All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “Oh, help, help, help me,” Ariel screamed. “You are our only hope.”

  Her voice died away, as if swallowed by a merciless distance.

  When the light flickered down, nothing was there, no one was in Kit’s room, but Kit and the elf that possessed Kit’s body.

  The elf let go of Kit’s body, then. Kit fell, exhausted, limp, to the floor.

  His face to those rushes so recently stained with bloodied water, Kit realized that he’d been the undoing of Silver and Quicksilver also, as well as Imp.

  Covered in sweat, too tired, too weak to rise, he whispered his grief to mingle with the howls of grief from below the floor, the female lamentations so loud that they blocked even all that had passed in this room.

  “Twice I’ve loved, twice,” he said. “And both loves dead by my hand. How this hand smells still of blood. All the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this hand again.”

  But already the elf quickened within Kit and cut Kit’s breath with a chuckle. “Repine later, now you have my work to do. We have a Queen to kill.”

  And on those words, Kit’s weak body rose from the floor, and washed itself carefully, and shaved and attired itself in Kit’s remaining clean suit.

  Through it all as a man in a nightmare from which he can’t waken, Kit watched himself act, watched his body perform the routines he’d so often performed, and marveled at his former blindness.

  How vile this captivity, how base. He would go to Deptford and destroy the world, in the command of a master he could not disobey. He, Kit Marlowe, who’d never been true to friend or foe before.

  He’d do the command of the thing that had slain Imp.

  And yet, and yet he would have it otherwise. For it was right and meet he should avenge his son’s blood upon the foul being.

  Looking at his smooth face in the mirror, the face from which the elf’s possession had erased all brand of grief, every wrinkle of care, Kit sighed.

  But for his own cowardice, this would never have happened. He should have braved the council’s pleasure and by other means confronted the noose encircling him. By means that didn’t require sacrificing others. He should have cut loose the noose by means of truth and courage. Else, should he have run.

  That many years ago, in Cambridge, he should have refused to turn anyone in. He should have stood his ground. He should have remained clean and loyal and got his money from poetry only.

  “A plague on all cowards,” he whispered to the uncaring face in the mirror. “A plague, I say, and a vengeance, too!”

  He must find a way to defeat the elf. But how could he, when he was but a helpless slave?

  Scene 38

  Will sits at his table, in his room. Scribbled-on papers litter the floor. Ink blots mar the table top, and a large bluish black block of solid ink sits nearby, waiting to have water added to it, and thus be converted into usable ink. Beside it sits a bag of fine sand, used to dry the ink after writing.

  Will sat at his table, his head in his hands.

  How was he supposed to write? His words, never plentiful, now came haltingly and slow to his hesitating pen.

  The dream he’d had—of the three women and their threats—and Ariel and her suspicions, all danced in his head, a ceaseless, threatening jig.

  How could Ariel believe that Kit Marlowe was possessed by Sylvanus? When had Kit done anything less than honorable?

  No. Nothing was wrong. Kit had lost his son and mourned for him, and Ariel would soon see the folly of thinking Kit the vessel of the evil elf, Sylvanus.

  Will reached for his pen, dipped it in the ink.

  The pen hovered over the new blank leaf of paper in front of him.

  Venus and Adonis. He must write about Venus and Adonis.

  Something, something, rosy-fingered dawn.

  His mind almost touched the words he should use, stretching toward them like fingers.

  But—if Kit Marlowe didn’t harbor the wolf, who did? Surely Sylvanus was still loose, surely dangerous, whomever he’d possessed?

  The words vanished from Will’s mind, and into it, another voice, another thought poured—clear as words screamed in that very room. Oh, help, help, help me, Ariel screamed. You are our only hope.

  Will stood up, startled. His chair fell with a crash to the floor and splintered into many bits. His ink bottle spilled, pouring blue oblivion over the few words he’d scratched on the page.

  Still holding the pen in his hand, Will looked for the fairy queen. Where was she, and why had she screamed?

  His heart still racing, he remembered what Ariel had said, about hearing a mind cry from Quicksilver. Was this then it? A mind cry?

  Had Ariel been taken then? Taken to the same place as Quicksilver? The place where Quicksilver would soon die?

  But that meant Marlowe truly must be guilty . . . . No, it could not mean that.

  Will righted his ink bottle, set his pen down in the midst of a pool of spilled blue, and stared at Marlowe’s glove, which was fast becoming dyed a deep azure.

  Yet Will remembered the fear in Kit’s eyes when the two men had flanked him in Paul’s.

  Kit had gone away with them, and soon after had come to Will with a job offer, with an invitation to dinner, with marks of kindness such as Will could never have anticipated.

  And it was not that Kit believed Will to be a great poet. No. Will knew better. Something had changed, but what? Had Kit thought to involve Will in some secret dealing? Will remembered the invitation to Mistress Bull’s in Deptford.

  And then how Kit had told him not to go there, under any account.

  What did it all mean?

  Will’s hands shook so that he couldn’t attempt to write, couldn’t attempt even to right the mess on his desk. The puddle of ink had started dripping onto the floor, staining the rushes and the floorboards beneath.

  Will wiped his hand on his doublet.

  He was their only hope? He?

  He supposed that meant Marlowe really was the harborer of the wolf. And if that were the case, what could Will do?

  The two sovereigns of Elvenland had gone to face this adversary, and both had lost.

  Why should Will go now, after them? Will, who had no knowledge of magic, no power of deception? Will, who until just now had believed fair behavior to bespeak fair thoughts and hadn’t realized that a man may smile and smile and be a villain?

  Will’s heart beat a marching rhythm, but he did not know where to march. He swallowed hard. He must do something. The three old women—aspects of the female element, Ariel had called them—had told him he was their champion. Those shadows of human thought that enformed multidinous reality had chosen him. Silver had come to him for help. He’d failed them all.

  But now Ariel herself had asked for his help, and how could he fail her?

  Kit had told Will not to go to Deptford. Yet if Kit were evil, then Will must do the opposite of what Kit had entreated.

  Therefore, Will must go to Deptford, go as soon as possible.

  Will covered his eyes with his inky hands. To go to Deptford, he must ride, and Will had no horse. He looked toward the mattress that hid his purse.

  Will was fast becoming penniless once more.

  Groaning, he went to get the money.

  Groaning, he thought what a fool he was to be doing this.

  When magical might collided, shaking heaven and earth with its clash—what could a mere mortal do?

  Scene 39

  Never Land, the in-between worlds—a desolate place with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overweening cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now palaces. None of the shapes remains in solid reality but it all changes like shadows of wind-whipped branches. Amid these shadows Ariel walks, her eyes now dry but looking as if they have dried from crying every tear that could be summoned to their bruised, reddened orbs.

  Where was Quicksilver? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?

&
nbsp; Ariel stumbled on a grey root that momentarily sprawled across her path. Before she’d regained her feet, the root vanished.

  Oh, what a terrible land, worse than anything that she could have imagined. How lost she was. How much she wanted to see her lord. Oh, that Ariel could cry, that her tears might warm this frozen place and bring a living ocean to this world of shifting nothingness.

  How cold the shifting shapes made her feel. And her lord had been here almost three days. Lived he yet?

  She must find him. She must see his sweet face again and drink the words of his sweet address.

  Tattered rags of trees with things like moss or mourning grey cloth hanging from them brushed across Ariel’s face, moved by an unfelt wind.

  Sometimes, through the shadows of trees and the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw Quicksilver. But running forward, through the shadows and the shades, she found him not.

  Like a rainbow, forever receding from the reaching hand, so her lord to her straining heart.

  Where was he now, for whom her heart longed?

  She wanted to apologize for all her misdeeds—for her distrust of him, her assumption that he had left her to disport himself in London.

  He’d left to defend Fairyland. He’d done what any noble king would have done. That he’d kept it from her and would not let her help him was no more than the excess of his love and the trembling insufficiency of his self-confidence. Quicksilver had, by virtue of his division, an over sensitivity to what others might think and a tender, overgrown conscience that would not allow him to have others risk themselves in his steed, or take any part of his responsibility, though his shoulders should crack from it.

  His infidelity, if it had been such, was probably no more than a symptom of the disturbance in the cosmos, the swaying winds of feminine alarm.

  And if not, then it was Ariel’s fault, for so wishing Silver out of sight until Silver’s desires burst from their bounds and became uncontrollable in their swollen need.

  Ariel walked here and there. She wished to call for Quicksilver, but the cold seemed to steal her voice. The cold was everywhere, came from everywhere at once and leached not only heat but life itself from her body.

  Thus would death come, she understood, a sad death—a nothing, a final whimper in a frozen landscape.

  The air smelled musty like the grave, like a never-inhabited womb, like all that might have been but never was.

  She sighed as she thought that she might have been Quicksilver’s loving queen, but had not been such, and in her barren unlove, her love and her royalty belonged, rightly, in this land.

  Her foot caught on something. She fell forward and the hands she put forth to save herself from hurt gripped solid shoulders and silky hair, which did not shift upon her holding them.

  Quicksilver.

  She knelt beside him. He wore white velvet, or perhaps the magical cold of this place had leeched color from his garments. All in white, he lay on his side, curled upon himself, his eyes closed, his blond hair spread out behind him.

  For a moment, blinking, Ariel thought him dead and her heart shrank upon itself, clutching upon grief and mourning over the love she’d betrayed and could never right again.

  Then Quicksilver stirred. He opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

  He stood up. He put his arms out to her. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

  “I thought you dead,” she said and put a hand out, to assure herself of his living reality. She touched his cold chest that yet moved, in search of breath.

  He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength yet remains to me. It is not much and it might not last long.” He unfolded himself and looked down on her, his face set and grave and regal.

  Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss green eyes so intent.

  He had never looked so much like a king.

  Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips, and after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold.

  Quicksilver had lingered too long in Never Land.

  “Oh, milady,” he said as their lips parted. “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch of the truth of all her features.

  He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her, that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

  Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days—nay, in years.

  Quicksilver raised one eyebrow. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him. As though her mirth warmed him, in his cold state in this desolate land.

  She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I . . . I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

  Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demirounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

  “Because I’m done being a fool, milord, and I only wish . . . I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

  “Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done . . .”

  “I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. I know somehow you freed Sylvanus. And I know you made love to the human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

  “And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked. His face looked even paler than when she’d first seen it, his eyes wide with horror. “Half my people are dead, and you hate me not?”

  Ariel shook her head and embraced him. How cold he was, how cold, how icy, how impervious to touch. Like snow, new-fallen, or like old ice on a cliff face.

  “How can I hate him who is another half of me?” she asked. “Whose folly is, ever, but a reflection of my own?”

  She wished she could share with him the heat of her love, the pulse of her life.

  But she could not.

  “And now we’ll die here,” Quicksilver said, his voice as cold as his body. “And Sylvanus shall have sway over the world and all in it.”

  But Ariel touched the marble-cold cheek, the icy hands, the cold, cold lips.

  “No. No. We have hope. We have hope still. There’s Will Shakespeare free. He’ll find a way to set things aright.”

  But she knew her own voice echoed with doubt, and she saw doubt in Quicksilver’s disbelieving look.

  Scene 40

  A London market, sprawling in all directions from a central point. Chickens and poultry, pigs and all manner of livestock are sold alive and dead, their feet bound or their carcasses swaying in the air. Women display baskets full of fresh-baked bread or farm-grown vegetables. At a corner of the market, horse dealers assemble. And there, Will wanders, with the look of a man who has shopped long and hard and found not what he sought.

  To go to Deptford, Will must buy a horse.

  But never having done it, he found it heavy going.

  Every horse he saw looked half-dead or too expensive. Examining a half-dead one, Will sighed.

  Kit—and Sylvanus—must be in Deptford by now.

  Perforce, Kit had meant to involve Will in Sylvanus’s plan, and then, re-belling after his son’s death, Kit had entreated Will not to go.

  Else, why would Kit have cautioned Will against Kit again begging him to go? Why else, but that he feared the wolf, within his body, would call Will to Deptford again.

  But why Deptford? Did Kit mean to kill the Queen there?

 
; Will must stop it. He was the last hope of humans and elves.

  “He looks lame,” Will said, staring at the nag in front of him, a grey creature of indeterminate age, with patches upon its hide that looked like the discolorations of mold.

  “Lame?” the dealer asked, standing beside Will and speaking so loudly that the whole fair would hear. “You insult me so? You say that of my horse? Why, he was only owned by an old parson, who rode him only to his church to preach, on Sundays, and the rest of the time was he kept stabled, and fed the best, and daily taken care of.”

  Will wrinkled his nose. The beast smelled diseased, too, a pungent, acrid smell. And its lower legs were all covered in mud, though the legs of the other horses in the enclosure were clean.

  Will was not so naive that he didn’t know the trick of covering a horse’s legs in mud to make it look hale and sound, where there might be deformity or injury.

  But he’d asked about every other horse in this fair that would serve his turn, and he could not find better—not among those that he could afford with the five pounds remaining in his purse.

  At this rate, he’d not make it to Deptford, nor save the magical pillars of the world from their doom. At this rate, the world would be lost to Sylvanus for lack of a horse.

  “Master, this horse will do you proud. You’ll will him to your grandchildren, yet.”

  Will ground his teeth. At least the horse hide, he would will to his grandchildren.

  Did Will look so much the credulous fool that all felt they must make up outrageous stories and try them on him?

  “How much for the horse?” he asked.

  The dealer bowed and smirked. “For you, master, for you five pounds.”

  And for everyone else two pounds? Will wondered if all the prices told him in this fair were like that, many times more than they should be.

  Will’s grandfather had left twenty pounds in his will and had been considered a reasonably well-off man.