Fool

ONE ALWAYS A BLOODY GHOST

“Tosser!” cried the raven.

There’s always a bloody raven.

“Foolish teachin’ him to talk, if you ask me,” said the sentry.

“I’m duty-bound foolish, yeoman,” said I. I am, you know? A fool. Fool to the court of Lear of Britain. “And you are a tosser,[1]” I said.

“Piss off!” said the raven.

The yeoman took a swipe at the bird with his spear and the great black bird swooped off the wall and went cawing out over the Thames. A ferryman looked up from his boat, saw us on the tower, and waved. I jumped onto the wall and bowed—at your fucking service, thank you. The yeoman grumbled and spat after the raven.

There have always been ravens at the White Tower. A thousand years ago, before George II, idiot king of Merica, destroyed the world, there were ravens here. The legend says that as long as there are ravens at the Tower, England will stand strong. Still, it may have been a mistake to teach one to talk.

“The Earl of Gloucester approaches!” cried a sentry on the west wall. “With his son Edgar and the bastard Edmund!”

The yeoman by me grinned. “Gloucester, eh? Be sure you do that bit where you play a goat and Drool plays the earl mistaking you for his wife.”

“That would be unkind,” said I. “The earl is newly widowed.”

“You did it the last time he was here and she was still warm in the grave.”

“Well, yes. A service that—trying to shock the poor wretch out of his grief, wasn’t it?”

“Good show, too. The way you was bleatin’ I thought ol’ Drool was givin’ it to you right proper up the bung.”

I made a note to shove the guard off the wall when opportunity presented.

“Heard he was going to have you assassinated, but he couldn’t make a case to the king.”

“Gloucester’s a noble, he doesn’t need a case for murder, just a whim and a blade.”

“Not bloody likely,” the yeoman said, “everyone knows the king’s got a wing o’er you.”

That was true. I enjoy a certain license.

“Have you seen Drool? With Gloucester here, there’ll be a command performance.” My apprentice, Drool—a beef-witted bloke the size of a draught horse.

“He was in the kitchen before the watch,” said the yeoman.

The kitchen buzzed—the staff preparing for a feast.

“Have you seen Drool?” I asked Taster, who sat at the table staring sadly at a bread trencher[2] laid out with cold pork, the king’s dinner. He was a thin, sickly lad, chosen, no doubt, for his weakness of constitution, and a predisposition toward dropping dead at the slightest provocation. I liked to tell him my troubles, sure that they would not travel far.

“Does this look poisoned to you?”

“It’s pork, lad. Lovely. Eat up. Half the men in England would give a testicle to feast thus, and it only mid-day. I’m tempted myself.” I tossed my head—gave him a grin and a bit of a jingle on the ol’ hat bells to cheer him. I pantomimed stealing a bit of his pork. “After you, of course.”

A knife thumped into the table by my hand.

“Back, Fool,” said Bubble, the head cook. “That’s the king’s lunch and I’ll have your balls before I’ll let you at it.”

“My balls are yours for the asking, milady,” said I. “Would you have them on a trencher, or shall I serve them in a bowl of cream, like peaches?”

Bubble harrumphed, yanked her knife from the table and went back to gutting a trout at the butcher block, her great bottom rolling like thunderclouds under her skirt as she moved.

“You’re a wicked little man, Pocket,” said Squeak, waves of freckles riding o’er her shy smile. She was second to the cook, a sturdy, ginger-haired girl with a high giggle and a generous spirit in the dark. Taster and I often passed pleasant afternoons at the table watching her wring the necks of chickens.

Pocket is my name, by the way. Given to me by the abbess who found me on the nunnery doorstep when I was a tiny babe. True, I am not a large fellow. Some might even say I am diminutive, but I am quick as a cat and nature has compensated me with other gifts. But wicked?

“I think Drool was headed to the princess’s chambers,” Squeak said.

“Aye,” said Taster, glumly. “The lady sent for a cure for melancholy.”

“And the git went?” Jest on his own? The boy wasn’t ready. What if he blundered, tripped, fell on the princess like a millstone on a butterfly? “Are you sure?”

Bubble dropped a gutless trout into a bushel of slippery cofishes.[3] “Chanting, ‘Off to do ma duty,’ he was. We told him you’d be looking for him when we heard Princess Goneril and the Duke of Albany was coming.”

“Albany’s coming?”

“Ain’t he sworn to string your entrails from the chandelier?” asked Taster.

“No,” corrected Squeak. “That was Duke of Cornwall. Albany was going to have his head on a pike, I believe. Pike, wasn’t it, Bubble?”

“Aye, have his head on a pike. Funny thing, thinkin’ about it, you’d look like a bigger version of your puppet-stick there.”

“Jones,” said Taster, pointing to my jester’s scepter, Jones, who is, indeed, a smaller version of my own handsome countenance, fixed atop a sturdy handle of polished hickory. Jones speaks for me when even my tongue needs to exceed safe license with knights and nobles, his head pre-piked for the wrath of the dull and humorless. My finest art is oft lost in the eye of the subject.

“Yes, that would be right hilarious, Bubble—ironic imagery—like the lovely Squeak turning you on a spit over a fire, an apple up both your ends for color—although I daresay the whole castle might conflagrate in the resulting grease fire, but until then we’d laugh and laugh.”

I dodged a well-flung trout then, and paid Bubble a grin for not throwing her knife instead. Fine woman, she, despite being large and quick to anger. “Well, I’ve a great drooling dolt to find if we are to prepare an entertainment for the evening.”

Cordelia’s chambers lay in the North Tower; the quickest way there was atop the outer wall. As I crossed over the great main gatehouse, a young spot-faced yeoman called, “Hail, Earl of Gloucester!” Below, the greybeard Gloucester and his retinue were crossing the drawbridge.

“Hail, Edmund, you bloody bastard!” I called over the wall.

The yeoman tapped me on the shoulder. “Beggin’ your pardon, sirrah,[4] but I’m told that Edmund is sensitive about his bastardy.”

“Aye, yeoman,” said I. “No need for prodding and jibe to divine that prick’s tender spot, he wears it on his sleeve.” I jumped on the wall and waved Jones at the bastard, who was trying to wrench a bow and quiver from a knight who rode beside him. “You whoreson scalawag!” said I. “You flesh-turd dropped stinking from the poxy arsehole of a hare-lipped harlot!”

The Earl of Gloucester glowered up at me as he passed under the portcullis.[5]

“Shot to the heart, that one,” said the yeoman.

“Too harsh, then, you reckon?”

“A bit.”

“Sorry. Excellent hat, though, bastard,” I called, by way of making amends. Edgar and two knights were trying to restrain the bastard Edmund below. I jumped down from the wall. “Haven’t seen Drool, have you?”

“In the great hall this morning,” said the yeoman. “Not since.”

A call came around the top of the wall, passing from yeoman to yeoman until we heard, “The Duke of Cornwall and Princess Regan approach from the south.”

“Fuckstockings!” Cornwall: polished greed and pure born villainy; he’d dirk[6] a nun for a farthing,[7] and short the coin, for the fun.

“Don’t worry, little one, the king’ll keep your hide whole.”

“Aye, yeoman, he will, and if you call me little one in company, the king’ll have you walking watch on the frozen moat all winter.”

“Sorry, Sir Jester, sir,” said the yeoman. He slouched then as not to seem so irritatingly tall. “Heard that tasty Princess Regan’s a right bunny cunny, eh?” He leaned down to elbow me in the ribs, now that we were best mates and all.

“You’re new, aren’t you?”

“Just two months in service.”

“Advice, then, young yeoman: When referring to the king’s middle daughter, state that she is fair, speculate that she is pious, but unless you’d like to spend your watch looking for the box where your head is kept, resist the urge to wax ignorant on her naughty bits.”

“I don’t know what that means, sir.”

“Speak not of Regan’s shaggacity, son. Cornwall has taken the eyes of men who have but looked upon the princess with but the spark of lust.”

“The fiend! I didn’t know, sir. I’ll say nothing.”

“And neither shall I, good yeoman. Neither shall I.”

And thus are alliances made, loyalties cemented. Pocket makes a friend.

The boy was right about Regan, of course. And why I hadn’t thought to call her bunny cunny myself, when I of all people should know—well, as an artist, I must admit, I was envious of the invention.

Cordelia’s private solar[8] lay at the top of a narrow spiral staircase lit only with the crosses of arrow loops. I could hear giggling as I topped the stairs.

“So I am of no worth if not on the arm and in the bed of some buffoon in a codpiece?” I heard Cordelia say.

“You called,” said I, stepping into the room, codpiece in hand.

The ladies-in-waiting giggled. Young Lady Jane, who is but thirteen, shrieked at my presence—disturbed, no doubt, by my overt manliness, or perhaps by the gentle clouting on the bottom she received from Jones.

“Pocket!” Cordelia sat at the center of the circle of girls—holding court, as such—her hair down, blond curls to her waist, a simple gown of lavender linen, loosely laced. She stood and approached me. “You honor us, Fool. Did you hear rumors of small animals to hurt, or were you hoping to accidentally surprise me in my bath again?”

I tipped my hat, a slight, contrite jingle there. “I was lost, milady.”

“A dozen times?”

“Finding my way is not my strong suit. If you want a navigator I’ll send for him, but hold me blameless should your melancholy triumph and you drown yourself in the brook, your gentle ladies weeping damply around your pale and lovely corpse. Let them say, ‘She was not lost in the map, confident as she was in her navigator, but lost in heart for want of a fool.’”

The ladies gasped as if I’d cued them. I’d have blessed them if I were still on speaking terms with God.

“Out, out, out, ladies,” Cordelia said. “Give me peace with my fool so that I might devise some punishment for him.”

The ladies scurried out of the room.

“Punishment?” I asked. “For what?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said, “but by the time I’ve thought of the punishment, I’m sure there’ll be an offense.”

“I blush at your confidence.”

“And I at your humility,” said the princess. She grinned, a crescent too devious for a maid of her tender years. Cordelia is not ten years my junior (I’m not sure, exactly, of my own age), seventeen summers has she seen, and as the youngest of the king’s daughters, she’s always been treated as if fragile as spun glass. But, sweet thing that she is, her bark could frighten a mad badger.

“Shall I disrobe for my punishment?” I offered. “Flagellation? Fellation? Whatever. I am your willing penitent, lady.”

“No more of that, Pocket. I need your counsel, or at least your commiseration. My sisters are coming to the castle.”

“Unfortunately, they have arrived.”

“Oh, that’s right, Albany and Cornwall want to kill you. Bad luck, that. Anyway, they are coming to the castle, as are Gloucester and his sons. Goodness, they want to kill you as well.”

“Rough critics,” said I.

“Sorry. And a dozen other nobles as well as the Earl of Kent are here. Kent doesn’t want to kill you, does he?”

“Not that I know of. But it is only lunchtime.”

“Right. And do you know why they are all coming?”

“To corner me like a rat in a barrel?”

“Barrels do not have corners, Pocket.”

“Does seem like a lot of bother for killing one small, if tremendously handsome fool.”

“It’s not about you, you dolt! It’s about me.”

“Well, even less effort to kill you. How many can it take to snap your scrawny neck? I worry that Drool will do it by accident someday. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

“He stinks. I sent him away this morning.” She waved a hand furiously to return to her point. “Father is marrying me off!”

“Nonsense. Who would have you?”

The lady darkened a bit, then, blue eyes gone cold. Badgers across Blighty[9] shuddered. “Edgar of Gloucester has always wanted me and the Prince of France and Duke of Burgundy are already here to pay me troth.”

“Troth about what?”

“Troth!”

“About what?”

“Troth, troth, you fool, not truth. The princes are here to marry me.”

“Those two? Edgar? No.” I was shaken. Cordelia? Married? Would one of them take her away? It was unjust! Unfair! Wrong! Why, she had never even seen me naked.

“Why would they want to troth you? I mean, for the night, to be sure, who wouldn’t troth you cross-eyed? But permanently, I think not.”

“I’m a bloody princess, Pocket.”

“Precisely. What good are princesses? Dragon food and ransom markers—spoiled brats to be bartered for real estate.”

“Oh no, dear fool, you forget that sometimes a princess becomes a queen.”

“Ha, princesses. What worth are you if your father has to tack a dozen counties to your bum to get those French poofters to look at you?”

“Oh, and what worth a fool? Nay, what worth a fool’s second, for you merely carry the drool cup for the Natural.[10] What’s the ransom for a jester, Pocket? A bucket of warm spittle.”

I grabbed my chest. “Pierced to the core, I am,” I gasped. I staggered to a chair. “I bleed, I suffer, I die on the forked lance of your words.”

She came to me. “You do not.”

“No, stay back. Blood stains will never come out of linen—they are stubborned with your cruelty and guilt…”

“Pocket, stop it now.”

“You have kilt me, lady, most dead.” I gasped, I spasmed, I coughed. “Let it always be said that this humble fool brought joy to all whom he met.”

“No one will say that.”

“Shhhh, child. I grow weak. No breath.” I looked at the imaginary blood on my hands, horrified. I slid off a chair, to the floor. “But I want you to know that despite your vicious nature and your freakishly large feet, I have always—”

And then I died. Bloody fucking brilliantly, I’d say, too, hint of a shudder at the end as death’s chilly hand grabbed my knob.

“What? What? You have always what?”

I said nothing, being dead, and not a little exhausted from all the bleeding and gasping. Truth be told, under the jest I felt like I’d taken a bolt to the heart.

“You’re absolutely no help at all,” said Cordelia.

The raven landed on the wall as I made my way back to the common house in search of Drool. No little vexed was I by the news of Cordelia’s looming nuptials.

“Ghost!” said the raven.

“I didn’t teach you that.”

“Bollocks!” replied the raven.

“That’s the spirit!”

“Ghost!”

“Piss off, bird,” said I.

Then a cold wind bit at my bum and at the top of the stairs, in the turret ahead, I saw a shimmering in the shadows, like silk in sunlight—not quite in the shape of a woman.

And the ghost said:

“Rhymes?” I inquired. “You’re looming about all diaphanous in the middle of the day, puking cryptic rhymes? Low craft and tawdry art, ghosting about at noon—a parson’s fart heralds darker doom, thou babbling wisp.”

“Ghost!” cried the raven, and with that the ghost was gone.

There’s always a bloody ghost.

TWO NOW, GODS, STAND UP FOR BASTARDS![11]

I found Drool in the laundry resolving a wank, spouting great gouts of git-seed across the laundry walls, floors, and ceiling, giggling, as young Shanker Mary wagged her tits at him over a steaming cauldron of the king’s shirts.

“Put those away, tart, we’ve a show to do.”

“I was just giving ’im a laugh.”

“If you wanted to show charity you could have bonked him honest and there’d be a lot less cleaning to do.”

“That’d be a sin. Besides, I’d as soon straddle a gateman’s halberd as try to get a weapon that girth up me.”

Drool pumped himself dry and sat down on the floor splay-legged, huffing like a great dribbling bellows. I tried to help the lout repack his tackle, but getting him into a codpiece against his firm enthusiasm was like trying to pound a bucket over a bull’s head—a scenario I thought comical enough to perhaps work into the act tonight, should things get slow.

“Nothing stopping you from givin’ the lad a proper cleavage toss, Mary. You had ’em out and all soaped up, a couple of jumps and a tickle and he’d have carried water for you for a fortnight.”

“He already does. And I don’t even want that thing near me. A Natural, he is. There’s devils in his jizm.”

“Devils? Devils? There’s no devils in there, lass. Chock full o’ nitwits, to be sure, but no devils.” A Natural was either blessed or cursed, never just an accident of nature, as the name implied.

Sometime during the week, Shanker Mary had gone Christian on us, despite being a most egregious slut. You never knew anymore who you were dealing with. Half the kingdom was Christian, the other half paid tribute to the old gods of Nature, who were always showing promise on the moonrise. The Christian God with his “day of rest” was strong with the peasants come Sunday, but by Thursday when there was drinking and fucking to be done, Nature had her kit off, legs aloft, and a flagon of ale in each hand, taking converts for the Druids as fast as they could come. They were a solid majority when the holiday was about, dancing, drinking, shagging the virgins, and sharing the harvest, but on the human sacrifice or burn-down-the-King’s-forest days, there was none but crickets cavorting ’round the Stonehenge—the singers having forsaken Mother Earth for Father Church.

“Pretty,” said Drool, trying to wrestle back control of his tool. Mary had commenced to stirring the laundry but had neglected to pull her dress up. Had the git’s attention hostage, she did.

“Right. She’s a bloody vision of loveliness, lad, but you’ve buffed yourself to a gleam already and we’ve work to do. The castle’s awash in intrigue, subterfuge, and villainy—they’ll be wanting-comic relief between the flattery and the murders.”

“Intrigue and villainy?” Drool displayed a gape-toothed grin. Imagine soldiers dumping hogsheads of spittle through the crenellations atop the castle wall—thus is Drool’s grin, as earnest in expression as it is damp in execution—a slurry of good cheer. He loves intrigue and villainy, as they play to his most special ability.

“Will there be hiding?”

“There will most certainly be hiding,” said I, as I shouldered an escaped testicle into his cod.

“And listening?”

“Listening of cavernous proportions—we shall hang on every word as God on Pope’s prayers.”

“And fuckery? Will there be fuckery, Pocket?”

“Heinous fuckery most foul, lad. Heinous fuckery most foul.”

“Aye, that’s the dog’s bollocks,[12] then!” said Drool, slapping his thigh. “Did you hear, Mary? Heinous fuckery afoot. Ain’t that the dog’s bollocks?”

“Oh yeah, the dog’s bloody B. it is, love. If the saints are smilin’ on us, maybe one of them nobles will hang your wee mate there like they been threatening.”

“Two fools well-hung we’d have then, wouldn’t we?” said I, elbowing my apprentice in the ribs.

“Aye, two fools well-hung, we’d have, wouldn’t we?” said Drool, in my voice, tone to note coming out his great maw as like he’d caught an echo on his tongue and coughed it right back. That’s the oaf’s gift—not only can he mimic perfectly, he can recall whole conversations, hours long, recite them back to you in the original speakers’ voices, and not comprehend a single word. He’d first been gifted to Lear by a Spanish duke because of his torrential dribbling and the ability to break wind that could darken a room, but when I discovered the Natural’s keener talent, I took him as my apprentice to teach him the manly art of mirth.

Drool laughed. “Two fools well-hung—”

“Stop that!” I said. “It’s unsettling.” Unsettling indeed, to hear your own voice sluicing pitch-perfect out of that mountain of lout, stripped of wit and washed of irony. Two years I’d had Drool under my wing and I was still not inured to it. He meant no harm, it was simply his nature.

The anchoress at the abbey had taught me of nature, making me recite Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated man, and a tribute to his culture, that he look for precision in a thing only as its nature allows.” I would not have Drool reading Cicero or crafting clever riddles, but under my tutelage he had become more than fair at tumbling and juggling, could belch a song, and was, at court, at least as entertaining as a trained bear, with slightly less proclivity for eating the guests. With guidance, he would make a proper fool.

“Pocket is sad,” said Drool. He patted my head, which was wildly irritating, not only because we were face-to-face—me standing, him sitting bum-to-floor—but because it rang the bells of my coxcomb in a most melancholy manner.

“I’m not sad,” said I. “I’m angry that you’ve been lost all morning.”

“I weren’t lost. I were right here, the whole time, having three laughs with Mary.”

“Three?! You’re lucky you two didn’t burst into flames, you from friction and her from bloody thunderbolts of Jesus.”

“Maybe four,” said Drool.

“You do look the lost one, Pocket,” said Mary. “Face like a mourning orphan what’s been dumped in the gutter with the chamber pots.”

“I’m preoccupied. The king has kept no company but Kent this last week, the castle is brimming with backstabbers, and there’s a girl-ghost rhyming ominous on the battlements.”

“Well, there’s always a bloody ghost, ain’t there?” Mary fished a shirt out of the cauldron and bobbed it across the room on her paddle like she was out for a stroll with her own sodden, steaming ghost. “You’ve got no cares but making everyone laugh, right?”

“Aye, carefree as a breeze. Leave that water when you’re done, would you, Mary? Drool needs a dunking.”

“Nooooooo!”

“Hush, you can’t go before the court like that, you smell of shit. Did you sleep on the dung heap again last night?”

“It were warm.”

I clouted him a good one on the crown with Jones. “Warm’s not all, lad. If you want warm you can sleep in the great hall with everyone else.”

“He ain’t allowed,” offered Mary. “Chamberlain[13] says his snoring frightens the dogs.”

“Not allowed?” Every commoner who didn’t have quarters slept on the floor in the great hall—strewn about willy-nilly on the straw and rushes—nearly dog-piled before the fireplace in winter. An enterprising fellow with night horns aloft and a predisposal to creep might find himself accidentally sharing a blanket or a tumble with a sleepy and possibly willing wench, and then be banished for a fortnight from the hall’s friendly warmth (and indeed, I owe my own modest apartment above the barbican[14] to such nocturnal proclivity), but put out for snoring? Unheard of. When night’s inky cape falls o’er the great hall, a gristmill it becomes, the machines of men’s breath grind their dreams with a frightful roar, and even Drool’s great gears fall undistinguished among the chorus. “For snoring? Not allowed in the hall? Balderdash!”

“And for having a wee on the steward’s wife,” Mary added.

“It were dark,” explained Drool.

“Aye, and even in daylight she is easily mistaken for a privy, but have I not tutored you in the control of your fluids, lad?”

“Aye, and with great success,” said Shanker Mary, rolling her eyes at the spunk-frosted wall.

“Ah, Mary, well said. Let’s make a pact: If you do not make attempts at wit, I will refrain from becoming a soap-smelling prick-pull. What say ye?”

“You said you liked the smell of soap.”

“Aye, well, speaking of smell. Drool, fetch some buckets of cold water from the well. We need to cool this kettle down and get you bathed.”

“Nooooooo!”

“Jones will be very unhappy with you if you don’t hurry,” said I, brandishing Jones in a disapproving and somewhat threatening manner. A hard master is Jones, bitter, no doubt, from being raised as a puppet on a stick.

A half-hour later, a miserable Drool sat in the steaming cauldron, fully-clothed, his natural broth having turned the lye-white water to a rich, brown oaf-sauce. Shanker Mary stirred about him with her paddle, being careful not to stir him beyond suds to lust. I was quizzing my student on the coming night’s entertainments.

“So, because Cornwall is on the sea, we shall portray the duke how, dear Drool?”

“As a sheep-shagger,” said the despondent giant.

“No, lad, that’s Albany. Cornwall shall be the fish-fucker.”

“Aye, sorry, Pocket.”

“Not a worry, not a worry. You’ll still be sodden from your bath, I suspect, so we’ll work that into the jest. Bit of sloshing and squishing will but add to the merriment, and if we can thus imply that Princess Regan is herself, a fishlike consort, well I can’t think of anyone who won’t be amused.”

“’Cepting the princess,” said Mary.

“Well, yes, but she is very literal-minded and often has to be explained the thrust of the jest a time or two before lending her appreciation.”

“Aye, remedial thrusting’s the remedy for Regan’s stubborn wit,” said the puppet Jones.

“Aye, remedial thrusting’s the remedy for Regan’s stubborn wit,” said Drool in Jones’s voice.

“You’re dead men,” sighed Shanker Mary.

“You’re a dead man, knave!” said a man’s voice from behind me.

And there stood Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester, blocking the only exit, sword in hand. Dressed all in black, was the bastard: a simple silver brooch secured his cape, the hilts of his sword and dagger were silver dragon heads with emerald eyes. His jet beard was trimmed to points. I do admire the bastard’s sense of style—simple, elegant, and evil. He owns his darkness.

I, myself, am called the Black Fool. Not because I am a Moor, although I hold no grudge toward them (Moors are said to be talented wife-stranglers) and would take no offense at the moniker were that the case, but my skin is as snowy as any sun-starved son of England. No, I am called so because of my wardrobe, an argyle of black satin and velvet diamonds—not the rainbow motley of the run-a-day fool. Lear said: “After thy black wit shall be thy dress, fool. Perhaps a new outfit will stop you tweaking Death’s nose. I’m short for the grave as it is, boy, no need to anger the worms before my arrival.” When even a king fears irony’s twisted blade, what fool is ever unarmed?

“Draw your weapon, fool!” said Edmund.

“Sadly, sir, I have none,” said I. Jones shook his head in unarmed woe.

We both were lying, of course. Across the small of my back I wore three wickedly-pointed throwing daggers—fashioned for me by the armorer to be used in our entertainments—and while I had never used them as weapons, truly flung they had spitted apples off the head of Drool, nipped plums from his outstretched fingers, and yea, even speared grapes out of the air. I had little doubt that one might find its way into Edmund’s eye and thus vent his bitter mind like a lanced boil. If he needed to know he would know soon enough. If not, well, why trouble him?

“If not a fight, then a murder it is,” said Edmund. He lunged, his blade aimed for my heart. I sidestepped and knocked his blade away with Jones, who lost a bell from his coxcomb for his trouble.

I hopped up onto the lip of the cauldron.

“But, sir, why spend your wrath on a poor, helpless fool?”

Edmund slashed. I leapt. He missed. I landed on the far side of the cauldron. Drool moaned. Mary hid in the corner.

“You shouted bastard at me from the battlements.”

“Aye, they announced you as bastard. You, sir, are a bastard. And a bastard most unjust to make me die with the foul taste of truth still on my tongue. Allow me a lie before you strike: You have such kind eyes.”

“But you spoke badly of my mother as well.” He put himself between me and the door. Bloody bad planning, building a laundry with only one exit.

“I may have implied that she was a poxy whore, but from what your father says, that, too, is not breaking the bonds of verity.”

“What?” asked Edmund.

“What?” asked Drool, a perfect parrot of Edmund.

“What?” inquired Mary.

“It’s true, you git! Your mother was a poxy whore!”

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, poxiness ain’t so bad,” said Shanker Mary, shining a ray of optimism on these dark ages. “Unfairly maligned, the poxy are. Methinks a spot o’ the pox implies experience. Worldliness, if you will.”

“The tart makes an excellent point, Edmund. But for the slow descent into madness and death with your bits dropping off along the way, the pox is a veritable blessing,” said I, as I skipped just out of blade’s reach from the bastard, who stalked me around the great cauldron. “Take Mary here. In fact, there’s an idea. Take Mary. Why spend your energy after a long journey murdering a speck of a fool when you can enjoy the pleasures of a lusty wench who is not only ready, but willing, and smells pleasantly of soap?”

“Aye,” said Drool, expelling froth as he spoke. “She’s a bloody vision of loveliness.”

Edmund let his sword point drop and looked at Drool for the first time. “Are you eating soap?”

“Just a wee sliver,” bubbled Drool. “They weren’t saving it.”

Edmund turned back to me. “Why are you boiling this fellow?”

“Couldn’t be helped,” said I. (How dramatic, the bastard, the water was barely steaming. What appeared to be boiling was Drool venting vapors.)

“Common fuckin’ courtesy, ain’t it?” said Mary.

“Speak straight, both of you.” The bastard wheeled on one heel and before I knew what was happening, he had the point of his blade at Mary’s throat. “I’ve been nine years in the Holy Land killing Saracens, killing one or two more makes no difference to me.”

“Wait!” I leapt back to the lip of the cauldron, reaching to the small of my back with my free hand. “Wait. He’s being punished. By the king. For attacking me.”

“Punished? For attacking a fool?”

“‘Boil him alive,’ the king said.” I jumped down to Edmund’s side of the cauldron—moved toward the doorway. I’d needed a clear line of sight, and should he move, I didn’t want the blade to hit Mary.

“Everyone knows how fond the king is of his dark little fool,” said Mary, nodding enthusiastically.

“Bollocks!” shouted Edmund, as he pulled the sword back to slash.

Mary screamed. I flipped a dagger in the air, caught it by the blade, and was readying to send it to Edmund’s heart when something hit him in the back of the head with a thud and he went bum over eyebrows into the wall, his blade clanging across the floor to my feet.

Drool had stood up in the cauldron and was holding Mary’s laundry paddle—a bit of dark hair and bloody scalp clung to the bleached wood.

“Did you see that, Pocket? Smashing fall he did.” All of it a pantomime to Drool.

Edmund was not moving. As far as I could see, he was not breathing either.

“God’s bloody balls, Drool, you’ve kilt the earl’s son. We’ll all be hung, now.”

“But he were going to hurt Mary.”

Mary sat on the floor by Edmund’s prostrate body and began stroking his hair on a spot where there was no blood. “I was going to shag him docile, too.”

“He would have killed you without a thought.”

“Ah, blokes have their tempers, don’t they? Look at him, he’s a fair form of a fellow, innit he? And rich, too.” She took something from his pocket. “What’s this?”

“Well done, lass, not so much as a comma between grief and robbery, and much the better when he’s still so fresh his fleas have not sailed to livelier ports. The Church wears well on you.”

“No, I’m not robbing. Look, it’s a letter.”

“Give it here.”

“You can read?” The tart’s eyes widened as if I had confessed the ability to turn lead into gold.

“I was raised in a nunnery, wench. I am a walking library of learning—bound in comely leather and suitable for stroking—at your service, should you fancy a bit of culture to go with your lack of breeding, or vice versa, of course.”

Then Edmund gasped and stirred.

“Oh fuckstockings. The bastard’s alive.”

THREE OUR DARKER PURPOSE[15]

“Well this is a downy lot of goose toss if I’ve ever read it,” said I. I sat on the bastard’s back, cross-legged, reading the letter he’d written to his father. “‘And my lord must understand how unjust it is that I, the issue of true passion, is shorn of respect and position while deference is given my half brother, who is the product of a bed made of duty and drudgery.’”

“It’s true,” said the bastard. “Am I not as true of shape, as sharp of mind, a—”

“You’re a whiny little wanker,[16] is what you are,” said I, my brashness perhaps spurred by the weight of Drool, who was sitting on the bastard’s legs. “What did you think you would possibly gain by giving this letter to your father?”

“That he might relent and give me half my brother’s title and inheritance.”

“Because your mother was a better boff than Edgar’s? You’re a bastard and an idiot.”

“You could not know, little man.”

It was tempting then, to clout the knave across the head with Jones, or better, slit his throat with his own sword, but as much as the king might favor me, he favors the order of his power more. The murder of Gloucester’s son, no matter how deserved, would not go unpunished. But I was fast on my way to fool’s funeral anyway if I let the bastard up before his anger cooled. I’d sent Shanker Mary away in hope that any wrath that fell might pass her by. I needed a threat to stay Edmund’s hand, but I had none. I am the least powerful of all about the court. My only influence is raising others’ ire.

“I do know what it is to be deprived by the accident of birth, Edmund.”

“We are not the same. You are as common as field dirt. I am not.”

“I could not know then, Edmund, what it is to have my title cast as an insult? If I call you bastard, and you call me fool, can we answer as men?”

“No riddles, fool. I can’t feel my feet.”

“Why would you want to feel your feet? Is that more of the debauchery of the ruling class I hear so much about? So blessed are you with access to the flesh’s pleasures that you have to devise ingenious perversions to get your withered, inbred plumbing to come to attention—need to feel your feet and whip the stable boy with a dead rabbit to scratch your scurvy, libidinous itch, is it?”

“What are you on about, fool? I can’t feel my feet because there’s a great oaf sitting on my legs.”

“Oh. Quite right, sorry. Drool, lift off a bit, but don’t let him up.” I climbed from the bastard’s back and walked to the laundry doorway where he could see me. “What you want is property and title. Do you imagine that you will get it by begging?”

“The letter’s not begging.”

“You want your brother’s fortune. How much better would a letter from him convince your father of your worth?”

“He would never write such a letter, and besides, he does not play for favor, it is his already.”

“Then perhaps the problem is moving favor from Edgar to you. The right letter from him would do it. A letter wherein he confesses his impatience with waiting for his inheritance, and asks for your help in usurping your father.”

“You’re mad, fool. Edgar would never write such a letter.”

“I didn’t say he would. Do you have anything written in his hand?”

“I do, a letter of credit he was to grant to a wool merchant in Barking Upminster.”

“Do you, sweet bastard, know what a scriptorium is?”

“Aye, it’s a place in the monastery where they copy documents—bibles and such.”

“And so my accident of birth is the remedy of yours, for because I hadn’t even one parent to lay claim to me, I was brought up in a nunnery that had just such a scriptorium, where, yes, they taught a boy to copy documents, but for our darker purpose, they taught him to copy it in exactly the hand that he found on the page, and the one before that, and the one before that. Letter to letter, stroke for stroke, the same hand as a man long gone to the grave.”

“So you are a skilled forger? If you were raised in a nunnery how is it you are a fool and not a monk or a priest?”

“How is it that you, the son of an earl, must plead mercy from under the arse of an enormous nitwit? We’re all Fate’s bastards. Shall we compose a letter, Edmund?”

I’m sure I would have become a monk, but for the anchoress. The closest to court I would have come would have been praying for the forgiveness of some noble’s war crimes. Was I not reared for the monastic life from the moment Mother Basil found me squirming on the steps of the abbey at Dog Snogging[17] on the Ouze?

I never knew my parents, but Mother Basil told me once that she thought my mother might have been a madwoman from the local village who had drowned in the river Ouze shortly after I appeared on the doorstep. If that were so, the abbess told me, then my mother had been touched by God (like the Natural) and so I was given to the abbey as God’s special child.

The nuns, most of whom were of noble birth, second and third daughters who could not find a noble husband, doted on me like a new puppy. So tiny was I that the abbess would carry me with her in her apron pocket, and thus I was given the name of Pocket. Little Pocket of Dog Snogging Abbey. I was much the novelty, the only male in that all-female world, and the nuns competed to see who might carry me in their apron pocket, although I do not remember it. Later, after I learned to walk, they would stand me on the table at mealtime and have me parade up and down waving my winky at them, a unique appendage in those feminine environs. I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on. Still, I always felt separate from the rest of them, a different creature, isolated.

I was allowed to sleep on the floor in the abbess’s chambers, as she had a woven rug given her by the bishop. On cold nights I was permitted to sleep under her covers to keep her feet warm, unless one of the other nuns had joined her for that purpose.

Mother Basil and I were constant companions, even after I grew out of her marsupial affection. I attended the masses and prayers with her every day from as long as I could remember. How I loved watching her shave every morning after sunup, stropping her razor on a leather strap and carefully scraping the blue-black whiskers from her face. She would show me how to shave the little spot under your nose, and how she pulled aside the skin on her neck, so as not to nick her Adam’s apple. But she was a stern mistress, and I had to pray every three hours like all the other nuns, as well as carry water for her bath, chop wood, scrub floors, work in the garden, as well as take lessons in maths, catechism, Latin and Greek, and calligraphy. By the time I was nine I could read and write three languages and recite The Lives of the Saints from memory. I lived to serve God and the nuns of Dog Snogging, hoping that one day I might be ordained as a priest myself.

And I might have, but then one day workmen came to the abbey, stonecutters and masons, and in a matter of days they had built a cell off of one of the abandoned passages in the rectory. We were going to have our very own anchorite, or in our case, anchoress. An acolyte so devoted to God that she would be walled up in a cell with only a small opening through which she would be passed food and water, and there she would spend the rest of her life, literally part of the church, praying and dispensing wisdom to the people of the village through her window until she was taken into the bosom of the Lord. Next to being martyred, it was the most holy act of devotion a person could perform.

Daily I crept out of Mother Basil’s quarters to check on the progress of the cell, hoping to somehow bask in the glory that would be bestowed upon the anchoress. But as the walls rose, I saw there was no window left to the outside, no place for the villagers to receive blessings, as was the custom.

“Our anchoress will be very special,” Mother Basil explained in her steady baritone voice. “So devout is she that she will only lay eyes on those who bring her food. She will not be distracted from her prayers for the king’s salvation.”

“She is the charge of the king?”

“No other,” said Mother Basil. The rest of us were bound by payment to pray for the forgiveness of the Earl of Sussex, who had slaughtered thousands of innocents in the last war with the Belgians and was bound to toast on the coals of Hell unless we could fulfill his penance, which had been pronounced by the Pope himself to be seven million Hail Marys per peasant. (Even with a dispensation and a half-price coupon purchased at Lourdes, the earl was getting no more than a thousand Hail Marys to the penny, so Dog Snogging was becoming a very rich monastery on his sins.) But our anchoress would answer for the sins of the king himself. He was said to have perpetrated some jolly-good wickedness, so her prayers must be very potent indeed.

“Please, Mother, please let me take food to the anchoress.”

“No one is to see or speak to her.”

“But someone has to take her food. Let me do it. I promise not to look.”

“I shall consult the Lord.”

I never saw the anchoress arrive. The rumor simply passed that she was in the abbey and the workmen had set the stones around her. Week’s went by with me begging the abbess to allow me the holy duty of feeding the anchoress, but it was not until one evening when Mother Basil needed to spend the night alone with young sister Mandy, praying in private for the forgiveness of what the abbess called a “Smashing Horny Weekender,” that I was allowed to attend to the anchoress.

“In fact,” said the Reverend Mother, “you stay there, outside her cell until morning, and see if you can learn some piety. Don’t come back until morning. Late morning. And bring tea and a couple of scones with you when you come back. And some jam.”

I thought I would burst, I was so excited when I first made my way down that long, dark hallway—carrying a plate of cheese and bread, and a flagon of ale. I half expected to see the glory of God shining through the window, but when I got there, it wasn’t a window at all, but an arrow loop, like in a castle wall, cut in the shape of a cross, the edges tapered so that the broad stone came to a point at the opening. It was as if the masons only knew one window they could put in a thick wall. (Funny that arrow loops and sword hilts, mechanisms of death, form the sign of the cross—a symbol of mercy—but on second thought, I guess it was a mechanism of death in itself.) The opening was barely wide enough to pass the flagon through; the plate would just fit through at the cross. I waited. No light came from inside the cell. A single candle on the wall across from the opening was the only illumination.

I was terrified. I listened, to see if I could hear the anchoress reciting novenas. There wasn’t even the sound of breathing. Was she sleeping? What kind of sin was it to interrupt the prayers of someone so holy? I put the plate and ale on the floor and tried to peer into the darkness of the cell, perhaps see her glow.

Then I saw it. The dim sparkle of the candle reflecting in an eye. She was sitting there, not two feet from the opening. I jumped back against the far wall, knocking over the ale on the way.

“Did I frighten you?” came a woman’s voice.

“No. No, I was just, I am—forgive me. I am awed by your piety.”

Then she laughed. It was sad laughter, as if it had been held a long time and then let out in almost a sob, but she was laughing and I was confused.

“I’m sorry, mistress—”

“No, no, no, don’t be sorry. Don’t you dare be sorry, boy.”

“I’m not. I won’t be.”

“What is your name?”

“Pocket, mum.”

“Pocket,” she repeated, and she laughed some more. “You’ve spilled my ale, Pocket.”

“Aye, mum. Shall I fetch you some more?”

“If you don’t want the glory of my bloody godliness burning us both down, you better had, hadn’t you, friend Pocket? And when you come back, I want you to tell me a story that will make me laugh.”

“Yes, mum,”

And that was the day that my world changed.

“Remind me, why is it we’re not just murdering my brother?” asked Edmund. From whimpering scribblings to conspiracy to murder in the course of an hour, Edmund was a quick study when it came to villainy.

I sat, quill in hand, at the table in my small apartment above the great gatehouse in the outer wall of the castle. I have my own fireplace, a table, two stools, a bed, a cupboard for my things, a hook for my coxcomb and clothes, and in the middle of my room a large cauldron for heating and pouring boiling oil upon a siege force through gutters in the floor. But for the clanking of the massive chains when the drawbridge is raised or lowered, it is a cozy den in which to pursue slumber or other horizontal sport. Best of all, it is private, with a thumping big bolt on the door. Even among the nobles, privacy is rare, as conspiracy thrives there.

“While that is an attractive course, unless Edgar is disgraced, disinherited, and his properties willfully given to you, the lands and title could pass to some legitimate cousin, or worse, your father might set about trying to sire a new legitimate heir.”

I shuddered a bit then—along with, I’m sure, a dozen maidens about the kingdom—at the mental vision of Gloucester’s withered flanks, bared and about the business of making an heir upon their nubile nobility. They would be clawing at the nunnery door to escape the honor.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Edmund.

“Really, you, not think? How shocking. Although a simple poisoning does seem cleaner, the letter is the sharper sword.” If I gave the scoundrel proper rope, perhaps he could hang for both our purposes. “I can craft such a letter, subtle, yet condemning. You’ll be the Earl of Gloucester before you can get dirt shoveled on your father’s still twitching body. But the letter may not do all.”

“Speak your mind, fool. As much as I’d love to silence your yammering, speak.”

“The king favors your father and your brother, which is why they were called here. If Edgar becomes betrothed to Cordelia, which could happen before the morrow—well, with the princess’s dowry in hand, there’ll be no cause for him to resort to the treachery we are about to craft around him. You’ll be left with your fangs showing, noble Edmund, and the legitimate son will be all the richer.”

“I’ll see he is not betrothed to Cordelia.”

“How? Will you tell him horrid things? I have it on good authority that her feet are like ferryboats. They strap them up under her gown to keep them from flapping when she walks.”

“I will see to it that there is no marriage, little man, don’t you worry. But you must see to this letter. Tomorrow Edgar goes on to Barking to deliver the letters of credit and I’ll return to Gloucester with my father. I’ll let the letter slip to him then, so his anger has time to fester in Edgar’s absence.”

“Quick, before I waste parchment, promise you’ll not let Edgar marry Cordelia.”

“Fine, fool, promise you’ll not tell anyone that you ever penned this letter, and I will.”

“I promise,” said I. “By the balls of Venus.”

“Then, so do I,” said the bastard.

“All right, then,” said I, dipping my quill in ink, “although murder would be a simpler plan.” I’ve never cared for the bastard’s brother Edgar, either. Earnest and open-faced is he. I don’t trust anyone who appears so trustworthy. They must be up to something. Of course, Edmund hanging black-tongued for his brother’s murder would make for a festive chandelier as well. A fool does enjoy a party.

In a half-hour I had crafted a letter so wily and peppered with treachery that any father might strangle his son at the sight of it and, if childless, bastinade his own bollocks with a war hammer to discourage conspirators yet to be born. It was a masterpiece of both forgery and manipulation. I blotted it well and held it up for Edmund to see.

“I’ll need your dagger, sir,” said I.

Edmund reached for the letter and I danced away from him. “First the knife, good bastard.”

Edmund laughed. “Take my dagger, fool. You’re no safer, I still have my sword.”

“Aye, which I handed you myself. I need your dagger to razor the seal off that letter of credit so I may affix it to this missive of ours. You’ll need to break it only in your father’s presence, as if you yourself are only then discovering your brother’s black nature.”

“Oh,” said Edmund.

He gave me the knife. I performed the deed with sealing wax and candle and handed the blade back with the letter. (Could I have used one of my own knives for the task? Of course, but it was not time for Edmund to know of them.)

The letter was barely in his pocket before Edmund had drawn his sword and had it leveled at my throat. “I think I can assure your silence better than a promise.”

I didn’t move. “So, you lament being born out of favor, what favor will you court by killing the king’s fool? A dozen guards saw you come in here.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Just then the great chains that ran through my room began to shake, rattling as if a hundred suffering prisoners were shackled to them rather than a slab of oak and iron. Edmund looked around and I scampered to the far side of the room. Wind rushed through the arrow loops that served as my windows and extinguished the candle I had used for the sealing wax. The bastard spun to face the arrow loops and the room went dark, as if a cape had been thrown over the day. The golden form of a woman shimmered in the air at the dark wall.

The knave who dares to harm a fool.”

I could only see Edmund by the glow of the spirit, but he was moving crablike toward the door that led out onto the west wall, reaching frantically for the latch. Then he threw the bolt and was through the door in an instant. Light filled my little apartment and I could again view the Thames through the slits in the stone.

“Well rhymed, wisp,” said I to the empty air. “Well rhymed.”

FOUR THE DRAGON AND HIS WRATH[18]

“Don’t despair, lad,” I said to Taster. “It’s not as grim as it looks. The bastard will stay Edgar and I’m relatively sure that France and Burgundy are buggering each other and would never let a princess come between them—although I’ll wager they’d borrow her wardrobe were it not guarded—so the day is saved. Cordelia will remain in the White Tower to torment me as always.”

We were in an antechamber off the great hall. Taster sat, head in hands, looking paler than normal, a mountain of food piled before him on the table.

“The king doesn’t like dates, does he?” asked Taster. “Not likely he’ll eat any of the dates that were brought as gifts, right?”

“Did Goneril or Regan gift them?”

“Aye, a whole larder they brought with them.”

“Sorry, lad, you’ve work ahead, then. How it is you’re not as fat as a friar, with all you’re required to eat, is beyond me.”

“Bubble says I must have a city of worms living up my bum, but that ain’t it. I’ve a secret, if you won’t tell anyone—”

“Go on lad, I’m hardly paying attention.”

“What about him?” He nodded to Drool, who was sitting in the corner petting one of the castle cats.

“Drool,” I called, “is Taster’s secret safe with you?”

“As dim as a snuffed candle, he is,” said the git in my voice. “Telling a secret to Drool is like casting ink in the night sea.”

“See there,” said I.

“Well,” said Taster, looking around as if anyone would want to be in our miserable company. “I’m sick a lot.”

“Of course you are, it’s the bloody Dark Ages, everyone has the plague or the pox. It’s not like you’re leprous and dropping fingers and toes like rose petals, is it?”

“No, not sick like that. I just vomit nearly every time I eat.”

“So you’re a little chunder-monkey. Not to worry, Taster, you keep it down long enough for it to kill you, don’t you?”

“I reckon.” He nibbled at a stuffed date.

“Duty done, then. All’s well that ends well. But back to my concerns: Do you think France and Burgundy are poofters,[19] or are they, you know, just fucking French?”

“I’ve never even seen them,” Taster said.

“Oh, quite right. What about you, Drool? Drool? Stop that!”

Drool pulled the damp kitten out of his mouth. “But it were licking me first. You said it was only proper manners—”

“I was talking about something completely different. Put the cat down.”

The heavy door creaked open and the Earl of Kent slipped into the room, as stealthy as a church bell rolling down stairs. Kent’s a broad-shouldered bull of a fellow, and while he moves with great strength for his grandfather years, Grace and Subtlety remain blushing virgins in his retinue.

“There you are, boy.”

“What boy?” said I. “I see no boy here.” True, I only stand to Kent’s shoulder, and it would take two of me and a suckling pig to balance him on a scale, but even a fool requires some respect, except from the king, of course.

“Fine, fine. I just wanted to tell you not to make sport of feebleness nor age tonight. The king’s been brooding all week about ‘crawling unburdened to the grave.’ I think it’s the weight of his sins.”

“Well, if he weren’t so dog-fuckingly old there would be no temptation toward mirth, would there? Not my fault, that.”

Kent grinned then. “Pocket, you would not willfully hurt your master.”

“Aye, Kent, and with Goneril and Regan and their lords in the hall there’ll be no need to jest geriatric. Is that why the king has kept company only with you this week, brooding upon his years? He hasn’t been planning on marrying off Cordelia then?”

“He’s spoken of it, but only as part of his entire legacy, of property and history. He seemed set on a course to hold the kingdom steady when I last left him. He bade me leave while he gave private audience to the bastard, Edmund.”

“He’s talking to Edmund? Alone?”

“Aye. The bastard drew on his father’s years of service for the favor.”

“I must go to the king. Kent, stay here with Drool, if you would. There’s food and drink to hold you. Taster, show good Kent the best of those dates. Taster? Taster? Drool, shake Taster, he appears to have fallen asleep.”

Fanfare sounded then, a single anemic trumpet, the other three trumpeters having recently succumbed to herpes. (A sore on the lip is as bad as an arrow in the eye to a trumpeter. The chancellor had them put down, or maybe they’d just been made drummers. They weren’t blowing bloody fanfare, that’s all I’m saying.)

Drool put down his kitten and climbed to his feet.

“With grave offense to daughters three,

Alas, the king a fool shall be,” said the giant in a lilting female voice.

“Where did you hear that, Drool? Who said that?”

“Pretty,” said Drool, massaging the air with his great meaty paws as if caressing a woman’s breasts.

“Time to go,” said Kent. The old warrior threw open the door into the hall.

They stood all around the great table—round after the tradition of some long forgotten king—the center open to the floor where servants served, orators orated, and Drool and I performed. Kent took his place near the king’s throne. I stood with some yeomen to the side of the fire and motioned for Drool to find a place to hide behind one of the stone pillars that supported the vault. Fools do not have a place at the table. Most times I served at the foot of the king, providing quips, criticisms, and brilliant observations through the meal, but only after he had called for me. Lear had not called for a week.

He came into the room head up, scowling at each of his guests until his eye lit on Cordelia and he smiled. He motioned for everyone to sit and they did.

“Edmund,” said the king, “fetch the princes of France and Burgundy.”

Edmund bowed to the king and backed toward the main entrance of the hall, then looked to me, winked, and motioned for me to come join him. Dread rose in my chest like a black serpent. What had the bastard done? I should have cut his throat when I’d had the chance.

I sidled down the side wall, the bells on the tips of my shoes conspicuously unhelpful in concealing my movement. The king looked to me, then away, as if the sight of me might cause rot on his eye.

Once through the door Edmund pulled me roughly aside. The big yeoman at the threshold lowered the blade of his halberd an inch and frowned at the bastard. Edmund released me and looked bewildered, as if his own hand had betrayed him.

(I bring food and drink to the guards when they are on post during feasts. I believe it is written in the Obfuscations of St. Pesto: “In nine cases out of ten, a large friend with a poleax shall truly a blessing be.”)

“What have you wrought, bastard?” I whispered with great fury and no little spit.

“Only what you wanted, fool. Your princess will have no husband, that I can assure, but even your sorceries won’t keep you safe if you reveal my strategy.”

“My sorceries? What? Oh, the ghost.”

“Yes, the ghost, and the bird. When I was crossing the battlement, a raven called me a tosser and shat on my shoulder.”

“Right, my minions are everywhere,” said I, “and you’re right to fear my canny mastery of the heavenly orbs and command of spirits and whatnot. But lest I unleash something unpleasant upon you, tell me, what did you say to the king?”

Edmund smiled then, which I found more unsettling than his blade. “I heard the princesses speaking amongst themselves about their affections for their father earlier in the day, and was enlightened to their character. I merely hinted to the king that he might ease his burden with the same knowledge.”

“What knowledge?”

“Go find out, fool. I’m off to fetch Cordelia’s suitors.”

And he was away. The guard held the door and I slipped back into the hall and to a spot near the table.

The king, it seemed, had only then finished a roll call of sorts, naming each of his friends and family at court, proclaiming his affection for each, and in the cases of Kent and Gloucester, recalling their long history of battles and conquests together. Bent, white-haired, and slight is the king, but there is a cold fire in his eye still—his visage puts one in mind of a hunting bird fresh unhooded and set for its kill.

“I am old, and my burdens of responsibility and property weigh heavily on me, so to avoid conflict in the future, I propose to divide my kingdom among younger strengths now, so I may crawl to the grave light of heart.”

“What better than a light-hearted grave crawl?” I said softly to Cornwall, villainous twat that he is. I crouched between him and his duchess, Regan. Princess Regan: tall, fair, raven-haired, with a weakness for plunging red velvet gowns and another for rascals, both grievous faults had they not played out so pleasurably for this teller of tales.

“Oh, Pocket, did you get the stuffed dates I sent you?” Regan asked.

And generous to a fault as well.

“Shhhhhh, bunny cunny,” I shushed. “Father is speaking.”

Cornwall drew his dagger and I moved along the table to Goneril’s side.

Lear went on: “These properties and powers I will divide between my sons-in-law, the Duke of Albany and the Duke of Cornwall, and that suitor who takes the hand of my beloved Cordelia, but so I may determine who shall have the most bounteous share, I ask of my daughters: Which of you loves me most? Goneril, my eldest born, speak first.”

“No pressure, pumpkin,” I whispered.

“I have this, fool,” she snapped, and with a great smile and no little grace, she made her way around the outside of the round table and to the opening at the center, bowing to each of the guests as she went. She is shorter and rather more round than her sisters, more generously padded in bosom and bustle, her eyes a grey sky short of emerald, her hair a yellow sun short of ginger. Her smile falls on the eye like water on the tongue of a thirst-mad sailor.

I slid into her chair. “A handsome creature is she,” I said to the Duke of Albany. “That one breast, the way it juts a bit to the side—when she’s naked, I mean—does that bother you at all? Make you wonder what it’s looking at over there—bit like a wall-eyed man you think is always talkin’ to someone else?”

“Hush, fool,” Albany said. He is nearly a score years older than Goneril, goatish and dull, methinks, but somewhat less of a scoundrel than the average noble. I do not loathe him.

“Mind you, it’s obviously part of the pair, not some breast-errant off on a quest of its own. I like a bit of asymmetry in a woman—makes me suspicious when Nature’s too evenhanded—fearful symmetry and all. But it’s not like you’re shaggin’ a hunchback or anything—I mean, once she’s on ’er back it’s hard to get either one of them to look you in the eye, innit?”

“Shut up!” barked Goneril, having turned her back on her father—which one is never supposed to do—in order to scold me. Bloody clumsy etiquette that.

“Sorry. Go on,” said I, waving her on with Jones, who jingled gaily.

“Sir,” she addressed the king, “I love you more than words can say. I love you more than eyesight, space, and liberty. I love you beyond anything that can be valued, rich or rare. No less than life itself, with grace, health, beauty, and honor. As much as any child or father has loved, so I love thee. A love that takes my breath away and makes me scarcely able to speak. I love you above all things, even pie.”

“Oh bollocks!”

Who had said it? I was relatively sure it was not my voice, as it hadn’t come from the normal hole in my face, and Jones had been silent as well. Cordelia? I scooted out of Goneril’s chair and scampered to the junior princess’s side, staying low to avoid attention or flying cutlery.

“Bloody buggering bollocks!” said Cordelia.

Lear, refreshed from his shower of flowered bullshit, said, “What?”

I stood then. “Well, sirrah, lovable as thou art, the lady’s profession strains credibility. It’s no secret how much the bitch loves pie.” I crouched again quickly.

“Silence, fool! Chamberlain, bring me the map.”

The distraction had worked, the king’s ire had turned from Cordelia to me. She took the opportunity to poke me in the ear-lobe with her fork.

“Ouch!” Whispered, yet emphatic. “Tart.”

“Knave.”

“Harpy.”

“Rodent.”

“Whore.”

“Whoremonger.”

“Do you have to pay to be a whoremonger? Because strictly speaking—”

“Shhh,” she said, grinning. She poked me in the ear again, then nodded toward the king, that we should pay attention.

The king pointed to the map with a bejeweled dagger. “All these lands, from here to here, with rich farmlands, bounteous rivers, and deep forests, I do grant to Goneril and her husband, Albany, and to their offspring in perpetuity. Now, we must hear from our second daughter. Dearest Regan, wife to Cornwall. Speak.”

Regan made her way to the center floor, looking down at her older sister, Goneril, as she passed, as if to say, “I’ll show you.”

She raised her arms out to her sides, trailing the long, velvet sleeves down to the floor so she described the shape of a grand and bosomy crucifix. She looked to the ceiling as if drawing inspiration from the heavenly orbs themselves, then pronounced: “What she said.”

“Huh?” said the king, and verily “huh” was echoed around the room.

Regan seemed to realize that she should probably go on. “My sister has expressed my thoughts exactly—as if she may have looked at my notes even before we here entered. Except I love thee more. In the list of all senses, all fall short, and I am touched by nothing but your love.” She bowed then, looking up a bit to see if anyone was buying it.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Cordelia, probably louder than was really necessary, as were the coughing and gagging noises she perpetrated thereafter.

Deflecting, I stood and said, “She’s been touched by a bit more than his majesty’s love, I dare say. I mean, in this very room I can name—”

The king shot me his best Must I chop off your head? look and I fell silent. He nodded and looked to the map. “To Regan and Cornwall I leave this third of the kingdom, no smaller or less valuable than that bestowed upon Goneril. Now, Cordelia, our joy, who is courted by so many eligible young nobles, what can you say to receive a third more opulent than your sisters?”

Cordelia stood at her chair, not making her way to the middle of the room as her sisters had. “Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing?” asked the king.

“Nothing.”

“You’ll get nothing for nothing,” said Lear. “Speak again.”

“Well, you can’t blame her, really, can you?” I interjected. “I mean you’ve given all the good bits to Goneril and Regan, haven’t you? What’s left, a bit of Scotland rocky enough to starve a sheep and this poxy river near Newcastle?” I’d taken the liberty of going over to the map. “I’d say nothing is a fair start for bargaining. You should counter with Spain, majesty.”

Now Cordelia moved to the center of the room. “I’m sorry, Father, that I can’t heave my heart into my mouth like my sisters. I love you according to my bond as a daughter, no more, no less.”

“Be careful what you say, Cordelia,” said Lear. “Your dowry is draining away with every word.”

“My lord, you have sired me, raised me, and loved me. I return those duties back, as is proper: I obey you, love you, and most honor you. But how can my sisters say they love you above all? They have husbands. Don’t they have to reserve some love for them?”

“Yes, but have you met their husbands?” said I. There was growling from various points around the table. How can you call yourself a noble if you’ll just start growling for no reason. Uncivilized, it is.

“When I shall marry, you can rest assured that my husband will get at least half my care and half my love as well. To say anything else I’d be lying to you.”

This was Edmund’s doing, I was sure of it. Somehow he’d known that Cordelia would answer this way and had convinced the king to ask the question. And she did not know that her father had been wrestling with his own mortality and worth for the week. I hopped over to the princess and whispered, “Lying now would be the better part of valor. Repent later. Throw the old gent a bone, lass.”

“So this is how you feel?” asked the king.

“Aye, my lord. It is.”

“So young and so untender,” said Lear.

“So young, my lord, and true,” said Cordelia.

“So young, and so bloody stupid,” said the puppet Jones.

“Fine, child. So be it. Let your truth be your dowry, then. For by the radiance of the sun, the dark of the night, all the saints, the Holy Mother, the orbs of the sky, and Nature herself, I disown you.”

In his spirituality Lear is—well—flexible. When pressed for a curse or a blessing he will sometimes invoke gods from a half-dozen pantheons, just to be sure to catch the ear of whichever might be on watch that day.

“No property, land, or title shall be yours. Cannibals of darkest Merica, who would sell their own young in the meat market, shall be closer to me than you, my used-to-be daughter.”

I wondered about that. No one had ever seen a Merican, being as they are mythical. Legend goes that in the name of profit they did sell the limbs of their own children as food—that was before they burned the world, of course. Since I didn’t expect a state visit from the merchant cannibals of the apocalypse anytime soon, it appeared my liege was either herniating the metaphor or speaking the tongue of a frothing nutter.

Kent stood then. “My liege!”

“Sit down, Kent!” the king barked. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath. I loved her the best, and hoped that she would take care of me in my dotage, but since she doesn’t love me enough, only in the grave will there be peace for Lear.”

Cordelia looked more confused than hurt. “But, Father—”

“Out of my sight! Where is France? Where is Burgundy? Finish this business! Goneril, Regan, your younger sister’s share of the kingdom shall be divided between you. Let Cordelia marry her own pride. Cornwall and Albany shall divide the power and property of a king evenly. I shall retain only my title and enough of a stipend to maintain one hundred knights and their carriers. You shall keep me from month to month in your own castles, but the kingdom shall be yours.”

“Royal Lear, this is madness!” Kent again, now making his way around the table to the center floor.

“Careful, Kent,” said Lear. “The bow of my anger is bent, don’t make me loose the arrow.”

“Loose it if you must. You’d kill me for being bold enough to tell you that you’re mad? The best of loyalty is that a loyal man has the courage to speak plainly when his leader moves to folly. Reverse your decision, sir. Your youngest daughter doesn’t love you least because she’s quiet, any more than those who speak loudest are the most sincere.”

The older sisters and their husbands were on their feet at that. Kent glared at them.

“No more, Kent,” the king warned. “On your life, not another word.”

“What has my life ever been, but a thing I risked in service for you? Protecting you? Threaten my life as you will, it will not stop me from telling you that you do wrong, sir!”

Lear started to draw his sword then and I knew he had truly lost all sense of judgment, if turning on his favorite daughter and closest advisor and friend hadn’t shown it already. If Kent decided to defend himself he’d go through the old man like a scythe through a wheat straw. It was unfolding too fast, even for a fool to stay the king’s blade with wit. I could only watch. But Albany moved quickly down the table and stayed the king’s hand, pushing his sword back down into the scabbard.

Kent grinned then, the old bear, and I saw that he wouldn’t have drawn blade on the old man at all. He would have died to make his point to the king. What’s more, Lear knew it, too, but there was no mercy in his eye and the madness had gone cold. He shook himself free of Albany’s grasp, and the duke backed away.

When Lear spoke again his voice was low, restrained, but palsied with hate: “Hear me, thou traitorous ferret. No one challenges my authority, my decisions, or my vows—to do so on British land is death, and in the rest of the known world is war. I’ll not have it. Your years of service noted, I give you your life, but only your life, and never again in my sight. You have five days, Kent, to provision yourself, and on the sixth day, turn your back on our kingdom forever. If twelve days pass and you are still in the land, your life is forfeit. Now go, this is my decree and it shall not be revoked.”

Kent was shaken. This was not the blade he had braced for. He bowed then. “Fare thee well, king. I go, for I dare to question a power so high that you give it away for a flattering tongue.” He turned to Cordelia then: “Take heart, girl, you’ve spoken truly and done nothing wrong. May the gods protect you.” He turned on a heel, putting his back to the king, something I’d never seen him do before, and marched out, pausing only a second to look at Regan and Goneril. “Well lied, you spiteful bitches.”

I wanted to cheer the old brute, write a poem for him, but the hall had fallen silent and the sound of the great oaken door closing behind Kent echoed through the hall like the first thunder of a world-breaking storm.

“Well,” said I, dancing to the middle of the floor. “I think that went about as well as could be expected.”

FIVE PITY THE FOOL

Kent banished, Cordelia disinherited, the king having given away his property and power, but most important, my home, the White Tower; the two older sisters insulted by Kent, the dukes ready to cut my throat, well—getting a laugh might be a challenge. Royal succession, it seemed, would not be a prudent subject to broach, and I was lost for a transition to slapstick or pantomime after Lear’s high drama, so Drool was but a millstone on comedy’s neck. I juggled apples and sang a little song about monkeys while I pondered the problem.

The king was, of late, leaning decidedly pagan, while the elder sisters favored the Church. Gloucester and Edgar were devout to the Roman pantheon, and Cordelia, well, she thought the whole lot was shit and England should have her own church with women in the clergy. Quaint. So the high-minded comedy of religious satire it would be…

I tossed my apples around the table and said, “Two popes are shagging a camel behind a mosque, when this Saracen comes up—”

“There is only one, true pope!” shouted Cornwall, great tower of malignant smegma that he is.

“It’s a jest, you wanker,” said I. “Suspend fucking disbelief for a bit, would you?”

He was right, in a way (although not for the purpose of the camel bit). For the last year there had only been one pope, in the holy city of Amsterdam. But for the prior fifty years there had been two popes, the Retail Pope and the Discount Pope. After the Thirteenth Holy Crusade, when it was decided that to avoid future strife, the birthplace of Jesus would be moved to a different city every four years, holy shrines lost their geographical importance. There arose a great price war in the Church, with shrines offering pilgrims dispensation at varying competitive rates. Now there didn’t need to be a miracle declared on the spot; anywhere could basically be declared a holy site, and often was. Lourdes would still sell dispensation coupons with the healing waters—but also some bloke in Puddinghoe could plant some pansies and hawk, “Jesus had a wee right on this very spot when he was a lad—two pennies and a spliff of Cardiff chronic ’ill get you out o’ purgatory for an eon, mate.”

Soon a whole guild of low-priced shrine keepers around Europe named their own Pope—Boldface the Relatively Shameless, Discount Pope of Prague. The price war was on. If the Dutch pope would give you a hundred years out of purgatory for a shilling and a ferryman’s ticket, the Discount Pope would let you out for two hundred years and send you home with the femur of a minor saint and a splinter of the True Cross. The Retail Pope would offer cheesy bacon toppings on the Host with communion and the Discount Pope would counter with topless-nun night for midnight mass.

It came to a head, though, when St. Matthew appeared in a vision to the Retail Pope, telling him that the faithful were more interested in the quality of their religious experience, not just the quantity. Thus inspired, the Retail Pope moved Christmas to June when the weather wasn’t so shit for shopping, and the Discount Pope, not realizing the game had changed, responded by forgiving hell altogether for anyone who gave a priest a hand job. Without hell, there was no fear, and without fear, there was no further need for the Church to supply redemption, and more important, no means for the Church to modify behavior. The Discount faithful defected in droves, either to the Retail branch of the Church, or to a dozen different pagan sects. Why not get pissed and dance naked around a pole all Sabbath if the worst of it was a rash on the naughty bits and the dropping of the odd bastard now and then? Pope Boldface was burned in a wicker man the next Beltane and cats shat in his ashes.

So, yes, a two-pope joke was untimely, but fuck all, it was dire times, and I sallied forth, for a bit: “So the second pope says, ‘Your sister? I thought she was kosher?’”

And no one laughed. Cordelia rolled her eyes and made a raspberry sound.

The pathetic one-trumpet fanfare dribbled, the great doors were thrown open, and France and Burgundy ponced[20] into the hall followed by the bastard Edmund.

“Silence, fool,” commanded Lear, with great superfluity. “Hail, Burgundy, hail, France.”

“Hail, Edmund the bloody bastard!” said I.

Lear ignored me and motioned for France and Burgundy to come before him. They were both fit, taller than me but not tall, a few years south of thirty. Burgundy had dark hair and the sharp features of a Roman. France, sandy hair and softer features. Each wore sword and dagger that I doubted had been ever drawn but for ceremony. Fucking frogs.

“Lord Burgundy,” said Lear, “you have rivaled for the hand of our youngest daughter. What dowry do you require for her?”

“No less than your highness has offered,” said the dark poofter.

“Alas, that is no more, good Burgundy. What we offered, was offered when she was dear to us. Now she has roused our anger and betrayed our love and her dowry is nothing. If you want her as she is there, take her, but there will be no dowry.”

Burgundy was stunned. He backed away, nearly stepping on France’s feet. “I’m sorry, then, sir, but I must tend to property and power in my choice of duchess.”

“She shall have neither,” said Lear.

“So be it,” said Burgundy. He nodded, bowed, and stepped back. “I am sorry, Cordelia.”

“No worry, sir,” said the princess. “If Burgundy’s heart is wed only to property and power, then it could never be to me truly. Peace be with you.”

I breathed half a sigh of relief. We might be driven from our home, but if Cordelia was driven out with us—

“I’ll take her!” said Edgar.

“You will not, you blubbering, beetle-browed, dog-buggering dolt!” I may have accidentally exclaimed.

“You will not,” said Gloucester, pushing his son back into his seat.

“Well, I will have her,” said the Prince of France. “For she is a dowry in herself.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!”

“Pocket, that’s enough,” said the king. “Guard, take him outside and hold him until our will is done.”

Two yeomen stepped up behind me and seized me under the armpits. I heard Drool moan and looked over to see him cowering behind a column. This had never happened before—nothing like it. I was the all-licensed fool! I of all people could speak truth to power—I am chief cheeky monkey to the King of Bloody Britain!

“You don’t know what you’re getting into, France. Have you seen her feet? Or perhaps that is your game, put her to work in the vineyards crushing wine grapes. Majesty, the poofter means to force servitude on her, mark my words.”

But no one heard the last of it, the yeomen had dragged me from the room and held me in the hall outside. I sought to brain one with Jones but he caught the puppet stick and tucked him in his belt at the small of his back.

“Sorry, Pocket,” said Curan, the captain of the guard, a grizzled bear in chain mail who held me by my right arm. “’Twas a direct order, and you were fast cutting your throat with your own tongue.”

“Not me,” said I. “He wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I’d have said he’d not banish his best friend or disown his favorite daughter before this night. Hanging a fool’s an easy leap, lad.”

“Aye,” said I. “You’re right. Let me go, then.”

“Not until the king’s business is done,” said the old yeoman.

The doors came open, fanfare trickled anemic through the portal, and out came the Prince of France, on his arm, Cordelia, radiant and wearing a grim smile. I could see her jaw clenched, but she relaxed when she saw me and some of the fire of anger left her eyes.

“So, you’re off with the frog Prince?” said I.

France laughed at that, bloody buggering French fuck that he is. Is there anything so irritating as a noble who actually behaves nobly?

“Yes, I am leaving, Pocket, but there is one thing you must always remember and never forget—”

“Both at once?”

“Shut up!”

“Aye, milady.”

“You must always remember, and you must never forget, that while you are the Black Fool, the dark fool, the Royal Fool, the all-licensed fool, and the King’s Fool, you were not brought here to be those things. You were brought here to please me. Me! So when you put your titles aside, a fool still shall there reside, and now and forever, you are my fool.”

“Oh my, you are going to do well in France—they hold unpleasantness to be a virtue.”

“Mine!”

“Now and forever, milady.”

“You may kiss my hand, fool.”

The yeoman released me and I bent to take her hand. She pulled it away, and turned, her gown fanning out around her as she walked away. “Sorry, having you on.”

I smiled into the floor. “You bitch.”

“I’ll miss you, Pocket,” she said over her shoulder, and she hurried down the corridor.

“Take me with you. Take us both with you. France, you could use a brilliant fool and a great lumbering bag of flatulence like Drool, couldn’t you?”

The prince shook his head, entirely too much pity in his eyes for my tastes. “You are Lear’s fool, with Lear you shall stay.”

“That’s not what your wife just said.”

“She will learn,” said the prince. He turned on his heel and followed Cordelia down the corridor. I started after them but the captain yanked me back by the arm.

“Let her go, lad.”

Next out of the hall came the sisters and their husbands. Before I could say anything the captain had clamped his hand over my mouth and was lifting me off my feet as I kicked. Cornwall made as to draw his dagger, but Regan pulled him away. “You’ve just won a kingdom, my duke, killing vermin is a servant’s task. Leave the bitter fool stew in his own bile.”

She wanted me. It was clear.

Goneril would not look me in the eye, but hurried past, and her husband, Albany, just shook his head as he walked by. A hundred brilliant witticisms died suffocating on the captain’s heavy glove. Thus muted, I pumped my codpiece at the duke and tried to force a fart, but my bum trumpet could find no note.

As if the gods had sent down a dim and gaseous avatar to help me, Drool came next through the door, walking rather more straight than was his habit. Then I saw that someone had looped a rope around his neck, the noose fixed to a spear whose point was almost piercing Drool’s throat. Edmund stepped into the corridor holding the other end of the spear, two men at arms flanking him.

“The captain havin’ a laugh with you, then, Pocket?” said Drool, innocent of his peril.

The captain dropped me to my feet then, but held my shoulder to keep me from going at Edmund, whose father and brother passed behind him.

“You were right, Pocket,” said Edmund, poking Drool a bit with the spear for emphasis. “Killing you would be enough to cement my unfavorable position forever, but a hostage—there’s a mute I can use. I so enjoyed your performance in there that I prevailed upon the king to provide me with a fool of my own, and look at his gift. He’ll be coming to Gloucester with us to assure that you don’t forget your promise.”

“You don’t need the spear, bastard. He’ll go if I ask him.”

“Are we going on holiday, Pocket?” asked Drool, blood beginning to trickle down his neck then.

I approached the giant. “No, lad,” said I. “You’re going to go with the bastard here. Do as he says.” I turned to the captain. “Give me your knife.”

The captain eyed Edmund and the men at arms beside him, who had hands on hilts. “I don’t know, Pocket—”

“Give me your bloody knife!” I whirled, pulled the knife from the captain’s belt, and before the men at arms could draw I’d cut the rope around Drool’s neck and pushed Edmund’s spear aside.

“You don’t need the spear, bastard.” I handed the captain his knife and motioned for Drool to bend down so we were eye-to-eye. “I want you to go with Edmund and don’t give him any trouble, you understand?”

“Aye. You ain’t comin’?”

“I’ll be along, I’ll be along. I’ve business at the White Tower first.”

“Shagging to be done?” Drool nodded so enthusiastically you could nearly hear his tiny brain rattling around his gourd. “I’ll be helping, right?”

“No, lad, but you’ll have your own castle. You’ll be the proper fool, won’t you? There’ll be all kinds of hiding and listening, Drool, do you understand what I’m saying, lad?” I winked, hoping against hope that the git would get my meaning.

“Will there be heinous fuckery, Pocket?”

“Aye, I think you can count on it.”

“Smashing!” Drool clapped his hands and danced a little jig then, chanting, “Heinous fuckery most foul, heinous fuckery most foul—”

I looked to Edmund. “You’ve my word, bastard. But you’ve also my word that if any harm comes to the Natural, I’ll see to it that ghosts ride you into your grave.”

A flash of fear showed in Edmund’s eye then, but he fought it down and affected his usual swaggering smirk. “His life is on your word, little man.”

The bastard turned and strutted down the corridor. Drool looked back, a big tear welling in his eye as he realized what was happening. I waved him on.

“I’d have taken the other two if you’d dirked him,” said Curan. The other guard nodded in agreement. “Evil bastard was asking for it.”

“Well, now you fucking tell me,” said I.

Another guard hurried out of the hall then, and seeing it was only the fool with his captain, reported, “Captain, the king’s food taster. He’s dead, sir.”

Three friends had I.

SIX FRIENDSHIP AND THE ODD BONK

Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk. I admit it, I grieved. Perhaps I am a fool to have expected Cordelia to stay. (Well, yes, I am a fool—don’t be overly clever, eh? It’s annoying.) But for most of my manly years she had been the lash on my back, the bait to my loins, and the balm of my imagination—my torment, my tonic, my fever, my curse. I ache for her.

There is no comfort in the castle. Drool gone, Taster gone, Lear gone mad. At best, Drool was little more company than Jones, and decidedly less portable, but I worry for him, great child that he is, stumbling about in the circle of so many villains and so much sharp metal. I miss his gape-toothed smile, filled as it was with forgiveness, acceptance, and often, cheddar. And Taster, what did I know of him, really? Just a wan lad from Hog Nostril on Thames. Yet when I needed a sympathetic ear, he provided, even if he was oft distracted from my woes by his own selfish dietary concerns.

I lay on my bed in the portislodge staring out the cruciform arrow loops at the grey bones of London, stewing in my misery, yearning for my friends.

For my first friend.

For Thalia.

The anchoress.

On a chill autumn day at Dog Snogging, the third time I was allowed to bring food to the anchoress, we became fast friends. I was still in awe of her, and merely being in her presence made me feel base, unworthy, and profane, but in a good way. I passed the plate of rough brown bread and cheese through the cross in the wall with prayers and a plea for her forgiveness.

“This fare will do, Pocket. It will do. I’ll forgive you for a song.”

“You must be a most pious lady and have great love for the Lord.”

“The Lord is a tosser.”

“I thought the Lord was a shepherd?”

“Well, that, too. But a bloke needs hobbies. Do you know ‘Greensleeves’?”

“I know ‘Dona Nobis Pacem.’”

“Do you know any pirate songs?”

“I could sing ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ like a pirate.”

“It means give us peace, in Latin, doesn’t it?”

“Aye, mistress.”

“Bit of a stretch then, innit, a pirate singing give us bloody peace?”

“I suppose. I could sing you a psalm, then, mistress.”

“All right, then, Pocket, a psalm it is—one with pirates and loads of bloodshed, if you have it.”

I was nervous, desperate for approval from the anchoress, and afraid that if I displeased her I might be struck down by an avenging angel, as seemed to happen often in scripture. Try as I might, I could not recall any piraty psalms. I cleared my throat and sang the only psalm I knew in English:

“The Lord is my tosser, I shall not want—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the anchoress. “Doesn’t it go, ‘the Lord is my shepherd’?”

“Well, yes, mistress, but you said—”

And she started to laugh. It was the first time I heard her truly laugh and it felt as if I was getting approval from the Virgin herself. In the dark chamber, just the single candle on my side of the cross, it seemed like her laughter was all around me, embracing me.

“Oh, Pocket, you are a love. Thick as a bloody brick, but such a love.”

I could feel the blood rise in my face. I was proud and embarrassed and ecstatic all at once. I didn’t know what to do, so I fell to my knees and prostrated myself before the arrow loop, pushing my cheek against the stone floor. “I’m sorry, mistress.”

She laughed some more. “Arise, Sir Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

I climbed to my feet and stared into the dark cross-shaped hole in the wall, and there I saw that dull star that was her eye reflecting the candle flame and I realized that there were tears in my own eyes.

“Why did you call me that?”

“Because you make me laugh and you are deserving and valiant. I think we’re going to be very good friends.”

I started to ask her what she meant, but the iron latch clanked and the door into the passageway swung slowly open. Mother Basil was there, holding a candelabra, looking displeased.

“Pocket, what’s going on here?” said the mother superior in her gruff baritone.

“Nothing, Reverend Mother. I’ve just given food to the anchoress.”

Mother Basil seemed reluctant to enter the passageway, as if she was afraid to be in view of the arrow loop that looked into the anchoress’s chamber.

“Come along, Pocket. It’s time for evening prayers.”

I bowed quickly to the anchoress and hurried out the door under Mother Basil’s arm.

As the sister closed the door, the anchoress called, “Reverend Mother, a moment, please.”

Mother Basil’s eyes went wide and she looked as if she’d been called out by the devil. “Go on to vespers, Pocket. I’ll be along.”

She made her way into the dead-end passageway and closed the door behind her even as the bell calling us to vespers began to toll.

I wondered what the anchoress would discuss with Mother Basil, perhaps some conclusion she had realized during her hours of prayer, perhaps I had been found wanting and she would ask that I not be sent to her again. After just making my first friend, I was sorely afraid of losing her. While I repeated the prayers in Latin after the priest, in my heart I prayed to God to not take my anchoress away, and when mass ended, I stayed in the chapel and prayed until well after the midnight prayers.

Mother Basil found me in the chapel.

“There are going to be some changes, Pocket.”

I felt my spirit drop into my shoe soles.

“Forgive me, Reverend Mother, for I know not what I do.”

“What are you on about, Pocket? I’m not scolding you. I’m adding duties to your devotion.”

“Oh,” said I.

“From now on, you are to take food and drink to the anchoress in the hour before vespers, and there in the outer chamber, shall you sit until she has eaten, but upon the bell for vespers you are to leave there, and not return until the next day. No longer than an hour shall you stay, do you understand?”

“Yes, mum, but why only the hour?”

“More than that and you will interfere with the anchoress’s own communion with God. Further, you are never to ask her about where she was before this, about her family, or her past in any way. If she should speak of these things you are to immediately put your fingers in your ears, and verily sing ‘la, la, la, la, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,’ and leave the chamber immediately.”

“I can’t do that, mum.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t work the latch to the outer door with my fingers in my ears.”

“Ah, sweet Pocket, I do so love your wit. I think you shall sleep on the stone floor this night, the rug shields you from the blessed cooling of your fevered imagination, which God finds an abomination. Yes, a light beating and the bare stone for you and your wit tonight.”

“Yes, mum.”

“And so, you must never speak with the anchoress about her past, and if you should, you shall be excommunicated and damned for all eternity with no hope for redemption, the light of the Lord shall never fall upon you, and you shall live in darkness and pain for ever and ever. And in addition, I shall have Sister Bambi feed you to the cat.”

“Yes, mum,” said I. I was so thrilled I nearly peed. I would be blessed by the glory of the anchoress every single day.

“Well that’s a scaly spot o’ snake wank,” said the anchoress.

“No, mum, it’s a cracking big cat.”

“Not the cat, the hour a day. Only an hour a day?”

“Mother Basil doesn’t want me to disturb your communion with God, Madame Anchoress.” I bowed before the dark arrow loop.

“Call me Thalia.”

“I daren’t, mum. And neither may I ask you about your past or from whence you come. Mother Basil has forbidden it.”

“She’s right on that, but you may call me Thalia, as we are friends.”

“Aye, mum. Thalia.”

“And you may tell me of your past, good Pocket. Tell me of your life.”

“But, Dog Snogging is all I know—all I have ever known.”

I could hear her laughing in the dark. “Then, tell me a story from your lessons, Pocket.”

So I told the anchoress of the stoning of St. Stephen, of the persecution of St. Sebastian, and the beheading of St. Valentine, and she, in turn, told me stories of the saints I had never heard of in catechism.

“And so,” said Thalia, “that is the story of how St. Rufus of Pipe-wrench was licked to death by marmots.”

“That sounds a most horrible martyring,” said I.

“Aye,” said the anchoress, “for marmot spit is the most noxious of all substances, and that is why St. Rufus is the patron of saliva and halitosis unto this day. Enough martyring, tell me of some miracles.”

And so I did. I told of the magic, self-filling milk pail of St. Bridgid of Kildare, of how St. Fillan, after his ox was killed by a wolf, was able to compel the same wolf to pull a cart full of materials for building a church, and how St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.

“Aye,” said Thalia, “and snakes have been grateful ever since. But let me apprise you of the most wondrous miracle of how St. Cinnamon drove the Mazdas out of Swinden.”

“I’ve never heard of St. Cinnamon,” said I.

“Well, that is because these nuns at Dog Snogging are base and not worthy to know such things, and why you must never share what you learn here with them lest they become overwhelmed and succumb to an ague.”

“An ague of over-piety?”

“Aye, lad, and you will be the one to have killed them.”

“Oh, I would never want to do that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Did you know, in Portugal they canonize a saint by actually shooting him out of a cannon?”

And so it went, day in, day out, week in, week out, trading secrets and lies with Thalia. You might think that it was cruel of her to spend her only time in contact with the outside world telling lies to a little boy, but then, the first story that Mother Basil had told me was about a talking snake who gave tainted fruit to naked people, and the bishop had made her an abbess. All along what Thalia was teaching me was how to entertain her. How to share a moment in story and laughter—how you could become close to someone, even when separated from them by a stone wall.

Once a month for the first two years the bishop came from York to check on the anchoress, and she would seem to lose her spirit for a day, as if he were skimming it off and taking it away, but soon she would recover and our routine of chat and laughter would go on. After a few years the bishop stopped coming, and I was afraid to ask Mother Basil why, lest it be a reminder and the dour prelate resume his spirit-sucking sojourns.

The longer the anchoress was in her chamber, the more she delighted in my conveying the most mundane details from the outside.

“Tell me of the weather today, Pocket. Tell me of the sky, and don’t skip a single cloud.”

“Well, the sky looked like someone was catapulting giant sheep into the frosty eye of God.”

“Fucking winter. Crows against the sky?”

“Aye, Thalia, like a vandal with quill and ink set loose to randomly punctuate the very dome of day.”

“Ah, well spoken, love, completely incoherent imagery.”

“Thank you, mistress.”

While about my chores and studies I tried to take note of every detail and construct metaphors in my head so I might paint word pictures for my anchoress, who depended on me to be her light and color.

My days seemed to begin at four when I came to Thalia’s chamber, and end at five, when the bell rang for vespers. Everything before was in preparation for that hour, and everything after, until sleep, was in sweet remembrance.

The anchoress taught me how to sing—not just the hymns and chants I had been singing from the time I was little, but the romantic songs of the troubadours. With simple, patient instruction, she taught me how to dance, juggle, and perform acrobatics, and all by verbal description—not once in those years had I laid eyes on the anchoress, or seen more than her partial profile at the arrow loop.

I grew older and fuzz sprouted on my cheek—my voice broke, making me sound as if a small goose was trapped in my gullet, honking for her supper. The nuns at Dog Snogging started to take notice of me as something other than their pet, for many were sent to the abbey when they were no older than I. They would flirt and ask me for a song, a poem, a story, the more bawdy the better, and the anchoress had taught me many of those. Where she had learned them, she would never say.

“Were you an entertainer before you became a nun?”

“No, Pocket. And I am not a nun.”

“But, perhaps your father—”

“No, my father was not a nun either.”

“I mean, was he an entertainer?”

“Sweet Pocket, you mustn’t ask about my life before I came here. What I am now, I have always been, and everything I am is here with you.”

“Sweet Thalia,” said I. “That is a fiery flagon of dragon toss.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You’re grinning, aren’t you?”

She held the candle close to the arrow loop, illuminating her wry smile. I laughed, and reached through the cross to touch her cheek. She sighed, took my hand and pressed it hard against her lips, then, in an instant, she had pushed my hand away and moved out of the light.

“Don’t hide,” said I. “Please don’t hide.”

“Fat lot of choice I have about whether I hide or not. I live in a bloody tomb.”

I didn’t know what to say. Never before had she complained about her choice to become the anchoress of Dog Snogging, even if other expressions of her faith seemed—well—abstract.

“I mean don’t hide from me. Let me see you.”

“You want to see? You want to see?”

I nodded.

“Give me your candles.”

She had me hand four lit candles through the arrow loop. Whenever I performed for her she had me set them in holders around the outer chamber so she could see me dance, or juggle, or do acrobatics, but never had she asked for more than one candle in her own chamber. She placed the candles around her chamber and for the first time I could see the stone pallet where she slept on a mattress of straw, her meager possessions laid out on a heavy table, and Thalia, standing there in a tattered linen frock.

“Look,” she said. She pulled her frock over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She looked younger than I had imagined, thin, but womanly—her face was that of a mischievous Madonna, as if carved by a sculptor inspired more by desire than the divine. Her hair was long and the color of buckskin, catching the candlelight as if a single ray of sunlight might make it explode in golden fire. I felt a heat rise in my face, and another kind of rise in my trousers. I was excited and confused and ashamed all at once, and I turned my back on the arrow loop and cried out.

“No!”

Suddenly, she was right behind me, and I felt her hand on my shoulder, then rubbing my neck.

“Pocket. Sweet Pocket, don’t. It’s all right.”

“I feel like the Devil and the Virgin are doing battle in my body. I didn’t know you were like that.”

“Like a woman, you mean?”

Her hand was warm and steady, kneading the muscles in my shoulder through the cross in the wall and I leaned into it. I wanted to turn and look, I wanted to run out of the chamber, I wanted to be asleep, or just waking—ashamed that the Devil had visited me in the night with a damp dream of temptation.

“You know me, Pocket. I’m your friend.”

“But you are the anchoress.”

“I’m Thalia, your friend, who loves you. Turn around, Pocket.”

And I did.

“Give me your hand,” said she.

And I did.

She put it on her body, and she put her hands on mine, and pressed against the cold stone. Through the cross in the wall, I discovered a new universe—of Thalia’s body, of my body, of love, of passion, of escape—and it was a damn sight better than bloody chants and juggling. When the bell rang for vespers we fell away from the cross, spent and gasping, and we began to laugh. Oh, and I had chipped a tooth.

“One for the Devil, then, love?” said Thalia.

When I arrived with the anchoress’s supper the next afternoon she was waiting with her face pressed nearly through the center of the arrow cross—she looked like one of the angel-faced gargoyles that flanked the main doors of Dog Snogging, except they always seemed to be weeping and she was grinning. “So, didn’t go to confession today, did you?”

I shuddered. “No, mum, I worked in the scriptorium most of the day.”

“Pocket, I think I would prefer you not call me mum, if it’s not too much to ask. Given the new level of our friendship it seems—oh, I don’t know—unsavory.”

“Yes, m—uh—mistress.”

“Mistress I can work with. Now, pass me my supper and see if you can fit your face in the opening the way that I have.”

Thalia’s cheekbones were wedged in the arrow loop, which was little wider than my hand.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I’d been finding abrasions on my arms and various bits all day from our adventure the night before.

“It’s not the flaying of St. Bart, but, yes, it stings a bit. You can’t confess what we did, or what we do, love? You know that, right?”

“Then am I going to have to go to hell?”

“Well—” She pulled back, rolled her eyes as if searching the ceiling for an answer. “—not alone. Give us our supper, lad, and get your face in the loop, I have something to teach you.”

And so it went for weeks and months. I went from being a mediocre acrobat to a talented contortionist, and Thalia seemed to regain some of the life that I had thought sure she’d lost. She was not holy in the sense that the priests and nuns taught, but she was full of spirit and a different kind of reverence. More concerned with this life, this moment, than an eternity beyond the reach of the cross in the wall. I adored her, and I wanted her to be out of the chamber, in the world, with me, and I began to plan her escape. But I was but a boy, and she was bloody barking, so it was not meant to be.

“I’ve stolen a chisel from a mason who passed by on his way to work on the minster at York. It will take some time, but if you work on a single stone, you might escape in summer.”

“You are my escape, Pocket. The only escape I can ever allow myself.”

“But we could run off, be together.”

“That would be smashing, except I can’t leave. So, hop up and get your tackle in the cross. Thalia’s a special treat for you.”

I never seemed to make my point once my tackle went in the cross. Distracted, I was. But I learned, and while I was forbidden confession—and to tell the truth, I didn’t feel that badly about it—I began to share what I had learned.

“Thalia, I must confess to you, I have told Sister Nikki about the little man in the boat.”

“Really? Told her or showed her?”

“Well, showed her, I reckon. But she seems a bit thick. She kept making me show her over and over—asked me to meet her in the cloisters to show her again after vespers tonight.”

“Ah, the joy of being slow. Still, it’s a sin to be selfish with one’s knowledge.”

“That’s what I thought,” said I, relieved.

“And speaking of the little man in the boat, I believe there is one on this side of the loop who has been naughty and requires a thorough tongue-lashing.”

“Aye, mistress,” said I, wedging my cheeks into the arrow loop. “Present the rascal for punishment.”

And so it went. I was the only person I knew who had calluses on his cheekbones, but I had also developed the arms and grip of a blacksmith from suspending myself with my fingertips wedged between the great stones to extend my bits through the arrow loop. And thus I hung, spread spiderlike across the wall, my business being tended to, frantic and friendly, by the anchoress, when the bishop entered the antechamber.

(The bishop entered the antechamber? The bishop entered the antechamber? At this point you’re going coy on us, euphemizing about parts and positions when you’ve already confessed to mutual violation with a holy woman through a bloody arrow slot? Well, no.)

The actual sodding Bishop of Bloody York entered the sodding antechamber with Mother sodding Basil, who bore a brace of sodding storm lanterns.

And so I let go. Unfortunately, Thalia did not. It appeared that her grip, too, had been strengthened by our encounters on the wall.

“What the hell are you doing, Pocket?” said the anchoress.

“What are you doing?” asked Mother Basil.

I hung there, more or less suspended to the wall by three points, one of them not covered by shoes. “Ahhhhhhhhh!” said I. I was finding it somewhat difficult to think.

“Give us a little slack, lad,” said Thalia. “This is meant to be more of a dance, not a tug-of-war.”

“The bishop is out here,” said I.

She laughed. “Well, tell him to get in the queue and I’ll tend to him when we’re finished.”

“No, Thalia, he’s really out here.”

“Oh toss,” said she, releasing my knob.

I fell to the floor and quickly rolled onto my stomach.

Thalia’s face was at the arrow loop. “Evening, your grace.” A big grin there. “Fancy a spot of stony bonking before vespers?”

The bishop turned so quickly his miter went half-past on his head. “Hang him,” he said. He snatched one of Mother Basil’s lanterns and walked out of the chamber.

“Bloody brown bread you serve tastes like goat scrotum!” Thalia called after. “A lady deserves finer fare!”

“Thalia, please,” I said.

“Not a comment on you, Pocket. Your serving style is lovely, but the bread is rubbish.” Then to Mother Basil. “Don’t blame the boy, Reverend Mother, he’s a love.”

Mother Basil grabbed me by the ear and dragged me out of the chamber.

“You’re a love, Pocket,” said the anchoress.

Mother Basil locked me in a closet in her chambers, then mid-way through the night, opened the door and handed in a crust of bread and a chamber pot. “Stay here until the bishop is on his way in the morning, and if anyone asks, you’ve been hung.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother,” said I.

She came to get me the next morning and hustled me out through the chapel. I’d never seen her so distraught. “You’ve been like a son to me, Pocket,” she said, fussing about me, strapping a satchel and other bits of kit on me. “So it’s going to pain me to send you off.”

“But, Reverend Mother—”

“Hush, lad. We’ll take you to the barn, hang you in front of a few farmers, then you’re off to the south to meet up with a group of mummers[21] who will take you in.”

“Beggin’ pardon, mum, but if I’m hung, what will mummers do with me, a puppet show?”

“I’ll not really hang you, just make it look good. We have to, lad, the bishop ordered it.”

“Since when does the bishop order nuns to hang people?”

“Since you shagged the anchoress, Pocket.”

At the mention of her I broke away from Mother Basil, ran through the abbey, down the old corridor and into the antechamber. The arrow cross was gone, completely bricked up and mortared in. “Thalia! Thalia!” I called. I screamed and beat the stones until my fists bled, but not a sound came from the other side of the wall. Ever.

The sisters pulled me away, tied my hands, and took me to the barn where I was hanged.

SEVEN A BROTHER TRAITOR

Am I to be forever alone? The anchoress told me it might be so, trying to comfort me when I felt pushed aside by the sisters of Dog Snogging.

“You’re gifted with wit, Pocket, but to cast jibe and jest you must stand separate from the target of your barbs. I fear you may become a lonely man, even in the company of others.”

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps it is why I am such an accomplished horn-beast and eloquent crafter of cuckoldry. I seek only succor and solace beneath the skirts of the soft and understanding. And so, sleepless, did I make my way to the great hall to find some comfort among the castle wenches who slept there.

The fire still blazed, logs the size of oxen set in before bed. My sweet Squeak, who had oft opened her heart and whatnot to a wayfaring fool, had fallen asleep in the arms of her husband, who spooned her mercilessly as he snored. Shanker Mary was not to be seen, no doubt servicing the bastard Edmund somewhere, and my other standard lovelies had fallen into slumber in proximity too close to husbands or fathers to admit a lonely fool.

Ah, but the new girl, just in the kitchen a fortnight, called Tess or Kate or possibly Fiona. Her hair was jet and shone like oiled iron; milky skin, cheeks brushed by a rose—she smiled at my japes and had given Drool an apple without his asking. I am relatively sure that I adored her. I tiptoed across the rushes that lined the floor (I had left Jones in my chamber, his hat bells no help in securing stealthy romance), lay down beside her, and introduced my personage to the nether of her blanket. An affectionate nudge at the hip woke her.

“Hello,” said she.

“Hello,” said I. “Not a papist, are you, love?”

“Christ, no, Druid born and raised.”

“Thank God.”

“What are you doing under my blanket?”

“Warming up. I’m terribly cold.”

“No you’re not.”

“Brrrr. Freezing.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“All right, then. I’m just being friendly.”

“Would you stop prodding me with that?”

“Sorry, it does that when it’s lonely. Perhaps if you petted it.”

Then, praised be the merciful goddess of the wood, she petted it, tentatively, almost reverentially at first, as if she sensed how much joy it could bring to all who came in contact with it. An adaptable lass, not given to fits of hysteria or modesty—and soon a gentle surety in her grip that betrayed some experience in the handling of manly bits—simply lovely she was.

“I thought it would have a little hat, with bells.”

“Ah, yes. Well, given a private place to change, I’m sure that can be arranged. Under your skirt, perhaps. Roll to the side, love, we’ll be less obvious if we keep the cuddle on a lateral plane.” I popped her bosoms out of her frock, then, freed the roly-poly pink-nosed puppies to the firelight and the friendly ministries of this master juggler, and thought to burble my cheeks softly between them, when the ghost appeared.

The spirit was more substantial now, features describing what must have been a most comely creature before she was shuffled off to the undiscovered country, no doubt by a close relative weary of her irritating nature. She floated above the sleeping form of the cook Bubble, rising and falling on the draft of her snores.

“Sorry to haunt you while you’re rogering the help,” said the ghost.

“The rogering has not commenced, wisp, I have barely bridled the horse for a moist and bawdy ride. Now, go away.”

“Right, then. Sorry to have interrupted your attempted rogering.”

“Are you calling me a horse?” asked Possibly Fiona.

“Not at all, love, you pet the little jester and I’ll attend to the haunting.”

“There’s always a bloody ghost about, ain’t there?” commented Possibly, a squeeze on my knob for emphasis.

“When you live in a keep where blood runs blue and murder is the favored sport, yes,” said the ghost.

“Oh do fuck off,” said I. “Thou visible stench, thou steaming aggravation, thou vaporous nag! I’m wretched, sad, and lonely, and trying to raise a modicum of comfort and forgetting here in the arms of, uh—”

“Kate,” said Possibly Fiona.

“Really?”

She nodded.

“Not Fiona?”

“Kate since the day me da tied me belly cord to a tree.”

“Well, bugger. Sorry. Pocket here, called the Black Fool, charmed I’m sure. Shall I kiss your hand?”

“Double-jointed, then, are ye?” said Kate, a tickle to my tackle making her point.

“Bloody hell, would you two shut up?” said the ghost. “I’m haunting over here.”

“Go on,” said we.

The ghost boosted her bosom and cleared her throat, expecto-rating a tiny ghost frog that evaporated in the firelight with a hiss, then said:

“What?” said the former Fiona.

“What?” said I.

“Prophecy of doom, innit?” said the ghost. “Spot o’ the old riddly foreshadowing from beyond, don’t you know?”

“Can’t kill her again, can we?” asked faux Fiona.

“Gentle spook,” said I. “If it is a warning you bring, state it true. If action you require, ask outright. If music you must make, play on. But by the wine-stained balls of Bacchus, speak your bloody business, quick and clear, then be gone, before time’s iron tongue licks away my mercy bonk with second thoughts.”

“You are the haunted one, fool. It’s your business I do. What do you want?”

“I want you to go away, I want Fiona to come along quietly, and I want Cordelia, Drool, and Taster back—now, can you tell me how to make those things come about? Can you, you yammering flurry of fumes?”

“It can be done,” said the ghost. “Your answer lies with the witches of Great Birnam Wood.”

“Or you could just fucking tell me,” said I.

“Nooooo,” sang the ghost, all ghosty and ethereal, and with that she faded away.

“Leaves a chill when she goes, don’t she?” said formerly Fiona. “Appears to have softened your resolve, if you don’t mind my sayin’.”

“The ghost saved my life last evening,” said I, trying to will life back into the wan and withered.

“Kilt the little one, though, didn’t she? Back to your bed, fool, the king’s leaving on the morrow and there’s a wicked lot of work to do in the morning to prepare for his trip.”

Sadly, I tucked away my tackle and sulked back to the portislodge to pack my kit for my final journey from the White Tower.

Well, I won’t miss the bloody trumpets at dawn, I can tell you that. And sod the bloody drawbridge chains rattling in my apartment before the cock crows. We might have been going to war for all the racket and goings-on at first light. Through the arrow loop I could see Cordelia riding out with France and Burgundy, standing in the stirrups like a man, like she was off to the hunt, rather than leaving her ancestral home forever. To her credit, she did not look back, and I did not wave to her, even after she crossed the river and rode out of sight.

Drool was not so fickle, and as he was led out of the castle by a rope round his neck, he kept stopping and looking back, until the man at arms to whom he was tethered would yank him back into step. I could not bear to let him see me, so I did not go out onto the wall. Instead I slunk back to my pallet and lay there, my forehead pressed to the cold stone wall, listening as the rest of the royals and their retinues clomped across the drawbridge below. Sod Lear, sod the royals, sod the bloody White Tower. All I loved was gone or soon to be left behind, and all that I owned was packed in a knapsack and hung on my hook, Jones sticking out the top, mocking me with his puppety grin.

Then, a knock at my door. Like dragging myself from the grave, was making my way to open it. There she stood, fresh and lovely, holding a basket.

“Fiona!”

“Kate,” said Fiona.

“Aye, your stubbornness suits you, even in daylight.”

“Bubble sends her sympathies over Taster and Drool, and sends you these sweet cakes and milk for your comfort, but says to be sure and remind you to not leave the castle without saying your farewells, and further that you are a cur, a rascal, and a scurvy patch.”

“Ah, sweet Bubble, when kindness shagged an ogre, thus was she sired.”

“And I’m here to offer comfort myself, finishing what was started in the great hall last night. Squeak says to ask you about a small chap in a canoe.”

“My my, Fi, bit of a tart, aren’t we?”

“Druish, love. My people burn a virgin every autumn—one can’t be too careful.”

“Well, all right, but I’m forlorn and I shan’t enjoy it.”

“In that we shall suffer together. Onward! Off with your kit, fool!”

What is it about me that brings out the tyrant in women, I wonder?

“The next morning” stretched into a week of preparation for departure from the White Tower. When Lear pronounced that he would be accompanied by one hundred knights it was not as if one hundred men could mount up and ride out of the gates at sunrise. Each knight—the unlanded second or third son of a noble—would have at least one squire, a page, usually a man to tend his horses, and sometimes a man at arms. Each had at least one warhorse, a massive armored beast, and two, sometimes three animals to carry his armor, weapons, and supplies. And Albany was three weeks’ journey to the north, near Aberdeen; with the slow pace set by the old king and so many on foot we’d need a crashing assload of supplies. By the end of the week our column numbered over five hundred men and boys, and nearly as many horses. We would have needed a wagon full of coin to pay everyone if Lear had not conscripted Albany and Cornwall to maintain his knights.

I watched Lear pass under the portislodge at the head of the column before going downstairs and climbing on my own mount, a short, swayback mare named Rose.

“Mud shall not sully my Black Fool’s motley, lest it dull his wit as well,” said Lear, the day he presented the horse. I did not own the horse, of course. She belonged to the king—or now his daughters, I suppose.

I fell in at the end of the column behind Hunter, who was accompanied by a long train of hounds and a wagon with a cage built on it, which held eight of the royal falcons.

“We’ll be raiding farms before we get to Leeds,” said Hunter, a stout, leather-clad man, thirty winters on his back. “I can’t feed this lot—and they’ve not enough stowed to last them a week.”

“Cry calamity if you will, Hunter, but I’m the one to keep them in good spirits when their bellies are empty.”

“Aye, I’ve no envy for you, fool. Is that why you ride back here with we catch-farts and not at the king’s side?”

“Just drawing plans for a bawdy song at supper without the clank of armor in my ear, good Hunter.”

I wanted to tell Hunter that I was not overburdened by my duties, but by my disdain for the senile king who had sent my princess away. And I wanted time to ponder the ghost’s warnings. The bit about daughters three and the king becoming a fool had come to pass, or at least was in the way of it. So the girl ghost had predicted the “grave offense” to “daughter’s three” even if all the daughters had not seen the offense yet—when Lear arrived at Albany with this rowdy retinue, offense would soon follow. But what of this: “When a second sibling’s base derision, proffers lies that cloud the vision”?

Did it mean the second daughter? Regan? What did it matter if her lies clouded Lear’s vision? The king was nearly blind as it was, his eyes milky with cataract—I’d taken to describing my pantomimes as I performed them so the old man would not miss the joke. And with no power, what tie could be severed that would make a difference now? A war between the two dukes? None of it about me, why do I care?

Why then would the ghost appear to this most irrelevant and powerless fool? I puzzled it, and fell far behind the column, and when I stopped to have a wee, was accosted by a brigand.

He came up from behind a fallen tree, a great bear of a fiend, his beard matted and befouled with food and burrs, a maelstrom of grey hair flying about under a wide-brimmed black hat. I may have screamed in surprise, and a less educated ear might have likened my shriek to that of a little girl, but be assured it was most manly and more for the fair warning of my attacker, for next I knew I had pulled a dagger from the small of my back and sent it flying. His miserable life was saved only by my slight miscalculation of his distance—the butt of my blade bounced off his behatted noggin with a thud.

“Ouch! Fuck’s sake, fool. What is wrong with you?”

“Hold fast, knave,” said I. “I’ve two more blades at the ready, and these I’ll send pointy end first—the quality of my mercy having been strained and my ire aroused by having peed somewhat upon my shoes.” I believed it a serviceable threat.

“Hold your blades, Pocket. I mean you no harm,” came the voice under the hat brim. Then, “Y Ddraig Goch ddyry gychwyn.”[22]

I wound up to send my second dagger to the scoundrel’s heart, “You may know my name, but that gargling with catsick that you’re doing will not stop me from dropping you where you stand.”

“Ydych chi’n cymryd cerdynnau credid?”[23] said the highwayman, no doubt trying to frighten me further, his consonants chained like anal beads strung out of hell’s own bunghole.

“I may be small, but I’m not a child to be afraid of a pretended demon speaking in tongues. I’m a lapsed Christian and a pagan of convenience. The worst I can do on my conscience is cut your throat and ask the forest to count it as a sacrifice come the Yule, so cease your nonsense and tell me how you know my name.”

“It’s not nonsense, it’s Welsh,” said the brigand. He folded back the brim of his hat and winked. “What say you save your wicked sting for an enemy true? It’s me, Kent. In disguise.”

Indeed, it was, the king’s old banished friend—all of his royal trappings but his sword gone—he looked like he’d slept in the woods the week since I’d last seen him.

“Kent, what are you doing here? You’re as good as dead if the king sees you. I thought you’d be in France by now.”

“I’ve no place to go—my lands and title are forfeit, what family I have would risk their own lives to take me in. I have served Lear these forty years, I am loyal, and I know nothing else. My thought is to affect accents and hide my face until he has a change of heart.”

“Is loyalty a virtue when paid to virtue’s stranger? I think not. Lear has misused you. You are mad, or stupid, or you lust for the grave, but there is no place for you, good greybeard, in the company of the king.”

“And there is for you? Or did I not see you restrained and dragged from the hall for that same offense: truth told boldly? Don’t preach virtue to me, fool. One voice can, without fear, call the king on his folly, and here he stands, piss-shoed, two leagues back from the train.”

Fuckstockings, truth is a surly shrew sometimes! He was right, of course, loudmouthed old bull. “Have you eaten?”

“Not for three days.”

I went to my horse and dug into my satchel for some hard cheese and an apple I had left from Bubble’s farewell gift. I gave them to Kent. “Come not too soon,” said I. “Lear still fumes about Cordelia’s honest offense and your supposed treason. Follow behind to Albany’s castle. I’ll have Hunter leave a rabbit or a duck beside the road for you every day. Do you have flint and steel?”

“Aye, and tinder.”

I found the stub of a candle in the bottom of my bag and handed it to the old knight. “Burn this and catch the soot upon your sword, then rub the black into your beard. Cut your hair short and blacken it, too. Lear can’t see clearly more than a few feet away, so keep your distance. And carry on with that ghastly Welsh accent.”

“Perhaps I’ll fool the old man, but what of the others?”

“No righteous man thinks you a traitor, Kent, but I don’t know all of these knights, nor which might reveal you to the king. Just stay out of sight and by the time we reach Albany’s castle I’ll have flushed out any knave who might betray your cause.”

“You’re a good lad, Pocket. If I’ve shown you disrespect in the past, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t grovel, Kent, it doesn’t wear well on the aged. A swift sword and a strong shield are allies I can well use with scoundrels and traitors weaving intrigue about like the venomous spider-whore of Killarney.”

“Spider-whore of Killarney? I’ve never heard of her?”

“Aye, well, sit on that downed tree and eat your lunch. I’ll spin the tale for you like it was web from her own bloody bum.”

“You’ll fall behind the column.”

“Sod the column, that tottering old tosspot so slows them they’ll be leaving a snail trail soon. Sit and listen, greybeard. By the way have you ever heard of Great Birnam Wood?”

“Aye, it’s not two miles from Albany.”

“Really? How do you feel about witches?”

EIGHT A WIND FROM FUCKING FRANCE

Hunter was right, of course, he wasn’t able to feed Lear’s train. We imposed on villages along the way for fare and quarter, but north of Leeds the villages had suffered bad harvests and they could not bear our appetites without starving themselves. I tried to foster good cheer among the knights, while keeping distance from Lear—I had not forgiven the old man for disowning my Cordelia and sending away Drool. Secretly I relished the soldiers’ complaints about their lack of comfort, and made no real effort to dampen their rising resentment for the old king.

On the fifteenth day of our march, outside of Lint-upon-Tweed, they ate my horse.

“Rose, Rose, Rose—would a horse by any other name taste so sweet?” the knights chanted. They thought themselves clever, slinging such jests while spraying roasted bits of my mount from their greasy lips.

The dull always seek to be clever at the fool’s expense, to somehow repay him for his cutting wit, but never are they clever, and often are they cruel. Which is why I may never own things, never care for anyone, nor show desire for anything, lest some ruffian, thinking he is funny, take it away. I have secret desires, wants, and dreams, though. Jones is a fine foil, but I should like someday to own a monkey. I would dress him in a tiny jester’s suit, of red silk, I think. I would call him Jeff, and he would have his own scepter, that would be called Tiny Jeff. Yes, I should very much like a monkey. He would be my friend—and it would be forbidden to murder, banish, or eat him. Foolish dreams?

We were met at the gate of Castle Albany by Goneril’s steward, adviser, and chief toady, that most pernicious twat, Oswald. I’d had dealings with the rodent-faced muck-sucker when he was but a footman at the White Tower, when Goneril was still princess at court, and I, a humble jongleur, was found wandering naked amid her royal orbs. But that tale is best left for another time, the scoundrel at the gate impedes our progress.

Spidery in appearance as well as disposition, Oswald lurks even when in the open, lurking being his natural state of locomotion. A fine black fuzz he wears for a beard, the same is on his head, when his blue tartan tam is humbled at his heart, which it was not that day. He neither removed his hat nor bowed as Lear approached.

The old king was not pleased. He stopped the train an arrow-shot from the castle and waved me forward.

“Pocket, go see what he wants,” said Lear. “And ask why there is no fanfare for my arrival.”

“But nuncle,[24]” said I. “Shouldn’t the captain of the guard be the one—”

“Go on, fool! A point is to be made about respect. I send a fool to meet this rascal and put him in his place. Spare no manners, remind the dog that he is a dog.”

“Aye, majesty.” I rolled my eyes at Captain Curan, who almost laughed, then stopped himself, seeing that the king’s anger was real.

I pulled Jones from my satchel and sallied forth, my jaw set, as determined as the prow of a warship.

“Hail, Castle Albany,” I called. “Hail, Albany. Hail, Goneril.”

Oswald said nothing, did not so much as remove his hat. He looked past me to the king, even when I was standing an arm’s length from him.

I said: “King of bloody Britain here, Oswald. I’d suggest you pay proper respect.”

“I’ll not lower myself to speak with a fool.”

“Primping little whoreson wanker, innit he?” said the puppet Jones.

“Aye,” said I. Then I spotted a guard in the barbican, looking down on us. “Hail, Cap’n, seems someone’s emptied a privy on your drawbridge and the steaming pile blocks our way.”

The guard laughed. Oswald fumed.

“M’lady has instructed me to instruct you that her father’s knights are not welcome in the castle.”

“That so? She’s actually talking to you, then?”

“I’ll not have an exchange with an impudent fool.”

“He’s not impudent,” said Jones. “With proper inspiration, the lad sports a woody as stout as a mooring pin. Ask your lady.”

I nodded in agreement with the puppet, for he is most wise for having a brain of sawdust.

“Impudent! Impudent! Not impotent!” Oswald frothing a bit now.

“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so,” said Jones. “Yes, he’s that.”

“To be sure,” said I.

“Aye,” said Jones.

“Aye,” said I.

“The king’s rabble shall not be permitted in the castle.”

“Aye. That so, Oswald?” I reached up and patted his cheek. “You should have ordered trumpets and rose petals scattered on our path.” I turned and waved the advance to the train, Curan spurred his horse and the column galloped forward. “Now get off the bridge or be trampled, you rat-faced little twat.”

I strode past Oswald into the castle, pumping Jones in the air as if I was leading cadence for war drummers. I think I should have been a diplomat.

As Lear rode by he clouted Oswald on the head with his sheathed sword, knocking the unctuous steward into the moat. I felt my anger for the old man slip a notch.

Kent, his disguise now completed by nearly three weeks of hunger and living in the outdoors, fell in behind the train as I had instructed. He looked lean and leathery now, more like an older version of Hunter than the old, overfed knight he had been at the White Tower. I stood to the side of the gate as the column entered and nodded to him as he passed.

“I’m hungry, Pocket. All I had to eat yesterday was an owl.”

“Perfect fare for witch finding, methinks. You’re with me to Great Birnam Wood tonight, then?”

“After supper.”

“Aye. If Goneril doesn’t poison the lot of us.”

Ah, Goneril, Goneril, Goneril—like a distant love chant is her name. Not that it doesn’t summon memories of burning urination and putrid discharge, but what romance worth the memory is devoid of the bittersweet?

When I first met her, Goneril was but seventeen, and although betrothed to Albany from the age of twelve, she had never seen him. A curious, round-bottomed girl, she had spent her entire life in and around the White Tower, and she’d developed a colossal appetite for knowledge of the outside world, which somehow she thought she could sate by grilling a humble fool. It started on odd afternoons, when she would call me to her chambers, and with her ladies-in-waiting in attendance, ask me all manner of questions her tutors had refused to answer.

“Lady,” said I, “I am but a fool. Shouldn’t you ask someone with position?”

“Mother is dead and Father treats us like porcelain dolls. Everyone else is afraid to speak. You are my fool, it is your duty to speak truth to power.”

“Impeccable logic, lady, but truth be told, I’m here as fool to the little princess.” I was new to the castle, and did not want to be held accountable for telling Goneril something that the king didn’t wish her to know.

“Well, Cordelia is having her nap, so until she wakes you are my fool. I so decree it.”

The ladies clapped at the royal decree.

“Again, irrefutable logic,” said I to the thick but comely princess. “Proceed.”

“Pocket, you have traveled the land, tell me, what is it like to be a peasant?”

“Well, milady, I’ve never been a peasant, strictly speaking, but for the most part, I’m told it’s wake early, work hard, suffer hunger, catch the plague, and die. Then get up the next morning and do it all again.”

“Every day?”

“Well, if you’re a Christian—on Sunday you get up early, go to church, suffer hunger until you have a big meal of barley and swill, then catch the plague and die.”

“Hunger? Is that why they seem so wretched and unhappy?”

“That would be one of the reasons. But there’s much to be said for hard work, disease, run-of-the-mill suffering, and the odd witch burning or virgin sacrifice, depending on your faith.”

“If they are hungry, why don’t they just eat something?”

“That is an excellent idea, milady. Someone should suggest that.”

“Oh, I shall make a most excellent duchess, I think. The people will praise me for my wisdom.”

“Most certainly, milady,” said I. “Your father married his sister, then, did he, love?”

“Heavens no, mother was a Belgian princess, why do you ask?”

“Heraldry is my hobby, go on.”

Once we were inside the main curtain wall[25] of Castle Albany, it was clear that we would go no farther. The main keep of the castle stood behind yet another curtain wall and had its own drawbridge, over a dry ditch rather than a moat. The bridge was lowering even as the king approached. Goneril walked out on the drawbridge unaccompanied, wearing a gown of green velvet, laced a bit too tightly. If the intent was to lessen the rise of her bosom it failed miserably, and brought gasps and guffaws from several of the knights until Curan raised his hand for silence.

“Father, welcome to Albany,” said Goneril. “All hail good king and loving father.”

She held out her arms and the anger drained from Lear’s face. He climbed down from his horse. I scampered to the king’s side and steadied him. Captain Curan signaled and the rest of the train dismounted.

As I straightened Lear’s cape about his shoulders, I caught Goneril’s eye. “Missed you, pumpkin.”

“Knave,” said she under her breath.

“She was always the most fair of the three,” I said to Lear. “And certainly the most wise.”

“My lord means to accidentally hang your fool, Father.”

“Ah, well, if accident, there’s no fault but Fate,” said I with a grin—pert and nimble spirit of mirth that I am. “But call then for a spanking of Fate’s fickle bottom and hit it good, lady.” I winked and smacked the horse’s rump.

Wit’s arrow hit and Goneril blushed. “I’ll see you hit, you wicked little dog.”

“Enough of that,” said Lear. “Leave the boy alone. Come give your father a hug.”

Jones barked enthusiastically and chanted, “A fool must hit it. A fool must hit it, hit it good.” The puppet knows a lady’s weakness.

“Father,” said she, “I’m afraid we’ve accommodation only for you in the castle. Your knights and others will have to make do in the outer bailey.[26] We’ve quarters and food for them by the stables.”

“But what about my fool?”

“Your fool can sleep in the stable with the rest of the rabble.”

“So be it.” Lear let his eldest lead him into the castle like a milk cow by the nose ring.

“She truly loathes you, doesn’t she?” said Kent. He was busy wrapping himself around a pork shoulder the size of a toddler—his Welsh accent actually sounding more natural through the grease and gristle than when clear.

“Not to worry, lad,” said Curan, who had joined us by our fire. “We’ll not let Albany hang you. Will we, lads!?”

Soldiers all around us cheered, not sure what they were cheering for, beyond the fact that they were enjoying the first full meal with ale that they’d had since leaving the White Tower. A small village was housed inside the bailey and some of the knights were already wandering off in search of an alehouse and a whore. We were outside the castle, but at least we were out of the wind, and we could sleep in the stables, which the pages and squires had mucked out on our arrival.

“But if we’re not welcome in the great hall, then they are not welcome to the talents of the king’s fool,” said Curan. “Sing us a song, Pocket.”

A cheer went up around the camp: “Sing! Sing! Sing!”

Kent raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead, lad, your witches will wait.”

I am what I am. I drained my flagon of ale, set it by the fire, then whistled loudly, jumped up, did three somersaults and laid out into a back-flip, wherefrom I landed with Jones pointed at the moon, and said, “A ballad, then!?”

“Aye!” came the cheer.

And ever so sweetly, I crooned the lilting love song “Shall I Shag My Lady Upon the Shire?” I followed that with a bit of a narrative song by way of a troubadour tradition: “The Hanging of Willie Wagging William.” Well, everyone likes a story after supper, and by the one-eyed balls of the Cyclops, that one got them clapping, so I slowed it down a bit with the solemn ballad, “Dragon Spooge Befouled My Bonny Bonny Lass.” Bloody inconsiderate to leave a train of fighting men fighting back tears, so I danced my way around the camp while singing the shanty “Alehouse Lilly (She’ll Bonk You Silly).”

I was about to say good night and head out when Curan called for silence and a road-worn herald wearing a great golden fleur-delis on his chest entered the camp. He unrolled his scroll and read.

“Hear ye, hear ye. Let it be known that King Philip the Twenty-seventh of France is dead. God rest his soul. Long live France. Long live the king!”

No one “long lived the king” back at him and he seemed disappointed. Although one knight did murmur “So?” and another, “Good bloody riddance.”

“Well, you British pig dogs, Prince Jeff is now king,” said the herald.

We all looked at each other and shrugged.

“And Princess Cordelia of Britain is now Queen of France,” the herald added, rather huffy now.

“Oh,” said many, realizing at last at least a glancing relevance.

“Jeff?” said I. “The bloody frog prince is called Jeff?” I strode to the herald and snatched the scroll out of his hand. He tried to take it back and I clouted him with Jones.

“Calm, lad,” said Kent, taking the scroll from me and handing it back to the herald. “Merci,” said he to the messenger.

“He took my bloody princess and my monkey’s name!” said I, taking another swing with Jones, which missed its mark as Kent was dragging me away.

“You should be pleased,” said Kent. “Your lady is the Queen of France.”

“And don’t think she’s not going to rub my nose in that when I see her.”

“Come, lad, let’s go find your witches. We’ll want to be back by morning in time for Albany to accidentally hang you.”

“Oh, she’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

NINE TOIL AND TROUBLE

So why is it that we are going to Great Birnam Wood to look for witches?” asked Kent as we made our way across the moor. There was only a slight breeze but it was bloody cold, what with the mist and the gloom and my despair over King Jeff. I pulled my woolen cape around me.

“Bloody Scotland,” said I. “Albany is possibly the darkest, dampest, coldest bloody crevice in all of Blighty. Sodding Scots.”

“Witches?” reminded Kent.

“Because the bloody ghost told me I’d find my answers here.”

“Ghost?”

“The girl ghost at the White Tower, keep up, Kent. Rhymes and riddles and such.” I told him of the “grave offense to daughters three” and the “madman rising to lead the blind.”

Kent nodded as if he understood. “And I’m along because…”

“Because it is dark and I am small.”

“You might have asked Curan or one of the others. I’m reticent about witches.”

“Nonsense. They’re just like physicians, only without the bleeding. Nothing to fear.”

“In the day, when Lear was still Christian, we did not do well by witches. I’ve had a cartload of curses cast on me.”

“Not very effective, though, were they? You’re child-frighteningly old and still strong as a bull.”

“I am banished, penniless, and live under the threat of death upon discovery of my name.”

“Oh, good point. Brave of you to come, then.”

“Aye, thanks, lad, but I’m not feeling it. What’s that light?”

There was a fire ahead in the wood, and figures moving around it.

“Stealthy, now, good Kent. Let us creep up silently and see what is to be seen before revealing ourselves. Now, creep, Kent, you crashing great ox, creep.”

And with but two steps my strategy revealed its flaw.

“You’re jingling like a coin purse possessed of fits,” said Kent. “You couldn’t creep up on the deaf nor dead. Silence your bloody bells, Pocket.”

I placed my coxcomb on the ground. “I can leave my hat, but I’ll not take off my shoes—we’ll surrender all stealth if I’m screaming from trodding tender-footed across lizards, thorns, hedgehogs, and the lot.”

“Here, then,” said Kent, pulling the remains of the pork shoulder from his satchel. “Dampen your bells with the fat.”

I raised an eyebrow quizzically—an unappreciated and overly subtle gesture in the dark—then shrugged and began working the suet into the bells at my toes and ankles.

“There!” I shook a leg to the satisfying sound of nothing at all. “Forward!”

Creep we did, until we were just outside the halo of firelight. Three bent-backed hags were walking a slow circle around a large cauldron, dropping in twisted bits of this and that as they chanted.

“Witches,” whispered Kent, paying tribute to the god of all things bloody fucking obvious.

“Aye,” said I, in lieu of clouting him. (Jones stayed behind to guard my hat.)

They double-bubbled the chorus and we were readying ourselves for another verse of the recipe when I felt something brush against my leg. It was all I could do not to cry out. I felt Kent’s hand on my shoulder.

“Steady, lad, it’s just a cat.”

Another brush, and a meow. Two of them now, licking my bells, and purring. (It sounds more pleasant than it was.) “It’s the bloody pork fat,” I whispered.

A third feline joined the gang. I stood on one foot, trying to hold the other above their heads, but while I am an accomplished acrobat, the art of levitation still eludes me; thus my ground-bound foot became my Achilles’ heel, as it were. One of the fiends sank its fangs into my ankle.

“Fuckstockings!” said I, somewhat emphatically. I hopped, I whirled, I made disparaging remarks toward all creatures of the feline aspect. Hissing and yowling ensued. When at last the cats retreated, I was sitting splayed-legged by the fire, Kent stood next to me with his sword drawn and ready, and the three hags stood in ranks across the cauldron from us.

“Back, witches!” said Kent. “You may curse me into a toad, but they’ll be the last words out of your mouths while your heads are attached.”

“Witches?” said the first witch, who was greenest of the three. “What witches? We are but humble washerwomen, making our way in the wood.”

“Rendering laundry service, humble and good,” said witch two, the tallest.

“All it be, is as it should,” said witch three, who had a wicked wart over her right eye.

“By Hecate’s[27] night-tarred nipples, stop rhyming!” said I. “If you’re not witches, what was that curse you were bubbling about?”

“Stew,” said Warty.

“Stew, stew most true,” said Tall.

“Stew most blue,” said Green.

“It’s not blue,” said Kent, looking in the cauldron. “More of a brown.”

“I know,” said Green, “but brown doesn’t rhyme, does it, love?”

“I’m looking for witches,” said I.

“Really?” said Tall.

“I was sent by a ghost.”

The hags looked at one another, then back at me. “Ghost told you to bring your laundry here, did it?” said Warty.

“You’re not washerwomen! You’re bloody witches! And that’s not stew, and the bloody ghost of the bloody White Tower said to seek you here for answers, so can we get about it, ye gnarled knots of erect vomitus?”

“Ah, we’re toads for sure now,” sighed Kent.

“Always a bloody ghost, innit?” said Tall.

“What did she look like?” asked Green.

“Who? The ghost? I didn’t say it was a she—”

“What did she look like, fool?” snarled Warty.

“I suppose I shall pass my days eating bugs and hiding under leaves until some crone drops me in a cauldron,” mused Kent, leaning on his sword now, watching moths dart into the fire.

“She was ghostly pale,” said I, “all in white—vaporous, with fair hair and—”

“She was fit,[28] though?” asked Tall. “Lovely, you might even say?”

“Bit more transparent than I care for in my wenches, but aye, she was fit.”

“Aye,” said Warty, looking to the others, who huddled with her.

When they came up, Green said, “State your business, then, fool. Why did the ghost send you here?”

“She said you could help me. I am fool to the court of King Lear of Britain. He has sent away his youngest daughter, Cordelia, of whom I am somewhat fond; he’s given my apprentice fool, Drool, to that blackguard bastard Edmund of Gloucester, and my friend Taster has been poisoned and is quite dead.”

“And don’t forget that they’re going to hang you at dawn,” added Kent.

“Don’t concern yourselves with that, ladies,” said I. “About to be hanged is my status quo, not a condition that requires your repair.”

The hags huddled again. There was much whispering and a bit of hissing. They broke their conference and Warty, who was the apparent coven leader, said, “That Lear’s a nasty piece of work.”

“Last time he went Christian a score of witches were drowned,” said Tall.

Kent nodded, and looked at his shoes. “The Petite Inquisition—not a high point.”

“Aye, we were a decade spelling them all back to life for the revenge,” said Warty. “Rosemary here still seeps pond-water from the ears on damp days,” said Tall.

“Aye, and carps ate my small toes while I was pond-bottom,” said Green.

“Her toes thus gefilted,[29] we had to seek an enchanted lynx and take two of his for replacement.”

Rosemary (who was Green) nodded gravely.

“Goes through shoes in a fortnight, but there’s no better witch to chase a squirrel up a tree,” said Tall.

“That’s true,” said Rosemary.

“Beats the burnings, though,” said Warty.

“Aye, that’s true,” said Tall. “No amount of cat toes’ll fix you if you’ve all your bits burnt off. Lear had him some burnings as well.”

“I’m not here on behalf of Lear,” said I. “I’m here to correct the madness he’s done.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Rosemary.

“We’re always keen on sending a bit of the mayhem Lear’s way,” said Warty. “Shall we curse him with leprosy?”

“By your leave, ladies, I don’t wish the old man’s undoing, only the undoing of his deeds.”

“A simple curse would be easier,” said Tall. “A bit o’ bat spittle in the cauldron and we can have him walking on duck feet before breakfast. Make him quack, too, if you’ve a shilling or a freshly-strangled infant for the service.”

“I just want my friends and my home back,” said I.

“Well, if you can’t be persuaded, let us have a consult,” said Rosemary. “Parsley, Sage, a moment?” She waved the other witches over to an old oak where they whispered.

“Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary?” said Kent. “What, no Thyme?”

Rosemary wheeled on him. “Oh, we’ve the time if you’ve the inclination, handsome.”

“Jolly good show, hag!” said I. I liked these crones, they had a fine-edged wit.

Rosemary rolled her good eye at the earl, lifted her skirts, aimed her withered bottom at Kent, and rubbed a palsied claw over it. “Round and firm, good knight. Round and firm.”

Kent gagged a little and backed away a few steps. “Gods save us! Away you ghastly carbuncled tart!”

I would have looked away, should have, but I had never seen a green one. A weaker man might have plucked out his own eyes, but being a philosopher, I knew the sight could never be unseen, so I persevered.

“Hop on, Kent,” said I. “Beast-shagging is thy calling and thou surely have been called.”

Kent backed into a tree and half cold-cocked himself. He slid down the trunk, dazed.

Rosemary dropped her skirts. “Just having you on.” The crones cackled as they huddled again. “We’ve a proper toading for you once the fool’s business is finished, though. A moment, please…”

The witches whispered for a moment, then resumed their march around the cauldron.

“Oh bollocks,” said Sage, “we’re all out of monkey hips.”

Parsley looked into the cauldron and gave it a stir. “We can make do without them. You can substitute a fool’s finger.”

“No,” said I.

“Well, then, get a finger from that comely hunk of man-meat with the bootblack on his beard—he seems foolish enough.”

“No,” said Kent, still a tad dazed. “And it’s not bootblack, it’s a clever disguise.”

The witches looked to me. “There’s no counting on accuracy without the monkey hips or fool’s finger,” said Rosemary.

I said: “Let us make do and gallantly bugger on, shall we, ladies?”

“All right,” said Parsley, “but don’t blame us if we bollocks-up your future.”

There was more stirring and chanting in dead languages, and no little bit of wailing, and finally, when I was about to doze off, a great bubble rose in the cauldron and when it burst it released a cloud of steam that formed itself into a giant face, not unlike the tragedy mask used by traveling players. It glowed against the misty night.

“’Ello,” said the giant face, sounding Cockney and a little drunk.

“Hello, large and steamy face,” said I.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, this one rhymes, too?” said I to the witches. “Can’t a bloke find a straightforward prose apparition?”

“Quiet, fool!” snapped Sage, who I was back to thinking of as Warty. To the face, she said, “Apparition of darkest power, we’re clear on the where and the what, but the fool was hoping for some direction of the how variety.”

“Aye. Sorry,” said large steamy face. “I’m not slow, you know, your recipe was short a monkey hip.”

The steamy face grinned.

I looked at the witches. “So I’m to somehow get Goneril and Regan to take Lear’s knights in addition to everything else they have?”

“He never lies,” said Rosemary.

“He’s often wildly fucking inaccurate,” said Parsley, “but not a liar.”

“Again,” said I to the apparition, “good to know what to do and all, but a method to the madness would be most welcome as well. A strategy, as it were.”

“Cheeky little bastard, ent ’e?” said Steamy to the witches.

“Want us to put a curse on him?” asked Sage.

“No, no, the lad’s a rocky road ahead without adding a curse to slow him.” The apparition cleared his throat (or at least made the throat-clearing noise, as, strictly speaking, he had no throat).

With that, the apparition faded away.

“That’s it, then?” I asked. “A couple of rhymes and we’re finished? I have no idea what I’m to do.”

“Bit thick yourself, then, are you?” said Sage. “You’re to go to Gloucester. You’re to separate Lear from his knights and see that they’re under the power of his daughters. Then you’re to write letters of seduction to the princesses and bind their passions with a magic spell. Couldn’t be any clearer if it was rhymed.”

Kent was nodding and shrugging as if the bloody obviousness of it all had sluiced through the wood in an illuminating deluge, leaving me the only one dry.

“Oh, do fuck off, you grey-bearded sot. Where would you get a magic spell to bind the bitches’ passion?”

“Them,” said Kent, pointing rudely at the hags.

“Us,” said the hags in chorus.

“Oh,” said I, letting the flood wash over me. “Of course.”

Rosemary stepped forward and held forth three shriveled grey orbs, each about the size of a man’s eye. I did not take them, fearing they might be something as disgusting as they appeared to be—desiccated elf scrotums or some such.

“Puff balls, from a fungus that grows deep in the wood,” said Rosemary.

“So, to recap, simply and without rhyme?”

“Squeeze one of these bulbs under your lady’s nose, then say your name and she will find your charms irresistible and become overwhelmed with desire for you,” explained Sage.

“Redundant then, really?” said I with a grin.

The hags laughed themselves into a wheeze-around, then Rosemary dropped the puff balls into a small silk pouch and handed it to me.

“There’s the matter of payment,” said she, as I reached for the purse.

“I’m a poor fool,” said I. “All we have between us is my scepter and a well-used shoulder of pork. I suppose I could wait while each of you takes Kent for a roll in the hay, if that will do.”

“You will not!” said Kent.

The hag held up a hand. “A price to be named later,” said she. “Whenever we ask.”

“Fine, then,” said I, snatching the purse away from her.

“Swear it,” she said.

“I swear,” said I.

“In blood.”

“But—” As quick as a cat she scratched the back of my hand with her ragged talon. “Ouch!” Blood welled in the crease.

“Let it drip in the cauldron and swear,” said the crone.

I did as I was told. “Since I’m here, is there any chance I could get a monkey?”

“No,” said Sage.

“No,” said Parsely.

“No,” said Rosemary. “We’re all out of monkeys, but we’ll put a glamour on your mate so his disguise isn’t so bloody pathetic.”

“Go to it, then,” said I. “We must be off.”