Heart of Whitenesse

Howard Waldrop

New Worlds (1997)

Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories, and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories, with more collections in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively titled The Moon World. His most recent book is a new collection, Going Home Again. A long-time Texan, Waldrop now lives in the tiny town of Arlington, Washington, outside Seattle, as close to a trout stream as he can possibly get without actually living in it.

I’m not even going to try to describe the weird, vivid, and funny story that follows, except to say that no one but Howard would ever even have thought of it, let alone written it. So fasten your seat belt, take a deep breath, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

For John Clute: The Hum of Pleroma

“Doctor Faustus?—He’s dead.”

Down these mean cobbled lanes a man must go, methinks, especially when out before larkrise, if larks there still be within a thousand mile of this bone-breaking cold. From the Rus to Spain the world is locked in snow and ice, a sheet of blue glass. There was no summer to speak of; bread is dear, and in France we hear they are eating each other up, like the Carribals of the Western Indies.

It’s bad enow I rehearse a play at the Rose, that I work away on the poem of the celebrated Hero and Leander, that life seems more like a jakes each day. Then some unseen toady comes knocking on the door and slips a note through the latchhole this early, the pounding fist matching that in my head.

I’d come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in, then dressed as best I could, and made my way out into this cold world.

Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn’t it.

And what do I see on gaining the lane but a man making steaming water into the street-ditch from a great bull pizzle of an accouterment.

He sees me and winks.

I winks back.

His wink said I see you’re interested.

My wink back says I’m usually interested but not at this instant but keep me in mind if you see me again.

He immediately smiles, then turns his picauventure beard toward the cold row of houses to his left.

Winking is the silent language full of nuance and detail: we are after all talking about the overtures to a capital offence.

*

I come to the shop on the note, I go in; though I’ve never been there before I know I can ignore the fellows working there (it is a dyer’s, full of boiling vats and acrid smells and steam; at least it is warm) and go through a door up some rude steps, to go through another plated with strips of iron, and into the presence of a High Lord of the Realm.

He is signing something, he sees me and slides the paper under another; it is probably the names of people soon to decorate a bridge or fence.

This social interaction is, too, full of nuance; one of them is that we two pretend not to know who the other is. Sometimes their names are Cecil, Stansfield, Salisbury, sometimes not. Sometimes my name is Christopher, or Chris, familiar Kit, or the Poet, or plain Marlowe. We do pretend, though, we have no names, that we are the impersonal representatives of great ideas and forces, moved by large motives like the clockwork Heavens themselves.

“A certain person needs enquiring about,” said the man behind the small table. “Earlier enquiries have proved…ineffectual. It has been thought best the next devolved to yourself. This person is beyond Oxford; make arrangements, go there quietly. Once in Oxford,” he said, taking out of his sleeve a document with a wax seal upon it and laying it on the table, “you may open these, your instructions and knowledges; follow them to the letter. At a certain point, if you must follow them—thoroughly,” he said, coming down hard upon the word, “we shall require a token of faith.”

He was telling me without saying that I was to see someone, do something to change their mind, or keep them from continuing a present course. Failing that I was to bring back to London their heart, as in the old story of the evil step-queen, the huntsman, and the beautiful girl who ended up consorting with forest dwarves, eating poison, and so forth.

I nodded, which was all I was required to do.

But he had not as yet handed me the missive, which meant he was not through.

He leaned back in his chair.

“I said your name was put forth,” he said, “for this endeavor. But not by me. I know you to be a godless man, a blasphemer, most probably an invert. I so hate that the business of true good government makes occasional use of such as you. But the awkward circumstances of this mission, shall we say, make some of your peccadilloes absolute necessities. Only this would make me have any dealings with you whatsoever. There will come a reckoning one fine day.”

Since he had violated the unspoken tenets of the arrangement by speaking to me personally, and, moreover, telling the plain unvarnished truth, and he knew it, I felt justified in my answer. My answer was, “As you say, Lord____,” and I used his name.

He clenched the arms of his chair, started up. Then he calmed himself, settled again. His eyes went to the other papers before him.

“I believe that is all,” he said, and handed me the document.

I picked it up, turned and left.

*

Well, work on Hero and Leander’s right out for a few days, but I betook me as fast as the icy ways would let, from my precincts in Shoreditch through the city. Normally it would mean going about over London Bridge, but as I was in a hurry I walked straight across the River directly opposite the Rose to the theatre itself in Southwark.

The River was, and had been for two months, frozen to a depth of five feet all the way to Gravesend. Small boys ran back and forth across the river. Here and there were set up booths with stiff frozen awnings; the largest concatenation of them was farther up past the town at Windsor, where Her Majesty the Queen had proclaimed a Frost Fair and set up a Royal Pavilion. A man with a bucket and axe was chopping the River for chunks of water. Others walked the ice and beat at limbs and timbers embedded in it—free firewood was free, in any weather. A thick pall of smoke hung over London town, every fire lit. A bank of heavy cloud hung farther north than that. There were tales that when the great cold had come, two months agone, flocks of birds in flight had fallen to the ground and shattered; cattle froze standing.

To make matters worse, the Plague, which had closed the theatres for three months this last, long-forgotten summer, had not gone completely away, as all hoped, and was still taking thirty a week on the bills of mortality. It would probably be back again this summer and close the Theater, the Curtain and the Rose once more. Lord Strange’s and Lord Nottingham’s Men would again have to take touring the provinces beyond seven mile from London.

But as for now, cold or no, at the Rose, we put on plays each afternoon without snow in the open-air ring. At the moment we do poor old Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay—Greene not dead these seven months, exploded from dropsy in a flop, they sold the clothes off him and buried him in a diaper with a wreath of laurel about his head—we rehearse mine own Massacre at Paris, and Shaxber’s Harry Sixt, while we play his T. Andronicus alternate with Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, of which Andronicus is an overheated feeble Romanish imitation.

Shaxber’s also writing a longish poem, his on the celebrated Venus and Adonis, which at this rate will be done before my Hero. This man, the same age as me, bears watching. Unlike when I did at Cambridge, I take no part in the Acting; Will Shaxber is forever being messenger, third murderer, courtier; he tugs ropes when engines are needed; he counts receipts, he makes himself useful withal.

No one here this early but Will Kemp; he snores as usual on his bed of straw and ticking in the ‘tiring house above and behind the stage. He sounds the bear that’s eaten All the dogs on a good day at the Pit. I find some ink (almost frozen) and leave a note for John Alleyn to take over for me, pleading urgent business down country, to throw off the scent, and make my way, this time over the Bridge, back to Shoreditch.

*

Shoreditch is the place actors live, since it was close to the original theatres, and so it is the place actors die. Often enough first news you hear on a morning is “another actor dead in Shoreditch.” Never East Cheap, or Spital Fields, not even Southwark itself; always Shoreditch. At a tavern, at their lodgings, in the street itself. Turn them over; if it’s not the Plague, it’s another actor dead from a knife, fists, drink, pox, for all that matter cannonfire or hailstones in the remembered summers.

I make arrangements; I realign myself to other stations; my sword stays in its corner, my new hat, my velvet doublet all untied, hung on their hooks. I put on round slops, a leathern tunic, I cut away my beard; in place of sword a ten-inch poignard, a pointed slouch-hat, a large sack for my back.

In an hour I am back at Riverside, appearing as the third of the three P’s in John Heywood’s The Four PPPP’s, a ‘pothecary, ready to make my way like him, at least as far as Oxenford.

The ferrymen are all on holiday, their boats put up on timbers above the ice. Here and there people skate, run shoed on the ice, slip and fall; the gaiety seems forced, not like the fierce abandon of the early days of the Great Frost. But I have been watching on my sojourn each day to and from the Rose, and I lick my finger and stick it up (the spit freezing almost at once) to test the wind, and as I know the wind, and I know my man, I walk about halfway out on the solid Thames and wait.

As I wait, I see two figures dressed much like the two Ambassadores From Poland in my Massacre at Paris (that is, not very well, one of them being Kemp) saunter toward me on the dull grey ice. I know them to be a man named Frizier and one named Skeres, Gram and Nicholas I believe, both to be bought for a shilling in any trial, both doing the occasional cony-catching, gulling and sharping; both men I have seen in taverns in Shoreditch, in Deptford, along the docks, working the theatres.

There is little way they can know me, so I assume they have taken me for a mark as it slowly becomes apparent they are approaching me. Their opening line, on feigning recognition, will be, “Ho, sir, are you not a man from (Hereford) (Cheshire) (Luddington) known to my Cousin Jim?”

They are closer, but they say to my surprise, “Seems the man is late this day, Ingo.”

“That he be, Nick.”

They are waiting for the same thing I am. They take no notice of me standing but twenty feet away.

“Bedamn me if it’s not the fastest thing I ever seen,” says one.

“I have seen the cheater-cat of Africa,” says the other, “and this man would leave it standing.”

“I believe you to be right.”

And far down the ice, toward where the tide would be, I spy my man just before they do. If you do not know for what you look, you will think your eyes have blemished and twitched. For what comes comes fast and eclipses the background at a prodigious rate.

I drop my pack to the ground and slowly hold up a signal-jack and wave it back and forth.

“Bedamn me,” says one of the men, “but he’s turning this way.”

“How does he stop it?” asks the other, looking for shelter from the approaching apparition.

And with a grating and a great screech and plume of powdered ice, the thing turns to us and slows. It is a ship, long and thin, up on high thin rails like a sleigh, with a mast amidships and a jib up front, and as the thing slows (great double booms of teethed iron have fallen from the stern where a keelboard should be) the sails luff and come down, and the thing stops three feet from me, the stinging curtain of ice falling around me.

“Who flies Frobisher’s flag?” came a voice from the back. Then up from the hull comes a huge man and throws a round anchor out onto the frozen Thames.

“I,” I said. “A man who’s seen you come by here these last weeks punctually. A man who marvels at the speed of your craft. And,” I said, “an apothecary who needs must get to Oxford, as quick as he can.”

The huge man was bearded and wore furs and a round hat in the Russian manner of some Arctic beast. “So you spoil my tack by showing my old Admiral’s flag? Who’d you sail with, man? Drake? Hawkins? Raleigh, Sir Walter Tobacco himself? You weren’t with Admiral Martin, else I’d know you, that’s for sure.”

“Never a one,” said I. “My brother was with Hawkins when he shot the pantaloons off Don Iago off Portsmouth. My cousin, with one good eye before the Armada, and one bad one after, was with Raleigh.”

“So you’re no salt?”

“Not whatsoever.”

“Where’s your brother and cousin now?”

“They swallowed the anchor.”

He laughed. “That so? Retired to land, eh? Some can take the sea, some can’t. Captain Jack Cheese, at your service. Where is it you need to go, Oxford? Hop in, I’ll have you there in two hours.”

“Did you hear that, Gram?” asked one of the men. “Oxford in two hours!”

“There’s no such way he can do no such thing!” said the other, looking at Captain Cheese.

“Is that money I hear talking, or only the crackling of the ice?” asked Captain Jack.

“Well, it’s as much money as we have, what be that, Gram? Two fat shillings you don’t make no Oxford in no two hours. As against?”

“I can use two shillings,” said Jack Cheese.

“But what’s your bet, man?” asked the other.

“Same as you. Two shillings. If you’ll kill me for two shillings,” he said, pulling at his furry breeks and revealing the butts of two pistols the size of boarding cannons, “I’d do the same for you.”

The two looked back and forth, then said, “Agreed!”

“Climb in,” said Captain Jack. “Stay low, hang tight. Ship’s all yar, I’ve got a following wind and a snowstorm crossing north from the west, and we’ll be up on one runner most the time. Say your prayers now; for I don’t stop for nothing nor nobody, and I don’t go back for dead men nor lost bones.”

The clock struck ten as we clambered aboard. My pack just hit the decking when, with a whoop, Jack Cheese jerked a rope, the jib sprang up; wind from nowhere filled it, the back of the boat screamed and wobbled to and fro. He jerked the anchor off the ice, pulled up the icebrakes and jerked the mainsail up and full.

People scattered to left and right and the iceboat leapt ahead with a dizzy shudder. I saw the backward-looking eyes of Frizier and Skeres close tight as they hung onto the gunwales with whitened hands, buffeting back and forth like skittle-balls.

And the docks and quays became one long blur to left and right; then we stood still and the land moved to either side as if it were being paid out like a thick grey and white painted rope.

I looked back. Jack Cheese had a big smile on his face. His white teeth showed bright against his red skin and the brown fur; I swear he was humming.

*

Past Richmond we went, and Cheese steered out farther toward the leftward bank as the stalls, awnings, booths and bright red of the Royal Pavilion appeared, flung themselves to our right and receded behind.

Skizz was the only sound; we sat still in the middle of the noise and the objects flickering on and off, small then large then small again, side to side. Ahead, above the River, over the whiteness of the landscape and the ice, the dark line of cloud grew darker, thicker, lower.

Skeres and Frizier lay like dead men, only their grips on the hull showing them to be conscious.

I leaned my head closer to Captain Cheese.

“A word of warning,” I said. “Don’t trust those two.”

“Hell and damn, son,” he smiled, “I don’t trust you! Hold tight,” he said, pulling something. True to his word, in the stillness, one side of the iceboat rose up two feet off the level, we sailed along with the sound halved, slowly dropped back down to both iron runners, level. I looked up. The mainsail was tight as a pair of Italian leggings.

“There goes Hampton. Coming up on Staines!” he called out so the two men in front could have heard him if they’d chosen to.

A skater flashed by inches away. “Damn fool lubber!” said Jack Cheese. “I got sea-road rights-of-way!” A deer paused, flailed away, fell and was gone, untouched behind us.

And then we went into a wall of whiteness that peppered and stung. The whole world dissolved away. I thought for an instant I had gone blind from the speed of our progress. Then I saw Captain Cheese still sitting a foot or two away. Skeres and Frizier had disappeared, as had the prow and the jibsail. I could see nothing but the section of boat I was in, the captain, the edge of the mainsail above. No river, no people, no landmarks, just snow and whiteness.

“How can you see?”

“Can’t,” said the captain.

“How do you know where we are?”

“Ded reckoning,” he said. “Kick them up front, tell ‘em to hang tight,” he said. I did. When Skeres and Frizier opened their eyes, they almost screamed.

Then Cheese dropped the jib and the main and let the icebrakes go. We came to a stop in the middle of the swirling snow, as in the middle of a void. Snowflakes the size of thalers came down. Then I made out a bulking shape a foot or two beyond the prow of the icerunner.

“Everybody out! Grab the hull. Lift, that’s right. Usually have to do this myself. Step sharp. You two, point the prow up. That’s it. Push. Push.”

In the driven snow, the indistinct shape took form. Great timbers, planking, rocks, chunks of iron were before us, covered with ice. The two men out front put the prow over one of the icy gaps fifteen feet apart. Cheese and I lifted the stern, then climbed over after it. “Settle in, batten down,” said the captain. Once more we swayed sickeningly, jerked, the sails filled, and we were gone.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Reading Weir,” he said. “Just where the Kennet comes in on the portside. If we’d have hit that, we’d of been crushed like eggs. You can go to sleep now if you want. It’s smooth sailing all the way in now.”

*

But of course I couldn’t. There seemed no movement, just the white blank ahead, behind, to each side.

“That would have been Wallingford,” he said once. Then, a little farther on, “Abingdon, just there.” We sailed on. There was a small pop in the canvas. “Damn,” he said, “the wind may go contrary; I might have to tack.” He watched the sail awhile, then settled back. “I was wrong,” he said.

Then, “Hold tight!” Frizier or Skeres moaned.

He dropped the sails. We lost motion. I heard the icebrakes grab, saw a small curtain of crystalline ice mix with the snow. The moving, roiling whiteness became a still, roiling whiteness. The anchor hit the ice.

And, one after the other, even with us, the bells of the Oxford Tower struck noon.

*

“Thanks be to you,” I said, “Captain Jack Cheese.”

“And to you—what was your name?”

“John,” I said. “Johnny Factotum.”

He looked at me, put his finger aside his nose. “Oh, then, Mr. Factotum,” he said. I shook his hand.

“You’ve done me a great service,” I said.

“And you me,” said Captain Jack. “You’ve made me the easiest three shillings ever.”

“Three!” yelled the two men still in the boat. “The bet was two shillings!”

“The bet was two, which I shall now take.” The captain held out his hand. “The fare back to London is one more, for you both.”

“What? What fare?” they asked.

“The bet was two hours to here. Which I have just done, from the tower bells in London to the campanile of Oxford. To do this, I had perforce to take you here in the time allotted, which—” and Jack Cheese turned once more to me and laid his finger to nose, “I have just done, therefore, quod erat demonstrandum,” he said. “The wager being forfeit, either I shall bid you adieu, and give to you the freedom of the River and the Roads, or I shall drop you off in your own footprints on the London ice for a further shilling.”

The two looked at each other, their eyes pewter plates in the driven snow.

“But…” one began to say.

“These my unconditional, unimprovable terms,” said Captain Jack.

We were drawing a crowd of student clerks and magisters, who marveled at the iceboat.

“Very well,” sighed one of the men.

“The bet?” It was handed over. “The downward fare?” It, too.

“Hunker down in front, keep your heads down,” said Jack Cheese and took out one of his mutton-leg pistols and laid it in front of him. “And no Spanish sissyhood!” he said. “For going downriver we don’t stop for Reading Weir, we take it at speed!”

“No!”

“Abaft, all ye!” yelled Jack Cheese to the crowd. “I go upstream a pace; I turn; I come back down. If you don’t leave the River now, don’t blame me for loss of life and limb. No stopping Jack Cheese!” he said. The sails snapped up, the icebrake lifted, they blurred away into the upper Thames-Isis.

We all ran fast as we could from the center of the ice. I stopped; so did half the crowd who’d come to my side of the river. The blur of Captain Jack Cheese, the hull and sails, and the frightened popped eyes at gunwale level zipped by.

The laughter of Jack Cheese came back to us as they flashed into the closing downriver snow and were gone.

And here I had been worried about him with two sharpers aboard. Done as well as any Gamaliel Ratsy, and no Spanish sissyhood, for sure. I doubt the two would twitch till they got back to London Docks.

The students were marveling among themselves. It reminded me of my days at Cambridge, bare seven years gone.

But my purposes lay elsewhere. I walked away from the crowd, unnoticed; they were as soon lost to me in the blowing whiteness as I, them.

*

I sat under a pine by the Riverside. From my pack I took a snaphance and started a small fire in the great snowing chill, using needles of the tree for a fragrant combustion; I filled my pipe, lit it and took in a great calming lungful of Sir Walter’s Curse.

I was no doubt in the middle of the great university. I didn’t care. I finished one pipeful, lit another, took in half that, ate some saltbeef and hard bread (the only kind to be found in London). Then I took from the apothecary pack, with its compartments and pockets filled with simples, emetics, herbs and powders, the document with the seal.

I read it over, twice. Then per instructions, added it to the fire.

I finished my pipe, knocked the dottles into the flame, and put it away.

The man’s name was Johan Faustus, a German of Wittenberg. He was suspected, of course, of the usual—blasphemy, treason, subornation of the judiciary, atheism. The real charge, of course, was that he consorted with known Catholics—priests, prelates, the Pope himself. But what most worried the government was that he consorted with known Catholics here, in this realm. I was to find if he were involved in any plot; if suspicions were true, to put an end to his part in it. These things were in the document itself.

To this I added a few things I knew. That he was a doctor of both law and medicine, as so many are in this our country; that he had spent many years teaching at Wittenberg (not a notorious stronghold of the Popish Faith); that he was a magician, a conjuror, an alchemist, and, in the popular deluded notion of the times, supposed to have trafficked with Satan. There were many tales from the Continent—that he’d gulled, dazzled, conjured to and for emperors and kings—whether with the usual golden leaden ruses, arts of ledgerdemain, or the Tarot cards or whatnot, I knew not.

Very well, then. But as benighted superstitious men had written my instructions, I had to ask myself—what would a man dealing with the Devil be doing in part of a Catholic plot? The Devil has his own devices and traps, all suppose, some of them, I think, involving designs on the Popish Church itself. Will he use one religion ‘gainst ‘nother? Why don’t men stop and think when they begin convolving their minds as to motive? Were they all absent the day brains were forged?

And why would an atheist deal with the Devil? The very professors tie themselves in knotlets of logic over just such questions as these.

Well then: let’s apply William of Ockham’s fine razor to this Gordian knot of high senselessness. I’ll trot up to him and ask him if he’s involved in any treacherous plotting. Being an atheist, in league with both the Devil and the Pope (and for all I know the Turk), he’ll tell me right out the truth. If treasonable, I shall cut off his head; if not…should I cut off his head to be safe?

Enough forethought; time for action. I reached into the bottom of my peddlar’s pack and took out two long curved blades like scimitars, so long and thin John Sincklo could have worn them Proportional, and attached them with thongs to the soles of my rude boots.

So equilibrized at the edge of the River I stood, and set out toward my destination which the letter had given me, Lotton near Cricklade, near the very source of the Thames-Isis.

And as I stood to begin my way norwestward the sun, as if in a poem by Chideock Tichbourne, showed itself for the first time in two long months through the overcast, as a blazing ball, flooding the sky, the snow and ice in a pure sheen of blinding light. I began to skate toward it, toward the Heart of Whitenesse itself.

*

Skiss skiss skiss the only sound from my skates, the pack swinging to and fro on my back; pure motion now, side to side, one arm folded behind me, the other out front as counterweight, into the blinded and blinding River before me. Past the mill at Lechlade, toward Kempsford, the sides of the Thames-Isis grew closer and rougher; past Kempsford to the edge of Cricklade itself, where the Roy comes in from the left just at the town, and turning then to right and north I go, up the River Churn, just larger than the Shoreditch in London itself. And a mile up and on the right, away from the stream, the outbuildings of a small town itself, and on a small hill beyond the town roofs, an old manor house.

I got off my skates, and unbound them and put them in the pack.

And now to ask leading questions of the rude common folk of the town.

*

I walked to the front of the manor house and stopped, and beheld a sight to make me furious.

Tied to a post in front of the place, a horse stood steaming in what must have been forty degrees below frost. Its coat was lathered, the foam beginning to freeze in clumps on its mane and legs. Steam came from its nostrils. That someone rode a horse like that and left it like that in weather like this made me burn. The animal regarded me with an unconcerned eye, without shivering.

I walked past it to the door of the manor house, where of course my man lived. The sun, once the bright white ball, was covered again, and going down besides. Dark would fall like a disgraced nobleman in a few moments.

I rang the great iron doorknocker three times, and three hollow booms echoed down an inner hallway. The door opened to reveal a hairy man, below the middle height. His beard flowed into his massive head of hair. His ears, which stuck out beyond that tangle, were thin and pointed. His smile was even, but two lower teeth stuck up from the bottom lip. His brows met in the middle to form one hairy ridge.

“That horse needs seeing to,” I said.

He peered past me. “Oh, not that one,” he said. “My master is expecting you, and cut the merde, he knows who you are and why you’re here.”

“To try to sell the Good Doctor simples and potions.”

“Yeh, right,” said the servant. “This way.”

We walked down the hall. A brass head sitting on a shelf in a niche turned its eyes to follow me with its gaze as we passed. How very like Vergil.

We came to a closet doorway set at one side of the hallway.

“You can’t just go in, though,” said the servant, “without you’re worthy. Inside this here room is a Sphinx. It’ll ask you a question. You can’t answer it, it eats you.”

“What if I answer it?”

“Well, I guess you could eat it, if you’ve a mind to and she’ll hold still. But mainly you can go through the next door; the Doctor’s in.”

“Have her blaze away,” I said.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” said the servant. “I’ll just stand behind the door here; she asks the first person she sees.”

“You don’t mind if I take out my knife, do you?”

“Take out a six-pounder cannon, for all the good it’ll do you, you’re not a wise man,” he said.

I eased my knife from its sheath.

He opened the door. I expected either assassins, fright masks, jacks-in-boxes, some such. I stepped to the side, in case of mantraps or springarns. Nothing happened, nothing leapt out. I peered around the jamb.

Standing on a stone that led back into a cavern beyond was a woman to the waist, a four-footed leopard from there down; behind her back were wings. She was molting, putting in new feathers here and there. She looked at me with the eyes of a cat, narrow vertical pupils. I dared not look away.

“What hassss,” she asked, in a sibilant voice that echoed down the hall, “eleven fingers in the morning, lives in a high place at noon, and has no head at sundown?”

“The present Queen’s late Mum,” I said.

“Righto!” said the servant and closed the door. I heard a heavy weight thrash against it, the sound of scratching and tearing. The servant slammed his fist on the door. “Settle down, you!” he yelled. “There’ll be plenty more dumb ones come this way.”

He opened the door at the end of the hall, and I walked into the chamber of Doctor Faustus.

*

The room is dark but warm. A fire glows in the hearth, the walls are lined with books. There are dark marks on the high ceiling, done in other paint.

Doctor John Faust sits on a high stool before a reading stand; a lamp hangs above. I see another brass head is watching me from the wall.

“Ahem,” says the servant.

“Oh?” says Faustus, looking up. “I thought you’d be alone, Wagner.” He looks at me. “The others they sent weren’t very bright. They barely got inside the house.”

“I can imagine,” I say. “Your lady’s costume needs mending. The feathers aren’t sewn in with double-loop stitches.”

He laughs. “I am Doctor Johan Faustus.”

“And I am—” I say, thinking of names.

“Please drop the mumming,” he says. “I’ve read your Tamerlane—both parts.”

I look around. “Can we be honest?” I ask.

“Only one of us,” he says.

“I have been sent here—”

“Probably to find out to whom I owe my allegiance. And its treasonableness. And not being able to tell whether I’m lying, to kill me; better safe than sorry. Did you enjoy your ride on the ice?”

There is no way he could have known. I was not followed. Perhaps he is inducing; if he knows who I am, and that I was in London this morning, only one method could have gotten me here so fast. But no one else who saw—

I stopped. This is the way fear starts.

“Very much,” I say.

“Your masters want to know if I plot for the Pope—excuse me, the Bishop of Rome. No. Or the Spaniard. No. Nor French, Jews, Turks, no. I do not plot even for myself. Now you can leave.”

“And I am to take your word?” I ask.

“I’m taking yours.”

“Easily enough done,” I say. Wagner the servant has left the room. Faustus is very confident of himself.

“You haven’t asked me if I serve the Devil,” he says.

“No one serves the Devil,” I say. “There is no Devil.”

Faustus looks at me. “So they have finally stooped so high as to send an atheist. Then I shall have to deal with you on the same high level.” He bows to me.

I bowed back.

“If you are a true atheist, and I convince you there’s magic, will you take my word and go away?”

“All magic is mumbo-jumbo, sleight-of-hand, mists, legerdemain,” I say.

“Oh, I think not,” says Faustus.

“Blaze away,” I say. “Convenient Wagner has gone. Next he’ll no doubt appear as some smoke, a voice from a horn, a hand.”

“Oh, Mr. Marlowe,” says Faustus. “What I serve is knowledge. I want it all. Knowledge is magic; other knowledge leads to magic. Where others draw back, I begin. I ask questions of Catholics, of Jews, of Spaniards, of Turks, if they have wisdom I seek. We’ll find if you’re a true atheist, a truly logical man. Look down.”

I do. I am standing in a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, written over with nonsense and names in Greek and Latin. Faustus steps off his stool. Onto another drawing on the floor. The room grows dark, then brighter, and much warmer as he waves his arms around like a conjuror before the weasel comes out the glove. Good trick, that.

“I tell you this as a rational man,” he says. “Stay in the pentagram. Do not step out.”

I felt hot breathing on the back of my neck that moved my hair.

“Do not look around,” says Faustus, his voice calm and reasoned. “If you look around, you will scream. If you scream, you will jump. If you jump, you will leave the pentagram. If you leave it, the thing behind you will bite off your head; the Sphinx out yonder was but a dim stencil of what stands behind you. So do not look, no matter how much you want to.”

“No,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong. I won’t look around, not because I am afraid I’ll jump, but because the act of looking will be to admit you’ve touched a superstitious adytum of my brain, one left over from the savage state. I look, I am lost, no matter what follows.”

Faust regards me anew.

“Besides,” I said, “what is back there”—here whoever it was must have leaned even closer and blew hot breath down on me, though as I remember, Wagner was shorter, someone else then—“is another of your assistants. If they are going to kill me, they should have done it by now. On with your show. I am your attentive audience. Do you parade the wonders of past ages before me? Isis and Osiris and so forth? What of the past? Was Julius Caesar a redhead, as I have heard? How about Beauty? The Sphinx woman should have been able to change costumes by now?”

“You Cambridge men are always big on Homer. How about Helen of Troy?” asks Faustus.

“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, etc.?” I ask. “I think not. Convince me, Faustus. Do your shilly-shally.”

“You asked for it,” he says. I expected the knife to go through my back. Whoever was behind me was breathing slowly, slowly.

Faustus waved his arms, his lips moved. He threw his arms downward. I expected smoke, sparkles, explosion. There is none.

*

It is fourteen feet tall. It has a head made of rocks and stones. Its body is brass; one leg of lead, the other of tin. I know this because the room was bright from the roaring fires that crackled with flame from each foot. This was more like it.

“Speak, spirit!” said Faustus.

“Hissssk. Snarrrz. Skazzz,” it said, or words to that effect.

And then it turned into the Queen, and the Queen turned into the King of Scotland. I don’t mean someone who looked like him, I mean him. He shifted form and shape before me. He turns, his hair is longer, his nose thinner, his moustache flows. He changes to another version of himself, and his head jumped off bloodily to the floor. He turns into a huge sour-faced man, then back to someone who looks vaguely like the King of Scotland, then another; then a man and woman joined at the hip, another king, a woman, three fat Germans, a thin one, a small woman, a fat bearded man, a thin guy with a beard, a blip of light, another bearded man, a woman, a tall thin man, his son—

This was very good indeed. Would we had him at the Rose.

“Tell him of what lies before, Spirit.”

“Tell him,” I said to Faustus, “to tell me of plots.”

“PLOTS!” the thing roared. “You want the truth?” It was back fourteen feet tall and afire, stooping under the ceiling. “You live by a government. Governments NEED plots! Else people ask why they die? Where’s the bread? Human. Hu-man! You are the ones in torment! We here are FREE!

“PLOTS! BEware ESSEX!” Essex? The Queen’s true right arm? Her lover? “BEWARE Guido and his dark SHINING lantern! BEWARE the House in the RYE-fields! Beware the papers in the TUB OF flour! Beware pillars! BEWARE POSTS! BeWARE the Dutch, the FRENCH, the colonists in VIRGINIA!” Virginia? They’re lost? “BEWARE RUSSia and the zuLU and the DUTCHAFricans! Beware EVERYTHING! BEWARE EVERYboDY! AIIIiiiiiii!!!”

It disappears. Faustus slumps to the floor, sweating and pale.

The light comes back to normal.

“He’ll be like that a few minutes,” says Wagner, coming in the door with a jug of wine and three glasses. “He said malmsey’s your favorite. Drink?”

*

We shook hands at the doorway early next morning.

“I was impressed,” I said. “All that foofaraw just for me.”

“If they’re sending atheists, I had better get out of this country. No one will be safe.”

“Goodbye,” I said, putting the box in my pack. The door closed. I walked out past the hitching post. Tied to it with a leather-strap was a carpenter’s sawhorse. Strapped about the middle of it, hanging under it, was a huge stoppered glass bottle filled with hay. How droll of Wagner, I thought.

I went to the river, put on my skates, and headed back out the Churn to the Thames-Isis, back to London, uneventfully, one hand behind me, the other counterweight, the pack swinging, my skates thin and sharp.

Skizz skizz skizz.

*

When I got back to my lodgings, there was a note for me in the locked room. I took the token of proof with me, and went by back ways and devious alleys to an address. There waiting was another high lord of the realm. He saw the box in my hand, nodded. He took the corner of my sleeve, pulled me to follow him. We went through several buildings, downward, through a long tunnel, turning, turning, and came to a roomful of guards beyond a door. Then we went upstairs, passing a few clerks and other stairwells that led down, from whence came screams. Too late to stop now.

“Someone wants to hear your report besides me,” said the high lord. We waited outside a room from which came the sounds of high, indistinct conversation. The door opened; a man I recognized as the royal architect came out, holding a roll of drawings under his arm, his face reddened. “What a dump!” said a loud woman’s voice from the room beyond.

“What a dump! What a dump!” came a high-pitched voice over hers.

I imagined a parrot of the red Amazonian kind.

“Shut up, you!” said the woman’s voice.

“What a dump! What a dump!”

“Be sure to make a leg, man,” said the high lord behind me, and urged me into the room.

There she was, Gloriana herself. From the waist down it looked as if she’d been swallowed by some huge spangled velvet clam while stealing from it the pearls that adorned her torso, arms, neck and hair.

“Your Majesty,” I said, dropping to my knees.

The lord bowed behind me.

“What a dump!” said the other voice. I looked over. On a high sideboard, the royal dwarf, whose name I believed to be Monarcho, was dressed as a baby in a diaper and a bonnet, his legs dangling over the sides, four feet from the floor.

“Well?” asked the Queen. “(You look horrible without your face hair.) Well?”

I nodded toward the box under my arm.

“Oh, give that to someone else; I don’t want to see those things.” She turned her head away, then back, becoming the Queen again.

“Were we right?”

I looked her in the eyes, below her shaven brow and the painted-in browline, at the red wig, the pearls, the sparkling clamshell of a gown.

“His last words, Majesty,” I said, “were of the Bishop of Rome, and of your late cousin.”

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it!”

“I knew it!” yelled Monarcho.

The Queen threw a mirror at him. He jumped down with a thud and waddled off to torment the lapdog.

“You have been of great service,” she said to me. “Reward him, my lord, but not overmuch. (Don’t ever appear again in my presence without at least a moustache.)”

I made the knee again.

“Leave,” she said to me. “You. Stay,” she said to the lord. I backed out. The door swung. “Builders!” she was yelling. “What a dump!”

“What a dum—” said Monarcho, and the door closed with a thud.

*

So now it is another wet summer, in May, and I am lodging in Deptford, awaiting the pleasure of the Privy Council to question me.

At first I was sure it dealt with the business of this winter last, as rumor had come back to me that Faustus had been seen alive in France. If I had heard, other keener ears had heard a week before.

But no! The reason they sent the bailiff for me, while I was staying at Walsingham’s place in Kent, was because of that noddy-costard Kyd.

For he and his friends had published a scurrilous pamphlet a month ago. Warrants had been sworn; searches made, and in Kyd’s place they found some of my writings done, while we were both usually drunk, when we roomed together three years ago cobbling together old plays. I had, in some of them, been forthright and indiscreet. Kyd even more so.

So they took him downstairs, and just showed him the tongue-tongs, and he began to peach on his 104-years-old great naunt.

Of course, he’d said all the writings were mine.

And now I’m having to stay in Deptford (since I can get away to Kent if ever they are through with me) and await, every morning, and the last ten mornings, the vagaries of the Privy Council. And somewhat late of each May evening, a bailiff comes out, says, “You still here?” and “They’re gone; be back here in the morning.”

But not this morning. I come in at seven o’ the clock, and the bailiff says, “They specifically and especially said they’d not get to you today, be back tomorrow.” I thanked him.

I walked out. A day (and a night) of freedom awaited me.

And who do I spy coming at me but my companions in the adventure of the iceboat, Nick Skeres and Ingram Frizier, along with another real piece of work I know of from the theatres (people often reach for their purses and shake hands with him) named Robert Poley.

“What ho, Chris!” he says. “How’s the playhouse dodge?”

“As right as rain till the Plague comes back,” I say.

I watch, but neither Skeres nor Frizier seem to recognize me; I am dressed as a gentleman again; my beard and moustache new-waxed, my hat a perfect comet of color and dash.

“Well, we’re heading for Mrs. Bull’s place,” says Poley. “She owes us each a drink from the cards last night; it is our good fortune, and business has been good,” he says, holding up parts of three wallets. “How’s about we stands you a few?”

“Thanks be,” I say, “but I am at liberty for the first time in days, and needs be back hot on a poem, now that Shaxber’s Venus and Adonis is printed.”

“Well, then,” says Poley, “one quick drink to fire the Muse?”

And then I see that Skeres is winking at me, but not one of the winks I know. Perhaps his eye is watering. Perhaps he is crying for the Frenchmen who we hear are once again eating each other up like cannibals. Perhaps not.

Oh well, I think, what can a few drinks with a bunch of convivial invert dizzards such as myself harm me? I have been threatened with the Privy Council; I walk away untouched and unfettered.

“Right!” I say, and we head off toward Deptford and Mrs. Bull’s, though I keep a tight hold on my purse. “A drink could be just what the doctors ordered.”

MNQ/2009.09.15

8,100 Words

From The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection

Gardner Dozois, Editor

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