Christopher Moore - Fool

“No riddles, fool. I can’t feel my feet.”

“Why would you want to feel your feet? Is that more of the debauchery of the ruling class I hear so much about? So blessed are you with access to the flesh’s pleasures that you have to devise ingenious perversions to get your withered, inbred plumbing to come to attention—need to feel your feet and whip the stable boy with a dead rabbit to scratch your scurvy, libidinous itch, is it?”

“What are you on about, fool? I can’t feel my feet because there’s a great oaf sitting on my legs.”

“Oh. Quite right, sorry. Drool, lift off a bit, but don’t let him up.” I climbed from the bastard’s back and walked to the laundry doorway where he could see me. “What you want is property and title. Do you imagine that you will get it by begging?”

“The letter’s not begging.”

“You want your brother’s fortune. How much better would a letter from him convince your father of your worth?”

“He would never write such a letter, and besides, he does not play for favor, it is his already.”

“Then perhaps the problem is moving favor from Edgar to you. The right letter from him would do it. A letter wherein he confesses his impatience with waiting for his inheritance, and asks for your help in usurping your father.”

“You’re mad, fool. Edgar would never write such a letter.”

“I didn’t say he would. Do you have anything written in his hand?”

“I do, a letter of credit he was to grant to a wool merchant in Barking Upminster.”

“Do you, sweet bastard, know what a scriptorium is?”

“Aye, it’s a place in the monastery where they copy documents—bibles and such.”

“And so my accident of birth is the remedy of yours, for because I hadn’t even one parent to lay claim to me, I was brought up in a nunnery that had just such a scriptorium, where, yes, they taught a boy to copy documents, but for our darker purpose, they taught him to copy it in exactly the hand that he found on the page, and the one before that, and the one before that. Letter to letter, stroke for stroke, the same hand as a man long gone to the grave.”

“So you are a skilled forger? If you were raised in a nunnery how is it you are a fool and not a monk or a priest?”

“How is it that you, the son of an earl, must plead mercy from under the arse of an enormous nitwit? We’re all Fate’s bastards. Shall we compose a letter, Edmund?”

I’m sure I would have become a monk, but for the anchoress. The closest to court I would have come would have been praying for the forgiveness of some noble’s war crimes. Was I not reared for the monastic life from the moment Mother Basil found me squirming on the steps of the abbey at Dog Snogging [17] Snogging, to snog—kissing, making out, swapping spit, sucking face. on the Ouze?

I never knew my parents, but Mother Basil told me once that she thought my mother might have been a madwoman from the local village who had drowned in the river Ouze shortly after I appeared on the doorstep. If that were so, the abbess told me, then my mother had been touched by God (like the Natural) and so I was given to the abbey as God’s special child.

The nuns, most of whom were of noble birth, second and third daughters who could not find a noble husband, doted on me like a new puppy. So tiny was I that the abbess would carry me with her in her apron pocket, and thus I was given the name of Pocket. Little Pocket of Dog Snogging Abbey. I was much the novelty, the only male in that all-female world, and the nuns competed to see who might carry me in their apron pocket, although I do not remember it. Later, after I learned to walk, they would stand me on the table at mealtime and have me parade up and down waving my winky at them, a unique appendage in those feminine environs. I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on. Still, I always felt separate from the rest of them, a different creature, isolated.

I was allowed to sleep on the floor in the abbess’s chambers, as she had a woven rug given her by the bishop. On cold nights I was permitted to sleep under her covers to keep her feet warm, unless one of the other nuns had joined her for that purpose.

Mother Basil and I were constant companions, even after I grew out of her marsupial affection. I attended the masses and prayers with her every day from as long as I could remember. How I loved watching her shave every morning after sunup, stropping her razor on a leather strap and carefully scraping the blue-black whiskers from her face. She would show me how to shave the little spot under your nose, and how she pulled aside the skin on her neck, so as not to nick her Adam’s apple. But she was a stern mistress, and I had to pray every three hours like all the other nuns, as well as carry water for her bath, chop wood, scrub floors, work in the garden, as well as take lessons in maths, catechism, Latin and Greek, and calligraphy. By the time I was nine I could read and write three languages and recite The Lives of the Saints from memory. I lived to serve God and the nuns of Dog Snogging, hoping that one day I might be ordained as a priest myself.

And I might have, but then one day workmen came to the abbey, stonecutters and masons, and in a matter of days they had built a cell off of one of the abandoned passages in the rectory. We were going to have our very own anchorite, or in our case, anchoress. An acolyte so devoted to God that she would be walled up in a cell with only a small opening through which she would be passed food and water, and there she would spend the rest of her life, literally part of the church, praying and dispensing wisdom to the people of the village through her window until she was taken into the bosom of the Lord. Next to being martyred, it was the most holy act of devotion a person could perform.

Daily I crept out of Mother Basil’s quarters to check on the progress of the cell, hoping to somehow bask in the glory that would be bestowed upon the anchoress. But as the walls rose, I saw there was no window left to the outside, no place for the villagers to receive blessings, as was the custom.

“Our anchoress will be very special,” Mother Basil explained in her steady baritone voice. “So devout is she that she will only lay eyes on those who bring her food. She will not be distracted from her prayers for the king’s salvation.”

“She is the charge of the king?”

“No other,” said Mother Basil. The rest of us were bound by payment to pray for the forgiveness of the Earl of Sussex, who had slaughtered thousands of innocents in the last war with the Belgians and was bound to toast on the coals of Hell unless we could fulfill his penance, which had been pronounced by the Pope himself to be seven million Hail Marys per peasant. (Even with a dispensation and a half-price coupon purchased at Lourdes, the earl was getting no more than a thousand Hail Marys to the penny, so Dog Snogging was becoming a very rich monastery on his sins.) But our anchoress would answer for the sins of the king himself. He was said to have perpetrated some jolly-good wickedness, so her prayers must be very potent indeed.

“Please, Mother, please let me take food to the anchoress.”

“No one is to see or speak to her.”

“But someone has to take her food. Let me do it. I promise not to look.”

“I shall consult the Lord.”

I never saw the anchoress arrive. The rumor simply passed that she was in the abbey and the workmen had set the stones around her. Week’s went by with me begging the abbess to allow me the holy duty of feeding the anchoress, but it was not until one evening when Mother Basil needed to spend the night alone with young sister Mandy, praying in private for the forgiveness of what the abbess called a “Smashing Horny Weekender,” that I was allowed to attend to the anchoress.