Fool School

by James Comins

  I take a look at the animal. His blunt nose has a black cross, which seems very religious, and the rest of him is white like good butter. He seems a sturdy pal, the pony, but I wonder if he can really take us the way across Somerset to Bath. His legs are so thin and white. Pale.

  The bargeman hooks the pony up to the barge and it follows along behind the Spanish horses. It seems very tired, but I don't want to insult Malcolm's horse-buying skills. I wonder if it's been exchanged along the Sarsbury Plain many times. Most of the barge's barrels are gone, but a few remain.

  A crossing of Roman roads built of the same white stone as the Sarum church intersects a real stone bridge, clearly built for legionnaires to travel quickly to Exeter from London. There's a settlement here, nothing exciting, a few shops with pigs hanging from hooks. At the stone bridge the bargeman lets us two off and helps us set our luggage on the cart. We tether the horse to the cart's iron rings and set off due north. It's straight north, we're told, past fabled Stonehenge and four days' leisurely ride to Treeburgh a few miles from Bath. The bargeman even wraps us a stack of cakes and buys us a waterskin full of third small. I find room in my heart to appreciate his gestures. He once was a boy, too, and says so.

  We walk, the two of us. Cross country, through the weeds of England.

  The cart is not well-made, and at once I find the irregular clumping of the axle to be unbearable. There are strange insects in the grasses, and I tie my hose tighter around my ankles to keep them away. Trees in odd spinneys rise up from the rolling hills. Tiny green cliffs block the pony's way, forcing constant detours. Malcolm decides he will speak now. He's been making up his mind about it for ages.

  "Tom?" His voice is undercut by the whinge and clump of the axle, and I suppress a wince.

  "I went crazy back there, didn't I?" I say. It bursts out through my throat, a wet cough.

  "Tom. I've been thinking. What did God intend for us, when he showed us what we saw?"

  He speaks in French. The pony is making a bad sound with its guts, and I try not to laugh.

  "I was supposed to keep Liza out of the pit, Malcolm," I say.

  "No, Tom," he replies, tapping the pony's rump with a small switch as the pony shies from a big step down. "No, there wasn't a way. I've thought about it. There was no way."

  "We could've gone back. At night. Taken the chains off," I say.

  "You think the priest would've left it unwatched? He'd of found us guilty of devilry and had us in there, too."

  "The ealdorman's wife--" I say.

  "No, she was wily, but there was less to her than meets the eye. She had no power but over her husband, and Edward said--"

  "I know what Edward said," I say morosely.

  The cart is still stopped before the big step down. We've left the cart alone while we talk, but now Malcolm stabilizes the luggage and swats the pony with his switch. A foul outpouring erupts from the nervous pony. It's worth a bit of a laugh for both of us.

  "Tom," he says, "we were meant to see it." He means Liza and the pit.

  "The infant," I say, and Malcolm doesn't want to talk about it, but I insist. "He was sewn of a baby and a goat."

  "How do you know?" asks Malcolm and I shake my head and admit I don't, I was asking.

  "The fur of a faun," he says without elaboration, and won't say more. "But what was meant? What were we to learn?" he says.

  "Another person's death is a pity to a good man, but a resource to a bad man," I say without realizing it, and I hear my mother and her angels saying the words with me. Malcolm gives me a look I don't like. He switches the pony, which is still motionless, and a second foul outpouring comes from the pony's rump. The outpouring continues, from ordure to dark bile to intestines to the full contents of the sallow-eyed thin-legged pony's body, and I learn more than I ever wanted to about the anatomy and composition of diseased offal, and a sound I desire never to hear again emanates from the pony's lips. It paces down the big step to a field of heather with its blue-black bag of guts dragging behind it, scraping against the bottom of the cart.

  Again I want to comment on Malcolm's horse-buying ability. That is my thought. He bought a sick pony.

  "Can--can it all be pushed back in?" he asks. We look at the white pony with a bag of black intestines and stuff hanging out its rear. The white pony turns its sunken face, its eyes are low and its teeth are showing. A smell hits us.

  I feel nothing.

  "It can't, can it?" he whispers, and walks to the front of the cart. I close my eyes as tight as they go and feel nothing.

  "Tom," he says with a shard of rising desperation cutting through his voice. "He's still on his feet, Tom." Malcolm is too grand to feel despair. I won't allow it. But my eyes are closed and won't open. "Tom, he's alive still."

  The pony rears and black guts catch on split bracken and the pony bolts, and Malcolm chases as the skin stretches and catches and tears and goes wrong. My eyes are now open. Malcolm touches the scrabbling shoulders of the animal, and I watch the animal calm.

  "They say," Malcolm says, "that a true king can heal an animal with its touch."

  "Can't heal this," my mouth says.

  "A king could," Malcolm repeats.

  "Malcolm," and things are happening inside me outside my control, which I hate, "neither King Hardknot nor Henri the First could undo what's been done to that creature."

  And Malcolm's perfect ice-green eyes well up, and his knees give out and he kneels before his sick thin pony and he grits his teeth and weeps.

  "It can't be brought back from where it is," I tell him. His head nods. Knots form in his red neck, and two shiny patches of tears give his pale cheeks a shine.

  He takes in air to his lungs and rises and draws a good eight-inch shortblade. "God's given me this pony," he says, and my Frenchness desires to mock him and his horse-buying abilities, "given this to me, and I'm to understand why."

  "If you make an end to him, that'll be two deaths we've seen on our way," I say, and I'm still not all the way myself saying it. Something else says it.

  "Two deaths," he mutters, looking at the knife. "But it's a mere animal."

  "You can tell it's an animal because it's willing to work even though it's sick," I say, and feel a bit of a Fool.

  Malcolm's weeping face goes red. "It's got no name," he says. "I owe it that much, Tom. Let's name it before it dies."

  Grass passes under my feet quickly, and I don't understand why until I realize that I'm sprinting. I jump the stretched black offal, I am at Malcolm's side, I have taken the knife from him, and I plunge it into the neck of the pony. It turns its eyes to me, and I stab it again, and it's dead. The smell is considerable.

  "Ye dedn't--" he says, breaking into his unusual English, "ye dedn't let me name the theng. Blading Jaysus, Tom, ye dedn't--"

  "God asked us to kill him, Malcolm, not decorate him."

  * * *

  We take turns pulling the cart. It's not too bad, considering. Malcolm lapses again into speechlessness, brooding even when he's hauling the rope.

  See a campfire on the dark of the heath. A circle of stones, newly hauled. The buzz of late summer. Oatcakes, vanishing in half-moon teethmarked bites. A boy beside me so beautiful he is a red sun himself. Night.

  "Were we meant to put the gairl in the pit?" he whispers. I start, because he hasn't spoken all day.

  "I should've left her alone," I say. "Shouldn't have listened. Maybe that's the message. Don't listen to girls."

  "Wise words," Malcolm says, and chuckles. Malcolm needed something to chuckle at. I think up some jokes to make him laugh and don't say them.

  "Maybe it's got something to do with love," I say and don't mean it.

  "What do ye mean?" We've both been using English more, since we're here, although it's good we both have good French.

  "Dunno," I say, and intend to leave it at that, but Malcolm presses me on what I mean. "If--" I begin, "if I'd fallen in love with her I might have swept her away with me to the Fool School, hidde
n her in the woods, built her a bower or something, and--"

  "So ye dedn't fall in love with her?" he whispers. I shake my head. "You tried to rescue her mam just . . . just to do a good deed, then?"

  I nod.

  "Love for every man," Malcolm mutters, as if he's had a revelation. I like his little mystery slogans. "Maybe that's et," he adds. I begin to understand his English almost perfectly, and the accent seems to fade.

  "But maybe that isn't it," I say. "Maybe the world's nothing but a cold and unfair place, a place where death swings his blade and whoever's in the way goes down. Maybe it doesn't mean anything at all."

  "Do you believe that? Truly?" Malcolm says.

  I say I don't know.

  "This is what I believe," says Malcolm, and he says this:

  "Tom, we are, each one of us, a light in the darkness. We're a lighthouse, a bastion, and the Lord relies on each of us to shine where there es no light. I believe that each of us es capable of lighting the way for every other. I believe there's an absolute love, Tom, and I believe we're all reaching for it, good and bad. And ef one of us hasn't come so close yet, it's not for want of good, but for weakness. We're so weak, Tom, like babs in cradles, but we're reaching. Can you feel it?"

  I begin to say something discouraging, and think better of it. I say: "Reaching." That sounds okay.

  "Aye. Reaching for heaven, Tom. Who isn't?"

  "The guilty priest isn't," I say.

  "Guilty priest," he repeats. "Don't you hear et? Et's his guilt that brought the devil inside hem. He's weak, Tom, weaker than you or I. That's where the devil enters our hearts. That's how the priest messed his footing and taken his joy in wrongdoing. That's why Christ es there for us, Tom. To close the breach."

  I think about this. It's a compelling metaphor, the hole in your heart that the devil crawls through. I say: "If we were strong enough, we wouldn't need Christ." After I say it, I decide it was a bad thing to say.

  Malcolm looks at me through a plume of smoke and sparks. I believe that he's decided I've lost my faith once and for all, that I've given myself to pagan gods or something, that I'm no longer a disciple of the good church, and I imagine him standing and walking away through the darkness and I rise and run after him but no matter how fast I run mighty Malcolm is faster and I chase through leaf-moon darkness through the cutting bracken for burnt hours and now I've lost my way and the rustle of Malcolm's body through heath dies away and I'm lost in the darkness on a rise in the land and I overlook the empty lands of England, forgotten by God, and--but--Malcolm is speaking:

  "You're right, Tom," and I pull myself back to real life. "Yes, ef we were strong enough to resist, we'd have no need of Hem." Malcolm nods as he speaks. "But we're not that, don't you see? Ef we were strong enough, et'd be paradise here. Esn't that so? Christ's here for the weak, and that's all of us."

  I enjoy arguing, so I say: "And the Saracens? Who's here for them?"

  "Damn the blasted Saracens. Ef they haven't the wit to rise toward God, then I haven't a minute to dwell on them. Here's a drachm." He takes the waterskin and drains two broad mouthfuls.

  "Do you think that priest will come to God?" I ask.

  Malcolm swallows his ale and points a finger at me. "Ef he wants God, God's ready for hem," he says, and I'm not sure that's an answer.

  It's late, and I lie down beside the fire, and Malcolm climbs over me and presses close behind me, his chin on my shoulder, and I feel his breath and the smell of the ale, and I don't seem to mind it, and his arm wraps my chest, and we are together.

  Thick morning rises. A good waking at last. At last, I have slept well, I feel wonderful, I feel life returned to my soul. Malcolm smiles at me and we shake the fire out and I take first shift as the horse. This time, the not-talking is joyful, companionable, we strive leg-longly through hip-deep heather and I imagine we've worked out all the horrors of the past week. Have we? It feels that way. I don't hate myself for Liza, although gusts of guilt rise up now and then in my belly and I feel bad. But it was meant to happen, and I take comfort in that.

  Nothing much happens the next several days, so I won't speak of them. Each night Malcolm and I find ourselves entwined, and each morning there is goodness in the air.

  Treeburgh's a proper buyer's town. It's stone from rooftop to gutter to the good square-cobbled streets, there's a market not unlike my Papa's Tourum and Angers markets, dense three-tiered stacks of clotheslines, herded animals, an abbey, the whole experience. I am proud of Treeburgh. It makes me think better of England, and I consider that England isn't merely a place of peasantry, it's just got more room between the cities. I imagine what Bath will be like, and perhaps if Bath is bad, I'll be allowed to travel to Treeburgh once a fortnight for a night of japes.

  Here is hot seafish, burnt orange in flax oil. A net full of gooseberries, fresh from . . . somewhere. A manor garden, I imagine, although at least in Somerset the English seem to have invented a new style of garden where they don't put any effort into it, and it grows unattractively. They seem proud of their irregularity here.

  The road rises away from Treeburgh. I wish I had money, wish I had kept Papa's cut coppers, so I could have bought at the market--even in their unkempt backwaters, the English have created good leather and fresh spices and jams--but I am too proud to ask Malcolm for gifts other than food. I love him, but I am French, and throughout France, pride is stronger than love, always. I look back at Treeburgh and tell myself I will return.

  Both Malcolm and I can feel it. It's coming. The Fool School and its promise of the beginning of a life, an education, a profession. We're not to be boys forever. Men, and fools besides. The proud head of manhood rears, and we approach together. We will learn.

  The road leads on.

  Part Two

  There is nothing in France like Bath. Not anywhere, nowhere, it's quite unique. It smolders with unFrenchness. First thing you notice is how Roman it is--those bold stone forms of recommissioned Italianate row houses clustered together like white cauliflower warts built up on each other. If I didn't recognize the smell of heather and goldenrod that constitutes wild England by now, if my eyes were everything, I'd say Bath was in Italy, which I have never seen, but I visualize it looking just like this: White walls, everything in stone, but much older and grander than the long row of alleys that is Treeburgh. Bath goes a distance in every direction, and you can walk--with or without a clunking cart--for more than a mile in each direction without seeing the last of it.

  It'll take me some time to make Bath mine, I decide. That's how it is with a new city, either you make it yours, conquer it, or it becomes an old prison that you can't escape from. A city you've conquered will always yield to your will. That's the best part of living somewhere new, is breaking a place open and drinking the hidden recessed juices. A city is a pomegranate.

  Where is the Fool School? we ask, and men direct us to the oldest part of the Roman city.

  We have walked the way. From a distance, the sound of tambrels.

  Home.

  There's a certain feeling, a breath of warm fresh earth and cold wind that floods you when you begin a new experience. Walk with me and I'll tell you all about this one.

  First, see where the brick city cobbles end and then there is dirt. Ahead is a considerable rectangular building as big as the Parthenon. I've never seen so grand a building in my life, and I've spent nights in castles. The building is four stories, colonnaded, and emanates the smell of water. Around it is a ring of older square cobbles; Malcolm guides the cart, which has nearly cracked in two by now, onto the cobbles and we circumnavigate the temple of water, looking around for people to tell us where to go.

  The far end; a door is hidden behind a very odd exterior tapestry, a thoroughly faded picture of a trident, and I try not to glare at it, because it's going to remind me of my little Neptune affair every time I see it. The cloth moves aside at our hand and thick steam escapes; water's gathered on both sides of the doors, which are made from extremely
cheap wood. The wood is warped and soaked. I open it and water pours onto me like sweat.

  Bath.

  Inside are curving corridors slick with water. We've left the cart inside the entrance, hoping that the general lack of people in the Roman temple will prevent our stuff from getting thieved. We go the whole way around--it's not as big a building as I make it sound, although it's not small--and there's nobody.

  Where had the tambrels come from?

  Bursting outside, we leave the fetid damp behind and try to dry ourselves off. The day is summer-warm, and the sun dries us.

  A man. What a man. His nose is augmented by what I sincerely hope is a false balloon-nose, he beckons us, and his shoes--ah! To see this again!--are a rosy red and curly in the toe, looping like long fingernails.

  I hold up my pathetic orange ones with my feet and bounce my toe-curl at him. He beckons.

  "My dear young pimpernels, hello! You may address me as Nuncle, for that is how I'm addressed. You're enrolling?"

  "We are, et that," says Malcolm.

  I add a yessir helpfully.

  "A Scotsman," exclaims Nuncle with a smile at Malcolm. "I've never taught a Scot. This will be an adventure. Wooja tellus wharr yer from, miladdie?" he asks in an exaggeration of . . . well, it's not exactly like Malcolm's accent, but it rings of his accent.

  "Atholl," says Malcolm, and I wonder that it never occurred to me to ask where he was from. Whereas Nuncle found out right away. By asking. Huh.

  I ask: "Is that a false nose?" the same way.

  Nuncle's expression darkens and he pats the bulbous protrusion. It is not a false nose, I learn. Nuncle is dying of facial cancer. Perhaps asking is not always best. Nevertheless I feel the odd thrill of meeting someone I will be getting to know better. Nuncle teaches the tambrel--a small drum--and the recorder, we learn. I tell him mine is made of African acacia, and he laughs at me and asks whether that's what they told me when I bought it. I don't yet mention that my father and ancestors were once kingsfools.