Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(63)
“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 surely 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.