“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.

They were not gentlemen attired in togas, prosecuting a republic, and having each other up the bum, like proper Greeks, but hard-handed men, in leather and wool, each composed of wire and gristle into such sharp-jawed countenance as is shaped by hard work and lean diet. One roared like a lion and I pushed Drool behind a bush and bade him stay so as not to frighten the players.

“Hark!” said I, stepping into the clearing and waving my puppet stick in a grand flourish. “What pathetic creature cries out for mercy to end its consumptive suffering?” The five turned to regard me.

“It is I,” said a tall fellow of perhaps thirty summers like myself. “Snug, the joiner. I play a lion.”

“Who are you?” said a younger fellow, just coming into his beard, who, strangely enough, wore a woman’s veil with his tradesman’s togs.

“I am Pocket of Dog Snogging,” said I, with great pomp. “Called the black fool.”

“He’s tiny,” said a balding fellow on the end.

“I think he is an elf,” said the director of the troupe, a sturdy fellow with a headful of curls going gray. I noted his position because he carried a scroll.