The older woman, silver hair loose and wild over her dull black dress, looks up with pale blue eyes. In looking up, she reveals that she has no ears -- for she who cuts the thread of life must be deaf to mortal pleas. “When our thread is cut and spun. When evil’s worst is done. When punishment and reward are won.”
“Where the place?” the blonde girl asks. She lifts her face up and for the first time shows that, amid the delicate tracery of her features, shine no human eyes, such as light mortal way. No space exists for eyes on her perfect face, nor scars where eyes once were, nothing but a blankness where eyes should be, for, like newborn life, is she blind.
“In the heart of men,” the old woman says and, as she speaks, the still air trembles and tears, like a paper burned, leaving an irregular hole in the scene, a hole through which a rich chamber can be spied.
In the burn, a creature appears -- looking like a young man, dressed in light blue velvet breeches and doublet, his pale moonlight-colored hair combed over his left shoulder, his moss-green eyes amazed. He looks at himself, as though disbelieving where he is and the form he takes.
The hole closes behind him, leaving him stranded in this odd forest, with these strange companions. He stands, his hand reaching to his side, as if for the handle of an accustomed sword that is not there.
All three spinners look up, displaying one’s lack of ears, the other’s empty eye space and the other’s sharp teeth in a smile.
The youth notices the spinners and starts. “Oh, what are these?” he asks, looking frightened. “Live you? Are you aught that even an elf such as me ought to question?” He puts his hands around himself and looks lost, like a small child in an unknown house. “What a strange chill and what a strange dream. And yet, I am in Arden forest, where the palace of faerie kind is set and where I reign as the king for faerieland. And you look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are on it.” He frowns in wonder. “You seem to understand me, by each at once her chappy finger laying upon her skinny lips. You should be women, and yet strange women you are. Speak if you can; what are you?”
The maiden smiles. Her sweet smile makes her deformity all the more glaring. “All hail Quicksilver, king of Elves.”
The middle aged woman smiles in turn, displaying her carnivorous teeth, “And Lady Silver, his other aspect.”
As she speaks, the image of a beautiful lady with dark hair and pale, pale skin stands besides the blond youth. He spares it no more than an amazed look, because now the crone speaks, “Both Quicksilver and Silver will too soon be bereft -- of kingdom and happiness, and aye, of life itself.” She turns her intent eyes to Quicksilver. “Lest look you to your keeping and learn to be a king as king should be, and to be yourself, both entirely.”
“Bereft?” Quicksilver asks. Despite himself, his voice does waver. “Bereft how? Say from whence you woe this strange intelligence? Or why upon this forest you stop my nightly work with such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you.”
The maid smiles. “Such as us can no man charge, no man hold,” she says.
“Nor no elf either,” the matron says, “for you are no more to me than is a man -- a thread spun that may be rolled between my fingers as I see fit.”
“And cut as I list,” the crone speaks up in tremulous voice. “And yet we’d warn you, for you serve our purpose well.” She reaches into a basket at her feet, retrieves a thread sullied to an indifferent grey. “Listen to us, for your brother, Sylvanus, the king that was -- whom you entrusted in keeping to the ancient Hunter, and who’s become one of the Hunter’s dogs -- Sylvanus lives still and, uneasy within his confinement, he strives to cut the bonds that bind him.”
The middle-aged woman smiles, showing sharp teeth -- the merciless teeth of a famished wolf. Her voice descends to a confidential stage whisper, and her finger pauses not over the twisting thread. “You, fool that you are, Quicksilver, king of elves, have set old evil to guard newer evil. Old evil has blunted and aged like a dagger put to humble use chopping greens in a cottage kitchen. It cannot keep the edge off your brother’s pure malice that would devour the whole wide world with its open maw.
“If Sylvanus succeeds so shall the worlds go clashing, the spheres breaking, till nowhere is everywhere, all is nothing, and only that is which is not.”
The older woman sighs. Her scissors tremble over a white thread held beside the sullied one. “Aye, king, you are a fool indeed. As we speak your brother strives for the heart of those already touched by faerie. Should he find a human to give him asylum, then can he grow and grow and come back to defy you.”
“Touched by faerie?” Quicksilver sounds amazed, lost. “Mean you Will Shakespeare, or—?”
The three women shake their heads.
“Not for us to say how the thread should be woven, how the battle should be fought,” the maid says. “Only to spin and twist and cut.” She lifts the thread with her fingers.
The matron nods. “Then in the hearts of men shall we meet again.”
“After the hurlyburly is done,” the crone pipes in with her reedy voice. “And the battle is lost or won.”
They vanish into the air, and Quicksilver stands, alone, amazed, eyes wide. His lips shape a single word that his voice yet fears to utter.
“Sylvanus.”
The name of his unworthy brother whose throne and majesty Quicksilver has taken.
Scene One
The market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, nestled in the crook of gentle flowing Avon. It is spring, and the poplars that dot the town unfurl their new green glory. Above the town a thunderstorm brews. The roiling masses of clouds hang, threatening. No breeze moves the nascent buds or the fresh green leaves. In this uneasy calm, the good burghers sleep snug in their beds, by their good wives’ sides. But in the garden of a house on Henley street, on the edge of town, between the back alley that runs into Arden forest and the back doors of twin wattle and daub houses, a shadowy man stands, transparent and imperfect like a figure glimpsed in a dream.
How came he here?
Will didn’t know.
Standing in the middle of his parents’ garden, Will had no memory of getting there, no memory at all except of lying down in his bed, in far-away London.
Yet, this was no dream.
Taking a deep breath, he smelled the ripe fruit in nearby orchards, savored the warm breeze on his skin, listened to the babble of the Avon.
No dream had ever felt this vivid, this alive. He pulled back his dark curls that brushed the collar of his cheap russet suit. Though Will’s hair had started receding in the front, making him look older than his twenty nine years, it remained lush and long in the back.
Will remembered, with a dew of tears in the eyes, how much he missed his native town. The last three years Will had been in London, where the smells the fresh spring wind transported were likely to be manure, or the perfume with which foolish Londoners masked the excessive human reek. Will had craved the familiar smells, the familiar sounds and tastes of his home town as a child craves his nurse’s bosom.
He sighed and poetry came to his lips, with a fresh spontaneity that evaded him in London. “From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.”
He’d never realized how much he missed his hometown till this moment. Had his desire for his home transported him here? Had some magical proportion of his longing brought him by blessed insensible transport from his rented quarters in London to this, the backyard of the house where he’d grown up?
But the theaters were closed for the plague, which swept through London like a flame conquering dry tinder. Will, never prosperous, now lacked even for the meager money that came from acting jobs. He did other, menial jobs and lived, quietly, in a small attic room. And he missed his Nan. How he missed his Nan.
Not a comfortable woman to live with, Will’s wife of ten years, his Nan, but yet not a woman he wanted to live wholly without. And even Nan’s domineering
ways, the way she planned his life for him, were preferable to the loneliness of London.
He’d been happy with Nan, if a little too confined.
With a wry grimace, Will remembered the incident that had taken him to London, when, three years ago, he’d killed one of Lord Lucy’s deer, and the old idiot, in high dudgeon, dreaming of long past feudal times, had tried to claim his ancient privileges and have Will arrested.
Though Lord Lucy wouldn’t manage that, in a free town like Stratford, governed by aldermen and good burghers, going to London had seemed, then, the best means of avoiding the unpleasantness. Going to London and trying his hand at the tawdry pomp of the stage and there bid try to displace Marlowe’s stage-dwarfing presence.
And his Nan, Will’s Nan, had believed he could do likewise, as well, and encouraged him to seek his joy on London stage, while she stayed home and minded the babes. She asked only that he return to visit, very often and forget neither her nor his children. As if he could, when he thought of them so often.
Still, if he returned to Stratford, how would he quiet the neighbors' guffaws when they talked of Will, who’d thought to make his fame and fortune in London, and yet returned empty handed to his parents’ house, to his father’s glove shop?
The thought was sweet, yet tinged by defeat. Will had gone to London to attempt his hand at the actor business, his fortune at play writing. To return would be to admit failure.
With love and fear, he regarded the shape of the twin houses at the end of the garden, those dear buildings that sheltered his wife and children on the left, and his parents and siblings on the right. Nearer to him loomed the bulk of the barns, the ground-hugging shadows of the spring plants.
The blessed silence of Stratford hung over all of it. Stratford, where Will had grown up, and where he knew everyone and everything. Stratford that was knit to Will’s very bones, etched into his mind and body like a mother’s touch upon her infant.
Stratford, where no one would ever believe that Will, the glover’s son, the grammar school graduate, could ever be a playwright and famous and successful in London.
Will didn’t believe it himself.
He listened to the wind rustling the new leaves on the tall poplars interspersed with the houses of the town. A whisper known and dear to him as the restless babble and noise of London had never been.
Will was here. That he couldn’t deny. And the mystery of his arrival -- that he must adjourn for solving at a better time. He could always return to London later, though he feared the courage would fail him for such a second flight. For now, he was near his family.
At the thought, his heart sped up, like a horse does when sensing the familiar barn. He thought of Nan inside, and of their children, ten-year-old Susannah and the seven-year-old twins, Hamnet and Judith. They’d be asleep in the upper floor of the house, beneath the gently sloping eaves. How joyously they’d welcome him, no matter how he’d got here, or how long he’d been absent. Nan would throw her arms around his neck, and his children -- grave Hamnet who looked so much like Will himself; bright, inquisitive Judith; and serious Susannah, burdened with a maturity beyond her years -- all of them would rejoice in him and leap about and caper in their enjoyment.
Curse London and its promise of false riches. Maybe he would return to it, maybe he wouldn’t. So far, his courting of fortune had been less than successful. Perhaps he should stay in his own sphere, and resign himself to his destiny.
Walking the gravel path, between the patches of garden that Nan had carefully tended with flax and vegetables and newly planted herbs, with his nose full of the scent of the roses that were Nan’s special pride, Will felt joyous relief.
Oh, it had seemed lovely then, and simple, three years ago. He had known his verses would dazzle all of London, and multitudes would crowd around for the privilege of watching a Shakespeare play, for the sheer entrancement of his words.
But when he’d thought to dazzle as a poet -- when he’d auditioned with Lord Strange’s company, to write plays for the Rose, where Marlowe strutted his words of fire and air -- Will had recited his best sonnet to the assembled company -- the lord patron, and Marlowe, and the actors themselves.
Oh, how Will could still remember, standing there in the tiring room that smelled of grease paint and sweat, explaining meekly that his Lady’s name was Hathaway and clearing his throat and reciting the fine sonnet that ended in, hate from hate away she threw/ And saved my life, saying not you.
Before even Will had finished, there was Marlowe laughing into his lace-edged sleeve, and looking at Will with malicious mirth.
“Hate away,” Marlowe had said. “And your Mistress’ name is Hathaway. Why, that’s marvelous, prodigious wit. Why, I wager no more than a man in two would think of such word play.”
After that everyone had laughed, except Lord Strange who had looked kindly and asked if perhaps Will would like to try his hand at an actor’s job, while he learned the trade of play writing.
Will had strutted upon the boards for three years, wearing other men’s words upon his lips. He’d been king and tyrant, slave and lover. In the excitement of playing, he bid on in London, for the applause of the crowds, their greasy cloaks thrown in the air in enthusiasm. Will had been almost happy. He’d even written three plays, which the company had put on to moderate success, when no new plays of Marlowe’s were available.
But then a month ago, the great and common plague that ravaged London had forced the authorities to close the theaters. Will had lost his last hope of dazzling crowds.
Now, walking the garden path where he’d played as a child, in the middle of the sweet, quiet, country night, Will thought that perforce it must be a miracle he had come here, like this, transported by the effect of magic or its minions, to his home town. And when God effected miracles, something was meant.
Here he would stay and here he would bide, and here hoe the narrow furrow of his life, and seed his future in peace.
Leave the London stage to the fools, and to such dare-devils as Kit Marlowe whose plays always, always, drew in the big crowds at The Rose. Leave his uncertain courting of Dame Fortune and that Bawd Fame for the assured joy of his wife, Nan, for Nan’s love, for her tender regard. Nan’s demands could be no harsher than Fortune’s, and Nan meant well, which Fortune might not.
Will stopped in front of the sturdy oak back door to Nan’s kitchen, and put his hand out to knock, since this late at night, the door would be bolted.
Behind him a hunter’s horn sounded.
Will stopped. The crystalline notes echoed through the still air and all Will could think was, A hunter now?
Oh, sure, the noblemen hereabout hunted, like Lord Lousy himself. But like this, this late at night? Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night, the time of night when Troy was set on fire; the time when screech-owls cried and ban-dogs howled, and spirits walked and ghosts broke up their graves?
Impossible.
Yet his hairs prickled and his ears rang with the refrain of that hunting call.
No. Not impossible.
The hunting horn sounded again, a bright, silver sound splitting the dark of night.
Will’s hair stood on the back of his neck, with the fear of the hunted thing, the terror of the night, the panic that comes upon man alone in the woods, in the unpeopled wasteland.
Who would be hunting this way, at night, but a spectral hunter? Who but the Hunter himself, primeval and merciless, who rode through the very thunderclouds as they roiled? The Hunter, whose dogs were said to be tormented souls?
Sweat ran down the middle of Will’s back. He didn’t turn, didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to face the certainty of what he feared.
Ten years ago Will’s Nan and his oldest daughter, Susannah, then a babe, had been kidnapped by elves, taken to faerieland. In rescuing them, Will had encountered this Hunter, this creature older than the oldest nightmares of humankind, this creature who stalked the night and caught -- what?
Will cau
ght his breath with a sudden inhalation into a gaping, dry mouth. How could one know for sure what this creature hunted?
Something that laughed and shrieked inside him, some ancestral knowledge, some leaping demon hooted and answered: Nothing and everything. The souls of men, the substance of elves, the pride of angels.
It was said that even elves, fairies, and the other folk rumored to hide in nearby Arden forest -- all that remained of the primeval forest that had once covered all of Great Britain -- feared the Hunter as much and with as much reason as humans.
Quicksilver, king of the elves, had once told Will that the Hunter had been a god and ruler of the elven race in the time before men and that he still remained, biding by, and time and again claiming those foolish enough to get ensnared in his coils.
Hair prickling as if with cold breath at the back of his neck, Will reached for the solidity of his door again. As he did, the call sounded again, and on the heels of it a storm of baying, a rising of howling, a wave of growling rose from the Hunter’s dogs -- their music frightful as the serpent's hiss, and bidding screech-owls made the concert full. All the foul terrors in dark-seated hell seemed to ride at Will’s very heels.
So, he’d not been transported here for good-chance, nor by a benevolent divinity.
Will spun around. He heard the clopping of hooves, and saw a dark and ominous shape amid the lowering clouds: a man riding a gigantic horse and raising a shining silver horn to his lips. The horn alone shone, like a new risen moon. The rest was dark, cloudy death.
The Hunter.
The shadow of the Hunter, his shape, and the turmoil of his snarling dogs filled the horizon.
The Hunter, lord of the storm, bringer of misfortune, omen of all ill change, who devoured souls caught outdoors, even the hard, brittle souls of elves made of moonbeam and primeval fire and little else.
They approached in a snarling tumble of fury, darkening the sky with their menace.
All Night Awake Page 30