Belle's Song Read Free

amputation, although it’s not much of a miracle to avoid the doctor when you can no longer even piss on your own.
I won’t dwell on the pain my father must have suffered. Not that he didn’t shout and swear and even scream, particularly when the bone setter tried to straighten things out. I think that the noise was for my benefit. My father knew that a martyrish silence would have been worse for me, so once he was conscious again he hollered when he felt the need, and sometimes even when he didn’t so as to give me a decent excuse to hold his hand and pretend I was doing something useful. When I was not home he was completely silent. I know that because the plump and garrulouswidow, who appointed herself his nurse, told me. I suppose she thought it would make me feel better. At mealtimes, she took to answering for him when I asked him a question. Pretty soon I longed to take her by the scruff of the neck and hurl her into the cook pot.
Sometimes, at night, when the widow was snoring by the fire, my father and I would both cry for my mother. When he comforted me—him comforting me !—a stone formed in my stomach. The pumice was my best friend then, and I think it must have taken the place of the unicorn and the ermine because I don’t remember ever being either of those creatures again.
Enough of that. Now for the opportunity—well, perhaps more an adventure, except that traditional adventures are organized affairs where people make plans and stick to them with courage and determination. My adventure wasn’t at all like that. For a start, it occurred quite by chance and most of it, just like my life, was haphazard. My death will be like that too, I expect. I’ll be dreaming of glory as I’m squashed by the butcher’s cart.
Anyhow, in the late summer following the accident, my father was in the Tabard. He had recently taken to going there in a wheeled chair constructed by Peter Joiner and decked out in fine style by the ladies from the brothel. Even that tiny journey was exhausting, for August storms bring August mud, but the lure of theTabard’s host, a man of vast and irrepressible cheer, was as strong as the lure of ale.
Master Host was always full of gossip and kept a good deal of company. He was also a man of opinions. Where others were more circumspect, he spoke freely about our current king’s troubles, making his own views perfectly clear, though what they were I couldn’t tell you because his views were as changeable as the tide. One day he loved King Richard, the next he despised him. One day we absolutely must make peace with the French, the next we most certainly must not. I wasn’t much interested. I did know that England’s king was wayward and that France was a trouble, but only because kings are always wayward and France had been a trouble my whole life. I’d never met King Richard, of course, and I wasn’t frightened of the French. There is a rough sea between us and them, and any French merchants I encountered at the Tabard, or even the occasional captive French knight I saw paraded through the streets, winked rather than threatened, particularly as my childish body bloomed into something a man could get his hands around. And anyway, men are always fighting. It gives them something to talk about.
In keeping with his forthright manner, Master Host didn’t skirt around my father’s helplessness as others did. He called Father “the Emperor” and, when he heard the grinding of the chair’s wheels, would shout,“Make way for the imperial chariot!” When he could see my father struggling against the deep gloom into which he had sunk, he devised entertainments, one of which was using a row of tankards as skittles and seeing how many my father could down with a stuffed goat’s bladder. It pained my father to throw, I know, but the host whispered that the exercise would make his back stronger. Nor was any money accepted, for as you may imagine, money was now short. “You can pay for your