Shakespeare for Squirrels

by Christopher Moore

  “She bonked me right proper, out of my sox,” sang the fairies as we went.

  “She’s a friend indeed, to a thousand cocks,” sang Bottom, because the fairies weren’t good at counting.

  And I filled my bellows to belt out, “Oh, I give your sweet mum—”

  Which is when the monkey swung down from a rather twisted cedar tree and snatched the hat of many tongues off of Moth’s head, then scampered to higher branches, where he screeched down at us.

  “Jeff!” I called. “You cheeky monkey, you!”

  “Why does that monkey have the same outfit as you, Pocket?” asked Cobweb.

  “Do you turn into a monkey in the daytime?” asked Peaseblossom.

  “No, why would you ask that?”

  “Because it would be smashing,” she said.

  “Also, because she is simple,” said Cobweb.

  “That’s true,” said Peaseblossom.

  “I love that hat,” said Moth. “That is my first and only hat.” She shook her fist at Jeff, who shook his little fist back at her, as is the way of his people. “If it were daytime I’d run that rascal down and get it back,” said Moth.

  “Sorry, love,” said I, “but I’m afraid there will be monkey spunk in the millinery before you see it again.”

  Alas, I would have tried to call Jeff back, but at that very moment the ground began to undulate around us, lumps of forest floor growing like great blisters of leaves and pine straw to erupt into creatures, six of them, manlike, as black as tar, great heads low on their shoulders, with ears like bat wings and yellow eyes as big as a duck’s eggs, each brandishing a short sword curved like a sickle.

  Cobweb screamed and scurried up a tree as two of the creatures broke for her. Moth and Peaseblossom similarly shinnied up trees out of reach.

  “Run,” I shouted at Bottom as I drew a dagger from the small of my back and flung it overhand at the attacker who stormed at me, screeching, sword swinging over his head. The dagger caught the creature high on the chest, and stuck, but did not sink to the hilt as it would have in a man, but penetrated only to the depth of the first joint of your finger. It stopped the creature for only a tick. He yanked my dagger out of his chest and cast it aside, while I drew my second dagger and dodged behind a fir tree. The thing hissed and bared a mouthful of jagged teeth like I’d seen in sharks we’d caught at sea, his mouth fully twice as wide as that of any human I’d ever seen.

  The single beast that pursued me swung his sword and I dove and rolled away. His blade caromed off the bark of the tree. I risked a look back. Three of the creatures were clawing at trees, trying to get the fairies, another two had taken off after Nick Bottom, who, no doubt fortified by the fairy frolic, was outrunning them easily.

  I backflipped away from my attacker and rolled to put another tree between us. I dared not throw another knife and have the same result as the first. The fiend was covered in plates, as smooth as polished onyx, each approximating where there might be a muscle underneath, and although there was space between the plates, there was no way to know if a blade would even penetrate at those points, and before I could flip the blade to throw it, he was on me.

  He hacked away at me with his sword as he advanced. By backing away and leaping I was able to avoid losing an arm. He was a shit fighter, really, signaling every slash with a great windup, so as long as I had a clear path to retreat to, I could avoid his blows. But even an agile warrior with only a knife cannot long hold off a stronger opponent with a sword, and when my heel caught on a downed branch and I fell backward, he was on me. I drew the puppet Jones from down my back and used his oak stick to parry a blow, then quickly riposted, hoping to lock his curved blade with the puppet, then slide under to plant my dagger beneath his breastplate.

  But the puppet stick snapped.

  “Oh, fuckstockings,” said I, regarding the splintered stem of my puppety friend.

  I should perhaps add here that I, too, am a shit fighter. Oh, I am nimble footed, and I can perform many acrobatic tricks, but they are not suited so much for fighting as for entertainment, so my base battle strategy is, generally, to jump around like a lunatic until my adversary is thoroughly confused, then stab him in the eye.

  The creature made a quick recovery and swung straight down at my face. I parried the blow with my dagger and made to roll away, but my jerkin caught on whatever branch had caught my heel and I lay open to the next blow.

  “Oi! Goblin!” Cobweb, behind my attacker perhaps four yards, stood with my first dagger, blade in hand, ready to fling. The goblin (for now I knew what the creature was) paused in his attack and looked under his raised sword arm to the attacking fairy.

  “In the eye, lass,” I called as I freed my jerkin and rolled away. Cobweb let fly with my knife.

  A thrown knife is a fussy weapon. Not only must it be thrown with enough force to pierce an enemy, but it must arrive at its target point-first and perpendicular or you may as well have flung a stick for all the damage it will do. Thus is required an assessment of the blade’s balance and weight, as well as the rate at which it will spin and how far the weapon will travel with each spin. With practice, and a matched set of throwing knives, one becomes able to instantly calculate the distance, time the rotation, adjust the force and attitude of the throw to match the circumstances, and, if truly aimed, drive a dagger into a soft target to the hilt. All this calculation, of course, depends on the ability to count, at which fairies are complete shit.

  The dagger slapped flat against the goblin’s back and fell to the ground, at which point I heard, for the first time, the sound of goblin laughing. The other goblins stopped trying to get after Peaseblossom and Moth and turned to see what was so funny.

  “We’re sent by the night queen, you gormless bloody git,” said Cobweb. “Show him the passport, Pocket.”

  I hadn’t thought about the blossom I’d put in my hat since we’d left Titania’s leafy cathedral. I pulled off my coxcomb and reached in, to see my finger emerge from the hole the crossbow bolt had made when I pursued Demetrius’s killer in the morning. There was some damp, plantlike pulp but little more. “The passport is ruined, but I’ve some of its essence. Here, smell my finger,” I said as I held out my damp digit for sniffing.

  He turned, made as if to sniff my finger, but with a closer look at his great maw of ragged teeth I withdrew the offer.

  “Take my word for it,” said I. “We are sent, to see the shadow king. Take us to him immediately.”

  The goblin regarded me, his cohort stopped worrying the trees and looked over.

  “Do you have any silver?” he said, his voice a rat scratching in a tin bucket. I could see now that the shiny plates I had thought to be armor were, indeed, part of the goblin’s body, like the shell of a turtle, only segmented and articulated. Other than a small silver ring in his ear, the goblin wore only a ragged loincloth and a thin dusting of the loamy earth from which he’d emerged.

  “I do, I do, I do,” called Nick Bottom, who had circled back at full gallop, leaving his two pursuers a hundred yards behind.

  “Silver!” said the goblin with the earring. I assumed he was in charge, because when he held up his hand, thin fingers tipped with thick claws, the two chasing Bottom slowed to a limping walk, which was the way all of them seemed to ambulate—bit of a sideways crab stride, as if they had suffered some injury.

  Nick Bottom had unbuttoned his fine waistcoat and was coming forward holding one lapel out. “This button is silver. It’s sulfured black, but that will polish off.”

  I strode to the weaver, my dagger still in hand, the ranking goblin like a shadow behind me. I snipped the button from Bottom’s vest and held it away from the goblin, who had become as single-minded as a begging dog with the scent of roast beef in his nose.

  “No,” said I. I polished the button against my jerkin and held it for the goblin to see the shining relief of a woven Celtic knot standing out silver against the black patina. His great yellow eyes rolled back in his head as he
looked, and he reached for the button as if reaching for a dream. I pulled it away. “When we see Oberon.”

  The head goblin looked at the others. “We take them to the shadow king.”

  And so they did. Peaseblossom and Moth came down from their trees. Nick Bottom fell in behind them, muttering something like, “So this is why we weren’t to go into the forest at night. I knew it wasn’t the bloody fairies.” I walked side by side with Cobweb, the silver button tucked into my belt, and the goblins formed a stutter-stepping formation around us, the one with the silver earring leading.

  “You lived among these goblins when Titania lived at the Night Palace?” I asked Cobweb.

  “We tended her in the forest. She came to us. We only went into the Night Palace for ceremonies, and never during the day. Except for Puck and the one hundred.”

  “The one hundred?”

  “Oberon’s concubines. They are locked in a chamber in the palace all day and night.”

  The head goblin began to drift back in the column until he marched at my side.

  “I am Gritch,” he said.

  “I am Pocket of Dog Snogging, all-licensed fool and onetime king of Britain.”

  “Fool? Like the Puck?” said Gritch.

  “Yes, like the Puck,” said Cobweb. “So mind your bloody manners, you scuttling dung beetle, or you’ll feel the fool’s wrath.”

  We walked for a bit, the forest faded away to rocky scrubland, the foothills to mountains that rose like jagged fangs against the night. I carved a new stick for Jones from a green branch as we walked, Cobweb watching as if I were performing alchemy rather than whittling.

  “So, love,” I whispered to Cobweb. “Not looking for a warm welcome back to the palace, then?”

  Before she could answer, Gritch sidled up to me and said, “Suck your dick for silver?” with all the subtlety of a fishmonger calling out freshly caught cod.

  “No, piss off,” said I.

  “Fine,” he said. And he scuttled across the column and came up on Cobweb’s side. “Suck your dick for silver?”

  “I don’t have any silver,” said Cobweb.

  “Fine,” said Gritch. As we made our way up the mountain, he went to each member of our troop, offering the same service to each for the same price, pausing next to Peaseblossom, who appeared to be haggling.

  “She knows she doesn’t have a dick, right?” I asked Cobweb.

  “Doesn’t have any silver neither. Pease is simple as sand, but she’s the mongrel’s dongles at bargaining.”

  When Gritch got to Bottom, the weaver looked at Gritch’s saw-toothed maw and audibly yelped with dismay before declining, as his only silver had been the button on his waistcoat. Gritch sulked and fell in beside me again.

  “Gritch, mate, do you have any idea what you are offering?”

  “I am told that if you say that to mortals, sometimes they will give you silver.”

  “But you asked the fairies. Females.”

  “They can have silver,” he reasoned.

  “Quite right,” said I. “Carry on.”

  Chapter 13

  In the Night Palace

  The palace rose into the night sky like a great pointed crown, nine ridiculously tall, angular towers constructed, it seemed, of the same smooth, black glass plates that armored the goblins. No man nor creature of forest had constructed this edifice, for there was no sign of joints nor mortar, nor even the mark of a stonecutter. It was a castle made by a demented jeweler, from pieces of polished night, which reflected every star in spectral brilliance and shone streaks of moonlight down its sides as if painted in molten silver.

  Gritch led us through a gate of polished stone, down a tunnel, and out into an open courtyard, or bailey, as wide as some of the old Roman amphitheaters I’d seen in Tuscany and Provence. The interior was lit only by dim lamps up the high walls and the odd torch carried here and there by ambling goblins. The goblins and fairies had no problem seeing by the dim light, but Bottom and I were nearly tripping over ourselves until Gritch retrieved a torch from a rack by a brazier glowing with coals and lit it from the same. He held it high so we mortals could see our way.

  A goblin carrying a sword with a silver earring somewhat smaller than Gritch’s approached him and the two exchanged what seemed to me to be low grunts and growls.

  Nick Bottom stepped up behind me and whispered, “He’s telling the other to tell Oberon we are here, sent by Titania.” Bottom pointed to his long ears by way of explanation.

  The soldier goblin hurried off, no doubt to deliver his message, and Gritch said, “Gathering is soon. Shadow king will bring down the moon. He will see you after the moon.”

  There was a raised stage at the far side of the courtyard, and goblins were beginning to gather below it, spraying out from gates at the base of each of the towers that made up the crown of the palace.

  “Where is their market?” I asked Cobweb. “Where are the horses? The oxen? How do they feed a walled city without farms?”

  “They eat things from under the ground,” she said. “Farm things under the ground.”

  “And do they turn into gophers during the day?”

  “No, they hide under the ground,” she said, ignoring my snark. “They can go about in the day, but only for a short time, wearing a cloak. They can’t see well and the sun burns them.”

  “So, one might shoot the wrong mortal simply because the daylight was too bright?”

  She shrugged, nodded toward a set of steps that led to a platform just below the stage. Two goblins with crossed halberds guarded the stairs and made way as they saw Gritch coming. A silver earring carried a lot of authority in the castle, evidently, for beyond that, nothing distinguished Gritch from the other armed goblins.

  As we passed by the guard he whispered, “Suck your dick for silver?” to Moth.

  “Fancy a frolic?” she replied. Cobweb and Peaseblossom laughed and the goblin growled at them.

  Once on the platform, the lower stage, our heads were level with the upper stage, but we were a man’s height above the groundlings, which is how I thought of the goblins who were filling the courtyard. There was some sort of caste system at play here; the warriors carried all manner of weapons, were heavier of limb, and were perhaps a head taller than another group with spindlier arms and thick claws on their large toes. Workers, I suppose? If they were of different sexes, I could not tell, for there was no evidence of a difference in attire or body shape. They were a sea of shining black, like boiling pitch or swarming ants, perhaps. The flash of a weapon or the occasional silver ring in the ear was the only thing that distinguished one from another. Then just below the stage I spotted a flash among the black, on a warrior carrying a crossbow and a short quiver of bolts slung from a belt at his waist. On his right arm he wore a silver armlet cast with the image of the head of a Gorgon. I turned to Gritch to demand he bring the goblin to us, but before I could speak, trumpets sounded from balconies near the ceiling of the chamber, and all the goblins dropped to their knees in a single motion.

  “Trumpets?” I said to Cobweb. “How are they playing trumpets? They don’t even have bloody lips.”

  “Oi, Gritch,” said Cobweb, “you got goblins with lips?”

  Gritch looked confused, and I had no doubt that if he’d had eyebrows, he would have raised one quizzically. “Lips?” he asked.

  Cobweb blew a raspberry at him to illustrate her question, just as the doors at the back of the stage swung open and Oberon walked out. The hall trembled and went quiet except for the dying echo of the horns.

  Oberon looked like a man built of night sky. He was black, head to toe, but spotted everywhere but his face with silver and gold stars that shone their own light—I could see it playing in patterns on the doors behind him. He wore a cape made of night, too, that billowed out behind him, although I could feel no wind. His face was black, like the goblins’, but he had handsome human features, like an Egyptian statue carved from onyx. Atop his head he wore a tall, nine-pointed
black crown, the model for, or modeled from, the very palace in which we stood. He wore wicked silver claws on his fingertips that looked as if they would draw blood with even a delicate touch.

  He raised his arms straight over his head and the trumpets blew again. There was an earth-trembling sound of machinery, like a dozen heavy mill wheels being turned at once, and as Oberon brought his arms down to cruciform, the ceiling of the great hall opened. Every goblin eye turned skyward as the arches of the ceiling pulled back into the towers, revealing a shining moon above.

  Gasps of awe and ecstasy filled the hall as thousands of yellow eyes in a sea of black were illuminated by the full summer moon. I looked around. Even the fairies were on their knees, staring in wonder. Oberon and I were the only ones standing and not looking up. I looked at him, he at me.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” said I. “He didn’t create the bloody moon, you nitwits, he just opened a fucking window. You could have seen the same moon by walking outside.”

  There were a few cries of distress around the arena, as if I’d interrupted someone’s especially somber moon wank, but most of the goblins were drooling at the moon like starved men at an apple.

  Oberon floated, or seemed to float, to the edge of the stage and looked down on us. Gritch’s feet began to make frantic scratching motions, like a dog having his belly rubbed, his heavy talons scoring the stone. If he’d been on soft earth he’d have dug his way under it and I realized that was exactly what his body was trying to do. Cobweb, Moth, and Peaseblossom were curled into tight balls, hoping not to be noticed, I guessed. I could see Cobweb trembling and I bent and patted her back before approaching Oberon, who seemed somewhat nonplussed that I was not overwhelmed with his sparkly fucking grandeur.