All Night Awake (70 page)

Ariel’s legs hurt. She’d already walked so much -- miles and miles, in the hot, humid weather.

Her feet hurt too, within their thin slippers. And though she tried to keep herself magically veiled, so that common people wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t look at her, would take no notice of her white pearl-embroidered dress, her complexion, her hair, her all-too regular features, people still saw her, still noticed her.

Her magic was too weak, too frail, here, near the big city. It hunkered like a frozen beast within Ariel’s heart, and quivered with fear at the looming darkness of the city.

Shivering, her arms around herself, Ariel avoided the hands of men and the stares of women, as she made for the tavern -- The Devil’s Ape -- its sign painted with an ape with horns and a forked tail.

The door to the tavern proper stood wide open. Inside it was dark, shady and cool, though outside the summer sun raged.

Looking around, Ariel found Will, though it took her two hard stares to convince herself this was indeed the proud youth that Silver had loved and Quicksilver doted upon ten years ago.

The ten years had dealt roughly with Will, and, indeed, he looked as old as Nan, though she was his elder by seven years or so. His hair had receded so that his forehead loomed, monstrous, and his body no longer looked as trim and lean as it had all those years ago when he’d daily walked the forest paths of Arden.

She approached the table, slowly. Would he remember her? Did he know where Quicksilver was? And would he tell her?

Approaching, she noticed that he had a plate of boiled mutton in front of him, and cut bits from it and ate them with his knife, in measured bites.

The mutton gave off the faint reek of meat kept too long in summer, and Will looked not like he enjoyed it.

When her shade -- faint as it was in this dark space -- fell across his plate, he looked up.

He had just put some meat in his mouth. Looking up at her, he dropped the knife, and choked on the meat, and started to get up, all at once, his eyes wide, round, disbelieving. Despite the many time-wrought changes in him, his eyes remained the same -- golden brown, falcon-bright, attentive.

“Master Shakespeare?” She asked. “You recognize me?”

He swallowed hastily and coughed into his hand, and swallowed again. “Oh, milady,” he said, his voice harsh, with his hurried dispatch of his morsel. “Oh, milady. Yes, I recognize you. But at first smelling your scent, I thought you the lady.... Your lord.... The Lady Silver.”

The Lady Silver. “Have you seen the Lady Silver?” Ariel asked. Her heart beat impatiently for the answer.

She had to wait.

First Will shook his head, then he nodded. Then, taking a deep breath, he managed to say, “Not since yesternight.”

“Oh,” Ariel felt as though all the strength that had animated her coming here had faltered. Her legs turned weak, her head confused with tiredness. This was the middle of the faerie night and here she was, sleepless, trying to ask Quicksilver’s whereabouts of this mortal.

She was aware of Will’s grabbing her arm, and easing her gently onto the long bench beside the table. She was also aware of other men talking, making comments. Three bawds, assembled near the door, made crude remarks about her faintness and what it denoted.

Ariel sat with her head in her hands. She’d come here, straight, without either eating or resting. The centaurs must know by now that she’d escaped. Malachite must know. What madness would both of them undertake to drag her back to the hill and use her in their foul intrigue?

But every heartbeat that passed without her finding Quicksilver, without her apprising him of the conspiracy, she felt as though disaster closed in on her, with red claws and hot breath.

Where was Quicksilver? Where was her lord? Was Quicksilver still hers? Or had Nan been right? Had Ariel, in denying Silver lost Quicksilver?

Ariel didn’t want to believe it. What was so wrong with wanting a husband as other women had? A man, a fixed creature with a true north, a true horizon?

She looked through her fingers, saw Will staring at her, lowered her hands. “I’m well,” she said, answering the mute question in his gaze. “I’m well. Perhaps faint. Perhaps I need eat more. Perhaps....” She floundered.

Will, mutely, pushed the plate of mutton at her.

The pungent smell of it caught in her throat. She shook her head. “A little bread, perhaps. And some ale? If you’d be so kind?”

Will gestured at the serving wench. “Milady, how come you here?” he asked. “What disturbance brings you from your dales?” Something to his eyes, some mute horror, showed to Ariel that he feared some certain cause that he didn’t wish to name.

Was it Quicksilver? What had happened to Quicksilver?

“Disturbance in the hill,” Ariel said. Her words were faint, falling so softly upon the background noise of the tavern that Will leaned forward to perceive them better. “I came to find my lord. Know you where I might find him? My Lord Quicksilver?”

“I know not where he is,” Will said. He sighed, deeply, a chest-straining sigh. “I wish I did.”

“You know not?” She stared at him, not sure whether to believe it. “The thread of his magic I followed to your room, and there.... He didn’t answer my knocks, and your landlord sent me here. I thought Quicksilver was in there, but veiled to me, because he....” Tears came to her eyes. “Because he resented me. Speak truth, Master Shakespeare. Is he there? Are you hiding him?”

Will sighed “I wish I were hiding him, milady. I wish.” He shook his head, pushed his plate away from him, then held his mouth closed, while he watched the ale wife put a cup of ale and three slices of thick bread in front of Ariel.

“I’ve seen your lord... or the Lady Silver. But we.... argued and he left,” Will said.

Ariel had picked up the bread, but she could neither break it nor eat. She felt her color flee her, leaving her cheeks marmoreally cold. “Ah, a lovers’ quarrel.”

“Milady!” Will looked genuinely shocked.

She looked at him, meeting his falcon eyes with questioning intensity. “What, mean you you’re no lover of my lord?”

Will shook his head. “I tried to be a friend to him.”

“Ah,” Ariel tilted her head, took a deep breath. A friend. What did Will mean by that? She took a sip of her ale, for she felt faint, and she said, “It is cursed to be friends with Quicksilver. He betrays as well as he seduces.”

Will shook his head, while his face grew hot. “Milady, Ariel? Why.... What happened to Quicksilver?”

Ariel shrugged. Her heart caught, her hands that held the breath trembled. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She heard her voice, small and miserable, and felt all the smaller and more miserable for it.

“I am the Queen of faerieland and I don’t know anything.” She felt tears run down her cheeks and wiped them, peevishly, on the back of her left hand, then tore a piece of bread, stuffed it in her mouth and bit into it. Salty tears mingled with its slightly stale taste, and Ariel tried to ignore both.

Will looked distressed at her tears.

Ariel could swear an echo of them -- a faint shimmer of unshed water -- shone in his eyes.

How would it be, she wondered for a moment, to have a man like this for a husband? A man who could not endure your tears without crying? A man who noticed when you cried?

Quicksilver was more likely to notice a limp in his favorite hunting mastiff, a mar on the uniform of his favorite attendant. His favorite attendant. Malachite.

This brought fresh tears to Ariel’s eyes, and she tried to drown their salt in her ale, that she might not make a passing fool of herself.

“Milady?” Will asked. He spoke very softly. “Milady, I don’t know of your husband, nor where he is. I am telling the truth when I say I only saw him -- in Silver form -- for the space of his asking me my help -- it seems fantastic -- in preventing his brother Sylvanus from -- ” He stopped and stared amazed.

Because Ariel, almost without meaning, had taken her finger to her lips in a commanding gesture. “Don’t say his name. The evil king’s name. Don’t pronounce it. With magical creatures the name is the thing, and the name can conjure it. We do not wish him to eavesdrop.” She drank her ale and sniffed back her tears and asked, “You were saying, Master Shakespeare?”

Quicksilver had told Will about the wolf and asked for help. That meant Quicksilver really had come to London to try to rescue the hill and both worlds. That meant.... And yet, Ariel knew Silver had disported with a mortal. But which mortal? And why?

“I was saying your lord told me a fantastical tale.” Will said. “And I thought.... I thought it was a trick played on me, and I dismissed him. I told him to plague me no more.”

Ariel sniffed and sighed. No use reproaching Will. Hadn’t she, by other means, and over many years, told the same to Quicksilver? And yet, where was Quicksilver now? What had happened to him? Ariel folded her hands, one upon the other and, together, set them on the dark greasy wood of the table. “And then, Master Shakespeare?”

“How would you know there would be more?” he asked, surprised.

Ariel sighed. How to explain to a mortal that her greater age and that racial memory that was inherited in elf and not in man, allowed her to read his expressions better than he could know his own thoughts? Oh, let him think it was his thoughts she read. Maybe it would discourage lies. “There is more,” she said.

“Yes,” Will said and, in a tumbling he told her a tale of dreaming Silver dead, and of three corpses, found on his street, wolf-mauled, animal-ravaged.

At the words, Ariel went cold, her heart turned to ice within her living chest.

The wolf had started rampaging. And Quicksilver was missing? Oh, would she ever see her lord again? And if not, how would she survive?

For a moment, out of sheer fright, she thought she must return to the hill and marry Malachite, and deviate the power of the hill to him. He would at least stand up to the threat to come. He would help her defeat it.

In the next breath, she felt ashamed, ashamed unto death. Oh, weak, weak Ariel who’d cut off the power of the hill from her sworn lord, her loved husband. Traitor Ariel who would thus sell her lord to sure death, consign him to the wolf’s harsh mercies all to save herself the solitude, the cold solitude of decision.

Ariel, who’d conjoin herself with a known traitor, a secret schemer, all not to be alone.

And she called Quicksilver weak.

She felt color ebb and flow upon her cheeks, her shame making her tremble, as her voice wavered, when she said, “Master Shakespeare, you must help me. For I’m weak and dumb. If the wolf is in London, he’s found shelter with someone in London who has been touched by faerie or elf.

“Someone has given my lord’s dark brother refuge. And his power grows, and I can feel it, in the breeze that comes from the Thames, in the pestilence that spreads all about, in the wrongness of this heat in so early a season and yet coupled with the rains of a much colder month. Think, Master Shakespeare, think. Who else could it be? Likely it’s someone that Quicksilver knows, someone he has gone to when you disappointed his expectations. And if that’s true, Quicksilver is in great danger, and all of faerieland.... nay, all of the worlds are endangered through him.” She looked at Shakespeare and felt fresh tears spring to her eyes, distorting his look, so that he appeared like one long drowned.

Only his golden eyes remained clear.

To those eyes she talked; to those eyes she appealed, “Master Shakespeare, help me save my foolish lord.”

Scene Twenty Six

Kit Marlowe walks beside the river. It is a poor neighborhood, at the edge of the slums. Across the river, the palaces of great lords can be glimpsed. But here there’s nothing but solitude, the stench of the river, the desolate strand. In the red light of sunset, things float on the current that might well be plague corpses, thrown in the river by businesses desirous to avoid closing, by relatives anxious not to be closed up in a plague house.

K
it hadn’t tidied his clothes, nor had he eaten all day. Every time he thought of eating or drinking, he remembered the taste of blood in his mouth, and he felt a sickness, overpowering, climbing from his empty belly to his parched mouth.

He must look like a ghost, walking this way by the shore, pale and scruffy and haunted, looking for help or relief where he could find neither.

But he knew better than to go towards the city, the teeming slums of Southwark. There was life there. He could feel it, sense it, crave it, like other men craved bread or wine, or love.

Kit could smell life, as he’d once smelled food. It was a scent in the breeze wafting by, making his stomach tighten with need, making his chest compress his beating heart and making him crave.... crave.... crave, the craving nothing clear or defined, just a nameless, driving, aching need.

Yet, with sweat on his brow, with tears in his eyes, his legs weak, his arms aching, his whole body feeling like a corpse that, animated, walks the scene of its former misdeeds, with all that remained to him, Kit willed himself to stay away from that life that called all his senses with passionate need.