Christopher Moore - Fool

The longer the anchoress was in her chamber, the more she delighted in my conveying the most mundane details from the outside.

“Tell me of the weather today, Pocket. Tell me of the sky, and don’t skip a single cloud.”

“Well, the sky looked like someone was catapulting giant sheep into the frosty eye of God.”

“Fucking winter. Crows against the sky?”

“Aye, Thalia, like a vandal with quill and ink set loose to randomly punctuate the very dome of day.”

“Ah, well spoken, love, completely incoherent imagery.”

“Thank you, mistress.”

While about my chores and studies I tried to take note of every detail and construct metaphors in my head so I might paint word pictures for my anchoress, who depended on me to be her light and color.

My days seemed to begin at four when I came to Thalia’s chamber, and end at five, when the bell rang for vespers. Everything before was in preparation for that hour, and everything after, until sleep, was in sweet remembrance.

The anchoress taught me how to sing—not just the hymns and chants I had been singing from the time I was little, but the romantic songs of the troubadours. With simple, patient instruction, she taught me how to dance, juggle, and perform acrobatics, and all by verbal description—not once in those years had I laid eyes on the anchoress, or seen more than her partial profile at the arrow loop.

I grew older and fuzz sprouted on my cheek—my voice broke, making me sound as if a small goose was trapped in my gullet, honking for her supper. The nuns at Dog Snogging started to take notice of me as something other than their pet, for many were sent to the abbey when they were no older than I. They would flirt and ask me for a song, a poem, a story, the more bawdy the better, and the anchoress had taught me many of those. Where she had learned them, she would never say.

“Were you an entertainer before you became a nun?”

“No, Pocket. And I am not a nun.”

“But, perhaps your father—”

“No, my father was not a nun either.”

“I mean, was he an entertainer?”

“Sweet Pocket, you mustn’t ask about my life before I came here. What I am now, I have always been, and everything I am is here with you.”

“Sweet Thalia,” said I. “That is a fiery flagon of dragon toss.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You’re grinning, aren’t you?”

She held the candle close to the arrow loop, illuminating her wry smile. I laughed, and reached through the cross to touch her cheek. She sighed, took my hand and pressed it hard against her lips, then, in an instant, she had pushed my hand away and moved out of the light.

“Don’t hide,” said I. “Please don’t hide.”

“Fat lot of choice I have about whether I hide or not. I live in a bloody tomb.”

I didn’t know what to say. Never before had she complained about her choice to become the anchoress of Dog Snogging, even if other expressions of her faith seemed—well—abstract.

“I mean don’t hide from me. Let me see you.”

“You want to see? You want to see?”

I nodded.

“Give me your candles.”

She had me hand four lit candles through the arrow loop. Whenever I performed for her she had me set them in holders around the outer chamber so she could see me dance, or juggle, or do acrobatics, but never had she asked for more than one candle in her own chamber. She placed the candles around her chamber and for the first time I could see the stone pallet where she slept on a mattress of straw, her meager possessions laid out on a heavy table, and Thalia, standing there in a tattered linen frock.

“Look,” she said. She pulled her frock over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She looked younger than I had imagined, thin, but womanly—her face was that of a mischievous Madonna, as if carved by a sculptor inspired more by desire than the divine. Her hair was long and the color of buckskin, catching the candlelight as if a single ray of sunlight might make it explode in golden fire. I felt a heat rise in my face, and another kind of rise in my trousers. I was excited and confused and ashamed all at once, and I turned my back on the arrow loop and cried out.

“No!”

Suddenly, she was right behind me, and I felt her hand on my shoulder, then rubbing my neck.

“Pocket. Sweet Pocket, don’t. It’s all right.”

“I feel like the Devil and the Virgin are doing battle in my body. I didn’t know you were like that.”

“Like a woman, you mean?”

Her hand was warm and steady, kneading the muscles in my shoulder through the cross in the wall and I leaned into it. I wanted to turn and look, I wanted to run out of the chamber, I wanted to be asleep, or just waking—ashamed that the Devil had visited me in the night with a damp dream of temptation.

“You know me, Pocket. I’m your friend.”

“But you are the anchoress.”

“I’m Thalia, your friend, who loves you. Turn around, Pocket.”

And I did.

“Give me your hand,” said she.

And I did.

She put it on her body, and she put her hands on mine, and pressed against the cold stone. Through the cross in the wall, I discovered a new universe—of Thalia’s body, of my body, of love, of passion, of escape—and it was a damn sight better than bloody chants and juggling. When the bell rang for vespers we fell away from the cross, spent and gasping, and we began to laugh. Oh, and I had chipped a tooth.

“One for the Devil, then, love?” said Thalia.

When I arrived with the anchoress’s supper the next afternoon she was waiting with her face pressed nearly through the center of the arrow cross—she looked like one of the angel-faced gargoyles that flanked the main doors of Dog Snogging, except they always seemed to be weeping and she was grinning. “So, didn’t go to confession today, did you?”

I shuddered. “No, mum, I worked in the scriptorium most of the day.”

“Pocket, I think I would prefer you not call me mum, if it’s not too much to ask. Given the new level of our friendship it seems—oh, I don’t know—unsavory.”

“Yes, m—uh—mistress.”

“Mistress I can work with. Now, pass me my supper and see if you can fit your face in the opening the way that I have.”

Thalia’s cheekbones were wedged in the arrow loop, which was little wider than my hand.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I’d been finding abrasions on my arms and various bits all day from our adventure the night before.

“It’s not the flaying of St. Bart, but, yes, it stings a bit. You can’t confess what we did, or what we do, love? You know that, right?”

“Then am I going to have to go to hell?”

“Well—” She pulled back, rolled her eyes as if searching the ceiling for an answer. “—not alone. Give us our supper, lad, and get your face in the loop, I have something to teach you.”

And so it went for weeks and months. I went from being a mediocre acrobat to a talented contortionist, and Thalia seemed to regain some of the life that I had thought sure she’d lost. She was not holy in the sense that the priests and nuns taught, but she was full of spirit and a different kind of reverence. More concerned with this life, this moment, than an eternity beyond the reach of the cross in the wall. I adored her, and I wanted her to be out of the chamber, in the world, with me, and I began to plan her escape. But I was but a boy, and she was bloody barking, so it was not meant to be.

“I’ve stolen a chisel from a mason who passed by on his way to work on the minster at York. It will take some time, but if you work on a single stone, you might escape in summer.”

“You are my escape, Pocket. The only escape I can ever allow myself.”