King of Shadows (4 page)

Then it was the turn of a bunch of workmen, real hicks, called Bottom, Quince, Flute, Snout, Snug, and Starveling, who plan to act a little play at the Duke's wedding feast. Bottom is the bossy one, he wants to play all the parts—and in real life, now that Pudding-face was out, Bottom was being played by a loud boy called David Roper, who was even more obnoxious than his character. I knew him a bit; he was the one who'd played Henry in the Atlanta production of
Henry V,
where I'd first met Arby. When he noticed my existence, which wasn't often, he called me Kid. From behind the back of the stage now I could hear him bellowing away out there—and I could hear Arby, from the first gallery where he was sitting, yelling at him to tone it down.

Then the “mechanicals,” as Bottom and Company are called, came off and Puck and the Fairy were on, so out I
ran onto the stage from behind the back curtain, turning two somersaults as I went, as Arby had planned it. I rolled to my feet, looked out at the theater—and was struck dumb. It was so amazing, being out in the middle of that rearing circle of gallery seats; it was so scary, it was so close.

I stood there with my mouth open.

“PUCK!” roared Arby.

I jumped, saw little Eric frowning at me onstage, and nearly died of shame. “How now,
spirit!”
I said feebly.
“Whither wander you?”

“GO BACK!” came the deep voice. “DO IT AGAIN! Wake UP, Nat!”

This time it was perfect; I came up from the second somersault just as Eric, running, reached his mark, and we were facing each other and zipping into the lines.

 

“How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”

 

Eric came close, as if to tell me a secret.

 

“Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere. . . .”

 

Eric onstage was a different animal from meek, shy little Eric in real life. His face was alight with excitement, his voice clear and high as a flute; he was this eerie little creature the Fairy, flickering about to serve Titania, his Queen. We darted through our short scene, telling about the row between his mistress Titania and my master Oberon:

 

“—but room, Fairy! Here comes Oberon!”
“And here my mistress! Would that he were gone!”

 

And from either side of the stage came Gil as Oberon with his gang of magic attendants, and the amazing-looking boy who was playing Titania, Alan Wong, who had an ageless, perfect face that might have made you think him a real sissy, if you hadn't known he was already a karate brown belt at the age of eleven.

 

“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania—”

 

Even without costume or makeup Gil looked like a real king, with his back straight and his head held high. Eric and I had to hang out, each of us behind one of the big stage pillars, while Titania and Oberon argued about the boy servant they both wanted—until Titania went away, cross and obstinate, with Eric scurrying after, and I was left with Gil.

 

“My gentle Puck, come hither—”

 

—and he went on with his speech with one hand cupped around the back of my head, just the way my dad sometimes used to hold me. I got goose bumps from the feel of it. That's a short scene, Oberon sending Puck off to find a magic herb with which he's going to bewitch Titania (and Demetrius and Lysander too, as it turns out) as a revenge, I darted across the stage at the end:

 

“I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes—”

 

Arby boomed out from in front: “Nat! Can you jump off the stage on that line without killing yourself? And exit through the house?”

I looked. It wasn't that much of a drop, and I had a good run-up. “Sure.”

“Do it.”

 

“I'll put a girdle round about the earth
(run)

In forty minutes
—” (leap)

 

—and I was soaring over the edge and down to the groundlings' floor, landing with bent legs, staggering a bit, running for the exit.

“Arby!” Gil was at the edge of the stage, calling out, concerned. I turned back to listen. “Arby—he can't do that with an audience there—he'll kill someone! He'll hurt himself!”

There was complete silence in the theater for a moment, a dangerous silence. Then Arby said, very quietly, “Warmun, I am directing this play, for this century, and you will all do exactly what I tell you.”

It was a weird thing to say, but there was absolute authority in his voice. Nobody said anything.

“It's your cue, Oberon,” Arby said.

So Gil went on with the scene, until the point where Demetrius comes on, pursued by unlucky Helena (who loves him), ungratefully trying to get rid of her as he hunts the eloping Hermia (whom he loves) and Lysander. And I went backstage to wait for my next entrance.

It's Puck who causes most of the trouble in
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
After Oberon has squeezed his magic herb's juice on Titania's sleeping eyes, so that she will fall
in love with the first thing she sees when she wakes, Puck finds the mechanicals rehearsing their play in the wood, and changes Bottom's head into a donkey's head. Bottom's friends run away, terrified—and guess who Titania first when she wakes?

Oberon has seen Demetrius being mean to Helena, and felt sorry for her, so he tells Puck to squeeze the magic juice on
his
eyes too, so that he'll switch from Hermia to Helena. Unfortunately Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and instead of sorting out the lovers he makes things worse. Pretty soon neither girl has the right guy in love with her, each of them is mad at the other, and the men are threatening to kill one another.

I had a great time leading each guy about the stage in the dark, putting on a deep voice to make him think I was the other one—until at last by the end of Act Three, which Arby had chosen as the place for our intermission, all four lovers were asleep and things could be sorted out by having Lysander fall back in love with Hermia.

I said, squeezing the juice on his eyelids:

 

“When thou wak'st
Thou tak'st
True delight

In the sight

Of thy former lady's eye;

And the country proverb known,

That every man should take his own,

In your waking shall be shown:

Jack shall have Jill,

Nought shall go ill.

The man shall have his mare again,

    and all shall he well”

 

And these last three lines I said out to the audience, or rather to the empty theater where the audience would be, and they jarred me suddenly out of my happy time, my acting time.
All shall he well.
I knew as I said it that it was a lie, Shakespeare's lie, because I knew from my own life that all does not go well, but that terrible things happen to people and cannot be put right, by magic flower-juice or by anything else in this world.

As I stood there on the stage, for the third time that day there was the weird blurring around me, as if I were underwater, and a buzzing in my head like the voices of a crowd, and through it a faint thread of music. The stage pillars and the galleries beyond them seemed to tilt and sway, and I felt myself stagger.

“Nat?” said Arby's voice from out front, inquiringly.

Gil must have been watching me from behind the upstage curtain, because suddenly he was out on the stage, holding me by the shoulders, looking down into my face in concern. “What's wrong, kid? Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I said. And sure, yes, I was okay, for as long as the play would last. Until I got back to real life, where nothing could ever really be okay again.

Gil and Rachel walked me back to the Fishers' that afternoon, even though the giddiness was gone again in minutes, just as it had been before. Everyone seemed to be treating me like some fragile piece of china, even Arby—though I guess that was understandable because he didn't
want anything to happen to his Puck. Eric was my understudy, and his voice projection was better than his tumbling.

I felt healthy enough, all through supper with Mr. and Mrs. Fisher and Claire; I even had a second helping of shepherd's pie, my favorite discovery about British food. But afterward, as we watched a series on television that always made the Fishers fall about laughing, I began to feel sick to my stomach, and slipped out to the bathroom just in time to throw up.

Claire was on her way to use the bathroom just as I Was coming out. She stared at me. “Are you all right, Nat? You're white as a sheet.”

“I lost my dinner,” I said. I tried to grin. “It was so good—what a waste.”

I went into my room and sat on the bed. I felt very cold suddenly; I was shaking all over. Claire must have gone straight back to her mother, because in a few moments Mrs. Fisher was beside me, her arm around my shuddering shoulders, her hand on my forehead.

“It wasn't the shepherd's pie,” I said miserably.

“It's that twenty-four-hour virus that's going round, I reckon. Were you sick? And diarrhea?” I nodded, and she gave me a brisk hug. “Poor Nat. Into bed with you—I'll get something to warm you up.”

By the time she came back, I was curled up in bed in my pajamas. She'd brought a hot drink that she made me sip cautiously—hot lemon with some sort of medicine in it—and one of those floppy English hot-water bottles, made of rubber covered with a fuzzy woolly fabric. I cuddled it to me, like a little boy with a warm teddy bear. My head was throbbing. I felt really sick, and about four years old.

Mrs. Fisher felt my head again gently. “Try to sleep,” she said. “I'll check you again in a little bit. You'll feel better in the morning, I promise.”

She pulled the curtains to shut out the daylight, which lasts longer on English summer days than it does where I come from, and I guess she went away, but that's all I remember of that night. There's only darkness when I try to look back, and the feeling of being sick, and the buzzing in my head.

But I'll never, ever, forget the next morning.

Between night and morning, Nathan Field has a dream, a dream of flying.

He flies high, high up, in the dream, up into the stratosphere, out into space. Space is dark, and prickled all over with bright stars. Then he slows down, coasting and turning in space, as if he were swimming underwater; and below him he sees the planet Earth, bright in the darkness, spinning like a blue ball.

He hangs there for a moment, and then he feels a hand take his own. He can see nobody, there is simply the feel of the hand. It holds him firmly, and pulls, and following the pull he dives down, toward the blue planet. It grows larger and brighter, and he can begin to make out the patterning of oceans and continents. Down he goes, down, until he is heading into a white overlay of clouds.

The hand draws him on, on, into the next day.

“Nat?” said the voice. It was a young voice, sort of husky, and it had an accent I didn't recognize: halfway English, halfway American. “Nat?”

“Unh.” I woke up with my face in the pillow, and even before I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong. My face and my body told me that I was lying on a different pillow, and a different bed; hard, both of them, and crackly. The bed was really uncomfortable. I moved my hip; surely it wasn't even a bed, but a mattress on the floor.

Maybe I was dreaming. Blurry with sleep, I turned my head, blinking in the daylight, and saw looking down at me the face of a boy I'd never seen before. He had long curly dark hair down to his shoulders, and black eyes, and he looked worried.

“How do you?” he said. “Is your fever less?” He reached out a cautious hand and felt my forehead.

I stared at him. “Who are you?” I said.

“Harry, of course. Harry, your new fellow. Have your wits gone, Nat?” He peered at me. “You look—strange, a little. Thin in the face. But better. Dear Lord, I was afraid you had the plague.”

I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had
gone mad.
The plague? Nobody's had the plague for centuries.
Everything was different. This was a straw mattress I was lying on; I could feel bits of stalk prickling through the cover now. My pajamas had gone; I seemed to be wearing a long shirt instead. The room around me was smaller, with one window, divided into small panes. Sunlight slanted in through it to show rough plaster walls, a threadbare carpet on the floor, and a smaller one draped over a sort of bureau. I grew aware gradually of a rattle and hum of voices and creaking wheels and the chirp of birds from outside the window, and a stale smell in the room like . . . like something I had smelled before, but I couldn't think what, or when.

I was baffled, and frightened, though at least I didn't feel ill anymore.

I pushed back the rough blanket over me and scrambled to my feet. The shirt reached to my knees. My head reeled, and the boy Harry saw that I was shaky and reached for my arm. I realized that I needed to go to the bathroom. I said: “I have to—”

He smiled, understanding, looking relieved. “Tha must be better if tha needs a piss,” he said, and he drew me to a corner of the room and took a flat wooden cover off a wooden bucket, whose smell made it instantly clear what it was for. I stared at it blankly, but Harry had turned away to fold up my blanket, and since there was no time to argue, I went ahead and used the bucket. It had been pretty well used already, for assorted purposes. When I'd finished, Harry came over, glanced outdoors, picked up the bucket, and in one shatteringly casual movement, emptied it out of the window.