The Serpent's Tongue Chapter 1

Author’s Note: Hello, all of you Othello and Macbeth fans! So...obviously, this is a crossover story, written collaboratively by myself and my good friend . We’ll be alternating chapters; I wrote this first one, she’ll write the second, and so forth. I can’t promise super-regular updates, but we’ll certainly try our best.

Disclaimer: I own nothing. I am naught but a lowly devotee of the Bard. With that in mind: yes, Bill Shakes, we’re mucking about with your canon. Tremendously. We’re not ashamed.


     Oddly enough, it was not the grave discourse being held ‘twixt his general and the Scots thane that held transfixed his silent attention, though a good deal more than half of his rational mind berated him for that. No...no, it was the woman, rather off of whom his eyes could not seem to stray, though to what end, he could not divine. The woman. A wife. The wife of a thane, no less, and though he could not have professed be precisely aware of what such a denomination entailed, there ought to have been some greater measure of sin to be had in taking up eye of the wife of one, than in doing the same for any layman’s lady fair.

X X X

    But then...when had sin ever troubled him so much? Verily, the whole of his existence was stepped in it, from his birth to his twenty-eighth anniversary of bastardy...and would he but speak plain, his soul’s blacker places reveled in it. Malefaction was his bread and meat, iniquity his water and wine, and what was the world, besides, but a couch of deception, of cruelty, of lies?  He had been blessed, in a way, to become so quickly disillusioned of the world’s alleged goodness, to become so intimately acquainted with its hard, bitter truth, for those content to remain in naive ignorance remained blind, blissfully, dolorously blind. They could do naught but be trampled underfoot, rendered stained and bloodied and useless and broken beyond despair, beyond repair, by those more cognizant of the true composition of the world’s key: a great bloody joke.

    Fools. All of them. Stupid, bleating, insufferable, enviable fools.

    ...Had he meant to deem them enviable? No, i’faith; there was nothing worth coveting from those paltry existences. The lowest of the low, they were: a sight beneath even those such as himself, for being so damnably, sickeningly, delightfully blind to the peculiar charms worked upon them by men of his ilk. Cassio was such a one. Othello was such a one. He had them in his palm, cupped like the fragile little puppets his machinations had forced them to become, trapped like so many flies in a web.

    This was the time for dishonest men to thrive, and he...well, he could do naught but bind himself to that devilish creed, could he not? Carry silence for his iron shield, with a dagger of wit to adorn an acrimonious belt, and a cloak of half-truths and untruths and false truths, a heavy black cloak of miserable, blessed lies, resting upon his shoulders, with all the envious hate of the world lending unto it that unbearable weight that his soul should not have hastened to don...though that had ne’er given it pause afore.

X X X

    But of course, this was no time for such idle introspection; forsooth, in the indulgence of it, he had neglected his purpose. Stand you awhile apart, Othello had said, by the door, there. We will have need of your counsel ere long, friend.

    Well. He had done that, was still doing it even now. Ere long, the man had said, but by God, he had yet to have it made clear to him what point there was to his being here. Insofar as he could see, there was none; he had accompanied Othello hither, as was his wont, had received that meager order, and had been more or less dismissed thereafter. The Thane of Cawdor, as he self-effacingly called himself (though there resided deep within his dull blue eyes a glint that bespoke of some festering ambition, seemingly incongruous with that diffidence, and still less befitting of the seasoned warrior his rugged face and frame revealed him to be), paid him no more of mind than one would some article of furniture: plain, unassuming, and entirely deserving of his neglect. Obviously the good Lieutenant Cassio had received a hearty welcome, as had a confederate general of the thane by the name of Banquo (who looked a bit of a mug, asking him, but then, he was not exactly at liberty to be judge of that)...really, the only comparable situation he could observe was that of the woman, who had stopped paying attention as soon as the pleasantries were exchanged and the talk turned military.

    Not that he could blame her, really. The three generals and the Florentine fop had hearkened to their purpose straight, filling the chamber with talk of battles and rations and blighted Anglo-Saxon whoresons and Cypriots and Turks and finally, the crux of the matter: an alliance.

    “‘Twould prove most fortuitous for all, I think, to commission the support of the venerable Venetian navy in our campaigns, given the, ah...condition of our own.”
    “Or lack thereof?”
    “...’Tis e’en so. Nevertheless, General Othello, you would not go without requital. Our highland militias are strong of arm and great in number; in your effort to oust the dread Turk from the mainland, they may provide some measure of aid to you….”

    That this man, this Macbeth, was truly in such great need of military backing in his efforts to prevail over the English advances in his country so as to beg the general of the Venetian army for it, only to levy a goodly portion of his troops to that same army’s service as recompense...well, he had his doubts on the matter; what man in his right mind would not? He could not help but perceive these anomalous actions of the thane as being rooted in a desire to achieve some ulterior end...but of course, no one had thought to seek his counsel in this regard, lowly ensign that he was.

    On the other hand...no one had forced him to wait for invitation: not now nor ever before. He could have alerted Othello to his misgivings so easily; O, he could have. But at least one of several contesting parts of him begged, metaphorical eyes alight with the anticipated prospect of imminent malicious knavery, to refrain: to remain complacent in his darkened corner, silent and watchful like always...and though the thought of such insouciance might have sickened him under any other circumstance, it veritably thrilled him now.

    Damn it all, but he knew not from whence this newfound eagerness to push and prod at men’s farthest limits arose. Titillating it may have been, but even now, he yet retained decency enough to chafe but slightly at the cognizance of the high potential for military calamity this whole affair yielded. After all, the army had been the sole arena of his life in which he had truly exercised that blunt honesty and steadfast devotion to duty that had granted him his falsely enduring monikers. Good, his men and betters had deemed him. Honest. Those things might ne’er had been said anyplace else but upon the tented field, and now...no longer could they be considered truth even there. Lies, all of it: a stinking heap of lies, but out upon’t, he had been wronged. Othello, Cassio, and all withal...they would pay. An ‘twere his final act upon this world, he would make them pay. O, how sweet, how rich, would the meat of just vengeance upon his silvered tongue be...he could nearly taste it now, standing here. Hanged be the wretches that tried to prevent him from collecting his due.


X X X


    She might have voiced her restlessness long afore if her husband would but desist from subjecting her to his harshly inquisitive look on every occasion on which she made move to rise. Why he did so, she knew not; nor, in troth, cared enough to guess. ‘Twas not the setting itself that consigned her to this state of tedium, for a stranger to military matters she was none, possessing in her marriage and equity and balance of power that she, growing up, had neither envisioned herself as possessing nor observed in other women of stature. She thought it an enormous privilege to be accepted as her husband’s right arm in the governance of their lands and keep, and intended to remain so for as long a time as had been allotted her by God.

    Still, to sanction for herself an appellation so exalted was one thing. It was another thing entirely to come here in expectation of fulfilling that duty to some extent, and Macbeth do erroneously little to involve her in the current proceedings. For God’s sake, he had merely introduced her to the Venetian commanders and been done with it all! Not once had he sought her opinion; not once had he stalled the conversation to involve her. Did it not, therefore, stand to perspicuous reason that her ire, pricked all the more to heat by her extant ennui, was more than a fair bit piqued?

    Surely, she realized suddenly, the man in the corner could wholly empathize with her plight, ensconced within like circumstance as he was. Having little else of import to do at the moment, she cast upon him a languid, appraising glance beneath half-lidded eyes, taking in the red-and-white leather jerkin, the dark, rough doublet and hose worn underneath, the black soft cap with its small brass badge glinting proudly in the brim, the wiry frame and sharp, hard, swarthy face: all marks of a military man through and through.

    If his look singled him out as a soldier, she could say with relative certainty that his stance ascertained the fact still more; he stood in that darkened corner by the door with a deceptive calm, concealing beneath that tranquil facade a hair-trigger tension more puissant than aught she had glimpsed in her own warmongering husband afore. Macbeth might have been a general-- forsooth, a great one--, but this man...no, this man was something else. Something...more.

    And she could not have said for certain whether it truly was that catlike warrior’s grace with which he stood that held her so enthralled, or some other salient feature of his. Perhaps it was the two scars, dark and deep, disfiguring the left half of his face and lending unto him an appearance ragged and gaunt, old beyond his years. Perhaps it was the stillness, the silence in which he waited. To be sure, he was a stranger to her, unintroduced and unknown, but even without acquaintance, she could sense within his upright posture something greater than a soldier’s mere desire to protect and guard his commanders. No, there was something...calculating...in this silence: something observant and hungry and lean and irrepressibly, alluringly dark. Something nearly...malicious…. And though she could not quite comprehend why, a viler vein in her heart thudded harshly with a note of tempting glee at the realization.

    ...But perchance it was not that at all. No, perhaps it was his eyes, his deeply shadowed, astonishingly pale eyes, that touched the place within her where no one had dared venture before, for fear of the diabolism that lay therein. Like chips of January ice, cutting and raw, they snapped up to meet her own too suddenly for comfort, narrowing briefly into invisibility before widening once more, baring to her unexpectedly ravenous soul a stunning acuity and choking, yet liberating fire. O, that fire, that bright and baleful gleam! It was one she knew well, too well: one she saw reflected within herself every moment. It was a fire of ambition: ruthless ambition, and passion, and an inherent danger that set some girlishly ignominious part of her soul, that she had thought lay dormant in her aspish breast, to blazing, alight with the searing black glow of glorious villainy.


Well, that’s that (in case you didn’t quite catch on, ‘he; is Iago, and ‘she’ is Lady Macbeth). This is actually the first time I’ve really written anything, or posted anything on this site, for...more than a few months (damn….), so...yeah, if you’d be so kind as to tell me what you thought (read: how much it sucked), I’d be eternally grateful. I might even get you an Iago hat as a consolation prize.

For future historical reference: I have taken the liberty of...well, really playing around with history (also, I haven’t cleared any of this with my partner, so it might be subject to change, as might the rating be later on). This story is set at the very beginning of the storylines of both plays: the Othello crew is still in Venice, and Macbeth is still Thane of Cawdor and battling for King Duncan.

The wars Macbeth is seeking an alliance because of are the Anglo-Scottish wars, which raged between Scotland and England for roughly 3 centuries (14th, 15th, and 16th), following the Scottish War of Independence and finally ending in 1603 (three years before Macbeth was written) with the Union of Crowns, which created the union of the Three Kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland, ruled by King James VI.

Scotland’s Royal Navy really was in the shambles Macbeth described: it wasn’t maintained after the death of King James the IV, and his son, James V, never really went about building it back up.

Apparently Macbeth was a real king. You learn something new every day.

Um...yeah, I’m out, for now! I have absolutely no idea what will happen next, but I’m sure it’ll be good, so be sure to stick around for installment 2! Make sure to look for it on the page of .