“Not a full one, I think,” Kit answered. “Remember old Doctor Dee, Gloriana’s astrologer?”
“I remember his beard,” Will said, picturing its white luxuriance. “The Queen used to ride out to his house on horseback and scandalize the court. He’s still alive, you know, though James won’t have aught to do with him.”
“Is the old bastard?” Kit’s smile shone through his voice. “I always liked him better than Northumberland. And he was right more often, too. Thou knowest his horoscopes for Elizabeth were sealed as state secrets?”
“Out of favor now, though.”
“We could ride out and see him, as Elizabeth would have – ” Kit’s voice swelled, a momentary flight of fancy on what a pageant that would be. And then he stopped himself, and shivered. “Nay. Unwise at the extreme.”
“So what would he say about that?” The moon continued to darken, even as the eastern sky grew pale. A third of the disc had vanished into shadow, and Will caught his breath at the beauty of it, and the danger. “That’s a portent, Kit.”
“The sky is full of portents.” Kit stood, and walked from one wall of the garden to the other, studying the sky. “But that’s an especially bad one. The moon is devoured in the dragon’s tail, or so the expression goes–the moon, astrologically speaking, equates the psyche.”
“What does it mean?” Will’s voice, still and small. He moved to stand beside Kit, as if the warmth of another body in the chill fall air would make a difference to his pounding heart.
“It means,” Kit said, “that the Mebd is right. And the war is nearly on us. And everything we have believed in, fought for – Gloriana, England, Faerie–is coming to an end.” He dropped his eyes from the sky; Will could see the yellow witchlight gleaming behind his right eye when he turned. “Will, just remind me. What day did Elizabeth die?”
“March twenty‑fourth,” Will said. “Very early. Or perhaps late the night before.”
“The last day of the year,” Kit said softly. “The sun would have been at fifteen Aries when she died if she had held on one day longer. The brave old bitch almost made it.” Tears clotted whatever he would have said next.
“Kit?”
Nodding, a sniffle in the darkness as the moonlight reddened and dimmed.
“I don’t know what that means,” Will said at last, plaintively, and was relieved when Kit laughed and threw an arm around his shoulders, as if they both needed the support.
“Fifteen Aries is when you sacrifice a King,” Kit answered. Whispered, really, though it had almost the quality of a pronouncement to it. “So that his blood may replenish the land, and make it strong. ”
“Oh,” Will said, only half understanding the shiver that rocked Kit’s body. “You’re saying she died for England.”
“I’m saying she tried her best.” Kit folded like a dropped marionette and sat down on the ground, his knees drawn up and his arms “wrapped around them to pull them close. “I’m saying we’relosing, and there’s our proof. That” – a shaky hand waved at the setting, half‑eaten moon – “means the end of an old way, and violence, and upheaval.
Will sat down too, and cleared his throat. “Couldn’t the end of an old way mean the Prometheans, just as well?”
“It means Elizabeth,” Kit said with quiet conviction, both his fists pressed against his chest as if his heart might burst right between his ribs, and there was no arguing then.
Will had cause to remember those words a fortnight later on October the second, when broad noon turned to darkness over London Town as if a tarnished silver coin had been slid across the disk of the sun. A strange twilight strangled the city’s voice to desperate murmurs as every foot paused, every voice hushed, every eye lifted and then quickly fell again, unable to bear the light of even a half‑occluded sun.
Will shaded his eyes with his hand, pressing his forehead to the rippled glass and lath of Tom Walsingham’s casement window and tilting his face to the side. “It seems a year for ill omens, ” he said softly, and did not look down until Tom came to draw him away from the window.
“What, a cloud across the sun?” Kit came up too–the three of them were alone, Ben and George having been left home from this particular council of war – and glanced through the window. “Ah. I don’t suppose I missed a rain of fire while I was away? ”
“Nay,” Will answered, and pulled Tom toward the door. ‘That’s a terrible sight.”
“Don’t look upon it,” Kit warned. “Wilt burn thine eyes. Tom, have you smoked glass?”
“Nothing so useful,” Tom answered as the three men emerged from the garden door into a world that seemed to Will even stranger and more alien than Faerie. In those places where gold and auburn leaves still clung to the trees and bushes, the dappled shadows moving underneath them formed diminishing crescents, layer on layer of moving images.
Will thrust his hand under the branches of an oak, watching the gleaming crescents shrink upon his skin. The air seemed thicker in its darkness, and hung with sparkles like a summer night. “Camera obscura,” he said, gesturing Kit and Tom to join him. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, he heard someone sob and the sound of a window breaking. “Look at this. The leaves make the pinholes.” He almost fancied he could feel the light brushing his skin as the leaves tossed in time with the breeze.
“Sweet buggered Christ,” Kit said. “I need my books.”
“What books?” asked Tom alertly.
“Oh, I had – ” He paused, as if considering. “A Ptolemy, and Brahe’s Die Stella Nova,an Agrippa, some of Dee’s work – ” Kit stopped and looked around, realizing that Tom and Will were staring. “Research,” he said. “Faustus.In any case, I loaned them all to Sir Walter and he never gave them back. A most notorious thief of books, that one–”
Tom coughed into his hand. “I have some volumes of Ficino.”
“Please?” Kit looked up, exactly as he had admonished Will not too, and closed his left eye. He seemed to pay no notice as Tom returned to the house.
Will cleared his throat, the unease swelling in his belly. “Kit?”
Kit looked down and smiled at Will. “Fear not,” he said. I doubt an eye that won’t be damaged by a knife will be blinded by the light of a half‑dimmed sun.”
“What art thou seeking?”
“The way the moon moves,” Kit said, taking the book from Tom’s hands when Walsingham returned with it. He angled the pages to catch what light he could, but read with ease words that Will would have found incomprehensible in the unnatural twilight. He watched as Kit riffled pages, seeming to know what he was searching for even if he did not know quite where to find it.
“Sidereal,” Kit murmured, and some other words that meant nothing to Will. Tom watched with interest, hands on his hips, head cocked to one side and the wind ruffling his silver‑streaked auburn hair. The strands too made pinholes as they rose and fell; as the eclipse ground toward totality, Will watched the tiny crescents scattering Tom’s face first fade to nothingness and then reemerge as twisting rings of light.
Will risked a glance upward and caught his breath at the image of the sun occluded, a jet‑black round crowned in twisting fire that reminded Will of Lucifer’s writhing, shadowy tiara in reverse. “Sweet Christ,” he swore, but it was more of a prayer, really.
“Ah,” Kit said, and clapped the book shut like a pair of hands. “No,” he said. “Not good at all.”
“It’s an omen, then?”
“Yes, and as ill as you’d like to make it. ‘Tis, again, a marker of the end of things, and an overthrow of balance and harmony. If Elizabeth and her famous temporizing were a force to keep England in symmetry, and in accord with God and nature–”
“Aye?” Will’s feet would not quite hold him steady.
Kit shrugged, and handed the book back to Tom. “You are witnessing the end of her power, gentlemen. And the death of whatever peace our sufferings, and those of the poets and intelligencers who came before us, and the Queen’s cool brilliance at the chess of politics, bought for Mother England.” Kit swallowed and looked down. “The sun will be in Sagittarius at the end of this month and the beginning of the next.”