King of Shadows by Susan Cooper Page B

heart, so I did Oberon’s speech, when he’s telling Puck what they’re going to do with the juice of the magic flower that makes people fall in love with whatever they see. It starts:
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    â€œI know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
    Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. . . .”
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    I was so nervous that I did all the things Arby hates: I went much too fast, and I sounded like a real southernboy from the Carolinas, not at all like an Englishman. While I was rattling along I saw a movement up in the gallery, as someone joined Master Burbage; I couldn’t see who it was and I didn’t care. I was just relieved when I got to the end of the speech without forgetting the words. But when I’d finished, a voice came soft but clear from up there, echoing through the theater, and it wasn’t Richard Burbage.
    â€œWell done.”
    It was Will Shakespeare.
    He didn’t stay. He went away again almost at once, and before long it was another class, given this time by a quiet, serious man called John Heminges. Fencing, he taught us. That is to say, he divided us into pairs and he watched us fight. We wore masks for protection, thank goodness, and we used rapiers, longer and heavier than any I’d ever seen, with a kind of button on the tip to keep you from hurting or being hurt.
    I fought Harry first. It was kind of a joke, because I’ve done hardly any fencing; I just know the basic moves. And this kind of fencing was different; you didn’t parry a sword thrust, you jumped out of its way, or ducked, or knocked it aside with your left hand, on which you wore a very heavy leather glove. Harry realized how little I knew as soon as we started, and was very patient; he never pushed me, but if we’d been fighting for real, I’d have been dead in the first half-minute.
    Then we changed partners and I got Roper.
    He was as good at fencing as he was at gymnastics,and twice as aggressive. He wasn’t about to be patient with my clumsiness; he was going to make me look as bad as he possibly could, to get his own back. He yelled in triumph every time his rapier touched me, which was every few seconds, and he chased me all the way around the stage, stabbing and lunging as I backed helplessly off.
    â€œLet be, Roper!” Master Heminges called at last. “This is the Paul’s Boy, is it not? He has not thy training.”
    â€œNo—nor any skill neither,” Roper said nastily. And his rapier came full at my throat, and would have hurt, button or no button, if John Heminges had not grabbed his sword arm with a large strong hand and twisted it roughly.
    Roper yelped with pain and his rapier clattered to the floor, and I knew I had a real enemy now.

SEVEN
    By the time fencing class ended, my stomach was growling loudly to tell me that it was lunchtime, though I didn’t ask about that—which was just as well since I guess the word lunch. wasn’t used much in the sixteenth century. They ate midday dinner, anywhere between 10 A.M . and 2 P.M ., and it was the main meal of the day. For us this time it was a kind of picnic, to be eaten fast before starting work at the theater. The plays were put on at 2 P.M . every afternoon, close to the times they would be done four hundred years hence in the theater designed to be a copy of this one, and if you weren’t acting, you’d be working backstage.
    Mr. Heminges gave a few pennies to a bigger boy who’d just joined us, Sam Gilbourne, who was the senior apprentice, and he herded us outside and bought street food from a girl with a tray around her neck. It smelled wonderful. We each got a kind of turnover, a big pocket of tough pastry with meat and potatoes inside, and a wooden mug of ale from another street seller, a one-legged man with a barrel on a cart. Sam had six mugs with him in a bag; they were pretty clunky, and smelled of stale beer, but I was thirsty enough not to care. If you didn’t bring