Free In a Dark Wood by Michael Cadnum Page B

looked into his own, dark and gleaming, like stones of great price. Geoffrey did not even know if the Fool spoke English or if the Fool was utterly deaf. “You see a lot, but I wonder how much you understand.”
    The Fool collapsed to the floor, and his feet projected into the air where his head had been, the stout shoes of a huntsman, until Geoffrey examined them closely, which he took the leisure to do, since he had paid for them. Not quite as stout as a huntsman’s shoe, thinner-soled, more built for leaping. Green leather, forest green, but unstained. The Fool rarely went beyond the courtyard.
    â€œThe world is so much surface. So much exterior,” said Geoffrey to the Fool’s shoes. “We can never be completely certain what is going on in someone else’s mind.” For some reason the Fool made him feel like talking, but this was understandable. Some men could open their hearts to a dog.
    â€œI have been encouraged to make you talk. But I detest the idea.” Nothing demoralizes like a promise of mercy.
    Geoffrey waited the amount of time he would have spent listening to the Fool if the Fool were talking. And in an odd way he was talking. By standing on his head in a very relaxed way, the Fool intended to communicate something. Geoffrey tried to guess what. A kind of cheerful insult, of course, but perhaps something else.
    â€œBecause we are flesh, cruelty can force us to do anything,” said Geoffrey. “When the king wants me to apprehend someone, he simply orders me to bring his body into the keep. His body. Alive, almost always, because justice cannot be visited upon a corpse. What it can be visited upon is the man’s soul, but to catch that, you must bring its cage. The body is everything.”
    The Fool sprang to his feet in a graceful bound that made Geoffrey step back, startled. The Fool seemed to say that yes, the body was everything and that this was a good thing. See, the body is beautiful. The Fool tumbled across the floor and sprang from hands to feet to hands on down the corridor, a way, Geoffrey supposed, of bidding good evening.
    When the tumbling figure had vanished down the corridor, Geoffrey continued to stare after it. The Fool was a mystery, like the mummified serpent with two heads Geoffrey had seen as a boy and actually touched. Tough as spliced cable, with four withered eyeholes and twin rows of fine teeth, barely teeth at all, armor in the mouth. A creature God had thrown down to the earth like Aaron’s staff, to say: see, I am God. Heaven and earth pass before me, and I can make anything I desire beneath the firmament.
    God, however, had not made the Fool, and Geoffrey did not know exactly what forces had. Something French, he imagined, which was to say something incomprehensible. Something men decided to make of themselves. Was there, he wondered, a guild of Fools? Did God measure such behavior a kind of penance? Of course not, thought Geoffrey, trailing one hand along the cold stone of the corridor. And if the Fool took pleasure in such behavior, wasn’t it a bit like sinfulness? The wrinkled priest who had instructed Geoffrey as a boy had been gentle but sure-handed. “But Christ’s mercy, and Mary and John, these are the ground of all my bliss,” the priest had said, smiling in a tired way, as if such bliss wore out the very soul it claimed. Plainly any bliss not grounded in Christ was grounded in something potentially wicked.
    He slipped into the East Tower and froze at the sight of a candle, a stab of light in the blackness. He put a hand on a manuscript and whispered, “Good evening,” a neutral greeting he would use with anyone, because he had expected darkness.
    A shadow spilled across a wall. An arm, cast in gold in the light of the candle, and the curve of a woman’s hip beneath gray cloth. “My lord?”
    Someday, thought Geoffrey, I will change my life. Someday—when I am a stronger, better