Fool School (7 page)

The ealdorman is flashing glances at his reeve. I
feel his pinprick discomfort, see him blink rapidly.

"But Svein was allowed to sail up the Thames--"
Edward seethes.

"Svein Forkbeard was a great man," the reeve says
quietly.

"Svein Forkbeard would have killed all of coastal
England if he were not met with our armies. He drank blood for
breakfast. The world is well rid of him. England is a Saxon
land."

"Em," the ealdorman says uncomfortably. "You know,
there
were
ah men in England before the um Germans
came."

Edward's eyes flick to him, he recognizes himself,
takes his own measure, and calms down.

"There were," he allows. "But the affair of the
Bishop of Worcester--"

"Yes, we've followed that closely, the Sarum bishop
speaks of it. He speaks of old King Harold--"

"Harold," Edward snarls, "was a gibbet of a king. The
men of England were prisoners of his belly. His crime against
Alfred was the mark of Satan's hand on earth."

"It was not a Dane who put Alfred's eyes out," says
the Danish reeve.

"No," Edward says, mollifed, "it was not. It was
England's own betrayers." His anger is so deep you can hardly hear
anything else.

"Er, is it cold in here? Perhaps another few logs on
the fire?" the ealdorman calls out to his servants. They scuttle
like furry insects between our chairs, and the fire is
heightened.

"England," says Edward, "needs a Saxon king."

"Is not the isle of England a place where the Welsh,
Saxons, Anglians, Picts and now the Danes have all settled in
peace?" says the reeve. "Let those who live in peace have
peace."

"As long as Æthelred was king, he asked for peace
from every one of his neighbors. He strove for peace. And what did
it get him?" asks Edward. "Plunder, invasion, Danish settlements
and bankruptcy. England must defend herself, and Harold--"

"Harold's gone now," the ealdorman's wife says.

"Yes," says Edward. "And the fiend left King Hardknot
with a defenseless kingdom."

"Edward?" interrupts Malcolm. "Might Tom and I have
at the kitchens for a bit of something? Messire ealdorman?"

"Yes, yes, of course,
bachgen
, off you go,"
says the ealdorman. "I bet the politics is as tedious for you as it
is for me," he adds under his breath.

And in this way Malcolm and I sneak out to the wooden
church.

A grove of cypress trees, something I wouldn't have
thought England even had--in my mind, the faded green columns that
are cypress trees are trees of Provence--create thick pillars of
shadow that pass around me like smoke. The moon is growing, this
part of the month, I think, but it's not large, just a white beech
leaf of a moon. If there are other people in this churchyard, they
are--

"Tom," says Liza, stepping into the bare moonlight
from her cypress-shadow cloak.

"Oh," I say, ineffectually. "Hi. God keep you."

"I'll prove it to you," she says, and I have no idea
what she means. She smells faintly of woodsmoke.

"Sure," I say, once again drifting away from
coherence. My mouth is my enemy.

Liza's ready to run out across the moors, but I must
introduce Malcolm, who wants to see the goat lady and . . .
something about sin? Honestly I don't even want to be here. I just
want to get to school, where I belong. These other people are
dragging me into these wild duck hunts and goose chases and
adventures of imbecility and I just want to stand at a king's side
and tell jokes. It's what I'm bred to do. It's how I was raised.
These people with their bravery and their ideas are going to kill
me. I'm going to wind up dead some day, I can just feel it.
I'm--

"Tom," says Malcolm. I shudder with deja vu.

"You're a snitch," Liza says before she can help
herself. "You've set me up--"

"Malcolm," I say with more confidence than I
feel--she is, after all, just a female--"this is Liza. It's her
mother--" I trail away.

"Gad's waird besoid ye," says Malcolm, and I realize
with a profound shock that it's the first thing in English I've
ever heard him say. He isn't English, I discover. He isn't French,
either. But his French is perfect, precise as mine or Papa's. How
strange that his English should be so sodden.

"Who is he?" Liza hisses to me.

"Malcolm's attending the Fool School with me," I say,
although I realize how improbable it sounds.

"Then where's his funny shoes?" Liza says under her
breath.

I think about this, and Malcolm clearly does, too.
"I'll peck them up when I git there," he says.

"He's a friend," I tell Liza, and she makes up her
mind and tells us both to follow her and leads the way into the
darkness.

Behind us, keeping a distance, is a pair of shuffling
clerical footsteps. I don't know why I don't say anything about
them. I don't say anything.

After such a heavy meal--roast beef and pork ribs
were plentiful in the ealdorman's house--I find myself droopy and
drowsy and feeling leaden. The sky is a wheel of stars, and the
soil is soft, not to say squelchy, beneath our feet. Malcolm is a
wolf, his eyes blazing starlight, and Liza is a prim wanderer
taking the barrens beneath a metaphorical aged walking stick,
confident. She is going to show us her mother. That's what she is
going to do.

The darkness closes over us. I feel the presence of
Death on this road, the constant dancer, the whirl of voices
silenced, the trailing edges of that black cloak, the bone silver
of his scythe. Beguiling, some call him, the beguiling friend of
the lost. Some seek Death, I'm told, follow, prance in his
footsteps, live inside his shadow, they dance across the moors,
laughing as the scythe sweeps and the bones crackle. You
can--yes--if you lift your nose high enough as you walk these
moors, you can smell headstones toppling, the smell of diffident
skeletons beneath, complacent, asleep. The bone mask of Death is
here with we three. My feet hurry to keep up with Liza.

A terrible sound. The snort of a dying calf, followed
by the mewling of a cat. The goat woman tries to sleep. She cannot.
In my mind I imagine the nails through her tongue waking her when
she snores. How long has she been kept in the pit?

Liza leaps. A slide of dirt, a surprised scream, then
a gutteral gasp and motherly weeping. I imagine that they are
forbidden from seeing each other. There is a smell of necrosis, of
dead flesh.

"Mum," sobs Liza, "we've come to get you out. We
have. We have."

Malcolm takes my hand, and we both have fear in our
blood.

"Help me get these off her," we hear Liza say, and we
walk to the lip of the pit.

"Do you feel it?" Malcolm asks me in French. "That
presence?"

"Death," I whisper, nodding.

"No," says Malcolm, and my head swings to look him in
the eye. "Not Death," he says. "Lucifer."

But I don't feel the presence of Lucifer, no fire, no
curling hairs. Only cold breath. I don't speak. A skeleton hand
presses over my mouth. I heed it.

None of us has the tools to remove the iron bands
from the sickly flesh of the woman. We try using our hands. I
desire to hear what the woman has to say to us. I take the nails in
her tongue out with my fingers. There is a voluminous stench.

She thrashes, and I hear a crack and it's one of her
fingers, which she has broken. Malcolm draws out the brass nails
like water from a well. The woman is blue in the skin, her veins
pulsing as blood leaks.

"She won't live without bandages," says Malcolm, and
I agree.

"Won't live," whispers Liza, a look of realization on
her face.

I pull up my tunic and wrap her hands in it. There is
still metal on her body, chains. We will likely not move her from
this spot tonight. I say so.

"Thain speak," Malcolm commands her, and I believe
that the very tides would heed his voice and cease now if he
commanded it. "Speak noo, woman. Confaiss ta me as ye would to a
priest. Be rid of thess infairnal presence."

"There ith nothing," the woman's dead, swollen voice
says out loud. "Nothing to confethhh."

"Be rid of it, woman!" commands Malcolm, and it
sounds so strange, these mannish words coming from a boy's
mouth.

"There was no devil," Liza declares, desperate,
breaking. "Tell them, mumma. Tell them it wasn't you. Tell
them."

There is no light in the woman's eyes, but she has
not yet died. This frightens me more than anything else that has
yet transpired.

"There ith a dewwil in thith town," and the woman's
words are deader than winter. Her eyes flare open and she points up
the brown scree of the pit to the top, where there is nothing.
"Him!" she cries with a last thimbleworth's of strength, her finger
shaking, and now she has bled out and died. A broken, swollen form
at the bottom of a pit.

A shadow rises over us, passing between the earth and
the moon. From the black shape comes a set of blazing teeth.

"Tom, lad," says the guilty priest, "I'd have hoped
more of you."

I find words in my mouth. "I wanted to hear her
story," I say.

"Understandable," says the priest, and Malcolm
shudders beside me. "Yes, I should think that a young sinner like
yourself would desire to make contact with the devil."

The priest believes that I was searching for sin. I
want him to understand that I--what? That I was going to take her
confession when he, the priest, would not? That I was doing
whatever Malcolm and Liza told me? That I felt compassion? That I
was going to rescue her?

"I didn't find the devil in the body of this woman,"
I say.

A hand with an appalling shape rises, casting a new
shadow over our eyes. Silhouetted against the Milky Way is a
humanculus like a sick doll.

"Your baby brother," the priest pronounces, and for a
moment I believe he is speaking to me and has gone insane. But no,
he speaks to the girl, Liza, who is pressed to her mother's body,
weeping. She looks up and acts blinded by the starlight.

"Yes," says the priest slowly, turning the humanculus
over and over in his hands like a windmill's blades. "Yes, I kept
him, on the uncommon chance that someone should ask to see him, or
that his blood should prove useful in medicine. Behold. Ecce
homo."

My body does not have access to motion, but the
warmth and touch that is Malcolm fades and he leaps and leaps like
a billygoat up to the top of the pit and beholds the infant man.
His hand reaches out and touches it.

"Hooves," comes his voice clearly.

I am shaken.

"So you see, Tom, the child and the woman who bore
him are no mere aberrations of childbirth. The child is half Satan.
There can be no error."

"You're wrong," Liza shouts, and bounds up from the
chains of the pit to the surface. Breaking through my fear, I
follow her. I want to protect her. I feel like no fool at all right
now. I have no fine words or music, only cowardice.

"His feet weren't hooved," Liza shouts into the night
wind. "I was there at my mumma's side all through the birth. It was
an easy birth, because he was so small." She's at the top and she
suddenly screams like all the souls of Hades, a scream of full,
surprised lungs. Breath seeps back into her and she says, "That's
not him at all. Don't you see, Tom? Malcolm? My brother's body was
small, like two eggs in a line, when he died. That's--that's
not--don't you see--he's full-grown--it's a different babby--"

The priest strikes her down. "Lies," he snarls. He
turns to me. "Do you see how the devil works his will?" he
says.

"I do," says Malcolm, and I see pain in his starlit
eyes.

The priest has ignored Malcolm. He is intent upon me.
I am the commander of this tithing-band. "Do you see, Tom?" he
asks, and I feel like I'm going blind. "The devil leapt from the
body down there, Tom. That's his way. He foresaw his darling's
death, and leapt."

I don't know what the priest means. I say so. "Do you
mean the devil's in me now?" I add.

"One of you." The priest's voice is very certain,
very calm. The shining teeth are smiling in the moonlight, and
that's all I can see. "Yes, the devil is certainly here among us, I
think," the priest says.

"I think so, too," says Malcolm, but I feel like he
means something different.

The priest's hand rests on Malcolm's shoulder. A
blaze of pain on the boy's perfect face. "Not here, I think," the
priest says. "Not in this one." Next the priest's hand grips my
face. The priest has big hands, bludgeon hands, reaching from my
temple to my neck. I feel violated, as if these hands are unclean.
"No," his voice drawls steadily, "no, Tom, for all your curiosity
you are not inhabited. There is strength in you," and never in my
entire life have I desired a compliment less, not ever. I want to
be weak now. "But you."

Liza shrieks as long fingers take her hair and pull
her face to the priest's hip. "You're something else altogether,
aren't you?"

"Tom! Get him off--" she cries.

"Oh yes, my dear, I heard you tempting these boys,
didn't I?"

"Tom!" she calls, and I am far away, even though I'm
standing right beside her. I know better than to contradict a
priest. My stomach is coal.

"It's the pit for you, asp-tongue," the priest tells
her, and I wait for Malcolm to stand up for Liza, which is what I
want to do, but Malcolm's face is one of sorrow, not bravery, and
it dawns on me that Malcolm is not going to make the priest let go
of her.

"Put a hand to her brow, Tom," the priest crows, and
against all my desires, I obey. Her brow is burning. "The fires,
Tom, feel the fires," and it's perfectly true, her brow is hot.
"Didn't you notice, Tom? Did you see the devil leap, Tom?"

I wish to God he'd stop saying my name every third
word, but God is not here between us. Only Death is here on the
hill.