Monthly Archives: December 2011

Marlowe ran into the water up to his knees as Drunais vanished from sight beneath the still surface, dragging Lady Belinda along with him. She refused to let go of his arm even as she struck him with her folded parasol.

All Marlowe could see was a crowned seal head that raised itself above the surface for a few seconds and then was gone in a swirl of dark water. He shouted after Drunais, and Tuc the seal king, but was answered by silence.

When he finally returned his attention to the screaming, soaking wet woman at his side he realized everyone on the beach was looking at them… including the newly-arrived Fey delegation, lead by Drunais’ father, Athis.

“Come to welcome our newly arrived compatriots?” Marlowe shouted up to them.

Athis looked around with barely-disguised contempt and didn’t deign to reply.

Some distance down the beach three four-footed figures congregated.

“Daphne! Is it really you?” said Cat, trying to bump his forehead against hers in that way cats have.

“Yo no soy el tipo de chica que habla a los caballeros que no han sido debidamente presentados”, he heard Daphne say as she pulled away from him.

“Ha! Funny!” said Drunais’ friend Skeezicks, the raccoon.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Cat. “What’s so funny about a cat meowing?”

“Oh no!” said Skeezicks, his eyes growing wide. “She said, ‘I am not the kind of girl who speaks to gentlemen who have not been properly introduced.’”

Cat’s heart sank.

“Why can I understand you but not this stupid cat?” Daphne asked Skeezicks in fluent Spanish.

Feast of Confusion


Grace sat glumly on a piece of driftwood. The tide was ebbing, and out in the bay the ship was turning at anchor, and the lewd calls of sailors came clearly over the still water.

The beach was empty, but for a group of three animals–two cats and a raccoon–off in the distance, and the Fey boy Yee-Ha, who approached her tentatively.

The rest of the villagers, the newly arrived sailors, and the Fey delegation had repaired to the village hall where Captain Stone, Athis and Grace’s father were meeting. Sir Hyphen-Dash had made it clear to his daughter she wasn’t wanted or needed, although Captain Stone had spoken up for her, having quickly understood how little grasp her father had on what passed for reality in these parts. Even Marlowe and Grace’s half-sister were gone, taking the strangely land-sick sailor with them.

“alone my Grace sits ~ contemplating empty bay ~ like you company?” Yee-Ha asked.

“Why do you talk like that?” she replied.

“It is our duty ~ to speak the world’s rhythms ~ with every breath,” Yee-Ha explained.

Grace shook her head. “That doesn’t tell me anything. Why is it your duty?”

“How could it not be? ~ Do not the sacred words say…” then he paused. “It is just our way.”

Grace had perked up at the mention of the scared words, but now returned her attention to the grey ocean. A sailor was swinging from the rigging, waving… everything… at her, although from the way he was grasping at his trousers perhaps it wasn’t quite intentional. Even from this distance she could tell her doubts about the verisimilitude of the clams were justified. She wrinkled her nose and turned her attention back to Yee-Ha. “Have you ever tried talking like us? You speak our language. Why not?”

Yee-Ha’s eyes grew wide as he contemplated the enormity of this suggestion. “It is forbidden! ~ So dangerous and quite wrong! ~ But I will try.” He stopped, his mouth tightly closed, his face turning red. The silence stretched interminably until at least he burst out, “Soon!”

Grace laughed at Yee-Ha’s obvious discomfiture as he shamefacedly admitted, “Perhaps there is more ~ to free-speaking in your way ~ than meets the Fey eye.”

Before she could reply she noticed that Christopher Marlowe’s cat, Cat, was coming down the beach toward them, followed by the ship’s cat Daphne and a talkative raccoon.

“Perhaps I’ll become a cat when I retire,” Skeezicks the raccoon was saying.

“I didn’t know raccoons could retire,” Cat said. He kept stealing glances at Daphne, who ignored him.

“Of course they can!” said Skeezicks. “At least I think so.”

Daphne came up to Grace and rubbed her head against the girl’s knee. “Meow?” she asked, and then said, “Can I haz feesh?”

“Err… no, I don’t has fish,” Grace replied uncertainly.

“At least she’s speaking English now,” Cat said to Grace as Daphne the ship’s cat continued to ignore him. “When she game ashore it was nothing but some dreadful kind of foreign.”"

“I didn’t know cats could speak foreign,” Grace said.

“We only speak cat,” said Cat. “You just listen in English.”

“Maybe you were listening in foreign, then?” asked Grace.

“Don’t be ridiculous! I’m an English cat!”

“And a very handsome one,” said Skeezicks the raccoon.

Cat rolled his eyes and ignored her. “Come, Daphne! We hunted the warfs together as kits!”

Daphne peered at Cat from her perch on Grace’s lap. “I’m sure I would remember zee purple!”

While Grace was talking to his cat, Christopher Marlowe was talking to himself:

Now what malignant fate does haunt my days,
come stalking cold across the Ocean sea
like some great pale and vicious cachalot
bent on sick vengeance? O, to yet be free
of dark entanglements! Drunais my love!
How simple would our life together be:
the two of us, like shepherd, shepherdess,
far from the madding crowd, we two can flee
from all that ails this fractious flagrant world!
I’ll go to you, go down on bended knee
and beg forgiveness. Now!”

“Christopher! Yoo hoo!” came a shout from behind him and he moaned, “Behold my life.”

Lady Belinda Hyphen-Dash-Throtestalking bustled up behind Marlowe, leaning slightly on the land-sick sailor, Donald Vagoe. “O Christopher!” she called again. “What was that strange apparition that rose so hideously from the sea?” she asked, recollecting her own impression of Drunais’ appearance.

He turned to face her. “She is… my love!”

“She is WHAT, my love?” Lady Belinda asked.

Marlowe shook his head and said slowly, “My love. That is what she is.”

“That? What?”

“The woman who walked out of the water is my love,” he tried again.

Lady Belinda looked at him strangely, “You are confused, Christopher. I didn’t walk out of the water! It was some undersea creature!”

Lady Belinda let go of Donald Vagoe’s arm and took hold of Marlowe’s. The sailor staggered and grabbed a nearby tree, turning his head to keep up with the rotation of the world.

“You took me quite unawares, being so unexpectedly alive,” Lady Belinda explained, “But now I can see… it was fated to be! My goodness, I made a rhyme! Perhaps I shall be a poet in this New World, like you, my love!”

Marlowe unavailing tried to gently pry her fingers loose. “It is more complicated than that, I fear.”

“Pish! Was ever the course of love more simple?”

Marlowe managed to free himself from her grip, but she immediately latched back on. “I wasn’t talking about love.”

“But Christopher…” Lady Belinda began before she was interrupted by the sound of an animal moving through the trees. Despite himself Marlowe pushed her behind him and faced the sound.

Donald Vagoe, who had been staggering from tree to tree behind them, found himself stumbling out in front. He picked up a branch from the ground and waved it in unsteady counter-point to his own uncertain relationship with the vertical.

“I shall defend you my Lady!” he cried, and then fell forward, catching himself at the last moment by using his makeshift weapon as a crutch.

Marlowe unsheathed his sword and pushed the sailor aside. “What are you going to do, fall down on them?”

The leaves at the side of the path stirred, and a familiar ursine face poked through.

Rothgar the sea-bear nodded to Marlowe while Lady Belinda brandished her parasol from behind him.

“Do not too quickly take the branch, or
Hope will find
the White Hart upon the white sand.
Glance ahead, not by chance, do not stand
old attachments. Let her rage.
‘Carefully think, but not too sage’,
Cock your ears
Where the path turns and where the path veers
Don’t fear to dare
Where the blue water meets the grey air
In Nature’s chapel, the ocean’s lair.”

With another nod, Rothgar trundled off, leaving only a few disturbed branches in her wake.

Marlowe puzzled over Rothgar’s characteristically oracular pronouncement as he strode on down the path, Lady Belinda stumbling along behind and peppering him with questions. The land-sick seaman staggered after them, calling, “Do not leave me in this dark wood! It is full of demons!”

He paused when he reached the point where the path forked off to the village in one direction and the point of the bay in the other, then impulsively took the branch toward the village, glancing down the other fork toward the water as he went. If he couldn’t escape Belinda he could at least see what was happening in the settlment.

He was interrupted by Lady Belinda raging behind him, now awkwardly supported by the green-tinged Donald Vagoe, “Christopher! I demand you stop at once!”

He turned to calm her, and in the momentary silence heard a sound like a splash from the water’s edge, but he dismissed it and tried to calm the angry woman, who seemed torn between clinging to him and striking him repeatedly over the head with her parasol.