Prologue

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    Scene: A wooden stage, looking very real and solid, amid swirls of yellow-green smoke or fog. On the stage three women sit on wooden stools, beside a painted earth. A beautiful maiden spins the thread, a strong matron measures it and a wrinkled crone cuts it with a pair of golden sheers. A man appears at the edge of the stage. He's a middle aged man who looks insignificant, with his receding hairline and dark curls that brush the shoulders of his cheap russet wool suit. Only his eyes, sharp and intent, golden as a bird of prey's, hint at curiosity and intelligence. He walks to the center of the stage and faces the women.

    Will does not know if he dreams or wakes.
    He walks on a creaking stage with hesitant steps and knows not how he got here. Only minutes ago he slept in his own bed.
    Three strange women face him. Women they look to be, and yet something about them proclaims them something else.
    "All hail Will Shakespeare!" The maiden lifts her head from her spinning. Her blonde hair falls back. She has no ears. "Hail to thee, great poet."
    Will jumps back, shocked both at deformity and greeting.
    Great poet? Did she indeed greet Will thus?
    "All hail Will, whose verse generations yet unborn shall recite." The matron looks up from the thread she winds and measures. Her smile shows feral, serrated teeth.
    "All hail Will," the crone pipes. Lifting her head, she shows no eyes amid the wrinkles on her withered face. "All hail Will whom death shall not defeat."
    Scared, Will takes three steps back.
    "Live you? Are you aught that man ought to question? Do I dream, or am I awake? You look not like the inhabitants of the earth. You should be women, and yet strange women you are. What are you?"
    "We are not women but that of which women are spun. The force like a womb that, within the universe, spins all that's female in the world of men," the maiden says.
    "By us is all life threaded and measured and cut, ours the weaving of human fate," the matron says.
    "But ours will be the undoing and the death, should we not find a champion to defend us." The crone's hair flies wild, framing her face in snow-white tendrils.
    "Defend us," the maiden says. "And you shall be the greatest poet born of woman's womb. Your plays will be heard, your verses repeated world without end."
    Will clenches his fists. They mock him. Surely they mock him. "Six months I've been in London and no one will listen to my poetry. Six months of starving and spending. No are all my money and all my hope run out. And yet you mock me."
    The maiden shakes head. "We do not mock, but promise."
    "Only do as we wish," the matron says. "And fame and ever-living poetry shall be your reward."
    "Sylvanus, who should be the Hunter's slave plots to rebel against his master," the matron says.
    "Sylvanus who was king of elves, and for his foul deeds was enslaved to the Hunter, the justiciar, the provider," the crone says.
    "Sylvanus will destroy us and thus remove both the male and female pillars that hold up all that is. Thus, like a cloak unraveled the universe shall fall, in tatters and threads with no meaning."
    "In our place Sylvanus shall weave himself," the maiden says, "Like a rotted patch upon a new cloth, rendering the whole worthless."
    "Why do not you stop him, yourselves?" Will asks.
    The maiden shakes her head. "We can no more stop him than we can stop the tide. We spin the thread, we wind and cut. But we can not weave our own fate. W do not tie our own knot."
    "Stop Sylvanus." The matron smiles, sharp teeth gleaming. "And the reward shall be yours, your poetry remembered, your words echoed through the ages unending."
    "Stop Sylvanus," the crone says. "And we shall make you greatest of his kind, for words that burn and spell and bind."
    "I am dreaming," the man says. "And in this dream, uneasy, do my fondest hopes mock me."
    He vanishes like smoke upon the stage, leaving the three women behind, spinning and cutting and measuring the thread that glimmers white in their laps.

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Scene 1

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The nave of St. Paul's cathedral, or Paul's walk, as it is called in Elizabethan England. People of all descriptions crowd every corner of the ample space: tailors, factors, lawyers, pickpockets, sellers of racy woodcuts, bawds and chimney sweeps -- all of them do business here, beneath the soaring arched roof and between the lofty columns. The imposing stone tombs of the nobility, the rood loft, even the baptismal font are used as money changing counters. Dandies stroll aimlessly, displaying their fashionable clothes. An ill-dressed young man in his late twenties, with the beginnings of a receding hairline and long black curls that brush his frayed lace collar stands by the eastern door, anxiously perusing a confusion of papers glued there, each headed "Si Quis".

    Will Shakespeare looked at the Si Quis notices posted on the door. There were so many that one glued upon the other, till the whole door appeared to be made of paper.
    Si Quis meant if anyone. Si Quis would be tailor, Si Quis would be serving man, Si Quis would be fencing master.
    All the jobs in London were spread before Will, like the countries of the Earth before the tempting devil.
    Yet Will remained unemployed, his stomach empty, his rent long overdue. Only an hour ago, Will's landlord had awakened Will from uneasy, fitful sleep to demand payment for late rent. Will had none to give him. Another day, and Will would have no lodging, either.
    Si Quis would be chimney sweep. Si Quis would be gardener.
    All these professions, though many, were to Will's purpose none.
    His head hurt with a thunderous headache, and clotted remains of his dreams haunted his mind.
    A great poet, the creatures had said Will would be.
    Will. A great poet.
    A middle-aged man, with fading looks, provincial grammar- school education and next to no friends in London, Will felt as though his fortune were as out at heel as his suit and his frayed lace cuffs.
    No one wanted a would-be poet. No one was looking for an aspiring playwright. No one craved to hire even Will's other, meager abilities: a petty school teacher, or a glover with little more than apprentice skill.
    "Sweep chimney sweep, mistress," a man's baritone boomed just behind Will, deafening him. "With a hey derry from the top to the bottom."
    A chimney sweep advertising his wares.
    The smell of roasting meat, seasoned with nutmeg and ginger drifted up to Will's nose, tantalizing his stomach with savors of a supper Will couldn't afford.
    "Well met, Richard, well met," a man said, to Will's left, hurrying forward to clasp another man in his arms. "Would you take ale with me? And sup?"
    Will dearly wished someone would invite him to sup. But in his six months in London, he'd formed almost no acquaintance. He'd been cozened and fooled and stolen from, but he'd formed no useful connection.
    The little money he'd brought to London with him -- scraped together from his father's failing business and his wife's selling of home-grown vegetables -- had fallen drop by drop into a wasteland of lost hopes. Now he had nothing. Not enough to buy supper, not even enough to return home.
    Walking to Stratford would take two days, and Will would starve long before that.
    Tears prickled behind Will's eyelids. How confident Will's wife had been, hi Nan, when she pressed the few coins into Will's sweaty hand before he left home.
    She'd kissed Will and told him that with his words and his wit he could pry London open like a treasure coffer, and make his fortune and the fortune of his whole family.
    Oh, deceived wife. Oh, poor, way-led woman who, despite having lived with Will for ten years and borne him two daughters and a son, still believed her man to be an Hyperion, a sage, the form and glass of all mankind.
    Poor Nan, who would never even know that her husband had starved in London, dead of his own folly and inflated pride.
    "Help, help," an old man screamed to Will's right. "Someone has cut my purse. Help. Cozenage and damnation."
    Behind Will men swarmed and pushed around the si quis door. Some were dressed as poorly as he, others arrayed in fine silks and velvets. All read the notices on the door. Each made a little triumphant noise or read the words aloud when he found a likely position.
    A man in a sky blue doublet, three finger-widths of creamy lace peeking from beneath his sleeves to shroud his hands, put a well-tended finger on the paper asking for a fencing master, and pushed Will out of the way to tear the sheet off the door.
    It was no use, Will thought. He would go back to his lodgings and starve.
    In his dreams he'd been a poet, but waking no such matter.
    His gaze swept over the yellowed papers and the crisp white ones, perusing the words scrawled upon them with desperate longing.
    Si Quis would be smith. Si Quis would be weaver. Si Quis would be horse holder outside the bear garden.
    Will's breath arrested. Wait. He could do that. He put his finger on the paper.
    He could watch horses for customers who went inside to watch the bear baiting.
    He grasped the corner of the sheet, meaning to tear it out and follow instructions on how to apply for the job.
    "Holding horses," a man said, so close to Will that his breath tickled Will's ear. "Well, I could have done that."
    Looking over his shoulder, Will saw a blond man as threadbare as himself. He looked back at Will and smiled, disarmingly. "Though, for my money, I'd rather have been an actor." He grimaced as though he'd named the lowest profession he could think of.
    Will sighed. "I came to London to be a playwright," he said.
    "No." His new acquaintance looked skeptical. "Did you indeed?" He pointed with sudden animation towards a man a few steps from them. "Look, there, in the red doublet and green hose. That's Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose, as I live and breathe."
    In a moment Will let go of the paper and turned, the thought of a job vanishing from his mind. The idea of holding horses in front of the bear garden became abhorrent, as did the idea of any job not in the theater.
    If Philip Henslowe was the owner of The Rose, in Southwark, then Henslowe was the owner of the largest and most successful theater in London. In The Rose were Kit Marlowe's plays acted, the most acclaimed shows of the age. Even in far-off Stratford-upon-Avon Will had heard of Tamburlaine the Great and, with trembling admiration, read its lines printed on the cheap paper of a hastily copied booklet.
    All his dreams reviving, Will thought that if only he could meet Henslowe, if he could impress Henslowe -- why, Will would conquer the theater and become as great as Marlowe, and perhaps greater.
    The man in red doublet and green hose stood in the center of the nave, right in the middle of Paul's walk, talking to an auburn haired dandy in a dark velvet doublet slashed through to show flame-colored fabric beneath.
    The dandy didn't matter, but Philip Henslowe did.
    In six months, Will had yet to meet someone as important in the theater.
    Now he would brave Henslowe on his own, with no introduction. Or, Will thought, clenching his fists while his lower lip curled in disdain, Will deserved no better work than to hold horses in front of the bear garden.
    Will elbowed the surrounding men out of the way, cut through the middle of a group of loudly-arguing dandies, and extending his hand, as though to beg, charged towards Henslowe.
    His extended fingers touched shabby red velvet and he spoke indistinctly through a mouth that suddenly felt too dry. "Please, master Henslowe, I am a poet."
    At that, all of Will's wit fled him.
    He wanted to say that he would like to write plays, that he was sure he could write plays as fire-woven as Marlowe's, or better. But he could say no more.
    Up close, Henslowe looked older than Will expected, his face as sun-tanned and worry-creased as the face of Will's wife, back in Stratford.
    Will's mouth opened, but his tongue could not find the turn of a rounded phrase or even the trick of a single word.
    Philip Henslowe, looked average: a man with brown eyes and longish, straight brown hair.
    His bold-colored doublet and bright green pants showed as much sign of wear as Will's russet suit. At elbows and knees, the fabric had worn old and thin, all the pile gone and nothing but the threadbare weave beneath.
    He looked back at Will, arched his eyebrows. "A poet?" he said, as though the word were a fantastical sound referring to some obscure occupation or some marvel told by sailors returned from distant lands.
    "A poet, Philip." The dandy Henslowe had been talking to grinned. He glanced at Will, and his long-lashed grey eyes sparked with humor. "You know those. They grow under rocks and in untended places, and hide in clusters in universities."
    The dandy smiled, showing white teeth that went well with his fine-featured, smooth, oval face, his well-clipped beard, and the fine moustache that traced his upper lip like a well-drawn line. He turned to Will and winked. "Tell me, good man, did you go to a university or to an inn of the court and there tended your wit like others tend vegetable patches, with the manure of learning and the heat of argument?"
    Will's mouth remained dry. He shook his head.
    Henslowe looked at the ceiling, as though beseeching a far-off divinity.
    Will stared at the dandy.
    Who could this be, whose clothing looked newly made, whose auburn hair showed the darker roots that indicated art aiding nature, whose every trait and feature betrayed a nobleman? Why would such a one talk to a theater owner, the impious rabble of society?
    The dandy's grey eyes looked a question, and his eyebrows arched. "Not a university man?"
    Will cleared his throat. "I've never gone to university." He bowed slightly. "I went to grammar school and then I taught for a time in the country. Then I helped my father in his shop."
    The finely drawn eyebrows of the auburn aired gentleman arched upon his white brow, a movement more intent and meaning than Henslowe's similar look. "Not gone to University? And your father had a shop? Why, that's fatal."
    The dandy pulled from within his sleeve a kerchief edged with lace worth more than all of Will's clothing. He waved this foppery in front of his nose, as though to dispel a bad stench. "A poet should never be a useful kind of person, capable of handling the grosser stuff of life. Tell me, your father is, mayhap, not a butcher, or some such gross occupation?"
    Will shook his head, bewildered, "I pray, no. He's a glover, but--"
    "Ah, he busies himself with the egg and flour of tanning, does he? And was it there that you learned the fine chervil leather of a couplet, the whiting of poetry?" The gentleman smiled.
    "I..." Will swallowed nervously. "I've always made poems, pray, to the local girls and.... And I admire Marlowe's plays much."
    The dandy laughed, a delighted cackle that jangled in the air, mingling with the calls of tradespeople, the enticements of bawds. "A good thing to love Marlowe's plays. I sometimes enjoy them myself. So, say a poem for us. A poem." He stuffed his handkerchief back into his sleeve and stepped back, as if to make room for Will's expansive wit.
    "Declaim," the dandy said, and waved a hand encased in pearly-grey chervil gloves with a heavy golden fringe at the end that dangled over his dainty wrist.
    Will glanced at Henslowe, who stared not at Will but at the other man, with something like wonder or alarm.
    Would Henslowe listen? Could Will earn his place as a playwright this way?
    Standing with his feet close, Will cleared his throat.
    When he'd dreamed of a moment like this, he'd imagined a tiring room, the air thick with the smell of grease paint.
    A theater owner, or perhaps even a nobleman, would ask Will to recite a poem and all the actors would fall silent, all movement stop, till, in the end, nothing stirred amid props and costumes, nothing moved except Will's voice rising and falling and dazzling all.
    But Will's reality always fell short of his dreams.
    "I have Dutch coins, and German, and French too. Change your coins here, before you set abroad," a money changer yelled near Will's ear.
    His voice shaking, Will started, in measured cadences, to speak his best sonnet.
    It was the one he'd written for Nan when they were courting, the one that ended in hate from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying not you.
    When Will finished, the noise of Paul's had not died down. From somewhere came the high-pitched laughter or a bawd, and somewhere behind Will two gentlemen argued loudly.
    "The sad ballad and sorrowful fate of Romeo," a ballad seller called out, just to the right of Henslowe, waving a sheaf of smudged printed sheets just within the theater owner's field of vision. "How he did kill himself for love unrequited."
    And the dandy, his eyebrows more arched than ever, looked puzzled. "A fine sonnet, to be sure," he told Will. "A fine sonnet." Despite the man's words, his lips worked in and out, battling some emotion that Will feared was mirth.
    With sudden heat, Will attempted to explain, "Your lordship will allow," Will said. "That my lady's name is Hathaway, you see."
    The small, neat mouth -- whose corners trembled upwards, beneath the narrow moustache, when Will addressed its owner as "lordship" -- opened in a round "o" of astonishment.
    "Ah. Hathaway. Hate from hate away. Why it's marvelous, man. No more than a poet in two would think of such a clever pun, I say. What say you, Henslowe?" He turned to the theater owner.
    Suspecting he was being mocked and feeling his heart droop down to consort with his worn-out boots, Will too, turned to Henslowe.
    But Henslowe never once glanced in his direction. Instead, he looked impatiently at the dandy and flicked him on the shoulder with a shabby glove, as though to call his attention. "I think you have strange amusements, Kit." And, before the dandy could more than open his mouth for what promised to be a droll reply. "And I think your time would be better employed in writing me a play that I could stage. What, with the plague raging over this winter and the playhouses just reopened, we could use a new play to pack them in. Faustus has run its time upon the stage. Give us something new. I have a new playhouse to pay for."
    In Will's brain the given name of Kit added to Henslowe's request for a new play, and to the name of Faustus, and, as Will turned to gaze on the dandy -- Will's mouth opening in wonder, his eyes wide -- he realized that this creature, with his slashed-through sleeves, his immaculate, white silk hose, his expensive boots, his lace handkerchief, and gold-fringed grey gloves was no other than Kit Marlowe, the leading playwright of the age, the muses darling, the light of the London stage.
    "Many good simples for all illnesses," a shrunken man in a black cloak called out, walking between them and away, waving a large, dark bottle. "It cures the French Pox, the ague and the plague."
    Kit Marlowe laughed.
    "In time, my dear Henslowe, in good time. I'll write another play." Marlowe smiled on the theater owner. "But first I've promised my Lord Thomas Walsingham to write a long poem on the sad tragedy and most sorrowful death of Hero and Leander."
    Philip Henslowe made a rude noise at the sad tragedy. "And on their romping, perforce, beneath a silken sheet. No. Don't answer that." He waved away Marlowe's attempt at speech with a hand clad in a glove dark with wearing. "Don't answer that. It doesn't bear discussing. I know why lordlings care about long-dead lovers. More honest, I say, to write for the people."
    "And make sure plenty of blood spurts, to make the populus throw its greasy cloaks in the air," Marlowe said, softly. "More honest, that might be, Henslowe. But not nearly so profitable."
    Marlowe swept his hand left to right through the air, describing a perfect arc and as though signifying the futility of human life. "Stay." He held Henslowe's arm as Henslowe made to turn away. "Soon as I'm done, I'll write you something new. A piteous doomed romance, maybe. Or would you prefer a revenge tragedy, like Thomas Kyd's?"
    Kit's eyes acquired a faraway look as if he were reading in the entrails of his future for plays not yet written. "Perhaps I could write on the legend of Hamlet, the Dane, and how he avenged the murder of his heroic father."
    Henslowe sighed. "Write on what you will, so long as you write. Marlowe's name on a playbill still draws them in."
    Marlowe laughed. "For which you pay me enough to buy the buttons for one of my doublets. No. Mind not. I'll write my poem for Walsingham and get my money there. I would be finishing my poem even now at the Lord's home of Scagmore, had not urgent business called me to London yesterday." He sighed and grinned. "Be gone with you. When I have my play I'll come searching."
    The playhouse owner patted Marlowe on the shoulder, as if acknowledging a joke or thanking Marlowe for a favor.
    "But pray what did you think of my poem?" Will asked. His voice, strangled and small did not carry very far and missed Philip Henslowe altogether, as the theater owner turned his back and disappeared amid the throng.
    "He didn't listen to your poem," Marlowe said and smiled at Will as though this were droll.
    Will's stomach twisted in hunger. Did Marlowe not understand that this was Will's very life in the balance?
    "They never do. Why would you wish him to? They know nothing of poetry, the unfeeling philistines. Theater owners listen only to the soft tinkling of coins, the whisper of gold." Marlowe adjusted the gilded fringe on his gloves, and bent upon Will a look of disarming honesty. "No, do yourself better, friend. Write a long poem. Know you the classics?"
    Will's mouth went dry again. Marlowe who had translated Ovid's amores, asked if Will knew the classics. Even the Amores, Will had read in translation. "I have little Latin and small Greek," he stammered.
    "Well, then, enough, I say. Write yourself a long poem, say on the subject of Venus and Adonis, and have the lovers disport in the glades of Arcadia and any nobleman will give you coin for it. What, with your clever punning style...."
    "But my lodging--" Will started, intending to explain that he was already overdue in paying for that and must make some coin or perish.
    "Your lodging is not convenient to gentlemen's abodes?" Marlowe asked.
    Will shook his head. "I lodge in Shoreditch, at Hog's lane," he said. "Over the Bonefoy hatters there, and I--"
    He would have said more: that he owed money to his landlord, that soon he would be turned out; that he hadn't eaten in a whole day, that he knew no noblemen, no one who might help. He might so far have forgotten himself as to ask for the help of this stranger, of this crowned, gilded king of poets.
    But before he could speak, two men emerged from the crowd, like wrathful gods from stormy waters, pushing aside money changers, ballad makers, and smirking, tightly corseted bawds.
    The men flanked Marlowe, one on either side.
    Will stepped away from them.
    Somberly dressed, in black with no adornments, the two men looked like puritans.
    They were not the sort of men that Will expected to see with a playwright.
    Marlowe looked at one, then the other. His whole face contracted, aged, soured, as if he'd tasted bitter gall.
    One of the man had narrow-faced, thin looks that reminded Will of a rat in a house with a fast cat. The other one was round, but old, his face wrinkled and his chin sporting only a dismal growth of beard, like grass striving to thrive on poisoned land.
    Will expected Marlowe to dismiss them or make fun of them.
    Instead Marlowe gave them his full attention and a weary look and bowed to each one in turn. "Gentlemen?"
    "If you would come with us," the small one said, his voice echoing with an incongruous boom.
    Marlowe smiled, an oddly forced smile that lacked the mobility of his amusement and the malicious quickness of his teasing. It looked like the grin of a death mask, like the drawn lips and vacant eyes of a final rictus.
    Funny how, when people died like that their neighbors said they'd gone to their reward smiling. Will would never believe it again.
    Marlowe bowed as a statue might bow, all stiff poise and graceful dignity. "I am, as always, at the council's disposal, am I not?"
    The three of them walked off, the two men on either side, hemming in Marlowe. Despite Marlowe's smile, his easy walk, he looked like a prisoner led to the gallows.
    Will stared after them, blinking. It couldn't be. What would a playwright be arrested for? His writings?
    No. The Queen's censor approved all plays, did he not? So, how could something libelous get on the stage?
    No. Those men must be Kit Marlowe's friends, and Will's foreboding the fruit of his own sick thoughts.
    Hunger gnawed at his entrails like a sharp-toothed rat, and all dreams of work in the theater had vanished before Will's eyes like a lacy fog that, lifted, uncovers dismal reality.
    He rubbed his calloused thumb and forefinger across his eyes, trying to thus remove the veil that tiredness and faintness dropped in front of his vision.
    Earlier that afternoon, to fool his hunger, Will had taken a nap, and a strange dream had visited him, a dream of women-like beings, who'd hailed Will as a great poet and forecast such a great future for him.
    In his dismal waking reality such dreams must be dismissed with a smile and a shrug.
    He retraced his steps through the thronging multitude, past a woman selling grilled chicken meat, to the Si Quis door again.
    But the notice for the horse holder job was gone, as the man who'd pointed Henslowe out to Will.
    Will would find no work in London.
    He was too simple a man for this town. In Stratford, respectable men were honorable and people acted as they seemed. Nothing had prepared Will for the widespread deception he'd found in the capital. Each day in London, it seemed, Will had been ill used by someone. His purse had been cut, his meat begged away from him, his bread shorted, his room overcharged.
    Yet, he could go nowhere else. He lacked the money.
    He'd die in London.
    He might as well return to his lodgings. If he were lucky, his pious protestant landlord would already have gone to bed and would not demand the rent that Will could not pay.
    Thus, Will would have a bed for yet another night.

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Scene 2

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Arden woods, near Stratford-upon-Avon. These ancient trees are all that remains of the primeval forest that once covered all of the British isles. As befits their antiquity, the woods are the run of fairy kind and the abode of elf. On a clearing, amid the trees, a tall translucent palace rises, more graceful and perfect than any built by mankind. And in the gold-and-white-marble throne room, the king and queen of elfland sit on their gilded thrones, and receive a centaur ambassador from the far-off reaches of their realm. Tall, regal looking, Quicksilver sits on the throne, his long blond hair combed over his shoulder. He wears a magnificent suit of dark blue velvet and pale blue silk stockings. Queen Ariel, smaller than her husband, and paler, sits next to him, wearing a white dress that makes her look at once too innocent and too young for the heavy crown on her head.

    Running steps approached the throne room of fairyland.
    "Lord," a breathless voice called. "Lord, our boundary is breached."
    Quicksilver looked away from the ambassador of the centaurs.
    The centaur ambassador shrugged his broad human shoulders, while the glossy black legs of his horse half tapped uneasily on the marble floor.
    The ambassador had been in the midst of one of the long speeches beloved of his people, mingling Greek and English with artless effusion.
    Now he, like all of the court, turned their attention to the broad arched entrance to the palace, from which a breathless voice called, "Milord, milord, a breach. A breach in our defense."
    An elf careened through the marble archway that opened to the outside of the palace.
    His eyes wide with fear, his breath ragged, a tall, dark elf male stumbled into the room to collapse, prostrating himself in a panting heap on the red velvet carpet in front of the throne.
    The centaur ambassador cantered away from the newcomer, closer to the magnificent Lords, the bejewelled ladies of fairyland.
    The ladies' fans moved nonstop, their lips whispering fast behind those fans.
    Quicksilver stood, recognizing the elf, whose sturdy body betrayed human origins, but who wore the green velvet of Quicksilver's own private guard, and whose black hair sported the golden coronet of a prince of fairy land. "Malachite?"
    This was Lord Malachite, Quicksilver's childhood friend, his milk-brother, raised with the king at the feet of the late fairy queen, Titania. A trusted friend, a keen advisor.
    Quicksilver's pulse sped in alarm. Brave Malachite thus alarmed? What could this bode? Decorous Malachite disrupting a royal audience? It could mean nothing good.
    As the whole court recognized Malachite, the elven ladies fans moved faster. Whispers rose from amid the elven gentlemen. Queen Ariel gasped and leaned forward.
    Malachite knelt, gasping for breath, and half raised his face, his mouth working, trying to say something for which he had no breath. His great jade-green eyes were full of that speaking force which eyes have when lips lack the strength to utter.
    Together, Quicksilver and Ariel stood, together they descended the ten marble steps from the platform on which their throne sat, and together they flanked Malachite who, still kneeling, managed to draw in full breath that whistled through his words as he spoke.
    "If your majesty pleases," he said, turning wide eyes to Quicksilver. "If your majesty pleases, our defenses have been breached."
    Quicksilver knit his brows. If your majesty pleases. What a phrase. He pleased no such thing. "The defenses?" he said. "What defenses, man? Speak."
    For they were not at war, nor where there defenses around the realm that another realm might break through. No. Nor such realm as might wish to do it.
    "The defenses to Avalon, milord. The defenses set around this palace, around this forest." Malachite gulped in air like a starving man will devour food.
    Still kneeling, he straightened so that his knees supported his weight, the rest of him upright. His earnest face, with its too-sharp nose, its jade-green eyes, faced Quicksilver.
    "While we were on patrol, we sensed it, Igneous, and I, and Birch and Laurel. And then we saw the breach blooming, evil resounding through it."
    The muttering of the court stopped, every breath suspended.
    Quicksilver shook his head. He could not doubt Malachite. Yet the defenses could not be broken.
    These magical wards and spells and dread enchantments that Malachite spoke of had been placed around the capital of the magical kingdom, time out of mind, by Quicksilver's ancestors.
    They protected the source of the hill's magic, the collective strength of hill power.
    Humans and other natural creatures could wander through the defenses, in and out of the forest, and disturb nothing. Most humans, blind, ephemeral creatures that they were, couldn't even see the fairy palace and that great, gilded land that co-existed along the human world like two pages of a book, touching but never mingling.
    But any enemy with ill intentions would be kept out by these defenses, unable to come near the ancient, sacred palace of elven kind.
    There was no record, ever -- either in Quicksilver's memory, or in the collective memory of his race which, as a King, Quicksilver held -- of the defenses being disturbed, much less broken.
    This elven kingdom had fought and won and lost wars against other magical kingdoms. It had suffered encroachment by humanity and dissension within its ranks, and yet those defenses that protected the core of the kingdom had remained inviolate.
    Until now.
    "You must be wrong," Quicksilver whispered.
    Malachite shook his head, pale lips compressed into a straight line.
    Quicksilver's court fell mute. The ladies blanched so that their cosmetics stood out in vivid relief. The horror-stricken faces of the lords looked like wax above their vivid, colorful garments.
    Feeling his hair stand on end, Quicksilver bent down grasped Malachite's shoulder, and pulled forcing his lieutenant to stand. "What force is it, Malachite? What force?"
    "Oh, Milord it looks...." Malachite swallowed and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down on his long neck. "It looks like the force of the Hunter, milord, like the Hunter's magical power."
    The silence of the court broke on a collective gasp from many throats. Looking up, Quicksilver saw alarm, surprise.
    But most of all, he saw fear, fear of the Hunter, a dread creature of legend, said to punish the wrongdoers and collect the souls of criminals.
    The Hunter was older and more magical than elves. In the old days, elves and humans, both, had worshiped him as a god. Whether he was such, Quicksilver couldn't hazard.
    But Quicksilver had met with the Hunter face to face, and knew the creature's power to avenge, the creature's strength to do justice upon evil doers. And the Hunter had only visited this hill once in living memory, and that for dread purpose.
    Compared to the Hunter's power, all of Quicksilver's might and Kingdom, were as a child's wooden dagger to a man's sword.
    Quicksilver forced hearty heat into his voice and looked doubtingly at Malachite. "Come, come, you must be mistaken. The Hunter? What would the Hunter, that great Lord of justice want with us?"
    His voice fell hollow upon the still room.
    Quicksilver's father, Oberon, said that a quiet court was a sign of danger, that the flutter and gossip of fairyland were a sign of health.
    Around the vast hall, nothing moved, and Quicksilver felt the gazes of his subjects resting on him.
    Even the servant fairies -- the tiny, winged beings who did all the hard work of fairyland -- seemed to have stopped mid-flight, the iridescent pattern of light they used for speech, stilled.
    Malachite shook his head. "I know not, milord. I know not what he wants with us."
    He looked away from Quicksilver as if he suspected his King of some crime so foul that only the supernatural vengeance of the Hunter could expiate it. "Not in fulfillment of his natural function since that would not necessitate his breeching our defenses. They gave him entrance easily enough when he had business among us."
    Malachite spoke business with a heavy tongue.
    Only ten years ago, the business of the Hunter in fairyland had been the collecting of the king, Sylvanus, Quicksilver's brother. Sylvanus had committed parricide, and thus enslaved himself to the Hunter. He'd been condemned to becoming one of the Hunter's dogs for eternity.
    Quicksilver shivered. He was Sylvanus' brother. Could the taint extend to him? But he had committed no crime.
    "I must see this breach," Quicksilver said.
    "Milord, I will go," Ariel said. Small, slight, she stood, beside her Lord like a page boy who showed the meaning of courage to mature royalty. "I'll go see what the Hunter seeks."
    Did she mean to protect Quicksilver?
    But why would she think he needed protection from the Hunter? Quicksilver spun around, looking at his court, and in every eye he read horrified suspicion.
    Of what crime did they suspect him?
    Quicksilver said, "You dare too much, milady. You dare too much and you're too bold. I am the king, and I need no protection. Not from the Hunter."
    And though he shivered, thinking of the dark being, of the dark power he'd encountered before, he tried to look brave.
    In an indecent display of magical power, he frowned at his clothes, which changed, immediately, from silk to well-cured leather, and from tailored doublet and frail hose to crimson armor over well-padded tunic and breeches.
    Pulling his hair back and knotting it behind his head, he bowed slightly to his alarmed wife. "Milady," he said. "You must do the honors of my court, while I go to defend our kingdom."
    Ariel didn't understand, or chose to ignore his words. She stepped close to him and laid her hand on his leather-gloved arm. "At least let me go with you, milord. At least let me help--"
    "Milady, indeed, I need no help." Quicksilver shook her hand from his sleeve, forced a smile and turned to Malachite, giving his back to his Queen. "Igneous and Laurel and Birch?"
    "Waiting outside the palace, milord. But should you...." Malachite shot a glance at Ariel, who stood behind Quicksilver, and swallowed, but forged on. "Is it wise to risk your majesty?"
    Was it Quicksilver's fate today to suffer fools? Did everyone of his vassals believe Quicksilver a secret criminal?
    He exhaled noisily. "My majesty was made for risk and to brave danger that my people might be safe," he said. With a quick eye he spied the incredulous looks of his courtiers, and this tempted him on. "Come, Malachite. We'll go."
    Quicksilver kept one step ahead of Malachite, they jogged out of the broad throne room, and through the arched door to the imposing entrance staircase outside.
    On the steps, three guards, Igneous, a languid blond, and Birch and Laurel, dark haired twins, looked awfully young and awfully eager.
    They bowed to Quicksilver, their flushed faces and impatient breath like that of a maiden at her first ball.
    They knew not the Hunter, Quicksilver thought. They knew nothing of darkness nor the danger it engendered.

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Scene 3

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St. Paul's yard, the market place of choice for book printers and book sellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll, in their finery and velvets and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Along the center isle between the tents, Marlowe walks towards the outer gate, at a clipped pace imposed by the two men who flank him.

    Kit would not be scared.
    Over the gallop of his heart, he ordered his hands not to clench one upon the other, as though in prayer to the God in which Kit no longer believed.
    This was the second time in two days he'd been seized by envoys of the Queen's council.
    Only the day before, he'd been dragged from Scagmore -- his patron's home -- by one of these men, Henry Mauder, and brought to town in such a great hurry that he'd not been given the chance to change out of his indoor slippers.
    Treason Abroad, a pamphlet pinned to the side of a printer's tent slapped in the breeze, catching Kit's gaze as he was hurried past. The cover displayed a caricature of the King of Spain.
    Yesterday, Kit who had worked covertly for the Queen's council, now and then since his days at Cambridge, had invoked names of those he had served: the late sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil, the Queen's present secretary.
    Yesterday, Kit had been let go.
    But only to be apprehended again today. Had those names, then, so quickly lost their power to protect him?
    "What do you wish with me, milords?" Kit asked, casting his voice just so, attempting to keep it from showing shaking anxiety, attempting to keep his fear from the sure knowledge of all the men walking past, all those scholars looking for pamphlets, as Kit had done so many times before.
    Henry Mauder, on Kit's left, cast Kit a brief, triumphant glare. A messenger for the Queen's chamber, Mauder looked perpetually scared. Kit had learned, there was none so dangerous as a scared man.
    What had Henry Mauder found out? What did he know? What did he hold over Kit?
    All of Kit's sins, remembered, danced before his eyes with lewd display.
    Henry Mauder shrugged. "You are being taken for to answer some questions."
    A trickle of sweat ran from Kit's forehead, past the ineffective dam of his thin, arched eyebrows, to sting in his eyes.
    He walked at a fast pace, to keep up with his captors. He saw Tom Watson walking the other way.
    Kit's friend, Tom Watson -- also a secret service man -- who had defended Kit in street brawls and been the first critic of Kit's poems.
    Tom's eyes slid past Kit as though Kit didn't exist, his gaze not answering Kit's beckoning recognition.
    So word was out among secret service people that Kit was taken, Kit thought, chilled. Word was out that Kit was lost.
    "What questions can you have that you did not ask yesterday?" he asked the fat man at his right.
    The fat man didn't even look at Kit. Swollen and wrinkled at once, like a prune too long forgotten in sugar water, he looked unimportant. A mere secretary. A witness.
    Or a nobleman in disguise?
    In the secret service, one could never tell.
    Henry Mauder pursed his mouth into close semblance of a chicken's ass and tilted his head sideways. "I see, Master Marlowe," he said. "That heavy deeds weigh upon your conscience."
    Kit's throat seemed to close upon his breathing, and his brain felt as if it had become a single teeny drum echoing only What do they know? Out of his panic, Kit spoke blindly. "I'll not meddle with a conscience," he said, in reasonable imitation of his normal teasing tone. He forced his lips into a smile, again. "It makes a man a coward and it fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust himself to live without it."
    He must not show fear. Like rabid dogs, justices and officers of the crown were very like to smell your fear and, smelling it, to react to it like a hungry man to meat and bread.
    They were now almost through Paul's yard. Almost to the outer iron gate. Almost past any hope of rescue.
    Passing the tent that displayed the sign of the white greyhound, where John Harrison, printer, should be indebted to Kit for many weighty purchases and many, even more weighty profits, Kit found neither recognition nor interest in his plight.
    As though Kit were a dead man, already, the lid of his tomb closed upon him, cutting him off from the world and his imagined friends.
    Henry frowned again, his lips contracting into their narrowest moue, his eyes no more than slits on his suspicious face. "So, you had no conscience, then, when you wrote down that Jesus was not truly god's son, and twenty other such blasphemies, that you proclaimed while in college?"
    While Kit had been in college? Eight years ago?
    Beggar the fools, had they all gone mad?
    He stared, his mouth hanging open, while in his mind he reviewed the riot of mad living he'd engaged in at Cambridge: the drinking, the gambling and the carousing.
    With those, like a man given weak ale after strong wine, Kit had in vain tried to rinse away his memory of his first love, his elf love.
    He'd not stolen, nor killed, nor any other of those offenses that rightly might have brought a man to justice.
    As for what he'd said.... What might he not have said?
    The memory of the elf lady Silver, his lost love, had made Kit mad enough for anything. Even now, he shivered at the thought of her: dark silken hair, pale silken skin, and a mouth that tasted of new wine.
    He stared at Mauder. "Who told you this?" he asked. "That I wrote any such thing?"
    "Never mind who told us," Mauder said. "We have proof enough, in a paper penned by your own hand."
    Mauder smiled wider, showing crooked teeth, yellow and savage. A wolf's teeth, that would maul all. "Master Marlowe, what we have against you is right enough to see you three times hanged or disemboweled or quartered, or indeed all of them."
    Marlowe drew in a quick breath.
    Unlike the boy he'd once been, who'd entered Cambridge hoping to be a minister, Kit had lost all hope of paradise beyond. Death meant nothing, save only keeping company with worms. Of his shattered faith no hope at all remained, only the fear of something worse hereafter.
    "Well, then," he said, his voice sounding hollow and yet striving for a note of bravery. "Well, then, you can kill me but once. Are we headed, then to execution?" Even pronouncing the word made his voice tremble and he bit the inside of his cheek hard, willing pain to steady him.
    Outside Paul's yard, just past the gate to which they hurried, he saw a dark, carriage with no markings waited.
    Was this Kit's final conveyance?
    Henry Mauder looked gravelly at Kit.
    "We would prefer if you would do the Queen a service and reveal where you might have heard such foul heresies," Henry Mauder said. "For certainly you realize, the mouth of so dangerous a member of society must be stopped."
    "Do you not have friends," Henry Mauder asked. "Do you not have friends who speak such vile lies, as Christ not being divine?"
    Kit could not imagine of whom they spoke. He had very few friends. He took care not to form friendships he might be forced to betray.
    Mauder huffed, exasperated. "Did someone not read you an atheist lecture, that you have since then repeated to others? Was there not something called a School Of The Night that mocked the teachings of the church?"
    The words fell like a strong light upon Kit's thoughts. It seemed to him that the sounds around him receded and his head grew faint. He took a deep shuddering breath.
    A School Of The Night.
    By the mass, they were talking about Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh, who'd befriended Kit years ago, when Kit was only penniless student, Sir Walter Raleigh who had enlarged Kit's perspective of the world a hundred fold.
    These two men wanted Kit to denounce Sir Walter Raleigh for an atheist and thus doom him to death.
    They passed the gate of Paul's. In that precinct, where Kit had so often shopped, he'd found no one who'd hail him, no one who would talk to him, no one who would interrupt this fatal march. To some prison's oblivion.
    Once, before, at Cambridge, Kit had been arrested. He'd made friends with Catholic students, then, and the council had seized him and asked him what incriminatory things he'd heard of them. He'd refused to answer, all high-minded and strong-worded pride.
    But Kit's high-minded bravery had earned him naught.
    They had told him then that he faced death for conspiracy and association with known conspirators.
    At eighteen, Kit had not been ready to die.
    Where his actions did not, his fear made him a traitor. He had given the names asked of him, and admitted to things told him in friendship, said to him in secret.
    He'd watched his friends die on the gallows, happy only to have escaped.
    Thus had Kit been seduced to working for the crown and that first misstep, caused by fear and rewarded with gold had gained him other secret offices, till Kit's conscience, blunted like an ill-used knife, troubled him no more, or only a little sometimes, late at night, when the ghosts of betrayed friends seemed to gather round his bed.
    Still six months ago, when Thomas Walsingham had offered Kit a purse and lavish patronage, Kit had shed the coils of secret like a snake that sheds its skin. He'd told Cecil he was done with it.
    And yet, the business would not leave him be and like a sleeper returning to the same nightmare, Kit now found himself at the starting point of all his treasons. They wanted him to denounce a friend again. They wanted him to denounce Raleigh.
    This must be a plot of Essex's, Raleigh's rival for the Queen's attention and her affections.
    Two noble cocks strutted for an aging hen, and Kit would be caught in the middle of their bloody fight.
    If Kit denounced Raleigh, the council would let Kit go.
    Yet even Kit's ill-awakened conscience yet rebelled from his being called again to the office of traitor.
    And, besides, if the plot failed, Raleigh could avenge himself on Kit in a more terrible way than Essex could, for Raleigh was an imaginative man, as Essex was not.
    He took a deep breath. "If I'm guilty of atheism, then it's my own guilt," he said. "I will name no other."
    Mauder chuckled. "A fine stand, Master Marlowe. A fine stand." He stopped by the tall carriage and opened the heavy door, and waited for Kit to enter ahead of him.
    The carriage smelled of wet wool and sweat.
    Mauder and the other man climbed in after Kit, and Mauder secured the doors.
    The curtains were closed. An oil lamp fixed on a bracket lit the carriage. Mauder rapped on the wood near his head, and the carriage started moving, at a slow, funeral pace.
    "Have you heard of Master Topcliff?" he asked. "Master Topcliff, now." Mauder shook his head and smiled with admiration. "He's the Queen's own torturer and he can break a man on the rack in an instant. Or make him sweat with all his weight suspended from manacles. Or other things, some of them so secret only he knows them. Why, it is said he can cut into a man for days, and take one sense at a time from him, all without killing him, while, little by little, crippling him forever. What think you, Master Marlowe? Hard to hold a quill, when you have no fingers, hard to write when your eyes are gone, hard to court ladies when you have lost that which makes you a man.
    "You'd be advised, Master Marlowe, to confess now, before you're put to the torture, while you might yet walk away free."
    Kit felt cold, yet sweat dripped down his back and soaked through his fine velvet suit. He smelled it, rank and sharp.
    He could see himself, a shapeless cripple, crawling on the filthy street, a begging bowl clutched between his few remaining teeth. Alms for the cripple. What good then, his wit, his fine grey eyes, his Cambridge education?
    He shivered.
    Removing his right glove, he clenched both hands tight upon it, as if by squeezing it he meant to throttle his vile pursuers. "I have nothing to confess that could be said after torture -- or before," he said. Kit meant it as a courageous scream, but his voice echoed, instead, the cringing, begging tones of his cobbler father.
    To Kit's surprise, Henry Mauder sat back as though conceding the point.
    "It was at your lodgings that they told us you'd gone to Paul's," Mauder said softly.
    "At my lodgings?"
    Into Kit's mind, unbidden, came an image of the modest house where he lodged in Southwark and, with it, an image of Imp, whose real name was Richard.
    Save that Imp was barely seven and that his hair yet showed a trace of red without need for the artifice of henna, it could have been Kit's own face. And a good reason for that, as Kit had long suspected that Imp, the son of Kit's landlady, was the result of his desperate attempt to put off paying his rent long ago. A miraculous result of so base an act.
    They would have asked Imp where Kit was. Only Imp always knew or cared where Kit went.
    Henry smiled, showing bent teeth, yellowed like a dog's. "That is a fine boy your landlady has, master Marlowe."
    Kit flinched. Imp was Kit's religion. At the innocent's foot he worshiped and for that small creature had he such hopes that they beggared heaven.
    He wished Imp away from these unhallowed plots and trembled to know him so close to them, so near the sprung trap.
    "A fine boy. A pity if something were to happen to him, but a high spirited boy might do such things -- steal an apple, say -- as would render him only fit to be hanged," Mauder said.
    Kit's hands trembled. He'd sacrifice anything, anyone, give anything up. Anyone but Imp.
    In his life, he'd loved but twice. The first time, when he'd been barely more than a boy himself and he'd fallen in love with a dark haired elven maiden. And the second time -- quite a different love -- Imp, the result of Kit's pleasing sin.
    Yet, Marlowe could not betray Raleigh. Raleigh was powerful and rich enough to take revenge, and to avenge himself on Imp as well as Kit.
    Kit's head felt as dizzy as if he had worked long on a hot summer's day. He took a deep breath. It did not steady him.
    "Are you ready to talk now, Master Marlowe?" Henry Mauder asked, his gaze steady upon Kit. "Are you ready to talk and tell us who taught you vile disrespect of religion?"

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