Fool (24 page)

“Bugger,” said I, under my breath. Then to Drool, “Hide, and don’t fight, and don’t call for me.”

I fell flat to the ground as the first soldier topped the hill.
Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! Bloody bollocksing buggering bugger!
I reflected serenely.

Then I heard the voice of the bastard Edmund. “Look, my fool. And what’s this? The king? What good fortune! You’ll make a fine hostage to stay the hand of the Queen of France and her forces.”

“Have you no heart?” said Lear, petting the head of his dead friend Gloucester.

I peeked out between my rocks. Edmund was looking at his dead father with the expression of someone who has just encountered rat scat in his toast for tea. “Yes, well, tragic I suppose, but with succession of his title determined and his sight gone, a timely exit was only polite. Who’s this other deader?” Edmund kicked his unconscious half brother in the shoulder.

“A beggar,” said Drool. “He were trying to protect the old man.”

“This is not the sword of a beggar. Neither is this purse.” Edmund picked up Oswald’s purse. “These belong to Goneril’s man, Oswald.”

“Aye, milord,” said Drool.

“Well, where is he?”

“On the beach.”

“On the beach? He climbed down and left his purse and sword here?”

“He was a tosser,” said Drool. “So I tossed him over. He kilt your old da.”

“Oh, quite right. Well done, then.” Edmund threw the purse to Drool. “Use it to bribe your jailer for a bread crust. Take them.” The bastard motioned for his men to seize Drool and Lear. When the old man had trouble standing, Drool lifted him to his feet and steadied him.

“What about the bodies?” asked Edmund’s captain.

“Let the French bury them. Quickly, to the White Tower. I’ve seen enough.”

Lear coughed then, a dry, feeble cough like the creaking of Death’s door hinges, until I thought he might collapse into a pile of blue. One of Edmund’s men gave the old man a sip of water, which seemed to quell the coughing, but he couldn’t stand or support his weight. Drool hoisted him up on one shoulder and carried him up the hill-the old man’s bony bottom bouncing on the great git’s shoulder as if it was the cushion of a sedan chair.

When they were gone I scrambled out of my hiding place and over to Edgar’s prostrate body. The wound on his scalp wasn’t deep, but it had bled copiously, as scalp wounds are wont to do. The resulting puddle of gore had probably saved Edgar’s life. I got him propped against the boulder and brought him around with some gentle smacking and a stout splashing from his water skin.

“What?” Edgar looked around, and shook his head to clear his vision, a motion he clearly regretted immediately. Then he spotted his father’s corpse and wailed.

“I’m sorry, Edgar,” said I. “’Twas Goneril’s steward, Oswald, knocked you out and killed him. Drool strangled the scurvy dog and tossed him over the cliff.”

“Where is Drool? And the king?”

“Taken, by your bastard brother’s men. Listen, Edgar, I need to follow them. You go to the French camp. Take them a message.”

Edgar’s eyes rolled and I thought he might pass out again, so I threw some more water in his face. “Look at me. Edgar, you must go to the French camp. Tell Cordelia that she should attack the White Tower directly. Tell her to send ships up the Thames and bring a force through London over land as well. Kent will know the plan. Have her sound the trumpet three times before they attack the keep. Do you understand?”

“Three times, the White Tower?”

I tore the back off of the dead earl’s shirt, wadded it up, and gave it to Edgar. “Here, hold this on your noggin to staunch the blood.”

“And tell Cordelia not to hold for fear for her father’s life. I’ll see to it that it’s not an issue.”

“Aye,” said Edgar. “She’ll not save the king by holding the attack.”

TWENTY-TWO – AT THE WHITE

TOWER

Tosser!” cried the raven.

No help was he in my stealthy entry to the White Tower. I’d packed my bells with clay, and darkened my face with the same, but no amount of camouflage would help if the raven raised an alarm. I should have had a guard bring him down with a crossbow bolt long before I left the Tower.

I lay in a shallow, flat-bottomed skiff I’d borrowed from a ferryman, covered with rags and branches so I might appear just another mass of jetsam floating in the Thames. I paddled with my right hand, and the cold water felt like needles until my arm went numb. Sheets of ice drifted in the water around me. Another good cold night and I might have walked into the Traitor’s Gate, rather than paddled. The river fed the moat, and the moat led under a low arch and through the gate where English nobility had been bringing their family members for hundreds of years on the way to the chopping block.

Two iron-clad gates fit together at the center of the arch, chained in the middle below the waterline, and they moved ever-so-slightly in the current. There was a gap there, at the top, where the gates met. Not so wide that a soldier with weapons could fit through, but a cat, a rat, or a spry and nimble fool on the slim side might easily pass over. And so I did.

There were no guards at the stone steps inside, but twelve feet of water separated me from them, and my skiff would not fit through the gap at the top of the gate where I was perched. A fool was getting wet, there was no way around it. But it seemed to me that the water was shallow, only a foot or two deep. Perhaps I could keep my shoes dry. I took them off and tucked them into my jerkin, then slid down the gate into the cold water.

Great dog-buggering bollocks it was cold. Only to my knees, but cold. And I would have made it undiscovered, methinks, if I hadn’t let slip a rather emphatic whisper of, “Great dog-buggering bollocks, that’s cold!” I was met at the top of the stairs by the pointy part of a halberd, leveled malevolently at my chest.

“For fuck’s sake,” said I. “Do your worst, but get it done and drag my body inside where it’s warm.”

“Pocket?” said the yeoman at the other end of the spear. “Sir?”

“Aye,” said I.

“I haven’t seen you for months. What’s that all over your face?”

“It’s clay. I’m in disguise.”

“Oh right. Why don’t you come in and warm up. Must be dreadful cold in your wet stocking feet there.”

“Good thought, lad,” said I. It was the young, spot-faced yeoman whom I’d chastised on the wall when Regan and Goneril were first arriving to gain their inheritance. “Shouldn’t you stay at your post, though? Duty and all that?”

He led me across the cobbled courtyard, into a servants’ entrance to the main castle and down the stairs into the kitchen.

“Nah, it’s the Traitor’s Gate, innit? Lock on it as big as your head. Ain’t no one coming through there. Not all bad. It’s out of the wind. Not like up on the wall. Y’know the Duchess Regan is living here at the Tower now? I took your advice about not talking about her boffnacity, even with the duke dead and all, can’t be too careful. Although, I caught sight of her in a dressing gown one day she was up on the parapet outside her solar. Fine flanks on that princess, despite the danger of death and all for sayin’ so, sir.”

“Aye, the lady is fair, and her gadonk as fine as frog fur, lad, but even your steadfast silence will get you hung if you don’t cease with the thinking aloud.”

“Pocket, you scroungy flea-bitten plague rat!”

“Bubble! Love!” said I. “Thou dragon-breathed wart farm, how art thou?”

The ox-bottomed cook tried to hide her joy by casting an onion at me, but there was a grin there. “You’ve not eaten one full plate since you were last in my kitchen, have you?”

“We heard you was dead,” said Squeak, a crescent of a smile for me beneath her freckles.

“Feed the pest,” said Bubble. “And clean that mess off his face. Rutting with the pigs again, were you, Pocket?”

“Jealous?”

“Not bloody likely,” said Bubble.

Squeak sat me down on a stool by the fire and while I warmed my feet she scrubbed the clay from my face and out of my hair, mercilessly battering me with her bosoms as she worked.

Ah, home sweet home.

“So, has anyone seen Drool?”

“In the dungeon with the king,” said Squeak. “Although the guard ain’t supposed to know it.” She eyed the young yeoman who stood by.

“I knew that,” he said.

“What of the king’s men, his knights and guards? In the barracks?”

“Nah,” said the yeoman. “Castle guard was a dog’s breakfast until Captain Curan came down from Gloucester. He’s got a noble-born knight as captain of every watch and the old guard man for man with any new ones. Crashing huge camps of soldiers outside the walls, forces of Cornwall to the west and Albany on the north. They say the Duke of Albany is staying with his men at camp. Won’t come to the Tower.”

“Wise choice, with so many vipers about the castle. What of the princesses?” I asked Bubble. Although she seemed never to leave her kitchen, she knew what was going on in every corner of the fortress.

“They ain’t talking,” said Bubble. “Taking meals in their old quarters they had when they was girls. Goneril in the east tower of the main keep. Regan in her solar on the outer wall on the south. They’ll come together for the midday meal, but only if that bastard Gloucester is there.”

“Can you get me to them, Bubble. Unseen?”

“I could sew you up in a suckling pig and send it over.”

“Yes, lovely, but I did hope to return undiscovered, and trailing gravy might draw the attention of the castle’s cats and dogs. Regrettably, I’ve had experience with such things.”

“We can dress you as one of the serving lads, then,” said Squeak. “Regan had us bring in boys instead of our usual maids. She likes to taunt and threaten them until they cry.”

I regarded Bubble with steely recrimination. “Why didn’t
you
suggest that?”

“I wanted to see you sewed up in a suckling pig, you oily rascal.”

Bubble has struggled with her deep affection for me for years.

“Very well, then,” said I. “A serving boy it is.”

“You know, Pocket,” said Cordelia, age sixteen. “Goneril and Regan say that my mother was a sorceress.”

“Yes, I’d heard that, love.”

“If that’s so, then I’m proud of it. It means she didn’t need some mangy man for her power. She had her own.”

“Banished then, wasn’t she?”

“Well, yes, that or drowned, no one will really say. Father forbids me to ask about it. But my point is that a woman should come to her power on her own. Did you know that the wizard Merlin gave up his powers to Vivian in exchange for her favors, and she became a great sorceress and queen, and put Merlin to sleep in a cave for a hundred years for his trouble?”

“Men are like that, lamb. You give them your favors and next thing you know they’re snoring away like a bear in a cave. Way of the world, it is.”

“You didn’t do that when my sisters gave you their favors.”

“They did no such thing.”

“They did, too. Many times. Everyone in the castle knows it.”

“Vicious rumors.”

“Fine, then. When you have enjoyed the favors of women, who shall remain nameless, did you fall asleep afterward?”

“Well, no. But neither did I give up my magical powers or my kingdom.”

“But you would have, wouldn’t you?”

“Say, enough talk of sorcerers and such. What say we go down to the chapel and convert back to Christianity? Drool drank all the communion wine and ate all the leftover host when the bishop was ousted, so I’ll wager he’s blessed enough to bring us into the fold without clergy. Burped the body of Christ for a week, he did.”

“You’re trying to change the subject.”

“Curses! Discovered!” exclaimed the puppet Jones. “That’ll teach you, you sooty-souled snake. Have him whipped, princess.”

Cordelia laughed, liberated Jones from my grasp, and clouted me on the chest with him. Even when she was grown she bore a weakness for puppety conspiracy and Punch-and-Judy justice.

“Now, fool, speak truth-if the truth in you hasn’t died starving from your neglect. Would you give up your powers and your kingdom for a lady’s favor?”

“That would depend on the lady, wouldn’t it?”

“Say me, for example?”

“Vous?”
said I, my eyebrows raised in the manner of the perfectly fucking French.

“Oui,”
said she, in the language of love.

“Not a chance,” said I. “I’d be snoring before you had time to declare me your personal deity, which you would, of course. It’s a burden I bear. Deep sleep of the innocent, I’d have. (Or, you know, the deep sleep of the deeply shagged innocent.) I suspect, come morning, you’d have to remind me of your name.”

“You didn’t sleep after my sisters had you, I know it.”

“Well, threat of violent, post-coital death will keep you on the alert, won’t it?”

She crawled across the rug until she was close then. “You are a dreadful liar.”

“What was your name?”

She clouted me on the head with Jones and kissed me-quickly, but with feeling. That was the only time.

“I’d have your power
and
your kingdom, fool.”

“Give me back my puppet, thou nameless tart.”

Regan’s solar was bigger than I remembered it. A fairly grand, round room, with a fireplace and a dining table. Six of us brought in her supper and set it out on the table. She was all in red, as usual, snowy shoulders and raven hair warmed to the eye by orange firelight.

“Wouldn’t you rather lurk behind the tapestry, Pocket?”

She waved the others out of the room and closed the door.

“I kept my head down. How did you know it was me?”

“You didn’t cry when I shouted at you.”

“Blast, I should have known.”

“And you were the only serving boy wearing a codpiece.”

“Can’t hide one’s light under a bushel, can one?” She was infuriating. Did nothing surprise her? She spoke as if I’d been sent for and she’d been expecting me at any moment. Rather took the joy out of all the stealth and disguise. I was tempted to tell her she’d been duped and Drool-shagged just to see her reaction, but alas, there were still guards who were loyal to her, and I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have me killed as it was. (I’d left my knives with Bubble in the kitchen, not that they’d help against a platoon of yeomen.) “So, lady, how goes the mourning?”

“Surprisingly well. Grief suits me, I think. Grief or war, I’m not sure which. But I’ve had good appetite and my complexion’s been rosy.” She picked up a hand mirror and regarded herself, then caught my reflection and turned. “But, Pocket, what
are
you doing here?”

“Oh, loyalty to the cause and all. With the French at our bloody doors, thought I’d come back to help defend home and hearth.” It was probably best we not pursue the reasons why I was there, so I pressed on. “How goes the war, then?”

“Complicated. Affairs of state are complicated, Pocket. I wouldn’t expect a fool to understand.”

“But I’m a royal, now, kitten. Didn’t you know?”

She put down her mirror and looked as if she might burst out laughing. “Silly fool. If you could catch nobility by touch you’d have been a knight years ago, wouldn’t you? But alas, you’re still common as cat shit.”

“Ha! Yes, once. But now, cousin, blue blood runs in my veins. In fact, I’ve a mind to start a war and shag some relatives, which I believe are the prime pastimes of royalty.”

“Nonsense. And don’t call me cousin.”

“Shag the country and kill some relatives, then? I’ve been noble less than a week, I don’t have all the protocol memorized yet. Oh, and we
are
cousins, kitten. Our fathers were brothers.”