“Had a wee chunder,” said Drool.
I took the wineskin and thought I might swoon again as I drank the cool water and felt the fire in my throat abate.
“Enough for now,” said the girl, taking back the wineskin. “There’s food, too, if the big one’s left anything.”
“I saved you some, Pocket,” said Drool, holding out my codpiece, which was spilling berries as he moved.
The girl returned and handed me the codpiece. “Wondered what these things was for.”
“Thank you,” said I. My cod was nearly full of berries and nut meats. I thought I might weep for a moment at her kindness and pinched the bridge of my nose as if chasing away a headache.
“Your friend says you are fools,” she said, giving me shelter.
“I am a fool. Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, at your service.” I tow a train of titles behind my name—royal fool, black fool, emissary to the queen, king of Britain and France—but I thought it ill mannered to be grandiose while lying on a litter of leaves with only a hat to cover my tackle d’amore. “Drool is my apprentice.”
“We are fools and pirates,” said Drool.
“We are not pirates,” said I. “We were set adrift by pirates.”
“But you were on a pirate ship?” she asked.
“For two years,” said I. “There was a girl, a Venetian Jewess who fancied me. She wanted to be a pirate but became homesick. When she returned to Venice I was not welcomed to join her.”
“So you stayed with the pirates?”
“For a while.”
“And they set you adrift?”
“With no food and only enough water for three days, the scoundrels.”
“But why?”
“They gave no rhyme nor reason,” said I.
“It was because you’re a shit, wasn’t it?”
“No, why would you say that?”
“Because I only have known one fool, a fellow called Robin Goodfellow, and he, also, is a shit.”
“I’m not a shit,” said I. I am not, that she could prove.
“Did you insult them? Make sport of their efforts and appearances? Craft clever puns on their names? Play tricks on the naïve and the simple? Compose rhymes disparaging their naughty bits? Sing bawdy songs about their mothers and sisters?”
“Absolutely not. There was no way to know if they even had sisters.”
“I think you were a shit, just like the Puck, so they set you adrift.”
“I was not a shit. And who are you to say? Why, I am deft at being rescued by wenches of great beauty and character, one for whom my heart still currently breaks, and I’ll not be abused by a waif, an urchin, a linty bit of stuff like you.”
“Feeling stronger then?” she asked, thin, sharp eyebrows bouncing over her disturbingly wide green eyes.
“Possibly,” said I.
A horn sounded in the distance, as if to call hounds to the hunt, and Cobweb leapt to her feet. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” said I.
The girl paused at the edge of the firelight. “What?”
“Where are we?”
“Look around, you’re in the forest, you git.”
“No, what land?”
“Greece.”
“It doesn’t look like Greece.”
“Have you been to Greece before?”
“Well. No.”
“This is what it looks like. I have to go. The night queen beckons.”
“The night queen?”
“My mistress calls. Rest, fool. Your friend knows where the stream is and there are plenty of nuts and berries to eat. Stay clear of the captain of the watch. He’s a shit, too. And not so playful as you and the Puck.”
“Wait—” But she was gone like a spirit in the night.
“She were the dog’s bollocks, was wee Cobweb,” said Drool.
“She was not,” said I. “And where is Jeff? Have you seen him?”
The ninny wiped a smear of berry gore from his lips. “No.”
“Drool, Jeff is a friend and valued crew member. If you ate him, I shall be very cross with you. Very cross indeed.”
Chapter 2
Presenting the Mechanicals
Two ticks after Cobweb disappeared into the thicket, sunrise was on us like an angry red dog. I donned my dried and smoke-scented motley and fitted my three throwing daggers into the sheaths across my lower back under my jerkin, which was sewn and slotted to conceal them. My friend Montalvo had slipped the daggers and a calabash of water into the boat before we were set adrift. It was good Montalvo who had convinced the crew to spend the boat at all, rather than just cast us into the sea. For a pirate, he had been a gentleman.
Drool was learning the unpleasant lesson of how berries grow in proximity to thorns and I had to pick the pricks from his great paws before leading us further into the forest. Like me, Drool was an indoor fool and not suited for foraging. We would need to find a village or town from which to beg our supper, or we’d be little better off than we’d been a day before at sea. The forest was a primordial behemoth, with moss hanging from a canopy of trees with the girth of cottages, not the sun-bleached stone hills with the odd olive tree clinging to them that I’d been told composed the Greek countryside.
We drank deeply from the stream and then made our way in a general westerly direction, away from the sea, over which the sun rose, for no other reason than it was the direction Cobweb had fucked off to. If there was a queen in that direction, I reasoned, so would there be a town, and accommodations more suiting a brace of abused indoor fools.
We called for Jeff as we went along, with no response. I hoped that he had scampered into the great forest thinking he had happened upon monkey Valhalla, but as the hours passed, I began to suspect that he had perished in the sea, and while there was still a chance that Drool had eaten him, I wasn’t about to dig through the nitwit’s stool looking for monkey bones like some philosopher, so I took his word that nuts and berries had been his only fare.
When not calling, we listened for the jingling of Jeff’s bells. He wore a tiny silver and black motley like my own, and while I had long ago traded my bell-toed jester’s shoes for soft leather boots, and the pirate crew had trimmed the bells from my hat and puppet stick because they found them annoying, they had never been able to catch Jeff, and he had jingled in the rigging like a bright simian sprite.
I would grieve, when there was time. Jeff had been with me for years, through adventures and imprisonments, kidnappings and shipwrecks, but the gleam had seemed to be fading from his eyes of late. Maybe years pass more quickly for a monkey. There were white hairs on Jeff’s little chin. Perhaps he was in his monkey way an old man, decrepit ancient, his senses going feeble, his mind dim, familiar faces becoming strangers in his monkey mind. That was my explanation, anyway, for why he spent our two years before the mast either frolicking in the rigging, flinging rhesus feces down upon the crew, or trying to shag the ship’s cat. Jeff was a vile little creature, really, but still, he had been a friend. When my humors were restored, I would shed a tear.
When the sun was high overhead and our morning victuals of berries and ditch water had faded to a growling memory, we came to a clearing where five men were posing and orating in turn like a band of polite loonies—rehearsing a play, it appeared.