All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  How dare he? Quicksilver showed as much carelessness in his own love as in interfering in other’s lives.

  And yet, Ariel loved Quicksilver. Quicksilver, who was trapped in nothing-land, in the land between existing and not existing, in the land that had never happened.

  Remembering Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s quick wit, his moonlight-pale hair, his perfect features, Will felt something very much like regret at the elf’s loss tinge his anger at Quicksilver. His anger paled to this feeling of regret and loss.

  The fool, Quicksilver, had allowed himself to be trapped, allowed everything to be destroyed, and Will could do no more than regret it, with an impotent regret that seemed to paint everything a pale, sickly yellow, like the sun in winter, falling slantwise upon the face of a babe who will not live out the season.

  “Need you escape, milady?” he asked, with quick fierce intent, with protective despair. He would not let this one be lost also. “Must you hide? I will defend you. I will protect your escape.”

  “No.” Ariel turned to look at Will, her little face grave, her eyes sympathetic. But she shook her head, loosening the multitude of braids that held her hair confined beneath the page’s cap. “No. It is not Malachite really, just an image of him. And even if he’s found me, he can’t come here that quickly. That he found me, alone, is a miracle. Unlike Quicksilver, we, the other elves, can’t transport between two places with the speed of thought. Malachite will have to come overland, as I did. We have a day before he gets here. A night and a day, or thereabouts.”

  “A night and a day,” Will said. A night and a day to save both worlds in. And save what he might, how could he ensure that Quicksilver would take better care of reign and wife in the future?

  Because, so that he could save Nan and Judith, and Hamnet, and Susannah, who held his love and all his hope for the future, in far-distant Stratford, he must relinquish his protection on this elf, and let her risk herself, as she might. The protection of Ariel didn’t rightfully belong to a man.

  Scene Thirty Two

  Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Marlowe stands in front of his array of crockery, his arms raised. The setting sun, coming through the window, paints his hair an odd red, and makes him look as though he’s surrounded by flames, like a magician of old practicing fearful magic. Around him, wisps of something like fog form, within the tight confines of his room, seeming to crowd him.

  Kit raised his arms. The evening sun was red, that red of spilled blood that Kit had seen all too often of late.

  His heart beat fast, so fast that his breath caught in rushing after it, and his raised hands trembled. His palms hurt, and his fingers looked bloodied again by the touch of that accursed, red light.

  He could feel as if a pressure, as those he wished near gathered around.

  And yet, he wished them not.

  Not so long ago, he would have paid and paid dearly not to have these things near that now just so dearly he tried to summon.

  “Ye are mine,” he said, to the shadows, the patches of fog, the dark that gathered around him and that he hoped were spirits. The spirits of men who had once walked the fair green of God’s Earth, men that Kit had dispatched, knowing or unknowing, through the tricks and arts of the denouncer, the spy, the informer, through the cruel claws and thirsty fangs of the guilty beast he’d lately become, through omission and commission, through what he’d done and what he’d failed to do.

  His hands thus raised, he seemed to feel the spirits pressing against them, hands holding his that were once pressed upon his in friendship, in the far, distant days of his youth at Cambridge. The men who’d trusted him, and with him discussed their crisis of faith, the weighty matters that held their souls down and drew them to Rheims, to the Catholic seminar.

  Those same men that, once known to the secret service, setting foot in their native England again, had been dragged to death in intricate torture by the servants of a Queen too fearful of Catholic conspiracies.

  Their hands had pressed Kit’s in friendship, once. Those same hands of Kit’s, that had been filled with the coin for which he’d betrayed them, and clad in the fine gloves such coin had bought.

  Now their clammy touch reached from the grave, cold and dank, and frigid and claiming him as much as he claimed them.

  Such was the price of the necromancer, Kit knew then. Not to be taken away by shrieking demons, though that might look better upon the stage, but to be claimed as much as those he claimed, and suffer a little of their death as he did it.

  And yet this, having the dead speak for him, was the last thing Kit could do to save his own life. For he could communicate to no living being what he thought or felt. Only to these creatures if they should read his true fear from his tortured brain.

  He must set them on their course, and then flee the environs of London, where too many people gathered, and too many people might provide fresh fodder to the ravening beast.

  Oh, only let him do this, his poor magic, and let the magic spring forth in healing for these souls, and in deliverance for him. Let his magic save Quicksilver.

  He thought of Quicksilver, forlorn Quicksilver in the land of shadows, Quicksilver whose lips had parted to say “I loved you well.”

  The strange thing was that Kit believed him. He remembered his distant, haughty behavior, and yet believed that Quicksilver loved him. Love was indeed too full of faith, too credulous, with folly and false hope perhaps deluding him. However, for once, Kit couldn’t help believing, couldn’t help reaching for captive Quicksilver and seeking to free him.

  “Ye are mine,” he repeated to the dark shadows that encircled him. “As I am yours, my crime having birthed you to death as it birthed me a murderer. By my tainted hands and my stained heart I conjure you. So far forth as by art and power of my spirit I am able to perform, I command you to take the shape of men as you once were.”

  All at once, he was surrounded, the small room almost too full, too crowded close.

  Terror and triumph warred within Kit, as he recognized that one’s faith-burned countenance, and this one’s trusting eyes, and, upon that one, the fresh features he’d noticed just the night before, seconds before the wolf tore her features asunder and rent the skin and crushed the bone beneath.

  Kit’s impulse was to cover his eyes, and he heartily wished to look away from those faces, each of which, shrouded in the pale garment of livid death, accused him.

  But another part of him gloried and grew.

  Kit could do magic. He could, indeed.

  Like his ancestor, Merlin, he could conjure. He marveled at it, as if from a distance off, and joyed in it like a child with a new toy. Never until now had he fully believed that the spirit lived after the flesh died.

  And now, believing it, he knew not whether to be happy or scared, for if the Christians were right then what waited him after death would be naught but endless torment.

  And if the Christians weren’t right and the afterlife more the domain of such creatures as elves....

  He grimaced. Oh, curse it all. Eternity with the wolf.

  Yet, for the moment, his joy in power overtook him, and he thought of Faustus and in his heart repeated Faustus’ words: I see there's virtue in my heavenly words; Who would not be proficient in this art? Full of obedience and humility, such is the force of magic and my spells.

  Aloud he said, “Gather around me, spirits, for tonight we must perform a deed that will redeem me and earn you rest. The theater awaits, and the play must be braved that will free the elven king, and set both worlds aright.”

  Scene Thirty Three

  Ariel and Will, outside a closed theater. The bulk of the building looms large above them, and a painted sign swings in the wind, proclaiming it The Rose.

  “This is the place?” Will asked. “This?”

  Ariel nodded. He looked more than surprised--disappointed. A human he was, an ephemeral creature and, by the standards of her race, a child or little more.

  What was she doing here, what wi
th him? She who had so bitterly censured Quicksilver, she who had thought her husband a fool for running after humans.

  Yet, Will was so grave, so eager, so ever ready to cast heart and soul into this quest he couldn’t possibly understand. He was a man as a man should be.

  The thought came, then disappeared.

  What did Ariel know of what a man should be? She who had so often, so bitterly censured her husband, and who, after all, could do naught but follow the same mistakes he made?

  Perhaps Quicksilver was right in hesitating, in suffering folly, in doing anything rather than rush forward, into the hot furnace of war, into the crazed frenzy of love.

  Ariel had thought she knew what she was doing.

  Yet, here she was, in London, facing a wolf that she knew not how to defeat. And all the while, all the while, the hill was undefended.

  She took her hand to her mouth, and covered it, while the thought came to her, for the first time, of what might be going on in the hill.

  The power of it still flowed to her. That meant the insurgents were not victorious. But that would have meant that Ariel could have stood and fought them, fought them, face to face. Wouldn’t that have been better than what she was doing now?

  “But....” Will put his large hand against the double door of the theater. He’d put on gloves before leaving the house, insisting that a gentleman didn’t go out with bare hands.

  His gloves were white, and somewhat the worse for wear, but they looked glaringly bright against the aged wood of the door. “This is the theater. The Rose. My plays.... my plays were put on here, by Lord Strange’s men.” A high color suffused his cheeks and, Ariel thought, something like shame darted around his hawk-eyes. “Not many people came. I am no Marlowe. And then the theater closed for the plague, and the actors went on tour but I thought if I stayed behind....” His voice ebbed. “I do not know who keeps the key to this, nor how we can enter it. And how would the one who has given.... the wolf asylum be in there? Surely, it is not one of the actors? Or Ned Alleyn?”

  Ariel sighed. All she knew was that her dream-vision, the feeling that had come over her, overpowering suffocating like a heavy blanket, had drawn her here, to the door of the theater -- if this immense, closed facade.

  She could still see the power -- the line of a power tainted with Sylvanus’s darkness, tinged with Quicksilver’s pulsing strength, but a different power altogether, leading to the door of the theater, like human footprints led to a place recently visited. Here she must come to find how to save Quicksilver, because the same power that surrounded the corpse they’d found had been here. And Quicksilver must be saved.

  She thought of her lord not so much with need as with fresh shock that he was not with her.

  For her sake, for her hill’s sake, for the sake of both worlds, human and elven, Quicksilver must be saved.

  “It is here,” she said, looking at Will. “We must go here.”

  Will sighed. “If we must, we must. And yet, this will be closed.”

  Ariel sighed. “Allow me.” Pushing the mortal aside, the put her hands on the door, one on either side of the joining partition. The lock was metal and larger than any Ariel had ever handled. Her mind flinched from the touch of iron, yet Ariel forced it on.

  Pushing and pulling with all her magic strength, she made the lock tilt and turn, and finally unlock.

  The door flew open, as though pushed by invisible hands.

  Ariel stared at the opening, at the vast space revealed, the vast space empty and desolate and yet, seemingly, still resounding with the echoes of past performances, with the cries of those who pretended to die, with the oaths of lovers, with the glory of imagined history.

  Looking in, Ariel hesitated.

  Maybe it had been a mistake coming here, to London. A mistake for Quicksilver, surely, and maybe one for her too. Maybe she should have stood and fought for her hill and for her throne, and maybe from there she would have been in a position to render her husband a better service. And maybe she still, now, made further mistakes. Would the dark power leave such clear steps, but that it meant for her to find it. To find it and be caught, and join her husband.

  Her captive, dying husband.

  She thought of Quicksilver as her sight had revealed him: A huddled, miserable Quicksilver, scorched by cold and frozen by the lack of life in the desolate in-between worlds, severed from all that was and consigned only to the fearful half-life of might-have-been.

  Quicksilver, didn’t deserve that.

  Weak he might have been, criminally weak, maybe. But how else could he be when everyone around him, from his treasonous servant, to herself, his ten-year wife, from the massed courtiers to the mincing servant fairies, to the plotting centaurs, had been wishing him to be something he was not, and could not be.

  They’d been wishing for Sylvanus’s force, his dark ruthlessness.

  A shiver went over Ariel at the thought of what they had wished and what their collective wishing had done.

  Impatient, she reached for Will’s hand, and, turning her face away that he could not see her tears, tugged him into the empty building.

  Scene Thirty Four

  The theater, as Ariel and Will close the door behind themselves. It is a huge fenced space, mostly open to the sky. Only the balconies and the stage area have partial roofs. The vast wooden balconies and a large, empty central area face a wide curtain. The moment the door closes, the whole building animates. Twinkles of light, and odd flashes of color run along the very tall wooden fencing, paint the aged wood of the balconies an eerie green, a glowing orange, a bitter yellow. Breezes, now cold, now hot, play with Will’s hair, with Ariel’s elaborate braids.

  “This is the theater, then,” Ariel said. She spoke in hushed tones and pronounced theater like a foreigner saying a word of whose meaning she wasn’t quite sure.

  “The theater, yes,” Will said. He looked around, remembering the last performance he’d seen there. Doctor Faustus. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, full of sound and fury, and the echo of great and dreadful happenings translated into awful words. Every part of the theater had then been crammed, the pit with apprentices and bawds cheering and heckling; the balconies with well to do burghers, a few lords, a sprinkling of ladies, peeling oranges and cracking nuts while watching the show.

  Now it was empty, but full of lights and flashes. Magic? Or some weird effect of nature upon long-dried wood?

  “What are we meant to do?” Will asked Ariel, as they stood by the door, in the walkway that led and up toward the stairs to the balconies, or downward, into the main, cheaper area of the theater.

  Ariel shook her head, distracted. Her face was sharpened, becoming intent, her whole mouth and eyes, and features set in an expression like one who listens for distant sound. She looked like an angel waiting for the final trumpet of judgment.

  The flashes of light ran madly around and around the balconies, like dervishes inebriated with life, and rolled in colored displays off the dry wood, and dazzled upon the very ground where Ariel and Will stood.

  Little by little, as if by playing they had found a place to stand, the lights collected upon the stage curtains, running up and down on them with strange effect, tingeing the deep black, cheap wool, all the colors of the rainbow.

  “I don’t know,” Ariel spoke, still very low, still as if out of a dream. “I think.... I think we’re supposed to watch and listen. But I do not know to what or why.”

  “Well,” Will said. “Then let’s search seats, there, in yonder balcony.” Speaking thus, he led her to the rickety stairs that climbed to the even more rickety nearest balcony.

  When he’d last been here, he’d stood downstairs, unable to afford the seating comfort of the balconies. Hazelnut shells, orange peels and the stray slop of beer from the balconies had landed on his head throughout the play, but he’d not cared.

  What a play that had been -- what a thing -- to make men forget it was but a play. When the actors had pretended true damnation, aye
, Will had seen it and tasted its effect upon his dazzled mind and his eager lips.

  That was what he wanted, thus to dazzle.

  He sighed, his sighing too loud, in this theater where no one laughed, no one applauded, no bawd displayed her wares, no patrons conversed.

  The theater could get just this hushed, just this quiet when Kit Marlowe’s villain declaimed his villainy, or when his hero prepared for great death.

  It had never silenced so absolutely for one of Will’s plays.

  He followed Ariel’s nimble feet climbing the stairs, followed Ariel to the balcony that shook beneath their steps.

  So absorbed was he in his professional fear, his professional jealousy, that he noticed nothing amiss, until Ariel shouted, “Look, look.”

  He looked, following her extended, trembling arm and the long, thin finger pointed towards the stage.

  In a blaze of noxious green light and flashes of darkness -- only explainable as such an absence of light that it absorbed what little light was present in the surroundings -- the curtain moved, opened stealthily.

  Will felt a shiver run down his spine. Were they not alone here, then? Was this all, the weird lights, the open door and now the curtain opening, part of some trap? Was someone -- human or elven, created or immortal creature -- trying to entrap him and Ariel? Was someone trying to scare him? Intimidate him?

  He half rose from his seat, determined to go backstage and see who operated the rope-and-pulley mechanism that opened the broad curtains.

  But the sight of what filled the stage stopped him. The sight of what strutted upon the boards held him silent and robbed the strength from his knees, so that he dropped, half dazed, back onto his creaking seat.

  The stage shone, as if backlit by a thousand candles. Not bright candles, such as might light a wedding or a family revel, but small, mournful, veiled candles, such as might veil a wake or a service for the dead.