Once before, while at Cambridge, Kit had been arrested. He’d made friends with Catholic students. At the time innocent, an ardent Protestant, in his missionary zeal he’d thought to talk them out of their grievous errors.
The council had seized him and asked him what incriminatory things he’d heard of them. Kit had refused to answer, all high-minded indignation and strong-worded pride.
But Kit’s bravery had earned him naught.
Alone, friendless, with no powerful connections, Kit had thought all lost and the pit of the grave had yawned at his feet.
Where his actions had not, his fear made him a traitor. He had given the names of those students who, in the heat of theological argument, had admitted their beliefs to him. He’d betrayed their dreams, their hopes, their not-quite plots.
He’d watched his friends die on the gallows, and he felt happy enough to have escaped. Since then had the secret service men known his limits and had tapped them again and again, sending him to parties where he would listen for the traitorous joke, the incautious remark, watch for the impolitic friendships.
Thus had Kit been seduced to working for the Crown and that first misstep, caused by fear and rewarded with gold, had gained him other secret offices till Kit’s conscience, blunted like an ill-used knife, troubled him no more, or only a little sometimes, late at night, when the ghosts of betrayed friends seemed to gather round his solitary bed.
And yet, Kit must have felt put upon. Something in him, some secret stirring, must have censored him.
Six months ago, when Thomas Walsingham, an old schoolfellow newly ascended to family honors, had offered Kit lavish patronage, Kit had shed the coils of secret like a snake that sheds its skin. He’d told Cecil he was done with it. From that moment on, he’d be a poet. A poet, nothing more.
And yet, the business would not leave Kit be. Like a sleeper returning to the same nightmare, Kit now found himself at the starting point of all his treasons. They wanted him to denounce a friend again. They wanted him to denounce Raleigh.
He looked from one man to the other and found nothing encouraging in those countenances.
This must be a plot of Essex’s, Kit thought. Essex was Raleigh’s rival for the Queen’s attention and her affections.
Two noble cocks strutted for an aging hen, and Kit would be caught in the middle of their bloody fight.
If Kit denounced Raleigh, the council would let Kit go. But if Essex’s plot failed, Raleigh could avenge himself on Kit in a more terrible way than Essex could, for Raleigh was an imaginative man, as Essex was not.
And besides, even Kit’s ill-awakened conscience yet rebelled from his being called again to the office of traitor.
He took a deep breath. “If I’m guilty of atheism, then it’s my own guilt,” he said. “I will name no other.”
Mauder chuckled. “A fine stand, Master Marlowe. A fine stand.” He grinned, showing yellowed teeth.
The carriage smelled of wet wool and sweat.
The curtains were closed. An oil lamp fixed on a bracket lit the carriage and gave off a greasy, burnt smell.
Mauder rapped on the wood near his head, and the carriage slowed to a funeral pace.
“Have you heard of Master Topcliff?” Mauder asked. “Master Topcliff, now.” Mauder shook his head and smiled with admiration. “He’s the Queen’s own torturer and he can break a man on the rack in an instant. Or make him sweat with all his weight suspended from manacles. Or other things, some of them so secret only he knows them. Why, it is said he can cut into a man for days, and take one sense at a time from him, all without killing him, while, little by little, crippling him forever. What think you, Master Marlowe?
“Hard to hold a quill when you have no fingers, hard to write when your eyes are gone, hard to court ladies when you have lost that which makes you a man.
“You’d be advised, Master Marlowe, to confess now, before you’re put to the torture, while you might yet walk away free.”
Kit felt cold, yet sweat dripped down his back and soaked through his fine velvet suit. He smelled it, rank and sharp.
He could see himself, a shapeless cripple, crawling on the filthy street, a begging bowl clutched between his few remaining teeth. Alms for the cripple. What good then his wit, his fine grey eyes, his Cambridge education?
He shivered.
Removing his right glove, he clenched both hands tight upon it, as if by squeezing it he could throttle his vile tormentors. “I have nothing to confess that could be said after torture—or before,” Kit said. He meant it as a courageous scream, but instead his voice echoed the cringing, begging tones of his cobbler father.
To Kit’s surprise, Henry Mauder sat back as though conceding the point.
“It was at your lodgings that they told us you’d gone to Paul’s,” Mauder said softly.
“At my lodgings?”
Into Kit’s mind, unbidden, came an image of the modest house where he lodged in Southwark and, with it, an image of Imp, whose real name was Richard.
Save that Imp was barely seven and that his hair yet retained a natural trace of red without need for the artifice of henna, it could have been Kit’s own face. And a good reason for that, as Kit had long suspected that Imp, the son of Kit’s landlady, was the result of his desperate attempt to put off paying his rent long ago. A miraculous result of so base an act.
These men would have asked Imp where Kit was. That was sure, or they’d never have found Kit. Only Imp always knew or cared where Kit went.
Henry smiled, showing his bent teeth. “That is a fine boy your landlady has, Master Marlowe.”
Kit flinched. Imp was Kit’s religion. At the innocent’s foot he worshiped and for that small creature had he such hopes that they beggared heaven.
Kit wished Imp away from these unhallowed plots and trembled to know him so close to them, so near the sprung trap.
“A fine boy. A shame if something were to happen to him, but a high-spirited boy might do such things—steal an apple, say—as would render him fit only to be hanged,” Mauder said.
Kit’s hands trembled. He’d sacrifice anything, anyone, give anything up. Anyone but Imp.
In his life, he’d loved but twice. The first time, when he’d been barely more than a boy himself and he’d fallen in love with a dark-haired elven maiden. And the second time—quite a different love—Imp, the result of Kit’s pleasing sin.
Yet Marlowe could not betray Raleigh. Raleigh was powerful and rich enough to take revenge and to avenge himself on Imp as well as Kit.
Kit’s head felt as dizzy as if he had worked long on a hot summer’s day. Snapes lay on either side of him. He took a deep breath. It did not steady him.
“Are you ready to talk now, Master Marlowe?” Henry Mauder asked, his gaze steady upon Kit. “Are you ready to talk and tell us who taught you vile disrespect of religion?”
Scene 4
The place where Arden Woods and the town of Stratford-upon-Avon meet. It is a warm summer night, and the few noises of the town—the distant singing of a drunkard, the voice of a man calling an errant dog—mingle with the sounds of the woods—the hooting of an owl, the shriek of a scared mouse. To the human eye, it all looks calm, but the elven eyes can see a blight like a blot of darkness spreading at the very edge of the woodland. There, no howl hoots and no creature moves, as though everything alive knows the presence of a predator.
“Ill met by moonlight, my proud brother.”
At the voice in front of them, Quicksilver and his guards stopped.
A chill ran down Quicksilver’s back like a cold finger dragged along his spine. The voice he heard was the voice of his brother. Changed and disembodied, but his brother’s voice, nonetheless.
The voice issued from the tendrils of light that, to elven eyes, marked the boundary between the human village and the sacred forest.
There, a blot of darkness marred the pure light, the shimmering strands of Fairyland’s protective enchantments.
The word
s themselves seemed to pulse through with the very essence of distilled darkness.
The younger elves shied back from it.
Only Quicksilver advanced, with Malachite close by.
“Sylvanus?” Quicksilver said. The word dropped from between his lips, unmeant, as a coin will drop through the tear in a rent purse.
“Quicksilver, wait,” Malachite said, and, a step behind Quicksilver, he laid a hand on the king’s shoulder.
“Aye, wait, Quicksilver, wait.”
The darkness throbbed with laughter that bespoke no mirth, but only a cold amusement, a distant mocking.
Then the dark node parted, like an eggshell cracking, and birthed a creature: an elf, goodly built, with dark hair and beard and features that resembled Quicksilver’s, from oval face to pulpy lips.
Though this elf looked half-transparent, like a painting on glass, like a cloud passing in front of the moon, his cold blue eyes appraised Quicksilver with amusement.
“Fares it then so badly with my brother?” the elf asked. “That he must thus consort with changelings?” He spared a cold, calculating eye to Malachite. “Is this your leeman, Quicksilver, that he thus calls you by your given name and lays hands on you?”
Quicksilver felt hot blood ascend his cheeks in shameful heat, and wrenched his shoulder away from Malachite’s clasping hand.
Yet Malachite reached, yet he persisted, yet he said, in a strangled voice, “Milord!”
Quicksilver gave Malachite a withering glance, over his shoulder. “Go, Malachite, I order you. I’m man enough to handle this villain alone.”
As Malachite stepped back, the transparent elf grinned, showing teeth larger and sharper than elf’s teeth. “Aye, brother, man enough and woman enough, too, I grant you. How fares my sister, Silver?”
The blood on Quicksilver’s cheeks flared and burned, the color of a red rose, hot as a poker fresh from the fire.
Now had Sylvanus’s ghost, Sylvanus’s emanation, touched the secret shame that had dogged Quicksilver ever from his birth.
Quicksilver had been born a shape changer, with the capacity—the need—to become a dark lady, with midnight black hair, the Lady Silver.
On Ariel’s request he’d forsaken the aspect, and forbore to change if he could control it. Yet, the Lady Silver was still within him, and he would change, sooner or later, meant or not.
This ability, more suitable to a lowly woodland spirit than to a royal elf, had almost cost Quicksilver the throne. He often feared his vassals still mocked him for it.
Quicksilver glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see his young guards fleering at him.
Instead, he saw them staring at Sylvanus, their faces stripped of all their cocky self-confidence, and infused with the pale strained look of fear.
Their fear lit a rage within Quicksilver. Looking back at the flickering elf amid the dark core that floated near the houses of Stratford, Quicksilver squared his shoulders, and made his face stern. “What want you, Sylvanus? Speak fast, for I’ll be done with you.”
The grin died upon the transparent face, like a candle blown out.
Sylvanus’s eyebrows gathered, his mouth pulled in a rictus of pain. “You were done with me, brother. Or so you thought. Done with me when you turned me out of Fairyland and stole my throne.”
A hunting horn sounded in the distance.
Sylvanus’s transparent shape wavered and trembled with each note, as though the sound injured him.
Quicksilver looked up at the sound, because he knew that horn well. Louder and clearer than any human instrument, it was the call of the Hunter, a being who had existed before the elves, a being whom the elves themselves believed embodied a fundamental thread in the fabric of the Universe. God or demon he might be. But powerful he was. Years ago Sylvanus had been made the Hunter’s dog, the Hunter’s slave.
Up on the horizon, in the purpled sky where thunderclouds began massing, a dark shape showed, looking like a hunter on horseback, his silver horn at his lips, calling to his dogs that clustered, growling and threatening, around his horse’s legs.
Twice before had Quicksilver met the Hunter, twice before, once in sorrow and once in joy.
But neither time had he escaped unscathed. The terror of the Hunter, the knowledge of something that, beyond elf and man, judged both and cared for neither, had chilled some core of Quicksilver’s innocence and forever ended his prolonged elven childhood.
Now, feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck, Quicksilver looked over his shoulder at Malachite and the three younger elves, all them terrified looking, all pale, all trembling.
“Go,” Quicksilver said. “Go, all of you. Stand back. Take refuge.”
The three younger elves ran madly toward the trees, but Malachite stayed, stubbornly, rooted to the spot, staring at his king.
“You, too, Malachite. Go.”
Malachite shook his head slowly. “No, milord. There’s something you must know—”
Sylvanus, in the center of the darkness, screamed, his voice changing from elven speech to a wide baying.
Quicksilver turned. Sylvanus transformed.
He transformed as if he were being burned, as though his substance had ignited in the hottest breath of a blazing furnace.
Twisting and writhing like a bit of hair that, caught in a candle flame, curls and twirls and is finally consumed by heat, Sylvanus dropped to all fours and trembled, and changed, and transformed, until in his place there was only a squat, square-headed, heavy-jawed dog.
One of the Hunter’s own dogs, which Sylvanus had become, in punishment of his many crimes.
In that shape, a form neither wolf nor dog but something predating both—a creature that had rounded and nipped at man in his cave and howled around the mountain holds of the elves when the world was young—Sylvanus turned baleful eyes to the Hunter.
The Hunter had stopped, amid the thunderclouds, and with outstretched arm, incited his dogs forth.
The dogs ran down from the sky, seemingly descending a staircase woven of darkness and steps made of roiling purple clouds.
As they neared, Quicksilver trembled. Panic closed his throat and ice gripped his stomach. What dread creatures, these, square and squat, broad of head and shoulder, low of legs, creatures made to hunt in ice eternal and eternal night.
How would it be to be hounded by them?
Sylvanus trembled and looked as piteous, as forlorn as a deer faced with the baying dogs that would tear it apart.
Whining, he backed away from the other dogs, his belly close to the ground, his tail tucked between his legs.
His squat body trembled, his hirsute fur ruffled at the neck, and his piteous eyes, Sylvanus’s incongruously blue eyes, turned to gaze at Quicksilver as the dog slid and shied away from the Hunter’s mastiffs.
“Brother,” Sylvanus said, his voice composed of growls and low baying, which yet formed intelligible words. “Brother, they’ve come and they’ll rent me limb from limb, or yet worse, they’ll take me with them. They’ll take me with them forever, to be one of them.”
He had time for the words—no more—as the dogs closed around him, screaming, nipping, baying, a pile of fur and open maws, of claws and blood-lapping tongues.
Quicksilver gaped at the mayhem of fur, the melee of furious canine bodies. His heart contracted in horror as fur covered fur and jaws snapped, and teeth met teeth in ferocious clash.
This was his brother there, he thought. His brother, turned to such a low, demeaning form. Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother, born of the same noble Titania, sired by the same majestic Oberon, once Queen and King of Fairyland. Sylvanus’s birth had been welcomed, celebrated through the hilltops of many lands. Sylvanus had been a pampered prince, once.
And now this—this pile of fur, this bestial strife.
Quicksilver heard Malachite draw breath behind him.
With scant breath, Quicksilver asked, “How does he not come to us? How not run this way?”
“I’ve tr
ied to tell you, lord,” Malachite said. “The barrier hasn’t really been breached. Your brother has projected the illusion of it being so. But it remains whole. Whole enough that he can’t crawl onto our side.”
“An illusion?” Quicksilver asked, and yet dared not look away from the giant figure of shadow, with glimmering red eyes and a shining silver horn, who climbed down from his horse and strode down the same stairway his dogs had used, toward them, toward cowering, pitiable Sylvanus.
“How an illusion?”
“How I don’t know, Quicksilver.” Malachite spoke in a whisper. “But that is all. It is all delusion. He has no power such as would breech our defenses. Yet he fooled us, and me first of all. What a trick to master! I think it was that he knew the defenses so well, having once been . . . . our king.”
Once the King of Fairyland and now a cur.
Quicksilver shivered.
Why had his brother wished him to see this? Had he meant Quicksilver to have nightmares over it, all his life long?
“Come,” the Hunter said, and his speaking rustled the leaves of the trees like an icy wind, freezing Quicksilver’s mind and heart. “Come.”
At this word, the dogs parted and heeled to him, gamboling and frisking like happy puppies on seeing their master.
On the ground lay a pile of fur, wet with blood, stained with the iridescent saliva of the creatures. Nothing more.
The Hunter took the horn to his lips and blew upon it. The cold, silvery sound wove itself into the surrounding trees like a mist of ice, bringing a reminder of winter to the summer night.
“Come,” the Hunter said.
At that one word, the pathetic remains quivered.
At that one word, the bloodied piece of fur moved.
Legs grew on it, and a muzzle. A cowed, shivering dog stood on uncertain paws, bleeding from myriad wounds.
You see how it is, Quicksilver heard in his mind. Neither death nor eternity will free me. I was greedy, brother, but I meant no harm. I thought you not able to rule the land, and so I tried to rule in your stead. Does this deserve punishment eternal?
All Night Awake Page 4
