All Night Awake (61 page)

“Centaurs can kill their kings if they wish,” Malachite said. “But our kings are different. Elven kings have in them all their subjects’ power, and we cannot draw power but from them. It’s hard enough, Hylas, just to have treasonous thoughts without Quicksilver finding me out.”

Hylas snorted and stamped his hooves. “You seem to manage.”

Ariel had reached the point where she could look into Quicksilver’s room, and see the two of them -- Hylas standing by the canopied bed and Malachite beside the gilded armor.

She saw Malachite narrow his eyes, she heard him say, “I’ve hated Quicksilver all my life. Always. Ever since I became conscious of what they’d done to me, of how they’d taken me from my mother and father, and brought me here, to faerieland, to be this creature’s
servant
.” He pronounced the last word like a crack of the whip.

Ariel shook. That voice. The hatred in it. It was no game.

“If you’d not been taken by elves, you’d probably be dead,” Hylas said.

Malachite exhaled, heavily, and pushed his lips together. “Well, then, I’d be dead in my own time, my own place, and not be a servant, not be looked down upon by creatures who have no right to think themselves better than I.” He stood in front of Quicksilver’s portrait. “It’s always 'Malachite, my other coat,' 'Malachite, my pearl-embroidered shirt,' 'Malachite, my cloak.' And him, not even a proper elf, not even a proper
man
.” Malachite grinned and in that grin looked more carnivorous, more ferocious than the centaur. “But now he’s done it. Now he’s torn it. Now he’s thrown himself into my power.

“She’s never loved him, not half, though she thinks she does. He distresses her, he vexes her. Now, he’s gone to disport himself -- or rather Silver -- upon London. It won’t take much till I woo her away from the delusion of being in love with him. And once I have her, I’ll have access to him. He gives her full reach to all the power of the hill. With me to guide her, she can take it, and she can cut him off. And then we can kill him.”

Hylas looked at Malachite, with a broad smile, but his eyes were anxious. “And then you’ll give Centauria to the centaurs?”

Malachite glanced at Hylas and nodded. “Of course,” he said. He turned to the mirror. “When I’m king, I shall get rid of all this foppery. I’ll have armor and swords only, in my room.”

“Should we be meeting here at all?” Hylas asked, stomping his front hoof nervously.

Malachite laughed. “And why not? In Quicksilver’s absence, only I come into this room. What think you? That his betrayed queen will come here to pine her loss?” He laughed.

Outside, trembling, Ariel felt tears prickle at her eyes.

She had to get away. She had to find someone she could trust.

Her head was such a whirlwind of confusion, that she knew not truth from lies, anymore.

She loved Quicksilver, or did she not? And Malachite was loyal, was he not? This had to be a game that he was playing upon the centaur.

But Ariel had heard the hatred in Malachite’s voice.

Shaking, she closed her eyes. Malachite would only have other changelings in his service. Only changelings in his confidence.

Did he indeed resent the kidnapping that had given him near immortality?

Oh, Ariel must get away from here. She must have true counsel, somewhere. Someone had to take pity on her.

Had her husband betrayed her? Or was he, himself betrayed? Or was she the one who was a toy of fortune?

Why did she yield to that suggestion whose horrid image did unfix her hair and make her seated heart knock at her ribs, against the use of nature?

Present fears were less than horrible imaginings: her thought that there was a plot in faerieland was yet but fantastical.

Shook so her confidence as queen that function was smothered in surmise, and nothing was but what was not?

Scene Seventeen

The inside of the tavern. It is a large room, whitewashed, filled with long, rough wooden tables, and long, rough wooden benches beside them. Tables and benches, and the none-too-fresh rushes on the floor, are stained with wine and greasy spots of food and candle drops. Amid the rushes, too, peek the white ends of bones of meat consumed there, where the bones have been carelessly disposed of upon the rushes. Closer inspection would show vermin crawling amid all this, their black, many-legged bodies fat and busy. But none would look at this, save the one or two drunkards who have fallen, face down on the floor, unable to go further. Candles burn in metal holders on the walls, and a fire roars in the large fireplace. There are few drinkers, and those poorly attired. A few dispirited, tired-looking bawds circulate, showing their withered dugs, trying to interest those few patrons. In an ill-lit corner, a few men play the dice.

A
t the door to the tavern, Will had tried to back out, but Kit had pulled him and cajoled him along, and told him that since they were here, anyway, they might as well have a drink together, to seal over Kit’s lamentable mistake.

Unwillingly, Will had let Kit drag him to a table at the back, away from the other drinkers.

The wench who knew Kit well enough, since he normally took his food at this tavern, living right next door to it, hastened to them, and filled their mugs with good ale.

She knew Kit for a heavy drinker and a good tipper who yet kept his hands to himself, and this, Kit thought, had much to do with her promptitude in attending to them.

“We could get something to eat,” Kit said. “I would pay. Some mutton, or quail, perhaps.” He hadn’t eaten since midday and felt lightheaded. Even the smell of old mutton grease in the air made Kit salivate. But Will shook his head, and Kit didn’t wish to press his point, nor did he want to eat while Will watched.

He wanted to ask Will, just ask, plain out, if Will had met the elves before and what Will knew of the affairs of faerieland.

But he dared not.

There was, of course, the possibility that Will’s hospitality to the elf was a chance thing, that Silver had used the human as her puppet, mesmerizing him into helping her, without Will’s knowing what he was doing or having any recollection of it.

Was it so?

Kit wanted to believe it was so. He'd believed Will when he’d said he loved only his Nan. There had been truth in his voice, truth in his words.

Kit wanted to believe him.

He looked at Will, as Will lifted his mug to his lips and drank. Such a tidy provincial burgher. No good as a poet, of course, and all lacking in the fire that would make him a dramatist. But not a bad sort.

How could such an uncomplicated creature ever have come by faerieland enchantment, faerieland love, faerieland deception?

He found Will’s gaze trained on him, and thought how like a falcon Will’s eyes were. A falcon intent upon the kill.

Of a sudden, he felt quite uncomfortable, as though those golden eyes could scry into Kit’s very soul.

“How now?” Will asked. “How now? What woe is here?” He looked sympathetic, worried. “Will you tell me, master Marlowe, why you thought me guilty of trespass against you? Surely a reasonable man would not seek my life thus without reason.”

Marlowe looked up. Reasonable? “And why think you that I’d be reasonable?” He asked and felt a chuckle scrape up his throat that felt raw from crying. “Ask the length and breadth of London, from the secretary Sir Cecil, to the privy chamber, to those arms of it that run the night and ensnare the guilty.” He grinned into the discomfiting green eyes, hoping, hoping that Will didn’t notice the sweat upon Kit’s forehead, the tremor in his hand that raised the mug. He felt like one who had been bereaved, with a secret mourning that no one could share. “Aye, the guilty and the innocent too -- and you might find yourself very lonely in your opinion of my reasonableness, good Tremblestick.” Did Will know of Kit’s bereavement? Was Will’s heart, likewise, dangling from the same high, unattainable point? Why, that would make them almost brothers.

Yet, Kit looked at those clear eyes with their straightforward glance and could not credit deception from this quarter. He sighed and shrugged. “My attacking you was but one of my mistakes. Of my own muddled head, I thought you’d done me injury. Of my own muddled head and my confused brain, on insufficient grounds and thoughts built thereon.” He frowned. He wanted to know, he needed to know. “Be kind with me, Will, if you would tell me -- ” He opened his mouth to speak, but found his tongue stopped. What if Will said that yes, he knew Silver? What if Will said that Silver had come to London to enjoy Will’s favors in his little, low-rent room?

Silence lengthened.

Will looked as if he weighed something in his mind, then shrugged in his turn. As the wench came around to refill their mugs, Will said, “I meant to thank you, Marlowe. Before our...misunderstanding.”

Kit raised his brows. Will meant to thank Kit, did he? Oh, he hoped, he very much hoped Will wouldn’t say that he meant to thank Kit for the loan of Silver, for Kit would lose what temperance he’d acquired, and go for Will again, be it with bare hands and in front of witnesses.

“I meant to thank you for your advice,” Will said. He smiled, though his smile looked somewhat like a grimace with bared teeth. Yet, the intention to smile remained, like a shadow behind the real expression. “On how to entice a young nobleman to extend his patronage.”

“Oh?” Kit asked, and raised his brows further, unable to recollect giving such advice, unable to guess what nobleman would have consorted with someone in Will’s sphere. If he’d heard it, he couldn’t remember.

He didn’t even know, himself, whether he meant harm to Will or not. He didn’t even know, himself, what he thought or felt, or where he was.

Once having walked into faerieland, he’d stepped into a land where shadows were things and things were shadows. He couldn’t flat out ask Will if he’d had Silver, because if he did, and Will said yes, then all of Kit’s world would crumble. Coward words that feared the unthinkable, the question would not cross his lips.

“At first I thought I couldn’t do it,” Will said. “But then the words came, and I recited -- improvised -- a poem on Venus and Adonis. And the Earl gave me coin to go on with, so I can survive to finish the poem, here in London, and I need not hie back to Stratford. I have even a little to send my wife.”

Venus and Adonis. How provincial. Nothing different or rare in the discourse, and yet apparently the earl had liked it. Marlowe half-closed his eyes at an inner, intellectual pang. How easy it was, sometimes, to satisfy the wealthy and would-be sophisticated. He didn’t sigh, though. He didn’t wish to offend the good burgher. It still meant nothing, even if Will wrote his meager verses for the earl. It meant nothing and it was no shadow on Marlowe’s own glory.

Hero and Leander, once he finished it, would eclipse the faked glory of the verses of this provincial. Why not let Will Shakespeare of Stratford have his one literary triumph, before returning to the good wife and the little Waggstaffs, all?

Yet thinking of Hero and Leander turned Marlowe’s mind, with a sick turn, like a winged bird that attempts to fly home but falls short, to Scagmore and to Thomas Walsingham, in whose home Kit had stayed and under whose patronage Kit had been working on the long poem.

He couldn’t return there now. He couldn’t return until his case were cleared by the Privy Council, on whose good mercy he depended for the very air of fake freedom he breathed at the moment. Perhaps he could never return there.

So far poor Thomas Kyd, under torture, no doubt, had accused Marlowe of heresy and homosexuality--and who knew what else besides? Several charges, certainly. Each of them enough, no doubt, to get him hanged seven times over.

Perhaps it was that the council hesitated only on the mode of dispatch -- hanging, beheading or disemboweling.

Or perhaps Sir Cecil’s word stayed the council, but at what price? Cecil wouldn’t have the sword of Kit’s possible babbling hanging over his head long.

And what would Thomas Walsingham think of all this? He too had worked in the secret service, with Kit, under his uncle, Francis Walsingham, the head of secret service that was. What would Thomas think of the chance of Kit’s being put to the torture and singing, as he might very well sing, like a fine-tuned instrument under the hands of those skilled in breaking the spirit of men?

Oh, Kit could imagine what Thomas Walsingham thought, and he didn’t like it. Sir Thomas would no more wish Kit to babble of the covert operations Kit had undertaken for his uncle, than Kit had liked Thomas Kyd’s accusations.

The difference was that Kit Marlowe, corrupt and dissembling though he knew himself to be, and tainted with the blood of more innocent lambs than would fill a paddock any Easter day, would never dream of killing his friend and erstwhile roommate for the meager security this would afford him.

But Sir Thomas Walsingham .... Ah, there was a different matter. Kit had seen more men sent to torture, more men sent to the gallows, more men broken at the wheel on a mere suspicion of a suspicion, of a suspicion, than he cared to attempt to count, and under the word of Thomas’s uncle.

Would Thomas prove that different?