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.