All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Will, in whose bosom a vat of emotional poison boiled, threatening to spill over everything, looked at the fair elf with suspicion, and took her measure with weariness. He tore his gaze away the better to think, and frowned, and said, “If you wished to be friends, you would be Quicksilver.”

  The soft laughter echoed in the room and Silver’s voice sounded like Quicksilver’s as she spoke next. “Why, Will. I thought you liked women better.”

  Will spread his hands wide, as if to mean that he knew what he liked and he didn’t see any reason to account for it to this creature. He sighed. “Listen, lady, it’s not going to work. You’ve got me scared enough that tonight, on my way to see the Lord Southampton, I thought I saw the wolf. And yet, it was all a game, was it not? A game of elven kind. There is no wolf, and it’s all your deception. So, do you wish to tell me what really happened?” He stared at the fair creature on his bed, and managed to keep his expression composed to sourness and disdain. “Your marriage grew too boring, your life too steady, and you thought to snare the fool, Will Shakespeare to your bed, to amuse you with his bumbling folly?”

  This arrow struck home, its barbs penetrating deep into the flesh.

  The Lady opened her mouth, then closed it. The color fled her cheeks that, during his speech, had collected in bright crimson pools upon her pale skin. “Is that what you think?” she asked slowly. “Think you that of me? Think you I’m no better than a bawd who’d come all this way to seduce you?”

  Will nodded. Indeed, he thought it, and the way she’d reacted only proved it further. For what, save truth, will make a creature blanch so? What, save ill-will, would make an elf look as if discovered by a mortal, and sore humiliated at that?

  Silver rose.

  By the soft candlelight coming from Will’s table, she flickered. It was an effect like the sun seen through winking eyelids. She flickered, and shone, and flickered again, and a soft heat permeated the room.

  In her place, stood Lord Quicksilver, king of faerieland, fully attired in male fashion.

  Only once before had Will seen that change, and that had been in his poor kitchen in Henley Street, and the change induced by the fearful heat, the glaring burn of forged iron applied to this creature’s flesh.

  Now the change was voluntary, and, unlike then, when Quicksilver changed so did his clothes. The lord who took the lady’s place still wore white, but his clothing consisted of a creamy doublet, and shiny velvet hose, both of them embroidered with gold and silver threads.

  White, translucent stockings molded the shapely, muscular calf, and a black dagger depended from Quicksilver’s belt.

  Will knew, from having seen elven weapons ten years before, that this dagger would be crystal. Black crystal, honed to a point, beautiful and strange to behold, but for that no less lethal than the forged steel of men.

  Quicksilver was taller than Silver, tall enough to dwarf Will, upon whom he looked, like a child judging a rebellious worm.

  “I see the friendship I imagined is all to naught.” Walking over to stand beside Will, he reached with thumb and forefinger and pinched the candle’s wick between his fingers and out of the darkness he spoke, like a waning sprite, “I’ll be gone, now, Will. I see the battle for your friendship, nay, your regard, is lost, and I was foolish to think it possible. You shall see me no more.”

  Like that, he winked out, in a dazzle of fireflies that left the room dark. The scent of lilac still weighed heavy in this confined space, reminding Will of this abrupt departure.

  Confused, wondering where Quicksilver might have gone and why, if the king of Elves could use such means, he’d not devised to do it before, when Will had dragged him -- or Lady Silver -- quivering and fainting across half of London, Will thought it had indeed been all a trap, all sport at his expense.

  It had all been a sham.

  Still angry, Will burned with resentment that the creature had even presumed to think that he could control Will so, and so have command of Will’s emotions, even though once before it had been rebuffed, and saw its worth set back when compared to Nan’s real love.

  Turning to the window, he saw that the man who looked like Marlowe still stood outside, but now had been joined by his dog.

  Or at least a dog, likely one of the many that roamed London streets in ravenous packs.

  The dog was enormous and very dark, and, as Will watched, it rubbed against the man’s legs, and the man lowered his hand to pet the massive head.

  Well, at least some people weren’t alone, Will thought, as he retraced his steps into his dark room, and undressed, and lay on his slim mattress, beneath his blanket.

  One thing was left of Silver’s magic, one thing she’d not changed back. The blanket his fingers encountered was soft, and thick, probably the multicolored blanket Silver had conjured.

  Though he still thought he had been right about Quicksilver’s intentions, Will wondered if he’d done the right thing.

  The creatures could be as spiteful as pagan gods, and like them vengeful. What wrath had he not incurred?

  He stared at the ceiling a long time, thinking of the gains of the day -- that fat purse he’d slid beneath the mattress before lying down, and which would not only pay his lodging and his food for many months, but provide a parcel to take to his Nan as soon as he could spare a few days to visit Stratford.

  Then he thought of the losses -- of Marlowe’s strange behavior, of the dog or what he’d thought was the dog, of the creature who was Silver and Quicksilver and as either or both an inscrutable mystery.

  Will turned the events over in his head, but nothing resolved itself, nothing made sense. At long last, he turned on his side, and, as the sounds came from outside, of waking apprentices and workers hurrying to their workshops, he fell asleep.

  Just as he closed his eyes, in that space between awakening and sleeping, he thought he heard a dog howl.

  Scene Twenty One

  Kit Marlowe, standing on the street, outside Shakespeare’s lodging. The night is dark, and around his ankles a darker shadow twines.

  The thought Kit had.... What was it?

  He’d thought of Will and how good it would be if Will lay dead, if he died before Marlowe might die, if that bed in which Will enjoyed Silver might forever cursed be with loneliness.

  “All that I will do, and yet more,” said a voice, gentle as the light of day that rose, whisper-soft, over the buildings across the street. “All that I will do, and yet I’ll grant that Kit Marlowe will not squander his life, that he shall not give up breath and heart for the heartless elf, the foolish peasant.”

  The smell of graveyard intruded, heavy and gagging, and something cold rubbed against his leg, but Kit listened to the voice.

  Looking down, where he thought there would be a dog, he saw only a darker patch of night, as if a concentration of darkness.

  What voice was it, what disordered thought, that to Kit’s ears seemed to promise life and love and all the good things that men dreamed of? Yet Kit knew himself so near to his death that he walked as if by the very crumbling edge of his own grave. He knew he could not live, for his continued life threatened the Walsinghams, and Cecil, and Essex, and for smaller threats had greater men died.

  And yet that sense that knew death inevitable, that same sense would reach for any promise of life, however vain.

  Kit did not want to die. He did not want eternal quietus in the dark, with worms.

  Like a swimmer amid overpowering waves, crossing the broad arm of a perilous sea, Kit, wave on wave, saw his death near, and felt the abyss rob him of his very breath and life and joy, and every heartbeat that he would yet take. Kit plunged head long towards the promise of air and life, even should that air prove stale, that life fickle.

  “Who are you?” he asked the still air tainted with the heavy smell of moist earth and rotting flesh.

  An apprentice clad all in black, walking by on the other side of the street, gave Kit an odd look as if he talked to himself, then, with an ob
vious glance at the tavern sign above Kit’s head, shrugged his shoulders.

  And perhaps I’m drunk, Kit thought. Or perhaps dreaming without sleeping.

  Maybe from his terror and his jealousy, from his pity for that poor Kit, so deceived, so abused, something else had sprung to make Kit Marlowe hallucinate salvation out of the still air.

  But what dream of his had ever smelled so foul?

  Laughter, unmistakably male in its low accents, and yet laden with soft, flowing promise, echoed all around Kit, seemingly wrapping him in coils of the mind.

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  “I am that which can grant you your heart’s desire,” a male voice said, soft and slow. “Your desire of revenge and love and life, and everything you ever wanted.

  “Only take me in, give me asylum, and shall your brow be crowned with a poet’s crown, and future generations will compare their meager efforts to your greater worthiness.”

  Kit cleared his throat against the foul stench that surrounded him. He did not know why his heart beat such a disordered dance within his chest.

  This was all a dream. It had to be a dream.

  Did he not stand in a Southwark street, looking on mundane facades of wooden buildings, and watching apprentices walk by? Was the morning breeze not cold upon his skin, did his clothes not feel clammy with his own sweat? Was he not in the world of real things, the world of the living?

  “Did you not stand in an ancient grove of trees, in a garden in your own home town, when you beheld Lady Silver? Aye, and when you rushed to her embraces, and submitted to those of Quicksilver, too?”

  Kit’s throat closed. This dream knew too much and was too mocking. This dream knew about Quicksilver? If a dream of his own, it was a foul dream that lifted the scab off the not-yet healed injury and exposed Kit’s own heart to the cold and bitter bite of memory. And if it came from elsewhere, real being or false, human or elf, this creature knew too much.

  Feeling his head pound, his heart clench, causing a faintness to tremble upon his limbs, Kit said in a voice that he hoped would be strong, “I have no need of you, to have my genius crowned. My poetry is enough that I produce, nor do I doubt that it will be remembered and, centuries after my death, serve as a monument more durable than ever was sculpted in marble.”

  A sound like a soft sigh echoed all around Marlowe. The darkness no longer tangled around his ankles and knees, but swirled all around him, wrapping him, like a dark blanket, so fine, that you could see the surrounding houses and street through it, and even the dark sky with the faint reddish taint up in the east. Yet the darkness, blanket like, felt warm and soft upon Kit’s head and hands, and shielded him from the wanton breeze.

  Darker flecks floated in this black haze, as though they were black diamond dust tossed in the wind. And a voice came from it, very softly, so real and exact that it seemed to tickle Kit’s ear with breath as each word was spoken. “Ah, you have confidence in your own worth.” A light chuckle followed upon the words. “And yet, if you die now, what will be your reward? You might, indeed, have in you greatness such as would astound the ages to come. But you know yourself that your plays, your meager poetry, are as of yet no more than a child’s doodles, a youth’s abstractions. To be remembered you must live, and you must know that without me you’re speeding at unstoppable gallop to your death.”

  Like that, the blanket was gone, the faint darkness around Marlowe all dissipated, leaving him with a clear view of the street, the facing building, the too-sharp-edged bite of reality upon his senses.

  The breeze blew with renewed vigor, bringing with it a scent of graveyard.

  That graveyard to which Kit was hastening, step by step, with his every step and his every breath.

  Kit turned his eyes to the window that had gone dark so long ago, in the tall building across the street.

  How Silver must be sighing, her joyous sighs, and how Will must be glorying in his conquest, while the broken-down bed creaked beneath their conjoined bodies.

  And they’d go on laughing and loving long after Kit was gone. Gone and forgotten, his poems derided as worthless juvenilia, his rhymes dismissed as minor works of a minor poet that had nothing in him, except this meager toil.

  “No, stay,” he heard himself say, though surely all darkness was now absent, and he called in vain to the empty air. “Stay. I will hear you. What can you do to grant me what you say?”

  For a moment nothing happened. The waking street was too real, all too mundane in its everyday noises: houses awakening, family members calling to each other. A few doors down a householder opened his lower door, where his shop no doubt was, and gave Kit an odd look, but not too odd, for, after all, what can you expect in Southwark but drunks?

  Then the blanket of darkness was back, suddenly, enveloping Kit like an embrace. “You must share my life and I yours, and in that life will you gain immortality, so that not only will your poems be remembered through the centuries, but you’ll be there to hear the praise and reap the accolades.”

  The blanket tightened around him, keeping the cold breeze out. A different scent than the rank smell of rotting flesh surrounded Kit, a smell not unlike that smell of lilac that he associated with Quicksilver, but grown overpowering, so as to smell like flowers arrayed around a funereal urn. “This I’ll do for you and more, if you take me in and give asylum to my high and lofty purpose. Rulers of the world, we’ll conjoined be, if only you keep me within your company. You rule in humankind, and I in faerieland.”

  “Faerieland?” Marlowe asked, the one word costing him all the accumulated breath he’d gathered, while the blanket coiled and coalesced around him. “Faerieland?”

  “From faerieland I hail,” the thing said. “And there I ruled, before that imp, that low shape changer, Quicksilver, took my place, and with cold, unloving hand, thrust me from my race, to die.”

  “Quicksilver? Quicksilver banished you?” Kit asked. In his own mind was the image of Quicksilver, the fair youth in all his noble splendor turning Kit away from his only love, from his true lady’s bed.

  “Banished?” A bitter laugh echoed on the heels of the word, and the darkness coalesced, so that over Kit’s shoulder, a man appeared, taller than Kit, and better formed for war, with broad shoulders and powerful arms so that beside him, Kit felt like a child, less than half-grown. The man’s -- elf’s? -- features looked noble, his face well proportioned, his hair dark ringlets, his beard carefully groomed, his heart-shaped mouth poised in a half smile.

  Kit made as if to move away, but a hand grabbed him around his middle, a powerful arm held him immobile. “The vermin had no right to banish me, nor to punish me, nor did he have power to do so. I was his king and he a foolish boy, playing with his mortals and his maidens. Yet, like the snake, well nurtured to the bosom, did he despoil me of kingdom and of country, and send me wandering in the desolate darkness, with no one and nothing to sustain me. But give me asylum, and together, we’ll recover my land, my kingdom entire, and lay the worm in the darkest dungeon that the imagination of man has ever built.”

  Kit felt he should say that he did not wish to see Silver harmed -- nay, nor Quicksilver either, harsher though he was -- nor did he wish their enchantment brought low.

  Yet she should be punished, and Quicksilver too, for the wanton disregard of Kit’s love. But no more than a rebuke, a soft rejoinder.

  Just as he thought this, another thought intervened, that Quicksilver had cast him from his bosom and from Silver’s warm favors and that, even as Marlowe in agony stood outside this house in the dark of night, inside the wanton elf enjoyed the pleasures and company of another.

  Into that thought wrapped the memory of disordered sheets and warm bed, of the soft, silken body beneath his own. He sighed and bit his lips, and didn’t say anything, did not defend his erstwhile love, nor attempt to turn away condemnation from that fair head.

  In that moment this other elf was upon him, seemingly still blanket and yet human, his hands ev
erywhere, and prying upon Kit’s breast, his thighs and every limb, and up again, and close beside him pressed, and talked of love.

  Gasping for breath, scared and giddy and confused, Kit made reply, “You are deceived, I am no woman, I.”

  The elf smiled at that and said, “It is no love such as human love I crave, but the fair use of your fair body that we will become one and the other and both interchangeable.”

  Too late, Kit thought to run. Too late he thought that if it were so, if this creature were to have use of his body -- whatever that use meant -- Kit, the weaker, would lose his body, aye, and his soul too and all that went with life.

  What good was life, if just a semblance, if Kit seemingly would walk and talk, but another creature use his mind and limbs?

  He sought to run, pushing his feet hard against the dusty ground.

  The elf ran with him, the darkness clinging on, laughter, immortal laughter stopping Kit’s ears.

  He ran and ran, in disordered running, till each breath made bid to burst his lungs, and, upon each breath he thought it would be his last.

  Then in a dark place, far away from the awakening street where he had started, he fell down. His knees gave out, and his legs with them, bringing him to his knees upon a muddy street, wet with slops and smelly discards.

  Kit’s eyes stung from sweat that had dripped into them. He blinked and looked around, and saw that all the houses here, once taverns and bawdy houses, were blocked, the board nailed across their doors, the seal of the Queen upon the board and a warning that here reigned the plague.

  Kit Marlowe made as if to rise again, but his knees wouldn’t support him.

  Kneeling like a penitent on the muddy street, he heard the elf laugh and felt a touch, upon his whole body at once, like a million wanton hands seeking to feel his skin, his very pores, and trying to possess him and know him and win him as never human lover could have done.