Any Man So Daring (8 page)

“He?” the woman’s eyebrows rose, startled, above her dark eyes.

“The Lord Quicksilver, the king of elf land. He is a dual creature, able to assume now the aspect of a man now that of a woman and, man and woman, both truly. The Lady Silver, his female aspect, she once loved me well, and maybe Quicksilver loved — loves me too. I much fear he did, maybe does.”

“You fear? You have her love? His love? And you come to me? What can I do for you?” The woman looked outraged, vaguely insulted. She set her hand on the table, and made as if to rise. “As the good book would say, whence am I worthy to receive my Lord?”

And now Will’s anger rose, red-hot, and he trembled as he clenched his fists and stood from the table, facing the woman no longer ashamed, no longer embarrassed, no longer fearing her strange and antic powers. “Oh, curse that love and the one that gave it. Curse his interference in my life. Curse that twisted, strange affection that took Marlowe and, in a fight for the kingdom of fairyland, like a flame consumes a candle thus consumed him.

“King Quicksilver used Marlowe, nay, used all of us like a puppeteer uses the puppets he holds. When his brother, his deposed brother, the past king of fairyland, tried to recover the throne, Quicksilver used us, his mortal slaves, to defend him. And like slaves, nay, like sticks and stones that children play with in a counting game, he threw us into the fray caring not who wielded the fatal blade and who was cut — dead with the blade through his left eye, the blood tingeing his well-cut doublet and that collar of the finest linen of which he was so proud.” Will pounded his fists together upon the table, a violent slam that made the table shake. “Thus died Marlowe, the Muses’ darling, the best poet ever to bestride a stage and reach for the stars.” He swallowed. “Thus died all the countless poems he would have penned in the remaining years of his natural cycle, the children of his genius — all perfect, all fire and air — so died they, with him, broken, throttled, buried in a paper’s grave in Deptford and forgotten by all. All this -- all -- for the cursed elf’s love.”

There were tears in his eyes, and through them the cottage looked weird and distorted like a drowned landscape, like a scene seen from far off and only half-understood. A sob cut his speech, unexpected, like a visitation from outside himself. “And thus I got to live, I — unworthy. But my life is shadowed by Marlowe’s ghost and when I try to write it is his words, those great, echoing words that made the stage tremble, that drip upon my page like echoes of his blood. And thus, miserable, I, have sold my friend’s blood to make a living.” He realized tears were falling down his face, unashamed, like the great crying of a woman or a child. He turned his face away from the woman and sat down.

Anger had left him. Fear had abandoned him. Nothing remained to him but this feeling of having run far and long and now having come to some sort of wall, some sort of end. He could go no further.

A great sob tore through his lips, shaking him.

When he looked back at the woman, he couldn’t read her expression.

She was looking on him, frowningly, not as though she disapproved of what he’d said. More like someone evaluating a piece of work.

Thus had Will’s father looked, when staring at a newly sewn glove. Thus did Nan look after planting flowers in a row, when looking at their arrangement.

Thus this woman now looked on Will, her eyes squinting down, her gaze fixed.

She was going to tell him that there was no ghost. She was going to tell him that Marlowe had died and did not walk the land as did shades that had some work to do, some wrong to right.

She was going to tell him this and mock him and send him on his way like a truant child.

Will found himself longing for such mocking. It was a consummation devoutly to be hoped for. Then could he believe that his work was his own and no one else’s. Then could he shrug that feeling of steps that doubled his own and actions that shaded his every movement — that feeling of words not his own falling in burning sentences upon his page.

“You’ve done well enough from his words, have you not?” the witch asked. “He wanted to give you his words, and you’ve profited from them. Why would you wish it otherwise?”

“It is his words, then?” Will asked, as his heart sank and his blood, seemingly, lost all heat and force. “It is his words I have?”

“His words were a gift, magical, come to him from Merlin, his ancestor. Marlowe willed them to you, with his dying breath. They are yours now. Go home and live contented.” The woman looked at Will, the marks of her former outrage still upon her.

It was, Will thought, as if she believed he was refusing a gift other men would kill to have.

He felt his gorge rise. “Be contented? How can I? When I can’t write my own words? When the sentences that come from my brain and trickle upon the page through my hand are not my own?

“Be contented, you say. I might as well be dead, then, and Marlowe alive, for when a man’s good words cannot be heard nor a man’s good wit understood, it strikes a man more dead than great reckoning in a small room.”

The woman shook her head. “The gift has cost him dearly, for his ghost has been chained by his words and thus banned from the heaven or hell his actions merited. The kindest thing you can do is to accept gracefully what was so dearly purchased.”

“It is his ghost?” Will said. “It is then truly his ghost that dogs my steps? That breathes down my neck? That writes through my pen?”

“His ghost, aye,” the woman said. “And his ghost craves a word with you.”

She waved a hand, and lifted it, the little finger wiggling, and set it down again, the edge of it outward, like a knife cutting the still, warm, homey air.

There beside the great bench at which Will sat, Marlowe stood.

Marlowe, still well attired and carefully combed, his auburn hair pulled back and tied with a blue satin ribbon.

One almond-shaped gray eye looked at Will in great amusement, the other dripped gore and blood, to which Marlowe paid no more mind than if it were tears.

Will felt horror grip him, expelling air from his lungs.

Marlowe might have been alive, there beside Will.

The ghost got a lace kerchief from his ghostly sleeve and with it dabbed at the blood upon his ghostly cheek.

It smiled, a ghastly, blood-stained smile, and said, softly, “Good morrow, Will.”

Scene Five

The palace of fairyland as people disperse, yet celebrating the conclusion of the long civil war. After the horrendous spectacle just witnessed, friend leans on friend and one holds the other’s arm, each congratulating the other. Girls and youths whirl in mad cavalcade amid the trees and around the execution block, dancing as though to unheard music. A young male elf declaims a war poem about Quicksilver’s feats. Quicksilver stands atop the marble stairs of his palace and watches Proteus vanish amid the trees. Malachite approaches.

“L
et me follow him, Milord,” Malachite whispered, his hot breath tickling Quicksilver’s ear, his gaze fixed on Proteus's golden hair, Proteus's retreating back. “Let me follow him for you.”

“Who would you follow?” Quicksilver asked, startled, called back from his contemplation of Proteus and of the great ill he could be thought to have done to Proteus.

What did Proteus think of Quicksilver?

He’d killed Proteus's father, and he could give no man back his life. No elf either. All of Quicksilver’s magic, all of the hill’s might, could not restore the life of an insect that had once buzzed through a long summer afternoon, much less the life of a being with thought, like a man or an elf.

Wherefore, then, should Quicksilver take the life he could not give? From whence came his right to do so?

Yet Vargmar was a traitor, and as a traitor he’d deserved to die.

Yet Vargmar was his uncle, and as his uncle, Quicksilver had owed him respect.

Yet Vargmar had done war on Quicksilver.

Yet had Quicksilver brought the war about through his own, immense failings? Through his divided self that failed to attach the loyalty of the warrior male elves.

He was lost in this thought and feeling still the discomfort he’d felt when the axe had severed Vargmar’s neck and spilled the noble blood to seep into the raw wood of the block.

Quicksilver felt a great sadness, as though he’d lost something as irretrievable as life itself. His innocence? His peace of mind?

He thought of that image of Silver he’d seen before his eyes. Silver fleeing him? But why should he lament that? Had he not, always, wished he could cease being a double being, at war with himself?

Out on the block, the body had already twinkled away into the nothing of a noble elf who’d been condemned to eternal death and barred from the wheel of reincarnation that was elves’ recompense for their exclusion from the paradise of mortals.

But the thoughts, the unease, lingered in Quicksilver’s heart and mind.

And then, Malachite’s suggestive whisper, his offer to follow--

“Whom? Whom do you wish to follow?” Quicksilver asked, turning to look into Malachite’s dark green eyes.

Malachite narrowed his eyes. “Proteus, milord.”

“Proteus?”

“He’s gone away from this festive gathering,” Malachite said.

Quicksilver looked around at the swirling, festive mass of elves, who celebrated the end of the war.
 

Girls sang and smiled and twirled with youth in improvised dance. They were relieved peace had come and that they’d survived the strife. But Proteus might think else.

“He’s taken himself way from the scene of his father’s death,” Quicksilver said. “To mourn in peace. Can you blame him?”

“Aye, I can blame him for mourning a traitor,” Malachite said, his voice cutting.

And what could Quicksilver retort to that? For it was true, as it was true that Proteus’s wounded pride, injured spirit, might lead him wrong.

But Quicksilver was not wholly ready to burn the branch where he’d cut the root.

The last glimmer of Proteus's pale hair, the last movement of his dark velvet suit vanished amid the trees not so far away, and Quicksilver sighed.

Maybe Proteus should be followed, and saved from any passing thought any folly, any youthful mistake.

But if Malachite followed Proteus and caught him at fault, if Malachite knew that Proteus had even weighed treason in the scales of his mind, how could Quicksilver forgive Proteus's straying and consider it normal of a youth so wronged by fate?

No. If Malachite knew, if anyone in the kingdom knew that Proteus contemplated treason, then Quicksilver must have Proteus executed.

For, did not, even now, Quicksilver’s enemies say that Quicksilver was too soft and yielding, the female half of his nature making him less than a warrior king should be?

“I will follow him,” Quicksilver said. “I will.”

Malachite stepped back, startled. “Milord--”

“No Malachite. Cease your strife, for you cannot win. The war is over and we must return to family and hearth and the burdens of peace. I will go. He is my relative and my responsibility.”

And, before loyal Malachite could protest, Quicksilver slipped away, amid the crowd, following the magical trail of Proteus’s presence — away to the depths of Arden forest, where the sounds of celebration and joy echoed only distant and diminished.

Behind him, Quicksilver thought he heard the slow and steady hoof-beats of centaurs.

But he turned back once, twice, and he saw no one following him.

Scene Six

The witch’s homey kitchen, where Will stares, horror-stricken, at Marlowe’s ghost. Marlowe smiles, sits down.

T
here Marlowe stood, there beside Will, to his left — wearing the blue suit in which he had died. The knife that had pierced his left eye had left it bloody and gory. Blood trickled from it like tears, dripping upon Marlowe’s fine clothes.

Yet, withal, Kit’s remaining gray eye stared mockingly from beneath a perfectly arched russet eyebrow, and his small mouth, with its protruding lower lip that gave Kit the look of a permanent pout, twisted in a wry smile between his thin moustache and his sculpted beard. “Hallo, Will,” he said and stepped, mincingly towards the table. “And hello good mother.” He bowed to the woman.