Fool School (8 page)

"You saw him, Tom. Say you saw him. You were a
witness, Tom. Say it."

"Tom!" Liza cries.

I know better than to contradict a priest.

"I saw him," and I am the greatest coward ever to
walk the earth.

As the priest and I wrangle Liza down into the black
pit, strip her, take the iron off her dead mother and lock it onto
her with the priest's special key, I say a very weak prayer to God
thanking him that I didn't know Liza very well.

I don't stay to watch the priest hammer brass nails
into the girl. As soon as the chains are locked I run, straight up
and away, and to my profound discomfort Malcolm runs too, beside
me, as if he's scared. Malcolm scared. The hanging gardens are
burning.

My head is down, and our feet tear up the dry summer
turf, and we both stumble into a sudden swamp, plunge in and follow
the twigs and rushes toward the sea, where the houses of Poole
wait. My face is fiery, and I wonder disconsolately whether the
devil is also in me now before realizing my face always burns when
I run. Ruddy father, ruddy son.

The splashing indicates we've run to the sea strand.
We're in a marsh not far from the town. Restlessly we follow the
beach to the wharf, and from there to the ealdorman's house. As
one, Malcolm and still-shirtless-I refuse separate beds from the
houseman and curl up in each other's arms, shaking.

To sleep.

* * *

The unfamiliar sound of seabirds. I believe myself to
be in Cherbourg, in the arms of the friar. We have spent the night
together.

"Up, lads, I say," comes from the doorway, and I
realize I heard those words just a moment ago, in a dream. The bed
is unfamiliar; it's squishy, and it's goose down, and it's
wonderful.

Malcolm opens his eyes and flings himself back,
upright, cracks himself on the headboard. "Did you see it?" he
gasps, slurring his French. Then he sees me.

"Did you see it?" he says again.

My head shakes no.

"I saw hem," he says, switching to his strange
English. "Saw hess face. Clear as water. All red. Even the
eyes."

I shudder. Now I am awake.

We are sitting around a table. Not the high table,
not for breaking our fast. It's a low table, in many different
ways. The kitchens are a doorway away. Servants ramble, doing
servant things. Normally we wouldn't be down here, but the
ealdorman's wife doesn't allow breakfast, and we're both starving.
Old mutton and good biscuit-rolls with butter. Fourth small beer,
which is terrible. Life with Papa spoiled me on good alcohol. I
will not become a drunkard, therefore I will drink bad beer that
tastes terrible and learn to hate it.

"Tell me about what you saw," I say to Malcolm. He
shakes his head.

Edward is in the doorway, looking majestic as always.
Strange how the dawn sublimates the night and its terrors. I feel
comfort in Edward's presence. I desire to reach Bath without ever
seeing the guilty priest again.

"Well, lads," Edward says. "We're alone now, for
practical purposes. Will you discourse on where you went last
night?"

Malcolm twitches and shakes his head and raises his
dark red eyebrows to me. Malcolm expects bravery from me. This
feels unusual. I speak:

"There's a priest in this town," I say, and suddenly
I am aware of the servants around me; they are not so lowly as to
be deaf and mute. But I choose to ignore them now. "He likes to
keep a woman in a pit, to beat."

Malcolm nods, and the fear roils off of him.

"This is the priest I sent you to," murmurs Edward
thoughtfully.

"Yes."

"On what grounds does he keep her?" asks Edward.

"He says the devil's in her," says Malcolm through a
biscuit.

"He had an infant--"

"
Don't speak of et
," Malcolm says.

Edward purses his lips. "Did you go to free the
priest's woman, then?" he asks.

"Didn't go well," I say.

Edward holds up something, and for a mind-numbing
moment my mind places the hooved child in his hands, but it's
merely my curly red shoes, torn and muddied and still sopping from
saltwater. "Running through the marshes at night," Edward says,
scolding.

"You'd be running yourself, ef you'd seen what we've
seen," Malcolm says.

"Edward--" I say, trying to form my thoughts.
"Could--you know the ealdorman of Poole," I say.

"I know him," Edward says.

"Could you--would the ealdorman have the priest
removed?" I ask. Malcolm looks hard at me, and I don't understand
why.

"No," says Edward, leaning against the wall. "No, I
don't think so."

"Not--" Frustration rises in my heart. In my heart, I
know that Liza did not deserve to go into the pit. "Not at
all?"

"No," says Edward. "A reeve, maybe. A stabler. Not a
priest. Too large a favor, too small a man. Not a priest. Now," and
I can feel the winds of the conversation changing, the wheel of
fortune turning away from poor Liza, "I've hired a barge to take
the two of you up the River Bourne and along Sarsbury Plain to
Sarum, and from there, toward Bath. You'll walk the last leg. I've
bought a cart flat for your luggage. You'll need to find a horse or
mule past Sarum. I'll not be coming with you."

"You'll nae be coming?" says Malcolm sharply.

"Other affairs," says Edward, and leaves it at
that.

The day passes.

Here is Bournemouth. Some furlongs from Poole, it's
nearly identical, the same tall thatched roofs, seabirds, the smell
of salt. There is the River Bourne, surprisingly narrow but deep, a
blue scar. There are always men with paddles here at the delta, I
learn, dredging the bottom, keeping it free of silt and debris.

A barge and its man. We are standing on the bank of
the River Bourne now. Look at these straight right-angled banks,
the marks of centuries of constant dredging. Without it,
flat-bottomed ships like the longboat might sail part of the ways
up the river and get stuck. There are curves in the Bourne where
we'll need to get out and push the barge through the tight
switchbacks and over shallow horse fords, the bargeman says. His
belly is injured somehow, I think, and it hangs loosely almost to
his knees, shaking. His face is bursting, jowlly, ugly, with purple
marks up and down it. Filthy hair clings to it. There is something
wrong with him. I wonder if it isn't leprosy, but he has all his
fingers, strong, like English sausage.

I don't want to ride over water ever again, but
Edward says I'm to do it, and I will do it for him.

"I'm for London," Edward tells Malcolm, and they
embrace. Edward gives Malcolm money, warns him about thieves and
highwaymen.

Next it's my turn.

"I expect you to stay true, lad. Keep your faith," he
tells me, and I yessir to him. "I place you in Malcolm's care.
You're his, so stay close to him and be his. You will?" and I
yessir to him. His face, when it speaks, is kingly, perfect. I will
be Malcolm's. But I think I knew that anyway. I bristle in the
French style at Edward's abrupt orders, but nonetheless I am
Malcolm's.

There is Edward, a signpost of beauty, waving as a
pair of Spanish mules trot briskly up the banks of the Bourne. We
have said goodbye. I didn't know Edward too well. There's no reason
for us to walk, the bargeman says, so Malcolm and I sit on the flat
of the barge, which is, after all, built for much greater weights
than two boys and their luggage and a few odd barrels.

And my mind has shot straight to Liza and settled on
her. I know I'm a coward, but I tell myself that I asked Edward to
have the priest removed, and that's the only help that was
available to her.

I say aloud to Malcolm: "Do you think I could have
convinced the ealdorman's wife to rescue . . . her?" I can't bring
myself to say Liza's name.

Malcolm moves his shoulders. He has decided not to
speak of it.

I leap off the barge and sprint flat-out back to
Poole, it takes hours, I burst into the ealdorman's wife's rooms
and fall to my knees and say to her that if my music touched her at
all, if she took joy in my entertainment, then there is a thing I
need doing, there is an evil priest and he must be removed and
there is a girl who is innocent, and after some cajoling the
ealdorman's wife agrees and we go to the church and she has the
priest taken to court, and she commands me to search the priest's
apartment for evidence, and there is the dried humanculus form of
the devil baby, and against my better judgment I lift it and take
it to the hundreds court and the hundredsman gathers everyone
around the devil baby and one takes out a wicked-looking knife and
cuts and the hooved legs drop away and the stitches become visible
and the hundredsman declares that the guilty priest has built the
baby out of a goat's hind legs and Goodwife So-and-So's poor child
who died of bad lights, and the hundredsman declares Liza innocent
and now they are putting the priest in the pit, and I stretch my
fingers toward God in the sky because finally, at last, I have done
right and justice is served, and the ealdorman's wife takes me to
London and has me knighted by King Hardknot.

Withy trees stroke the chains between the mules and
the barge, mussing my hair and bothering me in a charming way. The
sun is hot on my neck, and I wrap a fey-looking yellow liripipe
around the back of my shoulders where I always get sunburn. The
bargeman walks, I guess he doesn't trust the mules to keep apace
without leadership, and I understand this. We all need leadership
when we want to do right in the world. Nobody does God's work
without a prod behind him. Nobody chooses to act on their own.
We're all lazy lumps without a king. I wonder whether even King
Hardknot would have rescued--dear God, I can't even
think
her name anymore--that girl--had he been in my place. I failed . .
. that girl. That girl my age. Even mighty Malcolm ran. I wonder if
I have, in my mind, destroyed the image I had of Malcolm as a--what
did I think he was? I thought he was Apollo, Adonis. He's a boy. I
wonder where he came from.

The river is kept clear for several miles, so there's
not yet any trouble with the barge.

"Damned hard to make a crossing on horseback, this
near the sea," says the bargeman conversationally. "They don't
allow fords this near. One's to go miles around for a clean ford."
We don't really reply.

There aren't bridges, either, which surprises me--in
France there are always bridges. It's a point of pride. I imagine
the English don't take pride in their roads and rivers, but then I
think perhaps the rivers
are
the roads, and then I think
perhaps England is just poor, and in this way I can keep up a line
of internal dialogue to keep my mind away from that pit. I don't
want to think anymore. I want my mind amputated until I hear that
Liza has died and then I can forgive myself.

* * *

The evening fades to night. Listen to the river.
Hear, O muse, the sound of hooves on the dry roads, the sound of
Malcolm supping on best oatcakes and what passes for ale in
England. Hear the complete absence of French in the voices of
travelers, hear that gritty, guttural Germanic crap they call Saxon
English. See the foolish colors the English travelers wear. Regret,
O muse, that you have ever set foot in this terrible peasant
land.

I sleep.

Here is a dream. I dream. I swim, and fail, and will
drown, and without clear transitions one of my mistakes mutates
into another, as it is in dreams, and and now I break through,
starting, to the reality of the barge and I'm awake and and sweat
pours from my cheeks and and I have forgotten the dream, but I
slick sweat from my forehead and and wonder if I'm sick, but I
don't feel sick, just reeking of guilt and I realize I haven't
confessed any of my latest sins and and it's been--God, has it been
so many days since I attended mass? How long ago the church of
Cherbourg seems to me!--and and I look behind me and Liza is there,
dragged behind the barge on a chain around her neck, her face
bloated by water and brass pins. I look down and there is yet
another pin in my hand and and I--

Dawn on the Bourne. Malcolm stirs, as he has all
night--I've been watching him, it's better than my sick sleep--and
I taste best oatcakes and they're okay, a little dry perhaps,
luckily there's no mustard, which may or may not be made from mouse
turds--and Malcolm seems to decide against sleep and both of our
eyes have blue spotty bags under them, and Malcolm grabs me and
spins me around and I don't know what's going on, but he leans
against my back and I lean against his back and he takes my hand
and that's better.

I spend the day cleaning my curly red shoes in the
River Bourne, darning them with thick needles and thread, wishing I
had some way to dye them--after so much trouble and travail,
they're pale orange now. I consider trying to reconstruct the
remains of my great-grandfather's lovely suit, but I'm frightened
of losing cloth diamonds in the water and being unable to find
reams of the same fabric again. It's a very old style. I wonder if
kings would think it out of date, if there are fresher jester's
suits. I wonder what the Fool School will be like.

Here is a ford. Gravel's been piled up in a
deliberate way, from one bank to the other, evenly, so horses don't
stumble, and logs have been propped underwater, preventing the
gravel from drifting. It also prevents our barge from
advancing.

"Heaviest things off," the bargeman says, and sleepy
Malcolm and I haul barrels for a little less than an hour, pinching
our fingers repeatedly on the bowed slats of the barrels as we lift
them off the deck and hand them up to the bargeman, who takes them
with two hands. I'm amazed at his strength, and I can't stop
staring at his pendulous belly.