All Night Awake (75 page)

Ariel looked sharply at him, and sighed. “Quicksilver is neither dead nor alive. The life that sustains him is like the dying flame of a guttering candle, that any sharp breeze can put out. My.... His brother has imprisoned him in .... we call it between-worlds, a place that’s neither dead nor alive, here nor there. It’s the world that never existed, the potential never fulfilled. It’s where our dead go that can’t find rest -- the untimely murdered, the lost souls, those who die with unfinished business and unaccounted-for sins.” She tilted her head up.

The red of the setting sun, coming through the window, tinted her cheeks coral and made her look unbearably beautiful, unmistakably human, exquisitely fragile.

Had Will dared, he would have consoled her, as he comforted Susannah when she broke a toy. But Ariel’s troubles were more than all the broken toys, and Will dared not patronize this being of fire and magic.

“Fortunately, the evil thing didn’t have the power to kill my husband,” Ariel said. “Not while Quicksilver yet has the power of the hill. But the wolf’s power is growing by the moment and my husband.... Well, the hill is in turmoil. I came here because my husband’s enemies, within the hill, were trying to seize power through me. And even as I viewed the occult world in this simple water I felt our enemies at the hill tracking me down.” She dipped her dainty finger in the liquid. “If they sever my husband from the hill before evil is destroyed.... We will be lost, Quicksilver and I. Even with the power of the hill behind him, if Quicksilver’s brother should take one more life and acquire that much more power, Quicksilver will be utterly lost.”

Will walked to the window, turning his back on Ariel, on that beautiful face that reflected all the desolate bleakness of an empty, fearful Earth -- the death awaiting all this riotous panoply outside Will’s bedroom, the whores and the merchants, the ale houses, the gentlemen and the horse thieves, the hounds and the baited bear.

Looking out, at what he had always thought a dirty, noisy street full of beggared poor and crooked rich men, Will felt a sudden wave of tenderness for London, this London so harsh and so different from his sweet Stratford, this town that would allow Will to be what he would and claim as high a name as he dared for himself, provided only he had the courage to claim it.

Fearing his eyes too would fill with tears like Ariel’s, he blinked, and stared harder, searching for a face he knew.

He hadn’t seen Marlowe in a long time, and the last time he’d seen him, the playwright had appeared to be drunk, or else insane.

How could such a high mind come to such a low pass? Was the closing of the theaters working upon Marlowe more than upon Will? Or had Marlowe gone without food too long? Will remembered Marlowe telling him about the lack of food, the lack of money, the general poverty in the land these days.

Was Marlowe suffering? It was hard to reconcile with the playwright’s expensive velvets and smooth silks. And yet, who knew?

Something else, something that Will felt was vital, tickled at his memory -- a remembrance, a feeling that he had seen or heard something important, something he couldn’t lay his finger upon, something he couldn’t name, something that related to Marlowe.

He tried to pin it down. It was something Quicksilver had said -- an expression, a look, something .... But how could that relate to Marlowe, Marlowe who was so far from the faerie realm, a coarse and cold big-city hustler, even if dressed in the refined veneer of poetry?

Shaking his head with impatience, Will noticed something odd.

One of the men downstairs looked familiar, but as though Will had seen him many, many years ago. Someone from Stratford?

The man, standing outside, beneath the wind-rattled sign of the tavern across the street, was tall and dark, with very pale skin, and pronounced features that looked more beautiful than they should be. His green velvet suit displayed the latest fashion and looked so freshly washed and set as to make even Marlowe’s normal dressing standards appear sloppy and careless.

Not the type of person that Will associated with small Stratford upon Avon, where all the neighbors knew each other and took care not to dress too far above their stations.

Will frowned, trying to remember where he might have seen such singular features, such long, shiny black hair. Other than on Lady Silver, but then even Will, looking at the incisive nose, the beautiful but sharp features of that man couldn’t associate him with Silver’s soft, rounded loveliness.

As he watched the man looked up, and Will had the impression the whole creature flickered, in and out of the street, like the fading of an image reflected upon glass, like the images that had formed upon Ariel’s water bowl.

Then Will remembered he’d seen the man -- no, the creature. It had been many years ago, in the faerie clearing, on the night he’d reclaimed his Nan from faerieland. This had been one of the elves in Quicksilver’s retinue.

“What?” Ariel asked. “What is it, Will?”

He must have made some small noise, some shocked exclamation.

“There’s a man across the street,” Will said, feeling the man’s gaze on him and wondering how that could be. “That I think is an elf, and not there at all but somehow only an image of him.” Who could this be? Could it be one of the rebellious elves that Ariel feared had come for her? Or was it a friend, come to her help?

She’d called him Will. Not Master Shakespeare. Will.

He smiled at that. The queen of faerieland needed a keeper, a watchful protector. She trusted too much, made herself too vulnerable.

She stepped up near him, and looked out the window.

“Oh,” Ariel said, and her body stiffened in surprise and shock. “Oh,” she said. “He’s Malachite, and he has found me.”

“Malachite?” Will asked.

“The leader of the palace rebellion,” Ariel said. “He.... He would dethrone my lord and have me, and by having me have the faerie hill.” She turned a waxen-white face towards Will. “It’s like your game of chess, you see. Quicksilver and I both have the souls and power and loyalty of our kind. If he’s out of action, the one who captures the Queen wins the game.” Her tiny, needle-sharp elf teeth glimmered in a little feral smile, full of woeful irony.

Will trembled. He felt a sudden raging anger at Quicksilver. How could Quicksilver take a creature like this to wife, a soft, helpless creature, and then leave her to fend for herself this way?

How dare he? Quicksilver showed as much carelessness in his own love as in interfering in other’s lives.

And yet, Ariel loved Quicksilver. Quicksilver, who was trapped in nothing-land, in the land between existing and not existing, in the land that had never happened.

Remembering Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s quick wit, his moonlight-pale hair, his perfect features, Will felt something very much like regret at the elf’s loss tinge his anger at Quicksilver. His anger paled to this feeling of regret and loss.

The fool, Quicksilver, had allowed himself to be trapped, allowed everything to be destroyed, and Will could do no more than regret it, with an impotent regret that seemed to paint everything a pale, sickly yellow, like the sun in winter, falling slantwise upon the face of a babe who will not live out the season.

“Need you escape, milady?” he asked, with quick fierce intent, with protective despair. He would not let this one be lost also. “Must you hide? I will defend you. I will protect your escape.”

“No.” Ariel turned to look at Will, her little face grave, her eyes sympathetic. But she shook her head, loosening the multitude of braids that held her hair confined beneath the page’s cap. “No. It is not Malachite really, just an image of him. And even if he’s found me, he can’t come here that quickly. That he found me, alone, is a miracle. Unlike Quicksilver, we, the other elves, can’t transport between two places with the speed of thought. Malachite will have to come overland, as I did. We have a day before he gets here. A night and a day, or thereabouts.”

“A night and a day,” Will said. A night and a day to save both worlds in. And save what he might, how could he ensure that Quicksilver would take better care of reign and wife in the future?

Because, so that he could save Nan and Judith, and Hamnet, and Susannah, who held his love and all his hope for the future, in far-distant Stratford, he must relinquish his protection on this elf, and let her risk herself, as she might. The protection of Ariel didn’t rightfully belong to a man.

Scene Thirty Two

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Marlowe stands in front of his array of crockery, his arms raised. The setting sun, coming through the window, paints his hair an odd red, and makes him look as though he’s surrounded by flames, like a magician of old practicing fearful magic. Around him, wisps of something like fog form, within the tight confines of his room, seeming to crowd him.

K
it raised his arms. The evening sun was red, that red of spilled blood that Kit had seen all too often of late.

His heart beat fast, so fast that his breath caught in rushing after it, and his raised hands trembled. His palms hurt, and his fingers looked bloodied again by the touch of that accursed, red light.

He could feel as if a pressure, as those he wished near gathered around.

And yet, he wished them not.

Not so long ago, he would have paid and paid dearly not to have these things near that now just so dearly he tried to summon.

“Ye are mine,” he said, to the shadows, the patches of fog, the dark that gathered around him and that he hoped were spirits. The spirits of men who had once walked the fair green of God’s Earth, men that Kit had dispatched, knowing or unknowing, through the tricks and arts of the denouncer, the spy, the informer, through the cruel claws and thirsty fangs of the guilty beast he’d lately become, through omission and commission, through what he’d done and what he’d failed to do.

His hands thus raised, he seemed to feel the spirits pressing against them, hands holding his that were once pressed upon his in friendship, in the far, distant days of his youth at Cambridge. The men who’d trusted him, and with him discussed their crisis of faith, the weighty matters that held their souls down and drew them to Rheims, to the Catholic seminar.

Those same men that, once known to the secret service, setting foot in their native England again, had been dragged to death in intricate torture by the servants of a Queen too fearful of Catholic conspiracies.

Their hands had pressed Kit’s in friendship, once. Those same hands of Kit’s, that had been filled with the coin for which he’d betrayed them, and clad in the fine gloves such coin had bought.

Now their clammy touch reached from the grave, cold and dank, and frigid and claiming him as much as he claimed them.

Such was the price of the necromancer, Kit knew then. Not to be taken away by shrieking demons, though that might look better upon the stage, but to be claimed as much as those he claimed, and suffer a little of their death as he did it.

And yet this, having the dead speak for him, was the last thing Kit could do to save his own life. For he could communicate to no living being what he thought or felt. Only to these creatures if they should read his true fear from his tortured brain.

He must set them on their course, and then flee the environs of London, where too many people gathered, and too many people might provide fresh fodder to the ravening beast.

Oh, only let him do this, his poor magic, and let the magic spring forth in healing for these souls, and in deliverance for him. Let his magic save Quicksilver.

He thought of Quicksilver, forlorn Quicksilver in the land of shadows, Quicksilver whose lips had parted to say “I loved you well.”

The strange thing was that Kit believed him. He remembered his distant, haughty behavior, and yet believed that Quicksilver loved him. Love was indeed too full of faith, too credulous, with folly and false hope perhaps deluding him. However, for once, Kit couldn’t help believing, couldn’t help reaching for captive Quicksilver and seeking to free him.

“Ye are mine,” he repeated to the dark shadows that encircled him. “As I am yours, my crime having birthed you to death as it birthed me a murderer. By my tainted hands and my stained heart I conjure you. So far forth as by art and power of my spirit I am able to perform, I command you to take the shape of men as you once were.”

All at once, he was surrounded, the small room almost too full, too crowded close.

Terror and triumph warred within Kit, as he recognized that one’s faith-burned countenance, and this one’s trusting eyes, and, upon that one, the fresh features he’d noticed just the night before, seconds before the wolf tore her features asunder and rent the skin and crushed the bone beneath.

Kit’s impulse was to cover his eyes, and he heartily wished to look away from those faces, each of which, shrouded in the pale garment of livid death, accused him.

But another part of him gloried and grew.

Kit could do magic. He could, indeed.

Like his ancestor, Merlin, he could conjure. He marveled at it, as if from a distance off, and joyed in it like a child with a new toy. Never until now had he fully believed that the spirit lived after the flesh died.