Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

This story takes place in the time line of my Shakespearean novels entitled (as of this writing at least) Ill Met By Moonlight (published October 2001), and (upcoming) All Night Awake and Any Man So Daring. It would happen between the second and third novel. The fact that Shakespeare had a much younger brother who, emulating him, went to London to try to be an actor was too interesting a detail to pass up. One has to wonder if he had the same talent and what would have happened if he’d got to use it.

The winter of 1602 lay like cold death upon London, turning the great Thames into a frozen blue vein and putting waxen whiteness on the facades of the five-storied buildings.

St. Paul’s yard, that great market of books and pamphlets, lay hushed under the great frost, its few customers hurried and harried, exchanging their few coins for the latest play by Master William Shakespeare, that sweet swan of the Avon, or the latest moral excoriation by puritan preachers.

Within St. Paul’s Cathedral, the heart of London, less temple than meeting place and horse market and foreign currency exchange, street urchins urinated on the stone floor for to make it slick with ice and to watch the burgesses and bawds and dandies slip and fall.

Further down near the river, in the new, hastily built and dingy Liberty of the Clink, in the Theater, a wooden amphitheater open to the elements, the King’s men rehearsed.

They wore their somber, black or brown everyday suits and cloaks.

Watching them say their lines and take their marks, Will Shakespeare, playwright and sometime actor, sighed. He felt too old now, too worn out, for the capers and acrobatics of the stage. At thirty-eight, he felt worn beyond his years.

But he missed the stage still, and he envied the actors.

This afternoon, for the performance proper, transformed, like tropical birds in this icy London, they’d wear their bright feathers: the satin and the silk, the shiny tinsel and brightly colored paste jewels of their art and craft.

Upon the stage, they’d be kings or noblemen, and figure in this place a distant city of spires and gold. And for a moment the audience would forget the cold and the bad harvests and the price of food, and laugh and cry and applaud the magic on the stage.

But for now the art was all craft, craft that must be polished and honed and sharpened against mistakes in the weaving of the illusion later.

And, watching, Will marked slips in craft and missteps in technique. But, most of all, he marked the absent one, his brother Edmund.

Where could the boy be?

Will Kemp and Ned Alleyn and all the other actors echoed their lines rigidly and made slow movements that would come fluid and tumbling in the play.

“Here comes the almanac of my true date.” Will Kemp said. “What now? How chance thou are returned so soon?”

The line fell like a stone into a well of silence, no line answering it.

Kemp, who’d been reciting with his eyes closed, now opened them, startled, like a man who puts his foot down, in a dark night and finds not beneath it the solid ground he expects. “…so soon?” he repeated, and looked about, obviously trying to raise a response. “…So soon!” he said, this time peremptorily, as if the very force of the exclamation would force the reply.

Will Shakespeare sighed.

Edmund Shakespeare, who would play Dromio in the play, was not there. Kemp glared around himself and his mouth formed the words, “luckless boy.” He took his hands to his waist, and looked towards Will Shakespeare.

“Will,” he started.

Will answered not. He heard running footsteps outside, and guessed whose they were. He pursed his lips in a command for silence.

Will marked Kemp’s exasperation and smiled. This was expected, this was normal. Edmund was but twenty and yet subject to those temptations and perils of the flesh that often turned young men’s hearts to battle grounds.

Will thought back on his own youth with the soft smile that men reserve for folly survived.

Yet, as Edmund appeared on the stage, shouting the answer to the line that he’d half heard before, the smile vanished from Will’s face. His heart turned sick, within him, at his brother’s pallor, Edmund’s halting speech, cut by struggles for breath.

“Returned so soon! Rather approach’d too late.” Edmund stopped and rewrapped himself in his cloak. He shivered, despite the cloak and the sheltering wooden walls of the theater. “The capon burns, the pig falls from the pit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell—My mistress made it one upon my cheek.”

A young man of twenty, he gave Will the impression of seeing himself in a time-erasing glass, such the resemblance between the two brothers.

The hair that had receded from Will’s forehead, leaving its domed expanse bare, still fell in lustrous curls framing Edmund’s oval face and lending contrast to Edmund’s intent golden eyes that reminded one of a bird of prey.

But Edmund’s lips, that should have been soft and rounded and pink with youth and life, had become pinched, shrunk, blue as if with unknown pain.

He spoke Dromio’s lines with no energy, each one pushed out flat and dead. And how pale he looked, Will thought. How deathly pale.

Hag ridden, Will thought. Hag ridden.

Once having thought it, he could not rid himself of it.

Will had reason to know that the old expressions, the folk sayings, the words and sentences that hinted at another world beyond this physical stage were more than mere parlance, mere weaving of tipsy tongues upon the scale of verb.

Born on a Sunday Will had ever been blessed with the seeing of that other world that, parallel to ours, runs like a golden thread upon the all too common fabric of existence.

In his youth, Will had consorted with elves in the nearby forest of Arden. And lived to know them neither so glittering, nor so benevolent as they looked, and yet neither so dark nor demonic as legend would have them.

Looking like angels, they were none—fallen nor whole.

And yet, elves were so powerful that to them mortals were like flies to wanton boys. They killed men for their sport.

Will looked hard at Edmund. Was he reading too much in the natural dissipation of his brother’s youth? There was no reason for elf here.

Less than a year ago, Edmund had fallen in love—or professed himself so—with a girl, better than a bawd and less than an honest woman. She’d proved with child, though both she and that child were now dead.

Did that not speak of Edmund’s hot blood? Could his tired, wan paleness mean more than a few nights of dissipation?

Did that pale brow, those lackluster eyes, those lips tinged my bluish pallor, really mean more than the late nights, the drinking bouts, the easy ways of a twenty year old.

Will watched Edmund shiver and thought that his brother looked deadly tired.

“He’ll never make it,” Will Kemp said, from Shakespeare’s right, making Shakespeare jump.

Like most men gifted in the art of clowning on stage, Kemp compensated for it with a ponderous gravity, a lugubrious seriousness of thought and deed at all other times.

Now his eyes, doleful and brown, met Will Shakespeare’s inquiring glance with the forlorn look of a masterless hound. “He’ll never make it, Will, you know it well. He has no energy to caper, no joy in his words. Were he not your brother, we would not let him play.”

Will sighed. “Leave it be, Kemp. Leave it be. Let well enough serve its turn.”

Perhaps Edmund was ill. He looked forlorn, true, but must that sadness mean that Edmund had brushed fingers against the icy diamonds of fairyland?

Will sighed. He must speak with the boy. Sure, he must.

Seventeen years older than Edmund, Will loved Edmund as a father loved his first son.

He’d been lavish with Edmund, in money and education, in help and friendship. But fathers owed their sons discipline as well as love, did they not? Did not the Bible say so?

Yet, in his mind, Will remembered his little brother as he’d been, three or four years old at most, with chubby cheeks and a toss of dark curls, chasing chickens and tumbling with dogs in the garden of their parents’ house.

And he knew he could not be too hard with the boy.

Later, after the performance, Will sought Edmund out in the tiring room behind the stage.

Amid the smell of grease paint and in a confusion of discarded garments and hastily dropped tinsel crowns, every actor hurried and talked, each trying to wring from the other the praises that might lack from the audience.

“We’ve done well, think you not?” Ned Alleyn said.

And Will Kemp answered in his voice that ever, out of stage, sounded like the mournful tolling of a death bell. “Well at what, well? It did not go as it should. Not as it should, I say it. When young people lack the energy to…”

He stared at Edmund.

Edmund stood there, in the dark red velvet suit that had been Will’s and that Will had given him barely worn. He had put on his left boot, but the right he held up to his eyes and frowned at the sole as though it had done him offense.

“Edmund,” Will said, meaning to invite the youth to a tavern where, over mutton and wine, they might speak, like father to errant son and—with the medicine of Edmund’s good repentance—minister the spreading blight that threatened to consume their friendship.

Edmund looked up. “Look here, Will,” he said. In the shining pallor of his face, his golden eyes burned with something like fire. “Look here, Will. Look at this boot.”

Speaking thus, he waved under Will’s eyes the very worn sole of a boot, with a finger-thick hole starting at the center.

Will blinked. He pushed the boot away. “I gave you new boots, Edmund. Less than a fortnight ago,” he said. “Why not wear those?”

Edmund cackled like a mad man, attracting the gazes of the nearest actors. “I am wearing them, brother. Your fine gift. You never give me aught that’s not near worn through, do you?”

“They were new.” Will looked around at the staring actors, his gaze making each one avert his own gaze.

But he knew they looked back again, as Edmund yelled, “They looked new. I’ll grant you that. But unless they were rotten they would not have worn through in two weeks, would they Will? Not in two weeks, of walking home and to the Theater and nowhere else.”

Will felt the pressure of the actors’ gazes on his back. He could almost hear them begging Will to put the young pup in his place. The young pup who was an actor only on Will’s fiat.

That pressure made Will speak. “But you walk elsewhere, do you not, brother?” Will asked, his voice severe. “To what brothels, what houses of assignation, what drinking holes do those boots carry you, brother, that you come in here late, always late, and always having forgotten your lines, and always looking like death tottering upon its own skeleton?”

Edmund opened his mouth. His golden eyes stared in surprised shock. He roared, an indistinct sound. “Curse your moralizing and your vanity,” he said. He stomped his newly-shod foot upon the theater boards and trembled. “Now that your daughter is marrying a puritan, will you be a puritan too?

I wasn’t so young that I don’t remember how big bellied your Nan was when she married you. You had your fun too, when you were young, did you not? Why must I be a saint? Wouldst you see me still in my tomb before my time?” He glowered at Will, who glowered back.

Will remembered his mad youth all too well. But remembering it, he remembered other things: his consorting with the elves in the forest of Arden hard by Stratford-upon-Avon.

Worse, Will remembered Kit Marlowe, that brittle genius who’d taught Will the ways of poetry.

Kit Marlowe had fallen in love with an elf, when little younger than Edmund. And that love, unrequited, for a creature who could requite lust but never warm human feelings, had been Marlowe’s undoing. He’d pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy he’d sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief till his reason gave away and his mad plots killed him.

There was an air of Marlowe about Edmund, an impatience for joy which life did not give.

Will remembered Edmund as a little boy, with curls, playing in the backyard of their parents house.

Behind him the actors muttered of shame and lack of respect.

Will sighed. He must be firm. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Away, away!”

Edmund looked astonished for a moment, hands on either side of him, slightly drawn, his whole body tensed for a response, a gesture that would quell Will’s responding words.

Then he laughed again. The cold ripple of his laughter shook the ice on the makeshift roofs over the best seats.

“You quote your own words at me, do you?” he said, and laughed. “Your own words that you got from the gospel? Ah, Will. You say my own poems are never good enough and that my poetry is trite. But I’ve never stolen so much from the commonplace, everyday prayers and psalms as you have.” He trembled visibly, and a tide of color ascended to his cheeks, then receded again, leaving them paler. “Maybe that is why you always tell me my poetry is no good, Will. Maybe because it’s better than yours.”

Will could not answer that. Edmund’s poetry, such as it was, had all the fire and power that Will’s own words had possessed at twenty. But he lacked the calm of tutored thought, the quiet of reflected experience. Thus much had Will told him, ever. Thus much and naught more.

He’d always encouraged Edmund, had he not? Did he, in some corner of his being, fear this boy who reminded him so of Marlowe’s greatness?

Before Will could reel in his thought, before he could respond to Edmund, Edmund smiled, a triumphant smile as if having proved his point, and turned on his heel, and headed for the door.

“You did well,” Will Kemp said in a stage whisper. “You did well. Someone needs to rein in that boy, for his own good.”

But Will watched his brother walk away in a stumbling, shambling walk, and thought he’d not done well at all.

The boy looked ill.

Will was at that age when his friends died, one after the other. Sometimes it seemed that all his acquaintance and everyone he remembered were mere ghosts, crowding around him with memoried affection but no living presence.

Old Mr. Pope, the actor, had died only two years ago. And this year Augustin Phillips, another actor, had died. Elizabeth, the great Queen in whose reign Will had been born, had died years ago, and before her brave, thundering Essex, her erstwhile favorite, who had for a while seemed to bestride the Earth and make the skies shake.

And Marlowe, great Marlowe whose words had taught Shakespeare’s speech to sing, had lain ten years a-moldering in his anonymous grave in a Deptford cemetery.

It was as though Will had started a trip in this one coach, with coachmen and fellow-travelers, and one by one they’d all dropped off, leaving him alone and afraid.

But Edmund… Edmund had come into the coach long after the trip had started—he’d come into the world well enough after Will that he could have been Will’s own son.

Will watched Edmund trip and right himself slowly, in the hesitant movements of the infirm or old.

Edmund could not be allowed to dissipate himself until he died of it.

Children should not die before their parents, Will thought, despite the daily evidence of his eyes, despite the example of his own family.

Will, himself, would die, sure, but he’d leave behind himself this brother who was like a son and who’d continue Will’s own path.

Not knowing which he feared more: That Edmund’s distracted mind betrayed illness or that the boy was consorting with fairyland, Will sighed.

He was an old man. Old men had sick fancies and turns of the spirit that bode no good. It meant nothing.

“Your brother is ill, Master Shakespeare,” Edmund’s landlady said.

She stood at the door to Will Shakespeare’s Black Friar’s house, a disreputable woman with a flying untidiness of hair. Her garments, rough homespun inexpertly dyed black, stood out in this upper middle class neighborhood. She spoke with a decided French accent.

“He’s so ill he could not get up from his bed this morning.” As she spoke, she twisted a disreputable, frayed handkerchief in her hand. “He told me to tell you that he’d not be at rehearsal.”

And at this woman who, no doubt, consorted daily with actors and lived cheek to jowl with brothels, sniffed, a sniff of disapproval, at the theater and all the workings thereof.

Will nodded. What else could he do? He nodded and he searched the purse at his waist for two coins, which he handed the woman, and he spoke in the soft, cultivated voice he’d learned to use ever since his wealth, his name had set him above the normal run of actors. “I will be along, shortly, madam.”

Ill. Edmund was ill, after all.

He felt an odd relief.

Was this the coughing sickness that had claimed Edmund’s Jenny and her illegitimate son by Edmund?

Will shook his head. It mattered not.

If Will’s money could buy them, Edmund would have the best physicians, the most assured medicine.

If it was just this, just physical illness, then Edmund would survive.

And if not…

But all his hopes were dispelled as, after climbing Edmund’s stairs two by two, faster than his own aging legs should carry him, Will entered his brother’s shabby room.

Oh, sure, Edmund looked ill: parchment pale and drawn, he smelled of bitter sweat, of wasting illness. His breath left his lips like a howling wind, to be called back with groans of effort. The lustrous curls of youth lay matted and damp upon Edmund’s yellowing pillow.

And yet none of this mattered. None of this.

A maiden stood between Edmund’s small, rickety bed and the unsteady table that was meant to serve as Edmund’s desk—where a ream of paper that Will had bought for Edmund sat, virgin of words, next to the untouched inkstone.

Solid as stone, unreal as ether, the beautiful stranger with the golden hair, stood and smiled at Edmund, and beckoned with wide smile, with enticing gaze.

She wore a white, semi-transparent gown, tight to her tiny waist and stopping short of the swelling roundness of her breasts, which peeked above the fabric with the creaminess of fresh butter and the sheen of fine silk.

“Come, Edmund, come,” she said, her voice the soft whisper of a brook upon parched land. “Come with me to the plain of pleasure, Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye and where there’s neither anger nor sorrow, nor pain.”

Will stared. From the creature there came the heady scent of lilac flowering in a Summer night.

Hag ridden. He’d been right there. Edmund was prey of creatures like this, of creatures like onto the ones that Will had known in the far off days of his youth.

Standing at the door to that shabby room in the heart of London, Will ran his hand back over his domed forehead, through his thinning salt-and-pepper curls.

The smell of fairyland enveloped him. The creature’s voice was soft temptation. She glimmered in the scant light coming through the thick lead-paneled window. She shone with her own vitality, her power, her magic.

Her golden hair flowed like molten metal, as she turned to smile at Will.

In his heart, at that moment, as its beats sped like a mad drum played by a drunken reveler at a fair, Will was again twenty and, again, stood in a forest and, artless, was made the dupe of a fairy princess.

It was a moment. A moment only.

The smell of Edmund’s sour, bitter sweat mingled with the scent of lilacs. This smell of all too human mortality, the smell of the condition to which Will was born woke him from his dream.

Will had been right in that, too. Edmund was ill. And his illness might mean death. Or it might not.

Edmund was a healthy child, a happy boy, who had run happy and contented through the garden paths of his parents backyard, amid the vegetables and the roses, with never a sick day.

Edmund’s vitality would count for him. He was young, he was strong, his life would continue.

The fear of death was nothing but a distant danger, Will told himself. For Edmund as for Will. Part and parcel of the fears to which man was heir.

And yet, in that land, Edmund would live on for sure. Will would live on for sure…

Will shook his head.

“My lady, what do you here? What call have you?” His voice caught on the words, as he spoke them, courteous and soft.

The creature, beautiful as moonlight and twice as cold, composed her milk-white features upon her little oval face, and smiled a little demure smile. “I came for to take your brother,” she said. “To take him to the plains of ever-living, where the dance lasts forever and where his words, his fire and his youth shall serve us well.”

Serve them.

Will’s indecision stopped.

Oh, not serve them. Not Edmund who’d been protected from all debt, kept free and safe by his brother Will.

Free and safe.

He must be allowed to remain free. Even if he must risk death for it.

Will rounded on the thing, his hand going up to his forehead and retracing the papist sign of the cross, his lips falling, unawares, upon the words of the paternoster.

He should have known better. Of all people he. He knew these creatures neither angels nor demons—fled not from the holy signs, the holy words.

She laughed, a crystalline laugh. “What have we with your gods, Master Shakespeare? What have you with your crucified one? Leave it be. He has no rule over us.”

Her voice was soft as velvet run over ice. Together with her smell, it made his hair stand on end at the back of his neck.

He thought of Quicksilver, king of elves. Once they’d been friends. Will heard Quicksilver’s name upon his lips like a talisman.

“Aye,” the woman said, and laughed again, the soft, mocking laughter. “Aye, you’re of his well enough. I see his power mark upon you. But that’s naught to us. We are of Erin and not of this island. We care not for his rule. You are of Quicksilver’s company, and you we cannot touch, but him” She smiled at him, silver and crystal, glittering and cold. “The boy will be ours, and fair enough. A bard for a bard and poetry to oppose to Quicksilver’s spells, should it ever come to that.”

The smile was a challenge.

“He’s my blood,” Will said. “He’s my brother. You cannot”

“He is dying,” she said, cold and precise. “Your medicine cannot save him. Here he will die. In our land he’ll live. He’ll live forever.”

“In your land something shall live,” Will said. “Something. One of you. Not my brother.” He swallowed the words he wanted to say but knew not how to form—he, the master and spinner of so many words—that the creature there, in that glittering plain beyond pain and death would not be Edmund, not the child who’d run after chickens and played with dogs. There was no room for such things in fairyland, no room for the untidy mess of human feelings. “He might be ill, but he is young. He’ll live. He’ll live like the rest of us fellows who crawl thus, between heaven and Earth. He’ll survive. He’ll learn to take the bitter with the sweet.”

But she laughed. “You know the rules, son of Adam. You know them well. Tonight is Winter solstice and tonight we ride. You hold on to him and he is yours. But once you let him go, once he joins us, he is of ours, he is none of yours.” Before Will’s eyes, she vanished.

The ride. Will knew the ride well. In Arden it had been a solstice dance. In his youth the elves had taken Will’s wife, Will’s Nan, captive. He’d held onto her through fire and ice while the fairies danced all about.

He could hold on to Edmund while the elves rode on. He could.

He looked at Edmund’s pale face, Edmund’s feverish, shining golden falcon eyes.

“In the tavern,” Edmund was saying, as though he needed explaining. “I danced with her in a tavern. Oh, Will, it was the brightest place in the world, and their music the most wonderful.”

The dance. There had been a dance, then, already, and Edmund had already taken part in it. He was marked by them then. Oh, Will must hold onto him and hold fast, or else was he gone forever.

“Worry not, Edmund,” Will said. “Worry not brother. I’ll hold onto you, and they’ll never get you.”

But Edmund’s eyes were set and feverish, as if looking on landscapes that Will could not see.

“I am… ill…” he whispered. “Ill. The coughing sickness as took Jenny and the baby.”

“You are young, brother, you are young, and I’ll get you a doctor and medicine, the best, for my money, the best that can be got.”

“The best,” Edward echoed, and his voice rasped. “The best, for your money.” His eyes, still fevered, seemed to lose their luster and their intensity. He looked at Will like a man who has wandered into a strange house and knows none of the inhabitants.

It started with a gentle pitter-patter, like rain against the window, like the far-off sound of walking feet.

Awake, by his brother’s bed, Will looked at the candle markings by which he told the night’s advancement. Midnight.

Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night. The time of night when Troy was set on fire. The time when screech-owls cried, and ban-dogs howled, and spirits walked, and ghosts broke up their graves.

Solstice night at midnight. That time that best fit for what was to come.

Will looked at Edmund who slept and in his sleep had regained some tint on his cheek, some look of innocence.

Thus had Will watched his brother sleep when his brother had been a very small child. And he’d watched Edmund awake for fresh joys and renewed life.

Let it be so again.

The sounds from the outer wall increased, till, of a sudden, it was thrown open like a door to let bright, silvery light through.

On that light, shapes formed.

Will jumped from his chair beside Edmund’s bed, and, thrusting himself forward, grabbed his brother mid-body and held him tight, while Edmund woke and muttered a query.

But Edmund’s query was stilled on a rasped breath, and Will himself took in breath suddenly, at the creatures entering the room.

There were two horses, one roan and one white. Upon the roan, on a saddle of hammered gold, rode a giant who resembled a man except for his too-fine features. He was in every part what a man should be—his hands strong, his eyes wide and green, his red hair a starburst of light around his happily-formed face.

He laughed like the coming of dawn, like the banishing of nightmares.

The white horse beside his had no rider. Or rather, its rider walked by its side, her hand upon the flower-decked reins, her golden hair for once caught up, and entwined also with flowers.

“We came for the pledge,” she said.

Will shook his head and tightened his grip on Edmund.

But Edmund had awakened, and wriggled hard within his brother’s hold.

“Let me go with them,” he said. “For there I’m not sick. There is life grief-free, and it’s forever.”

“Their life is no life that you would want,” Will said. “Their gold is only tinseled over leaves, their food so much air that has no flavor. Oh, there’s grief aplenty in this world. But there’s sweetness too, if you stay to taste of it.”

“How would you know their life and their food?” Edmund screamed. With ineffective, weakened hands, he beat at his brother’s chest.

Behind the King and Queen, other elves appeared—pages dressed in the gaudy color of the butterfly wing, maids who’d called on all the jewels of the earth for their adornment.

Many, many, many, they came in, crowding behind their sovereigns and pushing, till the room seemed alive with them and no space there was in which they weren’t.

“How do you know who they are and what life would be like?” Edmund asked, his voice high and shrill. “Know you everything? Tried you everything ahead of me? Must I get my whole life as a stale thing, received second hand from my all-knowing brother?”

Will hardly felt Edmund’s blows, but the words stung him as much as blows might have. Had he ever thus imposed on his brother? Had he ever told his brother how to live and what to do?

Try as he might, he could not recall a single instance. No, never, save maybe from that natural desire to safeguard his brother from the pitfalls Will had experienced.

“If it was done at all,” he whispered. “It was done out of love.”

“Love?” Edmund asked. His eyes, for once clear and bright and falcon-sharp, gazed up at his brother, as Edmund half turned. “Love? Oh, vile, servile submission. If this is love, brother, give me hate. You say their life is no life, and yet what have I had here? What but the pale shadow of the life you’ve lead, which like stale remains of another man’s meal satisfy the hunger but not the palate?”

In the momentary pain of his surprise, Will trembled and Edmund all but wriggled free, crawling towards the light and the creatures in it.

“Let him come,” the elf king boomed. “Let him come, Master Shakespeare. It is not your choice to make.”

“No, never,” Will said, holding tight. “No, I never will.” And he held so tight, and he held so fierce that despite the lilac smell that made his head swim, despite Edmund’s half-strangled cries for freedom and his pleading to be allowed to go, yet Will’s grip was so strong, that the sovereign of elves quit laughing.

He looked to his wife and said, “Come my dear, for midnight passes nigh, and we must ride on.”

The golden nymph climbed her white horse, and turned a saddened face towards Edmund, and seemed to mouth adieu through her tear-moistened lips.

Slowly moving, as if a road led them through the narrow space between wall and desk, the elves rode on, towards the far distant wall that now glimmered and which a bridge formed of rays of light now appeared, leading on to a land beyond—a land of golden fruits and virgin forest, a land such as no land in man’s mortal world.

Edmund ceased his struggle, and his body went limp in Will’s arms. “Is it fair my brother, that you keep me? Out of love, you say, but love or hate, why should you make the decision on my life? I would with them go, with them be happy.”

“You’d not be yourself.”

“And have I ever been myself?” Edmund asked. “Or a pale shadow that followed your glory where you went? I do not remember a single time in my life, where I wanted to be other but Will. Is that what you want me, then, brother, a pale puppet of your greater play?”

The King and Queen of elves were almost to the wall, almost to the entrance to the bridge and Will remembered Edmund following him down garden paths. Edmund learning to read that he might decipher the secrets of his brother’s great genius. Edmund with great, adoring eyes, looking at his older brother and saying, “when I grow up, an’ I shall be like you.”

A pale puppet? What else had all this bought? Oh, it was flattering, and Will had dreamed that their paths would ever run parallel. He’d never thought that Edmund was not on a parallel path, but trailing him along a well beaten path, reluctantly trailing him like a boy who drags his book as he follows the schoolmaster.

Was that where this bitterness hailed from? The thrust of envy, the sting of discontent?

The faerie court was now mid-bridge, and the queen turned back to look at Edmund.

And yet Will knew that Edmund would be lost forever, if he let him go. And yet, hadn’t Will lost Edmund already, by holding too tight?

Had he ever known Edmund, or just doted on a reflection of himself and, like Narcissus, almost died of such idolatry.

And Edmund with him.

Will forced his arms to open. It hurt as if he were doing it against the weight of years, the hopes of centuries.

But little by little, me made his arms open, as though they were the heavy door of a jail that must be defeated. Whose prison, he did not know.

He whispered, “Go then. Go, and be yourself.”

Edmund hesitated but one moment. The space of a breath, he looked up at his brother, as if asking if he had indeed his consent.

And then he was gone, running nimble past most of the fairy court, to hold the flower-decked reins of the queen’s horse and smile, warmly, at him.

King Boadag laughed.

On the bed stayed something—who knows what? It looked like Edmund. Waxen, pale Edmund, dead as clay.

It must be a stock, Will thought, an enchantment left behind to prefigure the person taken by fairyland.

It must be a stock, for had Will not seen his brother run forward and, happy, join the fairy troop?

But the light was gone from the room, and the smell of lilac.

The walls had, once more, become solid.

From outside came the rustle of wind. A dog howled in the distance.

Will collapsed on his chair and covered his face with his hands, and found the accustomed words of confession coming to his lips in a trembling whisper, “for all we’ve done, and all we’ve failed to do…” And yet he knew not which had been the sin, and which the redemption.