Will had been right in that, too. Edmund was ill. And his illness might mean death. Or it might not.
Edmund was a healthy child, a happy boy, who had run happy and contented through the garden paths of his parents backyard, amid the vegetables and the roses, with never a sick day.
Edmund’s vitality would count for him. He was young, he was strong, his life would continue.
The fear of death was nothing but a distant danger, Will told himself. For Edmund as for Will. Part and parcel of the fears to which man was heir.
And yet, in that land, Edmund would live on for sure. Will would live on for sure…
Will shook his head.
“My lady, what do you here? What call have you?” His voice caught on the words, as he spoke them, courteous and soft.
The creature, beautiful as moonlight and twice as cold, composed her milk-white features upon her little oval face, and smiled a little demure smile. “I came for to take your brother,” she said. “To take him to the plains of ever-living, where the dance lasts forever and where his words, his fire and his youth shall serve us well.”
Serve them.
Will’s indecision stopped.
Oh, not serve them. Not Edmund who’d been protected from all debt, kept free and safe by his brother Will.
Free and safe.
He must be allowed to remain free. Even if he must risk death for it.
Will rounded on the thing, his hand going up to his forehead and retracing the papist sign of the cross, his lips falling, unawares, upon the words of the paternoster.
He should have known better. Of all people he. He knew these creatures neither angels nor demons—fled not from the holy signs, the holy words.
She laughed, a crystalline laugh. “What have we with your gods, Master Shakespeare? What have you with your crucified one? Leave it be. He has no rule over us.”
Her voice was soft as velvet run over ice. Together with her smell, it made his hair stand on end at the back of his neck.
He thought of Quicksilver, king of elves. Once they’d been friends. Will heard Quicksilver’s name upon his lips like a talisman.
“Aye,” the woman said, and laughed again, the soft, mocking laughter. “Aye, you’re of his well enough. I see his power mark upon you. But that’s naught to us. We are of Erin and not of this island. We care not for his rule. You are of Quicksilver’s company, and you we cannot touch, but him” She smiled at him, silver and crystal, glittering and cold. “The boy will be ours, and fair enough. A bard for a bard and poetry to oppose to Quicksilver’s spells, should it ever come to that.”
The smile was a challenge.
“He’s my blood,” Will said. “He’s my brother. You cannot”
“He is dying,” she said, cold and precise. “Your medicine cannot save him. Here he will die. In our land he’ll live. He’ll live forever.”
“In your land something shall live,” Will said. “Something. One of you. Not my brother.” He swallowed the words he wanted to say but knew not how to form—he, the master and spinner of so many words—that the creature there, in that glittering plain beyond pain and death would not be Edmund, not the child who’d run after chickens and played with dogs. There was no room for such things in fairyland, no room for the untidy mess of human feelings. “He might be ill, but he is young. He’ll live. He’ll live like the rest of us fellows who crawl thus, between heaven and Earth. He’ll survive. He’ll learn to take the bitter with the sweet.”
But she laughed. “You know the rules, son of Adam. You know them well. Tonight is Winter solstice and tonight we ride. You hold on to him and he is yours. But once you let him go, once he joins us, he is of ours, he is none of yours.” Before Will’s eyes, she vanished.
The ride. Will knew the ride well. In Arden it had been a solstice dance. In his youth the elves had taken Will’s wife, Will’s Nan, captive. He’d held onto her through fire and ice while the fairies danced all about.
He could hold on to Edmund while the elves rode on. He could.
He looked at Edmund’s pale face, Edmund’s feverish, shining golden falcon eyes.
“In the tavern,” Edmund was saying, as though he needed explaining. “I danced with her in a tavern. Oh, Will, it was the brightest place in the world, and their music the most wonderful.”
The dance. There had been a dance, then, already, and Edmund had already taken part in it. He was marked by them then. Oh, Will must hold onto him and hold fast, or else was he gone forever.
“Worry not, Edmund,” Will said. “Worry not brother. I’ll hold onto you, and they’ll never get you.”
But Edmund’s eyes were set and feverish, as if looking on landscapes that Will could not see.
“I am… ill…” he whispered. “Ill. The coughing sickness as took Jenny and the baby.”
“You are young, brother, you are young, and I’ll get you a doctor and medicine, the best, for my money, the best that can be got.”
“The best,” Edward echoed, and his voice rasped. “The best, for your money.” His eyes, still fevered, seemed to lose their luster and their intensity. He looked at Will like a man who has wandered into a strange house and knows none of the inhabitants.
* * *
It started with a gentle pitter-patter, like rain against the window, like the far-off sound of walking feet.
Awake, by his brother’s bed, Will looked at the candle markings by which he told the night’s advancement. Midnight.
Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night. The time of night when Troy was set on fire. The time when screech-owls cried, and ban-dogs howled, and spirits walked, and ghosts broke up their graves.
Solstice night at midnight. That time that best fit for what was to come.
Will looked at Edmund who slept and in his sleep had regained some tint on his cheek, some look of innocence.
Thus had Will watched his brother sleep when his brother had been a very small child. And he’d watched Edmund awake for fresh joys and renewed life.
Let it be so again.
The sounds from the outer wall increased, till, of a sudden, it was thrown open like a door to let bright, silvery light through.
On that light, shapes formed.
Will jumped from his chair beside Edmund’s bed, and, thrusting himself forward, grabbed his brother mid-body and held him tight, while Edmund woke and muttered a query.
But Edmund’s query was stilled on a rasped breath, and Will himself took in breath suddenly, at the creatures entering the room.
There were two horses, one roan and one white. Upon the roan, on a saddle of hammered gold, rode a giant who resembled a man except for his too-fine features. He was in every part what a man should be—his hands strong, his eyes wide and green, his red hair a starburst of light around his happily-formed face.
He laughed like the coming of dawn, like the banishing of nightmares.
The white horse beside his had no rider. Or rather, its rider walked by its side, her hand upon the flower-decked reins, her golden hair for once caught up, and entwined also with flowers.
“We came for the pledge,” she said.
Will shook his head and tightened his grip on Edmund.
But Edmund had awakened, and wriggled hard within his brother’s hold.
“Let me go with them,” he said. “For there I’m not sick. There is life grief-free, and it’s forever.”
“Their life is no life that you would want,” Will said. “Their gold is only tinseled over leaves, their food so much air that has no flavor. Oh, there’s grief aplenty in this world. But there’s sweetness too, if you stay to taste of it.”
“How would you know their life and their food?” Edmund screamed. With ineffective, weakened hands, he beat at his brother’s chest.
Behind the King and Queen, other elves appeared—pages dressed in the gaudy color of the butterfly wing, maids who’d called on all the jewels of the earth for their adornment.
Many, many, many, they came in
, crowding behind their sovereigns and pushing, till the room seemed alive with them and no space there was in which they weren’t.
“How do you know who they are and what life would be like?” Edmund asked, his voice high and shrill. “Know you everything? Tried you everything ahead of me? Must I get my whole life as a stale thing, received second hand from my all-knowing brother?”
Will hardly felt Edmund’s blows, but the words stung him as much as blows might have. Had he ever thus imposed on his brother? Had he ever told his brother how to live and what to do?
Try as he might, he could not recall a single instance. No, never, save maybe from that natural desire to safeguard his brother from the pitfalls Will had experienced.
“If it was done at all,” he whispered. “It was done out of love.”
“Love?” Edmund asked. His eyes, for once clear and bright and falcon-sharp, gazed up at his brother, as Edmund half turned. “Love? Oh, vile, servile submission. If this is love, brother, give me hate. You say their life is no life, and yet what have I had here? What but the pale shadow of the life you’ve lead, which like stale remains of another man’s meal satisfy the hunger but not the palate?”
In the momentary pain of his surprise, Will trembled and Edmund all but wriggled free, crawling towards the light and the creatures in it.
“Let him come,” the elf king boomed. “Let him come, Master Shakespeare. It is not your choice to make.”
“No, never,” Will said, holding tight. “No, I never will.” And he held so tight, and he held so fierce that despite the lilac smell that made his head swim, despite Edmund’s half-strangled cries for freedom and his pleading to be allowed to go, yet Will’s grip was so strong, that the sovereign of elves quit laughing.
He looked to his wife and said, “Come my dear, for midnight passes nigh, and we must ride on.”
The golden nymph climbed her white horse, and turned a saddened face towards Edmund, and seemed to mouth adieu through her tear-moistened lips.
Slowly moving, as if a road led them through the narrow space between wall and desk, the elves rode on, towards the far distant wall that now glimmered and which a bridge formed of rays of light now appeared, leading on to a land beyond—a land of golden fruits and virgin forest, a land such as no land in man’s mortal world.
Edmund ceased his struggle, and his body went limp in Will’s arms. “Is it fair my brother, that you keep me? Out of love, you say, but love or hate, why should you make the decision on my life? I would with them go, with them be happy.”
“You’d not be yourself.”
“And have I ever been myself?” Edmund asked. “Or a pale shadow that followed your glory where you went? I do not remember a single time in my life, where I wanted to be other but Will. Is that what you want me, then, brother, a pale puppet of your greater play?”
The King and Queen of elves were almost to the wall, almost to the entrance to the bridge and Will remembered Edmund following him down garden paths. Edmund learning to read that he might decipher the secrets of his brother’s great genius. Edmund with great, adoring eyes, looking at his older brother and saying, “when I grow up, an’ I shall be like you.”
A pale puppet? What else had all this bought? Oh, it was flattering, and Will had dreamed that their paths would ever run parallel. He’d never thought that Edmund was not on a parallel path, but trailing him along a well beaten path, reluctantly trailing him like a boy who drags his book as he follows the schoolmaster.
Was that where this bitterness hailed from? The thrust of envy, the sting of discontent?
The faerie court was now mid-bridge, and the queen turned back to look at Edmund.
And yet Will knew that Edmund would be lost forever, if he let him go. And yet, hadn’t Will lost Edmund already, by holding too tight?
Had he ever known Edmund, or just doted on a reflection of himself and, like Narcissus, almost died of such idolatry.
And Edmund with him.
Will forced his arms to open. It hurt as if he were doing it against the weight of years, the hopes of centuries.
But little by little, me made his arms open, as though they were the heavy door of a jail that must be defeated. Whose prison, he did not know.
He whispered, “Go then. Go, and be yourself.”
Edmund hesitated but one moment. The space of a breath, he looked up at his brother, as if asking if he had indeed his consent.
And then he was gone, running nimble past most of the fairy court, to hold the flower-decked reins of the queen’s horse and smile, warmly, at him.
King Boadag laughed.
On the bed stayed something—who knows what? It looked like Edmund. Waxen, pale Edmund, dead as clay.
It must be a stock, Will thought, an enchantment left behind to prefigure the person taken by fairyland.
It must be a stock, for had Will not seen his brother run forward and, happy, join the fairy troop?
But the light was gone from the room, and the smell of lilac.
The walls had, once more, become solid.
From outside came the rustle of wind. A dog howled in the distance.
Will collapsed on his chair and covered his face with his hands, and found the accustomed words of confession coming to his lips in a trembling whisper, “for all we’ve done, and all we’ve failed to do…” And yet he knew not which had been the sin, and which the redemption.
THE END
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright© 2002 by Sarah A. Hoyt
“Elvis Died for Your Sins” first appeared in Weird Tales, Spring 2000. “Like Dreams of Waking” first appeared in Dark Regions Magazine, Summer 1999. “Ariadne’s Skein” first appeared in ??? “Thirst” first appeared in Dreams of Decadence, Summer 1997. “Dear John” first appeared in Absolute Magnitude, Summer, 2001. “Trafalgar Square” first appeared in Analog. “Another George” first appeared in Dark Regions Magazine, Winter/Spring 2001. “Songs” first appeared in Weird Tales. “The Green Bay Tree,” “Thy Vain Worlds,” and “Crawling Between Heaven and Earth” appear here for the first time.
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN 10: 1-888993-29-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-888993-29-5
Cover Art Copyright © 2002 by A. B. Word
http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=9457
First printing, September 2002
Printed in the United States of America
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