Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(9)

“Well you can see me, can’t you?”

“Right, but I’ve got special talents, don’t I, a person of the forest. Normal, city folk can’t see you.” He leaned in and I could smell the odor of moss or something green coming off him. He whispered, “Because you’re dead. Dead, dead, dead. You are an expired fool. A ghost. Now, hand over the hat, I’ve some tricks to perform, and they will appear even more wonderful if I am wearing a proper hat.”

I stepped away from him, looked him over. Besides being small and pale, and having disturbingly wide green eyes, he had ears that came to gentle points. I hadn’t noticed them among his dark curls at first.

“The Puck, I presume?”

“Called Robin Goodfellow.” He bowed deeply. “Jester to the shadow king.”

“The shadow king?” The consort, I guessed, to Cobweb’s mistress, the night queen.

“The shadow king, Oberon. I craft clever japes in his court, trick and transform and make good sport. Bring him laughs and hoots and smiles—provide sweet respite for a while. Take the form of winsome filly and beguile the stallion horse’s willy. I can put a girdle round the Earth in forty minutes—fetch a flower from every land I visit. Take the form of a three-legged stool, when auntie sits, dump her bum-bruised like a fool. I am the merry wanderer Puck, a player of jest, a changer of luck.”

“And plagued by rhyme, evidently,” said I.

“And you are a meager ghost. No station nor skills.”

I stepped up. “I know a thousand songs in seven languages and ten thousand bawdy jokes in a thousand voices. I can throw a dagger and pierce a plum thrown in the air, then spear two more before the first one lands. I can juggle bottles, plates, clubs, swords, mooring pins, and fire, in odds, evens, and all at once if need be. I can scale a rope to the height of the battlements without using my feet, and descend it headfirst without using my hands. I can leap to a man’s shoulders and do a double somersault off them, backward, laid out, to land as soft as a cat. I can play a lute, lyre, drum, or pipe, compose a song extempore with a verse to every lord or lady at court. I can stand on a bareback horse at full gallop, while juggling and singing a song. I can pick any lock ever made, recite Homer in Greek, Petrarch in Latin, and throw my voice to a vase or puppet without moving my lips. I have bloody skills, Goodfellow.”

“Well the puppet can do his own talking, can’t he?” said Puck.

“He’s got a point there,” said the puppet Jones from his spot on the forest floor.

“So, just mortal tricks?” said Puck. “No real talents? Powers?”

“Waste of a good hat, really,” said Jones.

Suddenly, it occurred to me why others had always found the puppet so annoying—with a will of his own he was a right prickthorn. I jumped from the log, snatched Jones up, and shook him at the Puck.

Jones said, “Give the stick a bit of a buffing while you’re at it, would you, mate?”

“How is this wooden-headed ninny speaking without aid?”

“Perhaps you have but slumbered here and this is all a dream.”

“It’s not a bloody dream, thou barking dongfish. What goes?”

“Magic, I reckon,” said Puck. “Shame you never learned.”

“There is no bloody magic!”

“Said the bloody ghost.” Puck giggled.

“I am not a ghost.” I tossed the puppet away. “If I am a ghost, why do I not see my deceased loved ones? How is it I can move objects corporeal?”

“Buggered if I know,” said Puck. “Issues unresolved? Wrongs to be righted? Revenges to be taken? Perhaps you’ve a bit of haunting to do before you drift into the eternal never-again. I don’t make the rules. The Puck deals in jests, japes, and magic.”

“There is no magic,” said I, my conviction somewhat drained by the sight of Puck’s leaping from the log and descending slowly to the forest floor as if lowered by a crane. “Bollocks,” I muttered.

“Even now I am sent by the shadow king to cast a spell on young lovers.” He dug into the pouch at his hip and retrieved a funnel-shaped flower blossom and held it up to the light streaming down through the forest canopy as if trying to catch sight of a spirit hiding in there. “The potion, squeezed from this purple roofie flower collected in the west, if dropped upon the eyelid of a sleeper, shall cause them to fall deeply in love with the next creature they see.”

“Bollocks,” I repeated, with some incredulity.

Puck sniffed the funnel tip of the blossom, as if to test the aroma of the potion. “I have two, if you’d like to give it a go. Oh, but no one can see you . . . Oh, that won’t do, will it? Sorry.”

“Perhaps a drop or two on some unsuspecting victim for yourself?”

“Oh, I have no need of such potions, as I am an excellent lover. Of great renown. Very much in demand, is the Puck. What only today I have seen two queens, a joiner’s wife, and a marmot shagged.”

“A marmot?”

“Yes, rather like a large squirrel. Lovely creatures. Live in burrows.”

“I know what a marmot is. You shagged a marmot?”

“Went right to the rodent without a proper ‘well done, lad’ for the other lot. That’s just disrespectful of a fellow fool’s work.”