The Road to Amber by Roger Zelazny Read Free Book Online

clothes,” he said.
    “‘That’s why you’re carrying a long, sharp tool?”
    “Right.”
    We walked in silence for a time, passing through a field and into a grove of trees. Abruptly, he dropped to his knees at the foot of a small rise, extended his hands amid grasses, and spread them. Two small flowering plants lay between his extended forefingers and thumbs. No, what had seemed a pair of plants could now be seen as but one. What had misled me was that it bore both blue and yellow flowers. I regarded the leaves. I recalled a botany class I had once taken…
    * * *
    “Yes, study it,” he said.
    “I can’t identify it,” I told him.
    “I would be most surprised if you could. It is quite rare, and the only sure way to know it and to find it when you need it is by means of introduction and by worsd of summoning, which I shall teach you.”
    “I see.”
    “And in your case it will be necessary to place samples under cultivation in your apartment. For you must learn its usages more deeply than any other who knows of it. Roots, leaves, stalks, flowers: each part has a separate virtue, and they can be made to work in a wide variety of combinations.”
    “I do not understand. I’ve spent all this time getting a first-rate medical education. Now you want me to become an herbalist?”
    He laughed.
    “No, of course not. You need your techniques as well as your credentials. I am not asking you to abandon the methods you have learned for helping people, but merely to add another for…special cases.”
    “Involving that little flower?”
    “Exactly.”
    “What is it called?”
    “Bleafage. You won’t find it in any herbal or botany text. Come here and let me introduce you and teach you the words. Then you will remove it and take it to your home, to cultivate and become totally familiar with.”
    I ate, drank, and even slept with the bleafage. Morrie stopped by periodically and instructed me in its use. I learned to make tinctures, poultices, salves, plasters, pills, wines, oils, liniments, syrups, douches, enemas, electuaries, and fomentations of every part and combination of parts of the thing. I even learned how to smoke it. Finally, I began taking a little of it to work with me every now and then and tried it on a number of serious cases, always with remarkable results.
    My next birthday, Morrie took me to a restaurant in town, and afterward an elevator in the parking garage seemed to keep descending, finally releasing us in his office.
    “Neat trick, that,” I said.
    I followed him along a bright, winding tunnel, his invisible servants moving about us, lighting fresh candles and removmg the remains of those which had expired. At one point, he stopped and removed a stump of a candle from a case, lit it from the guttering flame of one upon a ledge, and replaced the old one with the new one, just as the former went out.
    “What did you just do, Morrie?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you replace one before.”
    “I don’t do it often,” he answered. “But that woman you fed the bleafage to this afternoon—the one in 465—she just rallied.” He measured the candle stump between thumb and forefinger. “Six years, eight months, three days, seven hours, fourteen minutes, twenty-three seconds,” he observed. “That’s how much life you have bought her.”
    “Oh,” I said, trying to study his face and failing, within the darting shadows.
    “I’m not angry, if that’s what you’re looking for,” he said. “You must try the bleafage out if you’re to understand its power.”
    “Tell me,” I said, “is it a power over life or a power over death that we are discussing?”
    “That’s droll,” he said. “Is it one of those Zen things? I rather like it.”
    “No, it was a serious question.”
    “Well, mine is a power over life,” he said, “and vice versa. We’re sort of ‘yin-yang’ that way.”
    “But you’re not restricted to your specialty, not when you have this bleafage business