King of Shadows by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

Harry said not many people lived in the area close by.
    After that they carted all The Theatre’s major beams and timbers to the River Thames—huge oak beams, Harry said, some of them thirty feet long—and shipped them over to the other side. And there, using them for a framework, Peter Streete and his workmen gradually built the theater that they christened the Globe.
    Birds were singing in the trees outside the theater as we went in. The doors seemed smaller than in my day, and in different places, so that I couldn’t tell whether we were headed backstage or for the groundlings’ pit. I followed Harry and Burbage blindly, through narrow pasfollowedHarry and Burbage blindly, through narrow passages, past busy preoccupied men and boys; the whole theater had an odd musty, grassy smell that I couldn’t place, and everywhere of course there were the unfamiliar accents and clothes. To keep from thinking I was crazy, I’d begun to pretend that I was in the middle of a movie set in Elizabethan times, among actors dressed in costume. It was comforting until something screamingly real hit me, like those heads over London Bridge.
    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.
    â€œThou shalt never have me back!” he snapped at the other man. “I shall dance my nine days’ Morris, I shall bethe 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!”
    â€œIndeed 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!”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œâ€™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