by James Comins
A slow smile. He shakes his head and says, "D'ye ken the one Edward?" he says. I ask what "ken" is. He blinks and says, "Who essie?"
"I don't know."
"When y'ken--when ye understand who he es, and can tell me, I'll say the secret."
I think deeply about Edward, the man who rowed us to England, and I say he's a gentry Englishman without any Danish blood, and Malcolm has a smile at my deductive mind and says, "aye."
"There's another thing."
I scan the room; gouts of men and women stream down aisles, some toward confession cells, some home. None pays two boys with clunky brown shoes any mind. Another two days before I can pick up my repaired shoes.
"The boy Ab'ly calls Demi?" I whisper. "I've exchanged secrets with her. Only it went wrong."
"How?" he asks.
"She knows what we . . . do at night," I say.
Malcolm sputters and says, "She? Et's a--" He's astonished, leans over, a smile of confusion spreads, he's bent double, processing. "He's a her? Are you sure he wasn't pulling 'em?" he asks.
I nod.
"Ded you tell . . . her . . . about us?"
I shake. "She knew," I say. "She's worldly."
"Not a lass but a woman, then. Et's a zany world," he says, and I love his strange expressions.
"But look," I say. "She threatened to tell everyone about us unless we do what she says. But it's acceptable, they aren't difficult tasks."
I tell him about the notches, and he takes a deep breath.
"It's don't lissen to gairls again, es et? You have the oddest luck with women."
"Is it okay with you? She said she'll come talk with us this evening."
He nods, and I say we have to get registered with the hundreds, and we say so to Nuncle, and the headmaster leads us out of the cathedral.
This time it's efficient. We pass the luthery, and I want to go to peer in at the silver flute, but Nuncle keeps up a forced march to a house. A clerk answers the door, and in a few trices we are registered to the hundreds. We are both now official residents of Bath and cannot commit crimes here anymore, not that we ever could. I can't steal the silver flute, at least not if I want to keep my neck. I sign my own name, Th's Barliwynne de Mottlie, it looks right enough. This clerk has professional pens with nibs shaped like ox horns bent together, they're made of pressed tin and produce a very smooth line. Iron can't be shaped small enough, the clerk tells me, and Malcolm nudges me and whispers, "Any Scot could do et," and I say, "Prove it," and he says, "I'm here to fool, not to werk the black," and I bet him a farthing he can't, and OUCH Nuncle's flicked my ear and tells me gambling isn't permitted at school.
As we follow the headmaster home, I ask whether I can borrow a flute to practice on. Nuncle hardly notices my presence. I see Hero's absence in the headmaster's eyes.
Yet again we aren't permitted to visit the town. We're herded back to the school. Dag is very unsteady on his feet from so much walking, his skin hasn't faded from yellow, and as the twins take his elbows, helping him along, I see Nuncle lift his eyes to the heavens, I see the prayer forming. The headmaster is a man of his passions and piety.
The school rises up on its cliff--
Hero.
Hero is sitting crosslegged on the path to the school. He is impossible to miss. Through what craft I don't know, he's constructed a hat like a peacock's fantail out of brown reeds, woven them somehow, and in the early afternoon light he has a halo spreading up around his head. As we approach (he remains quite motionless) I see two more woven fans. Thin Hero is an angel with yellow straw wings. His slight chin is propped on a pair of fists, and despair and disinterest mingle on the smooshed cheeks. An angel, descended into the reeds and re-risen.
"You." Nuncle is a bent devil, and captures the slim angel by an ear. "I've had plenty of you."
Hero cries out as his ear comes close to ripping off. He stands, and the wings droop and fall--he had them clutched under his arms. He says: "Hark!"
Nuncle blinks and gives him a look.
"The Pipkin-Queen comes." He points out over the moor. "To the fore of her caravan walks the Thistle King, the Duke of Daisies carries a bushel of flax upon his brow, the Baron Bettony sings in the wind, and the Great Duchess is nestled in a hollow inside a strawberry."
It is quite charming and oddly pathetic, this little boy naming an invisible parade. I can see Nuncle's fury getting quenched, one can almost hear the hissing as his forging sword of anger lands in a blacksmith's water basin of cute.
"And the Prince," he goes on. "Fireflies light his red hair, and his crown is made of dandelion leaves woven in a circle. To his one hand is the Merry Water-Insect, in whose hands the Scepter of Temperance is kept, and to his other, the Order of the Cattail keeps procession in their cornflower cloaks."
Nuncle releases the ear. Hero continues his fugue-poem.
"They are come on official business," says Hero, his eyes far away. "It is the Splitting of the Seed, now, at the change of the seasons, and a thousand feathers must be brought to commemorate the occasion. Yes, they are being scattered by the birds in their arrowheads, criscrossing the sky. The Pipkin-Queen has enlisted the Great Froufraa to stand on the Mountain of the Ages and fire the great invisible arrows that trail every broadhead of geese when the seasons change, he consults his silver astrolabe, this is how the geese know their direction as they course away across the sky."
It is quite captivating.
"And the Greenman--"
Nuncle picks up Hero and carries him like an infant into the Fool School. Through the spiral corridor we hear a fantasia of story. In a place I didn't even know I had, I desire to know the whole story, perhaps to see what Hero sees. My eyes have developed the fabled scales of maturity, however, and this childish story is lost to me. As Malcolm and I sit in the cafeteria, waiting for the twins to heat up luncheon, I mourn the absence of my open childish eyes. Then I remember my own childhood, sitting in wagons, listening to my father fuck prostitutes, and it occurs to me I never had a childhood of magical dreams. How unlikely, to mourn something in yourself that never was and could never be.
"Go to your room," I hear in an ear. Malcolm spins.
Wolf.
"Can it wait until after dinner?" Malcolm hisses.
Shake. A smug retreat.
Dag has found his room, his door is open for fresher air. Perille's shawm is tootling his expressive piece for the fair up in the music room. Hero and Nuncle are not around. The headmaster's probably either listening to the story or whipping the boy, I can't guess which.
I retire.
Seated atop my two trunks, holding a switch, is Wolfweir.
Her smile is seething with Satanic malice. Her hair is cut like a squire's, bowed brown around her face, forming a smooth sphere. She wears a thin knife with an outsized handle over her pied red and blue Saxon tunic. I realize that with her red and blue hose, her cross-colored tunic, her sinister grin, her interlaced fingers, she actually makes an ideal boy jester. Just as priests romanticize us cherub-boys, so do some kings and nobles fetishize the boy jester. All she needs to do is to get caught shaving her unshavable face on a regular basis, maybe ball a washcloth into her breeches, and she could pass for a very desirable boy jester in any of a dozen creepy nobles' houses. It's a sinister trick, but I see the devious forethought in it.
"Close the door, Malcolm. Latch it snugly."
It's so.
"And now. Lower your breeches. I want to see."
Malcolm and I share a look. Somehow this is far more intense than the comfort of each other's company. I feel a very unusual sense of exposure as I untie my breeches and see my Malcolm do the same. I feel the still air. I feel gratitude that I took a bath last night. I am exposed, and there is a girl in our room, and she's looking at me, her eyes angled down, the Satanic smile a constant. I shift my legs. Malcolm cracks his wide knuckles one-handed, one finger at a time, snap snap snap snap. We are both being observed.
The switch becomes the new focus as
it swishes unexpectedly. "I want," says Wolf vaguely, "you two to become saints for me."
"What's that meant to mean?" says Malcolm, but a blunt finger presses to Wolf's lips.
"To become a saint," she goes on in a low voice, her eyes flicking up to ours intermittently, "a man must deny himself the pleasures he desires to indulge in. Isn't that so?"
"Et es," says Malcolm, and her finger snaps up to her lips a second time. He scowls. He likes talking and hates holding himself in.
"And in place of the wanton pleasures," and the switch leans forward and jostles my nethers provocatively, "saints practice discipline and self-punishment."
A whiff of air, and a line of heat and fire is lashed against the bottom of my nethers, it's far from enough to make me buckle, but it burns my body and certainly makes me feel vulnerable to Wolf's power.
"Now," she says, "show me what you do."
A slow bolt of lightning as we realize what's meant to happen. We are two serpents facing, there is a switch like a line of fire sending us together, there is contact and I kneel and begin.
As I look up into Malcolm, his fire emanates, and again I don't know if he isn't hooked by a devil, if we both are to be tempted. Can it be adultery, two holy lovers intersected by this devilish girl? I feel the boil of Malcolm's blood, the extremeness that is nearing.
"Stop."
It is agony, the stopping. We are joined, Malcolm and I. Our bodies are briefly one. And, at Wolfweir's cruel command, we have split, and the taste fades.
Giggles bubble up from her. She is a goblin curled up on top of my cases, her smiles absolute, her limbs a tangle. It isn't that she's infinitely powerful, only God is thus, but her power is so outsized compared to her boyish little form. She's nearly as skinny as Hero, I can see her as a villain in Hero's fairy story, wielding a nightshade baton, enchanting the flowers with killing frost.
"I like it," she murmurs. "I like it a great deal. So to make you saints, that is how it must be. I know what happens at the end," and Malcolm says I bet ye do, and a finger flies to her lips, and she strikes his bare legs with the switch, once, twice. "And you mayn't go that far. You must deny each other. If you are especially good in other matters, I may give you permission. Until then," and she swings up to her full size and lands on the floor, "you are my two saints. Is that clear?"
We nod, and she turns at the latched door and says, "I expect to see no more notches. If any notches show up, I will be taking your confession with THIS." She brandishes the sharp switch, flips the door latch up and departs.
Malcolm and I take the measure of each other. We are both awakened, if you understand. We face the door, and I kiss him, and we feel considerable frustration, and we pull our breeches up and lie down facing one another and say nothing. The warmth is tense, like a viol string, and lasts.
"I hope t'others haird nothing of it," Malcolm tells me.
"I can't hear anything when I'm out in the hall," I say.
"But then how ded she know of us?"
It's a good question.
Here is the rest of the day. The rest of the day is centered on the immense frustration, and all else is swept to one side. Food is something we eat to take our minds off. I want to practice recorder--I will go tomorrow to pick up my recorked instrument--so I borrow one of the school recorders, but putting the end of the recorder in my mouth--well. This is too heightened an act for today. Wolf has really gotten her teeth into us.
By the end of the day, we are a pair of wrecks. Neither of us can bear to be away from each others' sides, and we have both contemplated all our possibilities: "We could nae tell her." She'd find out, she's wily, she expects our frustration. "We could act as she expects us, but--" You're not an actor, Malcolm. Neither are you an experienced fool. I try: "We could allow her to reveal us." I'll nae be known among those louts as, as--"As what you are." Dinna put it so large as that, would you? "We could accept the lashes." Aye. Like as may, we will, before the end, but I've no love for the lash, I've seen enough of et. And I've a mind she'll go farther to make us her 'saints.'
In the end, as night bears down on us, Malcolm is shivering, his knees sliding past each other, and I have him tight in my arms, it isn't precisely how Ab'ly rescued me, but then, perhaps it is. Perhaps our nethers are God's way of permitting us to expend our feelings in measured doses. I don't know.
Morning. Malcolm is warm beneath me, I've slept in my clothes and feel a desire to have them washed, we've not had our clothes taken to laundry, and I've only got four changes.
It's finally happened. Wolfweir scritches a finger at us as we try to sit at our accustomed table, and I and Malcolm rise and here is Hero, he looks groggy, I don't know why, but he looks up at us and I need him to return to the passive, cheerful, hapless Hero I am familiar with, so I tell him to come sit with us, we're joining the older table, why don't you join us, his eyes fume but he approaches, takes a pottage from the counter, glaring at the twins in the kitchens, and the three of us join Perille, Dag and Wolf.
The stone table is now nearly full. I visualize a half-dozen young children, the ghosts of jesters who didn't survive their educations, they had been sitting with us at the other table and we have deserted them. But there's never been anyone at that table but we three, and we've been consumed by the elder table.
Perille decides to advise us about the fair.
"An English fair, this is very little like our French fairs," he tells me. "The dancing is wild, they simply go crazy. Even the nobles dance," and he's right, this is quite news. "English girls, well, they'll take you to the barn merely for being French, they're keen on the Continent, they see us as suave." Both of us saints squirm. "Don't look to buy too much, the sweets don't last and the durable goods don't last either, the English don't make them well. And they'll try and cheat you."
"I don't have money," I say.
"Then this is for you," he says, directing a finger at Malcolm. "You look like the buying type. Buy honey taffy if you want something sweet, it'll keep if you don't finish it. Avoid decking yourself out in some lordly get-up, it isn't seemly, sometimes Nuncle confiscates tings if he thinks you've been spending your tuition on baubles, he hates dat. Bring whatever instrument will impress people. Malcolm, you're not sharp on the oboe, I'm sorry, but it's true. Bring a drum instead, and stand behind me or Tom, it'll make it livelier, you can always keep a beat. You'll make a shilling an hour if you've caught a good crowd at the right time. Watch the flow of the people, enough people in one place and you get a river, dere are regular eddies. Play where they stand and shop and rest, not in between, it takes a particular attitude to coax coins where people are passing, it's more like poetry than prose, you must play like Nuncle, creating emotional figures dat people don't expect, no one will stay and listen but they'll give you a coin for the feeling. But for regular money, stand across from popular stalls, play reliable music, give dem something to hear while they shop. You make less from each person, but there will be many more silver quartered-farthings, these really add up. You can take them to a Jew if you want to trade for larger coins, Nuncle prefers it. Oh, and if you want pocket change," Perille has leaned in over the table, his body is a snake, "hide a half-dozen pennies in your breeches, but make sure when Nuncle takes your money, he gets enough to tink he's got all of it." Big wink.
"He takes our money, does he?" says Malcolm quietly.
"Every year, he makes sure he's got an advance on da next. Once he's counted up four marks, he'll let you keep de rest."
"What if we don't collect four marks every year?" I ask.
Perille laughs with his gapped teeth stuck out, his hair is combed into two half-domes. "We're the Fool School, there isn't another, north of Venetia. Everyone is pleased to see you, you'll see what I mean. The girls are especially pleased, wear tight motley. Have you got a formal motley, Tom?"
"It'd be the clothing in your trunk with the diamonds on," adds Dag, chortling, and I'm not sure if this is his little insult, or he's merely trying to be
humorous and failing.
I briefly explain about the wharfmaster and the hated knife.
"You said nothing about it," says Malcolm, considering me.
"It was all a flurry, and far too embarrassing. After all, what could be done?" I say.
Malcolm has no reply.
"Show me," says Perille. "I've never seen true purple, you must have had quite a pépère."
Before Ab'ly's class begins, I and Perille run to my room and I lift the lid of my trunk and show him the despairing bundle of cloth diamonds. He withdraws the legs, which are intact, and lays a finger on the frayed threads.
"The Bath tailor can't do it. She hasn't got the thread, nor the hand. There's a man in Brystow who can do it, but you'll need an invitation to de Earl of Wiltshire's estate. I'll see if I can find him for you, he's not too bad of a man."
I size up Perille, who seems to have changed considerably from our first meeting at the stairs. He is no longer a threat. I feel kinship with this extraordinary-looking boy with the sackful of hair.
"Thank you, Perille," I say, and he smacks my shoulder in friendship and we leave for acrobatics.
"Flexibility very important," says Ab'ly as we enter. "Move in all directions. Not just four directions! Six directions. Very big deal, jumping and squatting. Half of life should be jump, squat, jump, squat. Now. Jump!"
At his command we leap into the air. His long, maybe-Greek fingers tell us to keep jumping. I'm not a terrific jumper, although my Papa was world class, so I know it's possible for me to become one. The skinny usually have an advantage, which is why you so rarely get a big meal in the fooling profession. Food is looked down on. Hamlin looms in my mind as the consequence of too much meat. I have no gut, far from it, but my legs are short, too. Tall Perille has an advantage, and I see Hero is quite capable at jumping.