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It was cold throughout Athens. On the duke’s wedding night, the laboured, false summer had finally given way to the natural order of the seasons. The first nips of winter bit exposed, sun-browned skin. The spiders rushed inside the houses, clinging to high corners like trailing ivy. Bottom could not bring himself to brush away their cobwebs.
For on the duke’s wedding-eve, Bottom had had a dream. There was no one he could speak this dream to, no way to pass the full knowledge of it from his body to another’s mind. There had been a moment where things might have been different, amid a frantic wedding dance. He had met the duke’s gaze and a brief, bright flash of affinity flared in his chest. It was as if the duke knew Bottom’s dream, that they had shared it, somehow, unlikely as it was. There was hope, then, for Bottom to be understood. And then it was gone, burned out against the night.
What was left was the sense of being out of step with time. Wherever Bottom set his feet, he was never stable on the ground. His tongue was slow over words he had known since his mother spoke to him in cradle. His fingers stumbled over the weft, the innate body-knowledge of his trade corrupted. Rita Quince gifted him some mustard-seeds to drink and purge the strange sluggishness that had taken root in the base of his stomach, but he could not bring himself to crush them.
There was something out of reach, he knew. His body had been the only thing that he owned entirely and something had been bestowed upon it, and something had been taken away. Or perhaps that was the fancy of his dream again, his dream where he had taken the duke’s face in his hands and drank from him like warm sweet wine.
Despite his stumbling fingers, business was good. He always seemed to have the exact number of customers to keep him well-paid and well-fed, putting a little aside for lean times, without becoming overtired. He supposed it was the duke’s patronage, that the trades of all his fellow players were flourishing in kind. He did not ask them. When he tried to speak of it, something stoppered his throat.
Rita Quince had written a new play, of four young friends kidnapped by a fairy court, forced to entertain the queen to keep their lives. Bottom had been cast as the queen’s would-be lover, left behind in their escape. They were to perform it for the duke and his favourites at a Midwinter feast to earn his patronage once more.
Often, after the close of rehearsal, or when his company were called to other duties, Bottom did not protest. He could not get out ahead of them as he once did, talk around them and tie them up with words until they were so convinced to stay another hour, to try another gesture, to turn over some of their dialogue to his own expression. That was past, when he was quick-stepped and danced in the rhythm of the flow of time. Now, at the close of day, and on Sundays, he harboured his rest-time to spend wandering alone throughout the wood.
Despite his longs hours crunching through the bracken on the forest-floor, the wood was largely impenetrable to him. Every method he devised for marking his path – scattering pine needles as a trail, tying strips of cloth to the trees – failed. To him the wood was a maze with an ever-shifting centre, concealing itself whenever he strayed too close. And yet, when he had finally given up, finding his way out was as easy as blinking, like he was pushed out by the relief of an invisible force. Yet, as hostile as the wood was to him, he kept trying. When the wind whipped about him, it carried the sweet scent of musk-rose. Sometimes he rested a while in the scrubby grass and awakened with the taste of violets on his tongue.
On the Sunday before Midwinter, Bottom was once again walking in the wood. This time, he had brought chalk with him to mark crosses on tree-bark as he passed, but this strategy was a failure like all the rest. He ran his fingers over some distinctive yellow-green lichen frothing over a silver branch, certain he had passed this same tree hours before.
A voice boomed behind him, multifaceted as a choir.
‘Nick Bottom,’ it named him, ‘you are a strange creature still.’
She appeared before him and everything in the forest sharpened to a point, pulling down in on itself to her, its centre of gravity. She was tall and gleaming white like a marble column. Her feet were bare and glittered against the barren ground.
‘You will not relent,’ she continued, ‘no matter how far I send you away. His will remains stronger than I supposed.’ She quirked her pale lips, blinked her white eyelashes. Outside of her colouring, she was an uncanny double for the new duchess.
Bottom’s throat ran dry. Every inch of his skin was alight with danger, every fragment of his bones screamed at him to run. He pressed his nails into the heel of his hand, to calm himself. He had spent too many hours searching to pass over a chance such as this.
‘Is this your wood, my lady?’ He said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and all within it. Do you know why you are here?’
Her question caught him off guard. ‘I am searching, my lady.’
‘Yes,’ she sniggered, distinctly mocking. She drew close to him, moving with unnatural speed and grace. She placed her index finger on the underside of his chin, her sharp nail digging into his skin. ‘Do you know what it is you seek?’
‘I had a dream,’ he breathed. It took all his concentration to keep still, not to even quiver, lest she drive her talons into his throat. ‘When I was lost in this forest, some weeks ago, I dreamed–’ his words failed him. It was like a thick smoke rose up through his throat and into his mouth, clogging his airways.
She cocked her head, her eyes keen. She inhaled deeply of his skin, satisfaction rolling through her body.
‘I dreamed of this wood,’ he forced himself to continue. In this moment, the danger she posed was greater than the danger within himself, the danger he could not speak. ‘I dreamed of a man – a king, I think. I dreamed I had–’ the smoke threatened to stop his breath completely and he faltered. His ears burned, his teeth hummed, his nerves electric. ‘I dreamed I was changed,’ he tried again. ‘I dreamed of laying in wild thyme, and–’ he gasped. Her nail drew a bead of blood and there was no more he could say of what he had dreamed.
‘Enough.’ She pulled her hand back. ‘You do not know. You are weak-minded. It is why I chose you.’
He stroked his throat, applying gentle pressure to his wound. ‘I don’t understand.’
She laughed again. ‘I will take you to him. Perhaps then you will stop defiling this place.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered as the world shifted. A crack reverberated as she disappeared in a blinding white streak, like lightning. In her wake, his vision swam and his mouth was filled with an iron tang.
‘What wakes me!’ An achingly familiar voice cried.
Bottom froze in place as his vision cleared. Before him was a shaded bank, impossibly lush with oxlips, honeysuckle and eglantine. The air was heady with the rich scent of summer, of–
Of wild thyme. Tears pricked Bottom’s eyes.
A man unpeeled himself from where he lay among the flowers, his shape slowly revealed to Bottom. Seeing him cleared some of the layers of doubt and half-truth from Bottom’s mind. He knew this man with a clarity that brought his dreams into focus. He had been dreaming of him, this man with the duke’s face. But where the duke’s power was sharp like an obsidian knife, it was limited by its wielder. This man’s power was unimaginable, broad as the earth and eternal as the sky.
‘It is you, gentle mortal,’ the man said. Despite the endearment, his voice was strange.
‘Yes,’ Bottom said. A pressure like a hand squeezed down on his heart, long fingers spreading through his chest and to his collarbones, until his shoulders might break. ‘What is your name? I never asked, upon our last meeting.’
‘And neither did I ask you,’ the man replied. ‘I am Oberon.’
It strengthened his voice, to name himself. His declaration rang between them as a church-bell.
‘My name is Nick Bottom,’ Bottom said. It sounded so small to him, lost in the distance between the forest floor and the peak of the bank.
Oberon smiled. ‘Nicholas. Of course.’ He spoke the name with reverence as he reached out his hand. ‘Come, Nicholas.’ He pulled Bottom up with ease, into the flowery bed.
Once inside, he dropped Bottom’s hand. They lay, side by side, backs cushioned by the bower. A thin slip of moon was visible through a teardrop-shaped break in the tree cover, the sky around it flat grey.
‘It was day, wasn’t it?’ Bottom asked.
‘Perhaps,’ Oberon said. ‘I have not kept with such rhythms.’
Bottom understood and fell silent.
‘I cannot fathom it,’ Oberon continued, his eyes fixed upon the moon. ‘I try to leave this bower and I find I am stuck here. I go to stand and find myself collapsing; I reach my foot towards the ground to find it will not bear my weight. I have asked,’ he winced, ‘I have begged her to tell me which enchantment she has cast upon me now, but she says this is not of her will. It must, therefore, be my own.’ He took a short, sharp breath, and forged on. ‘But the strangest matter of all is that the danger does not lie out there, beyond the thyme. It was this place, my place of solace, into which she stole herself and stole my mind away. It was here she laid her poision upon my eyes, and thus you and I lay together. It is here that has been corrupted by her crimes, and yet it remains that here is all I have. For I have nowhere else to find peace but this tainted bed of mine.’
His face was flushed, the skin under his eyes tight and shiny as if burned. Bottom closed his eyes and tried to picture Oberon’s words in his mind, tried to find the particular phrase that had caused the overwhelming shame he felt now.
‘She…poisoned you?’
‘With a love-spell, aimed towards whomever woke me.’
Guilt sliced through Bottom like a knife. He had done this. He had failed at something he could not have known, but had failed all the same, and with such disastrous consequences.
‘I am so sorry.’ He closed his eyes, unable to face Oberon in his shame. ‘I will leave, you will never have to see–’
‘No,’ Oberon said, his voice firm. ‘No. It is not your doing. She violated your body as much as mine.’
Tears flowed freely over Bottom’s face. He rubbed his head, the veil of his dream finally lifting enough to recall the long soft ears that had been grafted there, that Oberon had stroked with such tenderness. They had arrived and left with no pain, but to hear Oberon name them so plainly as violence resonated throughout his body, his muscles relaxing with a peace he had not known in weeks. He had been changed, and he had had no say in it.
‘Thank you,’ Bottom whispered.
‘Will you touch me?’
Bottom dared to look at Oberon, unable to understand this question in light of what they were speaking. His face was composed, his colour normal. The wind ruffled his hair gently, his deep blue eyes reflected the twilight, and tentative desire stirred in Bottom’s stomach.
‘Why?’ He asked.
‘Not in that way,’ Oberon said. ‘Not if you did not wish to. But only to understand that I was safe under your hands.’
Bottom shuffled closer, the rustle of flora beneath them as loud as thunder. Slowly, softly, he placed his hands on Oberon’s waist. His skin was as warm as basking in long grass on a summer’s day.
‘Are you well?’ Oberon asked. He brought his hand behind Bottom’s right ear and ran his fingers through his curls.
Bottom considered. He drew the thyme-scented air into his lungs and let it give him breath. He felt the wind run over his naked head and let the gentle circular motions of Oberon’s fingers comfort him. He let this bower cradle him, and in turn he moved his hands up Oberon’s back, between his shoulder blades, and cradled him fully in his arms.
‘Yes,’ he smiled.
They rested awhile, asking no more and no less from each other, as the sky above them first deepened into navy and lush black, then long through the night until dawn glowed on the distant horizon.
The weak light crept over Oberon’s skin, casting it an unearthly white. Something about it unnerved Bottom, the hair rising on his arms.
He shifted, trying to shake the discomfort, and awakened Oberon.
‘Must you leave?’ Oberon sighed, his voice thick and groggy.
‘I have work to do,’ Bottom said. He thought again about his trade in the past few weeks, how unlikely it seemed that he should always have the perfect number of customers. His need to escape grew.
‘Then take this.’ Oberon lifted a dewdrop from the tip of a pink honeysuckle and rolled into between the pads of his fingers, calcifying it into a pearlescent bead. He plucked a woody stem of thyme and stretched it to a thin brown cord, stringing the bead onto it.
‘Here.’ He gave it to Bottom. ‘Wear this, and you will never lose your way in this forest again. You will be cloaked from her, and you will always be able to find me.’
Bottom stared at it, tiny and delicate in his palm.
‘Is it enchanted?’
‘Of course,’ Oberon chuckled. Then he caught Bottom’s meaning. He cupped Bottom’s face, stroking his thumb across his cheekbone. ‘Do not be afraid – it will not alter your mind, or body. It will only provide you with direction, and protection.’
But Bottom could not tear his gaze away from this tiny bead. He could only trust it as long as he had it in his sights.
‘I don’t…I don’t know if I want enchantment, of any kind, to be a part of my life,’ he whispered.
Oberon was silent for a long moment. His hand went still, but he did not remove it from Bottom’s face.
When he spoke, his voice was halting. ‘I am enchantment itself. I am made of it, as you are made of flesh, and bone, and hot blood.’
Bottom balled his fist, enclosing the necklace within it. He forced himself to look into Oberon’s eyes. He was in pain, it was clear to see. Not the same quality of pain as when he spoke of the fairy queen: not the disbelief, the bitterness, the shame. But it was pain, all the same. And Bottom did not know how they could share anything that was not tinged with it.
‘I know.’
A lark sang out its first reedy note of morning above them. Bottom gently extricated himself from Oberon and left the bower. His foot struck the dense earthen path solidly.
Oberon peered out from the bank, holding his body back from the edge. ‘Please,’ he called, ‘take it with you.’
‘I will,’ Bottom smiled at him. ‘I can promise you that.’