“What is the fare, Master Ferryman?””
“The thing that you can least afford to lose,” the figure answered, scrubbing a hand over his bald scalp before pushing off. His trews seemed gray in the dim, directionless light, and they were rolled almost to the knee and belted with a bit of ivory rope. His horny feet were bare. No rope bound the ferry on its path too and fro and yet the boat cut clear and straight across the rushing river, making a clean angle to the farther shore.
“What river is this?” he asked, once the ferryman had settled into a rhythm.
“Lethe.”
Kit licked blistered lips. So the ifrit urged me drink. Drink, and forget all pain. Kit leaned back against the bow. The bank they had left retreated rapidly. He turned to look over his shoulder; the far bank seemed no nearer. All pain. All joy. No, thank you.The ferryman poled in silence for a little.
“You were eight years old in 1572.”
“I turned nine at the end of it, aye.”
“But in November? December?”
“I had measured eight summers.”
“Aye.”
“How do you know me so well, Master Ferryman?”
“It is my task to know. Do you remember what was special about that Christmas, Master Poet?”
Kit thought back. “The new star. Bright orange, it was. Visible by daylight.”
“Aye.”
“A new star in the heavens. A change upon the face of what many said was ineluctable destiny. It tormented the learned astrologers greatly.” Kit swallowed frustration; even though he spoke, the man poled fast. Surely they must be nearing the far bank shortly. He turned, and was surprised by the distance still to cover.
“What purpose these questions?”
“Idle conversation,” the ferryman said, and fell silent.
Kit glanced over his shoulder again. “How wide is this river, Master Ferryman?”
“As wide as it needs to be.” The steady rhythm of the pole continued, a little wake lifting in curls beside the bow. “You cannot land until you pay.”
Kit pressed his blistered palms together. He needed the gloves off, and to bathe his hands; not in this water, but he started peeling off the ruined kidskin anyway. “The thing I can least afford to lose? My life? I cannot pay that.”
“There’s something that has done you great service in your life, though you oft have denied it.” The ferryman never looked up from the water. “Not Will either. You lost that yourself. Hell had naught to do with it.”
Lost. Kit threw his gloves at his feet. Blood welled from his burns; he’d torn the skin. Lost. “Then what?”
The ferryman kicked the soles of Kit’s boots, never skipping a beat with his pole. The river made sounds against the boat like a maiden’s kisses. “Those will do for a symbol. Because it is. It’s symbols and the manipulation of symbols. Names and poetry. Even here.”
Kit’s brows rose in comprehension; the band of his eyepatch cut his forehead. “Those are all I have from my father.”
“No,” the ferryman said. “You have also his love, which led him to let you become this thing he could not understand. Because you needed it so desperately, my boy.”
“Oh, Christ.”
The ferryman shrugged. “One thing is the other.”
Kit hesitated. “My father did not love me.”
“Didn’t he? Doesn’t he? In his own narrow, thoughtless, assuming tradesman’s way? Hast never wished thou couldst love so, without the burden of thinking? Always thinking?”
Silence. And then, “Aye.”
“Hast never wished to be free of his love, his demands?”
“… aye.” Kit’s voice had gone small again. He didn’t bother, this time, to correct it.
“Then take off his boots.”
Kit lifted his foot across his knee and touched the leather. It smelled of saddle soap and bootblack. The old hide was supple and well-worn under his hand. His wrist had no strength suddenly; he hooked his fingers around the heel and wriggled his foot, and the boot would not shift. Or perhaps, more precisely, Kit would not shift it. He looked once more. The shore was no closer.
“Tis the same to me if we never arrive. I pole eternally.”
Will. Kit closed his eye and jerked the boot hard enough to burn his foot. He yanked the other one off as well and tossed them at the ferryman’s feet. Is that all?
“Get up,” the ferryman answered as the prow of the boat ground on the rocky shore. “Get up, Kit Marlowe.” His eyes flashed blue, amused. Kit shuddered. “Get up. Go in.”
Socks on his feet, hands reddened and weeping, mouth split with fiery kisses, Kit stood and turned in the ferry and did as he was bid.
Act III, scene xviii
Let me excuse thee: ah! my love well knows
Her pretty looks have been mine enemies;
And therefore from my face she turns my foes,
That they elsewhere might dart their injuries:
Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 139
Lucifer’s own long hands steadied Will down from the white mare; Will staggered as someone stroked brands of fire up his thighs, and Lucifer caught him.
“Pained by the ride?”
“Excessively.” Will forced his body to straighten and limped away. “By my troth, if I never set arse in a saddle again, it will be sooner than I like.”
The white mare regarded him expressively from under fringed eyelashes. He bowed a pained apology, spongy pine needles squishing under his feet. “No offense intended, madam.”
Lucifer folded his wings tight against his doublet and slanted the identical look at Will.
“None taken, I presume” The angel patted her on the shoulder. She leaned against him briefly, smearing white horsehairs on the black velvet of his doublet, and trotted away through the pines. Drifts of needles thicker than a rush mat muffled her hoofbeats to a rainy sound, and then she was gone, trailing the tinkling of bells behind her. Lucifer’s black stud followed.
Will closed his eyes and breathed deep of still. “A forest? In Hell?”
“They call it the Wood of Suicides”
Will turned quickly to catch Lucifer’s expression, but the Devil’s face remained placid.
“It’s so serene. I thought the trees…” Will looked up at their soaring heights, at the greeny-gold light that filtered through the needles. He heard the ridiculousness of his own unconsidered words. You’re talking to the Father of lies as if he were a familiar friend, as if thou wert on a country outing.“…would be sad.”
“Why?” Lucifer’s wings resettled. Will wondered whether the fidgeting reflected the angel’s emotions. “They have what they wanted. I imagine they are as content as such folk may ever be. Beside that, tis oaks who hate and oaks who act. As thou well shouldst know by now”
“Oaks who?”
Lucifer smiled. “Surely thou knowst the rhyme. The Faerie trees: Ellum grieve, and oak he hate…”
“Willow he walk, if yew travels late,” Will finished, and sank down on the ground with his head clutched in his fingers, his eyes shut so tight they pained him. It didn’t hurt enough to satisfy; Will ground the heels of his palms into his eye. The Faerie trees. Oh God. Oh Christ.
The angel crouched beside him, wings opening wide for balance, or perhaps to shield Will’s grief from the pitiless sky. He did not touch Will, and Will was grateful for it. “I see” he said softly, “that thou didst not understand how strongly some factions in Faerie oppose the Mebd, and Gloriana, and anything that supports them. Master Shakespeare, I must plead thine indulgence; it did not occur to me that thou hadst not realized the connection.”
“The Fae killed Hamnet,” Will said, just to hear it given voice. So calm and even. It must have been someone else, speaking the barb-tipped words. “It was my fault. They did it to stop me writing. To break me and drive me home. The Fae killed Hamnet. Because of me.�
�
“Aye,” Lucifer said. “Not all the Fae. But those who have no love for Elizabeth and less love yet for the Daoine Sidhe”
Will’s throat burned. His eyes were dry, somehow, although there was no strength in his arms or legs to lift him from the sweet-smelling carpet of needles. “It didn’t work.”
“Nor shall it now. Thy will is greater than it seems, Master Shakespeare.” The wings spread, arched, sheltering. Despite himself, Will laughed painfully at the pun. The smell of woodsmoke surrounded him, sweet and pungent, as if exhaled from Lucifer’s feathers and skin.
“Someone will pay for this,” Shakespeare said softly.
Lucifer patted him on the shoulder and offered him a hand. “Someone generally does. Come, Master Shakespeare, let me show you to your cottage, where you may begin your revenge.”
Will wobbled when he stood, his hands trembling more than they had in Faerie, his arse and his inner thighs still aflame. He was thankful when Lucifer dropped his hand. The angel’s touch was not what Will would have expected. “A cottage and not a dungeon, Your Highness?”
“A poet with naught to poesy on but dungeons is of but little use.” Lucifer walked ahead, arms swinging freely with his stride, wings luffing like sails.
“Thou mayest go where thou list, and pass without fear. Here in Hell”
Will almost walked into a tree, unable to take his eyes from Lucifer. Lucifer did not return the regard.
“I’m free?”
“Where couldst hide that Hell’s master could not find thee, an I wish’t?”
“Ah.”
“Here is thy home”
Home. The word had the sound of a hammer driving coffin nails. Will turned to regard a little cottage under the trees, a vegetable garden in a sunny glade beside it, a stone well with a yellow bucket resting on the lip. The smell of cool water and vegetable blossoms filled the air. “This?”
“Aye,” Lucifer said. “I think thou wilt find what thou dost need within. Goodmorrow, Master Shakespeare.”
“Your Highness, Will said softly. Don’t leave me alone. What am I to do here?”
“Lucifer, turning, looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Write poetry”
Will stood, mouth gaping. “A quiet cottage in the woods is Hell, lord Lucifer?”
The angel smiled. “It shan’t be quiet. Thou’lt have thy son and all thy many loves and failures to keep thee company, or I misjudge thee sorely”
Will shuddered. And Lucifer smiled, but it looked like sorrow. He dropped his eyes to the forest floor and drew a breath. Will saw it swell his wings. “I trust thou wilt find those adequate companions”
Will said not another word, but watched Lucifer vanish through the trees. He didn’t turn to look at the homely cottage, its verdant garden, the warm coil of smoke rising from the chimney. He sat down on the arched sweep of a root and laid his chin in his hands.
“Oh, Annie,” he said, miserably, what might have been hours later. “Oh, Hamnet. What have I done?”
Act III, scene xix
I’ll frame me wings of wax like Icarus,
And o’er his ships will soar unto the Sun,
That they may melt and I fall in his arms.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Dido, Queen of Carthage
A pleasant enough chamber, if a room walled with shadows and floored in cold stone floating like a ship on a nothing sea were one’s ideal of pleasantry. Kit turned at its center as the ferry poled into oblivion, noticing spare furnishings, a master mason’s hand in the angles where the stones turned down into the abyss. “Christ wept,” he murmured.
“So he did.” A voice like a fistful of velvet dragged across Kit’s skin.
Kit swallowed and turned toward his blind side. He might have raised his right hand to check if his jaw was hanging open, but didn’t quite. Father of lies,Kit reminded himself, but nothing could have prepared him for the confounding beauty of the figure in black who faced him, a raptor’s fanned wings glowing soft and pale as moonlight.
Lucifer Morningstar tugged elegant fingers through tousled golden locks and smiled. “Sir Christofer,” he said, furling his wings. “What an unexpected pleasure. May I offer you some refreshment?”
Kit licked dry lips with a tongue that failed to moisten them. He shook his head. The Devil sauntered catlike toward him and shrugged as if to say suit yourself. A casual gesture and a wine glass appeared in his hand, his fingers cupped around the bowl as if to a lover’s cheek.
“God help me.”
“He looks in now and again.” Lucifer commented, brow bent like a bow to dart that glance. “Thou dost interest me. Such eloquence in thee. And such pain.” As if pain were a thing to be savored. The wings flipped and settled, and Kit’s stomach flipped with them, in fear and something else. One white wing extended, a drift of snow glittering against the dark. Primaries trailed on dark stone as Lucifer paced in slow orbit. Deosil, sunwise, moving always to Kit’s blind side and so forcing Kit to turn. Idly swirling that red wine in its glass, until a few drops scattered over the rim and splashed.
“Thou hast a gift for the ages, Sir Christofer. Would that thou wouldst consider an allegiance with Hell.”
Kit drew a breath. Feathers flicked the back of his calves. They carried a rich, earthy musk he knew. He wasn’t sure where he found the humor he put into his voice, but he managed it.
“I’ve come to bargain, not offer allegiance.”
“I could make it very pleasant for thee. Thou hast a fascination with power”
“Get thee behind me, Satan.”
A wink broke the horse-trader’s appraisal in the Devil’s gaudy eyes. “The thought had occurred”
“Are angels equipped for such roguery?”
“like man, made in God’s image”
“So God has an arsehole?”
“Yes. He calls him Michael.” Lucifer laughed in such merriment that Kit smiled, despite the trembling knot in his belly. “Surely, thou hast heard of osculum infame.”
“The infamous kiss. Your kiss. The one that bestows power of witchcraft. Tis not a kiss on the mouth, I hear.” Lucifer only smiled. “Rutting with devils is sorcery.”
“So is rutting with boys. Of a kind with bestiality in thy human law books. It’s all sodomy, dear poet.”
“Only sodomy.” Kit laughed. Enough to burn on; but hanged for a lamb, hanged for a ewe is that what you insinuate? What virtue lies in your kiss, then, Prince of Darkness?”
“No virtue at all. But power. Come, kiss me and discover.”
“Am I Faustus? Shall a man be confused with his creations?”
“Nay. Thou art Marley, who should know better, and come to bargain nonetheless.” The Prince of Darkness spread his wings as if stretching. Kit had never seen anything so white, swans nor snow, limestone nor linen. They gleamed as if sunlit from behind. Kit’s fingers itched to stroke their arm-long primaries. Face burning, he forced his gaze to the well masoned stones under his boots.
“Thou’rt fascinated.”
“… Yes.” Kit folded his hands like a repentant schoolboy.
“Wouldst care to touch?.”
“Touch?”
Lucifer smiled over the rim of his wineglass and flexed the trailing wing forward. Kit clenched fist in fist as the pinions breathed coolly across his cheek, trailed down his throat, bending where they brushed his doublet, a pressure like fingertips braced against his breast.
“Touch.”
Kit disentangled his fingers from each other, lord, how can he be so beautiful, and hesitantly raised his right hand as if in oath and laid it gently, gently on the leading edge of that vast white wing. Rapture swelled his breast; he half expected to yank his hand back, fingertips scorched, but the feathers were cool and firm and slick over buried warmth. Bone and muscle moved beneath strong flexing plumage, tiny barbs catching the ridges of his fingertips with a rasp more felt than heard. He let those fingers burrow through feathers, into down soft as blown thistle seeds, to the blood-hot membrane b
eneath. And what has become of the burns on my hands?Lucifer shivered, a reflexive twitch of skin like a fly-bitten horse. Ravishing.
“Can you fly?” The wing flicked from his fingers like snatched paper, snapped shut with a slapped drumhead sound.
“If I care to.” Lucifer set his glass aside; it vanished when it left his fingertips, and moved toward Kit, golden curls in disorder against the black velvet of his doublet. He raised sinewy fingers and pressed them curiously against Kit’s forehead, hooking the strap of his eyepatch and dropping it to the floor.
“Oh, thou art too lovely for this.”
Kit thought he should step back, but the Devil’s fingers were cool against his scar. “I should think, to you, the damaged vessel might hold more appeal.”
“Perfection in all things.” Lucifer said. He caressed Kit’s sightless eye with rose-pale lips, the writhing shadows of his crown brushing Kit’s face with a palpable touch. “There. Scars do not suit thee.”
Kit blinked. And then gasped, because he could blink, and beyond blinking he could see. Not as he would have seen before. Not as he would see with his left eye, even now. But, he looked for a word, but otherwise.
The Devil still stood before him, close enough to kiss again, but on the right side Kit saw him as a vining of light and darkness, a twist of contradictions. Kit would have stepped back, but somehow those wings had crossed behind his back; he stood encircled by them and enfolded by the rich, heady pungency of sweat and good tobacco.
“I’ve dreamed of you,” Kit said, wondering.”
“And hast thy dream come true?”
“Not yet.” But he wasn’t sure it was truth as he said it.
“Now.” Lucifer whispered, and his breath at least was as hot as Kit thought it should be. “Bargain with me.”
Kit swallowed, shivered. The Devil’s hands stayed slack and open by hissides; only the wings restrained Kit. Who raised his chin to meet eyes that twitched at the corner with an almost smile. “Will Shakespeare,” he said. “I’m here to buy his life.
“The cost of that is dear.”
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