Hag-Seed Read online

  ALSO BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  NOVELS

  The Edible Woman

  Surfacing

  Lady Oracle

  Life Before Man

  Bodily Harm

  The Handmaid's Tale Cat's Eye

  The Robber Bride

  Alias Grace

  The Blind Assassin Oryx and Crake

  The Penelopiad

  The Year of the Flood MaddAddam

  The Heart Goes Last

  SHORT FICTION

  Dancing Girls

  Murder in the Dark Bluebeard's Egg

  Wilderness Tips

  Good Bones and Simple Murders The Tent

  Moral Disorder

  Stone Mattress

  POETRY

  Double Persephone The Circle Game

  The Animals in That Country The Journals of Susanna Moodie

  Procedures for Underground Power Politics

  You Are Happy

  Selected Poems: 1965-1975

  Two-Headed Poems

  True Stories

  Interlunar

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986

  Morning in the Burned House Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-1995

  The Door

  NONFICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature Days of the Rebels: 1815-1840

  Second Words

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004

  Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

  CHILDREN'S

  Up in the Tree

  Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) For the Birds

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda Wandering Wenda

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 2016 by O. W. Toad Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Hogarth UK, a division of Random House Group Limited, a Penguin Random House company, London.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780804141291

  Ebook ISBN 9780804141307

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Margaret Atwood

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Screening

  I. Dark Backward

  1. Seashore

  2. High Charms

  3. Usurper

  4. Garment

  5. Poor Full Cell

  6. Abysm of Time

  7. Rapt in Secret Studies

  8. Bring the Rabble

  9. Pearl Eyes

  II. A Brave Kingdom

  10. Auspicious Star

  11. Meaner Fellows

  12. Almost Inaccessible

  13. Felix Addresses the Players

  14. First Assignment: Curse Words

  15. Oh You Wonder

  16. Invisible to Every Eyeball Else

  17. The Isle Is Full of Noises

  18. This Island's Mine

  19. Most Scurvy Monster

  III. These Our Actors

  20. Second Assignment: Prisoners and Jailers

  21. Prospero's Goblins

  22. The Persons of the Play

  23. Admired Miranda

  24. To the Present Business

  25. Evil Bro Antonio

  26. Quaint Devices

  27. Ignorant of What Thou Art

  28. Hag-Seed

  29. Approach

  IV. Rough Magic

  30. Some Vanity of Mine Art

  31. Bountiful Fortune, Now My Dear Lady

  32. Felix Addresses the Goblins

  33. The Hour's Now Come

  34. Tempest

  35. Rich and Strange

  36. A Maze Trod

  37. Charms Crack Not

  38. Not a Frown Further

  39. Merrily, Merrily

  V. This Thing of Darkness

  40. Last Assignment

  41. Team Ariel

  42. Team Evil Bro Antonio

  43. Team Miranda

  44. Team Gonzalo

  45. Team Hag-Seed

  46. Our Revels

  47. Now Are Ended

  Epilogue: Set Me Free

  The Tempest: The Original

  Acknowledgments

  Richard Bradshaw, 1944-2007

  Gwendolyn MacEwen, 1941-1987

  Enchanters

  This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.

  --SIR FRANCIS BACON, "On Revenge"

  ...although there are nice people on the stage, there are some who would make your hair stand on end.

  --CHARLES DICKENS

  Other flowering isles must be In the sea of Life and Agony: Other spirits float and flee O'er that gulf...

  --PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills"

  The house lights dim. The audience quiets.

  ON THE BIG FLATSCREEN: Jagged yellow lettering on black:

  THE TEMPEST

  By William Shakespeare

  with

  The Fletcher Correctional Players

  ONSCREEN: A hand-printed sign, held up to the camera by Announcer, wearing a short purple velvet cloak. In his other hand, a quill.

  SIGN: A SUDDEN TEMPEST

  ANNOUNCER: What you're gonna see, is a storm at sea:

  Winds are howlin', sailors yowlin',

  Passengers cursin' 'em, 'cause it gettin' worse:

  Gonna hear screams, just like a ba-a-d dream,

  But not all here is what it seem,

  Just sayin'.

  Grins.

  Now we gonna start the playin'.

  He gestures with the quill. Cut to: Thunder and lightning, in funnel cloud, screengrab from the Tornado Channel. Stock shot of ocean waves. Stock shot of rain. Sound of howling wind.

  Camera zooms in on a bathtub-toy sailboat tossing up and down on a blue plastic shower curtain with fish on it, the waves made by hands underneath.

  Closeup of Boatswain in a black knitted tuque. Water is thrown on him from offscreen. He is drenched.

  BOATSWAIN: Fall to't yarely, or we run ourselves aground! Bestir, bestir!

  Yare! Yare! Beware! Beware!

  Let's just do it,

  Better get to it,

  Trim the sails,

  Fight the gales,

  Unless you wantin' to swim with the whales!

  VOICES OFF: We're all gonna drown!

  BOATSWAIN: Get outta tha' way! No time for play!

  A bucketful of water hits him in the face.

  VOICES OFF: Listen to me! Listen to me!

  Don't you know we're royalty?

  BOATSWAIN: Yare! Yare! The waves don't care!

  The wind is roarin', the rain is pourin',

  All you do is stand and stare!

  VOICES
OFF: You're drunk!

  BOATSWAIN: You're a idiot!

  VOICES OFF: We're doomed!

  VOICES OFF: We're sunk!

  Closeup of Ariel in a blue bathing cap and iridescent ski goggles, blue makeup on the lower half of his face. He's wearing a translucent plastic raincoat with ladybugs, bees, and butterflies on it. Behind his left shoulder there's an odd shadow. He laughs soundlessly, points upward with his right hand, which is encased in a blue rubber glove. Lightning flash, thunderclap.

  VOICES OFF: Let's pray!

  BOATSWAIN: What's that you say?

  VOICES OFF: We're goin' down! We're gonna drown!

  Ain't gonna see the King no more!

  Jump offa the ship, swim for the shore!

  Ariel throws his head back and laughs with delight. In each of his blue rubber hands he's holding a high-powered flashlight, in flicker mode.

  The screen goes black.

  A VOICE FROM THE AUDIENCE: What?

  ANOTHER VOICE: Power's off.

  ANOTHER VOICE: Must be the blizzard. A line down somewhere.

  Total darkness. Confused noise from outside the room. Yelling. Shots are fired.

  A VOICE FROM THE AUDIENCE: What's going on?

  VOICES, FROM OUTSIDE THE ROOM: Lockdown! Lockdown!

  A VOICE FROM THE AUDIENCE: Who's in charge here?

  Three more shots.

  A VOICE, FROM INSIDE THE ROOM: Don't move! Quiet! Keep your heads down! Stay right where you are.

  Felix brushes his teeth. Then he brushes his other teeth, the false ones, and slides them into his mouth. Despite the layer of pink adhesive he's applied, they don't fit very well; perhaps his mouth is shrinking. He smiles: the illusion of a smile. Pretense, fakery, but who's to know?

  Once he would have called his dentist and made an appointment, and the luxurious faux-leather chair would have been his, the concerned face smelling of mint mouthwash, the skilled hands wielding gleaming instruments. Ah yes, I see the problem. No worries, we'll get that fixed for you. Like taking his car in for a tuneup. He might even have been graced with music on the earphones and a semi-knockout pill.

  But he can't afford such professional adjustments now. His dental care is low-rent, so he's at the mercy of his unreliable teeth. Too bad, because that's all he needs for his upcoming finale: a denture meltdown. Our revelth now have ended. Theeth our actorth...Should that happen, his humiliation would be total; at the thought of it even his lungs blush. If the words are not perfect, the pitch exact, the modulation delicately adjusted, the spell fails. People start to shift in their seats, and cough, and go home at intermission. It's like death.

  "Mi-my-mo-moo," he tells the toothpaste-speckled mirror over the kitchen sink. He lowers his eyebrows, juts out his chin. Then he grins: the grin of a cornered chimpanzee, part anger, part threat, part dejection.

  How he has fallen. How deflated. How reduced. Cobbling together this bare existence, living in a hovel, ignored in a forgotten backwater; whereas Tony, that self-promoting, posturing little shit, gallivants about with the grandees, and swills champagne, and gobbles caviar and larks' tongues and suckling pigs, and attends galas, and basks in the adoration of his entourage, his flunkies, his toadies...

  Once the toadies of Felix.

  It rankles. It festers. It brews vengefulness. If only...

  Enough. Shoulders straight, he orders his gray reflection. Suck it up. He knows without looking that he's developing a paunch. Maybe he should get a truss.

  Never mind! Reef in the stomach! There's work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled! Tip of the tongue, top of the teeth. Testing the tempestuous teapot. She sells seashells by the seashore.

  There. Not a syllable fluffed.

  He can still do it. He'll pull it off, despite all obstacles. Charm the pants off them at first, not that he'd relish the resulting sight. Wow them with wonder, as he says to his actors. Let's make magic!

  And let's shove it down the throat of that devious, twisted bastard, Tony.

  That devious, twisted bastard, Tony, is Felix's own fault. Or mostly his fault. Over the past twelve years, he's often blamed himself. He gave Tony too much scope, he didn't supervise, he didn't look over Tony's nattily suited, padded, pinstriped shoulder. He didn't pick up on the clues, as anyone with half a brain and two ears might have done. Worse: he'd trusted the evil-hearted, social-clambering, Machiavellian foot-licker. He'd fallen for the act: Let me do this chore for you, delegate that, send me instead. What a fool he'd been.

  His only excuse was that he'd been distracted by grief at that time. He'd recently lost his only child, and in such a terrible way. If only he had, if only he hadn't, if only he'd been aware...

  No, too painful still. Don't think about it, he tells himself while doing up the buttons of his shirt. Hold it far back. Pretend it was only a movie.

  Even if that not-to-be-thought-about event hadn't occurred, he'd most likely still have been ambushed. He'd fallen into the habit of letting Tony run the mundane end of the show, because, after all, Felix was the Artistic Director, as Tony kept reminding him, and he was at the height of his powers, or so they kept saying in the reviews; therefore he ought to concern himself with higher aims.

  And he did concern himself with higher aims. To create the lushest, the most beautiful, the most awe-inspiring, the most inventive, the most numinous theatrical experiences ever. To raise the bar as high as the moon. To forge from every production an experience no one attending it would ever forget. To evoke the collective indrawn breath, the collective sigh; to have the audience leave, after the performance, staggering a little as if drunk. To make the Makeshiweg Festival the standard against which all lesser theatre festivals would be measured.

  These were no mean goals.

  To accomplish them, Felix had pulled together the ablest backup teams he could cajole. He'd hired the best, he'd inspired the best. Or the best he could afford. He'd handpicked the technical gnomes and gremlins, the lighting designers, the sound technicians. He'd headhunted the most admired scenery and costume designers of his day, the ones he could persuade. All of them had to be top of the line, and beyond. If possible.

  So he'd needed money.

  Finding the money had been Tony's thing. A lesser thing: the money was only a means to an end, the end being transcendence: that had been understood by both of them. Felix the cloud-riding enchanter, Tony the earth-based factotum and gold-grubber. It had seemed an appropriate division of functions, considering their respective talents. As Tony himself had put it, each of them should do what he was good at.

  Idiot, Felix berates himself. He'd understood nothing. As for the height of his powers, the height is always ominous. From the height, there's nowhere to go but down.

  Tony had been all too eager to liberate Felix from the rituals Felix hated, such as the attending of cocktail functions and the buttering-up of sponsors and patrons, and the hobnobbing with the Board, and the facilitating of grants from the various levels of government, and the writing of effective reports. That way--said Tony--Felix could devote himself to the things that really mattered, such as his perceptive script notes and his cutting-edge lighting schemes and the exact timing of the showers of glitter confetti of which he had made such genius use.

  And his directing, of course. Felix had always built in one or two plays a season for himself to direct. Once in a while he would even take the central part, if it was something he'd felt drawn to. Julius Caesar. The tartan king. Lear. Titus Andronicus. Triumphs for him, every one of those roles! And every one of his productions!

  Or triumphs with the critics, though the playgoers and even the patrons had grumbled from time to time. The almost-naked, freely bleeding Lavinia in Titus was too upsettingly graphic, they'd whined; though, as Felix had pointed out, more than justified by the text. Why did Pericles have to be staged with spaceships and extraterrestrials instead of sailing ships and foreign countries, and why present the moon goddess
Artemis with the head of a praying mantis? Even though--said Felix to the Board, in his own defense--it was totally fitting, if you thought deeply enough about it. And Hermione's return to life as a vampire in The Winter's Tale: that had actually been booed. Felix had been delighted: What an effect! Who else had ever done it? Where there are boos, there's life!

  --

  Those escapades, those flights of fancy, those triumphs had been the brainchildren of an earlier Felix. They'd been acts of jubilation, of a happy exuberance. In the time just before Tony's coup, things had changed. They had darkened, and darkened so suddenly. Howl, howl, howl...

  But he could not howl.

  --

  His wife, Nadia, was the first to leave him, barely a year after their marriage. It was a late marriage for him, and an unexpected one: he hadn't known he was capable of that kind of love. He was just discovering her virtues, just getting to really know her, when she'd died of a galloping staph infection right after childbirth. Such things happened, despite modern medicine. He still tries to recall her image, make her vivid for himself once more, but over the years she's moved gently away from him, fading like an old Polaroid. Now she's little more than an outline; an outline he fills with sadness.

  So he was on his own with his newborn daughter, Miranda. Miranda: what else would he have named a motherless baby girl with a middle-aged, doting father? She was what had kept him from sinking down into chaos. He'd held himself together the best way he could, which was not too well; but still, he'd managed. He'd hired help, of course--he'd needed some women, since he knew nothing about the practical side of baby care, and because of his work he couldn't be there with Miranda all the time. But he'd spent every free moment he could with her. Though there hadn't been many free moments.

  He'd been entranced with her from the start. He'd hovered, he'd marveled. So perfect, her fingers, her toes, her eyes! Such a delight! Once she could talk he'd even taken her to the theatre; so bright she'd been. She'd sit there, taking it all in, not wriggling or bored as a lesser two-year-old would have been. He'd had such plans: once she was bigger they would travel together, he could show her the world, he could teach her so many things. But then, at the age of three...