All Night Awake (80 page)

A darker traitor than Kit had ever been, because untroubled by the slightest glimmer of conscience, Robin Poley had turned in friends and lived to dance, unremorseful, upon their graves.

Now he smiled at Kit and said, “Oh, we just wished to make sure, Kit, that you’d not forgotten our hour for meeting in Deptford. Come with us, we’ve secured a carriage.”

And speaking thus they led Kit through the gate to the other side, where the carriage -- a looming dark thing -- waited on the rutted muddy street.

Heavy curtains veiled the windows of the carriage.

So that was how it was to be: one man from Essex’s camp, and one from Tom Walsingham, and one from Cecil.

Between them they’d take Kit to the docks, from whence he’d never come again.

Perhaps that was the best. Perhaps.

But, as Kit climbed the carriage steps into the dark interior of the carriage, a fear of death -- his old fear of death -- struck at his heart like a well aimed arrow.

Like a man who’s suffered all his life from blindness and from whose eyes, with sudden healing, the scales do fall, Kit saw himself and his own cold and empty center.

He was a coward who feared death.

Long had he known that, and yet he’d thought the undoing of his life had been loving Silver.

Now he saw he’d loved Silver because Silver was immortal or nearly so. He’d never found a woman to compare only because he could not love something that would die.

It was immortality Kit had longed for in Silver’s arms.

Kit, cold and miserable, had never loved at all.

With a push from Poley, Kit was sent sprawling onto one of the slick seats of the carriage.

“I must confess I am amazed, Kit, at your state, and the reports of your doings that we followed here. Either you’re bedlam or so cunning you’d fake yourself bedlam to evade reckoning. Either case, it is either worse or better than I’d expect from you.”

Kit felt the wolf stir within him, at his own fears, felt the wolf reach for control of his limbs.

Kit didn’t fight the fatal influence. Awestruck at seeing himself clearly, like a man who, lifelong, has thought himself lissome and suddenly discovers gross deformity upon his own limb, he wondered at his coldness, his wrongness.

All these years he’d thought himself expeditious and smart and capable, and congratulated himself on his cunning escapes, and he’d thought himself a lover who had once wooed a great one from faerieland and been unfairly dismissed from her sight.

Now he saw himself for what he was, the true, empty shell of a being with neither heart nor feelings, neither shame nor courage.

Kit could blame it on his elven blood, Merlin’s inheritance, but it didn’t seem right. His father was good enough, as was his mother, the best person Kit knew, always disposed and ready to help friend and neighbor, acquaintance and stranger, with her hands, her purse, her words.

How of two such had Kit been born? Except that, like the humble field mouse, he’d tried to reach beyond his own burrow and become something other.

What? A fox? A lion?

He didn’t know, but he knew he’d never changed. He’d just gnawed on the flesh of greater ones than him.

Latterly literally.
                 

Wrapped in misery, he heard Poley ask, “Are those tears? Does Kit Marlowe cry?”

He heard the wolf answer, but he did not know what. He saw the quickened interest in Poley’s look.

The carriage rocked beneath them and in the penumbrous dark, Kit Marlowe wondered if he headed towards death and damnation or damnation in life.

Scene Thirty Nine

The same gate but more animated, in the rush of midday entrance into and departure from the city. Will comes walking through it.

W
ill wished he could see the power tracks that Ariel had seen, the indications that beings of power had been there.

He could not. Instead, at first light of day, after a sleepless night of wondering where the queen of faerieland had been taken and how long until evil conquered the world, Will had returned to Marlowe’s street and followed the marks of heavy hooves upon the mud of the alley.

Strange that invisible centaurs could leave such visible marks: hoof prints, larger and deeper than would be left by a normal animal.

Will followed the tracks, down muddy streets and past awakening markets. He followed all the way to the city gate, where the creatures seemed to have trampled round and round a solitary tree -- nightlong to judge by the profusion of stepped-over tracks and horse dung, all in this one small space. Amid the hoof prints, prints of a man’s boot showed.

Marlowe’s fine boots, Will would wager, though, of course, one boot was much like the other. But Marlowe had been with the centaurs.

Will shuddered at recalling the transformation of Marlowe’s face, the wolfish, sharp quality of his look.

Again, Will asked himself why he was doing this. Why follow the evil creatures who’d almost killed him the night before?

Will who was afraid of meeting Lords and of exposing his creations to theater goers and of standing up and declaiming his own poetry, could Will truly think he might take on creatures like this in single combat and defeat them? Did Will think he had what it took to save the world?

He walked back towards the gate, following the footsteps of the boots, which had got joined by other human footsteps.

Into his mind unbidden came an image of Marlowe, wielding that round object -- a doorknob? a handle? -- patently it had been iron and burned Marlowe’s own changed nature. And yet Marlowe, the madman, had taken on the centaurs armed only with it.

Will shook his head. Marlowe had ever had more confidence than Will could muster.

It took self-confidence to strut your creations on stage and hope for reward and adoration from the crowds.

The footprints ended in rutted carriage tracks, and Will stood there, staring at them. The tracks led out the gate again. Will could not follow -- could not hope to follow -- carriage tracks.

Raising his eyes from them, with a despairing sigh, Will thought that it was here that his search ended and that he might as well go back to his lodging and pack and go back home to Nan.

He didn’t know how the end of the world would happen, or if the end of the world would be such indeed, come all of a sudden, in a blaze of horror or evil. He rather suspected it would come quietly, day by day, until in the end all that existed would be Sylvanus’s harsh world of granite and impiety, of cruelty and instant death.

But be that as it may, Will would be with Nan and Hamnet and Judith and Susannah. This was no time to try to make it in London, where any disturbances would be first felt.

A part of him felt a great relief at this thought, but something like disappointment yet nagged at him.
Venus and Adonis
had been going well, despite all this, and Will had almost believed he might be a true poet after all.

He sighed, and in mid-sigh saw a young woman on the other side of the street. She wore a dirty low-cut chemise and a skirt too tight on her ample hips. The shawl thrown over her shoulders was that flaming orange that people called harlot’s leg -- and the woman was probably a bawd.

Yet she looked at Will with meaning, attentive eyes, as though she wished to tell him something.

Probably wishing for a customer, Will thought, and sighed again. She looked so young. Scarcely older than ten-year-old Susannah, though, to be honest, she probably would be fourteen or fifteen, only stunted by ill-treatment.

Since coming to London Will had found himself often giving alms to prostitutes who tried to solicit him as a client, and he suspected this would be one of those times.

And yet, she looked so meaningfully at him. And a bawd this early in the morning was strange enough.

He walked towards her, careful not to smile or give any indication that he might be a potential customer. “Tell me,” he said, without preamble. “Have you seen a red-headed gentleman? He would be about my height but slenderer, and he wore a dark velvet suit, very rumpled and worse for the wear?”

The bawd looked relieved. She essayed a clumsy curtsy, and blushed a deep red, and looking away from him, said, all in a rush, “I thought as you might be looking for him. He looked.... well, he looked bedlam and that’s the truth, and I thought that his keepers might be coming for him.” She made a face. “But the men who took him didn’t look like his keepers, nor at all kindly inclined towards him.”

The men who’d taken him? Had Marlowe become Marlowe again, then? Will was not sure how the mechanism actuated, but he thought that in the beginning of the fight he’d witnessed, Marlowe had been himself, not Sylvanus. And, looking at it from what he knew now, Will suspected that when Marlowe had met him by the river, there he’d been Marlowe too and trying to tell Will the truth, though something had stopped him.

He wondered if Marlowe himself had sent the ghosts to denounce him, and felt a chill down his spine.

He might well have, for who else would do it?

“Did it look like the men took him with them against his will?” Will asked. In truth, if it were so, it must be Marlowe, for he couldn’t imagine any mortal forcing Sylvanus to do anything.

The girl nodded. “They were rough with him, and not like keepers who might be rough for his own protection. I thought...I thought that he might be wealthy and they mean to rob him, so I lingered hoping his friends would come for him. You are his friend?”

“Aye,” Will said. He was Marlowe’s friend, was he not? The playwright whose plays had thrilled Will’s heart, whose untamed heart fought even against the wolf within? How could Will deny him? “And know you where they took him?”

“I heard one of the men speaking to the coachman,” she said. “And he said Mistress Bull’s house, in Deptford.”

Will sighed. Deptford. A half day’s ride away, by the docks, where sea and river met. Not somewhere where Will could hope to go on foot.

He fished in his sleeve and got a few pennies, which he thrust at the girl. “For your pains. You’ve done me great service.”

“Thank you, master.” She smiled, displaying very bad teeth, then ran down the street, her conscience no doubt relieved.

But Will’s own conscience was not relieved. Deptford. If they’d taken Marlowe there, they might have killed him by now. At least if these were the same people about whom Marlowe had talked, the arms the Privy Council, the agents that moved, unnoticed through the darker shadows of London.

If they’d killed Marlowe, what would happen to Quicksilver and Ariel? Would they be restored or lost forever?

Will could not tell.

He moaned his indecision to the street, as a cart rumbled past. What could Will do if he followed Marlowe? What would he do?

Then he remembered the dark king’s command to the centaurs to leave the body alone, for they would kill him with it.

Would Sylvanus, able to summon enough strength to say this even when Marlowe’s body was no longer controlled by him, stand by while humans murdered Marlowe? Not likely.

And if they did not, what would happen when night fell? Ariel had said that creatures of faerieland gained strength at night. Would the wolf not take Marlowe’s body fully again for his use then? And if so, would those mortal assassins not be killed immediately?

Though the assassins might deserve their death, Will thought of the power that would give Sylvanus. Armed with such power, Sylvanus could and would kill Ariel and Quicksilver, if he hadn’t already.

Then would the world go down the unalterable path to evil regnant.

Will felt sweat spring from all his pores, instantly gluing his shirt to his body.

He was the only person who even knew of this threat that hung over the heads of all the inhabitants of this vast earth.

He walked along the street, watching vendors set up fruit and bread stalls. Chimney sweeps called loudly for clients. Urchins ran errands. Schoolboys with shiny, fresh-scrubbed faces crept their unwilling way to school.

On a street corner, a young boy kissed a girl about his age.

And come tomorrow all these people, all, might be Sylvanus’s vassals and his unwilling slaves. His corrupting breath might taint them all though they knew it not.

To save them from doom, Will must act, since he was the only one who knew that acting was needed.

But what could Will do? What say? How could he stop a menace that was destroying Marlowe? How could he stop a supernatural force that had imprisoned the king and queen of faerieland?

Will was only a provincial boy who wanted to be a poet.

And if he did not try, how live with it?

He saw himself an old man, in an evil-ravaged world, justifying to Hamnet why he had not fought for good and life and right.

No. No. It would be the same as explaining to Hamnet why Will had never tried his hand at making it as a poet. To both of those Will would find no answer. Were Hamnet in Will’s position, Will would expect his son to at least try.

Will stopped and sighed again, so loudly that several passersby looked at him.

Will reached for his sleeve, to which, that morning, he had transferred the purse that had been beneath his mattress.