All Night Awake (79 page)

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.

K
it 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 through 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.”

He took a deep breath, controlled his sobbing. “Soft, I dreamed. It was all a dream. Or else witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate's offerings, and withered murder, alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace towards his design moves like a ghost. you sure and firm-set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear thy very stones prate of my whereabout, and take the present horror from the time, which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.”

And yet he felt relieved, oddly relieved that he hadn’t managed to kill himself.

The same death he wished yet loomed before his eyes as the horrendous threat it had ever been.

A fear is not conquered in a minute, nor does the babe who cowers from the crackling thunder turn to playing in the baying wind with no remorse.

Shame choking him and a fear that he’d lack the courage to die, even now, he tried to think his way out of his predicament. Was it his own self love that deluded him, and stayed the hand that would have slain him? Could he not even, like the Roman fool, fall upon his own dagger?

Kit wrung his hands, one upon the other, digging his nails into the flesh of his palms, attempting to wake himself from this unending nightmare.

To die: to sleep. No more -- and by a sleep to say Kit ended the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh was heir to.

Oh, it was a consummation devoutly to be wished, no matter by what means attained.

To die, to sleep....

And yet, to sleep: perchance to dream.

Aye, and there was the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams might come when he had shuffled off this mortal coil?

Would all his sins revisit in his sleep, making his eternity as fearful as his living eternity here, with the wolf?Could Kit even kill himself, if he wished to, if he wished to with his whole heart?

Or would the wolf, some control over Kit remaining even in this full daylight, manage to stay the hand that would have severed Kit’s life and his own?

Could Kit not convince his cowardice of the sure need to kill himself? Could he not see the unending torment that waited immortal Kit upon an Earth where the wolf reigned?

Oh, cowardice got more complicated by the moment, till, to be the coward that he was Kit needed more courage and twice the force of a brave man.

And, desirable though his death might be, yet Kit feared it. His conscience for eternity might make better company than the foul wolf. But not by much.

Thus his conscience, newly discovered, rendered him as much of a coward as his self-love had made him before.

Thus conscience made him run from death, and thus the native hue of resolution was sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turned awry, and lost the name of action.

He wanted to save the multiple worlds, and aye, Kit would die for it, if he knew he could die all together, die without leaving behind any tendrils of feeling that hurt still.

Oh, if Kit could be assured of having no immortal soul.

But he remembered the ghosts he’d summoned to do his bidding. Were they the spinning of his own heart and memory?

Or the remains of those he’d betrayed, the spirit that, naked, wailed the death of the self?

He’d started walking around outside the gate, walking in circles, talking to himself.

“Holla, Kit, holla, ar’t though bedlam?”

He looked up. Everyone asked him this question lately. Everyone. Looking up, he saw three men.

Two he had seen recently: Nicholas Skeres, he of the impeccable blond hair, stood by and wrinkled his very clean nose at Kit’s state. Beside him, to his right, stood Frizer, his bovine expression even more bovine as with oxen patience he seemed to ruminate upon the scene before his eyes. And to the side of those, a man Kit had not seen in many a year. Robert Poley, sweet Robin Poley, who’d been Sir Francis Walsingham’s right hand man and was now Robert Cecil’s.