Fool School (9 page)

"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.

I take a look at the animal. His blunt nose has a
black cross, which seems very religious, and the rest of him is
white like good butter. He seems a sturdy pal, the pony, but I
wonder if he can really take us the way across Somerset to Bath.
His legs are so thin and white. Pale.

The bargeman hooks the pony up to the barge and it
follows along behind the Spanish horses. It seems very tired, but I
don't want to insult Malcolm's horse-buying skills. I wonder if
it's been exchanged along the Sarsbury Plain many times. Most of
the barge's barrels are gone, but a few remain.

A crossing of Roman roads built of the same white
stone as the Sarum church intersects a real stone bridge, clearly
built for legionnaires to travel quickly to Exeter from London.
There's a settlement here, nothing exciting, a few shops with pigs
hanging from hooks. At the stone bridge the bargeman lets us two
off and helps us set our luggage on the cart. We tether the horse
to the cart's iron rings and set off due north. It's straight
north, we're told, past fabled Stonehenge and four days' leisurely
ride to Treeburgh a few miles from Bath. The bargeman even wraps us
a stack of cakes and buys us a waterskin full of third small. I
find room in my heart to appreciate his gestures. He once was a
boy, too, and says so.

We walk, the two of us. Cross country, through the
weeds of England.

The cart is not well-made, and at once I find the
irregular clumping of the axle to be unbearable. There are strange
insects in the grasses, and I tie my hose tighter around my ankles
to keep them away. Trees in odd spinneys rise up from the rolling
hills. Tiny green cliffs block the pony's way, forcing constant
detours. Malcolm decides he will speak now. He's been making up his
mind about it for ages.

"Tom?" His voice is undercut by the whinge and clump
of the axle, and I suppress a wince.

"I went crazy back there, didn't I?" I say. It bursts
out through my throat, a wet cough.

"Tom. I've been thinking. What did God intend for us,
when he showed us what we saw?"

He speaks in French. The pony is making a bad sound
with its guts, and I try not to laugh.

"I was supposed to keep Liza out of the pit,
Malcolm," I say.

"No, Tom," he replies, tapping the pony's rump with a
small switch as the pony shies from a big step down. "No, there
wasn't a way. I've thought about it. There was no way."

"We could've gone back. At night. Taken the chains
off," I say.

"You think the priest would've left it unwatched?
He'd of found us guilty of devilry and had us in there, too."

"The ealdorman's wife--" I say.

"No, she was wily, but there was less to her than
meets the eye. She had no power but over her husband, and Edward
said--"

"I know what Edward said," I say morosely.

The cart is still stopped before the big step down.
We've left the cart alone while we talk, but now Malcolm stabilizes
the luggage and swats the pony with his switch. A foul outpouring
erupts from the nervous pony. It's worth a bit of a laugh for both
of us.

"Tom," he says, "we were meant to see it." He means
Liza and the pit.

"The infant," I say, and Malcolm doesn't want to talk
about it, but I insist. "He was sewn of a baby and a goat."

"How do you know?" asks Malcolm and I shake my head
and admit I don't, I was asking.

"The fur of a faun," he says without elaboration, and
won't say more. "But what was meant? What were we to learn?" he
says.

"Another person's death is a pity to a good man, but
a resource to a bad man," I say without realizing it, and I hear my
mother and her angels saying the words with me. Malcolm gives me a
look I don't like. He switches the pony, which is still motionless,
and a second foul outpouring comes from the pony's rump. The
outpouring continues, from ordure to dark bile to intestines to the
full contents of the sallow-eyed thin-legged pony's body, and I
learn more than I ever wanted to about the anatomy and composition
of diseased offal, and a sound I desire never to hear again
emanates from the pony's lips. It paces down the big step to a
field of heather with its blue-black bag of guts dragging behind
it, scraping against the bottom of the cart.

Again I want to comment on Malcolm's horse-buying
ability. That is my thought. He bought a sick pony.

"Can--can it all be pushed back in?" he asks. We look
at the white pony with a bag of black intestines and stuff hanging
out its rear. The white pony turns its sunken face, its eyes are
low and its teeth are showing. A smell hits us.

I feel nothing.

"It can't, can it?" he whispers, and walks to the
front of the cart. I close my eyes as tight as they go and feel
nothing.

"Tom," he says with a shard of rising desperation
cutting through his voice. "He's still on his feet, Tom." Malcolm
is too grand to feel despair. I won't allow it. But my eyes are
closed and won't open. "Tom, he's alive still."

The pony rears and black guts catch on split bracken
and the pony bolts, and Malcolm chases as the skin stretches and
catches and tears and goes wrong. My eyes are now open. Malcolm
touches the scrabbling shoulders of the animal, and I watch the
animal calm.

"They say," Malcolm says, "that a true king can heal
an animal with its touch."

"Can't heal this," my mouth says.

"A king could," Malcolm repeats.

"Malcolm," and things are happening inside me outside
my control, which I hate, "neither King Hardknot nor Henri the
First could undo what's been done to that creature."

And Malcolm's perfect ice-green eyes well up, and his
knees give out and he kneels before his sick thin pony and he grits
his teeth and weeps.

"It can't be brought back from where it is," I tell
him. His head nods. Knots form in his red neck, and two shiny
patches of tears give his pale cheeks a shine.

He takes in air to his lungs and rises and draws a
good eight-inch shortblade. "God's given me this pony," he says,
and my Frenchness desires to mock him and his horse-buying
abilities, "given this to me, and I'm to understand why."

"If you make an end to him, that'll be two deaths
we've seen on our way," I say, and I'm still not all the way myself
saying it. Something else says it.

"Two deaths," he mutters, looking at the knife. "But
it's a mere animal."

"You can tell it's an animal because it's willing to
work even though it's sick," I say, and feel a bit of a Fool.

Malcolm's weeping face goes red. "It's got no name,"
he says. "I owe it that much, Tom. Let's name it before it
dies."

Grass passes under my feet quickly, and I don't
understand why until I realize that I'm sprinting. I jump the
stretched black offal, I am at Malcolm's side, I have taken the
knife from him, and I plunge it into the neck of the pony. It turns
its eyes to me, and I stab it again, and it's dead. The smell is
considerable.

"Ye dedn't--" he says, breaking into his unusual
English, "ye dedn't let me name the theng. Blading Jaysus, Tom, ye
dedn't--"

"God asked us to kill him, Malcolm, not decorate
him."

* * *

We take turns pulling the cart. It's not too bad,
considering. Malcolm lapses again into speechlessness, brooding
even when he's hauling the rope.

See a campfire on the dark of the heath. A circle of
stones, newly hauled. The buzz of late summer. Oatcakes, vanishing
in half-moon teethmarked bites. A boy beside me so beautiful he is
a red sun himself. Night.

"Were we meant to put the gairl in the pit?" he
whispers. I start, because he hasn't spoken all day.

"I should've left her alone," I say. "Shouldn't have
listened. Maybe that's the message. Don't listen to girls."

"Wise words," Malcolm says, and chuckles. Malcolm
needed something to chuckle at. I think up some jokes to make him
laugh and don't say them.

"Maybe it's got something to do with love," I say and
don't mean it.

"What do ye mean?" We've both been using English
more, since we're here, although it's good we both have good
French.

"Dunno," I say, and intend to leave it at that, but
Malcolm presses me on what I mean. "If--" I begin, "if I'd fallen
in love with her I might have swept her away with me to the Fool
School, hidden her in the woods, built her a bower or something,
and--"

"So ye dedn't fall in love with her?" he whispers. I
shake my head. "You tried to rescue her mam just . . . just to do a
good deed, then?"

I nod.

"Love for every man," Malcolm mutters, as if he's had
a revelation. I like his little mystery slogans. "Maybe that's et,"
he adds. I begin to understand his English almost perfectly, and
the accent seems to fade.

"But maybe that isn't it," I say. "Maybe the world's
nothing but a cold and unfair place, a place where death swings his
blade and whoever's in the way goes down. Maybe it doesn't mean
anything at all."

"Do you believe that? Truly?" Malcolm says.