Shakespeare for Squirrels

“The Puck said he could put a girdle around the Earth in forty minutes. It may take me some time to retrace his path.”

“You have three days. You must return before the third watch on the night of my wedding, three days hence. Come directly here, to the gendarmerie. Tell Blacktooth, and have him come only to me, not the duke.”

“Blacktooth? Ma’am, if discretion is required . . .”

“Quite right. Blacktooth is much too much the crashing ox for subterfuge and guile. Burke then.”

“I’ll need my daggers,” said I. “Over there on the floor, by the chair.”

She fetched my daggers and grabbed a great iron key from a hook on the wall by a rack of halberds. She tossed my bundled daggers through the bars. This da

ft tart was actually going to let me go. As I strapped on my daggers she turned the key in the lock. “I’ll need to take along my apprentice, as well,” I said.

She threw the door open and stepped aside. “Three days or the giant dies.”

I might have run then, bolted down the tunnel and out into the city, but she had, quite deftly, drawn one of my daggers from its sheath and put the point under my chin.

“I will cut your throat where you stand,” she said. “Harken, fool, I do not trust the duke’s men or the watch. My warriors are confined to the castle, and the townsfolk are afraid to go into the forest at night. You are the only one who can do this, and not because I have any reason to trust you, but because I trust you know that I will kill both you and your great simple friend, slowly and painfully, if you do not do as I command. And if you think to turn to your dark magic, remember this mercy I extend to you now, your life.”

“You fancy me, don’t you?”

She grabbed me by the jerkin and threw me across the chamber into the rack of spears. They rattled down over me. I climbed out from under the weaponry.

“A little bit?”

Chapter 6

Once a Hero

As I made my way out of the gendarmerie I stepped lightly and sang a little song called “Blacktooth the Goat Blower,” which I composed as I went, my spirits lifted for the first time since my pirate wench had abandoned me to suffer among the salty dogs. I suppose it is a testament to my rebellious nature that I do not feel alive unless I am under threat of death by some poxy royal. I am a bit of a calamity whore, I figure, but with Hippolyta’s sword hanging o’er my head, I was absolutely giddy with the prospect of my task. I even encouraged the young, spot-faced watchman who escorted me out to join in on the “Goat Blower” chorus, but alas, he was too earnest in his duty.

I made note of my path—locks, gates, and portals—as I went, should I need to return in stealth to extricate an enormous ninny and sneak him by a half-dozen watchmen and as many guards. (Drool’s forlorn farewells had shaken me as I left the dungeon, and I had promised him I would return.) At last the labyrinth opened into the bright, cobbled street bustling with peddlers, beggars, and bawds. I caught the aroma of peaches wafting from a basket on a passing merchant’s back, a perfume so sweet as to roil a starving fool’s stomach. But alas, I had no coin.

“Buy us a peach, lad,” I said to Spot Face.

Spot Face snatched a peach off the top of the basket and tossed it to me. “Watchmen don’t have to pay,” he said.

“Wanker,” the merchant grumbled as he ambled away.

I bit into the peach with such abandon that I nearly chipped a tooth on the pit, and as the juice streamed down my chin I thought I might swoon—I closed my eyes and sank into the sweet peachy oblivion of it—but before I could take a second bite I was caught up and lifted roughly by the armpits, and my peach, my gentle fuzzy friend, was dashed on the cobbles.

“Duke wants to see you,” said Blacktooth, who had hooked me under my right arm.

“Thought you were away, eh, wee pirate?” said Burke, who had me under the left arm.

I made as if to struggle and when the watchmen braced against my efforts I swung my feet forward, then back over my head into a somersault, and slipped out of their grip, landing in a crouch in front of Spot Face with a dagger in each hand. Before Blacktooth and Burke had turned I was behind Spot Face with one dagger at his throat. The other I flipped and held by the blade, and held ready to send it to a happy home in Blacktooth’s eye.

“Back! Another step and I’ll cut his throat.”

Blacktooth looked to Burke, Burke to Blacktooth with a shrug, then to me said, “Go on then.”

“I will,” said I. “I’ll spill his lifeblood out onto the cobbles.”

“Get on with it, then,” said Blacktooth. “Then we’re off to see the duke.”

I found it odd that neither drew a weapon. Burke’s crossbow remained slung across his back, Blacktooth’s sword in its scabbard.

“Look there,” said I, nodding toward my fallen peach, “you’ve ruined a perfectly lovely peach and this lad will pay for it with his life.” Spot Face squirmed in my grip and I pressed the tip of my dagger into his neck to still him.

“Oh, all right,” said Blacktooth. He ambled to where my peach had fallen, took a small knife from his belt and trimmed off the bit where I’d taken a bite, then spat on the fuzzy bit and wiped it on his sleeve. He held the peach out to me. “Here you be.”

“Aye, slay the lad, take your peach, and we’ll be on our way,” said Burke. “The duke is waiting.”

“Oh bugger,” said I. “I’m not going to kill this pup for the loss of a peach.” I shoved Spot Face away and sheathed one of my daggers. In the same motion I pulled a chit of wood from my belt, a royal seal was impressed upon it in sealing wax. “But I’ve this passport from Hippolyta, and I’ll wager if you cross her, she’ll decorate her bedposts with your heads merely for the music of the night wind whistling through your eye holes.”

“Come along,” said Blacktooth. “Put up that pig sticker and follow us. You’re not a prisoner. Duke just wants a word.”

“Fine,” said I.

“Fine,” said Burke.

“Fine!” said Spot Face, his voice breaking with impotent outrage. “Take your bloody puppet stick, then.” He pulled the puppet Jones from his belt and tossed him at me. “I hope the duke spears your liver.” He looked to his superiors as if to add them to his curse but stopped himself and stormed back into the tunnel.

“Fine,” said Blacktooth, who, to my surprise, turned to lead us around the wall of the castle, rather than back into the gendarmerie.

The duke’s castle was not the gleaming marble edifice with gobs of columns that I’d been led to expect from Greek etchings and pots, but a squat and sturdy fortress atop a plateau (the stone hill into which the dungeon and gendarmerie had been carved). Along the battlements stood a guard every two yards, and even as we passed through the halls a pair of guards stood outside every doorway—a heavy martial presence for a kingdom at peace. In the great hall—a soaring, well-windowed, Gothic chamber, built later than the thick outer walls and other buildings in the bailey—I saw the reason for so much military. Fighting men wearing the duke’s crest stood around the walls of the chamber and on the six balconies above, numbering perhaps fifty in all, but between each man-at-arms stood another warrior, a woman, and these soldiers, decked in leather, mail, and plate, as muscled and scarred as their male cohorts, were unarmed. Amazons. Hippolyta’s soldiers.

“We’ll have them daggers,” said Burke. “Just while you’re seeing the duke. You’ll get them back.”

What damage they thought a speck of a fool could do with throwing daggers when surrounded by a hundred soldiers, I could not figure, so I unstrapped the harness from under my jerkin and handed it to Burke.

“Only two? Where’s the other blade, fool?”

“Left it behind,” said I. “Needed the spot in the sheath for that bolt, there. Orders of Queen Hippolyta.” And indeed, the harness held only two of my knives, for in the third slot was snuggled the black bolt taken from the Puck’s ribs. Burke nodded as if he understood, not considering there might be an errant dagger wandering around his jail.

They led me past a dais upon which sat a simple throne, to a door at the back of the chamber. A guard thumped the shaft of his spear on the floor twice. Burke shoved me through the door into a vaulted antechamber containing a long wooden table, at the head of which stood a rather road-worn chap of perhaps sixty hard summers, wearing an extravagant robe trimmed in gold and a thin golden crown fitted over iron-gray curls: Theseus, Duke of Athens.

Blacktooth and Burke immediately took a knee and bowed their heads. The guards, spaced about the room, Amazon and Athenian alternating, a dozen in all, clicked their heels. Theseus sat, arms folded, as if waiting for something, then a tall old fellow in a silk robe and hat scampered out from behind an arras and unrolled a scroll.

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“Egeus,” whispered Blacktooth.

“Lord high steward,” whispered Burke.

“Toady,” said I, sotto voce.

Egeus, his head thrown back as if trying to stanch a nosebleed, read from the scroll: “His Grace, Theseus, beloved High Duke of Athens, who defeated Sinis, the pine bender, vanquished Procrustes of the tortuous bed, dispatched the fire-breathing bull of Marathon, slew the Minotaur of the Cretan labyrinth, who defeated Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, and did bring her kingdom under the loving protection of Attica.”

“Well that’s a bubbly basin of bull bollocks,” said the puppet Jones.

There were various gasps from around the chamber, even from Blacktooth and Burke. One of the Amazons behind Theseus giggled, then caught herself and looked stern. A scribe, sitting by Theseus with quill and parchment, paused in his scratching as if considering whether he should write down puppet-speak.

I looked askance at Jones and shook him on his stick. “Beg pardon, Your Grace, the puppet’s been enchanted since yesterday.” It was I working Jones this time, because someone had to speak truth to power—and it was bollocks. The Theseus of legend, who had defeated the Minotaur, would have had to be a thousand years old now—but better the puppet lose his head than I, should Theseus prove less feeble than he appeared.

“The fool and pirate Pocket of Dog Snogging,” announced Burke, pushing me forward so I stood at the end of the table opposite Theseus.

“Enchanted?” asked Theseus.

“Aye,” said I. The scribe scribbled and looked up, distressed.

The duke said, “The captain of the watch tells me that Hippolyta gave you audience this morning. Of what did you speak?”

“This and that, Your Grace. It is not my place to say, but if you ask the lady, I trust she will tell you.”

“You will tell me. If you lie, your life is forfeit.”

I drove a quick, sharp boot heel into Blacktooth’s shin. “You said he just wanted to chat!” Burke made as if to restrain me and I smacked him sharply on the bottom on the spot where I’d sent a dagger a day before. He yowled and limped in a tight circle.