Fool by Christopher Moore Page B

feeling it. What’s that light?”
    There was a fire ahead in the wood, and figures moving around it.
    “Stealthy, now, good Kent. Let us creep up silently and see what is to be seen before revealing ourselves. Now, creep, Kent, you crashing great ox, creep.”
    And with but two steps my strategy revealed its flaw.
    “You’re jingling like a coin purse possessed of fits,” said Kent. “You couldn’t creep up on the deaf nor dead. Silence your bloody bells, Pocket.”
    I placed my coxcomb on the ground. “I can leave my hat, but I’ll not take off my shoes-we’ll surrender all stealth if I’m screaming from trodding tender-footed across lizards, thorns, hedgehogs, and the lot.”
    “Here, then,” said Kent, pulling the remains of the pork shoulder from his satchel. “Dampen your bells with the fat.”
    I raised an eyebrow quizzically-an unappreciated and overly subtle gesture in the dark-then shrugged and began working the suet into the bells at my toes and ankles.
    “There!” I shook a leg to the satisfying sound of nothing at all. “Forward!”
    Creep we did, until we were just outside the halo of firelight. Three bent-backed hags were walking a slow circle around a large cauldron, dropping in twisted bits of this and that as they chanted.
    “Double, double, toil and trouble:
    Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
    “Witches,” whispered Kent, paying tribute to the god of all things bloody fucking obvious.
    “Aye,” said I, in lieu of clouting him. (Jones stayed behind to guard my hat.)
    “Eye of newt and toe of frog,
    Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
    Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
    Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
    For a charm of powerful trouble,
    Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”
    They double-bubbled the chorus and we were readying ourselves for another verse of the recipe when I felt something brush against my leg. It was all I could do not to cry out. I felt Kent’s hand on my shoulder.
    “Steady, lad, it’s just a cat.”
    Another brush, and a meow. Two of them now, licking my bells, and purring. (It sounds more pleasant than it was.) “It’s the bloody pork fat,” I whispered.
    A third feline joined the gang. I stood on one foot, trying to hold the other above their heads, but while I am an accomplished acrobat, the art of levitation still eludes me; thus my ground-bound foot became my Achilles’ heel, as it were. One of the fiends sank its fangs into my ankle.
    “Fuckstockings!” said I, somewhat emphatically. I hopped, I whirled, I made disparaging remarks toward all creatures of the feline aspect. Hissing and yowling ensued. When at last the cats retreated, I was sitting splayed-legged by the fire, Kent stood next to me with his sword drawn and ready, and the three hags stood in ranks across the cauldron from us.
    “Back, witches!” said Kent. “You may curse me into a toad, but they’ll be the last words out of your mouths while your heads are attached.”
    “Witches?” said the first witch, who was greenest of the three. “What witches? We are but humble washerwomen, making our way in the wood. ”
    “Rendering laundry service, humble and good, ” said witch two, the tallest.
    “All it be, is as it should,” said witch three, who had a wicked wart over her right eye.
    “By Hecate’s night-tarred nipples, stop rhyming!” said I. “If you’re not witches, what was that curse you were bubbling about?”
    “Stew,” said Warty.
    “Stew, stew most true,” said Tall.
    “Stew most blue,” said Green.
    “It’s not blue,” said Kent, looking in the cauldron. “More of a brown.”
    “I know,” said Green, “but brown doesn’t rhyme, does it, love?”
    “I’m looking for witches,” said I.
    “Really?” said Tall.
    “I was sent by a ghost.”
    The hags looked at one another, then back at me. “Ghost told you to bring your laundry here, did it?” said Warty.
    “You’re not washerwomen! You’re bloody witches! And that’s not stew, and the