Fool School

By James Comins

Nothing ever goes right for Thomas de Motley. The teenage son of a drunken juggler, Tom aspires to be a kingsfool, the highest rank of jesters. First there's Fool School, however, and before he begins school, he'll need to cross the English Channel and travel a hundred miles to Northern England to get there. And his papa's spent all his money.

In the church of St. Martin's, Tom stumbles over one of the great secrets of history. A boy, Malcolm, his hair red as coals and his eyes green as glass, has been hidden away in coastal France. He wears royal purple and ermine, speaks little, watches faces, prowls, broods, remains nearly alone and incognito, and is protected by a great kingly man named Edward.

For his own reasons, Malcolm volunteers to join Tom at the Fool School.

A great crashing storm drives the ferry off course, but luckily Malcolm, Tom, and Edward have lowered a rowboat and muscle their way across the English Channel. There awaits Tom's new life as a student of tumbling and jongleuring. But Malcolm has purposes of his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Comins
• Release date: Oct 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310489969

James Comins

James Comins is the author of Fool School and Fool Askew, formerly available from Wayward Ink, "Notes Found Inside the Body of the Convict Clarence Skaggs," published in CrimeSpree Magazine #48, and other stories. He currently lives in New Orleans.

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Table of Contents

Part 1 Chapter 1 The docks at Cherbourg

Chapter 2 Malcolm

Chapter 3 England

Chapter 4 Dinner

Chapter 5 Dark of the Heath

Part 2 Chapter 6 Bath

Chapter 7 First Lesson

Chapter 8 Dag Returns

Part 3 Chapter 9 A Girl

Chapter 10 The Blue Knight

Chapter 11 The Jew

Chapter 12 The Fair

Published on SmashWords by James Comins

Copyright 2023 James Comins

This eBook may not be excerpted or used for commercial or noncommercial purposes without written permission of the author.

Wayward Ink Publishing

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Fool School Copyright ©2015 by James Comins

Cover Illustration by: Danny Phillips

Cover Graphics by: Jay’s Covers by Design

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EBook ISBN: 978-1-925222-42-5

IT’S THE year of our Lord 1040. Henri is king in France, the Vikings own Britain, and I’m leaving my life forever for a foreign education.

This is me, Tom Barliwine de Motley. I’m not so tall, sunken thin, with brown hair that goes in spirals and a mind that goes the same way. I wear green and honey-gold, the cloth too long and patched too often, and on my feet are curly red shoes. That’s how you tell fools from other professions. My destination is Bath, England, where for more than four hundred years all jongleurs north of Venice have been educated. Papa went there thirty years ago, Pépère seventy, and Grandpépère more than a century ago. Now it’s my turn.

I’m traveling with Papa. Come with me.

Grapes ripen on grids of staked vines, stems curling and berries fat. The ocean glisters on my left, and the horse has taken to sneezing every third trot as it makes its way up the coast toward Normandy. My papa slugs out of a wineskin and his face slowly reddens like a sunburn. I sit behind him in the shadow of his large hat, clutching his belt, less than thrilled to be on horseback. Large animals always seem ready to bite me. The horse sneezes again, and the miniature cart hiccups into the air and lands, shuffling my luggage.

Here, beyond the pear trees, is Cherbourg. We’ve come to the end of France. Through coastal warmth we reach the bustling pier overlooking the English Channel. Seagulls tumble above me in the early evening, just before sundown, calling for crumbs. Down my crooked French nose I watch as Papa unloads my two cases from the cart. They contain thousands of silver deniers’ worth of costumes and musical instruments and such. They belonged to my grandpépère, who was a kingsfool, the highest appointment of all jesters. Papa is not a kingsfool. He says he got thrown out of Paris for remarking on the king’s mistress, but old King Philip is a saint now and can’t have had a mistress, or they wouldn’t have let him be one. Papa lies.

Norman water washes beneath the dock. Silver whitecaps burst between the ferry’s low sides and the dock’s posts. The water is the blue of my mother’s courtesan eyes.

On the pier beside me my father sways, pointing a round ruddy nose into the air, arguing loudly with the wharfmaster, bellowing demands for cheaper passage and flashing fistfuls of old copper coins. Copper’s been worthless for almost a hundred years now, and Papa’s coins are cut to pieces for the metal anyway. The wharfmaster repeats a demand for real silver, and Papa snorts. Unsteadily, he balances a talon-sharp piece of copper coin on the end of his thumb, flicks it, and strikes the wharfmaster on the chin. Papa laughs like a seal on a rock. My papa.

The wharfmaster coldly turns from Papa and grasps my face between two sudden fingers.

Tell your father, he hisses, that you’ll get no passage on my ferry this evening. I’ve no place on my boat for a drunkard’s son.

And my papa throws up his lunch onto the pier in a tidy wine-purple pile, hurls two fistfuls of cut copper coins at me in an orange blizzard, and storms off unsteadily, wiping his cloud-colored beard.

Keeping my eyes up, watching the wharfmaster, I stoop and pick up the few pie-slice quart-deniers that haven’t slipped through the pier’s gaps, sweeping them out of the vomit and into a stack, wincing as more and more drop into the water.

Monsieur, my father is a good man, but he—

As the cold eyes of the wharfmaster meet mine, I stop speaking. I won’t pretend I’m not afraid. The big man draws a finger across his jaw where Papa’s coin struck him and a tiny line of red comes away.

A scar, the man says, showing me. I’ll have a sad bit of a scar from that. What have I done to earn myself a scar today, would you say, boy?

Nothing, sir.

A scar for my kindness. Get gone.

I stand, dumbstruck. My life is unraveling. Everything is nothing now. Papa’s given up, the Fool School waits across the English Channel, and I have no silver for passage. There’ll be no school without a ferry ride.

Look out over the sea toward the purple horizon with me. That’s where my life should be headed, and I can’t get there. Papa’s already made himself scarce, fading into the doorway of some bar. The quayside at Cherbourg is warm. Small unusual plants like palmer’s fronds grow wild.

I look down at the brown quartered discs in my hand, trying to burn them with my eyes. I hate them so much, and I hate Papa and want nothing of him or his poverty in my life. Overcome, I take a salty breath and throw the coins away, throw them outward from me with both hands, watch them skip across the water like stones. They catch the light as they spin beneath the surface, and then disappear, swallowed.

The wharfmaster’s eyes follow the old cut coins for a moment. I feel my cheeks flush hot red, feel pride rise up rudely behind my eyes. Then I turn and run.

In my secret mind I hope the wharfmaster will run after me, call out, pick me up and say he forgives me my father’s drunken sins and that he’ll take me across to England as an act of Christian charity. Maybe he’ll even say that I remind him of a son of his, one who died as a boy or who left to travel abroad in search of hope and never returned, maybe he’ll tell me that it was all a mix-up and Jean Motley isn’t my honest father but stole me from my cradle at birth, and the wharfmaster will embrace me and tell me to call him Papa now, and he’ll teach me the sailor’s and ferryman’s trades and I’ll grow old working the ferry—after a few years sailing the coasts of hot jungle lands abroad, of course, every boy must do that—and... but... but the wharfmaster is speaking with other men now and has forgotten me.

I walk the lane along rolling stacked-stone walls, keeping to the center cobbles between the cart ruts, smelling the filth of the human city. The odor is cut by cut flowers in sheaves projecting from the brown-brick buildings. I wonder whether a handful of silver coins will change the harborman’s mind. Perhaps I could steal the money, but I’m not optimistic. On the other hand, maybe the little cut on his chin will heal proper in a day or two, and I could pay him a full sou and he’ll take me and my trunks....

Oh, no. How could I? I turn around on my cloth heel and run back to the docks at full speed, certain they’ve been stolen. I always do this. Life’s important things spin away from me while I dwell on the impossible. I fly down the winding track streets, kicking up dust, falling more than running. I trip and rise and run again.

The wharfmaster has my trunks open. With a cobbled leather toe he pokes through my belongings, appraising them with his eyes. I imagine a merchant’s Moorish al-gebra scrolling through his mind. He becomes aware of my presence and shuts the case with his foot. Changing his mind, he opens it again.

Fine cloth, he says, pointing to my great-grandfather’s tumbler’s clothes from the duke’s court at Lyons. The motley is brocaded with real gold wire and trimmed in royal purple.

If you don’t know, there are no more than ten or twenty rolls of royal purple in the world at a time. In the world. They’re made from seashells that can only be harvested along the coast of North Afrique and Andalus. The color never fades, it only grows brighter with time. Only men in the court of a king may wear royal purple, but my great-grandfather had permission.

It belonged to my—

Take it out and hold it up to the light for me, the harborman says.

I lift my grandpépère Jacob Motley’s uniform from its place folded in the trunk and watch it unfold, blazing in a dozen bright colors against the early sunset. Cloth diamonds in red and gold, blazing purple trim, thick fine embroidery. Ocean water slops up—it’s high tide—and I hold the garment higher, keeping it above the froth.

The man lays a hand on the uniform. He pulls out a small knife and I almost die. I believe he’s going to cut up the golden cloth, but he turns the blade around and presses the pommel into my hand.

He wants me to cut up the cloth instead.

Take all the stitches out, he tells me.

Sir, this was made for my—

I’ll be taking the cloth for your passage. I’ll not be needing it as one garment.

I take the knife and sit.

Beautiful cloth, beautiful suit. It’s princely, and it almost fits. None of us is tall in my family, and Papa always said that I’d grow into Jacob’s suit and stay Jacob’s size, and when I was a kingsfool I’d wear it and outshine the king himself.

I begin shredding stitches, plucking them out like goose feathers and throwing the short threads onto the planks beside me. I tuck the scraps away from the reach of the wind. Can you believe this is my life? A wiser man would have sold the suit whole to a haberdasher for a thousand silver sous and returned to the ferryman with two or three of them and called himself rich.

I’m not a wise man. I’m an idiot boy. I’m the son of a jester who got himself thrown out of Paris for mocking King Philip for calling himself a saint. I live in oxcarts and penny-a-barrel bars. Here I am, shredding my clothes for a mule of a man. See me. Watch me picking at a duke’s tailor’s masterpiece.

And it’s over. All are swatches and a pile of high-end thread. I’ve destroyed Jacob Motley’s suit.

The wharfmaster takes the ball of cloth, removes a dozen purple scraps that had lately ringed the collar and hem, removes a few brocaded cloth-of-gold strips, and throws the rest back to me.

We leave at dawn, Monsieur Buffoon. Remove your trunks from my sight.

I drag my remaining belongings away from this man.

The town is a scattering of churches. They grow like untended wheat from Cherbourg’s back. My destination is the church of St. Martin, where I know I’ll be permitted a piece of floor and some straw to lie down on. Trying to keep my trunks from dragging through ruts full of ordure is hopeless, so I choose a few strategic crossings of the open sewers and once again make my way up the streets.

As I walk, something happens. I can feel the angels hovering over me, guiding me, their toes dancing on my forehead, glorious. It was my mother who taught me the ways of angels. If you listen to their voices, you can feel your heart touched by the Lord, she told me. And when that happens, you cannot be led astray. My mother is a visionary when she’s not at her job. I’m going to miss her when I’m away in England.

I walk. The cases scrape. Steeples are men standing on the roofs of churches, reaching. You can tell the type of church by the steeple. Above all else, gianting over the town, is the cathedral of St. Stephen. Not a place for a free nap. That’s a place for the wealthy to fill baskets with large coins and make themselves known. I am not wealthy, and therefore I go to a humbler house to pray and sleep.

You can always tell the Martinite friars because they have a lower steeple. It’s their way. Humility. The Dominicans, on the other hand, always aim to have the largest—larger even than St. Stephen’s steeple—as if they’re competing for the Virgin Mary’s affections.

Here’s the door to the church. Look up at it with me, I don’t like being alone. They paint it white, for purity, but in the way of things it’s mostly brown now. Someone should clean it.

Inside, though, it’s very clean indeed. It feels like there’s evaporated water on all the walls. The nave of the church is small, but the rectory and the friars’ cells are expansive, filling space in every direction. Halls and walls, white and clean.

I hear hushed voices, the kind with something important to say. My trunks scrape over the floor, leaving narrow trails of crap. The hushed voices stop, and a friar comes out of a cell.

God go with you, brother, I say politely.

May the pope’s blessings sit on your shoulders, little Monsieur, he says to me, pinching my cheek. I hate being patronized, but if you can play the poor pathetic cherub boy, some men of faith will be kinder to you.

Frére friar, may I sleep here? I ask.

Oui, yes, yes indeed, the friar says, touching my cheek again. I bat my eyelashes and smile. There is sometimes a price to free food and lodging. I will pay it tonight. I’m the son of a courtesan, after all.

Out from the friar’s room comes a boy in a nightshirt. I catch his eye, and he doesn’t smile. His face is bold, unexpected. Viking heritage, I think, with hair like dried blood and a man’s big head: long-necked, with a high forehead, even though he’s my age.

The friar twists and grabs the boy by his face and pushes him heavily back into the room. You cannot be seen, he hisses.

I’m confused. Why can’t the boy be seen? It can’t be the friar’s shame, I think; the friar is clearly shameless about his boys. I peek around the doorframe, and the boy peeks back at me from behind a thatch roof of red hair.

What’s your name? I ask the boy, but the friar hits me and I become silent.

You are forbidden from speaking, the friar tells me, and I obey. That’s what you do when a man of God commands you.

Now. You will follow me, say evensong, take your rest under God, and depart. You may not speak of what you’ve seen. Is that clear to you?

I open my mouth, close it quickly, nod.

The friar leads me away to an empty monk’s cell with a chamber pot and a bowl of not-quite-clear water. A crucifix hangs on the wall. There’s no bed and no straw. There’s nothing else.

I undress, wash, wait for the friar to come to me, but he doesn’t. I hear the hushed voices resume their muttering. I want to listen. Instead I dig a nightshirt out of the cases and go to evening services.

The worst part of Mass is the incense, hearing the censer chain clinking, thin stalks puffing thick Ceylon scents into your face as you worship. Couldn’t they use something else for smells, citrons or flowers, something that doesn’t burn your eyes? You can’t concentrate on the Lord when your eyes are itchy. I can’t, anyways.

Furthermore, I wish I spoke Latin so I’d know the words of the priests. Instead I hear a low litany of plainsong, like the sound of a baby babbling, ba bo bee bo baa, and in the high stone room I feel lifted, lifted by the scruff of the neck by the Holy Spirit. I feel purified.

I am walking back after two hours of services. My belly is sunken and my ribs create a small tent inside my tunic. I’m a child. I feel childhood on my shoulders, but no naïveté.

The friar is sitting on the floor of the cell. His tonsure has speckled shoots like spring flowers. Wordlessly I sit on his lap. He rests a florid hand on my thigh and kisses my face. Dead-drunk. I smell boiled wine on his breath, and he begins talking to me.

Ah, the soul of innocence, he murmurs. Red shoes.... You know, I remember my days as an actor, my son. I wore shoes not so different from these. Spreading morality through story to those who strive. It was brutal work—the holes in your soles, the peeling sunburns, the broken cartwheels, the rotten fruit, the sewing of the outfits—

I flinch involuntarily, remembering the wharfmaster’s knife. The priest doesn’t notice.

But for all that we might have intended to spread the Gospel, it was a Luciferean job, acting.

He reaches down and pulls off one of my red curly shoes and rubs my feet. I try to relax, but I don’t like anything touching my feet.

You know, Christ washed feet, he says, and dips fat fingers into the water bowl. To be of service, he moans to himself, pinching my toes, hurting me. Yes, tumbling, telling the Gospels, he repeats. Our company chief, Lord Caligula Petrovka Kingarthur Antiochus de Paree—his mother called him Jean Bureau of course—he’d whore his two wives out to the crew for half a month’s pay at a go. Everyone was broke all the time!

The friar laughs, and doesn’t notice my second big flinch. My mother is a courtesan.

Ah, but I saw in myself a higher calling, he says, rubbing my leg, smacking his lips sleepily. A life... without sin. And at last he passes out drunk, clunk.

I extricate myself from the monk and consider taking my things to another cell, but this friar would clearly birth a world of rage if he woke up in my cell and found I’d gone to another. It would be an indignity. These shameless friars get possessive of their boys. His snoring will keep me awake, though, so I stand and tiptoe to the Chapel of St. Mary in the corner of the church and kneel to say my prayers while the monk works the worst of the snore boogers out of his nose.

A slim shadow grows monstrous in the candlelight, appearing along the wall across Mary’s face, swaying as the blood-haired boy kneels beside me.

It’s Malcolm, he says in French.

I don’t speak, because the friar has forbidden me to.

He looks down at my shoes. I’ve put both back on. I’ve still got my pride. You’re a fool, he says.

I nod.

You’ve studied, then? he asks.

I shake my head. He gives me an amused look, as if he can’t believe I’m obeying the friar’s orders.

I’m told fools are considered the highest among the Third Estate, the strivers.

I don’t answer. I don’t know if this is true.

Would you like to know a secret? he asks me.

I look around and consider. This Malcolm seems very intense, full of braced fire. I find myself afraid of him, afraid of his fire. He’s not a normal child.

In the light of a dozen whale-oil candles—the Martinite friars are humble, but not cheap—I nod yes. I want to know Malcolm’s secret.

But a canon in dark hooded robes sweeps past, and Malcolm is gone.

I don’t see the strange blood-boy at all during the night. I try to sleep in the cell with the friar, but his snoring doesn’t stop. I stay awake for maybe an hour, maybe two, before choosing to step out a second time. It takes no time to see everything in the church. I pace, troubled, heightened, awaiting my journey tomorrow morning. I lie across a wooden pew that feels like a coffin.

RED LIGHT and white light stream down in morning rays across my face. For a moment I’m wondering whether it’s the French flag or the English flag, whether I’ve made it across the Channel and begun my schooling. But it’s the stained glass in the church of St. Martin’s, and it’s past dawn, and I’m not sure I haven’t missed the ferry.

My cases scratch grooves in the floor of the church. I run flat-out, pushing the white doors open and flying out down the narrow streets toward the wharf.

The ferry is touching off from the pier, a nearly flat block of wood carrying maybe two dozen people, bright-colored tunics and blouses and gowns. No purple, though. I let go of a case and wave to the wharfmaster as I cross the end of the cobbles to the planks, but he lifts his nose at me and doesn’t signal to the ferryman. I shout, "Arrête! Arrête!" but the ferry does not stop. I reach the edge of the pier with the handle of a trunk in each hand, and watch as the ferry, which is only a hundred feet from me, drifts away, propelled by a single large swishing oar.

I confront the harborman. I’ll need my cloth back, I say quickly. I feel panic rising, because I know that he’s as French as I am, and I know he isn’t going to give it back for anything.

It’s already been sold, he says, an immobile object.

Then I’ll need the money, I say.

The money was to pay for your passage, he says, and I knew it, I knew it, I knew it—he isn’t going to give me anything. If you can’t be bothered to be on the ferry when it departs....

I’m so angry I consider trying to tackle him, but I look up and he’s twice my height and built like a bricklayer, so I say, When will the ferry return?

And he looks down his nose and says, A fortnight.

Controlling my anger, I ask whether I’ll be permitted passage when it returns. He looks at me and nods imperceptibly, and I resign myself to two weeks at St. Martin’s, pleasing the friar. Sigh. I can do it. I won’t be defeated.

Feeling a weight like a cross on my back, I trudge back up the cobbles toward the church. I find myself disinclined to leave my trunks unattended in the cell and—

I stop, confronted.

Blood-flame hair and an improbably fine cloak. A cloak trimmed in purple. In my imagination the purple scraps are from my jester’s outfit, but they’re not.

Born in fire, Malcolm is here in the cobble city streets.

His eyes are green like glazier’s glass; he licks his lips.

Come with me.

His voice has something fierce inside of it. I drop the trunks as my shoulders shiver; then I pick them up again and follow him. For a moment, I felt something stir. I heard an angel speak.

Malcolm doesn’t help me carry the trunks. He doesn’t look back at me. He leads me up a flight of sawmill-smelling stairs, listening to the trunks scrape and bump. At the top of the stairs, in a big chair, waiting for us, is a man.

"What’s your name, garçon?" the man asks, sweeping an arm across his chair and throwing a cloak aside. This cloak, too, bears purple trim. It’s a day of purple.

My tongue is hiding in my mouth. It feels thick, like a swollen gland.

He’s a fool, says Malcolm.

Why do you say that? says the man. Oh, the shoes. He nods to himself. Yes, of course. Malcolm tells me you’re traveling to the Fool School.

I didn’t— I stutter, but then I realize it was a puzzle they’ve deduced. A boy in jester’s shoes who hasn’t yet studied, in Cherbourg at the crossing to England. Yessir, I say.

Malcolm will travel with you, the man says, and I look up at him and at Malcolm, whose smile is masked by his man’s face, and I find no words in my mouth.

How are you getting across? asks Malcolm.

There’s no ferry, I reply. It’s departed.

Haven’t they all, the man says vaguely. I’m sure we’ll find another way.

And in a burst of luck, I find all my troubles gone. It’s in the nature of a fool to be lucky. Or perhaps it’s my mother’s visionary blood. Perhaps it’s because I listened to the angels.

There are no firm memories of the next few hours. They’re an absent flurry. Images, sounds. Voices. The great man and Malcolm figure prominently in the void in my head, as well as the sound of my trunks clunking down steps and the sight of a bold Spanish hulk turning on the wind. The ship pulls in, and here is the wharfmaster cowering beside the cloaked man. Here are my trunks loaded onto the deck of the ship and laid through the hatch into the hold. Come to think of it, I never recovered my purple cloth or the coins from that wharfmaster, so I conceive that I mustn’t’ve mentioned their loss to anybody.

I am standing on the deck of a ship. Men move around me. Salt mist is in my mouth, and there are ropes like a nest of foreign snakes circling around my ankles. But it’s the boat’s rolling, the tipping over and straightening, the mama’s-baby rocking, that splits me open. It gives me the same discomfort as incense smoke in church. Worse, even. It gets in the way of my experiences. I wonder if all sailors begin their careers this sick.

I kneel at the edge and throw up. Am I my father? There’s no drink in me.

I’m immediately hungry, and that makes me sick again. I hate my body. It’s a cage for the soul. I should have been the son of a heretic Gnostic, meditating on a bird-flocked hill, pretending there’s no physical world around me.

Malcolm’s hand touches mine, and I follow him through the oak door in the house-shaped thing in the back of the rocking ship, into the captain’s quarters. A pillar and pulleys connecting the steering wheel to the rudder lurch and creak through the middle of the room. The gaps in the ceiling are blocked by what looks like a manticore skin, black spots on a cured yellow hide. The captain is here—it’s the navigator easing us away from Cherbourg, I