An Antic Disposition Read Free

evening after meals. Sometimes the novitiates would demonstrate their new-learned skills, sometimes one of us would perform, showing how to handle insults from the crowd or to cover for a dropped club.
    Father Gerald walked to the center of the room and waited for the hubbub to die down.
    “I can hear you whispering, Thomas,” he said quietly, and the boy clammed up immediately. “Better. Well, what shall it be tonight? Who will favor us with a performance?”
    He turned slowly, his staff pointing outward, sweeping the room.
    “I am in a permanent game of Blind Man’s Bluff,” he said. “With this humble piece of wood, I am dowsing for fools. Who shall the spirit of the First Fool choose?”
    “Father?” asked Thomas.
    “Yes, lad?”
    “There’s something unfair about your method,” said the boy.
    “Is there?” asked the priest. “I would have thought that random pointing by a blind man would be as fair a method as any that could be devised.”
    “But one person will never be picked this way,” said the boy.
    “And who is that?”
    “Yourself,” said Thomas. “Is that because you’ve never been a fool?”
    There were some sharp intakes of breath from the older fools in the room.
    “He’s in trouble now,” I muttered to Claudia.
    Even in the firelight, I could see the priest’s face darken.
    “Never … been … a fool?” he repeated slowly. “Is that what you think?”
    “You’ve never talked about it,” said the boy.
    “I’ve told my stories many times,” said the priest.
    “Not lately,” called out Brother Timothy, our juggling master and second in command.
    “Really?” exclaimed the priest. He considered for a moment. “I suppose it has been a while. Well, then, although I suspect that this is a ruse on the part of young Thomas to avoid being called upon, it is a ruse that I can respect.”
    “And it appeals to your vanity,” teased Sister Agatha, our seamstress and the keeper of our wardrobe.
    “Vanity have I none,” said the priest. “I am too old to sin. Let me think. What extraordinary events in my life would be of interest to you young people?”
    He stood still, pondering the question.
    “He’s playing the moment,” I whispered to Claudia. “He knows damn well what he’s going to tell us. Watch.”
    While he stood in thought, the staff appeared to slide upward through his gnarled hand with no perceptible assistance from the priest. When it reached the end, he held his palm out, and the staff traveled across it, still seemingly of its own volition, to the tip of his index finger. Then he flipped it once through the air and caught it on the bridge of his nose. The staff ceased all movement, as if it had taken root on that ancient face.
    You have no idea how hard it is to do that. But we do, and the hall was filled with the respectful whistling of the gathered fools and troubadours.
    Father Gerald smiled and let the staff topple back into his waiting hand. “I wasn’t always old,” he began.
    “No!”
    “Impossible!”
    “Don’t lie to the children!” and other such cries rang out from the older fools, the ones who knew him well enough to razz him.
    “I was a fool like yourselves,” he continued, ignoring them. “Trained at the Guildhall and sent out into the world on various missions. My last assignment prior to heading the Guild was as Chief Fool in Denmark.”
    I tensed suddenly. Claudia sensed it and turned toward me.
    “What is it?” she whispered in concern.
    “This is not a story I want to hear,” I whispered back.
    “Denmark,” repeated Father Gerald. “A country of fragments, of scattered islands and soggy peninsulas, of pieces of land jutting into the sea and pieces of sea jutting right back into the land. A country of fragmented peoples, bound together by ancestral conquest, their individual resentment of each other exceeded only by their collective disdain for the rest of the world. Condescending Sjællanders, contentious Skanians,