Any Man So Daring

Any Man So Daring

Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Any Man So Daring © 2003 by Sarah A. Hoyt

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY
 
10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-61824-040-8

To my brother, Alvarim Marques de Almeida

Prologue

Scene: A stage made of shadow and roiling cloud. In the backdrop a massive castle stands, built of rock so dark that it absorbs all light to itself and thus appears to radiate darkness in a halo about itself.

The stage faces a space vast enough to contain the universe and hide within it all the possible worlds. In that space, darkness deepens, a rich velvet darkness, alive like the secret dark of the womb, full of movement and expectation.

An uncertain flicker of that which can scarce be called light glimmers, then disappears again, as if it had never been.

Vague rustles echo, the sound of beings — men? — turning and shifting. Myriad small noises merge into a silence louder than any sound.

It is a silence that makes one hold one’s breath, as one’s ear strains to listen to that which can’t be heard: the scurrying of thoughts, the gliding of time.

Out of the dark castle, a being strides. He looks like a man, with short, curly black hair and classical features. Taller and more beautiful than human ever was, perfect as unmarred crystal and twice as cold, he looks immortal as a stone or a cliff is immortal -- immune to death and life both, and permanent in its indifference.

He wears a velvet suit, after the Elizabethan fashion -- doublet with broad shoulders that narrows to cinch his waist, and hose that outline the muscular contours of his legs. Beneath the hose, stockings and well-cut slippers show. All of it is the dark red of old blood, almost black as it shimmers under diffuse stage lights.

In the middle of his chest, where his heart should be, a black, gaping nothingness throbs and roils, as if all the nights of the world were there collected and from there reached to haunt the mortal mind.

Tendrils of something rise from him. Were they visible, they might resemble vapor rising from ice exposed to the sun.

But these tendrils are invisible. They can only be felt. Their expanding reach, beyond the creature’s presence, is the searching out of fear, the spreading of dread.

For in this something -- the creature’s trail -- mingle both the divine cold of godlike indifference and that assured, immutable immortality which mere humans fear more than death.

In his hand he carries a hunting horn. He steps, softly, to center stage, his steps small, controlled, as though he fears someone or something. But what can a creature such as this fear?

The posture becomes him ill. It is too human for such a thing as he.

“There’s no harm done,” he says, and looks furtively towards where the audience sits, like a school child in a crowded room, striving to remember his lessons for strangers. He looks from beneath a straggle of dark hair that almost covers his eyes, a gaze all too human, all too frightened.

“No harm.” He looks over his shoulder, as his hand clenches, white-knuckled, upon his hunting horn. “Have I done harm? Can one like me do harm and make the mistakes to which human clay is prey?”

He shakes his head and looks bewildered. “It is not possible. No. I’ve done nothing but in care of her. Of her, my dear one, my ... daughter.”
 

A smile softens his expression, but he lifts his fingers to touch his own lips as though perplexed that such a human expression should dwell there.
 

He lowers his head, so that his hair obscures his eyes. A furtive look veils his features, a furtive expression returns to cloud them, like a tenderness afraid of owning itself.

He frowns at his dark-red boots for a breath, then looks up and audibly inhales.

As if he cannot believe the words his own lips form, he speaks again.

“She is ignorant of who she is, naught knowing of whence I am. She thinks I am her father and nothing more. She thinks she is my daughter, nothing else.” He shakes his head again. “More to know never meddled with her thoughts.

“Her mother was a piece of virtue and her true father was the king of fairyland. She was his only heir, no worse issued. Her father, though, a wretch, scarcely deserving of the name, sold kingdom and soul to the dark forces that ever lurk at the edge of magic — and gave himself, indeed, to me, to my immortal, dark power.” He looks at the audience as he gestures with his free hand towards the space where his human heart would be, if he had one. It is a gesture of explanation and exculpation both — explaining that he is what he is and apologizing for it, in one. He clears his throat, a sound like thunder. He shuffles his feet upon the stage and from his soles issues sustained howling, like the winds upon distant mountain fastnesses.

“I myself am the Hunter, the justicer everlasting, the punisher, the avenger, the supernatural sword that cuts through the heart of malice and slices off the head of ill-intent.” He shrugs and opens both his arms this time, as though to signify ‘tis not his fault that he is what he is.

“And thus I collected Sylvanus, King of fairyland, whose several crimes cried to the heavens for vengeance.

“But with him he brought the child, a small babe, untouched by evil, innocent of envy. What was she to me? Or I to her? What could I do with such a flower that even the exhalations of ancient evil could not touch?

“And she... oh, a cherub. She did smile, infused with a fortitude from heaven. What could I have done? I took her as my own, and here I raised her.” With a gesture, he shines a light on the tall, impossibly perfect castle rising atop a black mountain. “Here on the far borders of fairyland, where neither elf nor man would seek her out nor disturb the perfect innocence of her childhood. Here, where no one would touch or hurt her, here I guided her first steps, comforted her crying and harvested her smiles, greedily, as the patient fisherman who waits besides the treasure-bearing oyster to steal the shining pearl. Thus I’ve learned the gentle heart of a human parent and been father and mother to a frail elf child

“But living creatures cannot long dwell in my sphere of justice and vengeance. Without even knowing of them, she longs for her own kind.

“And I, myself--” Again, he looks unnaturally bashful. “I feel a sadness, a desire to be again the unburdened beast I once was, who knew nothing but swift revenge and swifter cutting, and feared for no one, not even himself.” His immortal hand shakes as he lifts the horn. “Now I do fear for her, as I’ve never feared for whole countries, entire worlds, for rich civilizations or sparkling cities. I fear the blade that might sever a single one of her shining hairs, and more, I fear the evil — my own and others — that can tempt her to immortality darker and deeper than any death.

“For the sake of her frailty am I made frail, and for the sake of her fear do I tremble.

“Months on end have I put off the evil hour when I must perforce part with her, but the evil hour is now upon me. It will not pass without a pang, a pain and a rebirth.

“Like any enchanted princess, my own Miranda must awaken from her dream of innocence and relearn the ways of her kind, and in their world risk virtue and life in that struggle from which no warrior emerges unscathed.

“Yet the fairyland to which I must send her back roils in blood and tosses in strife, in the jaws of civil war, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

“And still it is her hour and she must go, to happiness or doom as chance may fall. For she is grown and within her stirs the need for a companion to her life, the need for her own path in the changing world.

“As within me stirs the hunger to forget who I was these fourteen years and return to my simple, brutish, clean ways. My rounds of vengeance have long softened their visitation upon the troubled world. And that, as all perverting of the natural order, brings flourishing of evil in its trail.”

He turns to the audience. From the amorphous dark comes not a sound: rather an amplification of hard-held silence — a composition of held breaths, of fast-beating hearts, of pulses rushing, rushing, in mad expectation.

To them, the Hunter speaks, softly, in a confidential stage whisper. “Something I must contrive -- a way to help my princess to happiness and ease.” He nods at his own words. “Yes, this much I will do. The hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee open thine ear. Obey and be attentive. For here will unfold events to amaze your eye, astound your mind and stun your reason.

“Listen. Watch. It is a story as old as the world and as new as the womb of tomorrow.”

He lifts his horn to his mouth and blows. What emerges is not sound, but sudden wind, a flash of blinding light.

The audience sighs, an expectant sigh. Its sigh trembles and transmutes, flutters and changes till it becomes the sounds of a bustling city waking up.

Hunter and castle vanish. The stage light grows brighter, and a different scene emerges from the darkness.

Scene One

Early morning, in Elizabethan London. Down the myriad narrow streets, bordered by five-story-tall wooden houses, foot traffic scurries and carriage traffic lumbers. Ox-carts, laden with the produce and goods needed for the daily life of the teeming city, creep at an almost imperceptible pace. The occasional messenger on horseback, impatient of obstruction in his way, shouts and lays about him with his whip. From busy workshops, the clang of metal, the knocking of wood, the untiring noise of work reverberates, an unnoticed background to daily life. Though it be early, taverns are full, and from them emerges the clacking of cups, the unruly noise of drinking songs. The gleeful shrieks of children at play, the admonitions of their vigilant mothers weave joyful notes through this tapestry of sound. All is busy, all resounds with life in London -- save, it seems, a soberly dressed man who sits upon a narrow stool in a second-floor rented room. The room itself looks like a hundred other rooms let to respectable burghers throughout London: its furnishings compass bed and chair, clothes-storing trunk with ceramic basin and ewer atop. The only added thing is the narrow table at which the man sits, with paper and ink stone and newly sharpened quill. He is a middle aged man, but yet good-looking, his hair receding in front but curling over his collar in the back. His face is oval, his lips small, his nose well-shaped. He wears a dark wool suit, well cut but no more so than the suits of any middle-class man. From his sleeves and collar a correct amount of white lace peeks, and the single golden ring in his left ear is no ostentatious jewel. But it is his eyes — golden and as intent as the eyes of a falcon intent on the prey — that give him distinction and make him memorable. Those eyes, surrounded by the dark circles of a sleepless night, glare at a blank piece of paper. His name is William Shakespeare, and he is the best-loved playwright in London.