My Hero (12 page)

Regalian scowled. ‘How the bloody hell am I supposed to know?' he replied, sitting down heavily under a chestnut
tree, taking his left boot off and shaking it. ‘You think I do this sort of thing all the time?'

‘You're a hero. Heroes are supposed to know these things.'

‘Get stuffed,' replied the hero.

‘You're formulating a plan of campaign, aren't you?'

‘Get real. I'm trying to get this poxy chunk of gravel out of my - ah, that's got it. Right, where were we?'

Skinner sat down beside him. ‘The next step.'

‘That's what I wanted the book for,' Regalian said. ‘Not that I'm admitting for one second that I have got a plan, mind. It's just that, the moment I saw it in the library there, I thought it might come in handy.'

‘What book?'

‘This one,' Regalian said, and held the volume out to Skinner. It was a first folio Shakespeare. Skinner recoiled as if he'd been handed a toad.

‘Absolutely no way,' he said vehemently. ‘I absolutely refuse to set foot in there. It's full of lunatics with damn great swords talking blank verse. The life expectancy of the guys in Shakespeare's about on a par with the first day of Ypres.'

‘Actually,' Regalian replied quietly, ‘I was thinking we could take it to a bookshop somewhere and sell it. It's a first edition, and I gather they're quite valuable.'

‘Oh.'

‘I thought some money might come in handy, you see. For food and things.'

‘Yes, quite. Sorry.'

‘Don't mention it.'

Idly, Skinner opened the book. Shakespeare had always bored him silly, but a first folio isn't something you come across all that often, and . . .

 

Idly, Skinner opened the book and began turning the pages, his mind slanting back to those days long ago when
he had sat in the little timber-framed schoolhouse in Dalhoxie County and listened to Miss Withers, the schoolmarm, reciting her favourite speeches. He could almost hear her high, shrill voice dwelling on the metre and the cadences, bringing to that small, remote building a faint echo of the wooden O, and beyond it, the field of Agincourt, the ramparts of Dunsinane, the wood near Athens . . .

 

‘Oh
shit
!'

 

That, by the way, isn't the horrible, inevitable, artistically necessary thing that happens to Skinner.That comes later. Soon, but later.

‘
O
f all the woods,' said Skinner, ‘in all the plays in all the world, we have to end up in this one. Thanks a heap.'

‘Not my fault,' Regalian snapped, lashing out at the brambles with a heavy stick. ‘I didn't say open the bloody thing. I didn't say start reading. If you had as much common sense as a bloody lemming, you'd have known better than to open the . . .'

Not far away, they could hear strange, disturbing sounds, half-animal, half-human. Possibly it was just lemurs, but somehow Skinner doubted it. He had a horrible feeling he knew exactly what was making that noise.

‘There may,' Regalian went on, between grunts of effort, ‘be an advantage to be had here, if we use our brains. Fantasy setting. Could be any time, anywhere. If only we could find some jumping-off point, we should be able to go anywhere from here.'

‘We should live so long,' Skinner snarled back. ‘Listen to the noisy sons of bitches. They're following us, you realise.'

‘You're paranoid.'

‘No I'm not. Why are you trying to make out I'm paranoid all of a sudden?'

Regalian glanced up at what was visible of the sky though the branches of the trees. ‘I reckon it's about four-thirty in the afternoon, so assuming it stays light till say ten . . .'

‘What are you drivelling on about?'

‘Midsummer Day,' Regalian replied. ‘The one thing we can be sure of is which day of the year it is.'

Skinner stopped in his tracks. ‘Hang on,' he said. ‘Midsummer
Day
.'

‘Exactly,' Regalian replied, gently bending a low branch out of his way. ‘It's still day. Which means the play hasn't started yet. Which means we're probably safe until dark. So if we get a move on and find our way out of this bloody wood, we can get to Athens and find a library, and then—'

‘Safe? Are you sure?'

Regalian scowled. ‘Well, I'm not about to swear any affidavits, but it could be worse. One thing I do know about fairies is, they don't come out during the day.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘I work in fantasy, remember? I know fairies from nothing, and they're strictly nocturnal, trust me. Which means that apart from bears and wolves and outlaws and quick-sands and the like, I think we're fairly—'

He vanished. Skinner froze in his tracks, which was probably what saved him. He looked round.

‘Hello?' he said.

‘Up here.'

Skinner looked up. Regalian was hanging upside down about fifteen feet up in the air. A rope, attached to his ankle, connected him to the top of a thick, tall green sapling.

‘I think,' he said, ‘I stepped in some sort of trap.'

‘Looks that way,' Skinner agreed.

‘Fine. Look, do you think you could see your way clear to getting me down? Or do you want to wait until autumn and see if I come down with the apples?'

‘Sorry.' Skinner looked round. ‘What we need,' he said, trying to keep his head, ‘is something like an axe or a saw.'

‘Left them in my other jacket,' Regalian snapped. ‘Can you hurry it up, please? I think my brain's trying to get out of my ears.'

‘You could shoot through the rope,' suggested the Scholfield helpfully. ‘At this range, if you rested on something, with a bit of luck—'

‘I've warned you already.'

‘I'm just trying to be positive,' the gun replied, hurt. ‘Nobody else has come up with anything, have they?'

‘Be quiet.'

‘I—'

‘I said be quiet.'

‘But—'

‘QUIET!'

It was then that Skinner registered the feel of a very sharp pricking at the back of his neck. Very slowly, he turned his eyes hard right, and caught sight of something luminous directly behind him, at the absolute limit of his vision.

‘I was just trying to tell you,' said the Scholfield smugly, ‘that there was this guy with a knife creeping up behind you. But you appear to have found that out for yourself.'

‘Okay,' said the fairy. ‘Which one of you scumbags is the weaver?'

 

‘Look, fellas,' protested Skinner, some time later, ‘don't
get me wrong, I sympathise with what you're trying to achieve here and I'll be delighted to do anything I can to help. I don't have a problem with any of it, I promise. But are the ears absolutely necessary?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you sure you're not just erring ever so slightly on the over-literal side here? I mean, we're into some pretty deep symbolism here, the donkey motif and all that, I mean, it's a common element in Western European literature right through from Apuleius, so couldn't we just take it as read and let the metaphor kind of do its thing without hammering it into the ground and having actual physical donkey's ears?'

‘No.'

‘I really don't want to seem in any way obstructive here, but the words “hopelessly jejune” are sort of hovering about over our heads, and you've got such a wonderful situation going here, I'd hate for you to spoil it by—'

‘Co-operate,' growled the fairy, ‘or I cut your nose off. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

Bloody marvellous, Skinner thought as they stumbled their way through the wood in unhappy convoy. The one time when a bit of initiative from that poxy gun might come in handy, and it just sits there in the holster, rusting. Now if only . . .

‘And if you're expecting your friend to help you,' said the fairy, ‘forget it.'

‘Friend?'

‘The metal guy with the long nose,' the fairy replied. ‘The one you carry around with you. We've put a hex on him so strong it's taking him all his time not to turn into a bunch of daffodils.'

Skinner shrugged. ‘Oh well,' he said, ‘dark cloud, silver lining. In fact, if you could just jot the spell down on a
scrap of paper sometime, I have a feeling it could well come in very useful in the future.'

‘Shut up.'

‘Okay.'

They had reached a clearing; well, more than a clearing. One tries to avoid the expression whenever possible, but there are times one has to call a glade a glade.

‘Right,' said the fairy. ‘Puck.'

‘Stub your toe, did you?'

‘Puck,' continued the fairy, ‘you hide in that tree there. I'll just hunker down behind this bush.You lot, make with the music.'

The fairies vanished, leaving Skinner standing in the middle of the glade with his hands in his pockets, feeling extremely conspicuous. Well, he consoled himself, at least they were only joshing when they said about the donkey's . . .

He felt a curious sensation, which reminded him of the time when he was a boy and had voluntarily swallowed a live worm in order to join Lumpy Flannagan's gang. If the worm had been made of burning mercury and coated in sugar, there would have been a striking resemblance.

And suddenly he could hear. Not just hear, but really
hear
. For example, half a mile away a rabbit sneezed. The shock nearly knocked Skinner over.

Unwillingly, he put a tentative hand to the side of his head, and felt fur.

‘You ba—' he started to say; and then the pile of leaves in front of him quivered slightly, and turned somehow into a tall, slim, scantily dressed young woman with silver skin.

‘What angel,' she said, rubbing her eyes, ‘wakes me from my flowery bed?' She rolled on to her side and squinted. ‘Just a minute,' she went on, ‘you're not the usual chap.'

Skinner realised that he was staring. Either she was extremely absent-minded and had forgotten to put on the rest of her clothes, or she didn't feel the cold at all. He looked away and made a sheep-clearing-its-throat noise.

‘Um,' he said. It came out different to the way it had sounded in his head; more a sort of guttural honk. Of course, he realised, completely different bone structure on a donkey, larynx in a different place. He smiled feebly. He felt like Cyrano de Bergerac in the distorting mirrors booth at the fair, and his ears itched like buggery.

The girl was staring too, and it suddenly occurred to Skinner that whoever usually did this job must look really
ghastly
, because it was the sort of stare that has a hidden agenda of pink hearts and gypsy violins. A fly landed on his nose and began to buzz.

‘Hi,' he said. ‘My name's Skinner, and I'm not really stopping, we don't really have to go through with this, so . . .'

‘Hi,' replied the girl, in a voice you could have iced a cake with. ‘I'm Titania, but my friends call me—'

‘Quite. As I was saying, I'm sure you're only too aware by now that you're being made the victim of a cruel practical joke, and since I have no wish to participate in this degrading exhibition, perhaps you'd—'

‘Take the weight off your hooves, why don't you?' She giggled. ‘You've got the cutest mane I've seen in a long, long time.'

‘Please,' said Skinner, ‘madam. I'm old enough to be your father.'

‘Really?' Titania raised an immaculate eyebrow. ‘Funny, you don't look ten thousand and thirty-eight years old.'

‘No, but I feel it sometimes.'

‘I can probably do something about that,' Titania replied, with a smile that would have grown roses on the dark side of the moon. ‘Come here and try me.'

Before he could formulate a reply, Skinner felt his legs collapse, as completely as if he'd been robbed by an international gang of high-class tibia thieves, and he found himself sitting on the leaves, with his head resting on an expanse of disconcertingly-contoured silver flesh. Christ, he speculated, what the hell could the other guy possibly have looked like?

‘Relax,' Titania said. ‘Now, then.'

 

Hamlet slept.

He was having a dream (one of his usual repertoire, in which he was standing on the stage in front of twenty thousand people, and he was being played by Kenneth Branagh, and he'd forgotten to put his trousers on) and snoring mildly through what was left of his nose, producing the sort of noise a New Orleans trombonist achieves by putting his bowler hat over the bell of the trombone. It had been a long day.