“Ha,” said I, with withering sarcasm. “Ha,” I repeated, with no little scorn. “Ha,” I reprised, dripping with venomous irony.
We trod on in silence for a bit, which allowed Bottom’s malignant, amateur jest to dry up and die.
Then: “What do you suppose they were?” asked Bottom.
“What what were?” I replied.
“The three words that Puck would have us remember, according to that Rumour chap.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said I. “They will not help in finding the Puck’s killer.”
“They might.”
“Not unless they are ‘BOTTOM KILLED ME’ or some similar nonsense, which they aren’t, because he said them before he was killed and so didn’t know.”
“Also, I did not kill him,” said Bottom.
“Well reasoned, good Bottom,” said I. I gentled my response to the once-weaver, for in the light of day, I could see that Bottom was becoming more donkey and less man as the hours passed. Dark, wiry hair had covered his hands and forearms already, and he had twice stopped along the path to graze, then had been quite stubborn about getting on with the journey afterward.
“So, who do you think killed the Puck?” asked Bottom.
“I’ve no idea. Every mortal in Athens is armed, it appears, but now we know it wasn’t a fairy.”
“Of course we do,” said Bottom, snatching up a handful of grass from the side of the trail, on which he began munching. “How do we know that?”
“Because I was nearby when the Puck was murdered,” I said, slapping the grass out of Bottom’s hand, “and although it was early, it was broad daylight when Puck stopped the arrow. And I think we can say that a squirrel is very unlikely to have shot a crossbow, no matter how small the weapon.”
“And you heard the horn then?”
“What horn?”
“This morning, just before dawn, there sounded a horn, like a hunter’s horn, right before the fairies changed.”
“I heard no such horn,” said I. Although I remembered the horn sounding on that first day, on the beach where Cobweb had rescued Drool and me.
Bottom pulled off the hat of many tongues and pointed to his long ears. “Not just for show, these fellows.” Then the weaver stopped, held a finger in the air. “Listen . . .”
I listened: wind through the trees, the occasional birdcall, an odd rustling of leaves, probably a hedgehog having a wank or snakes sneaking up on us, but nothing of note.
“A group of mortals. Men and women. Young,” said Bottom. “Up ahead. I can hear them arguing. One is called Helena?”
“Oh fuckstockings,” said I. “Perhaps we should go around, or stop for a wee rest.”
“They need help,” said Bottom. He began to gallop forward.
“I told you we were headed back to Athens,” I called as I fell into a trot after him, surprised after a hundred yards or so that I was neither fatigued nor out of breath. Two years before the mast and being starved and shipwrecked hadn’t taken the toll on my condition I’d expected. Even at a full run, as I caught up to Bottom, I found I still had the breath to complain.
“Why are you running? I know these Athenians and they’re wildly annoying. The last time you came upon them you frightened them off, and how far ahead are they, anyway?”
We rounded a bend in the trail, the two of us pounding out steps like a chariot team, and ahead stood three of the Athenians, Helena, Hermia, and the dark-bearded Lysander, kneeling over the prostrate form of the piss-haired lad, Demetrius, an arrow protruding from the back of his neck just at the base of his skull.
“Did you see the killer?” said I, before I even reached the quartet.
Hermia shook her head.
“Which way?”
They all looked blank faced at me.
“From which direction did the bolt come?”
Hermia pointed off the trail into a thicket of berry bushes of some sort. I could see nothing but foliage. At that point their gazes all turned to Bottom and their eyes went wide. Helena stood, as if to run, but then began to whimper and wave her hands before her as if taken with a palsy.
“Fear not,” said Bottom, “for it is I, Nick Bottom, the weaver, of Athens, here to assist you in your time of distress, except for that fellow on the ground, who may need help beyond my skills as weaver and actor.” He bowed deeply, which helped not at all, for it gave them all a good look at his hat of many tongues, which were disturbingly agitated.
Helena’s whimpers grew to panicked screams that escalated in frequency and volume until they sounded as if someone were pumping a bellows filled with owls. I grabbed the tall girl by the shoulders and shook her roughly, which served only to bat her bosoms into my face and calmed her not at all.
I stepped back. “Hit her,” I instructed the petite Hermia.
“Beg pardon?” She was still enthralled by Bottom.
“Hit her!” I commanded. “To calm her. I am a gentleman and will not hit a lady, even an annoyingly tall one.”
Without further consideration Hermia swung her fist in a wide and rapid arc, which landed smartly upon her friend’s jaw, snapping the tall girl’s head back and sending her folding to the forest floor, quite unconscious.
“Blimey,” said Lysander.
“I meant slap,” said I.
“Well you should have said ‘slap,’” said Hermia.
“She has stopped screaming,” said Bottom, ever the spirit of equine optimism, at which point the two remaining lovers turned to him and proceeded to stare in gape-jawed terror, or perhaps wonder, it is hard to say.
“This is Nick Bottom, a crude tradesman, as common as cat shit,” said I. “Enchanted by the Puck to appear thus, and nothing to be afraid of.” To Bottom, I said, “Sort this, I’m after the killer.”
And off I ran in the direction in which Hermia had pointed, leaping over the berry bushes as if they were painted flat on the ground and drawing a dagger from the small of my back as I ran. If Theseus wanted a murderer, I would bring him one, spitted like a roast pig, if it would help Drool’s case. Running through the forest, off the path, required a rather indirect and serpentine movement, which is just as well, for as I made to jump over a cow-sized boulder, I decided at the last instant to zag around it, lest there be a snake or other unpleasantness waiting on the other side, and in that blink of movement, a crossbow bolt thunked into a tree behind the space my head had just occupied. I dove behind the boulder to pause and reflect upon my situation. Yes, now it appeared that dashing into an unfamiliar wood after a murderer with a ranged weapon was perhaps not the wisest path I had ever chosen. Then I remembered, while at the White Tower, upon a
dare by the captain of the guard, I had devised a method to measure the time it took for a crossbowman to reload and fire—one that soldiers might use in the field when out of voice range of an officer. As it turned out, the time it took was precisely two stanzas of the romantic ballad “Milady Hath a Most Becoming Bottom.”
And so I sang.
“Milady hath a most becoming bottom—”
I was around the boulder and dashing downfield with no thought of evading aim.
“She gave me crabs and I was glad I caught ’em.”
As I ran I looked for any movement, any sign of where the murderer might be.
“The lads all say to leave her, I say rot ’em.”
Was that a glint off the weapon in the sunlight ahead?
“Milady hath a most becoming bottom.”
There was time; if the murderer was running, he wasn’t reloading—
“Oh, milady hath the most ebullient bosoms—”
A bowstring twanged and my coxcomb was ripped off my head by the bolt passing through it.
“I still had the line about the Muslims and the bloody refrain before you were supposed to fire!” I shouted as I trod back after my poor punctured hat, which lay on the ground like a dead bird. “Shoddy bloody warcraft, that, not keeping time with the shooting song, ya bellend!”
I was singing the song in my head as I shouted, so as not to be surprised by the next bolt, when the niggling notion occurred to me that at the White Tower we had decided to table “Milady’s Bottom” for a song less romantic and more suited to marching into war to kill and burn, and had settled upon the Irish hymn “When the Badgers Ate St. Bridget.” I had been timing the bolts with entirely the wrong song. I was lucky not to be dead a third time in as many days. I quickly ducked behind a tree. “Sorry,” I called.
As I waited for the next shot, and tried to remember the words to the hymn, there came a woman’s scream from whence I had come. Had the killer circled back? Or worse, perhaps there were two of them? I shuffled straight back from my shielding tree for perhaps ten yards, then turned and dashed back the way I had come, zigging and zagging as I went, lest the killer still had me in his sights.