Any Man So Daring (23 page)

“His enemies, not himself, stole your son. He came here only to rescue Hamnet and return him to you and thus spare you grief.”

While he spoke, he pulled Will and Will, following his words, stepped after that forceful, half-solid hand. It tugged him on an erratic path between trees and round misty ponds.

“There was a war in elvenland?” Will asked, for it had never crossed his mind that such ethereal kingdoms could fight with swords and hot-blooded armies.

Oh, he knew elves dueled now and then. But...a war? He tried to picture armies of magical beings, fighting and dying in the moonlit harvest fields, dying and killing amid mortal homes, and in homey mortal garden, invisible to all mortals but mages and Sunday children.

He shivered.

“A war that tore the hills of Avalon apart and spilled the blood of the noblest families,” Marlowe said. “Quicksilver’s kinsmen rebelled against him and formed an army of like malcontents. With it, they almost destroyed elvenland, almost won the throne from Quicksilver. Quicksilver’s victory in the end might have cost him his soul.”

On the last sentence, Marlowe’s voice descended, descended, till it was, once more, indistinguishable from the persistent murmur of the trees agitated by a lilac-scented breeze.

Marlowe’s image, likewise, flickered and dissolved - pale face, auburn hair, gray eye, coming unglued and floating in the wind like great bits of color and finally melting into the landscape, as though it had never been.

“Marlowe?” Will asked, and turned around and around. He saw nothing.

The whisper of the trees sounded now no more ominous than the sound of any wind-disturbed leaves.

“Marlowe?”

What madness was this? Had Will just slumbered here, while these visions did appear?

“Marlowe?”

No sound answered his call save a soft rustling and somewhere — to his left? — a gentle sobbing sound.

Sob? Who sobbed here, in this inhuman land?

The sounds were human — or elven -- and, Will would say, feminine.

“My lady?” he called, thinking of the young elf girl.

Young she was, no older than his Susannah, and how could she be expected to bear this barren desolation with fortitude?

She had run from him, when he’d told her what she did not wish to hear about her father. He’d ripped the veil of her filial illusion and made her face the truth without pretense.

He stumbled towards the sobbing, “Lady?” he asked.

A frisson of fear ran up his spine. He felt cold sweat trickle down his back.

Why answered she not?

He remembered her power crackling around him, the way she’d forced him to tell her the truth. He shivered.

So much power and so ill-controlled. She knew herself no more than Susannah knew herself — and was no more proficient with her magic than Susannah with her mending needle

Yet, he must go to her, for the girl was young, and therefore pliable. She’d brought Hamnet here and she’d know how to find the path to the castle, the path to Hamnet.

This thought hurried his feet. Cold and tired, he could only think of reaching Hamnet, of taking his son in his arms, of pulling him, with Will — by the witch’s magic and virtue that Will, himself, didn’t fully understand -- to the safe world of men.

Then would Will take Hamnet to Nan, and calm Nan’s fears. For Nan must be worrying over her boy even now. She must wonder where he was.

How long had Will and Hamnet been absent?

Was Will’s Nan sick with worry? Had the Lord Chamberlain’s men starved or dispersed for lack of the revenue from Will’s overdue play?

In these magical places, time was ever relative, and meant something other than in the world of men. Will had heard stories of people who danced away one night in the fairyhill and came home to find that all their relatives were dead, their village gone and themselves no more than a half-believed legend.

He shivered and hurried forward, towards the girl who could take him to Hamnet, who could get him out of the crux as soon as possible.

The trees ended abruptly in a circular clearing. There, sitting on what appeared to be a small pond, a woman sat crying.

Will stopped, startled. The woman was not the elf-princess, but Silver, the female aspect of the king of elves.

His breath caught in his throat. She was naked and, in the white, flat light of the crux yet managed to look irresistible. Light glimmered upon her pale skin and made her hair seem darker and softer.

So it was true. Will’s worst suspicions must be true. He took a step back. The deceitful creature was seeking once more to catch Will in the net of her passions and, to that end, had assumed this form to which she knew Will to be most vulnerable and most yielding.

Anger gave Will his breath back and blinded him to the Lady’s seductive beauty.

“Quicksilver,” Will said and, forgetting for the moment his tiredness, stalked into the clearing, fists clenched.

The woman looked up. Her face was pale and tear-ravaged and her naked flesh showed red marks, as though rude hands had grasped her unceremoniously here and there — on her pale breasts, her hips, her legs.

She saw Will and stared, as though she didn’t recognize him, or could not understand what he was doing here.

Her eyes widened in shock, her eyebrows rose. She whispered, “Will.”

Yet Quicksilver knew well that Will was here. They’d brawled on the beach. Had the elf already forgotten that?

“Do not play the fool, Quicksilver,” Will said. “You’ll not catch me with your tricks.”

The woman shook her head; she swallowed. “There is no Quicksilver here,” she said. “Only Silver.”

Will heard something much like a growl of frustration leave his lips. “Where Silver is, there Quicksilver lies, waiting but his opportunity to emerge.”

To his surprise, Silver stopped crying. The hands that had half-hid her face lowered. They hesitated in front of her breasts. Her face twisted in unreadable rictus. Her hands tightened into fists, they pounded her own thighs, while she threw her head back and laughed like a madwoman.

Half-scared, not understanding this at all, Will stared at her, unable to move.

Laughter slowed, then stopped, and the face that Silver turned towards him showed not a hint of mirth. “Oh, Quicksilver was here,” she said and pointed with trembling finger to a fine velvet suit, somewhat the worse for the wear, that lay all in a pile upon the ground near Will’s feet.

“Quicksilver was here, and here he left. Here has he left me, forsaken.”

Will looked at the suit, then at Silver. Ever before, when Will had watched the elf change aspects, Quicksilver had changed his clothes with his body.

Was this a more cunning trap than Quicksilver had thought? Or was it the truth? But for a truth, it was a strange truth, for a trap a
very
strange trap.

He thought of Marlowe’s ghost, his plaintive complaint that
they
were separate,
they
were now apart and apart
they
would die.

Were Quicksilver and Silver the
they
to whom Marlowe had referred?

But how could that be?

“You are one,” Will said. “How can you speak of being separated? How can this be? You are one.”

The Lady Silver stood, unfolding gracefully from her sitting position.

Standing above the water of the pond, naked, with her well-proportioned rounded body, her long black hair, she looked like one of those ancient goddesses that in olden times visited poets in their dreams.

Her body was white and pale, her skin so even that it appeared to shimmer with the subdued shine of pure silk. Her oval face, and within it symmetrically arranged generous red lips, a small nose and expressive, metallic silver eyes — all looked exquisite.

Even the ravages of tears had done nothing to erase the beauty of her high cheekbones, the gentle appeal of her eyes. Around the face, framing it and falling down the lady’s back, black hair like a rich velvet curtain hid some of her charms but none of the important.

Her soft, rounded breasts rose and fell with her every breath.

“We were one,” she said. “One was our birth, one our conception.

“But Quicksilver thought that I injured his chances to reign in fairyland and, as such, he pushed me further and further from reality, till I existed as no more than a dream, a feeling within his mind. At last, through the hard years of the war he pushed me out entirely, so that now it is only here, in the magic-filled crux, that I can find existence and a voice to speak.

“Yet, even here, he rejects me.”

With that, she put her head down again and cried once more, in loud, inconsolable sobs.

Will had almost loved this creature once and even now, weary and old as he was, he looked on her and couldn’t help his heart’s softening towards her plight.

“Lady,” he said. “Go to him. Find a way to become one with him once more. Or if not, become that which you are--you yourself alone--and be free.”

She looked up and shook her head, strewing her tears about in the wind. “I’ve tried to merge with him, but he will not allow it. For he believes he cannot be a king while I am half of him. The core of him resists me and wishes itself rid of my soft passion. I cannot live without him, nor do I think that he can live without me. His was the stronger aspect, though, and I do not think he has yet noticed his own lack.” She cried. “But he will, and when he does, it will be too late.”

Will sighed. He stepped towards the lady. He opened his arms. Her nude form fit itself within them, warm against his cold body.

He longed for her — for who could avoid longing for this creature of perfection?

But he knew where that slope led, and how slippery it could be. He knew she was not human, n matter how much she resembled one. Her silvery eyes were only the external and smaller mark of her oddity. The strangest thing, the thing that could not be changed and that made her not human, was her cold heart.

Not that she didn’t love. He’d seen the lady love him; he knew the lady had loved him true, her lust and her love mingled and conjoined like two fires burning together, inextricable.

He looked at her tear-filled silver eyes, turned to him in adoration, and he thought that perhaps she loved him yet, perhaps she loved him still.

But all her love was nothing to that love that his wife, his Nan, felt for him. Nan’s love was a steady fire, forged and tempered in the certainty of its own ephemeral nature, in the specter of death that would end both their lives.

How could a creature know love who knew not death?

And Lady Silver, even now, even dying, was a creature who did not understand death.

Death could not be compassed within the mind of an elf who could not age.

Fourteen years ago Will had made love to her, and yet here she was, here she remained, with no sign of aging, no sign of dissolution to her sweet features, her dark hair.

How could such a creature understand death that crept on humans, white hair by white hair and wrinkle by wrinkle?

No. His lips searched for hers, and they kissed, but it was the chaste kiss of siblings, and with it, Will realized how different a creature she was from humans.

He wondered where that other elf girl was, who’d brought Hamnet here. Had she gone, in search of Quicksilver to avenge herself on him?

And if so, would she find him?

Scene Twenty

A path in the forest, fog writhing in tendrils around trees and round the figure of Quicksilver who, looking addled, walks amid the trees — not in the path — completely naked, his long blond hair his only covering.

Q
uicksilver stumbled, and his feet hit hard against a root that made his toe bleed.

He stared, uncomprehending, at the magical blood, the sparkling blood of fairyland, dripping out to soak the rude root.

His body seemed as divided from him as he was from Silver. He felt numb, and distant and strange, as though his pain reached him at a remove, traveling a long time.

Staring at his foot, he waved his hand to stop the blood, yet he wondered why he should.

Let the blood flow. Let it all flow.

Why should not Quicksilver die now, painlessly, who’d already lost half of himself? Or why — why — could he not go home, to his palace and his wife, his home and his safety?

Quicksilver had determined this land was a trap for him. In his resentment, Proteus wished to murder Quicksilver. Therefore why stay?

No other king of fairyland would have done so.

But here, Quicksilver found he was not like other kings of fairyland. Though he’d pushed Silver away, though he’d given up a half of himself, yet he had certain responsibilities and certain feelings that would not be ignored.

Will’s face appeared in his mind: a Will who looked anxious and harried, puzzled by this one more unwonted intrusion of the supernatural into his ordered life.

Will, in whose life Quicksilver had intruded twice, once led by lust and once by need for help.

Will who hated fairykind and did not wish to become enmeshed in the elves’ plots of love and faceless treason, but whom the elves could not leave alone.

In this trap, Will had fallen also, and here he would remain till he found his son.