Any Man So Daring (29 page)

The black one laughed and reached for Caliban, and held him aloft, his hands under Caliban’s arms. “He’s but a small one. Still a cub. Tender, sure. In the days of yore did our fathers roast just such who lived in the caves of the isles. We’ve not eaten for a day and every creature in this cursed isle is damned with magic. I say we make him our dinner.”

Caliban shrieked again. His legs kicked maniacally but hit nothing. The centaurs laughed. Caliban’s eyes rolled into his head, and he foamed at the mouth, over his great canines, his huge fangs that bit at air. “I wish me,” he said. “I wish I’d never left my mother’s cave. Curse the Hunter that took me so, from my litter mates and from my mother with her warm fur and her soft tongue and her bountiful tit.”

Miranda, her heart beating with terror, her breath coming in short gasps, looked about her for a weapon.

These were Proteus's allies, were they not? How then could they be such savages?

But then, had they not planned to sell Proteus to the cursed, unrighteous king of fairyland?

And if they had, what did it mean? How could Proteus be so foolish that he knew not with whom he dealt?

But then, had centaurs not always been dual? Had they not, at their start, been gentle creatures who lived among men? And yet alcohol turned them to raging animals. When their kind got drunk at the marriage of Pirithous and Hippodamia, had they not, tasting human wine for the first time, become violent and brutal and tried to violate the bride at her own feast?

And had that not led to the war between centaur and Lapithae, which almost extinguished both races?

It was so, for Miranda’s father had taught her so, as he had taught her that the remnants of the centaurs’ decimated population had then immigrated to the south of Avalon and there become a permanent focus of rebellion, a permanent thorn on the side of the sovereign of fairyland.

And the Hunter did not lie.

“I say we skin him with my hunting knife,” the brown Chiron said. Speaking, he pulled a long knife from his belt, while his friend held Caliban, his arms back and held together, his fierce horned toes kicking at the air, his canines ineffectively snapping at nothing.

They might be joking. A coarse joke.

But they’d tasted wine.

Miranda dared not risk it. She pulled at the branch of a tree and broke it and, as the centaurs turned towards the sound, leapt into the clearing, screaming, “He is my servant. How dare you offend him?”

“Oh, better prey is afoot,” Hylas screamed, and dropped Caliban, then leapt over the moaning, prostrate troll, towards Miranda. “Better prey. I smell her, her hot female smell.”

The other centaurs hooted.

They surrounded Miranda. A pair of indelicate hands reached for her shoulders, more daring ones touched her breasts.

She lay about her with her stick, blindly hitting this one’s knees, the other one’s elbow.

She saw Caliban scurry away into the forest while the Centaurs yelped in pain from her blows and remained confused at her sudden attack.

She ran. She ran away into the forest, the sound of hooves fast upon her steps.

Even running she knew that they would catch her, for they ran like horses, faster than any elf.

“Help, oh, help me,” she screamed, hoping in vain that someone would hear and respond. But who could help her? Her father was in another world and knew not where she was. In this strange world, this island in a sea of magic, she had only a mortal whom she did not trust, a treacherous king who probably sought her death, and Proteus, upon whom she had laid a sleep charm. Would he wake at her voice? She feared not.

The centaurs neared and she could feel the hands of the foremost one upon her shoulders. She tried to pull away, she struggled, but the centaur was stronger than her and lifted her, as though she were a rag doll. He laughed at her distress.

“Oh, help me,” she screamed, but feared no one would.

Scene Twenty Seven

Will, sitting up. The stick, struggling beneath his shirt, looks like an additional, impatient heart. He sits up in the dark, swirling night of the crux, sees a lantern moving beyond the trees, and hears a woman scream.

W
ill thought it was Silver who screamed. The voice had Silver’s timbre, Silver’s tones.

His first impulse was to think that Silver had caused a distraction to scare him, to tempt him into coming to her.

But he thought of the lady as she’d been — nude, scared, afraid of her own shadow, afraid of a death that her almost-immortal mind could not understand but of which her halving felt like a prologue.

She could have had him back in that clearing. All it needed was a little more crying, a little more show of helpless grief, and Will would have been hers, faith, hers as he’d ever been.

But she’d not done it, and even as their lips touched, even as he’d tasted her intoxicating mouth of sweet wine, she’d stayed well apart from him — a sister, or a sweet friend from the days of childhood.

He’d wanted her, wanted her with an aching, physical desire, and any encouragement on her part would have given
him
to
her
.

But she’d not encouraged him.

And there, Will thought, sitting in the clearing, rubbing sleep from his foggy eyes, there was the rub, for perhaps the lady no longer wanted Will — Will with his receding hairline, his tired eyes.

But then, why was she screaming?

“Oh, help me,” the lady’s voice echoed.

Will stumbled to his feet and brushed away leaves that had stuck to his face and hair. He must look like a demon from the woods, he thought as, sleep-befuddled, he stumbled towards the light.

There was a woman. He could see that, in the light of the swaying lantern held by a creature that was half-horse half-man.

Half horse, half man. Three of them. Centaurs. Three centaurs and one woman, and one of the centaurs held the woman with his powerful arms, while another tore her green dress, exposing her soft body.

But the woman was no woman. Scarcely a woman. A girl at the edge of womanhood, the same age as Will’s Susannah at home.

Small breasts, narrow hips, innocent eyes and fragile shoulders.

Miranda, the princess of fairyland,
Will thought. This was the girl who’d run from him when he’d tried to tell her the truth about her father.

And now she faced much worse prospects than the truth.

For the centaur who’d torn her dress off was feeling her white body with large, careless hands — huge hands, larger than any human's, than any elf's hands, and so unfeeling that they left red marks on her soft skin wherever they touched.

To Will’s brain it was as though they were offering violence to his own daughter.

Madness overtook him, madness and that desperation of a righteous man facing evil he can’t understand.

“Spawn of a forgotten monster,” he said, stepping from between the trees, "let the girl go.”

His anger spoke through his voice, his anger filled his voice with power. Magic. He’d forgotten that here he had magical power and was too irate to stop himself from using it.

The very air crackled with magic, like the living air before a storm. He felt magical power, generated within his mind, crackle between him and his enemies.

Magical power hit the centaurs like a wave. They recoiled from the force that slammed them, and they stepped all out of order and almost fell.

They stepped back, and put up magical shields.

Will could feel their shields go up; he could feel their power blocking his.

Oh, but their power was no match for his
anger
. And they were drunk. He could smell it in their breath and in their presence, a revolting smell of liquor mingled with the stink of horse sweat and horse hair.

“Back,” he said, and threw all the power of his anger into the word. “Back you dark stallions of the night, you nightmares who gallop in flesh and blood through maiden’s fears.”

Each of his words seemed to push them back, each of his words to impel them farther away towards the fringe of trees and the darkness beyond.

The black one, who held the lantern, screamed, “How can you have such power, you who are mere mortal?”

How could he? Was he still a mere mortal? Where was the line, invisibly drawn, in the scales of the universe, the measure of the crux? At what point would he cease being Will, a mortal playwright, earning his living in London through the honest labor of his ink-stained hands? When would magic cling to him like a plague, cutting him off from the world of mortals and the heaven he could hope for hereafter?

At another time he would have panicked, but now it didn’t matter.

The girl stood where the centaurs had dropped her, pale and scared-looking, the marks of their hands still standing out too vividly upon her smooth skin.

“Back, vermin, back, and never bring your coarse desires near this maiden more. Go away.”

At his words, the centaurs went, dropping all pretense of civilized retreat and stumbling one over the other as they galloped into the forest.

Will was left alone with the elf maiden.

He looked at her and marked her chalk-white face, her wide-open, unseeing eyes, her hands slowly covering her small breasts.

“Lady,” he said. “Lady, are you well?”

She shook her head, looking bewildered. In that movement was more than Will wanted to know, more than Will wanted to think about.

For, despite her narrow waist and her high breasts and her beauty such that it could break the human heart, this elf girl was just that — a girl, a child, a little one lost and far away from her home.

The violence had taken her by surprise, shocked her as violence can only shock those whose life has been protected and coddled from birth.

“They are all gone,” Will said, in the same voice in which he used to reassure Hamnet after his episodic nightmares. “They are all gone. You are safe, lady.”

His hands, as gentle as his voice, pulled up her ripped dress, careful to touch only the fabric and not the soft flesh beneath.

Holding her dress up in front of her, he willed it knit again in a single piece as though it had never been split.

“You are safe, lady.”

Now she turned to him wide, scared eyes, more scared than they’d been when the centaurs had her in their rude grip.

She opened her eyes wide and fixed, and a small wrinkle of incomprehension divided her forehead. “Safe?” She asked. “But safe how, when it is all a lie?”

“A lie?” Will asked.

She nodded. “A lie. Every word, every legend has been a lie. Fair is not good, and foul is not evil. I am lost in a world with no clear signs, and I know not which way to turn.”

Faint moonlight-silvery tears chased down her pale face. She looked more like a child than ever.

Oh, what mattered if she were elven or human? She was a child and Will would protect her.

Scene Twenty Eight

The same clearing. Miranda looks at Will, bewildered.

M
iranda read in the mortal’s face -- in his blank eyes, his half-frown -- that he understood her not at all.

How could he not? Knew he not the legends, where the good were always beautiful?

She looked at the mortal with his wrinkled, ugly face. Why didn’t he
understand
her?

He was good. He’d been good to her and rescued her from the foul centaurs. He’d done this by using magic despite his terror at the very thought of being magical -- that terror she’d first seen on his face at the beach.

Why had he done it, but for love of her?

And why for love of her when she’d so cruelly turned her back on him when he’d tried to get her to help him — and had manipulated him with magic, too, and made him tell her that which he didn’t wish to say.

Therefore, the mortal was good and — look at him — his wrinkling skin, his faded curls, already receding from the broad forehead. Look at his stature, so much smaller, less imposing than either Proteus or Quicksilver. Look at his shoulders, half-folded in upon themselves.

How could he be good?

Were this a story, his looks alone would make him the villain. Yet, he was kind and good. Why were stories written, if they lied so?