All Night Awake (36 page)

Oh, what a terrible land, worse than anything that she could have imagined. How lost she was. How much she wanted to see her lord. Oh, that Ariel could cry, that her tears might warm this frozen place and bring a living ocean to this world of shifting nothingness.

How cold the shifting shapes made her feel. And her lord had been here almost three days. Lived he yet?

She must find him. She must see his sweet face again and drink the words of his sweet address.

Tattered rags of trees with things like moss or mourning grey cloth hanging from them brushed across Ariel’s face, moved by an unfelt wind.

Sometimes, through the shadows of trees and the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw Quicksilver. But running forward, through the shadows and the shades, she found him not.

Like a rainbow, forever receding from the reaching hand, so her lord to her straining heart.

Where was he now, for whom her heart longed?

She wanted to apologize for all her misdeeds—for her distrust of him, her assumption that he had left her to disport himself in London.

He’d left to defend Fairyland. He’d done what any noble king would have done. That he’d kept it from her and would not let her help him was no more than the excess of his love and the trembling insufficiency of his self-confidence. Quicksilver had, by virtue of his division, an over sensitivity to what others might think and a tender, overgrown conscience that would not allow him to have others risk themselves in his steed, or take any part of his responsibility, though his shoulders should crack from it.

His infidelity, if it had been such, was probably no more than a symptom of the disturbance in the cosmos, the swaying winds of feminine alarm.

And if not, then it was Ariel’s fault, for so wishing Silver out of sight until Silver’s desires burst from their bounds and became uncontrollable in their swollen need.

Ariel walked here and there. She wished to call for Quicksilver, but the cold seemed to steal her voice. The cold was everywhere, came from everywhere at once and leached not only heat but life itself from her body.

Thus would death come, she understood, a sad death—a nothing, a final whimper in a frozen landscape.

The air smelled musty like the grave, like a never-inhabited womb, like all that might have been but never was.

She sighed as she thought that she might have been Quicksilver’s loving queen, but had not been such, and in her barren unlove, her love and her royalty belonged, rightly, in this land.

Her foot caught on something. She fell forward and the hands she put forth to save herself from hurt gripped solid shoulders and silky hair, which did not shift upon her holding them.

Quicksilver.

She knelt beside him. He wore white velvet, or perhaps the magical cold of this place had leeched color from his garments. All in white, he lay on his side, curled upon himself, his eyes closed, his blond hair spread out behind him.

For a moment, blinking, Ariel thought him dead and her heart shrank upon itself, clutching upon grief and mourning over the love she’d betrayed and could never right again.

Then Quicksilver stirred. He opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

He stood up. He put his arms out to her. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

“I thought you dead,” she said and put a hand out, to assure herself of his living reality. She touched his cold chest that yet moved, in search of breath.

He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength yet remains to me. It is not much and it might not last long.” He unfolded himself and looked down on her, his face set and grave and regal.

Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss green eyes so intent.

He had never looked so much like a king.

Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips, and after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold.

Quicksilver had lingered too long in Never Land.

“Oh, milady,” he said as their lips parted. “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch of the truth of all her features.

He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her, that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days—nay, in years.

Quicksilver raised one eyebrow. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him. As though her mirth warmed him, in his cold state in this desolate land.

She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I . . . I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demirounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

“Because I’m done being a fool, milord, and I only wish . . . I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

“Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done . . .”

“I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. I know somehow you freed Sylvanus. And I know you made love to the human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

“And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked. His face looked even paler than when she’d first seen it, his eyes wide with horror. “Half my people are dead, and you hate me
not
?”

Ariel shook her head and embraced him. How cold he was, how cold, how icy, how impervious to touch. Like snow, new-fallen, or like old ice on a cliff face.

“How can I hate him who is another half of me?” she asked. “Whose folly is, ever, but a reflection of my own?”

She wished she could share with him the heat of her love, the pulse of her life.

But she could not.

“And now we’ll die here,” Quicksilver said, his voice as cold as his body. “And Sylvanus shall have sway over the world and all in it.”

But Ariel touched the marble-cold cheek, the icy hands, the cold, cold lips.

“No. No. We have hope. We have hope still. There’s Will Shakespeare free. He’ll find a way to set things aright.”

But she knew her own voice echoed with doubt, and she saw doubt in Quicksilver’s disbelieving look.

Scene 40

A London market, sprawling in all directions from a central point. Chickens and poultry, pigs and all manner of livestock are sold alive and dead, their feet bound or their carcasses swaying in the air. Women display baskets full of fresh-baked bread or farm-grown vegetables. At a corner of the market, horse dealers assemble. And there, Will wanders, with the look of a man who has shopped long and hard and found not what he sought.

T
o go to Deptford, Will must buy a horse.

But never having done it, he found it heavy going.

Every horse he saw looked half-dead or too expensive. Examining a half-dead one, Will sighed.

Kit—and Sylvanus—must be in Deptford by now.

Perforce, Kit had meant to involve Will in Sylvanus’s plan, and then, re-belling after his son’s death, Kit had entreated Will not to go.

Else, why would Kit have cautioned Will against Kit again begging him to go? Why else, but that he feared the wolf, within his body, would call Will to Deptford again.

But why Deptford? Did Kit mean to kill the Queen there?

Will must stop it. He was the last hope of humans and elves.

“He looks lame,” Will said, staring at the nag in front of him, a grey creature of indeterminate age, with patches upon its hide that looked like the discolorations of mold.

“Lame?” the dealer asked, standing beside Will and speaking so loudly that the whole fair would hear. “You insult me so? You say that of my horse? Why, he was only owned by an old parson, who rode him only to his church to preach, on Sundays, and the rest of the time was he kept stabled, and fed the best, and daily taken care of.”

Will wrinkled his nose. The beast smelled diseased, too, a pungent, acrid smell. And its lower legs were all covered in mud, though the legs of the other horses in the enclosure were clean.

Will was not so naive that he didn’t know the trick of covering a horse’s legs in mud to make it look hale and sound, where there might be deformity or injury.

But he’d asked about every other horse in this fair that would serve his turn, and he could not find better—not among those that he could afford with the five pounds remaining in his purse.

At this rate, he’d not make it to Deptford, nor save the magical pillars of the world from their doom. At this rate, the world would be lost to Sylvanus for lack of a horse.

“Master, this horse will do you proud. You’ll will him to your grandchildren, yet.”

Will ground his teeth. At least the horse hide, he would will to his grandchildren.

Did Will look so much the credulous fool that all felt they must make up outrageous stories and try them on him?

“How much for the horse?” he asked.

The dealer bowed and smirked. “For you, master, for you five pounds.”

And for everyone else two pounds? Will wondered if all the prices told him in this fair were like that, many times more than they should be.

Will’s grandfather had left twenty pounds in his will and had been considered a reasonably well-off man.

How could a fearful nag cost five pounds? Oh, all these men must be trying to cozen Will. He must look innocent as a mewling babe. No wonder even Marlowe had sought to cozen him.

And for Marlowe—to save Marlowe, to save the elves that Will had never trusted—Will would spend all the money he had left from what Southampton had given him? What would he do then, without the money?

“Will you take him, master?” the horse dealer asked, untying the horse from the post that held it in place—though the horse showed no inclination to roam.

The beast turned pitiful eyes to Will, as though asking for an end to its sufferings.

Will would very much like to see
his
own sufferings end, too.

If he paid for this horse, if he paid now, if he paid the whole five pounds in his leather purse, he’d be back where he was a couple of days ago, with no money to eat, with no money to return to his family in defeat.

No, no. Let Marlowe kill the elves, let Marlowe and Sylvanus take over the world. Let the die be cast and all come out as it would.

What could Will do anyway, unschooled in magic, against such great evil?

Will was a poor prospect for saving the world from a magical creature, a demigod. To own the truth, he couldn’t save himself from penury.

Will shook his head at the dealer, and started walking away, amid the crowd.

“Best poultry in London, buy it here,” a woman yelled, waving a live chicken, its feet bound, in front of Will’s face.

Will dodged the chicken’s beak. The chicken’s cackle rang like a trumpet of doom.

What mattered it to Will who ruled the universe—old pagan deities, or Sylvanus, or the God of Christians, or even the uncaring, amoral deities of Marlowe’s plays?

Surely Sylvanus couldn’t be any more vicious than the blind woman who cut the thread of life.

Yet in his mind, he saw the child, Kit’s son.

Whatever Kit might be guilty of, Will couldn’t believe he’d committed that murder willingly.

And what creature would force the hand of a father against his own son? Sylvanus had done it. If such a creature ruled the world—no, wove the world anew in its image—who would be safe? What world would this be, but measureless hell?

Will touched the coins in his purse, the coins that would allow him to go back to Stratford and see his son and daughters again.

But how would they be when Will got there? What if in Deptford, in Mistress Bull’s house, the final battle were won by the wrong being? What good would it do to Will to ignore it?

Would he not be like those who, in the time of Noah, feasted and drank, married and were given away in marriage, only to be swallowed by the impending flood?

Like Noah, Will was the only man, the only mortal who knew of the cataclysm coming.

And unlike Noah, Will wished to save all of the world.

Pray, how could he do this by hiding in his room and writing?

How could he do that by shying away from people who thought him a fool and allowing them to go on believing him so?

And how could he get to Deptford?

Will took a deep breath, tainted with manure and the smell of spoiled meat.

“Lace,” a peddler yelled, walking past, his wears spread across his arm. “Lace such as should grace your lady’s petticoats.”

His lady back in Stratford needed no lace for her petticoats. But she did need her life, and she did love her children, and by all that was holy, Will would keep
that
for his Nan.