New Worlds

by Edited By David Garnett

  Patricia Amelia Lourat. She of the clear eyes amid papery skin. She of the surprising turns of agility. She who would do what she could to protect the heritage of a dead mistress...

  Or of herself? Did This Year’s Model transcend the mimicry of life, to the point of perpetuating it?

  When had Pat Lourat died? In what secret grave did her body moulder? Beneath some forest tree, he guessed, flowers growing over her head. Where dryads wandered, singing. Where centaurs romped in sport.

  A wonderland which he, Henry Gypter, ached to conceal and preserve and delight in.

  When had Pat Lourat shrugged off her old body and donned the new? And when had she started to offer that kind of resurrection to others?

  A gift which he, Henry Gypter, would need one day.

  She knew it. Had planned for it.

  He knew it too—and shuddered at his dependence on her.

  Okay, he was in. The first hand had been dealt. Time to play. Best poker face, Henry. These are sharp folks.

  It would be a game without equal. Exquisitely dangerous, virtually unwinnable, played with a deck stacked against him. At stake were life and sanity. A fortune, too, on the side. A game worthy of him.

  Lourat could award extensions of life. Or withhold them. The political power which that conferred was beyond measurement. In the Coming Age, some would be content to buy; but many would seek to take and not be delicate about it. Either way, the world was going to be different, once the secret broke.

  And sanity? That needed digesting. He had noted how Lourat presided over her obedient herd of servants and house guests, and over the beings in the woods, all of them vassals to her whims...

  What servile niche had she prepared for him?

  Dear Henry: such a treasure.

  God, no! To endure eternity, imposed upon by her abominably wretched aesthetics. A pink and mimsy hell...

  The helicopter banked. Beneath, the landscape tilted. In a forest glade, far below, Gypter fancied he saw a mob of humanoids rushing wildly in pursuit of a ball. Their legs were crooked, as if tipped with hooves. And dark, as though furry.

  On their heads would be small decorative horns.

  He chuckled grimly. “Give it up fellas. Word is, our team hasn’t a chance. Not this year.”

  But, maybe eventually.

  If he could restack the deck his way.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  HEART OF WHITENESSE

  BY HOWARD WALDROP

  Down these mean cobbled lanes a man must go, methinks, especially when out before larkrise, if larks there still be within a thousand mile of this bone-breaking cold. From the Rus to Spain the world is locked in snow and ice, a sheet of blue glass. There was no summer to speak of; bread is dear, and in France we hear they are eating each other up, like the Carribals of the Western Indies.

  It’s bad enow I rehearse a play at the Rose, that I work away on the poem of the celebrated Hero and Leander, that life seems more like a jakes each day. Then some unseen toady comes knocking on the door and slips a note through the latchhole this early, the pounding fist matching that in my head.

  I’d come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in, then dressed as best I could, and made my way out into this cold world.

  Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn’t it.

  And what do I see on gaining the lane but a man making steaming water into the street-ditch from a great bull pizzle of an accouterment.

  He sees me and winks.

  I winks back.

  His wink said I see you’re interested.

  My wink back says I’m usually interested but not at this instant but keep me in mind if you see me again.

  He immediately smiles, then turns his picauventure beard toward the cold row of houses to his left.

  Winking is the silent language full of nuance and detail: we are after all talking about the overtures to a capital offence.

  ~ * ~

  I come to the shop on the note, I go in; though I’ve never been there before I know I can ignore the fellows working there (it is a dyer’s, full of boiling vats and acrid smells and steam; at least it is warm) and go through a door up some rude steps, to go through another plated with strips of iron, and into the presence of a High Lord of the Realm.

  He is signing something, he sees me and slides the paper under another; it is probably the names of people soon to decorate a bridge or fence.

  This social interaction is, too, full of nuance; one of them is that we two pretend not to know who the other is. Sometimes their names are Cecil, Stansfield, Salisbury, sometimes not. Sometimes my name is Christopher, or Chris, familiar Kit, or the Poet, or plain Marlowe. We do pretend, though, we have no names, that we are the impersonal representatives of great ideas and forces, moved by large motives like the clockwork Heavens themselves.

  “A certain person needs enquiring about,” said the man behind the small table. “Earlier enquiries have proved...ineffectual. It has been thought best the next devolved to yourself. This person is beyond Oxford; make arrangements, go there quietly. Once in Oxford,” he said, taking out of his sleeve a document with a wax seal upon it and laying it on the table, “you may open these, your instructions and knowledges; follow them to the letter. At a certain point, if you must follow them—thoroughly,” he said, coming down hard upon the word, “we shall require a token of faith.”

  He was telling me without saying that I was to see someone, do something to change their mind, or keep them from continuing a present course. Failing that I was to bring back to London their heart, as in the old story of the evil step-queen, the huntsman, and the beautiful girl who ended up consorting with forest dwarves, eating poison, and so forth.

  I nodded, which was all I was required to do.

  But he had not as yet handed me the missive, which meant he was not through.

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “I said your name was put forth,” he said, “for this endeavor. But not by me. I know you to be a godless man, a blasphemer, most probably an invert. I so hate that the business of true good government makes occasional use of such as you. But the awkward circumstances of this mission, shall we say, makes some of your peccadilloes absolute necessities. Only this would make me have any dealings with you whatsomever. There will come a reckoning one fine day.”

  Since he had violated the unspoken tenets of the arrangement by speaking to me personally, and, moreover, telling the plain unvarnished truth, and he knew it, I felt justified in my answer. My answer was, “As you say, Lord______,” and I used his name.

  He clenched the arms of his chair, started up. Then he calmed himself, settled again. His eyes went to the other papers before him.

  “I believe that is all,” he said, and handed me the document.

  I picked it up, turned and left.

  ~ * ~

  Well, work on Hero and Leander’s right out for a few days, but I betook me as fast as the icy ways would let, from my precincts in Shoreditch through the city. Normally it would mean going about over London Bridge, but as I was in a hurry I walked straight across the River directly opposite the Rose to the theatre itself in Southwark.

  The River was, and had been for two months, frozen to a depth of five feet all the way to Gravesend. Small boys ran back and forth across the river. Here and there were set up booths with stiff frozen awnings; the largest concatenation of them was farther up past the town at Windsor, where Her Majesty the Queen had proclaimed a Frost Fair and set up a Royal Pavilion. A man with a bucket and axe was chopping the River for chunks of water. Others walked the ice and beat at limbs and timbers embedded in it—free firewood was free, in any weather. A thick pall of smoke hung over London town, every fire lit. A bank of heavy cloud hung farther north than that. There were tales that when the great cold had come, two months agone, flocks of birds in flight had fallen to the ground and shattered; cattle froze standing.

  To
make matters worse, the Plague, which had closed the theatres for three months this last, long-forgotten summer, had not gone completely away, as all hoped, and was still taking thirty a week on the bills of mortality. It would probably be back again this summer and close the Theater, the Curtain and the Rose once more. Lord Strange’s and Lord Nottingham’s Men would again have to take touring the provinces beyond seven mile from London.

  But as for now, cold or no, at the Rose, we put on plays each afternoon without snow in the open-air ring. At the moment we do poor old Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay—Greene not dead these seven months, exploded from dropsy in a flop, they sold the clothes off him and buried him in a diaper with a wreath of laurel about his head—we rehearse mine own Massacre at Paris, and Shaxber’s Harry Sixt, while we play his T. Andronicus alternate with Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, of which Andronicus is an overheated feeble Romanish imitation.

  Shaxber’s also writing a longish poem, his on the celebrated Venus and Adonis, which at this rate will be done before my Hero. This man, the same age as me, bears watching. Unlike when I did at Cambridge, I take no part in the Acting; Will Shaxber is forever being messenger, third murderer, courtier; he tugs ropes when engines are needed; he counts receipts, he makes himself useful withal.

  No one here this early but Will Kemp; he snores as usual on his bed of straw and ticking in the ‘tiring house above and behind the stage. He sounds the bear that’s eaten All the dogs on a good day at the Pit. I find some ink (almost frozen) and leave a note for John Alleyn to take over for me, pleading urgent business down country, to throw off the scent, and make my way, this time over the Bridge, back to Shoreditch.

  ~ * ~

  Shoreditch is the place actors live, since it was close to the original theatres, and so it is the place actors die. Often enough first news you hear on a morning is “another actor dead in Shoreditch.” Never East Cheap, or Spital Fields, not even Southwark itself; always

  Shoreditch. At a tavern, at their lodgings, in the street itself. Turn them over; if it’s not the plague, it’s another actor dead from a knife, fists, drink, pox, for all that matter cannonfire or hailstones in the remembered summers.

  I make arrangements; I realign myself to other stations; my sword stays in its corner, my new hat, my velvet doublet all untied, hung on their hooks. I put on round slops, a leathern tunic, I cut away my beard; in place of sword a ten-inch poignard, a pointed slouch-hat, a large sack for my back.

  In an hour I am back at River-side, appearing as the third of the three P’s in John Heywood’s The Four PPPP’s, a ‘pothecary, ready to make my way like him, at least as far as Oxenford.

  The ferrymen are all on holiday, their boats put up on timbers above the ice. Here and there people skate, run shoed on the ice, slip and fall; the gaiety seems forced, not like the fierce abandon of the early days of the Great Frost. But I have been watching on my sojourn each day to and from the Rose, and I lick my finger and stick it up (the spit freezing almost at once) to test the wind, and as I know the wind, and I know my man, I walk about halfway out on the solid Thames and wait.

  As I wait, I see two figures dressed much like the two Ambassadores From Poland in my Massacre At Paris (that is, not very well, one of them being Kemp) saunter toward me on the dull grey ice. I know them to be a man named Frizier and one named Skeres, Gram and Nicholas I believe, both to be bought for a shilling in any trial, both doing the occasional cony-catching, gulling and sharping; both men I have seen in taverns in Shoreditch, in Deptford, along the docks, working the theatres.

  There is little way they can know me, so I assume they have taken me for a mark as it slowly becomes apparent they are approaching me. Their opening line, on feigning recognition, will be, “Ho, sir, are you not a man from (Hereford) (Cheshire) (Luddington) known to my Cousin Jim?”

  They are closer, but they say to my surprise, “Seems the man is late this day, Ingo.”

  “That he be, Nick.”

  They are waiting for the same thing I am. They take no notice of me standing but twenty feet away.

  “Bedamn me if it’s not the fastest thing I ever seen,” says one.

  “I have seen the cheater-cat of Africa,” says the other, “and this man would leave it standing.”

  “I believe you to be right.”

  And far down the ice, toward where the tide would be, I spy my man just before they do. If you do not know for what you look, you will think your eyes have blemished and twitched. For what comes comes fast and eclipses the background at a prodigious rate.

  I drop my pack to the ground and slowly hold up a signal-jack and wave it back and forth.

  “Bedamn me,” says one of the men, “but he’s turning this way.”

  “How does he stop it?” asks the other, looking for shelter from the approaching apparition.

  And with a grating and a great screech and plume of powdered ice, the thing turns to us and slows. It is a ship, long and thin, up on high thin rails like a sleigh, with a mast amidships and a jib up front, and as the thing slows (great double booms of teethed iron have fallen from the stern where a keelboard should be) the sails luff and come down, and the thing stops three feet from me, the stinging curtain of ice falling around me.

  “Who flies Frobisher’s flag?” came a voice from the back. Then up from the hull comes a huge man and throws a round anchor out onto the frozen Thames.

  “I,” I said. “A man who’s seen you come by here these last weeks punctually. A man who marvels at the speed of your craft. And,” I said, “an apothecary who needs must get to Oxford, as quick as he can.”

  The huge man was bearded and wore furs and a round hat in the Russian manner of some Arctic beast. “So you spoil my tack by showing my old Admiral’s flag? Who’d you sail with, man? Drake? Hawkins? Raleigh, Sir Walter Tobacco himself? You weren’t with Admiral Martin, else I’d know you, that’s for sure.”

  “Never a one,” said I. “My brother was with Hawkins when he shot the pantaloons off Don Iago off Portsmouth. My cousin, with one good eye before the Armada, and one bad one after, was with Raleigh.”

  “So you’re no salt?”

  “Not whatsoever.”

  “Where’s your brother and cousin now?”

  “They swallowed the anchor.”

  He laughed. “That so? Retired to land, eh? Some can take the sea, some can’t. Captain Jack Cheese, at your service. Where is it you need to go, Oxford? Hop in, I’ll have you there in two hours.”

  “Did you hear that, Gram?” asked one of the men. “Oxford in two hours!”

  “There’s no such way he can do no such thing!” said the other, looking at Captain Cheese.

  “Is that money I hear talking, or only the crackling of the ice?” asked Captain Jack.

  “Well, it’s as much money as we have, what be that, Gram? Two fat shillings you don’t make no Oxford in no two hours. As against?”

  “I can use two shillings,” said Jack Cheese.

  “But what’s your bet, man?” asked the other.

  “Same as you. Two shillings. If you’ll kill me for two shillings,” he said, pulling at his furry breeks and revealing the butts of two pistols the size of boarding cannons, “I’d do the same for you.”

  The two looked back and forth, then said, “Agreed!”

  “Climb in,” said Captain Jack. “Stay low, hang tight. Ship’s all yar, I’ve got a following wind and a snowstorm crossing north from the west, and we’ll be up on one runner most the time. Say your prayers now; for I don’t stop for nothing nor nobody, and I don’t go back for dead men nor lost bones.”

  The clock struck ten as we clambered aboard. My pack just hit the decking when, with a whoop, Jack Cheese jerked a rope, the jib sprang up; wind from nowhere filled it, the back of the boat screamed and wobbled to and fro. He jerked the anchor off the ice, pulled up the ice-brakes and jerked the mainsail up and full.

  People scattered to left and right and the iceboat leapt ahead with a dizzy shudder.
I saw the backward-looking eyes of Frizier and Skeres close tight as they hung onto the gunwales with whitened hands, buffeting back and forth like skittle-balls.

  And the docks and quays became one long blur to left and right; then we stood still and the land moved to either side as if it were being paid out like a thick grey and white painted rope.

  I looked back. Jack Cheese had a big smile on his face. His white teeth showed bright against his red skin and the brown fur; I swear he was humming.

  ~ * ~

  Past Richmond we went, and Cheese steered out farther toward the leftward bank as the stalls, awnings, booths and bright red of the Royal Pavilion appeared, flung themselves to our right and receded behind.