Shakespeare for Squirrels

by Christopher Moore

  Burke tried to stop but found himself sliding into the vault to see an enormous ninny holding a halberd with which he had just soundly brained the captain of the watch.

  “Foe?” Drool asked as Bottom and I trotted up behind Burke.

  “Aye, lad, but give us a moment.”

  “All right,” said Drool, disappointed.

  Burke reached back to feel the quite useless crossbow slung across his back, then glanced at the dagger at his belt, at which point I drew one of my own and Bottom brandished one of his ersatz leg sticks like a club.

  “Consider, leftenant, before you draw your dagger, that my apprentice has dispatched your commander with the shaft end of that poleaxe, but had he used the blade end, Blacktooth’s head would likely still be rolling free.”

  Drool, sweet lad, flipped the halberd so the blade was leveled at Burke’s chest.

  Burke did not move except to look at the unconscious forms of Blacktooth and the young, spot-faced guard lying next to him. I relieved him of his dagger and handed it, hilt first, back to Bottom.

  “What do you want?” said Burke.

  “For now, for you to stand completely still and refrain from shouting. Is there no one else here in the gendarmerie?”

  “No, just that one.” He nodded to the unconscious lad.

  “Drool, are you hurt? Did they harm you?” The oaf looked as vital, huge, and filthy as usual.

  “No, Pocket, I was real quiet and they left me alone.”

  “Except to feed you?”

  “No, they didn’t give me food nor water. I asked for some but the guards said they would cut off me willy if I asked again so I dinna ask. Cobweb give me some water just now. She’s a love.”

  “Where is Cobweb?”

  “She and her mates ran off when they heard you coming. Hiding, probably.” He dropped his guard with the halberd a bit, then pretended to have a thought. “Hey, Pocket, did you know that Cobweb is a—”

  “I know, lad. It’s a secret, so let us not discuss it in front of this fucktoad. Later.”

  “Aye, Pocket.” Drool nodded.

  It was all I could do to not spear Burke’s liver right then. Poor Drool had had nothing since eating the Mechanicals’ lunch three days prior, while I had been dining with kings and being frolicked back to health. A quick thrust of my dagger and Burke would bleed out just slowly enough to know which particular of his cruelties had cost him his life. Instead, I reached over and tipped the quiver of bolts that hung at his waist until its contents rattled out onto the floor. There were six long oak bolts and a single, shorter, black, distinctly goblin-looking bolt.

  “I didn’t kill the Puck,” Burke said, jumping ahead of my accusations.

  “I know,” said I. “But you paid the goblin who did.”

  “I did not. I swear.”

  “He told me such.”

  “Then he lied.”

  “Why were you at Turtle Grotto that morning then?”

  “The duke sent us. To retrieve something the Puck was bringing him.”

  “But the young Athenian Demetrius fell to your goblin bolt, did he not?”

  “Why no. I am an officer of the watch, I would never—”

  “Kill him, Drool,” said I.

  The great ninny drew back the point of the halberd, deciding, for variety’s sake I suppose, to skewer rather than bludgeon the watchman.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Burke. “It was I. I didn’t mean to kill the yellow-haired one. ’Twas the other one I was aiming for.”

  “Why didn’t you go back and kill Lysander as you’d been hired to do?”

  “Well you’d seen me, hadn’t you? Running like a loony after me in the forest. And I’d used all the goblin bolts I had with me. We’d have had to kill the whole lot. Egeus would have known it was us, and you were on task for the duke. Blacktooth thought it best to offer aid to the other youths and claim you’d been seeing things, or you were lying, if you lived to return to the duke.”

  “Then Blacktooth was in on it?”

  “A half a mile back, yes. He moves like an ox crashing through the forest. I couldn’t risk letting him come closer.”

  “And what are you up to tonight? Why is there only one guard down here?”

  “The wedding. Half the watch is patrolling the crowd outside the castle and the other half is out in the streets getting pissed themselves.”

  “Will others come down later to relieve this lad?”

  “Yes, any minute now.”

  “We had better kill you, then,” said I.

  “No,” said Burke rather quickly. “He was to be on watch all night by himself.”

  “How do I get into the upper castle? Will there be more guards?”

  “Straight ahead, left, then right, up a spiral staircase, gate at the top. No guards tonight. Hippolyta’s Amazons perhaps—”

  And that’s when Nick Bottom brained Burke with one of his false horse legs. The watchman crumpled atop his colleagues and a rivulet of blood trickled out of his scalp.

  “What’d you do that for?” I said.

  “I thought you were going to kill him,” said Bottom.

  “I wasn’t. I just needed him to think I would kill him.”

  “Well you had me convinced,” said Bottom. “You are truly the master.”

  “Don’t try to flatter your way out of this, Bottom. I had more questions for him.”

  “Pocket,” said Drool. “Why is that donkey talking?”

  “Oh, that’s no donkey, lad. That’s Nick Bottom the weaver. You ate his lunch in the forest. Remember his fine waistcoat?”

  “No.”

  “Well he’s been changed into an ass by magic.”

  “Smashing!” said Drool. “Magic is the mutt’s nuts, innit?”

  “Shall we find the fairies and carry on?” said Bottom.

  “Fairies!” said Drool. “Smashing!”

  “Cobweb is a fairy,” I told the dolt. “As are her mates. And, Bottom, don’t change the subject, I’m not finished being angry with you. You two, drag these three into Drool’s old cell. Take their clothes and weapons and lock them in irons. I will look for the fairies.”

  “Aye aye, Pocket,” said Drool. “Did we have any food?”

  “I’ll look, lad. The gendarmerie has to have a larder down here somewhere.”

  “Right,” said Drool. He set his halberd on the floor, grabbed the unconscious spot-faced guard by the collar, and began dragging him.

  Bottom was stripping Blacktooth and Burke of their weapons and tossing them into a pile. I headed deeper into the catacombs, calling softly for the fairies.

  “Pocket!” Drool shouted, and I turned as to see him toss the young guard into the cell.

  “Yes, lad?”

  “Do we have any silver?” Drool asked.

  “Fuckstockings,” I hissed under my breath. Drool had been with me a dozen years in a score of cities and never had he asked me for coin. “What do you want silver for, lad?”

  “Nothing,” said the ninny.

  “I found some, here,” said Bottom. I trotted back to where I could see him. The ass-man knelt over Burke’s prostrate form and was holding up a heavy silver armlet with the image of a Gorgon’s head cast upon it.

  “Keep that with you, Bottom. We may need it to buy our lives later.”

  Chapter 18

  The Play’s the Thing

  Why didn’t I, a shallow, callow fool, take my apprentice and my monkey and fuck off to who-knows-where, leaving the Athenians fuck-all for their trouble? Well for one, Cobweb and the other fairies had not returned to rendezvous at the edge of town, and I was the one who had sent them into the breach. Second, the Mechanicals were playing for their lives and had boneheadedly put their faith in me, willing ninnies that they were, and I could not let them perish. And finally, after my time as a diplomat, a spy, a pirate, a ghost, and a detector of crimes, I was, again, a fool, poised to take the piss out of power, and from the giddy delight I felt rising in my chest, this s
urely was my calling, and tonight I had been called.

  The Mechanicals, Drool, and I were gathered in the anteroom off the great hall where I had first met Theseus, before he’d set me to the task of finding the Puck’s killer and fetching the magic flower, which I had, of sorts. I’d given Egeus, the duke’s toady, a morning glory blossom I’d plucked off a fencerow just outside the gendarmerie. From the vague way Theseus had told me to bring “what the Puck was fetching” he might not even have known it was supposed to be a magic flower, but one can’t be too careful.

  Upon leaving Egeus, among the many Amazon guards I had spotted the tall blond one who had laughed at my japes upon my first meeting the duke.

  “Can you get a message to Hippolyta?” I asked her.

  She merely nodded, not a word.

  “Tell her that the Puck’s potion, which I delivered to Theseus, is a fake. Tell her before the wedding.”

  “I will tell her, little one,” she said.

  “Little one? You would be pleasantly surprised at my oh-so-large talents, my butch and brawny lass.”

  She grinned, flipped one of the tentacles of my coxcomb. “I will see your talents well used before I take your nut sack for my coin purse.”

  “I shall keep your treasure trove safe until then, my leather rose,” I said with a wink, missing having my codpiece to honk, which would generally accompany such a promise.

  She scoffed, no doubt to hide her profound arousal, and marched off, her hobnail boots clacking a tattoo on the flagstones as she went.

  Now, in the antechamber, with the Mechanicals fixing costumes, running lines, and generally fighting down their instincts to vomit, I opened the door to the great hall a crack and measured up our audience. The wedding couple, their ceremony finished, sat in high-backed chairs at the right, just below the stone dais that we would use as our stage. Hippolyta was in a simple white gown, now without her chain mail chemise, wearing a golden crown in the shape of a laurel wreath. Theseus wore a white robe trimmed in gold and a heavier crown of golden laurel. Right of the stage sat Oberon and Titania, with the Indian boy sitting between them. The petite fairy queen was draped in opalescent material that might have been woven of spider silk and unicorn spooge, as it shimmered blue-green even under the golden lamplight in the hall. Oberon was a great tower of onyx, his black robe and crown trimmed out in silver, and, of course, the wicked silver-bladed tips on his fingers. The Indian boy was dressed in finery, a long coat of jade silk and a gold silk turban with a red jewel pinned at the front. His countenance was vacant, as if he were drugged or just profoundly empty-headed.

  Beside the wedding couple sat Hermia and Lysander, who had been married in a quick ceremony after Theseus and Hippolyta, the duke having relented on Egeus’s insistence that his daughter be put to death or sent to a nunnery for not marrying Demetrius, since the piss-haired lothario had been rendered quite unsuitable for marriage by a crossbow bolt through the neck. Behind them sat foreign dignitaries, lords and ladies, ministers and magistrates, military commanders and merchants—perhaps two hundred in all, reclining on cushions or sitting on benches, all having feasted at the other end of the great hall before the entertainment began. Above them, in the six balconies that looked down on the hall, were those who had weaseled their way into the ceremony but had not been given a seat, hangers-on, sycophants, and lickspittles. At each of the six double-doored entrances stood four guards, two spearmen from Theseus’s forces and two unarmed Amazons, who nevertheless seemed poised and painted for battle, unlike their Athenian counterparts, who just seemed bored and resentful that they weren’t taking part in the revelry.

  These would be our audience, the judges and jury and executioners if we did not please, and oh, I did not think our modest play would please. No I did not.

  Egeus, still shaking with anger over Hermia’s finding her way past his condemnation, as master of ceremonies, sat directly beside the wedding couple, and behind him, rather cruelly placed, I thought, sat Helena, who had served as a bridesmaid for her friend. We would enter stage right, from our little antechamber, but there were great tapestries, hung from a line behind the stage, that provided us a backstage, too, and most of the players would move there upon Peter Quince’s reading of the prologue.

  A troubadour playing a lute was finishing a sad ballad, then we would be introduced. Nick Bottom peeked over me into the room, looking around the crowd for a friendly, or at least allied, face.

  “No sign of Gritch or Rumour?” he said.

  “Not tooth nor tongue,” said I. “Did you put Rumour’s hat in a satchel to keep Jeff from it?”

  “I did, but he’s had a go at Snout’s deerskin hat and was pulling on my ears for a bit before Drool restrained him.”

  “That little scamp has singular enthusiasm, doesn’t he? Are you ready?”

  “As I can be. But I’ll be using the notes you had Quince make. Short notice.”

  I had Peter Quince write down each of the players’ lines on strips of parchment that they carried. Bottom had had less time to study his lines than the others, as he had been with me, invading the gendarmerie. It had been four hours since we locked Blacktooth and Burke in the dungeon, yet no one seemed to miss them, which was suspicious in itself.

  “You know, Bottom,” said I, “your cause to return to a nonequine form may not be lost. When the fairies were frolicking, at the harem, I noticed the hair on your arms receded. They may be your hope for a cure when we finish here.”

  “Except we’re going to be executed when we finish here.”

  “Either way, you won’t have to face Mrs. Bottom looking like that,” said I, ever the optimist.

  “Oh joy,” said Bottom. “Pocket, do you see those black robes in the back? Are those Cobweb and the girls?”

  There were figures in the back of the hall, where the tables were still laid out from the feast, wearing hooded silk robes like those the fairies had taken from Oberon’s harem. They were far away, and the light dim, but they seemed the right size. Then, one of them moved, and I knew it was not Cobweb nor her two friends, for even from the length of the great hall I could see it scuttling sideways, with none of the light-footed grace of the fairies. Looking around the crowd I noticed black-hooded figures manning the balconies and lurking by the entrances. I counted at least a dozen before I heard the troubadour pluck a final chord and polite applause signaled our cue.

  “Places, everyone,” I called to the room. “Quince, you’re on.”

  Egeus rose from his seat and walked to the edge of the stage, unrolled a scroll, and, with a voice and manner only slightly less pompous than Rumour himself, read: “And now, for your pleasure or their pain, a group of tradesmen, hard-handed men who have until now never labored in their minds, rude mechanicals, shall present the most lachrymal and laughable tragicomedy of Romeo and Juliet, the original said to have been written by the Ninth Earl of Bumsex, upon his mistress’s bare bottom.”

  “A tongue-in-cheek comedy, then?” said Lysander.

  “Oh, both lachrymal and laughable,” said the duke, laughing. “Good we’ve had plenty of drink to fuel our tears, be they of laughter or of tragedy.”

  “I loathe you with the heat of a thousand suns,” said Hippolyta, staring a hole into the duke’s head, she, evidently, not an aficionado of the theater, and not doing very well at pretending to have received the love potion.

  Theseus said: “If it be horrid, we shall take sport in their mistakes and find amusement in their lowly skills—find in their paltry talents the couch of our superiority. Players, play on!”

  And around the hall amid applause they echoed the call of “play on!”

  As the rest of the company scrambled out of the antechamber, Peter Quince took his place at the corner of the stage and unrolled his own scroll. “Gentles, welcome to our most grisly comedy and tragically romantic Grand Guignol.”

  “’At’s fuckin’ French, innit!” shouted Drool from behind the tapestry.

  “Not to contradict our e
steemed master of ceremony, but we shall not be performing Romeo and Juliet, but instead a most raucous and respectful adventure, called A Fool in the Forest, penned by our own maître de drame Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

  At which point I bounded out onto the stage, doffed my coxcomb, and took a deep bow to what should have been thunderous applause.

  Egeus stood and waved his scroll. “Now, see here, this shall not stand! ’Twas Pyramus and Thisby you submitted for consideration, and by the grace of the duke, you were given permission to do Romeo and Juliet because you did not have a wall, but this change shall not be permitted.”

  In a single motion I drew a dagger from the small of my back and flung it underhand Egeus’s way. The dagger sailed past his ear and buried itself with a thud in the high back of his chair, exactly where I had been aiming.

  “Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, thou pompous toady,” said I.

  Egeus began to protest and I drew my second dagger. “Or don’t,” said I.

  There were gasps throughout the audience. The guards were gobsmacked, while the duke and even Hippolyta seemed somewhat amused at Egeus’s dismay. The powerful hold nothing but contempt for those who toady to them, all but the toadies know this.

  Egeus sat, leaning to one side as if that were his preference and not because of my dagger by his ear.

  “Proceed,” said I to Quince, giving him a grand “by your leave” flourish.

  “Fear not, ladies, do not be dismayed, for the dagger you have seen is but a stage dagger, a trick of the craft. Tonight we shall also present a lion, who, while fierce, is also false, and no more than Snug the joiner in costume, so cast because he cannot hold lines in his memory.”

  “RAWR!” roared Snug from backstage, and the audience tittered, because Snug’s roar was still shit and really only his saying the word “rawr” rather loudly.

  “Also,” read Quince, “when you encounter the moon, do not be afraid, for it is not a real moon, but a stage moon.”