A toothless man at the banquet, I
didn't even try. I could have sucked on a cob of corn but the
spectacle would be so grim that I thought it more dignified to feign
disinterest. How hungry I was though at all those banquets but
retaining what small amount of dignity I had superseded my howling
appetite. Dignity is important to a man who has little of it. I was a
figure of fun you see. Not just toothless but of diminished
proportions, with crooked spine and vacant sac. The court freak,
eunuch and fool. Designed specially to be a debased thing. Something
so stigmatised as to have nothing to lose. A man debarred from full participation in life so as to better reveal, through
mocking revelry, some
unspoken truths. A safe outlet for unsafe notions, it was my role to
play the jester and I was both happy and sad to do it.
I didn't much enjoy the ways of the
court. The puffed up arrogance of the king and those who sat at his
table was anathema to me. I made them laugh but found their guffaws
unrewarding. I made my jokes for the friends I had, the
dancers, the odd guard, the handmaidens – some of the latter I
futilely held feelings for but all of whom glad eyed the handsome
young prince and his trusty knave.
I would sit each night and await my
turn. Unimpressed by the proceedings but finding solace in the
glimpses of cloud moving across the beautiful moon in the high window
above me. That was enough. Well almost enough. There was that and
there was the thought of my final joke. A joke that was of such
searing satiric wit and cruel honesty that it would upset the state
of the court and make the king look a bigger fool than even I. A joke
that would reduce this swaggering, self-entitled tyrant to a status
lower than my own. My words would reveal him for what he truly was,
nothing. Nothing at all but a big, fat, ignorant, vicious fool.
The night came when I was to make my
joke. I had skirted dangerously close to this kind of thing before
and earned myself a night in the stocks but tonight, this night, I
was going to risk the noose. If my joke worked, and I was sure it
would, I would be safe as the king would be the one deposed and
dragged to the chopping block. I had seen
and heard a lot because my eyes and ears were considered to be of no
matter but that was an unwise assumption. Tonight I would reveal all.
My turn came and I took my position in
the centre of the court. I rattled my bells and bowed and my audience
both applauded and jeered. I inhaled deeply. I opened my mouth and my
words, the words of my joke, came out. My words came out, one after
another, and combined into a form of syntactical sedition the likes
of which had heretofore never been heard. My joke flowed from my head
and hung manifest before all. There was a silence. It was obvious
that it was sinking in. And then came the laughter I had expected but
not of the flavour I desired. A jester is
so expert at soliciting laughter that he can tell the flavour
of that laughter and this was the wrong kind. The laughter that
ensued was not a laughter derisive of
authority but a barely comprehending laughter of disbelief. How could
this fool make such fanciful claims about one so honourable? They
found the very notion absurd and that is why they laughed. Everyone
laughed but no one got the joke. They didn't see the truth in it. I
took my bow, went back to my corner and nothing changed at all.
Later that night, as the performing
bear demeaned itself, I snuck from the court. I went out into the
night and left the grounds. A guard who was a friend lowered the
drawbridge for me and I exited the castle. On the other side I told
the guard to pull the drawbridge up again. He asked if I was sure and
I insisted that I was. He did so and then I was alone. The cold stone
structure stood behind me, silently, and before me was the forest. A
row of trees and between them only darkness. Thick black darkness. I
did not know what awaited me amongst the branches and the trunks but
I had heard that a place lay beyond. I had heard there was a light
and that it led somewhere. I wasn't sure I believed it but I had to
see if it was true. I had grown so tired of being the wrong shape. I
had grown so weary of communicating through cryptic jest. Some loved
me for it but that was no longer compensation enough. I thought how I
would miss my friends and how I might never again see the moon. I
walked ahead nonetheless. Whether this dark forest lead me to
somewhere or lead me to nowhere, it would lead me to freedom.
And lead me to freedom the forest did
for the moment I stepped through its foliage I was set upon and
beheaded by a large black bear – the furious mother of the one
performing inside the castle. I knew this bear was the other's mother
because, as I entered the world of spirits, I knew all. I rose up and
looked down. I saw through the stone castle walls and saw the court
without me. I saw through the flesh and into the souls of the men and
women within and I saw that I was sorely missed, even by the king.
Yes, the king was the one who missed me most. I was his only release
from the pomposity he was forced to observe by lineage. The swagger
and arrogance was all an act. Within the rolls of royal fat there
resided a man who longed to be loved and not feared. He had to put a
face on it because inside his heart wept and no one wants a weeping
king. He so enjoyed my mockery of him as he considered it mockery of
the false him, an outward self that he too despised. He even had
disdain for the way he was forced to put me in the stocks the odd
time lest I topple his crown. A king without a crown is a dead man.
He was so fearful and lonely. He needed me as did all the others. The
handmaidens whose heartbreaking unrequited glad eyeing of the
prince and his knave would at best be rewarded by perfunctory and
mechanistic copulation because the prince and his knave had, in
fact, a great loneliness of their own to endure for they were glad
eyeing each other. A forbidden desire that would bring disgrace and
was punishable by death. The guards who were to stand all day and
appear fierce had sorrow in their hearts too for all they wanted was
to rest and drink and sing a while like those they protected. The
dignitaries of the court who bit into the
meat and drank heartily from the goblets were also miserable for they were
something that would one day come to be called bulimic and they would
end each evening discretely vomiting into the moat. Not only that but
they were only pretending to revel for fear that to be seen to do
otherwise would cause them to be suspected malcontents.
Oh, such a palace of melancholy.
And I perceived, as I faded from the
physical plane, that I was regarded by those in the court not as
something debased but as themselves distilled. They loved me because
I was a manifestation of the honest parts of themselves. I could say
what they truly thought for them and they could laugh at the world
and at themselves. I was not some diminutive, hunched, emasculated
figure of fun that served as a safe outlet for unsafe thoughts. Nay,
I was a tonic. I was something to help see them through their days.
Days that comprised of so much pity, fear and despair concealed so as
to preserve some semblance of dignity. Oh dignity, it had meant so much
to me once and how I realise now that it
was chief contributor to my discontent. I should have rejoiced in my
lack of dignity and encouraged others to do the same. They deserved
as much, the wretches, but I had abandoned them. I had taken light
from what small amount there was in that stone construction in the
centre of the dark forest that goes on and on and on, all around, for
as far as the eye can see. I had forsaken my calling and I was imbued
with bitter regret as I ascended toward my beautiful friend the moon.
I took one last look down and I saw
that there was some happiness in the court at least but just a
sliver. This small happiness was found in the performing bear for the
bear knew that soon his persecutors would
collapse from inebriation and that, even
though tethered by a chain, he could reach out with his claws and gut
every last one of them before the guards got to him. This was the
last thing I saw as I followed the light away from the world and it
gladdened me some because I knew that soon I would be entertaining my
friends again when we gathered together in the happier court of the
hereafter.
