All Night Awake (69 page)

Gathering himself with an effort, Will set off down the street. He must find Silver and tell her what was here.

Despite the heat of the sun he felt cold, as he meditated on the fresh terror of his dream. For Sylvanus, the villainous traitor, was inclined as was the ravenous wolf. And like the wolf he’d prowl till he’d mauled human world and faerieland both to death.

Scene Twenty Four

The fields outside the closed playhouses. These are rutted, muddy fields, crisscrossed and tamped down by countless feet. Will, hastily dressed, his hair in a tangle, walks past the empty, plague-closed theater. Marlowe walking the other way, sees Will and stops, startled.

A
nd there the man was. Alive.

Kit had searched Will’s street and heard of the killings. But neither had he that facility that some had of mingling with common people, nor had his disordered appearance, his great, anxious rush encouraged confidences from Will’s neighbors.

Kit hadn’t found the little Frenchman he’d talked to before, and he couldn’t find if one of the dead might or might not be Will Shakespeare.

The description of the wounds of the dead men echoed with him like an evil dream.

Seeing Will now, in this mundane street, walking, preoccupied, hardly noticing Kit, Kit breathed a sigh of relief and his legs that had held him steady through his long search for Shakespeare, now buckled under him, relief undermining them as fear hadn’t. Will was alive, the very man whose blood Kit feared he had just washed from his stained skin.

Will was alive. Alive and, as far as Kit could tell, none the worse for the wear.

“I didn’t kill.” The morning turned seemingly brighter, the air of Southwark, though heavy with garbage and decay, smelled cleaner, and Kit took deep breaths of the reviving, warm air. “I am no murderer.”

And though his conscience shied he had often killed with words, with denouncing, with baseborn treason, the alarmed part of his mind demanded to know where the blood had come from, then, that had bathed him head to toe upon wakening.

“Will, friend Will,” Kit called, his voice shaking, thinking only that if he talked to another it would quiet the voices of dissent in his own mind, for he was like a country broken to vicious fighting among angry factions, where none could emerge victorious.

Will turned, amazed, and looked at Kit, and half opened his mouth.

Will looked as bad as Kit felt, his face paler even than a shroud, his lips as grey as though death’s pale flag advanced there, fighting life away.

Will’s lips worked for a while, before he managed to say, “Marlowe?” and that came in a choking, rasping voice. “Marlowe?” The repetition implied incredulity, the questioning of what Marlowe might want there, the test of the unsteady truth of naming.

Kit crossed the distance between them, squelching mud whichever way under his boots, and not caring if they got splattered or not.

His shaky legs supported him ill, as he extended his hands, both of them, to Will. Words he hadn’t meant to say dropped from his lips. “I thought you dead. I feared you dead. But you’re alive.” He took a deep breath and attempted to explain. “I meant I came from your street and they said three men were found dead there.”

Will’s color faded another shade, going from pale to a sickly translucent grey like congealed lard. He straightened himself and looked at Kit with suspicious eye.

Kit had just managed to get his mouth under control of his panicked mind, and contrived to say, “I thought I might have injured you.... yesterday.” And upon saying it, he felt his cheeks color, because he knew well that he hadn’t injured Will.

He remembered too well, with sudden, vivid force, who the injured party had been and in which manner.

But Will didn’t laugh at Kit’s pretensions, though he relaxed and unbent slightly from his square-shouldered, defensive posture. “No, no, I’m well,” he said. He didn’t extend his hands to meet Kit’s, but, instead, raised his right hand and ran it back through his own thinning hair. “I’m well, I’m well. And how fare you?”

“Well enough,” Kit answered, though the question was asked for the sake of form. He let his hands fall, since his intended gesture of friendship had been ignored. Indeed, why had Kit made it? He and Will were not friends. Not friends like that.

Kit had no friends. All his friends were dead, and the brand of their death upon his conscience like a stain.

Will nodded. Once, twice, quickly, he nodded, then straightened. “Well, and I must be gone. Pressing matters of business call me hence. I must—”

He started to turn away from Kit, but Kit grabbed at his sleeve, held him. “No, wait,” he said. He must tell Will of his foul awakening...he must tell him of the wolf, the horror, the blood that had covered him on waking. He must know if Will knew of Silver and what Silver’s remedy could be for such an irremediable ill.

Will turned, vague and wondering.

“We have....” Kit searched for words, but couldn’t somehow find them. It was as if his mind had become a quick stream, in which fish flashed by, silver and gold, but couldn’t be caught. So did the words for what he wished to say evade him, and when his mouth thought to capture them, his tongue faltered and turned his speaking to incoherent sounds.

Will stared at him, eyes widening.

“We love -- ” Kit started, meaning to say that they both loved Silver and that this must concern Silver being, like Silver, a thing of another realm, alien to human. But his mouth stopped upon the words. He took in breath and tried again, in an exasperated exhalation, “We love -- ”

Will’s eyebrows rose, his expression something between sheer alarm and confusion. “Well, and may we talk about it another time? I am pressed for time, and I -- ”

“No. I must...talk.” As Kit said that, he realized he couldn’t. Between himself and his words interposed the dark shade of the wolf, squatting upon Kit’s reason like a dragon upon his hoard and determined, by these simple means, to keep Kit mute. He couldn’t speak. And Will was turning away, walking away.

Kit could get no help. He’d gone to Will’s lodgings, and knocked, and either Silver wasn’t there or she didn’t answer his knock. It came to the same. He must tell Will what was happening. He must. It was his last hope.

He must ask Will to beg Quicksilver to save Kit. Or he would die alone.

Maybe if Kit approached his meaning sideways, like a thing to be hunted. Maybe if he leapt on it like a cat upon a well-watched mouse, the thing would work. Thinking thus, Kit ran after Will, and stood in front of him, barring his way.

“Listen, listen: There are more things in heaven and earth, Will, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Will stared at him, uncomprehending, and made as if to walk around Kit.

Kit extended his arm, to bar his way. “But come; here, as before, never, so help you mercy, however strange or odd I bear myself.” Kit’s mind was barely ahead of his words, seeking to excuse his odd behavior to this man who stared at him as if he thought Kit should be in bedlam hospital for the insane, locked in chains, and fed on water and dry bread. “That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumbered thus, or this head shake, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, as 'Well, well, we know,' or 'We could, an if we would,' Or 'If we list to speak,' or 'There be, an if they might,' or such ambiguous giving out, ignore me, for what I have to say is hid in such foppery, and I must talk to you, I must say, we love both the same, both entwined in one heart, the same woman, the same-” He stopped short, unable to pronounce the word
elf
.

Kit let out an exasperated exhalation. Perhaps another way.

Perhaps Will, who dwelt with Silver, knew something of the wolf himself. “You may as well use question with the wolf,” Kit said, and amazed himself that he had managed to pronounce that word.

Upon the word, Will’s eyes widened, his face acquired an intensity of concentration as if here, at last, was something that interested him. “Wolf? What mean you of wolves, man?” he asked.

Kit opened his mouth to explain and, instead, horrified himself at the words pouring from his mouth, senseless words with no reason. “Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb; To wake a wolf is as bad as to smell a fox.”

Will took a deep breath. He detached Kit’s hand from the sleeve of his doublet, physically unfolding Kit’s fingers that clenched upon the cheap russet fabric.

“Ha! art you bedlam?” Will asked. “A roguish inconstant humor has installed itself in your wits. Or else have you drunk too much. Hence to bed, kind Kit, and leave us be, upon our fatal search.”

Like that, with no appeal, Will turned his back on Kit and walked away.

His fatal search? How fatal could it be? Could it compare to Kit’s anxious, hopeless quest?

Standing near the closed theater, tears stinging his eyes, Kit thought it was all to naught, and why had he thought it would be different?

Kit couldn’t speak, couldn’t betray the thief of Kit’s wits who’d installed himself in Kit’s heart and Kit’s mind as surely as if he were Kit himself.

And perhaps it was Kit. Always Kit. Oh, dread thought, and yet how likely. It would be no supernatural thing, and only Kit. The same Kit who’d turned in his friends and who, with fiendish humor and fiendish greed, had watched them go to their deaths, with very little regret and a justification that it was best for Kit’s own sake.

Now Kit was the wolf, and prowled the night. It was Kit, whose schemes were revealed, whose plots tolled his end as surely as an unsound bell. Kit whom the council suspected, who’d made himself suspicious to Cecil, who cowered in the shadows of his own mind, and who woke up covered in blood. Kit who now fed on human flesh more openly than he had before, and yet was this feeding so different from taking payment for the lives of friends?

And if this were all Kit, how could he be stopped, unless his immortal, fugitive Mistress knew of some simple that evaded the might of men.

And if it were not Kit, then, again, Silver must hold the cure.

“Can you not minister to a mind diseased?” Kit heard his own voice moan, and startled himself with its piteous tone. He yelled after Will’s now far-away, walking-away back, “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. Raze out the written troubles of the brain and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart. Good, sweet Will, for friendship’s sake. For the sake of humanity and kindness.”

But humanity and kindness didn’t so much as make Will turn back at Kit’s pleading.

Taking hold of his stray emotions, Kit swallowed hard. He ran his fingers through his entangled hair. What a fright he must look. What a sight. If anyone who knew him, who respected him should see him now.... How foolish they’d think him, how week.

If his enemies in the secret service should see him now, what easy prey, what a mark they’d not deem him.

He took a deep, deep breath.

“Soft, I dreamed. It was all a dream.”

But within him, the wolf howled triumph.

Scene Twenty Five

A tavern, in a narrow street, the ground muddy with accumulated refuse. Large, fearsome pigs run amid the people. Through the street Ariel walks, bewildered, confused, evading men who would hire her for a bawd, and shrinking from women’s envious gaze.

A
riel had walked too far. Her magic, and her magic horse, conjured by it, had both waned as she neared town. Her horse had vanished.

She’d never entered the city. London, with its dark walls, its gates upon which heads and limbs of traitors were displayed, rotting and festering, kite-pecked and fly infested, put out such a dark emanation, such pestilent reach, that Ariel could not convince herself to go there.

She’d followed the trail of Quicksilver’s power to Will’s lodgings. There, a little man, speaking in a funny accent, had told her that no one was within and that Will had gone to eat at a tavern down the road a piece.

Down the road a piece
was a long while down a rutted, muddy lane, filled with people and animals.

It rained, a dispirited drizzle, and though Ariel’s magic prevented her getting soaked, the rain turned the ground underfoot to silty mud.