Read Online King of Shadows by Susan Cooper - Free Book Online

your own mug, you had to drink right thereleather thong to the handle of the ale seller’s cart.
    The noise outdoors was stupendous, even an hour before the play was due to begin. The air was filled with voices shouting and calling, the rumble of wheels, the whinnying of horses, and over it all the shrill cries of the hawkers selling food and drink. The streets around the theater were crammed with people, and here and there tumblers and musicians working their hearts out for an odd coin. It was more like a fairground than a city street.
    We ate our pies, as Sam called them, perched on a fence over the river, watching long low boats called wherries unloading passengers at a jetty near the theater. Two or four brawny men rowed each boat, with long heavy wooden oars. Bigger boats, with sails, tacked up and down the river; it was much busier than in my day, and much more open, because there were hardly any bridges. London Bridge was the only one in sight.
    Sam was a friendly, almost fatherly boy. You could tell from the huskiness of his voice and his gangly arms and legs that he was going to be too old to play women’s parts pretty soon. But he was to play one this afternoon, in a play called The Devil’s Revenge, in which his character had her throat cut halfway through.
    â€œPig’s blood,” he said cheerfully, chewing a piece of gristly meat. “To be squeezed from a bladder in my sleeve. And a beating if even a spot of it lands on my skirt.”
    Roper snorted. “And show me a real throat-cutting where the blood does not splash everywhere like a broken waterpipe.”
    â€œNo matter,” said Sam peaceably. “The groundlings are happy so long as they see it gush. Come, we must goback.” He tossed his piece of gristle into the air, and three screaming seagulls made a dive for it. And I ran back to the theater, trying to keep up with the group, wondering uneasily where and how Roper had seen a man’s—or a woman’s—throat cut.
    The Devil’s Revenge was full of blood and murders, and a spectacular swordfight, and from behind the stage you could hear the groundlings who stood in the yard yelling with delight. It made great use of a trapdoor in the center of the stage, through which the Devil carried people off to Hell, and I was given the job of helping chubby Thomas open and shut the trap, down in the dark space under the stage. Roper was our signalman, standing a few yards off in a place where he could peer through a gap at what was happening onstage. He would make a chopping motion with his hand when it was time for us to knock aside the heavy wooden latch that kept the trapdoor closed.
    We’d been shown what to do by a tireman, a wizened, grey-haired little guy who grinned a lot, even though he was missing most of his front teeth. Strictly speaking his job was looking after the wardrobe (“tire” means “attire” means “costumes,” I found out), but he seemed to me more like a stage manager. He took us to the “plot,” the list of the play’s actions and exits and entrances that hung on the wall backstage, for everyone to check what they should be doing next. There were three trapdoor drops in the course of the play, and the cues for each were marked.
    The first two went well; we couldn’t always hear the words above us clearly, through the wood of the stage and the noise of the audience, but Roper’s signals gave us ourcue. Each time, Master Burbage, playing the Devil, came dropping down through the trap clutching another actor, and both of them landed lightly on their feet, on the big padded cushion that was there on the floor just in case. -Burbage caught my eye the second time, and grinned at me, a startling fantastical grin in the elaborate makeup that slanted his eyebrows up and out.
    But the third time, nobody was grinning.
    I didn’t understand what went wrong, at the time. We knew the cue for the third