by James Comins
"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.
"Ah! I'm glad you noticed, lad."
The captain is English, and speaks French very poorly. He folds his charts and rises from his chair.
"The Ethiopes call it a leopard. Bagged it swimming off the coast. Dashed brave creature. Lucky to catch it. Gave us a dashed tussle." He's chatty, bewildering. A Saxon. He rubs his whiskers. "Sometimes I like to think we claimed its pagan spirit and converted it before it visited the leopard afterlife. That the Holy Spirit prowls the boat in the shape of a big cat. Thought about renaming the ship after it, but it wouldn't be right to rename The Immaculate, of course." That must be the name of the boat. "If it'd been The Burgundian, I'd have done it!"
I decide I like the captain. He doesn't understand the Holy Spirit, but he likes It, and that's a good mark of a man.
"Hasn't got his sea legs," Malcolm says unexpectedly. He's right; I'm tipping over and I still feel dazed and sick. I hear a clunk and it's the anchor, a pronged block of red Scottish iron, rising past the nearest porthole. We're at sea.
"Easy to fix," the captain tells me. "Lie here until the seafoam gets under the skin." He puts his hand on a soiled-looking hammock hanging off the far wall. Gratefully I pull myself in, let a sheepskin blanket fall around
my legs, and drift back and forth. I hope the ride is not long. I hope the seafoam doesn't get under my skin. I'm glad I'm not a sailor.
* * *
Night. My eyes flutter open, and Malcolm is watching me. His eyes are strangely glassy, and for a second I think he's fallen asleep with his eyes open, like the Saracens do. But he blinks and stands and there's a half-eaten lamb leg in his hand.
"Hungry?" he says.
I shake my head.
"What's it mean to be a fool?" he asks.
"Dunno," I murmur, but this is not satisfactory to either of us. A serious question requires a satisfactory answer. "A fool--" I begin, and I swing my legs over the side of the hammock, and I land, and the captain is absolutely right, I have my sea legs. I can stand still now, and my nausea has subsided.
"A fool makes the invisible visible," I say, and it's better, but still not enough. I think more about it, and Malcolm stares at me. "We're surrounded by wisdom," I say, "but we can't see it. Priests are there to bring down the wisdom of heaven, which is one kind of wisdom, but there's also . . . the wisdom of men. It's a different kind of wisdom. It's the wisdom to say that . . ." I don't have a ready example, so I make one up. "To say that a king who takes mistresses and commits adultery shouldn't call himself a saint."
"Like David," says Malcolm.
"Who?"
"David, King of the Jews. He was a holy man, but he took the wife of one of his soldiers as a concubine, and God punished him for adultery," says Malcolm.
"That's exactly it, then," I say. "Who else other than a jester is able to go to the people and say that David wasn't as holy as he made himself out to be?"
Malcolm looks down at his hands, which are small but calloused. "If the people knew the truth, might they have decided not to follow him? Wouldn't the kingdom collapse without its king?"
"Why follow a king who isn't worthy of God's blessing?" I ask.
"Why indeed," says Malcolm.
The sky is stormy, and I'm concerned that we'll wreck or get blown asunder by a gale. Living inland, you take weather for granted, but here on the surface of the ocean, people drown every day. It's a way of life, out here, drowning.
Men hurry, doing rope things and sail things and wood things. I don't even know what any of this machinery is actually called. Boat stuff. The storm is coming--it looks like it's on top of us, but it isn't. It's further out, waiting, a black dog of drowning. The men have hair standing up on the backs of their necks, so you know it's going to be bad. You know the pagan gods are gathering their strength against us. Sailing through a storm is the same as defending your faith from pagans.
I peer over the side of the ship and imagine I can see green scaly shapes writhe beneath the swell. Shadows of great wyrms and serpents. Far below, far beneath the likes of mortal boys like me, perhaps the coils of Leviathan himself wait, snuffing gouts of seawater into nostrils like caves, providing beds for barnacles the size of dinner plates.
Malcolm takes my hand. I imagine he needs reassurance in the face of the coming fury, but I'm mistaken. He pulls me toward a longboat and my feet slip and I use his arm as a banister and pull him down, but there's iron in him and he turns it around and pulls me back up. His arms are ready for war.
"Practicing tumbling?" he says.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"England," he says, and pulls me to a cantilevered scaffolding hanging over the side, where the longboat is. There are barrels in the longboat; it swings, and the barrels clunk together. The sky is now very dark, and the sound of breaking waves rolls louder and louder. Men take ropes, and the longboat is stabilized. I see my trunks in the bottom of the boat, and with a risen horror I realize what's happening.
"Malcolm, we can't," I say.
He lets go of my hand and swings over the side of the ship into the longboat, dropping onto the bench. Sheets of rain follow him, as if he had called them down.
The man is there, no longer wearing his fine purple cloak. He leaps the side and lands, looking for all the world like a Pict berserker leaping into battle. A sailor picks me up by my skinny hips and hands me to the man. The hollow floor of the longboat ascends and I am in it.
In my fear I begin to imagine. I imagine that the Spanish men who spent a month of their lives building this eighteen-foot boat were hostile, disgruntled, hissy, perturbed. In my mind they have built into this longboat a secret mechanism that, upon exposure to water, begins to dismantle itself and disintegrate and come apart, because the men know that the people inside the boat deserve to die at sea, or perhaps these men merely wish to know that someone has died by their hands. They are cowards, and wish to murder, but they don't have the guts to do it in person, like the story of the gentle farmer who tries to coax his cow into a gallows to slaughter it and, in demonstrating to the cow his intentions, winds up hanging himself. These boatbuilders, they have spent years designing a self-destruct mechanism, they hid it inside two adjacent narrow boards disguised as a single solid board, and over time the ship will capsize--and--but the longboat hits the water, and my fantasy dissolves.
Rope loops slip away, up, pulled to the deck by men. I can't imagine how we'll ever get back to the top of the ship from down here, it seems so tall. I'm filthy wet from rain. It's like the ocean is falling on us. When I'm on land again, I will roll in dry dirt and curse all water.
The man is sitting like a bear in the prow. His arms take the oars and pull. We move. I desire to do the hard work for this man, whose hewn perfection-face deserves never to see hard work, but I haven't got arms like that. My bones would snap.
TANG. Behind the longboat, the great Spanish ship tips over, and I know its center has been chewed by one of the serpents beneath it, like a boy biting into a drippy meat pie, but the sails have been changed and the navigator has changed course to sail right behind us, a 90º turn. They're sailing back to Fr--no, as the winds pick up I see that the ship is sailing past the continent of Europe. There is an island, I know this, it can be seen from the coast of Brittany. The island of Jersey. They are sailing to Jersey, I believe. I don't know why. I don't understand why I'm in this slim rowboat.
Voice could never be heard over the storm. The fabric of the sky above us is cut through with celestial shears. Blue lightning is here, and I consider inventing a pagan prayer to say to Neptune, the god of this sort of thing, but I won't commit a crime against the Lord. Instead I remember The Immaculate, which is now upright and intact and sailing empty for Jersey, and I remember the Holy Spirit stalking the deck as a leopard, and my left hand grips my right hand as hard as I can and I say the Hail Mary, I say it again and again, then I stop and say the Our Father, then three Hail Maries, and I plunge like a pearl diver into the rosary. An ocean wave like nothing I have known pushes us into the sky, and the man pulls us over the edge with his oars, and we hit the water below so hard that my praying hands punch myself in the face, and I have forgotten where in the rings of little prayers I am, and I let go and I have lost my faith and this is what I shout:
"Neptune!" I have shouted. "God of water! Lord of the depths! Save us!"
Malcolm's voice has said no, rather strongly, and I have ignored him.
"Neptune! King of fish! Get us through this storm alive!"
My voice is strong, and I am proud of it. The man is not rowing. His face is buried in his hands. I don't know why.
"Neptune! Take us to England and take what you need from me!"
I'm not sure, but it feels like the worst of the storm is over. It's still raining.
"Please," is the last of my voice.
Something hits me in the chest, knocking me into the back of the boat like a boar on a lance. It's the man, who has shipped the oars and head-butted me.
"Ninny!" he screams, and I realize that for all his good French, he's also a Saxon like the captain, with those disconcertingly cute English expressions. "You damned ninny! Is your faith so weak? Couldn't you brave a little squall? Do you lose sight of the Lord so easily?" He slaps me. "You've
sworn yourself to a pagan god, you tomfool. We'll have to sacrifice and exorcise you before we touch land, or we're lost!"
Malcolm's eyes turn away from me, as if he's given up on me. And maybe he has.
I want to wait until the rain has passed before opening my trunk and choosing a sacrifice, but the man has spoken his mind, and I fear his hands and want his forgiveness and I unlatch the great box and grab the rest of my great-grandfather's motley, and I grasp it in two hands and shut the trunk and I had been hoping to repair and restore the rest of this jester's suit but now it will be a sacrifice to Poseidon and I hold the cloth above my head and shout, "For You, Neptune!" and the man grabs my wrist and I freeze and the man slaps my face over and over and Malcolm laughs out loud and the man stops hitting me.
"Why do you laugh?" the man asks Malcolm. My wrist is still held by his big hand.
"Don't you remember his occupation, Edward?" Malcolm says, and now I know the man's name. "You asked him to sacrifice, and he was prepared to throw away his suit for Neptune at your word."
"So?" asks the man Edward.
"He has more faith in the slap of a man's hand than in any god," says Malcolm. "Make yourself understood, Edward."
The man Edward rolls his eyes, takes my cloth and puts the diamonds back into my trunk. "We're sacrificing to the Lord, not to Neptune," he says through gritted teeth. "And besides, it's we who have to sacrifice on your behalf, as Christ did for us," he adds.
"Christ threw away his jester's clothes for you?" I ask, feigning surprise. It isn't funny enough.
Malcolm smiles, and this time the man Edward softens and smiles too. "How can you pray the rosary and not know the story of Christ, lad?"
"I don't speak Latin," I say, and Malcolm thinks this is the funniest thing he's ever heard.
"We have much to talk about," says Edward, "but first you'll need to recognize your sin. Seeing as we have no priest, I'll have to take your confession."
I tell the man called Edward that I've pledged myself to a pagan god, and he sentences me to thirty-five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Maries and I mumble prayers to myself and the man begins rowing. The rain is now patter, and Malcolm opens a leathern bag and takes out a particularly fine ermine hat and calls out, "Oh Lord, release him!" and throws the hat away and it floats alongside the longboat, and I want to reach over the side and give it back to him but that would defeat the purpose of him throwing it away.