Scene Two
A clearing in Arden Woods, hard by Stratford-upon-Avon. To mortal eyes, it is but a sprawl of rank weeds and straggling bushes, in the gloom beneath the overspreading shade of larger trees. Those with second sight, though, see a castle rising there, a noble palace, the capital of fairyland in the British Isles -- the reign of elven Avalon. The building is a white palace, a thing of beauty, with walls so perfect and smooth, towers so high and thin as to defy the imagination of humans and the reach of mortal artistry. In front of the palace, a clumsy structure of uneven boards rises, under the ceaseless hammers, the untiring work of many winged fairies. These winged servants of fairyland, small and dainty, flying hither and thither in flashes of light, work at building the platform for an execution block. The sound of their hammering penetrates the innermost confines of the palace, the royal chamber. There King Quicksilver stands before his full-length mirror. He looks like a young man of twenty, with long blond hair combed over his shoulder. Around him, his room lies neatly ordered, with a large bed curtained in green, a painted trunk, a well-worn golden suit of armor in the corner and -- on the wall -- a portrait of himself which, when viewed from a different angle, shows a dark-haired woman -- Quicksilver’s other aspect. Quicksilver looks only at his mirror, never at his portrait, as he raises his hand to adjust the lace collar that shows over his jacket.
When the knocking first sounded, Quicksilver wasn’t sure it was more than an echo of the hammering without the walls.
How much noise the servants made in building the execution block.
He flinched from the thought of the block and the purpose it would serve, from the execution to come and the inevitable spilling of noble elven blood.
“Am I a butcher?” Quicksilver asked his own image in the mirror. “A tyrant?”
His image stared back at him, bland and blond, looking as it had since Quicksilver had reached adult stature at twenty. It presented a fair prospect, slim and elegant, in the black velvet suit that molded Quicksilver’s long legs, and displayed to advantage his broad shoulders and his svelte body. Though Quicksilver neared sixty five years of age, yet he looked like a youth of twenty, his moss-green eyes full of sparkle, his perfect features unmarked by wrinkles, his pale blond hair shining like liquid moonlight, combed over his shoulder.
As his own people reckoned their life spans, Quicksilver had barely grown out of adolescence and was a very young elf indeed.
But looking at his own reflection, staring at his own dazed, tired eyes, Quicksilver felt old. The last three years he had spent commanding armies and putting down rebellion.
Had those three years of fire and blood, of fear and fighting, left no mark? No mark but the look in his eyes, and this tired, careworn feeling in his soul?
How strange nature. How strange that such resounding evil, such suffering, so much blood spilled, left the king of fairyland looking young and untouched.
Something sounded again — a knock that seemed different from the clamor of the hammer upon the wood of the block.
Quicksilver glanced away from the mirror, at the thick oak door of his room and called out, “Come in.”
The door opened to reveal the slim, pale loveliness of Ariel, Queen of Fairyland, Quicksilver’s wife.
She slid into the room furtively and cast a worried glance at Quicksilver, like a child afraid of scolding.
Quicksilver smoothed his lace collar.
His hands felt rough against the lace and his knuckles had thickened.
For three years, those hands had held charmed swords and thrown magic-spelled lances, and taken elven life, with no remorse -- or almost no remorse.
Could they now return to the smoothing of lace, the holding of game pieces, the signing of documents, the caressing of his wife, the quiet tasks of a king in peacetime?
They must, Quicksilver thought. After this day, this awful final day of killing, his hands and he himself must learn to live in peace.
The civil war that had rent the fairyland in two was finished. Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, profaners of neighbor-stained steel were reformed, and their leaders dead, or soon would be.
Quicksilver had won, and today the main leader of those who had challenged his rule would meet his swift and merciless end upon the block.
Quicksilver tried not to think of it, even as hammer blows sounded from outside. The worst horror of civil war had been visited upon him.
His enemy, whom he had defeated, was his near relation, almost the last surviving branch of Quicksilver’s own blood.
Quicksilver’s own uncle Vargmar, elder brother of that Oberon who had sired Quicksilver, had led the rebel troops in their treasonous blood-shed.
Ariel’s reflection upon the mirror — half obscured by Quicksilver’s own — showed as an intent oval face, staring out at Quicksilver with light-blue eyes as though she could read Quicksilver’s grief and worry. Her expression wavered as Ariel took a deep breath.
“Milord,” the Queen of fairyland said. She came forward, closing the door behind her. Her hand, soft and small on Quicksilver’s arm, might have been a sparrow that, alighting timidly upon a branch, fears the snare that will snag him should he delay. “Milord.”
The Queen Ariel’s voice was a mere whisper. Yet Quicksilver remembered how his queen, small and slight and seemingly fragile as she was, had stood by him through the years of this awful war — how she’d nursed the wounded and -- being the seer of fairyland -- had endured troubling dreams of blood and upheaval, as she governed the hill in his absence.
He turned to her and gave her his attention with a respect he’d have thought impossible when he’d, blithely, unthinkingly, married her fourteen years ago.
“Milady,” he said, and attempted to smile.
“Milord, I dare speak only because I fear if I do not I shall lose you.” She looked at him, her blue eyes veiled, disturbed, as by a dream that refused to dissipate in the light of waking reality. She put her hand on Quicksilver’s sleeve, and spoke in a way made more grave for his knowing that she was the seer of this hill, endowed with the power to pierce the future and give warning of it. “Aye, me,” she said. “I have an ill-divining soul.” Her eyes opened wide, unnaturally wide the way they did when she gazed upon her inner visions. “Methinks I see you, now thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Either my eyesight fails, or you look pale.” She looked at him in enquiry.
He sighed, and touched her face with his fingers, gently. “And trust me, love, in my eye so do you. Dry sorrow drinks our blood.”
Her large, blue eyes shone unnaturally, as though washed by tears, and her skin looked almost as pale as the white lace upon her black dress.
“Forgive my daring,” she said. “I know you’ve won a great war, and that upon you and you alone weighs this decision and this thought. So forgive your foolish wife for speaking.”
Quicksilver managed a smile, though it seemed to him his lips would crack with it. “Ariel is not foolish,” he said. “And my Queen may dare what she well wishes.” He put his hand out to cover hers.
The hammering went on, like mad music.
Quicksilver grit his teeth. He ran a finger down his wife’s cheek and cursed the rebels who had put fear and horror in Ariel’s gaze and etched Quicksilver’s soul with the acid of war. Curse them.
Today their leader would die. Was justice not served?
What else could menace Quicksilver? What else could put such fear in Ariel’s eyes, such pained discourse in her tongue?
“Milord,” Ariel said, her voice trembling. “You are not well. Your spirit like mine fears something that the mouth knows not how to utter and has no sense how to understand. Yesternight you urgently stole from my bed. And yesternight at supper, you suddenly arose and walked about, musing and sighing with your arms across and when I asked you what the matter was, you stared upon me with ungentle looks: I urged you further, then you scratched your head and impatiently stamped your foot. Yet I insisted. Yet you answered not, but with an angry wave of your hand gave sign for me to leave you: so I did. This humor will not let you eat, or talk, or sleep, and it could work so much upon your shape as it has much prevailed on your condition. Quicksilver, is it Vargmar’s execution that so weighs on you? And if so, is it really needed?” With her free hand, she waved towards the front of the palace, where the block was being built. “Might mercy not serve here?”
Mercy? Quicksilver frowned, as he felt his features harden and his eyes widen in horror.
Vargmar, who’d die today, had blighted fairyland for all too many years.
The revolt that today would end in blood and ordered pomp upon the block, had started with the murder of Quicksilver’s own guards upon a silent midnight.
These murders had served the greater plan of murdering Quicksilver himself, as he innocently slept by fair Ariel’s side.
Quicksilver shuddered, remembering his guards’ bloodied corpses, crumpled in a heap outside his door.
Only the guards' valor in that final test had saved Quicksilver. They’d stayed alive long enough and called for help loudly enough to rouse the household -- against the greater numbers of magically powerful foes.
Their blood had purchased Quicksilver’s own life.
Only then had Vargmar and his accomplices, caught at their attempt, called to them the malcontents and dregs of fairyland and with them taken to the hinterlands of the realm.
Those dregs had scourged the hills long enough.
Quicksilver let Vargmar live? What for? That he might call to himself another such coalition and think of new ways to amaze the cowering world?
Quicksilver stared at his wife’s face, uncomprehending.
Mercy?
Quicksilver sighed. “I’ve won the war, milady, and this much I know. I cannot have lasting peace if I show mercy. I showed mercy to my brother once, showed him mercy despite his evil acts and that was only the beginning of a worse strife.”
“But your brother--” Ariel started.
Quicksilver patted her hand, and let it go. “Milady, you were not there when, on the fields of Mars, I stood surrounded by enemies and must slash my way out or die. Nor were you there, on that awful night when I woke to feel a blade at my throat and see an enemy crouched beside my bed. Malachite saved my life then, by killing my foe. Think of all the valiant elves who died as I would have, by stealth and dishonorable attack. The fine flower of this hill was squandered upon the hills and marshes. The harsh, wild ground drank up their blood. Now you would that I show mercy to the man whose ambition murdered them. Arrest such thought, my Queen. Mercy would not serve. It is unworthy.”
Ariel gasped and her face hardened. Determination erased the normal gentle cast of her features. “You wrong me, Milord. If I went not to war it is that you left me behind to rule your kingdom against your return. And if I speak now, if I speak, oh, Lord, it is that I fear for you. For I’ve had dreams such as never before, dreams that stain my nights with blood and make my sleep rank.
“I dreamed tonight that I saw you as a statue which like a fountain with a hundred spouts did run pure blood; and many lusty elves came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.
“Do not go on with this, milord. For I fear for your life if you should.”
Quicksilver narrowed his eyes.
Ariel’s dreams were normally true, but this one smelt not of truth. Rather, the dream, like a frighted, wild thing, knocked its teeth and ran wild with terror. The war that had, for so long, held fear over all of their heads now, being ended, allowed Ariel to give voice to that fear.
Knowing she was affrighted, he spoke softly. “From whom should I fear?” he asked. “Who would harm me, once Vargmar is dead? For his own son has deserted his cause, and those centaurs whom he, with great pride, accounted his closest allies, have sworn fealty to me.” Again he raised his hand, pulling back strands of Ariel’s disarrayed pale blonde hair. “Be of good cheer, my dear, for once Vargmar is dead you’ll have nothing to fear.”
Ariel held her hand over her heart. “And yet I misgive me. Can this not be delayed?”
“What? And I shall ask the executioner to stay his ax till Quicksilver’s wife shall meet with better dreams?
“Your fears are foolish, wife, and if I stay my hand because of them I will all the more encourage that violence you fear against my person.”
Ariel blushed. Red splashes stained both cheeks and the bridge of her nose. “Woe is me. For once were my dreams accounted of service to my Lord."
She drew herself up to her full height, which, yet, came no higher than Quicksilver’s chest.
Her face strained and white, she looked like the miniature of a warrior Queen, as endearing as disconcerting.
He wanted to hold her and knew he mustn’t. He must stand firm.
This time her hand gripped his arm tightly. “The violence of the last three years has wounded you, milord, maybe more so than it wounded your enemies. Now you have won, and maybe it’s time to exert kind mercy and with it balance the scales of retribution that threaten to crush your joy and peace. I do not know what my dreams divine, but I do much fear that in killing the traitors, milord, you’ll kill part of yourself also.”
Quicksilver shook his head. If any part of him there was which harshness could kill, then it was dead already. “Trouble you not, my lady,” he said, offering her his arm. “Trouble you not. The villain will die, and I shall be none the worse for it.”
Speaking thus, he led her to the door and out of it, to the broad, marble paved corridor outside the bedroom.
There, courtiers waited for their sovereign to lead his court out of the palace, to where the traitor would die.
Amid the courtiers, Quicksilver marked Proteus, Vargmar’s only son, a pale, golden-haired youth in a dark blue velvet suit that made him appear even paler and more frail. Looking on him, Quicksilver wished Proteus strength.
Quicksilver, himself, had been little older than Proteus -- in his twenties and a child in elvenland -- when Oberon had died, leaving Quicksilver orphaned. And, oh, with what heat had Quicksilver sought vengeance for his father’s spirit.
Would Proteus?
Quicksilver took a deep breath and looked away from the youth who bowed to him while attempting to smile with bloodless, ghastly pale lips.
It was not the same situation at all.
Oberon had been cut down stealthily by an assassin’s knife, while Vargmar would be executed after inciting half of elvenland into a war against its rightful sovereign -- after killing half the youth of elvenland.
How many elves, fairies--how many trolls and centaurs, even, had died in those three years in which Vargmar had rained blood and destruction on those outposts that had remained loyal to Quicksilver and by stealth and dishonor killed all those whom he dared not face upon the open field?
And for what? For what but Vargmar’s ambition and his desire to be king?
Vargmar’s peasant troops -- servant fairies, changelings, small elf Lords, ignorant trolls, the small band of transplanted centaurs who’d come with the legions to the south of Avalon and, ever since, been torment and strife to fairyland -- all those had been forgiven. They’d been allowed to say they’d been Vargmar’s dupes and had believed that Quicksilver meant to destroy fairyland.
But Vargmar had knowingly betrayed his sovereign.
Knowingly, he must bleed for it.
The sound of hammering stopped.
The block was ready.
Quicksilver led Ariel across the throne room, to the broad stairway at the entrance of the palace, and down it, towards the crude execution block.
The palace guards would now be getting the prisoner, while the executioner troll — a creature three times as large as any elf and covered all over in golden fur — stood patiently upon the stand that supported the execution block, holding his large, magical ax — a contraption of black crystal created by dwarves in the bowels of the Earth.
But none would die by that ax till Quicksilver raised his hand and let it fall, in the signal for the execution.
Quicksilver took a deep breath. He could stop it all with one gesture.
The day was bright, but its brightness muffled, like sunlight shining through cheesecloth, as though the sun itself mourned and felt reluctant to watch such spectacle.
But why reluctant?
Quicksilver smarted at his own hesitancy, at his cringing heart. For was not what he did honorable? Did he not have law, tradition, and right on his side?
His lieutenant in the war past, his erstwhile page, his faithful friend Malachite emerged from amid the ranks and knelt at Quicksilver’s foot, signaling need to speak to his master.
With a wave Quicksilver bid Malachite stand.
Malachite had ever been Quicksilver’s companion and almost always Quicksilver’s closest friend. A changeling -- kidnapped from nearby Stratford-upon-Avon sixty four years past -- in the course of normal human life, he should have been an old man tottering at the brink of that second childhood from which none grow up.
Instead, he looked spritely and young, a human youth aged twenty, with dark hair and dark jade-green eyes that nonetheless looked as tired as Quicksilver felt -- and red-rimmed besides -- as from fretting, sleepless nights.
Standing up, he stood very close to Quicksilver, and leaned closer. “Milord,” he said. “Milord. I would fain not speak, but speak I must, for your own safety is imperiled which is that much dearer to me than my own.”
He stopped again. When he spoke, his voice echoed as little more than a whisper, barely audible to anyone other than Quicksilver and perhaps Ariel.
He glanced towards the mourning-clad Proteus, surrounded by centaurs – high-ranking centaurs who, through the war, had been his friends and his own council of war. Like him they’d been pardoned and now Chiron, Hylas, and Eurytion ringed Proteus about with their sturdy equine bodies.
Hylas had the body of a black stallion, surmounted by a powerful human torso. Chiron was a dappled white and black, and Eurytion a fair brown. All of their human bodies were golden skinned and their features and their dark curls bespoke their ancestors’ origins in far-off Greece, where it was rumored some of their kin still lived in hiding, away from the humans who’d almost destroyed them.
Today their horse halves were well brushed, their human halves oiled to glistening and ornamented with splendorously barbaric bronze jewelry. They bound their curly black hair back with leather. Their faces...was Quicksilver imagining in their faces the closed-mouthed, downcast look of those who plotted still?
Yes, he must be. It was hard to forget that ever since they’d come to this island the centaurs had worked treasons and plots against the rightful kings of fairyland. Or else, once having caught a whiff of alcoholic brew, would they run mad through the countryside, a danger to human maid and elf maid alike, a danger to themselves and that separation that must exist between human and elven spheres.
Twice before, to prevent wars between human and supernatural realms, had Quicksilver needed to make use of all his power to make injured mortals forget the grave outrages of these centaurs. Twice.
And then the centaurs had joined Vargmar in the war.
“I misgive myself, Lord, over your cousin, Lord Proteus,” Malachite said. “The son of the traitor. He looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes. Let me have men about me that are fat. Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep of nights. Yond Proteus has a lean and hungry look.” Malachite stopped. He spoke again, clearer. “He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”
Quicksilver’s eye followed where Malachite indicated, but where Malachite saw thought and maybe treason, he saw only a youth, painfully thin and painfully drawn, his eyes burning with grief and perhaps shame.
What shame must this not inflict upon the young, already too ready to be shamed by everything?
Quicksilver shook his head and, with more pity than condemnation, sighed. “Would that he were fatter! But I fear him not. Come, speak softly and tell me, is his leanness your only reason to fear him? Or have you detected in my good kinsman any mark of treason? For truth, he forswore his father’s ambition in front of my throne, publicly, after the last battle in the fields of the Avon.
“Did he forswear false?”
Malachite looked up. His odd, dark-green eyes met Quicksilver’s look, unflinching.
There were depths to Malachite which Quicksilver couldn’t quite fathom. He had taken Malachite for granted, as a changeling and a servant when they were both children, playing together at the feet of great Titania.
But little by little, in the twenty years since Titania’s death, pain and strife and strange events had shaken the fairy kingdom to the root, and revealed in Malachite that sort of strange intelligence that moves in the depths of the brain like deep-buried water. And, like such water, it seldom found an outlet that allowed it to bubble to the surface. Malachite thought deep and spoke little, not because he was secretive or kept his own council but because the workings of his brain, the machinery of his thought had little commerce with words and found them hard purchase for his tongue.
Perhaps, Quicksilver thought, it was the peasant, human blood that ran in Malachite’s veins -- little altered by Great Titania’s suckle that had purchased for Malachite the golden life-span of elf — the blood of men and women wedded to their land and knowing little, needing little, of speech or fancy words.
While Malachite’s wide-open eyes stared at Quicksilver, as though seeking to speak as Malachite’s mouth couldn’t, Quicksilver looked at his subordinate’s hands — those large hands with their broad, flat fingertips, so adept with the sword, so slow in the cleverness of card games, so halting at playing any instrument.
Malachite’s hands knit together, clutching one upon the other as if in struggle. And his mouth opened and let out a single syllable, a sound of frustration and despair. “Oh,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Oh, I can tell you nothing, point at nothing, that Proteus has done that is treasonous. I can do nothing, nothing, to make you understand the danger you face. I only know I like not his looks and trust not his words, nor his false meekness, nor his scraping bows. There is a quick intelligence in him, something that hides beneath his complaisance and spies through his bright eyes, like an assassin’s dagger seeking a place to strike.” Malachite shook his head. “I think it is not meet that Proteus, so well beloved of his father, Vargmar, should outlive him. We shall find him a shrewd contriver, and you know, his means, if he improve them, may well stretch so far as to annoy us all, which to prevent, let Proteus and Vargmar fall together.”
Quicksilver looked on Proteus again, then on the brand-new block, which Vargmar was to ascend and stain with the noblest blood in fairyland.
He marked with unease that Proteus had surrounded himself with centaurs, that is, with others, who’d think they had reason to avenge themselves on the king. Yet Quicksilver could not bring himself to punish treason and potential treason in the same stroke.
And the centaurs.... Oh, the other kings of fairyland had survived them well enough. Quicksilver would, yet.
Thoughts were not crimes, and until they became action they must not be punished.
No. Steeling his voice to gentleness, to soothe Malachite and not inflame him, Quicksilver said, “Our course will seem too bloody, Malachite,” he said. “To cut the head off, and then hack the limbs, like wrath in death and envy afterwards. For Proteus, even if treasonous, is but a limb of Vargmar. Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Malachite. We all stand up against the spirit of Vargmar, and in men’s spirit there is no blood. Oh, that we, then, could come by Vargmar’s spirit and not dismember Vargmar. But, alas, Vargmar must bleed for it. As for Proteus, think not of him. For he can do no more than Vargmar’s arm, when Vargmar’s head is off.”
Malachite looked his misgiving and shook his head, but he could not or did not speak.
“Come, Malachite, for this our needful bloodletting must be done with, that the hill, that feverish patient, can rest,” Quicksilver said, and, thus speaking, led Malachite and Ariel both out of the door, to watch the dread spectacle.
The guards of fairyland waited, two enormous giants in diamond armor, standing one on each side of Vargmar, who, shorter than Quicksilver’s father, yet bore some resemblance to Oberon in his lean, spare stature, his aquiline nose, the dark curls now gathered by a strap, to make the axe’s work easier.
Like Quicksilver, he wore a dark suit, and he gave the king of fairyland a look of such withering disdain that it was Quicksilver who must look away, like a child caught at fault, a sneaking waif.
Vargmar climbed the steps to his last destination.
As Vargmar’s head rested on the place where the ax was to strike and the executioner stood over him, waiting only Quicksilver’s order, Ariel said, “Milord, think. Consider. Maybe this need not be done.”
From Quicksilver’s other side, Malachite whispered, “Milord, what’s another stroke of the ax? A single day could rid you of all traitors.”
Poised between foolish mercy and wholesale massacre, where ideas were made crimes and suspicions fact, Quicksilver shook his head.
No.
He raised his hand and, as his hand fell, so did the ax, suspended above the head of noble Vargmar. The charmed ax fell, cleaving head from body. The head rolled, and the blood poured from the severed neck like water from a fountain, bathing the new boards and filling their pores with the glistening, glimmering, magical blood of fairyland.
Quicksilver felt as though something — some gigantic hand, all talons, reached within his soul and wrenched.
“Oh,” he said, and stood. Pale, he stood, trembling, while the gazes of his court converged on him, half appalled, half anxious.
For a moment, it seemed to him he saw his own female aspect, the Lady Silver, stand in front of him, like in a mirror. But she faded so fast into the hazy air he wasn’t sure he’d seen it.
He gasped for breath, feeling cleft in twain, feeling blood leave his cheeks. For a moment something like a fog intervened between the king’s eyes and the scene before him, and it seemed to Quicksilver that he had died and that the dead viewed himself among the living.
“Milord,” Ariel said, standing and wrapping her arm around his, her hand small and restless and anxious like a small, frighted creature that seeks shelter in a storm. “Milord.”
Quicksilver tried to answer, but only “Oh,” would cross his lips again, for he’d realized his affliction and the cause of his distress.
He’d been born a dual creature, male and female entwined and able to shift between the two aspects as the mood served, as the time demanded and sometimes — without meaning — as the unseen currents of events moved him.
Through the war he’d kept his female half — the dark-haired Lady Silver — in tight check. Her mad humor, her emotional nature would have thrown victory to the jaws of defeat. Besides, Malachite and, indeed, all of Quicksilver’s command, felt uncomfortable with and leerie of their leader’s capacity of being two in one.
But even then, through the war’s dark days, had Quicksilver felt the Lady Silver within him, like a twining beat echoing his own heart.
Twins they were — joined at the soul and born in one instant, one sundering breath serving both. Like twins and like one single person, who with his soul confides in secrecy, they’d ever been each other’s closest company.
Flesh of one flesh, blood of one blood, one creature in two and two in one.
Even when being Quicksilver, Quicksilver had known that he could change and that the Lady Silver lay dormant, not dead, just beneath the stern masculine shell that he must keep.
Now, on that ax stroke, something had broken. Like fabric tearing, like a tether loosened, something had let go.
And try as he might, look as he might, Quicksilver knew that the Lady Silver no longer lived within him, twining his heart and soul.
He’d become Quicksilver — Quicksilver alone and immutable.
Quicksilver, king and ruler of fairyland, whose heart had much duty and no joy.
Much as he’d cursed his capacity to change in the past, he now lamented its loss.
How could half a king rule this war-torn kingdom?