Cry Murder! in a Small Voice Page 6
Walk by a churchyard? Climb such a tree? So children talk, to find the compass of their world, its outermost: the O of I. Wouldst kill a man? If he were killing boys?
And Calder, with his comb and mirror: “Why, would not you?”
“No, by this heavenly light!”
The other smiled. “Nor I neither by this heavenly light; I might do’t as well i’ the dark.”
Ben watched from the tiring-house: Will’s play of the Moor of Venice. Flawed, of course. That cheat with the handkerchief! Yet ’twas favored: on the morrow, ’twould be played at Whitehall for the King. Hedgework. And yet—ill-managed thicket that it was—the thing had flowers, it had thorns. It caught at him. Sing willow, willow, willow—But that was the boy. Not an angel’s voice, invulnerable: its beauty lay in frailty. That brief aspiring candle that a man could snuff.
He would leave, he thought, before that business with the pillow.
But Desdemona having died in play, would live, arise, take plaudits gracefully. Eat syllabubs. (For that, young Timmins loved to play at court. Would end as Falstaff, did he not take care.) He would enlarge his world, the circles of it spreading outward. He could lie with whom he willed or love in vain; could sicken, quarrel, or rejoice; hate, learn, grieve, travel—aye, and grow as round as Ben himself: until the circles ended on a farther shore.
That much he and Calder had done: to leave one fate to providence.
And Rafe? Had been shriven (though equivocally, Ben feared). Kept his garret, like a worm in a nutshell. Read much; acted passing well; began to patch old plays. Showed none as yet. Said only that he had bad dreams.
In secrecy that rank wet summer Ben had brought a priest to Peter’s corner of the no man’s land. His patch of graveyard stank of cats’ piss and decay. But Rafe had raked and weeded it, had made a Cairn of pebbles. He was mourned. This ground cannot be hallowed, said the priest. Nor can my doublet, though I lie in it, said Ben: I prithee bless the soul within.
No stone was raised to unregretted Oxford, though he lay in seemly ground. Yet Ben would pray for him, in justice—aye, even for one Nightborn.
Lumbering as discreetly as he might through upturned faces, he stopped and bought a sixpence of the crier.
The morrow was the eve of All Souls: he would pray at midnight for the soul of Peter Whitgift, and for all lost innocents. But on this night of Hallows Eve, he’d go to Peter’s ground, and lay an orange on his grave.
Whitehall, May Eve 1606
“Unsex me here,” said Calder. The bearded man—a lord, a soldier—stared in horror. Yet compelled: as if he looked into a furnace heart wherein an alchemy is born. The very light of it was in his face. A backward step, the blast upstirring in his hair. Its passion withering his man.
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty: make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access, and passage to remorse . . .
A listening, out there in the light-made dark: amid the candles, many-branched, consuming, there was one whose spirit burned undwindling.
Not this king.
The lady touched his gown as if the nighted velvet of it were a shadow on her body: snow and blood on snow
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall. . . .
’Twas gone. The visitation, presence, tang.
Yet it wreathed about the cauldron; when he played Macduff’s wife, light hand to the other’s dark, the thing hobgoblined in her son.
A megrim coming on, he thought: its harbinger this frost of fire in one eye, this blinding green. They came now oftener. He willed it: hold.
With Actus Quartus done, there was an interval for viols and cand-ling: the catastrophe withheld a space.
In the tiring-room, already in the lady’s nightgown, the player’s boy stood muttering her lines. He had them—thought he had them. Hoped he did. He’d lost her name. Aye, and the poet’s name. The king’s name and his company’s. This country’s. And his own. How strange the world seemed now, as if he stood upon a tower: far and clear and silent as the moon. As if he held, beheld it in an O of crystal.
Properties called out: “Boy? Art ready?”
“Changing.”
He willed himself to wake; stamped, pinched himself, rehearsed the players’ names. In a fulmination of tobacco: Robin, Nick, Augustine. Burbage, shrugging all his joints like a pull-string puppet. Bom, he sounded, like a church-bell. Bom. The Witches had enspelled themselves: were now a wood. Young Harry that was called an egg and shivered, had remade himself unflawed; he danced triumphant on a table, crowing. He would fall again. And Will, white-powdered for a ghostly king—’twas he that bore the glass—was everywhere, distracted.
“Rafe?” Will touched his shoulder, felt his brow. “Canst play, boy?”
“Ay, sir.”
From across the room: “Will? Will, the branches . . .”
“Thy taper? Good lad.” And the poet, having much ado, hurried away.
Now.
The player’s boy drew breath. I split. A lightning at his crown, an ecstasy. The spirit bound within him—light in body—woke.
No other saw the courtier in green. But in his sight, the room was filled with hawthorn: with its writhenness, its shade, and yes, its vixenish rank scent. And in the wick of it, his master was, and it was of him: still renewing as a cold green fire. It was rooted elsewhere.
Master? And he louted low.
A silence.
I have done thy will.
That monster who hath slain thy changeling boy
Is dead.
A glint, a lifting of the leaves: What boy?
And even in astonishment, the spirit thought: I am a fool. And said: ’Twas not for Peter’s sake, thy fury? But in play: a black ice on the Thames; a snow like velvet, lightning-slashed; a whirlwind, blinding as it flayed with ice; an earth so adamant with frost that graves in it could be not howked, to cover what it killed.
The green was winding on the spindle of itself: became the figure of a hornéd king. Who shrugged. I have coyed so many children. Mortals fade. This one?
Thou didst win him of Titania.
Ah, that. A pretty toy. A turn. And now a thunder in his smiling August. But I did hate that lording who usurped mine impery of boys. A mock of me. And thou didst work a pretty mischief in his taking-off. He mimicked. “I have given suck.” And laughed. The candles cowered. And for that will I remit thy service.
I thank thee, master. At a word, I fly.
Oberon held up his hand. But stay. I bound thee to the moon, to knot thyself within a woman’s secrets: who did die of thee.
I mind, the spirit said. As Calder’s son—that other I—could not.
Thou hadst of her thy carnal suit, but as a lending: forfeit.
What, this body? For the tiring-house. Scarce worn.
And of me, thy fatal skein, thy clew of sun: which now I do revoke. Give back thy sun.
A silence. Then: The orange? Spent.
Twelve quarters?
On a mortal boy. To light his way from hell.
A boy? They grow as thick as brambles here: the dew yet on them, to be picked, enjoyed, not let to wither kept. They die. Go, pick another.
It is Peter I love. The spirit bowed his head. Ah, master. I am meddled now, as dew is, falling onto blood. There is a taint in me of soul. Of mortal longings. I have hoped and grieved.
What, fly-blown? That was incorrupted?
Sir, I am equivocal.
Again, the candles dipped. A thunder shook the hall. Unkindly spirit. Go, love then and be damnéd.
Thou best know’st
What torment I did find thee in
Ay, sir.
Over and again. In Sycorax her pine; ere that, in Nimue’s involving thorn; in rowan, alder, ash, and sloe. In hell ’twas oak, a harpy riving and befouling me—O Peter, canst thou hear this tale? Didst know leaves bled? They are my voices and my eyes. No listener in the dark. No warmth, no weight, no breath of
him. No bed. And still this bondage: to be mewed in carrion, enthralled of memory and desire.
And Ariel cried out, O, I am bound in willow. Sweet the prisoning of flesh; and bittersweet, of spirit.
Wouldst thou stay and mourn? Take mummy for thy lovesick thought? Possess his memory as an apricock a worm?
A silence.
Or is it thou wouldst catch this soul of his? this will o’ wisp, this echo’s echo of a boy?
When I am bloodfast? Even if I die—
And thou wouldst die—
Unsouled. I cannot follow him.
Yet I can give unbinding. And forgetfulness.
Then what of Calder?
A knocking with a staff. “Boy? Devil take the boy.”
Thy stump? Is thunderstruck. Will fall.
The spirit doubled up, as if in laughter or in mortal pain. “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” I prophesy.
And I: as thou wert bound in him, his clay, so was he captive in thy spirit, fire and air. Unbound from thee, he yet may journey.
Even to that farther shore?
“Boy!”
Go now. ’Tis thy cue.
Wax fell. Time woke. His moveless candle spired. Her shadow following, the player’s boy walked out upon the stage.
A voice. “How came she by that light?”
Another voice. “You see, her eyes are open.”
“Yet here’s a spot.” His shadow’s voice.
He walked now on the bare boards through a wood of self. His company his leaves, each a leaf a word. The air was full of voices.
come,
come,
come,
come,
give me your hand.
A wind uplifted, whirling him away. He flew, the Will-words scattering behind him.
. . . done . . .
. . . undone . . .
And all to do.
[1] “Speak,” said the witch of Thessaly, “as I shall bid thee; great shall be thy gain if thou tell’st true: unbinding ever from all arts of sorcery.”
[2] “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .”
Acknowledgments
With extraordinary thanks to my colloquist Sonya Taaffe, whose Marlowe haunts me still. I had brilliant advice from Kelly Link, who conjured “moments of strangeness” and from Lila Garrott, who reshaped the narrative as she would plan a city walk. Leah Zander and Faye Ringel—witty and perceptive—gave me excellent close readings of the manuscript.
This story rose from a long series of LiveJournal conversations with Nineweaving’s bright and obstreperous friends. You dared me.
I give my Shakespeare teachers thanks for my good grounding, and absolve them of all blame.
About the Author
Greer Gilman’s mythic fictions Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales have (between them) won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Crawford Awards, and have been shortlisted for the Nebula and Mythopoeic awards. Besides her two books, she has published other short work, poetry, and criticism. Her essay on “The Languages of the Fantastic” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, and for many years a librarian at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.
Small Beer Press is an independent publishing house.
Recent and forthcoming titles of possible interest include:
Joan Aiken, The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
“The stories inside . . . make the commonplace sinister.”—Bookslut
Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, A Life on Paper (trans. Edward Gauvin)
Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award winner
“So nimble that he seems, without effort, to show us what is best in others.”—Brooklyn Rail
Greer Gilman, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”—Paul Kincaid, SF Site
Alasdair Gray, Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers
“Funny and profane, but with a shuddering anger to the politics.”—Jessa Crispin, NPR
Hal Duncan, The A-Z of the Fantastic City
“Loving, clever, entertaining, and of course . . . quite excellently written.”—Rich Horton, Locus
Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy: A Novel
Gaylactic Spectrum Award winner
“From suspense and intrigue to undying love and toxic jealousies.”—Lambda Literary
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo: A Novel
Mythopoiec, Crawford, & Frank Collymore Award winner
“Sprightly from start to finish, with vivid descriptions, memorable heroes and villains.”—Caribbean Review of Books
Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse: Stories
“Incisive, contemporary, and always surprising.”—Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2011
Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree
“Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and radiantly human.”
—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
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