King of Shadows (6 page)

Two boys hurried past us, paused, and looked back, calling to Harry. I went quickly on after Master Burbage, who was climbing a narrow staircase. From somewhere beyond it came the sound of voices, indistinct but loud, one of them very loud, as if angry.

There was bright light ahead of us all at once. Master Burbage paused, and I found we had come out onto the central little balcony at the back of the stage. I had to step over a coil of thick rope lying on the balcony floor, and saw one end of it tied firmly to the balcony rail; it was a knotted climbing rope for a quick descent to the stage, something Arby had planned to use in my own time. I might have thought myself still in my own time if it hadn't been for Master Burbage at my side. Ahead and around us were the empty galleries of the theater; above us the painted sky of the “heavens” that gave the stage its roof—and below, on the broad thrusting stage, two figures, arguing. One of them—a small, lean, brown-faced man—was pacing angrily to and fro, thumping his fist into the palm of his other hand.

“Thou shalt never have me back!” he snapped at the other man. “I shall dance my nine days' Morris, I shall be
the wonder of London, and who will come see thy clowns then, I'd like to know! Lose Will Kempe and you lose his following—and then you will all be sorry!”

“Indeed thou hast a great following, Will,” said the other man mildly. He was sitting on a stool at the front of the stage, with a book at his feet.

Will Kempe wasn't listening. “And I shall write the tale of it!” he shouted. “My own book, I shall write! Th'art not the only wordsmith in this company, only a great fusser and fiddler who would have every point his own!”

“I tie no points,” said the man sitting down. “I guard only the words I set down.” I liked his voice; it was soft, but pitched to carry. Without ranting and raving, he was just as forceful as this small angry man. I liked his face too, lined and humorous above the short brown beard. It wasn't an old face, but one that had seen a lot.

He stood up, and held out his hand to the other. “Play our
Dream
once more, Will,” he said, coaxingly. “Play once more, before a great lady.”

“'Tis a dream of your own,” Will Kempe said coldly. “She will not come. And I am gone, and you and Dick may go hang.”

He swung himself over the edge of the stage, with the nimbleness of an acrobat, and marched across the floor of the yard—a dirt floor, where two men, oblivious of the shouting and the fury, were raking up a layer of some sort of coarse grass. Out he went, out of the theater. The man below us sighed.

Over our heads, doves were cooing in the thatched roof, a long burbling sound.

Master Burbage called down, “I told thee! I told thee!
So now I am thy Bottom, heaven help me.”

The bearded face tilted up to us. “Thou art my top and my bottom and all things between, Dick Burbage, saving decency.” His eyes were a strange color, a dark tawny mixture of hazel and green. They shifted toward me. “Is this the boy?”

“Will Kempe's lad, who will not now be playing with Will Kempe.” He poked me in the back. “Greet Master Shakespeare, boy.”

Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare.

It was as if he'd said, “Say hello to God.”

I stared down at the stage, speechless. I suppose we were ten feet or so above him. For a moment I couldn't move—and then more than anything I wanted to be closer to him. On impulse I grabbed up the climbing rope and tossed it over the rail; then swung my legs over and went down it, hand over hand, feet gripping the rope. Fortunately he was far enough forward that I didn't kick him in the head.

My feet hit the stage. Harry had jammed my cap so firmly on my head that it was still there, so I pulled it off and ducked my head in what I hoped was a neat little bow, the way Arby had taught us.

Will Shakespeare grinned at me. He wasn't a tall man: he was about Gil's size. His hair was receding, leaving lots of forehead, like in the pictures you see in books, but he didn't otherwise look much like the pictures at all. There were more lines on his skin, lines from laughing, and a thicker beard. He wore a little gold hoop in his left ear.

“So you are Nathan Field.” The hazel eyes were looking me over, appraisingly.

I said rather shakily, “They call me Nat.”

“Well, Nat, welcome to the Chamberlain's Men. Thy friend Will Kempe has left us in a huff—wilt play in our company even now he is gone?”

“Oh yes!” I said instantly. The words must have come out so fast, so eager, that both Shakespeare and Burbage laughed.

“When he was my friend he spoke highly of thy tumbling,” Shakespeare said. “And Dick Mulcaster of thy voice, bless his generous soul. We have all whirled you about London this past day or two, Nat—do you under-stand what's happening?”

This was so on the nose that for a dizzy moment I thought he must know where I really came from, who I really was. “No, sir,” I said.

But he didn't know. He said, “Three days from now we are to play a piece of mine from some years past,
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We had more boys in the company when first we played it—now we have only enough for the women, and we lack a boy for Robin Goodfellow, for the Puck. So Richard Mulcaster, having played the play of late, has of his kindness lent us his Puck. You.”

I wished I could ask him who Richard Mulcaster was. “I know the lines,” I said.

“Ah. He says thou hast the memory of a homing pigeon. Who knows, I may keep thee.” He smiled his quick smile, to show he was joking. “We had no love for the Paul's Boys when we were playing on your side of the river, but Dick is a friend of mine from long ago. A wise, gentle man. And a gentleman too.”

“Yes,” I said. Down in the pit, the two men had finished
their raking and were starting to untie and scatter new bundles—of what I now saw was not grass but a thicker green stem. Reeds, I guess. They gave off the odd smell that I'd noticed all through the theater; they made a kind of disposable carpet.

“'Ware heads, below,” said Master Burbage from above, and he swung himself over the edge of the gallery and shinnied down the climbing rope fast and expertly, with his blue cloak billowing out behind him.

Shakespeare shook his head. “The man is all actor,” he said.

“And a good thing for you,” said Burbage, “considering he plays four parts this week, all large.” He looked down at me, suddenly serious, and glanced out at the reed scatterers, as if to make sure they couldn't hear him. He said quietly, almost in a whisper, “Nat Field—one thing I will tell thee that Master Shakespeare has not, since th'art living in my house and will hear more than tha should. Our
Dream
is revived so suddenly not by choice, but by command. The Queen wishes it. She has a fancy to see our sweet new theater, but will have us play nothing in it for her but that.”

“But this must not be breathed to a soul,” Shakespeare said. “She will come in secret. Bankside is not Blackfriars, and these are dangerous times.”

Burbage took hold of one of my ears, not gently. “Mention it to anyone and I will cut off thine ear,” he said. “Very slowly, inch by inch.”

I thought of the heads stuck on poles, and decided he might mean it. “I promise,” I said.

Will Shakespeare moved back to the stool and picked
up his book. It was not a printed book, I saw, but a bound manuscript. He glanced up at the sky over the pit; sunshine was starting to slant down over the edge of the hollow roof. “Time passes,” he said. “This wooden O of ours is a sundial. Classes, Richard.”

I looked at the lines on his face, and at his ordinary brown doublet and hose, and I thought:
Don't go, please don't go.
It wasn't because he was William Shakespeare. I just knew that I liked being with him, more than with anyone I knew.

He moved away, then looked back at me. “We shall rehearse together soon, Puck,” he said. “I am to play thine Oberon.”

More than anything from that first day, I remember the noise. You'd think that we have more noise today in the everyday world, what with traffic and airplanes and so many different kinds of machines that didn't exist then, not to mention radio and TV and cassette players. But the London of that time was full of church clocks striking the quarter-hours, and church bells ringing for services; of watchmen ringing handbells in the street and shouting out the time, and town criers calling out the news. Everyone who sold anything shouted out his or her wares. People have always been noisy, I guess, in towns at any rate. At the Globe Theatre, nobody ever seemed to speak softly if he could shout.

“Nathan Field! Where's Nathan Field!”

It was a very large voice from a very small man; small but fat, dressed all in light grey. He looked like a button
mushroom, and he was marching onto the stage from the tiring-house, the dressing space behind it, with a group of five boys straggling behind him. One of them was Harry.

“Here he is,” said Master Burbage. “And the space is thine for half an hour, Henry—no more.” He clapped the mushroom on the back and headed for one of the upstage exits. Over his shoulder he said, “Master Condell is here to tie thee in knots, Nat.”

One or two of the boys sniggered. Master Burbage disappeared through the door. Small stout Henry Condell looked me over critically. “Well, Nathan Field,” he said, “we shall see what a Paul's Boy has to offer us. This precious half hour is tumbling practice. I will not turn thee into a show. Just try to follow what the others do.”

“If you can,” said one of the boys cockily. He was about my age but smaller; dark haired, very wiry and agile looking. I guessed he was probably the star gymnast. Henry Condell glanced at him with something close to dislike.

“Go first then, Roper,” he said. “Somersaults.”

Roper did a quick sequence of somersaults across the stage, light as a feather. The others followed him, one by one; two of them, Nick and Alex, were quite good, Harry was so-so; the last, a chubby, fair-haired boy called Thomas, was a real klutz. He rolled sideways out of his second somersault, and giggled. Master Condell sighed.

“Follow, Nathan,” he said.

Head over heels over head over heels I went across the stage, faster than Roper, ending with a jump. I was better than any of them; but then, somersaults are easy.

The boys watched me in silence, warily.

“Cartwheels,” said Master Condell.

One by one we cartwheeled back toward him; Harry turned two, the others three, Roper and I four. Thomas tried to turn one cartwheel and ended in a hopeless heap. This bothered him not at all, and the others seemed to take it for granted, but Roper snorted in disdain. He opened his mouth to say something, caught Master Condell's eye, and shut it again.

“Walk on your hands,” said Henry Condell.

Roper and I made it across the stage; Nick and Alex fell down halfway. Thomas couldn't get up onto his hands at all.

“Forgive me, Master Condell,” he said cheerfully. “If I practice for a year, I shall still have no balance.”

“You never practice at all,” Roper said.

“Each man has his own talents,” Henry Condell said mildly. “Now—I want to see the display you have each devised for me in these last three days. I expect to be gratified, surprised, and dazzled. Or at the least, pleased.”

Thomas said, “May I be first?”

Master Condell blinked. “You surprise me already. Very well—let us give Thomas the stage.”

He hopped over the edge into the groundlings' yard, with startling agility for someone so round, and we followed him. Thomas stood up on the stage looking pudgy and lumpish, and very woeful. For the next few minutes the sad expression on his face never changed, but he went through a mimed routine that was so funny it had every one of us, even Roper, helpless with laughter. He was playing himself, the hopelessly incompetent gymnast; he went through a huge effort to complete each movement,
failing more and more disastrously each time. His longing to succeed was so achingly apparent, and his failure so ludicrous, that it broke your heart while you laughed and laughed. He was a natural clown, of a kind I've never seen before or since, and he was brilliant.

Henry Condell said, wiping his eyes, “Thomas, I thank thee. Thine apprenticeship will never be damaged by thy tumbling.”

That was the start of my gradually realizing that each of the boy actors in the company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men was an apprentice, learning his craft. Unlike the boys who were being trained in schools—the real Nathan Field, for instance—they were out in the real world very young, learning to act by doing it. The adult actors were their teachers, and each boy was apprenticed to a particular one of the adults. Harry was Master Burbage's apprentice, which was why he was living in the Burbage house.

Thomas ducked his head mournfully to Master Condell, still with his sad clown's expression, then caught my eye and flashed me a quick grin.

Each of the boys in turn got up on the stage after that and went through his own little tumbling routine: a mixture of required movements and personal tricks put together to be as showy as possible. If they'd had parallel bars or a vaulting horse, it would have been like watching mini-versions of Olympic routines. They were all pretty good, even Harry, who seemed to have fairly inflexible joints, but Roper was by far the best. He turned cartwheels and back flips and leapt about the stage as if he were made of rubber, and ended with a double flip that
brought out a gruff “Bravo!” from Henry Condell.

Roper jumped lightly down from the stage and landed at my side. I said impulsively, “That was great!”

He looked at me with a twisted little smile that had no pleasure in it, just malice. Nobody had ever taught this boy how to like other people. “Now do better, Paul's Boy,” he said nastily, and he sat down cross-legged on the ground.