Ink and Steel pa-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Tis a complicated story, but it suffices that all thought me dead, except perhaps Her Majesty, and I might have been dead indeed. All but Sir Francis still believe it.” He put a hand out, pleased with its steadiness, and clapped Will on the shoulder. “Art a true friend to me, Will. How it pleases my heart, I hope you know.”

  Will’s lips thinned around a smile. “Is there some message I could pass your parents in Canterbury?”

  “My … No. Since I left Cambridge to become a vile playmaker, they’ve regarded me as a cuckoo’s egg. Better leave me dead.”

  “I must tell you …”

  “That is?”

  “I ran afoul of Poley and Baines at the Sergeant.”

  Despite the warmth in his belly, Kit’s mouth ached around the words he couldn’t quite say. Oh, not Will. Not Will. Poley. And Baines together.

  “Did they see you?”

  “They threatened me.”

  “Ah, no. Will, you have to break with Oxford and Walsingham now. Burbage too.”

  “Now that you re returned, they can do without me. But I am pleased to defend my Queen, and if you teach me what you know, the art of your plays …”

  “Don’t choose sides in this.” Kit wanted to take the other man by the shoulders and shake him, but he gave him pleading instead. “Flee. Take your Annie and get away. I’m not returned, man. I’m dead, and you’ll be dead with me if you stay.” He caught himself worrying his eyepatch, and forced his hand down. Put it on Will’s arm, instead, and clutched the broadcloth of his sleeve. “Some one of us is a traitor. Some one of us betrayed me, and will betray you. I trust only Walsingham. You cannot choose sides, Will: they’ll eat you.”

  Will looked at him for a long moment, and then shook his hand off and moved away, close to a broken-backed chair pushed up beside the hearthstone.

  “Run if they’ve broken you”

  “Broken me! I’ll not be called a coward.” It stung as much as if Will had spoken the accusation plain, and Kit flinched and looked down.

  In the dark kitchen that was very like the dungeon that Kit had come here to remember, William Shakespeare shook his head. “I mean to choose the side that’s right.”

  Tamora: So should I rob my sweet sons of their fee;

  No, let them satisfy their lust on thee.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Titus Andronicus

  Langley’s kitchen grew hot and close while Will leaned against the arm of a broken chair and listened to embers crack on the grate. It was a long time before Kit answered.

  “Tis not what side is right. Tis what side you’re on. Elizabeth and the Protestant Church. The third or fourth time you’re raped by a priest, you may start to regard the Church’s moral pronouncements with a jaundiced eye.”

  Kit turned away, still cupping that glass, and ran the other fingers over the scarred wood of the block.

  “Kit, from you of all people?” Will left the chair, came close enough to lower his voice and murmur through tightness. “Sodomy’s accounted a sin worse than any.”

  “What? What two men do willing is a sin worse than rape or usury? Than murder? Than denying God? I know Church doctrine.” A deprecating tilt of his head to show how well he knew it.

  Uncomfortable words through a stiff throat.

  “Equal to witchcraft, they say. Then burn me for a witch and a playmaker. I thought better of you. ‘The unspeakable Christofer Marley, may he rot in Hell, and he got less worse than he deserved.’ Say it if you think it! It’s what the Puritans will write. Although by their own doctrine, and I understand it aright, I’ve as good achance of election to Heaven as any of them, for if all our acts and our salvation are predetermined, how can you condemn any man?”

  Will had no answer. It was different, to know generally enough for coarse laughter what men and boys did in small rooms and shared beds, and to look into the face of his friend and see a rough, kind sort of honesty that begged him to understand it. He moved some steps as if Kit’s sin could taint him. Kit picked at the mortar between stones with a fingernail, eyes downcast.

  “More get at it than you might imagine, Will. Some hypocrites touch and kiss and clip and never call it what it is. But I am a lover of discourse, good William, and as I have said before, I would liefer lose my life than my liberty of speech.” A pause, and Kit chuckled. “And as I prophesied it, so it has come true.”

  “No. But I would hear you say you’ve never enjoyed the pleasures of a beardless boy, who cries rape now.”

  “Never one who took no enjoyment in return.” Kit met Will’s gaze a moment, then turned his head and spat upon the floor. “Oh, unfair, Shakespeare. What do you take your Marley for?”

  The cellar stone was cool as Will pressed his hand against it. He thought of his friend’s beautiful hands and lips turned to acts his stomach coiled to think on, and struck out savagely to deny the image. “Is that why you refused holy orders? Because you couldn’t trust yourself around boys?”

  Kit half turned back. He shrugged, and Will saw the bitter edge of a smile, as if Kit had expected no less. “Call it an unwillingness to practice hypocrisy, and another—unwillingness to abandon the pleasures of the flesh. I should not expect anyone to understand who does not know for himself; and there was Rheims. Richard Baines was at Rheims.”

  “Rheims? Where the Romish seminary is?

  “I went to France for Walsingham and Burghley, and made pretence to study among the Papists while they plotted. It almost got me barred from my Master of Arts at Cambridge, but the Privy Council interceded. They knew what I had done to preserve our Gloriana. I did not tell them all I suffered.”

  “This same Baines who has slandered you since your death?”

  A transparent attempt to turn him aside, but Kit was inexorable.

  “Tis not surprising. Gloriana has said that she would rather a loyal Catholic than a Puritan: our Queen is a freethinker, for all Burghley and his son Robert Cecil would like to see every Catholic hanged.” Kit looked up, folding one hand into the crook of his elbow as he lifted his glass to his lips.

  “Some of them are Prometheans. Ours, theirs. Does Baines accuse me of atheism and sodomy? Of blaspheming and railing?”

  “He does, and puts about the word that you died drunken, cursing God after a knife-fight in some filthy alley.”

  Would that I were drunken at Rheims, when they put the irons to my skin. There’s an art to it, did you know? You burn a little, and a little more. A finger’s breadth at a time, and never so deep as to numb sensation.” Kit’s voice was level and soft as a tutor’s, his eye unfocused. “And sodomy? Aye, and five men by turns, and one an Inquisitor. As for cursing God? Baines should know how I blasphemed in Rheims, before Baines stopped my mouth with a black scold’s bridle. Baines was there, also acting as an agent for the Crown. I could never prove treason against him, though I professed it: he swore he thought I was the Pope’s own man and not the Queen’s when he betrayed me. All lies. He belongs to them, though he pretends service to the Queen; but what man cares that outrages are perpetrated against a catamite, or a heretic, or a poet?” Kit scratched his wrist, half idly, a cat attending to its paw.

  And Willtasted bile. He wished he could stop his ears with his fingers, but he swallowed and stepped toward his friend. “Sayst thou he knew of this? An Englishman?!”

  “Oh, Will.” Marley worried his eyepatch with nervous fingers. Will, he held me down.”

  A dark, too-knowing eye. A sliver of an earnest smile. Will looked down, looked away. Anywhere but at his friend. “Kit ….”

  “It wasn’t so much different than Cambridge, all in all. I have been told I was a lovely boy.”

  “Oh, sweet Christofer.” Will’s knees folded and he sat down on the floor. One hand landed on the edge of the half-mended chair. He hauled himself into it, shaking. Kit squared his shoulders, leaning against the wall, one hand circling in the dim room like a white moth near a flame.

  “So, three times now I’ve escaped him and his masters. In
Rheims, when he referred me to the Catholic plotters though I have some satisfaction in knowing that truer Papists caught him out before he left France, and they put him to the question in the strappado. Then in the low Countries, when he forged a charge of counterfeiting upon me. And in England, now, and a knife in a hand I thought a friend’s.”

  “Can you prove it was Baines?”

  “I can prove it was Thomas Walsingham. And Baines will do as a sop to my rage, can I not find the grace to beard his master. But yet the Crown sees in them both loyal men. I must have proof, or his death. Elizabeth can lack stomach for blood.” Kit stopped as if his voice ran dry. “But I see I shock you.”

  Will unclenched his hands from the chair arms and stood.

  “No. Tell me more. Tell me about these shadows we oppose. Tell me how you escaped.”

  Kit threw his brandy back like a man intending to get drunk, and quickly. Glancing at the glass in his hand as if he meant to hurl it into the hearth, he shook his head and after three quick steps set the fragile thing lightly on the mantel. He crouched before the fire and held his hands out. “You re expecting the story of a daring escape.”

  Will nodded. Close heat made his beard itch.

  “I swore Bess and the Church of England blue and bloody. I vowed I’d see her headless corpse dragged through the London gutter. I vowed I made them think they had broken me. Hell, they did break me. I would have crawled, and gladly, but I hid my loyalty to our Queen.”

  A sound almost like a hiccup, so Will averted his gaze.

  “It doesn’t matter. I lied. And I lived. And later a few were hanged. Hast seen a Tyburn hanging?”

  God help Will, he had. Slow strangulation, but not to the death. With the criminal cut down living, disemboweled living, emasculated living, hacked into bloody chunks. God have mercy, by then almost certainly dead.

  “That’s what a Queen’s Man is, Will. It isn’t for you.”

  Will raised his hand from Kit’s shoulder, brushed his fluff of hair aside. He half expected a flinch, but Kit turned the long way round to look upon him square. “Christofer.”

  “How plainly can I tell you? Get out. This is not for you.”

  “How old were you?”

  “How ? I was twenty-three. It wasn’t so long ago.”

  “You survived.”

  “Lucky me. Unlucky Edward the Second. Or,” with an airy wave of his hand “—that Gaulish or Saxon commander. Whatever his name was. The one the Romans cut slits in, so more could go at him at once. Or was he a Roman raped by Gauls? Still, an Inquisitor. I’m tempted to count it some species of honor.”

  He’s drunk after all,Will realized, and almost laughed that the only reason he had known it was that Kit couldn’t remember the name of an obscure historical figure.

  “Not the tactics the Inquisition normally approves.”

  A tilt of Kit’s head, and that fleeting smile, shy as a girl’s.

  “It does seem a touch unprofessional, doesn’t it? These Catholics at Rheims were no true Catholics. They did not seem overly concerned with what the Church bids or unbids. I can’t but say I agree, somewhat: had God not wished us to savor meat and enjoy drink, he would have given us tongues too numb for tasting. Had he not intended us to enjoy companionship, would he have given us tongues so facile for conversation … or such a taste for it? The Church is not God.”

  “Kit, that’s heresy.”

  A smile bent around his scars. “I died for it.”

  Will opened his mouth. Embers in the banked hearth popped. Kit rested his hands on Will’s shoulders, leaned his forehead against the bridge of Will’s nose. “These are very bad people, Will. Get out. Go to the Continent. Join a nunnery. Save yourself.”

  Will set him back at arm’s length and studied his face. Flushed, maybe, but his gaze was sharp and he stood steady on his feet.

  “You haven’t run.”

  “I’m Kit Marley.”

  “And I’m Will Shakespeare. Dammit, Marley, an you’d ward me, tell me truth!”

  “The truth?”

  Will took a breath. “Aye.”

  Kit gestured to the chair and hooked a peeling stool over with the toe of his boot. “If you can’t be dissuaded, he said, then by what’s holy, Will, sit down.”

  You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute. And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Edward II

  The fire burned low. Kit found a black iron poker beside the hearth, a long bit of rod stock with a looped handle, the tip spiraling to a point like some black unicorn’s horn and poked the coals idly, knocking sparks and cinders up the chimney. An orange flame licked in the crevices, and Kit wedged the poker there, resting the loop on his knee. Will coughed once against the back of his wrist. Kit at last folded his arms one over the other and smiled. “You re tangled over Titus.”

  “I’m horrified,” Will answered with a shrug. “I’ve got to lavinia mutilated, ravished and next I must have the Moor’s treachery to Titus, and I find myself as tongueless as lavinia, and as bottled full of tales. Hands cut off, tongue torn out. How does a man make that real?”

  “You haven’t her rage to put in it.”

  Will nodded. “Her rage and her hurt. Tis not something that can be set right in an act.”

  “Tis not something that can be set right. That’s what makes it a tragedy.”

  The coals had gone dark near the poker’s tip. Kit leaned forward and puffed air until they flared blue and orange, casting disconcerting heat across his face.

  “The plays, your plays have the power to make people believe. Some of it—this craft lies in what I did to Titus. Some of it is in your own vision and tongue. Oxford writes some scenes and words, but he only knows what I taught him. It’s Plato’s magic; you make an ideal thing, and if the people believe that thing, the world itself must be beaten to the form.”

  “Plato. Like love, then.”

  “Aye,” Kit said dryly. “If you believe in love. And then the performance. Alleyn was good enough to carry the spell. Burbage and Kemp are strong as well.” He twisted the poker in the fire, one boot propped on the hearthstone. “There’s an art to that too: to giving the audience belief in a dream as real as the touch of hand. The Senecan structure won’t work for it, and blank verse is too static. Fourteeners are a loss, too formal. A Platonic ideal. And people will live for it. It seems too simple, doesn’t it?”

  Kit looked away from the embers. The loop of the poker grew warm against his knee. He shifted its resting place from his stocking to his breeches. “But give them men who could grasp heaven, and who turn away through willfulness and greed. Give them strong kings, or give them the truth of what happens when kings are not strong. Make them grieve for men they would hate, but it must be fresh, not stylized: words spoken trippingly on the tongue. Reality is drama.” He paused, and watched Will chew his mustache. “Like that lemon tree of Sir Francis . If you can convince enough eyes they’ve seen a thing, if you can convince a man or a beast he is a thing better than he is, more loyal, more true—that thing holds.”

  “I have often thought,” Will said carefully, for this was a heresy too, “—that a man given half a chance might act morally. Because he knows what morality is.”

  “Not Robert Poley.”

  “No. But another man.”

  “What man?”

  “Myself. You. Her Majesty. You don’t believe in God. And yet you were never but kind to me.”

  “Oh,” Kit said. “I believe in God well enough. It’s the Church I take issue with. But who would believe Kit Marley, monarchist?”

  “A King we must have.”

  “A man might prefer a strong woman who temporizes to a weak man who beheads.” Kit looked at his nails.

  Will cleared his throat after a time. “And … you say Titus is formal.”

  “And finish it formal. You’ve an ear for a scansion and a fair eye for an image, and there’s this in you: thou fearest not to own the myth. But now you must
put the fire in it, and not shy away, and bring them under the spell of your words. You’ve played my Jew.”

  “I have.” Will smiled. “Tis strong. But the third act I know.” It wasn’t all the play he would have had it be.

  “Write thy plays about people. You’ve a way of spinning height and depth I envy. All I’m fit for is making light in darkness, and spreading blood and bitter farce acros sthe planks.”

  “Foolishness, Kit. I’ve read your leander.”

  “Pretty, isn’t it? I’m partial to Tamburlaine myself: still my best work, I think.”

  Will choked, and laughed, and turned back on himself nimble as a ferret. “Where’s this danger?”

  “ The danger’s in the men who don’t want the plays written. Men like Baines, and Sir Walter’s rival, the Earl of Essex.”

  “Raleigh is an ally?”

  “Raleigh is someone I cultivated a bit, but he is not one of ours. Robert Devereaux, though Essex is one of theirs. Though both sides still use the same name, and trade alliances like chessmen.”

  “What do they want?”

  Kit marshaled half-drunken thoughts. “As I think it? Elizabeth off the throne, for one thing. A ruler in her place without such personality. Gloriana is the Faerie Queene. The other Prometheans, their goal is the elevation of man. Admirable. They want safety and an end to poetry, Will. An end to greatness of spirit, and all men made equal. They want to own God, and use him to make all men subject. I should liefer lose my life than my liberty of thought.”

  “And our half? Our half, is it still?”

  “Elizabeth and England, we stand for. Tis rough work. Even for a rogue like myself, whose works drip with gore, unacquainted with gentle thoughts.”

  “Can the man who wrote Hero and leander claim to be unacquainted with gentle thoughts?

  “Acquainted and yet unacquainted.” Kit shifted before the iron could scorch his leg. The tip was not yet glowing. “Tis a quaint small thing, a poem about passion Kit, it’s a poem about leander’s arse.” The iron slipped: Kit caught it right-handed and hissed, juggling a twist of sleeve around the metal to shield his hand.