Saint Antony's Fire

by Steve White

  They passed through the palisade in silence and proceeded between the longhouses and past the central fire-pit. All of them but White stared at the residents, especially the women: even more heavily tattooed than the men, and with breasts partially exposed by the knee-length deerskin garments they wore. Those garments left them quite naked behind, as the sailors did not fail to notice the first time one of them turned around.

  The stares they got in return were of a curious quality: not stares of amazement, for English people were no longer a novelty here, but rather of apprehension, as though the English had become linked in these people's minds with uncanny and ill-omened things.

  Manteo, who was rapidly proving himself as indispensable as White had said he was, broke the mood by announcing the identity of the red-haired English woman, and shouts of "Weroanza Elizabeth" rang out. Then he led them to one of the longhouses. The sailors and soldiers sank gratefully to the ground outside and ate the food the Indian women brought. But the Queen, Walsingham, Dee, Winslow and White followed Manteo into the smoky interior, where a man in the remnants of English clothing lay on a pallet. He was scraggly-bearded and unhealthy-looking, and his left leg was wrapped in some kind of large leaves.

  "Dick Taverner!" exclaimed White.

  The man lifted himself on one elbow and stared through the gloom. "Master White?" He shook his head. "No, it can't be. The fever must be back."

  "It's I, Dick. I promised I'd be back, didn't I?"

  "But . . . you said you'd be back in three months. How long has it been? We gave up on you."

  "I tried, Dick. As God is my witness, I tried. But much has happened in the world beyond this coast. Which reminds me . . ." He cleared his throat and spoke with awkward formality. "Your Majesty, I present your loyal subject Richard Taverner."

  Taverner's expression passed into something beyond bewilderment as the Queen stepped into his line of sight. "The fever . . ." he mumbled, blinking stupidly. But then he shook his head violently and stared. "No . . . I've gone mad in this place."

  "You are not mad, Master Taverner," said the Queen with a smile, "and I honor you for remaining faithful. . . . No, be still!" she added hastily as Taverner tried with obvious pain, to bring his legs under him and kneel.

  "But . . . but," stammered Taverner as he sank gratefully back down, "how can it be that Your Majesty is here?"

  "I dare say Lord Manteo has wondered the same thing." The Indian's expression gave ample confirmation. "But I have waited until we could speak privately, for these are not the tidings you wish to hear. I have come seeking refuge." The Queen took a deep breath. "You must remember that war with Spain was in the air even before you departed England last year."

  "Yes, Your Majesty. The Scots queen was two months dead when we set sail. The air was full of rumors of the Armada the King of Spain was preparing. Just weeks before our departure, Sir Francis Drake had set out from Plymouth. Everyone said he was to attack the Armada before it could sail."

  "Aye!" The Queen's eyes flamed. "Drake sailed into Cadiz harbor like the daring corsair he was. As he himself said afterwards, he 'singed the King of Spain's beard.' " The fire in her eyes guttered out. "But it was all for naught. Drake delayed the Armada's sailing, but it sailed this year. And as God is my witness, we would still have seen it off, if we'd had only men to contend with! We were defeated not by men, but by unnatural sorcery."

  Taverner's face took on an even more unhealthy shade. "The Gray Monks?"

  "Yes. Our fleet—Drake, Lord Howard, everyone—was consumed in St. Antony's fire. There was nothing left to prevent the Duke of Parma's forces from landing in England, and nothing in England could stop them." The Queen motioned Walsingham and Winslow forward. "My Principal Secretary persuaded me that my duty to my people required me to escape from England aboard captain Winslow's ship. We came here because my advisor Dr. Dee believes the Gray Monks are in search of something among these islands—something that may hold the key to their power."

  "The Gray Monks," Taverner repeated in tones of horror. "Sorcery. Yes. That would explain what happened here."

  "But what did happen here?" demanded White. "Where are the others?"

  "Yes," Dee urged. "You must tell us everything."

  Taverner took a deep breath. "When you did not return, Master White, we divided. Most of the men went inland, led by those of the Assistants who didn't have wives and children dependent on them, to try to find the Chesapeake Bay where we were meant to settle. God alone knows if they still live, and where they are if they do."

  "The 'Assistants'?" Dee queried.

  "Men appointed by Sir Walter to assist me in governing the colony," White explained impatiently. "Go on, Dick."

  "But only able-bodied single men went with them. It was decided that married couples and their children should go to Croatoan, where thanks to Manteo we could hope to find friends, among whom we could seek shelter."

  "My daughter Eleanor," White said eagerly. "And her husband, and her infant daughter Virginia Dare."

  "Aye. And the others with children: eleven children and seventeen women in all. Also twenty-one of the men, husbands and certain others—including me, for I had laid open my leg and it had grown inflamed. As you see, it's never healed. So I had to be carried in a litter by some of Manteo's men. We were marching inland, toward this village, when we reached a clearing. No, not a clearing, really—just an area of second-growth woods, much younger than what grew around it, as though it had been somehow cleared many years ago . . . but not by fire, for the outlines of it were too regular.

  "All at once, my litter bearers stopped. Manteo said it was because his people always avoid that area—they say it's bad luck. While he argued with them, the English people kept on going and . . . and . . ."

  "Yes?" Walsingham prompted. "Continue."

  "You'll think me a liar, your lordship. Or mad."

  "Tell them, Richard," said Manteo. "I will vouch for you."

  Taverner swallowed. "As the people walked into that strange area, they began to . . . to fade out. But only for an instant, so short I would have missed it if I hadn't been watching them. Then they were gone, without a trace!" Taverner looked from face to face with a pleading look. "As I am a Christian, Your Majesty, I swear it's true."

  "It is true," said Manteo solemnly. "And I too am a Christian. When I was a boy, old men claimed their grandfathers had told them that something like a tremendous thunderclap cleared out that area and then roared on southwestward. And ever since then, there have been stories of people disappearing there. But this is the first time that anyone has seen it happening."

  "This must be it!" Dee's voice trembled with excitement. "Anything so monstrous can only be the work of the Gray Monks!"

  "No doubt," said Walsingham with his usual calm thoughtfulness. "Or . . . could it be that this event of which the Indians' forefathers spoke was nothing less than the entry of the Gray Monks into the world? Remember, Florida is southwestward of here."

  Dee stared at him, for not even his imagination had reached so far.

  "But where did they enter from?" Winslow breathed. "Hell?" No one answered him.

  "Well," said the Queen, shattering the silence, "I would see this uncanny place." And before anyone could react, she was sweeping out of the longhouse. The others could only scramble after her.

  "Your Majesty," Winslow called out to her back, "I can't allow you to endanger yourself this way!"

  "Allow me?" she stopped and whirled around to face him with an abruptness that almost made him fall over backwards. Rage blazed in her eyes. "You may have authority over everyone on your ship, Captain, but now we are ashore. You do not command here."

  "But Your Majesty," wheezed Walsingham, catching up, "your life is too precious to—"

  "By the blood of almighty God, am I the only one here who isn't an old woman?" The Queen turned from them contemptuously. "Lieutenant Fenton, you and your men will accompany me. Lord Manteo, lead the way. The rest of you," she added withe
ringly, "may remain here if you choose." And she was off again.

  Repressing an oath, Winslow gestured to his sailors. They fell in behind Fenton's soldiers, forming up around Walsingham, Dee and White. Shakespeare formed up with them, gamely enough; someone had found him a boarding pike. Hopefully he knew the difference between stage fighting and the real thing. Winslow took his place in front with the Queen, Fenton and Manteo as they left the village and plunged into the forest.

  The area was as Taverner had described it, and Winslow felt his neck hairs prickle at the indefinable wrongness of it. Even the Queen was visibly taken aback for a moment. Then, shoulders back, she strode forward. The others could only follow.

  Manteo was the only one to hold back. His Christianity was too new to have wholly banished the older beliefs from his mind—all the more so inasmuch as he had seen confirmation of those beliefs with his own eyes less than a year ago. So he hesitated . . . and saw the English begin to fade from sight rapidly.

  "Weroanza Elizabeth!" he screamed, and in defiance of all the generations of his ancestors he gathered himself to spring forward.

  But then the too-sharply defined space in the forest was empty. And Manteo, all vestiges of Christianity vanished, fell to his knees and howled desolately.

  Seven

  Oddly enough, it never occurred to Winslow to think he was going mad.

  Afterwards, when he had time to reflect, he decided that was because he knew this was something not even the maddest of human minds could have dredged up from its reservoir of fears and fantasies. Monsters and devils, perhaps. Perhaps even the sight of the world being consumed by fire or flood. But not the world fading away, losing its color and becoming blurred and colorless—except for his companions, who remained as before, in sharp contrast to the unnatural twilight world around them. Sounds were fading too, for Manteo's cry seemed to come from a vast distance and then go out altogether.

  Besides, it only lasted for less than a minute. Manteo going to his knees was the last thing Winslow saw. Then the world vanished altogether and there was . . . nothing.

  Just that. Nothing. Not even blackness. He was afloat in an indescribable void which held only the others who had accompanied him. And even they could not be seen. There was no word for the way in which he was conscious of them, for it had nothing to do with the ordinary senses. Nor could he tell how close they were, for there was no such thing as distance. Nevertheless, in some way his language held no words for, he knew they were receding from him, passing beyond his ken.

  He screamed. He could not even hear himself scream.

  But then, he could not see himself either. His consciousness, his soul, was disembodied and adrift, all alone in nothingness.

  He had never thought Hell would be like this.

  But then, in the same fashion as before, he sensed that the others were reentering his frame of reference. Which, in turn, meant he had a frame of reference again. The infinite emptiness was acquiring a kind of texture.

  As abruptly as it had vanished, reality reappeared, and his companions were there in the same sharp contrast of color and solidity against the dim gray world around them.

  Only . . . it wasn't the same world.

  Winslow could see that at once. This rolling landscape was nothing like what had surrounded them on Croatoan Island before it had faded away. That was obvious even before reality firmed up and regained light and color and sound.

  They stood on a hillside in what looked like late-afternoon summer sun, overlooking a wide valley that stretched off to the hazy limits of vision, a countryside of many streams and lakes, with a scattering of low pale-tinted structures among foliage that more than half concealed them. Even at a distance, there was something peculiar about the trees. Winslow spied a flock of birds. They didn't look quite right either.

  They all stood stock-still, staring about them and then staring at each other in silence. No one screamed. What had happened to them had been too quick, and too foreign from all normal experience, for ordinary terror or panic. In a corner of his mind where he could still be amused, Winslow noted that for once Shakespeare had nothing to say.

  It came as no surprise to him that the Queen was the first to break the hush.

  "Have we died, Doctor Dee?" she inquired in a rock-steady voice.

  The brutally direct question brought the magus out of shock. "I think not, Your Majesty. I see no choirs of angels, as one would expect in Heaven. And this land bears even less resemblance to . . . the other alternative."

  "Then where are we?" the Queen demanded.

  "And how were we transported to this place?" added Walsingham, whose recovery of his mental equilibrium was as unsurprising to Winslow as the Queen's.

  "The faërie lords have spirited us away by magic!" came the quavering Welsh-accented voice of one of Lieutenant Fenton's soldiers. "We're under timeless Elf Hill!"

  "Enough of that talk, Owain!" rasped Fenton.

  "I fear, Lieutenant, that it holds as much or as little likelihood as anything else," said Shakespeare with a small, tremulous smile.

  Winslow voiced a thought that had entered his mind from he knew not where. "Can this be where the Gray Monks came from? Perhaps we've entered their world in the same uncanny way they entered ours."

  They all stared at him.

  "It would explain much . . ." Dee muttered to himself.

  "I see none of them about," observed Walsingham, ever the voice of realism.

  "Well," said the Queen briskly, "lest they arrive, we should seek shelter. I believe I see buildings in yonder valley. Perhaps we can even find the colonists who departed from Croatoan as we did, or at least word of them."

  "A moment, Your Majesty." Something in Winslow's voice made even the Queen pause. He stood for a moment, looking around him, committing to memory what this ridgeline and that copse of trees looked like from where he stood. He had gone on raids deep into Spanish territory, and had learned to fix locations in his mind. After a few seconds he blinked, and turned to meet the Queen's quizzical look.

  "I know not by what miracle or sorcery we came here, Your Majesty. But I beg you to recall that it has happened more than once on Croatoan Island—at the same place. I wonder if this place where we have appeared holds the same divine or magical potency. If so, we may wish to return to it."

  "In order to return to Croatoan, you mean," Walsingham stated rather than asked.

  "I think it may well be so, Mr. Secretary. And, should it become necessary, I am confident that I will know when I am here at—" he gave the Welsh soldier Owain a wink "—Elf Hill."

  The Queen smiled. "As good a name for it as any, Captain. And now, let us proceed."

  As they walked down into the valley, Winslow saw that he had not been mistaken about the strangeness of the trees. None of them was like any he had ever seen in any land to which he had voyaged. The leaves were a variety of odd shapes, and their characteristic yellowish-green color lent an autumnal look to what felt like summer. Many of them were hung with unfamiliar fruits which no one felt the urge to sample.

  As they descended into the valley, they came among the buildings. But there were no people as they had hoped. These structures, built to the tenets of a strange, curving architecture out of materials Winslow could not identify, were long abandoned and mostly collapsed. In many cases, they had clearly been seared and smashed by titanic forces of some kind. That had been a very long time ago, for the forest had taken over the ruins. But this was a different kind of forest: trees of various colors and shapes, blazing flowers, feathery shrubs, an overall look of diverse exoticism.

  It reminded Winslow of a garden left untended for too long, allowed to run riot. And that, he decided, was precisely what it was. This had been a city unlike any he had ever known, with no differentiation between city and parkland. And after the city had been devastated, the ubiquitous gardens had overspread their bounds, invading the crumbling buildings.

  "One thing at least I am now certain of," John Dee mu
rmured, peering at a huge violet-and-viridian flower.

  "Yes?" Winslow queried in the same hushed tone.

  "I had thought we might have been spirited to some remote and unknown part of our own world, perhaps even beyond Cathay. But this—" he made a vague gesture indicating the runaway vegetation "—is no part of creation as we know it."

  They proceeded in silence along the old thoroughfares, now cracked and weed-choked but still discernible. The soldiers and sailors, deployed around the Queen and the other noncombatants, were tensely watchful. But the only motion they glimpsed was that of occasional small, unfamiliar animals scurrying through the underbrush and darting into cracks in walls.

  It took a moment before Winslow realized that he was hearing a sound that was neither the chittering of the animals nor the cries of birds. It failed to register at first, for it was a kind of sound neither he nor any of the others had ever heard—a low, buzzing hum like nothing in nature, and like nothing produced by man. It took another moment before he spotted the source of the sound, as the sunlight flashed on a distant metallic craft that was sailing through the sky.