Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

by Lynne M. Thomas

“I live on air, as birds do.”

  “With worms and flies?” The lines from his own play came to him as easy as breath.

  “I made a bargain, Will. The writing was the price of it.”

  “They paid you to stop writing?”

  “Not with money.” Across the table, Marlowe rose to his feet, a player playing at being offended. “Do you think me such a low-mouthed cur as that?”

  “I’ve known you to do much for merely the price of a pipe of tobacco,” the poet said mildly.

  “Well.” Kit sat himself down again. “My silence is not so easily bought.”

  “Yet bought it was.”

  “It was.”

  Will Shaxpur had more patience than any man in Southwark. Marlowe knew it, so he took his time playing out the moment before revelation. He fidgeted with his goffered sleeve cuff, prized a splinter out of the table with his penknife (even a man with no pen still had one, fit to other uses; Will observed his hands; there was nothing wrong with them to stop Kit from holding a pen), lifted it to pick his teeth before finally calling halt to his little dumbshow.

  “I do not write. I live.”

  Will nodded brusquely. He’d heard that from many a University wit, come up to London to make his fame with words only to give way to temptation, having found his father’s allowance allowed him to postpone the work that precedes fame.

  Kit had heard it, too, and hurried on to say: “I live the lives I wrote about, I mean. The time of my choosing, and the personages as well, one upon the next. I have seven times seven centuries of youth and perfect health before me. Like the man born to be hanged—which I suppose I might be, when my times comes (I didn’t ask; I’m nice about such things)—I shall never drown at sea. No plague can touch me. It’s true my skin can be pricked—but the blood I spill regenerates itself.” He gestured with his hands like a very Italian: “Thus I may be pirate, thief or renegado; merchant, painter, costermonger… prince, I suppose, should the means present itself. I’ve all the time to learn a thousand skills, and practice each unto my heart’s content.”

  “I see,” Will said, for so he did. “Only have you lost the power of generation.”

  “Of writing, merely! That was the Bargain.”

  “You’ve traded your future work for present immortality.”

  Kit always looked surprised when Will saw straight to the point of things. No one else did that, anymore. Will was forty-four now, and had forgotten the days when everyone expected him to be a raw-boned fool. No friend like an old friend.

  “My ingenuity I have not lost. That creative force which makes us higher than the angels. I may yet paint, compose, carve… shape pastries if I will!”

  “It’s a fine art, the pastrycook’s. I saw a pie once at the Queen’s table at Windsor made to look like the Tower of Babylon. I might have desired to eat it—but never to craft it myself.”

  Marlowe’s retort was lost with the arrival of the potboy with the ale, in a pitcher, and two cups. Playing host, Christopher filled them both, and raised his own to Will.

  “To the reunion of true friends,” he said, and William drank to that; how could he not?

  But he had his own retort, his own toast ready. “And to truth in reunion.” He drank. “Now, by our friendship, Kit, if you do hold it sacred as you say: tell me what happened.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  Had Marlowe’s eyes always been this light, like mirrors he could see into? Or was it the simple pleasure of looking into them again, when he’d long thought them food for worms, that held him so?

  “They came to me when Faustus was being played at the Rose. So spare me your suspicions, friend! I know a good bargain from a bad. All I have gained is my life. All I have lost is my writing.”

  “Faustus at the Rose. So, two years before your dea—before Deptford.”

  “I do confess I thought I had more time.” Marlowe scratched his chin through that deep, ridiculous, obscuring beard. “They never say when it will come. How could I know?” He sighed. “I would have liked to finish my Hero and Leander.”

  “Chapman finished it for you with a creditable third Sesto.” Will couldn’t stop himself from talking shop.

  “Did he? I haven’t dared to look.”

  “The tale of the doomed Greek lovers is hardly unknown,” Will added a bit meanly. “And he was brave to take on not just your poetry but your dimple-arsed Leander.” Will quoted:

  Even as delicious meat is to the tast,

  So was his neck in touching, and surpast

  The white of Pelops’ shoulder: I could tell ye,

  How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;

  And whose immortal fingers did imprint

  That heavenly path with many a curious dint

  That runs along his back…

  Marlowe smiled as though tasting fine old wine, then took a sip of ale. “Well, never mind it. The point is that I knew as those three villains surrounded me in Deptford, held me up against that table with their blades out… I knew my time had come. But I tried not to piss myself in fear, for if the Bargain held, I would outlive their stabbings.” He paused. “They say that at the moment of his death, a man sees his whole life pass by like a great procession. As the knives came closer, my faith in the Bargain was sustained: for what I saw was all my plays, one after the other—stripped of their imperfections, each sweet and meaty like a banquet… a banquet I would never taste again. And that was all there was of death for me.”

  Will leaned forward, almost took one of the pale hands. “Is that your purpose here, Christopher? Do you want me to write your plays for you?”

  Kit looked at him bleakly. “How?”

  “You cannot write. But you speak well enough. Am I to play your scribe, as when we first worked together on all the Henry plays?” Will tried to keep his voice level, lest he betray to them both his strange mix of longing and disdain, of rage at the insult and desire for what was past.

  Marlowe was looking down at the nicks he’d made in the table. “No. No, that’s not it. Not it at all.” His mouth twisted in a painful grimace. “Nothing could be farther from my mind.”

  “What then?” He asked it gently.

  “Have you not divined? Truly not? Then I will spell it out.” He looked up with those strange eyes. “It’s your turn. You are next.”

  Will heard the scraping of his own bench, found he had pushed back violently from the table. “How? How can I be next, when I’ve made no bargain? This is not right! I will not have it so!”

  “Sit, Will, sit, I pray you. I’ve said it wrong. My lines are all ill-metered, now. Please, friend, sit. Of course you have a choice. Let me explain.”

  Will sat, and took a long pull at his cup.

  “An invitation only, Will. To the banquet that I now enjoy. Listen: they will come to you, offer you the Bargain, and ask for your consent.”

  “They?” The time had come to ask. “What is this they you speak of?

  Kit shook his head, like a horse ridding itself of flies. “I cannot say.”

  “Cannot?”

  “It is impossible.”

  If Will was angry, it was on his friend’s behalf. “What bright new Mephistopheles have you found, Kit, that binds your tongue from speaking his Master’s name?”

  “It’s not the Devil, Will! I swear it.” He shook his head again in that strange way, as though to clear it. “Nor yet God’s ministering Angels, nor yet the earthy bubbles of the Faerie Realm. They are the stars wrenched from their courses—they are the seekers and the seeking, the judges and the judging, past and future ransomed by a mercy none but they will show—”

  “Peace, Mercutio, peace.” Will spoke the lines that he had written for his dead friend. “Thou talkest of nothing.”

  And the friend fixed those deep, bright eyes upon him. “When your time comes, you will apprehend.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I do not know. They come while you are hale and living, so that you may ch
oose before the shadow of death is on you, choose freely and give consent to the Bargain.”

  “Which is to write no more, after I die? Not much of a choice. I’ll write no more in any case.”

  “That’s not quite it, though, Will.” Marlowe twisted his long fingers against one another. “We who take the Bargain must accept an early death—earlier than nature might have purposed—to turn from writing to eternal life.”

  “A violent one?”

  “What? Oh—no. Not unless you spy for Walsingham, and consort with atheistical nobles. I believe you’re safe there. You may die in your bed in Stratford. Just not at threescore years and ten.”

  “That’s the offer, Kit? After my own short span, a lifetime of being other folk besides myself?” Will drank again, and wiped his mouth. “It holds no true allure. I have been all those people—on the stage, some, but more so in my crafting of them, through and through.” It was his turn to look at the table. “That art is my own,” he murmured to the wood. “The art that others—even you—only begin to scratch at. To know each man, each woman, as I write them, heart and soul and contradictions, all. To give them words to make each moment sing bass, alt, and treble. I’d rather live, and know them, still, than survive my own death trying to become what I am not and failing to do that which I am.”

  The fox’s eyes narrowed. He let out an impatient breath. “Write all you like. Write all you may. But don’t play the fool. The bargain is to accept a thousand lives—to live the life that writing has denied you.”

  “And then become but mine own audience, ever after?”

  Marlowe sat back, considering. In that one moment, he seemed less of a young man, more one his own age, and Will was glad to see it finally. “Is that what troubles you?”

  “A bargain is an exchange where both parties benefit. You get eternal life without a pen. But what is it that this mysterious They have gotten in return? The knowledge that you consented to trade your art for life?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Kit, my only Kit. No matter how long you lived or however much you wrote, you were destined to die a poor man. You don’t know how to bargain, never did. University man!” he scoffed. “I have a house in Stratford, Kit. I have restored my family’s name. I leave my wife and children—and their children; yes, there is one now—a firm foundation.

  “Tell, me, Marlowe: what of that other posterity? Is your seed still good, I mean?” Both Marlowe’s eyebrows shot up together, scarred and unscarred. “In your long, scripting-free life, will you people the world with Christophers, or leave it bare of that as well?”

  “Too soon to tell,” Kit said with roguish bravado, the young scapegrace again. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  “When you find out,” the poet repeated. “You will find out many things, if you live forever.”

  “They play it yet, my Tamburlaine.”

  “But if you live and live, you may live to see it utterly forgotten.”

  “What matter?” Kit pretended not to care. “It is my life that goes on, with or without the work remembered.”

  “Then your true, natural life was all for naught.”

  “Not so! What’s more, whatever wind may sway a theater audience this way or that, a printed text is writ in stone. My Faustus, for example: though I am gone from the world’s stage, yet Bushnell still saw fit to publish the text some two years past.”

  “It’s four years past, Kit. Published the same year as my Hamlet.”

  “And you have written other plays since then.”

  “I have.”

  “Write all you like. Write all you may. Does it comfort you to think that you will die of old age, with all your words played out?”

  He said nothing.

  “Will—Will, listen to me. It’s fine to be a crafter of words. Not just to be admired for it, but to do it well, and know you do it well. But is not there something… monkish in it? For the time that you are writing, you are mewed up in your cell, your books your only company. The words break upon the page like waves. You’re on an island. An exile.”

  “A room in a cave, on an island on an island. This sceptered isle, this England…”

  “Which of us wrote that?” asked Kit, distracted by the phrase.

  “I can’t remember. We argued over it; I forget who won.”

  “This is the way off the island, Will! This—” Marlowe flailed in the air, then paused, suddenly sure of himself: an actor’s pause, then spoken with a flourish: “This is Illyria, lady.”

  The words went through him like a spear. The sound each syllable made, the very simplicity of them, that beckoned—no, that ushered one into a brave, new world.

  Marlowe saw, and pressed home the advantage. “Illyria, Will. News on the Rialto. Come from the farthest steppes of India. I am again for Cydnus! And that strange seacoast of Bohemia.” He chuckled, and Will let him; an old joke, a land-locked land, before he knew better. “What, not one hit?” Kit persisted in quoting, play after play: “From Tripolis, from Mexico and England, From Lisbon, Barbary? Grapple your mind to the sternage of this navy, and leave your England as dead midnight still… Think you are now in Mytiline… Come to the bay of Ephesus…”

  “Was ever Scythia half so barbarous? Really, Kit, you do torment me.”

  “Certes,” the lion-maned fox said. “Do you think I do not know you? The Bargain: it’s not just life they offer. It’s the chance to read every book yet to be written. Every sea yet to be sailed. Exploration, Will! A way off the island for you at last.”

  “And do you come to tempt me now to take this Bargain of yours? to forswear my so potent art only to draw more breaths in this all-hating world? And therewith to see my memory fade, my life’s work come to naught? How is that not hell, my Christopher?”

  Marlowe shrugged and drained his cup. “Then stay in your cave, my friend. Leave the world to us. Wait, year by year, for either your death, or the death of your pen—the Bargain is yours to make or to refuse. But think of it, Will! To savor the world in all its flavors. Its honey on your tongue… its words in your mouth…”

  Will held up his hand, the sign for an actor to halt.

  “It’s not an easy choice, Kit. There is regret in it either way. If I say No, I will regret it on my deathbed. If I say Yes, I will regret it one hour after, the first time I set quill to paper and find I cannot write. And I will have the pleasure of seeing youth overtake me, as my plays go out of fashion, my name forgotten… What comfort, then, is there?”

  “To make a new name,” Marlowe said. “Or none at all. But to know the world in all its glory, to be a fully living part of it at last.” Marlowe emptied the last drops from the pitcher into Will’s cup. “Say yes to them, Will. And then you’ll see me again.” He smirked, and rolled his eyes piously heavenward. “We cannot know our ends. But I’ll wager a gossip to a goose I’ll see you again on some high battlement, pennants flapping in a blist’ring wind, what teeth you have left by then bared joyously to the elements, ready with me for a battle that we two cannot lose.”

  “How attractive you make it sound. I think…”

  “What?”

  “I’d rather travel. Learn every tongue, speak with rogues and dukes their language everywhere… inhabit an infinity of lives that way.”

  “And so you may.”

  “I’ve a good ear for language,” Will said. “And music, too. I’ve never mastered an instrument. There would be time for that.”

  “There would.”

  Will Shakspere sat back, and templed his fingers. “I’m 44 now, Kit. So I might write on for one year, two years… or even ten, and still count it before my time, I hope.”

  “You might.”

  “I have always thought a man should die on his birthday.”

  “As you will.” Marlowe chuckled affectionately. “I didn’t.”

  “Like Caesar’s Cassius.” Will, smiling, quoted his lines:

  This day I breathèd first. Time is come round,


  And where I did begin, there shall I end.

  Kit said, “Or the Scottish Queen’s last words to the headsman: ‘In my end is my beginning.’”

  “…They say.”

  “No, I was there. I couldn’t tell you at the time.”

  Will kept to the point: “But Mary meant her end in this world, the beginning her eternal life.”

  Marlowe tried to look demonic. “Faith, so do I.” He rose, dropped coin on the table for the tab.

  “Wait—one question, Kit.”

  Marlowe leaned down, so that their two heads almost touched. “What is it, Will?”

  “With all this time ahead… with death defeated, and life begun anew… what was it you chose to learn first?”

  Marlowe’s fair skin flushed so deep a crimson it looked as though only his immortality could save him from the loss of blood. “To ride a horse,” he said. “I chose to learn to ride like a gentleman, and not a sack of sticks.”

  Will grinned at his friend. “A fine choice, Kit. Very practical.”

  “Think on’t,” Marlowe said. If he could have vanished theatrically in a blast of fire and smoke, he would have done so. But he just turned, and walked away through the tavern, one man in many, soon lost on the London streets.

  CODA

  She’d meant to go straight to the Ladies’ Waiting Room before her train. But Euston Station had recently been graced with a brand-new bookstall stocked with superior reading matter for passengers on the train lines, courtesy of Mr. W. H. Smith, a gentleman known for his taste and high morals. Here, for example, in ten tempting pocket volumes, the complete works of William Shakespeare. She picked up the last of them. These were the plays she knew the least. Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale… tales of travel, adventure on sea and land—though there was a favorite, The Tempest: a man exiled to an island, living in a cave, surrounded by magic of his own making, until he returns home at last. She had not known the Bard had written that one so late in life, before his sudden death at the age of fifty-two.

  As the short-sighted woman lingered there, examining the titles—a small woman in a plain gray traveling costume—she did not see the two men approaching until they were at her side.