All Night Awake (7 page)

Steeling himself, knowing he gazed on his own death, knowing nothing would come of this but his own destruction, he stepped forward.

The Hunter stepped forward also, in giant steps, approaching Sylvanus. “There will be an end to this, cur,” the Hunter said. “You cannot thus break your bond.”

Once more, Sylvanus changed, as if the sound compelled him, his well-formed humanlike form compacting and shrinking into the shape of a square-headed, squat dog.

Only the dog was bigger than he’d ever been, almost as big as a dog as he’d been as a man.

The Hunter looked puzzled for a moment, then his voice sounded so loud that it seemed to make both earth and sky tremble, and almost obscured the screams of the dying humans. “Come to heel, you
creature
.”

He advanced on Sylvanus, like a displeased master calling his puppy. “What? You dare defy me?”

Sylvanus hunkered down and showed his glowing teeth as the Hunter approached.

Suddenly, Sylvanus leapt. His glowing teeth pierced the darkness of the Hunter’s arm.

The Hunter screamed, a sound such as had never been heard before. Reality wavered and turned and reeled, like a windblown paper dancing in the whirlwind that announces a storm. What light there was, amid the smoke of the fires and the darkness of the Hunter and his dogs, seemed to waver also, the very moon growing pale as if in distress.

Drops of glowing blood fell to the earth, withering and blighting the very weeds it touched.

Around them, as if this were a contagion-infested breath, Quicksilver could feel crops withering and dying in the fields.

Time was out of joint and the mechanisms of the world jangled off-key.

The dog charged again, this time sinking its teeth into the Hunter’s leg. He pulled, seeking to bring the Hunter down.

The Hunter wrenched away and turned, his misty shape looking sickly green where it had been pitch black and alive before. “This is your fault, oh Quicksilver, king of elves. And I will come for you in judgment,” the Hunter screamed.

With his scream he vanished, like a fog upon the air. With him vanished his waiting horse, and the pack of his cowering dogs.

“My first victory is won,” Sylvanus crowed, his voice changing from a low growl to a smooth human voice as he shifted and unfolded into his elven form once more. “Now for the others.”

Quicksilver realized he was covered in a sweat of fear, as he hadn’t been in many a year, not since acquiring the rule of Fairyland and all the power that came with it.

Trembling, he watched as Sylvanus grew and seemingly called to him every tendril of darkness that touched on every one of the burned houses. He changed and shifted to a dark miasma and transported himself somewhere.

To London. Quicksilver felt it both as a word and an image impressed upon his fevered brain. Sylvanus had gone to London, the largest city in the land. It wasn’t so much knowledge but a deeper certainty, born of blood, of sinew, of Elvenland magic.

Sylvanus had transported to London, capital of this human realm whose boundaries overlapped sacred, elven Avalon—like two pages in a book will share a leaf, each taking up a different face, the two touching but never mingling.

What would Sylvanus want with London? What would he do there?

Quicksilver looked at the charred ruin around him, heard the lamentations of those who’d lost loved ones, and trembled.

What would Sylvanus
not
do there, in that London of packed multitudes?

More than half of Stratford had burned. Only a few houses stood amid the destruction caused by magical fire. Quicksilver’s magical fire.

Where the town had been silent, now it echoed the screams of widows and the inconsolable cries of orphans.

And all because of Quicksilver.

The Hunter said he would come for him. Come for Quicksilver he would, doubtless, as soon as the Hunter had recovered.

If the Hunter recovered. Quicksilver shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling small and young and foolish. Oh, curse the day he’d become king, he who was so naive, so dumb, so frail, so divided.

What if the Hunter didn’t recover? Quicksilver would willingly suffer any punishment to be assured of the Hunter’s recovery.

For what would happen if the Hunter did not recover? What would become of the workings of the world?

Quicksilver hadn’t even known that such creatures as the Hunter could be hurt. He’d never suspected it. And now the Hunter was injured. With the Hunter’s scream of pain something seemed to have changed about the very nature of reality, the truths that held everything in its place.

He watched through the smoke his elves, like unseen angels, smothering the last magical fires.

What did it matter, this belated charity? The damage was done.

Done through Quicksilver’s hand.

Quicksilver had set the fire, and Sylvanus had fed upon it.

Distracted, Quicksilver stared at the house closest to the forest, the double wattle-and-daub house of the Shakespeares. It still stood, undamaged.

Will’s wife, Nan, had organized her in-laws and her own three children—the older girl, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to carry buckets of water from the river and thus soak all before flame ever touched it.

Quicksilver thought of Will, who was in London. Once upon a time, the Lady Silver, Quicksilver’s female aspect, had loved Will with all-consuming passion.

Even now, thinking of that young man with the golden falconlike eyes made Quicksilver’s heart quiver.

Will was in London. Quicksilver remembered hearing elven gossip from one of Ariel’s maids, Peaseblossom, who’d seduced a mortal youth.

Will was in London and Sylvanus had gone there.

Quicksilver realized he was trembling again.

He must go to London and stop Sylvanus. He must keep the evil creature from wreaking havoc upon the unprepared humans.

Quicksilver must, if nothing else, keep Sylvanus from hurting Will.

And Quicksilver should stop Sylvanus, rein him in, atone for his crime against Stratford by keeping Sylvanus from destroying London.

He, Quicksilver, was the king of elves, and responsible for all other elves, even those who had ceased to be of elvenkind.

It fell to him to protect London from Sylvanus.

“Malachite,” he called, and his friend approached. “Go to your mistress. Tell her I’ve gone to London, and whatever you do, do not disclose this sad fray here. No reason she should fear.”

No reason fair Ariel, who loved Quicksilver enough to imagine him a good king, should know that he had brought doom on innocent humans and loosed plague and danger upon both fairy and mortal.

Scene 5

A road running along the Thames River. On the other side of the river, the impressive mansions of the nobility line up in impressive display, their stone facades vying to outdo each other in grandeur and architectural ornament. On the nearer side, only a few houses, hovels, and decaying warehouses cluster. Amid them, a small shop remains open, a lantern burning over the sign that advertises used clothes for resale. Will Shakespeare enters the shop, where clothes hang from the ceiling and lie in neat piles upon the two tables that take up most of the scant interior space. An old man sits at the back, by a small table at which a wavering oil lamp burns. Two other, younger men argue with him.

“
N
ot worth three pennies.” The old man turned a dark red velvet doublet over and over in his dried-up clawlike hands. He squinted at the fabric and squeezed his lips together, multiplying the wrinkles on his already wrinkled face.

“I need five pennies, please, master,” a tall man in his twenties, obviously the owner of the doublet, said. “I must have five pennies to pay my gaming debt.”

“Three pennies,” the man said. “And I’m being too generous. I’ll ruin myself this way.”

He waved the tall man aside, saying, “Think it over.”

The blond youth, no more than sixteen or so, pushed a folded dark suit at the man.

The boy looked scared and his anxiety mounted as the old man picked at seams, and turned sleeves, and made smacking sounds with his mouth.

Will Shakespeare held on tightly to his best suit, of much-washed black velvet, and waited his turn.

His suit had been new ten years ago when he’d married Nan. It was not, Will knew, nearly as well made as the tall man’s wine-colored doublet.

And yet Will had to have ten pence for the suit.

It wouldn’t pay Will’s rent, but it would—if he husbanded it right—feed Will through the days it would take him to walk home.

But what were his chances of getting that much when the much-better doublet was held so cheap?

Will watched the old man purse his lips with finality and look at the young man. “Poor quality,” he told the boy. “Poor quality. I don’t think I can—”

On those words he checked and arrested.

The young man had started quivering, like a leaf upon a tree in high wind.

He stumbled, gave a strangled cry, and fell toward Will.

“What’s this, what’s this?” the shopkeeper said.

To save himself from being toppled, Will dropped his suit and put his hands out, easing the tall, thick-boned youth onto the beaten-dirt floor of the shop.

“He’ll be drunk,” the tall man said. “Drunk or hungry. It’s hard days in the country and many young bucks come to town searching for work and food. As if we had it to give.”

Will shook his head. He’d come to town in search of work, but no one would call him a young buck.

He knelt beside the young man on the floor. He looked like a farmhand and he smelled neither of ale or wine. Will lay his hand on the youth’s forehead, as he would have on Hamnet’s, back in Stratford. It was hot enough to feel burning to the touch.

“He’s ill,” Will said. He fumbled with the man’s shirt, trying to open it, to give him air.

But as Will pulled, the worn-through shirt ripped, exposing the man’s underarm, and the huge, pulsing growth beneath it.

“Jesu,” the seller said. He got up and bent over the youth, staring at the growth. “Jesu. It’s the plague.” The old man’s lips quivered. His hand went to his forehead, tracing the papist sign of the cross in atavistic exorcism. “My shop will be closed now. What will become of my grandchildren?”

“How long have you been ill, good man?” Will asked. He wanted to ask where the man had been, where he might have contracted this illness, whether in London or the countryside.

For a moment he thought the man was too far gone to answer. His pale blue country-boy eyes looked at Will uncomprehending.

But then he cleared his throat and coughed, and whispered, “Faith, I’ve not been ill. It was just now, this pain . . . . I’ve not been ill. Tell my mother—” He stopped, and coughed again, and his body convulsed, in a long shudder. “Mother,” he said and he was still.

Will saw that breath didn’t rise in the broad chest.

Dead, the boy was dead. And he’d said he was well till just now, till that pain beneath his arm.

It could not be true. It could not be true. Even the plague took time to kill people.

Yet something told Will that this was true. He remembered the boy walking down the street, ahead of Will. He’d walked like a healthy man.

Trembling, Will stood up. Trembling, he wiped his hands to his pants.

Mercy, let him not catch the plague. Oh, mercy, not so far from his wife and children. How horrible it would be, dying here all alone and being buried without name or care. His sense of his mortality, awakened, beat afraid and agitated wings against his reason. Oh, fool he was to have left those he loved and for the sake of an illusory dream of poetry to have come so far to so dangerous a city.

“Out,” the old man said. “Out. I’ll not be buying any clothes for a long time.” With fumbling urgency, he pushed Will and the tall man with the wine red doublet from his shop.

Will could but stop and pick up his suit on the way, as he was being pushed out.

Outside, the cold air allowed Will to think more clearly, despite the bitter complaints of his empty stomach.

The plague. In truth, it was that—the growth beneath the arm that sapped a man’s vital humors.

But the plague came on slowly, took days to come on.

What strange plague was this that killed so quickly?

A strange plague, like a curse, like a supernatural miasma.

Will wiped his hands on his breeches again, one at a time, and he shoved his suit under his arm.

Oh, let him not catch the plague.

And yet, he thought, his despair mounting as he looked back at the closed shop, let him catch it, for the plague, this fast plague, would kill Will faster than starvation, and starvation was his only other choice now. He knew there were other used clothing shops in London, but this had been the most accessible, the one that catered to the poorer people who might indeed wish to buy Will’s cast-offs. All other shops would sneer at Will’s velvet suit.

Outside the shop, Will stood on the narrow road beside the Thames, with his nose full of the stink of the great river that served London as well, sink and sewer.

The Thames looked oily dark in the moonlight, like the River Styx flowing through a realm of the dead.