Any Man So Daring Read online

  Any Man So Daring

  Sarah A. Hoyt

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Any Man So Daring © 2003 by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-040-8

  To my brother, Alvarim Marques de Almeida

  Prologue

  Scene: A stage made of shadow and roiling cloud. In the backdrop a massive castle stands, built of rock so dark that it absorbs all light to itself and thus appears to radiate darkness in a halo about itself.

  The stage faces a space vast enough to contain the universe and hide within it all the possible worlds. In that space, darkness deepens, a rich velvet darkness, alive like the secret dark of the womb, full of movement and expectation.

  An uncertain flicker of that which can scarce be called light glimmers, then disappears again, as if it had never been.

  Vague rustles echo, the sound of beings — men? — turning and shifting. Myriad small noises merge into a silence louder than any sound.

  It is a silence that makes one hold one’s breath, as one’s ear strains to listen to that which can’t be heard: the scurrying of thoughts, the gliding of time.

  Out of the dark castle, a being strides. He looks like a man, with short, curly black hair and classical features. Taller and more beautiful than human ever was, perfect as unmarred crystal and twice as cold, he looks immortal as a stone or a cliff is immortal -- immune to death and life both, and permanent in its indifference.

  He wears a velvet suit, after the Elizabethan fashion -- doublet with broad shoulders that narrows to cinch his waist, and hose that outline the muscular contours of his legs. Beneath the hose, stockings and well-cut slippers show. All of it is the dark red of old blood, almost black as it shimmers under diffuse stage lights.

  In the middle of his chest, where his heart should be, a black, gaping nothingness throbs and roils, as if all the nights of the world were there collected and from there reached to haunt the mortal mind.

  Tendrils of something rise from him. Were they visible, they might resemble vapor rising from ice exposed to the sun.

  But these tendrils are invisible. They can only be felt. Their expanding reach, beyond the creature’s presence, is the searching out of fear, the spreading of dread.

  For in this something -- the creature’s trail -- mingle both the divine cold of godlike indifference and that assured, immutable immortality which mere humans fear more than death.

  In his hand he carries a hunting horn. He steps, softly, to center stage, his steps small, controlled, as though he fears someone or something. But what can a creature such as this fear?

  The posture becomes him ill. It is too human for such a thing as he.

  “There’s no harm done,” he says, and looks furtively towards where the audience sits, like a school child in a crowded room, striving to remember his lessons for strangers. He looks from beneath a straggle of dark hair that almost covers his eyes, a gaze all too human, all too frightened.

  “No harm.” He looks over his shoulder, as his hand clenches, white-knuckled, upon his hunting horn. “Have I done harm? Can one like me do harm and make the mistakes to which human clay is prey?”

  He shakes his head and looks bewildered. “It is not possible. No. I’ve done nothing but in care of her. Of her, my dear one, my ... daughter.”

  A smile softens his expression, but he lifts his fingers to touch his own lips as though perplexed that such a human expression should dwell there.

  He lowers his head, so that his hair obscures his eyes. A furtive look veils his features, a furtive expression returns to cloud them, like a tenderness afraid of owning itself.

  He frowns at his dark-red boots for a breath, then looks up and audibly inhales.

  As if he cannot believe the words his own lips form, he speaks again.

  “She is ignorant of who she is, naught knowing of whence I am. She thinks I am her father and nothing more. She thinks she is my daughter, nothing else.” He shakes his head again. “More to know never meddled with her thoughts.

  “Her mother was a piece of virtue and her true father was the king of fairyland. She was his only heir, no worse issued. Her father, though, a wretch, scarcely deserving of the name, sold kingdom and soul to the dark forces that ever lurk at the edge of magic — and gave himself, indeed, to me, to my immortal, dark power.” He looks at the audience as he gestures with his free hand towards the space where his human heart would be, if he had one. It is a gesture of explanation and exculpation both — explaining that he is what he is and apologizing for it, in one. He clears his throat, a sound like thunder. He shuffles his feet upon the stage and from his soles issues sustained howling, like the winds upon distant mountain fastnesses.

  “I myself am the Hunter, the justicer everlasting, the punisher, the avenger, the supernatural sword that cuts through the heart of malice and slices off the head of ill-intent.” He shrugs and opens both his arms this time, as though to signify ‘tis not his fault that he is what he is.

  “And thus I collected Sylvanus, King of fairyland, whose several crimes cried to the heavens for vengeance.

  “But with him he brought the child, a small babe, untouched by evil, innocent of envy. What was she to me? Or I to her? What could I do with such a flower that even the exhalations of ancient evil could not touch?

  “And she... oh, a cherub. She did smile, infused with a fortitude from heaven. What could I have done? I took her as my own, and here I raised her.” With a gesture, he shines a light on the tall, impossibly perfect castle rising atop a black mountain. “Here on the far borders of fairyland, where neither elf nor man would seek her out nor disturb the perfect innocence of her childhood. Here, where no one would touch or hurt her, here I guided her first steps, comforted her crying and harvested her smiles, greedily, as the patient fisherman who waits besides the treasure-bearing oyster to steal the shining pearl. Thus I’ve learned the gentle heart of a human parent and been father and mother to a frail elf child

  “But living creatures cannot long dwell in my sphere of justice and vengeance. Without even knowing of them, she longs for her own kind.

  “And I, myself--” Again, he looks unnaturally bashful. “I feel a sadness, a desire to be again the unburdened beast I once was, who knew nothing but swift revenge and swifter cutting, and feared for no one, not even himself.” His immortal hand shakes as he lifts the horn. “Now I do fear for her, as I’ve never feared for whole countries, entire worlds, for rich civilizations or sparkling cities. I fear the blade that might sever a single one of her shining hairs, and more, I fear the evil — my own and others — that can tempt her to immortality darker and deeper than any death.

  “For the sake of her frailty am I made frail, and for the sake of her fear do I tremble.

  “Months on end have I put off the evil hour when I must perforce part with her, but the evil hour is now upon me. It will not pass without a pang, a pain and a rebirth.

  “Like any enchanted princess, my own Miranda must awaken from her dream of innocence and relearn the ways of her kind, and in their world risk virtue and life in that struggle from which no warrior emerges unscathed.

  “Yet the fairyland to which I must send her back roils in blood and tosses in strife, in the jaws of civil war, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  “And still it is her hour and she must go, to happiness or doom as chance may fall. For she is grown and within her stirs the need for a companion to her life, the need for her own path in the changing world.r />
  “As within me stirs the hunger to forget who I was these fourteen years and return to my simple, brutish, clean ways. My rounds of vengeance have long softened their visitation upon the troubled world. And that, as all perverting of the natural order, brings flourishing of evil in its trail.”

  He turns to the audience. From the amorphous dark comes not a sound: rather an amplification of hard-held silence — a composition of held breaths, of fast-beating hearts, of pulses rushing, rushing, in mad expectation.

  To them, the Hunter speaks, softly, in a confidential stage whisper. “Something I must contrive -- a way to help my princess to happiness and ease.” He nods at his own words. “Yes, this much I will do. The hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee open thine ear. Obey and be attentive. For here will unfold events to amaze your eye, astound your mind and stun your reason.

  “Listen. Watch. It is a story as old as the world and as new as the womb of tomorrow.”

  He lifts his horn to his mouth and blows. What emerges is not sound, but sudden wind, a flash of blinding light.

  The audience sighs, an expectant sigh. Its sigh trembles and transmutes, flutters and changes till it becomes the sounds of a bustling city waking up.

  Hunter and castle vanish. The stage light grows brighter, and a different scene emerges from the darkness.

  Scene One

  Early morning, in Elizabethan London. Down the myriad narrow streets, bordered by five-story-tall wooden houses, foot traffic scurries and carriage traffic lumbers. Ox-carts, laden with the produce and goods needed for the daily life of the teeming city, creep at an almost imperceptible pace. The occasional messenger on horseback, impatient of obstruction in his way, shouts and lays about him with his whip. From busy workshops, the clang of metal, the knocking of wood, the untiring noise of work reverberates, an unnoticed background to daily life. Though it be early, taverns are full, and from them emerges the clacking of cups, the unruly noise of drinking songs. The gleeful shrieks of children at play, the admonitions of their vigilant mothers weave joyful notes through this tapestry of sound. All is busy, all resounds with life in London -- save, it seems, a soberly dressed man who sits upon a narrow stool in a second-floor rented room. The room itself looks like a hundred other rooms let to respectable burghers throughout London: its furnishings compass bed and chair, clothes-storing trunk with ceramic basin and ewer atop. The only added thing is the narrow table at which the man sits, with paper and ink stone and newly sharpened quill. He is a middle aged man, but yet good-looking, his hair receding in front but curling over his collar in the back. His face is oval, his lips small, his nose well-shaped. He wears a dark wool suit, well cut but no more so than the suits of any middle-class man. From his sleeves and collar a correct amount of white lace peeks, and the single golden ring in his left ear is no ostentatious jewel. But it is his eyes — golden and as intent as the eyes of a falcon intent on the prey — that give him distinction and make him memorable. Those eyes, surrounded by the dark circles of a sleepless night, glare at a blank piece of paper. His name is William Shakespeare, and he is the best-loved playwright in London.

  Will glowered at the paper and at his hands resting on either side of it, with something between impatience and dread.

  Never had Will felt such fear of a blank page and the words he should pour upon it. Nightlong, he’d tried to write, yet the page remained virgin of any ink.

  Taking up the pen, he subdued the treacherous tremor in his right hand. He dipped the pen into the ink well which he had earlier filled with the grindings of his ink stone and water.

  Vortigern and Rowena, he wrote upon the virgin page.

  He knew what he should write next. This was the grave and most piteous story of the king of the Angles in northern Britain who, for a woman’s love, sold his kingdom to the Saxons.

  Will put his pen to his mouth and nibbled upon the feather end.

  Words poured into his mind. He could picture noble Vortigern beholding Rowena’s beauty and being stricken with awe, speaking, “But what may I, fair virgin, call your name, whose looks set forth no mortal form to view, nor speech betrays aught human in thy birth.”

  He closed his eyes and allowed his hand that held the pen to trace the letters of these words upon the willing paper. “Thou art a goddess that delud’st our eyes and shrouds’t thy beauty in this borrowed shape.”

  The movement of his pen stopped.

  The words were familiar, and yet...

  As he'd been many times before, in the night, Will was sure that someone stood behind him. Without turning, Will could feel someone there, a suggestion of laughter, a hint of amusement.

  A soundless voice played in Will’s mind the next line of what he had been writing. But whether thou the sun’s bright sister be.

  Will stopped, as the hair at the back of his neck prickled up, for the words had the manner, tone and voice of the late Christopher Marlowe, once a greatly admired poet, but dead now for three years. Dead and buried.

  Yet the feeling of his voice, if not its sound, ran through Will’s mind. It is Dido, Queen of Carthage, Will. My Dido, Queen of Carthage. Those lines are spoken by Aeneas to Venus.

  Can’t you wait till a man turns to dust in his grave before stealing his words?

  The mockery, the feeling of disdain were as much Marlowe’s as the tone of voice. When alive, Marlowe had been the playfellow of nobility, the best-dressed dandy of sparkling London.

  Will could swear that if he turned, dead Marlowe would stand there, behind him, in all of his marred elegance, his brittle grace.

  He would smile at Will, a mild, ironic smile made horrible by the wound in his right eye, and the blood trickling down his small, neat features to stain the white lawn collar of his well-cut velvet suit.

  Cold sweat dripped down Will’s spine. He shivered.

  He should turn. Turn and dispel this irrational fear.

  Turn, he told himself, turn. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil

  But his body would not obey, and he remained sitting, his hands on his table, his quill pen beside them -- black ink slowly seeping into the blond oak wood.

  Between his hands, the paper sat, with Marlowe’s words shining upon it.

  This was the first time that, unknowing, Will wrote Marlowe’s words in his own hand. But he’d long suspected that every word that trickled from his pen was indeed Marlowe’s.

  The words came through him as though originating in some unknown fountain, not within Will’s brain. And they had the cadence, the effect of Marlowe’s own plays.

  There hung the problem.

  For if the words were Marlowe’s that made Will a success, it was not Will’s success, but rather Marlowe’s. If Marlowe’s words had earned the gold that, accumulating, would soon allow Will to buy the best house in Stratford-upon-Avon; if Marlowe’s were the words that had created Will’s new found wealth, what right did Will have to use them to buy a coat of arms that his only son, Hamnet, might proudly display.

  Marlowe was dead. After life’s fitful fever, he slept well.

  But then, whence came his words, like pieces of himself, evading his pauper’s grave, at Trinity Church in Deptford, and filling Will’s brain and his plays and his purse?

  What a horrible form of grave-robbing this was, were it true.

  Will meant to steal from no man. Yet each of his words echoed the words of Christopher Marlowe, the greatest playwright the world had ever known.

  Warm air drifted through Will’s open window, stale and smelling of the city’s odd mingling of spices and refuse.

  Despite it, Will felt cold, with the cold of the grave.

  If Kit Marlowe haunted Shakespeare, why did he do it?

  Will had been but an acquaintance of Kit’s, not close at all.

  Spirits walked for many reasons: for injury done to them — aye, and Marlowe had been murdered. Yet, Will was not one of the murderers. For something left behind
— and who knew what Marlowe might not have left? Yet, force, Will did not know it, nor did he have the object or the riches. For the craving of grace and forgiveness — and Marlowe, who in life had blazed forth atheistic opinions, might well need that. But Will neither judged Marlowe nor condemned him, understanding the man’s brittle genius and the doomed love that had led him astray.

  But maybe this was different. Maybe the reason Will felt Marlowe so close to him was that Will, and Will alone among mortal men, knew the truth of Marlowe’s death.

  Most people believed -- and not a few averred as though they’d been there -- that Marlowe had been killed in a tavern brawl over a bawdy, disreputable love, variously given as male or female, as best suited the speaker’s indignation.

  Moralists and puritans had rushed to see in Marlowe’s death a judgment on Marlowe’s mad, carousing life, on Marlowe’s too-free opinions, his too-analytical mind.

  Yet, Will would wager that the divine weighed men upon different scales from those of sour-lipped envy.

  If those who spoke could but guess, if they could but know that Christopher Marlowe had died in a brawl over the throne of fairyland, in a fight to preserve the world from the grasp of a dark power! Oh, if they knew that Kit’s death, his sacrifice, had earned freedom for them and their children, aye, and their great-grandchildren, too, how they would revere Kit Marlowe, how his cynicism and mocking would be forgotten.

  And, remembering Kit Marlowe, how they would recognize, in each of Will’s words, the tone, the cadence, the fall of Marlowe’s words. Will had written the Merchant of Venice. Aye, and it was like Marlowe’s Jew Of Malta.

  And in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus there echoed the powder and blood feel of Tamburlaine The Great, with which Marlowe had stormed and conquered the London stage.

  And there, upon his Venus and Adonis, and his Rape of Lucrece, the long poems that had settled his literary fame, how come no one saw the rhyme and word, the very turn of phrase that Kit Marlowe would have used?