All Night Awake (3 page)

“Well, then, enough, I say. Write yourself a long poem, say on the subject of Venus and Adonis, and have the lovers disport in the glades of Arcadia and any nobleman will give you coin for it. What, with your clever punning style . . .”

“But my lodging—” Will started, intending to explain that he was already overdue in paying for that and must make some coin or perish.

“Your lodging is not convenient to gentlemen’s abodes?” Marlowe asked.

Will shook his head. “I lodge in Shoreditch, at Hog’s Lane,” he said. “Over the Bonefoy hatters there, and I—”

He would have said more: that he owed money to his landlord, that soon he would be turned out, that he hadn’t eaten in a whole day, that he knew no noblemen, no one who might help. He might so far have forgotten himself as to ask for the help of this stranger, of this crowned, gilded king of poets. And Will less than a peasant

But before he could speak, two men emerged from the crowd, like wrathful gods from stormy waters, pushing aside money changers, ballad makers, and smirking, tightly corseted bawds.

The men flanked Marlowe, one on either side.

Will stepped away from them.

Somberly dressed, in black with no adornments, the two men looked like Puritans.

They were not the sort of men that Will expected to see with a playwright.

Marlowe looked at one, then the other. His whole face contracted, aged, soured, as if he’d tasted bitter gall.

One of the men had narrow-faced, thin looks that reminded Will of a rat in a house with a fast cat. The other one was round, but old, his face wrinkled and his chin sporting only a dismal growth of beard, like grass striving to thrive on poisoned land.

Will expected Marlowe to dismiss them or make fun of them.

Instead, Marlowe turned to face them and gave them his full attention and a weary look. He bowed to each one in turn. “Gentlemen?”

“If you would come with us,” the small one said, his voice echoing with an incongruous boom.

Marlowe smiled, an oddly forced smile that lacked the mobility of his amusement and the malicious quickness of his teasing. It looked like the grin of a death mask, like the drawn lips and vacant eyes of a final rictus.

Funny how, when people died like that, their neighbors said they’d gone to their reward smiling. Will would never believe it again.

Marlowe bowed as a statue might bow, all stiff poise and graceful dignity. “I am, as always, at the council’s disposal, am I not?”

The three of them walked off, the two men on either side, hemming in Marlowe. Despite Marlowe’s smile, his easy walk, he looked like a prisoner led to the gallows.

Will stared after them, blinking. It couldn’t be. What would a playwright be arrested for? His writings?

No. The Queen’s censor approved all plays, did he not? So, how could something libelous get on the stage?

No. Those men must be Kit Marlowe’s friends, and Will’s foreboding the fruit of his own sick thoughts.

Hunger gnawed at his entrails like a sharp-toothed rat, and all dreams of work in the theater had vanished before Will’s eyes like a lacy fog that—lifted—uncovers dismal reality.

He rubbed his calloused thumb and forefinger across his eyes, trying to thus remove the veil that tiredness and faintness dropped in front of his vision.

Earlier that afternoon, to evade his hunger, Will had taken a nap. In that sleep, a strange dream had visited him, a dream of womenlike beings, who’d hailed Will as a great poet and forecast such a great future for him.

In this, his dismal waking reality, such dreams must be dismissed with a smile and a shrug. But tears prickled hard behind his eyes at the loss of that dreamed greatness that had never been his.

He retraced his steps through the thronging multitude, past a woman selling grilled chicken meat, to the Si Quis door again.

But the notice for the horse holder job was gone, as was the man who’d pointed Henslowe out to Will.

Will would find no work in London. He was too simple a man for this town. In Stratford, respectable men were honorable and people acted as they seemed. Nothing had prepared Will for the widespread deception he’d found in the capital. Each day in London, it seemed, Will had been ill used by someone. His purse had been cut, his meat begged away from him, his bread shorted, his room overcharged for.

Yet, he could go nowhere else. He lacked the money.

He’d die in London.

He might as well return to his lodgings. If he were lucky, his pious Protestant landlord would already have gone to bed and would not demand the rent that Will could not pay.

Thus, Will would have a bed for yet another night. A postponing of the harsh fate he could not avoid forever.

Scene 2

Arden Woods, near Stratford-upon-Avon. These ancient trees are all that remain of the primeval forest that once covered all of the British Isles. As befits their antiquity, the woods are the run of fairy kind and the abode of elf. On a clearing, amid the trees, a tall translucent palace rises, more graceful and perfect than any built by mankind. And in the gold-and-white-marble throne room, the King and Queen of Elvenland sit on their gilded thrones, and receive a centaur ambassador from the far-off reaches of their realm. Tall, regal-looking, Quicksilver sits on the throne, his long blond hair combed over his shoulder. He wears a magnificent suit of dark blue velvet and pale blue silk stockings. Queen Ariel, smaller than her husband, and paler, sits next to him, wearing a white dress that makes her look at once too innocent and too young for the heavy crown that rests upon her head.

R
unning steps approached the throne room of Fairyland.

“Lord,” a breathless voice called. “Lord, our boundary is breached.”

Quicksilver looked away from the ambassador of the centaurs.

The centaur ambassador shrugged his broad human shoulders, while the glossy black legs of his horse half tip-tapped uneasily on the marble floor.

The ambassador had been in the midst of one of the long speeches beloved of his people, mingling Greek and English with artless effusion.

Now he, like all of the court, turned his attention to the broad-arched entrance to the palace, from which a breathless voice called, “Milord, milord, a breach. A breach in our defense.”

An elf careened through the marble archway that opened to the outside of the palace.

His eyes wide with fear, his breath ragged, a tall, dark elf male stumbled into the room to collapse, prostrating himself in a panting heap on the red velvet carpet in front of the throne.

The centaur ambassador cantered away from the newcomer, closer to the magnificent lords, the bejeweled ladies of Fairyland that, in two sparkling aisles, lined the room.

The ladies’ fans moved nonstop, their lips whispering fast behind those fans, of the shocking alarm and what it might betide.

Quicksilver rose to his feet, recognizing the elf, whose sturdy body betrayed human origins, but who wore the green velvet of Quicksilver’s own private guard, and whose black hair sported the golden coronet of a prince of Fairyland. “Malachite?”

This was Lord Malachite, Quicksilver’s childhood friend, his milk-brother, raised with the king at the feet of the late fairy queen, Titania. A trusted friend, a keen advisor.

Quicksilver’s pulse sped in alarm. Brave Malachite thus alarmed? What could this bode? Decorous Malachite disrupting a royal audience? It could mean nothing good.

As the whole court recognized Malachite, the elven ladies’ fans moved faster. Whispers rose from amid the elven gentlemen. Queen Ariel gasped and leaned forward. Her small, rosebud mouth opened in startled alarm.

Malachite knelt, gasping for breath, and half raised his face, his mouth working, trying to say something for which he had no breath. His great jade-green eyes were full of that speaking force which eyes have when lips lack the strength to utter.

Ariel stood and rested her arm on Quicksilver’s. Together, the sovereigns of Elvenland descended the ten marble steps from the platform on which their throne sat. They flanked Malachite, who, still kneeling, managed to draw in full breath that whistled through his words as he spoke.

“If your majesty pleases,” he said, turning wide eyes to Quicksilver. “If your majesty pleases.” He looked at Ariel. “Our defenses have been breached.”

Quicksilver knit his brows.
If your majesty pleases.
What a phrase. He pleased no such thing. Not sure what Malachite meant, yet he was sure it betokened no good. “The defenses?” he said. “What defenses, man? Speak.”

For they were not at war, nor were there defenses around the realm that another realm might break through. No. Nor such realm as might wish to do it.

“The defenses to Avalon, milord. The defenses set around this palace, around this forest.” Malachite gulped in air like a starving man will devour food. “The living defenses that ever protected our kind from evil beings abroad.”

Still kneeling, he straightened so that his knees supported his weight, the rest of him upright. His earnest face, with its too-sharp nose, its jade-green eyes, faced Quicksilver.

“While we were on patrol, we sensed it, Igneous, and I, and Birch and Laurel. And then we ran to the place where right away we saw the breach blooming in our magical defenses, evil resounding through it.”

The muttering of the court stopped, every breath suspended.

Quicksilver shook his head. He could not doubt Malachite. Yet the defenses
could not
be broken.

These magical wards and spells and dread enchantments of which Malachite spoke had been placed around the capital of the magical kingdom, time out of mind, by Quicksilver’s ancestors.

They protected the source of the hill’s magic, the collective strength of hill power, the core and Soul of elvenkind.

Humans and other natural creatures could wander through the defenses, in and out of the forest, and disturb nothing. Most humans, blind, ephemeral creatures that they were, couldn’t even see the fairy palace and that great, gilded land that coexisted along the human world like two pages of a book, touching but never mingling.

But any enemy with ill intentions would be kept out by these defenses, unable to come near the ancient, sacred palace of elvenkind, unable to touch the living force of their magic, the fountain of elf power.

There was no record, ever—either in Quicksilver’s memory, or in the collective memory of his race which, as a king, Quicksilver held—of the defenses being disturbed, much less broken.

This elven kingdom had fought and won and lost wars against other magical kingdoms. It had suffered encroachment by humanity and dissension within its ranks, and yet those defenses that protected the core of the kingdom had remained inviolate.

Until now.

“You must be wrong,” Quicksilver whispered. Yet he trembled with fear that they might not be. For if they were right, then Elvenland met a threat such as it had never encountered.

Malachite shook his head, pale lips compressed into a straight line.

Quicksilver’s court fell mute. The ladies blanched so that their cosmetics stood out in vivid relief. The horror-stricken faces of the lords looked like wax above their vivid, colorful garments.

Feeling his hair stand on end, Quicksilver bent down, grasped Malachite’s shoulder, and pulled up, forcing his lieutenant to stand. “What force is it, Malachite? What force?”

“Oh, milord, it looks . . .” Malachite swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down on his long neck. “It looks like the force of the Hunter, milord, like the Hunter’s magical power has borne upon this your kingdom with unsheathed malice and, overcoming these ancient wards with his greater might, affixed his cannon against our hill.”

The silence of the court broke on a collective gasp from many throats. Looking up, Quicksilver saw alarm, surprise.

But most of all, he saw fear, fear of the Hunter, a dread creature of elven legend, said to punish the wrongdoers and collect the souls of criminals.

The Hunter was older and more magical than elves, a creature of primeval darkness and unbound might. In the old days, elves and humans both had worshiped him as a god. Whether he was such, Quicksilver couldn’t hazard.

But Quicksilver had met with the Hunter face to face, and knew the creature’s power to avenge, the creature’s strength to do justice upon evildoers.

The Hunter had visited this hill only once in living memory, and that for dread purpose.

Compared to the Hunter’s power, all of Quicksilver’s might and power and kingdom were as a child’s wooden dagger to a man’s sword.

Quicksilver pushed his features into a smile and straightened up. “Come, come, you must be mistaken.” He forced hearty heat into his voice and looked doubtingly at Malachite. “The Hunter? What would the Hunter, that great lord of justice, want with us?”

His voice fell—hollow—upon the still room.

Quicksilver’s father, Oberon, had once said that a quiet court was a sign of danger, that the flutter and gossip of Fairyland were a sign of health as telling in absence as the silencing of a beating heart.

Around the vast hall, nothing moved, and Quicksilver felt the gazes of his subjects resting on him like so many drawn daggers pointed at his chest.