The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [217]
“Does he back down?” I mumbled and picked at the dried blood on my cheekbones, then wished I hadn’t.
“No.”
“Does he get his ass kicked?”
“No,” Dana admitted. “He beats the bigger guy and goes off to make his fortune. But that’s not the point.”
“The point is,” I hurried to conclude in self-pity, “I’m not a hero, and if you had stopped me you would have saved yourself this embarrassment.”
She was silent for a while. In my darkness, I complimented my stupid self that I had stymied her. After a bit, I heard her sigh, stand up, sit down again, more pages turning. “More? Really? Do I have to?”
“Wait,” she said.
Like most fifteen-year-olds (and most people), I was not delighted by Shakespeare, despite or because of my father’s indoctrination of us. The little of it I had read under duress in school had only confirmed the damage done by my family and had put me off the man forever. Most of it is a foreign language, excessively wordy, repetitive. It was either too much work to understand the characters or, alternately (since fifteeen-year-olds are programmed to produce endless reasons why they don’t like anything), too easy: those awful soliloquies where bad guys reveal their plans or good guys swoon because they’re so in love.
“Here,” she said at last, a little victory in her voice. “Here. Now listen. You’re seventeen years old. You don’t know how to fight, but you’re brave. And suddenly, you’re in charge of real soldiers. They push you out front, tell you that you’re king, tell you to rouse them to war. You don’t know anything about anything, about men in a group. You’re a kid. You’ve been raised as everyone’s favorite little boy, sheltered, coddled by women, and suddenly men are listening to you. To Arthur. Relying on Arthur. You don’t know war. Here’s what you know: girls, school, getting in trouble. But you’re naturally a hero, even if you’re not trained yet. So now listen to yourself.”
And she read his battle speech from Act II, Scene ii. Her voice was just deep enough an alto to pass as a teenage boy’s, and it worked. For the first time, it worked. The scene came to life for me, in my enforced darkness, and for this one moment, and then a whole afternoon, I thought Shakespeare was okay.
“Who waits for us within, fell Englishmen?
This Saxon pride set sail o’er Humber’s tide
And then conjoined to Pictish treachery
For but to cower, spent and quaking-shy,
Portcullised fast behind the walls of York,
As guilty lads will seek their mother’s skirts
When older boys they vex come for revenge.
But Arthur’s at the gate! ’Tis Britain’s fist
That hammers now upon the shiv’ring boards.
An English blood be thin as watery wine,
Then sheathe we now our swords and skulk away
With Saxon language tripping from our lips.
You’d con th’invader’s tongue? Absit omen.
Let’s school them then in terms of English arms,
Decline and conjugate hard words—but hark! Chambers
She sighs with gentle pleading that we come!
Now wait no more to save her, nobles, in,
And pull those Saxon arms off English skin!”
When she finished, she said, “Listen to it again. Arthur starts out with: the enemy is a little boy hiding in York because he pissed off a bigger boy, and we’re going to kick his ass. The soldiers don’t really go for that, so you reach again and you say, ’If they conquer us, we’ll have to learn their language, and that’ll be like Latin class, which was a drag, wasn’t it? Anybody?’ Figure by now the troops are getting a little dubious about you. And then the cannons go off “—Chambers—”the battle’s going to start, and so you try one more time, last chance, and this time you nail it: York’s a babe and she wants us in her. And suddenly everyone starts to nod and grip their hilts, if you know what I mean.
“You could do that,” Dana said softly. “That’s what I saw today. You could figure out how to be a hero when you have to. You were outnumbered, didn’t know what you