“Enough,” said the duke. “Answer me, fool.”
I shrugged. “Your lady wished to know if I knew who killed the Puck and if I had spoken to him before he was murdered.”
“Aha!” said the duke, as if he’d caught a pie thief in the kitchen.
“Aha!” repeated Blacktooth, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Do you prefer the fool hanged or broken on the rack, Your Eminents?”
“Or both,” added Burke, grabbing me by my bicep.
“We found him standing over the Puck, Your Disgrace,” said Blacktooth.
“Your Grace,” corrected Burke. “We encountered the fool on the previous day, as well, conspiring with a group of rude mechanicals, with no passport upon him, and would have arrested him on the spot, but he vanished.”
“Vanished?” Theseus seemed to lose his breath for a moment.
“Not even a puff of smoke,” said Blacktooth. “Just chucked a knife in Burke’s bum and vanished.”
“Did you kill the Puck?” asked the duke.
“Did you?” I replied.
“No, not that I—I sent the watch into the forest to find him.”
“To what end, if I may ask, Your Grace?”
“Well, I . . .” Theseus was not used to answering questions.
“Perhaps you were going to have the Puck entertain at your wedding, Your Grace,” said Egeus.
“Yes,” said Theseus. “That’s it—”
“Not that he was hammering your queen like a blacksmith setting rivets?” said Jones. I pounded the puppet on the table.
“Manners, you wooden-headed ninny,” said I. “Sorry, duke. Do go on.”
The great Greek hero Theseus fluttered his fingers like a flustered dowager feeling dog breath on her naughty bits. “Oh my, no,” said the duke. “My Hippolyta is a most chaste and modest lady.”
“She’s the queen of a race of bloody warrior women who keep men as pets, bonk them for offspring, then make coin purses from their scrotums.”
The tall, blond Amazon behind Theseus who had giggled earlier held up a small brown coin purse and grinned. I shuddered.
“Everyone out!” commanded the duke. “I would speak to this fool alone.”
The guards and watchmen headed for the door.
“Wait,” said the high steward. “Your Grace, the fool could be the assassin. Your safety.”
“Fine. You lot”—the duke waved to the cohort of guards behind his chair—“stay and see that I am not attacked by this flea turd of a fool.”
“Bit harsh,” said I.
All but the four guards, two armed Athenians and two Amazons, scurried out of the room.
“Sit here.” Theseus patted the arm of a chair where the scribe had been sitting. I made my way to his side and sat. “Tell me now, fool, are you of a kind with the Puck?”
“In that he was a fool, possessed of many talents, as am I, yes. But as I am much more handsome and wear proper motley rather than run around the forest dressed in leaves like a savage, no.”
“I see,” said the duke, stroking his short beard.
Theseus, ruler of Athens, slayer of monsters, seemed less sure of himself than I, a half-starving flotsam fool. I knew not why the royals held Robin Goodfellow in such regard, but I would have been foolish indeed not to take shelter in the Puck’s reputation.
A moment passed, the duke glanced over his shoulder at his guards, then motioned for them to move to the far end of the long chamber. When they were in place, he whispered.
“Do you know, did the Puck seduce my Hippolyta?”
“I think not, Your Grace. The puppet was merely making a jest at your expense.” It was not a lie, really. I did not know for a fact that Puck had been bonking the warrior queen. Speaking truth to power is a noble endeavor but of limited utility if one’s head is in a basket.
“Good, good. I took her as a spoil of war, but since the battle she has fired a passion in me I have never before known.”
“Well, she’s a flinty bit of fluff to be sure, and I’ve been well used by a brace of warrior wenches myself in the past. But for the rattling armor and random bossiness, they were quite lovely.”
“So you know? I would possess her, not as a prisoner, but as her lord.”
“A distinction without a difference, to be sure. How may I be of service?”
“Blacktooth tells me you go about the forest at night, is that true?”
“It is.” City of cowering wallies, was Athens, all afraid of the dark.
“Then I would have you find out if the Puck completed a task I sent him on. It can only be done at night.”
“You sent Puck on an errand?”
“He was my jester and servant. I sent him to take a message and fetch a trifling thing from the fairy queen Titania. The fairies can only be found at night.”
That explained Cobweb’s disappearance each dawn. “I’m your man,” said I. “Messages and fetching are well within my wheelhouse. What’s the message? I can compose it into a bawdy limerick if you prefer. There was a young fellow called Bucket—”
“No, you don’t need to know the message, just whether Titania received it. And she will know the thing you are to fetch and give it to you if she sees fit. Tell her the Puck did not have it with him.”
“Honored to be of service,” said I. “I will need my apprentice to accompany me, of course. He is held in your dungeon and I will need him for navigation and protection.”
“I think not,” said the duke. “Blacktooth has told me of your simple giant. He will stay here to assure your return.”
“Oh balls!” said I, somewhat disappointed.
“I’ll have the scribe make you a passport with my seal. It will give you my protection in the city, and with Titania’s servants, but I cannot guarantee your protection from other forest dwellers. Return here before my wedding, three days hence. If you accomplish your task, bring me what I require, you shall be the royal jester and your friend will be set free.”
“I will be honored to put my awesome and terrible powers in your service, Your Grace. But I’ll need money, for food and provisions. I’ve not had a decent meal for days.”
“Very well, give him money for food,” Theseus said to the guards. “Egeus will reimburse you. And call the scribe.”
The tall, blond Amazon grinned as she pulled a silver coin from her nut-sack and threw it to me across the table. The scribe was summoned and he constructed a passport on a thin shingle of wood and applied to it the duke’s seal in hard wax. I tucked it in my belt with its brother. I was dismissed and Egeus, the high steward, restored my daggers to me and led me out of the castle.
“So you will go to the forest?” asked the steward.
“Aye,” said I. “Secret quest and whatnot.”
Egeus leaned down to me. “My daughter, Hermia, ran away into the forest two nights ago. If you bring her back with you I will see that you are richly rewarded. I am a wealthy man.”
“And she will come willingly, will she? I am but a speck of a fool and not suited for taking prisoners.”
“Tell her all is forgiven and I will allow no harm to come to her. You will find her with a young rascal called Lysander. If you kill him in the process there will be a bonus in it for you.”
“Just like that? Kill the lad, fetch the girl, gold and glory in the castle?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I bring you the lad’s head?”
“No, that might upset Hermia. She is mistakenly in love with him. Just bring a swath of his shirt stained in blood. That and my daughter’s tears will be proof enough.”
“Lovely,” said I, strapping on my daggers. “Now point me toward the city gate, toady, and give me a route that takes me by a market, I’ll need a hearty meal if I’m to spend the evening murdering and kidnapping.”
Act II
And that distilled by magic sleights
Shall raise such artificial sprites
As by the strength of their illusion
Sha
ll draw him on to his confusion.
—Hecate, Macbeth, 3:5
Chapter 7
The Slow and the Quick
“RAWR!”
“Shut up!”
“RAWR!”
“Shut up!”
“RAWR!”
“Snug, if you roar one more time I shall lop off your knob while you sleep.”
“Rrrrr, rrrrrr—”
“Snug!” I called to the joiner, who was outside of his shop on the edge of Athens, having a discussion with his wife. She was a round and sunny woman, in contrast to her husband’s gangly dimness.
“Master Pocket,” said Snug. “We thought you were killed in the forest.” He turned to his wife. “This is him, Bess, the master of theater I told you about. High jester of Dog Tosser, he was. Tell her, Master Pocket, how I got to rehearse so I can be a proper fierce lion.”
Snug made as if he was going to roar again and his wife put a hand in his face for silence as she rolled by him to look me over.
I bowed extravagantly, hat in hand for the flourish. “Enchanté, Madam Snug,” I said in perfect fucking French.
“He’s right tiny,” she said, inspecting me from head to toe, pausing a moment to regard my codpiece. “Say, you ain’t an elf, are you?” She winked at me hard enough to approximate a seizure, with all the subtlety of a head wound.
“It’s not real,” said Snug. “And he ain’t an elf. And don’t you think about it again. Go make us some lunch, woman.”
“I thought you was having lunch with your mates in the forest.”
“Go,” said Snug, a stern finger pointed to the shop doorway.
Madam Snug rumbled off into the shop. Snug turned to me, affecting the aspect of a whipped dog. “Apologies. She’s been like that since that rascal Puck touched her up by the millpond. Ruined, she is. You’ll have lunch with us, I hope. Just bread and cold mutton.”
At the market I’d purchased a loaf and some cheese and a skin of wine, which I had slung over my back in a flour sack, but before I set out into the forest on a quest to find a killer and buy release of Drool, perhaps a chat with one of the only people I knew in this land who did not wish to imprison or murder me was in order—even if he was bone simple and possessed of a wandering wife.
“We was supposed to rehearse at lunchtime in the forest, but Bottom never came home yesterday. I reckon he’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Aye, overnight in the forest. Probably kilt by elfs or lions. You wouldn’t want to play Pyramus for the duke’s wedding, would you?”
“Aren’t you even going to look for him?”
“Not me. If the elfs got Bottom, clever as he is, I got no chance at all.”
“I’m heading into the forest,” said I. “I’ll keep out a look for him.”
“Right decent of you. Maybe bring back his waistcoat or a toe so his wife’s got something to bury. Otherwise she’ll worry, you know. Come along, lunch.”
I followed Snug into his shop. A large window of waxed parchment panels lit the space with golden light like a wall of candles. Various tools of his trade hung on a side wall: saws, planes, hatchets, hammers, and spokeshaves. The carpenter at the White Tower, where once I jested for King Lear, had befriended me, and while he worked we often had long conversations about theology, carpentry, or the nocturnal benevolence of various wenches about the castle, so I at once felt at ease in the shop. The smell of newly milled lumber hung in the air and put me in mind of my long-ago home.
Snug led me past his workbench, where a wooden-jawed vise held his current work in progress, a yard-long piece of oak he had been shaping with a spokeshave. Curled ribbons of wood littered the floor below the bench. Above the bench hung a half-dozen other oak constructions, the finished versions of the piece in the vise. They looked quite familiar.
“Good Snug, these pieces you’re working, are these crossbows?”
“Aye, they are. Just the stocks. I makes ’em for the duke’s men.”
“I thought only soldiers and the watch were permitted weapons.”
“These ain’t weapons, just bits of weapons. I makes the stocks, then they goes to the smith, who makes the trigger and whatnot. Another chap makes the bows, gluing up layers of horn and wood, and Jim the fletcher makes the bolts. Tom Snout the tinker puts them all together before they go off to the armory. You remember Snout from rehearsal. Bloke with the fine deerskin hat.”
“So you never have a finished crossbow?”
“They gived me one to make me patterns and jigs from.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Aye, around here somewhere. I’ll find it for you after lunch.”
“So all of the tradesmen you named, they each had a finished crossbow to work from?”
“Not all of ’em. Some just got the part they was to make. Me and Snout got one though, because he had to put them together and because I am slow of study and could not do my work without seeing what the finished one looked like.”
“So, because you’re thick as pig shit, they gave you a working weapon?”
Snug thought for a second, looking at the row of crossbow stocks as if they might have the answer inscribed in the wood. “Aye, that sounds about right,” he said.
He led me through a low doorway into a narrow chamber where he and his wife lived: a cozy hovel of a home, with two small waxed-parchment windows, a bed, a stove, and a small table with two chairs. A loaf of rough brown bread and a tin pitcher of ale sat on the table next to a joint of smoked mutton that had been worn at with a knife.
“You take the chair,” said Snug. “Bess can sit on the upended bucket.”
“You can put the upended bucket on your empty head,” said Madam Snug.
I sat down and dug in, my manners drowned long ago in a sea of pirates, nitwits, and monkeys. As I ate, the Snugs sniped at one another. Robin Goodfellow’s name was batted back and forth in quite unflattering terms. In denying her liaisons with the Puck, Mrs. Snug did not paint the fairy fool in endearing colors, and Snug was far from forgiving the fairy or his wife’s transgressions.
“Why, I wouldn’t let that rascal touch me if he was the last idiot in the village. A right trickster and a liar, he is, and tiny to boot.” She turned to me. “Nothing wrong with being tiny, mind you, if a fellow is true and knows his way about a lady’s bits, just as long as he’s not a lying scoundrel like that Puck.” She winked extravagantly again and hitched her bosoms up in her frock in my direction.
I looked to Snug as if I had not heard her. “Have you ever made a smaller crossbow? One, say, made for someone my size or smaller? One, say, that would fire a bolt like this?” I drew the black bolt from the sheath across my back and put it on the table.
Snug set his ale down, then picked up and examined the bolt. “Made out of some heavy wood. Ironwood or something that don’t grow around here. Tip is forged black iron and tied on with sinew. This ain’t a bolt like what Jim the fletcher makes. But it don’t speak to the size of the crossbow. You could shoot this out of one of the ones I make if you wanted to.”
“Balls,” I spat under my breath. “So this bolt could be shot by any crossbow carried by the watch, or the duke’s guards or soldiers?”
“Aye, as long as it ain’t too big around to fit in the arrow shelf, that groove on top of the stock, and it ain’t. But heavy as it is, you wouldn’t have range like with a longer bolt. Three score yards shot flat, I reckon.”
“So plenty for the forest?”
“Aye. But that bolt ain’t for hunting. Would have a wider head to bleed the animal. That one’s for poking through armor.”
The whole time Snug and I had talked about the weaponry, Madam Snug had chewed the same mouthful of bread, her gaze captured from the moment I’d drawn the crossbow bolt. I resheathed the bolt, drained my cup of ale, and stood.
“A fine repast, Madam Snug.” I bowed and tipped my hat in thanks. “But I must go; errand for the duke. Before I go, Snug, might I have a look at that finished
crossbow of yours?”
“Aye,” he said. He let go a roaring belch, stood, and led the way into his shop. I waited by the front door, while he rifled through every beam and scrap on and under every table, only to come up with a shrug. “Sorry, Master Pocket, I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps the missus took it.”
“I didn’t touch your sodding crossbow,” said Bess, who had watched from the hovel doorway during the search. “What would I do with a crossbow?”
“You might have given it to your wee lover-man, Robin Goodfellow.”
“No I didn’t. I wouldn’t give that two-faced scalawag the dust off my shoe.”
“Little chance of that, good Snug,” I told the joiner. Dead obvious, then, that news of the Puck’s demise had not yet reached the realm of the Mechanicals. I made my way out of the shop into the street. “Thank you for lunch, but I must be off. You sure you won’t join me? Perhaps you can look for your friend Bottom.” I confess, I am accustomed to traveling in the company of my own personal nitwit, and until Drool was liberated I thought Snug might suffice. An attending idiot can be a whetstone for the wit, and, in the event of bears or other beasts, a fine distraction while a quick and agile fool makes his escape.
“No, I gots work, but if Bottom’s alive, please to tell him how splendid and frightening my lion is. RAWR!”
“Shut up!” said Madam Snug, who appeared in the doorway. “You can tell your elfin friends they can stop here if they need a rest from forest life. Always happy to help a weary traveler.”
“Oh my,” said the puppet Jones (under my control), “the Puck made a right deep impression on you, didn’t he?”
“Did not. He was a crooked little tomcat, he was. You be on your way, now, puppet.”
“And a fond farewell to you, madam,” said I as I tucked Jones down the back of my jerkin and scampered away.
Was, she had said. He was a crooked little tomcat. I pondered it as I made my way over the fields and orchards that surrounded the city and into the forest. The ninny’s wife? A missing crossbow? The weaver Bottom not returned from the forest overnight? Everyone in the city terrified of the forest people, yet the young lovers two nights away and Egeus sending me, a stranger, out to murder his daughter’s suitor without so much as a glance at my CV? A duke and a queen overly curious about what the Puck had been doing in the forest before he was killed, and neither overly concerned with who had done the killing. Peradventure, I was not the first assassin sent into the woods this wedding week.
Shakespeare for Squirrels Page 7