All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

If Kit went down, surely he would die.

  But no, he wouldn’t. For the centaurs would not kill the body which harbored their master.

  And besides, afraid of death though he was, how often had Kit brawled and been involved in quick, violent frays? And he’d not died, skillful as he was at defending himself.

  He told his beating heart, his racing mind that he would not die of this. But he must go down stairs, and defend his rescuers from this supernatural menace.

  Scene Thirty Seven

  The street outside Marlowe’s lodgings. Centaurs, invisible to humans -- except those who have been touched by faerieland -- roam the streets amid bawds and pickpockets, gentlemen and cony catchers.

  Will saw the centaurs as he turned into Kit’s street. Strange beings, not at all like the elves.

  Where the elves’ glamoury was all delicate, like sugar spun confects, pretty and enticing, these creatures’ power rolled off their steaming horse bodies, their gleaming, golden human torsos in dark waves.

  Instinctively, without thinking, Will thrust his body in front of Ariel, as she exclaimed in surprise and fright.

  He’d have done the same were she Nan, or one of his daughters, frightened of gross, rank creatures.

  He did not think of the wooden maces in the creatures' hands, or what they’d to his skull. Only that he must protect Ariel.

  Breathing deeply, breathing slowly, he tried to control his heart, his breath, tried to look like he couldn’t even see them, tried to prevent them seeing Ariel.

  But first the powerful, sleek black leader noticed them, and grinned at them, his broad grin displaying what looked like teeth of the purest gold.

  The yellow eyes, a shade lighter than Will’s, turned towards them, the broad mouth pulled in sly amusement.

  He advanced at a canter.

  Bawds and gentlemen didn’t see him, yet moved out of his way, as he advanced, grinning.

  Ariel dug her little hand into Will’s shoulder.

  “What have we here?” Will asked, in a whisper, to her, as the centaur cantered towards them. “Who is this? What is this?”

  “A ... a centaur,” Ariel whispered.

  “That much I’d realized milady,” Will said. “But why?”

  “They are .... enemies. They wish to dethrone my lord. The traitors I told you about. These are they.”

  Then the centaur stood before them, no farther away than it would take a single horse step to close. That close, he bowed. “Ah, milady. We’ve come to escort you back to your hill. As we love you well, we’d not be unruled.”

  Ariel squeaked and made as if to hide between Will and the nearest wall.

  “Milady,” the centaur said. He bowed at his human waist again. “I am Laius, a noble of Centauria, and I mean you no harm, only to take you back to your hill, your proper abode. You’ve been wandering, lost in your wits, and you’ve wondered into danger. We’ve tracked you here and here we found you, and from here we’d take you to your safe home.”

  In Will’s mind, the centaur’s words resounded, slowly assembling into meaning. The centaur had come for Ariel, to take her to her hill. What kind of treason was that? How did Will know that Ariel had not escaped her rightful lord, and, wondering in her wits come to London? Because Quicksilver had been in London? But what if Quicksilver had gone back to the hill by now? Whose word had Will that the centaur had not?

  Hesitating, he stood, helpless.

  The centaur leaned over him, and reached for Ariel with a rough arm, with a hand twice the normal human size. He grabbed at Ariel’s shoulder and pulled her from behind Will, while his booming, barbaric laughter echoed. “Come, milady. Come. Your nuptials wait you.”

  Ariel shrieked and batted at the hand.

  Nuptials. Nuptials, not with Quicksilver. Captive, despoiled Quicksilver. Lost through Will’s own fault.

  Will’s dagger was out that he’d never yet removed from his belt in anger since coming to London. Out and flourished, before Will could think, and cutting a broad gash into the golden arm, sending blood spraying over Will’s face, over Ariel’s shoulder.

  The creature screamed, a scream like a bray, and for a moment his huge fingers unclenched from Ariel’s shoulder.

  In that moment, Will recovered her, pulled her behind him, interposed his body between her and this beast man.

  “How can you see me?” the centaur asked. He wrinkled his nose with distaste as though Will smelled badly.

  That close, Will himself smelled the centaur, a heavy scent of animal hide and cloves.

  He eyed the heavy hooves on the ground.

  “You meddlesome mortal, think you that you’ll be allowed to interfere in the affairs of elven kind?”

  The heavy hooves rose, the creature backed, a step, two. He backed and he reared and he came at them, using his hooves as a weapon, meaning to crush Will.

  Will grabbed Ariel around the waist and rolled with her to the mud of the alley, tripping over a gentleman who, unmindful of the centaur that reared an arm span away from him, cursed them soundly.

  His curses still rang in Will’s ears, when the centaur, rounding, came at Will again, his war mace out, and swinging, his human body half-bent, to dash Will’s brains.

  On all fours, Will crawled away from certain doom, leaving Ariel momentarily unprotected.

  Will would be killed. Killed and he knew it well. Killed and gone forever. And then they’d take Ariel, and what might these men-beasts not do to her, frail Ariel, queen of faerieland?

  He heard the hooves clop near his head. He almost felt the blow that would dash his brains.

  Then he heard a scream. This scream had no words. It needed no words to adorn the sheer battle-mad, blood-thirsting anger that molded it and curled it around the human mind, making all humans recoil and instinctively hold onto that which they held most dear.

  Thus had Cain screamed when Abel’s blood was spilled. Thus had every man who in anger had drawn sword screamed his rage at the unfair world and wanton fate.

  The hooves moved away.

  Centaurs screamed orders in some foreign tongue.

  Will sat up, panting.

  Every man and woman, every one of Adam’s children on that street had stopped walking, forgotten his or her round, the normal, appointed occupations of this night. Instead they stood, staring at what to them must look like an even madder man than he looked to Will.

  And to Will he looked bedlam.

  Oh, Will knew him well enough. This was Kit Marlowe, but a Kit Marlowe such as Will would not have dreamed, not two days before. His clothes looked neither dirty nor ragged, but slept on, or rather, worn the whole livelong night unsleeping, having accumulated creases and stains where the body had sat that would fain lie, where the man had stood who’d rather sleep.

  His hair, a matted fright and his beard untrimmed, Marlowe glared at the world with red-rimmed eyes, and threw a formless scream from his throat, like a threat held at man’s necks.

  But what he actually held in his hand, in fighting stance, was a small, rounded iron object. More interesting, from this object blue flashes flew, that made the air smell of scorch. And with this object Kit Marlowe attacked and feigned at the heavily armed centaurs.

  The iron touched the nearest one on the chest, and he screamed, as blue light blazed, and he lifted his mace and made as if to dash Marlowe’s brains out.

  Then a voice spoke through Marlowe’s mouth, a voice smooth and soft and purring-threatening. Sylvanus. Erstwhile king of faerieland. Will would have known the honeyed threat anywhere.

  His hair rose, as his scalp tightened in fear.

  “Stop,” the voice cried. “Kill not this body, for him I’ve claimed. I’ve but lost control for a breath. I shall regain it. Kill him and you kill me, the patron and abettor of your rebellion. Then shall Centauria be lost to centaurs.” The voice lost force as it went, till it disappeared, submerged, seemingly under Kit’s wild cry.

  But in that wild cry, in that maddened voice, Will now d
iscerned as though a whimper of pain, an edge of suffering.

  “He’s burning himself, you know,” Ariel said, in a whisper. She’d come up behind Will and, still sheltered by his body, knelt behind him. “Burning himself for the sake of keeping the wolf at bay. But the wolf is already him and in that embrace, he suffers for the pain he can’t but take, for the freedom but hardily purchased and so short of duration. Is this the coward we heard about? The fearful traitor? What odd behavior for one such. Brave, gallant, deranged behavior. If I knew not better I’d think him an upright man.”

  Around the street, people applauded and laughed, and pointed at the madman who fought nothing, and howled at emptiness with vain fury.

  “This is better than an afternoon in bedlam hospital,” a man standing near Will said.

  “And we need not pay the entry fee to see the zanies,” his companion, equally well dressed, equally well perfumed, said and smiled. “Yet, is he not Kit Marlowe, the playwright?”

  His friend who had first spoken smirked. “This is Kit Marlowe, you do not mistake. To Bedlam with him! is the man grown mad?”

  Not knowing of their comments, not caring, wild-haired, wild eyed Marlowe tried to keep away all the centaurs that they could not see. With his iron piece, his only weapon, he thrust and he parried.

  But even as he kept those in front of him away, those behind him grabbed him, and, with a smooth, effortless embrace, stopped both of Kit’s arms with his own.

  Marlowe thus surrounded and helpless, another centaur approached and struck a gentle blow with his war mace upon the playwright’s wrist. He dropped the iron.

  Gentle though the blow was for this creature, yet it made Kit scream, in ghastly pain as his already white face went whiter, and, released from the centaur’s hold, the playwright fell to his knees, holding his hand that dangled, seemingly boneless from his wrist.

  It lasted a moment, no more.

  The next moment, Marlowe’s face changed.

  In a way it was like seeing the Marlowe of yore return. The face that had looked sallow and tired smoothed out, the skin looking brighter, the eyes, of a sudden, focused. The hair remained uncombed, the beard wild, but with the new posture, the new straightening of the shoulders, those didn’t seem to matter.

  It went beyond that, though. Kit’s very bones seemed to change, the shape of his face sharpening, elongating, to look wolfish-cunning, wolf-hungry.

  That face like a hungry animal’s looked down at the shattered hand, still cradled in Marlowe’s other hand.

  Just a look and the hand seemingly regained shape and form. The wolf lifted it, flexed it, then smiled at the centaurs who, of a sudden, gave him space and bobbed him bows of great respect. “Thank you,” he said. “You have done well. Now, fetch her hence.” He pointed at Ariel.

  Before Will could react, a centaur galloped over, and grabbing Ariel, threw her over his own horse body, holding her there with an impossibly back-bent arm.

  The Marlowe who was no longer Marlowe smiled, his wolfish face distorted in a grin of murderous joy. “Now have I the king and queen both. One more life, and faerieland is mine.” Jumping, with unnatural grace, onto the horse-back of the nearest centaur, the wolf said, “Hence, quickly. We have work to do with this faerie queen.”

  As he galloped past Will, on his odd mount, he called out, “And then I’ll go find your family.”

  The people on the street stirred and talked and walked and resumed their normal occupations.

  “Did you ever see that?” one of the gentlemen who’d spoken before asked his companion. “Marlowe has galloped hence, on a horse I couldn’t see. How did he do that?”

  His companion looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “He must have been drunk. You know how he drinks.”

  Scene Thirty Eight

  Morning in a desolate place, on the edge of town. The dirt all around, little more than mud with desolate bits of grass clinging desperately to the clay-colored soil. A single tree, a bent tree, broken and pitiful, stands amid this ruin. Around the tree, a trampling of hooves. On the mud, beneath the tree, Kit Marlowe lies.

  Kit woke with a headache. The sun that shone on him seemed too bright. He tasted mud in his mouth, and wondered how he’d got here.

  Sitting up was sheer torture, as if every fiber in his being were mortal tired, unendurably drained.

  Looking around, he saw things through a red film, and his eyes felt gritty as though someone had flung sand into them. What he saw was the city gate, the nearby road.

  He’d been asleep under this single tree.

  How’d come he here?

  He remembered.... though he scarcely wanted to believe what he remembered. What a mad dream this had been, an insane dream.

  He thought he remembered centaurs and a fight and the wolf....

  The memory of the wolf made him reach for where his doorknob should have hung from his neck. But the knob was gone.

  So must he have....

  Kit must have collected the life the wolf longed for. All must be lost. All gone. The worlds would clash into annihilation, and Kit’s one true love was dead and gone.

  Oh, why was Kit still alive? Why did the offended conscience still remain, sparkling clear and aware to see the routing of all his dreams. Oh cursed Kit, cursed creature, that would go on living for all eternity having lost that which made him human.

  He raised himself to his feet by holding onto the tree.

  And yet, it seemed scant worth it.

  If he’d killed just one more human -- one more drop of blood added to the oceans accrued to his count -- if he’d killed just one more man -- and how could he not have, wolf-ridden? -- then he’d been the seal and unmaking of his fate.

  One moment he thought this and the next something quite different.

  Oh, why would the elves not save him, that had got him in this trouble?

  Thinking this, of a sudden he got a shady memory of the night before. There had been an elf. An elf woman, beautiful and delicate like the rising sun -- hair even lighter than Quicksilver’s, and a little, oval face with no harm in her.

  He remembered ordering -- no Sylvanus had ordered -- that she be taken, and they’d brought her here, to this gate at the edge of town and they had....

  Little by little, through his splitting headache, memory came. Perhaps the wolf was sick too or perhaps -- as he took over more and more of Marlowe’s mind and body with each passing day, so that even by day some of the wolf remained within Marlowe -- perhaps the wolf permeated Marlowe, his unhallowed knowledge reaching into Marlowe’s brain.

  Ariel. That was the elf’s name, and she was Quicksilver’s wife. With a start, Kit realized Quicksilver hadn’t lied. He was married, a king of elfland, and this was his queen come for him.

  She’d fought and bit, and finally collapsed, crying, beneath this very tree.

  There had been an argument. An argument between the wolf and the centaurs -- the centaurs who were beholden to him and yet not his.

  The centaurs wanted to take the fair elf to someone they called Malachite, but Marlowe -- no, the wolf -- had not allowed it.

  The centaurs debated, and many old wrongs were brought up where, seemingly, they reminded the wolf of past battles between the centaurs and the elves, in which the wolf had commanded the elves.

  While they were thus engaged, had the wolf reached for...the wolf had reached for Ariel and sent her to that same land of grey twilight where Quicksilver pined.

  But the wolf, contented with his sly magic, hadn’t counted on the centaurs’ brute force -- the war mace that had crashed on Marlowe’s head from behind.

  And then.... Darkness till this morning.

  Holding onto the tree with one hand, Kit cradled his aching head in the other. The blow should have killed him but it had not.

  The immortal malevolence in him would go on living forever.

  As through a mirror darkly, Kit remembered the words the wolf had spoken throu
gh Kit’s mouth the night before. He’d said, had he not, that if Kit died the wolf would die with him? Here was salvation. If Kit died, he would save all.

  But that meant...perforce that meant....

  And yet, Kit didn’t want to die. Or did he?

  The death he’d feared so long, that fearful death, whose scythe to stay he’d given so much, now looked like a soft, wonderful rest.

  Kit was this thing that must be stopped. Or at least must the wolf be stopped. And the wolf was Kit, was he not? Or was Kit the wolf?

  It mattered not, to make an end to Kit and to the wolf, it sufficed the dagger at Kit’s belt.

  Reaching for the dagger, he pulled it out, and sank it unresisting into his chest.

  No blood spurted. No faintness issued. Kit stared down at his chest and saw the dagger’s handle protruding from his doublet, then saw the dagger disappear like a ghost into thin air.

  Again he reached for the dagger, again he drew it. Holding it in his hand, he marveled at it. Was this the thing? Or the ghost of the thing? “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch you.” Clutching the dagger, he looked down and saw another dagger at his belt. Which the real, which the false?

  A woman -- probably a bawd -- walking along the other side of the street stared at him with amazed eyes, but Kit cared not.

  He spoke to himself, as did the very old, the very young and those not sure of their wits. “I have you not, and yet I see you still.” He looked at both daggers. “Art you not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art you but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see you yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. You marshallest me the way that I was going; and such an instrument I was to use. And yet I cannot. I cannot. My mind will yet play tricks to my heart and the wolf control me.”

  His voice broke down in a half-sob, while the woman across the street started to run. “Mine eyes are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest; I see you still. There's no such thing: it is the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes. Now over the one half world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep.”