in his voice that made Marco’s eye’s tear up.

  “Maybe if you massaged her stomach, to increase the absorption of the medicine,” Marco suggested, and he extended his smallest finger towards the pixie girl, to gently stroke her abdomen.

  As he did, his hand suddenly emitted a bright glow, which spread to the body of the girl, and Marco jerked his hand back as the whole surrounding crowd gasped in surprise.

  The light in his hand immediately extinguished, but the light in the little pixie changed from white to red to golden, then disappeared in a flash, and they all heard the girl give a gasp, a deep intake breath of air.

  Ariel’s eyes fluttered open, and the whole assembly of pixies gave a cheer, as the girl sat up and looked around in bewilderment, while Marco felt his heart fill with happiness.

  Kate leaned against Marco and gently kissed his cheek.

  “Look at you, the greatest doctor the pixies have ever known!” she told him, with a congratulatory hand on his shoulder. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back and join Cassius in the pool,” she said as she rose and walked away.

  “Blessed one!” Aleo looked up at him with a broad smile. “How can we ever repay you?”

  Ariel sat up, and her father hugged her. “What is one of the awkward ones doing in our home?” she asked as she looked over her father’s shoulder.

  “He saved your life; he cured you of your illness,” one of her cousins immediately answered.

  “Aleo, I treated your daughter as repayment for the help you gave me; you owe me no debt,” Marco said reassuringly, still smiling with pleasure at the successful cure. “I’d just like the chance to go relax in one of those pools of hot water you have.” He stood up and picked up his materials.

  Gawail led Marco to a small pool near his clan’s home. “This pool will be yours alone, and we will not let any of the others trouble you,” the pixie told him protectively.

  “Anyone can come,” Marco said, as he placed his belongings down and began to strip off the rest of his clothes. He looked at the filthy shirt in his hand, stiff with the remnants of the mud he had been smeared in while crawling in the cave. He looked at the pool, and threw the shirt in the water to soak on one side of the pool, then threw the rest of his clothing items in with the shirt as he removed them one by one. When he was done, he walked around the pool to the far side, a walk of only twenty yards, and he stepped into the water, the first step down deep enough to immediately raise the water level up to his knees.

  “Oww, ouch!” he said sharply, lifting his legs quickly, one by one as he tried to adjust to the water’s temperature.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he he
ard Pesino say, and he looked up to see her standing very nearby, alluringly illuminated by the gentle glow of the hovering pixies. She wore not a stitch of clothing, and, he realized, neither did he.

  They stood and looked at one another momentarily. Marco was no longer lifting his legs, the discomfort of the heat forgotten in his embarrassment at the girl’s view of his exposed body.

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming over,” she said. “Kate and Cassius seem to want to have time alone together, and I didn’t want to be alone.” She strolled closer to him, and then stepped into the water next to him.

  “Let’s go over there,” she said, as he stood entranced by the sight of her. He had seen her before, seen her flesh uncovered, yet tonight, through the magical light of the pixies, and the joy of having saved Ariel, and through the clarity that seemed to come with physical exhaustion, he saw her as alluring. He followed her to a tiny cove in the small pool, and they sat down side-by-side on the sandy bottom of the pool, then lay back, and began to float.

  “This water has some minerals in it that make us extra buoyant,” Pesino told Marco as they lay still, only partially submerged, just two feet above the bottom of the pool. “I can’t imagine what I would have thought about this if I was a mermaid still, and wanted to dive deep into the water but couldn’t!”

  Marco moved over next to her, and suddenly found himself kissing her on the shoulder, then kissing her neck.

  She moved swiftly, dropping her knees to the floor of the pool and raising herself up and stepping back, then looking at him with penetrating eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to come over her and seduce you,” she told him. “I’m sorry. I really only wanted to come over and be with you as a friend, hard as I find that to believe.”

  She was suddenly not as alluring, Marco suddenly realized.

  “I must have been sending my charisma out, without meaning to; not that you’re not someone I wouldn’t want to, well never mind,” she said.

  Marco lowered himself back onto the water, feeling foolish and confused, and Pesino resumed floating next to him. She reached her hand out and held his. “You saved the life of the pixie girl?” she asked. “The little people seem very happy. What did you do?”

  “I gave her some medicine, and then I touched her,” Marco said softly. He was growing used to the feel of floating on the water, and he was overcoming his shock at having kissed Pesino’s flesh. “My hand became magical again, and then the girl was awake, and healthy. My hand started to glow when I reached towards her, and then she glowed.”

  “Do you love your fiancé?” Pesino asked, as she squeezed his hand. They were both looking up at the sky in which random pixies floated with glowing illumination that interrupted the view of the bright, steady stars that seemed so brilliant and close in the thin air of the mountain top.

  “I haven’t thought about her in days,” Marco said sleepily. Climbing the mountains had consumed his strength and his attention, he realized. But as soon as he thought of her, he pictured her face, and he remembered how tenderly she had cared for him. “But I do love her. I want to go back to her and see her as quickly as possible; we’re supposed to get married in the spring, but at the rate this trip is going, I’m afraid I’ll miss my own wedding,” he chuckled, though the fear was real.

  “We’ll try our best to get you there,” Pesino told him. “I want you to get married, and live happily ever after, so I can ask you what it’s like. After I’ve got my tail back and get back to the water, you’ll have to come and visit me regularly to tell me about happily ever after, and what love is,” she murmured. And with those last words, the promise that ‘happily ever after’ could come true, they both fell asleep in the pool, and floated atop the water until the sun came up the next day.

  Chapter 12 – The Pixie Story

  When Marco awoke in the middle of the morning, Pesino was gone. He felt completely relaxed, so comfortable and loose that he felt as though a wave passing beneath him in the pool would have rippled him as though he were a leaf floating atop the water. Minutes after he opened his eyes he finally stood up, then walked over to where his dirty clothes drifted in the water, and he began to languidly scrub and rinse them until he had to move several feet to escape the spreading cloud of muddy water his clothes were creating. He finished scrubbing, then scrubbed his own skin and hair, and finally got out of the water and pulled on a clean pair of pants from his pack, and set out to find his companions.

  As he strode through the small valley he realized that an escort of faintly visible pixies was flying along with him. “Can I help you?” he asked the small beings.

  “How can we help you, blessed healer?” one of the pixies spoke to him.

  “I want to see my friends,” he said, and then realized he was hungry. “And I need to eat some breakfast,” he muttered.

  “Your friends are this way,” his volunteer guide announced, and then led the way through the incongruent greenery of the high altitude valley to a large pool of water, where all three of his companions were sitting on the edge of the water, their legs dangling in the liquid, as they ate from the supplies they had confiscated from the kidnappers’ cave.

  “Welcome and good morning Marco! It’s good to see you. You look good – better than you have in a couple of days,” Cassius greeted him.

  “I imagine we all look more rested than any of us have in the past few days,” Marco agreed. “I do feel relaxed. But we’ll have to get back out there again on the road, I’m afraid.”

  "When will we leave?" Cassius asked.

  Marco looked at his companions. All four of them – himself included – had suffered during the long trip up to the ridgeline, and then fallen victim to the attack by the trail thieves. Last night had been their first night of true rest in many days, and he knew that just as much as the others, he was ready to rest and heal some more.

  "If our hosts will allow us," he looked up at a nearby pixie, "I would like to spend the day here and leave tomorrow morning, after we all feel better."

  "You are certainly welcome to stay here, blessed healer," the pixie immediately replied. "I see your meal is being delivered right now, as well. Please rest and enjoy your stay with us."

  Marco looked up at the inexplicable comment about the delivery of a meal, then saw that a score of pixies were approaching through the air, each carrying a small amount of fruit, or a loaf of bread the size of a small muffin. He held his hands together and received the offered gifts in surprise. “What is this for?” he asked.

  “You said you needed breakfast, so we brought some to you,” one of the delivering pixies told him as she dropped some blueberries in his hand. “We want to show our appreciation to the blessed healer, and thank you.”

  Marco grinned, then sat down next to Cassius. “Would you like some fresh supplies?” he offered, as he set the food down on the grass and popped a loaf of bread into his mouth.

  “This is good!” he complimented the pixies. “Tell the baker this is excellent!”

  “You can go tell him yourself, if you want. He’ll be up at the ovens all day – today’s baking day,” a pixie replied. They were all difficult for Marco to tell apart, especially during the daylight when they faded into virtual invisibility.

  Marco popped a handful of blueberries into his mouth as he watched Kate reach across Cassius to take a loaf of the sweet bread. “I’ll do that – I don’t have any other plans for today. After I talk with my friends I’ll go visit the baker, if someone will lead me there,” he declared.

  “You shall have a guide,” the pixie promised. “Just call when you’re ready,” the small being told him, and then flew off.

  “Thank you for a day to rest, Marco,” Pesino told him from where she sat the farthest away from him, on the other side of Kate. “I could use at least a week to let these new legs get used to all the hard work I’m making them go through!”

  Marco tossed a loaf of bread to her, and grinned as he watched her eat it. She was such a confusi
ng companion, the siren who could stir his desire despite his wish to remain faithful to Mirra; she could turn her irresistible appeal on and off so easily, while he could not resist her at times when he was tired and exhausted, as had briefly happened last night. Yet she didn’t deliberately seek to lure him to be unfaithful, he knew. She needed a friend; she had been wrenched from her natural habitat, the sea, and sent on this unexpected, long, grueling adventure in which she really had no personal stake other than to keep an eye on him.

  He missed Mirra. She would be astonished at this unlikely place, the small valley of pixies and thermal springs at the top of a high mountain, probably unknown to any other human but the four of them. He missed Glaze as well; Mirra’s brother was older than Marco, but just as unprepared for the life they had been briefly thrust into while at Sant Jeroni, leaving the two of them on equal footing, able to be equals. Marco had looked forward to traveling with reliable Glaze, and the decision by the mermaid leader Neptin to split them apart still rankled, though Cassius and Pesino had been excellent companions.

  Marco arose, and left the others as he went in search of the pixie baker. He soon had a guide who led him to a series of ovens that were hewed out of the side of an exceptionally hot stone wall in the mountainside. There was no fire burning, he was amazed to see – just a busy pixie who continually pushed dough balls into some oven holes to bake thanks to the natural heating, and took finished loaves out of others.

  The day was more relaxing than any of the travelers could have expected. Marco and Cassius spent time in casual instruction, as Marco showed Cassius some of the rudimentary elements of how to handle a sword. That was their most productive time of the day, as they spent more time swimming in the various pools, or napping, or eating food that was delivered to them by the pixies.

  And Marco even spent some time with the pixies, listening to them as they told him about their life in the mountains. The valley with the warm springs was not a year-round home for the little people; it was where they all gathered to get together for the winter months. When the spring time came, they would disperse to their scattered homes throughout the mountains.