Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(74)
“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 drowned 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.