“Sorry, sir, the Natural jests out of turn. We are looking for some shelter from the storm and perhaps a hot meal. We’ve only bread and a little cheese, but we will share it for the shelter.”
“We are fools,” said Drool.
“Shut up, Drool, he can see that by my kit and your empty gaze.”
“Come in, Pocket of Dog Snogging,” said the bent figure. “Mind your head on the doorjamb, Drool.”
“We’re buggered,” said I, pushing Drool through the door ahead of me.
Witches three. Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary. Oh no, not in the Great Birnam Wood where they are generally kept, where one might fairly expect to encounter them, but here in a warm cabin off the road between the Gloucestershire villages of Tossing Sod and Bongwater Crash? A flying house, perhaps? It’s rumored that witches are afraid of such structures.
“I thought you was an old man but you is an old woman,” said Drool to the hag who had let us in. “Sorry.”
“No proof, please,” said I, afraid that one of the hags might confirm her gender by lifting her skirts. “The lad’s suffered enough of late.”
“Some stew,” said the crone Sage, the warty one. A small pot hung over the fire.
“I’ve seen what you put in your stew.”
“Stew, stew, true and blue,” said the tall witch, Parsley.
“Yes, please,” said Drool.
“It’s not stew,” said I. “They call it stew because it rhymes with bloody blue, but it’s not stew.”
“No, it’s stew,” said Rosemary. “Beef and carrots and the lot.”
“Afraid it is,” said Sage.
“Not bits of bat wing, eye of lecher, sweetbreads of newt, and the lot, then?”
“A few onions,” said Parsley.
“That’s it? No magical powers? No apparitions? No curse? You appear out here in the middle of nowhere—nay, on the very fringe of the tick’s knickers that sucks the ass of nowhere—and you’ve no agenda except to feed the Natural and me and give us a chance to chase the chill?”
“Aye, that’s about it,” said Rosemary.
“Why?”
“Couldn’t think of nothin’ that rhymes with onions,” said Sage.
“Aye, we were right fucked for spell casting once the onions went in,” said Parsley.
“Truth be told, beef put us against the wall, didn’t it?” said Rosemary.
“Yeah, fief, I suppose,” mused Sage, rolling her good eye toward the ceiling. “And teef, although strictly speaking, that ain’t a proper rhyme.”
“Right,” said Parsley. “No telling what kind of dodgy apparition you’ll conjure you cock up the rhyme like that. Fief. Teeth. Pathetic, really.”
“Stew, please,” said Drool.
I let the crones feed us. The stew was hot and rich and mercifully devoid of amphibian and corpse bits. We broke out the last of the bread Curan had given us and shared it with the witches, who produced a jug of fortified wine and poured it for all. I warmed both inside and out, and for the first time in what seemed days, my clothes and shoes were dry.
“So, it’s going well, then?” asked Sage, after we’d each had a couple of cups of wine.
I counted out calamities on my digits: “Lear stripped of his knights, civil war between his daughters, France has invaded, Duke of Cornwall murdered, Earl of Gloucester blinded, but reunited with his son, who is a raving loony, the sisters enchanted and in love with the bastard Edmund—”
“I shagged ’em proper,” added Drool.
“Yes, Drool boffed them until both walked unsteady, and, let’s see, Lear wanders across the moors to find sanctuary with the French at Dover.” Handfuls of happenings.
“Lear suffers, then?” asked Parsley.
“Greatly,” said I. “He’s nothing left. A great height from which to fall, being king of the realm reduced to a wandering beggar, gnawed from the inside by regret for deeds he did long ago.”
“You feel for him, then, Pocket?” asked Rosemary, the greenish, cat-toed witch.
“He rescued me from a cruel master and brought me to live in his castle. It’s hard to hold hatred with a full stomach and a warm hearth.”
“Just so,” said Rosemary. “Have some more wine.”
She poured some dark liquid into my cup. I sipped it. It tasted stronger, warmer than before.
“We’ve a gift for you, Pocket.” Rosemary brought out a small leather box from behind her back and opened it. Inside were four tiny stone vials, two red and two black. “You’ll be needing these.”
“What are they?” My vision began to blur then. I could hear the witches’ voices, and Drool snoring, but they seemed distant, as if down a tunnel.
“Poison,” said the witch.
That was the last I heard from her. The room was gone, and I found myself sitting in a tree near a quiet river and a stone bridge. It was autumn, I could tell, as the leaves were turning. Below me a girl of perhaps sixteen was washing clothes in a bucket on the riverbank. She was a tiny thing, and I would have thought her a child by her size, but her figure was quite womanly—perfectly proportioned, just a size smaller in scale than most.
The girl looked up, as if she heard something. I followed her gaze down the road to a column of soldiers on horseback. Two knights rode at the head of the train, followed by perhaps a dozen others. They rode under my oak tree and paused their horses on the bridge.
“Look at that,” said the heavier of the two knights, nodding toward the girl. I heard his voice as if it were in my own head. “Pretty little thing.”
“Have her,” said the other. I knew the voice immediately, and with it I saw the face for who it was. Lear, younger, stronger, not nearly so grey, but Lear as sure as I’d ever seen him. The hawk nose, the crystal-blue eyes. It was him.
“No,” said the younger man. “We need to make York by nightfall. We’ve no time to find an inn.”
“Come here, girl,” called Lear.
The girl came up the bank to the road, keeping her eyes to the ground.
“Here!” barked Lear. The girl hurried across the bridge until she stood only a few feet from him.
“Do you know who I am, girl?”
“A gentleman, sir.”
“A gentleman? I am your king, girl. I am Lear.”
The girl fell to her knees and stopped breathing.
“This is Canus, Duke of York, Prince of Wales, son of King Bladud, brother to King Lear, and he would have you.”
“No, Lear,” said the brother. “This is madness.”
The girl was trembling now.
“You are brother to the king and you may have whom you want, when you want,” said Lear. He climbed off his horse. “Stand up, girl.”
The girl did, but stiffly, as if she were bracing for a blow. Lear took her chin in his hand and lifted it. “You are a pretty thing. She’s a pretty thing, Canus, and she is mine. I give her to you.”
The king’s brother’s eyes were wide and there was hunger there, but he said, “No, we haven’t time—”
“Now!” boomed Lear. “You’ll have her now!”
With that Lear grabbed the front of the girl’s frock and ripped it, exposing her breasts. When she tried to cover up he pulled her arms away. Then he held her and barked commands while his brother raped her on the wide stone rail of the bridge. When Canus had finished and fell breathless between her legs, Lear shouldered him aside then lifted the girl by the waist and threw her over the rail into the river.
“Clean yourself!” he shouted. Then he patted his brother’s shoulder. “There, she’ll not haunt your dreams tonight. All subjects are property of the king, and mine to give, Canus. You may have any woman you want except one.”
They mounted their horses and rode away. Lear hadn’t even looked to see if she could swim.
I couldn’t move, I couldn’t cry out. All during the attack on the girl I felt as if I’d been lashed to the tree. Now I watched her crawl naked from the river, her clothes in tatters behind her, and she curled into a ball on the riverbank and sobbed.
Suddenly I was whisked out of the tree, like a feather on an errant wind, and I settled on the roof of a two-story house in a village. It was market day, and everyone was out, going from cart to cart, table to table, bargaining for meat and vegetables, pottery and tools.