The jester

The courtyard was long and tiled with arabesqued mosaics; long, and cold, and candlelit from the eternal chandeliers that hung, rustic but enduring, from a ceiling of wood too high for the light to reach.

A chill of a thousand medieval winters leaked through the naked windowpanes.

I sat behind an idea in a corner too plain to be a corner, but, overlooked and shadowed, it was a corner nonetheless. Legs crossed, pipe lighted, eyes bright with candlewarmth; a wooden cup on the floor by my side, filled with glühwein going cold. My lute against my shoulder and a whistling dying on my lips, I watched. I wore the stars as a cloack, and no one saw me that night.

A patchwork of colors and painted joy, the jester meandered around the great table, twisting around with grime tales out of which I could have made the greatest epos- they were but mud in his hands as he churned them with vulgarity, and at spans, the court burst into laughter. The son of the lord, however, remained in silence and paled.

The candles on the long table cast lugubrious shadows against the wappentiers that ornamented the bare fireplace, and made impossible monsters out of the two hounds that slept by the fire.

The jester twirled and twisted stories and twigs and torches, but made nothing in the courtyard seem less waxen, less distant. A night butterfly fluttered to close to the banquet, a guest whipped its arm towards it, and holding it over a candle burnt its wings away. It fell to the ground, worm and agonizing, but the hounds slept on in bestial petrescense.

The jester was a chime, he rang like a thousand bells, jumping around like an everlasting ember. In my eyes, he was also a night butterfly that would eventually have to burn away.
In the furthest crevices of the courtyard, the night silence gnawed at the edges of the candlelight, and flooded the hinterground like a patient predator.

I caressed the chords of my lute with love, and hollow they dispersed in the wideness of the stone walls that waited solemn behind the darkness. Only one ricocheted and returned to me, and it came in the reflection from the eyes of the lord’s son, the silent one. The only one that pitied the jester.

I have sung for him many nights after that night, only him, and I, and the sagas of his ancestors. We have ridden the plains of his fatherland a thousand times ever since, the silver moon a watchtower and both of us shadows, riders of cobwebby, ghostly stallions, and our shadows only illusions projected over a storyworld. We have sat on a marble balcony and overlooked the infinity, pipes alit and hearts akin, but no word I sing will ever bring him the sought joy, no tale I weave will ever ease him.

He seeks a peace in this world that is not of this world, but there is no comfort for such souls in a courtyard or a feast. But when if I stand up to leave, he stops me,

‘Sing it again,’ he says, ‘I want to hear it. One more time… One last time.’

And I heave my lute in lack of a sword, but kill him every time nonetheless. I stand in there before him and sing to him of his love,

and he thinks every note is beautiful,

every night, but not that night. That night I stood up, cloaked in stars, veiled behind an idea. I looked him in the eye and read his pain, but the jester came in his dance between us, a flash of red and yellow and patchwork, and when he sought my eyes in question, I was long gone behind the darkness.