Skizz was the only sound; we sat still in the middle of the noise and the objects flickering on and off, small then large then small again, side to side. Ahead, above the River, over the whiteness of the landscape and the ice, the dark line of cloud grew darker, thicker, lower.
Skeres and Frizier lay like dead men, only their grips on the hull showing them to be conscious.
I leaned my head closer to Captain Cheese.
“A word of warning,” I said. “Don’t trust those two.”
“Hell and damn, son,” he smiled, “I don’t trust you! Hold tight,” he said, pulling something. True to his word, in the stillness, one side of the iceboat rose up two feet off the level, we sailed along with the sound halved, slowly dropped back down to both iron runners, level. I looked up. The mainsail was tight as a pair of Italian leggings.
“There goes Hampton. Coming up on Staines!” he called out so the two men in front could have heard him if they’d chosen to.
A skater flashed by inches away. “Damn fool lubber!” said Jack Cheese. “I got sea-road rights-of-way!” A deer paused, flailed away, fell and was gone, untouched behind us.
And then we went into a wall of whiteness that peppered and stung. The whole world dissolved away. I thought for an instant I had gone blind from the speed of our progress. Then I saw Captain Cheese still sitting a foot or two away. Skeres and Frizier had disappeared, as had the prow and the jibsail. I could see nothing but the section of boat I was in, the captain, the edge of the mainsail above. No river, no people, no landmarks, just snow and whiteness.
“How can you see?”
“Can’t,” said the captain.
“How do you know where we are?”
“Ded reckoning,” he said. “Kick them up front, tell ‘em to hang tight,” he said. I did. When Skeres and Frizier opened their eyes, they almost screamed.
Then Cheese dropped the jib and the main and let the ice-brakes go. We came to a stop in the middle of the swirling snow, as in the middle of a void. Snowflakes the size of thalers came down. Then I made out a bulking shape a foot or two beyond the prow of the icerunner.
“Everybody out! Grab the hull. Lift, that’s right. Usually have to do this myself. Step sharp. You two, point the prow up. That’s it. Push. Push.”
In the driven snow, the indistinct shape took form. Great timbers, planking, rocks, chunks of iron were before us, covered with ice. The two men out front put the prow over one of the icy gaps fifteen feet apart. Cheese and I lifted the stern, then climbed over after it. “Settle in, batten down,” said the captain. Once more we swayed sickeningly, jerked, the sails filled, and we were gone.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Reading Weir,” he said. “Just where the Kennet comes in on the portside. If we’d have hit that, we’d of been crushed like eggs. You can go to sleep now if you want. It’s smooth sailing all the way in now.”
~ * ~
But of course I couldn’t. There seemed no movement, just the white blank ahead, behind, to each side.
“That would have been Wallingford,” he said once. Then, a little farther on, “Abingdon, just there.” We sailed on. There was a small pop in the canvas. “Damn,” he said, “the wind may go contrary; I might have to tack.” He watched the sail awhile, then settled back. “I was wrong,” he said.
Then, “Hold tight!” Frizier or Skeres moaned.
He dropped the sails. We lost motion. I heard the icebrakes grab, saw a small curtain of crystalline ice mix with the snow. The moving, roiling whiteness became a still, roiling whiteness. The anchor hit the ice.
And, one after the other, even with us, the bells of the Oxford Tower struck noon.
~ * ~
“Thanks be to you,” I said, “Captain Jack Cheese.”
“And to you—what was your name?”
“John,” I said. “Johnny Factotum.”
He looked at me, put his finger aside his nose. “Oh, then, Mr Factotum,” he said. I shook his hand.
“You’ve done me a great service,” I said.
“And you me,” said Captain Jack. “You’ve made me the easiest three shillings ever.”
“Three!” yelled the two men still in the boat. “The bet was two shillings!”
“The bet was two, which I shall now take.” The captain held out his hand. “The fare back to London is one more, for you both.”
“What? What fare?” they asked.
“The bet was two hours to here. Which I have just done, from the tower bells in London to the campanile of Oxford. To do this, I had perforce to take you here in the time allotted, which—” and Jack Cheese turned once more to me and laid his finger to nose, “I have just done, therefore, quod erat demonstrandum,” he said. “The wager being forfeit, either I shall bid you adieu, and give to you the freedom of the River and the Roads, or I shall drop you off in your own footprints on the London ice for a further shilling.”
The two looked at each other, their eyes pewter plates in the driven snow.
“But...” one began to say.
“These my unconditional, unimprovable terms,” said Captain Jack.
We were drawing a crowd of student clerks and magisters, who marvelled at the iceboat.
“Very well,” sighed one of the men.
“The bet?” It was handed over. “The downward fare?” It, too.
“Hunker down in front, keep your heads down,” said Jack Cheese and took out one of his mutton-leg pistols and laid it in front of him. “And no Spanish sissyhood!” he said. “For going downriver we don’t stop for Reading Weir, we take it at speed!”
“No!”
“Abaft, all ye!” yelled Jack Cheese to the crowd. “I go upstream a pace; I turn; I come back down. If you don’t leave the River now, don’t blame me for loss of life and limb. No stopping Jack Cheese!” he said. The sails snapped up, the icebrake lifted, they blurred away into the upper Thames-Isis.
We all ran fast as we could from the centre of the ice. I stopped; so did half the crowd who’d come to my side of the river. The blur of Captain Jack Cheese, the hull and sails, and the frightened popped eyes at gunwale level zipped by.
The laughter of Jack Cheese came back to us as they flashed into the closing downriver snow and were gone.
And here I had been worried about him with two sharpers aboard. Done as well as any Gamaliel Ratsy, and no Spanish sissyhood, for sure. I doubt the two would twitch till they got back to London Docks.
The students were marvelling among themselves. It reminded me of my days at Cambridge, bare seven years gone.
But my purposes lay elsewhere. I walked away from the crowd, unnoticed; they were as soon lost to me in the blowing whiteness as I, them.
~ * ~
I sat under a pine by the River-side. From my pack I took a snaphance and started a small fire in the great snowing chill, using needles of the tree for a fragrant combustion; I filled my pipe, lit it and took in a great calming lungful of Sir Walter’s Curse.
I was no doubt in the middle of the great university. I didn’t care. I finished one pipeful, lit another, took in half that, ate some saltbeef and hard bread (the only kind to be found in London). Then I took from the apothecary pack, with its compartments and pockets filled with simples, emetics, herbs and powders, the document with the seal.
I read it over, twice. Then per instructions, added it to the fire.
I finished my pipe, knocked the dottles into the flame, and put it away.
The man’s name was Johan Faustus, a German of Wittenberg. He was suspected, of course, of the usual—blasphemy, treason, subornation of the judiciary, atheism. The real charge, of course, was that he consorted with known Catholics—priests, prelates, the Pope himself. But what most worried the government was that he consorted with known Catholics here, in this realm. I was to find if he were involved in any plot; if suspicions were true, to put an end to his part in it. These things were in the document itself.
To this I added a few things I knew.
That he was a doctor of both law and medicine, as so many are in this our country; that he had spent many years teaching at Wittenberg (not a notorious stronghold of the Popish Faith); that he was a magician, a conjuror, an alchemist, and, in the popular deluded notion of the times, supposed to have trafficked with Satan. There were many tales from the Continent— that he’d gulled, dazzled, conjured to and for emperors and kings— whether with the usual golden leaden ruses, arts of ledgerdemain, or the Tarot cards or whatnot, I knew not.
Very well, then. But as benighted superstitious men had written my instructions, I had to ask myself—what would a man dealing with the Devil be doing in part of a Catholic plot? The Devil has his own devices and traps, all suppose, some of them, I think, involving designs on the Popish Church itself. Will he use one religion ‘gainst ‘nother? Why don’t men stop and think when they begin convolving their minds as to motive? Were they all absent the day brains were forged?
And why would an atheist deal with the Devil? The very professors tie themselves in knotlets of logic over just such questions as these.
Well then: let’s apply William of Ockham’s fine razor to this Gordian knot of high senselessness. I’ll trot up to him and ask him if he’s involved in any treacherous plotting. Being an atheist, in league with both the Devil and the Pope (and for all I know the Turk), he’ll tell me right out the truth. If treasonable, I shall cut off his head; if not.. .should I cut off his head to be safe?
Enough forethought; time for action. I reached into the bottom of my peddlar’s pack and took out two long curved blades like scimitars, so long and thin John Sincklo could have worn them Proportional, and attached them with thongs to the soles of my rude boots.
So equilibrized at the edge of the River I stood, and set out toward my destination which the letter had given me, Lotton near Cricklade, near the very source of the Thames-Isis.
And as I stood to begin my way norwestward the sun, as if in a poem by Chideock Tichbourne, showed itself for the first time in two long months through the overcast, as a blazing ball, flooding the sky, the snow and ice in a pure sheen of blinding light. I began to skate toward it, toward the Heart of Whitenesse itself.
~ * ~
Skiss skiss skiss the only sound from my skates, the pack swinging to and fro on my back; pure motion now, side to side, one arm folded behind me, the other out front as counterweight, into the blinded and blinding River before me. Past the mill at Lechlade, toward Kempsford, the sides of the Thames-Isis grew closer and rougher; past Kempsford to the edge of Cricklade itself, where the Roy comes in from the left just at the town, and turning then to right and north I go, up the River Churn, just larger than the Shoreditch in London itself. And a mile up and on the right, away from the stream, the outbuildings of a small town itself, and on a small hill beyond the town roofs, an old manor house.
I got off my skates, and unbound them and put them in the pack.
And now to ask leading questions of the rude common folk of the town.
~ * ~
I walked to the front of the manor house and stopped, and beheld a sight to make me furious.
Tied to a post in front of the place, a horse stood steaming in what must have been forty degrees below frost. Its coat was lathered, the foam beginning to freeze in clumps on its mane and legs. Steam came from its nostrils. That someone rode a horse like that and left it like that in weather like this made me burn. The animal regarded me with an unconcerned eye, without shivering.
I walked past it to the door of the manor house, where of course my man lived. The sun, once the bright white ball, was covered again, and going down besides. Dark would fall like a disgraced nobleman in a few moments.
I rang the great iron doorknocker three times, and three hollow booms echoed down an inner hallway. The door opened to reveal a hairy man, below the middle height. His beard flowed into his massive head of hair. His ears, which stuck out beyond that tangle, were thin and pointed. His smile was even, but two lower teeth stuck up from the bottom lip. His brows met in the middle to form one hairy ridge.
“That horse needs seeing to,” I said.
He peered past me. “Oh, not that one,” he said. “My master is expecting you, and cut the merde, he knows who you are and why you’re here.”
“To try to sell the Good Doctor simples and potions.”
“Yeh, right,” said the servant. “This way.”
We walked down the hall. A brass head sitting on a shelf in a niche turned its eyes to follow me with its gaze as we passed. How very like Vergil.
We came to a closet doorway set at one side of the hallway.
“You can’t just go in, though,” said the servant, “without you’re worthy. Inside this here room is a Sphinx. It’ll ask you a question. You can’t answer it, it eats you.”
“What if I answer it?”
“Well, I guess you could eat it, if you’ve a mind to and she’ll hold still. But mainly you can go through the next door; the Doctor’s in.”
“Have her blaze away,” I said.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said the servant. “I’ll just stand behind the door here; she asks the first person she sees.”
“You don’t mind if I take out my knife, do you?”
“Take out a six-pounder cannon, for all the good it’ll do you, you’re not a wise man,” he said.
I eased my knife from its sheath.
He opened the door. I expected either assassins, fright masks, jacks-in-boxes, some such. I stepped to the side, in case of mantraps or springams. Nothing happened, nothing leapt out. I peered around the jamb.
Standing on a stone that led back into a cavern beyond was a woman to the waist, a four-footed leopard from there down; behind her back were wings. She was moulting, putting in new feathers here and there. She looked at me with the eyes of a cat, narrow vertical pupils. I dared not look away.
“What hassss,” she asked, in a sibilant voice that echoed down the hall, “eleven fingers in the morning, lives in a high place at noon, and has no head at sundown?”
“The present Queen’s late Mum,” I said.
“Righto!” said the servant and closed the door. I heard a heavy weight thrash against it, the sound of scratching and tearing. The servant slammed his fist on the door. “Settle down, you!” he yelled. “There’ll be plenty more dumb ones come this way.”
He opened the door at the end of the hall, and I walked into the chamber of Doctor Faustus.
~ * ~
The room is dark but warm. A fire glows in the hearth, the walls are lined with books. There are dark marks on the high ceiling, done in other paint.
Doctor John Faust sits on a high stool before a reading stand; a lamp hangs above. I see another brass head is watching me from the wall.
“Ahem,” says the servant.
“Oh?” says Faustus, looking up. “I thought you’d be alone, Wagner.” He looks at me. “The others they sent weren’t very bright. They barely got inside the house.”
“I can imagine,” I say. “Your lady’s costume needs mending. The feathers aren’t sewn in with double-loop stitches.”
He laughs. “I am Doctor Johan Faustus.”
“And I am—” I say, thinking of names.
“Please drop the mumming,” he says. “I’ve read your Tamerlane— both parts.”
I look around. “Can we be honest?” I ask.
“Only one of us,” he says.
“I have been sent here—”
“Probably to find out to whom I owe my allegiance. And its treasonableness. And not being able to tell whether I’m lying, to kill me; better safe than sorry. Did you enjoy your ride on the ice?”
There is no way he could have known. I was not followed. Perhaps he is inducing; if he knows who I am, and that I was on London this morning, only one method could have gotten me here so fast. But no one else who saw—
I stopped. This is the way fear starts.
“Very much,” I say.
“Your masters w
ant to know if I plot for the Pope—excuse me, the Bishop of Rome. No. Or the Spaniard. No. Nor French, Jews, Turks, no. I do not plot even for myself. Now you can leave.”
“And I am to take your word?” I ask.
“I’m taking yours.”
“Easily enough done,” I say. Wagner the servant has left the room. Faustus is very confident of himself.
“You haven’t asked me if I serve the Devil,” he says.
“No one serves the Devil,” I say. “There is no Devil.”
New Worlds Page 19
