Fool School (5 page)

I get my arms under his and pull him away from the
slashing nails. A line of red soaks through his socks and a shoe
pops off his foot and slides away. At first I think his whole foot
has gone with it.

"Submit, child of Satan!" his reedy voice calls. The
sound of munching and crunching. I'm not sure if she's eating the
breadroll or the shoe. Sobs. I'm not sure if they are cries of
victory or pain. I don't know anything.

Several implements lay nearby. I don't know what
they're for, other than a pitchfork which the priest hefts and
holds in front of him.

"Teach me to be careless," he mutters to himself.
"Now. Let's do this thing properly. Come forward, but for goodness
sakes stay behind me, Tom." His English is now almost
understandable to me.

We move forward toward the edge of the pit. The
priest thrusts the pitchfork at the scrabbling hands, and at last
they draw back and we approach.

She wears no clothes. Metal is bolted to her body
with locks and rivets. Her fingers don't bend, and brass nails
stick out from her fingertips at indeterminate lengths. A tongue,
grotesque, long and swollen, sticks out like a--well, it sticks out
from her mouth, held in place by a clot of brass needles. Her mouth
is held shut around it by springs, making her look like she's
always sticking her tongue out at you. A chain connects a collar of
spikes around her neck to a post hammered deep into the bottom of
the pit. Scratches surround the post, but don't dig very deep in.
Scars form a thousand red-pink crucifixes on her skin.

"Trying to get out again, were we?" the priest says.
"See, lad? The dirt and worm guts around her fingers? That's why we
had to hammer these in." He holds up a nine-inch brass nail that
matches the nubbins of claws that stick out from her fingertips.
"Bang!" He imitates a hammer. "Straight through the bone. Quite
sturdy, I assure you. Now. Speak what she has done."

"I--" I look down at the cowering, filthy woman. "I
don't know what she's done."

"Now don't be slow, boy, she's pledged herself to
Neptunus. Because she was afraid of a storm surge. Come come, speak
it and be quick."

I think back to what Edward said on the boat, that
the way to expiate sins was to make a sacrifice for others. This
woman is making a sacrifice for all of us. This woman is
Christ-like. That's why she was put here on Earth. She is absorbing
the sins of Poole. That's her purpose. It's very noble of her to
make that sacrifice. I better hurry up.

I say: "This woman committed the sin of--" and
something catches in my throat and I look at the raw eyes of the
woman and the words dry up like desert sands.

"The sin of idolatry!" declares the priest.
"Unforgivable!" And he has a lash, and he strikes the woman,
strikes her, and screams emerge from the punished beast, and he
strikes her, and he's driving my sins away, and he strikes her,
scratching her stomach and shoulders, and you can see the holy
healing, really you can, and I feel faint and I shout that I'm
healed, because I begin to feel the lashes on my own skin, it's
like when Papa would reach the heights of his drink and would fetch
a belt and strike me with it, and you feel the need for comfort
after pain, so you cling to the only human in arm's length, which
is the drunk man who has beaten you, and you cling to your Papa
like a monkey on his back, and his drink changes and he comforts
you, and something about this process makes you feel sick like
plague, and this woman's wounds are my wounds, and I beg the priest
to stop, but he strikes her, faster now, a glow of deviant joy on
his face, and her body quakes until she stops moving.

"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 otherwise."

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.