Read The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel for Free Online Page B

she knew how small I felt, how useless, how badly I had fallen short of some idea of myself as courageous and chivalrous, and, most of all, how ashamed I was that I couldn’t destroy someone who had hurt her.
    I lay on the sofa, replaying the battle in my head, but with better results and snappier repartee. Dana brought ice in a cloth and laid it gently across my purple nose, unbloodied my cheeks with wet paper towels, dropped aspirin into my mouth, and recited,
“Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?”
A puff of laughter started to build in the back of my throat, despite mycondition, but it struck the bones and hollows of my face and quickly retreated as my eyes crossed and flooded.
    “Listen to this. Listen,” she said, as if I had a choice. “The younger son needs to make money, and so he goes to the fair and challenges the wrestler, who is a complete brute, for a prizefight. Everyone says he’s insane, begs him to back out, but he won’t. Stubborn like you. The princess in the audience, probably really hot, sayzzzzzz …” She dragged out the word, and I heard the pages riffling, and I knew exactly what book was on her lap across the room from me, though behind my eyelids, closed under acid ice, all I saw were black fireworks. “
Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years. You have seen cruel proof of this man’s strength: if you saw yourself with your eyes or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. We pray you for your own sake to embrace your own safety and give over this attempt
. That’s good, isn’t it? That’s what I would have said today. If I’d’ve known what you were going to do. And been able to speak that well.”
    “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 fifteen-year-oldsare 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 floating, disembodied 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