Shakespeare for Squirrels

“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.”