He hugged his shoulders in, as if to contain a shudder. "Look, Greta,"
he said, "it's the Snakes who are the warpers and destroyers. We're
restoring the past. The Spiders are trying to keep things as first
created. We only kill when we must."
_I_ shuddered then, for bursting out of my memory came the glittering,
knife-flashing, night-shrouded, bloody image of my lover, the Spider
soldier-of-change Erich von Hohenwald, dying in the grip of a giant
silver spider, or spider-shaped entity large as he, as they rolled in
a tangled ball down a flight of rocks in Central Park.
But the memory-burst didn't blow up my mind, as it had done a year
ago, no more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had ended
the world. I asked Martin, "Is that what the Snakes say?"
"Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta,
you have to _trust_." He put out the middle finger of his hand.
I didn't take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against his
thumb.
"You're still grieving for that carrion there!" he accused me. He
jerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over the
stiffening body. "If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled,
imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly in
the black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursing
one lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Only
to make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all
the other consequences flow on. The Snakes' Elizabeth let Mary live
... and England die ... and the Spaniard hold North America to the
Great Lakes and New Scandinavia."
Once more he put out his middle finger.
* * * * *
"All right, all right," I said, barely touching it. "You've convinced
me."
"Great!" he said. "'By for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set."
"That's good," I said. He loped out.
I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to the
death of the two Macks, Duff and Beth. But I only sat there in the
empty dressing room pretending to grieve for a devil-smiling snow
tiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German killed for
insubordination that _I_ had reported ... but really grieving for a
girl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater with a
whole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more than
subway bogies and Park and Village monsters.
As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fell
across my knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young man
in worn dark clothes. He couldn't have been more than twenty-three. He
was a frail sort of guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyes
that saw everything. I knew at one he was the one who had seemed
familiar to me in the knot of City fellows.
He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the
reserve makeup box by Siddy's mirror. And I began to tremble.
He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to
tremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine.
The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches
faintly wailing, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair--" Sid has them echo
that line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled.
Then Sid came pounding up. He's the first finished, since the fight
ends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache head
of him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door.
Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid.
He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the
same time in breathy little rushes.
* * * * *
Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up
behind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none
of them could get past. Their faces peered around him.
And all this while the stranger was saying, "What may this mean? Can
such things be? Are all the seeds of time ... wetted by some
hell-trickle ... sprouted at once in their granary? Speak ... speak!
You played me a play ... that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have
you disjointed the frame of things ... to steal my unborn thoughts?
Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are you
not my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King's Lynn ... singed by
time's fiery wand ... sifted over with the ashes of thirty years?
Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth
... aye, and perchance hell too ... Speak, I charge you!"
And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him,
I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I
ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say.
He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then,
with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out of
the way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around the
stranger's narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room,
himself following.
The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth's head to
Martin like a football while he tugged off his horned helmet, Mark
dumping a stack of shields in the corner, Maudie pausing as she
skittered past me to say, "Hi Gret, great you're back," and patting my
temple to show what part of me she meant. Beau went straight to Sid's
dressing table and set the portrait aside and lifted out Sid's reserve
makeup box.
"The lights, Martin!" he called.
Then Sid came back in, slamming and bolting the door behind him and
standing for a moment with his back against it, panting.
I rushed to him. Something was boiling up inside me, but before it
could get to my brain I opened my mouth and it came out as, "Siddy,
you can't fool me, that was no dirty S-or-S. I don't care how much he
shakes and purrs, or shakes a spear, or just plain shakes--Siddy, that
was Shakespeare!"
"Aye, girl, I think so," he told me, holding my wrists together. "They
can't find dolls to double men like that--or such is my main hope." A
big sickly grin came on his face. "Oh, gods," he demanded, "with what
words do you talk to a man whose speech you've stolen all your life?"