Shakespeare for Squirrels

by Christopher Moore

  Hippolyta twirled the dagger and held it out, as if I would come get it.

  “No, love, you bring it here. And do wipe it off.” I gestured to my loincloth made from Helena’s gown. “I’m wearing white.”

  Chapter 20

  Act 3

  “The problem with act three,” said I as I paced the stage, now back in my black and silver motley, my three throwing daggers home together across my back at last, the audience paying rapt attention, their concentration no doubt sharpened by the prospect of shiny black death raining down on them at a goblin’s whim, “the problem is, we have prepared no act three. True, we could have just killed off all the sympathetic characters as we would have in Pyramus and Thisby, or in Romeo and Juliet, and sent you on your way grieving for lost love, but now we’ve rather written ourselves into a corner from which we must cleverly extricate ourselves with the use of guile, subterfuge, and, of course, the staple device of royals around the world: heinous fuckery most foul.”

  “Shoot him!” Oberon shouted to the goblin archers. “Kill the fool!”

  I danced to Oberon’s side of the stage. “But they won’t, will they, oh king of shadows? Because you have no power but that they give you, and they seem not in a giving mood. Do sit down.”

  Oberon made as if to protest and I tsk-tsked at him. “All-licensed fool,” I said, reminding him of what he still did not know—whether or not I had the powers of the Puck.

  “You all will no doubt want to get to burying your duke, but first, let us meet the players and solve a mystery, shall we?” I waved my company onstage, all of them still in costume but for the fairies, who were back in their black robes. Helena had joined them and wore what was left of her torn, shortened, soot-stained gown.

  “Ladies and gents, the Rude Mechanicals,” I said with a wave of presentation. And there was terrified silence in the room. “Well clap, you wallies, if they weren’t here you would be but a pile of bleeding corpses.”

  Tentative applause expanded to a full ovation, at which point I took my place at the center of the players and led them in a bow. The Mechanicals were veritably glowing with the attention, while the fairies looked a bit confused. Drool, wearing the hat of many tongues, well, drooled. Moth cradled monkey Jeff in her arms while I looked to the fairies and winked at Cobweb.

  “Now, doubtless these three and Titania are the first fairies most of you have ever seen. But they have always been here, in the forest, where you are afraid to go at night. And you should know that only by their fertile magic are your lambs born, do your crops grow, are your milk pails filled, because this strange Athens of yours runs by forces not known in the rest of the world. These”—I waved to the balconies and around the edges of the hall—“these goblins, who graciously hold you hostage, while fierce, and frightening, and hideous—”

  Gritch lowered his crossbow and waved to the crowd, displaying a smile you could grind your bones upon.

  “—well, they are not entirely awful, but if you’re afraid to go into the forest at night, they are a much better reason.”

  Gritch bowed.

  I continued. “The one magical being you all know, by person or reputation, is, or was, Robin Goodfellow, the gentle Puck, who was murdered in the forest outside of Athens, and his killer is here tonight, and there he stands.” And I pointed to Oberon, who seemed not at all surprised.

  “I didn’t kill the Puck,” he said, less emphatic, I thought, than the situation called for.

  “No, you did not fire the bolt that killed him, but you sent the goblin assassin.”

  “I did not,” said the king of the night.

  “Well why, then, did you kill Talos, the goblin who did fire the bolt? I saw it.”

  “Because you told me he killed the Puck, and the Puck was my faithful servant, and Titania wished justice. Or so you said.”

  “Aha!” said I. “Admit it, you met with Hippolyta, and she promised a silver armlet for the goblin Talos as pay to kill the Puck, then you arranged for him to be at Turtle Grotto at dawn to kill the Puck.”

  “How would I know where the Puck would be at dawn?” said Oberon. “I had sent him to enchant Titania, as in your little pantomime, and never saw him again.”

  “Twat,” said Titania out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Tart,” retorted the shadow king.

  The Indian boy studied the air before him, his visage as vacant as a cloudless sky.

  “I see,” said I, now walking back among my players.

  “You’re doing smashing,” said Cobweb. “Tell them about Puck’s three magic words, like Rumour told you.”

  I wheeled on Oberon. “But you were jealous of the Puck having dalliances with Titania, so you killed him.”

  “You’re bloody barking, fool. You know well the Puck’s talents, and their value to me, why would I kill him over this well-used slag?”

  “Who killed the Puck?” shouted one of the goblins from the balcony.

  Then a second goblin, from the floor. “Oi, who killed the Puck?”

  Before I could get the crowd back a chant rose up, more voices each time, until two hundred or more voices were chanting, “Who killed the Puck? Who killed the Puck?”

  I had really thought I had solved the murder, but this ungrateful rabble was not allowing me to formulate a second theory of the crime.

  ENTER RUMOUR, PAINTED FULL OF TONGUES

  He didn’t blow in like a whirlwind, nor blink into existence like a shooting star, he came through the antechamber door and quite deliberately trudged to the stage, past Drool, from whom he snatched his hat of many tongues, which he pulled onto his non-head. Then came to stand next to me, center stage, where he glared for a moment while the crowd continued to chant.

  “You’re late,” said I.

  “You are a disaster, a calamity, and an abject failure all rolled into one,” said Rumour. “I would say you were a disappointment, but with expectations below a worm’s belly, that is not possible. You are a disappointment to disappointments.”

  “And you are ever a delight,” said I. To the crowd, I shouted, “This is Rumour, a teller of tales.” Which settled them not at all.

  Rumour stepped forward, took off his hat, then pulled open his coat and turned, slowly, in place. And as he turned, the great hall went quiet as man and goblin took in the sight of a creature holding open a coat of waggling tongues, wherein there was no body, and above it floated a face with no head for a home.

  “I see you’ve killed the duke,” said Rumour, his coat still open wide.

  “I didn’t kill him, the bloody queen of the Amazons killed him, and if you’d been here on time with the magic flower she’d be blissfully in love and the duke wouldn’t be an expanding bloodstain on the pavers.”

  “Well you’ve cocked it all up just the same.”

  “He’s been bloody brilliant,” said Cobweb. “Except for forgetting about the three magic words. Brilliant.”

  Rumour shook his head, turned to the audience, closed his coat of many tongues, and began.

  “Who killed the Puck? To know that, we must know why someone would want to kill the Puck.”

  “Because he was a shit,” shouted Snug, rather out of nowhere. “’At’s why I killed him.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” said Peter Quince.

  “Well I wanted to.”

  “Was it love? Was it greed? Or was it power? I submit, it was all three. The story starts a thousand years ago, when Theseus came to this land with an army, intent on conquering it as his kingdom. Well, the men who lived in this land submitted without a fight, for they were not warriors. But then Theseus’s men ventured to the edge of the forest in search of new villages to tax, and when night fell, they were slaughtered by the hundreds by creatures that could barely be scratched by their bronze swords, the goblins. They knew no way to fight these men of stone, as they called them, so they explored to the south, where they encountered a race of tiny people we know as the fairies. Some they killed, some they enslaved
, but most escaped deeper into the forest, and search as they might, Theseus’s men could not find them by day. But that spring the grain did not sprout, the fruit trees did not blossom, the cows gave no milk, and even babies born to the women of the village were small and weak and soon perished. In hiding, the fairies did not dance, and in this land, there was no life but by the power of the fairies. Another season without their light and the mortals of Athens would be in famine, yet Theseus did not know the source of his misfortune and continued to send raiding parties into the fairy forest looking for fairy villages they might plunder.

  “The queen of the fairies knew that her people could not long live in hiding and on the run, so she went to the black mountain in search of the shadow king, the goblin king, Oberon, to ask him a favor. She knew the goblins were fierce warriors, and the mortals feared them, so she begged the shadow king to protect her people. So began a love story, for the fairy queen and the goblin king fell deeply in love. Oberon agreed he would protect the fairies, send the goblins to the fairy forest to meet the mortals in battle and frighten them away, but he needed something beyond her love in return. Oberon’s power over the goblins was tenuous, by birth only, and he was not one of them, but a hybrid creature of some other race. To satisfy his goblin soldiers he needed silver, and there was no more in the black mountain. The fairies had no silver, no possessions at all to speak of. Only Theseus, and the mortals, had silver to give, and while the goblins could slaughter the people of Athens and take their silver, they would then lose their source. The goblins were not sailors and could not go about in the day. But Theseus had an army, a navy, ships that could raid and trade and bring silver back to the goblin king.

  “A three-way bargain was made. Oberon would protect the fairies from the mortals, and in exchange, the fairies would dance and bring their fertile magic back to the mortals, and in addition, the fairies would do their dances just for Theseus, and from them, he would become immortal.”

  Well that explains how he could be so dogfuckingly old, I thought, and still walking about talking about his adventures.

  “Under the arrangement, all the races prospered. Oberon, like Theseus, did not age or become ill, for he, too, was sustained by fairy magic. By and by, Titania had a child, a son, half fairy and half goblin, with more than the powers of either of the races. As he grew, his powers manifested.

  “He was a shape-shifter, a spell-caster. He could travel great distances in an instant and return again as fast. But in his mind, he was as simple and unassuming as a fairy, as dogged and steadfast and sturdy as a goblin. He took his parents to distant shores, planets even. He conjured skies full of art for their entertainment. Like his fairy brethren, he thought himself nothing but a servant, and as he grew more powerful, the king and queen did nothing to disabuse him of the notion that he was merely a servant like the others, a slave to do their bidding.”

  “The Puck,” said Cobweb loudly enough for it to echo in the high rafters.

  “You were shagging your son?” I said to the fairy queen. “I know you poxy royals are inbred, but—”

  “No,” said Rumour. “Titania would use her son as a beast of burden, but she did not lie with him as a lover.”

  “On the day I first met him, Puck said he shagged two queens that day,” said I.

  “He said he’d ‘seen two queens shagged,’ that is not the same.”

  “Well, that’s just unseemly,” I said.

  Rumour cleared his throat unnecessarily by way of dismissing me. “As time passed, Oberon and Titania grew apart, indulged in dalliances with others, played out their jealousies, and, in the case of Oberon, his cruelties. Titania was banished from the Night Palace. She and her fairies went back to living in the forest. Oberon demanded Titania give him a harem of a hundred fairies to dance for him to keep him vital and alive, but his pleasures with them became much darker. He demanded the Puck stay with him and no longer serve Titania. By then, the Puck had grown into a young man, or a fairy-goblin version of a young man. Oberon found a spell that made the boy forget that the king and queen were his parents, and he thought himself only a servant, the goblin king the commander of all of his magic and powers. Yet the Puck still felt a bond to Titania, one he did not recognize, and although Oberon forbade it, he would sneak away and meet his mother and whisk her and an entourage off to distant lands, jeweled beaches and crystal mountains, where they could pass months at a time and return to Athens to find only a moment had passed. It was on one of these adventures that Titania found a tribe of feral fairies in India, wild creatures who lived among tigers and elephants. They were small like the fairies of Athens but dark skinned, with black hair, and they wore only leaves and the brown lace from coconut palms, or nothing at all. The Puck was smitten with one of the Indian fairies, and she with him, and in time she became pregnant with his child, although the Puck did not know it. Being a fickle youth, he moved on to other lovers and forgot his Indian love.

  “Oberon had become more cruel, and more jealous of the Puck’s time away from the Night Palace, so the Puck would take Titania to a distant land, leave her with her entourage, and return to Oberon to quell his wrath, then retrieve his mother when time had passed. In such a way did Titania watch the Indian fairy grow big bellied with her grandchild, and the fairy queen was present with her servants when the girl gave birth. But alas, the Indian fairy perished giving birth to the child, and when the Puck came to retrieve his mother, she held a babe in her arms, which she brought back to Athens to raise in the fairy forest.”

  Every eye turned to the Indian boy, including Oberon’s, whose face was a mask of fury. He loomed over the boy, glancing back quickly at the balcony, where Gritch still had a crossbow trained on him. Titania put her arm around the boy and pulled him close.

  “He is still young, but already the boy shows signs he will have the powers of his father. Come, boy.”

  In an instant the Indian boy appeared next to Rumour on the stage, looking as bored and vacant as he had in his seat. The audience took a collective gasp.

  “Go back to your seat.”

  The boy was back in his seat in a blink.

  “I knew it!” said Oberon.

  “You did not know,” said Titania. “You are as dense as the stones you live among.”

  “At last Titania had her Puck, a protector more powerful than Oberon and his goblins or Theseus and his soldiers, so she set out to free herself from her bond.”

  “But,” said I, “Talos, the goblin who killed the Puck, wore one of Hippolyta’s silver armlets, given him by the watchman Burke. Surely—”

  “I gave the watchman an armlet,” said Hippolyta, “but it was pay to them for letting the goblins into the castle tonight. My other armlet I gave to the Puck.”

  “Which the Puck gave to the goblin Talos, as Titania instructed him.”

  “Talos described Burke as the one who gave him the bracelet,” said I.

  “As Titania wished. The Puck was a shape-shifter. She told him to deliver the silver to Talos in the form and uniform of a watchman. He did not know he was paying his own killer.”

  “I wanted only to stop Puck from delivering the love potion to Theseus,” said Hippolyta. “I knew nothing of his murder.”

  “You killed our son!” said Oberon, and with that he reached over the Indian boy and seized Titania by the throat, lifting her completely out of her seat and throttling her as he roared, shaking her like a great onyx terrier worrying a rat, the silver blades of his fingertips digging into her neck. Oberon’s motion caused his great crown to wobble precariously on his head, which was entirely too much hat for monkey Jeff to bear. He jumped from Moth’s arms, leapt from the stage, and landed on Oberon’s head, where he commenced to apply a rigorous monkey fuck to the shadow king’s crown. In his enthusiasm, one of Jeff’s back feet found purchase in the goblin king’s eye and Oberon dropped the fairy queen and slashed at the monkey with his silver blades. Jeff screeched and slapped at the goblin king until his screams were drow
ned by a louder, angrier scream. Sensing something coming at my head, I ducked as Moth sailed over me, from the stage to the goblin king, where she caught him by the head as she flew by and raked her razor across his throat, swinging around as she went, sending Jeff tumbling to the floor and Oberon spraying green blood over her, the still-twitching Titania, and the Indian boy, who calmly looked down on Titania’s supine form sprawled on the flagstones.

  Moth, sitting now next to the two dying royals, held out her arms and Jeff jumped into them. She petted his head and whispered to him. She stood and walked away, letting the razor clatter to the floor.

  I looked to Gritch in the balcony. “Mate?”

  The goblin shrugged. “I didn’t know who to shoot.”

  “Which leaves us,” said Rumour, calling the horrified audience’s attention back to center stage, “with the three words left us by the Puck. The three words that he wanted to be his legacy. The three words that, had the hapless English fool figured them out, might have saved us much of the carnage we have witnessed tonight.”

  “Oh, do fuck off,” said I.

  “Good guess, but no—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Cobweb.

  “Is that three?” asked Peaseblossom. “I feel as if that may not be three.”

  “Kill them all!” came a voice from the balcony, and everyone looked up to see Robin Goodfellow standing on the edge of the balcony.

  “Kill them all!” said the Puck.

  Chapter 21

  The Three Magic Words

  “Don’t kill them all,” said I. “Don’t kill anyone.” I looked to Gritch to confirm my command. A nod from him so terse his great goblin ears flapped a bit.

  The Puck looked around the hall. “I was going to kill them all. It was to be a surprise.”

  “No,” said I. “No more.”

  “What about her?” said Puck, pointing to Hippolyta. “We should kill her. Kill all the powerful and corrupt.”