Scene 40
A London market, sprawling in all directions from a central point. Chickens and poultry, pigs and all manner of livestock are sold alive and dead, their feet bound or their carcasses swaying in the air. Women display baskets full of fresh-baked bread or farm-grown vegetables. At a corner of the market, horse dealers assemble. And there, Will wanders, with the look of a man who has shopped long and hard and found not what he sought.
To go to Deptford, Will must buy a horse.
But never having done it, he found it heavy going.
Every horse he saw looked half-dead or too expensive. Examining a half-dead one, Will sighed.
Kit—and Sylvanus—must be in Deptford by now.
Perforce, Kit had meant to involve Will in Sylvanus’s plan, and then, re-belling after his son’s death, Kit had entreated Will not to go.
Else, why would Kit have cautioned Will against Kit again begging him to go? Why else, but that he feared the wolf, within his body, would call Will to Deptford again.
But why Deptford? Did Kit mean to kill the Queen there?
Will must stop it. He was the last hope of humans and elves.
“He looks lame,” Will said, staring at the nag in front of him, a grey creature of indeterminate age, with patches upon its hide that looked like the discolorations of mold.
“Lame?” the dealer asked, standing beside Will and speaking so loudly that the whole fair would hear. “You insult me so? You say that of my horse? Why, he was only owned by an old parson, who rode him only to his church to preach, on Sundays, and the rest of the time was he kept stabled, and fed the best, and daily taken care of.”
Will wrinkled his nose. The beast smelled diseased, too, a pungent, acrid smell. And its lower legs were all covered in mud, though the legs of the other horses in the enclosure were clean.
Will was not so naive that he didn’t know the trick of covering a horse’s legs in mud to make it look hale and sound, where there might be deformity or injury.
But he’d asked about every other horse in this fair that would serve his turn, and he could not find better—not among those that he could afford with the five pounds remaining in his purse.
At this rate, he’d not make it to Deptford, nor save the magical pillars of the world from their doom. At this rate, the world would be lost to Sylvanus for lack of a horse.
“Master, this horse will do you proud. You’ll will him to your grandchildren, yet.”
Will ground his teeth. At least the horse hide, he would will to his grandchildren.
Did Will look so much the credulous fool that all felt they must make up outrageous stories and try them on him?
“How much for the horse?” he asked.
The dealer bowed and smirked. “For you, master, for you five pounds.”
And for everyone else two pounds? Will wondered if all the prices told him in this fair were like that, many times more than they should be.
Will’s grandfather had left twenty pounds in his will and had been considered a reasonably well-off man.
How could a fearful nag cost five pounds? Oh, all these men must be trying to cozen Will. He must look innocent as a mewling babe. No wonder even Marlowe had sought to cozen him.
And for Marlowe—to save Marlowe, to save the elves that Will had never trusted—Will would spend all the money he had left from what Southampton had given him? What would he do then, without the money?
“Will you take him, master?” the horse dealer asked, untying the horse from the post that held it in place—though the horse showed no inclination to roam.
The beast turned pitiful eyes to Will, as though asking for an end to its sufferings.
Will would very much like to see his own sufferings end, too.
If he paid for this horse, if he paid now, if he paid the whole five pounds in his leather purse, he’d be back where he was a couple of days ago, with no money to eat, with no money to return to his family in defeat.
No, no. Let Marlowe kill the elves, let Marlowe and Sylvanus take over the world. Let the die be cast and all come out as it would.
What could Will do anyway, unschooled in magic, against such great evil?
Will was a poor prospect for saving the world from a magical creature, a demigod. To own the truth, he couldn’t save himself from penury.
Will shook his head at the dealer, and started walking away, amid the crowd.
“Best poultry in London, buy it here,” a woman yelled, waving a live chicken, its feet bound, in front of Will’s face.
Will dodged the chicken’s beak. The chicken’s cackle rang like a trumpet of doom.
What mattered it to Will who ruled the universe—old pagan deities, or Sylvanus, or the God of Christians, or even the uncaring, amoral deities of Marlowe’s plays?
Surely Sylvanus couldn’t be any more vicious than the blind woman who cut the thread of life.
Yet in his mind, he saw the child, Kit’s son.
Whatever Kit might be guilty of, Will couldn’t believe he’d committed that murder willingly.
And what creature would force the hand of a father against his own son? Sylvanus had done it. If such a creature ruled the world—no, wove the world anew in its image—who would be safe? What world would this be, but measureless hell?
Will touched the coins in his purse, the coins that would allow him to go back to Stratford and see his son and daughters again.
But how would they be when Will got there? What if in Deptford, in Mistress Bull’s house, the final battle were won by the wrong being? What good would it do to Will to ignore it?
Would he not be like those who, in the time of Noah, feasted and drank, married and were given away in marriage, only to be swallowed by the impending flood?
Like Noah, Will was the only man, the only mortal who knew of the cataclysm coming.
And unlike Noah, Will wished to save all of the world.
Pray, how could he do this by hiding in his room and writing?
How could he do that by shying away from people who thought him a fool and allowing them to go on believing him so?
And how could he get to Deptford?
Will took a deep breath, tainted with manure and the smell of spoiled meat.
“Lace,” a peddler yelled, walking past, his wears spread across his arm. “Lace such as should grace your lady’s petticoats.”
His lady back in Stratford needed no lace for her petticoats. But she did need her life, and she did love her children, and by all that was holy, Will would keep that for his Nan.
Without even realizing it, he’d turned around. In the horse enclosure, he laid hand not on the fearful nag, but on a better horse, a dappled brown beauty that frisked about with impatient spirits.
“Ah, you came back, master,” the dealer said with a smirk.
“Yes, and I’ll take this horse, and I’ll give you two pounds for it.”
“Two pounds wouldn’t buy the shoes on this horse. Two pounds? Villain, you would despoil me.”
The scream of the horse dealer brought stares from every person around. Will should shy away. He felt his face color. He felt the impulse to hide.
He was a provincial here in cosmopolitan London. He must have broken some rule and revealed himself for the fool he was.
Yet, he remembered his Nan, he remembered his children, he remembered the little corpse in the alley, the symbol and sign of all that Sylvanus might do to the unsuspecting world he bid fair to rule.
And though Will didn’t fully understand the means and magic involved or all this talk of elements and aspects, he knew that there was another magical reality that twined his and that the two were linked. Through one, Sylvanus could control the other.
Will thought of Sylvanus, who’d bring children to such low ends.
He ground his teeth. “Two pounds,” he said, and held on to the horse’s rein more firmly.
A few breaths later, having paid three pounds, he rode the horse out of the fair headed for Deptford.
His mind was elated with his victory over the horse dealer, the respect he’d read in the man’s eyes at parting.
But now he faced a tougher adversary, one not likely to be impressed with a firm stand.