All Night Awake (74 page)

Not a need, not a fear-driven need for her lord. And not a desire to have him near so that she wouldn’t lose him.

No, this need was other -- a plain necessity, a simple requirement, that Quicksilver be by, that Quicksilver be with her.

She saw him, in her mind, as he was wont to be -- his all-too-facile smile, his all-too-easy mind, the weakness in his heart as he weighed decisions of state and always hesitated. She saw him in her mind turning to Silver, and from Silver again into Ariel’s lord, and both forms, both of them were yet Quicksilver, both twined in his inconstant heart.

This weather-vane unsteadiness that should have repelled, yet didn’t. Those qualities in him that had always before brought despair to Ariel’s heart, now that Quicksilver might be lost, felt desirable, needed, precise and exactly the way Quicksilver should be.

Oh, let him be restored to her; let him return to her arms and to his throne; and she’d never more with weakness reproach him. She’d shore up his weakness without seeming to do so. She would allow him to be Silver, if Silver he must be.

Perhaps Nan Shakespeare was right -- Will said it was her habit -- and perhaps Ariel herself had made Silver stronger, irresistible, by making Quicksilver keep her back, by making Quicksilver be only half of what he was meant to be.

And perhaps that very halving of Quicksilver brought about the weakness of her lord which, in revolt against the splitting of his self, split everything he did and thought in half.

When he was young, Quicksilver had lightly changed, from one to the other aspect and back again. Yet his courage had not lacked, nor had his demeanor ever been maidenly.

“Oh me,” Ariel said. “Oh me, I am a fool. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, when I, thy ten years' wife, have mangled it? Oh me, who’ve encouraged rebellion and treason with my ill demeanor. Oh, me, who will be widowed through my own unmeaning hand.” She rocked back and forth, and tears escaped beneath her hands, which covered her eyes, to fall upon the blue velvet of her page’s attire. She cared not.

“Milady!” Will said, from near by.

Startled because she’d forgotten him, Ariel looked up.

“Milady,” Will said again. He looked disturbed, sympathetic, full of grief at her grief, sorrow at her sorrow. “Milady, I’m sure you do yourself injustice. I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

The mortal’s simple confidence, his well-meaning words, only encouraged Ariel’s anger at her own folly. What did the mortal know, what could he know? He a simple man, with simple ambitions, circumscribed within the world of a man? He with a wife and children in a little town, so far away? What could he know of the sins of kings, the awful, crushing weight of the indifferent crown?

Subjects had no such doubts, nor could subjects sin so awfully as their sovereigns, for it was enough if they knew they were the king’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, their obedience to the king wiped the crime of it out of them.

But Kings and Queens, they must think about their cause and advance into the dark, unguided, with no meek quality of humble obedience to excuse their egregious mistakes.

Ariel had been acting like a subject. And a subject she was, to her imperiled king. But, in her king’s absence, must she be a queen and tread her own path unafraid.

The tears dried in her eyes, decision chasing them out. No time to lament past mistakes. Time now, to act and to tread along a path that might be wrong but then again might be right.

Time to show that decision she would wish her lord had shown oh, so many times.

Getting up, she smoothed her velvet suit, and glanced at Will, who stood two steps away from her, looking solicitous and more than a little frightened at what must be fearful changes in her countenance.

“Get me a bowl of water,” she said, commanding lightly, as though this were faerieland and he her rightful subject. “A clean bowl, and water that has not touched metal.

“Milady?”

“You heard me,” she said. Going to his desk, she moved aside the pile of papers there, and cleared a space for the bowl. She fancied she saw him flinch at her handling of his scribbled over papers, but it didn’t matter. He was but a mortal, and his words, if mangled, could be written again. A hundred years from now he would be long dead, and no one would care what words he’d written or why.

But she, she was an immortal sovereign and if she could not rescue her husband she would have to face evil alone and win life for herself and her hill, and reward good and punish treason.

But first she must know where her lord was and if there were hope of ransoming him.

She no longer needed Quicksilver, but she would fain have him by her side, her lord love, and Silver, and all of Quicksilver’s multifaceted splendor.

Thinking of Quicksilver, dreaming on him, she hardly noticed Will saying, “I’ll be back in a breath,” and leaving the room.

In her mind, she could almost see Quicksilver. He looked pale, cold, distraught, and sat in a dark, grey, gloomy landscape where nothing existed expect shadows.

It looked like the land of the dead and, with a shiver, Ariel hoped her vision was not true.

Scene Thirty

Marlowe’s room. He stands by his writing table. He has -- obviously uncaring -- pushed all his papers to the floor, in scattered confusion. In the space thus cleared, he has set an infinity of bowls, cups, spoons, and three candles. These he moves around, while muttering to himself.

T
he landlady had kindly let Kit have a mess of crockery for his mad scheme, without even asking what he meant to use it for. Such the foolishness of women when they craved love.

Such the foolishness of men, also. For it was craving Silver’s love that had got Kit into this mess.

And the same craving must somehow give him force to see it through.

Standing in front of his work table, Marlowe looked at the crockery, and smiled to himself. What to put in these bowls, and what to do with them?

A mad idea had formed in his brain, while the bowls and cups were fetched, that he might put his guilt to good use, and conjure the spirits of the guiltless dead, killed by him and by the wolf proper, who might well, oh, too well, serve his turn and speak where his enemy forced him to stand silent. For would the spirits not wish to denounce their murderer.

Did they not say that murder cried out of the Earth for revenge?

Kit removed his gloves, the gloves that had cost him the torments of hell to slip on, and yet that he had to slip on to avoid notice of his burned hands.

He poured water into one of the bowls, and, picking up his most stained garment, dipped it into the water, making it pinkish with the blood of the wolf’s victims.

Frowning at it, it came to Kit that though he’d shared the mind of the wolf, he remembered no spells, as such. No grand gestures, no great work involving herbs or glory hands or the noose from a hanged man’s neck, nor other repugnant ingredients. No eye of newt, no toe of bat, none of it figured in the magic of elves.

Of course, if elves were of magic made, which Kit knew elves to be, then it would be easy enough, would it not, for an elf to move magic. It stood to reason since Kit, made of flesh, found it easy enough to move his body by command of his mind.

At least, and he smiled ruefully at this thought, he’d found it easy until the recent past.

He felt the wolf sniffing at the thought, from the other side of the partition that divided them. Afraid the wolf should surprise Kit and stop Kit’s scheme before ever he started it, Kit pushed all thought of the wolf, and all thought of what he must do, out of his mind, and concentrated on the crockery, the bowls, the cups, his hands moving them, clustering bowls full of clear water around the all important one.

Not that he knew what to do with any of them, but that he thought if he had enough of a confusing profusion of them, the wolf, if he peeked out through Kit’s eyes, would find it all innocent nonsense, desperate play, the foolish attempt of an ensnared rabbit at escaping the piercing claws of the hunting falcon.

Kit pulled his sleeves up and looked at the bowl of bloodied water, sitting against the dark table.

How could Kit, mortal Kit, poor Kit who could never control his own life, control magic?

All Kit was good at was words.

And yet, magic was ever words, was it not? And if so, who better to perform magic than Kit Marlowe? Was not his work a kind of magic, making the theater goers for a moment believe in Tamburlaine, or Faustus?

Still, he wished he had something more solid, a more eminent kind of knowledge.

“Yet fain would I have a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations, that I might raise up spirits when I please,” he whispered, and sighed. Faustus, at least, had a guide, but Kit, himself, must go traipsing, unshod and blind, into this dark, perilous country.

But.... well, if he must he must, and might as well steel his spirit to the task at hand. Because if he didn’t get help, the wolf would consume him, and soon there would be nothing, nothing at all to prevent the wolf’s victory. Except maybe Kit’s death. And Kit wasn’t ready to die. Neither in mind nor in body.

Stroking his chin with his left hand, he smelled the sweet-sickly taint of fresh blood and sighed. “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this hand again.”

Scene Thirty One

Will’s room. Outside, the sun is setting in a splendor of red. Ariel looks up from her bowl of water, and looks at the entranced Will.

M
any years later, Will would try to remember those moments, when the Queen of faerieland had gazed into a bowl of water and seen what was happening in the world of spirits, the play of ghosts, the battle of good and evil beyond the ken of men.

He could not.

In those moments, all he could say is that he’d seen figures, each fast succeeding the other upon the clear unruffled surface of the water in the bowl.

He’d seen elves and princes, women and men and children, each one after the other, each eclipsing the other, all of them followed, all of them pursued by the darkness that was the wolf. As night succeeded day, so the wolf succeeded all of human light, like eternal damnation closing in on the works of man, like an eclipse shutting up the bright inconstant moon.

He’s seen them all and understood little -- not even the image of worlds, spinning in the dark, distant void.

But Ariel had understood it. That much he knew, when she looked up at him.

This woman, for whom Will felt already too much paternal tenderness, this elf, towards whom, against his best judgment he’d been feeling a father’s love, looked up from her bowl, and the sapience of the ancient, all-knowing sea was in her eyes.

Those elven-blue orbs might not be all that much older than his -- he knew that in elf terms Ariel and Quicksilver were little more than children -- and yet in them was the instinctive knowledge of the succeeding ages, the intuition of world everlasting, the knowledge of mountains ground down to the grain of sand and of terra firma and ocean exchanging places over and over again.

“He’s near his goal,” she said. Her voice sounded distant and cold, like wind blowing over far eastern mountains, where men sat and meditated on eternal truth, far from the hurrying crowds of the rushing west. “My... my husband’s unworthy brother. One more life. One more human life, and if he gets it, it will be the undoing of us all. Human and elf alike.”

The calm with which she spoke shocked Will more than the words. He took a deep breath, gathered into timorous lungs and slowly expelled. “Did you find out? Who gave your brother-in-law shelter?”

Ariel shook her head. She looked not at Will but at the window in front of her, like a child lost in a nightmare all her own. “No. No. Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever vile abode my vile relative sought, he has hidden it well, protected it. I got no more than a feeling that my husband had found it. Stumbled onto it, to be honest. To his undoing.” Ariel’s eyes filled with tears, one of which slid, unknown, down her oval cheek.

“Your husband?” Will asked, more alarm and concern in his voice than he meant to put in it. But he felt responsible for this one victim of the darkness that might soon overtake all. “Quicksilver? Is he.... He isn’t dead? Is he?”