Chapter 1 – He
is Drowned and These are Devils

            We’d been adrift for eight days when the ninny tried to eat
the monkey.  I lay in the bow of the
boat, under the moonlight, slowly expiring from thirst and heartbreak, while
the great beef-brained boy, Drool, made bumbling snatches for the monkey, who
was perched on the bowsprit behind my head, screeching and clawing at my
jester’s hat, and jingling his bells in a festive manner.

            “Sit down, Drool, you’ll capsize us.”

            “Just one wee lick,” said the giant, grasping the air
before him like an enormous baby reaching for his tiny monkey mother. The bow
of the boat dove under Drools weight. Sea water splashed the monkey’s bottom; he
shrieked and made as if to fling poo at the giant, but it had been eight days
since any of us had eaten and he could birth no bum-babies for the flinging.

“There will
be no monkey-licking as long as I draw breath.”

“I’ll just
give him a bit of a squeeze, then?”

“No,” said
I. On the fourth day, after the water ran out, Drool had taken to squeezing Jeff
(the monkey) like a wine skin and drinking his wee, but now the monkey was dry
and I feared the next squeeze would produce little but a sanguine monkey
marmalade.

“I won’t
hurt him,” said the oaf, so inept in the lie that he might as well have tied
bells on the truth and chased it around the town square while beating a drum.

Drool
dropped back onto the seat at his end of the dingy, his weight sending the bow
up so rapidly that Jeff was nearly launched into the drink. I caught the monkey
and comforted him by slapping my coxcomb over his head and holding it fast
until he stopped biting.

“But…” said
Drool, holding a great sausage of a finger aloft as he searched the night for a
point.

“Shhhh,
Drool. Listen.” I heard something beyond the lap of waves and the growl of my
gut.

“What?”

I stood in
the boat, still hugging the monkey to my chest, and looked in the direction of
the noise. A full moon puddled silver across the inky sea, but there, in the
distance, lay a line of white. Surf.  

“It’s land,
lad. Land. That way.” I pointed. “Now paddle, you great dribbling ninny.
Paddle, lest it be an island and we drift by.”

“I will,
Pocket,” said Drool. “I am. Land’s the dog’s bollocks, ain’t it.”

He showed
less enthusiasm than the revelation should have engendered.

“Land, lad,
where they keep food and drink.”

“Oh, right.
Land,” a spark finally striking in the vast, dark, empty of his noggin.

The pirates
had set us adrift without oars, but Drool’s arms were long enough that if he
lay down he could get enough of a hand in the water to paddle. By his sliding
from one gunwale to the other, the little boat sloshed slowly forward.  My arms would barely reach the water, and as
it turned out, though the monkey could swim, even with a sturdy cord tied round
his middle,  Jeff was complete shit at
towing a boat.

An hour or
so later, what had been a calm sea began to rise up on rollers, the blue white
lines I’d spotted churned into a briny boil. What had been the distant swish of
surf now crashed like thunder before us.

“Pocket,”
said Drool, sitting up, his eyes wide and alight with fear. “I don’t want to
paddle no more.  I wanna go back.”   

“Nonsense,”
said I, with enthusiasm I did not feel. “Once more into the breech!”

And before I
could turn to see where we were headed, a great wave lifted the boat and we
were driven ahead on its face, racing as if on a sled down a never-ending slope.
Drool let loose a long, terrified wail and gripped the rails as the stern was
lifted, lifted – and then we were vertical on the face of the wave. I looked
above me to see a great flailing nitwit flying in the night and a monkey tumbling with him. Then the wave crashed down upon us. I
lost my hold on the boat and was awash in a confusion of salt and chill. Over
and down and over until there was no up, nowhere to go for air, and no way to
get there. Then a light. The moon. A tumble, and there again, the silver above,
shining life.  I kicked, hoping to find
some purchase on sand, but there was nothing but water; then the moon, and a
black specter diving out of the silver disc above – the boat. I tried to tuck
my head but too late and then a shock and a flash in the eye as the boat struck
me and all was dark. Oblivion.

                                                                     #  #  #

There were
flames dancing before me when I woke from the dead, which was not entirely
unexpected. The Devil was smaller and rather younger than I would have guessed.
He danced barefoot around the fire as he stoked it in preparation for my
torment. The fiend wore a tunic of rough linen, leaves and sticks clinging to
it, and a bycocket hat with a single feather in the style of bow hunters back home
in Blighty. Bit of a ginger fringe. Scrawny and pathetic, really, for the
prince of bloody darkness.

As I
stirred, the fiend made his way over to me and studied my face. He had wide eyes and high cheekbones, decidedly feminine, which
gave him the look of a cat that has been surprised in the middle of his repast
of a freshly killed rat — alert and fierce.  

“He’s
awake,” said the demon.

“Pocket!”
I heard Drool say, at which point pretending to still be dead was a fool’s
errand.

I
looked over to see the great oaf sitting splayed-legged on the other side of
the fire, a massacre of nuts and berries in his lap, the smeared evidence of their
fate already streaming down his chin in red rivulets. “Cobweb saved us,” said
the ninny. “She’s the git’s tits.”

“She?”
said I. “So not the devil?”

“’Fraid
not,” said the girl.

Of
course, a girl. I looked over the figure crouched before me like some gamine
gargoyle. Right tiny, and in need of a good scrubbing, but I supposed a girl
she was. And not a child, neither, despite her size.

“I
didn’t do so much of the rescuing as your large friend,” she said. “On the
beach I jumped up and down on his back until he was breathing again. He carried
you up here into the forest.” She leaned into me to whisper. “Methinks he may
have taken a blow to the head during the wreck. He seems a bit slow.”

“Slow
is his only speed, I’m afraid.”

“You
took quite a shot to the noggin yourself.” She touched a spot above my forehead
and I winced with the pain. “Covered in blood, you were. I cleaned you up.”

I
touched the tender lump on my head and bolts of pain shot across the corners of
my vision, a deep ache throbbed behind my eyes. Only then did I notice I was
lying on a bed of ferns and leaves, naked but for my hat, which had been draped
modestly over my man bits.

“Your
kit is drying still,” said the girl. She shot a thumb over her shoulder to
indicate my motley, propped on sticks before the fire, along with my jester’s
scepter, the puppet Jones. “You’ll want to wash it proper in fresh water when
you get a chance. Most of the blood came out in the sea, but not the salt.”

“What
about Jeff? Where’s my monkey?”

            “Weren’t no monkey, sirrah. Just the
big bloke and you.”

She
held out a leather wine skin. “Here. Water. Slowly. Your friend drank it all in
one draught and I had to fetch more at the stream.”

“Had
a wee chunder,” said Drool.

I
took the wine skin and thought I might swoon again as I drank the cool water
and felt the fire in my throat abate.

“Enough
for now” said the girl, taking back the wine skin. “There’s food, too, if the
big one’s left anything.”

“I
saved you some, Pocket,” said Drool, holding out my codpiece, which was
spilling berries as he moved.

The
girl returned and handed me the codpiece. “Wondered what these things was for.”

“Thank
you,” said I. My cod was nearly full of berries and nutmeats. I thought I might
weep for a moment at her kindness and pinched the bridge of my nose as if
chasing away a headache.

“Your
friend says you are fools,” she said, giving me shelter.

“I
am a fool. Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, at your service.” I tow a train of
titles behind my name — royal fool, black fool, emissary to the queen, king of
Britain and France — but I thought it ill-mannered to be grandiose while lying
on a litter of leaves with only a hat to cover my tackle d’amore.  “Drool is my
apprentice.”

“We
are fools and pirates,” said Drool.  

“We
are not pirates,” said I. “We were set adrift by pirates.”

“But
you were on a pirate ship?” She asked.

“For
two years,” said I. “There was a girl, a Venetian Jewess who fancied me. She
wanted to be a pirate but became homesick. When she returned to Venice I was
not welcomed to join her.”

“So
you stayed with the pirates?”

“For
a while.”

“And
they set you adrift?”

“With
no food and only enough water for three days, the scoundrels.”

“But
why?”

“They
gave no rhyme nor reason,” said I.

“It
was because you’re a shit, wasn’t it?”

“No,
why would you say that?”

“Because
I only have known one fool, a fellow called Robin Goodfellow, and he, also, is
a shit.”

“I’m
not a shit,” said I. I am not, that she could prove.

“Did
you insult them? Make sport of their efforts and appearances? Craft clever puns
on their names. Play tricks on the naïve and the simple? Compose rhymes
disparaging their naughty bits? Sing bawdy songs about their mothers and
sisters?”

“Absolutely
not.  There was no way to know if they
even had sisters.”

“I
think you were a shit, just like the Puck, so they set you adrift.”

“I
was not a shit. And who are you to say? Why, I am deft at being rescued by
wenches of great beauty and character, one for whom my heart still currently
breaks, and I’ll not be abused by a waif, an urchin, a linty bit of stuff like
you?” 

“Feeling
stronger then?” She asked, thin, sharp eyebrows bouncing over her disturbingly
wide green eyes.

“Possibly,”
said I.

A
horn sounded in the distance, as if to call hounds to the hunt, and Cobweb leapt
to her feet. “I have to go.”

“Wait,”
said I.

The
girl paused at the edge of the firelight. “What?”

“Where
are we?”

“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.”