Fool School

by James Comins

  "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.

  "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.

  "Now lift, lads," and we roll up our breeches and take our shoes off--I feel naked, and I don't even have my proper shirt, I'm wearing a spare tunic--and grapple with the barge and try not to ruin the bottom of it on the logs. With a terrible hiss, it slides away over the ford and we re-pile the barrels and continue.

  There is a tight bend in the river. We push.

  "Lads, here's where the Bourne meets the Dorset Afon," and I am thinking about other things, but yes, slightly larger river. Onward.

  But I think about this broad river, much more like our French rivers than the noodly narrow Bourne. This, I decide, this junction of rivers, this is the last point at which I can turn back. From here we hit Sarsbury Plain, a hundred miles of treeless heath, I can see it over the ridge, and when we begin this crossing through Sarum we won't be able to go back. Liza is back there. She's waiting for me. She trusted me. I'm all she has. No one else will come for her. This is my responsibility, to return to her and set her free and maybe I'm supposed to marry her, I'm not sure. Now is the time to speak to the bargeman and tell him I'm going to take the barge back to Poole because I have an important thing that I've forgotten to do. I wait for myself to say this out loud. Any second now I'll pipe up and tell him that there's something I need to do. I can be a hero to Liza.

  Any second.

  But maybe taking her out of the pit would kill her, the same way it killed her mother. Maybe she really did have the devil in her. Maybe--

  Any second now I'll tell the bargeman. There's plenty of time. There's--

  I realize the bargeman won't turn the barge around, even if I tell him. He's got deliveries to make.

  Maybe I can tell him to take me back after we get to Sarum.

  Maybe I have until then to dwell on it.

  The barge rolls on down the Afon. I roll with it.

  Every five seconds I tell myself this is the second I'm saying I'm going to go back. No, the next five seconds. My seconds spin, one over the other, like a line of tumbling jesters.

  I am juggling with her life.

  Here is Sarum, a fine-looking town, and I have gone mad, as the English insist on saying. Malcolm doesn't speak, but I do, only not out loud. I gibber into my own
mind about Liza. I wonder if this is how love feels. If I'm in love with Liza, then I hate love. My mind is consumed with guilt. Look, there I go, running across the stonecobbled riverfront of Sarum, leaving Malcolm and the puzzled bargeman behind, leaving my luggage behind, running straight to the nearest church. Yes. I have gone mad.

  Morning mass is ending. Good. I hear my feet slap the stone floor. Wild eyes scan the area full of the good people of Sarum--ah! This priest is free to hear my confession. Delirium coats my words, but the Sarum priest smiles and recognizes the symptoms of guilt and he takes me to a cell and I am crying in relief. Where am I? Is this real, or one of my imaginings? My hands shake. I come to, fade back to waking. Beneath me is a stool of polished dark wood, well-worn by a thousand thousand sinners' derrieres. Corkscrew rosemåling designs decorate the walls. Nicely-woven grasses cover the floor, and good stone under it; the church is built of a white stone, very smooth. Not marble. Limestone?

  "Ig am Fetter Etling," he says, and oh God his accent is completely different and even harder to understand than the guilty priest's or the bargeman's. I can pretend I understand him.

  "Father I've destroyed the life of a young lady," I say, then I realize I could be misunderstood and I blurt: "She's been punished for having the devil in her only she hasn't got the devil in her and I've put her in a pit and--" but none of it's coming out right.

  "Eicchht Ave Marias and four Our Fetters," he says, not even listening to me, and it's not right, he doesn't care, he doesn't understand, I take his floppy stole in my hand but I don't have any words that will express why he's so wrong. So, so, wrong. He pats my head avuncularly, and I hate him.

  The barge is waiting for me. Malcolm looks concerned. I wonder if he wishes we had talked on the journey, instead of clamming up. I sit on the barge and say eight Hail Maries and four Our Fathers without mistakes and I make believe that it's good enough. Now I have fulfilled my ecclesiastical duties, I tell myself. There are twenty miles before we must part ways with the bargeman. Malcolm has bought a pony. There's some sort of pony exchange system in Sarsbury Plain, he tells me, so it was cheaper than it might have been. That's good. The small cart rests upside-down on the flat of the barge, and before long we'll be walking ahead of it, I think. Both our weights would be too much for the pony.