Scene Thirty One
Will’s room. Outside, the sun is setting in a splendor of red. Ariel looks up from her bowl of water, and looks at the entranced Will.
Many years later, Will would try to remember those moments, when the Queen of faerieland had gazed into a bowl of water and seen what was happening in the world of spirits, the play of ghosts, the battle of good and evil beyond the ken of men.
He could not.
In those moments, all he could say is that he’d seen figures, each fast succeeding the other upon the clear unruffled surface of the water in the bowl.
He’d seen elves and princes, women and men and children, each one after the other, each eclipsing the other, all of them followed, all of them pursued by the darkness that was the wolf. As night succeeded day, so the wolf succeeded all of human light, like eternal damnation closing in on the works of man, like an eclipse shutting up the bright inconstant moon.
He’s seen them all and understood little -- not even the image of worlds, spinning in the dark, distant void.
But Ariel had understood it. That much he knew, when she looked up at him.
This woman, for whom Will felt already too much paternal tenderness, this elf, towards whom, against his best judgment he’d been feeling a father’s love, looked up from her bowl, and the sapience of the ancient, all-knowing sea was in her eyes.
Those elven-blue orbs might not be all that much older than his -- he knew that in elf terms Ariel and Quicksilver were little more than children -- and yet in them was the instinctive knowledge of the succeeding ages, the intuition of world everlasting, the knowledge of mountains ground down to the grain of sand and of terra firma and ocean exchanging places over and over again.
“He’s near his goal,” she said. Her voice sounded distant and cold, like wind blowing over far eastern mountains, where men sat and meditated on eternal truth, far from the hurrying crowds of the rushing west. “My... my husband’s unworthy brother. One more life. One more human life, and if he gets it, it will be the undoing of us all. Human and elf alike.”
The calm with which she spoke shocked Will more than the words. He took a deep breath, gathered into timorous lungs and slowly expelled. “Did you find out? Who gave your brother-in-law shelter?”
Ariel shook her head. She looked not at Will but at the window in front of her, like a child lost in a nightmare all her own. “No. No. Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever vile abode my vile relative sought, he has hidden it well, protected it. I got no more than a feeling that my husband had found it. Stumbled onto it, to be honest. To his undoing.” Ariel’s eyes filled with tears, one of which slid, unknown, down her oval cheek.
“Your husband?” Will asked, more alarm and concern in his voice than he meant to put in it. But he felt responsible for this one victim of the darkness that might soon overtake all. “Quicksilver? Is he.... He isn’t dead? Is he?”
Ariel looked sharply at him, and sighed. “Quicksilver is neither dead nor alive. The life that sustains him is like the dying flame of a guttering candle, that any sharp breeze can put out. My.... His brother has imprisoned him in .... we call it between-worlds, a place that’s neither dead nor alive, here nor there. It’s the world that never existed, the potential never fulfilled. It’s where our dead go that can’t find rest -- the untimely murdered, the lost souls, those who die with unfinished business and unaccounted-for sins.” She tilted her head up.
The red of the setting sun, coming through the window, tinted her cheeks coral and made her look unbearably beautiful, unmistakably human, exquisitely fragile.
Had Will dared, he would have consoled her, as he comforted Susannah when she broke a toy. But Ariel’s troubles were more than all the broken toys, and Will dared not patronize this being of fire and magic.
“Fortunately, the evil thing didn’t have the power to kill my husband,” Ariel said. “Not while Quicksilver yet has the power of the hill. But the wolf’s power is growing by the moment and my husband.... Well, the hill is in turmoil. I came here because my husband’s enemies, within the hill, were trying to seize power through me. And even as I viewed the occult world in this simple water I felt our enemies at the hill tracking me down.” She dipped her dainty finger in the liquid. “If they sever my husband from the hill before evil is destroyed.... We will be lost, Quicksilver and I. Even with the power of the hill behind him, if Quicksilver’s brother should take one more life and acquire that much more power, Quicksilver will be utterly lost.”
Will walked to the window, turning his back on Ariel, on that beautiful face that reflected all the desolate bleakness of an empty, fearful Earth -- the death awaiting all this riotous panoply outside Will’s bedroom, the whores and the merchants, the ale houses, the gentlemen and the horse thieves, the hounds and the baited bear.
Looking out, at what he had always thought a dirty, noisy street full of beggared poor and crooked rich men, Will felt a sudden wave of tenderness for London, this London so harsh and so different from his sweet Stratford, this town that would allow Will to be what he would and claim as high a name as he dared for himself, provided only he had the courage to claim it.
Fearing his eyes too would fill with tears like Ariel’s, he blinked, and stared harder, searching for a face he knew.
He hadn’t seen Marlowe in a long time, and the last time he’d seen him, the playwright had appeared to be drunk, or else insane.
How could such a high mind come to such a low pass? Was the closing of the theaters working upon Marlowe more than upon Will? Or had Marlowe gone without food too long? Will remembered Marlowe telling him about the lack of food, the lack of money, the general poverty in the land these days.
Was Marlowe suffering? It was hard to reconcile with the playwright’s expensive velvets and smooth silks. And yet, who knew?
Something else, something that Will felt was vital, tickled at his memory -- a remembrance, a feeling that he had seen or heard something important, something he couldn’t lay his finger upon, something he couldn’t name, something that related to Marlowe.
He tried to pin it down. It was something Quicksilver had said -- an expression, a look, something .... But how could that relate to Marlowe, Marlowe who was so far from the faerie realm, a coarse and cold big-city hustler, even if dressed in the refined veneer of poetry?
Shaking his head with impatience, Will noticed something odd.
One of the men downstairs looked familiar, but as though Will had seen him many, many years ago. Someone from Stratford?
The man, standing outside, beneath the wind-rattled sign of the tavern across the street, was tall and dark, with very pale skin, and pronounced features that looked more beautiful than they should be. His green velvet suit displayed the latest fashion and looked so freshly washed and set as to make even Marlowe’s normal dressing standards appear sloppy and careless.
Not the type of person that Will associated with small Stratford upon Avon, where all the neighbors knew each other and took care not to dress too far above their stations.
Will frowned, trying to remember where he might have seen such singular features, such long, shiny black hair. Other than on Lady Silver, but then even Will, looking at the incisive nose, the beautiful but sharp features of that man couldn’t associate him with Silver’s soft, rounded loveliness.
As he watched the man looked up, and Will had the impression the whole creature flickered, in and out of the street, like the fading of an image reflected upon glass, like the images that had formed upon Ariel’s water bowl.
Then Will remembered he’d seen the man -- no, the creature. It had been many years ago, in the faerie clearing, on the night he’d reclaimed his Nan from faerieland. This had been one of the elves in Quicksilver’s retinue.
“What?” Ariel asked. “What is it, Will?”
He must have made some small noise, some shocked exclamation.
“There’s a man across the street,” Will said, feeling the man’s gaze on him and wondering how that could be. “That I think is an elf, and not there at all but somehow only an image of him.” Who could this be? Could it be one of the rebellious elves that Ariel feared had come for her? Or was it a friend, come to her help?
She’d called him Will. Not Master Shakespeare. Will.
He smiled at that. The queen of faerieland needed a keeper, a watchful protector. She trusted too much, made herself too vulnerable.
She stepped up near him, and looked out the window.
“Oh,” Ariel said, and her body stiffened in surprise and shock. “Oh,” she said. “He’s Malachite, and he has found me.”
“Malachite?” Will asked.
“The leader of the palace rebellion,” Ariel said. “He.... He would dethrone my lord and have me, and by having me have the faerie hill.” She turned a waxen-white face towards Will. “It’s like your game of chess, you see. Quicksilver and I both have the souls and power and loyalty of our kind. If he’s out of action, the one who captures the Queen wins the game.” Her tiny, needle-sharp elf teeth glimmered in a little feral smile, full of woeful irony.
Will trembled. He felt a sudden raging anger at Quicksilver. How could Quicksilver take a creature like this to wife, a soft, helpless creature, and then leave her to fend for herself this way?
How dare he? Quicksilver showed as much carelessness in his own love as in interfering in other’s lives.
And yet, Ariel loved Quicksilver. Quicksilver, who was trapped in nothing-land, in the land between existing and not existing, in the land that had never happened.
Remembering Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s quick wit, his moonlight-pale hair, his perfect features, Will felt something very much like regret at the elf’s loss tinge his anger at Quicksilver. His anger paled to this feeling of regret and loss.
The fool, Quicksilver, had allowed himself to be trapped, allowed everything to be destroyed, and Will could do no more than regret it, with an impotent regret that seemed to paint everything a pale, sickly yellow, like the sun in winter, falling slantwise upon the face of a babe who will not live out the season.
“Need you escape, milady?” he asked, with quick fierce intent, with protective despair. He would not let this one be lost also. “Must you hide? I will defend you. I will protect your escape.”
“No.” Ariel turned to look at Will, her little face grave, her eyes sympathetic. But she shook her head, loosening the multitude of braids that held her hair confined beneath the page’s cap. “No. It is not Malachite really, just an image of him. And even if he’s found me, he can’t come here that quickly. That he found me, alone, is a miracle. Unlike Quicksilver, we, the other elves, can’t transport between two places with the speed of thought. Malachite will have to come overland, as I did. We have a day before he gets here. A night and a day, or thereabouts.”
“A night and a day,” Will said. A night and a day to save both worlds in. And save what he might, how could he ensure that Quicksilver would take better care of reign and wife in the future?
Because, so that he could save Nan and Judith, and Hamnet, and Susannah, who held his love and all his hope for the future, in far-distant Stratford, he must relinquish his protection on this elf, and let her risk herself, as she might. The protection of Ariel didn’t rightfully belong to a man.