Act I

 

Illyria, 1601

 

A desert shore, after a storm.

 

Spars and ropes and broken fragments of ship are strewn in abandoned disarray, along with sodden mounds of cloth. All is calm. Seabirds call out and their shadows cross the sand.

 

The closest heap of cloth twitches, shudders, coughs, vomiting forth the briny element, as Jacques would no doubt term it if he were here. As far as this survivor is concerned, though, the briny element can kiss his arse.

 

Enter PAROLLES.

 

 

HE WAS NOT a man well-made by nature, though he could feign it well enough when the sea had not been at him quite so much. The clothes that clung to his spare frame would have been, when dry, the grey of Rousillon, his post an ensign’s. Again, it was a role he could play, but the beach was affording him no rank and file to bully and browbeat, no officers to toady to. With a final cough, Parolles rolled over onto his back, regretted it and ended up retching on his hands and knees again.

“I swear,” he told the air, “not for gold, not for sack, not for a woman’s breasts shall I go back to sea.”

“Then, when you leave this shore, teach me to walk on water too!”

Parolles sat back heavily, fumbling for a sword the sea had swallowed. The newcomer was a man just as soaked as he, though he carried it better. He was a dark and handsome bearded fellow, his fine clothes mostly blues that the water had turned to near-black: one of the Aragonese contingent who had lately been Parolles’ shipmates.

“Once was an alchemist taught the trick to me,” Parolles offered. “And, were the stars and other bodies well-aligned, I’d jog from here to Milan and scorn the storms that chased my heels.” He was looking the newcomer over, reading the assured way the man stood, and the fact he still had his sword without having been dragged to the depths. “Why, sir,” he added, “do not think this is the worst of wrecks this body of mine has endured, for once was I—”

“’Twere better to save our tales ’til we had a fire and better company than we two,” the Aragonese put in.

A hand went out, and Parolles was not too proud to refuse the help.

“We two are rats so vile even the sea won’t have us,” the man observed with a weak smile. “Benedick, I.”

“Parolles of Rousillon.”

“Of the doctor’s retinue?”

“Her closest confidante and friend,” Parolles averred, on the basis that those who might point out the exaggeration were most likely drowned. “Alas, the sea has taken all her pills and potions, and not even changed its colour.”

“Well let us hope it has been sick with them, and hurled her forth,” Benedick said without much optimism. “As I must hope the same about my prince.”

They travelled down the beach, which had been lashed by the storm and carved by the wreckage, but yet not crossed with human tracks before their own. Parolles wrung out the damp from a few of the stories that were his stock in trade—bold tales of the military campaigns he had spent mostly hiding in the baggage train, the scars he had never really given, the victories he had barely had a hand in. His heart was scarcely in it, not for mourning lost comrades, but because he was cold and damp and this upright Spaniard was not going to let him just slope off and take shelter. Overhead, the sky was still dreary with clouds, though the sudden storm that had so dashed their mission and their ship to pieces had fled as swiftly as it had arrived.

Benedick, for his part, obviously weighed those threadbare boasts and politely declined to tug their holes any larger. At last, though, he put a hand up to silence his companion’s prattle. Parolles felt almost relieved.

In the quiet, they both could hear a voice, sonorous and mournful, intoning something that at first had the ritual cadence of a spell.

“In first of all his years does man emerge,” so went the words, “from breaking waters of his mother’s womb into the air; then Mother Church’s grace must dash another sprinkle on his head to wash away the garden’s primal sin. And are we yet content or must we dance upon the very malice of the deep, which so oft seeks to take us to her breast—?”

“I think he’s complaining about the sea,” was Parolles’ considered opinion.

“Then he’s our bosom comrade. Let’s go add our voices.” Benedick broke into a sprint, leaving the Frenchman to stagger along behind him, but then coming up short when a high voice cried for him to halt.

“Peace, I am of Aragon!” the Spaniard called. “Your allies, last I looked.”

Parolles caught him up to see a youth with a bent bow—no more than a slip of a boy, attired in the greenish garb of the Arden foresters, and behind him, seated on a rock with a dark robe puddling about him, a lean old bearded fellow.

“I see but a single shaft, and your quiver empty,” Benedick remarked, “and we are both near-drowned already. Best to save your shots for where your work is not half-done.”

The youth lowered his aim mistrustfully. “You are Signor Benedick, are you not? I saw you with your master at the high table aboard ship.”

He was Ganymede, he said, and his elderly friend was a philosopher, Jacques. The old man had been one of the diplomats, along with Parolles’ lost doctor. They were to have reached Milan to beg ancient Prospero his aid in the Tuscan wars.

Of late it seemed no battlefield in Europe was safe from magic. Only recently the very lords of Fairyland had been on the verge of bringing war to Illyria, before the war had suffered one of its customary reversals. Oberon’s hosts had melted away, and Orsino of Illyria entered the fray, seeming overnight to find fresh fiends and witches. There was no part of the conflict safe from spells and enchantments, monsters and prodigies. And unexpected storms.

Parolles looked glumly up at the sky and wondered why anybody had expected this nonsense to work.

The Arden youth ventured into the woods that ran along the line of the beach and came back with the makings of a fire. “Do you think we’re the only survivors, my lord?” he asked Benedick.

Parolles broke in: “Frail youth, hold off, for he has lost his prince to the hungry gulf. I have no doubt that, of all the multitudes within our barque, only we four were...”

He sought for the elegant term, and was considerably annoyed when Jacques furnished “vomited forth by the briny element.” More so when the old man added, “and besides, here comes a fifth. A kinsman of yours, Signor Aragon?”

Benedick leapt up, but the hope lighting his face went out the next moment. “None of mine,” he said flatly, “though of my lord’s. And proof that honour sinks where villainy sits like a slick upon the waves. What now, my lord Don John?”

The newcomer was another darkly-bearded Aragonese, more slender than Benedick, with cold eyes that rested briefly on each of them, and discounted them all. “Signor Benedick, I give God thanks the sea has spared you. Alas, is my brother not among you? I had prayed he might be spared the abyss, you may be sure.”

Parolles could hear Benedick’s teeth grinding. Listening to John, he had to admire a man who could put so much insincerity into so few words.

Overhead, the thunder rumbled. The clouds seemed to be growing visibly thicker, so that a dull day was becoming, moment on moment, full night.

“The weather has its second wind,” Benedick observed thoughtfully.

“No more naturally than its first,” Ganymede stated. He had his arrow back on the string, as though he could shoot the tempest out of the sky.

“When all the sky is red at eventime,” Jacques began, “the shepherds and the farmers smile, but yet it takes no worker of the land to cry and point when all the sky goes black at noon—”

“Yes,” Parolles broke in. “Yes, it’s dark. Yes it’s obviously some black magic. Can we get under the trees before it...?” He trailed off. “God’s own truth, what is it?”

Down the beach, passing over the furthest-flung spars and planks of the wreck, came something that drew in the gathering darkness like a cloak, so that the air swirled and seethed about it like night. Overheard, the clouds seemed to circle directly above it, and stabs and starts of lightning crackled from its hands. In form it was an old woman, a withered hag in tattered rags. The trailing edge of its ruined garment hung clear above the sand as it glided slowly towards them. It seemed blind, the eyes just a deeper crease in that wrinkled whorl of a face, and the lightning flecked and flashed like feelers, searching out the way, investigating every piece of flotsam.

“Something wicked this way comes,” said Jacques with commendable brevity.

“Perhaps a retreat?” Parolles suggested, because they had one sword and one arrow between them and this thing was likely vulnerable to neither.

None of them wanted much to acknowledge his tactical guidance, but they were shuffling back despite themselves. Parolles decided they could shuffle all they liked, but his experience was that a bold tale tomorrow could cover up any amount of cowardice today. He turned and almost barrelled straight into a woman.

She was very beautiful, and her robe was plastered to her in a way that, under other circumstances, would have given him considerable delight and opportunity for comment. As it was, however, he knew her of old, and had no wish to be on the wrong side of either her tongue or her skills.

“Hello, Helena,” he observed weakly.

“Down, all of you fools, and make no noise!” she hissed, shoving Parolles out of the way and striding into the midst of the bedraggled band. As the floating witch approached them, Helena wrested the bow from Ganymede’s hand and drew a circle in the sand about them, then spoke swift words under her breath, looking at none of them. Parolles wished he’d run the moment he’d seen the approaching creature, because now he was between the mercy of two witches.

“No sound, no stirring, let not your eyes rest on the hag,” Helena murmured. “Keep even your thoughts close in your head.” She gripped Parolles’ shoulder hard, and had her other hand on Don John’s, as though identifying them as the most likely to breach her terms.

But they all held still, and the witch drifted past them down the beach in a swirl of rain-lashed air, darkness and the sour smell of rotting seaweed. The crone was a long way past them before even Helena dared to speak.

“Don’t think that we are safe,” she told them, “for we are in Illyria, whence came the storm that sank us, and if the magic of their witches cannot find us then they shall send mortal agents for the task. We must flee inland while we still can.”

 

 

NOT LONG AFTER the castaways fled, a band of cavalry picked its way down the beach, pausing at each humped snarl of sailcloth and rope to prod it with a lance, in case a live body was concealed beneath.

At their head rode a young officer who might have given Ganymede a contest for beardlessness. The soldiers used the name Cesario and were none the wiser, for their leader could sit a horse, fence, gamble and swear with the best of them. Only the old sergeant riding behind knew her by the name Viola.

This was not the first time the young wife of Duke Orsino had slipped from the palace to put on britches and show the men how it was done. The old lord indulged her; indeed, seemed to love his old page the more for it.

Now, Viola scanned the sand, turned over by the witch’s stormy passage. She swore, in terms to make the regular soldiers blush. The rain, thoughtfully left behind after the witch had moved on, pattered down on the lot of them, and her sergeant tugged his dripping hood further down his face.

“Faith, tell me again why I went to play soldier a second time,” he complained.

“Because you never yet passed up a chance to be a fool, Feste,” Viola pointed out.

“Oh, so?” Feste leaned in and murmured. “Would I not be the greater fool if I let my lord’s lady play soldier, and no man there to help her?”

Viola bristled from long force of habit. “If you think I need your help...” She shrugged and smiled. “Yet I’m grateful for it, while you have wit left in you. I see tracks here. Our doubtful allies have wiped most of them clean, but I guess some party made it to the woods. A half-dozen, perhaps.”

Feste squinted at the sand. “In this light, what man can tell? Marry, we’ve had our share of midnight middays since these Scots graced us with their company.”

Viola said nothing for a moment, then gave the troop leave to dismount and rest their horses. She goaded her own a few steps away, Feste’s following obediently.

“I warned my lord against the Scot and his lot,” she confided, glancing at the preternaturally gloomy sky.

“I well know it,” Feste confirmed, “yet is there no honest battlefield left in Europe without this black magic to spoil it? You have the fairy king’s temper to thank for that. And what general has more command of it than the Scot? A man who cannot be killed, who has three witches chained to his girdle and the favour of Hecate besides. When such a sword is offered, your lord would wear my old cap and bells before refusing.”

Viola only shook her head. “And has it profited us? Or has it just made the slaughter on both sides the worse? Just as their magic fouls our tracking here, so it makes more costly every battle, win or lose.”

“Faith, and you’re more in your wits than most, to say so,” Feste agreed. “But so long as the Scot darkens your husband’s court, we are the fellow who rides the bear. Let him find it disagreeable, he’ll like it even less when he gets down.”