—Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 II 7-8
The light gleamed pewter under gracious, bowering trees; a liver-chestnut gelding stamped one white hoof on the road. His rider stood in his stirrups to see through wreaths of mist, shrugging to settle a slashed black doublet which violated several sumptuary laws. Two breaths steamed as horse and man surveyed the broad lawn of scythe-cut grass that bulwarked the manor house where they had spent the night and much of the day before.
The man ignored the slow coiling of his guts as he settled into the saddle. He reined the gelding about, a lift of the left hand and the light touch of heels. It was eight miles to Deptford Strand and a meetingplace near the slaughterhouse. In the name of Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council, and for the sake of the man who had offered him shelter when no one else under God’s dominion would, Christofer Marley must arrive before the sun climbed a handspan above the cluttered horizon.
“That’s—” Satyavati squinted at her heads-up display, sweating in the under-air-conditioned beige and grey academia of her computer lab. Her fingers moved with automatic deftness, opening a tin and extracting a cinnamon breath mint from the embrace of its brothers. Absently, she crunched it, and winced at the spicy heat. “—funny.”
