Fool School (23 page)

A slow smile. He shakes his head and says, "D'ye ken
the one Edward?" he says. I ask what "ken" is. He blinks and says,
"Who essie?"

"I don't know."

"When y'ken--when ye understand who he es, and can
tell me, I'll say the secret."

I think deeply about Edward, the man who rowed us to
England, and I say he's a gentry Englishman without any Danish
blood, and Malcolm has a smile at my deductive mind and says,
"aye."

"There's another thing."

I scan the room; gouts of men and women stream down
aisles, some toward confession cells, some home. None pays two boys
with clunky brown shoes any mind. Another two days before I can
pick up my repaired shoes.

"The boy Ab'ly calls Demi?" I whisper. "I've
exchanged secrets with her. Only it went wrong."

"How?" he asks.

"She knows what we . . . do at night," I say.

Malcolm sputters and says, "She? Et's a--" He's
astonished, leans over, a smile of confusion spreads, he's bent
double, processing. "He's a her? Are you
sure
he wasn't
pulling 'em?" he asks.

I nod.

"Ded you tell . . . her . . . about us?"

I shake. "She knew," I say. "She's worldly."

"Not a lass but a woman, then. Et's a zany world," he
says, and I love his strange expressions.

"But look," I say. "She threatened to tell everyone
about us unless we do what she says. But it's acceptable, they
aren't difficult tasks."

I tell him about the notches, and he takes a deep
breath.

"It's don't lissen to gairls again, es et? You have
the oddest luck with women."

"Is it okay with you? She said she'll come talk with
us this evening."

He nods, and I say we have to get registered with the
hundreds, and we say so to Nuncle, and the headmaster leads us out
of the cathedral.

This time it's efficient. We pass the luthery, and I
want to go to peer in at the silver flute, but Nuncle keeps up a
forced march to a house. A clerk answers the door, and in a few
trices we are registered to the hundreds. We are both now official
residents of Bath and cannot commit crimes here anymore, not that
we ever could. I can't steal the silver flute, at least not if I
want to keep my neck. I sign my own name,
Th's Barliwynne de
Mottlie
, it looks right enough. This clerk has professional
pens with nibs shaped like ox horns bent together, they're made of
pressed tin and produce a very smooth line. Iron can't be shaped
small enough, the clerk tells me, and Malcolm nudges me and
whispers, "Any Scot could do et," and I say, "Prove it," and he
says, "I'm here to fool, not to werk the black," and I bet him a
farthing he can't, and OUCH Nuncle's flicked my ear and tells me
gambling isn't permitted at school.

As we follow the headmaster home, I ask whether I can
borrow a flute to practice on. Nuncle hardly notices my presence. I
see Hero's absence in the headmaster's eyes.

Yet again we aren't permitted to visit the town.
We're herded back to the school. Dag is very unsteady on his feet
from so much walking, his skin hasn't faded from yellow, and as the
twins take his elbows, helping him along, I see Nuncle lift his
eyes to the heavens, I see the prayer forming. The headmaster is a
man of his passions and piety.

The school rises up on its cliff--

Hero.

Hero is sitting crosslegged on the path to the
school. He is impossible to miss. Through what craft I don't know,
he's constructed a hat like a peacock's fantail out of brown reeds,
woven them somehow, and in the early afternoon light he has a halo
spreading up around his head. As we approach (he remains quite
motionless) I see two more woven fans. Thin Hero is an angel with
yellow straw wings. His slight chin is propped on a pair of fists,
and despair and disinterest mingle on the smooshed cheeks. An
angel, descended into the reeds and re-risen.

"You." Nuncle is a bent devil, and captures the slim
angel by an ear. "I've had plenty of you."

Hero cries out as his ear comes close to ripping off.
He stands, and the wings droop and fall--he had them clutched under
his arms. He says: "Hark!"

Nuncle blinks and gives him a look.

"The Pipkin-Queen comes." He points out over the
moor. "To the fore of her caravan walks the Thistle King, the Duke
of Daisies carries a bushel of flax upon his brow, the Baron
Bettony sings in the wind, and the Great Duchess is nestled in a
hollow inside a strawberry."

It is quite charming and oddly pathetic, this little
boy naming an invisible parade. I can see Nuncle's fury getting
quenched, one can almost hear the hissing as his forging sword of
anger lands in a blacksmith's water basin of cute.

"And the Prince," he goes on. "Fireflies light his
red hair, and his crown is made of dandelion leaves woven in a
circle. To his one hand is the Merry Water-Insect, in whose hands
the Scepter of Temperance is kept, and to his other, the Order of
the Cattail keeps procession in their cornflower cloaks."

Nuncle releases the ear. Hero continues his
fugue-poem.

"They are come on official business," says Hero, his
eyes far away. "It is the Splitting of the Seed, now, at the change
of the seasons, and a thousand feathers must be brought to
commemorate the occasion. Yes, they are being scattered by the
birds in their arrowheads, criscrossing the sky. The Pipkin-Queen
has enlisted the Great Froufraa to stand on the Mountain of the
Ages and fire the great invisible arrows that trail every broadhead
of geese when the seasons change, he consults his silver astrolabe,
this is how the geese know their direction as they course away
across the sky."

It is quite captivating.

"And the Greenman--"

Nuncle picks up Hero and carries him like an infant
into the Fool School. Through the spiral corridor we hear a
fantasia of story. In a place I didn't even know I had, I desire to
know the whole story, perhaps to see what Hero sees. My eyes have
developed the fabled scales of maturity, however, and this childish
story is lost to me. As Malcolm and I sit in the cafeteria, waiting
for the twins to heat up luncheon, I mourn the absence of my open
childish eyes. Then I remember my own childhood, sitting in wagons,
listening to my father fuck prostitutes, and it occurs to me I
never had a childhood of magical dreams. How unlikely, to mourn
something in yourself that never was and could never be.

"Go to your room," I hear in an ear. Malcolm
spins.

Wolf.

"Can it wait until after dinner?" Malcolm hisses.

Shake. A smug retreat.

Dag has found his room, his door is open for fresher
air. Perille's shawm is tootling his expressive piece for the fair
up in the music room. Hero and Nuncle are not around. The
headmaster's probably either listening to the story or whipping the
boy, I can't guess which.

I retire.

Seated atop my two trunks, holding a switch, is
Wolfweir.

Her smile is seething with Satanic malice. Her hair
is cut like a squire's, bowed brown around her face, forming a
smooth sphere. She wears a thin knife with an outsized handle over
her pied red and blue Saxon tunic. I realize that with her red and
blue hose, her cross-colored tunic, her sinister grin, her
interlaced fingers, she actually makes an ideal boy jester. Just as
priests romanticize us cherub-boys, so do some kings and nobles
fetishize the boy jester. All she needs to do is to get caught
shaving her unshavable face on a regular basis, maybe ball a
washcloth into her breeches, and she could pass for a very
desirable boy jester in any of a dozen creepy nobles' houses. It's
a sinister trick, but I see the devious forethought in it.

"Close the door, Malcolm. Latch it snugly."

It's so.

"And now. Lower your breeches. I want to see."

Malcolm and I share a look. Somehow this is far more
intense than the comfort of each other's company. I feel a very
unusual sense of exposure as I untie my breeches and see my Malcolm
do the same. I feel the still air. I feel gratitude that I took a
bath last night. I am exposed, and there is a girl in our room, and
she's looking at me, her eyes angled down, the Satanic smile a
constant. I shift my legs. Malcolm cracks his wide knuckles
one-handed, one finger at a time, snap snap snap snap. We are both
being observed.

The switch becomes the new focus as it swishes
unexpectedly. "I want," says Wolf vaguely, "you two to become
saints for me."

"What's that meant to mean?" says Malcolm, but a
blunt finger presses to Wolf's lips.

"To become a saint," she goes on in a low voice, her
eyes flicking up to ours intermittently, "a man must deny himself
the pleasures he desires to indulge in. Isn't that so?"

"Et es," says Malcolm, and her finger snaps up to her
lips a second time. He scowls. He likes talking and hates holding
himself in.

"And in place of the wanton pleasures," and the
switch leans forward and jostles my nethers provocatively, "saints
practice discipline and self-punishment."

A whiff of air, and a line of heat and fire is lashed
against the bottom of my nethers, it's far from enough to make me
buckle, but it burns my body and certainly makes me feel vulnerable
to Wolf's power.

"Now," she says, "show me what you do."

A slow bolt of lightning as we realize what's meant
to happen. We are two serpents facing, there is a switch like a
line of fire sending us together, there is contact and I kneel and
begin.

As I look up into Malcolm, his fire emanates, and
again I don't know if he isn't hooked by a devil, if we both are to
be tempted. Can it be adultery, two holy lovers intersected by this
devilish girl? I feel the boil of Malcolm's blood, the extremeness
that is nearing.

"Stop."

It is agony, the stopping. We are joined, Malcolm and
I. Our bodies are briefly one. And, at Wolfweir's cruel command, we
have split, and the taste fades.

Giggles bubble up from her. She is a goblin curled up
on top of my cases, her smiles absolute, her limbs a tangle. It
isn't that she's infinitely powerful, only God is thus, but her
power is so outsized compared to her boyish little form. She's
nearly as skinny as Hero, I can see her as a villain in Hero's
fairy story, wielding a nightshade baton, enchanting the flowers
with killing frost.

"I like it," she murmurs. "I like it a great deal. So
to make you saints, that is how it must be. I know what happens at
the end," and Malcolm says
I bet ye do
, and a finger flies
to her lips, and she strikes his bare legs with the switch, once,
twice. "And you mayn't go that far. You must deny each other. If
you are especially good in other matters, I may give you
permission. Until then," and she swings up to her full size and
lands on the floor, "you are my two saints. Is that clear?"

We nod, and she turns at the latched door and says,
"I expect to see no more notches. If any notches show up, I will be
taking your confession with THIS." She brandishes the sharp switch,
flips the door latch up and departs.

Malcolm and I take the measure of each other. We are
both awakened, if you understand. We face the door, and I kiss him,
and we feel considerable frustration, and we pull our breeches up
and lie down facing one another and say nothing. The warmth is
tense, like a viol string, and lasts.

"I hope t'others haird nothing of it," Malcolm tells
me.

"I can't hear anything when I'm out in the hall," I
say.

"But then how ded she know of us?"

It's a good question.

Here is the rest of the day. The rest of the day is
centered on the immense frustration, and all else is swept to one
side. Food is something we eat to take our minds off. I want to
practice recorder--I will go tomorrow to pick up my recorked
instrument--so I borrow one of the school recorders, but putting
the end of the recorder in my mouth--well. This is too heightened
an act for today. Wolf has really gotten her teeth into us.

By the end of the day, we are a pair of wrecks.
Neither of us can bear to be away from each others' sides, and we
have both contemplated all our possibilities: "
We could nae tell
her
." She'd find out, she's wily, she expects our frustration.
"
We could act as she expects us, but
--" You're not an actor,
Malcolm. Neither are you an experienced fool. I try: "
We could
allow her to reveal us
." I'll nae be known among those louts
as, as--"
As what you are
." Dinna put it so large as that,
would you? "
We could accept the lashes
." Aye. Like as may,
we will, before the end, but I've no love for the lash, I've seen
enough of et. And I've a mind she'll go farther to make us her
'saints.'

In the end, as night bears down on us, Malcolm is
shivering, his knees sliding past each other, and I have him tight
in my arms, it isn't precisely how Ab'ly rescued me, but then,
perhaps it is. Perhaps our nethers are God's way of permitting us
to expend our feelings in measured doses. I don't know.

Morning. Malcolm is warm beneath me, I've slept in my
clothes and feel a desire to have them washed, we've not had our
clothes taken to laundry, and I've only got four changes.

It's finally happened. Wolfweir scritches a finger at
us as we try to sit at our accustomed table, and I and Malcolm rise
and here is Hero, he looks groggy, I don't know why, but he looks
up at us and I need him to return to the passive, cheerful, hapless
Hero I am familiar with, so I tell him to come sit with us, we're
joining the older table, why don't you join us, his eyes fume but
he approaches, takes a pottage from the counter, glaring at the
twins in the kitchens, and the three of us join Perille, Dag and
Wolf.

The stone table is now nearly full. I visualize a
half-dozen young children, the ghosts of jesters who didn't survive
their educations, they had been sitting with us at the other table
and we have deserted them. But there's never been anyone at that
table but we three, and we've been consumed by the elder table.