Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (7 page)

“Nay.” Tom tried not to feel disappointed. An intense expression had appeared on the other man's face, yearning and desire and more than a little fear. Did he truly believe he saw something? It would be a sorry thing for him if he did. And what would Mistress Wood say if this Bedlamite turned out to be her long-lost son? Perhaps it would be a kindness to let her go on thinking he was dead.

He heard mocking laughter from the fields. Nay, it was a screech owl out hunting, nothing more. But now he could make out faint shapes on the grass, figures clad in white with fire in their hair. Winged creatures, impossibly small, darted around them, and they danced to music that was like nothing he had ever heard.

“Arthur,” he said, whispering. “Look.” But the other man had gone.

The creatures left off dancing. In a single line they moved through the fields, a strange light shining from their faces. Tom followed as they passed through Moorgate and into the city itself.

He would never be certain how long they led him onwards, or what way they took him through the city. They wound through the dark streets like a thread of gold in a tapestry, going past churches and prisons and taverns, past the shops of cobblers and ironmongers and brewers. Into the stately groves and gardens of the nobles' estates they walked, and not a dog barked to let its owner know they were there. He saw the London citizens asleep in their houses, and beggars and vagabonds lying on the cobblestone streets, shivering in the cold; he saw St. Paul's, closed and desolate in the darkness. At last they came to the river's edge and the wharves with their boats moored tight until morning.

He had always loved London, loved its noise and smells and close-packed lanes, the excitement and vitality he could feel in his stomach whenever he walked the streets. But now he saw it in the light cast by the faerie folk, and it seemed the promised city, the city of heaven. Each turning brought him new sights sharp enough to pierce his heart.

All the while he walked with the faeries, though, he felt that they searched for something, something they had once had and given up, something lost. As dawn lightened the east, streaking the gray water of the Thames with silver, he saw them slow and finally stop. The wings of the little ones drooped, and the horned animal, its head once held up so proudly against the sky, began to tire. What was it they sought? He wished he could help them.

In the light of the new day they seemed finally to become aware of him. One of the women in white turned and pointed, and then a dozen of them surrounded him, laughing and calling. He backed away toward the shelter of a building but they followed him. Someone ran her fingers through his hair. He felt drowsy, wearier than he had ever been in his life. It had been a long night. He lay against the wall and closed his eyes. Their laughter was the last thing he heard before he slept.

A fine soft rain was falling the next morning as George went into the churchyard, and the drizzle had kept the usual throng of people at home. As he passed Alice's station on the way to his own he saw that she had not come in to work that day. Instead the young man who worked for her stood at her stall, laying cloths over the books to keep them from getting wet. She must be at the printshop, then. He felt a strange emptiness at not seeing her; he hadn't realized until then how pleasing he found it to watch her work. When she was his he would find ways of keeping her by his side.

Anthony Drury waited for him at his stall, nodding as if he guessed his thoughts. “What decision have you come to?” he asked.

At his words George felt alert, renewed, all disappointment forgotten. “I'll agree to your terms,” he said. “I'll take your potion.”

“I don't have it here.”

“Where is it, then?”

“At my lodgings. Come.”

The man's tone angered George. Why hadn't Anthony simply brought the elixir with him? He thought that the other man meant to draw him deeper into this strange business, and he was reluctant to follow him. His only concern was with Alice: he had no interest in Anthony's obsession with Arthur or his counterfeit coins (if Alice spoke true) or his obscure knowledge.

But he would not get the promised potion unless he went along with him. “Very well,” he said.

He closed his stall and followed the other man. They walked together through the empty churchyard, and then Anthony led him out onto Cheapside. Past the Eleanor Cross they went, past a small crowd watching expectantly as a man was tied to a cart and then flogged through the street. Anthony turned left off Cheapside, then right, then left again, and soon George was lost in a maze of dark alleys and passageways. The streets here were muddy from the morning's rainfall, and garbage overran the ditches; he smelled excrement and rotting food. Houses closed together over him, blocking out the sky.

Something moved in the shadows. George turned, afraid, but he could see nothing there. Anthony stopped, though, and made a complex gesture with his left hand. “Come,” he said.

“What—What was—”

“It will not trouble us further.”

He began walking again, and George followed. The houses to either side of them grew shabbier, meaner. This was a part of London George had never seen. He was about to ask how much farther they had to go when the shape he had seen earlier came forward out of the shadows, making no sound. This time when he looked directly at the thing it did not retreat. He saw a creature the color of sea moss, with a long snout, sharp ears and webbed fingers and toes. It opened its mouth in a snarl, showing uneven pointed teeth.

It turned and moved with a certainty of purpose toward Anthony. For a moment George could not speak, fascinated by the thing's horrible grace. He must have made some kind of noise, because Anthony stopped to look at him. The creature dropped back and crouched on its haunches like a cat, preparing to lunge. Muscles slid over bones as smoothly as water gliding over rocks. For what seemed like a long time Anthony stood and did nothing. Then he drew complex sigils in the air and spoke a few words George did not recognize. The creature hissed and fell back toward the shelter of one of the houses.

“What—” George said.

Anthony made no reply. George realized with amazement that the other man looked shaken, almost haunted. Growing bolder, he said, “I told you before I will not traffic with spirits.”

“Not—spirits,” Anthony said. His breath came in little gasps. George noticed, shocked, that the symbols Anthony had traced in the air still glowed, silver fading to tarnished green.

“Not spirits! Why, man—”

“The thing you saw is not a spirit, but as natural as you or I. We have performed certain experiments—”

“We?”

“You will meet the others when you're ready. We question the nature of things. What is true and what false.” The man's rhetoric seemed to steady him.

“That's too deep for me,” George said. As far as he was concerned what he saw with his own eyes was true, and everything else didn't matter. And he knew, with more certainty than he had ever known anything in his life, that the thing he had seen had no part in his everyday world. “But that creature had an unnatural air about it. You'll not tell me—”

“Don't speak of what you don't understand. When the time is right we'll tell you more.”

George scowled. He wanted to be out of the filthy maze of streets and back at home before nightfall, and he wondered uneasily if the thing still watched them from the shadows. But he knew he could not find the way back on his own, knew too that he needed Anthony to get what he had been promised. He vowed that when Alice was his he would have no more to do with the other man.

Anthony turned in at the most rundown of the houses. “Here it is,” he said, unlocking and opening the door.

Dozens of burning candles lit the room beyond. George got a brief glimpse of what looked like a monstrous mechanical being, with a hundred iron arms snaking out from a central core. Then he heard a high shrill scream, and the green creature fell on Anthony from the rafters. It grabbed hold of his arm and pushed itself up toward his face in a strange fluid motion. George backed away into the street and closed the door.

Another scream came from the room, and then silence. After what seemed like a long time the door opened and Anthony came out, blood streaming from his arm.

“Has it gone?” George asked. “Are you badly hurt?”

“Take it,” Anthony said. “Quickly.” He held out a small earthenware jar in his unwounded hand.

“I—What do I—”

“Quickly!”

George took the jar and backed away. The other man's eyes shone with a strange light, like a Bedlamite's. Something fell with a loud noise in the house behind him. George turned and ran down the street.

After a few minutes he felt something soft squelch under his feet. He shuddered and slowed to a walk. Where was he? How was he to get back home?

He looked around him, seeking a familiar landmark. Clouds covered the sun, making it look like a dark watchful eye. Something moved in the shadows and he jumped, but it was only a scrap of cloth blown by the wind. The same wind drove the clouds before it and the sun flared out for a brief instant. He saw a broad street in the distance and went toward it cautiously. As he came closer he saw movement and heard the creaking of cart wheels. Hurrying now, he followed the sights and sounds and found himself on Cheapside. He walked quickly toward the crowds of people ahead of him, not wanting to travel alone.

Anthony had deliberately confused him, then, so that he would not remember the way back. But why? Did it have something to do with the mechanical monster in Anthony's house? George had only gotten a quick glimpse of it, but he thought he recognized an alchemist's alembic from a book he'd seen in the churchyard. Did Anthony know the secret of changing base minerals into gold? But surely he would not live in such squalor if he had money.

He made his way slowly down the street. Now that he had leisure to think his mind filled with a tangle of questions. What was the creature? It had seemed bound to Anthony in some way. Had he conjured it and was now unable to rid himself of it?

And what was in the jar Anthony had given him? Did it come from the same place as the creature, and would it bind Alice to the same kind of necromancy? What if the other man had given him the wrong jar? He had had only a short time to find what he wanted, after all. If what he had given George harmed Alice in any way, George thought, the other man would have to face something worse than the green creature.

As he prepared for bed that night the memory of his strange journey began to fade. But he dreamed that the creature, in falling on Anthony, had brushed against him. It felt dank, repulsive, and George's gasp of horror woke him up. He lay still, his heart pounding. He tried not to look at the dark corners of the room where, he was certain, something crouched, waiting for him.

Afternoon light fell through the windows when Alice woke. She rolled over in bed and covered her eyes with her arm. What a night, she thought.

But what, exactly, had happened? Had she truly gone dancing in the fields with the faerie folk? Were all the stories from her childhood true?

Every muscle ached as she tried to sit up. If only John were here, she thought. What a tale she would have to tell him. Brownies and winged creatures and Robin Goodfellow, and at the end of it all the brightness of the queen herself.

But she couldn't lie here dreaming. There was work to be done, her stall in the churchyard to tend to. Nay, the young man who sometimes worked for her came in today, God be thanked. Today would have been the day she went to the printshop. But it was still early afternoon; she could go by the shop and then, if there was time, she could pay a visit to Margery.

Margery. Had she truly seen her sitting in the field as if she belonged there, talking to Queen Oriana? Alice knew Margery was wise in the knowledge of herbs and flowers and stones, but how did she come to have business with the Queen of Faerie? Aye, she would certainly go and have a talk with her friend, whether she had the time or not. There were questions she had to ask her.

At the printing house near Paul's Wharf she sought out the proprietor, a plump graying man whose leather apron had turned black across the stomach from bending over the presses, and gave him her order. One of her pamphlets and several of the ballads needed to go back to press, and already some acting companies had given her orders for playbills. He looked over the list and nodded, his free hand moving in the air as he calculated costs. The stationers whose books he printed complained loudly and often about his rudeness, but she liked him just for that reason, because he treated her the same way he treated everyone else. If he was curt to the other stationers he was also curt to her.

As he looked over the list she watched his employees at work. In one corner the compositor set up type, and when he had finished the corrector of the press looked over what he had done, reading it backwards like a Mohammedan or Jew. Then another man inked the type, worked the screw on the press and took out the finished pages.

Finally he looked up from the list and named a figure. She countered with a lower one, and he handed the list back to her and made as if to go. She called him back, the ritual familiar to her from her other visits and from the times before that, when she had accompanied John to the shop. Finally they agreed on an amount and she left.

It had rained that morning and the water in the ditches and gutters reflected the damp gray clouds. As she watched the sun came out, striking the water and turning it pale gold. The sudden blaze of color gladdened her, reminded her that spring would be here soon. The trees around her were starting to put out fine green leaves. Winter had lasted too long; they had been packed within the walls of the city like goods in a peddlar's bag. The brownie had done well to bring her outside.

Something moved on the surface of the water, something small and clad in gold. Was she always to be haunted like this, by things barely seen? Jewels hung on tavern signs and in horses' manes, and motes of silver winged past her. The gold reminded her of faerie coins, and she put her hand in the purse at her side. She felt the small coins she carried with her, groats and pennies, and a hard round lump. A piece of coal. So that was why they had laughed!