Fool (english) Read Free Page A

Drool, slapping his thigh. “Did you hear, Mary? Heinous fuckery afoot. Ain’t that the dog’s bollocks?”
    “Oh yeah, the dog’s bloody B. it is, love. If the saints are smilin’ on us, maybe one of them nobles will hang your wee mate there like they been threatening.”
    “Two fools well-hung we’d have then, wouldn’t we?” said I, elbowing my apprentice in the ribs.
    “Aye, two fools well-hung, we’d have, wouldn’t we?” said Drool, in my voice, tone to note coming out his great maw as like he’d caught an echo on his tongue and coughed it right back. That’s the oaf’s gift-not only can he mimic perfectly, he can recall whole conversations, hours long, recite them back to you in the original speakers’ voices, and not comprehend a single word. He’d first been gifted to Lear by a Spanish duke because of his torrential dribbling and the ability to break wind that could darken a room, but when I discovered the Natural’s keener talent, I took him as my apprentice to teach him the manly art of mirth.
    Drool laughed. “Two fools well-hung-”

    “Stop that!” I said. “It’s unsettling.” Unsettling indeed, to hear your own voice sluicing pitch-perfect out of that mountain of lout, stripped of wit and washed of irony. Two years I’d had Drool under my wing and I was still not inured to it. He meant no harm, it was simply his nature.
    The anchoress at the abbey had taught me of nature, making me recite Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated man, and a tribute to his culture, that he look for precision in a thing only as its nature allows.” I would not have Drool reading Cicero or crafting clever riddles, but under my tutelage he had become more than fair at tumbling and juggling, could belch a song, and was, at court, at least as entertaining as a trained bear, with slightly less proclivity for eating the guests. With guidance, he would make a proper fool.
    “Pocket is sad,” said Drool. He patted my head, which was wildly irritating, not only because we were face-to-face-me standing, him sitting bum-to-floor-but because it rang the bells of my coxcomb in a most melancholy manner.
    “I’m not sad,” said I. “I’m angry that you’ve been lost all morning.”
    “I weren’t lost. I were right here, the whole time, having three laughs with Mary.”
    “Three?! You’re lucky you two didn’t burst into flames, you from friction and her from bloody thunderbolts of Jesus.”
    “Maybe four,” said Drool.
    “You do look the lost one, Pocket,” said Mary. “Face like a mourning orphan what’s been dumped in the gutter with the chamber pots.”
    “I’m preoccupied. The king has kept no company but Kent this last week, the castle is brimming with backstabbers, and there’s a girl-ghost rhyming ominous on the battlements.”
    “Well, there’s always a bloody ghost, ain’t there?” Mary fished a shirt out of the cauldron and bobbed it across the room on her paddle like she was out for a stroll with her own sodden, steaming ghost. “You’ve got no cares but making everyone laugh, right?”
    “Aye, carefree as a breeze. Leave that water when you’re done, would you, Mary? Drool needs a dunking.”
    “Nooooooo!”
    “Hush, you can’t go before the court like that, you smell of shit. Did you sleep on the dung heap again last night?”
    “It were warm.”
    I clouted him a good one on the crown with Jones. “Warm’s not all, lad. If you want warm you can sleep in the great hall with everyone else.”
    “He ain’t allowed,” offered Mary. “Chamberlain says his snoring frightens the dogs.”
    “Not allowed?” Every commoner who didn’t have quarters slept on the floor in the great hall-strewn about willy-nilly on the straw and rushes-nearly dog-piled before the fireplace in winter. An enterprising fellow with night horns aloft and a predisposal to creep might find himself accidentally sharing a blanket or a tumble with a sleepy and possibly willing wench, and then be