The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice)

by Quyle, Jeffrey

  “Well then, we don’t really owe the inn anything, and I’d like to pay you and Rocko for your kindness to my friends and I,” Marco pulled out several coins from his purse and handed them to Slim.

  “Well thank you kindly, young sir,” Slim said gratefully, his fingers closing around the coins. “The masters of this inn don’t hardly pay what they should, but it’s a job, and one that gets me away from my missus for a few months each year when she’s a bit peckish, so I accept what they pay and get by.

  “And we really appreciate the help you’ve given with closing up the building. We’d have helped you of course for no payment at all, seeing as how you and your friends were in need of help, and your two lady friends are so pretty and all,” Slim said as his hand surreptitiously deposited the money in a pocket.

  Marco moved on, glad to have helped his host, and opened the door of his room to find Kate soaking in the tub, as Pesino lay in bed. The room had grown much darker, with boards across the outside of the window, letting in only slender rays of light.

  “Oh Marco, where have you been? We’ve needed you,” Pesino said as soon as he opened the door. “Kate needs some more hot water. Would you fetch some please?” she asked as she pointed to the empty buckets on the floor, as Gawail floated overhead.

  Marco gave a snort, and looked at Kate in the tub, who responded by languidly waving her fingers at him. Nonetheless, he took the buckets to the kitchen and returned with the hot water that he carefully poured in the tub a little at a time so as not to scald the girl who sat within.

  “You do that so well. You could make a wonderful maid with a little practice, and maybe some make-up,” Kate complimented him.

  There was a knock at the door, and Cassius opened it. “Have you seen Kate?” he asked, then realized who was in the room. “I guess you have,” he said as he entered the room.

  “Rocko was just telling me about how we’re going to make the rest of the trip!” he said excitedly as he sat down on the floor next to the tub. “You’ll never guess!”

  “The blessed one will make a bubble of warm air all around us and we’ll roll down the mountains,” Gawail spoke up.

  “If he can do that, he should have started a long time ago,” Kate said ominously.

  “No, that’s not it, but I agree with Kate,” Cassius said.

  “We’ll fly down,” Pesino said. “It will almost be like swimming in the sea again!”

  “No,” Cassius told her.

  “There are a dozen slaves who will carry us in chairs,” Kate guessed.

  “No, no, no,” Cassius told them all. “We’re going to go on dogsleds!”

  The room was totally silent.

  “What are dogsleds?” Marco asked in bafflement.

  “Rocko showed me one. They are wooden, and they have flat wooden boards that he called skids,” Cassius explained. “And the dogs pull them over the top of the snow.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Marco shook his head in astonishment.

  That afternoon, while Pesino remained in bed, Rocko and Slim showed the other three guests the stables where the pair of dogsleds and the pack of dogs were prepared for departure. “We’ll put your injured lady on this sled with the supplies we’re packing down, and a couple of you can ride on the other sled if you want to,” Rocko explained. “We stand back here,” he showed the footboard at the back of each sled, “and the dogs pull us down to the end of the snow, which may be all the way down to Boheme by now.

  “Then we’ll just walk the rest of the way into to town,” Slim said.

  “How long will it take us?” Marco asked.

  “Probably five or six days,” Slim ventured, as Rocko nodded his head.

  The journey by dog sled was exhilarating. They left early the next morning, and the dogs pulled the two sleds and their passengers swiftly down the slopes of the trail. The way had none of the rocky falls that the south side of the trail had thrown at the travelers, and the trip was fast and easy. Pesino laughed in joy at how quickly they moved along the trail, and she mesmerized Rocko and Slim with her beauty and kindness towards them, winning two fervent admirers quickly without using any of her siren charms.

  Pesino and Cassius loved the dogs. “They’re like dolphins on land, almost,” Cassius told Marco as he tried to make sense of the animals.

  Pesino rode in the front of one sled, tied to the frame as she sat up with her legs extended before her, and various packages tied around her and atop of her. Cassius and Kate rode together on the other sled in a similar fashion, while Marco stood behind Rocko on the back of Pesino’s sled and held on tightly, especially after he fell off once during the first day’s travels.

  Although the route on the north side of the mountains was easier than it had been on the south side, the trip was truly easier because of Rocko and Slim’s expertise in making the journey. They knew where to camp, and where to stop for breaks. The dogs and the sleds and gravity make the journey so fast and painless that Cassius remarked to Marco that if the whole trip had been so simple he’d be ready to do it again.

  Gawail chose to remain hidden from the two new members of the traveling group; the race of pixies generally stayed away from humans – only Aleo’s desire to save his daughter, and his recognition of the extraordinary blessing upon Marco, had driven the pixies to reveal themselves to the small quartet in the mountains. Each night when the tent was erected, Gawail would come out of his secure spot in Pesino’s clothing and complain about the amount of time he was staying in confinement. “Meaning no offense, wonderful lady,” he added to Pesino whenever he grumbled.

  By the fourth day of the trip they had descended to the foothills on the northern side of the Glacial Mountains, and Slim told them that they would enter Boheme the following day, if there was snow all the way to the city. The Amber Road was more properly a road once again, and ran along the bank of a small river.

  The next day there was not snow all the way to the city gates. As the dogs pulled the sleds, the pace of progress slowed; the terrain grew flatter, and the speed at which they moved forward was aided less and less by gravity. The layer of snow grew thinner, and they could see patches of exposed soil that Slim and Marco maneuvered around, but at last the two sleds slowed to a stop side by side.

  “Do you think we need to use Graeber’s barn?” Rocko asked Slim.

  “That’s just what I was thinking. We’ve made it a good way, but there’s no chance we’ll get to the city gates,” Slim agreed. “And Graeber’s is close. We can still walk into the city before sunset.”

  They started forward again, and within ten minutes turned off the road to arrive at a large farmstead with multiple barns. “This is Graeber’s,” Slim announced. “He’s a farmer who’s one of the owners of the mountaintop inn. We can leave the equipment here and walk into town. Let me go tell the foreman what’s what,” he said, as everyone unbundled themselves from the sleds.

  They sorted out packs while Slim was gone, as the sleds sat in a yard beside a small building. Slim returned with a mule and a farm hand, who took the dogs away to the farm’s’ kennels, and the rest of them were ready to go. Slim rode atop the mule, and the party returned to the road.

  “So how long will you be staying in Boheme?” Rocko asked as they walked along the road.

  “We’ll only be there long enough to figure out how to get down river to Fortburg,” Marco responded.

  “You’d best be taking a ship. The roads will be cold, and aren’t always the safest,” Slim advised. “There’re boats heading north every other day or so this time of year, when there’s less traffic.

  “If my lady and I had room, I’d offer to let you stay with us, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to do that,” Slim told them, as the city walls appeared in the distance. “And Rocko here is going back to his parents’ place, so he won’t have room for you either.”

  “We never expected anything like that Slim,” Kate told. “But it’s kind of you to think of us.”

&nb
sp; “Well, what I’m getting at is that if you’re going to stay at a hotel in Boheme, you might not know the laws of the city, such as the rules about married couples,” Slim said after he cleared his throat nervously.

  “In Boheme, an unmarried couple is not allowed to sleep together, and while I don’t know that such a thing troubles you, I thought you ought to know,” he said, then watched the startled looks that the four travelers from the Lion City exchanged with each other. “And they’ll be asking you if you’re married if none of you, especially the gentlemen, don’t wear the wedding collar; there may be some questions asked, if you know what I mean.”

  “What is a wedding collar?” Pesino asked.

  “Well, I’ll be putting mine on in a little bit so as to show you, not that anyone’s going to question me going home to my wife in the city,” Slim answered, as he started looking through a pack attached to his plodding mule. “Men receive the collar when they’re married, and they wear it to show folks they’re married. Lots of women are starting to wear them too, but that’s a new fashion.

  “Knowing what arrangements you had at the inn on the mountaintop, I just thought you ought to know,” Slim said. “Ah, here it is,” he said as he pulled out a strip of leather, and affixed it around his large neck.

  “We can sleep boys in one room and girls in the other,” Marco saw a simple way to solve the problem.

  “But if Pesino’s injury acts up, you need to be with her,” Cassius surprised Marco by saying. “Could we just acquire a couple of collars for the short term?” he asked as he looked at Kate.

  “Well, the priests are the ones that dispense them of course,” Slim answered after a momentary pause. “And I don’t know that you could get a collar from the priest without some effort.”

  “What kind of effort?” Marco asked curiously.

  “Why, a wedding perhaps,” Slim answered, as Rocko guffawed. “Nothing extravagant, of course. Just a few minutes in the church in front of the priest – and God, of course,” he added, “and then you’d have your collar and be on your way.”

  “You mean, get married?” Marco asked faintly.

  Slim nodded, as Rocko smothered more laughter.

  “It’s just for show, Marco,” Kate said in a low voice.

  “But I’m engaged already,” Marco protested, “and not to her!”

  “I’ll marry her if she has to have a husband!” Rocko spoke up with a laugh.

  “That’s very nice Rocko,” Pesino told the youth as they approached the city walls. “But my heart’s set on Marco at the moment.”

  Marco rubbed the back of his neck as he tried to grasp some obvious way out of a ridiculous situation.

  Chapter 14 – The Marriage Ceremony

  And that’s how it happened that Cassius, the former merman, and Kate, the former servant maid in the Lion City, received an expedited marriage at sunset in Boheme. After they parted ways inside the city gate with their traveling companions – making Rocko blush as he received kisses from both women – the small group walked to the church recommended by Slim, where a priest agreed to perform a fast ceremony to satisfy his two supplicants, following a small contribution from Marco.

  Marco stubbornly refused to marry Pesino, almost vociferously enough to make the siren want to charm him into the ceremony, though she held back. Instead he agreed to buy a room for the couple and a room for Pesino, and then he found a place in the hayloft of the stable for himself to save on funds, when they went to the inn recommended by Slim.

  The bright newness of Cassius’s collar elicited numerous comments at the inn, and several rounds of ale that were purchased in celebration, which led to trouble.

  Pesino drank wine, as the others drank ale, and as she drank, she began to grow coquettish.

  Numerous men in the tavern attached to the inn reacted to the allure that Pesino projected, and Marco was even caught in her net, as the ale he drank weakened his resolve.

  “Here now, she’s with me,” he finally spoke up as other men from the city joined them at their table.

  “I don’t see her putting a collar around your neck,” one of her new conquests protested.

  “He turned me down when he had the chance,” Pesino said mournfully.

  “I’d never turn you down, darling,” two men said simultaneously.”

  That’s because you’re reasonable boys,” Pesino told them.

  “So leave him and come with me,” one of her admirers said.

  Pesino looked over at Marco with a sly look in her eyes.

  “He’s the one I want,” she said. “We’ve done so much together. Won’t you marry me and put a collar on for me, so that we’ll be legal?”

  Marco looked over at her, incredulous, knowing that she was joking, but worried that the joke was going too far.

  Her eyes were alluring, he saw, and she seemed to glow with a healthy aura of life energy, a promise and a temptation of vitality and adventure and never-ending love.

  She had her siren powers on, at full strength! He realized he was succumbing to them. “This isn’t fair,” he said weakly, fighting with every fiber to keep from falling completely within her orbit. There was another girl, one he loved, and he tried to think of her, to remember her, but suddenly a pair of hands grabbed his shoulders roughly.

  “You’re going to make this woman happy,” a man’s voice said, and the man standing behind him suddenly lifted him off his seat.

  He felt other hands grab him as well, and suddenly he was lifted high above the men’s shoulders and was being carried physically out of the tavern, and onto the street by a small mob of men.

  “Pesino! What’s happening? What are you doing?” he called out.

  “We’re going to give that wonderful woman an honest life; we’re going to give her what she wants,” a voice below him said, as the group turned abruptly, then paused as someone opened a door, and suddenly Marco found himself being carried into a church.

  He landed roughly on his feet, to find himself standing in front of the altar. He felt hands still holding him firmly in place, and he turned to see Pesino stepping up next to him, still as alluring and desirable as ever, still carrying her wine glass in her hand.

  “We’ve sent a couple of lads to get the priest,” one of the half dozen men present told her.

  “Thank you my friend. You’re doing me a great favor tonight,” Pesino said, as she emptied her wine glass, then handed it to one of the nearby men. “I don’t think I’ve ever drank so much before.”

  The priest appeared suddenly, propelled forward by a shove in the back from one of the men who were handling him, coming into the sanctuary of the church that was dimly lit by candles being carried by the group in front of the altar.

  “What is all this about?” the man asked. “You can’t just break into a church.”

  “This woman wants to be married tonight, and this fellow’s here, because he’s who she wants. He owes it to her, your worship, if you know what I mean,” someone in the mob explained.

  The priest looked at Pesino – who smile angelically at him, and he too fell under her spell, then he looked at Marco, and scowled.

  “All right then, we’ll make an exception, and finish this up,” the priest told the group, and carried out the wedding ceremony in thirty seconds.

  “Will you take this man to be your husband in the eyes of God, and place your collar on him?” the priest asked Pesino.

  “I will,” she said, suddenly demure.

  “Will you marry this woman, wear her collar, and honor your wedding vows with her?” the priest turned to Marco.

  “I shouldn’t, your grace,” Marco said heavily, not sure any longer why he protested.

  There was a sharp jab in his kidney. “Tell the man ‘yes’,” a voice said.

  “Yes,” Marco changed his answer, as he saw Pesino’s joyful smile.

  “Then here,” the priest raised a leather collar he held, “is the symbol of your love and loyalty.”

  A pair o
f hands grabbed Marco’s shoulders to hold him still, and another pair grabbed his head to keep it still as well. The priest reached up and circled the leather around Marco’s neck, and it suddenly struck Marco that he was getting married. He felt a daze come over him, a realization that this was a true, holy rite being performed.

  He felt his right hand give a flash of energy, and the priest yelped, as he pulled his hands away from Marco, and jumped back a step. Likewise, his handlers also stepped back, as there was a flash of light that lasted for a blinding split second, and the feel of the leather against his neck turned hard.

  There was a collective gasp around him, and Marco’s hands went to his neck. He felt the collar, and knew that something had happened. The collar was not supple leather, it felt like it was cold metal.

  “It’s beautiful, Marco!” Pesino told him, looking at him. “Bring that candle closer,” she told one of her supporters.

  “It’s gold!” an excited follower said breathlessly. “His collar turned to gold!”

  “It’s a miracle!” another voice exclaimed.

  “It’s a sign from God,” the priest chimed in.

  “Let’s get this couple back to their room now,” someone else said, as Marco’s hands still continued to explore the stiff golden band around his neck.

  He was suddenly spun around, and pressed towards the door.

  Maybe it was all meant to be, Marco thought, as he felt the gold, and looked over at Pesino, and softly belched from the ale he had drunk. Maybe the other girl wasn’t who he was supposed to return home to; maybe Pesino had been brought into his life to be his mate.

  Pesino looked back over at him, and smiled a warm, endearing smile, one that was full of affection. “Thank you Marco. I’ll make you happy, I promise,” she told him.

  He reached out and took her hand, as they made the short walk back to the inn.

  Cassius and Kate were no longer with them, Marco belatedly realized. He hadn’t seen the other couple in some time, since long before he and Pesino had started on this adventure, he suspected.

  “Go upstairs and become woman and husband,” someone said, giving Marco a shove in the back, and he felt Pesino pull him forward as she started up the stairs.