Jack and Henry: A Shakespearean Chimera by Rachel Rodman continued...
Act 5
"Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and...
Plunged in the foaming brine...
The first man that leap'd, cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.'"
-The Tempest
A Fever of the Mad
Quietly, Henry bequeathed the kingdom to its rightful heir. Upon the (very pious) cousin of the king that his father had deposed, he set the crown. To Polonia, who spat at him, Henry gave Claudia's body, and possession of several duchies in northern France.
In the marketplace, Henry obtained a rowboat. He specifically sought an inadequate specimen-a rotting carcass, riddled with precariously-patched holes.
He packed carefully. In addition to food and water, he stored a few of the sisters' spiritualist books. They were printed onto well-oiled skins, which the sea would not damage.
When he rowed out of the harbor, the following evening, Jack accompanied him. Henry lashed the fat demon in the very center of the boat, so that his great weight would not overturn it. A strip of additional cloth, covering his mouth, muffled his cries of protest.
Many hours later-after rowing through the night-Henry removed Jack's gag. With an oar, brandished as a weapon, he coaxed a series of obsequious confessions.
"I missed you, Hal," said Jack-half purring, and half sputtering. "I just wanted you to come back to the tavern." He framed an exaggerated smile, which emphasized his strange wrinkles.
Finally-after many grovelling half-starts-Jack divulged the details. He explained that he had obtained a swarm of insects from the pit of Hell, and fed them on a diet of potent poison. To them, he had whispered specific instructions (The king's ear...) then released them into the king's garden, through a chink in the wall.
Claudia, Jack said, had also been an impediment to their friendship. ("I just wanted us to be close again," he said.) The opportunity to vilify Claudia had been too simple, and too tempting. "As you know, Hal," he said, with a fawning sigh, "I am such a weak creature." Beneath the ropes, the tip of his tail flicked.
For several weeks, Henry continued to row-West, West, West. To the both of them, he distributed the food and water at half-, then quarter-rations. Whenever Jack moaned for additional scraps ("Meat, Hal, Meat!"), Henry simply replaced the gag.
Henry became gaunt and hollow. Jack, more dramatically, just became loose. The excess skin on his stomach billowed, forming a makeshift sail, which, on windy days, speeded their journey. Each evening, Henry was careful to re-tighten Jack's restraints, so that his weight loss would not permit him to wriggle free.
There were other changes. Absent the spiritual influences, exerted by the land, their bodies began to depolarize. The tips of Jack's horns began to peel. Occasionally, a discrete chunk would detach, accompanied by a puff of brimstone. On Jack's tail, little sores broke out, which dribbled an acrid liquid.
Henry's wings also began to rot. For several days, he experienced an unsettling tingling. At first, he conceived of it as a muscle soreness, attributable to his sustained rowing. A strange aroma, however, accompanied it-subtly unpleasant, like ambrosia gone sour.
During most of the trip, Henry had kept the wings sheathed (on a spiritual level, because he knew that he did not deserve them; on a physical level, because they would have dangled outside of the boat, and interfered with his rowing). When he finally steeled himself to examine them, he discovered a meshwork of open holes. ("Moth-eaten," one might have described them, though moths were easily cowed by holy objects, and would not have dared to touch the wings of a king.) The flesh that lined each hole appeared pink and infected.
One day, squinting into the distance, Henry could no longer perceive the land. "It's time..." he announced, to the sky (or perhaps to no one-certainly not to Jack).
To underline his decision, he stood and flung one oar out to sea. He retained the second, steadied against his right side. It would, he hoped, make a serviceable magician's staff.
From the cargo hold, he removed the sisters' spiritualist books. Before embarking on the journey, he had marked several sections, each pertaining to weather manipulation. Now, he revisited them.
He selected a passage. "O elements..." he intoned. Though he felt weak, he raised a great voice...loud enough to block out Jack's objections...loud enough that the religiously neutral powers, which predominated at sea, must hear him.
When he had finished, he leaned over, in order to more directly address the water. "Consume me..." he said. With the butt of his provisionally magical oar, he thumped the outer side of the boat.
The storm that Henry summoned-novice that he was-was not as violent as he had hoped it would be. It did not kill him and it did not kill Jack.
Its effects were, nonetheless, dramatic. It destroyed the frail little boat that Henry had selected (though, of course, any moderate force would have accomplished this). It demolished Jack's ropes. It was also very frightening. Over and over again, while both screamed, its winds lifted them into the air, then slapped them back into the water.
The storm also scoured off what remained of Henry and Jack's rotting appendages. Behind, it left clean holes. Afterwards (wingless, hornless, and tailless), the two seemed to be merely men.
A half-hour later, when the storm calmed, both were floating close to one another. Henry clutched his oar and a stack of the sisters' (unexpectedly buoyant) books. Jack clung to a plank of boat debris. "Die," said Henry, kicking weakly at Jack from under the water. "I love you, Hal," said Jack, miming a kiss.
As they drifted, Henry paged intently through the sisters' books, determined to exert new controls upon Jack. Occasionally, he murmured a new incantation. Most failed, of course, which invariably prompted Jack to say something snide. "Is that a storybook, Hal?" Or: "Are you practicing your catechism?"
Within a short time, however, Henry mastered several useful tricks. With invisible ropes, he could bind Jack's limbs, or tighten a leash around his neck. Other methods of control were psychological. He could fill Jack's mind with images of hissing adders, or chattering apes. He could, in addition, manipulate the intensity of these images, so that they might serve as rejoinders to Jack's teasing. "Hal, you are worse than a demon," wept Jack, in the throes of one such experiment.
One evening, they washed up on the shore of a small island. It was lush and hilly, and it seemed oddly familiar to Henry. It reminded him, in a haunting way, of one of the imaginary countries that he and Cassio had invented, during their early years at play. (In the long, strange months that followed, Henry would come increasingly to suspect that he had accidentally magicked the island into existence.)
Jack was ecstatic. Through the sand, he scampered as best he could, within the radius permitted by Henry's restrictive magical ropes. At each new discovery, he squealed ("Pignuts!" as he rustled through the weeds, "Filberts!" as he reached into the branches, and "Scamels!" as he peered at the rocks). He shoved handfuls of each new food into his mouth, chewing with noisy relish, immediately after identifying them.
For Henry, the island-and Jack's feeding frenzy-stood in distasteful contrast to the dramatic obliteration that he had initially planned for the two of them. Weeks ago, when he had knelt before his wife's body, his plan had seemed so poetic. He had imagined the sea, like a great smothering hand, snuffing out their two wretched lives...just as Henry had snuffed out Claudia's. Afterwards-he thought-water-specific forces would redeem their disgusting bodies, transforming their bones into coral, and their eyes into pearls.
And yet-to Henry's profound regret-it had not happened that way.
On the island, for many years, Henry and Jack existed in a state of attempted atonement. For their crimes, however-the killing of a prince (and brother), the killing of a king, and the killing of a queen (and wife)-no possible atonement could be made.
Henry regulated Jack's condition very carefully. He could not actually make Jack sorry; he could only ensure that Jack's wretchedness was commensurate with the guilt that he ought to have experienced.
No longer a demon, Jack's physical decline was very rapid. With the decay of his Hell-based identity, he possessed no defenses against aging. The wrinkles in his face settled along a set of rational lines-raising no questions, but merely signifying a certainty: Old, Old, Old. His joints stiffened. At every task, he whimpered in a predictable way, which Henry eventually trained himself to cease perceiving. "I'm tired, Hal." And: "I'm hungry."
Each day, Henry divided their penance among three types of chores. There were chores of self-maintenance, such as gathering food and water, and maintaining the fire. There were chores of self-inflicted suffering-impractical, cyclical tasks, in which, for instance, they might drag a heap of logs, from one end of the island to the other, and then back again. ("We're sorry," they intoned, through the pain and monotony of it. "So sorry, so sorry, so sorry.") Finally, and most importantly, there were chores to honor the dead. At the center of the island, beneath a hill of waterfalls, they maintained three elaborate shrines-one for Claudia, one for Cassio, and one for the late king. They dusted and weeded them. They decorated them with beautiful shells and pearls, which they collected during regular diving expeditions. They also watered the shrines weekly, using liquor and berry wine-delicacies which Jack was required to manufacture, but which he was never, under threat of torture, permitted to taste.
"Forward, slave!" cried Henry, at frequent intervals. He flicked at Jack's heels with an invisible whip; at his ears, he set a buzzing whirlwind of invisible insects. At the sand, to underline the completion of each spell, he thudded his old oar.