Any Man So Daring

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  His single eye gazed upon Will, amused. “You have grown old, Will,” he said. “And you have waxed prosperous.”

  Will said nothing. Now, here, facing Marlowe’s ghost, he didn’t know what to say. So long, he’d wanted to be rid of Kit, so long he’d not been sure whether Kit’s specter really existed or it was a figment of his imagination, a burden imagined.

  Looking at Marlowe gave Will the first certainty that the words he’d written, the words that had made him famous and that caused everyone to acclaim him, were in fact Marlowe’s.

  And the first doubt about wanting the ghost exorcized.

  There was not, there had never been a Sweet Swan of the Avon. There was, instead, a doomed shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, dead three years and yet attracting London’s attention and adoration with the words of his dead, immortal pen.

  Will eyed Marlowe’s ghost narrowly and Marlowe smiled back, a strange smile, like that of a child who’s done something he knows he’ll be punished for.

  “Why do you haunt me?” Will asked. “What do you want of me?”

  “I never meant to haunt you, Marlowe said. “I was foolish. I gave you my words,” he said. “But no one told me the price to pay and the penalty of my good deed. In the final judgment, because of that one good deed, when the judge weighed my follies in the scale against my worth, the two plates of the scale came dead even and did not move.

  “Thus was my fate weighed, thus was I judged too good for hell, too ill for heaven, and then did my words like a golden filament, an unforgiving tether, call to me and hold me here.” His one eye filled with tears, while his mouth yet twisted in a smile. “It wouldn’t matter to me, nor would I care, but for Imp, that son I fathered without meaning and killed without intent. He waits for me heavenward. I disappointed the boy too much living to disappoint him again now.”

  Will raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know what Kit meant. Oh, he knew well enough — or at least suspected — that Kit had fathered a son by his erstwhile landlady and that the boy --nicknamed Imp -- aged six or seven, had died in the awful struggle for the elf throne that had claimed his own father’s life. But what Kit meant otherwise, Will could not tell.

  Will’s imagination had never run to matters of final judgment or of glory ever after, and what Kit spoke of seemed too legalistic, too exacting, to be real.

  Yet what did Will know of reality, he who had meddled with the fairy realms? Other people thought that an illusion, and yet Will knew it was real. How dared he doubt the reality Marlowe averred? For Marlowe was dead and, therefore, should know of judgment and heaven and hell. More than Will, who had not yet shuffled off his mortal coil.

  “I know you do not understand, yet hear this — one good deed would put me over the threshold of heaven, one good deed alone catapult me to glory with angel wings and harp song.” Kit tried to look innocent, but his small, expressive mouth twisted in wry amusement at such an image. Then his features sobered and softened and his gaze seemed to look on something inexpressively dear. “And Imp’s company forevermore. So you must hear, for this is my good deed, and I wish it accounted to me as it should be. I came to pay you warning.

  “In the fairy realm, anew, does trouble boil like pus out of an ill-healed wound. There’s conspiracy afoot and disaster beyond it. A trap for Quicksilver is being laid, with your undistinguished self as the cheese that shall lure the royal mouse.”

  “Myself? As bait for Quicksilver?” Will asked. It passed his understanding. He’d not seen Quicksilver for three years, nor did he know what Quicksilver thought of him now. They’d not parted so amicably three years ago. Could Quicksilver still love him? Could the Lady Silver still love him?

  At the thought of Lady Silver he grew dizzy and shook his head to clear it. “But what will they use to draw me into their quarrels who am so well schooled in their effects? How will they tempt me into their death-dealing duels, their magical arguments?”

  Kit’s ghost appeared to hesitate. His gaze wavered, and his hand moved, midair, as though attempting to clutch aught that wasn’t there. His whole form seemed to wink out of sight for a moment, only to solidify again.

  “This is my warning. Pay heed, Will; do not go rushing where your heart leads, for it will only lead you tripping into nothingness.”

  “Speak plainly,” Will said. “I tire of riddles.” What a nimble tongue this ghost had, that defied Will’s understanding.

  “You too have a son, an eleven year old boy.”

  “Hamnet?” Will heard his own voice, raspy and menacing, erupt from his throat as though it would scratch it on emerging. “What of Hamnet?” In speaking, he half rose from his bench and stood, trembling.

  He had that one son, aye, that one light and hope for this days. His two daughters — fourteen-year-old Susannah, and Judith, Hamnet’s twin -- he loved well enough. But Hamnet would carry his name. As a man he would be all that Will had failed to be, better educated and better trained and therefore more accomplished and better received in polite society than his father.

  Hamnet would be the first of a Shakespeare family of scholars and gentlemen.

  The coat of arms for which Will’s father had first applied, and which had been forgotten when John Shakespeare’s fortunes had dimmed, would now be resurrected, with added luster from Will’s toiling with the unyielding quill. From it, Hamnet would receive that status and grace which Will had lacked, the name of "gentleman," the right to wear a sword, the reverence and respect of humbler men.

  Hamnet would attend university. He would know the Latin and Greek that often evaded his father’s rude tongue. He would....

  Kit remained silent, staring at Will, as though studying Will’s changes of expression like a recondite book.

  “What of Hamnet?” Will said, again, and put a hand forward and drew it back, knowing he would touch nothing there, and fearing yet. What would his hand feel, where Marlowe’s ghost sat, immaterial? Nothing? Or, if it felt something, what would it be? The cold of death? The dustiness of the tomb?

  “Hamnet even now and as we speak,” Kit said, “is being lured into the forest by fairy power. And from the forest will he be taken elsewhere, to a place beyond the real world, where magic reigns supreme.”

  Will stood. He forgot his problem with his plays. What cared he now, whose plays those truly were? He’d written naught but for Hamnet’s sake, for the sake of Hamnet’s future.

  He forgot that he wanted to be rid of Kit Marlowe. He forgot all save that his son would be kidnapped into fairyland, that land of treachery and wonders, of danger and eerie terror.

  For -- once in fairyland -- who knew what might befall Hamnet?

  Hamnet was but a child, easily dazed. The glitter of fairy would deceive him, and those hollow riches that magic could spin would confuse him.

  Taken to the cloud-piercing castle of the hill, shown the power of effortless magic, the joy of elven dances, could Hamnet resist?

  Or would Hamnet, with ready, eager joy, eat of the fairy food and thus become a changeling--one of them who, under the hill, compassed their immortal lives, never knowing the greater joy of brief human lives?

  Would Hamnet thus become a brittle thing, frail and beautiful as spun glass? Know the joy of hate and the pain of lust, but not the greater, mellower fire of human love?

  No. Curse the thought. Hamnet would not be of them.

  They could not have him.

  Marlowe had brought Will news of this, hence Marlowe must, by heaven and hell and the dust beyond help Will save Hamnet from this fate.

  Once before had something like this happened. Once before had Will’s family been taken into elvenland.

  With Susannah but an infant in arms, his Nan had been stolen, and his daughter too, to serve the perverse king of fairyland. Then, ten years later, Kit Marlowe had succumbed to conspiracies engendered by elves.

  Now, Hamnet, his father’s darling, the hope of Will’s old age, would be taken also? Taken to that world of passing promise and empty joys
?

  Will dared fairyland to rip his child from his arms.

  Will trembled as he stood and, standing, felt blood drain from his face and leaving him as pale, as colorless, as immaterial as the ghost beside him.

  He reached for the woman who still sat at the head of the table.

  She looked from man to ghost and ghost to man, puzzled, like a child laboring at a difficult problem.

  “Good woman,” he said. “You must send me hence. If there’s a way you can make me travel with magic, like the fairy bridge of air, between two points without touching the gross material world between, then send me to Hamnet now, for I must rescue my son.”

  “No!” Kit reached for Will’s arm. Strangely, Kit’s hand had weight and could be felt, heavy as the tomb and cold as ice as it touched Will’s arm, and burned with cold through Will’s sleeve. “No, you fool. That is what I came to tell you. You must not go. Not you. You must--”

  He had no time to say more.

  The woman screamed at Will, her eyes rolling, wide open, terrified, the eyes of a horse about to bolt. “You must not do it, Master Shakespeare. I sense dangers--”

  Will had never, in his life, pulled the dagger in his belt against man or beast. That humble weapon he used to cut bread, to slice his mouton, to pare his nibs and to crumble his inkstone.

  He found his hand on the dagger, the dagger in his hand, pressed against the witch’s neck. “Now, good woman,” he said. “Now. Send me to my son.”

  Scene Seven

  The same odd landscape of broken ground, amid which the black castle rises, dark against the sky of fairyland. Past it, in the forest, where each tree seems to reach upwards to touch the indifferent sky, Miranda paces, while Caliban watches her, his canine eyes fixed in abject and mute misery.

  “Why comes he not?” Miranda asked, and in asking she paced as though, by walking, she could arrive at an answer. “Why tarries my lord so?”

  She held the book to her chest and walked back and forth in a narrow space circumscribed by the rough trunk of a broad, sprawling oak, and the towering height of an ancient pine tree.

  “He comes not. Has he forgotten me? No, I am foolish. How could he forget me? Yet I shall go distracted, for he comes not.” Holding the book precariously with just one hand, she traced, upon the pine tree’s scaly trunk, Proteus’s marks made by his dagger. M and P. Their initials entwined, as their hearts already were, as their lives would be forevermore. “No. My poor lord. What tongue shall smooth his name when I, his intended wife, so abuse him? No. He would come if he could. Therefore, he cannot. But why can he not? Why, Caliban? Has the tyrant stopped him on his way? Has the fiend had my love executed?” Thus speaking, in great anguish, Miranda turned anxious gaze to Caliban and sighed. “Speak, Caliban? Why are thou mute? Think you that he was stopped? Think you my lord is... dead?”

  Caliban only looked, his eyes immense.

  Throughout childhood. Miranda had thought that Caliban’s eyes were like her own, her own eyes never glimpsed except hazily in polished bits of tin and the ice upon a pond’s face on a cold winter’s morn. She’d thought Caliban’s eyes were like her own, or at least closer to her own than the cold fire of the Hunter’s eyes.

  But now she knew better. She’d seen her kind and her like in Proteus, and compared to him, Caliban was a nothing, a creature of strange, primeval forests, a creature like a dream unformed, like a nightmare unfinished.

  And his eyes, how dull his eyes

  were. How they made Miranda long all the more for company of her own kind.

  “Speak, Caliban,” she said, her voice full of impatience. Her anxiety for Proteus, her wondering about him, screamed through her lips, unmeant, turning itself into anger and lashing out at the ever-present Caliban. “Speak, Caliban, or I shall go insane. What thinkst thou happened to my lord?”

  Caliban raised his morose gaze to meet hers, and his eyes were full of patient misery, as though he’d made misfortune a friend and lain down companionably beside grief. “How should I know, mistress, what has happened to the elf you wait for? My opinion of him, you do not wish to know, and beyond that I know nothing, nor can I divine how to steady the mad rushing of your heart.”

  Miranda clicked her tongue impatiently. “Such beautiful words to hide such rude meaning. You would not comfort me.”

  “It is to me that such comforting should fall,” Proteus’s voice said.

  Miranda turned to see him approach through the broken landscape behind her. He looked tired, his hair matted and wild, his eyes sunk within dark circles, his face so pale that lips and skin and all seemed to melt in uniform gray-white sadness — like curdled milk or dingy sheets.

  Yet he attempted a smile for her and through his colorless lips his voice came, if not as spirited as usual, making a brave attempt at spirit. “If comforting you need, lady, it should fall to me. Why ask you this of such a creature as Caliban?”

  She turned fully and smiled on him. “You were late, milord.”

  He tried to smile, but his mouth seemed to lack the strength to turn upwards and, instead, hovered in indecisive sadness, halfway between smile and frown. He sighed. “I had heavy business to attend to. Heavy business.” His black eyes, like shiny pebbles long polished by the patient sea upon a familiar shore, turned to her. Today they looked opaque and remote, as if the sea that rolled them were a cold sea, on whose shores no one lived and whose depths harbored no creature. “Today I saw the noblest blood of fairyland spilled wantonly like so much water. Today I saw my father— my father--” And here he stopped and his lips trembled, and his eyes blinked rapidly, a teardrop caught upon his blond lashes looking like a dewdrop that the morning has forgotten upon the flower.

  “My lord,” she said, and put her hand on his wrist, struggling to hold the heavy volume with the other hand.

  “You’ve got the book,” Proteus said, with such effusive joy that one would think she’d gone away to war and brought back the bounty of a thousand captured cities. “You’ve got the book, Miranda. Lady. My Queen.”

  She was gratified as ever to be called his Queen and smiled upon him, a smile that was part pity for his sorrow and part pleasure at his company. “It didn’t take that much work, Proteus. It is not as though it were on the bottom of the sea or upon high cloud. It was in the library, and there I found it.”

  He looked at her, and his eyes were suddenly animated. Pebbles upon which a ray of sun played, making them shinier than jewels. “Ah, no. You’ll not play down your value, for did you not brave the wrath of the immortal Hunter to get me this?”

  He took the book from her and, setting it atop a taller shrub, opened it eagerly, searching through its time-yellowed pages. “Did you not go so far, indeed, for my cause? When we shall be married, you shall reap the full immortal joy of true love and true queenship.”

  Miranda squirmed and felt her cheeks warm, pleased at his praise and yet finding it difficult to believe she’d been in any danger from the Hunter.

  Oh, perhaps the Hunter wasn’t her true father. And perhaps he and his dogs roamed the night punishing evil doers.

  Yet she’d been his joy and his happiness for years now. She’d seen him smile at her smiles and come as near to crying at her griefs as such a being could.

  The Hunter hurt her? She’d sooner believe Proteus might.

  It seemed to her, also, that at Proteus’s praise of her Caliban made a sound in the background. The sound was too faint to be sure of its quality, but Miranda would have sworn it was a snort of doubt and derision.

  To abstract herself from her sense of discomfort at this praise, Miranda looked at Proteus's hands as he turned the pages of the book.

  Such long, white fingers. How could Proteus ever have held a sword or discharged himself honorably in battle? It seemed to Miranda as though her own hands, trained as they were to do nothing except the labor of the pen and the working of her needle upon the pliant embroidery fabric, were stronger and more purposeful.

  Proteus's
hands shook, as he turned the pages, and rushed eagerly, like lizards darting upon a patch of sun, following the first line of every page, as though he couldn’t read it with his eyes and must trust his hands to guide him upon the meaning of the letters.

  Proteus's index finger darted out, eager and curious, tracing the cryptic symbols upon the yellowed paper, then slowed on tracing the second line of symbols and finally stopped altogether.

  He would turn the page and then trace the mystic symbols again.

  The symbols were like no alphabet Miranda had ever seen before — strong and coiled like serpents about to strike. It seemed to Miranda, as she stared, that they writhed and moved upon the page, living letters — creatures of prey lying in wait for... whom? A reader? An enchanter?

  Their strangeness, the sense that they were alive made her eyes strive to focus, caused her head to ache.

  And yet the more she looked on them the more she thought that she could almost understand them. Almost.

  Those letters that twisted and writhed were like a phrase hovering on the edge of her tongue, like a recollection of a dream almost grasped and on the edge of vanishing forever into the nothingness that engendered it.

  As Proteus turned pages, Miranda’s gaze traced the letters. There, that was a spell for...finding what’s been lost. And there, that was a spell for restoring hair that had fallen.

  Yet farther on, she thought she saw a spell for mending a broken love, and for finding gold.

  Proteus's finger moved on, restless, seeking.

  “Milord, what words are this?” Miranda asked, fearing to interrupt him, fearing that he might upbraid her if he did, yet too puzzled to hold her tongue. “Milord, how is it possible that I can almost understand such strange symbols? What symbols are they?”

  For a moment she thought that Proteus had not heard her, as his finger rushed on upon the page. But he spoke, as from a distant place, without turning, without so much as lifting his gaze from the page. “Those letters, Miranda, are the writing of our kind.”