The Scar-Crow Men soa-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  ‘Raise the anchor,’ Gavell yelled.

  ‘I am the captain here,’ Raleigh bellowed. ‘Get below deck or I will have you clapped in irons.’

  As the crew slowly drew the anchor, the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham emerged from the captain’s cabin, his hands folded behind his back. Black-gowned, he stood erect, his dark gaze moving steadily across the men until it alighted on Marlowe, who sat by the rail with his head in his hands, staring at the chest. All the crew gave it a wide berth.

  ‘It went well?’ the saturnine spymaster enquired.

  ‘No,’ the young playwright responded, a sob bubbling under the word. ‘We have looked upon hell and we are all changed. Especially … especially poor Devereux.’

  ‘What did you see?’ Raleigh asked, feeling a chill despite the warm night breeze.

  Marlowe shook his head. ‘I cannot speak of it. But it will haunt me for ever.’

  ‘And the chest?’ Walsingham said.

  ‘Not here.’ Marlowe nodded to the crew. ‘Spare them.’

  When the box had been dragged into the captain’s cabin, the adventurer helped Marlowe unlock the padlocks that held the chains tight. Raleigh dabbed at a dribble of blood at his nose. Closing his eyes, the playwright steadied himself before he hauled open the lid for the spymaster to peer inside.

  The explorer recoiled before he had even seen the contents, a convulsive reaction felt at some level he didn’t understand.

  Chained in the box, knees against his stomach, was one of the Unseelie Court. His eyes burned into the three men who looked down upon him, and they all thought they would never forget what they saw in that glare until their dying day. He looked like a pool of ink in the bottom of the chest, dressed in black doublet and breeches, his hair black too. A piece of filthy cloth had been tied across his mouth.

  ‘He is Fabian of the High Family,’ Marlowe choked. ‘The things he does …’ He chewed the back of his hand, unable to complete his sentence.

  Raleigh felt the atmosphere in the room grow more intense, as if a storm was about to break. None of them could bear the eyes upon them any longer, and the spymaster gave the order to close the chest.

  ‘How did you capture him?’ the explorer asked in disbelief. He was trembling, despite himself.

  ‘It may well have cost me my soul,’ the playwright replied in a small voice. ‘But I had to! I had to!’ He ranged about the cabin like a cornered beast, unable to draw his gaze away from the box. ‘We must question him, at the Tower, and find out the truth of the monstrosities he performs. What do they mean? What terrible thing does the Unseelie Court plan for them? Why, it could be the end of all England! And then we have to return and seize the Corpus-Scythe-’

  ‘No.’ The voice boomed from the door. The three men turned to see one of the crew, a short man with grey whiskers and a ring in his ear.

  ‘You dare speak to your betters?’ the spymaster said with a cold fury.

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ Raleigh cautioned. ‘Return to your post-’

  ‘I was placed on board this ship by my master, Lord Burghley.’ The sailor looked from one man to the other.

  Walsingham glared with such intensity that the explorer thought he would take a dagger to the outspoken sailor. ‘We spy on each other now?’

  ‘Lord Burghley has greater plans that he cannot see disrupted,’ the sailor said, offering a scroll sealed with red wax. ‘He bid me give you this should such a situation arise.’

  Walsingham tore open the scroll and scanned it. ‘Leave now and do not speak to me again upon this voyage,’ he said to the new arrival without once looking at him. When the sailor had gone, the spymaster crushed the parchment in his fist in anger. ‘The fool,’ he muttered, forcing a wan smile when he remembered Raleigh. ‘It appears Lord Burghley does not want the presence of the Unseelie Court diminished in France. While the Enemy maintains a vital presence among our rivals, it weakens those who compete against us for gold and trade, and thereby strengthens England’s position.’

  ‘Politics? No, not here,’ Marlowe hissed, tears of anger stinging his eyes. ‘This matter is about more than our petty earthly rivalries. We must deliver this one to London for questioning about the Enemy’s plans. The atrocities they undertake at Reims will have terrible repercussions for our countrymen. Do you not understand?’

  ‘Silence,’ the spymaster snapped. ‘Do not question business that is beyond your understanding.’

  ‘And this is beyond your understanding,’ the playwright raged. ‘You did not witness the horrors we experienced in the English College or you would never agree to this. Our only chance of survival is to act now, not play games.’

  In his desperation, Marlowe was on the brink of damaging himself irreparably, Raleigh saw. As it was, Walsingham would not easily forgive such open questioning of his orders. ‘England is in a struggle for survival on many levels,’ the explorer said calmly, trying to soothe the spy’s temper. ‘There is no easy choice between right and wrong, and it is the role of the statesman to balance the many competing interests of a great nation attempting to survive in a harsh world.’ Even as he spoke the words, Raleigh did not wholly agree with them. From the terrified state of the spies, he suspected this matter truly was greater than mere politics.

  Marlowe looked broken. ‘I do not agree,’ he said in a small voice filled with power. ‘It should be about right and wrong. That is all that matters.’

  ‘You are naive,’ the spymaster said.

  ‘Leave now,’ the explorer urged quietly. ‘Spend some time in reflection, and then ask for your master’s forgiveness.’

  His head bowed in frustration, Marlowe trudged from the cabin. But as he opened the door, terrified cries resounded from the deck. When the playwright’s face drained of blood, Raleigh realized the spy’s worst fears had been confirmed. Drawing their rapiers, the two men raced towards the disturbance.

  On deck, in the dying heat of the evening, the crew fought furiously along the starboard rail against a stream of shadowy figures attempting to board the galleon. Swords glinted in the light of the swinging lanterns. The explorer ran to join his men in the fight, only to come to a juddering halt when he saw their faces ragged with fear and incomprehension.

  Raleigh’s gaze was drawn inexorably to the nearest assailant and his breath caught in his throat.

  Beneath a wide-brimmed felt hat, a face of straw.

  Ivy eyes, hands of yew, teeth of blackthorn, a tattered jerkin and breeches stuffed with dried vegetation.

  A constructed man. Yet with all the animation of a living being. It snarled and snapped, its human-like eyes glowing with a sickening intelligence.

  With horror, the explorer watched the straw man lunge for the nearest sailor, gripping him with an unnatural strength and tearing out his throat. The man’s scream turned to a wet gurgle. Blood splashed on to the deck.

  ‘Do not yield! Do not treat them like barleyfield scarecrows,’ Marlowe yelled as he ran along the line of struggling crewmen. ‘They are bred for slaughter. Run them through. They can die like any man.’

  As if to prove his point, the young playwright darted into the melee and thrust his rapier through the heart of a straw man. The lurching thing squealed with the voice of a baby, clutching at its chest.

  Raleigh recoiled, pressing his hands to his ears to block out the hideous sound. It soared up to the rigging, growing ever louder, until not a man could bear it.

  Blood seeped through scarecrow fingers. Sickened, the adventurer could not tell from where that life-essence came.

  More straw men clambered over the rail, dripping wet with seawater, and attacked with a greater frenzy, as if the thing’s dying shriek had driven them to greater extremes. Wildwood arms wrapped around a sailor and shattered his spine. Another man fell with a face torn in two. Across the deck, the scarecrows lurched towards anything living, silent until wounded when they joined in with the howling symphony of agony.

  Marlowe, too, renewed his attack. His face fixed
with determination, he slashed his rapier across straw throats and plunged it into overstuffed bodies. Raleigh flung himself into the fight alongside the playwright.

  ‘These are just the start,’ the younger man gasped with tear-stung eyes. ‘There is worse to come.’

  ‘Clear room at the rail!’

  The explorer recognized Walsingham’s booming voice. Glancing back, he saw the spymaster standing alongside two white-faced sailors who had dragged the chained chest from the captain’s cabin.

  The straw men come for the one in the chest, Raleigh realized.

  ‘Send him over the side,’ Walsingham said coldly.

  While the battle raged, the two gasping crewmen hauled the chest to the rail, lifted it with a grunt and a curse, and then rolled it over the edge.

  The resounding splash was like a bell signalling the end of the battle. The scarecrows let men drop to the blood-soaked deck, unfurled wooden fingers from pulsing necks, and turned away from killing blows. One by one, they stumbled towards the rail and climbed over the side, following the siren song of their master.

  The grim-faced crew staggered back, hands pressed to mouths, to a man trying to make sense of the horrors they had witnessed.

  Raleigh ran to the rail and peered into the black water. ‘What were they?’ he asked.

  Marlowe shook his head and turned away, a man on the edge of despair.

  The adventurer caught the playwright’s arm and asked, ‘The one you brought here … Fabian. Will the Unseelie Court let us escape now he is dead?’

  ‘They are hard to kill,’ Marlowe said in a flat voice. ‘I would not worry yourself unduly.’

  Walsingham strode over, his expression unreadable. ‘Set sail for Kent, Sir Walter,’ he said. ‘Master Swyfte waits for us, expecting news of a great victory. He will be disappointed.’

  Marlowe rounded on his master. ‘We will rue this day,’ he raged. ‘We had here a chance to stop the horrors that are moving steadily towards England. Playing games with politics has doomed us all.’

  The spymaster’s graven expression was a warning of the punishment that awaited the young playwright. ‘When we return to the Palace of Whitehall, you will tell me all you know. But you will speak to no one else of what you discovered in Reims, do you understand?’

  Dismally, Marlowe nodded. ‘And what of poor Devereux? This last day has destroyed him.’

  ‘Set him free,’ Walsingham said, turning on his heels and striding towards the cabin. ‘He has lost his wits. What harm can he do?’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  ‘What horrors did Kit witness at the seminary in Reims?’ Will stared into the glowing embers in the hearth with visions of bleeding straw men playing out across his mind.

  Raleigh took a draught of sack to steady himself. ‘Whatever he told Walsingham, the old spymaster took it to the grave with him. Marlowe certainly never discussed it with me, though we talked long and hard on the journey home to Kent.’

  Where I welcomed Kit, without realizing the monstrous things he had experienced in France, nor the nature of that work or the others involved, Will thought bleakly. So much suffering could have been prevented if secrets had not been kept. All the strands of recent events were drawn together in the story the explorer had just related: Gavell, Shipwash, and the other names on the list from Kit’s boarding house were there, as was Poley, that sly character who was in the small room where the playwright was murdered. And what connection was there betwixt those straw men who terrorized Raleigh’s ship and the Scar-Crows who could not be distinguished from living, breathing men?

  ‘In that conversation between Sir Walter and Marlowe, the seeds of the School of Night were sown,’ the Wizard Earl stated solemnly. Pacing to the window, he observed the distant lights burning in the trees. ‘A conspiracy, by any other name, that would no longer accept the brutal politics of empires, where risks are taken with the lives of good men and women for the sake of power and gain.’

  ‘We agreed to set ourselves to a higher standard.’ Raleigh drained his goblet and called for more. ‘Artists, writers, philosophers, thinkers, men of physics, aye, and men of magic too, who could understand the ways of the Unseelie Court and the strange realm from where they originated. Men like our good Dr Dee and those in his occult circle. Indeed, Kit already dabbled in these things. While at Cambridge, shortly before you two first met, he attended a lecture by that High Priest of the Sun, the Italian Giordano Bruno, and borrowed a book of magics from him.’

  ‘And that damnable volume brought to him the Fay that has haunted him these long years and made his life a misery at every turn,’ Northumberland muttered from the window.

  Will paused, his cup halfway to his lips. ‘Xanthus the Hunter? That thing with rings of blue and black marked upon his head, which I fought during my first meeting with Kit, and which now pursues me through hell and high water?’

  ‘The very same.’

  In that moment, Will understood so much about the sad life of his long-suffering friend and the events that had transpired in recent weeks. ‘I see patterns where I thought there were none,’ the spy whispered to himself. Like his protagonist, Faustus, Kit had summoned his own devil through a search for secret knowledge and it had destroyed him by degrees. He was the architect of his own end. How that must have tormented him.

  ‘Kit struggled hard to ensure you were not drawn into his circle of misery,’ the explorer said with a sad smile. ‘He was adamant in that. “Will is a good man and he should not suffer for my sins,” he said to me on that journey back from France. Indeed, the School of Night has helped you many times over the years, though you have never seen it. Information reaching your ears at just the right moment. Aid arriving as if by magic in times of danger.’

  ‘And the plotting of those bastards in the Privy Council, and of your new master, Cecil, diverted from your door,’ the Wizard Earl said, turning to face the chamber.

  ‘We are everywhere,’ Raleigh added with a nod.

  Will rose on weary legs. ‘So now all is made clear. If I am to know what Kit discovered and what the Unseelie Court wish to keep hidden, I must retrace my friend’s footsteps, to Reims and the English College. But one thing escapes me. You say Kit was keen to return to France to find this Corpus-Scythe. And Griffin Devereux spoke of it too. What is it?’

  The adventurer shook his head. ‘It was of the greatest importance to Kit, I can say that. He felt it was key in preventing whatever plot he feared was about to unfold.’

  ‘Then I thank you for taking me into your confidence,’ the spy said, ‘but there is no time to lose. I must make arrangements to leave within the hour.’

  ‘And the School of Night will do whatever it can to aid you,’ Northumberland responded, ‘as your good friend would have wished.’

  Leaving the men to their discussions, Will made his way back to the entrance hall. The gale buffeted the door, but beyond it he thought he could hear the same shrieking, insane laughter that rang off the walls of Bedlam.

  When the spy reached the first-floor gallery, he called Dee’s name, but the only response was the rattling of the panes and the wind in the eaves. A corridor branched off ahead of him, panelled with wood and lit by a single candle at the far end. Bedchamber doors lay along the wall to his right. When he had investigated the first two rooms, he heard dim moans behind the third door.

  The old man has injured himself, the spy thought with concern. Only when he reached towards the handle did he realize he was mistaken.

  Those are moans of passion.

  Will could hear the rhythmic thump of a bed and the sighs of lovemaking. The door was ajar. Unable to avert his eyes, he glimpsed Dee lying on the bed, his naked body pale and wrinkled and covered with faded blue symbols. Astride him was Meg, riding hard. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in an O of ardour, her red hair flying. She ground her hips into Dee and drew her nails across his flesh.

  Will was stunned. Stepping away from the door, he couldn’t begin to understand what
he had witnessed. The Irish woman had flirted with the alchemist ever since they had met in Manchester, but he could not believe this was pure attraction. Why was she taking him between her thighs on this very night, when threats lay all around?

  But what troubled him most was the surprising twinge of jealousy he felt underneath it all. He told himself he felt nothing for Meg. He could see right through her manipulations and he didn’t trust her one bit. But still the green emotion stung him.

  Making his way downstairs, the spy found the kitchens, where he collected together some cold meat, cheese and bread for the coming journey, but he continued to ponder on the meaning of what he had seen.

  When he had found a sack for the provisions, a loud crash reverberated through the house. He raced out to the entrance hall, where the door banged in the teeth of the gale. The other men had gathered to investigate.

  ‘Do not concern yourself,’ Raleigh shouted above the storm, ‘none of our enemies can have traversed the line of defence. It is just the wind.’

  As the explorer ran to close the door, Will caught his arm. ‘When I ventured upstairs, it was shut tight. Wind cannot blow open a latch.’ Pushing past Raleigh, he squinted against the hard rain driving into his face. He thought he heard a voice somewhere out in the tumultuous weather, but it was impossible to see anything beyond the small circle of light cast by the lantern above the door.

  Pushing his way past the other men, the spy raced upstairs. The room where he had seen the alchemist and Meg in congress was now empty, the musky smell of lovemaking still hanging in the air.

  Will searched the house and then plunged through the group of puzzled men into the rain-swept night. Along the tree-line the fires flared. He began to fear the worst. Thrown around by the howling wind, he ran up the grassy slope, his leather shoes slipping on the slick sward.