Shakespeare for Squirrels

Chapter 1

He Is Drowned and These Are Devils

We’d been adrift for eight days when the ninny tried to eat the monkey. I lay in the bow of the boat, under the moonlight, slowly expiring from thirst and heartbreak, while the great beef-brained boy, Drool, made bumbling snatches for the monkey, who was perched on the bowsprit behind my head, screeching and clawing at my jester’s hat, and jingling his bells in a festive manner.

“Sit down, Drool, you’ll capsize us.”

“Just one wee lick,” said the giant, grasping the air before him like an enormous baby reaching for his tiny monkey mother. The bow of the boat dove under Drool’s weight. Seawater splashed the monkey’s bottom; he shrieked and made as if to fling poo at the giant, but it had been eight days since any of us had eaten and he could birth no bum-babies for the flinging.

“There will be no monkey-licking as long as I draw breath.”

“I’ll just give him a bit of a squeeze, then?”

“No,” said I. On the fourth day, after the water ran out, Drool had taken to squeezing Jeff (the monkey) as if he were a wineskin and drinking his wee, but now the monkey was dry and I feared the next squeeze would produce little but a sanguine monkey marmalade.

“I won’t hurt him,” said the oaf, so inept in the lie that he might as well have tied bells on the truth and chased it around the town square while beating a drum.

Drool dropped back onto the seat at his end of the dinghy, his weight sending the bow up so rapidly that Jeff was nearly launched into the drink. I caught the monkey and comforted him by slapping my coxcomb over his head and holding it fast until he stopped biting.

“But . . . ,” said Drool, holding a great sausage of a finger aloft as he searched the night for a point.

“Shhhh, Drool. Listen.” I heard something beyond the lap of waves and the growl of my gut.

“What?”

I stood in the boat, still hugging the monkey to my chest, and looked in the direction of the noise. A full moon puddled silver across the inky sea, but there, in the distance, lay a line of white. Surf.

“It’s land, lad. Land. That way.” I pointed. “Now paddle, you great dribbling ninny. Paddle, lest it be an island and we drift by.”

“I will, Pocket,” said Drool. “I am. Land’s the dog’s bollocks, ain’t it?”

He showed less enthusiasm than the revelation should have engendered.

“Land, lad, where they keep food and drink.”

“Oh, right. Land,” he said, a spark finally striking in the vast, dark empty of his noggin.

The pirates had set us adrift without oars, but Drool’s arms were long enough that if he lay down he could get enough of a hand in the water to paddle. By his sliding from one gunwale to the other, the little boat sloshed slowly forward. My arms would barely reach the water, and as it turned out, though the monkey could swim, even with a sturdy cord tied round his middle, Jeff was complete shit at towing a boat.

An hour or so later, what had been a calm sea began to rise up on rollers, and the blue-white lines I’d spotted churned into a briny boil. What had been the distant swish of surf now crashed like thunder before us.

“Pocket,” said Drool, sitting up, his eyes wide and alight with fear. “I don’t want to paddle no more. I wanna go back.”

“Nonsense,” said I, with enthusiasm I did not feel. “Once more unto the breach!”

And before I could turn to see where we were headed, a great wave lifted the boat and we were driven ahead on its face, racing as if on a sled down a never-ending slope. Drool let loose a long, terrified wail and gripped the rails as the stern was lifted, lifted—and then we were vertical on the face of the wave. I looked above me to see a great flailing nitwit flying in the night and a monkey tumbling with him. Then the wave crashed down upon us. I lost my hold on the boat and was awash in a confusion of salt and chill. Over and down and over until there was no up, nowhere to go for air, and no way to get there. Then a light. The moon. A tumble, and there again, the silver above, shining life. I kicked, hoping to find some purchase on sand, but there was nothing but water; then the moon, and a black specter diving out of the silver disc above—the boat. I tried to tuck my head but too late and then a shock and a flash in the eye as the boat struck me and all was dark. Oblivion.

* * *

There were flames dancing before me when I woke from the dead, which was not entirely unexpected. The devil was smaller and rather younger than I would have guessed. He danced barefoot around the fire as he stoked it in preparation for my torment. The fiend wore a tunic of rough linen, leaves and sticks clinging to it, and a bycocket hat with a single feather in the style of bow hunters back home in Blighty. Bit of a ginger fringe. Scrawny and pathetic, really, for the prince of bloody darkness.

r />

As I stirred, the fiend made his way over to me and studied my face. He had wide eyes and high cheekbones, decidedly feminine, which gave him the look of a cat that has been surprised in the middle of his repast of a freshly killed rat—alert and fierce.

“He’s awake,” said the demon.

“Pocket!” I heard Drool say, at which point pretending to still be dead was a fool’s errand.

I looked over to see the great oaf sitting splayed-legged on the other side of the fire, a massacre of nuts and berries in his lap, the smeared evidence of their fate already streaming down his chin in red rivulets. “Cobweb saved us,” said the ninny. “She’s the git’s tits.”

“She?” said I. “So not the devil?”

“’Fraid not,” said the girl.

Of course, a girl. I looked over the figure crouched before me like some gamine gargoyle. Right tiny, and in need of a good scrubbing, but I supposed a girl she was. And not a child, neither, despite her size.

“I didn’t do so much of the rescuing as your large friend,” she said. “On the beach I jumped up and down on his back until he was breathing again. He carried you up here into the forest.” She leaned into me to whisper. “Methinks he may have taken a blow to the head during the wreck. He seems a bit slow.”

“Slow is his only speed, I’m afraid.”

“You took quite a shot to the noggin yourself.” She touched a spot above my forehead and I winced with the pain. “Covered in blood, you were. I cleaned you up.”

I touched the tender lump on my head and bolts of pain shot across the corners of my vision, a deep ache throbbed behind my eyes. Only then did I notice I was lying on a bed of ferns and leaves, naked but for my hat, which had been draped modestly over my man bits.

“Your kit is drying still,” said the girl. She shot a thumb over her shoulder to indicate my motley, propped on sticks before the fire, along with my jester’s scepter, the puppet Jones. “You’ll want to wash it proper in fresh water when you get a chance. Most of the blood came out in the sea, but not the salt.”

“What about Jeff? Where’s my monkey?”

“Weren’t no monkey, sirrah. Just the big bloke and you.” She held out a leather wineskin. “Here. Water. Slowly. Your friend drank it all in one draft and I had to fetch more at the stream.”

“Had a wee chunder,” said Drool.

I took the wineskin and thought I might swoon again as I drank the cool water and felt the fire in my throat abate.

“Enough for now,” said the girl, taking back the wineskin. “There’s food, too, if the big one’s left anything.”

“I saved you some, Pocket,” said Drool, holding out my codpiece, which was spilling berries as he moved.

The girl returned and handed me the codpiece. “Wondered what these things was for.”

“Thank you,” said I. My cod was nearly full of berries and nut meats. I thought I might weep for a moment at her kindness and pinched the bridge of my nose as if chasing away a headache.

“Your friend says you are fools,” she said, giving me shelter.

“I am a fool. Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, at your service.” I tow a train of titles behind my name—royal fool, black fool, emissary to the queen, king of Britain and France—but I thought it ill mannered to be grandiose while lying on a litter of leaves with only a hat to cover my tackle d’amore. “Drool is my apprentice.”

“We are fools and pirates,” said Drool.

“We are not pirates,” said I. “We were set adrift by pirates.”

“But you were on a pirate ship?” she asked.

“For two years,” said I. “There was a girl, a Venetian Jewess who fancied me. She wanted to be a pirate but became homesick. When she returned to Venice I was not welcomed to join her.”

“So you stayed with the pirates?”

“For a while.”

“And they set you adrift?”

“With no food and only enough water for three days, the scoundrels.”

“But why?”

“They gave no rhyme nor reason,” said I.

“It was because you’re a shit, wasn’t it?”

“No, why would you say that?”

“Because I only have known one fool, a fellow called Robin Goodfellow, and he, also, is a shit.”

“I’m not a shit,” said I. I am not, that she could prove.

“Did you insult them? Make sport of their efforts and appearances? Craft clever puns on their names? Play tricks on the naïve and the simple? Compose rhymes disparaging their naughty bits? Sing bawdy songs about their mothers and sisters?”

“Absolutely not. There was no way to know if they even had sisters.”

“I think you were a shit, just like the Puck, so they set you adrift.”

“I was not a shit. And who are you to say? Why, I am deft at being rescued by wenches of great beauty and character, one for whom my heart still currently breaks, and I’ll not be abused by a waif, an urchin, a linty bit of stuff like you.”

“Feeling stronger then?” she asked, thin, sharp eyebrows bouncing over her disturbingly wide green eyes.

“Possibly,” said I.

A horn sounded in the distance, as if to call hounds to the hunt, and Cobweb leapt to her feet. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” said I.

The girl paused at the edge of the firelight. “What?”

“Where are we?”

“Look around, you’re in the forest, you git.”

“No, what land?”

“Greece.”

“It doesn’t look like Greece.”

“Have you been to Greece before?”

“Well. No.”

“This is what it looks like. I have to go. The night queen beckons.”

“The night queen?”

“My mistress calls. Rest, fool. Your friend knows where the stream is and there are plenty of nuts and berries to eat. Stay clear of the captain of the watch. He’s a shit, too. And not so playful as you and the Puck.”

“Wait—” But she was gone like a spirit in the night.

“She were the dog’s bollocks, was wee Cobweb,” said Drool.

“She was not,” said I. “And where is Jeff? Have you seen him?”

The ninny wiped a smear of berry gore from his lips. “No.”

“Drool, Jeff is a friend and valued crew member. If you ate him, I shall be very cross with you. Very cross indeed.”

Chapter 2

Presenting the Mechanicals

Two ticks after Cobweb disappeared into the thicket, sunrise was on us like an angry red dog. I donned my dried and smoke-scented motley and fitted my three throwing daggers into the sheaths across my lower back under my jerkin, which was sewn and slotted to conceal them. My friend Montalvo had slipped the daggers and a calabash of water into the boat before we were set adrift. It was good Montalvo who had convinced the crew to spend the boat at all, rather than just cast us into the sea. For a pirate, he had been a gentleman.

Drool was learning the unpleasant lesson of how berries grow in proximity to thorns and I had to pick the pricks from his great paws before leading us further into the forest. Like me, Drool was an indoor fool and not suited for foraging. We would need to find a village or town from which to beg our supper, or we’d be little better off than we’d been a day before at sea. The forest was a primordial behemoth, with moss hanging from a canopy of trees with the girth of cottages, not the sun-bleached stone hills with the odd olive tree clinging to them that I’d been told composed the Greek countryside.

We drank deeply from the stream and then made our way in a general westerly direction, away from the sea, over which the sun rose, for no other reason than it was the direction Cobweb had fucked off to. If there was a queen in that direction, I reasoned, so would there be a town, and accommodations more suiting a brace of abused indoor fools.

We called for Jeff as we went along, with no response. I hoped that he had scampered into the great forest thinking he h

ad happened upon monkey Valhalla, but as the hours passed, I began to suspect that he had perished in the sea, and while there was still a chance that Drool had eaten him, I wasn’t about to dig through the nitwit’s stool looking for monkey bones like some philosopher, so I took his word that nuts and berries had been his only fare.

When not calling, we listened for the jingling of Jeff’s bells. He wore a tiny silver and black motley like my own, and while I had long ago traded my bell-toed jester’s shoes for soft leather boots, and the pirate crew had trimmed the bells from my hat and puppet stick because they found them annoying, they had never been able to catch Jeff, and he had jingled in the rigging like a bright simian sprite.

I would grieve, when there was time. Jeff had been with me for years, through adventures and imprisonments, kidnappings and shipwrecks, but the gleam had seemed to be fading from his eyes of late. Maybe years pass more quickly for a monkey. There were white hairs on Jeff’s little chin. Perhaps he was in his monkey way an old man, decrepit ancient, his senses going feeble, his mind dim, familiar faces becoming strangers in his monkey mind. That was my explanation, anyway, for why he spent our two years before the mast either frolicking in the rigging, flinging rhesus feces down upon the crew, or trying to shag the ship’s cat. Jeff was a vile little creature, really, but still, he had been a friend. When my humors were restored, I would shed a tear.

When the sun was high overhead and our morning victuals of berries and ditch water had faded to a growling memory, we came to a clearing where five men were posing and orating in turn like a band of polite loonies—rehearsing a play, it appeared.

They were not gentlemen attired in togas, prosecuting a republic, and having each other up the bum, like proper Greeks, but hard-handed men, in leather and wool, each composed of wire and gristle into such sharp-jawed countenance as is shaped by hard work and lean diet. One roared like a lion and I pushed Drool behind a bush and bade him stay so as not to frighten the players.