Fool School (2 page)

As I walk, something happens. I can feel the angels
hovering over me, guiding me, their toes dancing on my forehead,
glorious. It was my mother who taught me the ways of angels. If you
listen to their voices, you can feel your heart touched by the
Lord, she told me. And when that happens, you cannot be led astray.
My mother is a visionary when she's not at her job. I'm going to
miss her when I'm away in England.

I walk. The cases scrape. Steeples are men standing
on the roofs of churches, reaching. You can tell the type of church
by the steeple. Above all else, gianting over the town, is the
cathedral of St. Stephen. Not a place for a free nap. That's a
place for the wealthy to fill baskets with large coins and make
themselves known. I am not wealthy, and therefore I go to a humbler
house to pray and sleep.

You can always tell the Martinite friars because they
have a lower steeple. It's their way. Humility. The Dominicans, on
the other hand, always aim to have the largest, larger even than
St. Stephen's steeple, as if they're men competing for the Virgin
Mary's affections.

Here's the door to the church. Look up at it with me,
I don't like being alone. They paint it white, for purity, but in
the way of things it's mostly brown now. Someone should clean
it.

Inside, though, it's very clean indeed. It feels like
there's evaporated water on all the walls. The nave of the church
is small, but the rectory and the friars' cells are expansive,
filling space in every direction. Halls and walls, white and
clean.

I hear hushed voices, the kind with something
important to say. My trunks scrape over the floor, leaving narrow
trails of crap. The hushed voices stop, and a friar comes out of a
cell.

"God go with you, brother," I say politely.

"May the pope's blessings sit on your shoulders,
little Monsieur," he says to me, pinching my cheek. I hate being
patronized, but if you can play the poor pathetic cherub boy, some
men of faith will be kinder to you.

"
Frére
friar, may I sleep here?" I ask.

"
Oui
, yes, yes indeed," the friar says,
touching my cheek again. I bat my eyelashes and smile. There is
sometimes a price to free food and lodging. I will pay it tonight.
I'm the son of a courtesan, after all.

Out from the friar's room comes a boy in a
nightshirt. I catch his eye, and he doesn't smile. His face is
bold, unexpected. Viking heritage, I think, with hair like dried
blood and a man's big head: long-necked, with a high forehead, even
though he's my age.

The friar twists and grabs the boy by his face and
pushes him heavily back into the room. "You cannot be seen," he
hisses.

I'm confused. Why can't the boy be seen? It can't be
the friar's shame, I think; the friar is clearly shameless about
his boys. I peek around the doorframe, and the boy peeks back at me
from behind a thatch roof of red hair.

"What's your name?" I ask the boy, but the friar hits
me and I become silent.

"You are forbidden from speaking," the friar tells
me, and I obey. That's what you do when a man of God commands
you.

"Now. You will follow me, say evensong, take your
rest under God, and depart. You may not speak of what you've seen.
Is that clear to you?"

I open my mouth, then close it quickly and nod.

The friar leads me away to an empty monk's cell with
a chamber pot and a bowl of not-quite-clear water. A crucifix hangs
on the wall. There's no bed and no straw. There's nothing else.

I undress, wash, wait for the friar to come to me,
but he doesn't. I hear the hushed voices resume their muttering. I
want to listen. Instead I dig a nightshirt out of the cases and go
to evening services.

The worst part of Mass is the incense, hearing the
censer chain clinking, thin stalks puffing thick Ceylon scents into
your face as you worship. Couldn't they use something else for
smells, citrons or flowers or something else that doesn't burn your
eyes? You can't concentrate on the Lord when your eyes are itchy. I
can't, anyways.

Furthermore, I wish I spoke Latin so I'd know the
words of the priests. Instead I hear a low litany of plainsong,
like the sound of a baby babbling, ba bo bee bo baa, and in the
high stone room, I feel lifted, lifted by the scruff of the neck by
the Holy Spirit. I feel purified.

I am walking back after two hours of services. My
belly is sunken and my ribs create a small tent inside my tunic.
I'm a child. I feel childhood on my shoulders, but no naïvete.

The friar is sitting on the floor of the cell he gave
me. His tonsure has speckled shoots like spring flowers. Wordlessly
I sit on his lap and he rests a florid hand on my thigh and kisses
my face and he's dead-drunk and I smell boiled wine on his breath
and he begins talking to me.

"Ah, the soul of innocence," he murmurs. "Red shoes .
. . You know, I remember my days as an actor, my son. I wore shoes
not so different from these. Spreading morality through story to
those who strive. It was brutal work--the holes in your soles, the
peeling sunburns, the broken cartwheels, the rotten fruit, the
sewing of the outfits--"

I flinch involuntarily, remembering the wharfmaster's
knife. The priest doesn't notice.

"But for all that we might have intended to spread
the Gospel, it was a Luciferean job, acting."

He reaches down and pulls off one of my red curly
shoes and rubs my feet. I try to relax, but I don't like anything
touching my feet.

"You know, Christ washed feet," he says, and dips fat
fingers into the water bowl. "To be of service," he moans to
himself, pinching my toes, hurting me. "Yes, tumbling, telling the
Gospels," he repeats. "Our company chief, Lord Caligula Petrovka
Kingarthur Antiochus de Paree--his mother called him Jean Bureau of
course--he'd whore his two wives out to the crew for half a month's
pay at a go. Everyone was broke all the time!"

The friar laughs, and doesn't notice my second big
flinch. My mother is a courtesan.

"Ah, but I saw in myself a higher calling," he says,
rubbing my leg, smacking his lips sleepily. "A life . . . without
sin." And at last he passes out drunk, clunk.

I extricate myself from the monk and consider taking
my things to another cell, but this friar would clearly birth a
world of rage if he woke up in my cell and found I'd gone to
another. It would be an indignity. These shameless friars get
possessive of their boys. His snoring will keep me awake, though,
so I stand and tiptoe to the Chapel of St. Mary in the corner of
the church and kneel to say my prayers while the monk works the
worst of the snore boogers out of his nose.

A slim shadow grows monstrous in the candlelight,
appearing along the wall across Mary's face, swaying as the
bloodhaired boy kneels beside me.

"It's Malcolm," he says in French.

I don't speak, because the friar has forbidden me
to.

He looks down at my shoes. I've put both back on.
I've still got my pride. "You're a fool," he says.

I nod.

"You've studied, then?" he asks.

I shake my head. He gives me an amused look, like he
can't believe I'm obeying the friar's orders.

"I'm told fools are considered the highest among the
Third Estate, the strivers."

I don't answer. I don't know if this is true.

"Would you like to know a secret?" he asks me.

I look around and consider. This Malcolm seems very
intense, full of braced fire. I find myself afraid of him, afraid
of his fire. He's not a normal child.

In the light of a dozen whaleoil candles--the
Martinite friars are humble, but not cheap--I nod yes. I want to
know Malcolm's secret.

But a canon in dark hooded robes sweeps past and
Malcolm is gone.

I don't see the strange blood-boy at all during the
night. I try to sleep in the cell with the friar, but his snoring
doesn't stop. I stay awake for maybe an hour, maybe two, before
choosing to step out a second time. It takes no time to see
everything in the church. I pace, troubled, heightened, awaiting my
journey tomorrow morning. I lay across a wooden pew that feels like
a coffin.

* * *

Red light and white light stream down in morning rays
across my face. For a moment I'm wondering whether it's the French
flag or the English flag, whether I've made it across the Channel
and begun my schooling. But it's the stained glass in the church of
St. Martin's, and it's past dawn, and I'm not sure I haven't missed
the ferry.

My cases scratch grooves in the floor of the church.
I run flat-out, pushing the white doors open and flying out down
the narrow streets toward the wharf.

The ferry is touching off from the pier, a nearly
flat block of wood carrying maybe two dozen people, bright-colored
tunics and blouses and gowns. No purple, though. I let go of a case
and wave to the wharfmaster as I cross the end of the cobbles to
the planks, but he lifts his nose at me and doesn't signal to the
ferryman. I shout "
Arrête! Arrête
!" but the ferry does not
stop. I reach the edge of the pier with the handle of a trunk in
each hand and watch as the ferry, which is only a hundred feet from
me, drifts away, propelled by a single large swishing oar.

I confront the harborman. "I'll need my cloth back,"
I say quickly. I feel panic rising, because I know that he's as
French as I am, and I know he isn't going to give it back for
anything.

"It's already been sold," he says, an immobile
object.

"Then I'll need the money," I say.

"The money was to pay for your passage," he says, and
I knew it I knew it I knew it he isn't going to give me anything.
"If you can't be bothered to be on the ferry when it departs--" and
I'm so angry I consider trying to tackle him but I look up and he's
twice my height and built like a bricklayer and I say: "When will
the ferry return?" and he looks down his nose and says: "A
fortnight," and controlling my anger I ask whether I'll be
permitted passage when it returns and he looks at me and nods
imperceptibly and I resign myself to two weeks at St. Martin's,
pleasing the friar. Sigh. I can do it. I won't be defeated.

Feeling a weight like a cross on my back, I trudge
back up the cobbles toward the church. I find myself disinclined to
leave my trunks unattended in the cell and--

I stop, confronted.

Bloodflame hair and an improbably fine cloak. A cloak
trimmed in purple. In my imagination the purple scraps are from my
jester's outfit, but they're not.

Born in fire, Malcolm is here in the cobble city
streets.

His eyes are green like glazier's glass and he licks
his lips.

"Come with me."

His voice has something fierce inside of it. I drop
the trunks as my shoulders shiver, I pick them up again and follow
him. For a moment, I felt something stir. I heard an angel
speak.

Malcolm doesn't help me carry the trunks. He doesn't
look back at me. He leads me up a flight of sawmill-smelling
stairs, listening to the trunks scrape and bump. At the top of the
stairs, in a big chair waiting for us, is a man.

"What's your name,
garçon
?" the man says,
sweeping an arm across his chair and throwing a cloak aside. This
cloak, too, bears purple trim. It's a day of purple.

My tongue is hiding in my mouth. It feels thick, like
a swollen gland.

"He's a fool," says Malcolm.

"Why do you say that?" says the man. "Oh, the shoes."
He nods to himself. "Yes, of course. Malcolm tells me you're
traveling to the Fool School."

"I didn't--" I stutter, but then I realize it was a
puzzle they've deduced. A boy in jester's shoes who hasn't yet
studied, in Cherbourg at the crossing to England. "Yessir," I
say.

"Malcolm will travel with you," the man says, and I
look up at him and at Malcolm, whose smile is masked by his man's
face, and I find no words in my mouth.

"How are you getting across?" says Malcolm.

"There's no ferry," I reply. "It's departed."

"Haven't they all," the man says vaguely. "I'm sure
we'll find another way."

And in a burst of luck, I find all my troubles gone.
It's in the nature of a fool to be lucky. Or perhaps it's my
mother's visionary blood. Perhaps it's because I listened to the
angels.

There are no firm memories of the next few hours.
They're an absent flurry. Images, sounds. Voices. The great man and
Malcolm figure prominently in the void in my head, as well as the
sound of my trunks clunking down steps and the sight of a bold
Spanish hulk turning on the wind. The ship pulls in, and here is
the wharfmaster cowering beside the cloaked man. Here are my trunks
loaded onto the deck of the ship and laid through the hatch into
the hold. Come to think of it, I never recovered my purple cloth or
the coins from that wharfmaster, so I conceive that I mustn't've
mentioned their loss to anybody.

I am standing on the deck of a ship. Men move around
me. Salt mist is in my mouth, and there are ropes like a nest of
foreign snakes circling around my ankles. But it's the boat's
rolling, the tipping over and straightening, the mama's-baby
rocking, that splits me open. It gives me the same discomfort as
incense smoke in church. Worse. It gets in the way of my
experiences. I wonder if all sailors begin their careers this
sick--

I kneel at the edge and throw up. Am I my father?
There's no drink in me.

I'm immediately hungry and that makes me sick again.
I hate my body. It's a cage for the soul. I should have been the
son of a heretic Gnostic, meditating on a bird-flocked hill,
pretending there's no physical world around me.

Malcolm's hand touches mine, and I follow him through
the oak door in the house-shaped thing in back of the rocking ship,
into the captain's quarters. A pillar and pulleys connecting the
steering wheel to the rudder lurch and creak through the middle of
the room; the gaps in the ceiling are blocked by what looks like a
manticore skin, black spots on a cured yellow hide. The captain is
here--it's the navigator easing us away from Cherbourg, I
figure--and I point silently up at the spotted skin.