It came not as a thrust, or as the lingering accommodation that gentleness had almost seduced Kit into expecting. But one massive downsweep of those incredible wings hurled them upright one, and then another, as the pale perfect mouth found Kit’s again and Lucifer stood in a fluid arc, and Kit was pierced.
“Christ,” Kit whispered, impassioned, hearing his own awe and fear, disbelief thick in his voice.
“Tis not Christ thou wilt bear on thy back.” Amusement, wryness. Wrathful irony, almost a lover’s teasing. Lucifer’s hair tumbled down around Kit’s face, bearing his smoky, bitter, musky scent.
This is not real. This is not happening. There is no Devil. There is no Hell. God is love, and God judges not what is done in love Christ, Christ, Christ… . Rapt. Speaking in tongues. Possessed. Yes, possessed.
“God.” Warm arms and wings supported him. “God judges. And He is not pleased with His creation, for it can never echo His perfection and His will. He does not wish thy love. He commands thine obedience and fear. The lord thy God i sa jealous God, and thou wilt have no Gods before him.”
Bitterness? Sorrow? Oh, but that mouth on his throat, on his breast. The effortless puissance bearing him up. A decade and more of rationalization stripped away by that calm, gentle voice in his mind. Passion on him again, divine will, and remembering the agony that had come with the realization that whatever God had made of Christofer Marley, that Marley was a thing whose love the God of the Church would never return. A calling. The craving they named vocation. Put away now with other childish things. Raped away from God, and So this is what Leda felt, which made him giggle. Kit leaned into the embrace, trusting himself to those powerful arms, body decisive while his heart struggled and tore itself in his breast.
“No Gods before Him. Not even love. To love God completely, thou must set aside all others.” The Devil moved in Kit, and Kit wept and clung. “Christ the Redeemer.”
“God’s Redeemer, perhaps.”
“Oh God, forgive me.”
“First He would have to forgive Himself. And that, I assure thee, he will not.”
“Father of lies. Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ.”
Silent laughter. “Is that the name thou chooseth for me?.” A lingering caress. “Tis sweet, isn’t it, child?.” ‘Did you like it, puss?’ But even that pain was so far buried that Kit had no answer, no speech, no reason; was too far lost for anything more eloquent than whimpered sacrilege. Died blaspheming,he thought, and laughed out loud, and cursed again.
The Prince of darkness is a Gentleman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear
Will dug all ten fingers to the knuckles into friable loam, sand gritting under his nails, leaning the weight of his shoulders behind it. The earth was black as Faerie ink; he unearthed another turnip and rubbed crumbles between his hands. Neither the resin of pine needles nor the bitter sweetness of the fertile earth soothed the ache in his breast, as sharp as it had ever been for all he’d carved the notches of too many winters to count at a glance on both doorposts of the cottage. It seemed the ever-freshness of his grief was one of Hell’s many charms. Or perhaps it was simply being left alone with it; no one to speak to but the self-murdering trees, no way to express his soul except through the quill and paper Lucifer had left him.
The ink which stayed ever fresh in the horn, for all Will would not set a pen into it. ‘This is Hell, nor am I out of it.’ He thought perhaps he would have preferred the rack, the irons, to the slow wearing of days on his will like water on stone. Irons indeed: then I must be an iron Will, and let me rust shut.
He stood, hands trembling now the work was done, and picked his turnips up. The irons. Aye, which led him to think of Kit’s smooth chest, and the mark etched there that Will’s palm could just cover, if he angled it properly. The irons, indeed. And the irony: when he troubled himself to count, fitting his shaking hands into the notches he had carved in the posts beside the peeling blue-gray door, Will knew that Annie must be gone by now, Susanna and Judith quite possibly grandmothers, Elizabeth cold in her grave and Mary Poley and Richard Burbage and thank Christ Robert Poley and Richard Baines and that thrice-cursed old bastard Edward de Vere as well.
The years slipped by like seasons; the seasons slipped by like weeks; the weeks slipped by like water. And still Will ate turnips and snared rabbits and lived (if it was living) among the quiet of the trees who had gotten what they wanted and perhaps found it less than satisfying and longed for someone to speak to. Someone to hold. Somewhere, he thought, carrying his turnips into the cottage, somewhere Kit is alive. And Morgan. My gentle betrayers. Oh, unkind, William. He laid the turnips on the low table, recalling the glow of banked embers, a young man’s plea. What do you take your Marley for? He had a knife and a hatchet; the rhythm of the words came to him as he worked, the thud of metal on a stump cut into a butcher’s block, the verse cold and lovely as a winter freeze among his lonely pines. That you were once unkind besuits me now no, befriends. That you were once unkind befriends me now. Once unlike yourself, once untrue, once unfair. Unkind. Aye. There under the pines, under the arching branches of dead souls slain by their own pettiness, their own spite, their own grief and helplessness and pain.
Pines. How aptly named. Oak, he hate.
He would not think on it. If he thought, he would think on vengeance. He would think on Kit, immortal, and on Annie, now surely dead. If he thought, he would think on fifty years alone in a forest without end. He would think on how Lucifer wanted him to write, and how he would not do what Lucifer willed of him. How he would not pay the price, even though he knew, somehow, if he did, his horizons would broaden. That the Devil would reward Will if Will gave up that piece of himself. Of his soul. If he served. He would think on how there was someone left alive to take his vengeance for Hamnet on, someone in Faerie, and how poetry was the only tool he had to do it. He would not think on it, because he would not think on any of those things. His knife made cubes of the turnips, cubes of the rabbit. He browned them in the fat left from a pheasant and added an onion from the braid on the wall. Housewifely tasks; he’d learned them all well. And for that sorrow, which I then did feel, / Needs must I under my transgression bow
The words came; he could not stop them. They chewed at his heart, another pain among many. They gnawed at his breast, bosom serpents, venomed worms. He had no need to busy himself so; the pantry would fill on its own, the garden would unweed itself. Will himself had no need, it seemed, to eat unless the desire took him, although his hands did tremble with his illness when he had no task to set them to. Idle hands are the Devil’s playground. Idle hands had a tendency to stray to the well-appointed desk, to lift the white pen that was a twin to the one Kit had found under the covers of his bed. Unless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel. For if you were by my unkindness shaken…
Perfect words. Better than anything, Will knew, anything he had written before. As I by yours, you’ve passed a hell of time; / And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken / To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. Kit was alive. Somewhere. In Faerie. And his crime was ever less than Will’s; Kit had had no vow of marriage to forswear. Kit had made no promise of fidelity at all. Worse, worse. Kit had offered, and Will had refused him. Only to react like a kicked whelp when he discovered that Kit had believed what Will had told him. Kit, who was alive. Kit who would always be alive. As alive as the Fae who had killed Will’s only son. Alive and grieving. O! that our night of woe might have remembered / My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits, / And soon to you, as you to me, then tendered / The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!