King of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 hadgone 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.
    Such a small thing, such a huge meaning. I guess that was the moment when I first began to think, with a hollow fear in my chest, that I might have gone back in time. It was like being in a bad dream, but the dream was real. The night into which I had fallen asleep had sucked me down into the past, and brought me waking into another London, a London hundreds of years ago.
    I leaned weakly against the wall. “Where am I?” I said.
    Harry put down his reeking bucket and grabbed my shoulders, hard. He stared nervously into my face. “Art thou he they call Robin Goodfellow?” he said.
    I said automatically, “I am that merry wanderer of the night.”
    â€œThank the good Lord,” Harry said, looking relieved. “At least thou hast thy lines.” He moved me sideways and then downward, to make me sit. So there I was, sitting on a little stool topped with a hard cushion, sitting in a century long, long before I was born.
    â€œTh’art Nathan Field,” he said, looking me deliberately in the eye, speaking slowly as if to someone deaf or half-witted. “Come to our new Globe Theatre for a week from St. Paul’s Boys, since we lost our Puck for Master Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Th’art a wonderful actor, they do say, though it seems to me too much learning at that school has addled thy wits. Unless the fever has done it. Tha joined us yesterday, remember? We rehearsed lines, just thou and I together.”
    How could I say: Yes, I remember? That wasn’t what I remembered at all.
    â€œAah,” I said. Our new Globe Theatre, he had said. In 1999, where I lived, it was the Globe’s four hundredthanniversary. So, if the Globe was new, this was 1599.
    I sat there gaping at him, trying to cope with the unbelievable, with being bang in the middle of something that was totally impossible. All I could think was: Why is this happening to me?
    â€œCome,” Harry said. “It’s past five. Master Burbage will be up and ready—dress, quickly—” And he began thrusting clothes at me from a heap at the bottom of the mattress; it was lucky he was there, to show me the right