Hell and Earth pa-4

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Why should I wish to do such a thing as that?” A timeless ray of sunlight singled Baines out, fingering his blond hair gold. Perhaps we are in Faerie after all,Kit thought, and the Mebd has stilled time’s passage.

  And then Will’s lips moved. No, not precisely moving so much as compressing rhythmically, as if attempting to shape speech despite their immobility. Kit could read the panic in Will’s eyes, the tightness in his face. How hard is this for him, who lives with the fear of his body’s rebellion every day?

  Poetry,he realized, watching Will’s face. A furious brightness sparked in Kit’s breast, equal parts pride and fury. Even now, he corner back with poetry.

  Morgan did not try to move closer again. Murchaud’s face stayed impassive; Tom’s expression was that of a man who wished he had a pistol in his hand. Kit glanced over his shoulder, not certain what he was seeking besides reassurance, and found himself looking into the Mebd’s swirling violet eyes. Somehow, she’d come up beside him on the side opposite Morgan, her mount shoulder to shoulder with his own.

  The corner of her mouth quirked; it wasn’t humor. “‘Tis in thy hands, Sir Poet.”

  “Sister, nay!” ‘Twas Morgan’s protest, and the Mebd silenced her with a glance.

  Kit turned back to Baines and smiled like a small animal baring his teeth. “Let him go,” Kit said, feeling Mehiel’s understanding and acquiescence. “And I shall go with you.”

  “Kit!”Murchaud and Tom cried in unison. Will’s mouth also worked, his eyes squinting tight.

  Fight it, William.

  Morgan shook her head, sunlight glinting from her hair, but she said nothing. Kit sheathed his saber without looking, clenched his right hand on the nail in his pocket, his left hand tightening on the reins. Gin sidestepped, feeling Kit’s tension, the hair on his neck drying into salty spikes where the leather rubbed them. Trust me,Kit prayed, catching Murchaud’s eye for a moment before looking back at Baines. “Set him free, Dick.”

  “I know what thy parole is worth.” Baines’ smirk gave the words layers Kit did not care to think about. Baines jerked his hands as if tugging reins; the web of light around Will tightened. Will staggered woodenly, like a jangled marionette.

  “I did everything I swore I would,” Kit answered, refusing to flinch or look away.

  Baines smiled, voice like a velvet glove across the back of Kit’s neck. “Pussycat. Isn’t it time thou didst admit where thou dost belong?”

  “I’ll do what you wish, Dick,” Kit said, the words like grit on his tongue. He hated that he did not have to pretend to the fear and diffidence in his tone. “But let Will go, or you’ll get nothing from me.”

  Kit closed his eyes, feeling Baines’ consideration. Mehiel stirred restlessly under his skin. The man pushed the angel down, and waited. Morgan touched Kit’s boot again, and this time Gin did not shy. Kit leaned down to her, never taking his eyes off Baines, and she hoisted herself on the edge of his saddle until she could speak into his ear.

  “Is this the side thou’rt choosing, then, sweet poet? After all the kindness of the Fae to thee?”

  “Kindness?” Kit snorted, not caring that Baines could see his lips. “Is that what thou callest it, my Queen?” He hoped she could hear the irony in his tone. He drew his hand from his pocket and let his fingers brush her hair behind her ear. Trust me.“Do not vent thy wrath on Will, when I am gone,” he murmured, taking a chance and dropping his eyes for a moment to catch hers. “And trust us. I think, my Queen, at last we understand our destiny.”

  She chuckled. He straightened in the saddle, raised his head, and nudged Gin forward, aware that Ben had joined the Queens in flanking him. Kit warned the big man away with a glance, and turned his attention back to Baines and the tangle of light in his hands like so much knotted yarn.

  “Well?” Kit said.

  “I have your word, puss?”

  “I have been many things,” Kit answered, “but I have never been forsworn. I swear to thee that Christofer Marley will do your bidding, Master Baines, and do unto thee no harm.”

  “And your friends.”

  Kit pinned each one of them with a glance, registered their looks of protest, anger, grief, betrayal. “I give my parole for them,” he said, not looking away.

  Baines laughed low in his throat and opened his hands. “So mote it be.” And boldly, calmly he collected his reins and turned the bay gelding with his knees. “Thou’lt forgive me if I lay a compulsion and a binding upon thee, this time–”

  “I’ll forgive anything,” Kit answered, and reined Gin up alongside the bay, leaving the Mebd and Morgan and Ben staring after him, and Murchaud’s long fingers digging into Will’s shoulder to hold the poet back. He clenched his hand tight on the nail in his pocket and listened while Baines whispered the words, made slow passes in the air. The two steeds maintained a stately pace, down the bank toward a river that might almost have been the Thames, or might have been the Stour of Kit’s childhood memories: it twisted back and forth in his vision, from a broad tidal thing, green and brown with eddies, subtle enough to drown a man no matter how strong a swimmer he might be to a brook a man might ford on horseback and barely wet his boots.

  Kit felt the magic clutch at his mind and heart and liver, a mindless obedience that would have sucked the wit and love and courage from him. He bit his lip, and let the ensorcelled iron pierce his palm until his own blood wet his hand and his hip through the fabric of his doublet. He heard himself whimper, and felt his own power flare and then slither back, pressed aside by the practiced might of Baines’ sorcery. He quailed like a man slipping on ice toward a cliff face, clutching at slick grasses, and his fey horse shuddered beneath him. Mehiel–

  «Hold fast,» the angel answered, and quoted poetry. «Angels and ministers of grace defend us.»

  The pain of the nail in Kit’s palm was just enough to keep the laugh from bubbling from his lips. Baines’ spell clutched his throat; he could not breathe; he dropped the reins and clutched his collar, tearing it open, sagging forward over Gin’s blond mane. The pressure crushed him, swept him aside, rolled him under. Shoved.

  And eased.

  Baines’ hand was on his sleeve, tugging him upright. “Sit straight, Puss,” Baines said, and Kit obeyed without thought. “Come along.”

  Kit opened his hand, the nail driven through his palm grating between the bones. He gasped and sat back in the saddle, feeling the eyes on his back. The eyes of his friends. Trust me.

  Baines could destroy him in any fight. Sorcerous or physical, it mattered not. Kit had no hope of meeting him in open war.

  Which left just treachery.

  Kit gave Gin a little leg on the off side, sending him shoulder to shoulder with Baines’ bay. Kit’s knee banged Baines’ calf; Baines cursed good‑naturedly, raising his right hand to Kit’s shoulder to ward man and horse away.

  As he turned, Kit skinned the saber from its saddle sheath and put the whole curved, wicked length into Richard Baines’ belly and out his back, low and angled for the liver, a kidney, both if Kit was lucky. His hand on the hilt, the iron nail in his palm, his blood binding him to the blade, Kit felt skin pop before the blade’s knife tip –a slashing weapon, not designed to stab, awkward and unbalanced. But it went through.

  He leaned across his saddle and twistedthe weapon in Baines’ guts, and the nail thrust through the back of his own hand.

  Gin shrieked and planted both forehooves at the cataract of blood that drenched them both, and Baines’ bay horse too. The bay reared; Kit yelped as the saber was dragged from his grip, Baines somehow staying in the saddle as his horse curvetted.

  Staying in the saddle, Kit estimated, but not for long, with both hands folded across his belly like that, holding his guts inside like an overfull armload of mold‑slicked gray rope. Gin’s eyes were white‑edged, his ears laid back hard as he backed away, one step and then another, his head down to protect his throat as if he faced a slavering dog.

  “Puss – ” Baines managed,
more a bubble of blood on his lips than a word. He blinked, his expression the strangest blend of grief and hurt betrayal; Kit saw it with a clarity that made a mockery of the ten feet between them. “Forsworn?” And then his grip failed, and his guts slid out over his thighs and the saddle, and his body tumbled backward as his bay horse said enoughand put its hooves hard to the ground.

  Kit gentled Gin with a hand that left bloody streaks on the sorrel’s blond mane, remembered a moment later the nail sunk into his palm. He picked it free while his gelding’s quivering slowed, and bound the wound with a scrap torn from his filthy white doublet. He trembled like shaken paper, and it took all his concentration to wind the cloth around his hand. By the time he had the bleeding stopped, the Fae had joined him, and the mortal riders too.

  Morgan got to him first, Will seated pillion behind her. She reined her mare in close enough that Gin could lean a shoulder on her to be comforted, and slid her own arm around Kit’s waist, seeming not to notice that it took all of hisflickering strength of heart not to shy and buck. “Clever,” she said, and left it at that, leaning away.

  He sighed, stealing another glance at the ruin of his worst nightmare sprawled messily on the bank. He couldn’t quite look at Baines; nor could he–quite–look away.

  “Kit.” Will’s voice, and Will’s gentle hand on his arm.

  Kit flinched, held himself steady as Gin tossed his head in protest of the blood and his rider’s plain fear. “Aye, love?”

  “You forswore yourself for me?”

  Kit laughed, and looked up, feeling suddenly lightened. “No,” he said, and shook his head, feeling how his hair gritted against his neck. “I told Dick that Christofer Marley would do as he bid.”

  “And?”

  Kit shrugged, pressing his right hand to his thigh to slow the piercing agony in it to a throbbing ache. “There is no Christofer Marley any longer, Will.” He picked flakes of blood off the back of his hand with a thumbnail and did not stop himself this time. “Come away, love. I want a bath. Come away from this place.”

  Act V, scene xxiii

  And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,

  Never to hope again.

  –William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII,Act III, scene ii

  Catesby would not be taken alive. Will heard later that the chase led the King’s Men as far as Warwickshire, his cousins gone to ground in a gatehouse and pried loose only at the cost of blood on both sides. He heard, and nodded as if it had been no more than he expected, and–wishing he had more grief left in him–turned his face back to the fire.

  There was an ugly bit of business when they returned to London and learned that Salisbury had arranged to have the recusant Ben arrested for questioning regarding the Gunpowder Treason. But he was pried loose soon enough, following a renunciation of his convenient Catholicism and a few earnest threats from Will and Tom, and the comments of the Baron Monteagle, roused from his bed at an inconvenient hour.

  The following morning, Will took himself to Westminster in the company of Thomas Walsingham and that same Ben Jonson, where the three of them presented themselves again before the Secretary of State. Salisbury met them in a red‑walled receiving room where Will had once been greeted by a Queen, and Will suspected the canny old Earl had chosen that location on purpose. There were wine and a fire; Tom and Ben availed themselves of the former, Will of the latter, and they stood in wolf‑pack silence while Salisbury sugared a cup of sack for himself.

  “Master Shakespeare,” Salisbury said finally, turning to face the hearth and Will. “I’ve considered thy proposal, again. And I am afraid I cannot allow–”

  Will drew a breath and raised his hand, not quite believing himself what he was about to say. “I’m afraid, my lord, that my request is no more negotiable than Ben’s freedom.”

  “Not–” Disbelief. Salisbury set his cup aside.

  “Would you care, my lord, to see my talents turned to the sort of satire our friend Ben is known for? To the odd anonymous broadside? The Devil makes work for idle hands.”

  “I have mine own resources,” Salisbury countered, the threat patent in his voice.

  Will laughed, crossing his arms in the King’s red livery, trying not to show how much he needed the support of the wall he leaned back against. “What can you threaten me with? I am dying, my lord. Behead me tomorrow; you cost the world at most a few plays, and my wife the pain of nursing me through my decline.”

  Salisbury’s mouth worked. He glanced at Ben, who remained perfectly still, a shaggy, menacing figure in incongruous wire‑rimmed spectacles. Will did not need to turn to know that Tom Walsingham smiled. He could see its effect, the sudden nervous flicker of Salisbury’s smirk. Tom’s voice was light, level, and as sweet as a woman’s when she has her husband dead to rights. “I too have resources, ”Tom said. “And while I am not Secretary of State, my lord Earl, I amTom Walsingham.”

  Will took his cue from the heavy downflex of Tom’s voice, the emphasis of the accidental rhyme of verb and name. “And I dare say,” he continued pleasantly, “that we three know enough of your dealings, and have enough trust from the King and Queen between us, to see you in the room beside Sir Walter’s. No doubt His Majesty would not be averse to seeing one of his loyal Scotsmen in your place; you know how he prefers them to the English‑bred men of the court.”

  The silence stretched taut. Salisbury’s breathing slowed, a muscle in his jaw flexing in time. Will concentrated on that muscle, on Salisbury’s eyes – so arrogant and full of the awareness of power–and almost winced and glanced down. Almost. And then he thought of Burbage, and he thought of Lucifer Morningstar, and Will Shakespeare dropped his hands and pushed himself upright, retrieving his cane before he shuffled forward. Rush mats crackled under the ferrule – iron, of course–but Will kept his eyes on Salisbury’s. His two short steps framed him before the fire, and he lifted his head and crossed his arms once more, keeping a disinterested glare fixed on Salisbury.

  Salisbury folded his arms, an unconscious mirror of Will’s position. Will permitted himself a little smile of triumph, quickly quenched, as the Earl bit his lip and then sighed. “What is thy desire?”

  “You’ll convince the King that his legacy should be a new English translation of the Bible,” Will said. “And you’ll extend your personal patronage to Ben.”

  Salisbury coughed lightly against the side of his knuckle. “You feel entitled to a great deal, Master Shakespeare.” But there was an echo of capitulation in his tone.

  Will smiled. “Yes,” he said, stopping his hand a moment before it could rise to tug his earlobe, where Morgan’s earring no longer swung. “I will admit that failing, my lord Earl.”

  Salisbury sucked his teeth and turned his head aside quickly, raising one shoulder in a lopsided shrug, more at Ben than at Will. Ben chuckled low in his throat, but Salisbury’s voice rose over it. “Thy judgements proved better than adequate this week past,” he admitted at last, as if it pained him. “I will speak to the King. And thou wilt have a play for us by Twelfth Night.”

  “By Lady Day,” Will corrected. “I am going home for Christmas, to see my daughters and my wife.”

  The New Place was warm despite the weather that heaped snow to windward until it touched the windowsills, and warmer still with the presence of the friends and family crowded between its thick walls. Will straddled a bench beside the fire, leaning back against the wall, and breathed Annie’s scent as she leaned on his chest, her knees drawn up under her skirts. He closed his eyes and closed also his hand on her upper arm, drowsing to the sound of Susanna’s voice raised in caroling.

  “People will whisper of thy licentious London ways,” Annie said sleepily, leaning her head on his shoulder.

  Will turned his face into her hair, resting his cheek against the top of her head. He sighed, just slightly, and felt her stiffen.

  “Art lonely for London, husband?” She pressed her shoulders to his chest, her tone light. “The applause of the crowds – �
�

  “The rotten fruit hurled in our faces – ”

  She snickered. “Thou knowest, Susanna and Judith will be married before all that much longer.”

  “Aye, ” he said, although he wanted to deny it.

  “I had thought…” She hesitated, leaned back harder. “When the girls are gone, Will. There will be naught for me in Stratford.”

  Will held his breath lightly, trying to anticipate what she might be dancing up on with such intensity. He gave up, and blew some loose strands of her hair aside, trying to brighten her mood. “Out with it, my Annie.”

  She drew a breath. “May I to London with thee?”

  He didn’t hear her at first. The words were so entirely what he had never expected to hear, and all he could do was blink slowly and shake his head. “To London?”

  With thee. Surely thou couldst make enough room for a wife, and I’d not wheedle to be taken to court or interfere in thy trade. …”

  “Oh, Annie,” he said. He heard her held breath ease from her, then, and felt her shoulders slump in defeat.

  Foolish notion,” she murmured. “Thou’lt to home for Lent, my love?” Just like that, forgiven for what she saw as a dismissal, again.

  Will’s eyes stung. “Silly wench,” he murmured. “Thou canst not come to London with me, Annie. Because I’m coming home.”

  She sat up and turned, swinging her legs off the bench. Guests and daughters turned to look, then averted their eyes quickly as she leaned in close, her eyes on his. “Don’t tease me, William.”

  “I’d never tease,” he said. “I can make a play here as well as there, and playing’s finished for me. I’m coming home. I love thee, Annie. …”

  She leaned back, eyes wide, blowing air through wide nostrils. She studied his eyes for a moment, assessing, her spine stiff with wrath. Which softened, inch by inch, until she tilted her head to the side and blew the lock of hair he’d disturbed out of her eyes. “Thou daft poet,” she said. “I know.”