Fool School (36 page)

"Are--are they--?" Malcolm stutters.

"No more going up and down," she tells us. "Saints
don't get to grow in their breeches. Saints need to bow their
heads, don't they?"

We're both staring at the round wicker cages, shaped
like a small aubergine.

"Do we have to wear them the whole time?" I ask.

"Mm." Her smile came to us from hell. I can tell.

"Can we--" and she leads us away toward a secluded
spot and we unfasten the discreet two-layer flap for using the
midden and reveal ourselves to her. I feel swollen by the
everpresent switch circle, as if my man were full of pee leaking
into the skin.

The wicker cage slips over me and I feel crushed,
squashed, there's an oily feeling, and suddenly I'm crammed into
the cage and Wolf has secured it with a spiral binding. She has
jute twine and ties it in place. Now I won't be able to show off
for the girls.

"Will we--do you mean we should wear thes day to
night?" Malcolm whispers as she fastens him shut, too.

"Mhmm." She lets a finger touch our caged men. "This
is an ancient gypsy practice. They call it the Lace of Flowers."
From a fold of her baggy sleeve she withdraws some red and blue
thread and a thorn needle and threads a pattern around my man and
eggs. I can feel her touch very, very clearly. It's making me a
little crazy. Actually I feel myself going crazy because I'm
worried that the four acolytes will find me and she won't let me
run from them. "It keeps men chaste when the women travel away from
the caravan." Her nimble fingers tie a knot. "You can pee all you
want, but I'll know if you cut or untie this thread. So don't."

As she lifts my breeches back up over the swallow's
nest of wicker and thread that conceals my trapped man, I feel I
have no idea whether I'll be able to pee standing like a normal man
without getting piss everywhere. It's sure to spray.

And it's pinching! I adjust with my fingertips, but
she's giving me a bad look, and I'm scared of moving it around too
much. My legs do an involuntary jig and it feels . . . outlandish.
As if I had a heavy lump of clay hanging between my legs.

Wolfweir touches my chin and takes my hand and then
quickly gives me a big hug, pressing up all the way against me
without self-consciousness. I stare at her as if she were touched
with madness, but she smiles at me, not at all in a cruel way, and
hugs me again.

Malcolm is scowling at her. She gives him no more
than a tepid wave. I am Wolfweir's favorite. That's something I
have, for now.

"You two need to start fooling," she tells us, and
pats my shoulder. I reluctantly take out my recorder and hand
Malcolm the drum. We lean together, dazed, even though we received
a good night's sleep, and Wolf doesn't stay around, she sends us on
our way. A mellow tune, children's songs, both of us too
self-conscious to behave more foolishly than this. Today there are
no dense, impenetrable gatherings with coins flowing like metal
rivers. Instead we drift from place to place, noodling on the same
simple themes, impressing no one, and no one is wealthy today.
Malcolm stays close to me, he finds himself touching my arm, my
shoulder, and he shakes, jolts himself back to reality. His mouth
is perpetually open, he has no jests or insults, he is otherwise
occupied, occupied with the gypsy cage, the Lace of Flowers.

People notice us, we're famous, we're legends in our
own time, and I nudge Malcolm and tell him he should insult
someone. Instead he acts like he's got water in his ear, shaking
his head, practically vibrating.

"We'll not be much use to Robert of, of Jork, if
we're, if we're thus," he murmurs.

"I don't think she'll let us take them off," I say.
"After all, she spent all that time making them."

"I'll go to jelly, Tom, et takes all I have to stand
on my own feet."

"Let's take our mind off. I think we can find a cheap
chicken leg up ahead."

"Aye." Food takes his mind off. He always burns
through it so fast and desires more. Me, I find the sensation of a
packed belly to be distracting. Life is so full, who has time to
eat?

Ah, the vendors have set up a longtable on the tall
grass. A simply mammoth number of boisterous men have come to get
sweet oatcakes and morning pottage and biscuits and berries and
beer. The noise is big, wide, a Carthage sound, a barbarian sound.
"Rybbesdale," I hiss to Malcolm, and he shakes his head.

"I need food, Tom. Et's--"

"They'll be gone," I say. Diners rarely stay.

He punches my shoulder and begins tumping the drum. I
see the weariness in him, the gypsy cage is doing something big to
him, giving him feelings.

This is my masterpiece, I think to myself. I have
this piece practiced so bad, it's all carved into my mind, I know
every note, I'm ready for this, and the audience is exactly right.
And I think: everything will go wrong, something terrible will go
wrong, I can just tell, I'll break my recorder, I'll go clumsy and
drop it, I'll forget the song, the audience will hate it, the wife
of some ealdorman or other will dislike my song and have me hanged,
perhaps King Hardknot has come up and he'll find the words too
bawdy, or perhaps--yes--he's Danish, he'll find the words not bawdy
enough, he'll have his retainers bend their spears to my throat and
demand I invent dirtier words to amuse His Highness, in my mind I
try to find rhymes for "sheath," perhaps a "wreath" of curly hair,
ha, and Malcolm taps on my temple with his little mallet, and I
remember I'll not be singing any words at all, and I lift the
recorder to my mouth, I remember one of my Papa's lessons, "always
take a second before blowing the first note to pull yourself
together," and I do, I look through the haze at the several
expectant faces turned to us, nobody we know, and I see big men
with mountainous beards, beards like upturned forests, round scabby
noses like shingle-covered wells, the odd scar, old men with
valleys in their faces, and all of them wanting women.

I play.

Bouncing into the first notes, feeling Malcolm
awaken, feeling his drum become a steady, firm beat below me, I
play Papa's good version of "Riding By Rybbesdale." Faces light up,
the landscape of the table is welcoming. I keep feeling this funny
feeling that something is going impossibly wrong, and yet I permit
myself to become lost in the music; before the second verse they
are singing it with me, everyone here knows the words, the joy is
unanimous, what will go wrong here?--nothing's diminishing the
music, the voices bark, celebrate, they are filthy, happy men, and
I am leading them, and Malcolm is leading me. We are the young
kings of the table. Before I even realize it, the song is over, all
the dirty parts are sung, and the table erupts in cheerful
laughter. Ha'pennies are produced and the men ask for another.

"Bird on a Bough!" someone calls out.

Sigh. My Papa hates that song. I see no reason to
differ from him. I don't really want to play "Bird on a Bough,"
it's so pedestrian, it's a song of drunken oafs--

"Bird on a Bough!"

Well--

Humoring these perhaps pre-drunken morning men, I
feel I can manage to overcome my father's feelings on the matter.
After all, who is my drunk of a father to criticize drunken men?
Perhaps I need not agree with all my father's views. Let my father
believe himself to be a kingsfool, too high of a fellow to play low
songs for the likes of these; I will be the Fool of the Masses,
celebrating the oaf, the striver, the farmer Piers and his plough.
Yes, I choose to like these men. A friend of Piers, that's me.

Malcolm is really struggling as we get through a
less-well-rehearsed version of "Bird on a Bough." I can see him
failing. As the merry song closes, I shout: "Who will offer up a
good meal and a pair of mugs of second small to some famine-hungry
fools?" My Malcolm gives me a grateful look and men slide down
split-log benches, making room for us, and a pair of chicken
drumsticks and bowls of harvest stew with beans and parsnips are
handed down, followed by drinks. "To our hosts! May your health
always match your generosity!" I exclaim, one of Papa's lines, he'd
use it in response to both kindness and parsimoniousness.

A big beard faces us and the man behind it says, "Did
I ever tell you of the time I saw the White Stag?"

Me and Malcolm look at each other. We've never met
this man before. Malcolm is leaning into my shoulder in unmanaged
affection, the gypsy cage is turning him into a "
J't'aime
"
drunk, that's what my Papa calls it. Why do I dwell on his words
just now? So I can overcome them, triumph over them, invent my own
in their place. I must eject my Papa from my mind, I am not his
just now, I'm an inventor of new words.

"Nae, ye've not," says Malcolm through a mouthful of
beans.

"Didn't your mama teach you not to talk with food in
your mouth?" a man across the table says with sarcasm,
pretend-scolding.

"Me mama was eight foot at t'shoulder and belched
gaseous clouds upon us at the breaking of fast, ye professor of
iniquity," Malcolm shouts at the man, getting much sniggering in
response.

"The White Stag?" I say.

"Don't listen to Simon, his head's full of
yoo-nee-corns," another says to us.

"Nay, listen, if you would," says the bearded man
called Simon. "You know of the White Stag, do-you-not? Found
thither," he throws a hand at the bay. "In the forests of Dean,
never in the same spot twice. For 'tis said there's only one White
Stag, and it steps out from the land of Never-Grows-Old when
there's need for it. Its hide draws a man's sight away, so that it
cannot be seen unless it chooses, and when the hide is worn, the
one wearing it cannot be seen. Its hooves make no print, and it
leaves no trail. When it's caught, it can call on the good small
men to free it, but if you've laid no scratch on it they'll pay you
wishes for bargain. And I." The man plushes his beard, tousling it
from under the chin, then strokes it smooth. "I. I saw the one. I
saw it meself. For one moment, it was there, standing atop a bit o'
land in sight of me very eyes. I would have chased it but I had a
woman on the knee, and in my weak mind, that came first." He
chuckles heavily and pours beer into his mouth through a leonine
mustache. "And yet." His eyes unfocus, he stares out into the
morning fields. "Yet I wonder to meself, day to day, how life
should have been if I'd heeded the White Stag? What did it mean for
me to see? Was I meant to be a man of forests, of
mountains--mountains!--and not a poorman? Some days I wake and
there, before me, past the sunrise, I believe I see a different
land, a land where the sun never sets, where our eyes never need
close, a land where one may live and never die. And I shut my eyes,
and I can see it so clearly. So, so clearly. I see trees with
leaves as wide as this--" He spreads his hands. "--and water that
falls not from clouds but from a great hand that passes over the
sky, pouring from a fine silver ewer. And there's mists, just
beyond sight, such that once you've seen the Goodlands, you can
never leave, for you cannot find the way. And you heel to the good,
as a dog to its master, and never more do wrong in the world. And
all this the White Stag gave me. A visionary creature, it is.
Spectral. Should you ever chance to see it--" His brown eyes roll
to me. "Follow it," he whispers through cracked lips.

Some men are silent, and others become loud in their
mockery. Malcolm has his food at his lips, but is enchanted. I poke
him. He shivers.

"Ded you--? Es et?" he says.

The man Simon waves us away and laughs, but I see
distance and an unknowable sadness behind his eyes. We rise and
wave to the crowd, they beg us for another song, but I have a place
in my heart I need to examine.

A quarter mile from that scullery we sit on a rise
and observe the bay. Washer-women scrub and weep, scrub and weep,
uncommitted, fighting their hands in an endless losing fight. The
gulls comment, they can smell the nasty lye and keep up, looking
for open mussels or gullible children carrying bread.

Malcolm points his mallet across the bay at distant
Glamorgan. "Think-you that he's out there, doon the valleys of
Brython-Wales, stepping in and out of the land of Never-Grow-Old?"
he asks.

I feel cold, and I don't have special words to
contribute.

"Think-you?" Malcolm says again.

"I think the French have no magic in our souls," I
say, and Malcolm puts a hand on my knee, and I feel like
crying.

* * *

Now it's evening, and we've collected perhaps a
shilling six more. Papa never had so much money at once as we have
now, but then, we have nothing we need to spend it on, no
responsibilities.

Nothing except . . .

I put the flute out of my mind. I push it far away. I
cannot afford to spend a year's good pay on a silver flute. Silver
is brittle, it bends and dents and then there is no more sound.
This I tell myself. My obsession is unhealthy. I think instead of
saving the money for . . . for what? What new joys might life hold
for a boy with a pound coin? Could I buy a house, a horse--a good
horse--a suit of purple motley? What else is there but work? What
does Nuncle spend our money on? What sort of finery does he have
hidden away? Courtesans? Does he pay women for love because he has
a deformed nose? Has he never married? What is money for?

That beautiful flute . . . I have, what, eight
shillings or so? And several more from this Robert of Jork. Half is
Malcolm's by rights, but he knows my intermittent passions, he will
permit me my vanity . . .

"Malcolm," I say suddenly as we drift without notice
through the tapering remnants of the fair.

"Aye?"

"We can't let Nuncle have the money," I say.

"D'ye need it?" he says idly.