“Well no need to be a knob about it, one can’t control the calamity of birth. Do I disparage your people for their dribbling giants and twatty talking puppets?”
“And you’re nine hundred years old?”
“And thus well prepared for your wisdom and charm,” she said with a grin, reaching for my man tackle.
“Thou lecherous crone!” I rolled away from her, pointing my bits toward the night and fire. “I’ve barely a score and a half of summers on my back and yet you would use me like a public boot scraper by the church door.”
“That’s a completely shit metaphor. I shall use you like the cheese-stinking man-tart that you are.”
“I do not stink of cheese.”
“You are a cheese eater. All your people stink of cheese.”
“And your people don’t eat cheese?”
“My people are of the forest. Where in the forest would we get milk?”
“I don’t know, badgers?”
“Aye, that’d be why there are so few of us. We’ve been undone by milking accidents in pursuit of our insatiable taste for bloody badger cheese.”
“Possibly, fairies are not my milieu,” I said, thinking to baffle her with a bit of fucking French. “You are my first.”
“Second,” said she. “Or did you think you were invisible and your puppet is talking on his own because of your magical wisdom and charm?”
“The Puck?” I ventured.
“The Puck?” she mocked, making me sound simple and slow to grasp the obvious. “Go to sleep, fool.” She lifted her frock above her head and let it fall over her. “In the forest, it is only common courtesy, you know, to share a friendly tumble with a kind soul who brings you supper.”
I said, “Take heartfelt thanks from this fool true and humble, / But dinner free-given comes not with a tumble.”
“Did you just rhyme at me?”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
She settled into a spot on her side of the nest. “Sodding cheese eater.”
What fresh curse was this fierce, feral creature of wit?
“Good night, sweet hag.”
Chapter 5
I Am Slain!
When I awoke Cobweb was gone. A pile of nut meats and berries big enough to fill a yeoman’s helmet waited by the opening of the nest on a trencher fashioned from a large leaf. I resisted the urge to curse the fickle fucking fairy for abandoning me, for she had left breakfast and I was ravenous. She’d left me another waterskin as well and I drank deeply until the chill shuddered down my belly and made a shy turtle of my willy. My boots and motley stood propped on sticks before the smoldering bones of the fire, the salt stains and much of the soil and grit washed away, no doubt in the same stream where she’d filled the waterskin.
I dressed and sat down by the fire to eat my breakfast and plan my next move. On to the city, to be sure, but now that I was not dead, nor invisible, I would need to be careful. Blacktooth and his watch would be looking for me, and my having dirked his leftenant in the ham would not help in making my case for Drool’s release. No, I would have to find my way to the gendarmerie and see if I might free Drool by way of stealth, trickery, and cunning, the tools I’d learned as a cutpurse, and, failing those, subterfuge, guile, and duplicity, the skills I’d acquired at court.
I finished the fairy’s fare. What forest magic she had employed to shell so many nuts in the night without waking me, I could not say, but for the first time in a week my gut unknotted and I could turn my attention to other tasks undistracted. But which way was west and the city? The sun lay well below the forest’s canopy, and I could not remember which side of a tree moss was supposed to grow on, nor why moss was supposed to have a better sense of direction than I in the first place. Then I spotted it, three straight sticks laid out upon the ground in the pattern of an arrow. Good Cobweb, called by her night queen’s horn, had thought to leave me directions. Perhaps I had been too harsh with the haglet for simply succumbing to my prodigious charm.
I slung the waterskin around my shoulder, hitched up my cod, and set off in the direction in which the arrow pointed. I set a stuttering pace, picking my way through the ferns and deadfall until, perhaps after an hour, I encountered a path, where I, at last, felt my sea legs slip away and marched steady and fast until I heard a squirrel-startling scream from ahead.
“Help!”
Wisdom would suggest the best route would have been away from the shout, but having been only recently rescued from the sea by a stranger, the spirit of human charity bubbled high in my heart, so I ran toward the call. (Which also happened to be the direction in which I was headed, anyway.) I broke out of the trees and came onto a grotto with a shallow stream running by it, and there, not twenty yards away, at the water’s edge, by an enormous boulder shaped like a turtle, stood the fairy trickster Puck, clutching desperately at a sapling, as if he could not catch his breath.
“Puck,” said I.
“Oh, alack, alack, alack, good Prince Pocket of Soggy Dog, I am slain! I am slain!”
“You are not,” said I. He was standing right there, wearing my hat, decidedly un-fucking-slain.
Then the Puck loosed his grip on the sapling, gasped, and turned as he slid to the ground, facedown. I could see the shaft and fletching of an arrow jutting from his ribs just below his right arm. Blood coursed down his side with each beat of his heart. By the time I splashed my way to him, the coursing had slowed to oozing. I crouched and rolled the Puck onto his side as best I could, careful not to disturb the arrow, but my concern was for naught, the fairy was quite dead. I held his head in my lap and scanned the banks of the stream for the archer—listened for kicked rocks or rustled brush, but heard none. The blood trail in the sand ran only a few steps back. The Puck had fallen nearly where he’d been when the bolt struck, which meant that I, in the open streambed, would make an easy target for the next bolt. Hairs bristled on my neck with the thought of the murderer taking aim.
“Rest in peace,” said I, pulling back his hat and crossing the fairy’s forehead with a quick drawing in his own heart’s blood. I had not been on speaking terms with the god of my nunnery in many years (in my defense, he started it) but the passing of this Puck, this magical, perhaps ancient, magnificently annoying creature, deserved some reverent observance, even if done only to irony, the god of all fools. That done, I leapt to my feet and sprinted for the cover of a stand of bushes in the direction from which I’d just come, bracing for a bolt between the shoulder blades that might come any instant. I scrambled under the bushes and peeked out at Puck’s body, one of my throwing daggers already in hand. Not a movement in the trees, not a sound but the gentle jingle of the brook. The only direction I knew not to contain the killer was the one from which I had come, so after a quick three-count, I was on my feet, running back down the path with urgent stealth, only a squirrel chittering away above betraying my presence. Yes, it was away from the direction in which I thought the gendarmerie and Drool to lie, but I could trace a wide arc to my destination later if it meant avoiding a murderer now. This wasn’t the work of a random cutthroat or highwayman. The Puck’s name had been on the lips of every person I’d met since landing here, a favorite of kings and court, and who knew how old he might have been, how many half-marmot sons he might have fathered who would be seeking vengeance? No, the death of Robin Goodfellow would not go unnoticed, and whoever had done it would think nothing of murdering a charming wisp of a fool to cover his crime. And then . . .
“Fuckstockings,” I said to the trees, to the sky, to the sodding squirrels. “My hat.”
And I turned and padded back again toward the stream and the scene of murder most foul, to retrieve my coxcomb. My hat, which had been made to match my motley. My hat, which had graced my noggin in the company of nearly every random Greek I’d met. My hat, which now rested like a pillow beneath the head of the dead Puck.
Puck looked like a sleeping child, lying there on his side against the turtle rock, his fe
et in the water. From the spot behind my shrubbery, I scanned the streambed up and down, and, seeing no one, made my way to the body.
“Sorry, mate,” I said as I retrieved my hat from under the Puck’s head. Poor creature, not even a hat to his name. The fairy’s feet, washed clean by the brook, still lay in the water. Perhaps having been so recently a dead fool myself, I could not leave him thus, his feet to be eaten by prawns and snails and whatever other watery creatures lived in a Grecian stream. I arranged the Puck’s arms over his head so as not to disturb the arrow in his side and dragged him a few feet away from the water. Perhaps his people would find him before the woodland creatures made their supper of him. I saw now the arrow in his side was not an arrow at all, but a bolt from a crossbow, some heavy black wood, perhaps even metal, composed its shaft, the fletching made from stiffened leather, not feathers. Just so, the arrow from a proper English longbow would have been three times the length. This one appeared to have pierced the Puck to his heart or nearby, only a handbreadth protruded from his ribs.
“Halt!” came a voice from behind me.
I looked over my shoulder to see a watchman stepping out of the forest behind me. I dropped the Puck’s arms and turned to run.
“Hold there, or die on the spot,” said a different voice. I glanced over my other shoulder to see Burke, leftenant of the watch, lowering a cocked crossbow at me. I stopped. Three watchmen at his flanks lowered their spears, then Blacktooth stepped from behind a tree.
“Oh, good captain,” I said. “Look, I’ve found the Puck for you. I trust there will be a reward.”
* * *
“Pocket! My friend. My friend,” called Drool through an iron grate in a heavy cell door as we entered a wide, round antechamber lined with cells. I was slung by my bound hands and feet from a pole being carried by two watchmen, which was how I’d made my way through the forest and then the walled city into the tunnels of the gendarmerie—Blacktooth feeling that was the safest mode of transport after my previous disappearance into thin air. Likewise, the dead Puck was slung from a similar pole between two other watchmen. At the stream, Burke had argued that dispatching me on the spot would ensure my secure delivery to the city, but Blacktooth countered that my continued presence among the quick might mitigate to the duke their colossal cock-up in retrieving the Puck.
“Hi-ho, lad,” I called to Drool. “How fare thee?”
“Had a wee beating at first,” said the ninny. “But they gived me a drink of water what was lovely.”
“The beast yanked two watchmen’s shoulders out of socket when we untied him,” growled one of my bearers. “Took six of us to get him in the cell.”
“Just out of socket? Well, the lad hasn’t had a proper meal in a week. Off his game, I reckon. Normally he’d pluck the arms from spearmen like petals from a daisy.”
The spearman shuddered and signaled his mate to lower me to the ground.
“Leave him bound,” said Burke. “In the cell like that.”
They slid the pole out from between my limbs and dragged me into a small cell across from Drool’s, this one with an open barred door. One of the spearmen threw my coxcomb in after me, then bolted the door. The two watchmen carrying Puck’s body dropped him on the floor in the antechamber.
Blacktooth, who had watched the transfer from a heavy chair by the antechamber entrance, was picking his teeth with one of my daggers. “Burke, tell the chamberlain to tell the minister to tell the duke that we have retrieved the jester, Robin Goodfellow as previously festooned, and have further disinterred ourselves to our duties by also ingratiating his murderer.”
“Should I report that the Puck is dead?”
“It is implied in the subtaint.”
“Subtext,” corrected Burke.
“Aye, go.”
“Aye, sir,” said Burke, and off he went.
“I didn’t kill him,” I shouted.
Blacktooth climbed out of his chair, returned my knife to the sheath with its two brothers, which he threw to the floor next to the chair, then came to the door of my cell.
“Here is the case as it permits itself,” said the captain, counting on his fingers. “First, motive: thou art a known blackguard, having dirked Burke in the leg by magic.”
“That wasn’t magic, I threw the bloody knife.”
“Guilty, as confessed,” said Blacktooth. “Third, opportunity, you knew the diseased, and his name was said before you escaped.”
“I’d never seen him.”
“Sixth and finally,” said Blacktooth, “method, as you were going about with arms, which is forbidden to all citizens except soldiers, men of the watch, and criminals.”
“I had knives. He was killed with a bloody crossbow.”
“And second,” said Blacktooth, who had mysteriously run out of fingers to count on, despite having left several unused, and so was making his point by counting one of the bars on my cell door, “you were found au gratin with the victim when he was first defenestrated by the stream, as witnessed by various members of the watch. Non. Compos. Mentis.” He dusted off his hands as if he’d made a point.
Idiot.
* * *
A moment before lightning strikes, a charge fills the air, the hairs on your arms stand up, a general unsettledness comes over you, and holding a thought is like grasping at smoke, as if power and heat and blinding fucking light are about to reduce you to a cinder of memory, and so was the air in the gendarmerie when she entered. Even curled in the corner of my cell, hands and feet still bound, I could feel it. Watchmen who had been talking, laughing, or playing dice a moment before fell silent, as if the rude ribs of the castle had collapsed, dropping the mountain upon them.
I slid myself up the wall and hopped to the door of my cell. (Yes, I could have easily untied my hands and feet now that I was no longer slung under a pole, but as I was able to move and eat and even have a wee in the bucket in the corner while thusly trussed, I felt no need to put my captors on alert to my ability to free myself.) Blacktooth stood at attention by perhaps a dozen watchmen as Burke led her through the arch in the antechamber opposite from the one through which I’d been carried.
She was a woman in full, perhaps thirty years old, a head taller than Burke, although not so tall as Blacktooth. Her dark hair was woven into plaits with golden cord and tied back so that it fell to the middle of her back. She wore a long white gown with a plunging neck and back, the first garment I’d seen that looked like something a proper Greek would wear when modeling for pottery, except under it she wore a chemise of fine chain mail that looked to be fashioned from gold. Her arms were burnished by the sun, slim, strong, and lined with a net of fine white scars, bare but for a single silver armlet on her right arm with the head of a snake-haired Gorgon cast upon it. On her left arm was a patch of pale skin where she had worn another armlet, but the hair-fine scars stopped at the edges, as if the armlet had shielded her for many battles. This was not the look of a royal in any court I had attended.
“Ma’am!” said Blackfoot, coming to attention. The watchmen all came to some version of what they thought to be attention, although there was no uniformity to their motion.
She nodded to Blackfoot but looked at me. “Is this prisoner the one you found by the body of Robin Goodfellow?”
“Aye, Your Magnificence. We first encountered the knave yesterday, perspiring with a group of crude mechanicals, and he did fling a dagger into the bullocks of my consort Leftenant Burke, causing gracious injury, before disappearing by use of majiks.”
Burke stepped up and presented the bandage around his thigh with a flourish, then bowed and backed away a few shuffling steps.
“Begging your pardon, Your Municipal,” continued Blacktooth, “but we—not the royal ‘we’ as in your we, but the ‘we’ as in ‘us,’ meaning Burke and I and the men, being the ‘we’ collective, but not the ‘we’ as in the wee that me and the men have been known to take—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” said I. “Spit it out, y
ou addlepated ninny.”
“Ahoy!” called Drool through the little portal in his cell door at the mention of a ninny.
“Yes, do go on, captain,” she said.
“Aye, Your Radiance. The following day, that being today, while searching for the Puck at the behest of the duke, may the gods smile upon your union and the fruit of your looms, we came upon this scoundrel dragging the fresh corpse of the previously apportioned Robin Goodfellow, who was freshly expired by an arrow to the antiquated chest.”
“Anterior chest,” corrected Burke.
She looked to me. I smiled, removed my coxcomb, and bowed. “Your Grace,” said I.
She did not return the smile. “I would see the body,” she said.
Blacktooth led her to the next cell, where they had carried the Puck’s body. The watchmen shuffled in their ranks, none with the slightest idea what he should be doing. I had the distinct impression they were not accustomed to a royal presence in their cellar. In two ticks she stormed out of the cellar, a bloody crossbow bolt in hand.
“So this scrawny rascal is the killer?” She pointed to me with the bolt.
I stood as tall as my form permitted and thrust my codpiece forward so it arched through the bars and she might see my hidden potential. Scrawny, indeed?
“We heard the Puck scream, ma’am,” said Blacktooth. “And not three shakes of a lamb’s pail later, we came out of the wood to find him over the body. This fiend is most certainly the percolator.”
“Perpetrator,” corrected Burke.
“And where is his crossbow?”
“We did not find it,” said Blacktooth. “Only a brace of daggers strapped to his back. We had a third which he’d left in Burke’s nethers.”
“Your Grace,” I ventured, with a bit of a bow, “perhaps a more obvious killer presents . . .” I pointed through the bars to the crossbow slung across Burke’s back.
Burke’s eyes went wide and he swung the weapon around. “No, ma’am. The bolt’s too short. Would sail off the rail or hit the bow itself.” He drew one of his own bolts from a quiver at his hip and held it next to the bolt that had killed the Puck. Burke’s was nearly twice as long. “That one came from a smaller bow, ma’am. Carried by a smaller bloke, no doubt.” The scoundrel nodded furiously my way.
Shakespeare for Squirrels Page 5