“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.
22