Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (5 page)

She found she couldn't resist him. She nodded slowly. “I'll come with you.”

“Wonderful!” He moved closer, and this time she did back away, afraid. “Hold,” he said, and breathed on her left eye.

“What was that?” she asked.

“A change.” He took hold of her hand and she allowed herself to be led into the darkened streets. As they passed a cobweb on her wall she thought she saw something glimmering, shining like a jewel, but when she turned to look at it with both eyes it was gone.

The brownie went faster now, hurrying to the revels. She pulled on his hand, unable to keep up with him. On one side, her left side, she could see others rushing along with them, small and large, winged and hoofed. The brownie urged her along impatiently. A few minutes later they stopped, and she recognized a field outside the city walls.

A shining round moon lit the field and she saw the creatures spread out before her. Four squat men rolled casks of wine toward the gathering. Women in white with lighted tapers on their heads joined hands and began dancing in a circle. Now she realized that music played somewhere, that it had been playing as long as she had stood there. It sounded both familiar and unearthly, as though she had been hearing it but not recognizing it her entire life. Faster and faster the women went, fire burning from their hair. The music grew shrill, wild. Alice moved toward them.

The brownie pulled her back to his side. He was strong, she realized with surprise; she would not have guessed his strength by looking at him. “You must only watch,” he said, and she remembered a story of a man who had danced with the Fair Folk for a night and returned to his village a hundred years later. “And you must touch neither food nor drink. I'll leave you now.”

The brownie joined one of the circles. She closed her left eye and suddenly everyone in the field vanished, leaving only a whisper of the uncanny music. Desolate, she opened her eye again. Someone laughed loudly behind her and caught her arm.

She was pulled along with a group of them, men and women wearing green, their arms as thin as twigs and leaves sprouting where their hair should have been. “No!” she said, panicked, remembering the brownie's warning.

The twig-people laughed and tossed her into the air. “Don't worry,” one of them said. “No harm can come to you this night, unless you bring it upon yourself. Brownie told us so.”

They passed her along from one to the other, hurrying across the field. One of them pointed out a cottage to the others and they raced toward it, laughing and calling. They opened the door. Someone inside shrieked in terror, and then all the candles were blown out.

“Dirty!” said one of them. “Dirty, dirty!”

“Filthy!”

“Where's water for our baths?”

“Where's milk for our thirst?”

“Where are the coins?”

“Here, here!” said a dozen voices.

Her left eye saw a little in the dark, and she watched as they heaped gold coins on a shabby table. The man and woman of the house backed into a corner as if trying to hide. Three or four of the twig-people followed them and kissed them both on the cheeks and mouth. “Here,” someone said to Alice, giving her a coin. “For your labors tonight.” They all laughed wildly.

They rushed out the door, overturning stools and benches. Alice put the coin in her pouch and hurried after them. “Robin!” one of them called, running down a hillside. “Robin Goodfellow! Give us a light!” The others raced after him, a few turning cartwheels as they went.

A tall burly figure stood at the bottom of the hill. Matted hair grew from his arms, legs and chest, and he was naked. All the others had been clothed; even Brownie wore small breeches which barely came to his knees. Alice looked away quickly, but before she did so she saw with embarrassment that he was erect. He carried a staff in one hand.

“Give us a light, Robin!”

His staff began to glow softly. “Over there, over there!” several voices said, and Alice saw that they had spotted a solitary traveler walking across the field. Robin's staff grew brighter. A few winged creatures, barely the size of Alice's hand, flew toward the traveler. “Come to us,” they called. Their voices sounded like silver bells. “Why do you linger? Come!”

The man looked up. The creatures flew toward him and then away again, toward and away, singing. Their wings were the colors of jewels, sapphire, ruby, agate. The man began to follow.

“Come to us!”

The traveler headed toward Robin's light. As he came closer the light left the staff and floated out over the field. He tried to keep up, dazed. The twig-people, edgy with excitement, formed a circle and began to dance. “We wait for you … Come!” the winged creatures sang.

The light and the voices led the man to a river. He tumbled in, splashing, and the light went out. The twig-people laughed loudly and scattered across the field.

“Wait!” Alice said, calling after them. They ran toward a grove of trees and she followed. At the edge of the grove she stopped and peered in, hesitating. Not even moonlight penetrated the darkness of the trees. Something rustled among the leaves. An owl called.

Which way had they gone? She could no longer see them or hear their laughter. The music sounded very faint and far away.

Did they lure her here, then, the way they had lured the traveler? What was she to do now? Perhaps she could wait until sunrise and then try to make her way back to the city. But would the city be the same as she had left it, or had she passed a hundred years with the Fair Folk, like the man in the story? For the first time she noticed how cold the night had grown.

She walked slowly back across the field, feeling every one of her fifty years. She was no longer a young maiden, to dance all night and rise fresh with the dawn. Perhaps she could find the man who had been led astray and together they could make their way toward the city gate. But oh, the look on his face as he had climbed out of the stream! She began to laugh.

Something shone up ahead and she hurried toward it, hoping she was not following Robin's staff. A ring of lights burned on the grass, and in the middle of them sat the queen. She looked up and Alice saw her clearly across the field, her golden hair and gray eyes and the crown of crystals on her head. Alice stood rock-still, captured by the woman's beauty.

The queen nodded to her. The gesture seemed to convey something complex, a carefully scripted ritual between equals. We are both alike, her motion seemed to say. No lengthier ceremony can do us honor. Just so must Queen Elizabeth nod to monarchs when they came visiting.

But no—what was she thinking? Why should the queen think of her as an equal? She looked away and saw two horned men, warriors, standing at the queen's back. At her feet sat a small dumpy woman, her black hair plaited into elf-locks … Margery?

“You should not have seen this,” said a voice behind her. She turned, startled. It was Brownie.

“I—I know that woman,” she said.

“You know Queen Oriana?”

“Nay, the other one. She's a friend of mine.” Alice looked back at the two women on the grass. The queen whispered something in Margery's ear and they laughed. What business had Margery with the Queen of Faerie?

“Aye?” Brownie said. He sounded doubtful. “I must take you home.”

“Now? But—Let me stay awhile. Please.”

“You've seen too much as it is.” She stepped back but his motion, too fast for her to follow, brought him before her again. He breathed on her left eye, and the queen and her warriors and the circle of lights vanished. Margery sat alone on the field and laughed to herself.

But as Brownie led her home she thought she saw, out of the corner of that eye, strange lights and bright jewels, and once a creature passed them on wings as fine as silk.

4

Christopher found the note from Robert Poley under his door. Though it said only, “The usual place, this afternoon,” the agent had written it in cipher. Christopher thought this typical of Poley's secretive, small-minded ways. But what could the agent want? It had been no hardship to check the taverns, looking for a man who claimed to be king, but he had so far discovered nothing. Surely Robert knew that he would have arranged a meeting if he had any information.

At the sign of the Black Boar Robert handed Christopher a note. A brown stain blotted the top of the paper but it was still readable. “All is in readiness,” the note said. “Our king awaits.”

Christopher looked up. “Where did you get this?”

“Where? I thought you might know.”

“I? I have no idea.”

Robert made no answer. That was one of his tricks, Christopher knew: the habit of conversation was so strong in people that they would babble anything to fill the silence. “You're jesting,” someone at another table said. It sounded very loud.

Finally Robert said, “It was found on the dead man. The man who was killed that night.”

The brown stain, then, was blood. “Why should I know anything at all about that?”

“You were eager to go after his killer. I thought perhaps you knew who he was, knew that he had something to do with this errand I gave you.”

He understood now. Robert liked making his agents uncomfortable, and liked it not at all to be made uncomfortable himself. The night Robert had shown his fear still rankled. Probably he had gone back to the dead man to prove his courage, had discovered the note and seen a way to incriminate Christopher. And it didn't help matters that Christopher had been right all along: the dead man had been at the Black Boar, and had been following them before he was killed. “If I knew I certainly would have told you.”

“Would you? I wonder.”

Christopher paused in the act of lighting his tobacco-pipe. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I'm beginning to doubt your worth to me. Is it coincidence, do you think, that on the same day I give you an errand we are followed by a man who is tied in some way to that errand? Did you arrange to meet him here, at the Black Boar? Did the two of you plan to kill me where I stood in the street?”

“You were the one who asked to come with me.”

“Aye, and if I hadn't gone I'd be dead now, stabbed in the back.”

“I swear I know nothing about the dead man, or about this note.”

“And what is the word of an intelligencer worth? I am one myself, and I know that I will swear and forswear myself in the service of my queen.”

“My word will have to be good enough.”

“I'm afraid it isn't. Unless I know I can trust you your usefulness to me is at an end.”

Now they were coming to it, Christopher saw. The other man wanted to make Christopher pay for witnessing his cowardice. He felt Robert's dismissal almost physically, as if a net had started to close around him or he were being smothered. How would he survive without the extra money Robert gave him? “You know I have always done you good service.”

“Do I? I have had other agents who have sworn the same thing, and who have ended their lives on the rack and the gallows.”

“There is absolutely no evidence—”

“Nay, there isn't, is there?” Robert leaned back. “I suppose I'll have to keep you on—that way I'll be able to watch you closely. And if I hear of you asking questions you were not meant to ask, or talking to folks you were forbidden to talk to, I'll give you no further errands. I have my eye on you now.”

Christopher did not miss Robert's slight smile. It had all been part of the game, then: Robert had never intended to dismiss him. In his probing the other man had found Christopher's weakness, his dependence on the money Robert offered. “What do I do now?”

“Nothing. Listen in taverns—it's about all you're good for.”

“What about the dead man? Who wrote that note?”

“That's not your concern. I have other agents who will learn everything I need to know. Your task is to find that man, the one who claims to be king.”

Christopher bade farewell to Robert and went to the Saracen's Head close by. As he walked he remembered his first meeting with Robert Poley, while he was still a student at Cambridge. The terms of his scholarship provided him with a shilling a week, but he quickly found out that that would barely keep him in food and drink. A friend had introduced him to the queen's agent and he'd begun then to make regular trips into France. He'd had to interrupt his studies, but they'd started to bore him anyway. The things he found in books on his own were much more interesting.

On his last trip while at Cambridge Robert sent him to Rheims, where the English Catholics had established a seminary in exile. When he returned he found a story making the rounds that he had converted. The authorities threatened to deny him his degree, and he'd had to go over their heads, to the queen's Privy Council, to get it. He still relished the wording of their letter to the university: “… because it was not Her Majesty's pleasure that anyone employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those who are ignorant in the affairs he went about.” He could almost hear Elizabeth's imperious tones in those words, though of course she hadn't written the letter herself.

His walk to the Saracen's Head took only a few minutes, but going from one tavern to the other always made him feel as if he had entered another world. The university wits met here: it was usually loud, boisterous and crowded with people.

At this hour, though, only Tom Kyd sat at one of the tables, slowly drinking his small beer. A group of serving-women sat in the corner, playing cards and taking their supper and beer before the crowds came. “Good evening, Tom,” he said, sitting down beside him.

“Oh,” Tom said. Christopher remembered something Thomas Nashe once said, that Kyd always looked as if he expected to be hit. “You're back. Evening.”

“Aye, I'm back.”

“Where do you go? Some of us were wondering about you the other night.”