A Jester's Tale

(Written in 1997)

Once upon a sometime there was a beautiful queen. This is not her story. Her story, as it" happens, has already been comprehensively covered by a number of writers, particularly in the recent fabulists' conference, "Queen, Goddess, Mother: the feminine principle in non-existent society". Once upon a very similar sometime, however, there were a jester and a damsel, and this is indeed their tale.

It was a time when men wore metal and hurled themselves toward each other at great speed - much as they do to this day on the motorways. It was a time, too, when women were damsels, and habitually dwelt at the top of tall, inaccessible towers. Whether this was to stop the men in metal hurling themselves headlong at the damsels, or to prevent the damsels from running away into a different story, posterity does not record. Naturally these damsels wore tall, conical wimples, and these were ideal for concealing long silken ropes for escaping from their towers. People always find a way.

In this sunny land there was one particular damsel who was the fairest of them all. (Statistically speaking, of course, there was also a damsel (though she was stretching the term) who was the ugliest of them all but, again, this is not her story. Her story, which I'll just mention in passing, actually involves her being mistaken for a dragon and having a man in metal hurl himself at her.) This fairest damsel had wonderful blue eyes and the palest skin and the most beautiful light brown hair. Her face shone like the moon, and people walking past her tower at night often commented on how easy it was to see; one such grizzled old gentlemen had the moon-bright idea from this of putting lamps at the top of every tower, and thus, contrary to popular opinion, the lamp-post was not invented by dogs.

One of the few men in this place who wore only the smallest amount of metal, and that was in silver coins that dangled from the corners of his hat, was the queen's jester. It was his job to entertain her court with his wit, cunningly concealed attempts at wisdom and miscellaneous antics. There were those in the court who found pleasure in this behaviour, including the queen herself (particularly when his performance was accompanied by a large stoup of wine)...and then there were those who would gladly have folded him up into a box and left him in the dungeons to shut him up, so to speak.

One of the chief sources of entertainment caused by the jester, albeit unintentionally, was his remarkable short-sightedness. (In those far-off days before corrective lenses and laser surgery, his only means of optical improvement was a facility devised by a popular doctor of the day called the squint.) Every time he strolled into the court in his shambling jesterial fashion, he would walk straight into one of its beautifully carved columns. Future experts would long puzzle over the absence of noses from the sculpted figures on the columns; in the jester's time, it was simply a source of hilarity.

As for the jester, frequently with a wounded nose himself, this was most certainly not part of his act, and it would upset his carefully prepared routines. As it happened, those members of the court who didn't want to fold him up into a box found his resultant hesitancy far more amusing than the actual jokes anyway, but that was something, short-sighted as he was, that the jester never saw.

Like all fools, the jester was a lonely soul. (Only now are social historians beginning to appreciate the status of the fool in that period - consider, for example, a recent paper delivered at the Feste Symposium, "Tears of the Clown: laugh and the world laughs with you, tell jokes and you live alone".)

He would dearly have loved a damsel of his own, but nowhere could he see one. True enough, all of the damsels were already wedded to the knights, who had won them over with ever more reckless feats of high-speed panel beating. All, that is, except one, and improbable though it sounds (this is, after all, a fairy tale), it was indeed the fairest of them all. Some say this was because her tower was unusually high, and no-one in the land was tall enough to climb it, or for her to store sufficient silken rope to escape therefrom would have demanded an absurdly tall wimple, or indeed that she was simply too busy enjoying the view. Others speculated, as wagging tongues will in a small feudal society which has yet to invent television soap operas, that it was her ideals rather than her tower that were higher, and she was unimpressed by the piles of mangled armour that littered the fields around the latter.

Sometimes, as she looked down upon that very view, she would see the myopic jester trudging past. She noticed how he would always walk with his face to the ground as though he were looking for something to mark the way. Sometimes, though, he would pause at the foot of her tower and seem to look up at her and she wondered what went on in his mind, that laboratory of puns and tangential observations. Sometimes his neck would arch and he would appear to look back right at her...but then she realised that to his molish vision she was as far away as the moon. And he in his turn, when he blinked up towards the top of her tower wondering what damsel dwelt there, thought he was actually seeing the moon as her radiant face peered over the balcony.

Time came when this beautiful damsel, bored of her life in the tower and disillusioned by the errant knights who surrounded it nightly, resolved to venture forth into the world at large. Cleverly cutting down the entire length of her wimple-coiled rope with a pair of scissors, she doubled the silk's length, cast it over the balcony as though she were fishing for dreams and stole away into the night.

So tall was her tower and so inaccessible that it was several weeks before anyone noticed she had even gone. You will expect, of course, that her red-faced father was blustering and raging and imagining that she had disappeared in order that the knights might have a test of valour in traversing the globe to rescue her from whatever dire fate had befallen her; that the knights in due course had done so and one, braver than all the others, had battled dragons and sorcerors, scaled mountains and plunged the icy depths of the oceans, to win her fair hand. Not so. Perhaps, then, the guileful, wily jester outwitted them all, a classic fairytale triumph of sleight over might? Not a bit of it.

In fact, her parents were rather pleased to see her go, not because they did not love her, but because they did. She, unlike all the other thoughtless damsels sporting with their tin-headed knights, would see and understand the world.

And so the months passed. The jester continued to jest, more by accident than design, and he continued to trudge past the damsel's tower, stopping once in a while to wonder where the moon had gone.

After nearly a year, dark storm clouds began to gather over the queen's normally bright and sunlit realm. The folk of the fields, like rabbits scampering into their holes before the arrival of a hunter and his dogs, sought cover in their cottages and chattered darkly like mice behind the skirting boards.

Then the rains came. Not just occasional light showers or drizzle; not a refreshing spring shower that makes you want to dance in the fields; but a great, endless monsoon of a rain, a spiteful child of the glowering and angry clouds who were its parents. People peered at it from behind their curtains as though it were a tax inspector, and like the tax inspector it knocked day after day on everyone's doors. One or two even deliberately stole from the queen's stores, just so they could be locked up in the peace of the dungeons away from the incessant drumming of the rain.

The waters began to rise and the damsels were glad of their towers to be away from them. The knights invented water polo by accident, but after a few of them drowned from the weight of their armour, even the knights went home and hung up their rusting spurs.

In time, the rain eased a little (or perhaps, as folk will always adapt, they just got used to it). People cautiously ventured forth into the world again, but their world was no longer a sunlit, happy one. Everyone walked with their heads bowed: in the market square, no-one talked any more, for all were turned away from the rains and therefore from each other. For once, the jester felt at home - his world-weary gait was the same as everyone else's, and they all appeared to be looking for something to mark the way. Apart from the sound of the rain, the place was almost silent.

If winter comes, though, can spring be far behind? The poets, long before the weather forecasters (who generally pursued their science by examining dead chickens or tossing coins, as they do in our age) knew that nothing lasts for ever on this earth, that one day the sun would come again. And surely it did.

One morning, it caught everyone by surprise. Like a tax inspector (if you will let me pursue this image) determined to find a new way into the homes of the people, it tiptoed silently through the land one morning and then with the bailiff of blue sky burst open their doors and windows and shook them awake. But the sun was very welcome.

People ran out into the streets and danced and sang for joy. The usual dawn chorus of blackbirds, long silent through the endless rains, hastily assembled on the branches of the trees, looked nervously at one another, shook their feathers, and whistled in unison as though for the first time, until one of the knights threw a stone at them.

Every damsel in every tower threw open her balcony shutters and hallooed to her neighbours. The knights ran to the blacksmiths and demanded new suits of armour, and the blacksmiths, ever abreast of fashion, gave them all the latest styles in copper. Soon the verdant valleys echoed once more to a sound like scaffolding being thrown down from a new castle. Only the jester, blinking a little in the new light, continued to plod his way with his gaze at his feet.

But what, I hear you ask, sympathetic as you must surely be to the female lead in this tale, of the fairest damsel who had travelled far and wide across the mixing bowl of the world? Can you not see, gentle reader, you whose eyes travel far and wide across the words of this story? No joy travels alone in this world, and our damsel travelled with the sun. It lay at her feet like a dog when she rested, and when she had left the country, it had faithfully followed her. If the sun was back in the land, then so was she. And so she was...

After so many dark months, it can only be expected that the people, joyous at the return of the sun though they were, had changed. The memory of those foul times remained, and like the puddles that in every field and every square lay in wait and ambushed the unwary who looked only at the sun, the people were reflective.

In this new world after the rains, the jester felt strangely more at home. Short-sighted as he was, and with his back increasingly bent from his way of walking as though he shouldered the burdens of the world, he found when he walked that he could now see more of that world, reflected as it was in the pools of water underfoot, and it was newly beautiful to him.

In their joy at the return of the sun, no-one had noticed return of the damsel who had accompanied it. She was back in her tower and smiled a thoughtful smile, mingling her pleasure at seeing her land again with a fond remembrance of her travels, which she had left as one leaves an old love, like Orpheus leaving Eurydice in an even more distant age from ours, knowing she must walk forward, but burning to look behind. Like the jester, she too would often look down at the ground in thought, but from her tower she could see rather more of it.

One day, the queen bowed to growing political opinion and released the jester from his duties. Extracting only the cost of several dozen sculpted noses from his salary, she paid him off and he made haste away from the court before she could be swayed by ill-wishers to reconsider boxing him up in the dungeons instead.

Away from the stress of being a freelance humour facilitator as he would now be described, the jester walked away from the court with a smile on his face. As the sun warmed his cheeks, still turned downward though they were, he felt a new life was about to begin. He walked on through the squares around the queen's castle and out into the fields where the damsel-towers stood rooted like elms in a mighty forest. He splashed the puddles as he walked for the first time since he was young.

And so, of course - for why else would I have told this tale? - he came to the foot of the tower of the fairest damsel of them all. He was tired from walking and rested a while. His back was aching and he could not stretch to look up to the top of the tower, which he assumed he would never see anyway. Knowing nothing else, as he rested there, he looked down at the ground. And there, reflected in the clear, still pool of water at his feet, one of the few vestiges left now of those wearisome week-after-weeks of rain, shimmered the most astonishing vision. He found himself unable to move, desperate though he was to reach out and touch this vision, and fearful too that touching it would scare it away like a deer.

There, in the little pool, was a reflection of the moon, a moon with a most beautiful face and a smile that made the jester miss a heartbeat and fear for a fleeting moment that he would be transfixed there for evermore, stock still, bending over the pool like a garden gnome. But he moved again, and this time it was not to trudge onward as he would have done before, but to smile back at this vision and then to straighten his back and march towards the little wooden door of the tower with a thousand new punchlines in his mind.

And what of that vision, dear reader? How could it be that the myopic clown could see so much more than before, bright and sunny day though it was? Perhaps he could see perfectly well after all, and he had merely learned to look. Perhaps the tower was not as high as he had first imagined, and its fair resident not really so far away. I cannot say, but as we leave the jester walking towards that door, who knows what will happen? The door may be locked. Perhaps he is just as short-sighted as we thought all along, and he will walk right into it, straighten his nose and move on elsewhere like a beetle that walks into a wall. So, too, if he walks too slowly he might scale the tower's many steps and enter the damsel's room to find only a discarded wimple and a length of silken rope tied to the balcony. For every new punchline in his mind, there is a possible ending to the story.

We must leave the damsel and the jester, gentle reader, to finish the tale for themselves. You have heard my story, and I can only hope you will share with me your own.