Aegypt

by John Crowley

  Pierce set out, walking backward into oblivion, deep asleep in the Faraways; and he didn’t wake again until Spofford began breaking up kindling for their breakfast fire, and the smell of burning applewood filled the cabin and the chilly morning.

  II

  LUCRUM

  ONE

  ‘So you’re off today?’ Spofford asked him.

  ‘I guess. Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Get some grits first.’ He warmed his hands at the stove. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘Summer’s about over.’

  Outside, mist clouded a clear morning, rising quickly out of the valley and the river. Pierce thrust his hands into his pockets and pressed his arms to his sides; even in the city, he thought, this morning would be fresh, the streets rain-washed, the air new.

  ‘There’s a morning bus from the Jambs,’ Spofford said. ‘I’m not sure when, but we’ll catch it.’ He grinned. ‘If you’re sure now you don’t want to stay for good.’ He stopped breaking eggs into a bowl and studied Pierce, who stood silent and abstracted in the doorway of the room. ‘You sleep okay?’

  ‘Huh? Oh. Sure. Strange dreams.’ He had begun to shiver. ‘I forget what, now, mostly. I remembered, when I woke up in the night. But now I forget again.’

  A plan. A plan, a pearl of purpose distilled from whatever the dream had been: that much he retained. He turned it in his mind’s fingers. Well: all right. It was real. It even warmed him somewhat, like the huge red wool shirt Spofford tossed him to put on; warmed him and made him grin. The first thing to do, when he got back, was to call Julie Rosengarten. Who would, no doubt, be astonished to hear from him. And now what again was the name of that agency she had gone to work for? Something highfalutin, from a classical tag, he had kidded her about it; per ardua ad oh yes: Astra Literary Agency.

  The rocky road to stardom. All right. Okay. Keep thy shop, old Barr had said, chuckling in the warm security of tenure at Noate; keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee. Okay. There was more than one way to make a living at this, and this was the only way he had of making a living.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, sitting down to Spofford’s eggs, he was ravenously hungry for some reason. ‘Onward. Duty. The Future.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be back,’ Spofford said. ‘Now that you know the way.’

  For some reason Pierce was visited with a quick vision of Spofford’s Rosie rising from the deep. He cleared his throat of toast crumbs that had suddenly caught there, and looked busily around the little room; there was nothing there of his to collect and pack, for he had unpacked nothing.

  ‘Have to keep up with your friends,’ Spofford said. ‘At least I do. I miss that educated conversation, hey, you know there’s not a lot of that around here.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be back,’ Pierce said. ‘Sometime.’

  ‘You will,’ Spofford said. He poured smoking coffee. ‘You’ll be back. I’ll see to it.’

  Late, her wagon still ridiculously packed with her life, Rosie drove into Blackbury Jambs for her appointment with Allan Butterman. She had lost some time dressing, starting out with skirts and jackets but unable to find a combination unwrinkled, decent, and seasonal; had decided then (never having gone to a lawyer’s office before) that no, this was not like a job interview but more like a visit to the dentist, you should dress for comfort, and over a plaid shirt, fresh and tart-smelling new flannel, had put on yesterday’s overalls. Mrs. Pisky, holding Sam’s hand, and Sam, had waved goodbye from the porch as though Mommy would never return. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

  Town had, just for this crisp morning, lost its summer somnolence and was busy with traffic. Rosie noticed Spofford’s truck, but not Spofford; she nearly tangled with the New York bus just pulling out from before the candy store, which was its stop, as she was somewhat blindly trying to pull in. Slam of brakes, the brakes were good, and something heavy toppled over in the rear of the wagon.

  The bus drove around her, with a huffy snort of exhaust, and away; Rosie waved apologetically, and a passenger obscure behind the green glass waved back. She took Bitten Apples from the seat and with it under her arm went down Bridges Street to the Ball Building. When she was a child she had thought – it had seemed obvious to her – that this red-stone nineteenth-century block, four stories high and the grandest in town, was called the Ball Building (its name arching over the central doors) because of the stone balls that topped its corner finials. Her dentist had had his office here. His name had been Drill. He thought that was funny; Rosie only thought it was proper, like the Ball Building. The big town, the big strange-smelling halls of the big Ball Building: she hadn’t finished putting that town together with this small one.

  Allan Butterman’s secretary looked startled to see her. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Mr. Butterman had to go to a funeral this morning. He forgot. He came in, and had to rush right home to change.’

  ‘Oh, hey, that’s okay.’

  ‘He should be back in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Fine, that’s okay. I’ll just come back. I’m not really in any big hurry or anything.’ The faint smell in the lawyer’s office of antiseptics and medicaments drifting in from the doctors and dentists around him had Rosie thinking of the fantasy she used to have on being taken to Dr. Drill, that she would find him out, sick, on vacation, dead. It had never happened. As she went back out into the warming day she noticed her throat was dry and her heart fast.

  Two hours. Okay. Some shopping or something. In limbo, she wandered down to the bridge and started out on it, looking south toward Butterman’s on its rock; too far to see, even in this clear light.

  It all seemed an immense trouble suddenly, a hornet’s nest she had perhaps been saved from stirring up by Allan’s surprise funeral; and maybe she should take that as a sign; maybe she should forget about the Law, and go home. But when she thought about home it was of Arcady she thought, and not of the fieldstone-faced ranch house in Stonykill. So another of her minds seemed anyway to be still made up, below this mind that wavered.

  He would ask her (she supposed, she couldn’t imagine his not asking, certainly he would have to know) why she wanted to start these proceedings. Well I don’t want to start anything, she thought of answering; what I want is to stop something. But that wasn’t an answer.

  She had no reasons, in fact. The thing was that she seemed no longer to have any reasons to be married.

  It seemed clear to her that nothing, not her growing dislike (no stronger word would do) for Mike, not his flings and his needs, not her restlessness, nothing could be reason for divorce if there were reasons to be married. She supposed that in the old days, the Old Days, her parents’ days or before, there needed to be no reasons, to be married in the first place was enough reason to stay married; but now – a cursory survey of her own friends’ histories, of TV, the papers, showed nothing but evidence – now those who were still married stayed married only by a constant effort of imagining why they were married; a daily effort, since in any one day you could become unmarried. It was logical to think that a union based purely on choice, on willed election, would be stronger than one based (like her parents’) on mere social assumptions and taboos: but in fact the elective marriages could just evaporate, overnight, in a moment of inattention. And leave nothing behind, no reason.

  She thought of Sam.

  People stay together for the children. Her parents had done so. Yet now there were uncounted thousands – a majority for all she knew – of children in daycare centers and kindergartens who came from Broken Homes. Surely with so many people working at it, a way would be worked out, eventually, soon, for children to be raised by separated parents so that they didn’t suffer. Maybe anyway they had never suffered as much from Broken Homes as people said.

  She knew for sure – a cold and dreadful certainty far away and finished – that Sam could not be hurt by Rosie’s parting from Mike as much as Rosie had been hurt by her mother’s staying with her father: by that awful death-haunted house, no home to break.

  She woul
d have been better off without him.

  She would have been better off without him: it wasn’t the first time she had thought those words, but the first time in the context of her own motherhood. They startled her there. She wasn’t making any comparisons: no. No. She turned away from the bridge, brushed by a dark wing of that old grief as it fled past and backward. She went up along High Street a block to the Donut Hole, and sat in a cool booth; she ordered coffee and a jelly doughnut and opened Bitten Apples to the bobby pin that marked her place. Two hours to wait.

  Part Two was set in London, and Rosie had been liking it; Kraft seemed to like it too, the book seemed to expand and stretch, as though his fingers had been itching to get to this good stuff. Paragraphs grew longer, there were lists and catalogues of funny and bizarre sights, foods, habits, customs. The town was a continuous show, or so it was described, not only the Lord Mayor’s show and the guild processions and the Inns of Court plays but the true playhouses now being built and the innyards converted to playhouses like the Red Bull, playing farces and tragedies and Chronicles, the patrons noisy and attentive and critical and as good a show as the play, or the Theatre, where the Earl of Leicester’s Men played. But in Southwark there were still the bear pits, where Old Braw and Tattered Raf and the Precious Boy crunched the mastiffs’ heads like apples, everyone knew their names and went to see them, tinkers’ boys and great ladies and visiting grandees from other lands, they were tended by their loving masters and healed of their awful wounds and lived to break the backs of other dogs – Rosie felt sorry for the dogs, but few then did, apparently. There were white swans on the river and traitors’ heads on London Bridge pecked at by kites: there were conspiracies, and plots, and attempts on the Queen’s life by witchcraft that horrified everyone – a poppet was found in Lincoln’s Inn Fields made in the Queen’s image and stuck full of pins, and the Queen’s friend and astrologer Doctor Dee had to be called in to see about it, it was nothing, he said, a toy, the Queen would live long and in good health; and she showed herself to the people on her barge just so that they could see she was all right, and kept Christmas at Richmond.

  It was all so highly colored, Rosie thought, like a cartoon; and it was hard not to think they thought of it that way back then as well, in their outlandish clothes of every rainbow color and a few she could only imagine, saffron and mulberry and lawn and gooseturd. When they died they left these impossible outfits to their servants, who couldn’t wear them and so sold them to the actors: the boards of the innyard theaters were bare and the sun shone (or didn’t shine) for lights, but there the characters strutted rich in silks and embroideries that said King and Lord and Princess: no matter whether it was ancient Rome or Harry the Fifth’s time or faraway Italy they wore the same dead lords’ outfits, so long as they were gorgeous enough. Young Will (as Kraft kept calling him), thrust in among all this, learned to dance and sing (in the theaters they seemed to dance, ‘leap,’ and sing as much as they acted – the dancing sounded more like tumbling, Rosie wondered what it could have looked like, was it silly or graceful?) and made friends among the court-and street-wise kids of Leicester’s Boys. Inducted by stages into their company, tricks played on him, initiations to pass. Tough boys to quell. Show them you’re not afraid. Master Burbage stepping into the fray and the fussy black-robed chorus-master, now what’s all this, what’s all this.

  Will was tried out at first for women’s parts, the hard ones to fill – for there were of course no female actors at all; Rosie remembered that she had once learned that. Two oranges in his bodice. Kisses and catcalls. There came to be a strange, even dark, kind of sexual tension in the story that Rosie wondered if she was only reading into it because of what Boney had said to her about Fellowes Kraft: it was as though there were other initiations not told of, a kind of corruption touching the hubbub, just touching: at great men’s houses where the boys played there were sinister young lords with long curls and earrings in their ears, drunk and heavy-eyed, someone spewing in the corner. With the spring the plague came to London: Will’s special friend, who played Phyllis and Clorinda and Semiramide, but who had fought no-holds-barred for Will in the boys’ brawls, died, holding Will’s hand. Pale and delirious and babbling bits of verse and love songs. Will grew up a little. The young lords went to their estates or to France, the players’ carts went to the provinces to escape the plague; the Earl of Leicester’s Boys followed the court and the Queen on progress.

  The Queen! The book seemed to be empty of women except for her, as though she drew all the feminine to herself, one woman in the realm but what a woman. Kraft seemed to get a little tongue-tied and dazzle-eyed around her, and so did everybody in the story. Robin of Leicester danced attendance, he and the Queen had been lovers for years (but what did they do, Rosie wondered), and if anyone knew her heart of hearts it was smooth careful Robin: but no one did. To Wanstead in May Leicester brought his Boys to perform a masque written by his nephew Sir Philip Sidney, perfect gentle knight in silk as blue as his clear child’s eyes. The Lady of May. That was Elizabeth herself, who was the masque’s chief actor and only object, though she had no lines written for her; she needed none. In the soft chartreuse gardens she and her company come upon a nymph, stepping from between the lilacs and doing reverence: Do not think, sweet and gallant Lady, that I debase myself thus much to you because of your gay apparel . . . Nor because a certain gentleman hereby seeks to do you all the honor he can in his house . . . I would look for reverence at your hands, if I did not see something in your face that made me yield to you . . . And the Queen answered her prettily and graciously impromptu with a sharp wit that almost unsettled the boy-nymph, and reddened his cheeks beneath his rouge.

  Will, grown tall and earnest-looking, played the pedant Rhombus, a stock comedy character he was good at: pedants and scholars with mouthfuls of inkhorn terms he alone of the boys could commit easily to memory. Let me delicidate the very intrinsical maribone of the matter. Well-spoken, Doctor, I see you have your degree Magister artis. I do, if it please your Majesty (sweeping a low bow, with a hand to the crick in his old pedant’s back), I have it honorificabilitudinitatibus. The Queen laughed aloud at that, a word he had used to rattle out to make Simon Hunt laugh at Stratford School; and after the play she reviewed the Boys, and stopped before Will, a head higher almost than his fellows, a red-haired head.

  Uh-oh, Rosie thought, she’s going to make a prophecy.

  The Queen’s head rose up out of her rich dress small and white and lined, the face of a maiden long imprisoned in a fairy castle; her red hair was dressed in jewels as complex as curls, and a stiff white ruff of lace rose up behind to frame her wide-eyed, domed, long-nosed face. So she was a peacock too, a white peacock all displayed. Will before this fabulous monster could not look away; her bird’s eye looked sharply into his, green as emeralds.

  Two things the Queen loved were red hair and jewels. She brushed Will’s hair with her ringed hand, and her white mask smiled.

  Honorificabili-tudini-tatibus, she said.

  When cool weather came the Earl of Leicester’s Men returned from their tour of the North and took up their stand again at the playhouse James Burbage had built out beyond the reach of the London magistrates. It was a playhouse like no other in England at that time, and Burbage loved it and lavished money on it as on a wife (his wife had more than once noted so to him); in fact it was not a playhouse at all, not a bear pit or an adapted innyard or a hall fitted out with a stage and some doors and some seats for gentlemen – no, it was not a playhouse but a Theatre, as the Romans had named their circular buildings, and so it was called: the Theatre, the only one in England.

  —We shall have those vessels, this year, Master Burbage said.

  He stood feet wide apart on the stage, looking out over the empty pit and the ranks of galleries for the penny custom. Behind him the boys’ company rehearsed a new piece. Above him the heavens looked down, painted in gold on the night-blue canopy, the zodiac and its resident planets, the sun,
the moon.

  —What vessels? Will asked him.

  The boy – hardly a boy any longer – sat on the stage’s edge, dangling his long skinny legs. He had the playbook in his hand, but he had no part in the new play. There was no comic pedant or poet in it, only heroes and their loves. The new fashion. Stern and antique.

  —Brazen vessels, Burbage said. Brazen vessels, made – made in a certain fashion – made and placed under the ambries here, and there: I know not just how: and so they echo or swell the voice, catch it and cast it back.

  Will looked around the Theatre, trying to imagine this.

  —Vitruvius saith, Burbage intoned, that the true antique Roman theatre had such vessels. Placed here and there by careful art. So says my learned friend Doctor Dee. Who has read Vitruvy and all those authors. Whom you should read and study, boy. A player need not be ignoramus.

  He looked down at the boy. What was he to do with him. If his coming into the Boys had been regular, well, his going out of it when the time came might be regular too. Master Burbage in his haste had not considered that part of it. If a boy had good parts, and grew up lissome, sweet, small, and of the right voice, he might easily at adolescence graduate to women’s parts in the men’s company, and thence to a full share in the company; if he did not, well, he could be returned to his family, his contract finished, let him try another trade.