Christopher Moore - Fool

“But all the gratuitous shagging and tossing?”

“Brilliant misdirection.”

“You’re having me on.”

“Sorry, no, it’s pikeman’s surprise for you in the next scene.”

“I’m slain then?”

“To the great satisfaction of the audience.”

“Oh bugger!”

“But there’s good news, too.”

“Yes?”

“It remains a comedy for me.”

“God, you’re an annoying little git.”

“Hate the play, not the player, mate. Here, let me hold the curtain for you. Do you have any plans for that silver dagger? After you’re gone, I mean.”

“A bloody comedy—”

“Tragedies always end with tragedy, Edmund, but life goes on, doesn’t it? The winter of our discontent turns inevitably to the spring of a new adventure. Again, not for you.”

“I’ve never killed a king,” said Edmund. “Do you think I’ll be famous because of it?”

“You’ll not garner favor with your duchesses by killing their father,” said I.

“Oh, those two. Like these guards, quite dead, I’m afraid. They were sharing some wine over maps as they planned strategy for the battle and fell down foaming. Pity.”

“These guards aren’t dead. Merely drugged. They’ll come around in a day or so.”

He lowered the crossbow. “Then my ladies are only sleeping?”

“Oh no, they’re quite dead. I gave them each two vials. One with poison, the other with brandy. Bubble used the knockout poison on the guards, so brandy was our non-lethal substitute. If either of them had decided to show mercy for the other, at least one would be alive. But, as you said, pity.”

“Oh, well played, fool. But, that said, I’ll have to throw myself on Queen Cordelia’s mercy, let her know that I was brought into this horrid conspiracy against my will. Perhaps I’ll retain the Gloucester title and lands.”

“My daughters? Dead?” said Lear.

“Oh shut up, old man,” said Edmund.

“They was fit,” said Drool sadly.

“But when Cordelia hears of what you’ve really done?” I asked.

“Which brings us to our apex, doesn’t it? You won’t be able to tell Cordelia what has transpired.”

“Cordelia, my one true daughter,” wailed Lear.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Edmund. He raised the crossbow, sighted through the bars at Lear, then stepped back and seemed to lose his aim, as one of my throwing daggers sprouted out of his chest with a thud.

He lowered the crossbow and looked at the hilt of the knife. “But you said pikeman’s surprise?”

“Surprise,” said I.

“Bastard!” snarled the bastard. He pulled the crossbow up to fire, this time at me, and I sent the second dagger into his right eye. The crossbow twanged and the heavy bolt rattled off the stone ceiling as Edmund spun and fell onto the pile of guards.

“That were smashing,” said Drool.

“You’ll be rewarded, fool,” said Lear, his voice rattling with blood. He coughed.

“Nothing, Lear,” said I. “Nothing.”

Then there was a woman’s voice in the chamber: “Ravens cry pork from the battlements, there’s dead Edmund on the wind and bird beaks water at his scoundrel scent!”

The ghost. She stood over Edmund’s body outside our cell, rather more ethereal and less solid than she’d been when last I’d seen her. She looked up from the dead bastard and grinned. Drool whimpered and tried to hide his head behind Lear’s white mane.

Lear tried to wave her away, but the ghost floated to the bars in front of him. “Ah, Lear, walled up your father, did you? And?”

“Go away, spirit, do not vex me.”

“Walled up your daughter’s mother, didn’t you?” said the ghost.

“She was unfaithful!” cried the old man.

“No,” said the ghost. “She was not.”

I sat down on the cell floor, feeling light-headed now. Killing Edmund had made me queasy, but this. “The anchoress at Dog Snogging was your queen?” I asked, my voice sounding faraway in my own ears.

“She was a sorceress,” said Lear. “And she consorted with my brother. I did not kill her. I could not bear it. I had her imprisoned at the abbey in Yorkshire.”

“Well you damn well killed her when you had her walled up!” I shouted.

Lear cowered at my veracity. “She was unfaithful, having dalliance with one of the local boys. I could not bear the thought of her with another.”

“So you ordered her walled up.”

“Yes! Yes! And the boy was hanged. Yes!”

“You heinous monster!”

“She did not give me a son, either. I wanted a son.”

“She gave you Cordelia, your favorite.”

“And she was true to you,” said the ghost. “Up to the time you sent her away.”

“No!” The old king tried to wave the ghost away again.

“Oh yes. And you had your son, Lear. For years you had your son.”

“I had no son.”

“Another farm girl you took near another battlefield, this one in Iberia.”

“A bastard? I have a bastard son?”

I saw hope rise in Lear’s cold hawk eye and I wanted to strike it out the way that Regan had taken Gloucester’s. I unsheathed the last of my throwing daggers.

“Yes,” said the ghost. “You had a son, these many years, and you lie in his arms now.”

“What?”

“The Natural is your son,” said the ghost.

“Drool?” said I.

“Drool?” said Lear.

“Drool,” said the ghost.

“Da!” said Drool. And he gave his newfound father a great, arm-rippling hug. “Oh Da!” There was a cracking of bones and the sickly sound of air escaping wet, crushed lungs. Lear’s eyes bulged out of his head and his parchment-dry skin began to go blue as Drool gave him a lifetime of son’s love all in a moment.

When the whistling sounds stopped coming out of the old man I went to Drool and pried his arms off, then lowered Lear’s head to the floor. “Let loose, lad. Let him go.”

“Da?” said Drool.

I closed the old man’s crystal-blue eyes. “He’s dead, Drool.”

“Tosser!” said the ghost. She spat, a tiny gob of ghost spit that came out as a moth and fluttered away.

I stood then and spun on the ghost. “Who are you? What injustice has been done that can be undone so your spirit may rest, or will at least make you go away, thou ether-limbed irritation?”

“The injustice has been undone,” said the ghost. “At last.”

“Who are you?”

“Who am I? Who am I? Your answer is in a knock, good Pocket. Knock upon your coxcomb, and ask that trifling machine of thought wherefrom comes his art. Knock upon your cod, and ask the small occupant who wakes him in the night. Knock upon your heart, and ask the spirit there who woke it to the warmth of its home fire—ask that tender ghost who is this ghost before you.”

“Thalia,” said I, for I could, at last see her. I fell to my knees before her.

“Aye, lad. Aye.” She put her hand on my head. “Arise, Sir Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

“But, why? Why did you never say you were a queen? Why?”

“He had my daughter, my sweet Cordelia.”

“And you always knew of my mother?”

“I heard stories, but I didn’t know who your father was, not while I lived.”

“Why didn’t you tell me of my mother?”

“You were a little boy. That’s not the sort of story for a little boy.”

“Not so little you wouldn’t have me off through an arrow loop.”

“That was later. I was going to tell you, but he had me walled up.”

“Because we were caught?”

The ghost nodded. “He always had a problem with the purity of others. Never his own.”

“Was it horrible?” I had tried not to think of her, alone in the dark, dying of hunger and thirst.

“It was lonely. I was always lonely, except for you, Pocket.”