Fool School

by James Comins

  "That's how you know the process is complete," he says smartly, folding the whip. "When the Old Man leaves her eyes. He's all that's in there, you know. Nothing but a beast from the pit."

  The sun is directly overhead, denying the woman even the dignity of darkness.

  "How was she--" I find myself saying. "Why--"

  "How did we know she was possessed of the Beast? Simple, lad. She gave birth to an abomination. Cloven feet. She'd done the deed with the Devil. This is all she deserves now. This is all she wants. Perhaps, with enough of our teaching, she may yet ascend to an upper reach of Hell, rather than its lowest valley. We may hope, lad. She knows much of darkness, yet, and that must be beaten out of her. Come."

  He takes my hand. She is not moving. "If ever you wanted to know the nature of the Devil, she'd be the one to teach you. See that you kill such desires in yourself. Come."

  And we walk back.

  Malcolm is sitting on a barrel, eating fresher food than our longboat's salt fish and pork, something bought fresh from the town. Fried fish running with oil. I can't conceive of how he can eat fish after being surrounded by them for so long. Maybe he's punishing them. I don't know.

  I roll a second barrel up and sit next to him.

  "Where were you?" he asks.

  I tell him about the priest and the escaped goat woman. He listens intently. He's a good listener. I like that.

  "Funny it should be so easy to reclaim my soul from such an unforgivable sin," I find myself saying. "I just gave the sin away to her. That's how it works, right?"

  "If the sin can't be forgiven," says Malcolm, "what's the point in beating her?"

  "But she's had sex with the devil anyways," I say. "What's the harm in punishing her?"

  "The harm . . . ?" Malcolm whispers. "Who will forgive her her sins?"

  "Nobody," I say. "Unforgivable, remember?"

  "Christ's already sacrificed for all our sins," Malcolm says, thinking out loud, trying to work it out. "All of them, and you can hardly say he won't get forgiven for them, right? God will forgive his son anything. You know how fathers are," although my experience with fathers is otherwise, but I say I know what he means. "So Christ will get forgiven for that woman's sins if she confesses them. Even if they're unforgiveable. She just needs to give them to Christ. What if we took her confession? Wouldn't God forgive her sins, the way he forgave all mankind?"

  "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say," I say, and mean it. Take a beast woman's confession?

  "I want to try it. Meet me behind the church at midnight," he muses, and I say okay.

  Edward has gone somewhere right now, and Malcolm is staring out across the ocean, being ineffable, so I go to take the measure of the town. England's sewers don't smell so much as France's, I find. Oceanwater fills tiny canals, and a man pumps water out of them and into the sewer course, flushing. Jackdaws in rampaging hordes fashion black wings in the sky, wings made up of clusters of smaller wings. The odd peasant gets divebombed; jackdaws are known to be distrustful. Houses are single-story, but it's a really tall story. Some of the houses are taller than they are wide, like a motte-keep made of planks. There isn't a castle here, I find, nor a priory, just an ealdorman's house and the wooden church with the guilty priest. In France, every half-barn of a town has a stone castle and an abbey. I guess England is as backwoods as they say. I wonder why the Fool School is here.

  Alone, I trot like a gelding along the few charming alien lanes of Poole.

  I walk up and down, passing the wooden church as quickly as I can. I don't want to linger near it. I suppose I've taken care of my business there, but something about the place, and the priest . . .

  Someone is following me. I can hear footsteps in the dirt. I feel breath on my throat. It feels nasty, moist. I spin, and it's a girl. She's right there, behind me, standing in the lee of the church's overhang, not even trying to disguise herself. She is standing there.

  She's my age, maybe. She has a look in her eye, like she wants me to marry her, I can just tell, but I know I won't.

  "God keep you," I say in French, then again in English. It's what you're supposed to say to strangers.

  "We'll see," she says, crossing her arms. "You're French," she says in French, and I find myself relaxing. Foreign languages are like daggers in your ears. I say yes.

  "You've seen my mum," she says.

  I don't know how to answer.

  "I could tell," she goes on. "The Father only gets relaxed once he's beat her." Oh. It's the pit woman's daughter, I guess. Now I'm really uncomfortable. "Come with me," she says suddenly. "I've got something to tell you."

  I don't let her know, but the priest is standing nearby, watching. I look the man in the eye, and he looks in mine. Looking back on all this, I think I should have mentioned it to her, that he was listening to us, but at the time, I don't mention it. The girl keeps shifting her body like she's showing it off. I follow her. The priest follows me. The girl doesn't see him.

  I imagine she's going to take me to the goat woman, her mother, but she doesn't. The dustroad breaks away from the direction we're headed, which is into the heather. At one point the girl takes my hand, but I don't want that. Her hands are greasy. She holds on anyway.

  Grasses as tall as I am snap as we stumble through them, grasses with round hard stems and slicing leaves bent down into ridges. Ignoring the assortment of grasshoppers and the loose soppiness of the ground beneath her, the girl throws herself backward into the embrace of the thicket and reaches up for me. I think she wants me to lie down on top of her. I don't. I stand over her, my hands pressed against my sides, because there are worms and things squirming through the grass, I know there are, and I know the priest is nearby. She doesn't know.

  "Whatsa matter?" she asks, flapping her outstretched hands at me, grasping. "I know how."

  I want to be back at the dock with Malcolm and Edward, where it's safe and there are no girls.

  Pouting, she discovers I'm not going to lie down with her and sits up and presses her long dun dress out over her knees. "Sit," she says directly. I don't have the wit to disobey. The ground is disgusting, a morass. I can't wait to be living and fooling in a king's castle, where I'll be safe from stray nature.

  "What?" I ask.

  "You've seen my mum," she says.

  "Yes."

  "You know my mum didn't spend a night with the devil."

  Do I?

  "The baby's feet were just born split, is all. And I know why."

  I want to ask why, but my butt is getting soaked with swampwater, and I hate it so much.

  "Aren't you going to ask why?" she asks.

  I shake my head no. Then I say: "Why?"

  "Dad would beat her. You won't believe me, but when a man beats a woman, it changes her. Changes her soul. And it changes the baby, too."

  I think about this seriously. I repress the swamp feelings. "So beating her invited the Devil into her soul?" I ask at last.

  There's a rustle behind me. I think I know what it is.

  "No, you boy. There was no devil in her. It's just the baby wasn't finished growing. Why should there be the devil in her? Mum's a good, God-fearing woman. It was her man who had the devil in him. Glad he's dead."

  Again, I need to think about this. There's really no time, but I think about it anyways, letting the swamp fill with silence. She asks whether I heard something, and I say no.

  "What do you want?" I say. I feel like she wants something from me.

  Now it's her turn to think. "I'd like someone to believe me," she says at last, and her voice is not sprightly, it's filled with swampwater and endlessness.

  "I mean, how do I know?" I say. "I don't know. About anything."

  "Then let me teach you," she says. "A woman's like a--" She struggles to invent an analogy. "Like a beautiful clay pot. If you hit her enough, she breaks, and so does whatever's inside. Or no, she's an egg."

  "But how do I know about your mum?" I ask. "Priest says otherwi
se."

  I believe I hear the words good lad muttered somewhere behind me. Maybe I didn't.

  "Let me show you." She is now quite intent. "I'll take you to her. You can just listen to her. See what she has to say."

  "What's your name?" I say.

  "Liza."

  I shrug and say, "Meet me behind the church at midnight, Liza."

  It's funny how easy it is to destroy something nice just because you're too stupid to know better.

  * * *

  Here is the harbor. Look across it with me. Winding white strands of sand snake like chaff into the bay, forming serpent sandbars, crooked fingers. The man Edward is here. Liza has returned to the church, where she lives, a ward of the guilty priest. Edward says he's been looking for the fastest way for me and Malcolm to get north to Bath. Listening to Edward talk is like being an ancient Greek priest listening to birdsong: a witness to pure beauty and power, backed by an undercurrent of awareness that the gods are speaking in hidden languages you don't always understand. There's a river, I am told, a little one that travels up Sarsbury Plain toward Bath. Barges travel up the way, drawn by horses, and Malcolm and I can travel in relative comfort, riding the river. I don't mention to Edward that there is a woman in a pit, here in Poole. He is too numinous a man to be told these things.

  Here is the ealdorman's house. He's the head of the whole town, and I don't know why I've been invited here. His house is two stories of good-quality wood beams, not great oak, but expensive. Peaked roofs for snow. A courtyard in front, a tree grown from a dozen lesser trees twisted together. Not Parisian-quality grafting, but very pretty nonetheless. Stone benches. It's like the retirement home of an ancient philosopher, maybe. I don't know why my head's so full of ancient Greece and Rome these days. Maybe Neptune isn't gone from me. Maybe the priest didn't really put my sins on the goat woman after all. Maybe my soul is lost. Maybe I'm being haunted. I have so much to cower from. Hardly the right frame of mind for a future kingsfool to be in.

  Here is the ealdorman of Poole. Look at his red round face. A face like a fat glass pitcher full of wine. He looks jollier than my father, wiser than the Martinite friar, and I don't find him to be a vile drunk at all, though he is drunk. His accent is different, and I imagine him to be Welsh. Yes, he says, he's from Swansea. A Brython. A Celt.

  Here's his wife. Her outfit is no different from her husband's. Somehow, nobody finds this funny except me. Both their sleeves are long, dangling off their wrists, their tunics are nicely tailored, particolored red and yellow, with embroidered collars, and somehow in these colors they seem Navarran somehow, Spanish, Moorish even. Their Welsh hair is very dark, not black, and their eyebrows are thick and solemn. But the ealdorman's manner is boyish, and his wife is dramatic, and I find myself at home in their hall, forgetting about the goat woman and the priest, listening to Edward speak.

  This is what Edward says:

  "He's an exceptional lad." Malcolm he means, not me. "France was good for him. It's well to broaden your tongue." He gives the two of us a look. "We have high hopes for him now that he has a direction. It wasn't the one I'd expected, but he seems keen on it. He's so small a lad. Needs a burst of growth."

  Malcolm shifts uncomfortably, dips his fingers in the water bowl, takes a pair of pork ribs.

  "Not a fighter," Edward continues, shaking his head, and takes the water bowl in turn. "Not yet. I know his father wanted a sloan for a son, but a poet he's got instead. Trust in the Lord's judgment, I say, and he'll turn out all right in the end."

  "And the other boy?" asks the ealdorman.

  My muddy thicket-swamp hands fill the water bowl with disease-ridden brown. I feel sick all of a sudden, but I can mask my discomfort in the presence of the good ealdorman. That's an important thing for a fool to practice. If you can't hide your pain, you'll upset your host, and you won't be able to fake pain properly when the time is right.

  Edward's hand rests on my shoulder. "We don't know much about him, really. Enigmatic, I'd say. I think he means well enough."

  "Don't we all," says the ealdorman, and Edward smiles.

  "An education will be good for the two of them," says Edward. "Above and beyond books and tongues. Have you read, Tom?" he asks me.

  "Not really, sir," I reply. "Not enough." Or at all. I'm illiterate, except for music. I don't say that.

  "Not enough," Edward mutters. "Never enough."

  The ealdorman's wife begins to sup, so we all eat. I've never thought of myself as enigmatic. I don't like the idea. A fool should be simple, bold, plain. A fool is a man of the laity, a bumpkin, a yeoman in the court of the king. A fool shouldn't be a mystery.

  "Could we have a song?" the ealdorman asks me tentatively. This shouldn't be a surprise, I decide, but at the same time I'm unprepared. I've never been a natural musician, even though Papa taught me the recorder and the pandora lyre and other things, as well as singing. I fear embarrassment. But songs are expected of fools; in poorer courts, the fool is all the entertainment: orchestra, comedian, wizard, dancer and grand vizier. I run to dig my recorder out of my cases, which have been brought to the ealdorman's house. Part of me imagines that the devil harbormaster of Cherbourg has stolen my recorder, too, which is more than a hundred years old, made in Italy, of African acacia wood, clasped in finely-wrought iron bands. I may be the son of a drunk, but my Papa had the wit not to pawn our finest. A drunk fool, but not a fool. You understand.

  I race back to the ealdorman with the black hasped box that holds my recorder. I tell him I've only received the most basic musical training, and he waves me on. A cheery song, I think, one of Papa's drinking songs. "Long the Yard," I decide, hoping the ealdorman and his wife don't know the bawdy lyrics. It's a rollicking wine song and uses only the basic scale, and I play it just fine--it's not tricky or impressive--and the ealdorman clearly has found himself enjoying it.

  It's a very rare and special thing, let me tell you about it, when you perform in front of a crowd, even a small crowd, and find someone who takes special joy in your performance. Too often you'll watch an inadequate performer, maybe a traveling morality show, create a crowd only to see the people slough away like dead skin from the back of the theaterground, those few who stayed forcing themselves to put up with a bad show out of politeness, or out of a lack of entertainment in their lives, or God forbid out of a sense of pity for these sad men who have devoted their lives to entertainment and have failed at that task.

  I don't want that to happen to me. I don't want to turn into the St. Martin's friar, escaping from the world of jesting to the priesthood as a failure and a cad.

  So it's strangely gratifying when one of your audience finds joy, actual joy, in the music you make. Reassuring. The ealdorman conducts with his fat fingers, a genuine stupid smile on his lips.

  There's danger, too, in overplaying to the one man in the audience who's happy with your performance. I overplay to this man.

  "Enough," sighs the ealdorman's wife before long, and my tune dies away. I feel a pit of danger inside my chest. A warning. I see that the ealdorman himself is not the most powerful person in the room.

  "But--eh--darling," he murmurs, "don't you think--couldn't we--he's but a boy--"

  "Enough," she repeats.

  "Madame," I find myself saying, "how may I entertain you?"

  The room fills with a terrifying void, borne from her cold Welsh blood. A mist of icicles forms over the longtable draped by the red tablecloth, and people find their hands halfway to their mouths, food raised, uneaten. I fear for my life. I will be hanged now, taken to a gallowbraid and thrown off the side of the platform by this darkeyed woman and her timid, complying husband. I will be kept in the wine cellar till dawn, swatting drunken mice, and in that moist-eyed fresh breath of day I will see the whole of creation pass before me as I take fugue steps up from the damp to the sunlight and the dew of summer's toil, my feet drawn by the woman's harsh words toward a fate of breathless--and--but here the ealdorman's wife is speaking to me.
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  "Play a love song," she whispers, and this is somehow worse than being executed on the gallows.

  I don't understand love. I say so. She dismisses it.

  "Madame," I repeat, "I'll play for you, but I know nothing of love."

  "Yes," her lips say, "that's what I want to hear again."

  I'm frightened of her passion.

  There is an old song, some say it comes from Master Boethius himself, that speaks of the devotion that the constant Penelope felt toward her husband, the warrior errant, Odysseus. It speaks of long years alone, sequestered in a house, surrounded by enemy lovers like flies buzzing, they're trying to convince her that her husband is not coming back, that she is alone, but she is strong, a fire buffeted by the wind, and she maintains, year after solitary year, tending her flame.

  I cannot sing it--there's a thousand thousand verses, well, not really, maybe five, but they're long--but the melody is familiar, I can play it on the recorder.

  There is a very different world inside your head--and in the shape of your mouth--playing a love song than a bawdy drinking number.

  It begins in the first note.

  It begins with breath. This is what Papa taught me. I imagine myself six years old again, sitting on a hard stool on a stage in one of Papa's bars in the châteauneuf of Tourum, smelling the thick odor of woodsmoke and aged brandy and leather, a field of old men before us, old men yearning for escape, for renewal, and Papa speaks:

  "Your first note must be the breath before the kiss, Thomas. It's a breath of knowledge, knowledge and desire, the desire to touch a woman's soul, to grasp it, to entwine yourself in it. See yourself sitting across from the most beautiful woman your mind can create, the unobtainable woman, the perfect woman. See yourself gathering all the flecks of bravery you have, preparing yourself to speak. This is what you do before you play the note. You gather your courage, Thomas, and--"