All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  This weather-vane unsteadiness that should have repelled, yet didn’t. Those qualities in him that had always before brought despair to Ariel’s heart, now that Quicksilver might be lost, felt desirable, needed, precise and exactly the way Quicksilver should be.

  Oh, let him be restored to her; let him return to her arms and to his throne; and she’d never more with weakness reproach him. She’d shore up his weakness without seeming to do so. She would allow him to be Silver, if Silver he must be.

  Perhaps Nan Shakespeare was right -- Will said it was her habit -- and perhaps Ariel herself had made Silver stronger, irresistible, by making Quicksilver keep her back, by making Quicksilver be only half of what he was meant to be.

  And perhaps that very halving of Quicksilver brought about the weakness of her lord which, in revolt against the splitting of his self, split everything he did and thought in half.

  When he was young, Quicksilver had lightly changed, from one to the other aspect and back again. Yet his courage had not lacked, nor had his demeanor ever been maidenly.

  “Oh me,” Ariel said. “Oh me, I am a fool. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, when I, thy ten years' wife, have mangled it? Oh me, who’ve encouraged rebellion and treason with my ill demeanor. Oh, me, who will be widowed through my own unmeaning hand.” She rocked back and forth, and tears escaped beneath her hands, which covered her eyes, to fall upon the blue velvet of her page’s attire. She cared not.

  “Milady!” Will said, from near by.

  Startled because she’d forgotten him, Ariel looked up.

  “Milady,” Will said again. He looked disturbed, sympathetic, full of grief at her grief, sorrow at her sorrow. “Milady, I’m sure you do yourself injustice. I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

  The mortal’s simple confidence, his well-meaning words, only encouraged Ariel’s anger at her own folly. What did the mortal know, what could he know? He a simple man, with simple ambitions, circumscribed within the world of a man? He with a wife and children in a little town, so far away? What could he know of the sins of kings, the awful, crushing weight of the indifferent crown?

  Subjects had no such doubts, nor could subjects sin so awfully as their sovereigns, for it was enough if they knew they were the king’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, their obedience to the king wiped the crime of it out of them.

  But Kings and Queens, they must think about their cause and advance into the dark, unguided, with no meek quality of humble obedience to excuse their egregious mistakes.

  Ariel had been acting like a subject. And a subject she was, to her imperiled king. But, in her king’s absence, must she be a queen and tread her own path unafraid.

  The tears dried in her eyes, decision chasing them out. No time to lament past mistakes. Time now, to act and to tread along a path that might be wrong but then again might be right.

  Time to show that decision she would wish her lord had shown oh, so many times.

  Getting up, she smoothed her velvet suit, and glanced at Will, who stood two steps away from her, looking solicitous and more than a little frightened at what must be fearful changes in her countenance.

  “Get me a bowl of water,” she said, commanding lightly, as though this were faerieland and he her rightful subject. “A clean bowl, and water that has not touched metal.

  “Milady?”

  “You heard me,” she said. Going to his desk, she moved aside the pile of papers there, and cleared a space for the bowl. She fancied she saw him flinch at her handling of his scribbled over papers, but it didn’t matter. He was but a mortal, and his words, if mangled, could be written again. A hundred years from now he would be long dead, and no one would care what words he’d written or why.

  But she, she was an immortal sovereign and if she could not rescue her husband she would have to face evil alone and win life for herself and her hill, and reward good and punish treason.

  But first she must know where her lord was and if there were hope of ransoming him.

  She no longer needed Quicksilver, but she would fain have him by her side, her lord love, and Silver, and all of Quicksilver’s multifaceted splendor.

  Thinking of Quicksilver, dreaming on him, she hardly noticed Will saying, “I’ll be back in a breath,” and leaving the room.

  In her mind, she could almost see Quicksilver. He looked pale, cold, distraught, and sat in a dark, grey, gloomy landscape where nothing existed expect shadows.

  It looked like the land of the dead and, with a shiver, Ariel hoped her vision was not true.

  Scene Thirty

  Marlowe’s room. He stands by his writing table. He has -- obviously uncaring -- pushed all his papers to the floor, in scattered confusion. In the space thus cleared, he has set an infinity of bowls, cups, spoons, and three candles. These he moves around, while muttering to himself.

  The landlady had kindly let Kit have a mess of crockery for his mad scheme, without even asking what he meant to use it for. Such the foolishness of women when they craved love.

  Such the foolishness of men, also. For it was craving Silver’s love that had got Kit into this mess.

  And the same craving must somehow give him force to see it through.

  Standing in front of his work table, Marlowe looked at the crockery, and smiled to himself. What to put in these bowls, and what to do with them?

  A mad idea had formed in his brain, while the bowls and cups were fetched, that he might put his guilt to good use, and conjure the spirits of the guiltless dead, killed by him and by the wolf proper, who might well, oh, too well, serve his turn and speak where his enemy forced him to stand silent. For would the spirits not wish to denounce their murderer.

  Did they not say that murder cried out of the Earth for revenge?

  Kit removed his gloves, the gloves that had cost him the torments of hell to slip on, and yet that he had to slip on to avoid notice of his burned hands.

  He poured water into one of the bowls, and, picking up his most stained garment, dipped it into the water, making it pinkish with the blood of the wolf’s victims.

  Frowning at it, it came to Kit that though he’d shared the mind of the wolf, he remembered no spells, as such. No grand gestures, no great work involving herbs or glory hands or the noose from a hanged man’s neck, nor other repugnant ingredients. No eye of newt, no toe of bat, none of it figured in the magic of elves.

  Of course, if elves were of magic made, which Kit knew elves to be, then it would be easy enough, would it not, for an elf to move magic. It stood to reason since Kit, made of flesh, found it easy enough to move his body by command of his mind.

  At least, and he smiled ruefully at this thought, he’d found it easy until the recent past.

  He felt the wolf sniffing at the thought, from the other side of the partition that divided them. Afraid the wolf should surprise Kit and stop Kit’s scheme before ever he started it, Kit pushed all thought of the wolf, and all thought of what he must do, out of his mind, and concentrated on the crockery, the bowls, the cups, his hands moving them, clustering bowls full of clear water around the all important one.

  Not that he knew what to do with any of them, but that he thought if he had enough of a confusing profusion of them, the wolf, if he peeked out through Kit’s eyes, would find it all innocent nonsense, desperate play, the foolish attempt of an ensnared rabbit at escaping the piercing claws of the hunting falcon.

  Kit pulled his sleeves up and looked at the bowl of bloodied water, sitting against the dark table.

  How could Kit, mortal Kit, poor Kit who could never control his own life, control magic?

  All Kit was good at was words.

  And yet, magic was ever words, was it not? And if so, who better to perform magic than Kit Marlowe? Was not his work a kind of magic, making the theater goers for a moment believe in Tamburlaine, or Faustus?

  Still, he wished he had something more solid, a more eminent kind of knowledge.

>   “Yet fain would I have a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations, that I might raise up spirits when I please,” he whispered, and sighed. Faustus, at least, had a guide, but Kit, himself, must go traipsing, unshod and blind, into this dark, perilous country.

  But.... well, if he must he must, and might as well steel his spirit to the task at hand. Because if he didn’t get help, the wolf would consume him, and soon there would be nothing, nothing at all to prevent the wolf’s victory. Except maybe Kit’s death. And Kit wasn’t ready to die. Neither in mind nor in body.

  Stroking his chin with his left hand, he smelled the sweet-sickly taint of fresh blood and sighed. “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this hand again.”

  Scene Thirty One

  Will’s room. Outside, the sun is setting in a splendor of red. Ariel looks up from her bowl of water, and looks at the entranced Will.

  Many years later, Will would try to remember those moments, when the Queen of faerieland had gazed into a bowl of water and seen what was happening in the world of spirits, the play of ghosts, the battle of good and evil beyond the ken of men.

  He could not.

  In those moments, all he could say is that he’d seen figures, each fast succeeding the other upon the clear unruffled surface of the water in the bowl.

  He’d seen elves and princes, women and men and children, each one after the other, each eclipsing the other, all of them followed, all of them pursued by the darkness that was the wolf. As night succeeded day, so the wolf succeeded all of human light, like eternal damnation closing in on the works of man, like an eclipse shutting up the bright inconstant moon.

  He’s seen them all and understood little -- not even the image of worlds, spinning in the dark, distant void.

  But Ariel had understood it. That much he knew, when she looked up at him.

  This woman, for whom Will felt already too much paternal tenderness, this elf, towards whom, against his best judgment he’d been feeling a father’s love, looked up from her bowl, and the sapience of the ancient, all-knowing sea was in her eyes.

  Those elven-blue orbs might not be all that much older than his -- he knew that in elf terms Ariel and Quicksilver were little more than children -- and yet in them was the instinctive knowledge of the succeeding ages, the intuition of world everlasting, the knowledge of mountains ground down to the grain of sand and of terra firma and ocean exchanging places over and over again.

  “He’s near his goal,” she said. Her voice sounded distant and cold, like wind blowing over far eastern mountains, where men sat and meditated on eternal truth, far from the hurrying crowds of the rushing west. “My... my husband’s unworthy brother. One more life. One more human life, and if he gets it, it will be the undoing of us all. Human and elf alike.”

  The calm with which she spoke shocked Will more than the words. He took a deep breath, gathered into timorous lungs and slowly expelled. “Did you find out? Who gave your brother-in-law shelter?”

  Ariel shook her head. She looked not at Will but at the window in front of her, like a child lost in a nightmare all her own. “No. No. Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever vile abode my vile relative sought, he has hidden it well, protected it. I got no more than a feeling that my husband had found it. Stumbled onto it, to be honest. To his undoing.” Ariel’s eyes filled with tears, one of which slid, unknown, down her oval cheek.

  “Your husband?” Will asked, more alarm and concern in his voice than he meant to put in it. But he felt responsible for this one victim of the darkness that might soon overtake all. “Quicksilver? Is he.... He isn’t dead? Is he?”

  Ariel looked sharply at him, and sighed. “Quicksilver is neither dead nor alive. The life that sustains him is like the dying flame of a guttering candle, that any sharp breeze can put out. My.... His brother has imprisoned him in .... we call it between-worlds, a place that’s neither dead nor alive, here nor there. It’s the world that never existed, the potential never fulfilled. It’s where our dead go that can’t find rest -- the untimely murdered, the lost souls, those who die with unfinished business and unaccounted-for sins.” She tilted her head up.

  The red of the setting sun, coming through the window, tinted her cheeks coral and made her look unbearably beautiful, unmistakably human, exquisitely fragile.

  Had Will dared, he would have consoled her, as he comforted Susannah when she broke a toy. But Ariel’s troubles were more than all the broken toys, and Will dared not patronize this being of fire and magic.

  “Fortunately, the evil thing didn’t have the power to kill my husband,” Ariel said. “Not while Quicksilver yet has the power of the hill. But the wolf’s power is growing by the moment and my husband.... Well, the hill is in turmoil. I came here because my husband’s enemies, within the hill, were trying to seize power through me. And even as I viewed the occult world in this simple water I felt our enemies at the hill tracking me down.” She dipped her dainty finger in the liquid. “If they sever my husband from the hill before evil is destroyed.... We will be lost, Quicksilver and I. Even with the power of the hill behind him, if Quicksilver’s brother should take one more life and acquire that much more power, Quicksilver will be utterly lost.”

  Will walked to the window, turning his back on Ariel, on that beautiful face that reflected all the desolate bleakness of an empty, fearful Earth -- the death awaiting all this riotous panoply outside Will’s bedroom, the whores and the merchants, the ale houses, the gentlemen and the horse thieves, the hounds and the baited bear.

  Looking out, at what he had always thought a dirty, noisy street full of beggared poor and crooked rich men, Will felt a sudden wave of tenderness for London, this London so harsh and so different from his sweet Stratford, this town that would allow Will to be what he would and claim as high a name as he dared for himself, provided only he had the courage to claim it.

  Fearing his eyes too would fill with tears like Ariel’s, he blinked, and stared harder, searching for a face he knew.

  He hadn’t seen Marlowe in a long time, and the last time he’d seen him, the playwright had appeared to be drunk, or else insane.

  How could such a high mind come to such a low pass? Was the closing of the theaters working upon Marlowe more than upon Will? Or had Marlowe gone without food too long? Will remembered Marlowe telling him about the lack of food, the lack of money, the general poverty in the land these days.

  Was Marlowe suffering? It was hard to reconcile with the playwright’s expensive velvets and smooth silks. And yet, who knew?

  Something else, something that Will felt was vital, tickled at his memory -- a remembrance, a feeling that he had seen or heard something important, something he couldn’t lay his finger upon, something he couldn’t name, something that related to Marlowe.

  He tried to pin it down. It was something Quicksilver had said -- an expression, a look, something .... But how could that relate to Marlowe, Marlowe who was so far from the faerie realm, a coarse and cold big-city hustler, even if dressed in the refined veneer of poetry?

  Shaking his head with impatience, Will noticed something odd.

  One of the men downstairs looked familiar, but as though Will had seen him many, many years ago. Someone from Stratford?

  The man, standing outside, beneath the wind-rattled sign of the tavern across the street, was tall and dark, with very pale skin, and pronounced features that looked more beautiful than they should be. His green velvet suit displayed the latest fashion and looked so freshly washed and set as to make even Marlowe’s normal dressing standards appear sloppy and careless.

  Not the type of person that Will associated with small Stratford upon Avon, where all the neighbors knew each other and took care not to dress too far above their stations.

  Will frowned, trying to remember where he might have seen such singular features, such long, shiny black hair. Other than on Lady Silver, but then even Will, looking at the incisive nose, the beautiful but sha
rp features of that man couldn’t associate him with Silver’s soft, rounded loveliness.

  As he watched the man looked up, and Will had the impression the whole creature flickered, in and out of the street, like the fading of an image reflected upon glass, like the images that had formed upon Ariel’s water bowl.

  Then Will remembered he’d seen the man -- no, the creature. It had been many years ago, in the faerie clearing, on the night he’d reclaimed his Nan from faerieland. This had been one of the elves in Quicksilver’s retinue.

  “What?” Ariel asked. “What is it, Will?”

  He must have made some small noise, some shocked exclamation.

  “There’s a man across the street,” Will said, feeling the man’s gaze on him and wondering how that could be. “That I think is an elf, and not there at all but somehow only an image of him.” Who could this be? Could it be one of the rebellious elves that Ariel feared had come for her? Or was it a friend, come to her help?

  She’d called him Will. Not Master Shakespeare. Will.

  He smiled at that. The queen of faerieland needed a keeper, a watchful protector. She trusted too much, made herself too vulnerable.

  She stepped up near him, and looked out the window.

  “Oh,” Ariel said, and her body stiffened in surprise and shock. “Oh,” she said. “He’s Malachite, and he has found me.”

  “Malachite?” Will asked.

  “The leader of the palace rebellion,” Ariel said. “He.... He would dethrone my lord and have me, and by having me have the faerie hill.” She turned a waxen-white face towards Will. “It’s like your game of chess, you see. Quicksilver and I both have the souls and power and loyalty of our kind. If he’s out of action, the one who captures the Queen wins the game.” Her tiny, needle-sharp elf teeth glimmered in a little feral smile, full of woeful irony.

  Will trembled. He felt a sudden raging anger at Quicksilver. How could Quicksilver take a creature like this to wife, a soft, helpless creature, and then leave her to fend for herself this way?