Ink and Steel

Act II, scene xv

Rome if thou take delight in impious war,

First conquer all the earth, then turn thy force

Against thy self: as yet thou wants not foes.

M. ANNAEUS LUCANUS, Pharsalia, First Book (translated Christopher Marlowe)

It begins in a confessional at nightfall. The subtle bitterness of myrrh, the richness of frankincense, the sweat of the penitent lingering in age-calmed wood. Kit bows his head, leans close to the grille. Above the frankincense, the perfumed soap of the Spanish priest on the other side. With the cloying scent came cloying fear, knotting his belly like hunger, although he is successful. Accepted. Soon, he will be going home.

Christ, not this one. Not this

Kit heard his own voice, latin, the words of ritual. He fixes his eyes before him. Tis a good ritual. Comforting.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Indeed, my child, you have. But fear not. Your penitence will be adequate before Heaven.”

English, and a voice he knows. Blurs, a jumble of unclarity, of time slowed beyond time. The door of the confessional slides open, Kit blinking in the light as he moves to stand. Each heartbeat distinct as enormous hands close on his wrists, implacable as iron manacles, haul him up; he tries to kick

Kit: slender, not tall, barely bearded, without yet a grown man’s shoulders. He might break nine stone after a hearty supper. Richard Baines simply lifts him off his feet like an ill-tempered child, like a spitting virago, veins bulging in Baines muscle-ribboned forearms as the black robes fall back. Baines bounces him, once, and nausea fills Kit’s throat as his shoulder rips inside like twisted cloth snagging on thorns.

“There’s our cat, Fray Xalbador. Oh, don’t like that much, do you, puss? Got your claws now.” Baines shakes Kit; white flashes occlude Kit’s vision. Hands fumble his belt as the Spaniard claims his dagger.

“Where shall we have him, Fray?”

The priest’s accented voice. “The basement, I think. Tis pity my tools are not here.”

Baines answers, “Mine are.” Baines iron rings pinch Kit’s flesh. The skin at his wrist breaks; blood trickles. He fights, but the other Kit, who watched him, already knowing that Kit curled tight and hugged himself in resignation. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

“I’ll see him settled, wildcat!” another bounce, with a kind of a twist to it, and this time Kit screams as his shoulder pops with a sound like a drawn cork, “well, that should make him easier to manage.”

“Broken?”

“Just slipped, I think. Fetch the others, Fray Xalbador.”

This Kit chokes on pain, keening the agony as Baines twists his dislocated arm behind his back to make him march This Kit thinks “Others. This is the core. These are the names Sir Francis needs. ALL I have to do is talk my way out of this. ALL I have to do is live through this.”

That Kit wept for his own innocence. He blinked, and this Kit closes his eyes in pain and opens his eyes in pain, in a room prepared with a half-dozen torches, two braziers, and a fireplace for warmth. Dark, clean, the floor of rammed earth and the walls of mortared stone. Long tables against the walls, and Kit sees chalk, a small heap of candles, twine, and some things he can’t identify as Baines shoves him to his knees and twists his left arm behind him. He opens his mouth to argue, and Baines bends the arm higher. Not much, an inch.

Kit wheezes with pain and locks his tongue behind his teeth. And then there are men in the room, and he can’t beg if he wants to, because spiked iron fills his mouth. He did know the names of four of the other five. Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver. The last one is a slender-hipped, broad-shouldered blond, barely a man in years, whom Kit would have eyed with some appreciation under other circumstances. Catesby, Fray Xalbador calls him, and Baines calls him Robin.

Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver. Catesby. Richard Baines. Xalbador de Parma. Easton, Carter, Saunders, Silver I can remember that.

In the dream, the rough iron of the bridle already wears at his cheeks and nose. In the dream, the ruin of his right eye weeps blood and matter down his face. In the dream he kneels quietly at Baines feet, domesticated. ‘And rough jades mouths with stubborn bits are torn …’ History had been different, but dreams were what they were. Puke with that thing in your mouth, Kit, and you’ll die of it.

Kit strains to overhear the quiet discussion without attracting Baines attention. The Spaniard seems to be instructing the others with careful hand gestures. Kit presses at the gag in his mouth experimentally with his tongue, moans as fresh blood flows. Baines catches the iron straps around Kit’s skull in a free hand and gives it a little shake, playfully rattling the scold’s bridle, bruising Kit’s cheeks and tearing at his mouth. Baines reaches through the bars and smoothes Kit’s hair, leans down and whispers ‘Holla, ye pampered Jades of Asia, / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?’

Catesby, the splendid blond, turns from the rest and crosses to Baines, looking down at Kit with something like dismay. He’s a bit unprepossessing. Baines laughs, petting.

“He’s a poet. One of their sorcerer-playmakers, a darling of Walsingham’s. Already known around Cambridge for his filthy translations of Ovid, and London for a bloody travesty of a pagan play. Aren’t you, puss?” Another little shake, a caress, and more blood. This Kit nods, biding his time, a chip of tooth working into his gum.

“Good puss. Pick of the litter. It’s distasteful.”

“Twill break their black arts.” Baines jerks his head at Fray Xalbador. “Between me and he, you’ve two priests who say it. Desperate times.”

Catesby smiles bitterly, as that Kit thought but you weren’t there. It was only the five of them. Panic. I would remember if it had been six. I would remember. This is not how it happened. Catesby had been at Rheims, arriving just as Kit took his leave forever.Kit remembered the worn sword, the good clothes, the expansive grin. But Catesby had not, could not have been in that close basement room.

He still speaks. “It doesn’t sit well. But, to the glory of God and the Holy Mother Church.”

“To the glory of God,” Baines answers. Kit doesn’t think Catesby feels the lie in the big man’s words, but Kit does. Feels it in the way his hand tightens on Kit’s tattered arm.

Does Will know how much I left from that I told him?

Which will it be, the pentangle or the circle of Solomon?

Oh, God. No. Marley, I conjure thee, awake.

The braziers smoke as they make him ready, twisted rodstock heating in each one. It’s copies of the poker with which he’d threatened Will, not the irons de Parma actually used, and I fought. I fought and they had to drag me, he goes docile and willing to Baines command. It would be easier if they would bend him over the table, like Edward, so he can’t see their faces. But they want him on his back.

That Kit remembered how he had turned his head, cursing, pulling against the agony of Baines hands, and sunk his teeth in the base of the big man’s thumb. This Kit tries, but the weight of his head presses the bands of the bridle forward, drags the barbs on the bit across the soft ridges on the roof of his mouth in a mockery of a lover’s kiss. Still, that Kit remembered the taste of Baines blood with bitter triumph, and Baines mockery as he inserted the bit.

“Now, puss, if thou’rt going to bite we’ll have to muzzle thee sooner instead of later.”

“A fair idea,” the Spaniard had answered, “to stop his pagan poetry in his mouth. It’s why I had it with my mage-tools. That and in case we laid hands on a fay after all.”

Disorientation, time out of joint. Baines, laughing at the wound on his hand as the Inquisitor fetched the bridle. “Jesu Christi, she even fights like a wench.”

They come one by one into the circle and de Parma seals them one by one within. They take turns, every expression etched on Kit like the scars on his breast, his belly, his thigh. Catesby dispassionate, Silver mocking, Easton with closed eyes and a bitten lip except in the dream, it’s Edward de Vere who rapes him, and sweet Tom Walsingham, and over them falls the shadow of vast, bright wings. He feels the power they filter through him, the cool edgy blade of a magery so different from his own visceral poetry that he has no name for it. As different as blood-tempered, cross-hilted steel is to a crown wrought of raw reddish gold and fistfuls of the gaudy jewels of Asia. And through it all, Richard Baines, hands as sure as irons pressing him to the table, a soft voice in his ear encouraging him, making a mockery of comfort, calling him kitten and puss as it bids him be brave, good puss, it will all be over soon. And he cannot even scream.

God, enough.

God didn’t seem to be listening. Again.

Consummatum est

When they release him he rolls to the floor and lies there, drools blood as fast as it fills his mouth, mumbles through the agony, amazed his tongue will shape words at all. His knees curve to his belly. His chin curves to his chest. The bloody earth of the floor clings to his bloody flank.

“You’re for the Queen’s destruction,” he rasps. The priest nods, unafraid of him. Unsurprising: Kit couldn’t stand if the roof were on fire. “We are.”

“Let me help.”

“You hate her so much? I’m not inclined to trust you right now, poet. But you’ve earned a quick garroting; I’m not an unreasonable man.”

“Was not…” He spits again, smearing at his bloody mouth with a bloodier hand. “Was not Job tested in his faith?” The priest watches, unimpressed. Kit rolls prone, whimpering as his left arm touches the floor. He shoves himself upright with his right, drags forward, more on his belly than his knees. He slumps down on the chill earth and kisses the man’s boot with his broken mouth.

“I beg you. Let me help.” It isn’t enough, and he knows it. He closes his eyes. Both of them.

“If we have a chance to complete the wreaking in London,” Baines says, over the sound of the well-pump he works to wash his hands, “it would help to use the same vessel. Even more if he were willing, of course. Although mayhap our little catamite liked it, considering his tastes. Did you like it, puss?” He crouches beside Kit almost congenially, and tousles the poet’s blood-mattedhair with clean, wet fingers. A look passes between Baines and de Parma that Kit does not understand, does not wish to understand.

De Parma turns away. “Then let him live.”

This Kit covers his face with the hand he can move, curling like an inchworm at the touch, and that Kit finally managed to wake, whimpering, clinging to a pillow wet with sweat and red with the blood from his bitten tongue.

“God in Hell,” he said under his breath, checking guiltily through the darkness to be sure Murchaud still slept.

Kit rolled against the Prince-consort and buried his face in Murchaud’s hair until his gorge settled and his heartbeat slowed.

A nightmare. Nothing but Queen Mab running her chariot over your neck. He’d lived. And three weeks later he had stood in front of Sir Francis Walsingham, his arm still useless in a sling, and reported that the Queen’s enemies were resorting to sorcery and had fully infiltrated Essex’s service. And that he, Kit, had engineered a connection to one of them and the guise of a double agent. He’d worked shoulder to shoulder with Baines, ostensibly as a turncoat on the Walsinghams like Baines himself until 1592, in Flushing, where he had somehow slipped and given away the game and Baines had nearly gotten him hanged for counterfeiting. The only thing that had kept him sane those five years was the knowledge that one day he would look Richard Baines in the eye as a hangman slipped a noose around his neck. And the determination that nothing, nothing that had happened at Rheims would change Kit Marley. And what a fabulous lie that was, sweet Christofer. Because he had walked away from his chance at Baines in London, so terrified of the man he couldn’t have looked him in the eye if it meant his salvation.

Murchaud smelled of clean sweat and violets. Kit lay against him in the darkness and tried without success to chase the reek of frankincense from his lungs.