Scene Twenty Six
Kit Marlowe walks beside the river. It is a poor neighborhood, at the edge of the slums. Across the river, the palaces of great lords can be glimpsed. But here there’s nothing but solitude, the stench of the river, the desolate strand. In the red light of sunset, things float on the current that might well be plague corpses, thrown in the river by businesses desirous to avoid closing, by relatives anxious not to be closed up in a plague house.
Kit hadn’t tidied his clothes, nor had he eaten all day. Every time he thought of eating or drinking, he remembered the taste of blood in his mouth, and he felt a sickness, overpowering, climbing from his empty belly to his parched mouth.
He must look like a ghost, walking this way by the shore, pale and scruffy and haunted, looking for help or relief where he could find neither.
But he knew better than to go towards the city, the teeming slums of Southwark. There was life there. He could feel it, sense it, crave it, like other men craved bread or wine, or love.
Kit could smell life, as he’d once smelled food. It was a scent in the breeze wafting by, making his stomach tighten with need, making his chest compress his beating heart and making him crave.... crave.... crave, the craving nothing clear or defined, just a nameless, driving, aching need.
Yet, with sweat on his brow, with tears in his eyes, his legs weak, his arms aching, his whole body feeling like a corpse that, animated, walks the scene of its former misdeeds, with all that remained to him, Kit willed himself to stay away from that life that called all his senses with passionate need.
Fool that he was, and a traitor, his hands already tainted with the blood of those who had trusted him, he would not, he could not go on taking innocent life -- this time the life of strangers, of children, of women, of defenseless elders and young lovers.
Yet he knew his bravado would be short-lasting, his resistance a perilous, hard-won momentary triumph -- like unto that of a child wrestling with a giant.
The wolf, dormant within him, stirred more and more with each inch that the sun sank deep into the horizon. The night was coming, and Kit Marlowe, poor Kit Marlowe, as he’d taken to thinking of himself, would soon be nothing but the mindless vehicle to another’s crimes.
With the sinking rays of the red sun, Kit could sense the strength of the wolf increasing, and he remembered the dark blanket that had covered Kit, taken him, possessed him, body and mind, aye, and soul, if Kit had one. Kit’s rotted-through soul.
Drunken with his own misery, he looked out at the floating corpses and wished he could catch the plague from walking here, catch it from the stench and nearness of those rotting bodies.
Was Kit, himself, not unlike a plague, walking the world withering life? Let one plague, then, battle out the other and thus cancel the evil loosened on the world.
“Kit.”
He turned, half expecting to see Skeres or another emissary of the grey eminence, Cecil.
Instead, he saw a face he’d never thought to see again. Not in this world. It took him a long time of looking at that perfect face, that pale blond hair, the moss-green eyes, before he formed the name with his lips. “Quicksilver.”
There was no sound.
Kit didn’t have the strength for so much, nor would his parched throat allow sound through.
Kit felt the wolf squirm within his mind and seek a hold within him. He felt the flood of hate emanating from the wolf. Hate for Quicksilver. Hate, horrible and black and flowing, stronger even than the craving for life. Hate for those sweet features of that beloved creature, for whom Kit would have died... died a thousand deaths.
Quicksilver looked at Kit with a timid apology that Kit had never expected to see. His cheeks tinted with a faint pink. “Kit, forgive me. I was hasty, maybe cruel. I need your help.” And foolish Quicksilver approached, laying his hand upon Kit’s arm.
Kit recoiled and attempted, from the mad river of his mind, to fish the words to warn his one true love of the danger incurred in thus accosting the ally of the deadly wolf.
He formed a prayer in his mind, to a God in which he no longer believed. Oh, take all the world and Kit with it, all, take every loveliness, and all joy and grace from the sorry Earth and bury it all in a common grave. But leave this elf untouched, his bright mind uncorrupted, his magical body whole. Protect every golden hair of Quicksilver’s head; every black silk strand of Lady Silvers. And let Kit be damned then.
Let Kit spend eternity in his own damnation, with no hope of redemption, no appeal. But save Quicksilver.
No words came to Kit’s mouth.
He could do nothing but look on Quicksilver with mute, moist eyes, filled with dread and love and hate in equal parts, and open his mouth and wait for words that did not come.
“Forgive me, Kit,” Quicksilver said. He squeezed Kit’s arm, hard. “What I told you is true. I’m married. Married these ten years, and to my lady did I vow true love and faithfulness. In neither have I been perhaps perfect, and in both yet, must I strive.”
Strive, sneered the wolf. Strive. He who always followed his pleasure like the child follows the sweetmeat, like the gaudy bird follows the shining bauble.
Kit shook his head.
“You’ll not forgive me?” Quicksilver’s smile faded, pale and sickened, like a lost child’s. “Come, Kit. You are my only hope, as so far I’ve found hate, where I hoped to find love. Since then, have I searched for you, who always loved me so well. In this battle for the heart of men, I’m losing the fights, one by one, and my brother.... I suppose I should tell you.” Standing there, Quicksilver, grave and solemn, like a child saying his lessons to a stern master, told Kit of his brother, his older brother, Sylvanus, eldest son of the Queen Titania, the king Oberon who, disinherited by Quicksilver’s birth -- since the youngest inherited in faerieland -- had sought power from the dark Hunter, and with his help killed the king and queen and usurped the throne while Quicksilver was yet underage. And how Quicksilver had got his throne and Sylvanus had been collected by the dark Hunter to be one of his dogs through eternity.
“But my brother, with great cunning and power, has broken the bonds of his state,” Quicksilver said. “And, if he does find a foolish human who’ll take him in -- he can gain power by killing humans and absorbing their suffering and life, until Sylvanus is more powerful than the Hunter himself, more powerful than any bonds upon him. Then will he destroy me and faerieland, and aye, both the worlds of elf and of mortal.” Quicksilver sighed. “So you see, I need help. Help to find my brother. Help to find who might be harboring him. Oh, look not at me that way. I only thought to keep you out of this, Kit. I only thought to protect you.”
Kit dug his nails into his own palms, willing the pain to distract the wolf, and, with desperate tenderness, managed to speak. “Run from me,” Kit said. “Do not come near me.” Overpowering the wolf’s hate with all the force of his love, he pulled his arm away from Quicksilver’s grasping hand, from the warm of that elven life, that much warmer, that much more fragrant than pale mortal life.
Kit went two steps, no more. The wolf grabbed him. With a shudder that ran down Kit’s whole body, the wolf turned him about face, made him take two steps back to where he’d been and turned his eyes, his battle-broken eyes upon Quicksilver.
“Idiot,” Quicksilver said and smiled. “Idiot. Come with me. “I’ll buy you a drink at a tavern, and we’ll decide how to go on from here.”
The sun had all but sunk beneath the horizon.
The stench coming off the river was the smell of death and the graveyard.
Kit had no more control over his aching, tired body, than he had over his beating heart, over his fearful love.
Quicksilver put his hand around Kit’s arm and pulled him, and Kit followed, while within Kit the wolf laughed at easy victory.