Any Man So Daring

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Yet he remained an innocent, a tender young fool

  Caliban didn’t know troll females. Coming of age beside fair Miranda, he’d made her the pattern and plate of his affection until his love had slipped from the adoration of playmate, almost brother, to something quite different.

  Quicksilver wondered if Caliban knew it.

  He stared at Caliban and felt moisture come to his own eyes, moisture he could scarcely spare. For here had nature arranged a snarl, where elf loved human and troll loved elf, and none of them, neither elf nor troll — nor perhaps human — had the least chance of fulfilling his desire or gaining happiness.

  Quicksilver finished his bottle, and his body slipped down to curl on the ground. He fell asleep upon moss and leaves, wrapped in his bed cover.

  In the moment between sleep and wakening he heard the tinkling of glass, the beast’s footsteps upon the leafy ground and he knew the troll had besought himself some privacy for crying -- carrying his bottles of wine with him.

  He knew then that Caliban was aware of being in love with Miranda, and that Caliban knew his dreams would never come true.

  Scene Twenty Six

  Miranda, lying on the ground, with Proteus a few steps from her. Moving no more than necessary, she lifts her hand. Someone watching from above would see little sparks of magic flying from her fingers toward Proteus's head. But no one is watching. Proteus's eyes are closed, either in sleep or a good imitation of it.

  Lying on the cold ground, on a pile of leaves and moss, Miranda thought about the spells her father had used to put her to sleep when she was very little.

  Leaves poked through her dress and something that might be an insect squirmed beneath her. Miranda recalled those spells.

  How could one cast the like spell? Miranda didn’t remember the words her father had said, but it seemed to her that spells were about feeling. The words simply anchored the magic, but the magic itself, wild and unfettered, streamed across the magical being’s mind and imposed itself on reality - aided by the words, but never tied to them.

  And Miranda’s father had once told her that her magic was such that she’d soon outgrow the crutch of words.

  She should not need the words.

  Miranda lifted her hand and bethought her on the feel of the spell and, her hand raised, wished magic to go and close Proteus's eyes, and put him to sleep, a sleep as sound as that which had been wished upon her.

  Had Proteus wished it? Or someone else?

  She did not know; nor, she thought, should she care.

  If Proteus had sought to put her to sleep, then she would see what he’d tried to hide from her.

  And if Proteus was innocent, and someone else, some creature — her uncle, perhaps — had wished her to sleep, then perhaps, perhaps, this creature threatened them both. Perhaps she would save Proteus's life.

  Again, fantasies of being the heroine of the hill, as well as the Queen and Proteus's wife, beguiled Miranda into sweet dreaming.

  She cut them short, for such imagination was but a lullaby leading to sleep and oblivion while -- what treason went on behind her sleeping eyes?

  She thought on the spell and with all her might wished magic to fly from her fingers to Proteus.

  The tingle of magic ran burning down her arm and sparkled from her fingers.

  Opening one eye, she caught the last reflection of magical light shining upon Proteus's bright hair.

  With her eye still open, she spied her lover. Was he asleep? Truly asleep?

  Or had he expected this spell and, perhaps, in the manner of elves more experienced in the world, protected himself?

  She spied with her one open eye, and she didn’t see Proteus move.

  Rather it seemed to her as though he relaxed further into his leafy bed, as though the breath coming between his lips were more even, the rise and fall of his chest more spaced.

  She took a deep breath. Proteus was either asleep or so dissembling that his heart had rotted even as his exterior remained fair and dazzling.

  She would now get up--if he were asleep, then let him go on sleeping. And if he were not asleep — if he were a traitor -- she was ready for him, and curse her breaking heart.

  She stood up. He moved not.

  He is asleep, she thought, and smiled to herself. Faith, he was innocent of plotting and dark deeds, and everything she’d suspected for the last few hours.

  Her suspicions were mad, his love steady.

  She would now go and see what threatened them both and plotted against their happiness.

  She indulged in a look at her sleeping love. How beautiful he looked, his lips set in an almost-smile, his golden hair framing his oval face. Let him sleep. Oh, let him sleep and dream only of her.

  Standing up, she shook the leaves from her dress and tiptoed in the direction of the swaying light, from which also came the sound of hooves, the sound of voices.

  She glimpsed through the trees the shapes of men on horseback and blinked. Something was odd. The men sat too far forward. She shook her head. Oh, these were not men on horseback, but centaurs.

  These were Proteus's companions, Hylas, Chiron, and Eurytion: the one with the body of a black stallion, the one with the dappled black and white body, and the one with the brown body.

  All three looked tired and a little angry as they stood in the clearing, talking in loud, brisk voices.

  Though their accent put an odd sound in it, they spoke the common language of elves of Avalon, close enough to the English of humans that it could be understood by humans and elves alike. The two races, living side by side had, likewise, learned each other’s speech, each other’s ways.

  Hylas, the dark one, glanced at the trees behind which Miranda stood. But his gaze rested not on her. “He comes not. The traitorous dog comes not.”

  The traitorous dog...did they mean Quicksilver? Why would Quicksilver be meeting the centaurs? Were not the centaurs Proteus's allies?

  Her heart sped up. She caught her breath in a pitch of panic, trying to subdue it and, feeling it rise within her against her best efforts.

  Did this mean that the centaurs, Proteus's supposed allies, actually served Quicksilver? Oh, had Proteus been double crossed all along, been led into a fool’s paradise?

  Catching her breath, subduing her impatience, she watched as the brown-bodied centaur danced impatiently, his hooves pounding on the ground, his broad, golden features set in impatience. Clutching his large hands into fists, he waved them mid-air. “Curse the cur. He told us he would be here to finalize the plan. Is he then so weak-livered?”

  The dappled one snorted. He had a smaller face than the others and looked more delicate. His arms and chest were not so massive, and the black hair that covered his human chest was sparser as though he were younger. A young centaur just past adolescence. “Weak-livered as he’s ever been, shirking battle, ever looking to evade that most fearful of contests in which death is met,” he said. “But I didn’t know him an outright coward.”

  The black one held an oil lantern in his hand at the end of a stick. He lifted it high as if its light would reveal someone hiding in the undergrowth and snorted. “If he were not a coward, why would he have invented this whole plot? A coward’s plot it is, and a foolish one at that. Only a coward, who knows he has no rights to what he holds and what he craves, would squander his opportunities thus.”

  A coward who had no rights to what he held. Oh. They were talking about Quicksilver then, that unworthy king of fairyland

  who’d stolen the throne from his brother, Miranda’s true father.

  The other version, what the mortal had told her, must be a delusion or an outright lie.

  Or else, nothing made sense.

  She thought on the mortal, the way he looked, with sparse hair and burnt skin. No.

  It was all clear. The story the mortal told was a lie. For someone ugly as that must have, in his heart, some dark crime, some twisted vice. Lying would come easily to him.

  Which still
didn’t explain, she thought, uncomfortably, how beautiful her uncle looked, if he were a villain.

  But then, perhaps that beauty was an illusion. In many stories, did not the villain — ill-favored witch or ungainly mage — buy with his soul the power to make himself appear lissome and attractive?

  Yes, that had to be it.

  Quicksilver, the traitor, the criminal, must have purchased a lie for his appearance.

  She wondered what that must have cost while another being, no more than a shadow, lumbered into the clearing. As the creature stopped and stared, dumbfounded, at the centaurs, the centaur with the lantern turned, throwing light on the intruder, and Miranda saw a stooped creature, covered in reddish fur, his features a mix of the human and the canine.

  She stifled a scream. Caliban. So he had indeed come to the island, as had Proteus's companions.

  But why was he here? What was he doing here, alone, in the middle of the night? And why did he carry, in his many-fingered hands several dark, glistening bottles, of the type used to store wine?

  Caliban stopped, looking at the centaurs as though surprised at seeing them.

  The centaurs, in turn, seemed shocked, almost frightened. The brown one cantered nervously about. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon’s with savages and men of Inde, ha? I have not scaped the weird whirlwind to be afraid now of this creature. As proper a man as ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground: and it shall be said so again, while Chiron breathes at nostrils.”

  Caliban looked scared. “Pray,” he said. “Pray, do not torment me, for I’ve done nothing.” Visibly scared, by the huge half-horse beings, he stepped back, step by step, as though trying to efface himself.

  The dappled one laughed, a high, nervous laughter. “This is some monster of this isle, with two legs, yet, not an elf nor a human, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? I will give him some relief, if but for that. If I can recover him and keep him take and get back to New Thessalony with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on horseshoe.”

  But the black one scowled. “He’s a troll, you fools. I’d have thought you saw enough of them in the damned war. He’s the girl’s troll. The elf-girl Proteus craves.”

  “Ah, the girl,” said the dappled one. “As fine a piece of elf body as ever crossed my path, and I had my way she would cross more than path.”

  “Yet what have we here?” the black centaur said. “Why should a troll carry bottles? For trolls neither make wine nor consume it.” He bent at an awkward angle and reached down for one of the bottles that Caliban held. “Give us the loot you’ve stolen, beast.”

  With a whimper, Caliban let the bottle be pulled away. His eyes were wide, his mouth foamy. He looked as though he’d like to cower into himself.

  The dark centaur, Hylas, held the bottle to the lantern and whooped. “Liquor. Fine liquor, by Zeus.”

  He cackled, a high cackle, as he galloped to a tree and broke the bottle’s neck upon the trunk. “Elf liquor,” he said tasting it. “Such as no mortal could make. Why, it is distilled moonbeams and wild summer nights and the girls, with their tresses undone, under August moon.”

  His poetry went unheeded. Already, the other centaurs were getting wine bottles from Caliban, who, terrified, tried to run out of the clearing.

  But he could not run, because a visibly inebriated Hylas — though Hylas had only just tasted the wine -- galloped in circles around him, cutting his escape.

  Hylas looked quite changed. His handsome dark features seemed coarser. His nostrils flared and his eyes flashed. A smell of human sweat and horse sweat mingled, rolled off him, filling the clearing.

  His dark, Greek-dreaming eyes ignited with something animal, something uncontrollable. He flared his nostrils and blew through them, like a horse that smells the hay, and galloped around Caliban, and laughed. “I smell your terror, troll,” he said. “I smell your fear. Trolls are ever cowardly when alone, and only great bands of them dare to attack what crosses their path. But alone, they run from a cat and pay obeisance to a dog. Indeed, they’re like rats, in that way.”

  The brown one and the dappled one had broken the necks of their bottles, and were drinking them now. “Leave him alone, Hylas,” the brown one said. He grinned at Caliban. “That’s a brave god and he bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him.” And thus speaking, he joined action to words and went down on his front knees, before Caliban, who shrieked in fright.

  The black one laughed and reached for Caliban, and held him aloft, his hands under Caliban’s arms. “He’s but a small one. Still a cub. Tender, sure. In the days of yore did our fathers roast just such who lived in the caves of the isles. We’ve not eaten for a day and every creature in this cursed isle is damned with magic. I say we make him our dinner.”

  Caliban shrieked again. His legs kicked maniacally but hit nothing. The centaurs laughed. Caliban’s eyes rolled into his head, and he foamed at the mouth, over his great canines, his huge fangs that bit at air. “I wish me,” he said. “I wish I’d never left my mother’s cave. Curse the Hunter that took me so, from my litter mates and from my mother with her warm fur and her soft tongue and her bountiful tit.”

  Miranda, her heart beating with terror, her breath coming in short gasps, looked about her for a weapon.

  These were Proteus's allies, were they not? How then could they be such savages?

  But then, had they not planned to sell Proteus to the cursed, unrighteous king of fairyland?

  And if they had, what did it mean? How could Proteus be so foolish that he knew not with whom he dealt?

  But then, had centaurs not always been dual? Had they not, at their start, been gentle creatures who lived among men? And yet alcohol turned them to raging animals. When their kind got drunk at the marriage of Pirithous and Hippodamia, had they not, tasting human wine for the first time, become violent and brutal and tried to violate the bride at her own feast?

  And had that not led to the war between centaur and Lapithae, which almost extinguished both races?

  It was so, for Miranda’s father had taught her so, as he had taught her that the remnants of the centaurs’ decimated population had then immigrated to the south of Avalon and there become a permanent focus of rebellion, a permanent thorn on the side of the sovereign of fairyland.

  And the Hunter did not lie.

  “I say we skin him with my hunting knife,” the brown Chiron said. Speaking, he pulled a long knife from his belt, while his friend held Caliban, his arms back and held together, his fierce horned toes kicking at the air, his canines ineffectively snapping at nothing.

  They might be joking. A coarse joke.

  But they’d tasted wine.

  Miranda dared not risk it. She pulled at the branch of a tree and broke it and, as the centaurs turned towards the sound, leapt into the clearing, screaming, “He is my servant. How dare you offend him?”

  “Oh, better prey is afoot,” Hylas screamed, and dropped Caliban, then leapt over the moaning, prostrate troll, towards Miranda. “Better prey. I smell her, her hot female smell.”

  The other centaurs hooted.

  They surrounded Miranda. A pair of indelicate hands reached for her shoulders, more daring ones touched her breasts.

  She lay about her with her stick, blindly hitting this one’s knees, the other one’s elbow.

  She saw Caliban scurry away into the forest while the Centaurs yelped in pain from her blows and remained confused at her sudden attack.

  She ran. She ran away into the forest, the sound of hooves fast upon her steps.

  Even running she knew that they would catch her, for they ran like horses, faster than any elf.

  “Help, oh, help me,” she screamed, hoping in vain that someone would hear and respond. But who could help her? Her father was in another world and knew not where she was. In this strange world, this island in a sea of magic, she had only a mortal whom she did not t
rust, a treacherous king who probably sought her death, and Proteus, upon whom she had laid a sleep charm. Would he wake at her voice? She feared not.

  The centaurs neared and she could feel the hands of the foremost one upon her shoulders. She tried to pull away, she struggled, but the centaur was stronger than her and lifted her, as though she were a rag doll. He laughed at her distress.

  “Oh, help me,” she screamed, but feared no one would.

  Scene Twenty Seven

  Will, sitting up. The stick, struggling beneath his shirt, looks like an additional, impatient heart. He sits up in the dark, swirling night of the crux, sees a lantern moving beyond the trees, and hears a woman scream.

  Will thought it was Silver who screamed. The voice had Silver’s timbre, Silver’s tones.

  His first impulse was to think that Silver had caused a distraction to scare him, to tempt him into coming to her.

  But he thought of the lady as she’d been — nude, scared, afraid of her own shadow, afraid of a death that her almost-immortal mind could not understand but of which her halving felt like a prologue.

  She could have had him back in that clearing. All it needed was a little more crying, a little more show of helpless grief, and Will would have been hers, faith, hers as he’d ever been.

  But she’d not done it, and even as their lips touched, even as he’d tasted her intoxicating mouth of sweet wine, she’d stayed well apart from him — a sister, or a sweet friend from the days of childhood.

  He’d wanted her, wanted her with an aching, physical desire, and any encouragement on her part would have given him to her.

  But she’d not encouraged him.

  And there, Will thought, sitting in the clearing, rubbing sleep from his foggy eyes, there was the rub, for perhaps the lady no longer wanted Will — Will with his receding hairline, his tired eyes.