Fool School (3 page)

"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.

I dwell on my cowardice and my prayer to Neptune and
I ask God for forgiveness and the ermine hat follows the boat like
a whipped dog and my mouth forms words automatically and I lose
count, which in my mind means I have to start over. This happens
more than once, and after more than an hour of my muttering Malcolm
says: "Aren't you done yet?"

"I lost count," I say, and Malcolm smiles.

Edward takes a red jewel on a gold chain and casts it
into the sea. My heart stops and even Malcolm looks struck.

"It's been two hundred eighty-three Our Fathers,"
Edward says quietly to me. "Begin the Hail Maries."

And I do.

I count on my fingers for the Hail Maries, but I
still have to get each word exactly right fifty times in a row. If
the words were French it would be easier. The ermine hat follows
the boat no matter how fast the man Edward rows. I continue to try
for fifty Hail Maries. I am up to thirty-seven this time when I
miss a word and start over.

After another hour or two, Malcolm says: "Why aim for
perfection like that?"

I don't have a clear answer, and I can't think up
something witty or profound. I just wonder why other people aren't
like me.

Time passes. I wait to be exorcised, but it doesn't
happen. Water ceases to fall, and I and Malcolm set to bailing the
gathered rainwater out of the basin of the boat with his hat, which
he has reluctantly retrieved from the wake of the longboat. I
imagine that the souls of the ermines must be puzzled, and I
conceive the ghosts of a dozen tiny weasel creatures stalking the
deck, peering at their sodden skins. In my mind I christen the
longboat the
Immaculate Dead Ermines
.