Inside the carriage, I find Claret a red bundle on the floor, shaking – from cold, or from exhaustion. It can’t have been easy, driving these horses hard, for hours. Fresh out of reasons why I shouldn’t, I lie beside her, and hold her in my arms until her muscles loosen and she sleeps. I count her breaths, matching them to the beating of my heart, as all the stars in the night sky of my heart behoove me to keep holding her forever.
Forever becomes rudely interrupted by a fake cough.
‘We should get going soon. We’re just outside of Rothes, if the last sign I spotted on the road is to be trusted. Which means it’s at least three hours more till Elgin, and we might not be granted court should we arrive too late.’
Will. He stands at the carriage’s opening, but with his back politely turned on us.
I don’t know when I first started thinking of him assimply Will, simply a man, or when I stopped being so certain he controls my fate. But at this moment, I wish that Mary’s rock hadn’t broken down to pieces when she threw it.
That I had something to throw back at him for waking us.
Waking us …
Claret squirms in my arms – and just that squirming is enough to send shivers down my spine. She turns around to look at me and I am trying, very hard, to focus, but her bosom squishes over mine and the smallest movement makes me more aware of my nipples than I’ve ever been. Eternity would be too short a time to savour this.
‘We need to get back on the road, don’t we?’ she whispers.
I nod. I make to get up, but she holds me down. ‘Explain to me why this is so important. Why Gruoch is so important. In terms that I can understand,’ she adds, echoing the phrase she had used when we first met. That was the moment I first realized there was a heart, an intellect behind her then blood-soaked presence. How far we’ve come!
I try to string my thoughts in order.
‘Shepherd showed me a folio.’ She glares at me, the ‘what did I just say’ unspoken. ‘I’m sorry, a folio is a bunch of papers, of … papyri, folded together. It carries words on it, words that make a story someone’s written. I read it. It was my story. Depicting everything that happened in my life, every word I’d ever uttered, up to the point where I jumped off a balcony in my castle, and landed on that white corridor where I found you.’
That’s a lie, though, isn’t it?
The folio didn’t recount everything. My meeting withthe witches in the woods … That wasn’t there.The Tragedieof Macbethwas much more focused on Macbeth himself.
‘So you think … you’re not real?’ Claret asks. Her hand traces my ribcage and it’s so real, oh it’s all so real I could die.
‘I did, uhm, think that. That I was just a figment Shakespeare put to paper. But then I found a name in his study, Gruoch Macbethad. And when I cornered him, he explained he based his story on real people, who existed long before his time.’
Claret nods, an impressive feat given that her head is currently occupied with nuzzling my neck, heading down to my chest, her sharp nose carving a path of fire on my skin, scalding even over my dress. ‘So you wanted to see her for yourself. If she’s more you than you.’
Her head is almost at my waist, her hands are snaking up my thighs, and oh my God what’s happening?
‘Don’t worry,’ Claret whispers on my upper thigh and my lips shape a silent oh. ‘He left. He can’t see us right now. I can hear him saddling the horses. We have a little time. Tell me, does this feel like something else composed for you? Something you’re not choosing?’ Amber eyes flash me a wicked stare before they disappear. Her head sinks down on me, her lips, her tongue, her fingers, entering and claiming and lapping and opening and shaping and oh! I can feel it, I can so feel it, a new chapter of my life being carved across my skin, every word setting me on wondrous fire as Claret rewrites me, as my love rewrites me from the inside out.
No man could have ever written this.
38. Claret
When we get back on the road, Shakespeare is awkward next to me. So awkward he keeps drinking, making jokes, narrating little poems that become increasingly unhinged, punctuated by hiccups. I appreciate it, his way of telling me he accepts what I have with Anassa, that he views me as one of his drinking buddies – though I don’t partake much. I need my mind sharp, for what we’re getting into. And he needs sleep. Eventually, he dozes off, and for a blessed while, as the horses run and the road winds ahead amid farmlands and the day is bright with promise, I can occupy my mind with better things. Like the memory of waking up with Anassa, just a few hours ago. Like the surprise with which she stumbles on to joy, on to pleasure. I fall into the rhythm of the carriage ride, my muscles singing with an ache that’s not entirely unpleasant, the knowledge that I carry us forward swelling in my chest with pride.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot an eagle circling us, almost racing the carriage. It feels impossible yet exhilarating – and as the glorious bird soars down, his amber gaze so similar to mine, my bones vibrate with a strength that’s always been there but only lately has been willing to fully manifest. Only since I met Anassa and thought I’d lost her. The eagle flies away.
The elders of my court would call this encounter an omen, a message from Zeus.
I shake my head. If there’s a message in this brief avian strangeness, I hope it says that things will unfold easily from now on. But gradually, as the vast farmlands give way to villages, then to towns, this serene hope shutters. We are no longer alone on the road. Men, women, kids, dirty and hungry, missing body parts, walk on the side of the road. Dejected, aimless.
‘We didn’t have so many beggars where I’m from,’ I tell a shaken Shakespeare who’s just woken up. ‘Why are there so many in your world?’
He coughs. ‘This is not quite my world, is it? And beggars are a sign of societal distress; a famine or a war.’ We slow down but don’t stop, as he makes small talk with some of them, offering coins now and then. I don’t understand everything they’re saying, but they talk about a war coming, pointing south. Pointing to the direction we just came from.
Thom’s men, then?
Troubled by this, Shakespeare starts flicking through the stack of papyri he’s brought with him, consulting their strange markings, making ‘hmm’ and ‘oh’ sounds. His skin, pale to begin with, has grown increasingly more ashen. I’ve given him the time to think, to spin his tales, but I can’t keep indulging him for long. Not when it feels like we are trotting towards trouble.
Not when it feels the eagle was indeed an omen, but not of victory.
