The Gorgon's Blood Solution

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “Where are you going to go? Are there other babies out there you plan to save tonight?” the mistress of the shop asked.

  “I’d like to go explore the city,” Marco explained. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “I imagine a boy does want to walk about and see his new city. Go on, but don’t be late. I’d like to lock everything up before too long,” she graciously allowed him to go.

  Marco took off, and went towards where he judged the city harbor docks were likely to be. He wanted to go see the only friends he thought he might have in the city – the dolphins who had delivered him to land.

  Chapter 14 – Kieweeooee

  It took Marco half an hour and only one wrong turn to find his way to the docks. He eventually smelled the water and heard the sounds of the harbor in the evening, which led him to his destination. There was a guard on duty, but not very attentively, and Marco easily snuck past the man to go out on one of the piers that reached into the harbor waters.

  When he reached the end of the pier he climbed down the wooden understructure to reach the water level, where he put his head in the water and called out, “Kieweeooee friend come!”, then lifted his face out of the water and waited. He gently paddled his feet in the water to give the dolphin some notion of his precise location, if the dolphin were even to come at all, and he waited.

  Two minutes later he heard a quick burst of chatter; he pressed his face under water and called out Kieweeooee’s name again, and the dolphin came over to see him. The moon overhead was bright, but Marco’s location was in the shadows of the pier, so it was difficult to see many features at first, until Marco moved around the bottom of the pier to the moonlit side, where he could see the features of the marine creature he had called.

  “Kieweeooee and Marco go swimming?” he asked.

  The dolphin slapped fins against the water to agree, and moments later Marco was holding onto a dorsal fin that sliced through the harbor water on the way to the open seas beyond. They swam for an hour, Marco enjoying the thrill of the warm sea water flying by as they circled and dove and swam. It felt like a perfect celebration – a joyful way to commemorate the successful healing of baby Sybele.

  The two tried to talk to each other, but their limited shared vocabulary and limited ability to pronounce the words of each other’s language made any exchange difficult. When they returned to the pier they tried to teach Marco a few new words, then he patted Kieweeooee goodbye, and climbed back up to the top of the pier and walked back to Marches alchemy shop.

  His first night in the garret room was uneasy. The attic was uncomfortably warm, and he ended up opening a window and sleeping on the roof outside, where the breeze felt pleasant and he slept a sound last half of the evening.

  He didn’t awaken until the sun was well above the horizon, and he only awoke with assistance.

  “Master Marco,” he heard a feminine voice call.

  “Master Marco,” there was a poke on his shoulder, and he felt a blanket moving over him.

  “Your breakfast is ready downstairs, Marco,” he awoke enough to recognize that the voice was Mirra, the young mother who was now the morning cook at the house.

  “I need to get back down to Sybele,” she said. “I’ve pulled your blanket up so that you’re not giving a show to the ladies in the houses around you. Someday you’ll have to tell me why your clothes are lying here next to you on this roof in a damp pile.

  “And you’ll have to tell me why you have a flower on your chest,” she added, poking at the strange mark he had received in the cave on the island.

  “Come down and eat breakfast soon,” she poked him familiarly one more time, then he heard her step back in through the window frame and off the roof.

  Marco opened his eyes. The sky overhead was blue. A pair of pale faces in windows was staring at him. The curtains swayed closed, and the faces disappeared as he looked. Mirra had drawn his blanket over his hips, he realized. Other than that, the rest of his body was only bare skin facing the open sky. His clothes were still damp from his swim in the harbor, and laid in a pile next to him, a trickle of moisture running down the incline of the roof, draining away from his clothes.

  He wrapped his blanket around himself and grabbed his clothing as he climbed back into the window of his garret. Once inside, he pulled on his damp pants, and hung his vest out on the roof to dry further, then went downstairs, where he found Gabrielle sitting at a table with a plate of food in front of her. As he entered the kitchen, Mirra placed a plate upon the table for him as well.

  “Marco, you can dress better than that while having a meal with a lady, can’t you?” Gabrielle asked.

  “My vest is wet, and I wanted to let it dry,” he apologized. He hadn’t expected to see her in the kitchen so early.

  “And you don’t have anything else? No other shirts? I guess you didn’t bring anything else with you, did you?” she recollected.

  “Sit down and eat your breakfast, and then we’ll go look through Marches’ closets to see if we can find anything to fit you,” she said in a motherly tone.

  “I can’t accept,” Marco began, caught off-guard by the generosity, then he saw Mirra nodding her head vigorously behind Gabrielle. “I mean, thank you. That’s very kind,” he told the old lady.

  Mirra nodded in approval, and Marco sat down to begin eating his meal.

  Minutes later they were finished, and Gabrielle stood up. “Let’s go look at the closets. Mirra, will you and Sybele be okay?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course. We’ll just clean up the dishes, then be on our way,” the new cook answered.

  “Is she doing well?” Marco asked before he left the kitchen.

  “She is. She’s as good a new. You worked a miracle yesterday, and I’ve let everyone know that you did what Allied and all the doctors said couldn’t be done,” the cook answered with a smile momentarily flashed over her shoulder, as she started to scrub at the dishes piled in a tub of water.

  Marco followed Gabrielle upstairs to her apartment above the shop, a nicely furnished set of rooms, where she led him to a small room. When she opened the door a faintly musty odor came out. “I haven’t looked in here for months,” she apologized.

  “Since we had no children, Marches kept his things in this room, and after he passed away, I just moved everything of his into here and closed the door. It was so hard to look at everything and think of him,” she explained, as she pointed to a trunk.

  “Open that. Those are his oldest clothes, from when he would have been closer to your size,” she looked at Marco speculatively.

  The trunk was filled with folded clothes. As Marco lifted a white cotton shirt, a moth flew up and away.

  “Oh dear,” Gabrielle moaned. “That shirt is ruined,” she pointed at a small hole.

  “This is a good shirt; it’s better than no shirt at all,” Marco said to try to comfort her. He didn’t want her to be stressed over a small moth, or its effect on the clothes.

  “Can you carry that trunk?” Gabrielle asked, and in short order Marco found himself carrying the trunk down to the work room, where he tried on several shirts, and selected one to wear for the day. The sleeves were slightly short, but he rolled them up to his elbows, and tucked the hem into his pants, pleased to have the new clothing.

  “You look dashing, the way a lord should,” Mirra told him as she paused in front of the open doorway. “I’ll be off now, but I’ll see you again tomorrow. Will you be exposing yourself to the neighbors again?” she laughed, and then was gone from sight.

  “I’m not a lord!” Marco called in protest after her. He pressed the trunk to the side of the room, then went to the front of the shop, where Gabrielle was opening the door to the public.

  “What would you think about opening the windows too, and cleaning the public room out a bit?” Marco asked her. “So that your customers could see in here more clearly?”

  “You’re the alchemist. If you think it should be that way, we can do it. Marches kept ev
erything the same for years, so perhaps this is an old-fashioned look,” she said agreeably.

  Together they worked that morning to rearrange the clutter that was stacked against the windows and the walls, and by noon time they had a pair of the windows facing the street open, bringing in rays of sunlight.

  As Gabrielle was admiring the new illumination, a man came into the store. “I hear rumors that you’ve got a gem of an alchemist working here,” the man said. “I’ve got a daughter who has a wart growing right on her chin. Do you have something that can make it go away?”

  Gabrielle looked at Marco. “I can prepare a salve for you, if you’d like to come back tomorrow to pick it up,” he replied after quickly considering the request. “It’ll cost three and a half pennies,” he guessed at the value of the materials he would need to use.

  The man’s eyebrows shot up, and Marco worried that he had asked for too much. He hadn’t asked for much profit, but he did want Gabrielle to receive some return on the value of the items that Marches had left her.

  “That’s a deal. I’ll be back tomorrow,” the man promised, and then left the shop.

  Marco mixed they salve, and met the need of one other customer that afternoon as well. Over the course of the next few days, he managed to serve several customers, who all came in seeking cures for medical problems. Marco asked Gabrielle if Marches had left any books behind, and she showed him the stack of them up in the storage room where the clothes had come from.

  Marco studied the books closely. He felt much more attached, much more engaged, in learning the answers that alchemy offered than he had when he had been Algornia’s apprentice in the shop, and he spent much time scrutinizing and trying to decipher what the books revealed. He took it upon himself to use a couple of the formulae in the books to meet the requests of customers who came to the shop.

  A week after his arrival in the alchemy shop, he was in the front of the shop one morning, talking with Gabrielle, when a brutish man walked towards the door. “Oh dear,” Gabrielle said softly as she saw him approaching the shop, “Greystone.”

  Before Marco could ask any question, the man walked in the door. “I hear you’re good, and I hear you’re cheap,” the man said without any introductory comments.

  “I try to be good,” Marco answered cautiously.

  “I want you to make a love potion for me,” the man replied immediately. “How much will it cost?”

  Gabrielle sharply inhaled.

  Marco hesitated, trying to understand the dynamics of the situation. “It will depend,” Marco replied. “Can you tell me anything about the situation?”

  “There’s a girl. I want her to marry me. I need a potion. Do you want to do it, or do you want me to give it to someone else?” the man asked.

  The belligerence in the man’s eyes told Marco that there was nothing friendly in the proposed match. “I’ll need a piece of your hair, and a piece of hers,” he answered. The answer didn’t confirm that he would prepare the potion, and it didn’t deny it. Marco wasn’t sure what to do. His heart was screaming at him to refuse the business, lucrative through a love philter could be. But if he refused, he had no doubt that Applied or the other shop would be willing to prepare the potion the man wanted.

  “Here,” the man reached up and tugged out a small scrap of hair from his scalp, without wincing, and dropped the strands on the counter. “I’ll get a bit of hers in a day or two.

  “How much will this cost?” he asked.

  “It’s a tricky and expensive philter to concoct,” Marco answered. “Two golds and a silver if it works.”

  “And nothing if it fails?” the man gave a snarl that might have been meant as a smile.

  “No charge if it fails,” Marco blandly agreed, as a plan started to formulate in the back of his mind. “Just bring a few strands of her hair, and we’ll get started on the potion.”

  “I’ll be back in a day or two. Be ready,” the man said, and he abruptly left the shop.

  Marco unconsciously released his breath in an explosive exhalation, glad to see the man gone.

  “I agree. I know the man, and know more of him by reputation. He’s a monster. He’s had two wives die in ‘accidents’ already in his life,” Gabrielle said. “We aren’t going to help him trap a third girl in his clutches, are we?”

  “No,” Marco answered. “He scares me. I wouldn’t want to put a girl under a spell to fall in love with him.”

  “What are you going to do?” Gabrielle asked. “He thinks you’re going to give him a love philter. Can you even make a love philter? Marches said they were very complicated.

  “Who am I to ask the man who saved a baby’s life? Of course you can do this. What are you going to do?” Gabrielle asked.

  “I am going to prepare a potion that will make her resistant to him, even if he gets another alchemist to prepare a love philter for him,” Marco told the old woman.

  She looked at him with a quizzical smile on her face, then stretched up and kissed his cheek. “What a good boy you are!” she said gleefully.

  Marco went to the workshop and began to concoct the formula that would make the unknown woman resistant to Greystone’s efforts to use alchemy to seduce her.

  That night, Marco snuck out of his bedroom window, and climbed down a trellis on the outside of the house, then went to the docks and called Kieweeooee again. He’d visited with the dolphin twice more since his first call to the animal, and the two of them had spent a mutually enjoyable time swimming around the harbor. Marco was learning more words in the language of the dolphins – his vocabulary was still rudimentary, but with Kieweeooee it was sufficient for the two of them to communicate and play.

  After his swim, he climbed back to his room and brought his blankets out onto the roof again. He was careful to keep at least a sheet wrapped around himself, much to Mirra’s approval and amusement, for she continued to come up to his room to awaken him every morning.

  When she awoke him the next morning, he jumped in startlement, a bad dream about a woman murdered by the ill-intended man interrupted by her touch on his shoulder, and he sat straight up immediately.

  “Goodness!” she leaned hurriedly back into the window. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  Marco looked around, wide-eyed, trying to reconcile the dream and the reality of the morning. “Yes,” he murmured. “Everything is fine. Is breakfast ready?”

  “As ready as it can be,” the cook affirmed, and then left him.

  Marco waved over at the two women who watched him through their window every morning, and they shyly waved back, then disappeared from view, and he went downstairs to start his day.

  “Gabrielle says that you’re going to save another life today,” Mirra commented as she placed a plate of food before him at the kitchen table.

  “It’s true,” Gabrielle added. “You’re going to save someone’s life, there’s no doubt.

  “But he’ll be angry with you. He’ll come after you when it doesn’t work,” she reminded him.

  “I won’t charge him anything if it doesn’t work, so he won’t have lost anything. And if he goes to someone else to get a philter, she’ll be protected from that by the potion we’ve given her already,” Marco grinned at how beautifully the whole plot seemed to work.

  “My boy, Marches would be proud of you,” Gabrielle said.

  “Who is this man?” Mirra asked from across the kitchen as she began to clean the dishes.

  “Greystone,” Gabrielle answered.

  There was a clattering sound, as Mirra dropped a bowl. Both Gabrielle and Marco looked up in surprise at the slip by the usually sure-handed cook.

  “Sorry. I know him,” Mirra explained awkwardly as she bent to pick up the dish.

  In a flash of insight, Marco realized an extraordinary coincidence.

  “Is he?” he started to ask, then stopped himself.

  Mirra looked at him, then looked over at where Sybele slept in her basket, and nodded her head.

 
Marco’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. He lowered his head to resume eating his food, thinking furiously, knowing that the particulars were none of his business, but wondering how the gentle girl who fixed his food had come to be in such circumstances. He’d never asked the girl about Sybele’s father, never given it any thought, or had any questions about Mirra’s relationships or home or anything else. It suddenly struck him that he should know something more about the girl as a person, and he wondered why he had never asked her anything.

  Marco finished his meal silently, then excused himself and went to the work room, where he began looking through the long shelves of supplies, wondering if he had everything that one of the old formulae called for. He had taken Mirra for granted, and he felt a sudden wish to do something for her as a person, not just for her his household cook, or as the mother of the baby he had helped to save.

  He searched for the items he wanted, until he heard the door to the shop open and close, and he realized that Mirra had already left the shop.

  “Is she gone?” he hurriedly asked Gabrielle as he rushed to the front of the shop. The land lady was opening the windows and doors to start the day.

  “Who? Mirra? Yes, she and Sybele are on their way,” the owner affirmed. “She seemed in a bit of a hurry to be on her way.”

  A customer entered the store, having apparently waited for the door to open, and soon Marco was promising to create and deliver an ointment to restore old leather to a “good-as-new shape.”

  He returned to the workshop. The leather restorer was curiously akin to the other project he had thought about starting to work on that morning, and he already had some elements out that were common to both lotions, so he began mixing the items together, until Gabrielle came and knocked on the door.

  “Greystone is here,” she said shortly.

  Marco led her out to the front of the store. “Here’s the hair you wanted,” the man said without any preliminary conversation. He held a few strands of long red hair between his thumb and finger.

  “I’ll be right back,” Marco promised. He took the hair back to the workroom and sat down. He didn’t really need the girl’s hair for his treatment – he had simply asked for it when he had been stalling during their first encounter, trying to figure out how best to avoid helping Greystone. He sat and waited three minutes, long enough to seem to have done something, then he picked up the small stone jar he had filled with the protective liquid, and took it back to the front.